Rainstone Fall (25 page)
The sudden shout close by nearly made me fall off the last ladder. ‘It’s secure, sarge, padlocked! They didn’t come through here.’ A constable rattled the cage.
Bending down, hanging on the ladder, I watched his legs move away. I stood and panted in the dark at the foot of the ladder, getting my breath back and my nerve up for the next lap. Keeping my body as far back in the shadows as was possible I pushed my hands through the grid of the cage, got the key into the padlock, let it snap open and unhooked it from the latch. The constable had moved off to the left. My route of escape lay more or less straight ahead: through the wrought-iron gate on the opposite side and down the slipway. There was no point in delaying. I had no idea where the constable had gone nor if there were any other bodies in the car park, but every second would make the situation more dangerous. I expected at any moment to hear the cry go up as someone discovered Annis clinging to the landing stage.
I opened the wire door wide, took a deep breath and loped across the car park like a demented Quasimodo. My legs ached and the lump of bronze on my back seemed to try and push me into the ground. Just as I reached the slope of the slipway that would take me out of view of anyone searching the car park the beam of a torch swept across the back of the Empire Hotel’s walls and passed over me.
‘Hey, stop! Police!’ The shout I had feared went up as I dived into the darker slipway and shouldered open the door. I fumbled for the next bicycle lock to close the gate against my pursuers but when I heard the pounding of police boots echoing towards me I panicked and ran on, down the narrow canyon of the alley, dodging the stacks of crates and rows of empty beer kegs. I could hear the clang of the gate opening behind me as I strained to reach the little door at the other end.
Unencumbered by any Rodins the constable gained on me quickly, no longer shouting but saving his breath for the sprint and leap. I skidded against the little gate and had to step back to give it room to open and squeezed through. The dark shape of the officer filled my vision as I put the gate between us and fiddled the bicycle lock through the iron staple. He threw himself against it, breathing hard, just as I managed to shut the lock and twist the combination lock. He reached through the bars of the gate and made a grab for my jacket but I yanked myself free and staggered on along the colonnade, with the shouts of police and the roar of the weir in my ears.
Annis was waiting for me at the end of the walkway. ‘You got the damn thing then. You’ve been ages,’ she hissed and vaulted lightly back over the balustrade. I didn’t dignify her comment with an answer since, as usual, I didn’t have the breath to argue. I clambered over and gripped the handrail hard to steady myself. Everything seemed to be moving in the wind, the dinghy bucked, the river swirled. I practically fell into the boat and simply wanted to lie where I was but had to shrug out of the rucksack to untie the painter. Annis pulled the starter on the engine. There was no time to fiddle with the knot so I cut the rope. Annis pulled the cord again. Nothing. I lunged at the landing stage but it was too late, we were slipping away, accelerating fast in the current. Annis ripped the starter cord ever more frantically, again and again. Against the backdrop of the thunderous foaming of the weir it looked a soundless, futile exercise. The boat started its unstoppable race. It slewed sideways towards the drop of the weir. There were two paddles at the bottom of the boat. We both grabbed for them simultaneously while exchanging monosyllabic comments on the situation and started shovelling at the black water.
‘Not upstream, that’s hopeless!’ Annis called. ‘We can’t get away, the current’s too strong. We’ll have to go over the weir, but bow first or we’ll capsize!’
She was right. Without engine power we had no hope of fighting the greedy suction pulling the boat into the dark. We had to ride the chaotic white water that boiled and thundered and waited to engulf us.
It happened in a matter of seconds. Both of us paddled on the same side now, trying to point the boat bow-first at the weir, but we were carried across the side of the horseshoe before we had managed to change direction even a fraction. It felt like being swallowed by a screaming monster with an excess of saliva. For a moment I was deaf and blind and the boat appeared to be completely submerged. I gasped for air, swallowed water instead and reappeared coughing and spluttering, with a coughing and spluttering Annis next to me. By some miracle we were both still in the boat. Then we seemed to skate across the surface, the swirling waters twirling the dinghy round and round until we hit a calmer stretch alongside the bank of Parade Gardens. The boat was brimful of water but still floated on.
I quickly summed up the situation. ‘Blimey!’ I looked back. I couldn’t make out much detail in the rain but imagined I could see two figures peering down over the balustrade of Grand Parade into the spume and foam of the weir. We had come a long way very quickly and the current was still pushing us along. We added paddle power to that and soon disappeared from sight under North Parade Bridge, the curve of the river taking us all the while further from the museum.
‘Now what?’ I complained. ‘If we keep going this way we’ll end up in Bristol. Home’s the other way.’
‘Typical. A minute ago we nearly drowned but already you’re quibbling about my driving. We’ve got to get off this river pronto or they’ll scoop us up like a rubber duck.’
