‘Okay, but just . . . I need to know you’re safe. Please don’t go outside.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You promise me?’
After he’d gone, she surfed the net listlessly for ten minutes then got the copy of Our Man in Havana out of her bag. She lay down on the bed and tried to read but it was no good: her eyes slid off the words again and the jokes still weren’t funny. She closed her eyes, conscious suddenly of how exhausted she was. Sleep was like something from a different life, she thought, turning on to her side. She scarcely remembered what it was.
She was woken by the sound of a lorry reversing outside. Looking at the clock on the desk, she saw that more than an hour and a half had passed. Clearly, she hadn’t moved in that time: her shoulder and hip were numb. She turned slowly on to her back and looked at the ceiling. She’d dreamed, strange scraps of stories connected by a single common thread: the knowledge that she’d forgotten something vitally important.
That sense persisted now, joining the shifting, uncomfortable feeling she’d had since the morning that something was lurking at the fringe of her field of vision again, out of view but only just, something that didn’t make sense. This time, though, she didn’t think it was to do with Hermione.
She closed her eyes again, hoping that by concentrating, shutting out other distractions, she could bring whatever it was into focus. Within seconds, however, a hideous parade of mental images had started up instead: Hermione running, looking back over her shoulder in terror, quick steps gaining on her, a hand reaching out of the darkness. Blunt-force trauma: blood and hair and fragments of bone . . . Hannah sat up, heart pounding.
If she stayed here all afternoon, she realised, locked in this room, she’d go mad. But she couldn’t leave the hotel, either: she’d promised. She stalked about for a minute before she remembered the bar opposite the lobby. She could sit down there.
She found the key and let herself out into the corridor, feeling better the moment the door slammed shut behind her. At the bar she ordered a cup of coffee and carried it to a small table in the corner. When the man next to her got up to go, leaving behind a copy of the Evening Standard, she reached across and took it. The lead story was about house prices, on the rise again in London, but when she turned the page, she stopped. Top Female Surgeon Murdered in Spitalfields.
The piece took up half the page, much of the space dominated by two photographs. From the first, Hermione stared up at her. Her expression was the one Hannah had seen when she accosted her in the corridor, the polite but distant look that suggested she’d pulled herself out of a deep preoccupation to engage with the world for a moment. At the hospital Hannah had interpreted it as professionalism, a mask to help her keep her distance from needy relatives, but what she saw now was wariness and distrust.
Quickly, she read the story. There were no more details about Hermione’s death – at the time the piece must have been written, the police had still been waiting for the post-mortem – but at the end there was a quote from DI Wells. ‘We’re extremely keen to talk to Nicholas Reilly,’ he’d said, ‘who, we have reason to believe, was in touch with Ms Alleyn in the weeks preceding her death. We strongly advise anyone identifying Mr Reilly not to approach him but to alert the police immediately.’
The other photograph was at least ten years old: Hannah had seen it before in the online coverage of his trial, albeit cropped differently. If she remembered correctly, the original had shown Nick on the drive of a lovely Cotswolds house, swinging down into the driver’s seat of a convertible, tanned and laughing, but here the picture had been cut to provide the closest thing the paper could get to a mugshot, just his face, neck and shoulders, and in this context, next to the picture of the murdered woman who had once been his girlfriend, he looked unhinged: a handsome, dangerous madman.
Hannah picked up her BlackBerry and addressed a text to Mark.
Have you seen the Standard? The story’s on page 3 – it’s big.
She expected a reply immediately, he’d said he’d have his phone on all afternoon, but the minutes started to add up and none came. She told herself he was busy – he’d be talking to David or on a call; he’d probably gone to the loo – but ten minutes passed and then fifteen and she began to feel anxious: apart from last weekend, Mark had always responded straight away to any message she sent him, even right at the beginning when a lot of people might have played it cool and waited. Keep calm, she told herself, there’ll be a simple explanation, but after twenty minutes, her nerves got the better of her and she brought up his number and called him. The phone rang and she felt herself relax a little but it kept ringing and then voicemail clicked in.