by Peter Helton
‘The river is so swollen you won’t be able to navigate your little cockleshell. You’ll drown like rats and I’ll lie here unable to get up, and I’ll starve to death. Right, you can’t have any more of these.’ He swiped the family-size bag of doughnuts and stuffed it under his blanket. ‘It’s all that stands between me and death by starvation. They’ll find my emaciated body when eventually they open up the house after your bloated remains have washed up in Avonmouth . . .’
I let Tim witter on because in some weird way it was beginning to cheer me up. ‘You’re just jealous because you can’t come along, dear.’
‘I told you when you first suggested it that it was an idiotic scheme.’
‘You’re just scared that I might find out I can do without your criminal expertise and hand you a redundancy notice.’
‘Ha! Redundancy implies employment. You haven’t paid me for ages. Anyway, you’re scared of heights, remember? Halfway up there you’ll crap yourself with fear and the fire brigade will have to come and fetch you down like a kitten from an apple tree.’
This was so close to the centre of my own fears that I nearly told him to shut up, only I knew that the resulting silence would scare me more. ‘I’ll cope.’
‘You’ll never even get there. You’ll get swept away or your dinghy will turn turtle and you’ll drown.’ Tim was getting into his stride now and obviously enjoying his role as gloom-dispensing oracle. He had even acquired a familiar; ever since he’d settled down in front of the fire the cat hadn’t left his side.
I coughed as I lit yet another cigarette and wondered how long I could stay afloat for. ‘We can both swim.’ Annis nodded her agreement.
‘Not in the weir you can’t. It’s become eroded and the changed shape creates a fierce suction pulling you down to the bottom and preventing you from coming up again. Might be all sorts of bodies already down there. And with the river in spate like this your chances will be zero anyway. You’ll both be dead a couple of minutes after hitting the water. What’s for supper, by the way?’
It was Annis’s turn to cook. While I watched her boil fettucine and drown a few handfuls of prawns in arrabiata sauce straight from the supermarket (‘You didn’t think I was going to knit you a cassoulet, did you?’) I called Jill. A lot could go wrong but if it didn’t then it looked as though within a couple of days we might at last be able to exchange Louis for the Penny Black and The Dancer. There was no answer.
‘I tried before and didn’t get any answer then either.’
Annis elaborately licked a large wooden spoon, then waggled it at me. ‘Mm, yeah, meant to tell you: I swung round her place earlier after I picked up some of Tim’s stuff and she didn’t answer. I don’t think she was in, I leant on the bell for a while, it would have woken the dead.’
‘I’ll try her again later.’ I slipped the phone back into my pocket and decided to do rather more than that later.
We had just sat down to keep Tim company in front of the fire and begun to slurp fettucine and chase prawns round our bowls when I sensed more than heard a vehicle approach. I wandered off with my bowl of pasta into the dark hall and opened the door a crack, from where I could watch the entrance to the yard without showing a backlit silhouette of myself. Now I could clearly hear the slow, distinctive rattle of a large diesel approaching down the track. A few moments later headlights appeared and soon I recognized Jake’s vintage Land Rover. He was pulling a Rigid Inflatable Boat on a trailer, complete with outboard engine tilted up, into the yard. I turned on the outside light, which at the moment consisted of one feeble light bulb. There was more light coming from Jake’s Land Rover. He climbed from the cab, still in his overalls.
‘Hold this.’ I handed him the bowl of pasta and went to admire the boat. I walked around it, patting its sleek black flanks. It was far bigger than I had expected, a lot more substantial. Surely this would stand up to any amount of current, any kind of weather. ‘Can it be carried? With two people?’
‘Just. Without the engine. It’s a good little boat, that. I’ll leave you the trailer of course. Got anything to pull it with?’
‘Annis’s Landy.’
‘You’re sorted then. Cheers, Chris.’ He handed me back the bowl. Empty.
I stared at it in consternation. This had to be some sort of conspiracy.
Annis had appeared in the doorway but preferred to stay dry in its shelter while Jake unhitched the trailer.
