Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

I hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘We have a witness saying that he was talking to you before he died.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ I stood up because I was really about to lose it. ‘Anything else?’

  DI Owen looked at me calmly. She was a good interviewer, fully in control and I wasn’t. ‘Are the bad habits coming back, Maggie? Is Gabe another Colin Torday?’ I slammed the desk with my palm. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, but sometimes a woman just can’t help it. DI Owen didn’t flinch, but a tight smile of triumph spread across her face. ‘You’ve still got your temper, Maggie. Even after all these years.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  ‘That’s all for now. We just need to take DNA and fingerprints from you before you go—’

  She had prodded me too many times and I lacked the self-restraint to stay calm. ‘You know I’m already in the system. Everybody fucking knows that! Now go fuck yourselves.’

  I slammed my chair back and marched out of the room. If I had expected to feel triumphant, like I had stuck it to the man, I didn’t. As I left the station I heard the impact, the dull shudder of flesh and bone and sinew hitting dried mud replaying in my mind, over and over. I remembered his eyes as I cradled him, his desperate need in his final moments as the heat and the liquids drained from him. The tears came then, my anger drowned out. They only stopped when three reporters rushed me as I came out of the station.

  CHAPTER 49

  Alice

  Two weeks and four days before

  I went to Connaught Tower this afternoon. I had to see, to try and believe it had really happened. I wanted the world to freeze just as it was, for everything to be captured at the exact moment it had fallen apart, in respect and mourning for Poppa, and never unthaw again. But of course commerce never stops. Work at GWM paused for a day, but was back at full throttle. There were deadlines to meet, people that had to be paid. But as I passed through the Connaught Tower foyer the builders stopped what they were doing and doffed their hard hats to me. They looked ashamed. I walked the five floors up, emerged into silence, the distant hum of the city punctuated by bangs that sounded like gunfire.

  The police tape was still up across the area by the window but I stepped over it; the detectives had done their work now. I could see the view that Poppa saw. What he last looked out upon. I walked to the edge of the floor, stood by the large space where plate-glass windows would soon seal the householders in. I was facing west, but the day was young and I was in shade and the wind felt cold. I reached out into air, feeling dizzy.

  Poppa, Milo, Momma. Everyone I loved was snatched from me. My love was a curse that made people die in pain.

  Last night, scratchy with lost sleep and wandering zombie-like round the house, I ended up in the study and found a postcard that had never been sent. Its jaunty ‘Greetings from Devon’ reminded me of a sunny day on Putsborough Beach when I was barely ten years old, Poppa’s prized video camera in my hands as I walked backwards through the waves, filming him. I could still hear his voice, directing, encouraging, imploring: ‘Alice! Get further away, the perspective’s better!’ But I didn’t want to ever be further away from him, I always wanted to be closer, closer and closer. I loved my darling poppa. He was mine and mine alone. He would never leave me, someone took him from me. Someone else did this.

  I felt the hole left by him as a disembowelling. A nuclear wind howled through me. I saw the streets and buildings and the grey curve of the river of the city where our family had made its home and I stepped forward and looked over at the ground. Poppa is already so far away from me, hurtling at supersonic speed into the past.

  I turned round because someone was calling my name. Helene was walking towards me, arms outstretched. ‘I think you should come away,’ she said.

  To where, I wanted to scream, to where?

  CHAPTER 50

  Maggie

  Two weeks before

  I tried phoning Helene many times, but she didn’t answer.

  I took to writing her letters, trying to put my feelings of regret into words.

  The letters came back unopened.

  So this is how it ends, I thought. Eventually Rory told me to stop. Our cases don’t always end well. I needed to toughen up. It was a hard lesson to learn. Because you watch someone’s life, because you hear their pain and suspicion, doesn’t mean you know anything about them. I had forgotten this in the Moreaus’ case.

