The Valley (7 page)

‘I knew them,’ I said. ‘I was at Bristol with the husband.’

Everyone waited for me to say more. But I clammed up. It was not the same now as it had been with just Angela and me.

It was only when we were finishing our pudding that I remembered that I still had not asked Angela where she was moving to.

‘Hong Kong,’ she said.

She must have seen the shock and disappointment on my face because she quickly added, ‘I’m only going to be there for a few months.’

‘What are you doing over there?’ I asked.

‘Filling in for a pilot who’s gone on maternity leave. She flies long haul jets, which is what I want to do, but there aren’t any opportunities here at the moment. So when a temporary job came up at Hong Kong, I grabbed it.’

‘Where will you stay?’ I asked.

‘A dingy flight-crew apartment, I expect. BA aren’t very generous with their expenses.’

‘When do you leave?’

‘Next week.’

I took a deep breath and said. ‘You must give me your email address then.’

As I said it, I realised that I had not asked for a single woman’s contact details for about a decade. My brief romantic entanglements since my break-up with Karen had just happened, with no forethought or planning involved. I saw Angela exchange glances with Gill.

‘That would be lovely,’ she said, and she rose to take some plates away.

The supper party dwindled to a close. Angela had warned me that she had to be up early. When I said goodbye to her, I swapped email addresses and gave her my mobile number too, ignoring Gill’s arched eyebrow. The goodbye kiss I received on my way out was a sisterly peck on the cheek, but there was a short hug afterwards that hinted of the relationship we might have had if we had met six months earlier.

‘Let me know how things with Max turn out,’ she said.

I gave her shoulders a squeeze, breathed in the buttery scent she was wearing and followed Gill and James down the stairs.

Back in my own flat, I remembered the scent and where I had inhaled it before. It was the same one that Karen used to ware. And that made me realise that rebounding from a failed marriage into a long distance relationship with a stranger made no sense at all. A wonderful smile and a sympathetic face would not be much use if they were six thousand miles away.

But when I went to sleep that night, it was neither Karen’s perfume nor Angela’s smile that filled my unconsciousness. My dream was about my meeting with Max at his hedge fund’s offices the next day. In my dream, when I asked Max whether he was going to invest, he just laughed and said it had only been a lure to get me back into the building and find out what had really happened between me and Lucy. Then two heavily built men appeared from out of the shadows and led me to a sound-proof room, its walls lined with cattle prods and branding irons.

It was exactly ten days after Lucy’s disappearance that I visited the London office of Max’s hedge fund for the first time. It was on the fourth floor of a large office block in the middle of Mayfair. I stepped out of the lift into an imposing but nearly deserted reception area, staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with platinum blonde hair, sitting behind a shiny carbon-fibre desk emblazoned with the Alpha Tec logo. When I told her I had an appointment with Max Grainger, she instructed me, in a heavy East European accent, to wait on a sofa, then picked up a phone and whispered into it.

As I stared out of the window, I realised that the last time I had been inside an office with Max was the day he had left PropFace. There had been no farewell tears; just mutual relief that the painful negotiations over him leaving and me buying out his stake were finally over. We both said we would keep in touch but within a few weeks he had to fly off to the Caymans, and my attentions had already turned towards my son Jack, who had chicken pox, and Karen who was pregnant again with Tom and suffering from morning sickness, just as PropFace lurched towards another crisis. A few months later I ran into George who was one of Max’s backers at the ‘London-end’, as he put it. When I asked how everything was going, he replied ‘swimmingly’ and promised that when Max was next over from the Caymans he would arrange for us all to meet up. But the reunion never happened, and it was almost two years later when I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Max and George had fallen out badly, and George had suffered some form of breakdown, retreating to his ancestral pile in Dorset amid a blizzard of legal writs emanating from the Caymans.

‘Are you John?’

Another girl, this time English, smartly spoken and a brunette, loomed over me. When I nodded, she asked me to follow her. I was taken down a long corridor with deep beige carpets, past several empty offices. A few had been relegated to store rooms. One was piled high with the latest slim line laptops and docking stations which made the aging computers we used in PropFace look like relics from another century, which some of them were.

At the end of the corridor was a large metal and glass door, slightly ajar. It swung aside and out stepped Max, dressed in a roll neck sweater and jeans, his face beaming with enthusiasm.

‘John, how good of you to come,’ he said, guiding me into a vast office, with a view across the Mayfair rooftops to the American Embassy. Next to the window was a modern art installation. It consisted of a life-sized glass sculpture of a small girl swimming through a grass lawn, her torso mostly hidden in what appeared to be real soil, the grass behind her rippling in her wake.