‘It’s got a twelve horsepower engine, I know that doesn’t sound much, but it’s perfectly adequate. I filled her up, you can return her dry though, it’ll only go back into storage anyway. Give us a hand.’
We unhitched the trailer and pulled the boat as far as it went into the incomplete shelter of one of the crumbling outbuildings. The one adjacent to it, with most of its sagging roof still complete, hid Tim’s black Audi, under bits of tarp, carpet and cardboard. Jake spotted it instantly with the trained eye of the obsessive. ‘I won’t ask.’
‘It’s just Tim’s Audi. He’s come to stay for a few days.’
‘Blimey, does he always park like that? Right, gotta go, car to finish.’ He climbed into his cab, waved a goodbye and cranked the Land Rover out of the yard.
In the kitchen I made myself a tuna sandwich, closely watched by the cat who had suddenly appeared out of the ground beside me. How do they know? He was there before I got the tin-opener in. After explaining to him the merits of opposable thumbs when it came to the acquisition of tinned tuna I relented and dropped some in his cat bowl – and where had that come from? – just so I got some peace in which to munch my sandwich.
And think. And the more I thought, the more uneasy I felt. The feeling that my life was controlled by outside forces, that events and people might pop in and out of the ground like a nameless cat, was beginning to get to me. The museum robbery was of course an utterly ridiculous and doomed undertaking, even if the couple attempting it had not been a pair of painters with a fear of heights. Now that I was by myself and I didn’t have Tim’s ridicule to cheer me up the depressing realities of our situation crowded in on me.
Reluctantly I put on my still-damp leather jacket and boots, got on the bike and rumbled through the drizzle into town. The Norton never liked being parked on steep hills so I left it in Portland Place and walked the few yards down to Jill’s little house in Harley Street. No lights were showing. The blinds at the upstairs windows were drawn but I seemed to remember they’d been like that when we came to fetch Jill to Mill House. I checked my watch. It was only half past eight. The doorbell was shrill and remained unanswered, even after the fifth time of ringing. I called her mobile again without success. Bending down I pushed back the tin flap of the letter box. Only the dim glow of the street lights that fell through the doors leading off it illuminated the narrow hall. I hunted round my jacket pockets for my Maglite without success. What I wanted to see was in complete darkness. I turned on my mobile and, using the bright display as a torch, stuck it through the letter box. I had to hold it at an awkward angle and it slid from my rain-slickened fingers and dropped down the other side of the door, emitting a bleep of protest as it hit the large pile of uncollected post on the other side.
That decided it. It was only a Yale lock but my lock-picking expertise, despite Tim’s efforts to train me, was pitiful. The houses next door showed light behind their front room curtains. From the one on the left I could hear snatches of TV sound. I hoped the people on the other side were equally busy and didn’t suddenly decide to leave by the front door. I worked for a nerve-tingling minute, during which several people walked past on the pavement behind me. I forced myself not to look over my shoulder but to concentrate on the inner workings of the lock. At last it clicked open and I pushed through into the hall. The pile of post made it difficult, as some of it slid under the door. I picked up my mobile, closed the door and turned on the light. At my feet lay mainly junk mail, leaflets and takeaway menus and stuff addressed to The Householder, but there were other letters as wel
l, most bearing the name A. P. Downs. Presumably the previous tenant. There was no post for Jill, since she had only lived there for one or two days before tragedy struck. I simply couldn’t see how Jill could have entered her house without sweeping most of the mail to the side as I had done when I opened the door. Unless she had used a rear entrance. I dropped the letters back on the floor and looked into the sitting room on the right. In the orange glow from the street lights I could see that nothing had changed in here, the ashtray overflowing, the half-emptied boxes, the china pigs on the telly. I was still feeling for the light switch when a police car pulled up outside, without siren but blue lights flashing. Two officers jumped out. Now was a good time to find out if there was another way out. One of the officers made straight for the front door, already flashing his torch at the window, the other went to the next door neighbour’s, presumably to cut off any escape from the back.
