by Ali Knight
‘Who was it?’
‘He thinks it was a woman.’
I sat up in my chair. ‘What did she look like?’
I heard Dwight scoff down the line. ‘I can’t tell you that! But we’re working at a faster pace, things are falling into place, we’ve got forensics to concentrate on now.’
‘Anything more on Gabe’s death?’
I sensed a pause of irritation, but he continued. ‘Not that I’ve heard, but it’s not my case.’
‘Well, thanks, Dwight.’
‘Yeah, keep safe, Maggie,’ he said and rang off.
The doorbell rang.
I glanced at the clock, it was gone eight thirty. I pressed the intercom buzzer and waited at the top of the stairs. The door opened and it took me a moment to register that it was Warriner walking up to meet me.
She got straight to the point. ‘I need more reassurance that you’re going to leave me alone. I need to know that you’ve told your client that your investigation is at a dead end.’
I sat down on the edge of my desk and held my hand up in conciliation. ‘I was hired to do a job, which is now over. I’m not going to trouble you again. But I can’t speak for Alice Moreau. She’s looking for answers about Gabe’s death, and she’s going to be pretty persistent. It might be better just to meet her and answer her questions and that would be it.’
She gave a high, nervous laugh. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, if you can’t face the consequences, maybe you should have thought a little harder before you started your affair.’
She looked at me with pity bordering on scorn. ‘Consequences – you don’t get it, but then, why would you? Someone who grew up here, in this place,’ she waved her hands, the gesture taking in the vast city and maybe more beyond, ‘in this safety, can have no understanding of it.’ She blinked several times. ‘Gabe and I lost so much when we were young, you cannot begin to appreciate, but you think I can’t take a risk, can’t face a wife? War transforms everything. It crushes who you are, it changes what you do, it ruins every dream.’
So that was it – Gabe had succumbed to the pull of the past, to the feelings aroused by a young beauty he had known before the war, and years later they couldn’t resist a reliving of it. ‘So you’ve known Gabe a long time?’
She shook her head, realising she’d become distracted. ‘None of this matters. You won’t find me after I leave here.’
She swept her hand through her hair, pulling it back from her face as she glanced out of the window. As she turned I caught the profile and side view of her face. I stared at her in confusion.
She saw the change in me. ‘What?’ She gave a little pout and that banished more of my doubts. I had seen that pout before.
‘You look like Alice – you’re family … but I thought Alice’s family were all gone?’
I rose to my feet, coming closer to her. She backed away, and suddenly something that had been so obvious but that I had never seen was staring me right in the face. ‘Clara? You’re Clara Moreau!’
‘What? No—’
‘This client you’re banging on about is your daughter!’
She changed tack then and stopped the denials. ‘Not to me, she isn’t.’
I took a step across the room. ‘You better start talking, before I pick up the phone and bring a whole heap of trouble down on your head. Why did you pretend you were dead?’
She had retreated to the window, as if my words were punches driving her backwards. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. But it was something I had to do.’
‘Did Gabe know your death was a lie?’
‘No, not until years later. I took my chance to get away when our car ended up in the water.’
The questions were coming so fast I could hardly get them out. ‘But they found your body?’
‘No. I was registered as missing, declared dead seven years later.’
I recalled that her memorial plaque in the graveyard bore no dates.
‘So Gabe never wondered?’
‘He told me that he wondered plenty. But I was very resolute.’
‘Not that resolute – you came back in the end. Was that when he’d rebuilt his life and married again? When he was rich? I’ll bet you don’t like to be forgotten! You made yourself found. Now you’re gonna face the consequences. You were tapping him up for money, weren’t you? Your new life didn’t turn out so good, eh? The grass isn’t greener, is it?’
‘It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t about the money—’
‘Well, it sure as hell wasn’t about your daughter.’ My mobile rang but we both ignored it. ‘You abandoned Alice – you ran out on her!’
She was unaffected. ‘It was something I had to do, for her, for myself.’
The clamour in my brain was reaching such a crescendo it blocked out rational thought. My anger was a sea through which a menacing predator snapped and thrashed. ‘A child needs every family member she can find. Take it from me.’
‘I don’t expect you to understand, but I know you won’t report me, this is private family business. It’s not about you.’
I closed my eyes. Through my long and lonely childhood I had had a thing about doors. Every time one opened – in a classroom, on the tube, at a friend’s house – I would hope for a second that through it would come my mother, arms out to gather me up, that her long search for me was over, that somehow it was all a tragic misunderstanding. I had waited all my life for a moment that had never arrived. ‘Not about me, eh? My mum walked out on me when I was seven. I know how it feels to be abandoned as a little girl. I know that life!’
I shouldn’t have said it, it wasn’t my place, but I guess in the end I was a human being with a heart. I had never warmed to Alice, I had thought her spoilt and privileged, she had just been a job to me, a way of getting some revenge on Helene. But now, meeting her mother, hearing her selfish justifications, I felt for her so badly. Some part of what I had done to Colin was because of what my mother had done to me. She hadn’t loved me. She hadn’t wanted me enough. And I hated her for it. Now here was another mother who had spurned her child and let her husband pick up the pieces.
