Before I Find You

by Ali Knight

Genres: Women's Fiction; Amateur Sleuth; Private Investigators; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction; Domestic Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A thrilling new psychological suspense novel from the author of Wink Murder, perfect for fans of Friend Request, Close to Home and The Guilty Wife.

Maggie is a husband watcher. A snooper, a marriage doctor, a destroyer of dreams, a killer of happy ever afters. She runs her own private detective agency specialising in catching those who cheat. And she is bloody good at it.

Helene is a husband catcher. A beautiful wife, a doting stepmother, a perfect homemaker and a dazzling presence at parties. She has landed herself with one of the most eligible bachelors in town — handsome property developer Gabe Moreau.

Alice is just a teenager. A perfect daughter to Gabe, a kind stepchild to Helene, a tragic girl to a dead mother. She lives a sheltered but happy life, until she finds that handwritten note: 'You owe me. I'm not going away.'

All three women suspect Gabe Moreau of keeping secrets and telling lies. But not one of them suspects that these lies could end in cold-blooded murder....

Release date: November 1, 2018

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

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 her 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.’

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.’

Maggie nodded. ‘We? You sound quite involved.’

‘I work at the company too. I make sure we’re contributing the right proportion of profits to charity, that kind of thing.’

‘So you’re in the office with him?’ Maggie asked.

‘I do it mainly from home. I go in occasionally.’

‘But you know the people in the office?’

‘Yes. She’s not one of them.’

‘OK, that’s good, and rules out a lot of people.’

‘Have you looked at his mobile phone messages?’ Maggie continued.

‘Yes. I know his code to get into it, but there’s nothing incriminating on his phone.’

‘I’m afraid that means nothing. He’ll have another one. Or another sim at least.’

I was shocked. Maggie was talking as if this was all normal behaviour.

‘Have you ever had suspicions about infidelity before?’ Simona asked.

‘No, none at all.’

‘So, until the cloakroom, everything seemed normal with your husband, your family?’

‘Of course,’ I lied. Maggie looked at me with those big brown eyes. ‘Alice and I love each other …’ Despite trying to sound certain I tailed off; I was beginning to question everything about my home life. Did Alice and I get along? She was a moody teenager, the truth was she often drove me into a rage with her thoughtlessness and selfishness. But rage never looks good on anyone, so Maggie was not to know. I ploughed on, burnishing my lie. ‘She’s a wonderful stepdaughter and she adores her father.’

‘Why did his last marriage end?’

‘His wife died. Sixteen years ago. The car he was driving skidded through a barrier and into a river. She drowned.’

I could feel the pause in the room as what I had said sat heavily.

‘That’s terrible,’ Maggie said. ‘Had he been drinking?’

‘They had been at a party, but he was breathalysed and had drunk nothing.’ To my horror tears welled up. It was the lack of sleep, the stress, it was thinking about Alice and what she had suffered through the loss of her mother, it was my marriage hanging like gossamer. I was so ashamed, I couldn’t breathe. Large, bitter tears rolled down my cheeks. Maggie reached over for that box of tissues and pulled three out with a flourish and handed them to me. ‘Do you want to know the truth, or don’t you?’ she asked quietly. ‘That is the only question that you need to answer. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.’

The silence was punctuated by the roar of buses on the street. Maggie was holding my hand now, patting the palm. It felt lovely. She could have been a therapist – no, that wasn’t right, she was much better than a therapist perched on some distant chair. She was that touchy-feely, big-hearted woman who gathered you up in her breasts and pressed you there as you inhaled perfume, cigarettes and sweat and she flicked on a kettle switch or pulled out a bottle of gin. It was a memory of women I had known when I was young, in a different time and a different life.

‘You’re shaking,’ Maggie said.

I looked up at Maggie and into her large brown eyes and sat back and blew my nose. Simona handed me another glass of water.

‘Have you told anyone about what you saw?’ Simona asked.

I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t really have the words. I’m going to pay you in cash, I want no trace of this coming back to the house.’

‘Cash works for me,’ Maggie said.

‘Alice must never know, of course. Never.’

‘This is between you, me and Gabe. There’s no need to be scared,’ Maggie said.

I dabbed at my eyes, pushed back my hair. Composed myself. ‘Of course I’m scared. I’m worried that once you show me the truth, I’m going to kill him.’

Helene’s threats to kill her husband were run-of-the-mill. Everyone said that, or a version of it. Everyone. Jealousy was a killer. I had a client once shout at me – after he threw his coffee, his briefcase and half the contents of my desk across this room – that he would have rather his wife had been raped than slept with her tennis coach. You see, anger to eat up the world.

Cheating is the great leveller. It brings all who suffer from it – rich or poor, the beautiful or the ugly – to the same place. It makes us small, bitter shadows of ourselves, of what we thought we could be. That’s the problem with love, it raises you up, like a Mississippi preacher, and it casts you low, lower than you ever thought you could fall. And it leaves you with nothing to cling to when you’ve got there. I know, I’ve been there.

As I watched Helene dab at her eyes with my tissues I thought about my chance encounter with Danny and how he had set me on the path to hearing the most intimate secrets of rich, cuckolded wives.

Twenty years ago I bumped into Danny in a bar. He had elbowed in front of me to get a drink, so I stood on his toe. I was wearing stilettos and that got his attention. ‘Fuck, that hurt!’ he shouted, wheeling round, searching for and ready to deck whoever had caused him pain.

‘Bet your girlfriend doesn’t scream that very often,’ I retorted sourly. I had been waiting for far too long in a three-deep throng of punters, all of us waving tenners, desperate to get the attention of the two lazy sods behind the bar in a dive in Camden Town.

