Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  CHAPTER 54

  Helene

  Eleven days before

  I took my rage at Gabe and what he had done into GWM. I wore my widow’s weeds when I met the company directors in the conference room. My clothes gave the men bad juju and I was pleased.

  The meeting didn’t go how they expected.

  The company lawyer had phoned the week before, and had then visited the house. There were things about the structure of GWM that were unusual. Gabe was the majority shareholder and chief executive; upon his death his share passed to me. So I now owned fifty-nine per cent of the company. He asked me if I even knew about this.

  The man was a fucking moron.

  The directors and management team of GWM were keen to meet as early as possible. They were desperate to wrest that share from me.

  But I was up for the fight. Since Gabe’s death I had been on a journey from blubbering, self-pitying wreck to a creature full of rage that reared and bit wherever she fancied. The day I went into GWM I hadn’t slept, I was spectral and consumed by a limitless energy. I wanted to bring GWM back to life, to carry on Gabe’s work under the umbrella of a bigger, better, more adept firm. I was there to tell the board just that.

  In the conference room the chief operating officer outlined the options for me. They could appoint a new boss to run the company on my behalf, or I could sell all or part of the company I owned at a mutually acceptable price.

  I told them I wanted to run it.

  ‘With respect, Helene, that’s not possible,’ one of them said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘This company has fifty-seven employees, and hundreds more contractors and unfinished projects worth seventy-five million, many at a critical stage. You have done valuable but small-scale work on social responsibility.’

  I turned to the lawyer. ‘Legally, I am in control of this company.’

  He had turned white, his lips an anus of stress. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I am going to run GWM Holdings, starting today.’

  The operating officer had heard enough. ‘This is outrageous!’

  The head of marketing took over. ‘I agree that this is fanciful. Hundreds of jobs depend on us and the decisions we take, which you simply don’t appreciate. If you take over we’ll be made a laughing stock!’

  I turned to the lawyer. ‘I want you to agree severance terms with these two; I’m recruiting new personnel starting today.’

  A glass of water by the arm of the marketing boss spun across the table as he knocked it over. He put his fists gorilla – like on the table. ‘You don’t have the right!’

  ‘I have every right.’

  ‘You’re not bringing this company down!’

  ‘Gabe would want me to run it. Is this about you, or is this about the company? Because I only want one of those things.’

  The operating officer took a different path, and began pleading. ‘Helene, we have been friends for many years—’

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  ‘Please reconsider for a period of time—’

  ‘The lawyers are going to be over this like flies on shit,’ the marketing director thundered.

  ‘Good. It’ll clear the mess away quicker.’

  There was uproar as the marketing man stood and slammed his way out of the room and somebody else went with him and there was a lot of empty talk and pointless gestures. I got up from my seat and went to look out of the conference-room window at Regent Street, at the energy and bustle in the street below. A moment later I turned back round to the shocked faces in the room. ‘So, gentlemen, we’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Helene, please take some time to think this through,’ the lawyer counselled. ‘This is grief talking! There are so many challenges, it will be very difficult to sustain the level of intensity needed to run a business of this size—’

  ‘And that’s because I’m so busy doing what, exactly? Shopping? Decorating? I’ve heard enough.’ I’d been thinking about many things since Gabe died, since I became a widow, unencumbered but for an eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. It was the perfect solution. I would work, I would pour all my energy, brains and ambition into the company I now owned.

  ‘OK, so what …’ the finance officer spluttered and began again. ‘So what are your plans for the company, what ideas have you got, how are we going to address the problem of our debt?’

  ‘There is one thing we are going to address today. The provision for social housing in Connaught Towers One and Two. It’s going to be changed.’

  I saw the men in the room glance at each other, adapting to new information as it came at them.

  I walked to the door and opened it and asked Soraya to assemble the entire company. News that something was up travelled fast and moments later everyone was crowded in the lobby. I stood on a chair and addressed the room.

  ‘I’m Helene Moreau. As of today, I’m the head of GWM. We’ve all had a shock, since Gabe died, but we can and we must recover. Gabe is gone, and we mourn him and we miss him. But you work for me now. I am the boss of this company. If you’re unhappy about that, you can be on your way. If you stay and you’ve got a good idea, come see me.’ There were three seconds of uncomfortable silence, with men and women gawping. ‘I have one plan. I’m going to make this the most high-profile property company in London within five years. Get on board or get out now.’

  The silence was a wall, but then someone began clapping, and the applause spread until it became a wave that swamped everyone and every corner of the office.

  CHAPTER 55

  Maggie

  Ten days before

  I knew when I’d been conned. And nobody conned Maggie Malone.

  It was Rory who shared the online news report with me, reading it out from his phone. There was a photo he showed me too, of Helene Moreau surrounded by the board of GWM, whose name wasn’t going to be changed – how charming – now that she was the head of the company. She was still wearing black, she wasn’t smiling, her self-possession radiating out in a hundred thousand pixels. There was a lot of talk about tragedy and unexpected loss and mourning and moving on and a new stage and so much bullshit I wanted to scream.

