Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  I felt a surge of triumph. Lily was right, Milo did prefer me to Lily, and it felt like victory. We staggered across soft grass in the wan London sunshine, kicking litter and dirt from our sandals, and it was exquisite.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alice

  Five weeks and six days before

  By the evening I felt I had been so fucking stupid I was lost for words. When I thought about last night in Vauxhall – and I had been thinking about literally nothing else – I had to put my hands over my face, I was so ashamed. I had fallen at the first grown-up hurdle I had tried to jump. I paced around my room in an agony of remorse and rejection. I burst into tears. I had been weak, I had been gauche. I had shown Milo I was just a stupid little kid, a dull child who couldn’t take her drink or her drugs. I had stood there roaring like an idiot, topless in his bedroom! Milo didn’t like me, he couldn’t like me after that, he didn’t care about me, he was probably making a YouTube short about me right now. And underneath it all I was thinking about what ammunition I had given him that he could use against GWM, that he could use against Poppa. I would be the intern who brought bad publicity on the company. I would become the girl who had made her family lose millions.

  FFS, you are just a dumb bitch, Alice! I was so unhappy I wanted to die.

  Milo didn’t text, he phoned. He actually phoned me! That was so retro! I didn’t remember giving him my number, maybe he got it off Lily. Yeah, maybe she gave it to him, or maybe he was hunting me down all over town! I had forgotten how good his voice was, he had got that kinda flat, rough London thing going on.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine. Fine.’ I was trying to not give anything away, to make up for earlier.

  ‘It was a shame you ran off this morning, I could at least have made you a cup of tea.’ I could listen to his most banal sentences over and over.

  ‘Anyway, there was something I was going to mention to you but you had split before I remembered. There’s a protest meeting on Tuesday in the community centre here, I’m speaking and so is Gabe. Why don’t you come along? I’d really like to see you again.’ I felt such a surge of pleasure that it sucked the breath from me and I couldn’t answer. ‘You’ll see all sides of the arguments about development that are going on down here. It’d be great for your work experience. You’ll realise that we’re in a fight for the soul of the city.’

  I sensed danger – the liberation he was proposing was novel.

  I forced myself to tell Milo that I’d think about it. He didn’t pressure me and that was something that also surprised me.

  ‘Well, give me a call when you decide. Catch you later, Alice.’

  And he was gone. After half an hour of feverish Internet typing, I had watched two YouTube videos of Milo delivering speeches at council meetings, viewed fifteen hundred times each, found his Insta and Facebook pages and read everything on his blog, Homes are for Living In. I was not naïve; if he could get close to me, perhaps recruit me, the developer’s daughter, to stand on protest lines, it was a coup. Was that why he was interested in me? Or was it something else? It had felt so right being with him it couldn’t possibly be a lie, could it?

  And suddenly Tuesday seemed a lifetime away and I couldn’t possibly wait that long to see him again. But first I had to get through the charity fun run that Helene had organised. I felt on such a high I felt I could fly it without my feet even touching the ground.

  CHAPTER 19

  Helene

  Five weeks and five days before

  There were ten thousand of us amassed in central London on a Sunday morning in a road that was closed off to traffic. There was an air of excitement and fidgety preparation as runners warmed up, adjusted ear buds and tied shoelaces tighter. Alice, Lily and I were stood in a loose circle. I took it as a point of pride that I could recruit both of them to get out of bed early and get involved – I can be manipulative when I need to be. The glow of raising money for a good cause was the headline argument, but thinner thighs and tighter butts ran a close second.

  I was dutifully doing stretches while Alice was fussing about fixing her race number straight with four little safety pins. Lily was finishing off a last cigarette, causing mutters from competitors surrounding us as her smoke drifted over their faces. Sunglasses obscured her eyes. The girls radiated low energy, catching frightening loud yawns off each other and using each other’s shoulders as props to stay upright. They had been out a lot and I had hardly seen Alice all weekend.

