by Peter Helton
I bent towards her ear. ‘So you do know her,’ I shouted.
‘No, not really,’ she corrected herself. ‘I need the loo.’ She got up and disappeared into the crowd that now filled the space between the tables. That left me with the other three who ignored me. One of the blokes picked up their empty pint glasses and shoved off towards the bar, ramming into me as he passed behind me.
Back at my own table, the two blokes there were valiantly defending my seat against a girl whose dress, make-up and swastika jewellery marked her out as a follower of the band, in full swing by now. ‘Oh, it’s your seat, is it? We can share, can’t we?’ she shouted and sat down, leaving me four inches of space to park half my behind. The group were playing some kind of gothic neo-punk noise that revolved mainly around the belching bass saxophone, the monstrous horn of which was now only five feet away from me. While the sound was not going to make it into my music library, the group certainly looked interesting. I took out my sketchbook and fineliner and started drawing. No one was ever going to believe the sheer size of this sax. How could anyone have enough breath to wind the thing? But the chap at the other end of it did and blasted it straight at me while I drew him and the whole band. The girl beside me bellowed into my ear that my sketch was great and that she had an art A level. I started the next drawing while taking tiny sips of my beer and keeping half an eye open for Verity. I had chosen a bad day; the HE 109s were obviously popular as the pub had filled up so much that Verity could have wandered in and out without me noticing. I should really have stayed outside and watched the back entrance where smokers came in and out. Just then Pink Hair squeezed through the throng and appeared at my table, carrying empty glasses. She looked over her shoulder back towards her own table which was invisible now. ‘Couldn’t talk back there. I’m not sure, but Verity is in some kind of trouble. And if not trouble, then some other shit. You’re not the first one to ask around for her.’
‘Who’s been asking?’
She shrugged. ‘Couple of people. Posh people.’
‘You know where she is? What’s it worth?’ I handed her a twenty-pound note.
‘Make it thirty.’
‘That’s all I have on me. I’ll give you a tenner next time I see you.’
‘You might try the traveller site just outside town – you know, the one everyone’s complaining about?’ She nodded her head back towards her table. ‘Those blokes are from there.’
‘What about Joshua Grant? Was he a friend of Verity’s? Her boyfriend?’
‘He thought so. But not really. She kipped at his some nights but she had another guy she fancied at the travellers’ camp.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Sam. He’s got a mobile home sort of thing.’
‘Do you live out there?’
She pulled a face and shook her head.
‘Who set fire to Joshua’s place?’
‘I don’t know. Even if I did … I’m not flameproof, you know?’ She disappeared with her glasses towards the bar. I was about to go after her when the dark-haired girl appeared and followed her, giving me a suspicious sideways look as she squeezed by. I packed up my drawing gear, drained my pint and trawled through the pub to make sure Verity really wasn’t here, then stepped outside.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the door swung shut behind me on the fug and noise. Getting old, Honeypot, I accused myself. Impatient as I was to make sure Verity was all right, a dark and moonless night was not a good time to visit a travellers’ site. I wasn’t sure there ever was a good time, but broad daylight would be my minimum requirement. I went home and sat in the kitchen, listening to the ticking of the empty house, seeking consolation in cold rabbit stew.
For going on to an illegal travellers’ site on a rainy September morning, I would normally insist on taking at least one Annis with me for protection. Annis has a persuasive smile, honeycombed voice and a diplomatic turn of phrase, but she also used to play hockey at Cheltenham Ladies’ and has quite a kick on her.
The site was not a large affair. The travellers had pitched up in a farmer’s field just outside Bath and their camp consisted of twenty-odd vehicles. Quite a few of them were medium-sized ex-coaches; many looked thirty or more years old. There were a few cars and three caravans but only two mobile homes, one of which ought to be Sam’s.
The travellers had been here for nearly three months now and it showed. Piles of refuse had accumulated, with plenty of plastic and paper rubbish drifting about the muddy site. A lot of the meadow had been churned into mud. The only amenity of the site was a cattle trough; there were no toilets. These were not Romany travellers; this was a disparate group of nomadic people, most of them under forty, who travelled in convoy, set up illegal camp wherever it suited them, knowing that the eviction procedure would take time. Eviction notices had been served a while ago; I was glad I hadn’t been the one hired to serve them.
