Just after the picture had been taken he’d turned to kiss her, confetti still scattered on the shoulders of his jacket. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.’
About a hundred times that day, during the wildly extravagant lunch at Claridge’s, the champagne afterwards and the cab ride out to Heathrow for the flight to Capri, she’d looked at him and thought, My husband, and had hardly been able to believe it. Now, just eight months later, here she was sneaking about in his office on a Saturday afternoon. She felt a wash of intense revulsion at herself. Come on then, she thought; just look for the file and go.
The drawers opened effortlessly, as if cushioned by air. She went through them one by one, not letting herself be distracted by anything else, just looking for the grey marbled cardboard of the box-file. By the time she reached the last two, she’d convinced herself it wasn’t going to be there, but as she opened the lowest of the three drawers on the right-hand side, the spot corresponding to the one the file occupied in his desk at home, she saw it. She lifted it out on to the desktop and pressed the round plastic button at the side to release the lid.
Inside was a pile of paperwork an inch or so thick, a statement from Mark’s Coutts current account on the top. She scanned quickly down the list of recent transactions but there was nothing that caught her eye, no large amounts of money going out to Tiffany, the Waldorf-Astoria, or even – as far as she could tell – some high-end florist. She sprang the clip that held the papers in place and took the statement out but, as she was turning to the second page, she saw what was next in the file, a letter from the building society, and her eyes homed in on a number. £130,000. She picked the letter up and read the full sentence. ‘Following our recent meeting, I am pleased to be able to confirm an extension to your mortgage of £130,000, as requested.’ She skimmed the rest and then turned to the sheet attached, a revised schedule of payments. Almost without thinking, she put out her hand, pulled up Mark’s chair and sat down.
If the schedule was correct, they owed just shy of £700,000. ‘Seven hundred thousand’ – she murmured the words aloud, shocked. She’d had no idea their mortgage was so huge – it was an incredible amount. Even when she’d had a job, there was no way her salary could ever have supported a loan of that size. It was in Mark’s name, of course, and any salary she had was irrelevant, but he’d told her he didn’t have much of a mortgage left at all; that having owned the house for over a decade, he’d paid off several large chunks as well as making the regular payments. It was the main reason she’d agreed, after several heated discussions, to let him go on paying it as he always had, without any contribution from her, until she found a new job.
But extending the mortgage like this, without talking to her about it, that was something else. How could he do it? Weren’t they married? Weren’t they supposed to talk about things like this, make decisions together? Perhaps, she thought, Mark would argue that he hadn’t wanted to worry her about it while she didn’t have a job – and her not having a job was because of him, since she’d had to resign hers to move back to London – or perhaps, because he’d owned the house for so many years before they met, he still thought of it as in some way his, or at least his responsibility.
But however he was justifying it to himself – if he even felt he had to justify it – Hannah was angry. How could he? Following our recent meeting: he’d had an appointment at the building society, been in to discuss this with someone without even mentioning it to her. Which meant he’d come home one day in the not-too-distant past and lied about what he’d been doing. She turned the page back over and glanced at the date. 29 October – less than a fortnight ago. God.
She sat back in the chair and the anger became something else. At first she couldn’t name the feeling but then she identified it as hurt. She was hurt. Didn’t Mark want to involve her in the business of their life? Didn’t he think of her as a partner in their relationship, an equal who would want to know what was going on and be involved? Because this did involve them both, even if she wasn’t contributing to the mortgage payments at the moment. She would, as soon as she got a job, and anyway, what if something happened to him? She’d be left with a £700,000 mortgage she’d known nothing about.
The hurt had another element. Rationally or not, she felt humiliated that he hadn’t told her – belittled. When they’d met, she’d been entirely independent, succeeding at her career, supporting herself financially, renting an apartment in the West Village and living a good life in one of the most expensive cities in the world while managing to save, too. Now look at her: unemployed, living in someone else’s house on someone else’s money, and not even being kept in the picture about that. She took a deep breath and felt the anger burn in her chest.
And then there was the other big question: why did Mark need to extend the mortgage at all? Clearly there was something going on she didn’t know about. Was he in some sort of financial difficulty? She frowned. The idea seemed incredible. Mark wasn’t struggling – he couldn’t be. He earned a huge salary and lived like he did, albeit in the best of taste.
She thought back over the past few weeks. Had anything changed? Was he behaving any differently, so far as money was concerned? No, she didn’t think so. True, he hadn’t been talking about anything expensive like updating the car or booking a holiday, but the way he spent money day to day was the same: they went out to dinner just as often and he took black cabs without thinking. He’d bought her one of the huge hand-tied bouquets of flowers from the stall near Aragon House last weekend and, having bought one herself for her mother’s birthday, Hannah knew how expensive those were. And he’d come home with two new shirts last week; if he were really under the financial cosh, would he still be shopping on Jermyn Street?
Perhaps it wasn’t him who was in trouble but DataPro. Maybe he was borrowing money on his personal account to pump back into the business. How could she find out? She’d have to ask, and if he was hiding this new mortgage from her, he evidently didn’t want her to know. But again, she was confident that DataPro wasn’t in trouble. They’d talked a lot about the recession and how it was affecting the business, and he’d told her several times that things had slowed a bit but were steady. Though they weren’t huge accounts, they’d signed two new clients since the beginning of last month, and there was the prospect of the one in New York, too. ‘Flat but comfortable,’ was what Mark had said.
