Her Beautiful Monster Read online

  But guess what Mark proposed to the investors?

  If Gaskell-Bridger got exposed and arrested, it would take at least two years for him to go to trial and eventually be sentenced, and who knew when the investors would get their money back? Mark proposed that we could get their money back, and much sooner than the police ever could. As long as they didn’t ask how we did it.

  The money drained out of the accounts, back to the investors. All it took was for Olivia, who controlled the account, to do a bit of typing and hit RETURN.

  Then we went radio silent.

  The night before we were to be at Gaskell-Bridger’s company, Benjamin snuck into the place and hid webcams in the office, the reception area, and the boardroom. This was where Benjamin was most at home, sneaking in and bugging. Hardware and surveillance were his thing. Every now and then he would get a job offer from GCHQ, but he always turned them down. Benjamin did not work well with rules and restrictions, and certainly not the Official Secrets Act. He liked to cause mischief, though he wasn’t actually malicious. He wasn’t a troll. He was your typical sarky Chinese lad who had grown up in Peckham and liked to fuck with people.

  Once Gaskell-Bridger found the money gone, he would start to panic. First disbelief, then the dawning horror of the con man getting conned. The frantic attempts to get Rajaratnam or his people on the phone, but every number Mark and Julia had given him was out of service.

  Sunny Rajaratnam was vaporware.

  Sunny Rajaratnam was in the wind, his time was up and thus dispersed like a mirage. Olivia had erased all traces of him. His website was gone. His entire digital footprint was but a vague memory.

  And Tarquin Gaskell-Bridger was well and truly buggered.

  We’d given the investors all the evidence we’d gathered for them to do with as they pleased. That was what they’d hired us for, after all, to gather proof that Gaskell-Bridger had swindled them.

  The investors voted to turn it over to the police, one of the rare occasions where our clients actually did things by the book and went to the Old Bill. Well, after we stole their money back for them. They left that bit out. The Serious Fraud Office began an investigation that didn’t take very long at all since they already had our evidence.

  We knew Gaskell-Bridger was a flight risk, so Olivia hacked into his personal bank account and froze it. She reported fraudulent activity on all his credit cards and had them suspended. He wasn’t buying a plane ticket anywhere. He was stuck in Blighty, ripe for the Fraud Squad to come a-knocking. The day they came for him, he ran out the window and stood on the ledge of his tenth-floor office in Canary Wharf. It took them an hour to talk him off it, and it was all over the news.

  “Good result,” Roger grinned as we all watched the telly in the office. Cheers all around as Gaskell-Bridger stood on that ledge, exposed for all the world to see.

  “He’s not gonna jump,” Marcie said, chewing on popcorn. “He’s too much of a narcissist. This is a cry for help. It’s about getting attention.”

  Over a year ago, I might have felt sorry for his humiliation, but now I felt no sympathy whatsoever. I was on the side of the pensioners whose money we got back.

  When we got home that night, Julia and I celebrated in our own way. Addicts didn’t stop being addicts. They’re either in recovery or they aren’t. Julia was a recovering sex addict. Our job seemed to placate her addiction by substituting sex with the risk-taking behaviors of going undercover and pulling off feats of deceit and duplicity. She felt no urge to have one-night stands with awful blokes, staying monogamous with me. We were in for the long haul. And when Julia and I made love, the gods didn’t show up to watch. They granted me that bit of privacy, at least.

  As Julia lay asleep in my arms, I thought about where I was now, since I first started working as a private investigator.

  This is what it’s like to dance for the gods.

  FIVE

  Sundays were dinner with my parents.

  My father seemed in good spirits since his surgery and recovery from prostate cancer, though he still didn’t approve of my job. My mother seemed a bit high-strung, but at least she wasn’t gambling or racking up debt. My sister and her husband, on the other hand . . .

  “When are you going to give us grandchildren?” my mother would ask.

  “When we’re good and ready,” grumbled Sanjita.

