Until Death (32 page)

She refused to believe that the fiasco at the customs area when they’d lost Isabella had been her fault alone. They should have got the captain to accompany Isabella personally, right into their hands. But that plant of the Wolf’s had been good. Nobody talked to her like that and got away with it. No one. Women who thought they could play her needed to be taught a lesson, but her desire for the upper hand had made her take her eye off the ultimate prize.

She swallowed back tears. She felt the separation from her child as keenly as if it had been actually ripped from inside her. For the first time in years she felt weepy and flaky, almost unable to concentrate on what had to be done. Children were our undoing, she realised.

Christos turned round. ‘Only a few more hours and we’re back on track.’

Sylvie forced a smile and looked at her watch. She had already phoned Medea and instructed the old woman to bring the kids out to the play centre. She could look after them there. She’d relish the idea of providing care to Kelly’s kids, just in case Kelly got the idea that they were hers to take. She’d done a runner from Christos’s men earlier, but without her kids she wasn’t going anywhere. For the first time the thought terrified Sylvie, that she was also going to succumb, like so many before her, to the biological pull of offspring. She would be left wide open by the love she had for the baby she hadn’t yet even seen. She turned and headed up the stairs, having to retreat to the toilet. She forced herself to calm down, forced herself to remember what she had been told, that love allowed you to grow. It would make her stronger, this love for her child. She walked into a cubicle and shut the door, saw a handbag hanging on the hook. She opened it to see whose it was and found Kelly’s driving licence inside.

And a loaded gun.

K
elly had given Christos everything: her love and her freedom and her self-respect and still it was not enough. Adopting Yannis, giving him a new life and a new start, wasn’t enough. Their son and her child from her first marriage, whom Christos had professed to love, had been cast aside in the desire for a biological connection. She felt a fire of protectiveness towards Florence and Yannis. They were Malamatoses in everything except for the blood that pumped through their small bodies. And it turned out that to Christos, that was all that mattered. Christos wanted an heir. Like some bloated, syphilitic Henry VIII, he wouldn’t stop until he got his heir.

Well, if the children weren’t good enough, he didn’t deserve to have them. All her guilt about separating them from their father evaporated like milk boiling dry in a pan. She stopped in the street, had to bend down to stop the bile bubbling up her throat. Sylvie wasn’t just the mistress, wasn’t just the lovesick other woman waiting hopefully in the wings for her lover to love her enough: she was so much more than that. A woman with a plan – a woman with a baby on the way. A woman with something Kelly could use. Kelly spun around in the street and stuck out her arm for a taxi. Sylvie had sneaked around her house in the middle of the night, revelled in getting into every corner, thinking she was clever. A black cab slowed to a halt. Tit for tat, bitch, Kelly thought as she climbed in.

Sylvie’s flat was in a three-storey block in Maida Vale, set back from the main road. Kelly knew all about it; she had found out where Sylvie lived when she had discovered Christos was having an affair. She’d looked it up on Google Maps, had thought about it many times: the place where her husband’s other life was lived. It was a self-effacing block with pretensions to grandeur. It didn’t have a porter but it did have a small communal garden and bullying signs insisting that people couldn’t park by the doors. The windows were flat modern panes with no sills, most of them with nets or venetian blinds. It was anonymous, private, made for people not planning to stay long.

She saw the CCTV camera trained on the doorway and immediately discounted it. She was an expert in surveillance, after all, she would bet it didn’t even contain film, was there only as a deterrent. She rang the bell of number 9. Nothing happened. She rang again and then started on all the other doorbells and got someone on an upper floor to buzz her in. She crossed the wide lobby and took the stairs to the first floor, coming through a set of glass fire doors to a series of four plain wooden doors, each set with a spyhole.

She turned the handle on number 9 and leaned against the door. It didn’t budge. The hiss of a bus’s brakes and the screech of its wheels carried through the corridor window from the street. She realised she had nothing with her that she could use to force the door. She made a note of the flat numbers on this floor, retreated back down to the entrance and pressed the buzzers again. No one answered. It was the kind of place where people worked and came back late, their lives lived in more appealing places.

