Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  She opened her bag and pulled out a chequebook. ‘I don’t care. Rip it up if you want. I won’t take no for an answer.’ She scribbled with her pen and placed the cheque face down under the vase. There was another silence. We weren’t friends, and never would be, but we had reached an understanding of sorts, a mutual respect of what we had suffered. She looked away across the river. ‘Do you really think she was with Gabe when he died?’ she asked.

  ‘I think it’s likely, yes. Whether it was an accident or premeditated I can’t say.’

  ‘What did he say after he fell?’

  I felt for her then, trying to stay afloat as her life unravelled around her. She didn’t deserve it. I wondered whether to sweeten the pill, but I’d told the only lie I was ever going to tell to protect what was left of her family. I shifted in the bed. I took a deep breath and it hurt, in my heart and my head.

  ‘He was mumbling. It was difficult to hear it all. He said “Clara” several times.’

  Helene swallowed. ‘Did he say anything else at all?’

  ‘I cradled his head so he could speak. He said “Clara my love,” or something that sounded like that. He was finding it hard to form the words.’

  The colour drained right off her face. It was a harsh thing to hear all right. At his end, Gabe hadn’t been thinking about Helene. She stood up on shaking legs and gave me a short nod. Then she turned and walked away.

  What a mess. Clara had been absent from Gabe’s life for years, he had gone on to make a new life, to love again, yet they held a power over each other unmatched by anyone else and undimmed by the passage of the years. Theirs was a twisted tale of two emotionally damaged people whose relationship had been lifelong.

  In the final moments of his life, dying in my arms, Gabe hadn’t been calling out for his wife, he had called out for his sister.

  CHAPTER 88

  Maggie

  The day after

  The day wore on, the light from the river shifted and moved in ceaseless variation. At one point the sun came out brightly but it couldn’t lift my mood. When Clara had come to my office we had argued. I was going to bring the full weight of the law down on her pretty head, and nothing she could have said would have stopped me, until she had shown me a photo. In it were a nuclear family, a smiling mother and father sat behind their son and daughter. Gabe looked about fourteen in the photo, Clara a few years older. She looked so like her brother and Alice it was unmistakable. But she had tapped the photo just in case I still didn’t believe her. The girl in the image was wearing a university sweatshirt with Clara emblazoned on the front.

  Clara had insisted that theirs was not the dark and twisted tale I assumed; Gabe was two years younger than her, a beloved brother who meant the world and more to her. When she was twenty-one and a mortar shell hit the house and obliterated their family, the emotional pain and chaos made them find momentary comfort in each other. But their moment of madness and grief had consequences. She fell pregnant.

  They fled to London together, pretending they were husband and wife, they changed their name from Buric to Moreau, trying to outrun their mistake and the destruction of everything they held dear. Clara couldn’t deal with the consequences of what they had done. As Alice grew, she felt a growing alienation from her daughter, a repulsion at what she saw. She told Gabe she had to leave. There were months of screaming arguments as he demanded she stay for their daughter, that they see it through. And during a vicious row in the car one night, he skidded off the road and into the water and she did indeed go.

  But she kept tabs on him over the years, what he was doing, who he was seeing. She saw how, freed from the weight of his broken past, he founded and ran a successful business. When I quizzed her on her daughter she showed little interest, dismissing the importance of her with a lazy wave of her hand. ‘She reminds me of a period we wanted to run from,’ she said. It remained all about Gabe. When she saw that he had fallen in love with Helene, she felt she had been forgotten.

  It was pretty clear from Clara’s personality that being forgotten, being rendered invisible, was what she hated most. There were long descriptions of parties before the war, of the beauty of her mother, and by extension herself, of the attention her looks commanded and the ease with which she could win people over to do her bidding. She talked with bitterness about Alice’s limitless possibilities and how different her daughter’s teenage years had been from her own. I thought back to the pills she took, and knew that for every high came a corresponding low, where her mood would have been very different, where everything would have seemed black and hopeless and she would have railed angrily at the world and her reduced place in it.