I took a step across the room, my fists balled. ‘I’m never keeping this quiet, even if Alice has to see you from through the glass of a prison visiting room. I’m going to make you face up to your responsibilities if it’s the last thing I do.’
She didn’t cower, she stood up to me. ‘You think Alice is better off knowing about me? I’ve watched her, you know. I have observed her limitless opportunities, the advantages her youth and beauty bring. She’s so lucky and you’re not going to take that away from her. You want to make me pay for running out on my flesh and blood? Get real – men do it every day. I’m going to tell you a story that will make you change your mind about what I did.’
She put her hand in her bag and I took an involuntary step backwards, unsure what was going to be coming back out in her fingers.
As I began to tense, something else sprang into my mind like a little firework blasted into the night sky. If Clara wasn’t dead, Helene was never legally married. She didn’t own GWM. She had no right running Gabe’s company, she had no right to his fortune, to anything.
CHAPTER 77
Helene
The night of
The waiter was smiling, Peter was hanging on my every word. Peter’s wife came into my mind then. She was a lawyer called Deirdre; they had three children. I could have told Peter that Deirdre and I had talked for a long time at one of the functions that had thrown us together; she had wanted to get the measure of me, not because she saw me as a threat, but because she was actually interested in me. She had known I would have been more fun than those bores our husbands hung out with. Deirdre had had an acid sense of humour. She had made me laugh.
I told the waiter I wanted only coffee.
Peter’s smile faded a little. He shifted in his seat. ‘I heard that the police think the activist’s death is drug related.’
/> ‘He’s got a name, Peter. He was called Milo Bandacharian. Drugs can trip up even the best of us.’
Peter made a face. ‘Still, reputation is everything in this business. Maybe, Helene, you need to take more care about your friends; I heard you two were close.’
That was a low blow, but I smiled as he would expect me to. ‘Developments are easier when you have the local community on board. You’ll realise that, Peter, when you do your first large-scale London project.’ Take that, you Yank fucker, I smiled.
I stood up, put my napkin on the table, looking every inch a woman who was born to this. Quite the opposite, but I’d left my past behind, a long time ago.
Keep the fuck away from my company, Peter, I thought.
Peter stood, defeat like dandruff on his shoulders. He kissed me on both cheeks and I walked out into the night past a doorman.
Yes, I had been a mistress, yes, I had used men for what I could get. But everyone reaches the end of that road. I was fully aware that I had ended up here, in central London, expensively dressed, living a life of comfort, rubbing shoulders with powerful people, because I acted and looked a certain way. But that didn’t mean I had a heart of stone, quite the opposite. When I met Gabe everything had changed. And Gabe wasn’t even married; I didn’t have to act the mistress and we didn’t have to lie and cheat and pretend. I could give myself for the first time, body and soul, to someone else.
It hadn’t always been easy. But then the best things never are. His first wife still hovered over us like a spectre, with her death she would never be diminished in his eyes. She had died when her daughter was two. There would have been moments when Gabe would have looked over at little Alice perched on her mother’s knee and Clara would have soared so high on a pedestal in his mind that nothing would ever knock her off it. I would never be able to compete with that.
And I thought I knew why Gabe couldn’t keep his demons at bay any longer, why he took the self-destructive step to end his life. His guilt over what had happened at his hands to Clara eventually ate him out from the inside. Maybe it was Alice reaching eighteen and about to flee the nest that made him think the long struggle of his life could finally be done. He had never shared his insecurities and pain with me, and that was something I would have to live with. But love is complicated, relationships even more so. I forgave Gabe, I would remember and I would mourn, and I would try to learn. I had been blessed to love another human being so completely.
And so what of the woman in the green dress, that threatening presence of the last month, stalking my dreams and invading my most personal spaces? I walked slowly along pavements, past groups of people laughing and talking and enjoying the summer. Hers were the actions of a woman who had lost, a woman whose desires would never be met. She had fallen for Gabe, more fool her. He had unleashed emotions in her she couldn’t control. She could almost be pitied. Now that Gabe was gone she simply didn’t matter, it was all blood under the bridge, because something so precious had been left behind: Alice. On her I would lavish all the love I had left, she was the last remaining memory of Gabe I had; I could nurture her, help her grow into the beautiful woman she could be. I had her, I had GWM, I had memories of Gabe’s love from an earlier, simpler time, it was more than enough; it was more than many had.
A text pinged. It was from Alice. ‘I know all about your past, you whore.’
I felt something sliding away from me. I fumbled with the phone and rang her, but there was no answer.
Another text arrived. ‘I know about all of it, Maggie found out for me. Don’t lie and deny it.’
I phoned her again and left a message, pleading with her to call me.
‘Leave me alone,’ she wrote back. ‘You chucked Poppa out, now I’m throwing you to the dogs.’
I phoned Maggie’s cell and her office. There was no reply. I had the sensation of swimming for years to reach dry land but when I was finally there it disintegrated under my feet. I’d worked so bloody hard to build a relationship with Alice and now Maggie in just a few days had blown it up.