‘There’s bound to be a landing place coming up soon.’ At the moment the sheer sides of the river banks didn’t offer the faintest hope of getting out. The old railway bridge hove into view but when we passed under it there wasn’t even a handhold. Annis was right, we had to get off the river quickly and disappear into the night. As the Avon gently curved right I spotted an irregularity in the uniform dark of the left bank. ‘On the left, let’s make for that darker splodge.’
‘Dark splodge coming up.’
I recognized the place. ‘I know where this is, an arm of the Kennet and Avon joins here, there’s a lock on the other side of that opening.’
‘You want to go in there?’
‘No, a bit further, is that steps? Up ahead.’
I was right. Only a few yards beyond the gloomy arch of the lock a series of concrete steps led up to the towpath. Kneeling in the bows I managed to grab the handrail and steady the boat while Annis heaved the rucksack on to the steps and climbed out after it.
‘What about the boat? We can’t leave them the boat. They find that, they find us.’
‘I know. Shame though,’ I answered and started stabbing the dinghy with my pocket knife. It deflated quickly and crumpled under me. I made it on to the safety of the steps just before the weight of the outboard pulled the entire thing bubbling and hissing into the murky depth of the Avon. The two paddles took off downriver into the darkness.
‘Jake will be pleased.’
‘Perhaps not. His wife might be though.’ Yet I couldn’t help feeling that Jake would be unsurprised at the outcome. He tended not to expect things he lent me to come back in any usable format.
‘Now what?’ Annis asked as we gained the towpath.
‘Now? Now we’ll take the long way home.’
She shouldered the rucksack and expressed her disapproval of Monsieur Rodin in words of extreme yet eloquent economy.
‘Dysentery, cholera and dengue fever is what you’ll get,’ presaged the oracle by the fire. ‘How much river water did you swallow?’
‘Enough to last me a lifetime, thanks.’ Annis shivered theatrically and followed it up with a very real sneeze and a trumpeting blow into a wad of tissues.
It had taken us hours of staggering about in the rain through dark side streets, hiding from every car engine we heard, before we eventually made it back to the Landy and finally home. What we had feared most during our wanderings, the sound of a helicopter overhead, never materialized. Perhaps the weather was too bad to fly, perhaps they’d been attending elsewhere. By the time we got to the Land Rover we were both frozen and shivering.
‘I’d happily kill you for a mug of hot soup,’ Annis admitted. I gave her a muesli bar and told her to drive us home before we perished from hypothermia.
After a shower, some hot coffee and an awful lot of toast I was beginning to revive but Annis seemed to have come off worse. As she pointedly pointed out she’d waited around in the cold and rain for me
for ages
while I clambered all over roofs and scaffolds,
keeping warm
.
‘Is it too early to try Jill again?’ she asked. ‘I worry about her. If she hasn’t been home as you say then what can have happened to her?’
I dialled her mobile again. This time I got her voicemail service and left a message. ‘Hi Jill, just letting you know that everything went fine. We got the . . . item and hopefully we’ll swap it soon for . . . something more interesting. But we’re a bit worried, not having heard from you at all. Give us a call when you get this message.’ I put my phone away and shrugged, but secretly I’d been worrying about Jill’s nerves.
‘She might have gone to stay with her sister,’ Tim suggested. ‘It must be lonely for her in Harley Street, with her son’s stuff all over the place and no one to talk to.’
Annis nodded. ‘True. Her sister’s in Trowbridge, that’s not so far. Or she could have gone to stay with friends in Bristol. She might even have decided that Craig, her ex-boyfriend, had his uses after all. Have we got an address for him? We haven’t, have we?’
‘She never mentioned it. Somewhere in Bristol.’
Annis looked thoughtful. ‘Unless . . .’
‘Unless what?’ Tim propped himself up on one elbow and pulled a pained face as his back reacted.
Annis took her time answering. ‘I don’t know. Unless she no longer believed that her son was alive. Perhaps she gave up.’
‘Give up, how?’ I asked.
‘How would I know? As she said, none of us have children of our own, so perhaps she did feel that something had happened, something changed.’
‘And chucked herself in the river.’
‘It’s possible,’ she admitted.
There was another possibility that began nagging at the back of my mind but seemed too remote to give it much house room. All three of us looked thoughtfully at the little Rodin. At the museum it could inspire hushed voices and admiration on its spotlit plinth, here it looked prosaic standing next to a potted yucca on my floor. Context was everything and as ornaments went I preferred the yucca.
The morning drifted on and slipped into afternoon while I ghosted about the house and studio, carrying both cordless phone and mobile, waiting for the call, listening out for the crunch of police cars braking hard in the yard. I was getting increasingly worried about Jill not being in touch.
