by Peter Helton
‘Which ones, there are so many?’
‘The Moonglow crew.’
‘That dark floating coffin?’
‘Yes. I’m pretty sure they’re after this little stash of carbon.’ I fished out the package, dried it off, opened it again and stared at the glittering things. ‘They searched Dreamcatcher back at the Barge Inn, looked behind the wood panelling and under floorboards. And that explains why they didn’t touch any of my stuff. They guessed quite rightly that I had no idea about the diamonds and that it had to be hidden in the fabric of the boat. Let’s hope they continue to think it hasn’t been found.’ I picked out one of the diamonds and, holding it tight between thumb and forefinger, drew it across the window. It left a scratch. ‘Real diamonds,’ I concluded. I was suddenly getting quite nervous about the baubles and sealed them all up again. ‘They didn’t come past us while you were out there shifting the batteries, did they?’
‘Not that I saw but I admit I didn’t pay attention to boats.’
I hastily drew the curtains on the window and looked around for a new hiding place. What to do with the stuff? ‘Shame you haven’t got a python, we could stuff them in a chicken and feed it to her – they’d be safe for a bit.’ While I peeled potatoes, Vince and I went through possible hiding places, most of which were on the preposterous side.
A pan of plump sautéed sausages were kept company by a handful of finely sliced onions, a glug of wine and a bit of stock, left to braise while I boiled the potatoes. When they were nearly ready to be mashed, I cracked open a jar of Polish red cabbage and quickly heated it through.
‘You make it look so damn easy,’ admired Vince as he sat down in front of his mountain of mash, potatoes, gravy and cabbage.
‘It is,’ I said distractedly, while still puzzling over what would be the safest place to stash the diamonds. At a police station was the logical answer, but at the moment I had no desire to spend a day explaining myself in an interview room, and while there was the tiniest chance of walking away with all of/half of/some of the diamonds, I would hold on to them. Then it came to me. The best place to hide a thing from someone who is searching for it is in a place that someone has already searched. ‘Got a housewife, Vince?’
‘Needle and thread? Sure. What colour thread?’
‘Sort of mattress colour.’
‘Eh?’
Half an hour later I had sewn up my slashed mattress with the diamond package inside.
‘But what kind of crook carries around diamonds?’ Vince mused as we sat on the stern deck of Morning Mist and sipped coffee, away from Dreamcatcher’s chugging diesel engine. The sun was back, though there was still enough wind to remind us that it was really autumn. Leaves were turning. I would light the stove tonight.
Few boats had come past us and we had seen no sign of Free Spirit or Moonglow. Of course, if I had thought about it back then, I could have slowed up Free Spirit considerably had I chucked their windlass in the drink. ‘All sorts of criminals use all sorts of things apart from money. Large drug deals are often struck with precious stones or stolen works of art as collateral. Plus it’s an international currency and won’t go out of date.’
‘It’s crap, though, isn’t it? You can’t go into a car dealer’s and pay with a couple of diamonds.’
We spent the afternoon watching the slow traffic, drinking too much coffee, smoking and talking about reptiles, diamonds, crooks and boats until the sun disappeared behind the trees and it became too chilly. Vince went to feed his charges and I went to cook us a meal and to light Dreamcatcher’s solid fuel stove. I promised to call Vince when supper was ready. The stove in Dreamcatcher was a small pot-bellied lump of cast iron with ornate clawed feet like a roll-top bath and had a stove pipe that kinked first this way then that before it went through the roof. Up on the roof lay the chained-up lum-hatted pipe, removable for passing through low tunnels. I stuck it in the hole without looking inside – the Moonglow crew would have – and went to build my fire. Some of the less useful pages of the road atlas went in, followed by kindling, two logs and a smattering of coal. Then I lit it. The paper burnt merrily, the kindling caught and I was confident I’d have a roaring fire soon. I closed the front hatch and turned my attention to my provisions, but moments later I heard Vince call my name repeatedly, coming nearer. He clattered down the steps into the boat, all aflutter.
‘It’s Chomsky, he’s escaped!’
‘What? How?’
