The Valley (2 page)

The sergeant was evidently relieved and returned the favour by mentioning there might be some reporters outside waiting for me.

‘I’ll let you slip out the back, if you want,’ he added. ‘Just pretend you’re a copper, going home after a long shift.’

He escorted me to a side door, pressed the buzzer and I stepped outside into a cold, grey street, the sudden sensation of fresh air making me falter and blink. I turned around to say ‘Thank you’, but the door had already closed.

In the distance, I heard someone shout. I put my head down and strode away in the opposite direction as quickly and as confidently as I could, without having a clue where I was going. At the first corner I turned right and after a hundred metres, stopped and pretended to tie up a shoelace, glancing back into the late afternoon gloom, relieved to see that nobody was following.

Ahead I saw a street with brightly lit shops, busy pavements and a road full of slowly moving cars, some with their headlights already turned on. I knew I had been taken me to a police station in Chelsea, and fifteen years of living in London told me I was probably stumbling towards the Kings Road. I asked the first pedestrian I met which way was Sloane Square, and walked towards it. By the time I reached the tube station, I had decided to go to back to the office rather than slope off home. I could imagine all the rumours flying around the company since I had been taken away. I hoped that by returning without handcuffs on, I might put a stop to at least some of them.

When I got off the tube at Southfields, it was already colder and darker. I wedged my hands into my trouser pockets and cut through the Victorian side streets towards the PropFace office, which was located above an undertakers, on a grimy south London high street notorious for its heavy traffic.

After the oppressive uniformity of the police cells, there was something strangely welcoming about our ramshackle working conditions, with every electrical socket overloaded with adapters, and all our aging desktops surrounded by a spaghetti-like mess of half-buried cables. The business had been going for nearly a decade, but it still felt like a start-up. There were only seven other employees and they all looked up and stopped talking when I walked through the door. We all knew each other pretty well. I had personally hired every one of them and we worked in a cramped, open-plan space with no privacy, apart from one small meeting room dwarfed by its oversized wooden table, a legacy from our previous, grander premises. It was around this table that DCI Milburn and Steve had first questioned me, and now it seemed appropriate to gather everyone there to explain what had happened.

I tried to make it sound as though I was just a witness, telling them that a serious crime had occurred – which unfortunately I could not talk about – and my evidence was going to be crucial. In return I heard how the police had taken away my laptop, and demanded access to our server and email accounts. I tried to look unconcerned, saying this was all just normal police procedure.

As everyone shuffled out in silence, my mobile rang: it was Karen, my estranged wife. I had telephoned her from the police station because I could not think of whom else to call, and I did not want the police to suspect that I had no one. She sounded relieved that I had been released – quickly adding that, of course, she had always known I would be.

I remembered what the duty sergeant had said about the news reporters and asked Karen whether she would mind popping over to my flat – it’s only fifteen minutes’ walk from her house – to see whether there were any journalists camped outside. But Karen had only just returned from work, and now Jack and Tom were eating their tea, the au pair we shared with another family had left, and Karen had too much to do before tomorrow morning. Perhaps feeling guilty, she told me that if I was worried, I could stay the night at ‘our place’ – the ambiguous term she used for my ex-home in which she now lived with my two sons.

It was a tempting offer, if only because I could look for clues as to whether the mysterious Nick really had moved into my territory. But before I said ‘Yes’, I imagined what it would be like if the press tracked me down, and my children had to walk to school the next morning through a barrage of camera flashes. So I declined and decided to work late instead, hoping that by the time I returned to my flat, any photographers currently outside it would have given up.

I had more than enough to do at PropFace. My detention by the police meant that I had not done any work for nearly two days, and the week before had been mostly spent preparing the investment proposal for Max and Lucy. February was always a bad month for us. We worked for estate agents and they never commit to anything new in January but still want everything ready for the spring selling season. On my chipped Formica desk was a printout listing all the clients who still owed us money from December. I began telephoning them. Most would not take my call so I was reduced to leaving voicemail messages, taking care not to sound too desperate. After the tenth call I reflected that this was the sort of life I had led for nine years. No wonder the police thought that I might kill someone to change it.

The employees drifted off home from five o’clock onwards. The last one out was Terry, the IT manager, who set me up on the spare laptop. Its previous user had been the Head of Sales who had resigned at Christmas, when once again his promised pay rise had failed to materialise.

