Headcase

by Peter Helton

  “Ehm, yeah, yeah.” I watched him jump into chinos and pull a fresh T-shirt over his head while Annis walked out, leaving the front door wide open. Tim stopped in front of me, still wriggling into his shoes. “Correct me if I’m wrong, mate. Did we just agree to share…the favours of our esteemed colleague?”

  “Looks like it, dunnit?”

  “Bloody hell, Chris, do I need this drink…”

  We sat by the aquarium again, the fish huddled near the sputtering pump, dying to the slow rhythm of a Cowboy Junkies tune. Annis had got in the Stellas, which seemed only fair. All three pints were still untouched.

  “So what exactly are we drinking to?” I enquired.

  “To…us?” Tim suggested, looking from me to Annis and back.

  “There are conditions.” Both of us got a green flash from her eyes. “First: no one knows. Number two: no comparing notes.” Tim and I looked at each other like a pair of nodding dogs in the back of a car, our pints lifted. But Annis hadn’t picked hers up yet.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Three is company. Agreed?”

  “Two’s a crowd, I always said so.”

  “I really need to drink this now/ Tim insisted.

  After we’d drained our pints it was decided the next round was Annis’s too. By majority vote.

  CHAPTER VIII

  It was midnight when the taxi dropped me off outside Mill House. As usual, I had to be the pilot for the last part of the journey along the country tracks. I was barely awake enough (or sober enough) to do it but I had no trouble picking up the driver’s chagrin at finding himself in the back of beyond on a Friday night with next to no chance of picking up a return fare on the long haul back into town. He acknowledged my tip with a grunt and sped off, lights on full beam.

  During our second round Annis had revealed her decision to go back to Cornwall to see Alison, this time unannounced. “I have a bad feeling about it somehow. It’s been constantly on my mind these past couple of days. I should’ve stuck it out, whatever Alison said. In fact I’m going now, I can still drive, I only had a pint and a half.” We didn’t try to stop her. Annis’s hunches usually paid off (unlike some of my own I could mention) but I did get her solemn promise to keep her mobile on and charged and to call me at the first opportunity. After she’d left, the evening had turned into a bit of a session, conversation on general bloody-hell-I-can’t-believe-it lines. But no comparing notes.

  There was only the battered Beetle in the starlit yard, so Annis had taken the Land Rover. Perhaps I could drive the heap into town tomorrow and hand it over to the first scrap merchant before it grew roots here like the rest of our junk collection. Somewhere in those sheds sat a 1950s Norton, a quad bike, a diesel generator and at least six lawnmowers. None of them worked.

  I fumbled for my keys by the front door. They had disappeared into the lining of my jacket and kept eluding my probing hands. Damn, this was difficult. To steady myself I rested my forehead against the cool surface of the door. It gave. Annis hadn’t closed it properly. Handy. I reached up and flicked the light switch in the hall. Nothing happened. Not so handy. But I still had my Maglite, somewhere. Ah, that was better. Our unwanted mail lay strewn across the floor by the little Moroccan table. Perhaps this wasn’t the moment to clear this up, though. Especially considering the mess I found in the living room. It only took me a nano-second to realize that this chaos wasn’t due to Annis’s hasty departure. Every drawer open, a small bookcase knocked over, CD cases strewn everywhere, broken glass underfoot. I crunched on tiptoe to my kitchen — it made Alison’s look fastidious by comparison. Every jar seemed to have been smashed, their contents oozing everywhere and the whole mess caked in flour. It seemed more like vandalism than burglary. Or perhaps frustration? Back in the devastation of the sitting room I took in the fact that the stereo had been shifted but not unplugged. Even in my befuddled state I realized that this was no ordinary burglary. It was a search. Someone had taken a good look around for something specific. Who and what? Avon and Somerset would never have left such a mess, nor would they have searched the place without me while I was in town. The french window to the veranda was ajar. From the top of the meadow a flicker of light. They were still here and they were in the studio. Even though the alcohol had anaesthetized me well against my aches I was quite sure that fisticuffs with a burglar were out of the question. It would have to be persuasion. I unlocked the gun locker in the cupboard under the stairs and got out the twelve bore and my special cartridges.

