Before I Find You by Ali Knight

Author:Ali Knight
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781473684782
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2018-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 41

Maggie

Three weeks and two days before

Two hours after Helene left my office I received the blunt recorded message that Helene wanted my work for her to end. It was over.

Rory was happy. ‘Think positive,’ he counselled. ‘We got out of that potential mess in Vauxhall without getting burned. Gabe never rumbled us. We’ve got another success under our belt. Let’s move on to the next case.’ He went off to make a coffee, humming a pop tune under his breath.

An hour after that Simona found an envelope with the outstanding cash Helene owed us in the company mailbox. There was no message.

I phoned Helene and she answered straight away. I told her we’d received the money.

‘I can’t really talk, I’m at work,’ she replied. Her voice was clipped and cold.

‘Our clients are free to terminate the agreement at any time. But I’m always here if you need to talk or want us to investigate further.’

‘I want you to destroy any information you’re keeping in your files about my family,’ she said.

I had to let her down gently. ‘I’m afraid we can’t do that, we have to keep it for tax purposes. But it will be safely stored—’

‘I don’t believe you. I mean I don’t believe you that it can’t be got rid of.’

‘I’m sorry, Helene, but that is the way we do it.’ There was silence. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do?’

‘No.’

‘Talk to him. I advise all my clients to talk it out. It’s the only way. Go to counselling.’

She was surprised. ‘You’ve changed your tune. I thought you were of the shock and awe school, Old Testament justice.’

‘Sometimes. Hell, other times I just want people to be happy. It’s difficult enough to find people with which to spend our days. If you ever need to talk, you know where to find me.’

She wasn’t in the mood for goodbyes. She simply hung up.

And that was that. The Moreaus were out of my life.

I sat back in my chair and looked around my office, chief of my little domain, feeling empty. I sometimes had this sensation after a case had come to an end. Sentiments and attachments that had to be processed and put aside before we plunged into the next case and went back to hanging out in dark alleys and photographing silhouettes at windows.

We weren’t going to start on Mrs Gupta’s family mess until next week when her sister came back from a visit to Mumbai, so I gave Simona and Rory the rest of the day off. They cheered and there were smiles all round. I counted out Helene’s money and logged it while Simona put on a sun hat and headed to a deckchair in Regent’s Park with a good book and Rory said he was off to ogle men in swim shorts at a pool in Covent Garden. We were Londoners in the heat, hormones drifting on the hot air currents and mixing with the traffic fumes and the smell of rubbish.

When they’d

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