‘I … I must have forgotten to close the terrarium after I showed him to you. And both bow and stern doors were open for ventilation. While we were sitting having coffee, he legged it.’
Smoke seeped from several gaps in the coal burner. I opened the front door a bit. Smoke billowed out. ‘Would he have jumped in the water?’ I asked. ‘And swum off?’ I added hopefully. If he had, our chances of getting the croc back would be nil. ‘Could you just leave him to it? Could he feed himself in the canal? Eat fish?’
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Fish, ducks, swans, dogs, small children. Later bigger children. He would not survive the cold; we have to find him.’ Outside, the sun was setting. ‘We’ll have to hurry.’ He coughed. ‘Your stove is smoking.’
We rushed outside but we didn’t get far. Waiting for us, or rather for me, was a familiar face. It was Mickey, Mr Lead Piping from the traveller camp, only this time he had what looked like a filleting knife which he pointed at my chest while grabbing me by my jacket. His eyes were wild with whatever drugs he had recently snorted and his mouth worked weirdly. His black T-shirt looked damp and his skin was covered in a sheen of sweat. Mickey had waited for me squeezed into the corner of the stern deck beside the rear door and grabbed me before I saw him.
‘Steady on,’ said Vince who retreated to the tiller and looked as terrified as I felt.
Mickey was not alone. On the towpath, holding their bicycles, loaded with rolls of camping gear and bags, stood Sam, the dippy chap whose caravan had gone up in smoke and who had deluded himself that he and Verity were going to sail off into the sunset together. He looked fine, considering he had nearly died, though his hair was much shorter now, suggesting he might have lost some in the fire. He looked drunk and even dippier than before.
Unlike his mate Mickey. Whatever he had imbibed made him look too awake to live. He brought his face close to mine. With it came a memorable smell of rotting gums. ‘I’ve had enough now,’ he babbled at me, ‘totally enough I think you know exactly where the little bitch is hanging out and where she’s stashed the dosh and you’re going to tell me because I ain’t gonna mess about, you get me? Totally not.’ This came out in one gush without punctuation but with considerable force and a soupçon of spit. The knife had pierced my T-shirt and I could feel that he had already drawn blood.
Sam stood unhappily on the towpath, hunched in a camouflage jacket that was too big for him. ‘Mickey, no, if you stab him, we’ll never find Verity.’
‘Shut up!’ snapped Mickey. ‘I’ll stab him a bit at a time, until he tells us.’ He leant past me to hiss at Vince. ‘And you don’t move, right?’
‘I’m not moving,’ I heard Vince say behind me. His voice was strangely calm and I could see why. As Mickey leant away from me, I could see past him towards the front of the boat and at the other end appeared the knobbly front end of a young crocodile. Chomsky had used the tarpaulin-covered tandem as a ramp to climb up on the roof and was now making his way towards us, eyes glittering.
Mickey turned his attention back to prodding me. ‘Right, where is the little bitch? She owes us a wodge of money big enough to keep me in style for years. It was me who pinched the sodding laptop bag in the first place.’
‘I’m afraid,’ I said as slowly as I dared to give Chomsky time to cover some ground, ‘I have no idea where Verity is.’
‘Yeah, right,’ spat Mickey, getting restless on his feet. ‘That’s why you got yourself a boat to run up the canal with, is it? We know …’
‘Mickey, mate,’ interrupted Sam. He had at
last spotted Chomsky in the twilight, making progress across Dreamcatcher’s roof.
‘Shut up, Sam, it’s now or never. It’s now, mate, he’s gonna tell us.’
‘I do know Verity bought a boat,’ I admitted.
‘We know that, we know, but what is the damn thing called? And where is it?’
‘It’s called Time On My Side.’ Chomsky had a hungry gleam in his eyes as he advanced on Mickey from behind. Mickey’s right hand, which threatened me with the knife, was held high, his elbow pointing directly towards the croc.
