by Ali Knight
I nodded and we entered.
Milo’s flat in Reg Jones House conformed to a standard layout I’d seen a hundred times: a small entrance hall with stairs up to the top floor that would contain two bedrooms and a small bathroom, a small kitchen off to the left and past the stairs a lounge with a picture window.
Dwight followed me into the lounge. The room faced west and the place was cooking in the heat. The room was large, with a gas fire set in the wall with a thick-framed mirror above it, and square plastic tiles on the floor that Milo had painted bright blue and covered with a rug.
There was a tatty leather sofa and an armchair, a coffee table and a desk in front of floor-to-ceiling shelves made of scavenged planks and stacks of bricks. The desk had space for a computer, I saw a printer and a shredder. I opened the shredder and found it empty. There was an overflowing wastepaper bin filled with old banana skins, beer bottles and fag butts.
The walls of the lounge and parts of the carpet were covered with Post-its and tape marks that pointed out blood spray patterns. Milo’s body had fallen across the carpet and hit the coffee table and lain bleeding on the rug.
I looked at the items on Milo’s shelves: photos of him as a boy with his parents, a smiling woman that was probably his mother; a mocked-up retro newspaper front page with the headline ‘Agitator who must be stopped’ and a photo of Milo holding a banner on a student loans march.
I felt the terrible loss of that young man’s life, which had been ended so violently in the flat he had been born in and grew up in. The sun moved behind Connaught Tower and the light in the room shifted to darker hues.
‘Did you find the shredder empty?’ I said.
‘Yes. And his computer’s missing.’
‘That’s hardly a drug dealer profile, is it?’
‘It is when he used to video the dealers who hung around by the playground you can see from the kitchen window.’
‘Are you saying his mobile is gone too?’
‘And all his cash, though according to his friends he never carried much around with him.’
‘Why would a bloke like Milo bother to empty his shredder when he leaves his bin overflowing right next to it?’
Dwight sighed. ‘Maybe he never did. Maybe he never used it, or maybe someone stole everything in it. We have to work through. Every bin within a large radius of this flat has been searched, for the murder weapon and any other items. We’ve found nothing of Milo’s yet.’
‘This whole thing makes me crazy,’ I said, shaking my head.
Dwight came and put a consoling hand on my arm. ‘It’s how we do it,’ he said quietly. ‘We work methodically, we keep a cool head, we rule nothing out, but we don’t indulge in fantastical theories either.’
I didn’t have Dwight’s self-restraint. I couldn’t stay calm. ‘How about this for a theory. I lie every day to get my job done, but there are bigger liars and bigger cheats competing for millions, even billions, and maybe Milo got in the way, maybe the people on this estate are being cheated of their homes by powerful groups—’
‘I didn’t have you down as a people’s crusader, Maggie,’ Dwight said.
I wiped my hand across my face, shaking with emotion. ‘Me? Give me a fucking break. Like you said, I ran the first opportunity I got.’ I looked back at the nasty stain on the carpet, the last struggles of a beautiful young man with everything to live for. What an utter, pointless waste. I felt small then, grubby and irrelevant. Truth was, I couldn’t become a police officer, not because I found something better, but because it would push buttons in me that for the good of everyone around me should never be pushed. And then there was the small matter of my criminal record.
We walked into the kitchen and I looked across the children’s playground at the block of flats opposite. ‘How often did Moreau come here? What did the neighbours say?’
‘They say they’d seen him sometimes, but not the night he died.’
I turned and opened the fridge, used my foot to pull the salad drawer and saw the usual bag of leaves disintegrating in its plastic coffin. I closed the drawer pretty fast. Dwight looked at me, non plussed. ‘Force of habit,’ I said by way of explanation. ‘I once found a mobile phone used by a wife to cheat on her husband in the salad compartment. My client said afterwards that in all their years of marriage he had never once opened it, which was exactly the reason she chose to use it.’
Dwight looked at me with fresh appreciation. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever opened mine,’ he said.
It was the only revelation in that sad and sorry visit.
CHAPTER 26
Maggie
Five weeks before
We tailed Gabe for another day and got nothing interesting, so I called Helene. ‘This other phone that we saw Gabe using in Connaught Tower is troubling me,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he has it with him every day, which means he’s hiding it somewhere, most likely the office or your home. If we can find it, we’ll basically find out everything.’
‘Do you want to come here and look for it?’ Helene asked.
I hadn’t expected her to be so accommodating, but finding that phone was beginning to get me itchy and scratchy so I eventually agreed. And after hours of waiting outside the Moreau’s house I was genuinely interested in seeing what lay inside it.
Helene opened the door in her ‘at home’ uniform of track pants in a colour probably called Dove and her hair up in a casual ponytail. She looked decades younger than she was. She led me into the kitchen and made me a coffee from a machine more suited to a NASA spaceship and poured it into a wobbly artisan cup in dullest pewter that probably cost the same as the GDP of a small African country. She couldn’t find any sugar, which made it quite the worst and most expensive coffee I’d ever tasted.
