Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  Who was Miss L Warriner?

  CHAPTER 63

  Maggie

  Eight days before

  I travelled back to the office intending to take a second look at the photos we’d taken of Gabe and Warriner in the street in Chelsea. It was early evening by the time I got back to Paddington and I found Dwight waiting outside, basking in the last rays of the sun. He must have forgiven me for giving him the hairdryer treatment the other day. I felt the sharp tang of anticipation and desire.

  ‘I’ve got some questions for you,’ he said.

  ‘Fire away,’ I said. ‘But you have to buy me a drink first.’ We stood looking at each other, my mind flooded with images of the last time we were together. ‘I have a great selection at my flat,’ I added. Come on, Dwight, I thought, the best way to get over an argument is to kiss and make up.

  Two hours later Dwight and I were in my bed, and I felt more at peace than I had done since Gabe’s death. My head was resting on his broad chest, the sounds of car horns and couples bickering in the street were a soft and pleasing backdrop.

  ‘When you had your drinks with Gabe, what did you talk about?’ Dwight asked.

  I sat up and plumped a pillow behind my head and reached over for my glass of red wine. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Did he talk about work?’

  ‘He talked about his family mainly. He talked about his childhood.’

  ‘Did he ever mention drugs to you?’

  ‘Drugs?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Did you ever do drugs with him?’

  I leaned over the bed and pulled a T-shirt off the floor and put it on. I found Dwight’s questions exposing and I needed to cover myself. ‘No. But you think Gabe and Milo’s deaths are related, don’t you?’ Dwight paused and that got me excited. ‘You do, don’t you? I knew it.’

  Dwight sighed. ‘No, actually, Maggie, we don’t, but the case is proving difficult. That drug dealer we arrested in the wake of Milo’s murder was a dead end. It wasn’t him. He had been seen on the estate earlier that night, but he was captured on CCTV robbing a convenience store in Tooting at the time of the murder.’

  ‘So you’re back to square one.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dwight said defensively. ‘We’ve got all sorts of leads and information we’re pursuing.’

  ‘Yeah, and Gabe threw himself off that tower, I suppose,’ I retorted sarcastically.

  Dwight gave me a strange look, pained and vulnerable at the same time. He put his wine down and began to get dressed.

  ‘Milo’s got a friend from when they were kids, he lives nearby, a black guy named Larry. He told us Milo was going on about blues or reds.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Well, blue is slang for heroin, and methamphetamine.’

  ‘Reds and blues are depressants, aren’t they?’

  Dwight nodded. ‘Red is slang for any drug you want to name, but in Vauxhall, crack is called reds.’

  ‘In the Matrix, you can take the blue or red pill, can’t you? The red pill shows you the truth, shows you it’s cowardly to live a lie.’

  ‘I guess,’ added Dwight.

  ‘Well, there’s a lie going on somewhere over Milo’s death – and Gabe’s.’

  ‘We found the usual recreational crap in his house, roaches in the bins, that type of thing. The guy certainly liked a party. He helped organise raves all over that estate in the abandoned buildings there.’

  ‘But you don’t have him as a drug dealer, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t, to be honest.’

  ‘The answer is somewhere in Gabe’s company, I’m sure of it. One night when I followed the Moreaus home there was graffiti on their house. “You can’t hide” scrawled in red paint.’

  ‘I know, the daughter Alice told us. She’d also found threatening notes, addressed to her dad.’

  I sat bolt upright now. ‘See! I told you! What did they say?’

  ‘Inconclusive. They could have been from the mistress, or from someone else, it’s unclear at this stage.’

  ‘This is proof, don’t you see? – Milo and Gabe were killed for the same reasons—’

  ‘Maggie—’

  ‘It’s something to do with that property deal, I’d bet my life on it – Milo knew too much and was murdered and Gabe came second—’

  ‘Maggie!’ His tone brought me up short. ‘Stop it. This is pure speculation, based on nothing more than a hunch. The last time I saw you, you thought Helene had pushed Gabe off.’