I turned off the hall light and ran to the small kitchen at the rear. A narrow, half-glazed back door led to a tiny garden. It was locked. There wasn’t the time to try and unpick the lock. I lifted one of the wooden kitchen chairs, hoped it was solid enough to break through the glass, took a good swing back and spotted a key hanging on a hook in the door frame. I put the chair down and tried the keys. Behind me the front door was being rattled, then a powerful torch beam, aimed through the letter box, jumped about on the kitchen furniture. The lock disengaged, I pulled. Bolted. I released the top bolt and pulled. I swore and released the bottom bolt, which was stiff because the wood had warped. At last I managed to get the door open, only to see a police constable’s head bob over the fence to the right. The fence was overgrown with brambles and the copper was looking for a way across without getting shredded. I ran straight down the middle of the strip of garden, cracked my ankle against something in the dark but kept running.
‘Halt! Police! Stop right there!’ The authority of his voice was subtly undermined by the quieter addition of ‘Shit.’ I took a run at the fence at the back, ignoring the padlocked door, and scrambled over it. It landed me in the narrowest of alleyways full of crud. To my right a puffing police officer rattled at the high back gate of the neighbour’s fence. It was topped with rusted barbed wire. I jumped over what looked like a collection of empty paint cans and sacks of rubbish and ran past him uphill. It was a dead end. The back-to-back gardens of Harley Street and the much posher Northampton Street converged and soon I found myself at the bottom of an eight-foot sandstone wall. Fortunately someone had neatly piled large sections of a dead fruit tree under it for me to climb up. Behind me the constable crashed through the pile of paint cans, getting awfully close. I clambered up the pile of logs, which began to move precariously. It seemed to take me forever. When I got one leg on the top of the wall I gave the wood pile a good kick with the other one. I didn’t wait to check the results. I dropped down between a brick barbecue and a glass greenhouse into the sudden glare of a security light high above on the back wall of the house. This was a much larger garden, belonging to the last house on Northampton Street. The light was helpful, though. I spotted the door to the car port on the other side and when I got there found it open and squeezed through the two cars to freedom. No time to hang about. The Norton was parked twenty yards up the road. When I reached it I was so out of breath I wanted nothing more than to bend double and throw up. I worked the kick-starter instead. One of the constables was back in the street in front of Jill’s house and, seeing me frantically trying to start the bike, began running uphill towards me.
The Norton never did like the damp. Only on the fourth attempt did the engine come to life. Realizing that he wouldn’t reach me in time the officer changed his mind and ran back to his car. With the thunderous noise the fifty-year-old bike emitted I had no chance of giving him the slip quietly and I certainly couldn’t outrun him. I pointed the bike left and roared along Portland Street straight at a large complex of council flats. I squeezed the bike past the beam that barred the car park and rode the few yards to the pedestrian underpass. Blue flashes of the police car’s beacon pulsed on the wall above me as I negotiated the metal barriers designed to stop people from driving through it. It was an agonizingly slow squeeze through it but once on the other side I was home free. For a couple of seconds the Norton’s exhaust noise was ear-splittingly amplified in the short tunnel, then I hustled the bike up the curved tarmac path to the top where it spat me out on to Lansdown Road. I turned left uphill and opened the throttle all the way. There was no sign of pursuit, even when I reached the long straight on top of Lansdown.
Taking the long way home along dark and deserted country roads allowed my adrenalin levels to readjust themselves and gave me time to subdue my paranoia. The arrival of the police at Jill’s house had nothing to do with the kidnapping or our planned robbery; someone had watched me spend ages breaking the lock and sensibly called the fuzz. If they’d been after me personally, they’d have been CID.
The much more important question was now: what had happened to Jill? I hadn’t had the chance to search the house but it seemed obvious that no one had been there for a while. Quite apart from the evidence of the junk mail pile what had convinced me that Jill hadn’t been back for a couple of days was the smell. The place smelled uninhabited. Nobody had smoked there for a while and Jill was a heavy smoker.
Had she decided she needed company after all? Had she gone to her sister’s? She said she didn’t know anyone in Bath; had she gone to Bristol, perhaps even back to her ex-boyfriend?
