Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  The woman smiled. ‘I knew your momma, as you call her, very well indeed.’

  Alice clapped her hands together. ‘This is a miracle, it was destiny to find you! I want to know everything, I have waited all my life for this moment.’

  I don’t have the strength to tolerate this, I thought. Some bigger part of me knew that understanding her heritage was good for Alice, but what about me, I wanted to scream, what about me?

  ‘Oh tell me about her,’ Alice enthused, ‘I want to feel as close to her as it’s possible to be.’

  Maggie took a step forwards. ‘Helene, I think it would be better if you waited downstairs—’

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ I snapped. ‘How dare you.’ I turned back to this woman. ‘Just because you once knew Alice’s mother doesn’t give you any moral right to do what you did! He loved me, he married me, we raised Alice together, you just met him in sad little flats and skulked in cloakrooms—’

  ‘Helene, I beg you—’

  Maggie’s pleas spurred me on, ‘—stealing my keys, stalking my daughter, what were you thinking? What you did is not a sign of love, it’s a sign of madness. You were only interested in Gabe’s money, that’s the real truth here, isn’t it? You weren’t interested in Alice. You’re nothing, you’re no one, you will be forgotten soon enough. To the Moreau family you never existed!’

  She looked angry then, a vein pulsing above her eye. ‘You were wrong at the beginning and you’re wrong now. It was always about Gabe and me. I am everything to the Moreaus, I am the Moreau family. I’m Alice’s mother.’

  CHAPTER 80

  Maggie

  The night of

  Helene seemed to fall backwards and it was only hitting the wall that held her up.

  Alice stood with her arms hanging limply by her sides, staring at her mother. ‘So the car crash into the water, your disappearance, was all a lie?’

  ‘No – that crash was very real. Arguments can make drivers lose their concentration and come off a bend in a road. But I’m a survivor, and I walked away. I was very young, I had to go. Gabe never knew I survived that crash, not until years later.’

  ‘Why did you never tell me, why did you never come back?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Because Gabe begged me not to. He said you weren’t ready. I used to watch your dad, it comforted me, I saw him at work, saw how much he had achieved, saw this huge tower going up in the richest city in Europe – well, that was something! I watched you too, Alice. I saw you with that handsome young man in Vauxhall—’

  ‘You saw me with Milo?’ Alice’s face was a moving sea of shock and joy that overwhelmed her. She burst into tears and collapsed into Clara’s arms, putting her hand around her neck and laying her head on her breast.

  I saw Clara recoil.

  ‘So many years I have loved you and dreamed about you,’ Alice sobbed. ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘Of course, child, of course, but it’s complicated.’

  Alice looked up at her mother, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘Love isn’t complicated,’ she said, ‘it’s simple!’

  I glanced at Helene. We both knew Alice would learn the hard way when she was older how untrue that was.

  ‘What do you think happened to Poppa in the tower?’ Alice asked.

  A defensive look flitted across Clara’s face. It was less than a second long, but I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. She pulled away from Alice and stepped backwards, her heels clacking on the wooden floor. Something snagged on my memory, a connection I was trying to make, and then several bits of the puzzle finally fell into place. I stood up sharply. ‘You were in Connaught Tower with him at the end!’

  ‘No.’

  I pointed at Clara’s feet, with every second my conviction becoming stronger, because I understood where I had heard that noise before. ‘Your shoes, I heard your high heels on the cement floor above me.’ She took a step away from me as I advanced towards her, my fists balled. ‘Gabe decided enough was enough, didn’t he?’ I thought back to the photos I’d taken of him outside Clara’s Chelsea flat, his unhappiness, his similarity to Colin Torday. It wasn’t love and passion I’d witnessed, it was threats and intimidation. Gabe’s fist grinding into Clara’s memorial plaque in the cemetery took on a sadder meaning too. ‘He said he wasn’t going to pay you any more – was that it? You met up in Connaught Tower because he was going to put an end to your blackmail—’

  ‘No!’ Her eyes were blazing. ‘You’ll never understand the bond we had. We had a connection that was lifelong!’

  ‘This is bullshit. Did you two fight? I bet you’re capable – all that history, all that pain and misunderstanding, oh I bet you guys got right to it. Did he fall, unable to hold on with his bad arm?’ I held my elbow up, clenched it with my other hand. ‘Or did you push him off?’

  ‘How dare you—’

  ‘I know you were there, I know because when Gabe landed at the foot of the tower – he was calling out your name as he died in my arms!’

  ‘So he should have been,’ she hissed.

  And there it was, her admission, bubbling to the surface on her uncontrollable anger.

  CHAPTER 81

  Helene

  The night of

  Never had a secret kept been at such high cost.

  I had endured agonies of conjecture over the past weeks that my love and marriage had been betrayed, yet I had been wrong, more wrong than I could ever have known. My heart screamed at Gabe, Why didn’t you tell me? We could have worked it out, we would have emerged stronger, better. My husband hadn’t been having an affair, he was processing the reappearance of his wife from long ago, but that period of his life was over and he had resisted Clara’s attempts to resurrect it. He hadn’t jumped off Connaught Tower, he hadn’t abandoned Alice and me. And if he hadn’t jumped, that meant she had pushed him. I started forward across the room.