Sagging tarpaulin had been stretched between some of the vehicles to provide extra shelter and this morning smoke rose from several places and from stovepipes on some of the modified coaches. For the casual observer and on a sunny day, the place might have held an aura of freedom and adventure; on a rainy morning like this, it suggested squalor, poverty, drugs, mental illness and petty crime. There was the occasional whiff of urine and a strong smell from the main pile of festering garbage. Hard living was also evident in the faces of the few people I could see: a young man with shaved head using a hammer to break up wooden pallets for feeding into his tin stove under a bit of tarpaulin; a woman wearing a faded rainbow of garments, washing a protesting child by the horse trough. A dark-haired man with a scrawny drug user’s face and red-and-blue tattoos on his bare arms stood leaning against a tiny brown caravan, smoking a roll-up. He followed my squelching progress across the field with an expression of intense hostility. He never took his eyes off me as he knocked on the caravan door beside him. The door opened a crack and the tattooed man pointed across at me. I reminded myself that I was here of my own free will and could run away at any time. I also made a point of reminding myself that I was a slow runner before making for the nearest of the two mobile homes. It was small, built sometime in the last century for the narrow and winding roads of the British Isles. The windscreen was covered in cardboard and bits of black plastic, perhaps in a bid for privacy; the side window I could see had beige curtains drawn. A constellation of six squashed flies decorated the pane from the inside, which appeared not to bother the live bluebottle crawling diagonally across it. The suspension at the rear looked as if it was tired of life and no amount of mud could disguise the fact that the front tyres were practically bald. It was conveniently parked in an enormous grey puddle which was, as I found out, ankle deep. I paused in front of the door, taking a look around. I had seen no sign of Verity’s bicycle and didn’t have much hope of finding her, but I had a supernatural conviction that I would find her friend Sam inside this mobile shack. Both my boots had sprung a leak and my socks began the work of soaking up the puddle. I rapped a friendly rhythm on the door.
Someone on the inside groaned something that might have been a version of ‘What now?’ laced with expletives. The groaning came nearer to the door but slowly, taking an age to arrive. Perhaps the caravan was bigger on the inside than it looked from here. The door swung open outwards, missing my careless nose by a whisker. What stood in the opening had once been a young man; now it was a pitiful, crumbly-looking frail thing, hunched over, riddled with self-pity and wracked by nauseating waves of headache. I immediately recognized the tragic hangover-from-hell symptoms and greeted them with quiet delight; he would tell me everything I wanted to know as long as I promised to stop talking loudly about the fried breakfast I’d had earlier.
‘Sam?’
‘Who, who, who wants to know?’ he hooted.
‘I’m Chris,’ I announced breezily. ‘Mind if I come in for a moment?’ I asked and advanced on him, closing the door behind me. The curtains were drawn and the interior was di
m, which was a mercy. Dickens would have described the state of Sam’s home as ‘melancholy domestic circumstances’.
He retreated from me as far as the table where he had been sitting, fished a half-smoked roll-up from a full glass ashtray and sucked on it. It had gone out. ‘What, what, what do you want? I mean …’ Sam did not have a speech impediment, but his brain was still so fogged it had left the handbrake on. Standing up for this long became too much for him and he subsided on to the short bench beside the table. He didn’t say any more until he had lit his cigarette, filled his lungs with smoke and coughed in one long lung-emptying spasm that ended in a wheeze. ‘Are you one of them? Leave her alone. Oh, hang on … Chris? Are you the arty guy she sat for?’
‘That’s right, I’m the arty guy!’ I said too loudly. He actually winced. ‘She’s not turned up for the last couple of sessions. I heard she sometimes stayed here.’ Though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why. Sam’s caravan was an anxiety disorder on wheels. It smelled strongly of ashtray, spilled cider, unwashed feet with notes of stale washing-up water, sour milk and something else I couldn’t and didn’t want to lay my finger on. The short bunk at the end of the van was covered in something pink and woollen, a tired sleeping bag and a baby-blue blanket with a historic brown stain in the shape of a bolt cutter on it. (No, me neither.) I had no trouble picturing Verity without her clothes on, yet I could not picture her taking her clothes off in this camper van to climb into this bunk. But then what did I know about her?
