by Peter Helton
I was glad we did not have to stop at Bath Marina, the site of my illicit research. People usually break into places; trust me to break out of a place. I instinctively ducked my head as we passed it. The lock at Weston was Number 6. ‘Your next lock will be on the Kennet and Avon,’ announced Jake, as though we were heading for the Zambezi River after a long and arduous journey.
The landmarks around me became more familiar, although not all of them were as good to look at from the back. Neither of us was in the mood for sightseeing anyway; I was itching to get properly under way and Jake had given up much of his day to get me kitted out and show me how to use the boat. ‘It’s very good of you to let me take out your boat,’ I said as at last we neared the turn-off to the canal. In fact, I had been wondering, with growing suspicion, just why Jake would entrust me with a sixty-foot boat which, admittedly, he had acquired gratis, and then go through the palaver of getting it back in the water.
‘You’re sort of doing me a favour,’ he admitted. ‘Keeping it parked on the trading estate costs money, and getting a permanent mooring for it is bloody expensive. I just couldn’t justify the expense, considering wild horses wouldn’t be able to drag Sally on to it, especially since what happened to Neil in the lock. Dreamcatcher is still insured and licensed for about six months, so having you putter about on it suits me well and for once you are saving me money. When you get back, I’ll probably put it up for sale. If you don’t sink it or set fire to it. In which case, please make sure you do it properly and I’ll just collect the insurance,’ he added.
The shores of the river on either side had been tamed with a lot of stone and concrete which was not much to look at, so I nearly missed my exit. Even Jake was a bit vague about where exactly it was – the entrance to the Kennet and Avon Canal. Unless you are an experienced boater, it looks like a tiny magic door in the wall. This time Jake helped with the lock gates to speed up our progress since he knew what I didn’t: as soon as we left the river we had six locks to pass through in quick succession. The first one was much deeper than any we had encountered so far, but it was itself dwarfed by the next one, which was huge. It was cavernous and so deep I thought it was going to swallow us like an enormous wet and algae-covered mouth. The massive gates were so heavy that I struggled to move them at all, which had me worried. ‘Are there any more of these?’ I asked, pushing backwards and breaking into a sweat.
‘Never saw one like it on our entire trip, so I wouldn’t worry,’ Jake said. I later found out that we were negotiating the second deepest lock in the entire country. The nearby church warned us ‘Prepare to Meet Your God’, in three-foot-high letters on its roof, which did nothing to lighten the mood as we sweated and worked our way through the locks, though they became much easier and the views prettier. Lock 13, Jake assured me when we reached it, would be the last one for quite a long stretch.
‘This is where they found Dreamcatcher unattended,’ he said, ‘and eventually they found Neil’s body, barely visible, in that furthest corner there. I wish I had brought some flowers or something to throw in. Though chucking things in a lock is not the done thing, I suppose.’
We went through it in respectful silence after that, while I imagined Neil somehow slipping, falling, knocking himself senseless and tipping overboard, unconscious or semi-conscious in the lock, his lungs filling with murky canal water. I was glad I was wearing a life jacket. Jake had refused to spend money on one for himself just for the day and, rather stingily, I hadn’t offered to buy one for him as I was still in shock after having bought enough diesel to circumnavigate the country. I was soon shaken out of my quiet reverie, though, by a phenomenon we had not encountered before – heavy traffic.
Once we had passed the Bath Boat Hire place, which was probably responsible for overpopulating this stretch of the canal, there were boats everywhere. The forecast for the foreseeable future was for warm and dry weather and a lot of people, for some reason mainly groups of shirtless males, had hit on the same idea: ‘Let’s hire a boat, get sunburnt and drink our weight in tinned lager!’
I now found myself passing more familiar territory as the canal cut through Sydney Gardens, but we made little progress. The towpath was now busy and there was no sign of the homeless man who had shared his chicken broth with me. There were queues of boats wanting to pass under the bridges and boaters as inexperienced as me were bumping into each other’s vessels. One of the boats pumped out some kind of booming dance music at an astonishing volume, though the nine half-naked men that populated the deck and roof of the boat looked too far gone to dance. All of them were pink of face and shoulders and looked exceedingly if brainlessly happy. Eventually, we managed to pass under the bridge where I had come a cropper on my bicycle. I told Jake about it.
