Chapter 24
VICTORIA
We’re not doing this for money. We’re doing it for RETRIBUTION.
The words swirl around my head for the rest of the day as I join the others by the pool, pick up my Kindle and pretend to read.
My thoughts are all over the place. If the threats were motivated by money, at least I’d know where I stand.
I could negotiate with the perpetrator, buy my way out.
But they’re clearly motivated by revenge, and revenge is an unpredictable beast. It’s personal, non-negotiable and totally bewildering for someone like me, conditioned to think in terms of leverage and deals, whose default response to problems is to throw money at them.
They’re also right. I am a hypocrite. I could blame my current situation on ignorance or naivety but I’d be lying to myself. I’ve been greedy and I’ve taken for granted that I’d get away with it because of my position, my status. The irony is, the higher you are, the harder you fall.
Am I about to pay the price for my hubris?
No matter which way I look at it – and I consider every single angle as I lie on the sunbed with my eyes closed, the glaring sun painting patterns on my eyelids – everything leads back to Number Twelve Claremont Crescent. Granny Aggie’s house.
Granny Aggie, my paternal grandmother, was a formidable woman who could silence a room with a single arched eyebrow.
Feared and revered in equal measure, she was the undisputed matriarch of the family, a haughty, refined dowager who wore head-to-toe tweed and judged people not by their achievements or character, but by the cut of their jib.
Number Twelve is a shabby Georgian townhouse in Camberwell.
Both the house and the area were once beautiful: all white stucco and leafy streets.
Elegant and genteel. But over the years the house and its neighbours have fallen into disrepair, chopped up into flats and bedsits, and the neighbourhood has lost its gloss.
I was Granny Aggie’s only granddaughter and by far her favourite grandchild.
On the whole, Agatha disliked boys. They were loud, boisterous and – more often than not – boorish, with few manners and even fewer things to recommend them.
I, on the other hand, was a pretty, dainty child, with porcelain-blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion and impeccable manners.
Not only that, I was the only member of the family who visited Number Twelve with any regularity.
My brothers accused me of currying favour with the old harridan, but they were wrong.
In Agatha, I recognised something of myself.
Old-fashioned values, perhaps. Or the same flinty resolve that ran through us both.
No one in the family was surprised Agatha left me her house when she died a decade ago.
It was worth over a million even then. Barney wanted to put it straight on the market to pay off the mortgage on our own six-bedroom home in Surrey.
But I, always the strategic thinker, was more interested in playing the long game.
I wanted to be able to retire at fifty, buy a farmhouse in the Dordogne or Provence, and split our time between France and the UK.
I’d seen what canny property developers had done with other houses in the crescent and estimated I could squeeze nine bedsits out of the five-bedroom house.
With other landlords in the area charging tenants ￡700 a month for a single bedsit, I was confident Number Twelve could generate over seventy grand a year in gross income.
By the time I was fifty I’d have built up a nice little retirement fund.
Felix advised me to set up a management company to keep my direct involvement under the radar, so I registered Claremont Crescent Property Holdings Ltd with Companies House, enlisted the services of the cheapest building company I could find, and the conversion began.
Thanks to London’s housing crisis, the bedsits were snapped up within days, and I felt a certain quiet pride when the first tenants moved in.
At work, I campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the homeless.
At home, I ensured my beloved Granny Aggie’s house was a refuge for the displaced and the desperate.
Yes, there were issues with the plumbing, the walls were thin plasterboard and the basement and ground floor suffered from rising damp, but I was giving people a roof over their heads, wasn’t I?
Maybe not giving. It wouldn’t do to bend the truth too much.
Providing. I provided nine occupants with a place to call home.
I sat back and watched the money roll in.
Everything was going swimmingly until a chichi café opened at one end of the street and a high-end boutique sprang up at the other.
Half a dozen homes were bought by people who proceeded to gut them and restore them to their former glory.
The last straw came when a flower shop opened its doors.
It meant one thing: the area was in the grip of re-gentrification.
It didn’t take long for Barney to cotton on. I shouldn’t have been surprised when, behind my back, he asked an estate agent to value Number Twelve.
He phoned me at work, squawking so loudly with excitement that I’d had to hold the phone away from my ear.
‘Two-point-five million,’ he crowed. ‘That’s what the estate agent said. Two-point-five fucking million.’ I could picture the pound signs lighting up his eyes. ‘You need to get it on the market pronto before interest rates rise again. We’re sitting on a goldmine, Vic. A fucking goldmine.’
I was sitting on a goldmine, I silently corrected him. It was my name on the deeds and mine alone. Further, I was sole director of Claremont Crescent Property Holdings Ltd. A decision that seemed prudent at the time.
Maybe if I’d made Barney a company director I might’ve been able to lay some of the blame for what happened next at his feet.
But it’s too late for that. I’ve made my bed. Sooner or later I’ll have to lie in it.