The Valley (14 page)

It was less than ten miles away and we bounced over the waves at top speed. Outside it began to drizzle. I turned to Max and saw him smiling as the rain splashed down on the deck, washing it yet again.

As we approached the harbour, I could see a queue of small boats bobbing up and down as they waited at a jetty equipped with three large petrol pumps. Max turned the engines down and gave me my last instructions.

‘We’ll queue up as if we are buying fuel. Officially you’re supposed to tell the Harbour Master if you land here but no one bothers – especially when it’s raining. Just jump onto the quayside and walk straight out. There’ll be some taxis outside.’

‘Where will you go to?’

‘France probably. Maybe Spain.’

I gestured to the fuel gauge. ‘You’ll need to buy some diesel.’

Max laughed. ‘There’s something called wind, John. It’s free, it creates no record of where you’ve been, and there’s enough of it to take me anywhere in the world I want to go to.’

‘How about your crew?’

‘They’re used to flying out to strange places to meet me. They won’t object to an extra week’s leave.’

He looked at me. ‘Whilst I’m away, we shouldn’t phone or email each other. If anyone asks you anything, just remember: you never came to the marina; you never met Gerry; you never came on board this boat.’

‘Got it,’ I said, and forced a smile.

‘I’ll never forget what you’ve done,’ he said, clasping my shoulder, his hand less than six inches from the gun concealed in my pack.

When we reached the small harbour, I stepped onto the narrow jetty and kept walking, along the quayside, up the slipway, then through the main entrance and out to the street. There were two minicabs waiting in the rain. As I approached the nearest one, I thought I heard the powerful growl of the
Glen Avon’s
engines in the distance, but nothing – absolutely nothing – would have persuaded me to turn around.

It took two taxi rides and one hydrofoil crossing to take me from Bembridge to where my car was parked near the marina. It was after eight o’clock by the time I clambered into the Ford Focus, placing the backpack with the gun inside on the passenger seat, and keyed the postcode of Angela’s cottage into the SatNav.

I had already called ahead to say I was running late. A woman called Jane had answered. I had tried to persuade her that they should start supper without me but she had insisted that they would wait.

As I drove through the outskirts of Southampton, I wondered what Max was doing. It was easy to imagine him alone at sea, miles from any port, sailing through the night, smiling as the rain lashed down and washed away any trace of Gerry.

It was only after I had turned off the major road that I noticed a car had been following me for some time. Five miles further on, the SatNav instructed me to turn off again, this time down a narrow country lane. The car behind turned off as well.

It could not be the police, I reasoned. They could not have discovered what had happened on board the
Glen Avon
– at least not yet. But if Gerry had arrived at the marina with some accomplices, they would have seen me spirit him away. And when only I returned, they could easily have followed me. I tried to recollect what Gerry had said to me and whether he had indicated that he might not be alone. But all I could remember was that he owned a boat called a Benetti and it was ninety-six feet long.

The glare in my mirror did not go away. I gently increased my speed, wondering if I was going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and checking in mirrors. Max had sailed away as if he did not have a care in the world. But Max had money.

The road twisted up a steep hill and through a dark wood. The car behind stuck doggedly to my tail. Apart from us, there was no other traffic. I glanced over to SatNav. It was two miles to the next village.

As I approached the first houses, I sped up rather than slowed down, ignoring the 30mph sign. Around a corner I saw an entrance sign to a pub’s car park. I swung into it, going much too fast, splashing through a large puddle before I skidded to a stop. I switched off my headlights and looked over my shoulder, clutching my backpack, as I waited for my follower to go past. I waited five seconds, ten seconds – no one appeared. I unzipped the top of my bag and put my hand inside, feeling the gun’s barrels. A car swept past and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I waited another minute, then reversed out of the pub car park, and drove in the opposite direction, ignoring the repeated demands of the SatNav to turn around. I added another fifteen miles to my journey, driving in a huge circle through the relentless rain. I was shaking by the time I arrived at the cottage. I thought I might have a minute to compose myself, but the front door opened almost immediately and a large man with dark hair and glasses strode towards me.

