The Valley (18 page)

‘No,’ he said emphatically.

‘Why not?’

He put his whisky down. ‘You told me your visit wasn’t about Max.’

‘It’s not. It’s about me. Max wants to get more involved with PropFace again. If he does, I want to know who I’m dealing with.’

‘You know Max better than me.’

‘I used to,’ I said. ’But I’ve barely seen him for years.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘George, I’m about to make one of the most important decisions of my life and you’re the only one who can help me fill in some gaps. Come on. What happened between you and Max?’

He stared at his glass of whisky for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was little more than a mumble. ‘John, if any of this gets back to Max…’

‘It won’t, I swear.’

‘When I worked as a stockbroker, I learnt one important lesson about finance: if something looks too good to be true, it usually is. And right from the start, Max’s performance in running our hedge fund was much too good to be true.’

‘What was going on?’

‘Insider trading.’

I smiled, remembering how George had once pestered me for hot tips when he had been an actor and I had been a junior analyst. George must have read my thoughts, because he raised his hand in acknowledgement.

‘John, I know that might sound hypocritical coming from the aristocratic Arthur Daly. But Max’s insider trading was on a completely different scale. A little bit here and there I could have lived with. This was millions of pounds.’

‘Did you catch him?’

‘It’s a bugger to prove, especially with derivatives. And, without proof, there was nothing I could do. Theoretically, Max didn’t even work for us. ‘Arm’s length’ was the key phrase in those days. He ran a Cayman’s based fund; I advised a number of London-based investors. If they took my advice and invested in his fund, we got paid a commission but that was it. And of course they all thought he was a star. They didn’t care how he increased their wealth every year.’

‘So what did you do?

‘I knew I couldn’t prove insider trading but I could prove he was over leveraging. He was supposed to be running a cautious balanced fund. So I paid an ex-derivatives trader to go through his trading book to see if he had ever borrowed more than his remit. And he had. He was betting the farm. Regularly.’

‘But he always won?’

‘That was the irony. The fund was never really at risk from his bets, because he knew the outcome before he placed them. But Max could never mount a defence based on that. So I had enough on him to force him to resign. My mistake was warning our client relations manager in advance.’

‘You mean Lucy Grainger?’

‘Back then, she was Lucy Crighton. I had no idea she was seeing Max. When I first hired her, I rather fancied her myself. Romantically things never clicked, but business-wise we were fine. The clients loved her, and I trusted her totally. And like a fool I told her everything we were planning to do.’

George took another gulp of whisky.

‘We hauled Max in for a meeting with just Lucy, me and a lawyer. I presented the evidence of what he had been doing. I expected him to deny it and tell me I was too mathematically incompetent to understand his trades because that was his usual line whenever I questioned him. But he just stayed silent, so I told him we would go to the authorities, unless he resigned quickly and quietly. He haggled a bit about an unpaid bonus, which I eventually said I wouldn’t object to, and in return he let me dictate his resignation letter. I even shook his hand on the way out.’

‘The next morning Lucy was supposed to start warning investors that Max had resigned from the fund. But she didn’t turn up. She said she was sick. Two days later, I received her letter of resignation. When I tried to call her, she refused to talk to me. Then investors started notifying us that they wanted to redeem their money. Eventually one spilled the beans, telling me he was transferring into a new fund that was marketed by Lucy and run by Max.’

‘Couldn’t you sue them?’

‘Legally it wasn’t clear-cut. I hadn’t tied Max to any notice period – I wanted him out as fast as possible. And we’d never updated Lucy’s contract: she was only on one month’s notice, less any unused holiday time owed to her, and she had stacks. In effect she was a free agent the moment she walked out of the door.’

‘And all the clients followed her?’

‘Over half did. Then all the professionals we relied on in the Caymans – the accountants, lawyers, bankers and trust secretaries – switched sides as well. And without them, we became a sitting duck for every two-bit official in the Cayman Islands government who wanted to shake us down, pretending we had not filed our accounts correctly or paid enough tax. It was all bollocks, of course, but we had no one to fight our corner. And then in the midst of everything my dad had a stroke.’

George drained his glass. I got up and took the whisky bottle over to him. As he held out his glass, I noticed how his hands were shaking.

‘It was a dark time, John. I remember driving up the A303, after spending an awful weekend here with a distraught mother and a sick father, and knowing that my week ahead in London was going to be even worse. I started taking sleeping pills and I hit this stuff pretty hard as well.’

He tapped his glass then took a swig,

‘But there’s a happy ending to this. My life was saved by two people. One a near saint, the other a sinner.’