  “Your father and I would like to see at least one before we drop dead.”

  “Arrgh!” cried my sister.

  Vivek stuffed his face with naan to avoid having to say anything.

  Then my mother would ask Julia when we were going to marry. Julia would charmingly deflect, as usual. In my mother’s mind, it was no longer “if” but “when.”

  At least it wasn’t as awkward as when Julia finally introduced me to her parents. We’d gone over for Sunday lunch a few months ago, and they were relieved that I was a normal, middle-class bloke instead of some sleazy nutter she might have picked up from a club. Julia told them I used to be a religious scholar, which helped.

  “So you were a PhD candidate?” her father asked, impressed. “Why did you give that up to teach secondary school?”

  “I decided that academia wasn’t really for me,” I said. “I felt I needed to be in the world, to be engaged, and teaching was a way to see how the world was evolving.”

  “Ravi’s mother was a teacher,” Julia said, filling in the colors. “He was following in her footsteps.”

  “She must be very proud,” Julia’s mum said, beaming. “So how did you two meet?”

  “When I was being treated for my addiction.” Julia said matter-of-factly.

  “Addiction?” Both her parents froze.

  “Mum, Dad, I’d been meaning to tell you,” Julia said. “I have a problem with alcohol.”

  The Sunday roast sat cold as the mood changed.

  “What kind of problem?” Her mother choked.

  “Alcoholism.”

  “Surely that’s an exaggeration,” her father said. “Everyone has a tipple every now and then.”

  “That was what I thought,” Julia said. “I did it to unwind. The course work at uni was quite intense, I had some relationship problems, and I started binging.”

  What Julia binged on was not booze but sex. Sex with strangers. Sex with creepy men. Sex with unsuitable men from a club. Sex with at least one of her professors.

  “Did . . . did Louise know?” her mother asked.

  “She did. I swore her to secrecy.”

  “Oh, poor Louise.” Her mother wiped away a tear.

  “To think she didn’t even tell us about what you were going through when she was ill . . . ,” her father mused.

  “It was Lou who got me to seek treatment,” Julia said. “I woke up one morning in a man’s bed and I couldn’t stop crying. I called her and she came to fetch me. She took me to the doctor and I got a referral for treatment.”

  “You two always looked out for each other, more than we knew how to,” her father said.

  “And that was how I met Ravi,” Julia said, suddenly brightening up as she squeezed my hand.

  “Were you in treatment as well?” her father asked, a veil of suspicion coming over his eyes.

  “No,” I said. “I was a volunteer sober companion. I was assigned to help her cope, to keep her focus on her recovery, to not judge but help her if she relapsed.”

  “Ohh.” Her mother nodded in approval.

  “Eventually, we found we were attracted to each other, and I had to stop being her sober companion in order to be her boyfriend. We had to follow strict ethical guidelines. Julia continues to go to group meetings, but our relationship is now personal.”

  “I see,” her father said.

  Then her mother brought out a treacle tart.

  “Well,” I said when we left. “That was all very English. Aside from the blatant lying.”

  “Oh, including the blatant lying,” Julia said with a laugh. “Lies are as English as they come.”

/>   “You could have warned me you were going to spring that on them.”

  “Well, I thought I ought to confess to them I was in recovery. They’d been suspecting I had a problem and they worry about me.”

  “But they didn’t know you were a sex addict.”

  “They don’t know what that is. Dad certainly wouldn’t. They would say I was just oversexed or a slut. They don’t get it and I can’t be arsed to spend the next six months trying to convince them it’s a real thing.”

  “So alcoholism is a more acceptable problem than sex addiction. Great,” I said. “And you were testing me as well, weren’t you?”

  “I wanted to see how you were going to play along. Given how good you are on the job, I was curious.”

  “You just used me to socially engineer your mum and dad.”

  “And you passed the test,” she said, and gave me a kiss.

  “You get off on this. That’s how you haven’t relapsed. You’ve traded social engineering for sex.”

  “Win-win,” she said.

