The Valley (16 page)

The next day at PropFace, I had barely sat down and turned on my laptop, when I received an email from [email protected].

For a while I just stared at it, too stunned to do anything. Eventually I sent her a reply, saying ‘Please can we talk’. It immediately bounced back. According to the British Airways email server, [email protected] was no longer a valid email address.

I grabbed my phone and called her mobile. There was no ringing tone, just the continuous hum of a misdialled number. I rang it again, this time from my office phone, taking care to key in the right digits, but the result was the same. Her mobile number no longer existed.

I rushed over to the IT department and dragged one of the developers back to my office, saying I had something urgent which I needed him to deal with. I showed him my bounceback message.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘Can you tell me whether it’s genuine or not?’

Grudgingly, he clicked on the Properties icon and extracted an IP address. ‘Well, it seems to have come from the BA server,’ he said. ‘Their email might be down, I suppose. Perhaps your friend could give her IT department a call?’

The moment he left, I closed the door to my office and found the switchboard number of British Airways in Hong Kong. When I called it, I was put on hold for twenty minutes until someone would talk to me. He was very formal: British Airways would not release any details of its employees to strangers.

Through the glass panel in my door, I spotted Ian. I had forgotten he was coming into work that day. He was talking to Kevin, the new Sales Director I had hired. Occasionally they glanced at me but I ignored them, instead calling British Airways’ HR department in London. I received the same response as I had from their Hong Kong colleagues, except this time it came with a warning that they had recorded my call and if I persisted in my efforts to make contact, I could be prosecuted for harassment.

Just then, Ian came into my office. ’Kevin’s sales forecast make pretty grim reading,’ he said.

‘We’ve been through worse,’ I replied, hoping that he might leave it at that.

Instead he drew up a chair and for over an hour we discussed the company’s finances, oblivious to my hints that I had more important matters to attend to. When he finally left, I called and emailed Angela again, hoping that there had been some sort of technical fault which was now corrected. But the result was the same: neither her phone number, nor her email account, existed anymore.

That night Jack and Tom came to stay. By the time I had fed them, read them a story and put them to bed, I was more tired than they were. Wearily I turned on a computer and put ‘Angela Hope + pilot’ into Google. To my dismay, I saw there were over 30,000 results. I doggedly waded through the first hundred, then another hundred, then another, the webpages blurring into one another as I searched in vain for any hint of the Angela I knew.

I had a different sort of dream that night. I dreamt that a man phoned me, telling me that he had seen me take Gerry on board a boat. Now he was holding Angela and would only return her to me if I returned Gerry to him. When I told him I could not do that, he started torturing her. I could hear her screams down the telephone and soon I was screaming back at them, until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I woke up to see Jack and Tom, looking very frightened, standing over my bed. For a moment I thought they too were part of the nightmare, until I realised that my screams had woken them up. I put them back to bed, made myself some coffee and waited until dawn, not trusting myself to sleep any more.

That set the pattern for the rest of the weekend. When I took the children back to Karen’s house on Sunday night, they rushed in as if they were desperate to return to a more normal environment.

‘You look rough,’ Karen remarked as they scampered past her.

I opened my mouth to speak but she got in first. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Is there a work crisis on at PropFace?’

I was too tired to rise to the familiar bait, so I smiled. ‘Just a few growing pains.’

‘We could do with a few of those in the NHS right now.’

I looked at her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ve agreed to reduce my hours,’ she said. ‘I’m job-sharing with another woman. At least it will give me more time with the boys. And, I suppose, we can just about afford it.’

I briefly wondered whether I was included in her definition of ‘we’. But I knew that any questions might provoke an argument or, even worse, a question about Angela, so I merely nodded sympathetically and turned to walk away.

‘Actually, John, do you have a second?’ she said.

I shrugged my shoulders. I was tired but I knew there was going to be no relief from tiredness back at my flat.

She led me down the hall towards the kitchen, where I could hear the boys playing, but then swung left, entering the small room where I used to keep my old desktop computer, and where a very large man was now huddled over an iPad.

‘John, this is Nick,’ Karen said. ‘It’s time you met.’

He shuffled to his feet and we shook hands, both of us looking embarrassed. He was in his mid-forties, I reckoned, six feet tall and overweight, with dark curly hair. And he was wearing a light blue cardigan similar to the sort my father used to wear.

Karen left us. For two excruciating minutes we exchanged small talk. I asked about his work, and he explained that he sorted out companies’ pension schemes. Not knowing what else to say, I mentioned that PropFace’s probably needed looking at. He opened his mouth to speak but must have detected my lack of real interest, because he simply smiled, handed me his business card and said that if I needed any advice, to give him a call.

On the way back to my flat, I inspected the card, before placing it in in the part of my wallet where I kept old receipts and other bits of junk. He was a partner for one of the big City law firms. It was no wonder that Karen could reduce her work hours. Even in a bad year he would be taking home several times my salary. I did not know whether to feel jealous, inadequate or just relieved that if I was arrested my kids might have a chance of not being bought up in poverty.

I did not need nightmares to keep me awake at nights any longer. I had enough well-founded feelings of despair and loneliness to ensure I would not sleep. And my mood did not improve when I arrived at PropFace and was told one of our largest clients had failed to renew their order. The rest of the morning was spent in a fractious meeting with the sales team and the customer services team who both blamed each other. As the arguments raged around me, I sat thinking of Angela and Gerry and what could link them together, except me or Max.

Eventually I could not stand it any longer and left the meeting, saying I had some urgent work to attend to. Back in my office, I googled different variations of Angela’s name. When that brought back no useful results, I tried Facebook and Linked-in. There were plenty of Angela Hopes on both networks, but none resembled her. Just like Gerry, she had completely disappeared.

