This was a tough one. On the one hand it was a paying gig. On the other, I was way too close. And if I did find Galatea’s husband, and he did turn out to not want her any more, and all this stuff about the past catching up with them was nothing but a story she was using to make herself feel better, what then? “I’ll look into it,” I said.
“Thank you. I—I have money.”
“I’d hope you would. This ain’t no charity lady.” I did the last bit in a bad Bogart voice, which confused her.
“How do I…? That is, how much do I…?” Oh this was getting unbearable. I had to get this dame out of my office before I lost it.
“We’ll sort that out when I find your husband. Until then I’ll stay in touch. Give your details to my … give me your details, and we can sort out the fine print later. You’re clearly still in a bad place.”
She rose with that same brought-to-life-by-angel-fire grace I remembered Elise having. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”
“I’m really not. Believe me.”
I took down a couple of other bits of information—her address and phone number, mostly. It turned out she didn’t know that much about her husband’s life outside their home, which was odd. And, though I hated to think it, another point on the side of his being a bad guy. Whether that meant the normal cheating love-rat kind of bad guy or the more complicated secretly a vampire or a gangster or a vampire gangster kind of bad guy, I wasn’t going to speculate. Basically I had his name, and the fact that he was an estate agent, and that he probably worked somewhere in Brentford. Still, I’d worked with less.
Once she was gone I sat back at my desk, stared blankly at a spreadsheet I’d forgotten how to update, and cried. This was unfair. Right when I thought I’d got all the other last things I needed cleaned up and dealt with, the universe had to come along with its fucked in the head sense of humour and give me a new last thing I needed. It was bad enough knowing that my as-good-as-dead best friend had a bunch of spooky doubles running around without the one spooky double who didn’t know about all the other spooky doubles turning up in my office.
And what sort of man doesn’t tell his own fucking wife where he fucking works. Stupid question; probably the same sort of man who marries an animated statue with no past in the first place. Because sure, maybe he was being all noble and trusting and shit, but I’ve never gone far wrong betting against human decency and it was likely that he just cared more about the fact that she was hot, vulnerable, and would do him than about little details like where she came from or if she’d ever been trafficked into sexual slavery.
Fuck it, maybe I was projecting. I liked to think that I would have taken Elise in even if she hadn’t been absurdly easy on the eyes and I hadn’t been essentially forced into it by a swarm of sentient rats. But, honestly, I couldn’t have sworn to it in court.
Anyway. Job. Whoever the guy was, I’d been hired to find him. Edward Brown was about as common a name as you could get—hell it was so common that the wikipedia disambiguation page for men called Edward Brown listed other disambiguation pages that disambiguated searches for men with names a bit like Edward Brown. Add that to a vague idea about his job and where he had, until recently, lived, and I at least had somewhere to start. And how many estate agents could there be in Brentford anyway?
I checked.
That many, huh?
Ringing every estate agent in a major London borough and asking if they have an employee with a completely ordinary name was about the coolest and most exciting thing I’d done on the job in at least six months. And it was cooler and more exciting when after only three hours of calling, holding, checking if people had the authority to give information, worrying about GDPR and holding some more, I finally got an answer.
“Ed Brown?” said the woman on the other end of the line. “Yes, he used to. But he handed in his notice last month.”
“Any idea where he went?”
“I’m not sure I can—”
“Give that information over the phone to a total stranger. I get it. Look I’ve got a license, I’m a real PI, you can look me up.”
There was an ominous sound of keystrokes from the other end of the line “Doing that right now. Wow, your website is really out-of-date.”
“Yeah, I’ve been busy.”
“This looks unbelievably suss.”
“We’re a small business, we don’t have the resources to—”
“I’m sorry but there are a whole bunch of red flags here. I’m going to have to talk to my manager.”
Well shit. “Don’t you da—” Too late. I was cut off by some plinky classical music. Opening a new browser tab, I fired up Google maps and tried to work out if it would be quicker to go to Brentford in person than to sit on the phone listening to a piano concerto more or less indefinitely. 53 minutes on the Piccadilly Line. Almost tempting.
After a wait that could easily have got me to Ravenscourt Park if I’d left there and then, the lady came back. “So my boss says we can’t give out details of former employees because—”
“Please don’t say because of GDPR.”
“Because of GDPR.”
“Between you and me, does anybody at your company know what that actually is, or are they just using it as an excuse to get out of answering questions they don’t want to answer?”
That at least made her laugh. “Please don’t get me started. It’s been a nightmare.”
“And I suppose I’d get the same answer if I showed up in person?”
“Afraid so. Sorry, Kate.”
Okay, desperation gambit time. “You did know the guy, though. Didn’t you.”
“I should get off this line.”
“That’s fair, that’s fair. But—and I’m aware this is clutching at straws—would you be at all open to having the information seduced out of you by a middle-aged lesbian whose job sounds about three times sexier in theory than it is in practice?”
“Well when you say it like that, how can I refuse?”
“People normally find a—hang on did that work?”
“What can I say, you got me curious. I’m off work at five, there’s a fairly decent gastropub near the office. Wear something PI-like.”
I was beginning to feel like I’d been played. “You’re not seriously expecting me to seduce you, are you?”
“Why don’t we see how it goes? I’ll see you there.”
She hung up, and a couple of seconds later my phone buzzed with an unknown number. I wrote this down from our call logs. Which technically violates GDPR but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.
This lady was going to be trouble. I hoped she’d wind up being the right sort of trouble.
What with the travel and the being on hold, it was close to the end of working hours already, so I finished up what little I could work out how to do in the office and set out for Brentford. The bus was going to be a non-starter at this time of day, so I swallowed my pride and my fear of being drawn literally into hell, and got on the damned Tube at Covent Garden.
It was proper rush hour, so the platform was packed, and I edged my way along to the end like they always tell you to do on the announcements. In theory, one of the things I love about London is being smack in the heart of the joyful chaos of life in a thriving metropolis. Then again in theory—I don’t know, I’m not a scientist—but probably there’s loads of stuff that’s true in theory that isn’t true when you test it out. Like was there something about bumblebees? Anyway in real life the joyful chaos of the thriving metropolis was hot and crowded and awful and inconvenient. I missed one train because it was physically impossible to cram any more human bodies onto it, and as it was roaring away from the platform I could have sworn I heard a sound like sixty dogs barking in the tunnel behind it. Then again, it was the Tube, I’d heard weirder sounds.