  I tried to go round to Helene’s house with a bunch of flowers. Simona told me to stay away, in fact she did more than that, grabbing the bouquet from me and forcing me back into the chair. ‘Imagine if you’re photographed, it just makes it all worse, we’re trying to repair the damage, Maggie! Until they declare what happened to Gabe Moreau you need to stay out of sight and far away from their home.’

  I argued with her, his death was not my fault, but she hit right back. ‘No, but Helene is grieving and people in pain need to be respected.’ Simona was right, but I didn’t like the fact she was right.

  On the day of Gabe’s funeral I stood for a second time in the graveyard where I’d followed him earlier in the summer, watching the throng of people through the trees. Gabe was buried, not cremated. Helene wore a veil. I glimpsed a flash of Alice’s red hair underneath a beret. At one point in the service someone howled. I didn’t know if Helene had ever confronted Gabe about the woman in Chelsea, or if their last interactions as a married couple had been an argument. I wondered how Helene and Alice’s relationship would be now, the man who connected them gone in such a brutal and sudden way.

  I didn’t see the woman from Chelsea.

  CHAPTER 51

  Helene

  Two weeks before

  Back at the house after the funeral service I retreated to the bedroom. I could hear the guests arriving downstairs, the hub and swell of them, the smell of lunch drifting up the stairs and into the bedroom, the cloying scent of lilies. So many people had come to show how much they loved and respected Gabe.

  I took out my earrings with shaking hands and put them on the dresser. They were heavy and the day was stifling. I somehow had to get back down those stairs, endure the afternoon. Face the queue that would form as I shook hands and hugged over-perfumed women and red-faced old men.

  Young girls think life is a train ride that stops at the following stations: Love, Sex, Marriage. But the final destination is Happiness, where the engine is uncoupled and you idle away your life, never wanting or needing to leave. I was that young girl once, I dreamed that if I was very good and obedient my life would take that journey. But my train has been driven straight off a cliff. I have been destroyed. My entire life was fiction.

  He killed himself when we had decades longer together. He abandoned Alice when she was only eighteen.

  I felt my knees going. I couldn’t sit down, otherwise I was never going to get back up again. I gripped the side of the dresser so hard I looked like a woman in labour.

  I had been in love with a man who I knew not at all. He had done something so awful I couldn’t begin to contemplate it. Every gesture, every conversation, looping back days, months and years, I couldn’t rely on any of it. I never saw him as capable of throwing himself off that tower. I had no indication he would or ever could do that. Every time he smiled at me, every time he laughed, it was all a lie because underneath he was an oozing mess of emotional pain, in such a dark place that he couldn’t stand the effort of living.

  The door opened without anyone knocking. Irina Oblomov was striding across the bedroom towards me. ‘What are you doing in here alone? No wife is alone at a time like this.’ She held me by both arms and pulled me upright and forced me to look in the full-length mirror. ‘You know what Gabe said to me at your charity event? He said, “My wife is a force of nature.”’ Irina actually shook me. ‘That is what you are. Strong as iron. A lioness. Yes?’

  She was staring back at me in the mirror. We looked comical next to each other, her short and fleshy body in its stiff mourning twi
n set, her short hair set just so, my dank blonde tresses accentuating my hollow cheeks. I was too shocked to know what to do; I was mute. ‘You are more strong than you can ever believe,’ Irina continued. ‘Today you show that strength. Tears are for other days. Not today.’ I just stared; all will to speak had left me. ‘Love has given you strength to endure today. Yes?’

  I nodded, but I couldn’t move. Irina put a perfumed hand on my face, still standing behind me as I looked in the mirror. ‘You are a woman. A woman! You can survive anything.’ She nodded, full of conviction. ‘You can survive even this. Yes?’

  Some of her strength moved me. Her conviction was infectious. I took a deep breath and stood up taller.

  ‘Say it,’ Irina intoned.

  ‘I can survive it. I am a woman and I can do it.’ Irina was right, I felt better.

  ‘You will do anything for your family, yes? To see it safe, to see its reputation kept, you will do anything.’

