The Valley

Will Thwaite

Copyright © 2014 Will Thwaite

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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‘When did you last have sex, John?’

I tried to think of a clever reply, but Milburn did not wait for it.

‘Come on John, you’re nearly forty years old. You’re divorced.’

‘We’re separated.’

‘You can call it what you want, but your wife doesn’t live with you any more. And there’s no replacement girlfriend in sight, is there?’

I yawned and instinctively glanced down at my watch. But it was no longer around my wrist. They had taken it away several hours ago, along with my belt, phone, wallet and shoelaces.

I looked up. The two men facing me across the table were smiling at my discomfort. On the left was Detective Chief Inspector Milburn, a fifty-something Ulsterman with a grey moustache, grey hair, grey eyes and a crooked nose: half accountant, half thug. Next to him sat Steve: a young muscular detective constable with an Estuary accent who towered over both Milburn and me. Until now, he had let his boss do most of the talking, but now he leaned in, so his head was level with mine.

‘What’s the name of your ex, John?’

‘Karen,’ I said wearily. I had already told them twice.

‘Has she got a new fella?’

I hesitated. Karen had mentioned someone called Nick a couple of times, but I had not pressed her for details. The wounds were still too fresh.

Steve sensed my unease. ‘If she has a new man, I suppose he’d be a sort of father figure to your kids?’

I kept calm. ‘Actually I live nearby. I see the boys almost every week.’

‘You’re a good dad, then?’

‘I try not to be a bad one.’

‘You will be, if you’re behind bars for the next twenty years,’ Milburn said.

I turned to face him. He was stroking the ends of his moustache and studying me as though I was an exhibit in a museum.

‘If you threaten me,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask for my lawyer and –‘

‘What lawyer would that be, John?’ Steve asked.

I tried to remember the name of the solicitor I had met at a conference a couple of weeks ago. He probably did not do criminal cases but someone in his firm might. I wondered whether they credit-checked clients before taking them on.

‘We can get you a lawyer if you want, John,’ Milburn said. ‘Or you can just tell us what happened and we can all go home. Why don’t we go through it again? Start off with why you chose to meet Lucy Grainger on Valentine’s night.’

I sighed. ‘It was a business meeting, not a date.’

‘A business meeting on 14
^th
February that ended with you producing a bottle of wine from your office fridge,’ Milburn scoffed. ‘We don’t tend to have wine at our meetings, do we, Steve?’

Steve grinned inanely.

‘So you meet Lucy Grainger
at your office, after everyone else has left,’ Milburn continued. ‘You drink a bottle of wine; then the two of you head off to her place.’

‘We were hungry. It was Valentine’s night. The restaurants were all full.’

‘And when you arrive at her home, you both take off your clothes?’

‘We were caught in the rain,’ I protested. ‘She put them in the tumble dryer, that’s all.’

Steve leaned in again. ‘So why didn’t you tell us about all this getting naked business when we first questioned you?’

I said nothing. But even silence had a cost, and Milburn made sure I realised it, drumming his fingers up and down on the table where the twin-deck tape recorder was placed, forcing me to look at it as it captured and preserved my refusal to answer.

His fingers suddenly stopped mid-drum roll.

‘All right, John,’ he said, ‘you admit you were all alone with Lucy Grainger in her house in Chelsea. She’s five younger than you, a good looking blonde, early thirties, bit of a peach — and guess what, she happens to be married to the same bloke who screwed you over.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Nearly ten years ago, you went into business with Max Grainger. He got rich. You stayed poor. What do you call that, if it’s not getting screwed?’

Another pause. I tried not to fidget. When Milburn next spoke, his accent sounded harsher.

‘But now, John, your luck’s changed. It seems that Max Grainger’s wife is a little bit bored with him. So what do you do? You open some more wine. It’s late, it’s Valentine’s night, you’re both in dressing gowns, maybe she’s spilling out of hers a little bit. Her hubby’s abroad and you both need some mutual comforting.’

‘I’ve already told you what happened.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Milburn said. ‘You’ve told us a pile of shit.’