‘You must be John!’ he called out, as I reluctantly opened my car door. ‘Angela has been telling us all about you.’

I grabbed my backpack and opened the boot, where my suitcase was.

‘Do you want a hand?’ the man asked.

‘Could you take the case?’ I said, keeping a tight hold of my backpack.

He led me into the cottage, walking through a hallway into a large kitchen. Angela was standing over a pot, gently stirring it. She turned and smiled, and I briefly remembered why I had come. She walked over to me, giving me a sister-like peck on the cheek.

‘This is Paul,’ she said, gesturing to the man who had let me into the house. ‘He’s the closest thing I have to a boss in this country, so I don’t want you making up any stories about me.’

‘My lips are sealed,’ I said, as I shook his hand.

‘And this is Jane, Paul’s wife.’

A small mousy-haired woman emerged at the bottom of the stairs. I carefully lowered my backpack to the floor, making sure the gun did not clatter on the tiles, and strode over to her. ‘Good to meet you,’ I said. ‘Are you another pilot as well?’

‘No, I’m a police officer.’

The smile must have frozen on my face, because she quickly added: ‘Yes, my job usually has that effect on people.’

I laughed nervously. ‘Are you with the Sussex police?’

‘No, City of London. I’m with the Fraud Squad.’

‘Don’t look so worried,’ Paul said. ‘She’s just an accountant with a badge. Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving.’

I brought the backpack over to the table with me, surreptitiously placing it under my seat. I was offered a glass of wine and a large bowl of pasta. Gradually, I began to relax, even momentarily stepping away from my chair to extract from my suitcase a bottle of champagne which I had brought Jane as a present.

When I had finished eating, Angela turned to me. ‘So where did you go for your corporate awayday?’

‘What?’

‘I thought that was what you were doing with Max all day?’

I suddenly remembered that this was what I had told her. ‘Oh yes, we called it a management bonding exercise.’

The others laughed but Angela gave me a strange look.

‘Did you go somewhere good?’ Paul asked.

‘It was all right. I can’t remember its name. The something Arms, I think.’’

‘I wonder which one it was.’ he said. ‘I know most of the hotels around here.’

I pretended to rack my brains. ‘I couldn’t even tell you where we were, I’m afraid. We had a bit of an emergency in the office, so my finance director drove me there and back, and I was glued to my mobile phone the whole way.’

Angela started clearing away the plates. As she took mine, she stopped and sniffed.

‘John, have you been near a fire?’

‘We had a barbecue,’ I said. ‘It’s a South African thing. We call them braaies. It was part of our team building.’

‘Weren’t you cold?’ Angela said.

‘That’s why I stayed close to the fire.’

I smiled at Angela but she did not smile back, so I turned to Jane. ‘I’m really sorry, but it’s been a long day. Would you mind if I call it a night? I’m absolutely exhausted.’

Angela said she would show me to my room. I grabbed my backpack and suitcase, and followed her up the stairs to a small, chintzy room with a very small double bed. I said goodnight to her and was rewarded with another peck on my cheek.

I fell into bed feeling certain that I would swiftly fall asleep. But I was wrong. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw Max, bending over Gerry’s wounded body, twisting his neck round and round, until Gerry’s legs twitched and jerked and his broken arm flapped helplessly, like a bird with a broken wing.

I woke to the sound of a door being slammed. Next I heard footsteps crunching across the gravel, then Angela’s voice, and a car driving away. I looked around my bedroom, slowly remembering where I was, before staring with horror at my backpack on the carpet. It was wide open, with Max’s shotgun lying on the top.

I sat bolt upright, remembering how my nightmares had kept me awake all night; and how, just before dawn, I had opened up my backpack and held the gun; and that had somehow helped me drift off to sleep.