Max saw me gazing at it. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ he said. ‘I bought it for Lucy, but then…well, you know about the miscarriage, don’t you? It seemed insensitive to keep it in the house, so it ended up here.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘“Waving, Not Drowning”. Or maybe it’s “Drowning, Not Waving”. I’m not really sure. A man comes every three month to brush the lawn and top it up with worms.’

‘Worms?’

He knelt down beside it. ‘I think they are the best bit. Look where the soils have been mixed.’

He pointed to something that looked like a root, until it wriggled.

I shook my head in amazement.

Max laughed. ‘You were never much of a gardener, were you? Perhaps this is more your cup of tea? Do you recognise it?’

He pointed to an oil painting above a mahogany desk. It depicted two Victorian gentlemen shooting birds on a marshy inlet, with a sailing ship just visible in the distance. I knew I had seen it somewhere before.

‘It was in the Castle at Glen Avon,’ Max said, helping me out.

‘You bought the painting from the Gores?’

‘I bought the whole estate: the Castle, the Lodge, the cottages and all the land that was left, although there wasn’t much. They’d been selling off bits and pieces for ages.’

‘And all this?’ I said, looking around the huge office.

‘It all belongs to Alpha Tec. The plan was to shift some of the Client Relations work from Grand Cayman back to London, but then we decided to close the fund, so now it’s a bit of a white elephant. In the last couple of weeks, though, it’s been a real godsend.’

I wondered if that was my cue to say something about Lucy, but before I could think of anything appropriate, he had motioned for me to sit down beside a glass table strewn with printouts of all the emails and attachments I had sent him and Lucy. All the business plans, cashflow forecasts, balance sheets and client lists were there – with notes in Max’s scratchy handwriting scribbled in their margins.

. ‘John, I take it you still want me involved in PropFace?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And quickly too – if that’s possible.’

‘Good,’ Max said, ‘because that’s what I want as well.’

He looked up and must have witnessed the broadest smile to have crossed my face in years.

‘First though, John, could you sign this? It’s our standard NDA.’

He passed me a couple of ring-bound documents. My brain was reeling so much that for a few seconds I could not actually remember what NDA meant until I saw the words ‘Non Disclosure Agreement’ printed on the cover. I started to skim through one of the copies, conscious that Max was watching me closely. It was twenty pages long and full of legal jargon. But the gist was clear: it banned me for life from even mentioning Max’s involvement in PropFace, let alone the terms of his involvement.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have much time now,’ Max said. ‘But if you want to take away the NDA and go through it with your lawyer, we can reconvene next week.’

I flicked over another page, studied it for two seconds and then looked up.

‘I’m sure it’s fine, Max,’ I said, and signed both copies.

He proceeded to outline the deal he was offering. It was a little bit different from the straight forward single investment I had proposed. It was also, he stressed, completely non-negotiable.

Instead of investing in one lump sum, he would pay in stages, with each instalment arriving just before I had to pay the ex-owners of the business I had bought.

‘My hands are tied,’ he explained. ‘Most of my money is offshore. If I bring back too much, too quickly, the taxman will take half.’

‘And you’ll be our chairman?’

‘No,’ he said vehemently.

‘But Lucy…’

‘She would have been a great Chairman. But not me. I just want the right to nominate a finance director. I’ll put in my accountant, if that’s all right with you?’

I had not expected this at all. Max leaned back and sipped his tea.

‘John, I’m not going to try to reinvent the past. Comebacks are always a mistake. So take my money – and get a nice Jewish accountant to help you balance the books each month as part of the deal.’

He was smiling now.

‘There’s going to be some transition expenses. You’ve been running on empty for a long time. You need some new IT, some extra sales people and a new marketing campaign. I don’t want you running out of working capital just as everything takes off. So I’m also offering an extra loan of £200k to get you started. There will only be a token interest rate – a pound a year, that sort of thing. Do you want it?’

I stared at him. I was trying to add up in my head how much cash he was about to hand over.

‘Well, it’s just an idea,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be better as a loan, because I don’t want your stake to get too diluted.’

‘I’m not rejecting it!’

‘Good.’ He smiled. ‘And, that Venture Capital firm who bought George’s stake…’

‘VeeCap?’

‘I never liked them. We’ll offer them £200,000 to buy them out once and for all. Do you think they’ll go for it?’

‘I think they’ll bite your hand off. They’ve been trying to find a buyer for ages.’

‘We’ll both be one-handed then, because the offer will come from both of us.’

My smile froze. ‘Max, I haven’t got a hundred grand.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll add it to the loan. Then we’ll get them off our back for good, and it’ll just be you and me who own the equity. Of course, the staff can have some options too if you want to give them some, but we must have control.’

‘Max, you don’t have to…’

‘Yes, I do. You once lent me cash for my equity stake, remember. All I’m doing is paying you back.’

He stood up and walked to the window. ‘I’m doing it for Lucy as well. She wanted it to go ahead. It was one of the last things we spoke about.’

