The Valley (3 page)

He looked up: ‘Did she say she was unhappy?’

‘She told me you’d been through a rough patch, but things were looking up. She was really pleased about you closing the hedge fund. She knew you’d done it for her and – ’

‘What the fuck are you looking at?’

Max was glaring at the couple on the next door table. Then he swung round to the group of four across the room. ‘And you,’ he said, pointing at them. ‘What are you so interested in?’

By now, everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. I reached over to try to calm him down, but he leapt up and strode over to the headwaiter, reached into his pocket, peeled off several £20 notes and flung them down on top of the restaurant reservations book.

‘Keep the change,’ he said, and then turned to me. ‘Come on, John, we’re leaving.’

He walked straight out, and I followed, grabbing our coats on the way. Outside I had to run to catch up with him as he marched down the pavement. Even from behind, I could see his whole body shaking with rage, and then suddenly, outside an estate agent’s window, he began to crumple. His hands reached out to grasp a railing and he almost doubled up. For a moment, I thought he was being sick or suffering a heart attack. Then he turned to look up at me and I could see the tears running down his face.

‘I miss her, John. I miss her so much. I just want her back but she’s dead. We all know that but no one will say it. She’s dead, John, and she’s never coming back, is she?’

I had never seen Max cry before. Instead of answering him, I put his coat around his shoulders and stood quietly beside him. The pedestrians who passed us stared at us, as did the drivers waiting in their cars for the lights to change, and the mothers pushing buggies on the Common, and even the estate agents working inside their office. Eventually Max hauled himself up and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

‘Come on, Max,’ I said, ‘I’ll get the car and take you home.’

He shook his head. ‘No, the exercise will do me good. Which way’s the river?’

I pointed across the expanse of Wandsworth Common. ‘It’s about two miles that way. Where are you going to?

‘My office in Mayfair. Why don’t you walk with me to the end of the Common? That’s not far, is it?’

I nodded, remembering how he preferred walking to taking any form of public transport.

As we set out across the Common on a footpath, he suddenly turned to me. ‘I think we’re the only people here without children.’

‘Welcome to The Valley,’ I said.

‘The Valley?’ He looked around. ‘I don’t see any river. Or any hills for that matter.’

‘It’s not a physical thing.’

We looked at each other and then he started laughing and put his arm on my shoulder. ‘John, do you know how long it’s been since I last heard you speak that sort of bollocks?’

‘Too long,’ I said.

‘Tell me about The Valley then. What do people do in this valley besides breeding?’

‘They look at the areas they once dreamed of living in. Then they extend their houses.’

I thought Max might smile at this, but he gave me a look of incomprehension. I realised that loft conversions were not really part of his world. When people like Max needed more space, they just bought another house.

‘Do they make any money, these Valley people?’ he asked.

‘Not by your standards.’

‘Oh, I don’t make money anymore, John. I’m retired now.’

This time it was me who muttered, ‘Bollocks,’ and we both grinned. We walked in silence for a while, but it was a good silence.

‘Max,’ I eventually said, ‘I’ve got something to ask you. It’s probably the wrong time, but it can’t wait.’

‘Is it about the investment?’

‘Yes. I am sorry to ask but –’

‘When’s the deadline?’

‘Two weeks. Slightly less now. I went through everything with Lucy before…before she disappeared. I sent you both an email. You probably haven’t had time to read it but –’

‘I read it,’ Max said, without breaking his stride. ‘It was going to be Lucy’s project. She was going to go on your board. With her there wouldn’t have been any problem with past history.’

He let his words tail off. He obviously did not want to spell out his rejection. But I couldn’t afford to withdraw gracefully.

‘Max, if the deal made any sense to you before, please don’t cancel it now.’

I sensed his stride lengthen slightly.

‘Max, I really need this to happen. I know I shouldn’t be asking you now but…’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘I’m not sure there’s time for that.’

He stopped in his tracks and looked at me. ‘All right: I’ll let you know one way or another next week.’

Before I could react, he had enveloped me in a bear hug.

‘You’ve been a good friend, John,’ he said. ‘I won’t forget it.’ And then he spun on his heels and strode off, marching North at almost jogging pace.

‘Goodbye,’ I shouted and saw him raise a hand in what might have been a wave. But he never turned around.

Walking back to my flat, I realised it was barely three o’clock. Jack and Tom would be coming home from school soon. Normally I would seize any chance I had to pick them up. But now I felt ashamed. I kept thinking of the photographer and Milburn’s comment that I wouldn’t be much of a dad to them if I was locked away for twenty years.