‘Presumably Max was the sinner?’

‘No, it was his accountant in the Caymans, one of the ones who stabbed us in the back. He was a shifty little man, but a good behind the scenes fixer.’

I immediately thought of Ian Joseph. I thought about blurting out his name, but George had hit his stride now and I didn’t want to interrupt him.

‘This accountant came over from the Caymans and offered me a settlement. The deal was that if I stopped making trouble for Max and helped close down the old fund, Max would give me a shareholding in his new one, free of charge, and a bit more would be added to it every year, provided I stayed quiet. They’d even make it tax-free if I wanted.’

‘Hence the new roof at Ferreston?’ I said.

George chortled to himself. ‘It’s turned out to be the best investment of my life. But at the time I was so angry with Max I nearly turned it down. And then the saint intruded in my life. You’ve already met her. She cooked our meal tonight.’

‘Gail?’ I said, trying to disguise my surprise. I could think of a lot of non-saint-like reasons why a plump woman in her thirties might take a shine to the next Lord Ferreston.

’She’s always been religious,’ he said. ‘I’ve known her for yonks. Her brother was at Eton with me. When everything was looking desperate, I went over to her brother’s house one night for a few hours’ light relief. There I met Gail, whom I hadn’t seen for ages. Anyway we got talking, and before I knew it I was unburdening myself to her in a way that I hadn’t done to anyone else. We were inseparable all evening, apparently.’

‘And are you now equally religious?’ I asked. I could not recall George ever expressing any adherence to any faith

‘God no,’ he said, and laughed at his own blasphemy. ‘Well, I keep up appearances – you know, church most Sundays and I invite the vicar over to supper once a year. But I didn’t get re-born or any of that nonsense.’

The thought of George being baptised in a river made me laugh, but he waved a finger at me.

‘Oh – it’s easy to mock religion and I do it all the time when Gail’s not here. But it was her religion that made me think about what I wanted to get out of life and why I was so unhappy. I realised that I’d never really wanted to become a financial big-wig. I’d stumbled into stockbroking only because acting didn’t work out, and that led to me helping to fund PropFace and a few other start-ups. I was lucky enough to have a chance to sell out at a profit, and as hedge funds seemed to be the flavour of the month, I ploughed some of the money into one. Due to Max’s fraud, it had done very well. And now Max’s accountant was giving me a chance to bow out at the top, on very good terms. My dad was ill and likely to need a lot of looking after for the next few years, my ancestral duty was calling, I was profoundly unhappy in London and I wanted to be with Gail who wanted to live down here. In the end it was a relatively easy decision.’

‘So should I let Max into my business?’ I asked.

‘Do you want it to remain your business?’

He smiled then drained his glass and stood up. My audience was obviously over, so I thanked him for the meal and let him lead me out through the kitchen. In the hallway, I asked him one final question.

‘George, what was the name of that accountant – the one who came over from the Caymans?’

George’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why on earth do you want to know?’

‘I’m worried that Max has imposed him on me as my Finance Director.’

George carried on staring at me.

‘The chap I’ve got is called Ian Joseph. It’s him, isn’t it?’

George mumbled something about not being able to remember.

‘You’d remember, Ian,’ I said. ‘He’s in his fifties, mostly bald but with some dark hair. He’s thin. Max says he’s Jewish.’

‘You’ve no worries there. It’s a sandy haired, plump Irishman you’ve got to watch out for.’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘Gerry?’

George opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. ‘It’s time you left.’

‘Come on, George…’

‘No,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘I told you I didn’t want to talk about this.’

He strode over to the outside door and opened it, waiting for me to leave. As I walked past him he suddenly stuck out an arm, barring my path.

‘Did Max send you?’ he said. ‘Christ, I’m such a fool. There were gag clauses all over that contract I signed with him. He got you to come here just so he could catch me breaking the confidentiality agreements, didn’t he? I should have known. You two always stuck together with your fake accents. What did you do – tape me?’

He lurched forward and made a drunken effort to frisk my pockets. I pushed him away.

‘Max doesn’t know I’m here,’ I protested.

George slumped against some coats. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. Please leave, now!’

I walked past him, then turned on the step outside the door, and looked him in the eye. ‘George, I swear to God I won’t tell anyone I’ve been here. But in return, please do me a favour. That accountant in the Caymans who squared things between you and Max – his name was Gerry, wasn’t it?’

George murmured something under his breath. I leaned towards him to hear what he was saying, but he reached for the door and slammed it in my face.

