The computer was beyond fast and within four or five seconds she had the browser open and was typing in ‘Birmingham Midshires’. When the page came up, she reached for her bag, got out her diary and flicked to the back where her codes and passwords were written down. Yes, she knew you weren’t supposed to, but how else were you supposed to keep track of them all? She could spend her whole life trying to remember the answers to her ‘personalised security questions’. Well, she thought bitterly, maybe she was about to learn her lesson the hard way.
She hit the ‘Log in’ button and entered the passwords. She had codes for four airlines’ frequent-flyer programmes, Amazon, iTunes and numerous other sites for online shopping, but her banking arrangements, at least, were simple: this ISA, her HSBC current account, and then, also managed via HSBC, two thousand shares in a tech company that she’d bought three years ago on a hot tip. She’d paid two pounds each for them but the last time she’d looked, last week, they’d been worth £120 in total.
She hit ‘return’ and the page with her account details started to open. Suddenly she didn’t want to see. She pushed the chair back and stood up. Her heart was thumping behind her sternum. She rested her head against the cold window and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw a man jogging up the steps to the entrance seven storeys below. David.
Quickly, she came back to the computer, took a breath and looked at the screen.
She’d expected it – really, from the moment she’d found her statement she’d known – but that didn’t make it any less shocking: her ISA had been cleared out. The balance onscreen now read £29.02. She stared at it until the numbers blurred in front of her eyes. £29.02. She clicked on the link to her recent transactions and there it was, four days earlier: a transfer to M. J. Reilly of £46,800. It was gone – he’d taken it all.
Chapter Six
The glass panels shook as the front door slammed behind her. Still in her coat, Hannah sat down at the foot of the stairs and put her head in her hands. A sharp stabbing pain had started behind her left eye and was spreading across her forehead. It was so intense she thought she might throw up.
On the way back from Hammersmith, the shock had been joined by a feeling of intense loss. Her savings, everything she’d managed to put aside in the fifteen years she’d been working, were gone. Before she’d met Mark, her ISA had been her flat-deposit fund, the money she’d planned eventually to use for buying a place of her own. New York prices were mad, of course, and she’d loved her rented apartment and hadn’t wanted to move to a different, cheaper area, so she’d put it off and put it off and then she’d met Mark and that had been it. All that work, she thought now, all those months of little transfers, especially at the beginning, just after university, when she was living in London for the first time and had no real money to spare. Determined to be independent, though, and never ask her parents for anything again, she’d opened a savings account and set up a direct debit of £75 a month. She’d watched it slowly accumulate, feeling proud and in control; as soon as she’d got her first small pay-rise, she’d increased the direct debit to £100. Her first-ever bonus, too, £300 – she’d bought a pair of cheap winter boots, then resisted temptation and salted the rest away.
Now came a hot sweep of panic: she was broke – completely broke. She had about £250 in her current account, the near-worthless shares and £29.02: less than £400 in total. And without a job, she had no way of earning any more: there was no salary coming in at the end of the month. She was sweating, she realised, her armpits were wet, and a string of adjectives was running through her head: stuck, screwed, powerless. Fucked.
Needless to say, she hadn’t been able to get out of DataPro without being seen by David. She’d called the lift then stood in the lobby and watched the numbers on the overhead panel as it climbed towards the seventh floor, agonisingly slow. At last the doors pinged open and, without looking up, she’d stepped in and almost collided with him as he came out. Shit. She’d had a momentary impression of his body warmth and a sharp, lemon-soap scent before he moved away with a short laugh of embarrassment, his hand on her forearm holding her away from him as much as greeting her.
‘Hi.’ He’d pressed the button to stop the doors closing and let go of her arm. She’d stepped back out into the lobby and he’d followed her. He was smiling, his expression friendly but curious. ‘Hannah – lovely to see you.’
‘You, too,’ she said. ‘How are you? Tony said you were in.’
‘Yes, just popped out to get a bite to eat.’ He’d lifted the evidence, a brown-paper bag spotted with grease. He was in weekend wear: jeans and a brushed-cotton plaid shirt with a faded T-shirt underneath, a pair of Adidas shell-toes. She couldn’t remember ever having seen him out of a suit before. He was thirty-eight, she knew, but today he’d looked about twenty-five.
‘Saturday afternoon in the office?’ she said.
‘I’m doing projections, whipping some figures into shape before we meet Systema. Mark’s told you about their approach, obviously?’
‘Yes, of course. Interesting times.’
‘Could be. I’ll be here most of the weekend anyway. How about you, though? I thought you two were going away?’
‘To Rome?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, that’s still a couple of weeks off yet, unfortunately.’
He’d looked confused for a moment but then his face cleared. ‘Oh, I see. Well, if you’re here, you can’t be there, can you?’ He smiled. ‘Is Mark with you?’