  She shook me forcefully, my body moving left and right like one of Alice’s old rag dolls.

  ‘Resist me.’ She shook me again and this time I stood stronger. ‘You see, there is nothing stronger than a woman in grief.’

  I took a long, deep breath. I stared at my reflection and repeated her words, this time with conviction. ‘There is nothing stronger than a woman in grief.’

  Irina was right. I would do anything to save my reputation, that of my family and my daughter. Irina moved me towards the door.

  ‘Wait!’ I commanded. ‘My earrings.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Irina said. ‘You can and you will look magnificent.’ She picked them up and put them in my ears. ‘You do two things downstairs.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Don’t eat and don’t drink. Let’s go.’

  And the wife of Gabe’s business rival followed me down the stairs.

  I spent the afternoon listening to many kind things that people said, to many expressions of love and sorrow. None of it helped. Not even a little bit. Because some things that you hear are so shocking you can never get them out of your head. Maggie was there with Gabe when he jumped. She held him while he died. She was there with him at the end, not me.

  It was the greatest transgression I had ever known. It felt a thousand times worse than him cheating with that woman.

  The truth of what really happened that night at Connaught Tower had not been told. Maggie Malone was a fucking liar.

  CHAPTER 52

  Alice

  Twelve days before

  Grief is being marooned in a tiny, leaking boat on a storm-tossed sea. The waves are a hundred feet high, the coast many miles away. The disorientation is fear and it left me almost unable to breathe.

  But today I woke and for a blessed moment the waves were a little further apart.

  I struggled downstairs to find Helene in her rabbit-ear slippers sitting at the island, smoking. I never knew she smoked. Her face was a hard line, her hair straggly. She nodded hello. ‘Have you slept?’ I asked, but I knew the answer. She shook her head, tapped her fag. I sat down next to her. ‘Tell me everything about Maggie Malone.’ In nearly a week it was the first time we had been alone at a moment when I had felt able to ask about this other woman, the woman who was with Poppa, at the end.

  Helene ran her tongue around her teeth, as if cleaning a bad taste off them. She ground out her fag.

  ‘I never wanted you to know any of this, Alice.’ Her eyes were dead, her face emotionless. ‘And I’m sorry. I suspected Gabe was having an affair, so I hired Malone to find out.’

  I was so shocked I could hardly breathe. ‘That isn’t possible. Poppa would never do that – he loves you!’

  Helene closed her eyes for a long moment, as if against the sun on a hot day.

  ‘Remember that night Gabe and I went to the Café Royal? I saw him in a cloakroom with a woman, and I didn’t like what I saw.’

  ‘What did you see? You must not have understood!’

  She looked irritated. ‘Alice, that woman stole my keys and broke into our house. She took a dip in my tub, she was right here, she accosted you at the fun run.’

  I said nothing, anger tapping an insistent beat against my skull. There was no woman at the fun run, there were hundreds of women. One thing I knew for sure: Helene just didn’t like to lose. My stepmother had always had an overactive imagination, planning brilliant schemes and plans. She was a drama queen. Who’s to say what she saw in the Café Royal was even real? And the bathtub tale feels like attention seeking of the first order – I found her keys on the side, if she would remember.

  ‘Who was this woman, then?’

  ‘Malone found out she lived in Chelsea, she got photographs of your father and her together. I never got a name.’

  ‘Did you talk to her?’

  Helene shook her head, but she didn’t look me in the eye. ‘I went to her flat once but there was no answer. After I saw the photos, I … I panicked, and sacked Maggie.’ Helene lit another cigarette, fumbling nervously with the ashtray and the box, pulling the foil apart with shaking fingers. ‘What I was paying her to do seemed so sordid and wrong. I didn’t want to know who she actually was.’

  ‘Show me the pictures.’

  ‘I don’t have them, I destroyed them. I couldn’t have that stuff here in the house, polluting it!’

  I sat very still in our kitchen. A strange sensation began to dawn. Helene was lying. ‘Why was Malone with Poppa at Connaught Tower if she wasn’t working any more for you?’