As he said ‘shit’ he slammed his fist on the table and pushed back his chair, its legs screeching across the tiled floor. He loomed over me, looking every inch the old bruiser, then strode over to my side of the table, standing directly behind me. I tried to concentrate on Steve – big muscular Steve who would do anything to impress his boss – but then I felt Milburn’s tie brush against the back of my neck, and smelt the tobacco and mints in his breath, and I knew the bristles of his moustache were only a few millimetres from my ear. Then he started shouting.

‘For fuck’s sake, John! How long have you been banging Lucy Grainger? It wasn’t just that night, was it? So how long? A year? A month? Just fucking tell us and we can all get some sleep!’

I turned around but Milburn kept moving and now he was on the other side of me, squatting on his haunches.

‘Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong?’ he whispered. ‘Maybe this was a new situation and you didn’t get anywhere that night and that was your problem. Did you get too frisky too fast? Did the wine go to your head? Did she threaten to tell her rich hubby about your wandering hands? That would have been awkward, wouldn’t it? A million pound investment about to disappear, unless you made her disappear instead.’

He walked over to Steve. ‘We can be understanding about this, can’t we Steve? We’re all men. We know the score.’

Steve nodded. Milburn turned back to me, arms outstretched.

‘There’s plenty of evidence that she led you on, John; all that slipping into something more comfortable routine. It’s called mixed signals. We get it all the time in here. We understand it. Judges understand it. And we can make sure a jury understands it too. But first you’ve got to tell us what happened.’

‘I’ve told you already,’ I said.

Milburn’s fist crashed down on the table.

‘Don’t, Johnny, don’t!’ he shouted.

I thought he was about to hit me. His whole face was red and contorted as he stood over me.

‘I’ve said we’ll be understanding, and I’ve said we’ll be reasonable, so don’t give us any more crap about you only giving Lucy Grainger a quick kiss and a cuddle on your way out. Just tell us what fucking happened.’

‘I didn’t kill her,’ I screamed.

As my voice echoed around the small soundproofed room, Milburn slowly sat down, his eyes flickering from the tape recorder to the dark glass mirror on the side wall. Behind it, I imagined several of his colleagues were observing the bead of sweat that I could feel trickling down the back of my neck.

‘Okay, John, let’s go over it again, shall we?’

And so we did, three more times, their questions alternating with threats. And each time, to keep me talking, Milburn divulged a little bit more about what the police had so far discovered in the Graingers’ Chelsea home – which was chiefly lots of blood, all of it poor Lucy’s, but no actual body. The congealed fluids and spatter marks indicated that she had been attacked in her bedroom with a knife, and either killed or severely wounded sometime between midnight and 4am. Shortly afterwards, she, or more likely her carcass, had been removed from the scene, probably wrapped up in a rug that had also vanished.

Eventually Milburn called a halt to the interrogation and I was led to a white concrete cell by two grimly silent police constables. There I lay awake on a shiny PVC mattress, huddled under a grey blanket, breathing in the ingrained aroma of bleach and vomit, and feeling it seep into my hair and skin until I stank of it as well; all the time wondering what the police forensic team would find in the clothes they had taken from me, and in the fingerprints and fibres I would have left behind in the Graingers’ house, revealing exactly where I had been and what I had touched.

A few hours later, the lights were turned back on, and I was served breakfast in my cell: a paper cup full of lukewarm tea and a stale bun. Then I was marched back into the interview room by two new, but similarly silent, constables. Milburn was already waiting for me, freshly shaven and wearing a different shirt and tie. He had a new sidekick as well: big Steve had been replaced by a petite, dark-haired female detective who insisted that I call her Joy.

She asked me about my childhood in South Africa and said she had recently been to Cape Town. Soon we were talking about beaches that I dimly remembered from my mother’s old photographs.

‘You don’t look like a South African,’ Joy said.

‘You don’t look like a detective.’

She laughed. We were both right. My pale white skin and straight black hair conform to neither the African nor Afrikaner stereotypes. As for Joy, she seemed to be about thirty years old, and was good looking in a slightly clinical way – her black hair tied back in a neat bun and her clear skin looking impossibly fresh against a crisp white shirt. If I had seen her on the street outside and been asked to guess her job, I would have gone for pharmacist.