  I was about to let rip at him but struggled to stay silent instead. ‘There’s one thing I know,’ I said eventually, ‘over affairs of the heart, I’m always right.’

  He paused, looking unhappy. ‘Problem is, Maggie, believing Gabe was murdered gets you off the hook. But according to the police, at this stage, it’s just as likely he saw you, realised you had been following and reporting back to his wife, and took matters into his own hands. It’s just as likely your mistake led to his death as any conspiracy theory.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ I was furious, but Dwight didn’t back down. He stood up to go. I got up and tried to pull him back down on to the bed. He looked at me and shook his head. ‘This game is old, Maggie.’

  ‘I checked out Gabe’s lover. She’s done a bunk from the flat in Chelsea.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Pretty fast after he died, no? Why did she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Maggie!’

  ‘Listen, Dwight, this is important. Maybe she wasn’t his lover, maybe Helene knew that all along. Maybe she hired me to make it look like that woman was Gabe’s lover, when there’s something else entirely going on. Maybe it’s a blackmail deal and Helene hired me as a cover for something we don’t know about. Something so bad that it could lead to his death—’ I stopped, Dwight was studying his phone. ‘Are you listening to me?’

  Dwight looked up. ‘You know what, Maggie? Hunt down this lover/non-lover if you want. Waste your time on this family that doesn’t want you involved if that gets you off. But where’s your life going, Maggie? What’s the plan?’

  ‘I don’t have a plan. I just like going with the flow.’

  It didn’t wash. ‘We all have fears, Maggie. Being afraid isn’t a weakness. Don’t feel scared that you can feel.’ I made a scoffing sound that irritated him. ‘You know what? I want to build something.’ He pulled on his shoes. ‘Ask yourself, Maggie, do you still want to be here like this next year, in five years? All these casual maybe/maybe-not games?’

  I knelt on the bed and came up behind him, wrapped my arms around his chest, keen to use my powers to get him to slide back under the sheets. ‘Come on, let’s not fight.’

  He pushed me away. ‘Just because you always see the bad end of relationships doesn’t mean they are not worth having.’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ I whispered.

  But Dwight wasn’t through. ‘When you swim through the kind of shit I do in my job, Maggie, you need the comfort of another human being to be able to bear it. I mean in here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘You need a mental connection. You need to make a leap of faith. You are at the most vulnerable you’ll ever be, but that’s not a bad thing.’

  I shoved him roughly away. ‘I think you’d better go, Dwight.’

  It was as if I had slapped him. He stood up suddenly and pulled the last of his clothes on. ‘Jesus, you’ve got a screw loose, Maggie.’ He slammed the door as a final fuck you.

  I slumped back down on the bed, a bad mood obliterating every soothing sensation and feeling of the last few hours. I hadn’t given Dwight what he wanted to hear, because I couldn’t and I would never be able to. When you had a past like mine, all the usual words that make life worth living – comfort, love, partner, commitment – are negatives, not positives. But I couldn’t tell him that. Not now, not ever.

  And like so many times before, I fell asleep alone, the name Colin Torday on my mind and the warmth of a just-departed human being cooling in the sheets.

  CH
APTER 64

  Maggie

  Seven days before

  By the following morning I had blocked my argument with Dwight from my mind and chose to remember the sharp pleasures of being with him, being under him. Dwight gave me the means to rock on; it was summer and I was satisfied. I’d already checked some databases for Gabe’s mystery woman and I was sure that with a name and an address we’d find her pretty soon. As the water drummed on my head from the shower, I was working out how quickly we’d see what had really been going on in Gabe Moreau’s life, maybe what really happened on the fifth floor of Connaught Tower.

  I was doing the old back rub with a towel when I saw the phone dancing on the bedside table. Odd, Simona never rang, she only texted. I ignored it until she rang again. Once I’d thrown the towel over the radiator I answered it.

