Ghigau 25

Monday 17th evening 

Hermione wanted to know why a young, handsome man was so interested in her, and her business affairs. He had revealed very little about himself and though at first this had made him seem enigmatic and interesting, now it just looked suspicious. Google had come up with nothing apart from one two year old post on his instagram with generic beach photos that could have been taken anywhere. He claimed his job meant keeping a low profile on social media but she didn’t know whether to believe him. She really knew nothing about him, except for what he had told her, and that could easily be lies. He had never even invited her to his home.

    Telling herself it was about self protection (but in truth the possibility of a little espionage excited her)  Hermione decided she would follow her lover home and see where he lived. Perhaps he was a complete fraud and it would turn out he lived with his parents in a hi-rise block in Tower Hamlets. 

    An opportunity presented itself on Monday evening. As usual, her suggestion they meet at his place had been brushed off. Nevertheless, they had spent the late afternoon and early evening pleasantly enough in her bed. There had been no further attempt to go through her things; as far as she knew. Afterwards, when he suggested they shower together, Hermione made an excuse and left him alone. Once she could hear the water running, she went downstairs, stepped outside, and put her plan in to action.

    Later, scrubbed and brilliantined, and with not a hair out of place, her mysterious  paramour patted her on the bottom as he left, which irritated her as it always did.  She wasn’t sad to see him go. Perhaps, after all, it was just the sex she was interested in. 

    When his bright yellow Porsche roared into life, it had, unbeknownst to him, a tiny tracking device magnetically attached to the underside. 

    Amazing what you can buy online these days, Hermione thought as she watched his car turn out of the driveway.

    She had downloaded an app for the tracking device, and logged herself in as soon as the belligerent sound of the Porsche faded. A map appeared on her screen and on it, a little red pulsating dot moving along Ruislip High Street, heading east. She felt like a spy or a secret agent. It was rather exciting.  She waited a few minutes and then grabbed her car keys.

    As she pulled her BMW out on to the road, the Porsche still wasn’t that far away and had been stationary for a while according to the tell-tale red dot. ‘Why has he stopped?’ Hermione muttered to herself, as she crawled along a side road glancing down occasionally at the dot drawing nearer and nearer on her phone.  She parked in a convenient gap just around the corner, cut the engine and waited.

    There was a Tesco express right at that location she knew, perhaps he’d gone in to buy something. Sure enough, within five minutes the dot began to move again. Hermione’s heartbeat speeded up as she gripped the steering wheel and checked her mirror, before pulling away from the kerb.

    It was quite difficult following a car, she soon discovered, even with a tracker; nothing like the movies. She couldn’t concentrate on the road and watch her phone at the same time, which meant that by the time she registered the route her quarry had taken, she was often already heading down the wrong road. She decided the best tactic was to stop every few minutes and check the Porsche’s location, put that information into her own Sat Nav and drive there, then stop and check again. This worked much better. When they joined the M4 and turned east, it became clear they were heading in to central London. 

    As she drove, the sun’s white-gold reflection dipped and swooped across the city's distant glass towers, its nuclear flash intermittently blinding her; she donned her Valentino sunglasses. 

    The metropolis was an assault on the senses. Bright red buses growled through the gears and belched smoke up and down their segregated lanes, emergency vehicle sirens wailed, and traffic lights blinked silent instructions. Heat shimmered off the bonnets of idling black-cabs, their drivers dozed-off and slack-jawed. 

    The journey had taken about forty minutes; the little red dot had come to rest and it looked as if it wasn’t going to move again. Less than a hundred yards away, around the corner, Hermione sat watching her screen. 

    If this was home, where lover-boy had said he was going, the location wasn’t Docklands, as he had intimated, but rather Holland Park, which was several steps up the social hierarchy of London’s neighbourhoods. 

    She decided to investigate on foot. Emerging from the air-conditioned car was like stepping in to a sauna. Holding her phone in one hand and watching the red dot carefully, in case it began to move again, she made her way up Holland Park Avenue and then onto Princedale Road, a pleasant street of nineteenth-century pale brick and white-stucco villas, lined with sycamore trees.

    The heat showed no signs of abating, despite the sun having now dipped below the horizon, and the short walk produced beads of sweat on Hermione’s forehead and made her clothes stick to her skin.  She wished she had worn trainers and not leather loafers.

    The yellow Porsche was tucked in to the kerb outside a mid-terrace home about half way along the street.  The house had a raised ground-floor entrance, at the top of a small flight of stone steps, and a glossy, dark-green front door. To the left of the porch, iron railings incorporating a swing gate leading to narrow steps down, stood guard along the lip of the semi-basement wall.  Hermione held her breath as she approached the house, hoping her hastily donned disguise of wide-brimmed straw hat and baggy linen overalls, that she normally wore for housecleaning, would prevent her being recognised. The temptation to look directly in the window as she passed by was almost irresistible. Instead, she managed to incline her head just enough to use her peripheral vision, and get an impression of the room within.

    It was him, no mistaking that cocky stance. He had his back to the window and was holding a phone to his right ear. She walked on, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder.

    Half an hour later she was back in her car, parked in a convenient spot, watching the house. Another hour ticked by and, as the daylight faded, the faux victorian street-lamps flickered into life one by one, casting spindly shadows over the pavement, while the illuminated nameplates on the smart houses formed a twinkling necklace along their facades. Hermione shifted in her seat, easing the pressure on her coccyx, and wished she had brought something to eat and drink.

    At around 8pm her patience was rewarded. The man who had, only a few hours before, been doing things to her she had never let anyone else do, emerged onto the steps of the house with what was clearly his wife and two children. The children looked to be about six or seven years old, a boy and a girl, both with tousled sandy locks, cut long. The woman was slender and elegant with ash-blonde hair in a pony tail, and wore loose, expensive clothing.  

    The family stood for a few seconds in the dusk, debating which direction to take; Hermione sunk down in her seat. After some sleeve tugging and imploring gestures, the children appeared to win the debate and the family held hands as they set off in the direction of Holland Park Avenue, away from Hermione.

    Bastard. Utter bloody, flaming, goddam, slime-ball, bastard. Muttered Hermione under her breath.

    Waiting until her quarry was well and truly out of sight, she stepped out of her car and walked back past the house. She ought to throw a brick through its window. A brick with a note tied to it saying, ‘CHEATER’, but what would that achieve? She didn’t really want to hurt a family who were probably completely unaware that their husband and daddy was a lying, conniving, sexual deviant — aren’t they all? She thought, dispiritedly.

    She noticed a brass plate by the door with a doorbell and a name-card above it. She stepped closer, curious. The card read ‘COMPTON-WISE’. Which was strange because the man she had been in bed with all afternoon was called, Harry; Harry Gallo.

    Above her head, the black lens of the discreetly mounted camera looked on.