by Peter Helton
‘Ah yes, sorry about that.’
‘No, no, it’s quirky, I’m fine with quirky. The whole place is quite, erm …’
‘Run down?’ Tim supplied.
‘Full of character?’ I said hopefully.
‘… charming,’ Becks completed diplomatically, running her eyes over the multicoloured fingerprints around the cupboard handles, the kettle and the light switch – something painters tend not to see.
She poured herself a glass of wine while I checked on the guineafowl in the oven, then Tim and I grabbed a beer each and headed outside to fly the camera-equipped drone while there was still enough light in the sky. Rebecca watched from the safety of the kitchen door while Tim explained to me in terms a five-year-old could grasp how to control the Phantom 3 drone and how to watch what it saw live on my phone which clamped to the remote. For the first time I could see my little realm at the bottom of the valley from the air, albeit on a tiny screen. Being a bloke, I naturally assumed I’d be quite good at controlling a drone (how hard could it be?) although in the event it took quite a bit of coaching (‘not that fast/watch that tree/back a bit/I said back/what did you do that for/it’s stuck on a branch’) but in the end I got the hang of it.
To be honest, I’m more at home with guineafowl, brandy and a bit of crème fraiche. We ate at the big table in the kitchen.
‘And you live here with your partner?’ Becks asked. ‘Anna?’
‘Annis. She’s away doing a mural commission at the moment.’
‘Have you been together for a long time?’
It was obvious that Tim had mentioned Annis only fleetingly and entirely in terms of Honeysett’s girlfriend, and his eyes clearly said ‘this is not the time’, so I didn’t go into details. The past is another country and they do things differently there, I reminded myself. Quite differently.
Since neither biology nor IT is my thing and I never tire of talking about myself, I steered the conversation round to Verity’s disappearance.
‘Wouldn’t the police look for her if she had disappeared?’ asked Rebecca.
‘You would think so, wouldn’t you? But last year a quarter of a million people were reported missing. Police aren’t interested unless it’s a child under sixteen and the kid didn’t pack a bag. If you call to report anyone else missing, you won’t even get to talk to a police officer, just the civilian who takes the call, and that’s as far as it will go. There’s no point even telling them; get yourself a private eye straight away. Can’t afford one? Then there’s little you can do. Most people turn up again, of course, but about one in ten stay missing. You wouldn’t have thought you could disappear in a country with more CCTV cameras than people, but apparently you can.’
‘I find that quite reassuring,’ said Tim through a mouthful of mashed potato.
‘What about parents, relatives and so on?’ Becks mused.
‘According to Verity, she has one living relative – an aunt she doesn’t get on with. And the aunt turned up here looking for her.’
‘Ah.’
I fished the receipt with the aunt’s number from my jeans pocket where I had safely filed it away. ‘She gave me her mobile number in case I hear anything. But I have a bad feeling about auntie.’
‘Evil auntie?’ asked Tim.
‘Verity said her aunt lived in Belgium and they weren’t on speaking terms. This auntie claimed she had recently talked to Verity on the phone and that she lived in Cheltenham. She was also making out she was poor when her accessories said otherwise. I’d be surprised if she was anyone’s aunt.’
‘Being an aunt isn’t something you do, you know?’ objected Tim, wagging a half-eaten guineafowl leg at me and splattering sauce over the receipt. ‘It’s something your siblings turn you into.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Becks, frowning at Tim’s guineafowl leg and looking very much like a Rebecca for a moment. ‘You think something has happened to her, then?’
‘Something has happened to a chap she hung out with. He died when someone posted petrol through his letterbox. And everyone who does know her is either cagey and scared or aggressive. One girl I spoke to seemed to be afraid her place might get torched if she talked too much. I think there’s money involved somehow – perhaps quite a bit of money. I found a very disappointed bloke in a rancid caravan who had expected to be buying a houseboat with Verity and he’s now drowning his sorrows in homemade cider. Yeah, I think she might be in trouble.’