  A man with a loudhailer began issuing instructions that were so distorted by feedback no one could hear what he said, but we all knew it meant we would imminently be underway. We were boxed in among a large crowd of competitors far back from the starting line, but even so I felt the familiar pulse of adrenaline at the start of a race. ‘You’ll smash it, Alice,’ I said. ‘You’ll be so much faster than me.’

  ‘Yeah, like, of course!’ she answered, rolling her eyes, as if the result was a foregone conclusion. I felt a flare of competitiveness. Just you wait, I thought, I might surprise you, I want to win.

  The runners in front began to move forward like a wave, and everyone around us cheered and took off at a tremendous pace, far too fast to be maintained. I kept Alice in sight in front of me, her perky ponytail bouncing to my rhythm. I kept pace with her until I saw the four kilometres sign, then felt thirsty. I grabbed a bottle of water from the race helpers that lined the route as the crowd behind the street barriers roared us on.

  Somewhere in that crowd was Gabe, offering his support. I began to feel lethargic and heavy. Running, which had always come so effortlessly to me, became more difficult. I saw Lily on my right catch up with Alice and she beckoned her with her hand, and the two of them suddenly took off, their long legs carrying them away. They were swallowed up in a moment in an undulating sea of runners.

  I tried to stay positive – there was still a long way to go – but I felt so tired, my lack of sleep catching up with me, the stress of my problems with Gabe robbing my body of vitamins and energy. I felt very alone.

  I tried to push myself forward through sheer force of will, but my body refused to cooperate. The markers for eight kilometres appeared and went. The crowd of runners surrounding me began to age, the young were nowhere to be seen. A giant Teletubby waving at the spectators and enjoying their cheers nearly tripped me up; a speed-walking woman in her seventies overtook me.

  The gap between how I saw myself and the reality was growing bigger all the time. I became prone to unsettling thoughts as the tarmac jarred below my feet. I was middle-aged. I was barren. I was done. No wonder my husband was having an affair.

  The nine kilometres sign appeared. I felt so drained I wasn’t sure I could run the last thousand metres. Finally the finish line took shape up ahead, and I gamely tried to speed up to cross it in style, but there were so many people ahead of me I had to queue to get into the enclosure.

  I stood alone, a pain in my chest, my legs wobbling, surrounded by runners being embraced and congratulated by friends and family. I saw Lily with her arms around a reality TV star, his hand on her taut thigh as someone took a photo. I searched in vain for Gabe, but didn’t see him.

  I caught a glimpse of Alice’s red ponytail, got a partial view of someone she was talking to. The crowd parted and I could see it was a woman in high heels. Her face was turned away. The crowd thickened again and my view was obscured.

  I was sure it was the woman from the Café Royal. A wave of panic swamped me and I pushed against the crowd, desperate to get to Alice. She moved in and out of view as the crowd surged like water. My leaden legs wouldn’t carry me to her, as I saw the woman put her hand on Alice’s shoulder. A tall man blocked my view and I shoved him aside, his shout of protest echoing in my ear.

  I was roughly shouldered from the side and nearly fell over.

  ‘Fantastic job, you’re a star!’ Gabe had his arms around me as I tried to push him away, desperate to get to Alice, but now I couldn’t see
her at all.

  ‘Where’s Alice?’

  ‘Oh, over there, I think, did you see Lily with that guy, honestly—’

  I started forward to get to Alice when she came up alongside me, her face split with a smile and her eyes bright. ‘That was great, wasn’t it? I roasted you!’

  ‘Alice, thank God,’ I breathed, putting my hand on her arm. ‘Are you OK? Who was that woman?’ I was hunting for her in the crowd, but could no longer see her.

  ‘What woman?’ Alice asked.

  ‘The one who was just with you, what did she say, are you OK?’

  Alice gave a shrug of irritation. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She drew back and pouted. ‘Jesus, Helene, it’s not all about you, you know. I ran in a personal best time, you should be happy for me.’

