by Ali Knight
Maggie nodded. ‘We? You sound quite involved.’
‘I work at the company too. I make sure we’re contributing the right proportion of profits to charity, that kind of thing.’
‘So you’re in the office with him?’ Maggie asked.
‘I do it mainly from home. I go in occasionally.’
‘But you know the people in the office?’
‘Yes. She’s not one of them.’
‘OK, that’s good, and rules out a lot of people.’
‘Have you looked at his mobile phone messages?’ Maggie continued.
‘Yes. I know his code to get into it, but there’s nothing incriminating on his phone.’
‘I’m afraid that means nothing. He’ll have another one. Or another sim at least.’
I was shocked. Maggie was talking as if this was all normal behaviour.
‘Have you ever had suspicions about infidelity before?’ Simona asked.
‘No, none at all.’
‘So, until the cloakroom, everything seemed normal with your husband, your family?’
‘Of course,’ I lied. Maggie looked at me with those big brown eyes. ‘Alice and I love each other …’ Despite trying to sound certain I tailed off; I was beginning to question everything about my home life. Did Alice and I get along? She was a moody teenager, the truth was she often drove me into a rage with her thoughtlessness and selfishness. But rage never looks good on anyone, so Maggie was not to know. I ploughed on, burnishing my lie. ‘She’s a wonderful stepdaughter and she adores her father.’
‘Why did his last marriage end?’
‘His wife died. Sixteen years ago. The car he was driving skidded through a barrier and into a river. She drowned.’
I could feel the pause in the room as what I had said sat heavily.
‘That’s terrible,’ Maggie said. ‘Had he been drinking?’
‘They had been at a party, but he was breathalysed and had drunk nothing.’ To my horror tears welled up. It was the lack of sleep, the stress, it was thinking about Alice and what she had suffered through the loss of her mother, it was my marriage hanging like gossamer. I was so ashamed, I couldn’t breathe. Large, bitter tears rolled down my cheeks. Maggie reached over for that box of tissues and pulled three out with a flourish and handed them to me. ‘Do you want to know the truth, or don’t you?’ she asked quietly. ‘That is the only question that you need to answer. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.’
The silence was punctuated by the roar of buses on the street. Maggie was holding my hand now, patting the palm. It felt lovely. She could have been a therapist – no, that wasn’t right, she was much better than a therapist perched on some distant chair. She was that touchy-feely, big-hearted woman who gathered you up in her breasts and pressed you there as you inhaled perfume, cigarettes and sweat and she flicked on a kettle switch or pulled out a bottle of gin. It was a memory of women I had known when I was young, in a different time and a different life.
‘You’re shaking,’ Maggie said.
I looked up at Maggie and into her large brown eyes and sat back and blew my nose. Simona handed me another glass of water.
‘Have you told anyone about what you saw?’ Simona asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t really have the words. I’m going to pay you in cash, I want no trace of this coming back to the house.’
‘Cash works for me,’ Maggie said.
‘Alice must never know, of course. Never.’
‘This is between you, me and Gabe. There’s no need to be scared,’ Maggie said.
I dabbed at my eyes, pushed back my hair. Composed myself. ‘Of course I’m scared. I’m worried that once you show me the truth, I’m going to kill him.’
CHAPTER 3
Maggie
Eight weeks before
Helene’s threats to kill her husband were run-of-the-mill. Everyone said that, or a version of it. Everyone. Jealousy was a killer. I had a client once shout at me – after he threw his coffee, his briefcase and half the contents of my desk across this room – that he would have rather his wife had been raped than slept with her tennis coach. You see, anger to eat up the world.
Cheating is the great leveller. It brings all who suffer from it – rich or poor, the beautiful or the ugly – to the same place. It makes us small, bitter shadows of ourselves, of what we thought we could be. That’s the problem with love, it raises you up, like a Mississippi preacher, and it casts you low, lower than you ever thought you could fall. And it leaves you with nothing to cling to when you’ve got there. I know, I’ve been there.
As I watched Helene dab at her eyes with my tissues I thought about my chance encounter with Danny and how he had set me on the path to hearing the most intimate secrets of rich, cuckolded wives.