  Alice’s voice stopped me in my tracks. ‘Maggie wasn’t expecting me here tonight, so it was an accident that we met, wasn’t it? You never wanted to see me, did you?’ Her voice was quiet.

  Clara turned back to Alice, and I fancied that she had almost forgotten she was there. ‘Come now, child,’ she snapped.

  I felt a tremor of fear. That was a dangerous thing to say. Clara didn’t know her daughter, this young woman who carried her DNA but nothing else. She had no idea how emotional Alice could get.

  ‘Why don’t you love me?’ Alice asked, her voice a whisper.

  Clara took a deep inhale and paused, and I felt an extraordinary sensation: Lie, I wanted to scream, tell her what she wants to hear. This vulnerable girl who has just lost her father is your flesh and blood, trip over your words for her, contort your twisted feelings into something palatable for her – force yourself to do it. Lies make us compromised hypocrites, but sometimes lies make us live.

  But she didn’t do that. Clara pulled out a cigarette and tapped the end impatiently on the side of the packet.

  CHAPTER 82

  Maggie

  The night of

  Clara put the tip of her cigarette between her lips. She twisted, searching for her lighter, instead of giving Alice an answer. Alice stepped forward sharply towards her mother. She shoved Clara once, very hard, in the chest. Clara’s face had the briefest chance to register her shock before she teetered backwards, her high heels catching in the cord of the broken fan, her arms cartwheeling too slowly to be any use. By the time Clara’s bum had cleared the windowsill I was in full lunge, rugby tackling her round her thighs, figuring my greater weight would pinion her in the room. Too late did I realise she was pulling me out of the window and I was hurtling to the pavement with her.

  CHAPTER 83

  Helene

  The night of

  It took me a few seconds to get down the stairs and out into the street. The angle of Clara’s neck spoke louder than any hunting for a pulse or putting hands on her chest. She was dead.

  My limbs moved like I was stuck in treacle. I looked back up at the wi
ndow and saw Alice silhouetted against the yellow light one storey up. I replayed her step forward, her hard shove in her mother’s chest; intent to cause injury glowing in every cell of her body. It was premeditation in a court of law; a charge of murder sure to follow. I heard brakes in the road and the shouts of passers-by.

  Maggie was gasping little breaths of air, blood pumping from a head wound. I knelt down, touched her face and leaned closer because she was talking. ‘I saw her fall. It was an accident,’ she said.

  Her eyes were burning with intensity.

  ‘No,’ I said. Shock had robbed me of speech and it came out as no more than a whisper.

  Maggie gripped my wrist, folded something into my hand. I took it dumbly. ‘I saw it all and so did you. Warriner tripped and fell backwards out of the window and I couldn’t save her.’

  My hands were rubbery, unable to grip Maggie’s clothes. Maggie was making no sense. For a start, this wasn’t Warriner, it was Clara Moreau. You couldn’t lie to the police, it would never work, Maggie would change her mind as soon as she was able. I had fallen through layer after layer of horror, but here was another. Alice was going to have to face the legal consequence of what she had done. ‘No,’ I said, stronger this time.

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie said, and fainted.

  I looked at the object she had forced into my palm and saw a photo.

  CHAPTER 84

  Alice

  The night of

  I stayed where I was, looking out of the window at the scene below. That woman had obviously broken her neck. She fell just one floor, but get it wrong, as she did, and that’s enough. Maggie was groaning and struggling, she landed right on top of her.

  Helene looked up at me, her face entirely rearranged with the shock of what had happened. I turned away.

  I came out into the street to find Helene a different woman. She hurried towards me, a look of hunted protection on her face. ‘Maggie’s told me exactly what she saw – Warriner tripped and fell backwards and Maggie couldn’t save her. Is that what you saw?’ Helene waited, hanging on my reply, her eyes beseeching.

  So this was how she was going to spin it. People were milling around, the sound of sirens was moving closer. I nodded, repeated the lie and hugged Helene. I took a long look over her shoulder at that dead woman.

  I noticed that Helene was holding a photograph in her shaking hand. When the first police officer arrived she transferred it to her pocket.

  CHAPTER 85

  Helene

  The night of

  We were in the street a long time. So many people had to process us. They took Clara away first, because there was nothing anyone could do for her. Maggie they took longer on, an oxygen mask, a drip and a brace to protect her back. Alice and I gave our statements, as did a man who saw the two of them hit the pavement. The police went up to the office of the Blue and White and we weren’t allowed to follow. I could see them intermittently moving back and forth in front of the window, sometimes leaning out and looking down.

  The photo burned a hole in my pocket.

  Much, much later we were allowed to go home. I had to almost carry Alice into the house; the shock at what she had done was creeping into her limbs, rendering her almost unable to walk but leaving her with the wide eyes of a terrified small animal. I laid her in bed fully clothed and pulled the sheet up under her chin.

  ‘What’s going on, Momma?’ she said.

  I froze. It was the first time she had ever called me that.

  I hugged my daughter so tight. My daughter. I kissed her on the forehead and stroked her hair and shushed her and a few minutes later she was asleep, adrenaline and lies robbing her of consciousness in a moment.

