Before We Met(94)

Findmypast.co.uk offered records to 2006. The search boxes on the home page asked for first and last names, the range of years in which the person might have died, the country within the UK and then the county. She filled them as far as she could, entering ‘Elizabeth Reilly’, 1995–2005, England and Sussex. There was a box for her year of birth, too, and Hannah tried to think. How old had Mrs Reilly been when she died? She had no idea. How old had she been when Mark had been born, then? They’d never talked about that, either. She made an estimate, working on the theory that the previous generation had had their children younger, on the whole. If she’d been twenty-six, for example, when she’d had Mark and he’d been twenty-seven when she died in 1999, she would have been born in 1946. God, if that was right, she’d died far too young – she’d only be sixty-six if she were alive now. Hannah entered 1946 with a range of five years on either side. She hit return and waited. No results found.

The coffee was stone cold but she took a sip and went back. Where had she gone wrong? Maybe it had been Elisabeth, not Elizabeth, though her name had been spelled with a ‘z’ in the news coverage. In a new window, she double-checked that Eastbourne was in Sussex then broadened the range of years in which Mrs Reilly might have died from 1990 – when Mark would have been only eighteen – to 2005. She gave the search for her year of birth a span of twenty years. No results found.

Going back again, she unchecked the boxes that stipulated precise matches only, allowing all variant spellings and abbreviations of the names Elizabeth and Reilly and widening the range of her possible birth year to twenty years either side of 1946. Mark had been born in 1972 so that had to cover it: if she’d been born in 1926, she’d have been forty-six when she’d had him, forty-seven when she’d had Nick the following year. If she’d been born in 1966, she would have had Mark at age six. Still nothing.

Maybe there was a problem with Elizabeth’s record. Hannah cleared the boxes and instead entered Mark’s father’s details, as far as she knew them, double-checking with Carole Temple’s feature, where people who knew the family unambiguously called him Gordon. She entered his year of birth as 1935, on the basis that he may have been older than his wife, and set the range at twenty years to either side, 1915 to 1955, making him somewhere between seventeen and fifty-seven when Mark had been born. No results.

Frustrated, Hannah cleared the boxes again and entered her own grandmother’s details, leaving ten years around the date of her death, though she knew it exactly, and twenty years around her date of birth. When she hit return, Margaret Hannah Simpson, died Gloucestershire, Malvern, 1989, came up straight away. A search for her grandfather was just as quick.

She stood and walked around for a moment, pulling the curtain aside and looking down into the street. Outside one of the Victorian terraced houses, a teenage boy was soaping an old Volvo at glacial pace, and further up, a woman in jeans and a fleece was opening her front door, a nest of Waitrose carrier bags around her feet. A normal Saturday morning. Hannah dropped the curtain and came back to the table. Either there was a problem with the Reillys’ records or she’d got something wrong. Maybe they hadn’t died in Eastbourne; maybe Mark had brought them to hospitals in London so that he could be close to them or get them private care. She tried new searches on that basis but again, got nothing.

Into a new Google window, she typed ‘UK electoral roll’. The snippet of text underneath the link to whitepages.co.uk assured her that using the electoral register was a reliable way to search for people. Her hope faded as she scanned a short introductory paragraph that told her the site used a database from 2002 but she typed Gordon Reilly’s name into the boxes at the top – Gordon was probably less common a name than Elizabeth – and added ‘Eastbourne’. She hit return with no great expectation but almost immediately a new page opened: ‘1 Match for Gordon Reilly in Eastbourne’. The box underneath gave an address.

Hannah frowned, went back to the search page and typed in ‘Elizabeth Reilly’. This time, the site found two people with that name in Eastbourne. One of them lived at the same address as Gordon.

Heart thumping now, she went back and double-checked. Yes, the database was from 2002, when Mark had been thirty, but how well maintained was it? Could their names have been left on there by mistake? Had word failed to reach the council when they’d died? At her old flat in Kilburn, polling cards used to arrive for former residents years and years after they’d moved out: the system definitely wasn’t watertight. Further on, however, she saw that the site was claiming to update its records quarterly.