Back at the flat, I glanced briefly at the PropFace debtor sheet that I had brought home from the office, but I could not concentrate on work. Instead I started surfing the web, looking at the websites of all the newspapers I had read earlier in the morning, frantically searching for updates on Lucy’s disappearance. Time was ticking away. Twenty-four hours ago the police had told me that if Lucy was alive, she would be in urgent need of medical attention. As I waded through the all the comment and speculation that filled the websites and blogs, I gradually realised that no genuine breakthroughs had been reported, and that could only mean one thing: Lucy was dead.

My phone rang. I let my answer-phone take the call. It was a reporter from the Daily Mail. He had left two messages before, but this one was blunter. He would pay me five grand in cash for an exclusive full page interview, revealing everything I knew about Max and Lucy Grainger; there might even be a bigger payment if the revelations were ‘juicy’.

For a long time, I sat staring at my laptop, trying not to think about what I could do with five thousand pounds. It would pay my rent, my share of the mortgage payment on the family home and make a dent in my overdraft. It might even be my only income for the month. And if Max did not come through with the investment, I was going to need every penny. But I could not do it. I owed Lucy that at least.

Eventually I moved over to the sofa and turned on the TV news. Lucy’s disappearance was no longer a headline story. There was just a short report that started with pictures of two men, clad from head to foot in white forensic overalls, walking from a police car to the front door of the Graingers’ house in Chelsea. Off screen, the newsreader announced that the police were now treating the disappearance as a murder case. Then the report cut to Max walking down a street with reporters running after him.

Suddenly he turned around, his eyes blazing with anger.

‘I will do anything,’ he said, ‘anything in my power, to find out what has happened to my wife.’

I first met Max Grainger in the 1990s when we both arrived at Bristol University. We had been allocated rooms next to each other, in an isolated student hall of residence that had been built just before the First World War, aping the design of an Oxbridge college. My room was on the third floor of a faux-medieval turret, reached via a narrow winding staircase. And it was here that I first saw Max, his fair hair glowing in a narrow beam of autumnal sunlight from a small window, as he tried to manhandle a vast, old-fashioned, blue trunk up the stone stairs.

‘Do you want a hand?’ I asked.

‘Yah, grab that end, will you?’ he replied without even looking up.

I took hold of a handle and the two of us heaved the trunk up to his room. As I put it down on the wooden floor, I noticed how the blue colour on one side had faded, and how someone had written in thick white paint, the initials MFG. And just below them, also in white, were the initials DFG, crossed out with a single neat white line.

I held out a hand for my new neighbour to shake and muttered my full name.

‘Gosh, how very formal,’ he said, staring at me.

I started to withdraw my hand, but he grasped it in both of his and pumped it up and down.

‘I’m Max,’ he said. ‘Now, how about a drink?’

His voice was always loud and in that cold bare student room it boomed out, and I was not sure if he had given me an invitation or an order.

Max smiled and tapped one end of the trunk with his shoe. ‘Got some Earl Grey down here. Or, if you want something stronger, there’s some sloe gin somewhere.’

But it was too late: I was already backing out of the room, making polite excuses. I’ve never actually liked tea and I had no idea what sloe gin was. Max’s Edwardian trunk and public school voice fitted perfectly with the Hall of Residence, but they made me very self-conscious about the two plastic suitcases I had used to transport all my own possessions, and which were still lying on the floor of my room next door because I did not know where to put them. It had been a long day, mostly spent on a long-distance coach from Durham, and meeting Max was just too much, too different, too soon. I reverted to my natural poise of hanging back, lest I wander into a place where I did not quite belong.

I had arrived in England only five years previously, along with my recently widowed mother and my six year old sister Susie. We had moved to the same house in Durham where my mother had grown up. Everyone assumed we were part of the white flight escaping the final death throes of apartheid and the blood strained transition to African majority but our reasons were more personal, stemming from my mother’s wish not only to be close to her increasingly frail mother, but also to be as far away as possible from the hospitals in Kimberley in South Africa, where my father had spent his last six months, slowly dying of cancer.

