The Valley (23 page)

‘Karen might have arranged something.’

‘You’re entitled to spend some time with your children as well, aren’t you? Come on. It’ll be fun. Karen won’t mind. I helped persuade her to marry you once, didn’t I?’

‘Reminding her of that might not be your best tactic.’

Max laughed again, and then gave me a concerned look. ‘She’s fairly loved up with this Nick fellow, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you okay with that?’

‘Sort of.’

He nodded.

At the end of the meal, as we paid our bill, I saw a group of people at a table nearby repeatedly point in Max’s direction, then whisper among themselves. But Max never noticed them, or if he did, he ignored them. He was in too good a mood. And it dawned on me that he really was happy with how things had turned out. The police had made their move and he had beaten them.

Outside the club, standing on the pavement, he bear-hugged me.

‘Where are you off to now?’ I asked.

‘The first class lounge awaits.’

‘You can always spend time at PropFace if you want more privacy. I can easily put aside a meeting room for you.’

‘And will there be jam and scones for tea?’

‘Probably not,’ I said, relieved he had declined my offer. Even in normal times, putting Max in a meeting room would be like tethering an elephant to the middle of your workplace. And these were not normal times.

Quite how unusual they were, was brought home to me when I arrived at my flat to find a police car parked outside with two uniformed officers in. They studied me as I put my bike away in the shed and walked up to the mansion block’s front door. Inside the hallway, rather than go straight down the stairs to my flat, I hung around for a couple of minutes, reading the various notices put up by the resident’s committee, then opened the door and looked outside. The police car had gone.

Later that evening, I rang Karen. I told her I had seen Max.

‘I wish I’d known,’ she said. ‘It would have given me bragging rights at the school gate. Max is a folk hero among the mums. Most of us quite like the idea of a husband avenging our death if we’re murdered.’

I stayed silent.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘I’m tired.’

‘You’re due to have the children to stay this weekend aren’t you?’ Karen said. ‘Why don’t we cancel that, and instead you can come around to the house for lunch on Saturday and see everyone here?’

I thought about it for a while.

‘You don’t have to come,’ she said. ‘It’s only an idea. I just thought you might be in slight chaos after…after what happened. Look, don’t worry. Maybe it is a bit weird.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d love to come.’

After I put down the phone, I walked across to my sitting room, and peered through the window in the old coal hatch to the street outside, trying to see if the police car had returned. There was no sign of it. But I could not be sure it was not waiting around the corner, just out of sight.

The next morning, when I left to go to work, there was another police car parked outside. I bicycled to the end of the road, and looked back. The car pulled out into the street and followed me.

I changed my route, taking a detour along the cycle paths across Clapham Common and Larkhill Park where cars were banned, and then crossing the Thames at Westminster before crossing back at London Bridge. When I finally reached the PropFace office, half an hour late and exhausted, there was another police car waiting by the entrance.

It was still there in the evening when I left. I did not give it a chance to follow me, crossing a pedestrian-only plaza then cycling down a narrow alleyway near Borough Market. But when I arrived at my mansion block, another one was already waiting for me.

The pattern was repeated every day, starting at six o’clock when the first car would take up position outside my flat. The only variable was how long the cars hung around once I had arrived at my destination. Sometimes they would leave after fifteen minutes; sometimes they would stay for hours.

I tried to ignore them, but without success. Riding my bicycle, I found myself looking over my shoulder every few seconds and in the office, I would wander over to the window and check the roads below. At night, I would toss and turn until eventually I would give up and stride over to the old coal hatch window, scanning the street outside. Returning to bed, I would look at the drawer with the gun in it and curse myself for ever bringing it inside my flat.

The surveillance carried on into the weekend, a squad car even shadowing me as I walked to Karen’s house for lunch. Reaching her doorstep, I considered what would be reported back if I let myself in with my own key. I still kept it on my key ring, next to the one for the drawer beneath my bed.

In the end, I rapped on the door and Tom let me in. As I headed though to the kitchen, I wondered when Karen would change the locks. I noticed the oven and chairs were all new.

Nick hovered at the far end of the kitchen, basting a chicken. We said a polite ‘Hello’ to each other, before Karen come down the stairs.

‘I hear the children are going sailing with you and Max,’ she said, as she pecked me on the cheek.

‘What?’

‘Max said you’ve arranged for Jack and Tom to go sailing on his boat with you and him on the 19th February. You could have warned me.’

‘I didn’t think it was a firm date,’ I said.

‘Well, Max does. He was very precise. Apparently you’ll need to pick up the children first thing on Saturday morning to drive down to the marina to catch the tide, and I shouldn’t expect to see them back again until 9 o’clock on Sunday night. Anyway I said it was okay as far as I was concerned.’’