‘At least I can occasionally sound like a detective,’ she said in a voice that was flat and accentless. ‘But you, John, you don’t sound like a South African.’

‘Maybe I’m not anymore. I’ve lived here since I was thirteen.’

‘So you think you’re British?’

‘Partly,’ I said.

‘Partly,’ she echoed.

I noticed she was wearing shiny patent leather shoes with pointed toes. When listening to me, she often smiled and without meaning to, I started smiling back. Even Milburn seemed to relax as Joy asked me to go over my story once more, just for her benefit, and gently pushed for clarification on a few points. Her questions darted around my whole life, one moment pressing for details about my business or my children, then asking how I had first met Max Grainger, then picking up on something I had claimed Lucy Grainger told me that night at her home. She met my answers with smiles and nods, and the sort of silence that keeps you talking.

It took me a while to understand exactly what linked her questions together. She was insinuating that I had another motive for murdering Lucy: I had killed her for Max. After all, we were old buddies. We did not see too much of each other now, because we lived in separate worlds, Max among the super-rich and me among the wannabes down in The Valley. But our sort of friendship stays solid forever, and we had a powerful motivation to get together again. I was desperate for Max’s money; and he needed someone whom Lucy would trust enough to let into their house, so she could be murdered when Max was hundreds of miles away, establishing a cast iron alibi. Of course this clashed with Milburn’s theory that I hated Max and had killed his wife out of revenge, but Joy used that to her advantage, quoting back to me everything I had said as evidence that I was his partner in crime. And in the confusion this created, I began contradicting myself.

‘So you actually went into Lucy’s bedroom?’ Joy asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Was that before or after you got changed into Max’s dressing gown?’

‘After.’

‘What was Lucy wearing?’

‘Her dressing gown.’

‘Did she get changed with you?’

‘No, afterwards.’

‘So, to start with, she was sitting in her wet clothing on the double bed?’

‘No, she was in her dressing gown, as I told you.’

‘But then surely she must have got changed before you?’

Soon all my answers were starting with ‘I think…’ or ‘I might have….’ or ‘I can’t remember’. The silences between questions and answers grew longer, punctuated only by the sound of Milburn’s fingers drumming up and down on the table next to the tape recorder. When at last I was led away for an early lunch back in my cell, I was too embarrassed to look Joy in the eyes.

The questioning session after lunch was short and brutal. There was no pretence of friendship now, from either Joy or Milburn: just an all-out effort to break me. I had only one defence left, and I clung to it, insisting that I could not remember anything clearly from that Valentine’s night because I had been drunk, and this magically explained all my inconsistencies. Joy’s teasing smile changed to a look of disbelief, then derision. But beneath her sarcasm, I detected a hint of urgency. Milburn started intervening more, sometimes shouting, sometimes scoffing, sometimes threatening. A couple of times, I saw him glance at his watch.

‘When do you have to release me?’ I asked.

They both ignored the question, so I repeated it.

‘It depends on what we charge you with,’ Joy said.

‘So when do you need to charge me?’

‘We can apply for an extension.’

‘Have you applied for one?’

At that, Milburn terminated the interview. Both of them left the room. Two minutes later Joy came back alone and told me they would release me if I signed a statement. When I asked for a pen and paper, she laughed and said someone would draft something for me, based on the answers I had already given.

It was another half an hour before she returned with a printed statement she wanted me to sign. There was no attempt to fit me up. I recognised some of the exact phrases I had used. But I still haggled over every paragraph, insisting that some of the certitudes I had previously uttered were deleted in case they were later disproved. The last wrangle was over the time I had left Lucy’s house. Originally I had told Milburn that it was around ten-thirty. But now, I was less sure. We negotiated over words; Joy suggested the compromise phrase of ‘before midnight’ and, in return for the promise of instant freedom, I signed.

There was one final delay to my release. The duty sergeant could not find the belt that had been taken from me when I had been led down to the cells. By now Milburn and Joy had long since disappeared, and as the sergeant fumbled around for the appropriate Lost Property forms, I took pity on him, telling him not to worry: the belt was old and my chinos stayed up by themselves. Its loss could go unreported.