Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  It was when she had crossed the road and was approaching the Underground that she felt she was being followed. A man in a dark suit with heavy stubble crossed the road with her at the lights. She glanced behind her and he looked away. The lawyer’s office was nearby, but she walked past it and round the corner. The man followed. She picked up speed and turned another corner into a square with a football pitch encased in green fencing. He was still behind her. She held her bag tighter against her shoulder, her discomfort increasing. The square was quiet, no one was out and about on a cold day in October. He wasn’t trying to hide what he was doing. She walked a whole circuit of the square, her anger building in her. Then she turned and ran at him. ‘What are you doing? Leave me alone.’

  He put up his hands. ‘I’m employed to follow you, to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘Bullshit. I’m calling the police, this is stalking,’ she hissed.

  ‘Really, Mrs Malamatos, it’s just my job. Christos wanted me to make sure you’re OK. He’s worried about you.’

  ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you call the police, there’ll probably just be someone else here tomorrow. Try not to think too much about me, I’m just doing my job. I can stay further back if you’d prefer.’

  She stomped off, but what he said had an absurd logic. There would be someone else here tomorrow, and the next day and the next. She turned around and headed back to the lawyer’s office, making no attempt to hide where she was going.

  She came to the door of Mr Cauldwell’s offices, opened it and climbed up the stairs. She pushed open the door and stopped, confused. She must have the wrong floor.

  She looked around. Bethany’s desk was still there; a thin layer of dust covered the veneer. The chairs were gone. She ran through into Mr Cauldwell’s office. It was bare, the law books taken from the shelf, the filing cabinets half opened and empty. The only trace of him was a McDonald’s wrapper in the bin.

  I’ll be here for years, he’d said.

  Not unless something or someone made him leave – in a hurry.

  She went down a floor to another office, was buzzed in, and asked the receptionist there when the lawyer upstairs had left and why. The receptionist called an Indian manager out of a back office and they decided between them that he had left last week. No, the lease wasn’t up, he hadn’t said goodbye. No, he had left no forwarding address or number with them.

  Returning upstairs, Kelly picked up a pile of unopened mail on the lawyer’s floor. She ripped the envelopes and found normal day-to-day correspondence, even cheques. She sat down on the narrow steps with the hard blue carpet, stunned. Christos had done this, of that she had no doubt. He had frightened him away with just one visit. In twenty-three years Mr Cauldwell had never come up against anyone as determined to get what he wanted as her husband.

  She felt the last threads of hope begin to unravel, her night-time vigil and determination fading to grey. The futility of her efforts to get out pushed down on her so heavily she feared she would stop breathing. She came out of the building and sat down on its shabby steps and wept. The man sent to follow her stood politely a good distance away and waited calmly for her to finish.

  36

  Georgie spent a good few minutes driving round the back streets south of St Pancras, not seeing Kelly anywhere. She was frustrated by one-way streets, blocked-off pedestrian access and cycle paths. She swung a right back on to the Euston Road and spotted Kelly sitting on a doorstep, sobbing. She pulled over and waited, unsure what to do next.

  After a few moments Kelly took a deep breath, dried her eyes and stood up. She looked around and spotted Georgie sitting in the car. She froze, and then casually turned full on to her, mouthed something Georgie didn’t catch and walked to the kerb and stuck out her hand for a taxi. A man standing a short distance away came to the kerb too. A few moments later Kelly and the man both got in a taxi. Intrigued, Georgie pulled out into the traffic and followed.

  The taxi headed to Oxford Street and parked down the side of a small shopping centre. Kelly and the man got out and went inside. Georgie put her customs sticker in the window of the car and rode up the escalator a few shoppers behind them and watched Kelly enter a gym on the top floor. The man waited outside; he obviously wasn’t a member. Georgie went up to reception and showed her ID to the manager and he let her in. She followed Kelly into the changing area.

  She walked towards a bench facing a row of lockers and could see Kelly from a corner starting to take her clothes off. Georgie thought she was changing for a class, but she didn’t put on sportswear; she wrapped a towel round herself, speared a pair of flip-flops with her toes and headed for the sauna.

  Georgie stripped and scrabbled around in her bag for change for the locker, and then realised with a jolt of embarrassment that you didn’t have to pay for them. She stuffed her clothes in hurriedly and picked up a towel. It was mid-morning, the changing rooms empty before the lunchtime office crowd descended. Georgie glanced around and pulled at the thick sauna door.

  It was gloomy inside, the faint smell of pine and sweat not unpleasant. Kelly was sitting on the top shelf near the steam source, the hottest part of the room.

  ‘I take it you want to talk to me?’ Kelly said.

  ‘Yes. But you make it difficult.’

  Kelly shrugged. She looked exhausted, with dark rings under her eyes and her shoulders slumped.

  ‘Who’s that man waiting outside?’

  ‘The guy Christos has following me. When I got in the taxi I thought he might as well come with me, it’s partly my money that’s paying him, after all.’ Her attempt at wry humour was lost on Georgie, whose questions were piling up.

  ‘Your husband has you followed? Why?’