‘If she was going to buy a houseboat with your caravan chap, perhaps she bought one without him? Whose idea was it – his or hers?’ asked Tim.
‘Don’t know; he didn’t say and I’m not sure I want to go back to ask him. I ran into a bit of opposition in that camp. But you could be right. I’ll have a look at houseboats when I have time. First I’ll have to get some handle on the Blinkhorn thing. If I get a video of activity at the house, I can send it to the insurance company and keep Haarbottle happy.’
‘Happy Haarbottle,’ said Tim and clinked his bottle of Becks beer against our glasses.
The next morning dawned sunny with a light breeze. ‘Ideal flying weather,’ I told Annis.
‘Happy Honeypot, you can try out your new toy.’ I could hear the echo of the pool house down the line. ‘It’s still a bit misty here, we’re not far from the canal, or is it the river? I forget. But it’s pretty tropical here by the pool, day and night.’
‘Have you done any work yet?’
‘A bit. I’m taking my time. So you’ve met Becks? What’s she like?’
We gossiped. I told her everything I knew about Rebecca – what she looked like (serious), drank (Merlot), wore (simple but expensive dress) and drove (minute Mercedes) – and Annis told me about the tiny record producer, his muscle-bound manservant, the gardens, the sauna and the four-course dinners. I hung up, thoroughly jealous of her commission, the pool and her tiny cozzie.
I put the Phantom 3 in the boot of the Citroën and drove to Charlcombe. You are not supposed to fly drones within fifty metres of a house, but if anyone complained, I would feign ignorance of the law, apologize and run away. I parked up a hundred yards or so from the Blinkhorn house and, full of enthusiasm for this new form of surveillance, I started up the drone. The thing took off like a rocket. I tried a few manoeuvres to remind myself of what Tim had taught me, then I aimed at The Chestnuts. It wasn’t at all easy to keep an eye on the drone and at the same time follow the footage on the tiny screen of the phone. The sun was bright and I could not shade the screen and fly at the same time, so I squinted into it until, yes, I saw the house. The Mercedes was poking its rear out of the car port and there was her friend’s black BMW on the drive. There was no sign of either of them at the back of the house, but there, from under a tree, stepped Mrs Blinkhorn’s straw-hatted gardener, pushing a wheelbarrow full of autumn leaves towards the back of the garden. He did not seem to have noticed the drone high above. While he walked away from the house, I let the Phantom 3 sink lower. Perhaps, if I got low enough, I could look into the kitchen window. I aimed at the big barbecue, swivelling about, when two school kids from the nearby Royal High School walked past me. ‘What are you doing?’ asked one.
‘Flying a drone,’ I said distractedly.
‘Where?’ asked the other.
I looked at the kids. I looked up. The drone was out of sight. I panicked. Even though the picture had been steady, the fact that the thing had vanished from sight felt all wrong. ‘Up, up, up!’ I urged the drone and yanked the stick right back. The Phantom bobbed up like a cork and I was so glad to see it in one piece (especially since Tim had told me three times how much it cost) that I decided to bring it back again straight away and look at the footage I had taken on my computer at home.
On the way to Mill House, however, I calmed down and my confidence returned. I was in a different car and I would not have to go too close to the travellers’ site to fly over it and see what, if anything, was going on there on an average day.
With the DS parked u
p in a nearby passing place on a narrow lane, a few hundred yards from the travellers’ camp, I started the drone right beside the car. I was in the shade of a large unkempt hedgerow and this time had a clear picture of what the drone saw on my phone’s little screen. Slightly nauseated by the swaying, I went quite high and immediately saw the camp which lay to the right. ‘Comin’ at yer,’ I said aloud, feeling James Bondish and childishly amused at my imagined invulnerability as I flew over to them. It took me a moment to get my bearings since I was approaching from the other side, but once I got my eye in I could see it was all there. Two things became immediately apparent: there was much more to see than last time and the camp was not having an average day.