  Helene shook her head. ‘I don’t know. The answers she’s given the police are not complete.’ She looked at me, desperate. ‘Why did he do it, Alice? Why did he choose this way?’

  The emotional breakers battering my beach retreated and a hard pebble of resentment shone through the sand. The police had still not concluded what really happened at Connaught Tower that night. They were still investigating Poppa’s death. Yet here was Helene, so ready to believe the worst – that he threw himself off. That he would abandon me after everything he’d been through, after all he had overcome. ‘He didn’t. He would never do that. At best it was an accident.’

  Helene took a deep breath. ‘We can’t help each other unless we’re honest. We can’t begin to move forward unless we accept that … unless we face it. That ultimately it was a choice he made.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘I loved your father so much.’ She didn’t say his name, she had taken to calling him my father. I didn’t like it.

  Did she? When I think back over the last six years, is that what I saw? Was that love? He had loved me, I know that. I absolutely know that.

  ‘Do you think he loved this other woman?’ Helene asked.

  Her voice was small and pathetic, and my pebble of resentment grew bigger. I got angry at Helene’s self-obsession. She looked different – older and weaker. I hated weak women. She didn’t understand anything about the family she married into – about Poppa or me. I wanted to scream it at her smeary face – Don’t you get it? My mum died in fear and pain at my poppa’s hands. Yet I loved him totally and unwaveringly, because Poppa was a magnet for unwavering love and loyalty. Helene had it so wrong. The question she should have been asking was how much did this mystery woman love Poppa. And I realised that I was desperate to meet this woman, to have her talk to me about Poppa, to hear how much she loved and admired him. How could it be otherwise?

  I picked up my phone and typed Maggie’s name into Google and looked again at the photo of the woman who had been flirting with Poppa in the Langham Hotel. I had even warned the tart off in the toilets. Something sour invaded my mouth.

  I didn’t trust Helene. Or this Maggie Malone.

  CHAPTER 53

  Helene

  Twelve days before

  From feeling assaulted and exposed on all sides, I now felt safe. And safety allowed me to move into a new phase where anger began to consume my very flesh. Anger allowed me clarity to see where my duty lay. I was focused on what I had to do, which was care for Alice. I was
unsure what family was, before Gabe made his unimaginable choice. I thought that that woman could split us into single people, like metal through wood, but I now knew I was wrong. We were a family, the strongest unit.

  I had to bear some responsibility. Milo’s death rocked Gabe, but I hired Maggie, it was me who put that in motion. The police said that Maggie admitted that she was seen by Gabe before he entered Connaught Tower. He would have put it all together then – understanding who and what kind of person Maggie was, and that I would have been the one that had hired her. He had been caught; his lover had emerged from the shadows and into his very house, but I had already discovered much about her. Standing outside Connaught Tower, Gabe would have known our beautiful story had ended. He would have realised that he had destroyed it.

  We can overcome anything once. Gabe had managed it, all those years ago when Clara died at his hands, but he had ruined everything that was good in his life a second time. There was no coming back from that. So it is up to me to struggle on with the remnants of his family.

  That evening I felt strong enough to take a look at the box of Gabe’s effects that the police had given us. I saw office keys and his watch, his mobile phone and a crumpled business card. Some bloodstained pieces of clothing in their clear plastic bags made me start to put the whole box aside but the clear packages shifted and I saw a second mobile phone.

  I pulled it out, held it in my hand. It was a cheap burner model, still charged, and I turned it on. It contained only one number that had been called and received. I looked at the incoming texts.

  The first said ‘You can’t let me go x’. The second said ‘Alice need never know xx’, and the last, ‘I deserve more x’.

  Gabe hadn’t answered any of the texts. I called the number. It was disconnected. Another thought came to me about Gabe’s phone and those texts. They had never mentioned me. It was as if I didn’t feature in Gabe or Alice’s life at all.