Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed?

by Ali Knight

  ‘We know now that Milo’s girlfriend was also the lover of Gabe Moreau,’ he explained. ‘In her flat in Peckham we found a card that he had written telling her it was over; in it Milo said he didn’t like the secrecy and he had found someone else, the daughter of a friend who shared his outlook on things.’

  I winced. Poor Milo. I don’t think he had any idea of the deadly emotions he would have unleashed by rejecting Clara. On such thin threads do our lives dangle.

  ‘Forensics are working on a match between what the doorstop was wrapped in and fibres from Warriner’s flat. It seems likely she insisted on keeping their relationship quiet because Milo had no money and she was seeing the much richer Gabe and didn’t want to jeopardise that.’

  It made sense from an investigation point of view for Dwight to be looking at the financial angle, but I knew now how Clara and Milo met: Clara would have spotted Milo on the estate while she was watching Gabe. Her head would have been turned, just like Alice’s was. And what a way to win a little power back, to feel wanted and admired, than to launch into a relationship with a much younger man who knew Gabe well?

  ‘I’m putting you up for a police reward,’ Dwight said. ‘It’s important. This isn’t whether some adult couldn’t keep it in his pants. This is murder, the obliteration of a young man’s opportunity, his one chance. This is as fundamental as it gets. You got Milo justice, Maggie. You.’

  My eyes filled with tears.

  I felt more certain then that Clara had taunted Gabe with the violence she had meted out to Milo, knowing he could never reveal it. I could never know when she had told him, but the last evening of his life when I followed him to Connaught Tower something fundamental in him had changed. She had dragged Gabe back into the secrets and pain of their youth, and all the effort he had expended to overcome his past had come to nothing.

  I felt Dwight’s warm hand on my ankle, comforting and reassuring. ‘You seem quiet,’ he added. ‘What are you going to do once you get out of here?’

  ‘I’m broke and I’ve got lawsuits pending, but I’ve been broke before, probably will be again.’

  I lay back, looking at Dwight. I felt surprisingly good. Across the river over the Houses of Parliament a cloud floated, grey as a dove. Big Ben chimed five p.m. and we listened to its low boom as it rebounded away over the river. I asked him to come and lie on the bed with me as I shifted gingerly over.

  ‘Nice view,’ I said after a while.

  ‘Must be the best in London,’ Dwight added.

  ‘The good old NHS, eh?’

  ‘I was born in this hospital, you know,’ Dwight said.

  I smiled. ‘So was I.’

  Dwight stayed until he was thrown out by the nurse when visiting hours ended.

  CHAPTER 92

  Alice

  Five days after

  I take a long inhale; the smell of the fresh layer of cement, the wetness of it, hangs in the air. ‘It’s going to be so beautiful in here,’ I say.

  Helene nods, but she’s looking at me. ‘You’re beautiful, Alice, beautiful and sweet. The trauma and pain are behind you now. I will help you face the future every step of the way.’

  I see pity on her face. Every time she looks at me she sees Gabe and Clara and what they did and it repulses her, even as she struggles to shield me from it. It’s boring after a few days, let alone a lifetime. What Helene doesn’t understand is that I can’t stand pity. It’s time this charade ended.

  My Fitbit glows 13.00. It’s quiet in the foyer now, we are mainly hidden from view behind the cement truck. The builders have moved away, probably on their lunchbreak munching chicken and chips.

  I punch Helene hard in the jaw with my little fist and she topples over backwards into the base of the fountain. She’s so shocked she makes just a small gasp, struggling for purchase in the heavy cement. She gropes forward to get to the edge, trying to wipe the cloying, gloopy mess from her eyes but my hands are instantly round her neck. ‘I saw that photo,’ I hiss. ‘This is my life, it’s my family, you don’t get to judge.’

  I push her under and I don’t let go, I am as strong as a fury. I am as strong as my mother. And as I feel Helene’s last struggles, I think, I’ve always hated weak women.