  And the victims of those actions? Gabe and Alice above all. I remembered Alice’s face when Clara revealed who she was. The momentary ecstasy followed by the understanding of the scale of the betrayal. I saw those wiry arms thrust forwards and the tumble out of the window. I had known when I was on my back on the pavement that Clara was dead. I saw Alice, silhouetted in the light from the window above. She was eighteen years old, poised to dive into her life, but about to drown under the weight of events she had no control over from a generation ago.

  I had felt the photo still in my hand as I looked up at her and tightened my fist around it. Not all family secrets needed to be revealed. How ironic, for me, the woman who prised apart secrets for profit, to wish to protect my client from this one. My job was to watch and expose but at that moment I turned a blind eye. When Helene saw the photo, read the faded names and the date on the back, she immediately understood. We were middle-aged, our pasts were littered with pain we had inflicted and suffering we had endured. We had wanted to protect Alice from at least some of it.

  I fell asleep thinking about forgiveness.

  I woke a little later when Rory came in with a plastic bag full of chocolates and bunches of grapes, Simona following with Tupperwares brimming with home-made food. Their hugs and good wishes were balm to my soul.

  ‘What the hell happened last night?’ Rory asked.

  Lying to Rory was harder than lying to the police. He looked at me sceptically as I related what happened. ‘I’m not sure she was worth falling out of a window for,’ Rory counselled.

  ‘Good job I landed on her then.’ It was a bad joke and no one laughed.

  ‘When are you going to be up and about again?’ Simona asked, peeling the lid back on a Tupperware, and a smell of roast tomatoes and basil filled the room.

  ‘A while,’ I said.

  Rory came and sat on the bed, opening the box of chocolates and popping one in his mouth. ‘Why’d Warriner come and see you?’ he asked frowning, pressing for the details he instinctively knew I was keeping from him.

  ‘She wanted to make sure I was going to leave her alone. She didn’t want to meet Gabe’s family.’

  ‘Well, that was a bust,’ he said tartly.

  ‘Can I ask you something,’ Simona said. ‘When you were plummeting to the ground, what went through your mind?’

  ‘Christ, Simona, what a question!’ Rory exclaimed.

  ‘It’s important to understand the world,’ Simona insisted. ‘I’m just really interested. Did your life flash before you?’

  ‘I think it’s fair enough to wonder,’ I said, as Rory got up and began walking round the room.

  He spied the cheque under the vase and picked it up before I could stop him. He looked at me sharply. ‘So you’ve decided she didn’t have anything to do with Gabe falling from that tower?’

  ‘I think I got that wrong,’ I said to Rory, then I turned to Simona. ‘Yes, my life flashed before me. I really thought I was going to die, to tell the truth. It’s made me think about Gabe, he fell a lot further than I did.’

  ‘God, I wonder what went through his mind,’ Simona shuddered.

  ‘I bet you were swearing all the way down to Praed Street,’ Rory said.

  I grinned. ‘Like a bastard. That shows the difference between us, I guess. Gabe was talking about Clara be
fore he died.’

  ‘Jesus, a deathbed confession a Catholic would be proud of,’ Rory said. ‘Poor man.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll put this cheque in the company account, if you don’t mind.’ He picked it up off the table and pocketed it. He glanced at me and did a double take. ‘Are you OK?’

  A lot of images were crowding my mind all at once, but one thing was becoming clearer. I threw back the cover on the bed and swung my feet to the floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Simona asked.

  I yanked the drip from the back of my hand and awkwardly pulled on the trousers that were in the cupboard by the bed and slipped shoes on my feet.

  ‘What the hell?’ Rory was bewildered.

  ‘I have to go somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘Get back in bed!’ Rory shouted as I began to walk out of the ward.

