The Valley (15 page)

I looked at Jane and Paul, but their eyes did not meet mine. They were looking at a spot just above me. I felt a hand touch my shoulder and I realised that Angela was standing behind me. And for a brief second my whole body was flooded with joy at this small gesture until I realised that this really was the end. In my short speech I had been as honest with Angela as I ever could be. There could be no real intimacy between us. Not now.

I stood up and rather than face Angela, I kept my eyes on Paul and Jane. ‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ I said, ‘but I’ll be leaving early in the morning, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to get a good night’s sleep.’

They did not bother to offer the usual platitudes about keeping in touch, so I marched out, taking care not to look in Angela’s direction, in case my resolve melted.

Upstairs, I gathered my possessions so I could keep my promise of leaving the house swiftly the next morning. I brushed my teeth then lay on the bed and listened to the snippets of conversation drifting up from downstairs. The voices were hushed and so I only heard the odd phrase, such as Paul saying, ‘I told you so,’ and Jane telling Angela not to worry, as she had done all she could.

I managed to get undressed and climb into bed, but then a paralysis set in. I did not even bother to draw the curtains. I just lay there, too tired to move but too troubled to sleep.

Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Gerry’s body flip-flopping gently backwards in the water, the white soles of his feet rising up to me, before the heavy chain dragged him down out of sight. And when I opened them, I could not help staring through the bare window into the darkness, and imagining Max was out there, sitting in a makeshift hide, keeping perfectly still, with a gun slotted into his shoulder, his eyes scanning the darkness, watching me.

I felt my hand reach down to the empty space on the floor, where my backpack had been the night before. I remembered how the shotgun had felt in my hands, from the cold steel of the triggers to the burnished walnut of the stock, and how its touch had made me feel safer. For a while, I even contemplated getting up and walking to my car, so I could bring the shotgun back and hold it again. But gradually I descended into a state of glazed over semi-consciousness. I heard the others come up to their rooms and the noise of the water tank emptying as loos were flushed and taps run, but everything seemed very distant and unconnected, as if I was listening in to it all from another house. I could not even raise the energy to turn the light off or pull the curtains across my window. I just lay there, awake but motionless.

When I heard the creak of my door opening, I was too tired to be startled. I turned my face towards the sound and saw Angela. She was wearing a long white T-shirt. She closed the door behind her.

‘It’s rather bright,’ she whispered. ‘Do you mind if I turn off the light?’

I nodded and she flicked the switch. Rather than being plunged into sudden darkness, the room was bathed in a soft white glow, as the full moon shone through the window panes.

She climbed into the bed beside me and nestled her head against my chest. I could feel her hips and legs rest against mine. She kept perfectly still; and I made myself do the same, despite the blood rushing to my groin.

I put my arm around her shoulders, fighting back the temptation to rip her T shirt to shreds, and grasp her breasts. She seemed so at peace, lying gently beside my naked body that for one awful moment I wondered whether that was all she wanted to do. Then she raised herself up and looked into my eyes.

‘Do you want to talk?’ I said, my voice trembling.

‘No,’ she whispered.

Then she sat upright and pulled the T-shirt over her head. Her small breasts sprung free, the nipples thrusting outwards; and then she leaned over me, her smooth thighs pressing against me. Her lips found mine, and we made up for our earlier stillness in a sudden writhing frenzy.

I had the bad dream about fleeing the Graingers’ house in the dark.

Except this time the dream changed, because as I charged through the Chelsea streets, I ran into Max and Gerry. Max then killed Gerry in front of me, and when he had finished, his hands slipped around my neck and slowly tightened until I could not breathe – and I woke up, choking, my legs kicking at the duvet, my panic increasing when I felt someone beside me.

I turned over with my fists clenched, ready to strike, and saw Angela. She was lying in bed, staring out of the same window that the moon had shone through, and which now let in the first glimmer of dawn. I gazed up at her freckled face and was rewarded with one of her smiles.

‘You had a bad dream,’ she whispered, her hand ruffling my hair.

‘It wasn’t just a dream,’ I said slowly.

Her hand stopped stroking me. I looked into her eyes.

‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered and turned on her side, so my head slid between her breasts, and her legs locked around mine and pulled me towards her.