I leapt out of bed. The door was still closed and there was no sign that anyone had come into the room. I thrust the gun back inside my pack and dressed quickly. When I went downstairs, I took the backpack with me. There was nobody in the kitchen, so I opened the front door, intending to lock my backpack away in the boot of my car. But Paul was standing on the gravel drive and he saw me.

‘Hi there,’ he called out. ‘Did you have a good night’s sleep?’

‘Yes,’ I said, repressing a yawn.

I strolled towards my car. Paul wandered over to it as well, and I could sense him observing me as I slung my backpack inside the boot as quickly as I could, before slamming it shut and locking it.

I turned to face him. ‘Where’s Angela?’

‘Gone off with Jane,’ he said. ‘There’s a market they wanted to look at. Can I make you some coffee?’

I followed him back into the house and sat down at the kitchen table, as he filled up a kettle.

‘Angela told me you’re an internet tycoon?’ he said.

‘That’s probably about as accurate as describing you as a fighter pilot.’

Paul laughed. I could sense him gearing up to ask me a fresh batch of questions so I decided to get mine in first. ‘How long have you known Angela?’

‘About six years,’ he said as he spooned ground coffee into some filter paper. ‘We did long haul together; she met Jane, got on well with her also, and we became friends.’

‘Are you really her boss?’

‘I’m supposed to keep an eye on her when she’s back in England, that’s all. Some of the time she’s on call, although it’s pretty unlikely she’ll ever get used.’

‘Is she doing the right thing staying out in Hong Kong?’

‘Probably. We’ve just had some more redundancies at Heathrow.’

As I helped myself to toast, butter and jam, Paul sat down opposite me. ‘So tell me about your internet business,’ he said. ‘Angela described it as selling hi-tech gizmos to estate agents. Is that right?’

I told him what we did and who we worked for, without once mentioning Max. I was just finishing when Angela and Jane reappeared. For a while all four of us sat drinking coffee, inspecting some carved wooden candle sticks that Jane had bought at the market.

Shortly before noon, Paul and Jane left to meet some friends for lunch, I had been uneasy in their presence, but their departure ratcheted up the pressure even more. It was now just Angela and me alone – the scenario I had prayed for – and yet now it had arrived, I wanted it postponed. My body might have been in the cottage, but my mind was still back on board the
Glen Avon
.

Angela seemed to sense my anxiety. ‘Did Paul interrogate you?’ she asked.

‘A little bit.’

‘He means well. They both do. But they can be a bit…’

‘…Over protective?’

Angela hesitated. ‘Actually I was going to say curious.’

We both smiled. Thin nervous smiles again. And we carried on talking in this disjointed way for nearly an hour, before Angela suggested we walk to a pub in the next village for some lunch.

It was an overcast day. Angela led the way, clutching a map. We walked up the village street, then across a style and into a wood, along a path lined with dead leaves. We emerged at the top of a hill facing open fields. As if on cue, the sun came out, and for a brief moment, the whole valley below was lit up.

‘Look – that’s the sea, I think,’ Angela said.

I looked where she was pointing. On the edge of the horizon I could just see the steel grey English Channel. And immediately I thought of Gerry and turned away.

‘It’s all right. I’m not proposing that we swim in it!’ she said, with a puzzled expression.

‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘My knee’s hurting – an old rugby injury. Do you mind if we keep going?’

We walked on in silence. I wanted to talk to her but I realised that everything I had told her since I had arrived at the cottage had been a succession of lies. And I was not sure she had believed any of them.

When she drew level with me, I tried to put my arm around her but I felt her stiffen, and I settled for threading my hand through the crook of her arm.

She turned to look at me. ’You were very mysterious about your meeting yesterday.’

‘Clueless rather than mysterious.’

‘How many of you came down for it?’

‘Our finance director was there. And Kevin and Andew, and Max of course.’

The lies kept tumbling out of my mouth.