On the little screen I could make out a red car from the fire department, a police car and a police motorbike. The reason they were there became apparent when I let the drone sink down. Two caravans had been reduced to ashes – or, more precisely, both camper vans. I could see the remains of the axles and engines inside the black oblongs. Both were surrounded by black-and-brown halos where the fire had scorched the ground and baked the mud all around. There was no smoke and no fire engine, which meant I had missed the main event. Police officers in yellow high-vis vests were talking to a group of travellers but I could not make out whether Sam was among them. There was a lot of arm waving and gesturing. I dropped lower and crept closer.
Too close. Being so far away from the drone, I had no sense of how close I was flying to the group and how noisy the little propellers were. They all looked up. The police looked all about them, presumably to see who was flying the thing over their investigation. The motorcycle cop jogged over to his bike which was parked close to the entrance to the field and a moment later started it up, blue lights flashing front and rear. Time to wind in my neck and make myself scarce. In my panic to reel in the drone, I executed some ineffectual aerobatics over the field before I landed it, with a bump, on the roof of my car. I stuffed it unceremoniously into the boot and started the engine. Only I was facing the wrong way if I wanted to avoid the police bike. The lane was narrow. Even where I had parked up in the passing place, it took a six-point turn before I could get away. Of course, my ancient Citroën was no match for any sort of police vehicle built after 1945, which meant my chances of outrunning the bike were always zero; I needed to hide. The bike now had its siren going and it approached fast. A convenient crossroads of narrow lanes offered me a one-in-three chance of evading him. On instinct, I chose to turn left and put my foot down. Perhaps the steering needed seeing to because it felt a little more vague than I would have wished. I knew that driving at this speed was idiotic and that if I met another idiot coming the other way, both my steering and I might end up permanently vague. I could still hear the siren, which was bad news. Was it worth risking a monumental accident just to avoid being told off for flying the thing? What was the worst they could do to me? The police bike appeared in my rear-view mirror. I was just about to slow down and face the music when I met another idiot. Two idiots, in fact. Fortunately, they had already stuffed their Golf GTI into the hedgerow and stood head-scratchingly beside it. There was just enough space for me to fly past once the hapless pair had jumped out of the way. In my rear-view mirror, I watched the bike pull up at the car wreck, having found something more interesting to do (like breathalysing the pair in the ditch). This didn’t stop me from constantly checking my mirrors for police cars and bikes, but I got back to Mill House without further incident, as they say.
It became clear to me that there is a difference between being able to fly a drone without crashing it through people’s windows and being a good drone cameraman. Watched on my computer, the footage was more than a little nauseating since the drone had never stood still. The first sequence in and above the garden of The Chestnuts really yielded little information. I could see the gardener from above and at a distance pushing a wheelbarrow towards the back of the large garden and then, after a stomach-churning fun-fair swoop to barbecue level, I could just make out the shape of Janette Blinkhorn behind the French window of – presumably – the sitting room. Only a couple of seconds later, as the pilot was being unnerved by a couple of school kids, the drone zoomed high into the air and careered across several rooftops to land by my feet. I sent an email headlined ‘Progress report’ to Haarbottle and attached the video file, hoping it would make him as queasy as I felt.
The travellers’ camp footage started off well and thankfully calmly: a gentle sweep over the hedgerow followed by a steady rise and straight approach, then a slow descent. What had happened there was as plain as yellow pudding: only two vehicles had been targeted – the only two camper vans. All other vehicles looked untouched. That it was arson was likely since they had stood wide apart. And that they had been specifically targeted was obvious since none of the caravans or buses had been touched. Someone had gone in during the night and, knowing only that Sam was asleep in a camper van, had torched both to be certain of getting him. I checked the local BBC website and, sure enough, the fire was the main item, with a picture of the aftermath, a fire engine still in attendance. My eyes flew over the lines of the article to get to the salient points: No fatalities … a miracle no one was killed … treated for burns and smoke inhalation at a specialist burns unit … arson … accelerant, thought to be petrol.