As I pushed it aside politely she said, ‘I don’t want this tragedy with Milo to stop you doing the best job for me.’
‘I’m a professional: you pay me, I work for you,’ I said neutrally.
‘Come off it,’ she almost snapped. ‘You must have been pissed off being kept in the dark about Alice knowing Milo, but it was as much a surprise to us as to you. Imagine, she was with him only hours before he was murdered, how much danger was she herself in?’
None, I wanted to say, but didn’t. That was the thing about rich people, they thought the world revolved around them and for them. Maybe it did. ‘I’ve got a question,’ I began, ‘do you think his murder has anything to do with the redevelopment going on—’
‘Absolutely not.’ Helene was adamant, interrupting me to claim it so.
‘It’ll be one of the theories that the police are working on.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ She shook her head, as if to dispel bad thoughts. ‘I just refuse to believe it could be.’ She put her empty cup down on the island. ‘But then that leaves even more unpalatable options – that Milo was involved in some kind of illegal activity, drugs, or he was badly in debt or something.’
‘Well, there’s always a third option,’ I said.
‘Oh, what’s that?’
‘It could be a crime of passion. He rejected someone, and they didn’t like it. Not one little bit.’
She almost snorted with derision. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It happens all the time,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Men aren’t murdered over that, only women.’ She sounded sure of herself, but she had turned away towards the corridor so I couldn’t see her face. ‘Why don’t you come and see the house?’
It didn’t disappoint. It gave, and then it just kept on giving. It made the five-star hotel bars I’d followed Gabe into look shabby. As Helene showed me round it, despite knowing I needed to keep my distance from her and maintain my critical faculties about the motives of the Moreaus, I fell completely under the spell of that house and the family lucky enough to live there. I felt a hunger to feel the plumped sofa cushions, to stroke the nap on a velvet chair, to run my toes through spotless calfskin rugs, to be able to say somethi
ng, anything, about the pictures – sorry, Art – on the walls. Up on the first floor I let a fantasy carry me along for a few more moments – of imagining I was slipping between those smooth bed sheets, pissing in that marbled bathroom, bathing in a sunlight glow from those tall windows, running my hand across the soft cashmere of a husband’s sweater.
I knew Helene wasn’t keeping this domestic show on the road herself, she was ordering staff about to achieve it for her, getting them to buy into her vision. There was effort required to keep it up. The high standard of presentation went deep – as she showed me the upper recesses of her vast domestic playground it made me appreciate what Gabe had chosen – he had married a woman who enjoyed order, who was ruthless about getting what she wanted. And who kept a fucking beautiful house.
That was until she opened the door to Alice’s room. And I understood the messy compromises that families – even ones headed by Helene – were subjected to. Helene had told me that Alice had helped refurbish the house, but grand visions and day-to-day reality don’t always marry. That room was like a festering spot on the back of a beautiful woman.
CHAPTER 27
Helene
Five weeks before
‘We need to talk about Milo,’ Maggie had said when she phoned. She was clipped and controlled, but I sensed a deeper level of suspicion than she had shown previously. She tried to hide it but failed. I was paying her, but she still had the right to be angry.
I told her to come round to the house. Gabe had taken Alice into the office about an hour earlier, to take her mind off Milo, and Alice had agreed.
Maggie didn’t like the idea. ‘I shouldn’t be seen at your house,’ she said.
‘Oh come on, you think I can’t lie convincingly in the unlikely event one of them comes home?’
Maggie to her credit hadn’t pretended to protest. Half an hour later she was standing at the door. I brought her into the kitchen and as we drank coffee I found I couldn’t stop running on about Alice and Milo. ‘Alice met Milo for the first time when she went with Gabe to see Connaught Tower. Apparently Milo invited her and Lily to some party at the weekend and then she went to the public meeting. Lily didn’t go to that. That’s why she was back at his flat the night he was killed. There were lots of other people there too, they were never alone.
‘Gabe’s hit the roof. I told him she’s eighteen, like it or not she’s a grown-up, her head’s going to be turned, she’s going to fall in love with inappropriate people, do stupid things, but he doesn’t like it.’
‘You should have told me straight away.’
‘You know what, Maggie? It wasn’t a priority. Things have been hell here. There were policemen here all day, Gabe had to give a statement, they were probing Alice, there were reporters at the offices today.’
‘How well did you know Milo?’ she asked.
I could see her watching me carefully, sizing me up, trying to see what made me tick. She had been around enough liars to spot them easily. ‘I’ve known him for about a year. Gabe and I got introduced to him shortly after we won the bid for the Vauxhall site. He was my type of guy, passionate, kind, funny. We had meals with him, we met him at his flat, I went with him when a petition was presented to Parliament about the housing crisis in London—’
‘You went without Gabe?’
‘Yes. It was just Milo and me.’ I could see she was surprised. Well, she could shove her suspicions where the sun didn’t shine. ‘So I knew him quite well, and I am devastated that this has happened.’
She didn’t answer that, but got off her stool and began wandering round the kitchen, her stilettos making hard clacking sounds on the tiles. ‘Can I see the rest of the house?’