‘I thought Max did not want to get involved with these things?’

‘He changed his mind.’

I imagined she could feel my arm tensing around hers. I changed the subject, asking about her flight over to the UK but she was almost as monosyllabic as I had been.

When we reached the pub, we ordered food and I bought some drinks at the bar. Angela asked for Coca Cola.

‘You never drink alcohol,’ I said, when I returned to the table.

‘It’s not a great mix with my job.’

‘But you’re not about to fly off now, are you?’

‘You’re right. I don’t like drinking much.’

‘Because of your father?’

She looked at me, questioningly.

‘You told me he was a drinker. You said it was one of the reasons you and your mother left New Zealand.’

‘I did not mean to bore you with my family secrets.’

‘You didn’t bore me.’

I glanced around the pub. It was filling up fast. All around us, there seemed to be people talking effortlessly with one another. And here I was, with the girl who I thought was my soulmate, and everything was going wrong. I reached out to put my hand on top of hers, but she snatched it away.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Don’t what?’

Just then one of the bar staff shouted out that our food was ready. I collected the two plates and returned to our small table, where we ate in silence. Eventually I could not stand it any longer.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

She took one more bite of her food and then pushed the plate away. ‘I wanted you to realise that I’m just going to be a friend and not a girlfriend.’

‘You’ve already told me that,’ I said.

‘But you’ve never accepted it, have you? Now I want you to, otherwise we’ll both get hurt.’

‘We don’t have to get hurt,’ I said. ‘Come back to London with me. Stay for a few days.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Angela, what’s all this about?’

‘It’s about being honest with one another,’ she said. ‘I feel I don’t know you. Ever since I’ve met you I think you’ve…’

Her voice tailed off.

I looked at her. ‘Come on, say it.’

After a long pause she said: ‘I think you’ve hidden things from me.’

‘And you’ve been open with me?’

‘Well maybe that’s because…’ she said, and then shook her head. ‘Oh forget it. Maybe we are as bad as each other. Come on, we should go. I told Jane we’d get back by three o’clock.’

She stood up, ending the conversation. We had been inside the pub for barely an hour. As we walked back, it began to rain. We trudged on in total silence, Angela never slowing down.

When we returned, Paul and Jane were waiting for us. I could tell from their faces that they already knew that Angela had ended our relationship. She had probably rehearsed what she was going to say with Jane when they had gone shopping in the morning.

And now they obviously wanted me to leave the room, so Angela could tell them how I had taken the news. For a while I tormented them by staying put, until I decided that prolonging their agony wasn’t worth my own embarrassment, and I said I needed to check some emails.

‘There’s a computer in the study with a broadband connection,’ Paul said.

The room they called the study was a small poky corner room, lined with hardback books. I scanned through my emails, then thought about composing a rude one to Angela, and sending it to her now. But in the end I contented myself with writing a short message to my children and emailing it to Karen to pass on.

After an hour I went back to join the others. They had moved from the kitchen to the living room. As I entered, Paul stopped talking in mid-sentence. There was a short silence which all three of them desperately tried to fill, all talking at the same time.

I waited for them to stop and then told them that something had cropped up at work and I would have to leave early the next morning. I had prepared myself for a volley of questions about this latest lie of mine, but no one said anything.

For a while, we exchanged small talk until I went up to my room, claiming that I had to do some work. Once the door was safely closed behind me, I plucked a Dick Francis paperback from the bookcase and read it on my bed, until I reached a scene where the hero discovered a dead body floating in the sea. After that I just lay very still, staring up at the ceiling.

At seven o clock I roused myself sufficiently to have a bath. Paul had been right. I did smell of smoke, and it did not matter how many times I washed my hair and immersed myself in the hot soapy water, I still thought I could smell it.

When I came down to the kitchen, the others were all there. Paul was complaining that he had endured a cold bath because someone else had used up all the hot water. I started to apologise when Angela interrupted.