As I re-read Alice’s texts I got angrier and angrier. Maggie wouldn’t get away with this; not for a moment would I let this stand. If Maggie wasn’t at her office I would track her down at her home. Ten minutes later I was on Praed Street looking up at her window.
CHAPTER 78
Alice
The night of
I felt liberated, it wouldn’t have been too much of an exaggeration to say reborn. Poppa’s death and the fresh revelations about my stepmother made me into a harder, older person. I knew now that my stepmother was a cold, conniving, strategic exploiter of men’s weaknesses and desires. Her beauty was a weapon she had used to full and potent effect for her own selfish ends. She had ensnared Poppa, pulled him into her tainted web, but her power over him and over me had been broken.
I would cast her out. The break felt physical. I wanted her to feel it too. I didn’t trust anything Helene had ever said. Her love for Poppa was a lie from the start, a calculating plot to profit from a man’s weakness and need for companionship and affection.
She was out on the town right then, winking, preening and gurning at Peter Fairweather, at Poppa’s business rival, in her widow’s weeds, as treacherous a betrayal as any. GWM is my company, not hers.
No wonder Poppa had had an affair. He had been driven to seek the comfort other warming, kind arms and minds could give him.
I left the house and headed to Maggie’s office. What I wanted now was to meet Poppa’s other woman, this Warriner, and hear what Poppa had meant to her. She must have loved him! Maggie would give me her address and I would find her. I would get her to overcome her shame at being the other woman and talk to me. We could comfort each other – we had a connection! I for one would never condemn her. I felt the sense of an ending, of things shifting into new patterns.
I turned into Praed Street and saw the lights spilling from Maggie’s open office window.
CHAPTER 79
Helene
The night of
Maggie’s door was ajar and I took the stairs two at a time, hustled into the office and stopped in confusion. Maggie looked shrunken and tired, sitting hunched on the edge of her desk, a far cry from the brash and bold force of nature I had known. Someone was near the window. She turned and I saw with a start that it was the woman in my bathroom. Now she wore a silky striped top, trousers and high heels and her hair was dyed dark.
The room crackled with an oppressive silence that was broken by the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs. A moment later Alice burst into the room. She took one look at me and twisted away as if I was rotting meat. Her eyes caught the woman near the window. It took her only a couple of seconds before she realised who she was.
‘Oh God, it’s you, talk to me about Gabe, he was my dad you know, yes, he was my dad. Tell me about him! I want to know everything! How you knew him, where you met him.’
The woman took a step back, eyes wide.
Stop it, Alice, I felt forcefully. Stop this right now. It wasn’t her place to be asking this, it was mine. This was between Gabe and this woman and me, not his daughter, yet this naïve child only had eyes for this interloper, as if his mistress was more important in her life than me.
Maggie stood up, tense and unhappy.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Alice. ‘Don’t be afraid, I’m glad you’re here to talk to me. When was the last time you saw him?’
‘Why was he giving you so much money?’ I snapped, hatred blooming in my chest.
The woman looked at me and I thought back to the text messages I had seen on Gabe’s phone, the intimacy of them, the way she talked so casually about Alice. My dislike transformed into a cold, hard anger. ‘Well, why?’ I asked, louder and more insistent.
‘He felt he needed to help me,’ she said.
‘So you had a real connection?’ Alice began, her voice hopeful.
‘Shut up, Alice!’ I screamed at her.
A noise of protest cam
e out of the woman but I carried on. ‘Why did he need to help you? What’s so special about you?’
‘Helene, stop it!’ Alice countered with a loud voice of her own. ‘What’s your name?’
‘I don’t want to know your name,’ I shouted. ‘You disgust me. You don’t get to claim that you knew him – you knew nothing about him or his life or his struggles.’
‘Ladies, please,’ Maggie appealed for calm, but I was having none of it.
‘You’ve been harassing my family, you’ve been screwing money out of Gabe. You’ve invaded our house – I should call the police and have you arrested.’ I felt the moral high ground solid under my feet. ‘You’re nobody,’ I snapped. ‘Nobody at all in this family. You’ll be forgotten soon enough.’
I grabbed Alice’s hand, trying to turn her round towards the door but she snatched her hand away, hissing, ‘Get off me right now.’
‘Stop it, just stop it, Alice!’ I pleaded. The woman stood there mesmerised by our vicious family row, she drank in the depth of our conflict and difficulties and I hated her for seeing it.
‘Do you miss your mother, Alice?’ The room stilled as she spoke. She had the same accent as Gabe, and I realised that they must come from the same place.
‘My mother? Yes, of course I miss her. Did you know her?’ Alice’s little face was lit from within, it was her greatest fantasy come true, to find someone who had known her, who had been there with her in the past. ‘Oh my God, you knew her. I have met so few people from Poppa’s past, hardly anyone who knew my momma. Please, tell me more.’
I felt the foundations of my life beginning to crumble. I saw in Alice’s face the possibilities of a heritage she could never access opening up through this woman, I felt her turning away from me and towards this other woman whose stories, invented or real – and who would be able to verify? – would change our lives.