  Rory tried to get me to calm down but I wasn’t listening. ‘Don’t presume, Maggie, we’ve only read a news report,’ Rory counselled.

  The situation stank.

  I got out of my seat and paced the office and no amount of shouting from Rory could get me to calm down. I drove round to Helene’s house and parked up. I went straight up and knocked on the door.

  I was ready for a confrontation but there was no answer. I tried several more times, but no one was in. I retreated from Helene’s front step and walked past the three houses to the corner. I noticed that the graffiti had been scrubbed off their garden wall. I walked round the corner house and ended up by the entrance to the alley that led down the backs of the houses.

  I walked down the alley, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the roses and vines of carefully cultivated urban gardens spilling over fencing and walls. I looked over Helene’s fence at the patio doors at the back of the house but the sun was at the wrong angle and I couldn’t see in. The alley ended in a high fence with a locked gate. I pulled myself up and managed to see a large untended garden belonging to a small block of flats. I jumped back down again and stood for a moment looking around. I pulled aside a mass of ivy that hung over part of the fence. Everything looked normal, until suddenly I realised it didn’t.

  I looked closer at part of the fence next to the gate. I pushed it and three slats fell away like a little door. I pulled myself through into the garden belonging to the flats and had a clear path round the side of the building into a road that ran at right angles to the Moreaus’ own.

  I have many times in my life had cause to hate myself, but here was a new low. I had overlooked the obvious. All the hours Rory, Simona and I had sat and watched the front door and side alley of the Moreaus’ house, Gabe, Helene or even Alice could have been slipping out unnoticed via
the flats. Yet I had given everyone in this house an alibi for Milo’s murder.

  I phoned Rory. ‘I’m standing outside the third exit from the Moreau house. There’s a hidden way out of the alley.’

  Rory used a string of expletives that would have made a navvie blush. ‘I checked that alley carefully. There was no way anyone could climb those fences without making a hell of a racket—’

  ‘Whoever did it was clever. It was well hidden.’

  ‘We have to tell the police.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  CHAPTER 56

  Maggie

  Ten days before

  I met Dwight in a room at Kennington Police Station, housed in a tired Sixties office block south of the river. As I ranted at him he did his best to look interested.

  ‘I’m telling you Gabe was enjoying life, he didn’t jump. I watched him for more than a month, day and night, I shared drinks with him, spent a whole evening with him—’

  ‘Is that so?’ Dwight crossed his arms, pushed his bum back on to his desk. That had come out wrong, but that wasn’t the issue that was most important at that moment. I wondered if I saw hurt on his features, hope raised and dashed.

  ‘Helene taking over the company proves it,’ I added.

  ‘I’m telling you the initial forensics on Gabe Moreau’s death are inconclusive,’ Dwight countered. ‘The dust all over the floors up at Connaught Tower is full of footprints that don’t make any sense as yet, but we have a trail of Moreau’s footprints in a pattern pacing back and forth by the window—’

  ‘He was being threatened – there was a threatening message on the wall of their house.’

  ‘Yes, and we are working through that. The angle of how Gabe’s body fell is also being examined, but you said yourself there was no noise of a struggle.’

  ‘The CCTV was turned off.’

  ‘We have interviewed the contractor who cut the line by mistake a day before Gabe’s death—’

  I was astonished at his calmness. ‘Are you listening to me? I’m hired to follow Gabe Moreau two weeks before a local campaigner is murdered. I’m conveniently there to give the whole family an alibi, except I’ve discovered there’s another hidden exit from the house. His wife sat there in my office and told me she wanted to kill him!’

  ‘You tell me every client of yours wants to kill their spouse. Hell, I wanted to kill mine! The science will prove what happened. And by the way, I heard about how you stormed out of here the other day when officers were simply trying to ask you some questions – let the guys do their jobs!’

  ‘Helene’s got motive to kill him. She could be punishing him for having an affair and using me to cover her tracks. She met and married him within six months, now six years later she’s got rid of him and is running the entire company! The woman’s a fucking psychopath in designer clothing!’

  ‘Maggie—’

  But I was in full flow now, moving round his office in an agitated manner. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that a grassroots hero opposing the building of new flats and the boss of the company that’s going to be building those flats are both dead? They must be connected, only an idiot could think otherwise! Milo knew the whole family and they have no alibi—’

  ‘Come on, Maggie, you sound like this is the 1950s! Alibis? Get real – most murders are solved these days using physical evidence, DNA traces, hair, blood, you know this.’

  ‘But you don’t have any physical evidence, do you!’

  ‘Milo and Gabe, we believe at the moment, are separate issues.’ He sounded tired. ‘Milo was murdered with extreme violence in his own home—’

  ‘You’re going nowhere fast with that investigation, aren’t you?’

  ‘Wrong. We are pursuing multiple leads on that case at the moment—’

  ‘What leads?’

  ‘We have chatter that he may have been involved in the selling of reds and blues—’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Yes, Class As. Maybe that’s why the girlfriend was so low profile.’