‘He’ll probably ring me with a few days to go to say he’s stuck in the Caymans or something.’

Karen shook her head. ‘He seemed pretty certain about it. And he’ll have hell to pay if he does cancel because Jack’s been talking about nothing else since he heard.’

Lunch passed off peacefully, and afterwards Karen suggested a trip to the Common, the boys jumping at the chance to sail Max’s boat again. Nick diplomatically said he had some work to do.

Whilst Karen helped the children into their boots and coats, Nick and I cleared the plates away, and he used the brief respite to ask me quietly whether Jonathan Harrison had proved satisfactory.

‘Very,’ I said. ‘Thanks for recommending him.’

‘Glad to have been of assistance,’ he said.

*

As the children rushed out of the house, I found myself checking to see if the police car was still there, but there was no sign of it. I carried Max’s boat in a large plastic bag whilst the children rode their bicycles on ahead, giving Karen and me a chance to talk in private.

‘So how was clink?’ Karen said.

‘Not very pleasant.’

‘Is there any danger of you being re-arrested? If I’m going to have to explain to the children that from now on they’ll only see their father through a glass screen, I’d like to have advance warning.’

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ I said. ‘The last time we spoke, Max was a hero to all the mums.’

‘Max isn’t the father of my children.’

‘Well don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not a murderer.’

We helped Jack launch his boat, and I watched him steer it using the remote control, my eyes occasionally flickering around the edge of the pond to see if any of the families feeding ducks were taking an unhealthy interest in us. It was impossible to tell. Jack’s boat was so big, it would always attract attention.

On the way back, Jack walked beside me, pushing his bicycle, whilst Tom cycled ahead with Karen.

‘Have you known my Godfather Max for a long time?’ Jack asked.

‘Yes, I suppose I have.’

‘Longer than Mummy has known Nick?’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘Jack, can’t you remember when Mummy and I lived…’

My words tailed off. It had been nearly three years since we had all lived as a family; more than a third of Jack’s entire life. If Jack had forgotten about me living in the house, he would also have forgotten about all the rows and screaming.

‘What were you saying, Dad?’ Jack asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said, smiling at him

He smiled back. ‘How big is Godfather Max’s boat?’

‘I don’t know exactly. As far as from us to that tree, I think.’

‘Have you been on it?’

I hesitated. After all the questions I had faced from Joy and Davies, it was almost second nature to me to lie, even when my interrogator was my eight year old son.

I looked up and down the path before answering.

‘Yes, I’ve been on his boat,’ I said at last.

‘I’m going on it too. Godfather Max told me himself.’

At the main road I said goodbye to Karen and the boys. The moment they were out of sight, I started running, only pulling up when I saw the police car parked outside the mansion hall’s main entrance. I smiled at the officers as I jogged past them, but once inside, I swore at Joy and what she was doing to me.

In the communal entrance hall there were mailboxes for all the flats. In mine was an envelope with the logo of Jonathan Harrison’s firm of solicitors. I took it down to my flat and opened it on the kitchen table. Inside was a brief covering letter from Jonathan attached to a bill for nearly £4,000. I wrote out a cheque for half the amount and clipped it to a short note saying I would pay the rest at next month. The credit card bills from the Euro Disney had just started to arrive. The brief illusion I had enjoyed that I was relatively wealthy, was well and truly over now.

I walked across to my window to see if the police car had gone. But before I reached it, I stopped mid-stride, realising that this was exactly what Joy wanted me to do. For a while, I just stood there, piecing it all together. The police were not watching me: they were trying to frighten me. If I had been the target of a genuine surveillance operation, Joy would not have warned me about it in advance, and the officers outside my flat each morning would not have been sitting in a marked police car.

I wandered over to the old coal hatch. Joy had obviously figured out I was hiding something, and was ramping up the pressure until I cracked. The gun was like an unexploded bomb: dangerous to move, but even more dangerous to keep.

I looked outside. It was already getting dark. The weather forecast had predicted a hard frost so it would soon be bitterly cold too: an ideal night to sneak off to Wandsworth Bridge and throw the gun into the Thames

I thought briefly about how Max and I had scrubbed the
Glen Avon
clean, destroying all possible evidence of Gerry’s murder. It would be relatively easy to do the same to the gun, so even if it was eventually washed up on some mud bank, there would be nothing to link it back to me or Max or the
Glen Avon
.

Before I could change my mind, I grabbed my coat and walked out of flat, heading for the shops and returning an hour later with a bulging shopping bag. Rather than go straight inside the mansion block, I walked up and down the street, making absolutely certain that there were no police cars in sight.

In my kitchen, I took out from my bag a half litre container of Toilet Duck lavatory cleaner. I had paid for it in cash, and specifically chosen a brand I had never bought before, and would never buy again.