‘What is your problem?’ he shouted.

‘It’s simple. You’re not getting a drink before me, because I might die of old age before this useless barman ever serves me.’ I was hollering back at him, because the music was terrible and the acoustics bad. ‘Try the blonde five down, she’s bored enough with her date that she’ll enjoy you swearing at her.’

Danny’s eyes slid to the blonde as I finally caught the barman’s sloth-slow attention. I ordered and was about to join my mate and begin the fight to get a seat but found Danny was still staring at me. ‘See the bloke in the red shirt and the trilby?’ he asked.

I looked along the bar. ‘The peacock with a pint and a G and T and … is that an umbrella he’s putting in that glass?’

Danny grinned, showing a gold tooth. ‘That’s the one. He’s eyeing up a woman. Who is it?’

The peacock had weaved his way through the crowd and plonked his drinks down in front of an eager-looking woman and slid in next to her, his back to the wall so he could see the whole pub.

I watched the couple for a few moments. She was leaning forward and talking at him in an unbroken flow, twirling the little umbrella between her fingers and then stabbing the ice in her glass with its end. Every time she looked down, Peacock gave a smouldering look to a woman on another table. ‘He’s got his eye on the girl in the beret and braces.’

Danny rolled his eyes, disappointed. ‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.’

I frowned. I was competitive and I didn’t like his brush-off. I scanned the bar again, checking out Peacock and his date, trying to interpret body language and mood. After a few minutes Peacock got tired of staring at the woman in the beret because she had turned her attention to a tall guy with a crew cut and bodybuilder biceps. Beret and braces turned full towards me and in the harsh light that passed across her face I saw she looked very young, probably too young to be in this bar legally.

I looked back at Danny, took in his dad-down-the-pub outfit, his bulky bag and that he seemed to be drinking alone. ‘You’re not in here by choice,’ I said. ‘You’re working. I bet you a beer you’re following Beret and braces cos her dad’s worried and he’s paying you to find her, or keep tabs on her.’

I saw Danny’s big and generous smile for the first time. ‘I don’t know what you do and I don’t really care, but you’d be a great private investigator.’ He handed me his card. Despite trying to feign disinterest, I was intrigued. I had always wanted to join the police, but I was too impatient and cocky to want to waste my time marching up and down at the Hendon training ground.

‘How much do you earn?’ I asked.

It was his turn to sneer. ‘Enough that I don’t have to drink in here by choice. Give me a bell if you’re brave enough. Now get the fuck out of my way so I can order a beer.’

I got bladdered that night and the rest of the weekend. But by Sunday night I was staring at his card, smelling a break. I was in a dead-end job going nowhere and I liked his upfront manner. I didn’t phone Danny or send him a fax; low-key wasn’t my style. I broke into his office on Monday morning – a supermarket loyalty card picked up from a pub floor and applied to the lock on his shabby Caledonian Road office door took twenty seconds – and waited for him to arrive.

He stopped in confusion when he saw me sitting there. ‘You’re hired,’ he said. ‘But this is important. Don’t break the law. Ever. You’re not doing this job correctly if you break the law.’

I’ve taken Danny at his word – more or less – ever since. Danny taught me everything about the business. He was passionate and cynical. ‘Everybody cheats,’ was his motto. ‘And everybody lies about it. I get paid to show them that they cheated, and that they lied.’

Danny was bullying and volatile and erratic but he was loyal and funny and smart. I loved that job. I stayed for five years. We were the tabloid equivalent of the bedroom police, taking money from whoever wanted to know and was willing to pay. Insecure wives, jealous husbands, worried parents, even sometimes the benefits agency. There was a guy, an Irish bloke called Gerry O’Brady, he walked with a cane and the revenue protection boys at Westminster Council weren’t entirely convinced about Gerry’s permanent disability. They hired us to take a look. Poor old Gerry, it was his soft old heart that gave him away in the end: his daughter was getting married, and amid the many guests and the mountains of booze was me, and I caught him on video dancing with his beloved Nancy in her wedding finery. No cane, no bad back, just the love for his daughter and his pride on her special day, and Michael Jackson to seal the deal. Did I feel guilty that I got Gerry five months in jail? Not one little bit. Did I like exposing the truth? I had no doubt I was strong enough to take it. If I was ever stuck in the Matrix, I used to say, I’d be grabbing the red pill. Give it to me, show me everything, I could handle it.

When I gathered up the courage to tell Danny that I was leaving to set up my own operation, he swore at me, then he paused, his finger tracing along the top of a brown Leica that he was fond of using on his stakeouts. He understood why I was going. ‘The business is changing, girl, new technology’s going to make what we do a piece of piss. Work hard and you could do very well.’ I wasn’t beyond basking in the approval of others, particularly of my boss, and I was pleased. He pointed his tobacco-stained forefinger at me. ‘The reason you could be the best of the best? You don’t have any second thoughts about who you’re going to fuck over.’ It was a requirement of the business, I knew, but I had wondered then, as I wondered later, whether he had meant it as a compliment.

‘Give your agency a feminine name. Something women can relate to. Make them think the business isn’t grubby.’

I thought for a second. ‘What about Before I Find You?’

He frowned as he began pacing the office. ‘Before I find you I get paid the big bucks?’ He shook his head. ‘No, use the name of a flower or a pet or a Farrow and Ball paint colour. Women love that Farrow and Ball shit.’

I laughed. ‘What’s your favourite colour, Danny?’

‘Blue and white. Like Tottenham football club.’

That’s how the Blue and Whit. . .