The moment I arrived back in London, I tried to mend my relationship with George, sending Gail a huge bouquet of flowers and writing George an effusive thank-you letter, saying how much I had enjoyed our supper, and stressing that I would keep everything he had told me strictly confidential. A couple of days later, I telephoned him, leaving him a message to call me back. But he never did.

This meant that if I wanted to know who Gerry really was, I was going to have to identify him myself, building on the clues George had already given me. But my days were already fully occupied: winning the Dawsons account had been a major new business win for PropFace, and now we had to set everything up. My search for Gerry was therefore going to be limited to evenings and weekends when I did not have my children with me. I was also still frightened of creating a data trail that could later prove my guilt, and so further restricted my search by confining it to times when I could escape to anonymous internet cafes.

I started by putting ‘Gerry + Alpha Tec + accountant + Caymans’ into Google. This returned no results, so I tracked down an online copy of Alpha Tec’s annual reports, found the name of the accountancy firm that was listed as its auditor, scoured its website for a list of partners, and wrote down anyone who was based anywhere near the Caymans and whose initials started with a G or J.

There were twenty-two suspects and I spent an entire weekend checking them all out. Some of my Gerrys turned out to be a Garys or Johns, or even Julies and Jennifers. Others proved to be clearly too old; or too young; or too black; or simply too alive. By the time the internet café closed on Sunday night, I had only three possibles left.

That night, my nightmares returned, forcing me to open the drawer and clutch hold of the gun. In the morning, waking with the gun beside me, I questioned whether I should carry on with my search, but after a full day’s work at PropFace, my curiosity got the better of me again, and I returned to my three remaining suspects. This time I did not bother scouring the internet. Instead I took a leaf out of Gerry and Max’s book, and on my way home I purchased a pay-as-you-go mobile phone under a false name. Sitting in my kitchen, I then used this to call the offices of the partners whose initials started with G or J and asked to speak to them. Two picked up the phone, so I stammered ‘sorry, wrong number’ and hung up; the other was out but his PA assured me he was very much alive.

Just as I finished my call, my home phone started ringing. Briefly, I wondered if somehow I had accidentally divulged my home number, and picked up the receiver gingerly, only to find Max on the other end.

‘I’m coming to England for a few days,’ he announced.

‘Oh good,’ I said, trying to sound as if I meant it.

‘I’ll be staying on the
Glen Avon
on the weekend of the 16
^th
December. I was rather hoping you could come down and join me.’

For a few seconds, the mere mention of the boat’s name was enough to make my whole body tense up, until I realised that I already had the perfect excuse to refuse his invitation.

‘I’m sorry Max, that’s when I’m taking a long weekend off myself. I’m going to EuroDisney, with the children.’

There was a long silence. I wondered what amazed him more: that I could afford to take a holiday; or that I did not offer to cancel everything just to fit in with his plans.

‘What on earth are you doing there?’ he asked eventually.

I laughed. I could not imagine Max in an amusement park. I doubted whether he had ever been to one in his life.

‘It’s a kid’s thing,’ I said. ‘They have rides and you can meet cartoon characters. The boys will love it and I need a break, as well. Anyway, what did you want to see me about?’

‘Oh, nothing that won’t wait,’ Max said. ‘You enjoy your Disney-thing. And have a good break.’

After I had finished talking to him, I thought about George. He had suffered a nervous breakdown trying to uncover things in the Caymans that Max had wanted to keep hidden. And unlike George, I did not have a stately home and twenty thousand acres of Dorset to fall back on if Max turned against me. I glanced down at my sheet of paper with all the accountants’ names, and tore it up. And the day, on my lunchbreak from work, I deliberately left my pay-as-you-go mobile phone beneath a park bench, having taken out and destroyed its SIM Card.

A week later, when I boarded the Eurostar train with my children, I went one stage further to make sure I did not feel tempted to resume my search. I did not even take my laptop with me. And for a few precious days, I didn’t think once about PropFace or Gerry, or George or Max. Instead I concentrated on the boys. We flew with Peter Pan, soared with Buzz LightYear, fought pirates on a beach and exhausted ourselves on countless rides and rollercoasters. In the evenings, I ate an early supper with the children, and then after they went to bed, I read a book. And when Jack accidentally stood on my mobile phone, crushing its antenna, rather than rush to buy a replacement. I revelled in my new found isolation, feeling even more relaxed. I slept well every night without any need for a gun under my bed and the boys seemed to respond to my mood, talking to me more than they ever had before and visibly enjoying every moment.