‘Mark? Er – he’s at home.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Hannah had seen the question in his eyes. ‘He’s shattered, I think,’ she’d said. ‘He’ll probably be zonked out in front of the TV when I get back.’ She patted her bag hammily. ‘He left our electricity bill here by mistake last week – got it mixed up with some other papers. I’ve just been to Westfield for a bit of shopping and said I’d pop in and pick it up on my way back so we can pay it before we get cut off. Usual domestic chaos.’ Her laughter had come out sounding a lot more convincing than it had felt.
‘Right,’ David had said again, but the unasked question had lingered in the air between them: if Mark was in London, why was he at home on the sofa while David was spending all day at the office?
In the kitchen Hannah stood at the sink and downed three Aspirin with a large glass of water. Mixed with the shock and hurt was another feeling now: fear. Yes, she admitted to herself, she was afraid. What the hell was going on? If Mark needed her money so badly, why hadn’t he just asked for it? They were married, they loved each other, didn’t they? They were supposed to be a team, to support each other. If he’d asked her for it, she would have given it to him straight away. Why just take it like this unless he didn’t want to tell her the reason – or couldn’t?
What if he was in trouble? Not just money trouble, real trouble. What if he’d crossed someone dangerous? For a moment the idea seemed ludicrous – someone dangerous? Come on, Hannah, back to the real world – but then she remembered a story that Paul, a friend of Dan’s, had told over dinner the other day. He was in commercial property and the company he worked for, a specialised arm of one of the large estate agencies, had started doing business in Russia, going over and giving presentations to super-wealthy Muscovites to convince them to buy investment property in London. The presentations had been a success and they’d been hired to find properties for several new clients, but afterwards, Paul said, one of the clients had refused to pay their commission. It was a substantial amount, nearly half a million, and Paul’s company had chased and chased and eventually instructed their lawyer. Soon after starting work, however, the lawyer had come back and advised them quietly to write the money off. If they didn’t, the implication was, the repercussions would be violent.
Could Mark have got himself into something like that? DataPro did a lot of business overseas, and they’d handled a couple of projects for new Eastern European clients earlier in the year. What if one of
them had refused to pay, he’d pursued it and they’d come after him? But why not tell her something like that? There would be no reason to hide it. And anyway, in that scenario, they would owe him, not the other way round.
Gambling made more sense. What if Mark was in debt to violent people and they were threatening to mess him up? She exhaled sharply through her nose. It was ridiculous – she was being ridiculous. What next, the Mob?
She stalked the room, successive waves of anger and panic breaking over her. She fended them off by focusing on what she could do. She could call the office and talk to David. If it were something to do with DataPro, he would know. But actually, would he? He’d thought they were both in Rome: Mark had lied to him, too. And what if it were nothing to do with the company? She liked David as far as she knew him, but that was hardly at all – she couldn’t stand the idea of him knowing their personal business and thinking there were problems in their marriage. And what if there was a simple explanation for all this – there still could be, couldn’t there? – and Mark returned to discover she’d involved his business partner?
She thought about his financial paperwork. She should have brought it back with her and gone through it here, line by line. She’d looked as carefully as she could in the office but she’d been too flustered, too shocked. Unlike her, as far as she knew, Mark wasn’t stupid enough to keep a written record of all his banking passwords so she couldn’t access his accounts online. She’d have to wait until tonight, somehow make sure David had left the office and then go back there. Unless . . .
On the hall table was the pile of Mark’s post. Hadn’t there been a letter for him from Coutts this morning? She ran into the hall, picked up the pile and flicked through it. Yes, here it was. She dropped the rest of the letters and clutched it to her chest. It was just a normal window envelope, plain white paper, not one of the glossy pamphlet things advertising a promotion. It would be a letter about his account or a statement. She hesitated. They never opened one another’s post – why would they? And if she opened this now, she’d have to get rid of it afterwards: she wouldn’t be able to explain having opened it.
She looked at it a second longer then stuck her finger under the flap and ripped the envelope apart. Inside were three sheets of paper, his monthly statement. Her eyes ran down the transactions but nothing jumped out: no big transfers, no bookmakers, no La Perla or hotels. But if Mark were staying at hotels with another woman, she realised, he’d pay on his DataPro card so there’d be no risk of her seeing. She felt a rising sense of hopelessness. The statements for his business accounts went straight to the office; it would be nearly impossible for her to access them.
Back in the kitchen, she smoothed the statement out on the table and went through it item by item, Biro in hand. There were the new shirts, the gas bill, their supper at Mao Tai last Tuesday, the tickets for La Bohème. There was a payment to the delicatessen at the top of the street, and then the butcher’s shop next door for the ribs of beef they’d had a couple of weeks ago. Lea & Sandeman, the wine merchants, and the private gym Mark used in Chelsea; £25 to W. H. Smith at Heathrow Terminal Three, for books, no doubt. She could identify almost everything, and by the time she reached the end there were only two transactions with Biro crosses next to them: a payment on the second page to someone or something called Trowell and then, near the bottom of page three, another to or at ‘Woodall’.