I poured it all into a washing up bowl which I then filled to the brim with lukewarm water. The stench of chlorine hit me immediately, and I had to stand clutching the table top, fighting off the memories it provoked. Then I pulled on the rubber gloves which I had also bought, and took the gun out of the backpack in the drawer. I split it into its lock, stock and barrels, like I had seen Max do a hundred times in Bristol, and dropped each part into the washing up bowl.

The lock and the stock slid under the frothy green surface, whilst the barrels poked over the side. I knotted three jay cloths together, immersed them in the bowl then threaded them through the gun barrels and out the other end, pushing them backwards and forwards until I was convinced that every inch of metal had been subjected to my chemical assault. I sponged the lock and the stock with the jay clothes, then left everything to soak in the pungent liquid, whilst I went over to my window.

I looked outside. The police car had not returned and probably would not until the morning. That would give me more than enough time to get down to the Thames and back. I reckoned the best time would be around ten o’clock when Wandsworth Bridge would be uncrowded but not so deserted that a lone cyclist would attract attention. I would simply cycle to the mid-point, open up my backpack, pull out a bin liner containing the gun and hurl it over the side. With the tide and currents, it could end up anywhere between Teddington lock and the North Sea. In the morning I would complete the job, going to Wandsworth rubbish tip and disposing of the backpack, the towel, the silencer and the cartridges. By lunchtime I would be free.

I walked into my bedroom and picked out the clothes I would wear: a cycling helmet that would obscure my face from any overhead cameras; an anonymous pair of blue jeans; an old grey fleece. Tomorrow, they could all go to the tip as well, in separate bags.

Returning to the kitchen, I hoiked the lock, stock and barrel out of the bowl, leaving them to drain in my sink. I took off my gloves, and checked the time. It was only eight o’clock: two hours to go.

I tried to relax by opening a bottle of beer and watching television. A game show was on, and I sat staring at it without paying any attention. Instead I kept remembering how methodical and in control Max had been when we cleaned the
Glen Avon
. In contrast, I was already a bundle of nerves. And I still had not gone outside, where the real adventure would begin.

I made myself a sandwich. As I ate it at the kitchen table, I read the full description on Jonathan Harrison’s invoice of the charge he had successfully defended me from – that of killing Charlie Wall on the 17th December.

That date had been important. It had been the unarguable reason why the police had released me and left my flat unsearched. And yet no one had told me why the police suspected that was when Charlie Wall had been killed.

I was just about to put the invoice down when I remembered something else. The 17th December was in the week when Max had been due to come over to the UK before he had changed his mind. It had also been the week when he had wanted me to meet him on board the
Glen Avon.

I helped myself to another beer from the fridge. On the shelf below were two packets of jelly, which I had bought for the boys when they had last stayed over. Seeing them reminded me that in a few weeks time, all three of us were due to go sailing with Max. And then I recalled what Max had said when I had told him that you can’t dispose of a body without anyone knowing: ‘at sea you can’.

I glanced across to the gun in my sink. In a few hours all the evidence would be gone forever, and so too would my most powerful weapon.

I went back to the kitchen table. Next to Jonathan Harrison’s bill was a large pile of unopened letters and other paperwork. I rummaged through it until I found what I was searching for: Joy Clarke’s business card, with her mobile phone number scribbled across it.

I took Joy’s card and my beer over to the TV.
Masterchef
was on. I settled back in my chair and watched it, sipping my beer and flicking the card between my fingers. I imagined Joy watching the same programme, sitting on a sofa with her feet tucked up under her, her pointed leather shoes on the floor.

Calling Joy on a Saturday night was definitely cheeky. But she had given me her card and told me to call at any time. I was not committing any criminal offence that could justify her ordering an immediate search of my flat.

I carried on drinking beer and playing with the card. It was another half hour before I dialled the number. She answered on the fifth ring.

‘It’s John,’ I said. ‘John Flood.’

She did not say anything for a while. I thought I could hear a TV playing in the background.

‘How can I help you, John?’ she eventually replied in a very formal tone, as if she was announcing my presence to someone else.

‘Why did you think Charlie Wall was killed on 17th December?’

There was another long pause before she said: ‘John this really isn’t a good time to answer those sorts of questions. I’ve got my feet up, watching television –’

‘What are you watching?’

‘Masterchef.’

‘Where’s your anaesthetist boyfriend?’

‘None of your business.’

I waited, letting the silence build, then gave her one more prompt. ‘It’s important Joy – for both of us.’

There was a click. For a second I thought she had cut me off, but then I realised she must have pressed a mute button. I could imagine her getting off the sofa, muttering an apology to her boyfriend, and then retreating to another room.

Her voice came back on the line: ‘Why do you want to know about the date, John?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘John, you’ll have to give me a reason if you want me to reveal details of our investigation.’