After a while, my attention wandered to my email inbox. I had sixty unopened emails. I scanned through them, looking if any of them was from Max. None of them was. At some point I knew I would have to contact him, and I dreaded the prospect. I have never been good at expressing condolences. My stuttering attempts always bring back painful memories of how I was lost for words as a twelve year old child at my own father’s funeral. And Lucy’s death wasn’t a normal one. It might not even be a death, for the police had said there was an outside chance that she might still be alive. And if she was dead, she must have been murdered, and Max would know I was a suspect.

Around eight o’clock, I packed up my borrowed laptop and rode home on my bicycle. It’s a twenty minute journey, mostly through side streets, crossing Earlsfield, Wandsworth, Battersea, and finally into Balham; all good, solid, middle class postcodes, filled with bland Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing, and all part of The Valley.

My flat was in a mansion block, built between the wars in a brutal Art Deco style, as if it wanted to challenge its surroundings. Outside the main entrance I spotted a young man pacing up and down on the front step, hands thrust into the pockets of his black leather jacket, with two cameras slung around his neck, one with a long telephoto lens. Remembering the duty sergeant’s warning, I cycled past with my head down.

When I was safely out of sight, I stopped and turned off my lights and removed my luminous yellow jacket, scrunching it up and tying it around my waist. Already feeling the cold, I dug into my trouser pockets, extracted my front door key, and gripped it tight against the handle bar. Then I wheeled my bike around.

I pedalled hard, shifting rapidly through the gears. The bike picked up speed as I swung around the corner back into my road, and then accelerated on the slight downhill gradient towards the mansion block. With fifty yards to go, I stopped pedalling, coasting silently.

The photographer was still standing on the step, his head bent down as he talked into a mobile phone. I swerved across the road and headed straight for him.

I hit the kerb hard, only just managing to cling on, my right hand gripping the key, my left squeezing the back-brake. As I skidded into the step, the photographer screamed, jumped sideways, stumbled and fell over, his equipment clattering onto concrete. But I was up already, dragging the bike behind me, my other hand outstretched with my key pointed towards the front door. Just for once, the lock turned smoothly and I kicked the door open. The photographer raised a camera and there was a brief stroboscopic whirl of flashes as I dragged the bike inside and slammed the door closed.

I waited in the gloom of the communal hall, hunched over my bicycle, slowly regaining my breath and wondering whether the photographer had snapped anything a newspaper might want to print. My left knee hurt – it had been weakened by too many rugby injuries in my teens and twenties – but I was also smiling to myself: I had not done badly, I reckoned, for a desk-bound thirty-nine year old.

The mansion block’s communal lights flickered on. I staggered to my feet, glancing nervously at my grubby bike and the stain it had left on the hall carpet. I was only a few feet away from the residents’ noticeboard with its prominent sign:

‘What’s going on?’

A young woman with a freckled face and short blonde hair leaned over the bannisters at the top of the main staircase.

‘There were some drunk kids mucking around outside,’ I called out, as I wheeled my bike over to the other side of the hall as fast as possible.

I reached the much narrower set of stairs that led down to a small basement floor, consisting only of the mansion block’s main boiler and my own poky flat, and turned around. I hoped she would have retreated back to her flat, but she had walked down the stairs and was standing in the hall. She must have been in her early thirties and was quite pretty in an outdoorsy sort of way. She was wearing a blue jumper and jeans, and she was staring at my bike.

‘One of the kids kicked it,’ I explained. ‘They ran off but I’d rather not go out to the bike shed in case I attract them back.’

‘Sure,’ she said, and for the first time I noticed a nasal twang in her voice. For a second I thought she might be a fellow South African, but her vowel sounds were different. I lifted up the bike to carry it down the stairs, ignoring the pain in my knee.

‘Do you live down there?’ she asked.

‘Flat 1A,’ I said as I descended the first few steps. She was still looking at me, but I could not tell whether it was with worry, disapproval or friendliness. On any other night, I would have been tempted to find out.

‘See you around,’ I said, as I disappeared from her view.

‘Yeah,’ I heard her reply, ‘see you around.’

She was a New Zealander, I reckoned. On my way past the boiler room, I realised that my brief conversation with her had been one of my more friendly encounters with my neighbours since moving in. Few of the other residents even knew there was a flat in the basement, and those that did probably assumed it belonged to a caretaker. I had never been inside any of the other flats or turned up to any of the meetings of the residents’ association that were regularly advertised on the noticeboard in the hall. I did not want to appear unfriendly but I did not regard my flat as a permanent base. It was just a temporary pad that had somehow lasted for two years.