  ‘You still can’t find her? What about their texts, phone messages?’

  ‘Her number’s a burner phone, messages reveal nothing.’

  ‘Well, ask his friends, someone must have—’

  ‘Maggie, I know how to run a murder investigation!’ He walked round his desk and sat heavily in his chair again. ‘Gabe’s case is tragic for different reasons. He was a middle-aged man who probably had many reasons to be depressed or want it to end—’

  ‘I was there. He died in my arms. Do you know what the injuries are like on a man who jumps five storeys on to sun-baked earth? Gabe Moreau did not kill himself. He had a daughter who he loved – he never stopped talking about her. She had lost her mother already! What kind of father compounds that?’

  ‘That’s the problem with suicide. It leaves so many things unresolved. You can shake your head all you like, but that’s the truth and you know it. It’s the biggest what-if you’ll find, however much it frustrates you. Sometimes people pedal for so long and so hard, looking good on the surface, looking on top to the outside world, and then they just can’t do it any more. Think about what he survived – his family was blown to bits in Yugoslavia, weren’t they? He came here with nothing? That’s as fundamental as it gets. While he seemed to have overcome, I bet that stays with you; I’ve heard about it before with those who’ve endured horrific events, that years later when everything should be fine, it overwhelms them.’ Dwight paused, then leaned forward and urged me to listen. ‘If you want my advice, Maggie, take a step back.’

  ‘I’m not going to let this lie. I’m going to find out what really happened.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’m going to crawl over every little piece of evidence, I’m going to go so far back into that family’s history that the past will open like—’

  Dwight got very angry then. ‘You’re going to stop this, right now. You jeopardise this police investigation into Milo’s murder, which is high profile enough as it is, and whatever happened to Gabe Moreau, and we don’t know yet, there will be very serious consequences. And I implore you to leave the Moreau family alone. I will feed back your information about the lack of an alibi for the family on the night of the murder, but remember you’ve got history of getting too closely connected to people.’

  I sat down sharply on a chair. Dwight probably thought he was giving me a straight answer, but it felt like a really low blow. And boy, it hurt something chronic.

  Dwight must have seen my face as he began to backtrack. ‘Sorry, Maggie, you know I didn’t mean it like that, what you did in the past doesn’t count for anything now.’

  I felt sweat spring out all across my body.

  Did Helene know about Colin Torday, a name that still resonated as strongly now as it had more than twenty years ago? If she did, what was I up against? Her cool, controlled exterior, the precise, smooth movements, did they hide a calculating killer underneath?

  ‘That’s exactly how you meant it,’ I said to Dwight. ‘Don’t you think that’s another reason why she hired me! She picked me very carefully indeed.’

  We remained stuck in toxic silence for a moment or two, the promise and flights of fancy of our recent nights together all destroyed. It was the story of my life.

  ‘So who was Gabe’s mistress? You’ll be doing the police a favour if you pass on the details—’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to find out.’

  ‘Maggie, don’t—’

  But I was out the door and slamming it before I heard him finish.

  CHAPTER 57

  Alice

  Nine days before

  Detective Dwight Reed came round to the office for our next interview. I was proud that my co-workers stopped and gawped as they tracked his journey down the corridors to my office; the water-cooler dwellers now had something weighty to talk about! I had been shadowing a group in the design team the last couple of days; they treated me as if I was a precious pie
ce of china that they were about to break at any moment, they looked terrified of where my emotions must be taking me, but I would rather be busy than sitting around at home. People were very kind in those early days following Poppa’s death. The staff didn’t know what to make of Helene taking over – she had announced that the company was going to go in a fresh direction but few details had been released about her plans and gossip and rumour were rife. I wondered if power was going to go to her head.

  I led Dwight into a private meeting room. The interview didn’t go how I expected. He was colder on this second interview, something between us had shifted.

  He asked me new questions about Milo. ‘Did he ever mention anything about blues and reds to you?’

  I shook my head. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He ever talk about drugs, or drug dealers, anything like that?’

  ‘No.’

  He got out several photos of feral-looking men and asked me if I knew or had ever met any of them, had seen them ever with Milo, but they were strangers to me.

  ‘Did you know that the fence in the alley of a neighbouring property to yours is broken and that there is a way of getting to a side street unseen?’

  ‘Why is that relevant to anything?’

  ‘Have you ever used it?’

  ‘I had no idea you could get out through there.’

  ‘You absolutely sure about that?’

  I felt angry and uncomfortable with his tone. It reminded me of how I had been made to feel at times in my police interviews regarding my old teacher, Mr Dewhurst. But I was very strong, as I had been then. I knew where the truth lay in that story and I drew on that strength now, years later. I remembered the cold, appraising looks of the police back then, trying to see if they could spot a liar, a child fantasist.

  It was time to turn the heat in another direction. ‘My poppa was being threatened before he died.’ Dwight looked up at me sharply. ‘Someone was sending him messages at home and at work.’