But if South Africa was no longer home, nor was Durham really. We were the outsiders with the funny accent – a funny accent that many of our neighbours still associated with an evil regime. I was one of just a handful of kids to join my school in Year 9, and I quickly came to appreciate the sharp divide within it between the kids from the local council estates and the offspring of Durham’s academic and professional classes who clustered around the university. Neither group recognised me as one of their own, and I felt ill at ease with both. Back in South Africa, my father had founded and run a small mining equipment firm, but when he died my mother had been forced to sell his business to his former partners for a knockdown price, which was then reduced still further by exchange controls and a rapidly devaluing currency. Even as a teenager, I could tell that we were sliding down the socio-economic ladder, and that my mother’s solution – working as a shop assistant in a delicatessen – hardly slowed our descent.

I responded by being an over-conscientious pupil, obsessed with transforming my C grades into Bs and sometimes even As, to the delight of mother who saw university as a route back to middle class respectability, but to the detriment of my already limited social life. Outside of the classroom, my main interest was rugby. It was the sport I had most enjoyed when I had lived in South Africa and the only one I had been any good at. When my father had been ill, it had been the one topic we could always talk about; I had even inherited his role on the rugby pitch – playing out on the wing, using my natural speed to make up for my lack of size. In Durham, however, rugby only added to my weirdness, because my school played only football. Therefore twice a week my mother had to drive me to a rugby club on the far side of the city where none of my school friends ever set foot.

It was my love of rugby that drew me to Bristol. I knew it was a good university but I also knew it was a rugby university, in the middle of rugby country. My teachers told me it was an aspirational target, but that merely added to its appeal. By sheer hard work, I scraped a place to read History, only to have my triumph threatened by another family upheaval.

My Gran had died a few months previously and my mother had found comfort in the arms of an old family friend and fellow South African émigré called Pete Du Toite. Pete had been working for De Beers in London but was due to move on to the diamond mines in Western Australia, and before he left, he proposed to my mother and suggested we all come out with him.

In many ways, this was the best thing to happen to my family in a long while. Pete clearly made my mother happy and he had always been kind to my sister and me. And whilst my mother was not marrying him for his mining engineer’s salary alone, I knew it would give her the financial security she craved. Nor did Australia seem such a bad place to make a fresh start: it promised South African weather without South African politics, suburbs full of the barbecues and swimming pools we had known and enjoyed in Kimberley, and even a successful rugby side. But going there immediately would have meant throwing away my hard-earned place at Bristol University. So instead I decided to accept the university’s offer, but on the assumption that my stay there would be just a brief transitory period in my life – a sort of alternative gap year with extra rugby thrown in – before I too joined my mother, sister and new stepfather in Australia.

It was Max who changed these plans. I might have backed swiftly out of his room on that first day at Bristol, but he was never going to be an invisible next door neighbour. Tall, with almost white fair hair, a large roman nose and a cut-glass accent, he would have stood out physically even if he had been the retiring sort. But neither he nor his loud rich friends were the least bit retiring. At a time when most students did not own cars, he drove a Land Rover and would saunter from it into the Hall of Residence and up to his room, as often as not wearing an army officer’s uniform or carrying some blood-stained small animal he had shot and was now intending to eat.

His very presence at the university seemed to be an affront to the more politically correct students, perhaps even more so than my South African accent. And whereas I toned down my accent in an effort to blend in, Max made no attempt to modify his behaviour. Rumours about his origins proliferated, the consensus being that his family owned half of Scotland and had purchased his place at the university by subscribing generously to its appeal fund.

Hearing his baying laughter through the walls of my room almost every day reminded me of the large social gulf between us. But Max could never see the point of inviting only four friends over for a drink if he could just as easily invite forty. And so his parties would inevitably spill across the corridor and into my room, an arrangement which suited me as I got to drink Max’s expensive wine and eat the food he had spend all day preparing. All I had to do was open my door. I did not have much in common with most of his friends, but a party was a party, and Max always made an effort to include me, introducing me as his co-host to all the good-looking upper-class girls his parties seemed to attract in droves, telling them that I was Bristol’s star rugby player.

My actual rugby success was short-lived. Halfway through the first term, I smashed up my knee trying to haul down an opposing wing who was six inches taller and three stones heavier than me. I spent four weeks wearing a brace, hobbling around the university as my ligaments slowly mended. My former teammates all wished me a speedy recovery and then went back to their games and training. Our hall of residence was situated out in the suburbs, two miles away from the main university buildings, and all the students I knew had bicycles. Now they rode off to lectures without me, leaving me to catch the bus. And then one day, when I was waiting in the rain for the Number 52 to arrive, an old mud-splattered Land Rover mounted the kerb behind me, and Max shouted for me to jump in.

