The Woman At The Door by Daniel Hurst (manga ebook reader .TXT) 📗

up a report that was already overdue. I send a quick message back to Maria, thanking her for covering for me once again, seeing that this is the second time after she saved me in the meeting this morning. Then I put my phone away and focus on the task at hand, which is not an easy one.

I have to try and spot Erica on this busy street.

Looking around through a sea of commuters and tourists, I struggle to catch a glimpse of my PI and wonder why she picked such a busy place to hold this meeting. Surely a coffee shop or a park bench would have been better than outside one of the busiest train stations in one of the busiest cities in the world.

But then I see her. She is standing about twenty yards away from me in a black blouse with a handbag over her shoulder. To the untrained eye, she looks like an ordinary woman on her lunch break. But I know who she really is.

She is a woman of means.

Or at least I hope she is.

Rushing over towards her whilst almost being run down by a cyclist going way too fast down the road, I eventually reach her and get the greetings over quickly so I can move on to the important stuff.

‘What do you have?’ I ask her, and Erica wastes no time going into her handbag and taking out a brown envelope.

Feeling like I’m in some kind of espionage movie, I take the envelope from her and open it up. That’s where I see two photographs of the woman I have been looking for.

The woman at the door.

‘You found her?’ I ask, studying the two images carefully to make sure that it really is her. But it definitely looks like the woman in Steve’s CCTV footage.

‘Yeah, I found her,’ Erica replies casually as if it was easy work, which it may very well have been. But I don’t care if she didn’t have to work very hard for the money I am paying her. I just care that she did her job and found this woman. But I’m not quite ready to hand over £1000 yet. I still need to know more.

‘Who is she?’ I ask,

‘Her name is Alexandra Burton. She is thirty six years old, and she lives in Clapham in South London.’

It feels good to finally have a name to put to the face that has tormented me for so long. Now my thoughts of frustration and revenge can be spliced with more personal details rather than just an image of a blonde woman walking away from my house. These photographs show Alexandra sitting outside a cafe enjoying the sunshine.

Enjoying her life while mine falls apart.

‘Okay, so why is she doing this?’ I ask as I put the photos back into the envelope.

‘That’s what I am still looking into,’ Erica replies as the lunchtime hordes of London rush by all around us.

‘How did you find her?’

‘I was able to get access to further CCTV footage near your home based on the direction in which she had been walking. From that, I was able to see her getting into a vehicle on a street around the corner from yours. A search on the registration plate of that vehicle gave me her name, date of birth and address.’

I’m impressed by Erica’s work, although it is precisely the kind of work that I am paying her to do.

‘That’s great, thanks. This is a good start.’

‘Yes, it is. I will continue to watch Alexandra and see what I can learn from her movements but finding out exactly what she is doing and why will require much deeper investigative work.’

I already know from the way Erica said those words that she means it is going to cost me more money if I want her to carry out that “deeper investigative work.”

‘How much?’ I ask, cutting to the chase because we are standing in the middle of a city that was built on that mindset.

‘I’ll need another thousand pounds. That’s for bugs.’

‘Bugs?’

‘Recording devices. I can place them in her home if I can gain entry or even access her phone records.

‘That sounds illegal.’

‘That’s because it is.’

Suddenly an additional thousand pounds doesn’t seem too steep. Instead, I’m more worried about the fact that we are now entering territory that could see one or both of us fall foul of the law.

‘I don’t know if I want anything like that,’ I confess, starting to sweat a little and not just because of the sun beaming down on us from overhead.

‘I appreciate that, but it might be the only way to find out what she is doing. Other than going and asking her to her face, of course.’

‘Can’t you do that?’ I suggest, perhaps a little naively.

‘I could, but why would she tell me? And all it would serve to do then would be to tip her off to the fact that someone has been looking into her. She could start being more cautious or disappear completely, and then you would never know what she was really up to.’

I nod my head because Erica has a point. She is obviously good at her job and has been doing this long enough to know all the outcomes of all the different moves she could make. That’s comforting, but it’s offset somewhat by the fact that she isn’t as clean-cut of a PI as I thought she was.

No wonder her website was so basic.

She probably has just as much to hide as the people she investigates.

‘Do I have to decide now?’ I ask, wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead and glancing around nervously at some of the people rushing past us as if they can tell that this conversation might not be a legitimate one.

‘No, like I said. I will keep an eye on her and see what I can find out that way. I appreciate that you don’t want to go down the more extreme route, and