  “It’s still acting out,” I said.

  “But with more benefits.”

  No wonder Bagalamukhi was following us so much these days. She followed us all the way from Julia’s parents’ house to my folks’, and lingered in my parents’ dining room when we visited them later. And it turned out even here, someone other than Julia and me was hiding something.

  “Mum and Dad aren’t having sex,” said my sister when we stepped out to the garden for her ciggie break.

  “I don’t generally think about our parents having sex,” I said.

  “No, I mean he hasn’t been interested since his recovery. He just goes about his routine except for the sex. It’s driving Mum spare!”

  “No wonder she seemed a bit tense. Wait—How do you know this? Did Mum tell you?”

  “Course she did. Women talk. It’s what we do. What do you blokes talk about, just football?”

  “Sanji, dads do not generally talk to their sons about how they bonk their mums.”

  “Well, it’s becoming my problem because Mum is channeling all her pent-up sexual energy into nagging me and Vivek into getting pregnant. Bollocks to that! We’ve got to get more job security first! I have to deal with Mum, but you have to talk to Dad.”

  “What do you want me to do? Throw a box of Viagra at him and say, ‘Here, Dad. Mum needs a good rogering. Have at it!’?”

  “Don’t be a dick. For God’s sake, think of something. She’s going to get the nosy relatives involved. They’re going to form a whole group to gang up on me and Vivek and bully us into getting pregnant!”

  I couldn’t find a way to talk to Dad about, oh my God, making more of an effort to have sex with Mum, but I had at least sussed out a way to get her out of the house and feel less frustrated.

  Mrs. Dhewan, Mum’s friend and our local neighborhood loan shark and gang boss (under the guise of her grande dame persona), had opened a local food bank to help keep the poorest local residents and their kids from going hungry. It wasn’t a big one like the Trussell Trust, and its charity registration was still pending, but it had become an essential local fixture. Mum, as a former schoolteacher, would be good with helping organize and distribute the food. That should take up enough of her energy to not dwell on Dad’s negligence and hopefully get her off Sanjita’s back.

  Little did I know the chaos this would unleash, but that was much later.

  So life was good.

  Well, as good as it could be when you’re paid to do dodgy things to clean the dirty laundry of the rich and powerful, and you’re hallucinating gods.

  As private investigators, we are not nice people. We are not paid to be nice people. We are paid to solve problems by not being nice.

  So that became our routine. Solve a big case, get paid handsomely, go out for drinks to celebrate, Julia and I, bonk each other’s brains out at the end of the evening. Wash, rinse, repeat.

  I didn’t even think about it when we went to the wine bar near the office in Farringdon to celebrate the result for the ADDT case. As I sipped my gin and tonic, I glimpsed Kali standing in the corner of the bar, watching me intently. She wasn’t sticking out her tongue. She seemed oddly subdued. That was not the smile of someone who was amused or happy. Had she just shaken her head at me?

  She was walking towards me now, past the punters in suits drinking and laughing.

  I tried to ignore her, but she came up to my shoulder and, as she passed, whispered in my ear.

  “You’re getting entirely too comfortable in your status quo, my lovely boy,” she said.

  And with that, she walked out of the bar, texting on her phone.

  . . . Fuck.

  THE TRUE PRICE OF LONDON PROPERTIES

  ONE

  Lev Sergeyevich Mayakovsky was one of the major Russian oligarchs who had swept into London in the 1990s and come close to taking it over, buying properties in Mayfair, as well as mansions, newspapers, and football teams, and setting up all sorts of organizations and charities.

  Throughout the early 2000s, Mayakovsky was rarely out of the news. It was impossible to avoid him and his fellow oligarchskis as they seemed on the verge of taking over London the way Arab money had been flowing into the capital since the 1970s. The Russians were the shiny new rich kids on the block, and the government welcomed them with open arms, more than happy to accept their lovely money to shore up the London and UK economy.