Afterwards, she snuggled up to me, resting her head on my chest as we both watched the dawn take hold and the dark woods in the distance slowly reveal their autumn colours. Stroking her blonde hair, I felt not only at peace, but also that I could tell her anything and she would not desert me.

I was just wondering how to begin, when she suddenly twisted away and jumped out of bed.

‘Come back,’ I said

She smiled. ‘I will, in a moment. I need a pee.’

She crept out of my room and I turned my face to the part of the sheet where she had been lying and inhaled. I noticed that she had changed her scent. It was no longer the same one that Karen wore. This one smelt of apples and freshly picked flowers but mostly it smelt of Angela and it made me think about her imminent return to my bed, and I felt my penis stiffen.

I heard the lavatory flush and soft footsteps in the corridor approach my room. Then a door creaked and I heard Jane call out, ‘Angela?’

For a couple of seconds there was complete silence then I heard Angela, sounding startled, say: ‘Oh hi Jane, I was just…’

And then there was more whispering, and the sound of footsteps walking away. I leapt out of bed wanting to intervene, then realised that bursting into the corridor, stark naked with an erection, probably would not help. Instead I pulled on some boxer shorts and a sweat shirt, grabbed a pair of trousers in my hands and poked my head into the corridor.

Nobody seemed to be around. I started walking in the direction of where the footsteps had gone. Then a telephone rang behind me. I heard Paul shout, ‘I’ll get it’. I sensed that if there was a problem, he would only make it worse so I nipped into the bathroom, closing the door before he ran past. He was talking into a mobile phone, saying ‘Okay, okay, I’ve got Sarah on the other line. I’ll sort things out’.

As I put on my trousers, I heard footsteps rush past the door, first in one direction and then in the other. When I re-emerged, the only noise I could hear was Paul talking loudly downstairs. I followed his voice down to the kitchen, expecting to find Angela with him. But only Paul was there, with a phone pressed to his ear. He beckoned me to enter and then ignored me, listening intently to whoever was talking to him down the phone for over a minute, before saying, ‘Okay, I’ve got to go now,’ and hanging up.

‘It’s good thing you’re leaving early, John because I think we all are,’ he said, at last. ‘There’s an emergency back at the base.’

‘An emergency? You mean a plane’s crashed?’

‘No, not that sort of emergency, thank God. Just a pilot not turning up.’

‘But surely you have cover?’

‘Of course we have cover. And the cover has cover as well – that’s what Angela is, reserve cover. So I’ve now got to go with her.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Upstairs, packing. She’ll be down in a moment and…’

I did not wait for him to finish. I tore off up the stairs. Behind me I heard Paul call out: ‘Hang on a second, John. It would really be much better if you’d just wait a minute.’

At the top of the stairs, Angela was standing next to Jane, holding a small suitcase.

‘Something’s come up, John,’ she said.

She seemed worried rather than pleased to see me.

Jane pushed in front of her. ‘Angela has to leave straight away,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive her.’

‘I’m taking her,’ Paul said, from behind me.

I turned around. ‘You needn’t bother. Heathrow is more or less on my way home.’

‘The staff entrance isn’t. You have to go through security. Your car doesn’t have a pass, so you’ll have to queue for hours.’

‘I’m not in any rush. Stay here, Angela, I’ll only be a minute.’

‘Actually, Paul’s right,’ she said. ‘Security is rather tight. It might take all day.’

She walked out from behind Jane and kissed me briefly on the lips.

‘But…’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll call you,’ she said.

The four of us filed down the stairs. I did not have any shoes on my feet so I hovered by the front door as Paul and Angela strode across the gravel to his car. As they drove off, I waved to them. Paul briefly waved back, but Angela just stared fixedly ahead, as though she was in some sort of trance.

‘Do you want some coffee?’ Jane shouted from the kitchen.

I walked through the hallway to join her. ‘Is there really an emergency?’ I asked.

‘Oh, there definitely is,’ Jane said. ‘You caused some of it. Milk or sugar?’

‘Neither.’

She busied herself making some coffee. Rather than waiting for the coffee to drip slowly through the filter paper, she stirred it vigorously with a spoon.

‘Angela’s in trouble,’ she said. ‘She shouldn’t have been drinking last night. When you’re reserve cover you must stay alcohol-free and she didn’t.’

