by Ali Knight
But before the bottle of vodka was finished, my emotions had changed from self-pity to anger. Helene had overplayed her hand. She had underestimated the danger from a woman who was at risk of losing the only thing she had. I was, at forty-two, unattached and childless. My work was the thing I loved, the thing that gave my life meaning and in less than one day it had been laid to waste. I had within me the passion to be obsessive about finding the truth, the ability to never give up and the need to keep at it until the picture was clear. I was going to find out what had happened to Gabe Moreau, I was going to find out what had happened to Milo, I would understand why Helene had really hired me.
Game on, Helene, I thought. Now I really have nothing to lose. Unlike you.
When the bottle of vodka was finished, I thought about Gabe Moreau. About following him down dark streets, watching him unobserved from the security and warmth of a car. Had I been beginning to form an obsession with Gabe, had he turned something dormant back on? Had I been taking the first steps down a dangerous road that would lead back to the behaviour I had shown to Colin? That long night I thought and I examined and I wondered. But it wasn’t true. I had been looking for the truth. And it was still to be found.
I pulled out the series of photos that Rory and I had taken of Gabe’s mystery woman in Chelsea. I blew every one up to maximum size and studied each one carefully – what could be seen of her tanned face, her blonde hair and her clothes. She was maybe a little older than Gabe, but well preserved, with slim wrists and ankles on teetering high heels that lent her a fragile air that was accentuated when she moved to and fro in front of him. It was almost as if she was dancing for him.
I went back to my phone and sped through the photos, now a jumpy silent cine film. She patted his chest, she leaned in to him, she talked continuously. At no point did Gabe smile or reply, he stood stiffly by as she performed around him and he followed her with leaden steps through the front door of the flat. If anything he seemed scared of her.
I realised then where I had seen that behaviour before. I had done those things to Colin; he had been stiff and silent as I had acted in more increasingly desperate ways to get him to love me, to get him to see me. I had revelled in the power that I seemed to hold over Colin at those moments; I told myself that his silence, his inaction, were signs he was devoted to me. I saw it as love, when really it had been fear.
And fear was what Gabe was showing in these photos. And now he was dead.
CHAPTER 65
Maggie
Six days before
There’s a lot of chat these days about online harassment; people complaining about 140 characters floating in the ether, but being doorstepped is analogue torture. You can’t close down an app of your home and get back to real life. I like the sunlight – who doesn’t? – but there I was in my flat, blinds closed against a huddle of men and women staring up into my window, the doorbell ringing every half an hour as they searched for something quotable, pushing notes through the letterbox, annoying my neighbours in the block, texting, phoning the landline. They didn’t give me a moment’s peace.
The phone kept vibrating so often on the coffee table that it had become a game to watch it inch towards an edge and fall to the carpet, but as I picked it up a text caught my eye. ‘It’s Alice. I’m outside your back door.’
I phoned her and she answered straight away. ‘Let me in, I need to talk to you.’
‘We have nothing to say to each other.’
‘Be the judge of that after you let me in.’
I was intrigued and wanted to hear what she had to say. I buzzed her in through the back gate and a little later there was a knock on the door.
I took her through into the lounge and she looked around uncertainly so I sat in the armchair and she perched on the couch.
Considering she had lost her dad, she looked better than expected. Paler and thinner, her whiteness threw her red hair into sharp relief. She was a beauty in her own way.
‘You were there with Poppa at the end.’ It was a statement, not a question. I nodded. ‘Was he in pain?’
I took a while to digest that question. She could have meant in his life in general, but I took it to mean after he fell. ‘A little. But not for long.’
She didn’t bow her head or cry, she was as tough as they come. ‘What happened at Connaught Tower?’
I would have needed a heart of stone to not have sympathy for this abandoned girl, and I certainly had never had one of those. As a grieving daughter she had every right to know, so I told her what I had seen as accurately as I remembered it. I said that Gabe had seemed out of sorts earlier in the evening and that was why I had begun to follow him; he had caught sight of me and understood he was being followed. I told her about going into the gloom of Connaught Tower itself, walking up the cement stairs. I watched her face as I retold events, but something I had heard at the scene was scratching at my memory, a thing that had been on the floors above me that I couldn’t catch hold of. But it was gone as soon as I tried to recall it. It was in direct contrast to the images outside the tower moments later, which I was finding impossible to get out of my mind.
Finally I told her I was sorry, and I meant it.
I thought we were done, and I got up so she could leave, but it turned out we had only just got going.
‘Do you think he jumped?’ she asked. I sank back into my chair. She didn’t take her eyes off me. The silence stretched. ‘Because I’ll tell you that he didn’t. He left no note or explanation. He wouldn’t do that. He would never do that.’
‘Ms Moreau, I—’
‘I want to know what really happened at Connaught Tower.’
‘I can’t help you—’
‘I’ve come here, because I saw you with Poppa.’ I wasn’t sure what she was referring to, and felt myself stiffen. ‘You loved my father.’
‘Steady. Stop making assumptions—’
‘I saw you in the Langham with him. I’m not blind, or a child. Most women react to Poppa in the way you did. Most have their heads turned. You owe me answers, at least.’