She dropped the papers back into the box and leafed through the next few, seeing letters from Jupiter Asset Management and UBS, Santander and Kent Reliance. ‘Dear Mr Reilly,’ read the one from Santander. ‘Thank you for your letter dated 24 October. I am pleased to confirm that following your request, your two-year fixed-rate savings account will now be closed and the final balance transferred to your linked bank account.’ She flicked back through the others and they all said the same: his accounts would be closed and their final balances – minus, in two cases, interest penalties for withdrawing the money before the end of fixed terms – would be transferred to his current account. None of the balances were huge by the standards of someone with a salary like his, but in total he would have about £73,000.
Hannah experienced a wave of something close to nausea. What the hell was going on? What was he doing? Why was he marshalling all this money?
Another woman, said the insidious mental voice, but she dismissed it. Why would he need to gather his money together if he were having an affair? It didn’t make sense. It does if he’s planning to leave, said the voice. Maybe he’s got a mistress and he’s going to use the money to buy another house, one where she can live and he can visit her until he’s summoned up the balls to leave you.
Stop it – just stop it! This was insane – she was thinking like some sort of madwoman. Mark wasn’t having an affair; he didn’t have a mistress. A mistress, for Christ’s sake – what sort of concept was that, anyway? This was London in the twenty-first century, not Paris in the nineteenth. And Mark wouldn’t bother with a
protracted lie like that, another woman, another house. He wasn’t that sort of man. If he wanted to be with someone else, he’d just tell Hannah and be done with it.
Pushing the chair back, she stood up and walked to the window. She leaned forward until her forehead rested against the cold glass. She was hot and her heart was beating quickly. She focused on the coldness against her skin and tried to think. If not another woman and not DataPro, then what?
Debt. She stood up straight again, lifting her face away from the glass. What if he was in debt? Yes, that made more sense; that rang much truer than the idea of his having someone else. What if he had debts he was ashamed of, and couldn’t bear her to find out?
Mark was someone who took risks; she’d always known that. Look at this place, DataPro: how many other twenty-three-year-olds came out of university, hired two of their contemporaries and offices in London, and started touting their services around the major financial players of the City? She would never have had the nerve to do that. Instead, she’d worked her way up in companies where the financial gambles were taken by other people and she could be sure of being paid at the end of the month. The idea of setting up her own business hadn’t even crossed her mind at that age.
Yes, some sort of financial gamble, a risk that he’d taken and regretted – the idea took root. He loved brinksmanship, pushing his luck: she’d seen it even that very first afternoon in Montauk, when he’d swum out beyond the breakers. The current was strong all along the beach there; even very confident swimmers came unstuck against it. Now Mark was forty, he was less of a daredevil physically, he said, but over dinner the other day his friends the Kwiatkowskis had told her about the ski trips they used to go on together, before their sons Charlie and Paddy were born.
‘Well, we say we went on holiday together,’ Pippa had said, resting her elbow carefully on the table among the glasses and empty cheese plates, ‘but really we only saw Mark to speak to after dark. Dan and I would be pottering round on the blue runs, nerving ourselves up to try a red run on day three, and we’d see Mark from the ski lifts, all in black like the man from the Milk Tray ads, hurtling past on his snowboard as if the hounds of hell were after him or something.’
‘There was this one afternoon,’ said Dan, ‘where I was literally thinking about the protocol for repatriating his body – would we have to go through the embassy or would the insurance company sort it out? Pip and I were feeling pretty smug – we’d just done this hairy red run and we were—’
‘Hairy!’ Mark laughed. ‘It was a nursery slope.’
‘It was the hardest of the red runs, pal. Anyway, we were getting the lift back up and we saw him coming down this black run. Jesus . . .’ Dan shook his head. ‘One side of the run was fairly smooth, steep as hell, obviously, but at least it was covered in snow. The other half . . . Basically, it was a rock-face with a bit of snow here and there, where there was actually enough of an angle for it to stick on. Bear in mind this was the first week your husband had ever used a snowboard – we watched him come down that thing and I reckon the board must have made contact with the run only six times. He was bouncing from crag to naked crag – it made me feel sick just to watch.’
Hannah turned her head and looked at the river, her heart beginning to slow down. Debt . . . If that was it, how had he got into it? A bad investment? It couldn’t just be something straightforward gone wrong. If he’d put money into a unit trust or something and it had tanked, it wouldn’t have left him in debt; he’d just have lost what he’d invested. And it would have been money he’d had to start with: you didn’t borrow to make that sort of investment; the returns weren’t high enough. You’d have to pay all the fees and then enough to cover the interest on the loan before you even started to think about a profit. And Mark would regard something like a unit trust as a staid, long-term investment, she was sure, steady, not spectacular. No, he definitely wouldn’t have borrowed money to do that.
