Before I Find You: Are You Being Followed? Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Ali Knight

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Maggie

  Chapter 1. Maggie

  Chapter 2. Helene

  Chapter 3. Maggie

  Chapter 4. Maggie

  Chapter 5. Alice

  Chapter 6. Helene

  Chapter 7. Alice

  Chapter 8. Alice

  Chapter 9. Helene

  Chapter 10. Alice

  Chapter 11. Maggie

  Chapter 12. Helene

  Chapter 13. Alice

  Chapter 14. Alice

  Chapter 15. Maggie

  Chapter 16. Helene

  Chapter 17. Alice

  Chapter 18. Alice

  Chapter 19. Helene

  Chapter 20. Maggie

  Chapter 21. Alice

  Chapter 22. Maggie

  Chapter 23. Helene

  Chapter 24. Alice

  Chapter 25. Maggie

  Chapter 26. Maggie

  Chapter 27. Helene

  Chapter 28. Maggie

  Chapter 29. Maggie

  Chapter 30. Maggie

  Chapter 31. Alice

  Chapter 32. Maggie

  Chapter 33. Helene

  Chapter 34. Alice

  Chapter 35. Maggie

  Chapter 36. Maggie

  Chapter 37. Maggie

  Chapter 38. Helene

  Chapter 39. Alice

  Chapter 40. Helene

  Chapter 41. Maggie

  Chapter 42. Maggie

  Chapter 43. Alice

  Chapter 44. Helene

  Chapter 45. Maggie

  Chapter 46. Maggie

  Chapter 47. Alice

  Chapter 48. Maggie

  Chapter 49. Alice

  Chapter 50. Maggie

  Chapter 51. Helene

  Chapter 52. Alice

  Chapter 53. Helene

  Chapter 54. Helene

  Chapter 55. Maggie

  Chapter 56. Maggie

  Chapter 57. Alice

  Chapter 58. Helene

  Chapter 59. Maggie

  Chapter 60. Alice

  Chapter 61. Helene

  Chapter 62. Maggie

  Chapter 63. Maggie

  Chapter 64. Maggie

  Chapter 65. Maggie

  Chapter 66. Alice

  Chapter 67. Maggie

  Chapter 68. Maggie

  Chapter 69. Maggie

  Chapter 70. Maggie

  Chapter 71. Maggie

  Chapter 72. Alice

  Chapter 73. Helene

  Chapter 74. Maggie

  Chapter 75. Helene

  Chapter 76. Maggie

  Chapter 77. Helene

  Chapter 78. Alice

  Chapter 79. Helene

  Chapter 80. Maggie

  Chapter 81. Helene

  Chapter 82. Maggie

  Chapter 83. Helene

  Chapter 84. Alice

  Chapter 85. Helene

  Chapter 86. Alice

  Chapter 87. Maggie

  Chapter 88. Maggie

  Chapter 89. Maggie

  Chapter 90. Alice

  Chapter 91. Maggie

  Chapter 92. Alice

  Chapter 93. Alice

  Chapter 94. Alice

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Before Ali began writing she did many jobs, including waitressing, teaching English to foreign students, working in a knicker factory and answering phones at Wembley Stadium. She spent a decade as a journalist and sub-editor before she wrote her debut thriller, Wink Murder, which was chosen as one of the Independent’s Books of the Year in 2011. She lives with her family in London.

  Find out more about Ali and her psychological thrillers on Twitter @aliknightauthor, Facebook @aliknightauthor or Instagram @potteralison

  Also by Ali Knight

  Wink Murder

  The First Cut

  Until Death

  The Silent Ones

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Ali Knight 2018

  The right of Ali Knight to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 9781473684782

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my family, with all my love

  PROLOGUE

  Maggie

  The night of

  I don’t know what’s happened but I know it’s bad. It always is, when you wake up on the floor, a bad taste in the mouth and blood in your eyes. It feels like youth and I’ve been running from that for as long as I can remember. The summer heat has cooked the paving slabs so they smell of tar and oil and something nastier – I can’t breathe.

  I hear squealing brakes as I try and suck something into my shocked and emptied lungs, images are scrambling in my brain and I’m trying to put them in order. A new, sickening sensation overwhelms me – the dark shape next to me on the ground isn’t moving. Panic forms a cloud.

  A tear rolls away across my face. The last few moments are coming back to me in violent flashes. The figure next to me is never going to move again. I heard the pop, as clear as a boot stamping on a Styrofoam cup in a gutter, of spine snapping as we landed – as clear a death sentence as any. Someone screams. Dread fills me and I arch my back, desperate to know if I will ever get off this floor, out of this God-awful mess and even if I do, how much of this will have been my fault?

  The yellow rectangle of light from the window above me shimmers through my tears. She’s standing there so calm and still, looking down, and my panic is snuffed out by fear.