Sam tried again but his drunkenness and astonishment played havoc with his eloquence. ‘No, mate, really, it’s not that, it’s—’
‘Shut up! It’s your fault in the first place she got away with all our money, you stupid git!’ Sam gave up. He shrugged and let one of the bikes fall sideways with a clatter and began wheeling the other away along the towpath. Mickey looked towards Sam just as Chomsky reached his quivering, sweat-glistening, bite-sized elbow. With a sudden lurch forward, he chomped down on it. I stepped back and hit Mickey on the nose. ‘Aaaaah, a crocodile! What the … aaaaaaaaaaarrrh!’ The knife clattered on the deck as he tried to prise Chomsky’s jaws apart with his left hand while a stream of swear words issued from his mouth in a high-pitched voice.
Soon we all worked on Chomsky. To say that crocodiles have quite a bite on them is an understatement and even a juvenile biting you could not be described as ‘giving you a bit of a nip’. What Chomsky had in his jaws tasted like food and he was determined to hang on to it. Smoke started to rise from the inside of my boat, stinging in my eyes. Five hands were now prising the animal’s jaws apart and all three of us were screaming, swearing and imploring respectively. Eventually, Mickey managed to wrench his punctured arm free with a final scream. I gladly let go and Vince pounced on the disappointed Chomsky, holding his jaws shut. ‘Help me carry him back!’ he coughed as the smoke got worse.
Mickey, in the meantime, had staggered off the deck on to the towpath and, swearing incoherently, picked up his bicycle and wheeled it away into the dusk at a trot.
We managed to carry the surprisingly heavy and struggling croc back to Morning Mist and plonk him unceremoniously into his prison. Who knew crocodiles could hiss with anger?
THIRTEEN
Autumn had arrived overnight. The air was markedly cooler than before and a blustery following wind chased me westward. Vince had seen me off soon after sunrise. He had promised to give his illegal housemates to a zoo and keep an eye out for Verity on Time Out; if he saw her, he would warn her that the canals were not a safe place to hide.
Barring any more accidents, reptile strikes or knife attacks, I would reach Ufton later that day. Annis had promised to pick me up as long as I could make it to a road. In the meantime, I learnt to drive a boat that was blown along by a blustery, unpredictable wind. Sudden showers that lasted for a minute or two flung in more nuisance. After Vince had found the old bird’s nest in the chimney, Dreamcatcher’s stove was working fine and the inside of the boat was toasty and dry while the skipper was standing in the wind and rain. Recent events had taken the shine off narrowboating. Having to stand in the cold and wet just five feet away from warmth and comfort now seemed like a glaring design flaw to me. But when the sun reappeared and the rain clouds passed away into the east, the charm of the canal worked on me again, enough to be interested in a curious boat moored beside the towpath. It was an immensely long, seventy-foot narrowboat, painted pillar-box red with the words ‘Boaters’ Lending Library’ in foot-high letters on the side. Being sure that Verity, who was never without a charity-shop paperback, would not have bypassed this boat without looking in, I tied up beside it and climbed across.
Books and more books, as you would expect from a library. They covered the walls – sorry, bulkheads – and stood about in orange crates, all of them paperbacks. The librarian was there, sitting in a small armchair beside a tiny table with a mug of coffee and a laptop. She was suitably bespectacled, middle-aged and wore a pink cardigan – what more could you demand from a floating librarian?
‘Membership is a pound. Administration fee,’ she explained.
But how did it work? ‘How long are you allowed to keep the books? It could be a year before people pass you again.’
‘Oh yeah, and I move about, too. It’s a pound deposit per book. Most people don’t bring them back. Some always do, which is disappointing. I buy paperbacks at charity shops for fifty pence and basically sell them for a quid. But as a library I don’t need a trading licence, don’t have to charge VAT and I don’t earn enough to have to pay tax. Just enough to keep me in food, diesel and reading matter.’
I congratulated her on her business acumen and asked if a young woman had recently joined. She was a friend, I explained, and I was trying to catch up with her. I described Verity to her and mentioned the name of her boat.
‘Yes, just a few days ago. New on the canals. Valerie, isn’t it?’