I showed Maggie the living room and the six bedrooms and the en-suite bathrooms and the study.
Maggie paused in the doorway of the study and looked around. ‘Who works in here?’
‘Me mostly.’
‘What are these boxes for?’
I had piled them along the walls and tried to create more space. ‘When we renovated, the cellar had to be cleared. A lot of it is Gabe and Clara’s old stuff. Since Gabe had no desire to sort through any of it – it would have been too painful – it all got dumped in here. I’ve been trying to go through it but honestly, I’d rather not.’
‘It’s a good place to hide a phone.’
I shook my head. ‘I already looked.’
Maggie stood on the landing of the house looking around, like an animal sniffing a predator on the wind. She looked back at me. ‘I’d put it in the place you’re least likely to go, the place you feel you shouldn’t go.’ I frowned, I wasn’t getting it. ‘If it’s in the house, it’ll be in Alice’s bedroom,’ she said.
A moment later I’d opened Alice’s door.
Alice was as messy as her father. I took the decision for family harmony that I wouldn’t get involved in either the nagging of her to clean her room or ever giving in and doing it myself. It was a cesspit. Alice’s cloyingly sweet perfume mixed with a base note of sweat had nowhere to escape as the window was shut against the hot day. Her bed was a rumpled take on Tracy Emin’s – minus the condoms. Her collection of soft toys and dolls sat in a straggly line on her headboard, their glass eyes shining dully. Her desk held a clutter of books and a photo of three teenage girls in school uniform; Alice was the figure leaning in from the left-hand edge. I watched as Maggie took a step forward and pulled open the desk drawer. I glanced at a chaos of pencils, childish rubbers, bits of paper, hair bands and a half-empty packet of Tampax – here was a room where a child had become a woman.
Maggie got down on her knees and looked under the bed. Her arm reached under the base and I heard the muffled sound of objects being moved. A moment later she stood up again and turned to open the large cupboard.
‘Stop it,’ I said sharply. She turned to look at me, her hand on the knob. ‘I can’t do this. It’s not right. She has nothing to do with this. I can’t invade my stepdaughter’s privacy and root through all her things. We’ll have to find another way.’
It took Maggie a few seconds to reply. ‘Well, the tailing hasn’t worked, so we can employ another tactic.’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘We can try a honeytrap.’
CHAPTER 28
Maggie
Five weeks before
‘With a heterosexual man we put a woman in his way – say in a bar or restaurant, a private club, even on a train, and see whether he comes on to her. We record the conversation and sometimes have someone else in the room taking pictures. If he takes her number and then calls her later, it shows a pattern of behaviour, which is indicative of a cheating mindset. It colours in the picture, if you like. It’s not proof of anything, and our honeytrap never meets the man again, she just waits to see if he calls or suggests another meeting.’
‘How much success have you had with honeytraps?’ Helene asked.
‘A hundred per cent.’ I could see that this shocked her, but it shouldn’t have really. Once a client comes to us, the cheating has already started.
‘So, who would do it?’
‘Either Simona or I.’
There was a pause as Helene searched for an elegant way to say something she thought was rude. ‘But neither of you are his type.’
‘Experience has shown me that it doesn’t really matter what a honeytrap looks like. It’s the availability that’s important.’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘A hundred per cent success rate? Jesus Christ.’ Helene was pacing around in her shiny kitchen, absorbing what I was saying. ‘You know what’s been bugging me about that night at the Café Royal? It was how brazen it was. I was so close by, so were our friends, and he does it right there. That shows such arrogance, such confidence, doesn’t it?’
I didn’t reply, because it was better that way, but she was right. To be wanted sexually is the biggest ego booster I know. For some people, to flirt with r
isk is to live. Gabe was playing for high stakes. Everything was on the line: reputation, career, family and fortune.
‘So where do we do this honeytrap?’ Helene asked.
‘Sometimes Gabe drops into the bar beneath the office at the end of the day. That would be a good place to make an approach, if you want to pursue this tactic.’
It didn’t take her long to agree.
So how did I get a man to notice me when he’s met, wooed and married someone very attractive? When his life is a succession of beautiful, cultured women and endless choice? It’s so fucking easy, that’s the shame of it. Plumbers, CEOs, footballers, pensioners – in the end they all crave tits and attention, even if they don’t know it. If their predilections veer towards Rory, it’s cocks and attention.
Here’s what we did.
A few days later Gabe went into the bar under the office and Rory and I swung into action. I was the one who honeytrapped him simply because he was in the bar when I was outside on my shift instead of Simona or a freelancer. In the back of the cab I changed into a tight, black worky-style dress with high heels, nude tights, a plunging neckline and loose hair.
Luckily Gabe had placed himself at the bar on a stool rather than at a table where it would have been harder but not impossible. Rory went in first and took the stool two away from Gabe.
I came in a few moments later and approached the bar, looked hesitant, and began to sit down next to Rory and a seat away from Gabe.
‘My mate’s taking that,’ Rory said to me rudely.