‘This’ll cheer you up, Paul,’ she said, brandishing the bottle of champagne I had brought them.

I did not feel like celebrating so I turned to Jane. ‘Wouldn’t you rather keep it? It was meant to be a present for you and Paul.’

Before she could answer, there was a loud pop. I turned around. Angela was holding aloft the opened bottle.

‘I think we all need a drink, don’t we? John’s always telling me that I don’t drink enough, so I intend to prove him wrong. Cheers.’

As Angela and Jane went to find some glasses, Paul stared at me.

‘It was just a joke,’ I said under my breath.

From then on, everything seemed to move at a snail’s pace. First we had to sit down and drink the champagne that no one apart from Angela wanted to drink. Then we found out that the oven’s temperature gauge was wrong and the casserole needed to go back in the Aga for another thirty minutes. As we waited, our conversation became more and more strained.

By the time we sat down to dinner, I did not know how much more I could take. Then Jane turned to me and said, ‘I hear from Angela that you know Max Grainger.’

I looked accusingly towards Angela who was sitting at the opposite end of the table but she just looked down at her food.

‘Yes,’ I said to Jane. ‘Do you know him?’

‘I only know of him. Part of our job is to keep an eye on hedge funds and Alpha Tec is one of the more high profile ones’.

‘Oh really,’ I said. ‘Max always told me Alpha Tec was quite small.’

‘Small but successful. Amazingly successful, really.’

I shifted nervously in my seat. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.’

‘So who’s this Max Grainger fellow?’ Paul said, refilling my glass.

I told them a little bit about how Max and I had ended up in business together. Normally it was easy to talk about Max, but this time I was not quite so fluent. Max’s love of shooting was not so easy to describe now that I had seen him shoot a man. And celebrating his financial success was much harder now I knew it had caused Lucy’s death. I found myself stuttering. Instinctively, I looked to Angela for reassurance. But she was gazing into space, and by the time I had finished my story, it was Jane who seemed to be the most interested.

‘And he invested the money in your business, just like that, with no strings attached?’ she said incredulously.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Tell us about the murder, then,’ Paul suddenly said.

Everyone stared at me. For a moment, no one moved a muscle.

‘Sorry,’ Paul said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it a murder. I meant the abduction of Lucy Grainger. It was in all the newspapers.’

I took a deep breath. A mad part of me wanted to reply: ‘Oh, that murder? I thought you meant the other one I helped to commit yesterday’, just to see how they would react. But this was not a joke. Everyone was leaning forward, waiting to hear what I had to say.

‘It’s okay to call it a murder,’ I said at last. ‘I try not to when I’m with Max, but we all know Lucy’s dead, so murder is probably the right word. There’s not much to say about it though. The police now think it was just a robbery that went wrong.’

Paul cleared his throat. ‘You don’t think it could be anything to do with Max Grainger’s hedge fund, do you? I mean all that money sloshing around – he must have made some enemies?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘The police don’t seem to be any closer to finding the murderer, so I guess it’s as good an explanation as any. They’ve tried most other theories. At one time they thought I did it.’

For the second time that night an awful hush fell on the table, as everyone gawped at me.

‘It’s alright,’ I said, looking at their surprised faces, ‘I didn’t kill Lucy. But I can see why the police thought I had.’

Everyone was listening to me. I knew I should stop talking but I wanted to say something more, to try to explain things to Angela as a final parting shot.

‘When I heard that Lucy had been abducted and probably killed just after she’d met me, I thought there was no way Max would invest.’

Angela pulled her chair back but I continued. I knew I was rambling slightly, but I did not care.

‘I knew I’d have to make people redundant – people I’d worked closely with in a small room for several years. And after I’d sacked everyone else, I’d have to sack myself and admit the company I’d spent the best part of a decade fighting for and building up, was in fact worthless, and all I had done was waste my time. So when the police questioned me they must have thought I appeared a little bit desperate and shifty – because I was.’