She walked back up to Sylvie’s floor and saw a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall next to the swing doors. She unhooked it and marvelled at its weight. She stood by Sylvie’s door and swung the extinguisher at the lock. A great thud rang out, and a big dent appeared in the door. She did it twice more before the flimsy door crumpled near the lock and she could shoulder-barge the door open. She hung the extinguisher back on the wall.

The door opened straight on to an open-plan living room. She closed the door as best she could behind her. There was a modern sofa in beige and a matching chair, set at right angles to the square room. The white blind cut a lot of the daylight. The coffee table was low and glass, with a celebrity magazine set neatly on top. The wall between the living room and what must be the bedroom was lined with a low bookshelf that contained a self-help manual, a fertility book and a baby care manual and a biography of a prominent businessman. There was also a photo in a silver frame – of Christos and Sylvie, her arms tight around his barrel chest. They were both laughing; it looked like it was taken at work, a world she never intruded upon.

She moved into the small kitchen, touched the curved glass of the coffee percolator – cold. She opened a kitchen cupboard. A packet of spaghetti, a drum of salt. She opened the fridge. In the door was a pint of milk, a carton of orange juice.

She opened the door to the bedroom and saw the light was still on in the bathroom beyond. It was gloomy in here, but she didn’t dare turn on the light. The bed was made, the brown silk cover pooling on to the floor around it. There was a bedside table and a neutral lamp. At the bottom of the bed was a cot. Sheets and a cot bumper decorated with blue teddy bears.

She walked into the bathroom. It was cluttered with cosmetics, brushes, combs, bottles of perfume – the same perfume she wore. She opened the mirror above the basin. Her gaze fell on a lock of dark hair, like a sample hanging by the Clairol boxes in Boots. She picked it up, rubbed it with her fingers. It was real. With a flash she remembered Christos leaning over her when she was out cold after her escape attempt. He had cut off her hair. There were three boxes of hair dye under the basin in a further cupboard. She snatched at the bottles of dye; each was a varying colour of brown. Sylvie had been experimenting to find the exact matching shade to her own.

Kelly didn’t attempt to stay quiet or hidden now. She went back into the bedroom in a hurry and flung open one of the wardrobe doors. There was a huge cardboard box, weighty and thumping when she pulled at it. There was a picture of a pram on the side. Sylvie was expecting to walk the streets of London with her new baby and she had posed as Kelly to get that child.

Kelly threw open another wardrobe door and saw shoes lined up neatly in the bottom of the wardrobe. They were replicas of her shoes at home. She bent down and looked at the brand names – pretty much all the same.
That
is what Christos had been writing down in the notebook and what she had filmed with the Sleepchecker. She grabbed at clothes, pulling them from the rails so they fell to the floor in an untidy cascade. Her shift dresses, pairs of black trousers, the long-sleeved black number she wore to their recent party. In the next wardrobe were Sylvie’s usual clothes: gaudy skirts and pink trousers, patent shoes and flowery tights.

Two different personalities in two different wardrobes; two different people claiming the same man. Kelly found a wig, long straight dark brown hair with a fringe, cut to mirror her own.

She saw a recording machine and what looked like a projector. She pressed play and an image of herself jumped to life on the far bedroom wall. It was a recording of Kelly in her own home, taken by Christos’s cameras. Walking down the corridor in the flat, from the back, images of her doing the tiniest movements that distinguish one woman from another, throwing her head back to move her hair out of her eyes, inserting a finger under her shirt by her collar bone to reposition a bra strap, twisting her hands together to adjust a wedding ring, the way she planted her feet wide as she stood at the stove, how she pushed out her bottom lip when she was irritated – and there was her glassy-eyed look as she shrank back in fear from her tyrannical husband.

All her most personal details projected life-sized on to Sylvie’s wall, feeding a rival’s obsession, urging a rival on. There were more photos of her in this apartment than there were of Sylvie’s lover. Kelly threw things out of the wardrobe, looking for something. A few moments later she found it – a black beret, a little worn, a different brand, but just the same.