  CHAPTER 89

  Maggie

  The day after

  I was more injured than I had realised. I was feeling sick and sweating with pain by the time I’d hailed a cab on Westminster Bridge and directed it to Vauxhall. I got out and staggered across the lawns by Connaught Tower and asked in the local pub and a couple of shops if they knew where Milo’s friend Larry lived. My inquiries drew a blank and exhausted, I took a rest on the swings in a nearby playground. The sun beat down and left me lightheaded.

  I spotted Larry an hour later cutting across a patch of grass and I flagged him down with a wave of my hand.

  ‘Jesus, lady, you look like shit,’ he said as he approached.

  I really didn’t feel so good any more and the heat of the day wasn’t helping. My head was swimming and something was jabbing painfully inside. ‘I just have a few more questions.’ I pulled out my phone and showed him a photo of Clara again. ‘Is this the woman you saw with Milo?’

  He looked exasperated. ‘I told you, it’s not her.’

  ‘What if she had different hair? She changed her hair colour, maybe quite often. You only saw her from the back.’

  He sighed and looked at the picture again. ‘I don’t know, man! Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘Did she wear high heels?’

  ‘What? I don’t know … yes, I guess so.’

  ‘What exactly did Milo say about this woman he was seeing? Was she older?’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything! He never spoke in detail about her, told me he couldn’t.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he talk to you about her? You shared everything normally, didn’t you?’

  Larry shrugged, pulled out his fags. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Was it because she needed it to stay a secret? That’s why you never met her, wasn’t it? Because she didn’t want it to be public knowledge that she was seeing Milo.’

  Larry took a deep drag on his fag. ‘He said as much, I guess.’

  ‘What would be a reason for Milo to have to keep who he was having a relationship with a secret?’

  ‘I dunno, if she was married, if she was dodgy somehow, maybe if she was famous … A million reasons!’

  I smiled in triumph. ‘No, not a million reasons. Each affair is different, with many different circumstances and motives, but it needs to remain a secret because it matters in the end to only one person.’

  I pulled out my phone and called Dwight.

  Dwight answered. ‘Maggie, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you—’

  ‘What was the number that Milo used to call his girlfriend?’

  ‘Why?’ Dwight began, but I cut him off.

  ‘The number, Dwight, just give me the bloody number.’ A wave of tiredness hit me and I slumped off the swing on to the spongy tarmac of the playground floor.

  ‘I don’t have it right here, and I’m not allowed to tell you anyway.’

  ‘Did it end 4472?’

  There was a short silence on the line. When he spoke again his voice was almost menacing. ‘How do you know that?’

  I stared at the sky, which looked tinged with red. It was the same number Clara had used to text Gabe. Clara had wanted to keep her affair with Milo hidden from Gabe.

  Rory’s comments by my hospital bed about a deathbed confession had made it all come together. In my office Clara talked about how she had watched Gabe in Vauxhall. I guessed she had met Milo there and started a relationship with him.

  When I held Gabe in my arms as he was dying, he had tried to tell me something I hadn’t understood. It wasn’t Clara, my love, he was trying to say, it was something very different. It was Clara and Milo. He wasn’t struggling to explain how he loved his sister in a tragic twist on familial bonds, he was telling me something much darker. His sister had killed his friend. I remembered how Clara had seemed with Alice, her spiteful comments about her looks, her youth, her opportunities. When Clara, with her taut and explosive temper, saw her own daughter’s blossoming relationship with Milo, something snapped. And Milo bore the tragic and brutal consequences of her murderous rage.

  ‘It’s Warriner’s number,’ I struggled to say to Dwight.

  ‘Lady, get off the floor!’ Larry bent down and tried to pull me upright and something pulled taut inside and I remembered nothing more.

  CHAPTER 90

  Alice

  Five days after

  Helene couldn’t hide her joy. It was an unbridled, bubbling-over euphoria at what the police revealed to us last night.

  That that woman, known to the police as L Warriner, was the prime suspect in the murder of Milo Bandacharian. The working theory was that she hit Milo with his doorstop in a jealous rage and dumped his computer and mobile phone to cause confusion for the investigation.