  CHAPTER 1

  Maggie

  Eight weeks before

  I was always intrigued when a real bobby-dazzler walked into my office and asked for my help. It proved yet again that no one is immune from betrayal – no matter how rich, famous or physically blessed, every walk of life needed my services: a husband watcher. I was a snooper, a sex detective, a marriage doctor, a destroyer of dreams, a killer of happy-ever-afters. I had spent my career down amongst the grubby pain of love betrayed, of lies exposed. Beauty wouldn’t save you, money couldn’t insulate you from it. The woman in the doorway proved just that. She smelled rich and she was a babe.

  ‘Don’t be shy, come on in,’ I said. I was in a good mood, joshing and joking with Simona, the studious young Italian who worked for me.

  The woman in the doorway was blonde, casually dressed, hard to put an age to but somewhere just north of forty, and scared as hell.

  She stepped uncertainly into the room and Simona jumped up and closed the door behind her. ‘Please, take a seat,’ she said, holding out her hand towards the sofa.

  The woman declined our offer of coffee or tea so Simona gave h
er a glass of water.

  The woman perched on the edge of a small sofa near the window, her ankles and knees clamped together in a pose that the royals used to guarantee no knicker shots. Her blue eyes roamed over the three desks in the room, mine, Simona’s and Rory’s, over my retro filing cabinet and the pot plants and the black fan that only gets used on the three hottest days of the year. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed by my stripped wood floors or my linen blinds, but I was. I loved my office and I loved my job. ‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

  There was silence for a moment. The woman looked at her hands helplessly, twiddled with her wedding ring and gripped her bag. ‘God, this is so embarrassing.’ She tailed off, her voice was quiet. She conjured up English country gardens and mellow stone walls, scones and cricket matches and all that Olde English stuff.

  Simona gave me a conspiratorial look and made herself scarce by heading into the small kitchen off the main room to make fresh coffee and pull out some little Italian cakes that always oiled the wheels when a client came in. ‘OK, let’s start at the beginning,’ I said. ‘I’m Maggie Malone, I run the Blue and White agency, and I’m going to find out if he’s cheating on you. I’ll tell you who he’s cheating with, where and how, I’ll show you the video, pictures or audio evidence if you want to see or hear it. And you’ll pay me.’ I smiled. Her mouth fell open, but only for a moment. ‘And then you get to skip all the bits where he claims it was a misunderstanding and he’s innocent and all that. It saves you a lot of time.’

  I usually got one of three reactions at this point: tears, anger, or an empty seat and a banging door. Very rarely I got a fourth: she sat bolt still for about three seconds and then she burst out laughing. It was the first cocktail of the evening, that smile. She put her bag on the floor and sat back, twirling a shapely ankle that poked beneath her trousers. She ran her hands down her shiny hair, clasped them in front of her over her knees. Her beauty came out when she relaxed. ‘I think you and I are going to get on very well.’

  I’d always been Marmite, people either loved me or hated me. This lady was a snob and I was a yob, and often opposites attract. Some people disliked what I do, they found it grubby and underhand, but I say, wouldn’t you want to know if he was cheating? Wouldn’t you open that envelope, click on that video file? Of course you would and anyone who says otherwise is a hypocrite.

  I stood up and came over and we shook hands.

  ‘I’m Helene Moreau,’ she said.

  Of course she had a name like that. Exotic, classy, I guessed the husband was French. There was no ‘which Helene?’ for her. She was one of a kind.

  ‘And how can I help you, Helene?’

  Simona arrived back in the room with fresh coffee in a cup and a cake plate decorated with flowers, on which sat the Italian biscuits. This time she took both without hesitation. She sighed. ‘I want you to tell me if I’m married to a cheating bastard.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Helene

  Eight weeks before

  There are just a few moments that remain seared into my memory for years – seconds that have changed my life. One of those was the revelation that my knight in shining armour had another life.

  We were at the Café Royal on a Tuesday evening; a thousand of us were raising money for wells in sub-Saharan Africa. It was chandeliers and evening dress, black-tie waiters and curving staircases, and a temporary cloakroom on the first floor, in which I caught a glimpse of my husband skulking, slapping away the hand of a woman in a green dress. I saw the hard, tanned planes of his face turn with a flash of anxiety towards the far door, checking to make sure no one was watching. Her slim bare arm came up over his shoulder and brushed slowly down his dark hair as he pushed her away. A moment later he left through the far door and she followed. I watched her shoulder muscles moving in her backless dress as she followed him out, I saw the ripple of her blonde hair.

  What I saw made me feel as old as the hills, which are such immoveable, solid things, but it made my marriage as insubstantial as sand in an hourglass, draining through till not a grain of it remained.

  I hurried through the cloakroom, round a maze of coat rails and out the other side, tracking her green dress but I couldn’t find her, my mind already doubting whether what I had seen was real or not.