  She put a heavy emphasis on happy as Gabe enveloped his daughter in a hug. I desperately searched the hundreds of faces surrounding us, but couldn’t see the woman anywhere. I momentarily wondered if I was losing my mind. The crowd began to swim in and out of focus and I had to put my hands on my knees.

  I felt Gabe’s palm on my back.

  ‘Helene, are you OK?’ Alice asked. ‘Oh dear, maybe it was all a bit too much for her,’ she said to Gabe, ‘it’s quite a long way to run at her age, isn’t it?’

  CHAPTER 20

  Maggie

  Five weeks and three days before

  After watching Gabe in Connaught Tower and finding the second phone, I had thought we’d get a breakthrough imminently and see his lover, but it didn’t happen. We got through the weekend and the family’s fundraising at a 10K run and then in the early evening on Tuesday, Simona and I followed Gabe from the office back to Vauxhall. The day was muggy, the evening light beginning to fade. His car pulled up outside a three-storey building with bars across the ground-floor windows and a rail line level with the second-floor windows. The Vauxhall Gardens community centre was pulling all comers in through its open doors – mothers with double buggies, students and shuffling old men, people of every race and creed. Outside, kids on bikes, teenagers on mopeds and youths with pitbulls competed for space.

  Simona nudged me to point out a new black Mercedes with blacked-out windows that pulled up under the railway bridge. The driver’s door opened and a heavy-set man in a dark suit got out and opened the rear door. A tall man got out and stood taking in the scene. He turned and I saw his face – he was middle-aged, but looked good on it.

  ‘He’s a cross between Colin Firth and George Clooney,’ Simona breathed.

  My reply was more to the point: ‘God, he’s fucking hot!’ I shot back.

  The wealthy passenger from the back seat wore a thousand-pound suit and had a sheen of wealth and importance. I thought he looked Russian.

  ‘The City that takes all comers,’ Simona added in appreciation as we followed him into the centre.

  There were a lot of angry people sat in rows of chairs and a lot more angry people crowded into the spaces at the sides. The room was stifling and the ceiling low. A Lambeth councillor took to a small stage that had been set up at the far end of the room but he took too long to open the meeting and try and establish an agenda – he was drowned out by boos and catcalls from the audience.

  The Russian stood near me at the back of the room, his face impassive. Gabe got up to speak. The atmosphere was poisonous and felt on the brink of getting out of hand.

  ‘Leave our estate alone!’ someone shouted.

  Emboldened, a heavy-set woman stood up. ‘My kids haven’t had an afternoon kip for three years because of the drilling! It’s driving me round the bend!’ she began but Gabe interrupted her and forced her into silence.

  ‘I’m Gabe Moreau. I own GWM Holdings and we are redeveloping Reg Jones House. Many of you know me as I’ve spent a lot of time here with you over the years.’ I noticed several nodding heads in the audience. ‘Reg Jones House is going to be knocked down and a tower built in its place. The plans are freely available for you to have a look at. But plans do change, because the cost of materials and the cost of demolition vary. As you are well aware, we are the company that accept the lowest profit margins and have promised to deliver more social homes than any other. But there are going to be changes to the original scheme.’ There was a ripple of discontent through the room.

  Gabe began to walk around the stage, his voice becoming slower and more intimate. ‘I want to take a moment to tell you a story. I come from a town in a small country far away that was completely destroyed by war, where my family was killed and my house was bombed to rubble. My dad asked me once, when I was young, “What is a home made of?” I thought for a moment and I answered. “Bricks.” “What else?” he asked. “A chimney and glass for the windows?” And my dad shook his head and he said to me, “A home is made of none of those things. It is made of love and hope and dreams.” I don’t build tall towers because I like steel or glass or square footage or aspect. I build homes because I believe in hope and family and renewal.’ The room was quiet, he had their attention.

  Simona leaned in and whispered, ‘I’d make love to him.’