  She asked me if I’d seen the Daily Mail online. She said we had a problem. Then she got flustered and said that I had a problem.

  I opened the site.

  Troubling case of the death of a millionaire businessman and the snooper hounding him

  There are calls today for private detectives to be regulated after the troubling and still unresolved death of millionaire property developer Gabe Moreau.

  Gabe Moreau was a charismatic and handsome self-made millionaire who was a regular on London’s charity fundraising circuit. Having come to the UK as a refugee from war-torn Croatia, he had overcome the tragic death of his first wife when the car they were travelling in plunged into a river, and gone on to build a multi-million pound property empire in the capital. Two weeks ago Gabe Moreau fell to his death from Connaught Tower, a skyscraper of luxury apartments that his company GWM was building in Vauxhall, London. The controversial development on a site by the Thames formerly known for its crime and social problems had been at the centre of protests over the loss of low-cost social homes in the capital. Investigations into Gabe Moreau’s death are ongoing, but it has now been revealed that with Moreau in the skyscraper at the time of his death was Maggie Malone, a private investigator once hired by Moreau’s wife Helene to look into whether he was having an affair.

  Maggie Malone, 42, runs the Blue and White, a private investigation agency that according to her website ‘does the hard work exposing cheats so you don’t have to’. But the self-proclaimed top private detective hides a controversial past. In 1994, Malone was convicted of stalking her former boyfriend Colin Torday, given a restraining order and ordered to do one hundred hours community service.

  ‘I hired Malone at a moment of deep personal pain,’ Helene explained. ‘Every marriage has its strains and I worried Gabe was having an affair. A wife has a right to know what her husband is doing,’ Helene added. ‘But it’s certainly not right that the woman I hired to do a specific job developed an obsession with my husband that may have contributed to, or directly caused, a tragedy. I had terminated my relationship with Malone but unknown to me she was still following my husband long afterwards. That’s stalking, pure and simple, and invasion of privacy. I believe that Maggie Malone is an unstable woman who should under no circumstances be undertaking this kind of work. She is not mentally suited to it.’

  More troubling still, according to police sources Malone has not been forthcoming with investigators as to what she was doing with Moreau in Connaught Tower or indeed what relationship she had developed with him.

  The growing private investigations industry has been attacked for poor results, underhand tactics and invasion of privacy, yet legally there is very little to stop anyone setting themselves up in the business. This troubling case asks some unanswered questions: why was a woman convicted of stalking her boyfriend twenty years ago allowed – essentially – to get paid to stalk other men today?

  A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘We won’t comment on an ongoing investigation into Gabe Moreau’s death, but we have made representations to Parliament for the regulation of the private detective industry.’

  A spokeswoman from Homes are for Living In, a pressure group campaigning for more low-cost housing in London, said: ‘Thousands of ordinary Londoners are being driven from the capital as their council homes are replaced by luxury developments that are of no benefit to local communities. Sadly, that process is underway in Vauxhall, as in many other parts of our great city.

  There was a photo of Gabe in a restaurant on holiday, happy and relaxed, Helene looking gorgeous and content beside him. There was a photo of me, taken off the website, unsmiling and confrontational, arms crossed.

  When I got to the office, Rory and Simona met me at the door looking like they were about to announce someone had died. Rory put a cup of coffee down in front of me. ‘Well, this is a pile of shit,’ he said quietly.

  That was an understatement. Rory and Simona had trusted and believed in me, had given years of their life to helping me grow the Blue and White. While I had never lied about my past, I’d never told them about it either. It wasn’t exactly something that came up easily in conversation. I had tried to move on from it, I had tried to live better, and as the years had passed, it had faded but never disappeared. Now, more than twenty years later, this was where it had got me. I had betrayed my staff by never revealing my past and allowed it to undermine my business. I didn’t join the police not because I wasn’t suited to it – I would have loved a police career more than anything. I didn’t apply because I knew my criminal record prevented me. So I did what I thought was the next best thing and threw myself into becoming a private detective.

