Chapter 22
‘Are you certain?’ says Elle. ‘You know, it’s possible people can just wake up one morning and turn over a new leaf. Maybe Jasmine’s finally seeing you for who you really are.’
I give this comment the reception it deserves.
‘Yeah, I think that’s not quite right, hun,’ Em chips in. ‘I think the problem was she always could see Al and his personality clearly, which is why she’s disliked him for years.’ Elle’s brow wrinkles.
‘In that case,’ says Jonny, ‘you’re completely compromised.’
They don’t know the half of it. Here’s the truth: I’m a fraud even at being an interloper.
I have a name, a real one, I mean. I don’t ever use it.
Nobody knows it. Not the agency, certainly not my interlope contacts, nor my new friends either.
But to go fully off grid is harder than ever these days, unless you’re buying a mobile home in north Norfolk for a cash deposit and living on baked beans.
So I half-arsed it, like I have done everything else.
My bank account is in my real name, although I told the agency my fake name and they’ve never queried the disparity.
I also have somewhere for my post to go, an old mate’s house from which I pick it up sporadically.
I dropped off the census last time they conducted one, which made me very happy – I was staying in a beautiful shepherd’s hut in a famous writer’s garden (he had no idea I was there).
But that’s as far as I’ve gone. I’m not Robin Hood.
It’s much easier to slip between the cracks than to build yourself a brand-new identity.
All of that means there’s a little thread for the police to pull. If they are in touch with my agency, they’ll be all over my bank account, and from that they’ll find my real name. Not only that, thanks to the Terminator cop from the restaurant and his stupid phone, they have my face too.
I’m starting to feel like a fox, halfway through a bracing and easy escape from some dumb dogs and red-coated poshos, who has just smelled a second set of dogs coming from the direction he was headed in, and has realised: Ah. This might get a bit complicated before the day is out.
I realise I haven’t replied to Jonny’s comment.
‘Yeah. “Completely compromised” is a good way of putting it. Thanks, Jonny.’
‘Oh, leave him alone,’ says Em. ‘We’ll work out what to do in the morning.’
‘Sure.’ I turn off my work phone – was it on long enough that the police could work out which mast the messages were delivered to? Probably. Either way, for all the good it will do me, I take the SIM card out, disassemble it, and chuck the lot in the kitchen bin.
‘OK, guys, I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day. I’m going to turn in.’
As I stand, my pocket buzzes. My main phone – thankfully bought off the shelf and with no link to me whatsoever – has received a new text message.
Time is running short, Al.
Tremendous.
Not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had.
I can’t swear, but I think someone faintly tapped on my door around midnight.
The tap seemed much more ‘Elle coming to say how sorry she is that you’re probably going to prison’ than ‘Em coming to ravish you’.
Even if it had been the latter, I wasn’t quite in the ravishee’s mindset, so I just waited, patiently, until whoever was on the landing gave up and left.
At breakfast the next morning, we work out what we’re going to do next.
The reasoning goes as follows: there is clearly something going on at Davy’s firm. These addresses he kept – all with dates and sizeable sums of money next to them – must have meant something to him. And several are within an hour’s walk of here. So we may as well start asking questions there.
Elle says she doesn’t fancy coming along, although she’s a bit vague about why. Not like her – she has strong ‘joiner-in’ energy. Maybe Em’s told her to give us some alone time. Dream on, Al.
Jonny doesn’t want to come either – he’s still trying to access Davy’s laptop, which is apparently unbelievably hard to crack.
He’s tried about fifteen tricks so far, with zero luck, and the fact he’s been failing all this time makes him think there must be something significant in it, especially as Davy didn’t seem the type to bother with strong security.
But he does produce a list of the properties that haven’t been resold since the date in Davy’s ledger, and an itinerary of the fastest route between them. We’ve got our cover story in place, and our petticoat story beneath that in case the first one blows away.
And, fuelled with nothing but toast and nerves, off we go.
The first place is in Chalk Farm. There’s a square near the Tube station that is honestly ridiculous.
It looks like the sort of place they’d film a Paddington movie, or any other heritage Brit culture to trick the world into thinking London’s a nice place to live.
It’s exactly that kind of dependable Georgian brickwork, trussed up with wisteria lingerie.