  The story that Helene, Maggie and I told after that night in Maggie’s office now had justification. Helene looked at me as if thanking me for pushing that woman out the window, but she never mentioned it. She was going to live that lie, and over time it would become real.

  It would make Maggie’s lie easier for her to swallow.

  So, pats on the back all round.

  It brought a bittersweet memory back to me, forgotten in my long night with Milo. He had held me close and touched my face, saying ‘you look so like someone I know’. It was truer than I had ever supposed.

  Helene couldn’t stop hugging me. She came over and opened her arms and gathered me up, as if touching me was balm to her soul. Maybe she thought she had healing hands, that she could unpick my twisted and entangled DNA with love alone.

  The day had dawned bright and blue and Helene had ditched the black clothes for the first time. The long process of mourning my father had entered a new stage. Helene asked me what I wanted to do, just the two of us.

  I told her I wanted to go to Connaught Tower, one more time, for Poppa.

  Helene nodded and smiled.

  A little later we were walking arm in arm through St James’s Park, past tourists and cyclists and Chinese tour groups, ice creams in hand, talking. We were almost happy together.

  Helene looked up as something caught her eye. ‘Look, the first leaf of autumn.’ And sure enough, a brittle brown leaf parted from its host and fluttered soundlessly to the ground. It was a little death in the height of summer.

  As we walked Helene talked about her past, explained what Rory had discovered in her home town. She painted a vivid picture of her childhood privation and subsequent happiness, there was no deviation from the usual rags to riches story. She apologised, and begged my forgiveness; I was noncommittal. She told me repeatedly how much she loved Poppa. We passed the Houses of Parliament and Lambeth Bridge, heading towards Vauxhall.

  When we arrived at Connaught Tower the builders were busy working on site, but they welcomed us in and handed out yellow hard hats as we entered the foyer.

  ‘I feel a little bit of Gabe will always be in this building,’ Helene said, gazing up and around.

  It was lighter in here today, as the hoardings at the front of the tower where the doors would eventually be had been removed so that the cement lorry could lay the foundation of the fountain. Helene sat down on the side of the unf
inished fountain, staring up at the cavernous, vaulted ceiling. It was possible for the first time to see what a beautiful and inspiring space it would eventually become.

  ‘I love it in here,’ I said, sitting down next to her.

  ‘So do I,’ Helene smiled, encouraged by my attention to her. ‘There’s something I need to say, Alice. I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m sure it’s the right thing to do. I’m taking the company in a new direction. It is a fitting legacy for Gabe. You know that he always tried to do the best he could for local communities, and in that spirit I want to turn GWM into a cooperative, invest every penny of our profits back into building homes for Londoners, and everyone who wants to become a Londoner. This tower is allocated to have twenty-five per cent social housing, but I want to make it ninety.

  ‘The block where Milo lived was called Reg Jones House, but do you know who Reg Jones was? He was a local Vauxhall flying ace who died for his country fighting the Nazis, and they named a block of flats after him, where people lived and loved and raised their families. Let’s call the tower we’re going to build there Bandacharian House, let’s call this one Moreau House, not Connaught Tower. Let’s celebrate Gabe’s and Milo’s lives and what they stood for, Alice! I want Gabe’s legacy, his lives, to be a celebration of what can be achieved, not of the demons that haunted him.’

  ‘A cooperative?’ I asked, stunned.

  ‘Yes!’ Helene was warming to her theme now, gazing adoringly around the foyer. ‘We can make GWM the most high-profile building company in London. Our family has got enough money, for Gabe it was never about the money, it was about what a person can create. It’s a new start, a new way of doing things. We can turn the bad stuff, their deaths, into something good.’

  Helene was excited; her eyes were shining, her shoulders tight to her ears with optimism for the future. Oh dear oh dear.

  CHAPTER 91

  Maggie

  Five days after

  My ill-advised trip to Vauxhall slammed me right back in hospital and it was several days before I was well enough to see anyone. Dwight was the first one to come and visit. He brought a gaudy bunch of supermarket flowers with the price label still attached and they were perfect.