The Valley (6 page)

And then one care-free Sunday in the Spring, when we were lying in bed, wondering where we would go for brunch, her phone rang. She answered it, and then passed the receiver to me, with a mystified expression.

‘It’s someone asking what you’ve done with his trunk.’

I actually had mentioned Max to her a couple of times, but only in passing. The emotional bond between us was still there, but in terms of day to day life, I had left his orbit many years ago. With the exception of George, none of my friends really knew him, and now it was hard to see him fitting in with any of the things we did, whether it was playing tag rugby on the common, or sitting in bars laughing at our unsuccessful careers.

When he came round to my house in Battersea to pick up his trunk, it soon became obvious that he had returned with few savings and no job lined up. When I offered to put him in touch with the derivatives trading desk at my bank, he turned me down on the spot.

‘I can’t go back to The City,’ he insisted. ‘Comebacks never work.’

I asked what he was going to do instead, but he just shrugged his shoulders. The only offer of help he would accept was the loan of my room. As I was spending most nights at Karen‘s flat, even he recognised that it made sense for him to stay there rent-free whilst he searched for a job.

I saw very little of him whilst he lived there. Partly this was due to me spending so much time with Karen. But I also could not help feeling that Max did not want to see me whilst he relied on my charity.

Then one day at work, one of the other flatmates in the house rang me to say that Max had been behaving strangely. I tried to call him but there was no reply and I had to rush off to a meeting.

When I returned, our group secretary told me Max had telephoned me twice. ‘He sounded very anxious to talk to you,’ she added.

I rang George to see if he had heard anything but he was away on holiday. I therefore decided to see for myself what was going on, returning to the house for the first time in over a month and walking up the stairs to my room.

My bed was undisturbed. In fact the whole room was exactly as I had left it, apart from a hammock slung between two walls and beneath it the blue trunk that Max had left in my cellar.

At midnight, with no sign of Max, I left a note in the hall saying I had returned for the night, and went to bed, leaving my bedroom door open so if Max did return, he could creep in without waking me and sleep on his hammock. Two hours later I heard the front door open and close, then the noise of various pots and pans being taken out of their drawers in the kitchen.

I tiptoed down the stairs and opened the kitchen door. Max, wearing a mud-stained blue Guernsey sweater, was plucking the feathers from a freshly killed duck. When he saw me, he smiled.

‘Please tell me that has not come straight from Battersea Park,’ I said.

‘They cull them anyway.’

I heard the kettle whistle as it came to the boil.

‘Could you get that?’ Max said. He did not have to tell me what else to do. I had done it many times before in Bristol and up at Glen Avon, pouring the hot water over the bird’s breast and legs to loosen the feathers.

‘Aren’t you going to hang it?’ I asked.

‘I prefer to marinade the young ones,’ he said, his hands ripping clumps of feathers from the area I had scalded. He suddenly stopped and held up the bird, opened its bill with his fingers and stared into its mouth. ‘This one is less than eighteen months old. It’ll be perfect by Sunday. Can you and Karen come over? George is back then and I’d like to cook everyone a celebratory meal.’

‘You’ve got a job?’

‘I’m becoming an estate agent,’ he said. ‘I start tomorrow with Bakers. In their Docklands office.’

I tried to look pleased, but on almost any scale I could think of, estate agents ranked a long way below derivatives traders. And Bakers, known for the sharp suits and even sharper practices of its flash young salesmen, seemed to represent the lowest rung possible.

Max must have sensed my concern. ‘I still think Docklands is going to boom,’ he explained. ‘Selling flats will require a lot less capital than building them. That was my mistake last time.’

He put the bird on a cutting board and casually sliced off its head and legs.

‘I hate using snares,’ he said, examining the duck’s neck, showing me a thin red line, etched into the skin. ‘I stay as close as I can so they don’t have to suffer for long.’

Max slit open its stomach and slipped his hand inside, pulling out the duck’s intestines, and separating the liver and kidneys. The putrid smell of the bird’s guts filled my nostrils.

‘For God’s sake, Max,’ I said, opening a window. ‘This isn’t Scotland. You can’t live off the land.’

‘I’ll be gone in a fortnight,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

He left within a week, moving to a small bedsit in Chelsea which he rented. I thought at the time he had been given some sort of salary advance but later found out that George had loaned him the money for the deposit.