I’m just relieved we started at a reasonable hour and have beaten the Instagrammers to it.
Number 33 is the prettiest of the lot. Sky-blue door, delicate iron balconies, and at least five storeys on the inside.
I’m willing to bet the basement is one of the iceberg jobs (enormous, cold and lifeless.
The owners are often similar, with the added similarity that they’re more dangerous than you think).
The places on this square all have that weird stone bridge from the street to the front door, with spiky railings on either side, good for keeping the outside world that little bit further away.
We’ve dressed smartly enough – nothing too fancy, but the sort of thing that might make you think we were from Harcourt and Wallace, London’s premier boutique super-prime property agency.
We ring the bell, and step back a few paces.
There’s a long wait before the door opens, and when it does, the woman inside is clearly unthrilled to see us.
She’s East Asian, still in what looks like a proper silk dressing gown.
Behind her, I get a glimpse of some expensive-looking art on the wall, and children’s voices are shouting happily in the back.
‘Yes?’
‘Hi there. We’re from Harcourt and Wallace, the estate agent who sold this home five years ago. We just have a few questions for you. It’s a long-running customer satisfaction survey, we can offer a substantial reward for taking part, and …’
… and I’m talking to sky-blue wood. At the word ‘survey’, the woman shook her head and softly closed the door.
‘Nice one.’
‘Come on. There’s no combination of words that would have opened her up.’
Two floors up, as we step back to the street, there’s a movement in the window, but by the time I’m looking, I can only see reflected sky.
The woman would have to have been an Olympic hill-runner to get up there in time.
Maybe she is. But it seems likelier that someone else was observing us from within.
‘Strange.’
‘Yeah,’ says Em. ‘Well, that’s one off the list. We have about twenty more. Good to get the rubbish talkers out of the way. Maybe we’ll have done ten by lunch and then we can knock off for a drink.’
If only we’d known how the morning would go, we would have gone to the pub right then.
I’m not going to say exactly how many times the exact same scene plays out over the next few hours. But it’s a lot. Nobody tells us anything. Here’s the playbook:
We walk to the door, looking smart, presentable and – yes – a little flirtatious. We knock.
Someone opens the door. This might be an attractive young woman in yoga gear, a tattooed man restraining a bulldog, a skullcapped butler, an impatient Sub-Saharan imam, an Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman …
doesn’t matter. They vary, is my point, in the kind of way you only get in a few cities of the world.
The one thing they all have in common is that they look like they’re doing all right for themselves.
They listen to whichever of us is pitching, and after about fifteen seconds they shake their head and the door drifts shut.
We try everything. We try naming the firm.
We try naming Davy. We try holding up a picture of Davy.
We try pretending we are his grieving children, collecting evidence for his memorial. None of it works.
Nobody has heard of the companies that own the properties. We start mentioning them halfway through the list, thinking we’ve got nothing left to lose. If anything, when people hear the name Tritone ALM or Phoebus Moonbase Partners, or whatever, they close the door even faster.
As we leave – and this happens particularly in the places where we’ve named the company that owns the building – we get the queasy feeling of being watched.
By 3 p.m., we’ve knocked on the doors of – at a conservative estimate – ￡100m-worth of central London.
We’ve gone without lunch, we are in South Kensington, and we are furious with each other and ourselves.
I’ve observed that Em isn’t selling our line quite right, and she’s observed that I’m a condescending twat. Eventually we give up and get crêpes.
‘This is hopeless.’ I nod agreement, and Em keeps thinking aloud. ‘What does it mean? Does it prove we’re on to something?’
‘Doesn’t matter if it does prove that if nobody’s talking. Just means we screwed up our chance to find out what’s going on.’
‘I keep having a horrible premonition that Mr Bowling Ball’s going to be behind the next door.’
‘Me too.’
‘Ugh.’ Em sighs and spears her galette. ‘What do we do next?’
‘Don’t know. Davy’s got this other meeting tomorrow.’
‘The one you’re convinced you saw the answer to somewhere. BB AGM.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, why not think about that? What does B stand for in the property market?’
‘Bricks, bedrooms. Buyers. Er, bad landlords. I don’t know.’
‘What about places?’ Em says. ‘Bedfordshire. Battersea. Balham.’