by Ali Knight
‘I called you as soon as we had the photos, to confirm we are talking about the same woman. I’ve put Rory on the background checks. When Gabe drove away I knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. So far we don’t know who she is.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘I appreciate that this is difficult—’
‘Don’t say that. You have no idea at all.’
Maggie tried a different tack. ‘No one is on the electoral roll for that address, there is no landline registered there.’
‘Did you hear what they were talking about?’
‘No,’ Maggie replied.
‘Did she get in the car?’
‘No.’
I picked up one of the photos by its corner, as if it was radioactive. Their faces were inches apart. You fucking bastard you fucking bastard you fucking bastard, was a mantra spinning on repeat in my head but I was thinking about half an hour. What can be done, what can be said, what can be promised, in thirty minutes. How a life can unravel in such a short time.
I felt so overwhelmed by a surge of jealousy I couldn’t breathe. I thought what I saw at the Café Royal would be the worst, but the cold calculated nature of this, here in this poky Paddington office, was worse. I wanted Maggie gone, I never wanted to see her again. I hated her for even knowing this shameful secret about me and my husband, I loathed her coolly surveying the wreck of my marriage. Marriage is hard, such hard, hard work. I looked at Maggie, she who had gaily told me that marriage and commitment had never panned out for her. She had been so glib, so pleased with herself, having substituted commitment and trust with temporary indulgences and passing fancies. She couldn’t even begin to understand the bedrock that is laid down over the years of a marriage and how infidelity is a fracking team exploding right through the heart of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think it’s important to remember that this is not definitive evidence of an affair. He met her, but what they are doing is inconclusive.’
I saw Gabe’s back retreating into her house, the door closing, the silence in the street. The tsunami that had broken over my marriage retreating down the beach and pausing, gathering strength to surge even more aggressively to obliterate everything in its path for a second time. Jesus, I was a glutton for punishment. I didn’t have to commission these photos. I didn’t have to see it. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s human nature, the inability to turn off that screen, to look away from that car crash, to put down that photo, before it’s too late. Way, way too late.
‘There’s something else,’ Maggie said. ‘Gabe took out a large amount of cash before he visited this woman. Is that usual behaviour?’
‘Cash? How much?’
‘It was a significant wodge, that’s all I know.’
I stared at her, confounded. ‘Is it a brothel?’
She paused for a moment and I fancied I saw respect on her face, that I had the guts to confront it. ‘I doubt it. We were there for a considerable time. One delivery van and one car passed me. Brothels give themselves away because there’s male traffic. For them to cover their costs there’s high throughput. You can’t disguise that unless you run it out of a nightclub or the back of a restaurant or from an area where most people couldn’t care less.’
Maggie was interrupted by my phone ringing. It was Gabe. I hurled the phone across the room so hard Maggie had to duck.
CHAPTER 39
Alice
Three weeks and two days before
This afternoon it was Helene’s turn to show me how things worked at GWM. I waited for a long time in her office because that was where we had arranged to meet, but I ended up kicking my heels because Helene was late. I was surprised, she knew as well as I did that in business it was important to always be on time. When she finally arrived, she looked flustered with high red spots on her cheeks, and I realised she had forgotten we were meeting.
‘I can come back another day, Helene, if you prefer,’ I tried to put a positive turn on it.
She was glancing around her office, distracted, but insisted I stayed. She sat down and put her hands on her clean and orderly desk. ‘Let’s start on the charity auction. What’s the most important thing to do once an event has finished?’
‘Plan the next one?’
Helene shook her head. ‘Follow through. Now is not the time to let go. Even if the individual didn’t donate on the night, we pursue, pursue and pursue until before they know it, we’ve got them in the palm of our hands. And they don’t even know it.’
She had her fingers gripped around an imaginary stress ball, her eyes fiery. ‘So, from our list of every attendee, we start with a personalised card saying thanks.’ She reached for a list in a neat pile on her neat desk, ran a fingernail over some calligraphy pens. ‘So you can help Sara in my team with that. Leave Oblomov, anything addressed to Partridger and anything addressed to Members of Parliament to me personally,’ she added. We filed out of Helene’s office and towards Sara’s desk. ‘A good fundraiser makes people feel good, makes them feel wanted. Everybody wants to be wanted.’
Her movements were brittle and sharp, her voice had a tint of sarcasm to it. The look in Helene’s eyes was strange. As if she had realised something she long held to be true wasn’t any more. I wondered if Helene was having the menopause. Lily said her mum had gone completely bonkers with hormonal surges. I was about to ask her, but I was interrupted by a commotion further down the corridor. I walked towards Poppa’s office and three men were stood up around Poppa’s desk, Poppa holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘This is not good enough, don’t you see it? It has to be perfect and we are already late!’
Soraya, Poppa’s secretary, came hustling out of the room a moment later. She gave me a look that signalled bad day at the coalface and hurried away to her desk.
I sensed the tension in the office tightening, like a screw being turned. Something was going on with the Vauxhall development that wasn’t working. I thought back to the notes I had found, the writing that was at this moment being scrubbed off our front wall. I needed to know what was happening. It was time to confront Poppa and get the truth, it was time to find out what Helene knew. I glanced at my stepmother. She was an onlooker to the argument but she had turned away and was on her phone and I couldn’t see her face.
