Chapter Ten #2
With the light, she could just make out the silhouette of a person sitting on the driver’s side of a dark sedan—was it a deep blue? Black?
It was hard to tell from the distance.
She was used to the cars that normally parked on her street, but she didn’t recognize this one. Her neighbors were largely creatures of habit who came and went around set work hours.
How long had the car been there, and if she could see the person’s silhouette, what could they see of her flat?
The light in the car turned off.
Margo jumped back from the window.
The drapes closed behind her.
She hurried over to the lamp and turned it off, plunging the flat into darkness and obscuring her from the window’s view.
Was someone out there watching her? The same man that she had seen on the Tube? Or was she simply so rattled by Mr. Thornton’s murder that she was now imagining danger where there was none? That was the trouble with living in a city; it was hard to know what was a coincidence and what was a threat.
Her phone rested on the table where Margo had left it beside her laptop, and she picked it up, gripping it tightly in her hand.
She crept back toward the window, the heavy velvet curtains too thick to see through. They weren’t a complete blackout, though, so whoever was down below would know that she had turned her light off.
In the distance, a car horn honked, piercing the quiet night.
Margo jumped.
Her cell phone slipped from her hand and hit the ground.
Damn.
Margo bent down and picked it up, peering around the edge of the curtain, staring out at the street below.
The car was gone.
—
She needed coffee. Two cups, at least.
After the car had freaked her out, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep until four in the morning, and when her alarm went off three hours later telling her it was time to get ready for work, it had taken every ounce of energy not to snooze the alert.
Despite the exhaustion, as soon as her alarm woke her, it all came flashing back in horrifying detail. Margo checked her email right after she woke up, but there was nothing from Greer and nothing from Luke. No message from the police, either.
Margo grabbed the detective’s card and dialed the number listed there.
“Matthews,” he answered.
“This is Margo Reynolds. I’m ringing to see if you have any new information about what happened.”
“We’re still investigating,” he replied after a moment. “If we have any more questions for you, we’ll be in touch.”
She opened her mouth to say something, to tell him about the flash drive, and Oliver Reston, and the strange car she had seen outside her flat, but he’d already disconnected the call.
For a moment, she could do nothing more than stare at the mobile in her hand, shock and indignation filling her. Maybe it was na?ve of her, but she’d expected, hoped that the police would be a little more forthcoming, considering she’d been there when Mr. Thornton died.
Margo dressed quickly for work, going through the motions on autopilot, her mind reeling as she processed everything that had happened, trying to make sense of it all.
Her morning commute seemed to take twice as long as normal with Margo constantly looking over her shoulder, choosing the most circuitous route to the office.
Luckily, her journey took her through well-traveled streets so she was never alone, but she still tensed whenever someone walked close to her, when an arm brushed against her or a loud noise sounded.
In short, her nerves were shot by the time she got to work.
Margo reached into her bag and pulled out her office keys, more than a little surprised to see that the door wasn’t already unlocked, and that Bea hadn’t beaten her there, given the late start to the day.
She and Bea had a playful rivalry over who got into work first, and up until today Bea had been leading.
Margo stared at the keys for a moment, her gaze lingering over the key ring.
Luke had given it to her the day that she secured the office space in Chelsea. They’d celebrated with a bottle of champagne and sex on her new desk, and life was heady with promise—in her marriage, in her career, in the sense that she was growing into the person she had always wanted to be.
Eight months later, she told Luke she wanted a divorce.
Margo shook off the memory, the pain of seeing Luke last night bringing so many emotions bubbling to the surface.
It was easier when she didn’t think of him, when he was buried beneath the layers of all the things she focused on instead.
But she’d reopened the wound by going over to his flat last night, and now she struggled to not think of him.
Margo grabbed the doorknob, ready to fit the key into the lock—
The door pushed open beneath her palm before she even had a chance to slip the key inside.
She froze.
“Bea,” Margo called out.