‘Has there been any more news about Lucy?’ I asked nervously.

‘Not really,’ Max said, ‘I’ve got a good private detective on the case. He’s turned up a few odds and ends – including a sighting of you running down the Old Brompton Road late that night.’

‘Me?’

He turned around and studied me. ‘We think so. The description matches. An old lady was out walking her dachshund and got a good view of you as you charged past. She said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘That means drunk,’ I said, ‘which I was. And lost as well. You know what my sense of direction is like. When I left your house, I thought the Old Brompton Road was the Fulham Road and headed off down it in the wrong direction. And then I couldn’t find a cab for ages. When I spotted one in the distance dropping off a passenger, I had to sprint after it. That’s probably when your old lady saw me. She must have thought I was a madman.’

I smiled but Max didn’t. I could almost see him weighing up what I had just said in his head.

‘Max, there haven’t been any important leads, have there? I mean any clues as to where they took her…’

My words trailed off. Max just looked at me.

‘There’s been no breakthroughs,’ he said eventually. ‘We haven’t given up, though. I’m still doing press conferences and appeals. Fewer reporters turn up for them now and –.’

‘Max, if there’s…’

He waved away my concern and moved over to his desk

‘I’m still plugging away,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ve got to see a journalist in a few minutes, so I’m going to have to wrap this up. My lawyers will email you the paperwork this afternoon. If you’ve any problems, talk to them. I will tell them to wire the first instalment to you the moment you sign. Now go and make me some money.’

I walked towards the door and then turned. Max was still sitting at his desk, staring out of the window.

‘Max,’ I said, and then in a louder voice, ‘Max!’

He turned to look at me.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and he nodded, and I walked out of the room trying not to dance with joy.

Later that afternoon, Max’s lawyer emailed me the contract. I did not try to negotiate – there would not have been any point. But I did notice one change: technically my deal was not with Max. He was the named counter-signatory but only in his capacity as a director of Alpha Tec Management Holdings Ltd, registered in the Cayman Islands.

I called the lawyer to say that everything was in order. He suggested a time the next day when Max and I could come to his firm’s office and sign all the documents.

I turned up. Max never did. His lawyer explained that he had signed everything in advance because he had been forced to change his schedule. I added my signature just below Max’s, and on my way back to PropFace, I rang him on his mobile to let him know everything was now signed and sealed. The call diverted to his secretary who told me he was en route to the Caymans.

As I walked through the front door PropFace shared with the undertakers below, and up the concrete stairs to the stained carpet and our under-heated office, I was already smiling. I gathered everyone around the oversized table in our one and only meeting room. As I talked, I could see them all waiting for me to mention some bad news – some compulsory redundancies or salary reductions. But gradually their scepticism was overcome, especially when I said I was going to the off-licence to buy some champagne to celebrate.

On my way out, I received a text message on my mobile from an unknown number. I clicked on it, thinking it might be from Max. It simply said: ‘hope your meeting went ok – off to HK tomorrow. keep in touch. angela’. I started to key in a brief reply, before realising that I had not even thanked her for supper, so I phoned her back instead.

‘Hi,’ she said, sounding slightly surprised to hear from me so quickly.

‘I feel terrible that I never thanked you for dinner. When are you leaving for Hong Kong?’

‘Crack of dawn tomorrow.’

‘Do you want to meet for a drink tonight?’

There was a long pause and then she said: ‘Sure. Why not?’

We met in a bar in Wandsworth. I came straight from the office, having drunk slightly more than my fair share of the champagne. Angela was sitting by herself. When she saw me, she smiled, but it was a nervous, half-hearted version of the smile I had seen before.

I sat down beside her and told her that Max had come through with all the money I had needed. But instead of looking happy, she seemed worried.

‘What did you have to promise in return, John?’

It seemed a strange question to ask someone who has just announced that they have pulled off the deal of a lifetime. But then I remembered that, at her flat, I had told her about the previous deal I had agreed and how it had nearly bankrupted me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m in the clear. It’s all sorted.’

The look of concern remained on her face.

‘Honestly, it’s a good deal, Angela. There are no conditions. I should order a bottle of champagne to celebrate.’

‘I couldn’t drink it,’ she said. ‘We have to be alcohol free for twenty-four hours. And I’m afraid I have to go back soon. I still haven’t packed.’

I wasn’t sure if this was a gentle brush-off. Emboldened by the drink I had already consumed, I took her hand and asked her to promise me that when she was next in London, she would come out with me for a delayed celebration.’

Suddenly the 100 watt smile returned. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I would like to. I’d really like to.’

It was only when I got back to my flat that the regrets came, and they were not about Angela or the deal with Max. They were about the person who had made it all possible but was no longer alive.