Chapter 55
WILLOW
I can’t stop crying. Every time I think there can’t be any more tears, more come. My throat aches and my eyes are slits, but that’s nothing compared to the stabbing pain in my chest.
I can’t believe Dad’s dead. Not just dead – murdered.
I know he wasn’t perfect, but he was my dad, and now he’s gone.
If only I could turn back the clock. I should never have left him alone that night.
I should have brought my duvet downstairs and slept on the armchair beside him.
If I had, he’d still be here, wouldn’t he?
So if you follow that to its logical conclusion, it’s my fault he’s dead. All. My. Fault.
I blow my nose and take a sip of the tea Amber brought me. It’s stone cold, but I drink it anyway, grimacing as I force it past the hard knot in my throat.
It was kind of her to come and check on me. I was so desperate to offload, I almost told her about the other thing. I get the feeling she wouldn’t have judged me, she’d have just tried to help. Not that there’s anything she could’ve done. The cat’s well and truly out of the bag.
My phone buzzes again. It’s been pinging with notifications all day thanks to the Google Alerts I set up a couple of weeks ago. I glance at the headline.
This is the face of disgraced charity CEO Victoria Wyndham, the landlord at the centre of the eviction scandal
This is it. The moment I’ve been planning for weeks. Victoria’s spectacular fall from grace. Only instead of feeling triumphant, I feel… grubby. But if I’m replaying how we got here, at least I’m not thinking about Dad.
I was volunteering at our local soup kitchen when I met Niall.
At first, clocking his gaunt face, tatty anorak and frayed beanie, I thought he was one of the homeless guys.
In fact, I was about to offer him a bowl of soup when he joined me behind the trestle tables and started handing out bread rolls.
We got chatting once the queue had died down. When he told me he used to be an outreach worker for The Anchorway Trust, I almost dropped the ladle I was holding.
‘I know your old boss,’ I said.
His head jerked up. ‘Victoria Wyndham?’
‘She’s a friend of my dad’s. Well, my stepmother, to be precise. They went to uni together.’
‘And what do you think of her?’
It felt like a test, and I considered my answer carefully.
‘I think people like her are the reason we’re all screwed. Bloody boomers have plundered the planet and we’re the ones paying the price.’
‘Technically, she’s not a boomer, but you’re right.
’ Niall scowled. ‘She’s the worst kind of parasite.
She swans around like she gives a fuck, but she’s morally bankrupt.
’ He leant in close, lowering his voice.
‘You know she’s a private landlord, right?
Squeezed nine bedsits into a five-bedroom house she owns in Camberwell. Nine!’
I shook my head, scandalised but not exactly surprised. Victoria is the kind of fake who wouldn’t see the irony in sipping a glass of Chablis in her bougie five-bedroom home while she preached about the plight of the homeless.
‘Word is she’s just issued Section 21 notices to all her tenants because she wants to sell the place.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said, because even though I had no idea what a Section 21 notice was, I was pretty sure it wasn’t good news for Victoria’s tenants.
‘The bitch needs bringing down,’ Niall said. ‘But I can’t do it because everyone would say it was sour grapes.’
‘Why?’
‘She sacked me for trying to help two rough sleepers. All I did was give them my phone number in case they needed help out of hours.’
‘That’s terrible!’
‘I know, right? Listen, I’ve got to go, but can I have your number?’
‘Why?’ I said again.
He looked at me appraisingly. ‘You’re one of the good guys, I can tell.’
I glowed with pride.
‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise,’ he added, waving a hand at the ragtag collection of the vulnerable and the marginalised we were there to help.
The people ninety-nine per cent of the population walked past without a second thought every day of the week.
‘But if you really want to help, I know how you can.’
I eagerly handed over my number. Hadn’t I told our school careers adviser I wanted to be a professional agitator? Someone who upset the status quo, who asked the right questions, who challenged the people who thought they were untouchable?
That night, I googled Section 21 notices, and the more I read, the angrier I got. Victoria, the face of a well-known homeless charity, was evicting people from their homes without a second thought. The hypocrisy made my blood boil.
Two weeks later, Niall messaged me with the email address of a freelance reporter called Johnny Nelson who ‘specialised in exposing corruption’.
It was clear what he wanted. Someone had to blow the whistle on Victoria’s double standards. And I was perfectly placed to do it. I’d wanted a cause. Now I had one.
I emailed Johnny Nelson. I could tell straight away he was one of the good guys too.
You get a feeling for these things. You wouldn’t believe the number of crooks and sleazeballs he’s brought down.
We jumped on a video call and I explained what I had on Victoria.
Niall had been adamant I mustn’t mention him so I stuck to our story, that I’d overheard a conversation between Victoria and Simone in which she’d mentioned the no-fault evictions and I’d been so incensed at her double standards I’d decided to go to the media.
Johnny went away and did some digging and I helped out where I could.
I struck gold when, trawling through Dad’s archived WhatsApp messages to Victoria one day, I found one in which he advised her to set up a management company to ‘keep her direct involvement under the radar’.
It didn’t take Johnny long to find Claremont Crescent Property Holdings Ltd registered under Companies House.
Even though we had Victoria exactly where we wanted her, I couldn’t resist sending her a few anonymous texts, just to wipe the smug smile off her face.
Johnny offered me a tip-off fee but I told him to donate it to Friends of the Earth.
I did ask him for help with something else I’ve been working on, though, and he and his girlfriend Lara showed me how to find what I needed from the Public Record Office.
That ticking time bomb’s been sitting in a plain white envelope in the pocket of my dressing gown, ready to detonate when the time’s right.
But since Dad died, I haven’t had the heart to set it off.
Johnny’s exposé was waiting to be cleared by the Tribune’s lawyers when Owen Evans turned up dead in the doorway of The Anchorway Trust’s offices. Suddenly every investigative journalist in the country was sniffing around the charity.
Worried someone else would beat them to it, the lawyers pulled their fingers out and green-lit the story. And now everyone knows Victoria Wyndham is a money-grabbing hypocrite who was prepared to let a vulnerable agoraphobic die on the streets.
Niall messaged about an hour ago, gloating. I should be pleased.
So why do I feel like I’ve been played?