Tim had been right about the newsworthiness of the stolen Rodin: it got top billing on the lunchtime news. Hearing my rooftop antics being described as a ‘daring raid’ and Annis and myself as a ‘well-organized gang’ would have been almost funny if the bulletin hadn’t started with the words ‘A nationwide police hunt is today under way’.
I tried to distract myself by clearing up in the studio. The painting on my easel had been only half finished when the storm and Haarbottle’s call had interrupted. Looking at it now I could barely make out my own intentions, even less feel the emotions that had driven the image across the canvas. It would never be finished now. Too much had happened since then.
The Stanley knife is the painter’s best editing tool; four slashes quickly empty a stretcher of canvas and make sure of rigorous quality control in his oeuvre. But I was under no illusion that I could start a new canvas before this mess was resolved. The pointed blade slid seductively from the grip of the knife. The phone rang and effected a stay of execution. I slid the blade back in, dropped the knife into the tool box and pressed the talk button on the phone with a heavy heart.
‘Well, congrats, shithead, told you you could do it.’ The grating voice held a sour edge of feigned amusement. ‘And now listen very carefully to what I have to say. The handover will happen tonight. You will be by yourself. There will be nobody with you, there will be no police and none of your mates. And you know why you’ll do exactly as I tell you? Because now I’ve got the brat’s mother. That’s right, shithead, mother and son reunited, only not the way you expected. And you don’t want anything to happen to
her
, because how could you live with yourself? You still listening, shithead, or did you faint?’
I sat down heavily on my painting stool. This was exactly what I had feared but hadn’t allowed myself to say out loud. But the question that weighed heavier on me was this: why would the kidnapper go to the trouble of snatching Jill if he already had the boy? Why would he need another victim, unless . . . ‘I’m listening.’
‘You’d better. Because now I’m ready for you. Here’s what you do, very simple. One: you’ll secure the Penny Black inside a padded envelope, reinforced with cardboard. Then you’ll tape it safely to the statue. Two: you’ll wrap the lot in several bin bags and secure them with tape so they don’t flap about. Three: you load it on the back of your Land Rover and drive out of your yard at eight o’clock
precisely
, with your mobile phone charged up and switched on, ready to receive instructions. Four: you talk to no one. You’ll be by yourself and you’ll bring no weapons and no wires. Oh yes, and just so I’ll know you’ll have no weapons or microphones, you’ll be wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Just to make sure there are no hidden surprises. Do anything differently and the woman dies.’
I drew breath to answer but he had already hung up.
Jill
. We should never have left her alone all these days. What happened to the sister . . .? This might still come out right of course but there remained one question that seemed to make this unlikely: why would the kidnapper bother to take Jill, when he already had the boy? Unless the boy was dead.
Five minutes to eight.
I felt chilly even though I was still only standing in the hall of my own house. Annis pulled me hard against her. ‘You make sure you come back to me, okay, Honeypot? No heroics, just do as you’re told for once and bring them back. Promise?’
‘I love you, Annis.’
‘I know, Chris.’
This time, apparently, it counted. It also saved me from having to make promises I might not be able to keep.
In the yard, parked as close as possible to the front door, the Landy had been ‘warming up’. I got in and mentally went over everything again. There wasn’t much to check. The stamp in its envelope and the Rodin were on the back, wrapped in black plastic and covered with a bit of old carpet. I myself was wrapped in a scratchy grey blanket, the only one I could find, making me already feel like the survivor of some kind of disaster. Despite the kidnapper’s warning I was wearing basketball shoes. If he objected he could always make me take them off. I had my mobile, as instructed. I had also purloined Tim’s far flashier mobile, and his Bluetooth headset, without bothering to tell him, because I had made no decisions yet about what to do when I got there and was literally going to play this by ear. I put my mobile on the dash, stuck the Bluetooth set on my right ear and let my hair fall over it. I set Tim’s mobile next to me on the seat.
Eight o’clock.
I waved to Annis in the doorway, silhouetted against the warm light of the house, put the engine in gear and rumbled out of the yard.
The heater in a 1960s Land Rover was a well-known joke and Annis’s decrepit example was no exception. Only most people who complained about how bad their Landy’s heater was didn’t usually drive it half-naked through a late-October night.
My mobile chimed its hateful little tune. I answered it. ‘I’m on the move, so where am I going?’
‘Patience. You’re on your lonesome, like I told you?’
‘I am.’
‘And you are unarmed and in your shorts?’
‘Unarmed, freezing cold and half-naked, apart from a pair of basketball shoes.’
‘Who said you could wear those?’
‘You want me to slip on the brake and drive your Rodin into a ditch?’
He grunted reluctant agreement. ‘Where are you?’
‘Top of my drive.’