  She gave a little irritated shrug of her shoulders. ‘He’s paranoid. He wants to know what I do all the time, who I see.’

  ‘But why?’

  Kelly rubbed her eyes with her fingers and let out an exasperated groan. ‘Because some men are just like that. But there are always places a man can’t go.’

  Georgie felt the heat beginning to make her scalp itch. ‘You were upset earlier. Care to share?’

  Kelly wiped a hand through her hair, which was damp with steam. ‘Share with you? You’ve threatened to take my kids away.’

  ‘About our last meeting, I’m sorry, I felt maybe we got off on the wrong foot—’

  ‘You’re lucky you came into the toilets at the play centre to talk to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have given you the time of day. There was probably someone watching me that day too.’

  ‘Why is there so much security in your flat? What’s he hiding?’

  ‘He’s not hiding anything. He’s keeping something there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m desperate to leave. But a man like that, he decides, he has to be in control. So I can’t go, certainly not with the children. Now he’s punishing me through the kids, he’s sending them away and I’m really worried he’s going to do something to me when they’ve gone.’

  Georgie saw the tears beginning to form. ‘But you’re married, you have rights—’

  ‘You only say that because you’ve never been in my situation.’

  ‘But the law is on your side.’

  ‘He’s just threatened my lawyer in such a way that he’s abandoned the practice he had for twenty-three years. I’d just left his offices when you saw me earlier.’ She was getting agitated again.

  ‘I’m the law, I can help.’

  ‘No one can help me.’ She jumped to the floor in a sudden burst of energy, yanked her towel away and stood defiantly before Georgie. ‘Just take a look at what it’s really like.’

  The sauna was narrow, and with Kelly standing, Georgie felt the shock of forced intimacy, of having to see a stranger’s naked body. Her face was only inches from Kelly’s pubic hair, but something caught her eye. And then she couldn’
t do anything but stare. Even in the gloomy light of the sauna, the white puckered skin on Kelly’s stomach was impossible to miss, the tracery of lines and twisted skin that showed a burn.

  A woman’s history is written on the skin of her stomach, but Georgie wasn’t looking at the folds and sags of impending old age or a lifetime’s battling with body image, the welts of stretch marks from her pregnancies, a scar from where a baby might have been yanked. The burn had a definite outline, starting wide by her pubic hair and tapering to a point below her belly button. Within it were two lines of small circles of unburned skin that made the shape understandable, which told the real story.

  The mark left permanently on Kelly’s skin was from an iron.

  ‘He did that to you?’ Georgie’s tongue felt huge and dry in her mouth.

  ‘That burn took about twenty seconds. It will last a lifetime. The law takes about three months, then there are appeals, and more appeals and then my kids don’t know me any more, and I’m in the nut house or the cemetery.’ She turned away and in contrast to the violence inflicted on her stomach Kelly had a small dolphin tattoo low down on her back.

  She turned back to Georgie again, her voice full of conviction. ‘One day he’s going to get rid of me. He’s going to take me out on one of his ships and put me in the world’s biggest grave – the ocean.’

  ‘Are you the tip-off?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone’s phoning us, feeding us information about his illegal business activities.’

  ‘He never shares his business with me. He thinks it’s beneath him. He’s got Sylvie for that.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘You must think I’m sick in the head. How did I end up here? Such a doormat. You know there’s no word for what I am. No word for the person I’ve become.’

  Georgie tried to reassure her. ‘You’re in a relationship with a very violent and controlling—’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. There’s no word in the English language for me. For a mother who’s lost her child.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘England has some of the biggest and most dangerous tides in the world, do you know that?’

  Georgie was nonplussed. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Neither did I, until my child died in one.’

  ‘Your child?’

  Kelly was somewhere else now, her eyes glazed, her voice low. ‘I grew up in Southampton. Poole, near Southampton, sits on one of the biggest natural harbours in the world but it has a tiny entrance, like a huge bottleneck. All the water has to be pulled in through the bottleneck, and back out. The current’s so strong there it’ll pull you over at ankle height. The ferry across the entrance has to be attached to chains.’

  Georgie had been there once, on a school trip to the Isle of Wight. She remembered liking the azure water of the south coast, so unlike the greeny-grey sludge of her native Thames.

  ‘We were out in a friend’s boat, my first husband Michael, Florence was four and Amber was two. The fog came down, thick and fast. We heard a distress call from another boat and we went to help. Its engine had broken and it was drifting fast in the fog so Michael tried to get on board to help the man in the other boat restart the motor. If boats get too close to the ferry they can be pulled right under it. I was at the front of our boat, steering, the girls were sitting in the middle, and Michael was trying to get from the side of our boat on to the deck of the other, but he slipped as he tried to climb out and he fell in. I had my hand on the wheel, looking behind me and Amber, puffed up in her life jacket, leaned right over to see where her dad was. I was screaming at her to get away from the side, but before I could reach her she toppled right in after him. And then they were being pulled away, so fast they were pulled away from the boat and I was desperately trying to follow their life jackets in the water, chasing after them in the boat, and I could hear we were so close to the ferry. And I lost them. The broken boat was carried right out to sea past the ferry. The guy was fine.’ She paused. ‘But neither Amber nor Michael was ever found.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Georgie underwent a very rapid reassessment of Kelly.