‘He insisted on paying me interest,’ George said, as we sat side by side in a sandwich bar in the City.

‘How’s he going to afford it? It’ll take time for him to earn some sales commissions.’

‘Apparently he’s going to live on air,’ George said. ‘And maybe the odd duck or two from the park.’

I smiled. At our Sunday lunch together, I had been thankful that no one had mentioned where the duck had come from. Karen already thought Max was strange enough without knowing how he sourced his food.

George grinned back at me. ‘Yes, he said you had been rather bourgeois about his nocturnal hunting trips.’

‘Well, I guess I am bourgeois.’

‘And so am I,’ George said, ‘at least by Max’s standards.’

I started to protest, but he lifted his hand. ‘I’m not talking about class or wealth,’ he said,’ just moral codes. Max lives his life like a medieval knight. As a friend, you could not ask for a better one. But I’d hate to get on the wrong side of him.’

Exactly one week after Lucy’s disappearance, it started to snow and it did not stop for two days. In Scotland, the blizzards were much worse and created a stream of news stories about closed schools, traffic chaos and electricity blackouts, and these pushed out any mention of the Lucy Grainger case from the media. Snowflake by snowflake, the past was being buried.

The weather made my bicycle journey to and from the office a nightmare. By the time I returned to my flat on the Tuesday evening, I was soaked through from the slush sprayed out from passing cars. I had just finished showering, when I heard a loud knock on my front door.

I went over to it with just a towel wrapped around me, dreading the prospect of finding Joy on the other side accompanied by several policemen, all intent on carting me back to Chelsea police station

Instead there was only Angela, holding up the mug I had lent her.

‘Oh,’ she said, as she saw I was wearing only a towel. Then she started to giggle.

‘Are you laughing at my manly physique?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sure I’ll swoon later.’

‘If I promise to put on some more clothes, will you come in?’

I left the door open, and turned around before she could answer. I was not wary of her seeing my naked back. Bicycling each day into work, and rarely going out, meant that my body was in good shape for a man in his late thirties. But I still sucked in my stomach and walked with my shoulders thrust back.

As I neared my bedroom, I turned around. She had crossed the threshold but was still hanging around my doorway, clutching the mug in two hands.

‘Do you want a beer?’ I shouted as I closed my bedroom door, and slung on a T-shirt and trousers as fast as I could.

‘No…I mean I can’t. I’m not allowed to drink anything before flying. Sorry.’

‘How about Ribena?’ I said. ‘My kids are addicted to it.’

‘Kids?’

‘Yes, I’ve got two,’ I said, re-emerging into the kitchen fully dressed apart from my bare feet. I pointed to a photo of Jack and Tom on the fridge. ‘They live with their mother. Is it Ribena, or water?

She shook her head: ‘Neither. I only came here to apologise. I slightly ran out of here last time, didn’t I?’

‘A little bit,’ I said smiling, and she smiled back. She had nice blue eyes, with naturally long eye lashes.

‘I wanted to make amends by asking you to supper tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Actually, you’ll be doing me a favour. The couple I invited are rather loved up, and I’ll feel a bit of a gooseberry if I’m with them all by myself. And it won’t be a late night either, as I’ve got the first flight out the next morning, and I’m not much of a cook and…’

‘I’d love to come.’

She stopped talking. ‘Oh good,’ she said, looking surprised. She turned around to walk out of the flat.

‘Have you forgotten something?’ I said, and pointed to the mug she was still holding.

‘Sorry,’ she said, her face reddening for a second time, as she handed it back to me.

She moved towards the door, then stopped. ‘Have there been any developments in the Grainger case?’ she suddenly asked, her words blurting out as if she had been dying to ask me all along, but had only now found the courage to do so.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘That poor woman,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about her all weekend. Did you manage to speak to her husband? You were going to ring him when I left.’

‘Yes. We met up.’

‘I saw him on the news. He looked…’ She searched for the right word. ‘…He looked pained.’

I nodded. It was an accurate description.

‘Are you going to see him again?’ she asked.

‘On Thursday.’

She smiled approvingly. ‘That’s good. He’ll need people like you. Look, I’ve got to go. You will remember, won’t you? Tomorrow, 8pm, Flat 3B – please don’t be late, or I’ll burn all the food.’