The wish to have answers, who doesn’t want that?
She ploughed on. ‘I can’t let this rest, I can’t get beyond this until I have all the answers. Show me a photo of Poppa’s lover.’
‘They’re at the office, not here.’
‘OK, but I want you to find Poppa’s lover for me,’ she persisted.
I got angry then, and even though she had lost her dad I couldn’t contain it. ‘Your stepmother did that to me,’ I snapped, jabbing my finger at the ogling crowd outside the window. ‘Hire another private detective.’
She opened her bag and pulled out a tabloid and threw it on the coffee table. There I was, down amongst the tits and tarts, my shameful past laid out for all to see. She was forcing me to take a look, to know what few options I had left. ‘Helene claims she found that woman in her bathtub the night before poppa died.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Helene was ranting and raving that she had stolen her keys, had come into the house, had a bath and left when she arrived home.’
‘Did Helene say what the woman said?’
Alice shook her head. ‘To be honest, I wondered if it had even happened; Helene is often fanciful. And anyway, if it did happen, I mean, it’s a sign this woman really loves Poppa, isn’t it, that she’s prepared to do anything for him.’
I was shocked. Alice was so young, she didn’t get relationships, she had no idea how extreme this behaviour was, how provocative. It wasn’t a sign of love; an act like that was about power, humiliation and ownership – it was the opposite of love. I remembered what Helene had mentioned in my office a while ago – that this woman might have been following her, maybe even the family. That’s why Gabe had been so shaken when I tailed him on his last night, this woman Warriner had blown his secret affair wide open. An end was coming, and he knew it. It was all the motive Helene needed to unleash her deadly passions – or Warriner for that matter.
‘It’s out of character for Poppa to do what he did,’ Alice urged. ‘You think there’s something wrong about his death. I know you wonder if it’s connected to Milo’s murder, he and Poppa were too close for it to be chance. You dislike coincidence as much as I do. Well, the first place to start is with this woman – let’s see what she knows. You want to find her, and this way you get paid. I’m guessing you’re going to need the money.’
Despite everything I’d been through, and against my better judgment, I felt a flicker of interest. Alice was saying out loud what I suspected, but I had another question. ‘Helene’s taken over Gabe’s company. You happy about that?’
She paused and I saw something unpleasant pass across her face. ‘I want you to look into Helene. Do a background check on her. You’d better make it very low key. Get your employees to do it, not you. She’s taken over GWM, I want to know that everything is above board.’
So she didn’t trust her stepmother any more than I did. After that my decision was easy. I’d done a lot of the legwork on Gabe’s mystery woman, Ms Warriner, already. Rory at present had less than nothing to do and could hunt for information on Helene. I didn’t tell Alice I would have done the work for free. But if she was happy to pay, I wasn’t going to refuse.
CHAPTER 66
Alice
Six days before
Maggie let me in the back door of her block of flats and we took the stairs to the third floor. I was shocked at how much she had changed from when I saw her in the Langham Hotel, gurning at Poppa. Then she had been cocky and sexy, her boobs out and the gaudy dress holding her in in all the right places – if you liked that kind of thing. Now she seemed tired and ragged, her nails needed doing and her hair was a mess. She opened the door to her flat, which smelled of food waste, and I saw wine and spirits bottles and beer cans stacking up in the corner of the kitchen. She wouldn’t have wanted to carry those out to the communal bins past the waiting reporters.
She walked into the living room where the blinds were drawn against the world and sat back in a chair, made a sarcastic gesture towards the sofa for me. She didn’t offer me a drink, which was fine. We weren’t friends and it wasn’t a social call.
The kitchen might have been a mess of too much drink and too many ready meals but the small living room was tidy. I saw the neat lines of DVDs on a shelf, thrillers and zombie films and other commercial crap: box sets of Top Gear, crowd pleasers from yesteryear such as The Office. There were books too, and I reminded myself not to be surprised, people were complex, she was smart. Andrea Dworkin, a book on self-esteem, something on economics.
There were many photos in frames of different sizes, circles of sunburnt faces grinning behind a table full of cocktails, fat shoulders red with sunburn, clichéd Mediterranean sunsets and smiling, toothless babies.
It was a collection of the mess and tangles of a normal life. All her relationships jumbled up on the shelves in here, but she lived alone. It was obvious from the moment you stepped into her flat. I bet explaining her criminal conviction to a hot date was a deal breaker, even now.
I got straight down to the point of my call. ‘Why were you following Poppa? What were you doing there when he died?’
She told me the sequence of events. I felt nothing when Maggie apologised for Poppa’s death. I didn’t want to be here, I didn’t want to ever see Maggie again, but I had unanswered questions that needed to be cleared up. Getting emotionally involved with my family had cost her dear and she had been backed into a corner. So we needed each other to get what we wanted in our grief and rage. She made little protest to me hiring her. She needed the money, I needed to find that woman from Chelsea and be reassured about Helene. So we were equal.