‘But Paul let her,’ I said.

‘She told him someone else was filling in for her until Monday morning. Quite why she felt so much pressure to drink and then lie about it, I don’t know – do you?’

She held out a mug half full with steaming black coffee.

‘What will happen to her?’

‘It depends how much she drank. Paul’s going to say I put too much brandy in the pudding. They’ll have to give her a test. As long as the result is compatible with her story, they’ll let her off, particularly if Paul insists that it was all his stupid wife’s fault.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Jane eyed me coldly: ‘She’s got a problem with drink. And she’s in a vulnerable state right now. People shouldn’t take advantage of her.’

‘Oh, fuck off. ’

Jane took a step back, but I was in no mood to compromise. ‘Look, Jane, I get the message about drink, but don’t build this into a Victorian melodrama. I didn’t ply Angela with booze and then jump on her. No one was taken advantage of and I’m not going to apologise for what happened because I’m glad it happened, so –’

‘Is that what happened to Lucy Grainger?’

‘What?’ I said. I could feel myself trembling.

‘I googled you last night,’ Jane said. ‘You were with Lucy Grainger the night she disappeared. Did you get her drunk too? Did she —’

I hurled the mug of coffee so it smashed against the kitchen wall, just a few feet away from Jane.

She jumped away, looking frightened. Briefly we glared at each other, then I marched off to my room and grabbed my suitcase. When I returned, Jane had opened the front door, and was standing beside it with a phone in her hand. I walked straight past her without saying a word, got into my car and drove off, never once looking back.

It was only when I was nearing London that I remembered I still had a shotgun in my boot. I briefly considered driving to Wandsworth Bridge and throwing it in the Thames. But too much had happened, too quickly, and I knew I should calm down before I did something really stupid.

I decided to hide it in a large drawer in the wooden base of my bed. When I had first moved into my flat, I had originally intended to keep clothes inside the drawer, but it was heavy and difficult to open, and after a few days, I had stopped using it. Now all it contained was an empty holdall. I placed the whole backpack on top of this, then closed the drawer and locked it.

I attached the key to my key ring and listened to the messages on my answer phone. As expected, there was nothing from Max, but there was one from Angela, saying that she was going to be busy for a while, and would call again soon.

I did not sleep that night; nor the one afterwards; nor the one after that. The moment my eyes closed, I was back on board the
Glen Avon,
watching Gerry being murdered. In the mornings, I dragged myself into work, but spent most of my time alone in my office behind a closed door, searching the internet for reports about the disappearance of an Irish financier called Gerry. I started with bbc.co.uk, but when it carried no relevant stories, I expanded my search to the online editions of all the national newspapers, then all the Irish ones, then all the South Coast regional ones, and finally all the financial websites. I became a devoted follower of the ITN South of England correspondent’s
Twitter
feed and a Facebook friend of the BBC
South Today
programme. Returning to my flat late at night, I watched the rolling 24 hour news service into the small hours, waiting for the news to break.

But it never did. And as the news vacuum continued, I grew more frightened: rich yacht owners did not just vanish into thin air without anyone noticing. If nothing was being reported, it had to be the result of a temporary news blackout, and that would mean the police were closing in on their suspects.

Lying in my bed, unable to sleep, I would think about all the evidence I had left behind. Surveillance cameras inside the marina must have filmed Gerry and me strolling along the quayside; witnesses would have seen us together in the coffee shop; two taxi drivers had taken me across the Isle of Wight and then from the hydrofoil to the marina. I had also used my credit card to pay for the rental car, which had a SatNav inside. From its data, the police could track not only my journey down to Southampton but also my visit to the cottage, and if they retraced it, they would find a perfect prosecution witness, in the form of Jane, a fellow police officer. It was easy to imagine the pleasure she would take in recounting how I had turned up at the cottage on the day that Gerry disappeared: late, panicky, smelling of smoke, and evasive about where I had been. And her smile would grow even broader if she was asked whether she had ever seen me lose my temper and turn violent, and she could reveal how I had thrown a coffee cup against the wall.