  CHAPTER 93

  Alice

  Five days after

  Helene doesn’t take long to die. There’s a bit of fighting against the cloying weight of the cement and my hands round her neck but she gives up pretty fast. Like I said, weak. I pull my arms and her yellow hard hat clear of the mess. I sit for a few moments looking at part of her elbow poking skywards. I push it back under the surface. I glance around the foyer, but everything is as quiet as five minutes ago. I walk over to the water tap a short distance away that has a hose attached and wash my hands and Helene’s hat and wipe the splashes off my sleeves and front. I look back at the fountain; there’s not even a ripple of disturbance on the surface. I give the cement layer under which Helene lies a fine spray with the water hose and wipe its end and hang the hose back neatly where the builder left it.

  In a few days when the cement has hardened, the builders will put an even finer layer of plaster on and after that has dried thoroughly they will lay a layer of epoxy, and when that has dried the tiler will arrive and lay the small squares of marble around the sides and all across the fountain’s large base, its modern curves an expression of faith and an investment in the future.

  I head out of the foyer with the cement mixer between me and where I assume the builders are gathered. At the small hut by the entrance I hang up our two hats and leave Connaught Tower and stroll away in the late afternoon sunlight. ‘We leave behind only the things we build and the families we create,’ Poppa once said to me. But Poppa wasn’t always right.

  The victors tell the stories. Now I get to tell my tale my way.

  My momma and poppa were happy, they met young and fell in love in a war-torn land and escaped to London and began a new life and built a family and a business and loved their child. Their wonderful relationship was cruelly cut short by a patch of ice on a bridge. Theirs was the perfect love story; they were the perfect couple. I have made them so.

  I will change every dark colour of my past into something bright. I like to think it was me, just a tiny collection of cells, multiplying and transforming, who brought them to London, me who has saved the Burics and transformed them into Moreaus.

  My parents were shaped by unspeakable events and went on to do an unspeakable thing. On some people that burden weighs heavy. I know why Poppa stood in Connaught Tower with his long-lost sister as they circled each other, insults flying, maybe fists and other hurts. I know why he never told me Clara had come back; because she was a bad person, she was not my mother. You don’t get to come back when you feel like it. You don’t get to open your arms after sixteen years and expect me to run into them. A mother is someone who cares, who loves. That’s the kind of mother I’ll be, when the time comes.

  I dished out justice for that woman in the end. It was a sensible and moral decision. I’m a very moral person.

  I’ve decided I can do better without Helene.

  Poor Helene. I quite liked her. This isn’t a story of a loathed stepmother, a cuckoo who set up in my nest and tried to eject me from it. Her only fault was falling in love with Poppa.

  People say that parents have a biological imperative to protect their children at any cost, well, I have the opposite, I have a duty to safeguard my parents, to create them in any fantasy I see fit. And thus are the dark bits of the past swept away, like rats or nasty rumours.

  I walk east, quite contentedly, through the maze of buildings and warehouses, keeping the river on my left until I come round the side of St Thomas’ Hospital and find the riverside walk and look across the Thames at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Ten minutes to five. The calming white disc of the clock’s surface and its heavy black hands mark time over the city; order triumphing over chaos.

  I turn and look back at the hosp
ital. There is a stream of people coming and going through the doors, ordinary people of every age, colour and nationality. Londoners.

  I walk over to where an overflow pipe on the wall of the hospital has created a puddle on the uneven paving slabs. My reflection shows only that woman and Gabe, only the Moreaus, there is no fresh blood in my features, no chaotic collision of DNA that develops in unknown and unpredictable ways. A lesser person, a weaker person, would be repulsed, but I am proud. I have a terrific ability to shut down things I don’t want to see, to live life as if certain events never happened. I always wanted the memory of a happy family, a family that overcame. And now there is no one to tell me I never did.

  I look down at my hands and begin to pick tiny fragments of cement out from under my fingernails. There is just one tiny flaw. Maggie is recovering in this hospital. She knows the story.

  I walk towards the entrance.