‘I don’t think Verity will do any more modelling for you,’ Sam said without looking at me, his eyes drifting.
‘Oh? Why do you say that?’
‘Doesn’t need to now. And she’s buggered off anyway, hasn’t she?’
‘Don’t know, you tell me.’
‘We was going to buy a boat together,’ he lamented. He nodded his head diagonally in the direction of the river and the nearby marina. ‘But the cheating cow disappeared without even—’ A perfunctory knock preceded the door being yanked open. Bare-armed tattoo chap entered with the bald-headed man who had been breaking up palettes; he was still carrying the hammer in a fashion which suggested he didn’t want me to miss the fact that he was attached to it. He closed the door behind him. The place suddenly felt crowded and airless. I had no time to count all the studs and piercings, but the chap with the hammer had nose, eyebrows, ears and lower lip pierced, which made the tattooed chap’s two nose rings look positively conservative.
‘This one of them?’ he asked Sam without taking his eyes off me. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’ He stepped closer, which wasn’t hard to do. That is when I noticed the piece of lead pipe in his belt.
‘Whoever they are, I’m not one of them,’ I assured him.
Sam half rose from his bench but there really wasn’t enough room for him to stand anywhere. ‘He’s not, Mickey, no, he’s not one of them.’
‘He was asking about her, though, wasn’t he? I heard the name mentioned from outside.’
‘He’s just some other guy she knows,’ Sam said feebly.
‘Yeah, but he could have been put up to it by them, couldn’t he?’ said tattoo man. Bald-headed man nodded sagely at this and twirled his claw hammer.
‘Verity used to model for my life-drawing class.’
‘What, naked?’ said Mickey, looking from me to Sam. We both nodded at that. ‘For money? I don’t think she’ll do any more of that!’ said Mickey emphatically.
‘That’s what I said,’ confirmed Sam. ‘Which is why he was just leaving.’ The air in the caravan was thick with sweat, testosterone and fear. Sam seemed to be as scared of the two as I was.
‘I was just leaving,’ I echoed.
‘Really? I was listening at the door,’ said Lead Piping. ‘Didn’t sound like it. Sounded like you’re a nosy git who sticks his nose where it’s not wanted. Would you like me to rearrange it for you?’
‘He’s good at that,’ promised Claw Hammer.
‘I believe you,’ I said and slowly stretched out a hand between the two for the door handle. Neither of them budged an inch. I managed to poke the door open and, with a rather forced ‘excuse me’, squeezed between them into the open and stepped into the lake of mud. The two of them jumped from the caravan and with their wellies splashed about to maximum effect. They escorted me slowly off the site in a tight frogmarch which was now watched with interest by at least a dozen adults and a few children. ‘See?’ growled tattoo man into my face. ‘They don’t like you either. We don’t like people coming here uninvited, especially if they ask stupid questions about what’s none of their business. Get it?’
‘I think I do,’ I said, failing to salvage any dignity whatsoever as I strained towards the car which I had wisely left on the road. Never before had the sight of a pale blue Honda Jazz been greeted with more relief. The two did not follow me all the way to the car, but as soon as I had slipped behind the wheel the first stone hit the bodywork. By the time I had fumbled the keys into the ignition and got the engine going, the rear window had a star-shaped crack in it and several stones had hit elsewhere. Wheels spun as I slithered away from the site.
At Mill House there was an answerphone message on the landline; I avoided it. Somehow I felt I had done a day’s work already. The Jazz had a couple of dents and scrapes and a cracked window – nothing too substantial. I was sure Jake would expect no less and there was no point in worrying about it now; I would claim ‘rock fall’ or something on the insurance form. To restore my equilibrium, I went into the kitchen and made pancake batter. I know, I am letting down private eyes everywhere by not downing double whiskies in gritty black-and-white in the middle of the day, but pancakes work much better for me and if you don’t have too many of them you can still drive afterwards. I left the batter to rest and went to think the Verity thing over in the big blue comfy chair in the sitting room. The house stood silent, not even a ticking clock anywhere. This was what the house had felt like before Annis who talks and talks, clatters up and down stairs, leaves radios on in bathroom and kitchen, sings and whistles and fills the house with life. Yes, this thick silence was what had pervaded the house before Annis, and I didn’t like it.