  ‘I’d certainly fuck him,’ I whispered back. It was impossible not to be impressed by Gabe Moreau that evening. It was the first time I’d heard him speak and his charisma stood out like salt on the rim of a margarita. When Helene and Gabe fell in love it would have seemed a relationship in balance – she provided the class and he provided the money. He had been a grieving widower being offered a new start and a new beginning. And I was being paid to pull it all apart.

  ‘But there is a problem. The new costs mean that the number of new homes for council tenants has to be reduced—’

  There was uproar. ‘But we need more low cost homes, not fewer!’ a young woman near the front said. It was a mournful plea that had people nodding heads.

  ‘You have a choice, but it’s not a nice one,’ Gabe continued. ‘The way I see it, we can spend the next ten years letting the lawyers argue about who is responsible for the changes, while your homes don’t get built and the lawyers are the only people who get paid, or we can agree to the amendments.’

  ‘You’re stealing our homes from right under our noses!’ a man shouted.

  ‘Milo Bandacharian leads the tenants’ rights group,’ Gabe continued. ‘I came from across the world to this city, Milo grew up right here. Let’s hear from him.’

  The man I had seen talking to Alice and Gabe the week before stood up. He wore a loose-fitting white T-shirt, battered Nikes and faded jeans and had a light London summer tan. ‘I was born here in Vauxhall. I live in Reg Jones House. I have known many of you for years.’ He looked tired, and was probably fighting off a hangover and too many late nights. ‘I more than anyone want more homes, but I don’t think there is any other way. We will have more homes under this developer than any other.’

  It was all too much for a guy at the front who’d had too much to drink. He stood up chanting ‘homes not profit’ and the meeting began to crumble as others joined in. A councillor pleaded for calm. The Russian left.

  Simona and I headed out the door. The mood was ugly and on the brink of getting out of hand. A hot summer night in the city, a brooding sense of injustice and grievance, this was how riots started.

  ‘You follow Gabe, Simona. I’m going to walk a bit.’

  ‘Here? I’d watch out, it’s not somewhere to hang around.’ She looked nervously at the long dark underpass by the community centre where suburban rail lines roared above.

  ‘I can take care of myself.’

  She shrugged, knowing better than to persuade me once my mind was made up. Why did I walk around the estate that night? Because it reminded me of where I grew up, the past reaching out to drag at my heels. And yet my estate was not like this. Whatever my problems – and there was a list as long as a toilet roll – I had security. Our scruffy patch of south-east London wasn’t slathered over by developers like Gabe and that Russian, it wasn’t seen as a patch of ground where millions
could be made if you just knocked down the old and built the new. I crossed a playground, where the urban foxes were dining on the rubber of the swing seats, to an abandoned row of shops plastered with graffiti and wreathed in metal shutters. I vaguely followed the curve of the river east, the sound of passing trains from the nearby tracks competing with the cries of children and the barking of dogs.

  I was in central London, the richest, most vibrant city on the planet – the flats towering in the distance were worth millions – but that wealth had never trickled down to here. To governments, to developers, here was human detritus to shove aside by the machine of progress. Gabe Moreau was expounding a different vision, but how different was he really? How different could he hope to be? Helene had told me to be careful about her husband, to not underestimate him. He had suffered the emotional explosion of his wife’s death, but was she warning me about something else? You didn’t become successful and get rich that young in the London property game if you weren’t ruthless, smart and maybe more besides.

  I was always careful on my jobs; love and exposure created a perfect storm that gave people licence to act badly, to be violent, to show the worst sides of themselves.

  I walked east, bound up in my thoughts, until I got to St Thomas’ Hospital, the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben lit up like a fairy-tale castle across the river. By one of the service doors of the hospital were a huddle of cleaners on a fag break, others streaming out at the end of their shifts. I saw the workers of the world in the 21st-century city, and they were limitless in number.

  It wasn’t until I got into work the next morning that I heard about the murder.