I opened the door to my flat and turned on the light. Luminous blue and white crime-scene tape, emblazoned with the words ‘POLICE EVIDENCE – DO NOT CROSS’ glowed back at me. In the centre of the large room that stretched the full length of the flat and served as a combined kitchen, dining room and lounge, there were four large transparent polythene bags, each overflowing with tape, dockets, swabs, forms, bottles, powders, rubber gloves and other debris from a forensic search. Someone clearly wanted to remind me that I was still a suspect.

For a while I just stood and stared at the mess. Rather than feeling guilty, it made me wonder what someone like Joy must have thought when she had first set eyes on my flat: a typical divorced dad’s bolthole, dark and lonely, designed to accommodate one adult but gerrymandered to squeeze in two young children, who most of the time would never be there, except as photos on the fridge door.

It was only then that I noticed the answering machine’s red light blinking at me. I played the messages. Two were from the police when they were still trying to track me down. One was an old one from Karen, checking that I had remembered to pay my share of the mortgage on the house I no longer lived in. Six were from people who promptly hung up – probably reporters, I guessed. And finally, there was a message from Max, asking me in a pained and sleepy voice, to call him in the morning on a mobile number which he had never given me before.

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was the luminous police warning tape. A quick glance at my watch revealed it was nearly 9 am already. I was late for work, but if the police had meant to prick my guilty conscience, they had failed: I had not slept this soundly for months. ‘Fuck you Milburn,’ I murmured to myself, briefly smiling at my small triumph, until I remembered the message Max had left on my answerphone – and the smile faded from my face.

I knew I would have to talk to him, and preferably in private, so I called the PropFace office and left a message that I would be working from home. But first I needed to drink some coffee and there was none in the flat. As I prepared to dash to the local corner-shop, I remembered the photographer who had tried to doorstep me. My flat had a small front window that looked out onto a barred-off light well created from an old coal hatch. Squatting down in front of this, and gazing up through the top pane, I could just see the feet and ankles of the people walking along the street above. Nobody seemed to be loitering around.

I strode out of the mansion block as fast as I could, with my head down and the collar of my fleece turned up. Inside the shop, I had just picked up a bag of filter coffee, when I saw a photo of Lucy Grainger in her wedding dress, staring at me from the front page of the Daily Mail. I bent down to pick it up and noticed that all the newspapers had the same photograph. I scooped up the nearest five and bought them all. On my way back to my flat, I started skimming through them, and with my attention distracted, I failed to hear the fast approaching footsteps behind me, until a hand tapped me on the shoulder.

‘How’s your bike?’

I spun around. It was the New Zealand girl with the short blonde hair and freckles. She was wearing blue jeans and an open-neck lumberjack shirt, and carrying a milk carton.

I closed up the newspaper I had been reading. ‘It’s…it’s slightly knackered, I’m afraid – rather like its owner.’

‘Oh, I didn’t think it looked that bad,’ she said with a smile.

I laughed but continued walking back to the mansion block. She fell into step beside me, occasionally glancing at the pile of newspapers under my arm.

‘You’re famous, aren’t you?’ she finally said.

‘No.’

‘Didn’t someone try to take a picture of you last night?’

‘Not really. It was just a gang of kids fooling around with a camera.’

We were about fifty yards from my flat.

‘I’m John Flood,’ I said. ‘I promise I’m not a celebrity.’

‘I’m Angela, Angela Hope,’ she said, looking down one more time at my huge bundle of newsprint. That made my mind up. I could not face another drawn out conversation based on lies, even if it was with a pretty stranger with a nice smile.

I stopped and pointed at her milk carton.

‘Damn, I forgot I’m out of milk too,’ I said. ‘I’d better go back to the shop.’

I turned to walk away from her but she waved her carton in front of me. ‘You can have most of this. Go on, otherwise I’ll only throw it away. You’d be doing me a favour.’

I hesitated.

‘I’m a pilot,’ she explained. ‘I’m flying out to Zurich later today and I’ll be gone till the weekend.’

She smiled again, and it suddenly seemed rather rude not to continue walking with her. Instead I let her tell me about her job at British Airways which eventually prompted a question about what I did.

‘I work for my own company,’ I said, noticing that that she was still looking at my newspapers.

Inside the mansion block, she followed me down the stairs, clutching the milk carton.

‘You’re a Kiwi, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘Yes. And before you ask, I haven’t slept with an All Black or shorn a sheep, or met the bloke who directed The Lord of the Rings.’