No one answered her.
Margo stepped forward, pushing the door open another inch, a chill sliding down her spine.
Their beautiful, cozy office, every inch of space painstakingly designed by Margo, from the pale Farrow the cushions from the little settee near the front door where clients could wait before meeting with Margo were slashed open, feathers cast out on the floor.
Bea’s computer was on the floor, the phone next to it.
Her assistant was nowhere to be seen.
Margo glanced through the reception room to where her own office door was ajar, the sliver of her office showing the same destruction as Bea’s.
This time, she didn’t hesitate, didn’t take the chance that the perpetrator might still be there.
She pulled out her phone to call for help and got the hell out of her office.
—
“It’s all clear,” the police officer confirmed. “We’ll pull the CCTV footage and see what we can find. It would help if you could go through and let us know what, if anything, is missing.”
The fact that this was the third police officer she’d met in two days didn’t bode well.
“And my assistant?” Margo asked.
She’d called Bea a dozen times, but Bea had yet to answer.
“We’ll send someone by her flat, but it looks like she wasn’t here. There’s no sign that anyone was working.”
“How can you tell in this mess?” Margo fought to keep her voice calm, panic rising.
“Well, her purse isn’t here. And you keep calling her mobile, but that clearly isn’t here, either. She’s lucky she didn’t come in. This would have been a lot worse if she’d interrupted the middle of the robbery.”
Margo leveled him with a look. “You can’t seriously think this was a robbery. And you say there’s no sign that Bea was here, but what about the fact that the alarm was off? What if Bea put in the code, what if they forced her to?”
“We’ll investigate all of this. We can check on the security system. The most important thing is not to panic. We see burglaries all the time.”
“The night after an associate of mine was murdered in Notting Hill? What are the odds that those two things aren’t connected?”
Margo took a deep breath, trying to keep from losing her temper even though it was beyond frustrating the way they were placating her.
The first thing Margo had done when the police arrived on the scene was to tell them about Mr. Thornton’s bookshop, about the man she thought was following her, and the man she thought she had seen parked in a car outside her apartment last night.
In hindsight, she wasn’t sure if giving them that much information off the bat had helped or hurt her, considering the skepticism she could feel coming off the officer in waves, but she was done taking chances.
The police may not be ready to believe her yet, but there was no doubt in Margo’s mind that this was absolutely tied to A Time for Forgetting.
Anger lanced its way through her, the emotion sharp.
This was her office. The one she’d built with little more than what at times had felt like an impossible dream.
She’d agonized over whether she was going to be able to stay in business that first year, had worked more hours than not, had sacrificed so much in the pursuit of this goal, this company that she had built on her own.
And now seeing what someone had done to the space—
She’d worked too hard to let someone come in here and smash up her life.
“Margo?”
She whirled around.
Luke walked through the doorway of her office. His gaze swept the room and the destruction before settling on her.
“Are you alright?” Luke asked her.
“I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
His voice lowered. “I wanted to talk to you. To follow up from last night. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I came in this morning, and it was like this.”
“Where’s Bea?”
“I keep calling her and it keeps going to voicemail. I’m worried—Bea wouldn’t just blow off work like this. After what happened last night—”
“We sent a couple officers to her flat to check it out,” the police officer interjected. “Like I told Ms. Reynolds, she probably just took the day off or decided to work from home.”
Annoyance flashed in Luke’s eyes. “No, not Bea. She wouldn’t do that to Margo.”
“That’s what I told them,” Margo interjected.
“Give us a minute,” Luke said to the officer, not waiting for permission before drawing Margo out into the hall.
“Have you noticed anyone else following you since you came to my flat last night?” he asked her.
She hesitated. “I thought I saw someone parked outside of my flat last night,” Margo said, filling him in on the details.
She hadn’t cried since she found Mr. Thornton’s body, but the grief was building inside her like a crashing wave, mixing with her fear over the possibility of something having happened to Bea.