  My father had tried for a while to teach me to shoot, when I’d turned fifteen, after we’d quit the city and moved to Mill House. But not only did I feel uncomfortable with the big unwieldy weapon, I also had objections on vague moral grounds I’d never quite thought through then. It was enough that my father thought it was something I ought to master for me to deliberately make a mess of it. I was a lousy shot, closing both my eyes at the moment of firing. I winced at the noise. I complained. I hurt my shoulder. My father soon gave up. And I’m still a lousy shot.

  It felt good to hold a licensed weapon, though, in case I actually had to use it. (The Webley is really just a deterrent and I’ve only ever fired it into the air.) I had made up some special cartridges for my up-and-over twelve bore for just this kind of emergency. I’d chucked away the shot and replaced it with rice, which can save you from a lengthy jail sentence if you intend to go blasting away at real-life walking-talking people. It can’t kill anyone but I have it on good authority that it hurts like hell. (Arborio rice is best, of course, and highly appropriate for scaring Italians, but I found pudding rice does just as well.)

  With a handful of the cartridges stuffed into my jacket pocket and the safety catch off I eased myself out of the veranda door. The moon had been around all afternoon but naturally now, when I needed a bit of illumination, there was no sign of it. I walked slowly up the rise, placing each foot carefully. My breathing seemed by far the loudest thing abroad. Too much booze, too many cigarettes, too much fear. The light still flickered in the studio, swaying shadows danced against the barn door. Only small sounds came from inside. For some reason my visitor didn’t seem to throw things around here but worked more systematically, much like our friend at Alison’s cottage. I made it to the front of the barn undetected, leant my back against it a few feet from the door, dizzy with suppressed breathing. I tried to calm myself. Breathe. Quick in, slow out. If I guessed right my visitor would turn out to be a masked man armed with a machete. Since our last meeting, though, I had upgraded from a length of copper pipe to a loaded shotgun. No contest.

  And then it all went, as they say, pear-shaped.

  From the shadows of Mill House the dark shapes of two men appeared, advancing up the meadow towards me. Then, like some evil magic, a bright pinhole appeared in the meadow and swallowed them. The hole turned into a gash, slashed straight through my vision. I ducked down and angled my head away — the shapes reappeared in my peripheral vision. They didn’t speed up so probably hadn’t spotted me yet. Covering three men with one gun was an unattractive proposition at the best of times but you can’t cover what you can’t see. A strategic withdrawal then. There was still time to slip away and hide. Then my mobile rang.

  It was good to know that Annis was keeping her promise to call me as soon as she got safely to Cornwall, only at this precise moment I felt positively ungrateful. I plunged my hand into my jacket pocket but the phone was hopelessly lost in the lining somewhere. The dark shapes sped up the hill and at the same time my original quarry stepped out of the barn door to my left, his eyes glistening in the starlight. He wasn’t brandishing his machete. Even half blind I could make out the glint of the pistol in his hand. I levelled my shotgun at him.

  “Shit!” He spoke for both of us and jumped back inside, firing a shot through the wooden wall at my back. The noise made the lights dance wildly in front of me. Splinters flew but he’d missed. Just. There was little point in trying to hide while my mobile chimed insa
nely away in my jacket. Straightening up I blasted blindly at the two men in the meadow and ran around the corner of the barn towards the shelter of the tree line behind it. Another shot rang out, thumped into the foliage ahead of me. As soon as I reached the trees I shrugged off my jacket and flung it as far away from me as possible into the dark. It stopped ringing instantly. Typical. In a sideways lope, always angled at the remains of my vision, I trampled through the undergrowth for ten seconds, then flung myself down behind a tree, panting. I could hear urgent voices from the direction of the studio but couldn’t make out what was being said. Only now did it dawn on me that I had thrown away not only my sole way of calling for help but also the spare shotgun cartridges in my jacket. One barrel loaded with pudding rice was what I had left. Not much good against a real gun and pretty useless to a blind man. Where there wasn’t total darkness the bright acid of overlit images flickered and twisted like burning celluloid. The doctor’s advice about coping with another attack had been: complete darkness, lie down, relax. Well, two out of three wasn’t bad. I closed my eyes and concentrated on listening. A few birds had been upset by the ruckus and complained to each other from the safety of their perches. If I held my breath I could even make out the rush of the mill stream far below. Nothing else, apart from the pounding of blood in my ears. What would they do next? What would I do in their position? They hadn’t come here to kill me or they’d have jumped me in the house — I’d be dead by now. So all the blazing-gun nonsense was just a panic reaction to finding a bloke with a twelve bore on the prowl.

