Black Valley (25 page)

‘Tegan’s not used to having kids around,’ he went on. ‘Or a bloody puppy, come to that. She just couldn’t cope.’

‘It’s understandable.’ Jess sat down opposite him. ‘Although I’m surprised she was quite so bad-tempered. I mean, Rose is a very cooperative child. And she
hero-worships her. Or did.’

‘I know.’ Bob looked down at the table. ‘The thing is, it’s not altogether her fault. There’s a certain amount of tension in our relationship at the
moment.’

Jess wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear more.

‘She wants children herself,’ Bob went on. ‘In the long term, of course,’ he added hastily, seeing the look on Jess’s face. ‘But I’m not sure if I . .
.’ He came to a halt. ‘I mean, I’ve already got the girls.’

Again, Jess didn’t respond. Listening, as she knew from long experience, was the best policy in such situations.

‘And to be honest . . .’ Bob hesitated. Jess wondered what was coming next. ‘Tegan doesn’t seem all that keen to have Rose over at the weekends. Not quite so much,
anyway.’

Bob lifted his eyes from the table, looking into hers. For a moment, they both shared the pain of their child’s rejection by another adult.

‘She’s never shown any interest in meeting Nella, either.’ There was more than a hint of resentment in Bob’s voice.

‘I think that’s mutual.’

‘I know. But . . .’ Bob sighed. ‘To be honest, I don’t really think there’s a great deal of mileage in this relationship, if that’s her attitude. If she
doesn’t want to take on my kids, I can’t see much future for us.’

Jess felt relieved that she’d kept quiet. Bob had taken the words out of her mouth. They would have led to a row if she’d spoken them.

‘How did your weekend go?’ Bob changed the subject.

‘Fine. I had a lovely time.’ Jess picked up her tea and blew on it. ‘Though, in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone.’

‘Nonsense.’ Bob paused. ‘So who is this . . . friend of yours? Anyone I know?’

‘No.’

‘Is it . . .’ He seemed flustered. ‘Is there . . . I mean, how’s it going?’

‘Fine.’ Jess was determined not to get into a discussion with Bob about Dresler. The less he knew about her private life at present, the better.

Bob took a swig of tea. ‘You make a lovely cup, Jess.’

‘Thanks.’

They’d begun to speak as if they were strangers.

‘Well.’ He put his mug back down on the table. ‘I suppose I’d better be heading off.’

There was a silence.

‘You know, I miss all this,’ he said suddenly, gesturing round the room. ‘The house. The girls. You.’

Jess nodded in the non-committal way she’d perfected over the years.

‘I sometimes dream about it. I dream that I’m still living here with you, that we’re back together, a family again, just as it was before. Then I wake up, and I find
you’re not beside me and . . . well . . .’ He shrugged, and looked away. Jess could see that there were tears in his eyes.

She couldn’t help feeling touched. She missed the familiarity of their life together, too. They had been happy, the two of them, the three of them, the four of them, for a very long time.
But she was also irritated that he was saying this now that he was considering a split from Tegan.

‘Things move on, Bob.’ Jess spoke in a soft, low tone.

‘Yes, but I wish they didn’t.’ His voice had dropped, too. ‘I wish they hadn’t. Between us.’

He was waiting for a reply, but it didn’t come. Jess remained silent, looking down at the table. Then he drained his mug, and got up. Jess got up, too.

‘Thanks for being so understanding.’ He moved forward to kiss her. She offered him her cheek, stiffening slightly at his touch.

He sensed her reserve. ‘You stay here and finish your tea. I’ll say goodbye to the kids on the way out.’

‘OK.’ Jess sat down again. ‘We’ll speak on the phone.’

‘See you.’ He hesitated briefly, as if struggling to find something to say that would prolong the intimacy of their moment together. Then, failing to do so, he headed for the
door.

Jess and Dresler were waiting in the car. They hadn’t seen each other since the previous weekend, up in London. They were parked in the street, at the back of the museum.
They could see a white van in a loading bay. There was no logo on the side of it. The wheels, Jess noticed, were splattered with reddish mud. It looked promising, she thought; it could be
Nathan’s. On the other hand, they could be wasting their time.

