His hands were balled into fists on the table. Who was he talking to now, she wondered, trying to justify himself? His father? His mother? Or Nick?
‘My brother was amazed when he saw that side of me. In his mind, I was a loser: a worker, an effort-maker, a drone. I loved showing him that he was wrong, that I wasn’t boring – I think it encouraged me. I loved showing him that women found me attractive, too, that he wasn’t the only one who could go into a club, flirt with a pretty girl and take her home. Of course,’ Mark said, dryly, ‘as it transpired, our style of taking girls home was somewhat different.’
He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Hannah, I feel like a shit telling you this. I feel like I’m disrespecting you – us, our marriage – but now we’re talking about it, I want you to know everything, the whole thing. I need to get it over with once and for all. I wasn’t a saint, I’d be lying if I let you think that.’
‘I’m an adult. I can handle it.’
He gave a single nod. ‘Okay, but it wasn’t just a flash in the pan. My . . . behaviour had been going on for a couple of years by the time I met Patty. We met in France, skiing – Nick had got into the habit of renting a chalet for three or four weeks a season and I went over there now and again.’
‘That was in the papers, too.’
‘Of course – no stone left unturned.’ He reached out and ran his fingertip around the rim of the empty glass. ‘Patty was lovely, Han – sweet. That was why I liked her. Yes, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box and we were never going to be serious but, despite the party-girl behaviour you’ve no doubt read about, there was something sort of . . . innocent about her.’
Remembering the photographs she’d seen, the puppy-fat curves, Hannah felt a stab of pain.
‘She was a decent person,’ he said, ‘just young and a bit lost. But she was lovely-looking, too, and of course Nick noticed. The added bonus, as far as he was concerned, was that I was fond of her – not in love with her, not even close, but I liked her. It stuck in his craw having to do what I told him at work – he hated me having that power. A pretty girl and an opportunity to show me who was still top dog? Two birds with one stone.’
Mark reached for the bottle and poured himself another half-inch of Armagnac, most of which disappeared in the first swig. When he started talking again, his voice was harder. ‘I can’t stand thinking about that night,’ he said. ‘It was all so . . . sordid. Not just Nick, what happened to Patty, but my part in it, too.’
‘Tell me,’ she said calmly, but inside she was begging: Please. Please don’t let there be anything else.
‘A friend of Nick’s had just bought this club in Shoreditch and so we all piled over there. We were wasted before we even arrived – we’d had cocktails first and, of course, every time you went out with Nick there were drugs. Coke, mostly, but he was into E as well and speed now and again. Patty and I had had some charlie and . . . I should have recognised the signs. Why didn’t I recognise the bloody signs?’
He looked up at her as if he expected an answer. Hannah stayed silent.
‘He’d been flirting with Patty from the moment she arrived at the bar, but that was nothing unusual. It was this look he gave me. We were in a stall in the toilets, doing a last couple of lines before we went on to the club, and Nick looked up at me with this look on his face. I’ll never forget it – I actually dream about it sometimes. It was like . . . this sounds crazy but it was like a carnival mask, one of those ones with the exaggerated, leering features, all nose and eyes and this horrible, curling mouth showing his teeth.’ Mark shuddered.
‘Anyway, not long after we got to the club, Patty and I ended up having sex in the toilets – no doubt you read about that, too. It tells you everything you need to know about that night, doesn’t it, that so much of it took place in toilets? I can’t remember how it happened, whose idea it was, but it happened and we came back out and I went off to the bar. It took a while, there was a queue, and then I bumped into this guy who was on a team we’d done some business with a few months beforehand. By the time I got back with the drinks, Nick and Patty had disappeared and no one else could look me in the eye.’ He ran his fingers backwards over his head and clenched them in his hair. ‘God, I wish I still smoked.’
‘We’ve got some – Tom left them.’
‘No, I think I might actually throw up. Talking about it like this . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The thing is, Hannah, the whole thing, Patty’s death – it was my fault.’