Journalists and travellers alike naturally wished to portray this as part of the struggle between the travellers and the farmer who owned the field and who had been trying to get them moved on for months. The travellers accused the farmer of having sent ‘paid thugs’ to set fire to the camp to scare them away. I was certain there were one or two of them who did not believe that for one minute. During an interview, the farmer dismissed it as nonsense, adding grimly yet not unreasonably that if he had set the fires, he’d have burnt down the lot of them.
Downstairs in the kitchen, I switched on the radio and tuned into the awesomely awful Radio Bristol to see if their news bulletins could shed any more light on the matter, but I had just missed the news. Gratefully, I retuned to Radio 3 and started grating an onion into a bowl. Bear with me.
So Sam was alive but had sustained some injuries. I thought he was extremely lucky to have fought his way out of a burning van at all, considering the kind of stupor he seemed to drink himself into at night. The thought of inhaling the smoke from his wretched van made me shudder. Perhaps, I thought, feeling uncharacteristically charitable, the drinking had been a one-off. Either way, I doubted I’d be able to talk to him again any time soon and I also suspected that he would take the attempt on his life as a warning not to get chatty with private detectives.
I peeled and then grated a few potatoes into the same bowl and turned the resulting sludge into a clean tea towel and squeezed all the moisture out of it. But chatty about what? How had a few piss-poor young people at the margins of society managed to upset Porsche-driving people towards the other end of the income scale, enough to become a target for murder? Drugs came to mind, naturally. But two things made me doubt that drugs were involved; I had met many a drug user in my time and Verity just didn’t seem the type – in fact, I doubted she even smoked pot. And having been inside Sam’s stinking hole of a camper van, I had seen no sign of illegal drug use there either. The other thing, of course, that made the irate-drug-dealer scenario unlikely is that while they are often happy to kill rival drug pushers, they don’t normally go around killing their customer base, no matter how much they owe them. They might happily break their legs, yes, but it’s all about the money. How much money could a traveller owe anyway?
Having whisked in an egg and seasoned the resulting mix, I dropped ladlefuls of it into a quarter inch of oil in my largest frying pan and watched them sizzle and brown on the stove. There’s quite a short list of reasons for premeditated murder. Setting aside sexual jealousy and other relationship nonsense, the list is topped by greed, fear and hatred. Even though there was a connection between Sam in the camper van and Joshua Grant in his bedsit in the form of
Verity, their lifestyles were very different. If anyone set fire to travellers’ vans out of hatred for their kind, then how did Joshua fit in? Greed seemed out of the question as I could not see anyone greatly profiting from doing away with Joshua or Sam.
There was enough batter for six potato pancakes, which was good because I’m quite capable of snaffling that many in one sitting. I piled them on a plate and sat down with it at the kitchen table.
That left fear. But before I could spend time speculating on what might scare anyone into murdering this lot of unfortunates or even sink my teeth into the first pancake, the sound of car tyres crunching to a stop in the yard supplied me if not with fear then with a definite tingle of apprehension. I went to the window and peered out. From a steel-blue Peugeot 308, which had been parked by the gate so as to prevent any car from leaving, emerged two men. I’d have recognized them as police officers even had I not known the specimen who climbed out from the passenger side. Detective Inspector Reid was a symphony in brown. He had what looked suspiciously like a spray tan, tightly curled brown hair, and he wore a brown leather jacket, tight chinos and brown shoes. DI Reid always reminded me of an Airedale terrier. I had one as a small child, the kind with wheels that squeaked when you pulled it behind you. Since I’m a painter, you can take it from me that his driver was no oil painting either, but at least he had the sense to wear a grey suit, white shirt and black shoes, an ensemble that screamed ‘junior officer’. He was carrying an A4 plastic folder. Both were carefully picking their way between the water-filled potholes which pockmarked the yard. I briefly considered not being at home, but with both the Honda and the Citroën in the yard, I was sure Reid was not going to leave without making a nuisance of himself. I decided it was best to get it over with. A loud open-handed policeman’s knock summoned me to the front door. Sticking what I hoped was an expression of mild surprise and unconcern on my face, I opened the door to them.