I shot out of the armchair and fetched the key to the gun locker which is bolted to the wall in the cupboard under the stairs. It contains my shotgun, for which I have a licence, and the Webley, for which I don’t. I opened the chamber: six .38 calibre rounds shimmered in the understair gloom. You were not supposed to keep loaded revolvers in your locker even if you had a licence, but since the thing could land me in jail loaded or unloaded, I couldn’t see the point in leaving it empty. (What will you say to the intruder – ‘Wait a moment while I fetch some ammunition’?) I closed the revolver, made sure the safety was on and took the heavy lump with me into the kitchen. I didn’t have a holster for it, which made carrying the Webley awkward. On its first outing, after popping off a few rounds apropos of nothing, I had stupidly stuck it into the waistband of my jeans; I still have the burn mark to prove it. I knew I would not have pulled the gun at the travellers’ camp, but I also knew I would have been less scared had I carried it. Whether being scared of scary things is a good or bad thing is debatable but I had come away from Sam’s rancid caravan with one firm belief: Verity had somehow attracted the attentions of some unpleasant people, and Lead Pipe and Claw Hammer might not be the worst of them.
I’ve been making pancakes since the dawn of time but I’m still rubbish at flipping them. So I don’t. Which means I’ll never get any better at it. Having quickly sautéed some mushrooms and leeks and added some white wine and a dribble of stock, I made two large pancakes, ladled the leek-and-mushroom filling into the centre, added a dollop of crème fraiche and rolled them up. Then I ate them at the kitchen table while focusing on the gun at its centre. The Webley Mark IV is the ugly duckling of the gun world; even the worst gun fetishist would call it unlovely. It was designed purely to kill people at fairly close quarters without fuss. Did I want to ca
rry the thing around and risk a jail sentence if caught with it? I couldn’t decide, so I put it in a kitchen drawer as a kind of insane compromise between keeping it somewhere safe and waving it about in the street. Then I called Tim at work.
‘The surveillance job I’m supposed to be doing on this Blinkhorn woman, I can’t plant myself outside her house without her noticing me, there’s nowhere to hide in the lane and what’s even more annoying is that the garden can’t be overlooked. Any ideas, Tim?’
‘Mmm … she knows what you look like, too, so you can’t blag your way in as a gas engineer either.’
‘If the Blinkhorns are con artists, then she’ll see through that kind of thing straight away.’
‘If she asks you in again, you could try to plant a bug under the kitchen table.’
‘I can’t sit out there waiting for it to rain and hope she sees me and asks me in. And planting a bug is the last resort. And against the law.’
‘Well, that’s never bothered us before. In that case, you’ll have to fly over the house and hope to see something interesting.’
‘What, in a hot air balloon?’
‘With a drone, of course.’
‘Ah, have we got one of them?’ Tim keeps a lot of the technical stuff Aqua Investigations uses at his place (because I would only break it), but I hadn’t heard we had a drone.
‘We do not have a drone, but I do and I might be willing – I’m not entirely sure why – to lend it to you. I’ll come up tonight and teach you how to use it, and I’ll bring Becks – she’s been asking to meet you for ages.’
‘I’ll cook.’
‘We’ll eat. No rabbit food. I’ll bring the beers.’
FIVE
‘I must admit,’ said Becks, standing in the kitchen at Mill House with a bottle of red in her fist, ‘at first I thought Timmy had made up all that private-eye stuff to make himself look more interesting, but you’re the real thing, I looked you up.’ Becks – Rebecca Harrington to her Bath Uni biology students – was everything Annis wasn’t: she was a head shorter than Tim, blonde, blue-eyed and curvaceous. And obviously in love with Tim, although she appeared to be a little surprised by this and often frowned at him, as though wondering if it could really be true. Tim is a woolly-haired chap full of little contradictions; he lives in a pathologically clean flat full of computers yet has the eating habits of a toddler. ‘And’ – she looked down into the kitchen drawer where the corkscrew lives – ‘you keep a revolver in your kitchen drawer. That’s very authentic.’