There was half a cup of coffee left in the breakfast pot, and when she was dressed she poured it and turned on her laptop. Opening Google, she typed in Nick and Patty’s names and started going through the links one by one, looking for the story that had used the picture of Nick with the sports car. Perhaps they’d be lucky and it would be one of the pieces that hadn’t mentioned DataPro directly, but either way, Mark was right: it could only be a matter of time before someone made the connection and the whole thing came out again. How much time, though, might make all the difference to whether or not he could get the deal done.
She clicked through fifteen or twenty stories before she found it and, when she did, she saw that it had been printed with the long Sunday news-review feature. Hannah was surprised by how accurately she’d remembered it: the silver car and the lovely golden-stoned house, Nick’s pale cotton shirt, its sleeves rolled back to the elbow.
Her eyes flicked to the start of the text. The curtains were drawn this week in the front windows of the two-bedroomed bungalow where Nicholas Reilly spent his childhood, as if his parents, who still live in the house, want to close their eyes against the reality of the crime of which their son was this week found guilty.
Who still live in the house – Hannah read it again, just in case, but she hadn’t made a mistake: according to the journalist, this Carole Temple, at the time Nick stood trial and went to prison, his parents were still alive. But that couldn’t be right. Since the very beginning, their second date at the Mulberry Street Bar back in New York, Mark had told her that his parents had died when he was in his mid-twenties, and when he’d told her the whole story on Tuesday – finally, said the voice in her head – he’d said it again: ‘I’m just glad that when it happened, the really bad thing we’d been waiting for, for all those years, my parents were already gone.’
She stood up and started pacing the small area of carpet in the centre of the room. The journalist was wrong, it was the only explanation: people didn’t make mistakes about when their parents died. Mark said that his had died when he was in his mid-twenties, a year apart, and he’d been thirty when Nick had gone to prison. She tried to remember the actual years of the senior Reillys’ deaths but found she couldn’t. Had he ever told her? He must have. But actually, why must he? She’d never pushed him for that kind of exact fact; what was relevant was how long ago it had been, what stage of his life he’d been at, and he’d told her that. She’d let him talk about them when he wanted to, at his own pace, trusting that gradually she’d get the full picture.
She sat back down, feeling a little better. The journalist had got her wires crossed; that was all. Patty’s death had happened not long after they’d died, a couple of years, maybe; perhaps Mark hadn’t sold the house immediately, or perhaps another older couple had moved in and Carole Temple had mistaken them for the Reillys. That was quite likely, wasn’t it? It was usually older people who lived in bungalows.
Hannah hit the back button and returned to the list of hits but as she clicked through the stories, realising now just how many had mentioned DataPro, she felt more and more uneasy. When she reached the Gazette piece with its Sick Nick headline and lurid capitals, she put her head in her hands.
She closed the page, shut her computer and stood up. She stacked the dirty dishes on the breakfast tray and put it outside the door. The corridor stretched away to left and right, empty. Back inside, she made the bed meticulously, plumping the pillows and smoothing the sheets until they were wrinkle-free. In the bathroom she drank a glass of water and rested her forehead against the cold glass of the mirror. Then she went back to her computer.
How did you find out when people had died? Into Google she typed ‘UK death records’. The first link was to the General Register Office, the official government site. She clicked on it and skimmed down the page until she found a link promising information on birth, marriage, death and adoption records. When it opened, however, there was no access to records, just advice on registering a new death.
The National Archives advertised themselves to people looking for records of a birth, marriage or death in England or Wales. Hatched, matched and dispatched – Hannah heard her own mother’s voice. The site was clearly designed for genealogical research but while marriage certificates could be viewed online, birth and death certificates could not. A section titled Indexes to Birth, Marriage and Death registrations (1837 to present) had a link to a site transcribing the Civil Register but she quickly discovered that so far, the transcription, at least for deaths, hadn’t progressed beyond 1970. If Mark’s parents had died when he was twenty-six or seven, say, she was looking for 1998 and 1999.