CHAPTER 40
Helene
Three weeks and two days before
I left Maggie’s and went back to the office. I worked on autopilot, made my excuses and left early. I was surprisingly calm. I needed to be at home, to retreat to my place of safety. I almost cried with relief when I closed the front door behind me and threw my bag down. Now I could slide to the floor and dissolve.
I heard a noise upstairs.
Gabe and Alice were at work, the cleaner didn’t come today. I stood very still, sensing in my bones that something was wrong; the very air in the house felt disturbed.
I climbed the stairs. A low noise I couldn’t place was coming from my bedroom. A splash of water emanated from the en-suite bathroom; someone was humming. I walked towards that noise as if towards a siren singing from the rocks and pushed the door open all the way.
A woman with blonde hair piled messily on top of her head was lying in the bath, a sea of bubbles lapping at her neck. One curving foot with bright pink dots of nail colour was raised and resting on the taps. Our eyes met and she moved, standing fast so the water sluiced in an aggressive gurgle, foam draining off her limbs as she stepped out of the tub and in one movement plucked a black raincoat off the floor and began to wrap her wet limbs in it. It was the woman Maggie had shown me pictures of from Chelsea. I staggered back into the bedroom, horrified, but at the same time grotesquely fascinated by her nakedness. She stood defiantly in front of me, with no hint of embarrassment as she tied the belt in a tight, aggressive knot at her waist. She was tall, her boobs high and full, white streaks of bubble bath slicking down her tanned skin. I caught the flash of her blonde pubic hair, a m
ole on her stomach near her belly button.
‘Get out,’ I croaked, trying out the words for size. ‘Get out,’ I said louder, gaining in confidence, the depths of her transgression finally beginning to filter through to my voice.
She passed me in an instant, dark, watery footprints staining the carpet, and picked up a pair of heels I hadn’t noticed before and headed into the corridor.
‘Get out of my house, you fucking bitch!’ I screamed at her as I ran towards her, crazy emotions flooding me.
She was at the bottom of the stairs and turned, looking up at me defiantly. ‘I’ve got as much right to be here as you have,’ she said before she opened the door and was gone.
I flew down the stairs and out the front of the house to see her jogging away up the street on bare feet, her shoes dangling from one hand.
I ran back into the steamy bathroom, a panting wreck, spying towels piled in heaps on the floor, the bathmat rumpled and sodden, the water in the tub still spinning from her presence. She had used my bath foam, it sat unstoppered on the side, half empty.
I picked up the bottle of bubble bath and hurled it to the floor in a rage. The glass shattered into a thousand ugly shards that scattered over the marble floor. Had she been in my house before? I turned and stared at the bed. They hadn’t, had they? I slid down the wall to the bathroom floor as another connection became clear. She had stolen my keys. I hadn’t lost them that day in the café – my initial fears, my intuition, had been right. She had watched me, stalked me and planned with vicious precision this invasion and humiliation. I’ve got as much right to be here as you have. I thumped the floor. I didn’t even feel the broken glass slice my finger.
I stumbled into the study, sat down and logged in to Gabe’s bank account. We had shared and personal accounts, but I had access to all of it. We never had any secrets, or so he had led me to believe. I wondered then how he had made me think something so stupid. How had he convinced me that our relationship was transparent? He talked and acted it, and I was happy to be deceived. No, the truth was darker: I wanted to be deceived, because I was stupid enough to believe the fantasy. I thought I was above the grubby pain of love betrayed.
And less than an hour later, I wondered why I had been such a fool. Why I had treated Gabe so differently from how I had treated every other man in my life, every other lover.
I began to forensically examine the accounts for the past few months. The amount of money flowing out of our household was a river, and even though I knew that, I had never examined the detail of it. I didn’t care about the trail of blood from my finger that began to meander around the letters on the keyboard. After a while I began to see a pattern of cash withdrawals from his personal account: five hundred pounds here, a thousand there, other withdrawals for up to two thousand pounds. I went back further, scrabbling round in the boxes in the study and found Gabe’s bank statements from before he had transferred everything online. Eighteen months ago, the large cash withdrawals weren’t happening.
If he had been paying for her for a year and a half, he must have been seeing her for longer. Gabe was just like all the men I had ever known; none of them were faithful either.
This woman had come into my most personal space, had fouled my nest that I had worked so hard to make perfect. She had flaunted her flesh, had taunted me with her nakedness – here, she was saying, your husband likes this bush, he likes it this way, he likes these boobs, these very nipples here, he likes my long neck and he likes what sits inside my pretty head. She had trampled on every boundary and laid waste to my life, to everything I believed in and loved. And she had targeted my daughter. And Gabe had allowed it, he had taken pleasure from her. I wiped my bloodied hand across the last bank statement I had seen. What was I going to do now?
CHAPTER 41
Maggie
Three weeks and two days before
Two hours after Helene left my office I received the blunt recorded message that Helene wanted my work for her to end. It was over.