I suddenly realised that, on my mobile phone, I still had the number of the cottage where we had spent the weekend. I dialled it, listening to it ring and ring before clicking through to a robotic voice asking me to leave a message. I resisted the temptation to shout and scream at Jane, and instead left a polite request asking whoever picked up the message to call me on my mobile because I had recently stayed at the house and accidentally left behind a cufflink. I could not imagine this would persuade Jane to re-establish contact, but she had said the house belonged to her sister, and if she listened to it first, she might call me back. Afterwards I racked my brains for any other connections to Angela that I could use to re-establish contact, eventually remembering that when I had first met her, she had lived in the flat above mine.

I tore out of the office. Everyone saw me leave. It was barely two o’clock but I did not care. The more I thought about Angela’s disappearance, the more sinister it seemed. I bicycled as fast as I could to the mansion block, then ran up the stairs to Flat 3B, and hammered on the door.

No one answered, so I loitered around its entrance, trying to recall Angela’s explanation of how she had come to live there. All I could remember was that it involved her house-sitting for a fellow Kiwi.

It was not until seven o’clock that the occupant of 3B came back. She was a girl in her early twenties with thick-set glasses, long dark hair and a heavy French accent. For five minutes we talked in broken English, and the only thing I really understood was that she did not want to let me into her flat. Then she said ‘
Un moment,
’ and opened the door, and slipped inside without giving me the chance to follow her.

Outside, I wondered how long ‘
un moment’
really meant. In South Africa we used to say we would do things ‘just now’ which meant we were not going to do them for some time and I suspected ‘
un moment’
had a similar meaning.

A middle-aged, grey-haired woman came out of the next door flat. I remembered her walking past me half an hour earlier. More importantly, she remembered me.

‘Excuse me,’ she said ‘but what are you doing?’

‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ I said, and rapped on 3B again

‘
Un moment,
’ the French girl shouted.

The middle-aged woman looked me up and down.

‘She’s French,’ I said gesturing at the shut door, as if that explained everything.

The woman snorted and shuffled along the corridor.

‘Monsieur?’

The French girl had opened her door six inches and was offering me something. ‘
Argent
’ she seemed to be saying. From what I could recall from my French lessons at school, that meant money.

‘No money,’ I said, ‘I don’t want money.’

The middle-aged woman turned around and stared at me.

‘Not money,’ the French girl said, and thrust a card into my hand, before closing the door.

I strode past the middle-aged woman, without stopping to look at what the girl had given me. Only when I was halfway down the stairs to my flat did I see it was a business card for Tim Worth, Head of Lettings at Franktoms, a firm of London estate agents. I knew the firm: they were clients of ours. The girl had obviously been saying ‘agent,’ not ‘
argent
’.

It was hardly a strong lead but it did at least offer a glimmer of hope. When I went to bed, I even managed to get some sleep before the familiar images returned: Gerry, Angela, Lucy – all blurred together, all covered in blood, and all staring up accusingly at me.

The next morning, I called Tim Worth at Franktoms at 9am on the dot. He was cordial on the phone until he discovered that I was neither a prospective tenant nor a landlord. When I asked if I could have the contact details of the owner of Flat 3b or the tenant who had rented it back in February, he accused me of asking him to leak confidential information. The more I tried to reassure him, the more I was drawn into an argument. Eventually he slammed down the phone.

I wanted to ring him straight back, but then remembered that I still had an ace up my sleeve. Kevin, our Head of Sales, had introduced me to the firm’s Managing Director a few months ago and I still had his business card. So I called him, and explained what my problem was. He said he would look into it.

I found out what this meant at lunchtime, when I received an email from the Franktoms MD, with Kevin copied into it. It was blunt and to the point. My request earlier this morning had been totally unprofessional. If I repeated it, they would cancel their contract with us with immediate effect.

As I read it, I saw Kevin heading towards my office, waving a print out. I intercepted him before he could come in.

‘It’s just a misunderstanding, that’s all,’ I said.

He opened his mouth to speak but I brushed past him, walking as fast as I could to the toilets to splash cold water on my face. Looking in the mirror, I realised I had bags under my eyes and two days’ stubble on my chin. PropFace had always had a relaxed dress code, but I had never before arrived at the office unshaven. When I returned, Kevin and two other people were waiting outside my office. I told them I had to rush to an urgent meeting. I packed up my laptop and walked as fast as I could to a coffee shop, stopping off first at a newsagent to buy a copy of the
Financial
Times
just in case it had a had a report of a missing Irish banker called Gerry. I ordered a sandwich and a double-espresso and sat down at a corner table to eat my lunch.

The next thing I knew, a waitress was leaning over me, and smiling. It was six o’clock and the coffee shop was closing. I had only eaten one mouthful of my sandwich. The espresso was untouched. My newspaper was still open at the first page and my laptop’s battery was completely run down – and I had absolutely no idea what I had been doing for the last five hours.

Back at my house, I made a second attempt to scan the newspaper for any news about Gerry, but the print blurred in and out of focus, and when my telephone rang, I welcomed the distraction.

It was Karen, asking what I was doing for Christmas.

‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled. Christmas was eight weeks away. I was not even sure what I was doing tomorrow.

‘Are you all right, John?’

I told her it had been a long day and waited for her normal barbs about PropFace. Instead she started talking about a chalet in the Alps that belonged to a friend of Nick’s and how he had invited them all to stay for both Christmas and New Year, and what a great opportunity it would be for the children.

The news washed over me. I did not even have the energy to be angry at the implication that Nick was giving my children opportunities that I could not. I just said yes and collapsed on my bed, not bothering to undress or brush my teeth.