  Still no sign of them. On all fours, as quietly as I could manage in the undergrowth of ferns, brambles and nettles, I inched forward towards the edge of the trees, aiming roughly for the place where my jacket should be. After a few more minutes of crawling, waiting, listening, I stood. A car engine started up somewhere, then total silence. They were gone. Knowing nothing of my handicap and the culinary nature of my ammunition the idea of entering the wood to flush me out must have looked pretty uninviting. Eventually I found my jacket. I reloaded the first barrel, just in case, and stepped into the meadow. It felt peaceful. The gash in my vision had contracted into a small light-fling strike in the corner of my eye. My head was pounding but that was nothing new. For the first time since I got home I had time for any emotions other than fear and the first that surfaced was anger. This kind of thing was not supposed to happen. Mill House was my refuge, the only place I could run to and forget about the murkier things the Good People of Bath got up to. Of course Simon Paris, fearful of losing a sale, had kindly taken the Saudis directly to my doorstep. I had little doubt that it was Al-Omari and his retinue who had just paid me a visit, but I was shocked that guns had made an appearance. Guns are invariably bad news. In Britain only a certain type of crook uses guns: drug dealers, those defending their territory against other crooks, and very rarely the loner holding up a pub or post office (nobody robs banks any more, it can’t be done). And desperate people of course, who don’t count the cost.

  I didn’t get paid enough for this nonsense. But I’d give it one more shot, so to speak, and if that didn’t do it then I’d hand the whole shebang to Needham to sort out. And perhaps I’d take early retirement while I was at it.

  Back at the house I found that the fuses had been ripped out. Even after I had restored the lights it took me a while to satisfy myself that I was really alone, poking the gun barrel into each room, closet and corner. Everywhere the same mess but nothing missing as far as I could see.

  “But how could you tell in this mess?” Tim said, slurping coffee from his mug and indicating the scene in my office with a sweep of his free hand. “I mean, even before they came and messed it up this was a bit of a tip, mate.”

  I’d restored every room so far except my office, which is usually where my occasional cleaning frenzies peter out. It had taken me all morning but it had miraculously cleared my head, only not sufficiently to see the obvious. Tim wasn’t so handicapped. “So you think it was the Saudis? And the guy from Alison’s cottage?”

  “Pretty certain. But what on earth has Alison to do with it all? What are they after? They searched her studio, then my house and our studio.” I swivelled idly on my office chair, stirring the mess of papers on the floor with one foot.

  “Looking for any evidence we might have found that they’ve been naughty Saudis?”

  “In Alison’s studio? Doesn’t make sense. What’s more, we didn’t find any evidence, did we?” I was thinking of our disastrous trawl of the drinks warehouse.

  “What about Gill’s pictures?”

  And of course Tim was right. Not that I had the foggiest notion where I had put them but even after going through every scrap of paper in my office, where I thought I might have dumped the prints, we found no sign of them. “Hey, your office looks quite neat with everything in piles,” Tim said. “All you need now is a skip to put it all in.”

  “It’s not me who needs a skip. They’ll need a skip, a towtruck and an ambulance if I ever catch up with them.”

  “Would you say you’re a bit annoyed then?”

  “Very astute. Wouldn’t you be? I’ve been threatened with a machete, beaten senseless, burgled and shot at. And all since I’ve agreed to find the missing Dufossee canvases.” I didn’t even count my lacerated behind, which was mending nicely, thank you.

  “I still don’t understand why they’d buy your paintings, for good money, too, and then get involved in art theft five minutes later.”

  Five minutes later. “They didn’t,” I muttered to myself.

  “Ay?”

  “Five minutes later, you said. But they went to Simon Paris on the same day the canvases disappeared.”

  “That’s what I call busy.”