I laughed. ‘I guess that’s the same as being South African and not liking biltong.’

‘Are you South African?’ She looked surprised.

‘I used to be.’

Whilst I unlocked my door, I asked how long she had been in the mansion block. She was halfway through a complicated story involving house-sitting for an absent flatmate when she suddenly stopped mid-sentence. My door had swung open, revealing the crime scene tape stuck across my radiator, and the clear plastic bags with the evidence dockets and chemical swabs inside. I might as will have drawn a chalk outline of a dead body on my carpet.

I mumbled something about having just got out of bed, and then stopped. The lies had to end at some point.

‘Angela, I’ve not been very honest with you.’

I put the newspapers down on the kitchen table and pointed to the photo on the front page of the Daily Mail. ‘That woman is called Lucy Grainger. She was a friend of mine, and the police think she’s been murdered.’

‘Here?’ Angela said nervously, staying close to my doorway.

‘No, in her house in Chelsea. But I was the last person to see her alive. The police had to question me and check my clothes and stuff. I think the photographer last night wanted a picture of me in case I was a suspect.’

‘A murder suspect?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘although Lucy might not be dead. The police don’t know for sure yet. There’s a chance…’

My words tailed off because I could see she was not listening.

‘I was released without charge, Angela, but if you want to run out of here screaming, I’d understand.’

She neither ran nor screamed but continued to hover by the doorway. I flicked through the Daily Mail until I came to the centre spread, with photos of Max looking haggard and tired.

‘That’s the husband,’ I said. ‘I have to call him soon and I’m not sure what to say.’

She hesitated, and then walked over to the table on which the papers were spread.

‘And that’s me,’ I said, pointing to the end of an article.

I let her read it: ‘John Flood, a friend of Lucy Grainger who saw her on the night of the disappearance, was detained by the police to help them with their enquiries, but later released.’

I suddenly realised that nowhere did it say that I had been ruled out as a suspect.

Eventually she looked up. ‘So what were those kids doing last night?’

‘There weren’t any kids, just a photographer. He’s gone now. I was only a B list murder suspect, I suppose.’

She smiled at that, but not in the easy way she had smiled previously.

‘I should leave you to make your call,’ she said. She quickly poured some milk into one of my mugs which she took with her, leaving me with the carton as she scurried back up the stairs.

I wondered whether I would have behaved any differently if I had found out that one of my neighbours was a murder suspect, and how long it would now take for the first rumours to reach the other flats that there was a killer living in their basement.

I sifted through the newspapers. They all had reports on the assault, abduction and suspected murder of Lucy. Some had descriptions of the missing rug and speculated how blood-stained it was likely to be after an attack which was universally described as ‘frenzied’ and ‘horrifying’. Most of the stories ended with a plea for further information, and a sombre warning that if Lucy was alive, she would be in desperate need of medical attention.

There were no photographs of me, although all the newspapers mentioned that I had been arrested and later released. In the reports there was one new detail that the police had not revealed. Apparently some money, expensive jewellery and two valuable shotguns had been stolen from the house at the time of the attack. It did not seem enough to justify a murder.

I delayed calling Max for over an hour. As I tidied up my flat, I agonised over what I could possibly say to him that would not make matters even worse. Several times I picked up the receiver and then replaced it before I finally dialled the number.

He picked up on the third ring, sounding hesitant and suspicious. His initial ‘Hello’ was more of a question than a welcome.

‘Max, it’s me – John.’

There was a pause, and I wondered whether I still knew him well enough to identify myself as John rather than John Flood. Then back down the line came the old Max, assured, confident and very loud.

‘John! John, thanks for calling. Oh God, what a mess, eh. Where are you now?’

‘Back home.’

‘Thank God for that. I can’t believe the police picked you up. Complete idiots, the whole lot of them. I’ve wasted two whole days. They didn’t even want the description of the rug to go into the papers. Honestly John, you wouldn’t believe…’

‘Max…’

‘I’m putting my own team together. I’m going to find these bastards –’

‘Max!’

‘Yes?’

I swallowed hard: ‘I’m sorry.’

There was a brief silence, which was rare during a conversation with Max, and for an awful moment I wondered whether he had misinterpreted my remark as a confession rather than merely an expression of sympathy.

‘Thanks,’ he said at last. ‘It’s ghastly, but we can’t give up hope. She could still be alive.’