Twenty years ago I bumped into Danny in a bar. He had elbowed in front of me to get a drink, so I stood on his toe. I was wearing stilettos and that got his attention. ‘Fuck, that hurt!’ he shouted, wheeling round, searching for and ready to deck whoever had caused him pain.
‘Bet your girlfriend doesn’t scream that very often,’ I retorted sourly. I had been waiting for far too long in a three-deep throng of punters, all of us waving tenners, desperate to get the attention of the two lazy sods behind the bar in a dive in Camden Town.
‘What is your problem?’ he shouted.
‘It’s simple. You’re not getting a drink before me, because I might die of old age before this useless barman ever serves me.’ I was hollering back at him, because the music was terrible and the acoustics bad. ‘Try the blonde five down, she’s bored enough with her date that she’ll enjoy you swearing at her.’
Danny’s eyes slid to the blonde as I finally caught the barman’s sloth-slow attention. I ordered and was about to join my mate and begin the fight to get a seat but found Danny was still staring at me. ‘See the bloke in the red shirt and the trilby?’ he asked.
I looked along the bar. ‘The peacock with a pint and a G and T and … is that an umbrella he’s putting in that glass?’
Danny grinned, showing a gold tooth. ‘That’s the one. He’s eyeing up a woman. Who is it?’
The peacock had weaved his way through the crowd and plonked his drinks down in front of an eager-looking woman and slid in next to her, his back to the wall so he could see the whole pub.
I watched the couple for a few moments. She was leaning forward and talking at him in an unbroken flow, twirling the little umbrella between her fingers and then stabbing the ice in her glass with its end. Every time she looked down, Peacock gave a smouldering look to a woman on another table. ‘He’s got his eye on the girl in the beret and braces.’
Danny rolled his eyes, disappointed. ‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.’
I frowned. I was competitive and I didn’t like his brush-off. I scanned the bar again, checking out Peacock and his date, trying to interpret body language and mood. After a few minutes Peacock got tired of staring at the woman in the beret because she had turned her attention to a tall guy with a crew cut and bodybuilder biceps. Beret and braces turned full towards me and in the harsh light that passed across her face I saw she looked very young, probably too young to be in this bar legally.
I looked back at Danny, took in his dad-down-the-pub outfit, his bulky bag and that he seemed to be drinking alone. ‘You’re not in here by choice,’ I said. ‘You’re working. I bet you a beer you’re following Beret and braces cos her dad’s worried and he’s paying you to find her, or keep tabs on her.’
I saw Danny’s big and generous smile for the first time. ‘I don’t know what you do and I don’t really care, but you’d be a great private investigator.’ He handed me his card. Despite trying to feign disinterest, I was intrigued. I had always wanted to join the police, but I was too impatient and cocky to want to waste my time marching up and down at the Hendon training ground.
‘How much do you earn?’ I asked.
It was his turn to sneer. ‘Enoug
h that I don’t have to drink in here by choice. Give me a bell if you’re brave enough. Now get the fuck out of my way so I can order a beer.’
I got bladdered that night and the rest of the weekend. But by Sunday night I was staring at his card, smelling a break. I was in a dead-end job going nowhere and I liked his upfront manner. I didn’t phone Danny or send him a fax; low-key wasn’t my style. I broke into his office on Monday morning – a supermarket loyalty card picked up from a pub floor and applied to the lock on his shabby Caledonian Road office door took twenty seconds – and waited for him to arrive.
He stopped in confusion when he saw me sitting there. ‘You’re hired,’ he said. ‘But this is important. Don’t break the law. Ever. You’re not doing this job correctly if you break the law.’
I’ve taken Danny at his word – more or less – ever since. Danny taught me everything about the business. He was passionate and cynical. ‘Everybody cheats,’ was his motto. ‘And everybody lies about it. I get paid to show them that they cheated, and that they lied.’