I squeezed onto the front seat beside a large wooden box with small holes on the top, breathing in a strong musty smell that reminded me of my sister’s pet hamster, although it was much more pungent. Max must have seen me wrinkle my nose

‘That’s Betty and Freda,’ he said, tapping the box.

‘What are they?’

‘Ferrets, although I sometimes think Freda might be part-stoat. She’s a bloodthirsty little thing.’

I squirmed away from the box and Max smiled. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not fluffy enough for her.’

When he dropped me off, Max asked what time I would be returning, and offered me a lift back. Soon I was going into the university with him almost every day, altering my schedule so it coincided with his. One evening, as he drove me back to the hall of residence, we found out that we had something in common. We were both, as Max put it, ‘half orphans’. His mother had died when he was seven.

When my knee brace came off, the doctor cleared me to resume cycling, but at least twice a week I would still hitch a lift with Max. He would not accept any petrol money so eventually I bought him an expensive bottle of wine as a thank-you present. We ended up drinking it together in his room. At some point I let on that I was looking for a job as a part-time waiter. If nothing else, I reckoned he would know where the smartest restaurants, with the biggest tips, could be found.

‘Do you know anything about gardening?’ Max asked.

I assumed at first that his family owned a stately home nearby and needed another servant, but that was not what he was looking for. I learnt that gardening for other people was what Max did himself two afternoons a week, and he now had a waiting list of clients. The work was far better paid than waiting tables, I could start immediately, and it did not matter if I knew nothing about it. All I had to do was say I would join him.

And so our first financial enterprise was born. On entering a client’s garden, Max would immediately point towards something and tell me to rake, mow, saw, dig, or water it. And whilst I got on with that, he would talk knowledgeably to the owners, suggesting new plants, soil mixtures or pruning methods, and do any skilful tasks that were needed.

The clients were always billed for two expert gardeners and they never complained. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of rich, middle-aged families in the Bristol suburbs who wanted a large attractive garden without having to work on it themselves. Payment was cash-only and we charged ourselves out at twice what a waiter earned. We paid no taxes, VAT or national insurance, and split all the proceeds 50:50. If we bought any fertiliser or weedkiller, we automatically charged it onto our clients at three times the price we paid, pocketing the difference. By student standards, we were soon coining it in.

Working alongside Max in our clients’ garden, I realised the young country squire image was not just a façade: he genuinely adored shooting and fishing and if he had not hated horses, (‘stupid animals’ in his opinion) I am sure he would have hunted as well. And almost everything he killed, he ate, using an old Victorian cookbook as his guide, creating wonderful dishes from the most unpromising balls of fluff and fur.

His knowledge of wildlife, however, extended far beyond his sporting or culinary interests. Often, whilst gardening, he would point out a small bird hidden in the undergrowth that I would never have seen, or decipher the age and health of an animal from just its tracks. Animals also seemed to instinctively trust him, and, for a large person, he could be surprisingly delicate when he held them. But he was never sentimental about wildlife, particularly unwanted pests. Vermin removal became a lucrative sideline for our business and foxes, mink, rabbits, crows, squirrels, even small deer, all paid the ultimate price for despoiling our clients’ gardens. They were despatched in the middle of the night by Max, who would wait for them with a shotgun in his hands. To muffle the bang, he used an improvised silencer, made from damp toilet rolls and duct tape. When he fired, it was blown to pieces, generating a shower of smoking fragments that slowly wafted to earth, leaving only a singed stub on the end of the gun. Fortunately, he never needed a second shot.

Max’s other passion was sailing. The nearest he came to a team sport was crewing for a retired admiral who owned a large catamaran. The two of them would take part in the local sailing club’s races across the Bristol Channel, achieving their best results whenever the weather was at its stormiest.

Max’s attitude to Maths, his degree course, was much more complicated. He often seemed to regard his academic course work as a necessary evil. Yet on another, deeper level he was clearly fascinated by the subject. He never read novels, but bought endless books on mathematics, all completely unconnected to his degree. At times he would try to explain things, like what a circle really was or how the number 9 had shaped civilisation, and I would stand there nodding, slightly interested but hopelessly lost, appreciating the zeal in his eyes, and feeling a bit ashamed as I tried to steer the conversation back to something I could understand.

Although Max was very social, I was never sure whether he really liked people. He had lots of acquaintances but very few friends. Previous guests would disappear from his party invitations at the drop of a hat, no reason given. Girlfriends were acquired and then disposed of before I even knew that he was keen on them. Three months was the record length for any of his relationships and often the girls would spend as much time with me talking about Max as they actually did with him.