Something higher risk, then, less regulated. Had he been spread betting? That was a quick way to get into serious trouble. You could open these accounts with an online broker, she’d read about them, where you started without depositing any money and just ran your account until they asked you to settle up, betting on things to go up or down half a point – shares, commodities, currencies, whatever was going – betting against yourself so you spread the risk, changing your positions every day, every hour, every few minutes, even. What if he’d got into that? She could imagine it, Mark online at the office, playing the market just for the buzz of it. He could have done that and made a miscalculation, or just have been called away to do something urgent without closing his position, and come back to find himself thousands and thousands in hock.
But it needn’t be that, either: once you moved in the kinds of circles he did, there were countless ways to make and lose money. He knew so many entrepreneurs and speculators, and he was always talking about someone or other with a new project in the works who was looking for venture capital. Only a few days ago he’d been talking about a guy who was trying to raise cash to set up a TV production company, and last month there had been someone who was buying mining land in Brazil. What if Mark had decided to remortgage the house, empty his savings and invest in something like that? Well, if he had, shouldn’t he perhaps have mentioned it? ‘Pass the marmalade, would you, Han? Oh, and by the way, I’ve decided to put half a mill into a Kazakhstani oil pipeline. I’m having to remortgage the house but no need to worry your pretty little head about it, sweetheart.’
In the quiet of the office she heard herself snort. Maybe that was it – the scale on which he operated surprised her less and less these days. Immediately, though, she remembered something else. About once a month in New York, he and a group of four or five friends had had poker evenings. Generally, Mark came home half-cut afterwards and she’d assumed that the poker was really just an excuse for them all to get together and have a few beers. One night, though, he’d got in some time after two and put fifteen hundred dollars on her bedside table and she’d realised that they played seriously. Teddy, who’d lost most of the fifteen hundred, Mark said, had been chilly with both of them until the next poker evening, when the tide had turned somewhat and he’d gone home a thousand richer at Ant’s expense, much to Roisin’s fury.
What if this was down to gambling? Could something that had started off as a bit of a laugh have escalated into something more serious? Maybe when she thought he was at business dinners he was really at casinos. Maybe he’d had a big win and got addicted. On the other hand, was he really the kind of person to keep beating his head against a brick wall when he was losing? Would he do that, Mark, keep telling himself that the next big win was one more bet away – then one more?
She turned away from the window, went back to the box-file and lifted the pile of paperwork out on to the desk. Nothing in the Coutts statement suggested he was gambling; there were no transactions with anything that sounded like a casino or a bookies or, as far as she could tell, any online gambling site. There were no huge cash withdrawals, either, just the £250 he took out once a week or so for newspapers and drinks and cabs. She set the statement and the mortgage letter aside and flipped quickly through the rest of the papers, looking for anything that related to debt – letters about loans or demands for payment. There was nothing, though. Even his three credit cards weren’t maxed out: together, they had a combined balance of just under seven thousand pounds, which, when your finances worked on Mark’s sort of level, was nothing at all.
She flicked through the last few papers, Coutts and Mastercard statements from over a year ago, her eyes still skimming the transactions but no longer really expecting to find anything relevant. When she turned over what she thought was the last sheet, however, her hand stopped in mid-air.
In front of her on the desk, the very last piece of paper in the file, was a statement from Birmingham Midshires. Mark didn’t bank with Birmingham Midshires, though. She did.
She picked up the pape
r, noticing a slight tremor in her hand, and looked at the name and address in the top left-hand corner. Her name, not Mark’s. She looked at the date. It was the most recent statement, the one she’d been sent at the end of the tax year in April, showing her new balance with the year’s interest added: just under £47,000. She remembered opening it, feeling frustrated by how low the interest rates were then filing it away in her accordion file. So why was it here? Why was it in Mark’s box?
The tremor in her hand magnified and she slapped the statement down on the desk, the sound startling her. There was no other explanation: the only way the statement could be in his file was if he’d taken it out of hers and put it there.
She glanced at the clock above the door. How long had she been here? David would be back with his lunch any minute, surely. Well, that was a risk she’d just have to take, wasn’t it? If he came in and found her, she’d think of something. She couldn’t wait until she got home; she needed to know now.
Pulling the chair up to the desk, Hannah opened Mark’s laptop and turned it on. A few seconds passed and then a dialogue box appeared demanding a password. Shit. Well, of course it was going to be password-protected, wasn’t it? DataPro was one of the most sophisticated corporate software-design companies in Europe. Glancing at the clock again, she tried to think. Numbers, not just letters or a word: she’d got a telling-off about that when he discovered she used MalvernHills as the password for her Hotmail account. Leaning forward, she tapped in his birthday, 110772, and hit return. The password you have entered is incorrect. Please re-enter your password. She thought again then tapped in her own birthday. Wrong again. Shit, shit. How many chances did she have before the system shut itself down? Would it send out an alert? One more go, she decided: three strikes and you’re out. She closed her eyes and focused. Numbers and letters, she realised, not one or the other; personally significant but not legal data. She opened her eyes. It was a long shot but – yes, it felt right. She typed in the name and street of their old favourite hotdog restaurant in New York: Westville10. Heart thumping, she hit return. Bingo.
Before We Met: A Novel Page 6