  ‘Helene, come and boogie!’ A friend caught my arm and spun me towards a dance floor. I pulled away, trying to see the woman through the crush. Gabe danced towards us – well, my husband doesn’t dance, he sort of sways his shoulders to any music that’s playing, be it disco, reggae or rap, on the balls of his feet, this way and that, forward and back, his slim legs bending at the knees. He has a raffish charm from a former age, a hint of colonial hotels or boat docks on hot Mediterranean nights, the dirty, dirty old goat.

  He was humming, his composure returned, handing me a drink. Gabe always wanted others to enjoy life as much as he did, even if they didn’t have a heart big enough. He raised his drink to save it from the dance floor crush – I saw the liquid slosh over the sides, as if his cup literally runneth over. As I stood there marooned amongst the swaying throng I wondered if this was how it had always really been and I had just been too stupid to understand: him having a high old time, gin and vermouth and olives, women and infidelity, secret trysts and traumas and me in evening dress and a smile, standing by his side. A Russian phrase I was once told came to me – only an idiot smiles all the time. Well, I might smile on the outside, but it would be a grave mistake to think I was an idiot.

  I hunted all night for the woman in the green dress, but I never saw her again.

  That was three days ago. I told no one what I saw and I did nothing – I’m not a dinner service thrower, a cut-up-his-suits-and-hurl-them-out-of-the-window type of woman – why give the neighbours the satisfaction? I’m calculated, a watcher, I have my eyes on the long-term prize. I had never had reason to think he had done this before, he had been a perfect husband. Which made what I saw all the more devastating. And I couldn’t confront him, because I couldn’t bear him lying to me. I knew all about liars. When it comes to sex I was one myself, and a good one, so I can spot it easily. I didn’t want to have to watch him flailing in his deceptions. I was done with that.

  But I hadn’t slept for three nights as I pored over Gabe’s every look and gesture, his behaviour and habits – his increased drinking, his blank looks, his open eyes in the darkest part of the night.

  And then at three a.m. this morning I cracked. I Googled private investigators, and up popped the Blue and White, run by a woman named Maggie Malone. I liked the name and I wanted a woman. I had a wishful idea that she would understand me, that there would be some homeopathic trace of sisterhood, women together, united against the cheats.

  That was how I ended up on Praed Street, Paddington, walking up a set of poky stairs past a lot of foreign-looking men loitering outside a lawyer’s office. I could hear a woman laughing like a sea otter. I turned on the landing and saw the Blue and White sign on the open door. A big woman with dark hair caught sight of me and swallowed her laugh double-quick. She probably felt enjoying oneself didn’t fit well with the business she was running – like giggles in a funeral parlour.

  ‘Don’t be shy, come on in,’ she said. A petite younger woman with long dark hair got up and closed the door behind me.

  I ended up on a sofa, which meant I was staring at a box of tissues on the table more suited to the back shelf of a minicab. I felt ill. I had already done something I never thought I would, walked into this office. It was all wrong, what was I doing here? The bigger, older woman was saying something to me, but I didn’t even hear it.

  Then she got my attention by outlining what she could do for me. What she could discover. She was blunt – rude, in fact. I thought about actually sleeping through the night again. And I thought, yes, that was what I wanted. That was what was just. I saw the flash of the green dress, of strappy, gold, fuck-me shoes. I heard that woman’s throaty laugh, the way that her hand on my
husband’s hair had implied an ownership she didn’t have, and I thought, Gabe Moreau, you have caused me pain. Husband dearest, you have broken my world, and I’m going to find out the truth, and then we’ll see. I think I was laughing. Nerves, that’s what it must have been.

  Maggie was smiling. ‘How can the Blue and White be of service to you, Helene?’

  And out it tumbled, the whole sorry saga. ‘My husband’s having an affair. Well, I think something’s going on. I want you to find out the details. Who she is, where …’

  ‘OK, Helene. We need to get some information—’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t write anything down.’

  Maggie nodded and put down the pen and paper and leaned back. ‘Tell me about your husband.’

  ‘He’s thirty-seven, we’ve been married for six years.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘No. He has a daughter from his previous marriage. Alice is eighteen now, she’s just left school and is about to start an internship at Gabe’s company.’

  ‘Why do you suspect your husband?’ Simona asked.

  ‘I saw something I didn’t like at a charity function. He was in a cloakroom with a woman … There was a woman who … I couldn’t see who it was. Just a flash, but … but …’ I tailed off and started again. ‘There was definitely something not right about it. Not at all.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Maggie said. ‘Has there been any other behaviour that’s changed lately? Coming back late or not at all, business trips he’s going on?’

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. I ran my hands up and down my arms as if I was ashamed. Like this, I was just another client to Maggie, just the humdrum day-to-day business involving liars and cheats.

  ‘It can even be the opposite – is he being more attentive to you? Happier with you?’ Simona added. ‘That’s standard behaviour too.’

  ‘I would say he is stressed and drinking more. He’s distracted, but that could be work.’

  ‘What does your husband do?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘He owns a property company. We’re doing a big redevelopment south of the river in Vauxhall.’