‘You gave the bike away? That was a stupid thing to do,’ was his considered opinion.
‘I was a bit disenchanted with the thing. To tell you the truth, it was crap.’
‘You’ll need a bike on the canal unless you want to take up jogging. Without a bike, you might have to do long treks on foot to get into towns and to and from shops and so on. The nearest bus stop could be miles away from where you find yourself moored.’
‘I can’t afford to buy a bicycle after, ironically, having bought enough fuel to fill up half a car park of diesel cars,’ I complained.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a solution for that as well. Come up and see me before you set off.’
I was now retracing my damp bicycle journey, only considerably more slowly, and we were heading for Bathampton, along with everyone else, it seemed. We had survived all day on plastic triangles of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches and fizzy pop and were both hungry, but Jake wouldn’t hear of going to the George for food. ‘I’m taking Sally out for dinner later. I’ve arranged for Gary to find us at the café on the other side of the bridge.’ We were both tired out and Jake was now impatient to get off the boat. We had to moor quite a way below the George Inn, such was the demand around here today.
The Raft, on the other side of the bridge, was a floating café, a widebeam river barge moored craftily opposite a school full of ice-cream-hungry children. It had tables on board as well as on both sides of the path that ran past it. The place was doing a roaring trade and every table was taken. We armed ourselves with cappuccinos and the last two slices of walnut cake and collapsed on the grass. I hadn’t done this much exercise in years.
‘Do you good,’ was Jake’s verdict. ‘All that sitting in cars watching people can’t be healthy for you.’
We didn’t have long to wait for Gary to turn up. In fact, he had got here before us and, not seeing us at the café, had sensibly whiled away the time downing pints outside the George. He did not seem to mind having to play ferry pilot for Jake’s car, which made me suspect that either he got paid well or he owed Jake a favour. I already owed Jake so many favours I might one day have to work for him full-time without pay. Gary waited patiently for us to stuff ourselves with coffee and cake, then Jake dropped him at the train station on the way to driving me home.
Perhaps there was something in this exercise lark because I slept exceedingly well and rose full of optimism. Then my muscles woke up too and started up a chorus of complaints. Apparently, I had used groups of muscles that had considered themselves safely retired long ago. I ran myself a bath, added half a bottle of ‘moisturizing foam bath’ that Annis had carelessly left behind and lowered my creaking body into it until some of the knots in my disgruntled musculature had dissolved. But I could not lie around here for long – no, I had a boat to kit out. I wanted to get back on it as soon as I could; having left it on a forty-eight-hour mooring close to a pub made me nervous as now I felt responsible for the thing, no matter what Jake had said about an insurance write-off. I parked the Jazz and its six-hundred-litre boot space in the supermarket car park and continued to cripple my finances, first in the supermarket and then at the farmers’ market that was in full swing under the roof of the old Green Park station. I didn’t notice the
note under the windscreen wiper until after I had loaded the boot and sat behind the wheel. It was a folded-up piece of notepaper, not a flyer, so I got out and retrieved it.
It was handwritten in (expensive) biro. ‘Dear Mr Honeysett, I have still not been able to make contact with my niece. If you have had any news of her please call me. Here is my number again.’ There followed a mobile number and a signature: Christine Reiner. I retrieved the till receipt on which Verity’s ‘aunt’ had originally given me her number. The number was the same, so was the handwriting, as far as I could tell from just the name and numbers. However, auntie couldn’t remember how to spell her own name: on the first note it was ‘Rainer’, on the new one clearly ‘Reiner’. I made a show of carefully refolding the note and putting it in my pocket in case I was being watched. Surreptitiously, I looked about me as I got back into the car, wondering how they had found me here. It was hard to believe that the woman had remembered my car and number plate and then chanced upon it while doing her shopping, especially if she lived in Cheltenham. Or Belgium. It could only mean one thing: auntie had followed me. And, knowing from personal experience just how tedious following people was, if she was bothering to follow me, then she must want Verity badly. For a moment I considered calling the number, pretending I had heard from Verity and sending her on a wild goose chase to the other end of the country, but it struck me as less than fiendishly clever as a plan. It also meant I would have to shake off anyone following me before I stepped on to the boat.
