The It Girl(45)

A porter was standing at the door, and opened it as she came near.

“Can I get you a taxi, miss?”

“No, no thank you,” Hannah said. “I’ll be fine walking, but—” She paused in the doorway, uncertain of what to say, how to put it.

“Yes, miss?” The porter was kindly, in his seventies perhaps. He looked like a grandfather.

“My friend, she’s still upstairs—will you make sure she gets home okay? She’s had a bit to drink…”

“Say no more, miss.” The porter tapped the side of his nose and winked, but not in the way the barman had, with a hint of suggestion. This was purely avuncular. “I’ll see to it myself. Where’s home?”

“Pelham College. She’s a student.”

“You leave it with me. She’ll be grand.” He nodded at the rain, which was just starting outside, turning the stone flags of the pavement to dark mirrors and the lamps to splashes of gold. “Are you sure you don’t want that taxi now? I can put it on Mr. Clarke’s account.”

Hannah smiled, knowing that he had sized up her clothes, and April’s, and had a very good idea of how much cash she had in her account, and shook her head.

“No, that’s very kind, thank you. I’ll be fine. I’ve got my mac.”

“All right, then. Good night, miss. You take care.”

“Good night,” Hannah said.

And pulling her hood up, she headed out, into the rainy winter night.





AFTER


Hannah arrives home at the same time as Will. She’s looking through her handbag for her key when she hears the low growl of a motorbike coming up the mews, and turns to see him, blindingly bright, driving towards her. He comes to a halt, kicks out the stand, and unbuckles his helmet.

“How was your day?” he asks. She’s still trying to think of what to say, how even to begin, when he turns aside, pulls his work bag out of the bike’s rear pannier, and heads towards the front door.

Upstairs, she sinks into an armchair with a sigh, watching as Will peels off his leathers and shakes his folded suit jacket out of its creases.

“Let’s get takeaway,” she says, ignoring the brief twinge provoked by the thought of the cost. “I can’t face cooking.”

“Bad day?” Will asks, looking up, and Hannah nods, and then regrets doing so. She doesn’t want to talk about it, but now she’ll have to. She’s always going on at Will for buttoning things up; she can’t very well do the same. Plus she has to tell him about the midwife appointment. It’s his baby—it wouldn’t be fair to keep that stuff from him.

“I had high blood pressure at the midwife appointment,” she says at last. “My own fault. I ran there.”

“Okay…” Will says slowly. He sits down on the arm of the sofa next to her, his face puzzled. “Is that a big deal?”

“It can be, apparently. It can be a sign of this thing called pre-eclampsia, which is pretty serious, though they don’t seem to think it’s that. But they want me to come back next week for another check.”

“Next week?” Will’s face doesn’t betray much emotion, but Hannah knows him well enough to read the flicker of alarm beneath the surface. “Well, that’s annoying for you. Seems pretty stupid they didn’t just wait for it to go down and try again.”

“They did,” Hannah says reluctantly. “But it was still high. I think I’m just stressed—oh God, I don’t know. She told me to go home and relax, so that’s what I’m doing.”

“Stressed?” Will says. He has picked up on the word immediately, and Hannah wants to kick herself. “Stressed about what? Is this still about Neville?”

Hannah says nothing.

“Han, love, we’ve discussed this. It’s over. Neville is gone. It’s time to move on.”

It isn’t over, Hannah wants to say through gritted teeth, if I made a mistake. It isn’t over if Geraint Williams is correct and my evidence left the wrong person to rot in jail. If all that’s true, it’s very, very far from over. But she doesn’t say that. She can’t. She can’t bring herself to say those words aloud, to make the possibility real.

“I really need a cup of tea,” she says at last, and Will nods, jumping up, glad to have something to do, a way to be a good husband in all of this.

As the sounds of the kettle boiling and Will moving cups and containers in the kitchen filter down the corridor, it comes to her like a reluctant realization—she has to tell him the truth about the encounter in the bookshop. Anything else would be a betrayal. It’s just a question of how.

“Will,” she says at last, when they’re both settled, him on the sofa with the takeaway menus, her curled up beneath a fluffy blanket with a mug of peppermint tea warming both hands.

He looks up.

“Yes? I was thinking pizza—what do you reckon?”

“Pizza’s fine, but listen, there was something else. Something happened today.”

“At the clinic?”

“No, at work. This—this guy came into the shop. The journalist I told you about, the one who emailed—”

“He came into the shop?” Will puts down the menus and turns to face her. His expression takes her aback—this is exactly why she didn’t want to tell him, out of a fear that he would overreact. But his face has a fury in it that’s even more out of proportion than she was expecting. Will knows what she’s been through with the press over the years; he’s watched her change her number and her appearance and even her name. He gets angry on her behalf, angry enough to swear at reporters who call the house, even threaten them sometimes, but that doesn’t begin to touch what she sees in his reaction now.