It was a rainy Saturday and a wind was blowing up. Shoppers were scurrying down the streets, battling with their umbrellas. It was a day for going into town, for sitting in a cafe with a
cappuccino, watching the windows steam up, not for hanging around in a dismal car park. But Dresler was in a determined mood. He’d decided that he didn’t just want to contact Morris
about the Berlin exhibition, but to offer him his services as an agent, now that Blake was out of the running. So he was hell-bent on tracking Morris down, starting by finding out where his studio
was.

Dresler craned his neck forward, peering through the glass of the windscreen. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said. ‘They may be using some other exit, for all we
know.’

‘I don’t think there is another exit.’

‘Well, we can’t sit here all day. We’ve already been here for two hours.’

Jess was beginning to realize that Dresler wasn’t a patient man.

‘Look, the exhibition comes down today. They definitely haven’t all been bought by the museum. You checked that, didn’t you?’

Dresler nodded.

‘And this is the only way they can come out. So let’s just wait till they do, shall we?’

Dresler sighed. ‘You’re right. I’m just not really cut out for this sort of thing—’

‘Hey,’ Jess interrupted him. ‘Look at that.’

Two men appeared from the back entrance. One of them was wearing a peaked cap and a hoodie, the other was dressed in overalls. They were carrying what looked like a large wooden crate. The man
with the cap opened the back doors of the van and then they put the crate inside. Once it was safely stowed away, they went back to the entrance, disappeared inside, and reappeared again a moment
later with another crate. This happened twice more, and then the man with the cap locked the back door of the van and went round to the front.

‘OK.’ Dresler was whispering. ‘Don’t follow him too closely. Leave a gap. Make sure he doesn’t see us.’

‘Jacob, he can’t hear us. You don’t need to whisper.’

‘OK. OK.’ Dresler didn’t laugh. He was obviously tense. Jess felt less so. After all, they weren’t committing any crime, following a van to see where the owner stored his
paintings.

The van pulled out of the car park, stopping at the barrier to slot in a ticket, then moved off slowly into the traffic. Jess waited for a moment and pulled out behind it. It would be easy to
follow, she thought; even if other cars cut in between, the van was high sided, and she’d be able to see it from a distance.

They drove through the city centre, heading north, over the flyover. Immediately after the junction with the M4, the van turned left, towards the valleys. They came to a roundabout, and this
time the van turned right. Jess followed, keeping at a reasonable distance, occasionally letting another car come between them. As they drove along, Dresler kept up a steady stream of instructions.
He was beginning to irritate her. She was a good driver, careful yet not overcautious, and she knew this patch well. She was also feeling quite calm and controlled, which was more than she could
say for him.

The road wound up a hill, past a warren of industrial estates. It was the kind of bastard sprawl that is never honoured with the name of countryside: a half urban, half rural no-man’s-land
of factories, warehouses, garages and small businesses. Further up the road, the estates gave way to a series of ramshackle smallholdings, and then there was a turning to the right, to an old
mining village, now a pretty dormitory town. The van went past it, climbing on up the hill until they came to a wide gravel path that led off up into the woods, with a sign beside it advertising
aggregates, whatever they might be. The van turned off onto it. Instead of following it, Jess drove on.

‘What did you do that for?’ Dresler burst out.

‘I’m hardly going to follow him up that hill, am I?’ Jess slowed down, looking for a place to park the car. ‘We’ll park the car down here and go up by foot, through
the woods.’

‘Fine.’ He seemed to calm down. ‘Sorry.’

Jess didn’t reply. She found a lay-by and parked the car. Then she went round to the back, opened the boot, and put on her walking boots. Dresler hadn’t thought to bring any, but his
shoes looked fairly sturdy.

‘OK.’ She fished out an old padded coat from the boot, and put it on. It wasn’t far up the hill, she knew, but they might be hanging around in the woods for a while. Dresler
was wearing a dark blue wool coat. It looked a little too good for forest wear, but it would be serviceable enough if it started to rain.