Returning home on the Eurostar late on Monday evening, Jack and Tom soon slumped in their seats from sheer exhaustion. As they dozed off, I spotted a discarded copy of the
Mail on Sunday
that someone had left on the empty table next to us. As I had just finished my novel, I grabbed it, reading the sports section first, wading through Saturday’s football results until I reached the rugby. Flicking through to the front of the paper, I was astonished to see a photograph of George on page five.

Below the main photo of George, were three grainy CCTV stills. The first was of a man in a motorcycle helmet standing next to George as he hunched over a cashpoint. The second seemed to show them hugging, but the caption underneath said it captured the moment when George was stabbed. The last showed George collapsed in a heap on the pavement as the man in the motorcycle helmet strode away.

Suddenly I remembered the phone call Max had made to me just before we had gone on holiday, announcing that he was coming over to the UK. I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes and instantly saw another image, not of George but of Gerry, sprawled across the floor of the mess, all bloody and bruised.

I knew I now had to go to the police. I would hand over the shotgun and the towel, confess everything and face the consequences. Gerry and George had been killed; Lucy and Angela had vanished off the face of the earth; it could not be a coincidence, not anymore.

For ages, I sat there, feeling my damp shirt cling to my skin. I turned to look at the boys who were still fast asleep. I realised this would probably be our last holiday together for a long time. I should warn Karen of what I was going to do, and also my mother and Pete. And finally, I wondered if, for old time’s sake, I should tell Max just before I entered the police station – so if he wanted to, he could set sail from his house on the Caymans one last time, and wrap himself in another anchor chain.

Tom fidgeted in his sleep. I stroked his forehead and he nestled back into his seat, his eyes tight shut. I picked up the newspaper again and studied the photographs, looking for any clue that George’s assailant was Max. At first I thought his helmet was so concealing that he could have been anyone, until I noticed something so obvious that I could not believe that I had not spotted it before.

The CCTV shots showed George and his attacker side by side. The attacker was a little shorter than George but much more powerfully built. In rugby terms, it was like a scrum half being tackled by a prop forward. And one thing was absolutely certain: George’s attacker was not Max. Max stood at least five inches taller than George, and his lean, wiry body was an utterly different shape from that of the killer.

A feeling of relief surged through me. I read the newspaper again, scrutinising the photos from every angle, double checking if there was any way the killer could possibly have been Max. There wasn’t.

That night, after we had returned to Karen’s house, and I had carried the exhausted children up to bed, Karen asked whether I had heard the news about George.

‘Max called me,’ she said. ‘He’s been trying to get hold of you all weekend. The funeral’s next week. He’s flying over for it.’

She passed me a scrap of paper on which she’d written a mobile number for Max in the Cayman Islands.

‘You will call him, won’t you?’ she said. ‘He’s a funny old thing and he sounded really distressed.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And Happy Christmas,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘We’re leaving on Friday,’ she said. ‘We won’t see you again until January.’

‘But my presents…’

‘Leave them till we return. The boys have more than enough to keep them going and we won’t have any room. I’ll call you on Christmas day. Will you be at home?’

‘Ring me on my mobile,’ I said. I had absolutely no idea where I would be. And all of a sudden, Christmas seemed to be the least of my worries.

I telephoned Max the moment I got back to my flat. The moment he answered, I told him that I had heard the news about George.

‘It’s a terrible business,’ he said. ‘His wife’s had an awful time. The police won’t release the body. Anyway they’re going ahead with a funeral on Monday. The burial might not be for months, but they wanted to get the funeral over before Christmas. He’s got a son and –’

‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘I saw George a few weeks ago.’

There was a long silence.

‘I went to see an estate agent in Ferreston,’ I explained. ‘I rang George and he invited me over to supper. I hadn’t seen him for ages.’

There was another long silence. Eventually Max said: ‘I wish I’d been able to see him again before he died.’

‘I heard you’re flying back for the funeral. Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?’

Max laughed: ‘Don’t worry. The airline throws in a limo and a chauffeur.’

I had forgotten the difference between how Max and I travelled. I was about to end the conversation when Max asked: ‘How was your holiday?’

‘Really good.’

‘Maybe next year you can all come up to Scotland and stay with me.’

I could not think of anything worse, but I told Max we would love to.

‘Or perhaps we could all go out on the boat someday,’ he said, ‘just you, the boys and me.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ I lied.

Much later, when I was lying on my bed trying to get to sleep, I remembered that four people connected to me had either been killed or disappeared.

I got out of bed and unlocked the drawer beneath it. I took hold of the gun opened it, and inspected the unused cartridge in the right hand chamber. I closed the gun and pointed it at the wall. If I ever had to use it, I would only have one shot.