  “Or organized.” I suddenly had an awful feeling about this Saudi Arabian interest in my paintings. I swivelled round and switched on my computer. While it gurgled away sorting itself out I rang Simon Paris, a wonderfully organized man. “When was the first time we sold to Al-Omari?” Simon took less than a minute to call up the information on his screen. “And you have the list of paintings, naturally?” He had. “Fax it to me, will you?” I hung up before he could bombard me with questions. Tim sat patiently while I went on to the Art Loss Register and trawled the relevant pages until I found what I had hoped was not there. But no doubt about it, four paintings had gone missing from a country house just over the border in Wiltshire on the day of the first sale. By the time the fax machine spat out Simon’s neat list I felt quite ill. I rang Jake.

  “Had any luck with those number plates?”

  “What about my money?” was the prompt answer.

  “It’s on its way, Jake, this is urgent.”

  “It’s always urgent with you. You don’t know how to relax.”

  “There’s truth in that, any suggestions?”

  “Try winding up a private eye, always works for me.” He cackled. I hate it when he cackles. “Hang on, I’ll get it for you.” After an eternity he came back on the line. “The Beemer belongs to a Leonard Dufossee, the Merc is rented, from Bath Exec. That do you?”

  “Cheers, Jake, the cheque’s in the post.”

  “I don’t want a bloody…”

  I hung up and turned to Tim. “Chuck me the phone book and make some more coffee, will you?”

  He groaned but moved. “The kitchen is miles from here,” he complained, going downstairs.

  That was the idea. I had a delicate phone call to make and Tim was prone to fits of the giggles when I did impersonations. I called Bath Executive Cars. “Detective Inspector Deeks, Bath CID. I’d like to run a check with you on a silver Mercedes 500S, registration number…” It works every time. I’m quite good at doing Deeks’ voice too, I just pretend I’m falling asleep. The car was rented out to a Mr Al-Omari. The smug bastard had used his own name. And it was due back in three days, to be collected at Bristol airport. “No, no offence has been committed, it’s just a question of elimination. Thank you for your c
ooperation.”

  That fluttering feeling returned. Was I doing the right thing? What exactly was I doing? Airport. I didn’t like the sound of that and I still only had a vague idea of what was going on. I rang Alison’s cottage and Annis’s mobile, for the fifth time this morning, and again got no answer. Annis had promised to leave her mobile on and keep it charged…If ever there was a time to call Needham it had to be now. Hadn’t it? How long would it take to bring the Superintendent up to speed…how would he react…would he commit resources to what was no more than a bad feeling in my gut, a bad taste in my mouth…

  . how long would I be stuck in Manvers Street cop shop, unable to make a move?

  Move. I clattered down the stairs and shouted for Tim. “Scrap the coffee, we’re moving.” I handed him the shotgun and a handful of cartridges.

  “You know of course the police wear bulletproof knickers for a job like this?” he asked as he loaded the gun. “And they absolutely refuse to do this kind of job on their day off?” We walked out to his car. “And they’re practically immune from prosecution if anything goes wrong?” He put the shotgun on the tiny back seat and covered it with his raincoat. “Not to mention the fact they’re highly trained professionals?” He started the car and we moved off towards Bath. “And they get a detailed briefing about what their role in the operation will be?”

  “All right, here’s what I want you to do. Anyone shoots at you, you shoot back.”

  “Sounds reasonable. What if someone shoots at you? “

  “Just don’t join them, is all I ask.”

  I picked up the DS at Northampton Street. From there, Tim followed in his TT. Two black cars, two good guys, two guns. This felt better. If we got caught Needham would hang us from the nearest lamppost.

  We accelerated at the turnoff for Starfall House, swung through the gate at speed and crunched side by side into the gravel, just as Leonard slammed shut the boot to his BMW. No sign of the Mercedes but Virginia’s yellow Lotus and an old-fashioned red Fiesta were parked in the bay. Too wound up to think straight I got out of the car and walked towards Leonard. He’d acquired a new set of black eyes and wore a broad plaster over his left temple but it didn’t impede his movements one bit: he was in his car, flooring the accelerator before I had time to grab him. Tim furiously lent on his horn. I had come between him and the BMW and he couldn’t cut him off without running me over. No slouch, he threw his car into reverse and the TT and Beemer both slewed towards the road. By the time they reached the gate it had become a side by side race of chicken: there just wasn’t enough space for two cars to go through the opening. At the last moment Tim threw his car into forward again, wheels spinning, while Leonard kept going. He missed by a few inches and hit the stone gatepost with that hideous sound only crumpling car metal seems to produce. The BMW pivoted, bucked and stalled.