In the mornings I would arrive at PropFace already exhausted, and scurry to my desk where the cycle would begin all over again. Jittery and bad tempered, I avoided people and cancelled meetings, just when PropFace needed my attention. The economy was still in the doldrums, the main home buying season was over for another year and our rapid expansion had left us exposed. Decisions had to be taken but I kept to myself, endlessly searching the internet. And the less I found, the more frightened I became. Eventually, my fear turned in on itself, as I became increasingly alarmed about the very data trail my own anxiety was creating. In a panic, I deleted my browser history and switched to non-electronic information sources, walking halfway around London every morning and evening, trying to find newsagents that sold Irish or South Coast newspapers.

But wherever I looked – print, online, TV – the result was the same: no one resembling Gerry had been reported missing. And as the news blackout continued, my sense of isolation increased. I desperately wanted to talk to Max, not to discuss what had happened, but just to hear him explain this complete absence of news. But Max was lying low. And even if I could track him down, I knew he would be furious to hear from me.

In desperation, I scrabbled around for other information sources. When Ian came into my office to talk about our declining revenues, I casually mentioned that I had bumped into an old friend of Max’s recently.

‘But rather stupidly, I can’t remember his name,’ I added. ‘Perhaps you might know him?’

‘It’s very unlikely,’ Ian said.

‘He’s a small Irishman, about your age, with a chubby face, round glasses and sandy coloured hair. I think he might be called Gerry – does that ring a bell?’

Ian shook his head.

‘He might have something to do with Alpha Tec,’ I suggested

’I don’t know many of the people there, I’m afraid,’ he said. Then he looked at me. ‘Are you all right, John?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, stifling a yawn.

That night, I had a nightmare that Gerry’s wife and children were still waiting for him to come home. I imagined them pleading with Garda officers to keep searching for him. I slept so badly that in the morning I could barely drag myself out of bed. But on my way out, I suddenly remembered Max telling me about Andy Cartwright, the compliance officer who had supplied all the insider information. If I could only find out more about him, he might lead me to Gerry.

Instead of going into work, I walked through Balham and into Battersea, looking for a café from where I could search the internet anonymously. The Valley seemed a different place on a weekday morning. Men my age were almost invisible; women were everywhere – mothers, teachers, au pairs, shop assistants – and I felt them all staring at me. I pressed on until I found a grubby internet café near Clapham Junction. Sitting at a rented PC, drinking coffee, I googled Andy Cartwright and found a short obituary of him that had appeared in his local newspaper in Surrey. That in turn linked to another report in the same paper about his death, two weeks previously. He had been run over whilst walking along a pavement near his flat in Esher, en route from the railway station he used every day. The police described the accident as a ‘freak occurrence’.

The longer I stayed in the café, piecing together the fragments of his life, the more plausible Max’s account seemed. There was no overt mention of any insider dealing or a predilection for little boys, but Andy’s career seemed to have mysteriously stalled five years ago. There was a report in his bank’s internal newsletter that in the last year he had been much admired for his resolve and forbearance in dealing with the recent problems encountered by the bank’s compliance department. He had left a wife and two children but they had not come to his funeral. I checked the date of his death and cross-referenced it against the date that Max had announced the closure of Alpha Tec. Andy had been killed a week later, which was consistent with the timings that Max had told me.

But nowhere was there any mention of someone who could be Gerry. Back at my flat, I realised I had not eaten anything all day and there was no food in the fridge. Tired and hungry, I collapsed on my bed – too frightened to close my eyes, but too exhausted to move.

It was a Thursday night. Tomorrow my children would be coming to stay for the weekend and that made me think, not only about how I would cope with their energy, but also about what would happen to them if I was arrested.

I glanced across to the phone on my bedside table. It was nearly five days since I had last spoken to Angela. She had texted me a couple of times and I had texted her back, but I had not tried very hard actually to talk to her. I remembered how stilted our conversation had been at the cottage, and how without meaning to, I had ended up telling her lie after lie.

But as I lay back on my pillow I also remembered the sense of peace I had felt that night at the cottage when she had stroked my hair and told me not to worry; and the feeling I had experienced that I could tell her anything.

Several times, I reached for my phone then stopped myself, unsure of what I would say or how she would react. But eventually I dialled her mobile number, and when I was transferred through to her voicemail, I left a message saying that I desperately wanted to see her again. All she had to do was tell me where and when, and I would come running.

And then, finally, I found the sleep that had evaded me all week.