They set off, up a marked footpath through the trees. It was strange, this place, Jess thought. She’d never been here before, but she’d heard of it: Bryn Cau, the Hollow Hill, so
called because since the nineteenth century, as much as a million tons of iron had been hacked out of the bowels of the hill. There were holes all over it, so that if you left the path, you could
fall into the tunnels below. The beech wood was one of the most ancient in the country, yet it was just a stone’s throw away from the industrial estates. The air was still, the trees arching
above them like a great cathedral. There was a carpet of ramsons and wood anemones below their feet, the flowers bowing their heads in the shade, their petals closed, and opening them again where a
shaft of sunlight penetrated the canopy above. The earth was soft and springy, the rich mulch of rotted leaves silencing their steps.

They walked on, savouring the deep quiet of the woods that was almost religious in its intensity, despite the fact that only a few yards below them, cars sped along the main road, while above,
the odd car travelled up the gravel path. Yet the roar was somehow stifled by the damp sponge of the earth and the panoply of beech trees above their heads. The climb wasn’t steep, but it
needed effort and concentration to keep going, so they didn’t talk. Besides, they were both now beginning to feel keyed up; Dresler’s nerves were catching, and by the time they reached
the top, Jess’s heart was thumping in her chest.

At the top of the wood, they came out onto the gravel path. Opposite were the gates to the gravel pit, and a sign warning that the premises were controlled by security guards. Inside the gates
was a warehouse building, the same kind of identikit structure they’d seen below, in the industrial estates. Like the van they’d been following, it was unmarked.

‘Is there anyone around, d’you think?’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’ Jess looked down the road. There was no sign of the van. ‘He must have come up, unloaded quickly, and gone.’ She paused. ‘Shall we
take a look?’

Dresler nodded, and together they stepped out of the woods. They walked over to the open gates, which were surrounded by plastic bottles and Coke cans. In among them, Jess noticed, an orchid was
growing. She wanted to go over and look at it, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

‘If anyone sees us, we’ll just say we were walking in the woods,’ Dresler said.

‘Good idea.’ Jess was doing her best to be polite, but she couldn’t help feeling irritated at Dresler’s obvious suggestion.

They walked through the gates towards the building. On the way, they peered down at the quarry. It looked as if some massive crater had dropped on it from on high. All around it were ledges,
like windowsills, where the rock had been hewn away. On the flat surface of the bottom were triangular piles of gravel, together with tractors, machinery, and pipes running all around it. Yet there
was no activity. The place was completely still, an echoing, empty canyon.

Jess heard a cry and looked up. Above their heads, a falcon wheeled in the sky. It flew off towards the far side of the crater. She was fascinated, wondering if the falcon was returning to its
nest. The ledges on the sides of the quarry were said to be home to falcons, goshawks, tawny owls. She’d read about it in the
Western Mail
. These bird-friendly ledges had been an
unexpected benefit of new technology, arising out of the way rock was now blasted out of the quarry.

‘Come on.’ Dresler was impatient. ‘We don’t want to be seen. Let’s get this over with.’

They walked over to the warehouse. They tried the front door, but it was locked. They went round to a side window and peered in.

Inside, the building was empty. It was one great room, like a vast garage. The lights were off, so it was hard to see, but they could just make out the crates stashed against the far wall.
Further down in the room were some tins of paint. The floor and walls at that end were smeared with paint, mostly black, but with other, lighter colours glinting in the darkness – red and
white, a glittering yellow, and a kind of silvery black. Jess squinted, trying to see more. She could see the outlines of a great heap of something. Cubes of rock. Coal, perhaps?

Something moved in the darkness. A flash of fur. Of teeth. A face sprang to the window, the face of a dog, angry and barking, the roof of its mouth ridged and red, its tongue salivating.

Jess and Dresler shrank back. The dog went on barking, working itself up into a paroxysm.

‘I hope that bloody thing’s locked in there.’ Dresler’s voice shook with fear as he spoke.

They were just about to turn tail and run when a man appeared from the back of the building.

‘Oi. What you doin’ down by yer?’ He was squat, thickset, middle-aged. A long, wispy beard curled down from his chin, and there was a large black plug in one of his earlobes.
An ancient woolly hat was jammed on his head.

‘Nothing. Sorry . . . Sorry to trouble you.’ Dresler was flustered.

‘Just seeing if we could find someone who could tell us about those falcons,’ Jess said. Her tone was friendly but respectful. ‘We noticed them nesting over there.’