  Julia, who was still pursuing her literature degree part-time, compared Mayakovsky’s story to a thick Russian novel.

  “Just think,” she said. “He comes to England an outsider, in some people’s eyes a pariah. A man with money and resources but very little connections, which he remedies by throwing that money around to buy influence and a place on the map. He starts to step out in society with Cecily Harkingdale of the Sussex Harkingdales.”

  “Landed gentry gone to seed,” smirked Marcie.

  It was true. The Harkingdales were of that class that had lived off the rent on their land for over a hundred years, but had since fallen on hard times. Landowning wasn’t all it was cracked up to be these days if you were not the Royal Family. The Harkingdales branched off into The City and, what else, property speculation, but debt had been eroding their standing for over twenty years. Mayakovsky was their knight in shining armor, coming in from Russia, and they pretty much threw Cecily at him. He wanted that English aristocratic life, the Savile Row suits, attending social events as if he was a count in a Tolstoy novel. Interviews with him were full of soulful Russian allusions to literature and poetry.

  “I feel my soul is Russian, but the romance of the English spirit touches my heart deeply,” he effused on Channel Four.

  I remember that interview. A few million viewers must have vomited in disgust at the same time that evening.

  But then there was the requisite scandal. No rich foreigner who put up sticks here with such a high profile was devoid of skeletons in his closet. Mayakovsky’s first wife showed up with his young son. This was the upmarket reality soap opera for people who were tired of gossip involving footballers and their wives.

  Irina Petrovna Mayakovsky kicked up a very loud fuss the moment she arrived in London, landing interviews with the papers and society magazines. She was the first wife, who had stuck with Mayakovsky through the thick and thin of the Cold War years when he traveled all over Europe and the US, holding down the fort back home in Moscow and raising their son on her own while he was doing spy stuff under the guise of diplomatic activities. He couldn’t tell her what he was up to, of course, but he always sent money back and made sure she and little Sacha wanted for nothing, which was considerable in the dying years of the Soviet Union. She played the role of loyal wife as he weathered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the utter chaos of the perestroika years. She railed against his callousness, this woman who supported him in his leanest times only to be abandoned when he became prosperous, for a younger, more attractive model with a higher social standing.
The media ate it up.

  “That scandal was the shit,” said Marcie. “I remember my old PR firm chomping at the bit to rep her. Every PR wanted in on that gig.”

  Of course, Marcie secretly being CIA meant that landing Irina Mayakovsky as a client would have meant acquiring a potential piece of leverage on her husband should the Company ever decide they had a use for him, like, say, propping him up as America’s man to run for President of Russia . . . but that didn’t come to pass. He was not a fan of America, and she refused all overtures to be represented by any PR firms. Perhaps she was sincere in her desire to just have her husband acknowledge her and their son, and then to live a quiet life after all.

  Mayakovsky condemned the media coverage as a plot by his enemies to discredit and humiliate him. As a former spy, he certainly had his long list of suspects. It could have been one of the other media moguls out to take him down a peg, his former colleagues in the KGB-now-FSB running an op, someone in MI6 out for revenge, the CIA (though Marcie denied it). No one ever found out who paid for Irina and Sacha’s air ticket to London. Mayakovsky couldn’t marry Cecily Harkingdale because he hadn’t yet divorced Irina. Mayakovsky then had to make a very public display of atonement, helping Irina and Sacha get British citizenship, setting them up in a decent flat in Bloomsbury, far less extravagant than the luxury penthouses and condominiums he had bought all over London, making sure Sacha got into a decent school, then finally getting his divorce with a generous settlement to keep Irina housed and fed and alimony for Sacha’s upkeep. Now he could complete his fantasy of joining the British aristocracy by marrying Cecily. Then he set about his Great Project of being a patron of the arts, a donor to political causes for Mother Russia, supporting campaigns for reform there and even hinting he might run for president there, if there wasn’t a warrant out for his arrest, and showing up at all the right parties and events with his newfangled Sloane Ranger wife.