After she left, I wondered what to make of her. There seemed to be a freshness, almost an innocence, about her that made her very appealing. In many ways she reminded me of the sort friends I’d had before a failing business and a wrecked marriage had dented my social life. The prospect of dinner with a pretty stranger also offered a welcome change from sitting around and waiting for further news about Lucy to break, or for the police to arrest me again, or for Max to decide whether or not he wanted to invest.

It was the last of these that most worried me. For all the friendship Max had expressed at our lunch together, I knew Joy would have tried to talk to him and it was easy to imagine her playing him some choice snippets from the recordings of my police interrogation, and that would be enough to scupper any chance I had of doing a deal with him. I had to get to Max first, but I had no way doing this until Thursday.

I was still worrying about this as I climbed the stairs to Angela’s flat, clutching some flowers in my hand. I had hardly slept the previous night, and when I rapped on her knocker and saw my reflection in the brass plate, I was horrified by the gloomy face that stared back at me. Hearing her come to the door, I forced myself to smile.

‘You look happy,’ she said, grinning back at me.

She was wearing a plain pink cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. But it was her smile that grabbed my attention. It was a fantastic smile – the sort that immediately puts you at ease and draws you closer. There were no distractions like make-up, jewellery or lipstick; just a freckled friendly face, beaming towards me. And without meaning to, I found my own forced smile being transformed into the real thing.

Her flat – or as she kept on reminding me, her friend’s flat – followed the same layout as mine but was much larger. As I stepped into it, I inhaled the aroma you only ever find in a single girl’s flat, a mix of baking and herbs, flowers, shampoo and hints of perfume. It’s an utterly different smell from that of a family house, or an office or a man’s home. And as I breathed it in, I realised I had not smelt it for a long time.

She put my flowers in a vase, pressed a large glass of red wine into my hand, and insisted that I sit on a stool in her kitchen and chat to her as she carried on cooking. She had three saucepans bubbling away and the table was littered with dirty pots and plates. I volunteered to tidy up but she said she had everything under control, which was probably true until her phone rang.

‘Bugger, the others are stuck in traffic,’ she said, when she finally hung up. ‘They won’t get here for another hour.’

As if on cue, there was a loud hiss of steam as one of her saucepans boiled over.

I helped her decant the main course into her last two clean pots, which she then placed in the oven to keep warm, whilst I filled a washing-up bowl, ignoring her protests that I should sit down, although I did accept a second large glass of red wine as payment for my labours. As I washed and she dried, she asked whether I had heard anything more about Lucy Grainger.

I hesitated before answering, not wanting Lucy’s disappearance to define me in her eyes. But I was also frightened of appearing too defensive, so I made a few bland remarks about the missing guns and jewellery.

‘Oh, I know all about that stuff,’ she said. ‘It was on the news. I just wanted to know how you were coping.’

She was kneeling down, trying to force a large frying pan into a small cupboard. She looked up and smiled.

‘You seemed rather stressed the last time I saw you, that’s all,’ she said.

‘I suppose I was.’

‘And how about Max Grainger? He must be going through hell.’

Before I knew it, I was telling her all about Max, right from the time when I had first met him. She was a good listener, and there was something about the shared intimacy of doing the washing-up together that encouraged me to talk. But the main reason why I told her so much was that I desperately wanted to talk to someone about it. I had tried to discuss it with my mother during my fortnightly call to Australia, but as soon as she sounded worried, I had backtracked, implying that my overnight stay in Chelsea police station had been entirely voluntary. I had also meant to talk to Karen, but then I realised that we did not have that sort of relationship anymore. And now Angela was standing next to me, smiling sympathetically, and listening to my story rather than questioning it; and that was all the encouragement I needed. I did not draw breath for thirty minutes, by the end of which I had told her far more than I had intended, even drifting into a discussion of how PropFace had started.

‘It was Max’s Grainger’s idea,’ I said, hanging up the dishcloth. ‘He was working as an estate agent at the time.’

She looked at me with a puzzled expression. ‘An estate agent? I mean I’ve only ever seen him on the TV but…’

I laughed. ‘You’re right. He was hopeless at it. He’d tell homeowners that their child’s bedroom would make an excellent gun room and they’d just stare at him, thinking he was mad. But he understood the internet before most estate agents had even heard of it. And he realised estate agents would need to get a lot of information from their databases onto their websites – floor plans, postcodes, property descriptions, prices, photographs, all that sort of thing – and that would require some sort of interface. So we called it PropFace.’

‘We?’