  CHAPTER 94

  Alice

  Five days after

  I ask for Maggie Malone’s ward and wait outside the lifts. I examine my reflection in the chrome of the lift doors. I suppose Helene was a combination of traits, as we all are. A calculated, cold-hearted girl who fell in love when she never expected to and didn’t realise how fatally weakened she had become because of it. She was a dreamer, but GWM as a cooperative! Give me a fucking break! In some ways Gabe and Helene were well suited, there was an old-fashioned outlook to their utopian dreams. But her plan will stay a fantasy.

  Helene was too trusting generally – she understood every nuance of human nature when it came to what went on beneath the sheets, but not when it came to power plays in boardrooms and pubs and alleyways. But I understand it.

  My teacher Mr Dewhurst ended our relationship before it had even begun. He was scared, of us, but particularly of me. He had a right to be. I didn’t like being rejected and my invented and fantastical tales of what we did together were my punishment for him rejecting me. Turns out my mother didn’t like being rejected either, as poor Milo found to his cost.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  The lift pings and the doors open, but I step away, I’ve changed my mind.

  That woman came back because she was jealous of what Gabe had achieved, of the life he had managed to build after the tragedy of their youth. She was desperate that all her early promise had turned to dust. Yet just one generation later, the opportunities available to me are limitless.

  I walk out the doors of the hospital.

  Maggie is no longer my concern. She has lied for me, and I didn’t even have to force her to!

  The sun is out and shining brightly. I walk to the bridge and stare back at the hospital. Buildings today are really only designed to stand for fifty years. The thirteen storeys of the hospital I’m looking up at were built in 1975. It could well be only fifty years when it’s blasted to the ground. It will make such lovely apartments. I think Moreau Plaza has a certain classy ring to it.

  Tomorrow morning I think I’ll go and see Peter Fairweather and then Arkady and Irina Oblomov. Maybe I’ll have a joint meeting with all of them! With the upheaval facing GWM and the loss of Helene Moreau, their expertise will be essential to have on board as we expand Poppa’s company into a profit-making machine. We have a lot to discuss.

  I walk away over Westminster Bridge. The sun dances and sparkles on the moving water. I think about my mother. Before I found you, I say to myself, I was unformed and unfinished, a child created wrong. But now, everything is so different and exciting! Opportunities are everywhere. I am young, I am rich. My family is all gone, a thought that is liberating, not scary. There is nothing to hold me back, no religion or culture or family to temper me. This is London. And my future is bright.

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  Acknowledgements

  Books are written by one person, but they are created by many. With many thanks to my agent Cara Jones, to the great team at Hodder for all their work taming this book – Emily Kitchin, Eve Hall, Helen Parham and Rosie Stephen; to the writerly support offered so generously by Polly Williams, Liz Fremantle and Tammy Perry; and to the Euro gals, because an anecdote of yours ends up in every book I write. Finally, special thanks to Stephen, for always having faith and showing me the way. I couldn’t have done it without you.

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  I snap my eyes open in the dark, sensing something is not right. The room is instantly familiar, coming into focus with the help of the city light that sneaks past the roman blinds. Tasteful prints hang on the wall, armchairs guard the fireplace opposite, one has Paul’s clothes piled on it in a disordered mountain, the other cradles my dressing gown, neatly folded. I’m in our bedroom, a place of safety, a haven from life. The other side of the king-size is empty, the pillow fluffed. Paul is not home. I hold my breath because there is the noise again, a shuffly scraping that’s coming from everywhere and nowhere. My heart pounds in my ears. The clock clicks to 3.32 a.m. as I hear a crash downstairs. It might wake the children and this thought alone forces me out from under the comforting warmth of the duvet. I am a mother; point one on the job description is to protect them, at all costs. My movements are slow and deliberate as I try to steel myself for what I’m about to do. I pick up my mobile and turn the handle on the bedroom door hard to ensure it opens without a sound. Someone is groaning in the hallway and it doesn’t sound like Paul.