The problem with having your eyes glued to your rear-view mirror is that you don’t pay enough attention to where you are going. I had two close shaves and drove smack through a red light, the horn from an irate driver chasing me off the junction; looking back, though, I could see no one else had jumped the lights to keep up with me. Now was the time to shake off any pursuit. For nearly half an hour I drove like an idiot, down tiny streets and up narrow lanes, parking up from time to time to see if anyone followed. Either no one was or they were very good. The third possibility did not occur to me at the time.
Eventually, I deemed it safe enough to drive my purchases to the canal. I staggered back and forth between car and boat until I had thrown it all at the minute galley which disappeared under it. I got the fridge to work and lamented the pitiful dimensions of its ice box, the general lack of storage space and my own idiocy; not only did I have enough fuel for six months, I now had the food to go with it.
Jake was busy. Saturday was a favourite time for owners of classic cars to find things wrong with their ancient chariots and to discover that they had to spend yet another fortune to keep the thing roadworthy. This suited me since it might serve to distract him from the lamentable state of the Jazz’s bodywork and windows. Eventually, I managed to prize him from his workshop. ‘You mentioned a bicycle?’
‘Oh yeah, I got it out for you.’
He had. ‘But it’s pink. And it’s a tandem.’
It was, in fact, a pink tandem with black polka dots. He dinged the bell on it, which was also pink. It worked. ‘Naturally. We bought it for our own narrowboat trip. And Sally picked the colour.’
‘I’ll look ridiculous riding that.’
‘That’s no problem – you always look ridiculous. Anyway, you might make a friend out there. Take it or leave it.’
I took it. I was wheeling the immaculate tandem towards the less-than-immaculate Jazz which I had hidden behind a customer’s ancient Austin. ‘Perhaps you could ask around about Neil,’ Jake suggested lightly. ‘You know, see if anyone has an idea what might have changed him like that. People who knew him will recognize Dreamcatcher.’ Another prophetic remark I would remember later. Jake turned back to his workshop and waiting customers without having noticed the state of the Jazz. I fought with the ridiculously long tandem which took up the whole length of the car and drove it back to Mill House.
As soon as I stood in the quiet sunny yard next to the car, I got an odd kind of feeling and there was no Jake to tell me that it was because I was an odd kind of man. The sun was sinking and there was a pleasant breeze that stirred the grasses in the meadow. The studio barn at the top stood in the shadow of the belt of trees behind it; there was birdsong. And yet I felt as though I had walked into a gunman’s crosshairs, and standing still was to invite disaster. I also had the distinct feeling I would feel better with a .38 in my pocket.
The moment I got through the door I knew that someone had been in the house. Or still was. At first I could not tell why, but I practically held my breath until I had reached the kitchen drawer and my hand had closed on the grip of the Webley. If you are susceptible to it, then the seduction of the gun begins the moment you grasp it; it is as though the illusion of safety travels up your arm into your brain. I breathed more easily and began to search the house. In Annis’s absence, the kitchen had become the kind of tip where it was impossible to tell if an intruder had turned it upside down. The sitting room looked deceptively undisturbed until I examined the old-fashioned door to the verandah; it had been forced, which wasn’t difficult. Quietly and very slowly, I crept through the house, examining every nook, cranny and cupboard where an intruder might have hidden on my arrival. When I was sure the ground floor was clear, I moved up the creaking stairs. I was not in the mood for being jumped, which would most likely result in me shooting several large-calibre holes into the house. I wrenched open the door to the upstairs bathroom and, despite my fear, had to smile – the place smelled as if someone hadn’t been able to resist trying out Annis’s collection of perfumes and body sprays, which made me think that perhaps my visitor was female, maybe auntie herself. Somehow this lessened my fear, which serves as another illustration of the stupidity of the male brain. I poked the Webley under beds and into wardrobes without a sign of my visitor until I reached my attic office. Someone had taken out their own frustration on the place. It was a tip and for once I was not to blame. Papers strewn about, every drawer pulled out and emptied on to the floor, the computer still on, my email account still showing, the idiocy of ‘keep me logged in’ clear to see.