Pinned to the inside door of the wardrobe were close-up photos of her: in profile, from the back, side on. Someone who was prepared to put in that much work on a mad project to imitate a rival was someone unhinged, and very dangerous indeed. Kelly ran back into the living room, sweeping items off tables, desperate to discover how far it went. She returned to the kitchen, reopening cupboard doors that she’d shut just moments ago. Her eyes snagged on the de Cecco spaghetti. The brand she tended to buy, because Michael used to buy it and she liked the fleeting memory. She flung open the fridge again, examining the contents forensically. A packet of pancetta pieces, squidged into their plastic square, a half-finished Parmesan cheese. She whirled round, saw a line of cookbooks leaning against the microwave and picked one up. Tuscan hills and Jamie Oliver’s grin. The book fell open at a recipe for spaghetti carbonara, the page splattered with oil spots and egg yolk. She picked up another book offering perfect pasta and scrabbled through the pages to spaghetti carbonara. The page was well thumbed, crispy flakes of dried Parmesan cheese like shed skin clinging to the crease.

Her children’s favourite meal. Being perfected by her rival.

Suddenly, a thought came to her that made the bottom fall out of her world. She had let Sylvie look after her children. Had assumed that Sylvie wasn’t a threat to them, that no one could want to harm their lover’s children.

She snatched up the phone on the side table and called Medea.

‘Where are the kids?’

‘More to the point, where are you? You’ve been running across motorways, what the—’

‘Are they with you?’

‘Yes, they’re here, but we’re leaving for the party right now.’

‘Wait for me. I beg you, Medea, wait for me—’

‘There’s no time. The driver’s already here. We’ll see you at the docks.’

‘Hello? Anyone here?’

Kelly wheeled round. A woman hovered by the front door.

‘I saw the door had been damaged. Are you OK? They’ve busted right in.’ The woman was staring round at the disordered room. ‘Can I help? When they break in it can feel like a, like a …’

‘Personal violation.’ Kelly ran out of the flat and down the stairs.

G
eorgie had had her phone on mute when Mo and she had been talking to Ian Scanlon, but she turned it back on as they drove Ian back to customs, and found a message from Kelly, claiming to know what was on the
Saracen
.
It’s not what you think
.
It’s something that will destroy my family.
She phoned Kelly back but no one answered at the house and her mobile was turned off. She cursed. She thought for a moment; she knew Kelly was going to be at the charity party this afternoon at the play centre near the docks – if she couldn’t get hold of her she’d go there and talk to her. But for now she and Mo had to take Ian to the cells under the building and she left Mo to book him in and to complete the paperwork.

She was barely back at her desk before she got buzzed from reception that Ricky Welch had arrived. Mo wasn’t back yet, so she went down to the lobby alone. The slim man with the long limbs didn’t look like a hot-headed docker who’d done a stretch for murder. She shook his hand and brought him up to the offices and into a meeting room. This side of the building faced the Thames, and Georgie saw him glance out of the window at the miles of containers stacked on the dock.

‘I guess it’s changed a bit since your day,’ she began, to break the ice.

He shrugged. ‘We didn’t check for dirty bombs in my day.’

She thanked him for coming so far at such short notice and offered him tea, which he waved away. She got straight down to it. ‘We’re investigating a case here that we think might have links to Southampton. If you cooperate with us we might be able to get the terms of your parole renegotiated. They’ll be less onerous.’

‘What are the links?’

‘We’re not sure at the moment.’

Ricky frowned. ‘Sounds like you need to talk to someone who works at the docks today. I haven’t been there in years, as you know. I haven’t been anywhere much in years.’

‘I’m interested in how the illegal stuff worked down there. What the processes were, the scams, if you like.’

‘One thing’s for certain, it will have changed now. I’m out of date. Out of the game.’ He crossed his legs, took a long glance out of the window. ‘Customs must be a strange job to do.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘To know that you only ever catch some of what’s smuggled. That every success, every seizure, is actually a failure because it proves that the illegal stuff is there, and its very existence must mean that there is more, always more.’