Building Security

"We're looking for a cat," I repeated, because my first attempt at winning the guards' trust had so spectacularly failed that my panicking logic suggested repetition might somehow make the line more convincing.

It did not.

"What cat?" asked the older guard, the one holding the torch, now sweeping it back and forth between me, Poppy, and the empty space behind us, where, needless to say, there was not a single cat, real or imagined.

"A grey one," Poppy said, unexpectedly quickly, picking up my ridiculous lie with a professional resolve that, honestly, startled me more than the fact of our arrest itself. "Belongs to a neighbour. She's terribly upset."

"At nine in the evening. Behind a closed pub. The two of you."

"Cats don't pick convenient times," I said, with the desperate sincerity that, in hindsight, probably sounded like a line from a badly directed comedy sketch.

The younger guard, radio clipped to his belt crackling now and then with static, looked us over with the expression that made it perfectly clear he believed not one word we'd said, but also didn't consider us dangerous enough to spend more than five minutes of his evening sorting out.

"ID," he said simply, holding out his hand.

We handed our IDs over with the meekness of two people who had suddenly grasped that their entire detective adventure had come down to explaining to a private security firm — not the police, as it turned out, though at the time the distinction felt purely theoretical — why they'd been hiding behind pallets round the back of a closed pub, a pub, as the older guard helpfully explained in a brief but informative lecture, with ties to local criminal circles going back to the nineties, which explained the heightened attention the security company paid to any suspicious activity in the area.

"Wellington Court," the older guard read off my ID, and something in his expression shifted — not softened, exactly, but grew more thoughtful. "You live there?"

"Yes," I said, not entirely sure where the question was heading.

"Your building manager — that's Grimshaw?"

I blinked, caught off guard that a name which, until recently, had occupied nothing more than a dull background role at residents' meetings had suddenly surfaced from the mouth of a stranger, in a suspicious alley, of all places.

"Yes," I repeated. "Why?"

The guard exchanged a glance with his colleague — brief, almost imperceptible, but one that did not escape my now thoroughly trained eye for suspicious detail — and handed back our IDs with the particular caution of someone returning an item that had unexpectedly turned out not to be what he'd taken it for.

"No reason," he said. "Just asking. Next time, if you're looking for cats, try daylight. Less chance of getting mistaken for burglars."

We were let go without any further questions — which, frankly, surprised me nearly as much as the encounter itself — and Poppy and I, trying not to run but moving with as much speed as dignity allowed for two grown adults, hurried out of the alley towards a lit street.

"'A grey cat,'" Poppy mimicked, once we were far enough away to allow ourselves a nervous laugh. "Dave, that was awful. Absolutely, impressively awful."

"You went along with my version!"

"Because the alternative was staying silent while you kept insisting on the cat, which would have looked even worse."

We stopped by the lit window of an all-night shop to catch our breath, and it was then I noticed my hands were still slightly shaking — not from fear of the guards themselves, but from that strange, unsettling feeling left behind by the question about Grimshaw.

"Poppy," I said slowly, "why on earth would a private security guard, in some random alley, know the name of our building manager and react to it — specifically?"

She looked at me, and for the first time all evening there was no trace of her usual scepticism in her eyes — only the same uneasy thoughtfulness that, evidently, had already started settling in my own head.

"I don't know," she said quietly. "But I don't like it, Dave. I don't like it at all."

We walked home in an unusual silence, both turning over the same thought neither of us was quite ready to say aloud yet: that, perhaps, all this time, we'd been watching the wrong man.

At home, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea I'd made almost mechanically, hardly tasting it, I opened my laptop and typed "Bartholomew Grimshaw" into a search engine, alongside the word "manager" — something I really should have done weeks earlier, if my detective energy hadn't been entirely consumed by Nigel's wardrobe and laundry timetable.

The results were sparse but telling: a three-year-old note about a residents' association on a neighbouring street terminating its contract with Grimshaw's management company "following an internal audit," with no further detail; a forum thread from another building where someone posting as "vex_london" complained about "strange estimates" and "investigations that mysteriously go quiet"; and a single comment beneath that post, left a few months earlier by a user with no profile picture: "be careful, you're not the only one asking questions."

I showed Poppy what I'd found over a video call, even though it was nearly midnight, and she, rather than her usual scepticism, only gave a low whistle.

"Dave," she said seriously, "I think we've accidentally stumbled onto something real. Just not where we were looking for it."

"Do you think we should tell Nigel?" I asked, myself a little surprised that the question had come out, for the first time, not as a joke but as a genuine thought — that, perhaps, it was time to stop following the neighbour and start actually talking to him instead.

"I think," Poppy said after a pause, "we should start by getting some sleep. And tomorrow we can decide what to do with all of it — the guards, Grimshaw, and, good grief, even that woman with the scar over her eyebrow you're apparently now going to hunt down across every social network in London."

She was right about that last part. I went to bed at three in the morning, having found the woman with the scar on precisely none of the social networks, but having thoroughly convinced myself of one simple thing: whatever was going on in this building, it was far bigger, and far more serious, than the strange habits of one umbrella-loving neighbour.

The following evening, running into Nigel on the landing between floors, I felt, for the first time in this entire investigation, not my usual detective's thrill, but something considerably less comfortable — something close to guilt. He looked tired, genuinely tired, not the performed weariness I'd grown used to seeing in his excuses about the gym and his war novel, but the kind that settles on a man carrying a weight he can share with no one.

"Everything all right?" I asked, and the question came out more sincerely than I'd planned.

"Yes," he said. "Just tired. Busy week."

I nodded and carried on up the stairs, but halfway up I stopped, turned back, and, on a sudden impulse I regretted within the second for my own indecision, still didn't say out loud what was on the tip of my tongue: "Nigel, if you need help — with anything at all — I'm here." Instead I just said, "Night, then," and went up to my flat, where the board was waiting, full of questions, but, it seemed, answering the most important one of all less and less clearly: what exactly was I supposed to do with everything I now knew.