CHAPTER 67
Maggie
Six days before
In the afternoon after Alice had come round I went back to the office. I couldn’t stand to stay cooped up in that hovel of a flat a moment longer. It was time to face the music.
The first thing that confronted me on my return was the state of the front door of the Blue and White. Someone had drawn a cock and balls in white paint that reached from the floor to the door handle. Pull the handle down to open the door and it looked like you were pleasuring it. #menfightback was scrawled underneath it. Several people were taking photos on phones of the door.
I walked away, turning my head from a honking horn on a car pulling up beside me that I assumed was a reporter.
‘Maggie! Get in!’
It was Dwight’s voice. He opened the passenger door and I jumped in.
Dwight drove round the corner and began to weave through the West End.
‘What do you want?’ I asked petulantly.
‘I came to see how you were. You’ve had a rough few days, I’m guessing.’
I rounded on him. ‘You don’t have any bloody idea!’
He held his hands up in defeat. ‘OK, I put that badly. But this will blow over.’
‘Have you seen my door?’ I snapped.
‘Get the council to come and clean it off. They’ve got a team that deal with that kind of thing. It’s a criminal offence.’
‘I don’t need a council team, Dwight, I just want to get on with my job.’
‘What happened in the past, it doesn’t bother me, Maggie.’
‘Come on, Dwight! That’s bullshit and you know it.’
‘Stop telling me how I think and feel. Mrs Moreau gave you a proper roasting, that’s for sure.’
‘Hell, maybe I deserved it.’
He braked in the middle of the street and turned to look at me. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t you ever doubt yourself. What you did was more than twenty years ago. You made a mistake and you paid for it. Don’t ever forget that.’
I couldn’t look at him and something moved inside me that I couldn’t control and which I didn’t like. I tried to get out of the car but he pulled on my arm, bringing me back towards him.
‘Hey! Nobody can do it all alone, Maggie, not even you.’
I didn’t answer and opened the car door. It began to rain, the heat of the past few days giving way to a heavy summer shower. I hated getting wet. It was like the world pissing on you. Simona phoned and the piss turned to shit.
‘I thought you would want to know that we’re being sued. Remember that guy from a few years back who you caught having sex with a trio of prostitutes in his house when his wife Trudi was at a conference? He’s claiming invasion of privacy and damages from the Blue and White, citing unprofessional behaviour and breach of the Data Protection Act because we filmed him at his front door, which is his private property.
‘And I phoned a painter and decorator to repaint the front door. When I told him the address and the company he said that if I was such a feminist I could paint my effing door myself.’
‘Get back in the car, Maggie!’ Dwight shouted.
The traffic was backing up behind Dwight and horns were being blasted.
I walked away, my phone a shield against my ear.
‘Simona,’ I said, ‘make a list of what needs referring to a lawyer, but first I need you to do something for me. Go and buy some paint for the front door. I’ll do it.’
I had nearly finished the first coat when Rory turned up. He stood in the street for a few moments staring at me. ‘Stop that right now,’ he said.
I ignored him and carried on, using jabby, angry little strokes. ‘At least let me paint over the tip of the penis.’
Rory didn’t see the joke. He said nothing, just stood still in the street looking at me. I couldn’t meet his eye, because I was fighting back tears. In all the years Rory had worked for me I had never shown such weakness to him, never felt so exposed and vulnerable.
‘What are you looking at?’ I snapped. ‘We don’t have much other work to do.’
‘Any other work,’ Rory replied.
I put the brush down and stepped back, still staring at the brush strokes in the wet paint. ‘Well, something has come up,’ I said. ‘A
lice has hired us to—’
‘Jesus, Maggie, we need to walk away from that family!’
‘— to find Gabe’s lover, to find out what she knows.’ Rory gave me a look that showed his interest was piqued. ‘And Alice wants us to dig into Helene’s past, see if we can find any dirt.’
Rory began to get excited. ‘It would be my pleasure. Helene’s up to her neck in something, and I’ll never forgive her for what she did to you.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘We are going to open her up like a tin can. We know what’s lurking in your closet. Let’s see what skeletons are rattling in hers.’
Then he handed me a tissue and I blew my nose and he used his thumb to wipe away my streaked mascara before I pushed him away and said I could bloody do it myself.
CHAPTER 68
Maggie
Four days before
Alice’s cash kept the Blue and White afloat and allowed me to keep Simona and Rory on the payroll. Simona had suspended the Twitter account; we unplugged the phone because no one but reporters and abusers rang it. Rory began digging into Helene’s life and so Simona and I tackled the woman from Chelsea. Two days later we had drawn a blank. We looked up Warriner in every directory and site we could think of; we did the trawl round social media, Simona got hold of the guest list for the party at the Café Royal; there was no Warriner on it.
I drove down to the pharmacy on the Old Kent Road where Warriner’s pills came from and met the usual shuffling line of the public gathering up their medical panaceas. It was a quiet, ground-down kind of place, the high-rise flats poking skywards from every angle. Warriner’s pills were Zoloft, which a quick Internet search told me was used to treat mood disorders and anger issues. It would be important that she took her pills regularly. I showed her photo to the chemist and the cashier, they shook their heads.