Danny was bullying and volatile and erratic but he was loyal and funny and smart. I loved that job. I stayed for five years. We were the tabloid equivalent of the bedroom police, taking money from whoever wanted to know and was willing to pay. Insecure wives, jealous husbands, worried parents, even sometimes the benefits agency. There was a guy, an Irish bloke called Gerry O’Brady, he walked with a cane and the revenue protection boys at Westminster Council weren’t entirely convinced about Gerry’s permanent disability. They hired us to take a look. Poor old Gerry, it was his soft old heart that gave him away in the end: his daughter was getting married, and amid the many guests and the mountains of booze was me, and I caught him on video dancing with his beloved Nancy in her wedding finery. No cane, no bad back, just the love for his daughter and his pride on her special day, and Michael Jackson to seal the deal. Did I feel guilty that I got Gerry five months in jail? Not one little bit. Did I like exposing the truth? I had no doubt I was strong enough to take it. If I was ever stuck in the Matrix, I used to say, I’d be grabbing the red pill. Give it to me, show me everything, I could handle it.
When I gathered up the courage to tell Danny that I was leaving to set up my own operation, he swore at me, then he paused, his finger tracing along the top of a brown Leica that he was fond of using on his stakeouts. He understood why I was going. ‘The business is changing, girl, new technology’s going to make what we do a piece of piss. Work hard and you could do very well.’ I wasn’t beyond basking in the approval of others, particularly of my boss, and I was pleased. He pointed his tobacco-stained forefinger at me. ‘The reason you could be the best of the best? You don’t have any second thoughts about who you’re going to fuck over.’ It was a requirement of the business, I knew, but I had wondered then, as I wondered later, whether he had meant it as a compliment.
‘Give your agency a feminine name. Something women can relate to. Make them think the business isn’t grubby.’
I thought for a second. ‘What about Before I Find You?’
He frowned as he began pacing the office. ‘Before I find you I get paid the big bucks?’ He shook his head. ‘No, use the name of a flower or a pet or a Farrow and Ball paint colour. Women love that Farrow and Ball shit.’
I laughed. ‘What’s your favourite colour, Danny?’
‘Blue and white. Like Tottenham football club.’
That’s how the Blue and White agency came into existence. Football colours.
I’d like to be able to catch up with Danny, in the wake of how everything turned out, but he died windsurfing in Greece two months after he retired. He got trapped under the board as he was pulled out to sea on winds that were too strong for him. He didn’t have the strength to right himself and he drowned, in the bright blue Aegean. I still miss Danny.
Two weeks after I parted company with Danny I found a dingy first-floor office on Praed Street in Paddington that shared the corridor with a travel agent’s. It was central and cheap and I’ve stayed ever since. The travel agent’s is now an immigration lawyer’s – people do the leaving themselves and need help with the arriving – but little else has changed over the years. I did a simple refit, ripped up the carpet to get rid of the smell of fags, brought in pot plants and pale linen blinds and bought retro filing cabinets and that large black fan. I got tasteful calling cards printed and handed them out liberally. My first three clients all came via word of mouth: and it was far from glamorous. I was staking out pub car parks, a massage parlour in King’s Cross, the men’s public toilets on Clapham Common. That first year was hard. I wasn’t making money, or not enough. I had big ambitions and I couldn’t realise them. I had to get noticed. My costs were high too: I had a group of freelancers I used on occasional jobs, and in the office I had my part-time secretary/office manager/helper. I wanted to pull in richer clients and do more complex cases. Higher profile cheats had more to lose and would be harder to catch, I reasoned.
I probably would have stayed as a struggling one-and-a-half-woman band, if it hadn’t been for Mrs Farmley. What happened to Mrs Farmley still haunts me to this day.
I tuned back in to Helene and Simona and their conversation. ‘How did you hear about the Blue and White?’ Simona asked.
‘I found it on Google. I liked the name. The Blue and White sounds like an old colonial hotel in Rangoon,’ Helene said.
I smiled. I didn’t set Helene right.
CHAPTER 4
Maggie
Eight weeks before
The day Mrs Farmley came into the Blue and White it was raining. The rubbish was flowing down the gutters of Praed Street and the odour of someone’s omelette bap was trapped in the enclosed stairway.