Not that auntie had learnt anything about Verity’s whereabouts. Very briefly, I wondered whether this might have nothing to do with Verity and those who were trying to find her; could this be to do with the Blinkhorns’ insurance fraud? Had Janette found out my real identity, tracked me down and broken in to see what, if anything, I had on the pair? In which case, she should have felt reassured since I had precisely nothing. But it seemed an outlandish career move for the grieving widow and I dismissed that line of thought.
I called Tim at work. I wished I could say that Tim owed me a favour, but I knew that the balance sheet of favours was weighted heavily against me, so I was pleasantly surprised when Tim said, ‘Yeah, sure, don’t mind house-sitting your place; it’ll be like a holiday. Also,’ he added more thoughtfully, ‘ever since we came for supper at yours, Becks has been saying what a large place it was and how small my flat is.’
‘It’s when she starts complaining about there not being much space in the back of your Audi that you want to start worrying. She’ll be thinking child seat then.’
‘Tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking child seat lately.’
‘Really? Fatherhood?’ It felt as if my universe was tilting. For how many years now had Tim, Annis and I celebrated our child-free status and the freedoms it afforded us? ‘You’re serious about Rebecca, then.’
‘Yes.’ Another shock to my system. I could not remember Tim ever having expressed an affirmative with ‘yes’. ‘Yup’, ‘sort of’, ‘yeah’ and ‘uh-huh’. Not ‘yes’. This was serious stuff, but I thought I could probably live with it.
Tim promised to spend as many nights at Mill House as he could and make the place look lived-in while I was away. Someone had also been in the studio, although it hadn’t been necessary to break in since the sash windows we bodged into the wall are easily opened from the outside. It had been left open. Nothing was missing, which was just as well; have you se
en the price of paint? I found myself a couple of wine crates and crammed them with everything a painter might need on a long boat trip and several things he might not: pencils, erasers, Indian ink, dip pens, spare nibs, waterproof fineliners in six sizes, spare waterproof fineliners in six sizes, watercolour box, china palette, plastic palette, tubes of paint, spare half pans of paint, collapsible travel brushes, ordinary brushes, more brushes, gum Arabic (never used) and lifting preparation (ditto). I grabbed another box: sketchbooks, gummed watercolour blocks, loose sheets of watercolour paper (three grades), cartridge pads, gum strip, masking tape, sponges, cotton rags, roll of kitchen towel, jam jars, bulldog clips and rubber bands. I staggered up and down the meadow to the car and back until it was all stowed in what space was left once I had stuffed clothes and bed linen into the corners. You were thinking I had forgotten my collapsible camping stool and my travel easel? Already in the car. I used string to tie down the boot lid as it would no longer shut.
The sixty-foot boat which had, when I first set foot on it, seemed to have all the space a man could need for his few worldly possessions had now turned into a giant jigsaw puzzle where a mischievous soul had thrown a handful of spare pieces into the box. Where was all this stuff going to go? After a two-hour fight with all the things I had unwisely deemed indispensable, I still kept stumbling over this and had to squeeze around that. Couples, I reminded myself, lived on boats this size. People raised children on boats. I was born, as shall become obvious if it isn’t already, without a single boating gene in my body.
‘Got your mobile?’ asked Tim.
‘Yup.’
‘Charger?’ reminded Rebecca.
‘Packed.’
‘Torch, spare batteries?’ Tim probed. ‘Toothbrush? Nail file?’
‘Packed.’
‘Bog roll?’
‘Shit!’
‘Quite.’
I ran upstairs and grabbed all the spare toilet rolls. Tim and Rebecca had come up after work to drive me to the boat so I could leave the Honda in the relative safety of the yard at Mill House. I had briefed Tim about being followed so he could take evasive action when he drove all three of us and a bootful of extra must-have items to the canal. He embraced this so enthusiastically that it took us an extra half hour to make it to Bathampton.