‘Turn left and keep going until you get to the London Road. Keep the line open. If you disconnect your mobile even for one second then the deal is off and the woman will feel the consequences.’
I turned and drove slowly along the unlit, narrow road through the valley. The worn blades of the windscreen wipers squeaked as they ineffectually scraped at the renewed offering of rain falling out of the blackness. I was once more on the move, on my own, with the spoils from a robbery. My memories of the hold-up on Charlcombe Lane were still vivid in my mind. What was to stop the kidnapper from taking the plunder off me by force when I got to my dark destination, and go on indefinitely with his demands? Now that he had abducted a second victim he could afford to kill one of them simply to demonstrate the seriousness of his threat, if he hadn’t already done so.
As I reached the sodium-lit London Road at Batheaston I put the phone to my ear. ‘I’m there.’
‘Turn right. Drive carefully and at legal speeds. Don’t attract attention. When you reach Bailbrook Lane, turn into it.’
There was not a lot of traffic on the road, it was dark and the rain was hammering down; chances were that no one would remember a dirty old Landy. The goose bumps on my arms were an indication not just of how cold I felt but also of the hideousness of the realization that this time I really was in deep shit, just as Needham had predicted. I had let myself be drawn into the deepest mess of my dubious career and my only backup was Tim’s dinky little Bluetooth mobile. The turn-off into narrow Bailbrook Lane came up quickly. Bumping the car into it I asked for instructions.
‘You know this lane? You must do. Just keep going until you get to the highest point from where you can have a good look over Larkhall and the rest. Then stop.’
He was right, I knew the lane well. It skirted the bottom of Solsbury Hill, made famous beyond its stature by some dippy song. Dark, evergreen hedgerows whizzed past on either side as I hustled the Landy along. A particularly nasty pothole made my load jump on the back and I slowed down a bit. Soon after I’d passed the rusty corrugated iron mission church the view opened out. The lights of Larkhall and Lower Swainswick twinkled below. I stopped. ‘I can see Larkhall below. Now what?’
‘Turn off your lights.’
I did as I was told. At least it might save them having to bash them in with baseball bats. It was baseball, last time, I remembered it clearly. Unlike poor old Albert who’d apparently been hit with a cricket bat. Same result I should think.
‘Now turn them on again and flash your lights. Very good. Just wanted to be sure you were where you said you were. I can see you. Which means I’ll also be able to see any monkey business. Well, what are you waiting for? Come on down.’
It was quieter in the cab because the engine was still in neutral and I thought I heard an engine start up at the speaker’s end. I put the phone on the dash and kept on driving downhill, over the bypass and plunged further down until I reached the bottom.
‘Where exactly are you now?’ he asked after I’d announced my arrival.
‘St Saviour’s to the left. Dead Mill Lane to the right.’
‘You’ve gone too far. Take Dead Mill Lane. Then turn left and take the second turn on the left again. And keep going.’
I had suspected it since he made me leave the London Road and this confirmed it: I was heading into the Lam Valley. Soon the now familiar tracks swallowed me up. I recognized this one in particular. Very soon it would bring me to Jack Fryer’s farm. I slowed down, fingering Tim’s mobile beside me on the bench. The farm buildings hove into view on my left.
Dimly illuminated by a single watery bulb fixed to a telegraph pole in the yard the main structures of Spring Farm squatted in the wet darkness like black cattle depressed by the rain. I speed dialled the number for Mill House on Tim’s mobile while driving slowly up to the gate, peering into the gloom beyond. The dial tone snarled in my ear via the headset. I stopped. This didn’t feel right at all.
‘Hello?’ Annis’s voice in my ear.
A door opened in a concrete shed on the other side of the yard. Fryer’s farmhand shielded his eyes against the glare of the Landy’s light, looking puzzled.
‘I’m at Spring Farm,’ I said into the mobile.
‘Hello? Is that you, Chris?’ Annis spoke into my ear.
‘Keep going, follow the sign, don’t stop until you get there,’ came the impatient voice on the other mobile.
This was the wrong place. I hastily reversed back into the lane and drove on.
‘Did you say Spring Farm? Hello? All I can hear is noise now,’ Annis said in a faint voice, to Tim, presumably. Both mobiles started crackling as I drove deeper into the darkness of the valley, then reception died. How would I get my instructions now?
The answer stood at the turn to the narrow track on the left. A roughly made blank finger post had been rammed into the soft verge. It pointed forlornly down towards the ford of the Lam brook. This slippery track led to only one place: Grumpy Hollow. One way in, one way out.
I cranked the wheel over and plunged the ghostly signpost back into darkness as I followed its direction down towards the Hollow.
When I reached Gemma Stone’s herb farm I turned off both mobiles. I no longer needed them.
I had arrived.