Mrs Farmley had been married for nineteen years and had three beautiful children. She had shown me photographs of a happy family; they lived in a spacious detached house in a Hertfordshire village. Husband Hal worked at a large insurance firm in the City. He worked long hours and often came back late. Two nights a week he was at a branch office in Hampshire and he played golf on Saturday mornings. In the end, it’s the smallest fissures that break a marriage. People talk about doubt as a seed. But that’s wrong, seeds grow slowly and steadily. Doubt is a disease and once it’s taken hold in your tissues, in your heart, nothing can stop it mutating and expanding until it destroys everything you know and love. Everything.
People think they’re stronger than that, that they are immune, that vows and social pressure and routine and children – always the bairns! – can protect them from doubt’s effects. They are wrong. And so was Mrs Farmley. Hal made a careless mistake, he left his mobile phone – he was new to that new technology and he left it on a shelf where his seven-year-old could reach it. The natural curiosity of his beloved seven-year-old son destroyed his life. His son opened a message.
While Hal was in the shower Mrs Farmley, knowing the mobile was valuable and worrying about it breaking, took it from the son’s grasp and saw the message ‘24th no good x’.
The number was another mobile. That x at the end. X marks the spot. The 24th of October was the following Saturday and she was taking the kids to her parents’. He was travelling back from a conference out of town.
Mrs Farmley made her first mistake. She didn’t ask him about it. She let the doubt swamp her like a tidal wave. She didn’t confront Hal, she didn’t give him the opportunity to lie and convince her of a false truth. She came to me.
I eventually found out Hal’s secret with the help of a grey wig. I have a bag of tricks that help me do my job. A hi-vis jacket and hard hat – the public and the target obey without thinking when someone is wearing that kit – an ID badge pinned to a chest, a variety of hats, sunglasses and a short grey wig. A woman, if she’s older than twenty-five and wants to become invisible and forgettable, puts on a short, grey wig.
Hal was used to parking his car in a hotel car park and doing a quick switch in the back corridor and driving away in another vehicle. The grey wig allowe
d me to follow him closely enough to see it. Three weeks later we found out that Hal wasn’t having an affair with his secretary or a woman he met at conferences. He was married. Hal had a whole other family, two daughters aged fourteen and twelve. He wasn’t at the other company branch, he was leading another life as a man called John Andrews. He was a front-page-of-the-paper bigamist.
I told Mrs Farmley that what I had found was serious, that this was not something to deal with on her own. I asked her to come to the office with a friend. She didn’t do it. The reaction of clients to the material I presented to them was unpredictable. I assumed women were safer, they tended to cry out their shock and betrayal; their fists didn’t tend to fly, but I’d dodged more than one tipping bookcase and phones shoved off desks to clatter at my feet. And what I’d found was as bad as it got.
Mrs Farmley stood by my desk when her world fell apart, nodded, tucked her handbag into her armpit and walked calmly out of our door. I followed her, pleading with her to call someone, have a friend pick her up. She insisted she was fine, really, as she stepped into a taxi.
I called her several more times that evening, and when she didn’t answer, my misgivings increased. Eventually, against all my normal operating procedure, I went to her house. I was too late – I couldn’t get past the police cordon.
The police told me later that Hal had come home from the office at seven thirty. Mrs Farmley had watched Hal kiss their younger daughter goodnight at eight. As he was running a bath, Mrs Farmley had rooted around in the cupboard under the stairs and found an electric bar heater and an extension cable. While Hal/John was relaxing in the tub, she had plugged in the heater and opened the bathroom door. The house had plunged into darkness as the lights shorted.
The lawyers argued for a long time about whether the smell of burnt flesh was admissible at Mrs Farmley’s trial.
Never think that infidelity doesn’t ruin lives, that our secret, domestic selves can’t wreak the most vicious vengeance. Cheating ruined Mrs Farmley’s life, the life of her children, those other children who knew Hal as John, but as a darling daddy just the same. And I had made it happen. Hal might have been the one who did the dirty, but I had been the one to pull back the stone and watch the raw pain of the secrets wriggling and scorching under the light.