In the valley I approached the turn-off to my house from the east instead of the usual west. I hid the Norton as best I could by the side of the road and walked the last quarter of a mile, this being the approximate distance the bike’s engine sound travelled at night. I was thoroughly wet and tired but kept on my toes by a brain feverishly trying to compute all the possibilities, all the alternatives, any exit strategies or plan Bs. If I found the yard full of police the answers would become painfully obvious. If not, then our plans had to be put into action as soon as possible. I cautiously crept along the last bit of track, darting from tree shadow to tree shadow. The outside light was on, there were no police cars in the yard.
If it was still empty by tomorrow night, I would go and steal a Rodin.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Pack everything in the right order, so what you’ll need first is at the top.’
‘Yes, Grandma Bigwood.’ Now that we were definitely going Tim had decided to stop dispensing gloom and be helpful instead. I wasn’t sure what I found more irritating, but I realized how helpless he felt and I also knew that despite his myriad objections to the scheme he would eventually have done it, and done it well.
‘Cereal bars? What, are you going to hold a picnic in there first? What other nonsense are you taking?’
Annis sighed. ‘Ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, camping stove for making hot soup and a gramophone, if I’d have let him.’ Annis was long ready and only waiting for me to see that really, so was I. It was three o’clock in the morning, the city centre would be as quiet as it would ever get, and there was no moon. We were dressed in black, with black trainers, and I’d be carrying a black waterproof rucksack I deemed large enough to carry the little Rodin in. Outside, the dinghy on its trailer, disguised with cardboard boxes and tarpaulin to give it a different shape, was hooked up to the Landy.
I thought I had everything. I thought I was ready. ‘Let’s do it.’
Annis knelt down to kiss Tim goodbye. A bit longer than was strictly necessary, I thought. Then we were off. We hardly spoke on the way. We’d gone over it countless times and in my experience it never paid to labour your plans. Nothing ever worked out quite the way you’d imagined it anyway. We met few cars on the London Road and soon turned off, crossed the river and disappeared into the quiet suburbs. Here for a while we were at the mercy of insomniac neighbourhood watch schemers but it wasn’t long before we left the houses behind and Annis manoeuvred the Landy down a narrow lane that ended a
t a gate set into the low stone wall bordering the riverside meadows. It was only held shut with a loop of nylon rope. I opened it and stepped back to let Annis drive in. She killed the lights and bounced past me towards the river, far into the boggy meadow. I wasn’t convinced of the merits of this; the last thing we could afford was to get stuck in the mud here. I ran after her in the thin rain and was relieved when her brake lights came on at last.
‘I checked it out, it only gets really soft closer in,’ she said when I protested. ‘We don’t want to have to lug the boat any further than absolutely necessary. We’ll be all right from here.’
‘You’re the expert.’ Which she was. Annis could manoeuvre a Land Rover with dreamlike ease. Learnt it on a driving course somewhere.
Untying the tarpaulin in the rain was harder than tying it on, especially since my rope craft was nil. Those beautiful secure knots that untangle themselves when you pull on them were quite beyond me. My knots were the muttered-curses-and-broken-fingernail type. Everything took longer than expected, was more difficult, wetter, windier, colder. When eventually we managed to get the thing off the trailer the RIB proved spectacularly heavy. Fortunately dismounting the engine was easy. We first carried, then dragged the inflatable to the water’s edge, aiming for a dead-looking tree in the gloom. The river was in noisy spate; I had to use my torch to make sure we didn’t slither down the steep bank and pitch straight into its swirling waters. Launching the boat didn’t look to be at all easy. We were in the middle of a shouted discussion about it when the thing displayed a watery will of its own and launched itself, aided by the wind and me slipping in the mud. We both dived for the long trailing rope and managed to stop the boat from disappearing into the darkness. After we managed to tie it to a fallen branch of the dead tree we trudged back and got the engine. By the time we had carried it to the boat and mounted it again I was too wet, scratched, bruised and narked off to even complain about it and Annis was grimly quiet. She got the engine started easily and ran against the current while I untied the rope from the log and climbed back in.