  ‘After something like that, I don’t trust my own judgement any more, I’m overprotective of the kids, I’m a mess.’ She leaned forward and looked Georgie straight in the eye. ‘But I want to bring him down, before he decides he doesn’t need me at all.’

  ‘Tell me everything you know.’

  ‘That’s the problem, I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Does he keep papers at home that we wouldn’t have found when we searched the flat? Do you listen to messages on the phone?’

  ‘The cameras stop me looking.’ She paused. ‘Anything incriminating would have to be in his office. That’s the place in the flat I can’t go.’

  ‘We looked there,’ Georgie added with a sigh. She thought for a moment. ‘The tip-off said something important was coming on your husband’s ship, the Saracen. It’s docking here in London in two days.’

  Kelly sat up. ‘On October 30th?’

  ‘Yes. Why is that important?’

  Georgie saw her pause, thinking through some problem. ‘Sylvie crowed to my daughter that I was going away at the end of the month. Christos is sending the kids away to school on November 1st, his mother’s going with them. He’s clearing the decks of everyone. Why?’

  Georgie looked at her. ‘We need to find out what’s on that ship, Kelly.’

  But Kelly was thinking something else. ‘Where am I supposed to be going?’

  37

  Georgie left the gym first and drove back to the docks. Stuck in a long queue on the Highway in Wapping, she pushed in the cigarette lighter and waited for it to pop back out. She touched the end of her finger with it. Less than a second later she had drawn it away, the pain of the burn lingering unpleasantly. Georgie spent the rest of the journey thinking about what women would suffer for the sake of their children.

  In the evening Georgie wanted to go to the climbing wall and Ryan gave her a lift part of the way. They chatted about Dad and other family, about a neighbour trying to build an extension who was having problems with a busybody in the planning department of the council, according to Ryan. Georgie instinctively took the council’s side, but decided it was best not to tell Ryan that. She wanted their journey to be pleasant and relaxed, Kiss FM was blaring, and it was good to have a catch-up with her brother.

  They were stationary at the lights when Ryan made an announcement. ‘We’ve got something for you – me and Uncle Ed.’

  She was confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘A phone message. Want me to play it for you?’

  He was looking triumphant and sly, the two commonest Bell traits. She became alarmed. ‘You didn’t do what I told you not to the other night, did you?’

  ‘Yeah. It works a treat. If you have the number you can get in to their message service – if they’ve never put in a security code or changed the factory default. He hadn’t, probably because he rarely uses it, like most people nowadays—’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Your shipping guy.’

  Georgie was horrified. ‘You broke into the message service of Christos Malamatos? How did you find his number?’

  ‘You left your bag by the fire when you stomped out. You’re always so moody these days, G, we all think it. So Uncle Ed looked through your papers. Malamatos sounds Greek. Is he?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake – I told you not to do that. What were you doing rooting round in my bag?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ added Ryan. ‘We’re trying to help. Do you want to hear the message or not?’

  ‘No, I bloody well don’t. It’s illegal.’

  ‘That’s not true though, G, is it? I know you want to get on, you don’t want to be stepped on all your life, just like we don’t.’

  She knew he meant the rest of the Bells. Everyone doing what they could to live a little better, dream a little bigger. She had the same blood running through her
veins. It was what she wanted, too. Ryan was waving his phone in front of her face, teasing her with it.

  She switched off the radio. ‘Play it.’

  He pressed a button and put it on speaker. The automatically generated computer voice said, ‘A message was left on Saturday, 19th October at 6.35 a.m. The caller withheld their number.’ Then a bunch of noises and a man’s voice, slow and deliberate. ‘1824 is no.’ There was the sound of the phone being put down.

  ‘Is that it?’ She couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Ryan was indignant. ‘What did you want? A murder confession?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Who phones at six thirty in the morning? Everyone says their name when they leave a message, even if it’s me phoning you. You know, the moronic “Hi, sis, it’s me, Ryan” – as if you don’t recognise my voice. But this message? It’s code, must be, and people only use code when they’ve got something to hide. You took his mobile and iPad and stuff when you searched the place, didn’t you, so no one would have been able to contact him. This is the old-fashioned way.’

  Georgie thought for a moment. They had gone to Christos’s flat the day before the message, on Friday the 18th.

  ‘Play it again.’

  They both hunched over, listening in. ‘What can you make out about the voice?’

  ‘He’s disguised it. It’s impossible to know if he’s young, old, it’s too short a message to reveal an accent. It’s just a man, that’s all.’

  Georgie nodded. ‘Which is why he risked leaving the message.’

  Ryan played it again.

  ‘What’s that noise at the end?’ There was a scrapy-tappy sound just before the call was cut. ‘Play it again.’

  The pitter-patter scraping, then the clunk of the phone going down.

  Ryan shrugged. ‘Sounds like Shelley when she taps her shellacs on the bar.’ They both listened again to the short message, frowning at each other. Then Ryan smiled. ‘You see, you can’t resist, G. It’s human nature to want to know.’