  I told Rory and Simona I was sorry. I sat them down and gave them every unvarnished, sordid, dark little detail.

  Colin Torday was a decent, caring human being, nothing like my mum. In fact, as far removed from my mum as it was possible to be. He was nine years older than me. He had a regular job, money and a nice house. I was nineteen when I met him and I fell in love for the first time; I loved him madly, I loved him without limits. Maybe it was because I had been abandoned by the person I had loved as a child, by the woman who had a duty to love me, that I overcompensated with Colin. I moved in with him pretty quickly. Colin was my entire world; he was my route to a better life and I grasped at him with both hands.

  Our relationship was short-lived. I was too volatile and high tempo for him; he found my adoration cloying and overbearing. After a few months together he began to withdraw from me; the arguments began. But instead of understanding and accepting that our relationship was over I clung to its carcase. He asked me to move out. We argued more. He begged me to leave and I eventually slunk off to a friend’s sofa, defeat and failure cloaking me. Deep down I wondered if I would always fail at love; I didn’t have the capacity to be good enough because after all, no one had ever wanted me. I thought if I could show Colin how much I loved him, that would be enough. If I sent him endless letters, if I called him and woke him from his sleep, he would see that as charming and a sign of my commitment. If I carved our names inside a heart on his front door, he would finally be convinced that we should be together. If I sent him photos I had taken with my camera of him going about his day, he would realise his mistake. When he pleaded with me to stop, when he shouted at me to go away, I thought he was paying attention to me, and I redoubled my efforts to get him to notice me again, to get us to turn back time and get back to what we once had. I did all these things for five months, until the police came calling. Again, and then again.

  It took a judge and a court case and hours and hours of hard self-reflection to realise that what I had done to Colin was wrong, that I had ruined his life with my love. I wasn’t a blessing, I was a curse. And he would have wished he had never met me.

  And in my life that I’ve lived since then, I have come to realise that I was unlovable and unloved.

  I knew it was Helene who had tipped off the press about me. But could I blame her? What the media had published wasn’t a lie. I went crazy when my heart was broken, but the work I had done in the intervening decades to make myself a different person wasn’t mentioned
in the reports. I would forever be the sum of my youthful mistake. Whatever the newspapers and the media did to me that day I had already done to myself. The way I chose to live my life had been a reaction to my loss of control when I was nineteen; never get attached, never get too involved. Always move on. And I had succeeded at that, all too successfully.

  Once I’d finished my confession, Rory came over and hugged me for a long time and then Simona joined in and we stood as a little crabby huddle in the offices of the Blue and White. It took all of my self-control not to sob in their arms like a baby.

  And then before we could adjust, we were fighting a firestorm with a leaky bucket.

  By ten thirty, Mrs Gupta had cancelled her job. So had another two clients. And the hate mail had started on the company’s Twitter account. I was trending under the hashtags #menfightback and #banthebitch. I was caught up in the perfect storm of concerns about invasion of privacy, trolls who had an itch in their pants about feminism and men whose wives had stiffed them in a divorce settlement (and that was every man that had ever got divorced). Social media that day showed that I had pricked the boil of feminism, money, and sexual jealousy, and released a river of pus.

  When Simona answered the phone to a man saying he wanted to rape her, I sent her and Rory home and closed the office. Against Rory’s advice I nipped out to the off-licence, came back to the office and got cuddly with an entire bottle of vodka. Before the booze haze obliterated every sensible reflection, I went through a moment of cold, hard admiration for Helene Moreau. This was her move against me; her way of seeing me off, of sending me a warning – leave my family alone, walk away from the bad smells and the unanswered questions. Ten to one she knew before she hired me what lay in my past, and she saw an opportunity that might prove useful to her in the schemes she was planning and to gain control of GWM. Privacy is dead, as I’ve said before. A quick Internet search, a bit of digging in a library, and all my sordid past was there for anyone to find. Could I prove what she had done? No. Could I use it? No. But sometimes a woman just knows.