‘Originally it was just Max and another friend from Bristol called George. He provided most of the capital. Max was supposed to invest a bit as well, but he didn’t have a bean because he’d gone bankrupt only a few years earlier, so I said I’d put some money in on his behalf. And then one thing led to another, and I ended up joining.’

She topped up my glass of wine. ‘You make it sound like an accident.’

‘An accident waiting to happen. I’d been working in a bank for seven years, going nowhere, and spending all my time writing about internet companies, without actually having ever worked for one. Max wanted me involved, George thought I would have some useful City connections and I just wanted to do something a bit more meaningful.’

‘And you all carried on working together?’

‘No, George got out as soon as he could make a profit on his investment. That was all it ever was to him – something he could buy and sell.’

‘And Max Grainger?’

‘At the start, PropFace was his baby. But he got bored. And when the recession came and it was obvious we were never going to make it into the big time, he moved on.’

‘On the news, they said he lived in the Caymans.’

‘When he isn’t in his Chelsea or his villa in Spain. To be honest, I don’t know much about his life anymore. Once he left PropFace, we drifted apart very quickly. I was married, with young kids and working all hours just to keep my head above water. He was three thousand miles away, and soon he was rich and living a completely different sort of life. I didn’t even know he’d got married until he sent me a card with a photo of him in a morning suit and Lucy in a wedding dress, standing on an empty tropical beach.’

‘Is that what prompted you to get back in touch?’

I smiled wryly. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’

‘Come on, you can tell me,’ she teased. ‘What was it?’

‘I ran out of money.’

She suddenly looked embarrassed, unsure what to say.

‘I bought one of PropFace’s competitors,’ I explained. ‘We were stuck in a rut and at the time it looked a good deal. The owners let me pay me in instalments. But then one of our clients went bust leaving us with a bad debt, and before I knew it I was slipping behind on the payments. When the bank turned me down, I didn’t have many options left, so I asked myself, ‘how many people do I know who could possibly invest over a million pounds in my business?’ It wasn’t a very long list.’

‘And Max Grainger just said ‘yes’?’

‘He hasn’t said anything yet. I’m seeing him tomorrow.’

She stared at me. ‘And if he doesn’t…’

‘I’m bankrupt.’

She looked at me, unsure whether I was joking or not.

‘It’s a real possibility,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know if Max is still that interested. It was really Lucy who wanted to be involved…’

My words tailed off.

‘God, you must be on tenterhooks,’ she whispered. ‘Come and sit down.’

She led me to a long red sofa, lined with blue scatter cushions. Kicking off her shoes, she sat next to me, her legs curled up under her.

‘So tell me about you,’ I said, keen to change the subject.

‘Well, I’m a pilot at BA –.’

‘Married, divorced, single? Rampant lesbian?’

She laughed. ‘Very un-rampant single, I’m afraid. I’ve only just come out of a relationship.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.’ I don’t think there is ever one reason, is there? Work, friends, ambitions, kids…’

‘You had kids?’

‘We managed to argue about hypothetical ones.’

‘You wanted them?’

‘Some day,’ she said quietly. ‘But not with him, that’s for certain.’

She got up to inspect the food in the oven, leaving me to mull over the news that my attractive female neighbour was both heterosexual and single.

‘How about you?’ she asked, returning to the sofa. ‘Why did you split up with your wife? ’

‘She said I’d fallen in love with my business.’

‘Was she right?’

‘Well, certainly no one else was in love with it. But I’d poured all my savings into Propface and even some of hers and couldn’t let go. Meanwhile she was back at home with post natal depression and a screaming baby and wondering why I wasn’t around to help.’

Angela smiled sympathetically, then asked whether I enjoyed living in the area.

‘I call it The Valley.’

‘The what?’

‘The Valley. It’s a name Karen thought of. She said it was an in-between place. Not quite the mountain tops we once dreamed about, but within sight of them.’

The door bell rang. The other guests had arrived: a woman called Gill, who was an old friend of Angela’s, and James, her new husband. They spent ten minutes apologising for being late, and then when we finally sat down to eat our rather overcooked food, they talked about their honeymoon in Barbados. Then the conversation turned to whether there was going to be a recession or not; until James, out of the blue, mentioned ‘that horrific murder in Chelsea last week’ and soon we were back onto the Graingers. Gill saw Angela look at me, and there was a brief embarrassing silence.