  I have mentally rehearsed what happens next quite often because Paul is away for work a lot at the moment and I think it’s important to know how I would fight for the only thing that really matters to me – my family. I like to be prepared. So, as if I’m a fire warden at work, I’m putting it all into action. I take a deep breath, punch 999 into the keypad but don’t press the green button, turn on the light and run for the stairs, shouting as loudly as I can into the night silence ‘Get out of my house!’, phone aloft like a burning spear.

  I thump loudly down the stairs and use my gathering momentum to swing round the swirly circle at the bottom of the banister as a shape heaves itself across the kitchen at the end of the hall. ‘Get out, get out! The police are outside!’ I flood my world with light at the flick of a switch as the dark bundle clatters to the floor with a chair. I pull a cricket bat from the coat stand and feel its comforting weight in my palm and am in the kitchen in a second, the weapon close to my chest. ‘Get out of my house!’ He has his face on my kitchen tiles but as I raise the bat the shape turns to me and I see my husband, staring up at me from the floor.

  It is my husband, but not as I have ever seen him before. He is crying, taking great gulps of air, snot running down to his mouth. I toss the phone on the table and drop the bat to the floor. ‘Paul, what on earth’s the matter?’

  He doesn’t answer, because he can’t. He looks up at me and my former fear for myself is replaced by a more acute worry for him. I try to pull him upright but he is like a dead weight in my arms; he’s folded over and crushed, his demeanour transformed. That was why I didn’t recognise him from behind, he is not the man he used to be. ‘What’s happened?’

  Paul smashes his fist into the side of his head and groans again. ‘Kate, Kate—’

  ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?’

  He gets to his knees, shaking, leaving the car key on the floor. Paul is a big man; he’s tall, with wide palms, and shoulders you can fall asleep on, it was one of the many things about him that I fell in love with all those years ago. He made me feel protected. ‘Kate, oh help me—’

  His hands are caked with blood.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’

  He looks down at them in disgust. He staggers to his feet and I pull limply at his coat, he must
be cut somewhere under the thick wool. ‘Are you hurt?’

  I … I, oh God, it’s come to this.’

  ‘What?’ He closes his eyes and sniffs, swaying. ‘What has happened?’ He shakes his head and drags himself into the downstairs toilet and starts washing his hands, flakes of blood and brown water swirling away down the plughole. ‘Paul!’

  He wipes his face on his shoulder and nods his head. ‘I killed her …’

  He shakes the water off his hands and I slap him, hard. ‘Tell me what is going on!’

  My husband looks at me, his arresting brown eyes bloodshot from his tears. ‘What a mess, what a stupid load of …’ He sighs from deep within. ‘Oh fuck, Kate, I love you so much.’ And with that he falls right past me on to the hallway floor in a faint no manner of prods, shoves and screams will wake him from.

  Something at least becomes clear to me: Paul is pissed. He must be completely rat-arsed. There are probably many things I should do at this moment but first I must pee. I sit on the toilet and stare at the long body of my husband passed out on the floor, his feet turned inwards, his palms up as if he’s indulging in a spot of yoga. I am shivering with anger that he could get in a car and drive home in such a state. I shake his shoulders but he doesn’t move. I am not a spontaneous person, I need to plan things, to think; I have never imagined a situation like this before and I am at a loss, paralysed in the face of so much that needs to be discovered. After a lot of pushing and heaving I manage to turn Paul over on to his back and pull his coat apart checking everywhere for a wound. When I find nothing I am pathetically thankful – blood makes me faint. I sit back on my heels and stare. The hard planes of his handsome face have dissolved into a puffy mess, his strong jaw has receded into his neck. Paul is snoring, his chest rising and falling. The house is silent, my children slumber on unaware. The kitchen clock accompanies him with its staccato beat. The fridge hums and a window rattles. The house settles back into its night-time rhythm. At 3.50 a.m. I get to my feet, tiredness moving over me in waves. I can think of nothing better to do than go to bed. He’ll wake up in the end.