  I quietly closed her door, and then I tore the home office apart. I upended every box, scrabbling for information on every aspect of Gabe, Clara and Alice’s life, looking for any and every detail which could explain and disprove that picture in Maggie’s bloodstained hand – and then I would destroy it. But the deeper I looked, the less I found. There were barely any photos – a few black and whites of his parents, but no record of the wife he had loved and lost, no photos from his childhood. I found his name change documents, from Buric to Moreau. There was no marriage certificate. I found Alice’s birth certificate, but that was it. Her parents were listed as Gabe and Clara Moreau. I found the file about the accident on the bridge, about how his wife was listed as missing, not dead. I found letters from solicitors about the long process of declaring Clara dead.

  I picked up the cheap disposable phone that Gabe had used to communicate with Clara. I examined the texts again. ‘You can’t let me go x’, ‘Alice need never know xx’, ‘I deserve more x’.

  I pulled out the photo that Maggie had clutched in her hand as she had tried to save Clara’s life. No image like it existed in this house. The people in it were all gone, the names on the reverse faded but still clear. I stood up and waited outside Alice’s door, listening to the silence.

  When I was sure she was asleep I walked into her room and stared down at her. The sheet was thrown back in the summer warmth. I watched her breathing, the small rise and fall of her chest. With every in-breath ugly images of what had happened earlier that night in Maggie’s office flashed through my mind.

  Alice’s red hair was spread across her pillow, the white crook of her arm folded near her ears. She was miraculous, and it utterly broke my heart. I took out my phone and risked using the torch. I double-checked her features, comparing them to the photo in my hand.

  A long while later I walked out and closed the door. My doubts had all dried up. I turned towards the stairs, determined to burn the photo in the kitchen sink, but saw instead that the bottom of my dress was stained with Maggie’s blood, my knees coated in rust-coloured smears of her pain.

  Revulsion swamped me and I ran to the bathroom, threw the cloying dinner dress and my underwear and jewellery to the floor and got into the shower and turned it to boiling. I reached for a flannel and began to scrub.

  CHAPTER 86

  Alice

  The night of

  Helene was standing over me in the dark, the light of her phone swinging around the walls of my room, scattering shadows and creating others. She stared for a long time at me and at the photo in her hand before she left.

  I got out of bed and crept towards the bathroom door and opened it a crack. I heard the shower running.

  Helene had cast her clothes in a heap on the floor, steam was curling in tendrils across the ceiling, her naked body was the faintest outline behind the frosted glass of the screen.

  I bent down and pulled the photo from the pocket of her jacket.

  CHAPTER 87

  Maggie

  The day after

  I was driven to St Thomas’ hospital where there was a free bed rather than carried to St Mary’s right next to where I fell. I woke to a view across the river to the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben was practically sitting in bed with me.

  I bitched and begged for painkillers. I wanted to stay high as a kite for as long as possible; the police would come to interview me soon enough and I wanted to delay it.

  I had been told by a young nurse that I had a broken collarbone, concussion and they were monitoring possible spinal damage, but by late morning I was judged well enough to give my version of events at my office the night before. A police officer came to take my statement. My feelings from yesterday hadn’t changed. The lies fell easily and slickly from my lips: it was a dreadful accident, she had been right by the window, the cord from the broken fan was behind her heels; when I saw her trip I instinctively rushed to try and save her and had been pulled out the window myself.

  Why did I stick to such a monstrous version of events? Why did I subvert due process and put myself at risk of a perjury charge? Because in that moment when Alice stepped forward, her arms outstretched, a look of wild fury on her face, I saw myself. If it had been my mother, I would have acted the same. I would have thought, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking d
are stand there and pretend you love me. You don’t get to come and go, you don’t get to lay waste to my life and treat it casually. So Alice Moreau and I, separated by class and background and age and experience, found a way to feel as one. I’d instinctively done my best to stop Alice, but I couldn’t condemn her for it.

  In the early afternoon Helene came to visit. The cellophane around the extravagant flowers she carried crinkled under her touch, their heavy scent perfumed the room.

  She looked as terrible as I felt, with bags under her eyes and skin that looked grey in the summer light. She sat down by the side of the bed, asked me how I was.

  ‘I gave my witness statement this morning,’ I said.

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Did you remember anything else since last night?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘The sequence of events remains quite clear in my mind.’ There was a short silence as she looked around the ward, checking who was near.

  ‘I burned that photo,’ she said in a whisper.

  We looked at each other for a moment before she looked away. Clara’s secret was buried so deep it would never resurface now.

  ‘I cannot ever thank you for what you have done for my family, for Alice,’ she said. ‘I am sorry for the public pain I put you through and the damage I must have inflicted on your business.’

  ‘Forget about it,’ I said. ‘There is one thing I want to ask you, though. Did you know about my past when you hired me?’

  She nodded. ‘I did research on you, I’m always thorough. But it wasn’t until Gabe died and it was being insinuated that I was responsible that I decided to strike back at you.’ Gabe’s name hovered uncomfortably between us. ‘I want to make up your financial loss.’

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ I said.