‘Yes,’ I said, but not nearly quick enough, and I sensed how my hesitation must have hurt him. I closed my eyes and thumped my head against the wall and waited for Max to say something. All I could hear was his breathing. Eventually I asked whether there was anything I could do.

There was another long silence before he said, ‘Look it’s a bit chaotic here, John. I’m not allowed to go back to the house so I’m stuck in the office with private detectives, cops, PR men, you name it. Could I meet you for lunch? You’re over in Earlsfield, aren’t you?’

‘No, that’s the office. I’m at home.’

‘Clapham? 22 Commons Road?’

‘No, that’s where Karen lives. I’m in Balham now.’

‘Oh yes. Sorry, I had heard.’

There was another pause and I imagined him racking his brains to work out whether he had ever been to Balham.

‘Max, don’t worry. I’ll come to you.’

‘No, I need to get away. Balham has restaurants, doesn’t it?’

I laughed and gave him the name of the most expensive one I knew. It was not really in Balham at all. It overlooked Wandsworth Common and I remembered hearing that it held a Michelin star. The last time I had been there was with Karen about three years ago, on our wedding anniversary, and at least the food had proved a success.

I arrived there five minutes early and was already sitting at our table, staring out of the window, when I saw a taxi pull up outside and Max clambered out of it. As he swept into the restaurant, I noticed his fair hair was thinner now, but it was still the same striking pale yellow colour and cropped in the same short back and sides style as it had always been. He was half a foot taller than the waiter who followed in his wake, and his blue eyes darted around the room, before fixing on me. He strode over, gripping my shoulder as I rose to my feet, and announcing in a loud voice that he was absolutely starving. I handed him the menu, and as he studied it, he seemed to derive comfort from the same prices that had horrified me.

After ordering, he asked about my children, which reminded me that he was Jack’s godfather. He had not seen him since the christening over six years ago, but every Christmas, a present had always arrived by courier with a card from Godfather Max.

By the time our food came, I had plucked up the courage to ask him about Lucy. He said she had spent the weekend in Marbella with him, where they owned a house and a yacht. They had planned to fly back together on the Monday morning: she had to see her university tutor at lunchtime and he had some business to attend to, and then they were both going to meet me at the PropFace office that evening to discuss the investment. But Max had changed his mind at the last minute, staying on in Marbella after some friends had invited him sailing, Lucy insisting that there was nothing he needed to say to me that she could not tell me on his behalf.

‘It was only when she was leaving on Monday morning that we realised it was Valentine’s Day,’ Max continued. ‘I offered to cancel everything but she said not to worry: she’d always known my first love was sailing.’

He smiled but then the smile seemed to freeze on his face.

‘It was the last thing she ever said to me,’ he added.

‘I’m so sorry, Max.’

He stared at a space about a foot above my head. ‘I rang her in London at about 7pm when I got back from sailing. She must have been out – still with you, I suppose – so I left a message, and then went to dinner at the yacht club. The next day I flew to Heathrow on the early morning flight. On landing, I switched on my mobile phone and discovered I had three messages from the police asking me to call them immediately. It was our cleaning lady who discovered the blood, apparently.’

As Max talked, I could see that the couple sitting nearest to us were listening in. Across the room, another party of four kept glancing at us. I should not really have been surprised. Max always stood out and his face had been in every newspaper and on every news bulletin, and the one thing he could never do was talk quietly.

I was wondering whether I should warn him, when he suddenly put down his knife and fork, and looked me straight in the eye.

‘John, I have to know. What did happen that night, between you and Lucy?’

I had been preparing for that question all morning, but I had not factored in the mini-audience who now also waited on my words. Nor was I prepared for the intensity of Max’s gaze. His eyes burnt with anger.

I looked down at my food. ‘I didn’t sleep with her,’ I said quietly.

‘I didn’t say you did, John.’

‘No, but the police did. Several times.’

There was a long silence before I continued, still avoiding his eyes.

‘I didn’t sleep with her, Max, I promise. We had a bit of a hug when I was leaving, but that was mostly because I was having trouble standing up. We’d both had quite a bit to drink.’

I smiled: the recollection of Lucy’s flushed cheeks and giggly laugh briefly triumphing over all the other memories of that night. I looked up, and saw Max smiling back.

‘What did you talk about?’ he asked.

‘You.’

This time it was Max who glanced down, and shifted in his seat.

‘She told me a lot, Max,’ I said softly. ‘She told me about the miscarriage. I wish you’d said something. I wouldn’t have bothered you so much about the investment.’