Rory was happy. ‘Think positive,’ he counselled. ‘We got out of that potential mess in Vauxhall without getting burned. Gabe never rumbled us. We’ve got another success under our belt. Let’s move on to the next case.’ He went off to make a coffee, humming a pop tune under his breath.
An hour after that Simona found an envelope with the outstanding cash Helene owed us in the company mailbox. There was no message.
I phoned Helene and she answered straight away. I told her we’d received the money.
‘I can’t really talk, I’m at work,’ she replied. Her voice was clipped and cold.
‘Our clients are free to terminate the agreement at any time. But I’m always here if you need to talk or want us to investigate further.’
‘I want you to destroy any information you’re keeping in your files about my family,’ she said.
I had to let her down gently. ‘I’m afraid we can’t do that, we have to keep it for tax purposes. But it will be safely stored—’
‘I don’t believe you. I mean I don’t believe you that it can’t be got rid of.’
‘I’m sorry, Helene, but that is the way we do it.’ There was silence. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do?’
‘No.’
‘Talk to him. I advise all my clients to talk it out. It’s the only way. Go to counselling.’
She was surprised. ‘You’ve changed your tune. I thought you were of the shock and awe school, Old Testament justice.’
‘Sometimes. Hell, other times I just want people to be happy. It’s difficult enough to find people with which to spend our days. If you ever need to talk, you know where to find me.’
She wasn’t in the mood for goodbyes. She simply hung up.
And that was that. The Moreaus were out of my life.
I sat back in my chair and looked around my office, chief of my little domain, feeling empty. I sometimes had this sensation after a case had come to an end. Sentiments and attachments that had to be processed and put aside before we plunged into the next case and went back to hanging out in dark alleys and photographing silhouettes at windows.
We weren’t going to start on Mrs Gupta’s family mess until next week when her sister came back from a visit to Mumbai, so I gave Simona and Rory the rest of the day off. They cheered and there were smiles all round. I counted out Helene’s money and logged it while Simona put on a sun hat and headed to a deckchair in Regent’s Park with a good book and Rory said he was off to ogle men in swim shorts at a pool in Covent Garden. We were Londoners in the heat, hormones drifting on the hot air currents and mixing with the traffic fumes and the smell of rubbish.
When they’d gone, I watched the tramps weaving and the commuters hustling down Praed Street from the window for a while. I watched the new mothers, just discharged from St Mary’s Hospital, hugging their precious bundles, the new fathers fumbling with prams and hovering anxiously around their partners as if they were too fragile to touch. I heard the cries of a Big Issue salesman. The hot afternoon wore on. I phoned Dwight, itchy for shits and giggles. He didn’t answer or he dodged my calls.
I locked up, walked out past the queue of men waiting at the immigration lawyer’s. I meandered directionless through central London, enjoying the summer heat. I was feeling dissatisfied, as if something about Helene and Gabe hadn’t become clear to me. They were glamorous, they were alluring, I had liked observing them, but Helene had drawn a line under it all. She didn’t want to know who the blonde-haired woman was. That was not unusual, nothing she had done was off beam. I wondered about the money. Was Gabe giving it to that woman, and if so, why?
And then I checked myself. I didn’t need to know why, or when or how. I had found him out, I had been paid, it was over.
I don’t know how it happened, but I ended up on Regent Street. There’s one thing I like early evening when it’s hot and the summer is in full swing and I’d just successfully completed another case. I needed a drink. The steps of the Langham felt like I
was coming home; the bar, with its glittering rows of bottles and glasses, felt comfortingly familiar. I succumbed to the sensation of the drone of voices, a martini set on the little paper circle edged in blue, an olive and a smile, rising hopes and expectations. I phoned Dwight again, he didn’t pick up.
I didn’t use Tinder, I had never signed up to speed dating. I was old-fashioned, I liked a hotel bar. I wasn’t looking for love, I was looking for thrills, and they are very different things.
I was halfway through my second martini when the bar door opened and Gabe walked in.
CHAPTER 42
Maggie
Three weeks and two days before
This time Gabe remembered who I was. He came straight over and held out his hand. ‘Melissa.’ He smiled at me. Maybe it was the hit of vodka from the drink, or the heat, or both, but I felt a surge of pure joy and anticipation run through me.
He pointed to the barman, like the man in the white shirt and black trousers was a secular priest performing his time-honoured rites. Gabe pointed to my glass and pointed to his own chest. Nothing else was said. He sat down.
A moment later we chinked drinks.
‘How was your day?’ he asked, a question that when he posed it was expansive and open to interpretation.
‘Uneventful. Yours?’
He made a movement I couldn’t interpret. ‘Quiet.’
I had had no food, the drink was going to my head, the edges of my understanding were going fuzzy. ‘How’s the family?’
I watched his lips as he put the wide glass to them. ‘Good.’
‘I think I should say that your daughter wasn’t very nice to me the last time I was in here. She warned me off you in the toilets.’
He looked shocked and then he rolled his eyes. ‘She’s very young. There’s so much about adult relationships that she doesn’t understand.’