Reaching for her laptop, she typed ‘Trowell’ into Google. The first hit was a link to Wikipedia, the snippet of text underneath telling her that Trowell was a village in Nottinghamshire. She scanned down, seeing links to a garden centre, a definition of ‘trowel’ in an online dictionary, and then links to social networking sites and people with the surname Trowell. She looked back at the statement. There were no initials, no obvious indication that the payment had been made to a person, though that didn’t rule it out.
She typed in ‘Woodall’. This time the first hit was a link to a site of motorway service stations. She skimmed down the page. The next was a Wikipedia entry for William Woodall, politician, 1832–1901, and the third another Wikipedia entry, this one for Woodall, ‘a small hamlet in the civil parish of Harthill, with Woodall situated in the metropolitan borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK’.
She went back to the search bar at the top and added ‘Trowell’. When she hit return this time, the first thing she saw was a link to a trivia site, and a line of text underneath that read: ‘Which motorway has service stations named Woodall, Trowell and Tibshelf?’ The answer, which appeared straight after the question, eliminating any fun to be had in guessing, was the M1.
Hannah stood up and went to the pinboard. She unhooked the calendar and brought it back to the table. The payment at Trowell had gone out on 12 October, the one at Woodall on 26 October, both Fridays. In the little squares for both days, Mark’s large, confident handwriting read Germany – Frankfurt.
Chapter Seven
Though it was nearly eight o’clock, Knightsbridge was still clogged with traffic, no more than two or three cars at a time making it through the lights. The couple in the seat in front were riding the bus like a bumper-car, leaning against each other, their feet up on the plastic ledge that separated them from the glass expanse of the enormous windshield, his feet encased in grimy trainers, hers bare in a pair of canary, yellow patent-leather heels that Hannah, feeling like an old woman, thought she’d regret within the hour. Thermals from the heater underneath their seat carried back a woody, masculine scent that Hannah recognised as Gillette body-spray: she’d had a boyfriend at college for a week or two who’d worn it.
The boy turned to look out of the window, adjusting his arm beneath the fake-fur trim of his girlfriend’s hood. The bus was now inching its way past Harvey Nichols, where the windows were already dressed for Christmas. Against a backdrop of glittering silver cloth, a mannequin in an exquisite gothic lace dress swung on a trapeze with an insouciance suggesting she was already several glasses into the bottle of champagne dangling from her stiff plastic fingers. In the next window along, another sat astride a golden reindeer in nothing but flimsy silk underwear and heels, a male mannequin in full evening dress, shoes and all, pressed indecently close behind her, the sex pest at an absinthe-fuelled office party.
How long was it now until Christmas? Six weeks or thereabouts. God, she’d barely given it a thought. Last year, they – she and Mark – had spent the holidays with her mother in Malvern. As children, she and Tom had alternated between their parents, spending Christmas Eve and the day itself with one, moving to the other’s house for Boxing Day and the rest of the long week that stretched towards New Year’s Eve, changing the order the following year. Since they’d been adults, however, and especially while she’d been in America, Hannah had felt that she should spend the day itself with her mother. Dad had Maggie, and Chessa and Rachel, her two daughters from her first marriage, who always turned up in what Dad called their ‘charabancs’ with their own blonde daughters, two apiece, and their husbands, and the collection of semi-wild dogs that Chessa serially adopted from animal-rescue centres.
Though her own plans hadn’t been negotiable – it was Tom’s turn to spend Christmas with Lydia’s family, and her mother would be left alone if she didn’t go – Hannah had hesitated to ask Mark to come with her last year. She’d wanted to spend the holiday with him but had struggled to imagine him in the little red-brick railway worker’s cottage which her mother had moved into after the divorce and had barely changed since, where even the air seemed trapped, heavy with regret and the sense of a life tentative and half-lived. The previous year, lying on the bed in her old teenage bedroom, the sound of The Archers seeping up through the kitchen ceiling, the word moribund had come into Hannah’s mind. What would Mark, with all his energy, think of the place? But then, she’d thought, her mother’s house was part of her, Hannah’s, life, too. It was where she’d spent half her childhood. If they were going to have a future, she had to trust Mark and let him in.
She’d waited until a Friday at the very end of November, when she’d met him at JFK and they were lying in bed in her apartment, catching up on each other’s news and ignoring the rumbling in their stomachs that indicated it was time to get up, face the cold and go round the corner for hotdogs at Westville, their habitual post-airport, post-bed spot. She’d broached the subject gingerly but Mark had pulled her on to his chest, tucked her hair behind her ears so that it was out of his face and said simply, ‘I’d love to come with you.’
‘Really?’ she’d said, sounding very surprised.
‘Of course. I was beginning to feel offended you hadn’t asked.’
‘Oh.’ That idea hadn’t occurred to her.
‘I’m joking. But of course I want to spend Christmas with you, and I want to meet your mother. Both your parents.’
Happy – and relieved – she’d kissed him and he’d slipped his hands down her spine and kissed her in return. ‘I want to know you,’ he’d said.
‘You do know me.’ She’d sounded indignant, hating the implication that he didn’t already, the distance between them that implied.
Before We Met: A Novel Page 7