‘Erm, yes,’ I agreed. She typed the name into her computer and ‘Valerie’s’ borrowing history appeared. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Dracula, Frankenstein and Around Ireland with a Fridge. ‘That should keep her quiet for a bit,’ said the indiscreet librarian. ‘Exactly a week ago. Nice girl.’
I declined to join, claiming I was fresh out of pound coins.
Keeping an eye on my map, I drew level with Ufton in the middle of the afternoon, though the tiny village lay back from the canal about a quarter of a mile in the lee of a green hill crowned with a copse of broad-leafed trees. There were no other boats to be seen. I moored near a humpback bridge and called Annis.
‘I think I’ve been across that bridge. Stand on it so I can see you and I’ll come and get you.’
Standing on the bridge, I looked down on Dreamcatcher where it sat forlorn beside the narrow muddy footpath. It contained virtually all my painting materials, my gun and a fortune in someone else’s diamonds and I was just going to leave it parked there? Was I about to make another monumental mistake?
When Annis turned up in her Landy twenty minutes later, she had an answer to that question. Several, in fact. ‘You can buy more painting gear – don’t worry about that – and your gun? When has that ever been of any use? You never have it handy when you need it, have you noticed?’ She turned into a narrow tarmacked lane: mossy drystone walls on either side with a narrow belt of beeches or oaks, then pasture beyond. Brown cattle grazed in the afternoon light. ‘As for the diamonds? If someone comes asking for them, hand them over and stay alive. That’s my firm recommendation. And there’s Bearwood.’
The Land Rover backfired as though to salute it. Before us loomed an enormous dark hedge. The land beyond it rose so that in the distance I could see a substantial country house studded with countless chimneys, and not far behind that the dark line of trees that gave Bearwood its name. We drove along the hedge for quite a way before we came to the front gate, set between two sandstone pillars topped with stone balls and a security camera each. Not far beyond it stood Annis’s temporary abode, the gatehouse – a substantial nineteenth-century building with an out-of-proportion mock turret stuck to one side. Annis got out and punched the security number into a keypad and the gate swung open on well-oiled hinges.
‘Everything here is well oiled and electrified,’ she said as she drove the Landy off the tarmac road that wound through a vast expanse of grass towards the big house three hundred yards away. She parked on the grass in the lee of the gatehouse, out of sight of the manor. ‘Reuben has motion sensors around the big house, activated after dark. You come within fifty yards of the place and an alarm goes off, metal blinds rattle down behind the ground-floor windows and the lawn is floodlit. He’s very proud of it and deliberately left it on to impress me when he first had me up for supper. Problem is, every other day the deer get in and set it off, which must be a nuisance.’
‘He obviously thinks it’s worth it.’
‘He’s got a stinking amount of money – lots of it h
anging on the walls. He’s got a Hockney in his bedroom.’
‘Has he?’
‘Apparently.’
‘What have you got in yours?’
‘Fresh sheets,’ Annis semaphored with her eyebrows.
Two hours later the fresh sheets were just a memory, and when we got out of the shower, Annis returned her attention to less pleasant matters. ‘Weird things are going on here. There’s more than one entrance to the estate; it’s a hundred acres or so. Some traffic comes through here and some from somewhere else – I’ve no idea where the back door to this place is. Reuben always comes through the main entrance here. He drives up to the house like a racing driver; you can hear the Bentley’s tyres screech to a halt at the house from here. He loves doing it, especially when he has someone in the car with him.’
I dug out my mobile and the picture I had taken of the Bentley collecting the two detectives. ‘Is that it?’ I zoomed in as far as it would go.
‘Yup, that’s it; his plate reads REU8EN.’ I squinted at it. If you knew what it spelled, you could just make it out. ‘So the guys he turned up with that night really were your bent police officers,’ she said.
‘DC Mark and DC Nick. And from what I overheard, they have both been suspended and are doing a favour for someone with influence who promised to get the charges against them dropped.’
‘I don’t think it’s Reuben, but he has a lot of posh friends who turn up in posh cars: Mercs and Porsches. But they all come in the back way, which I thought is a bit strange since the other way goes through the wood and isn’t tarmacked. Why would you want to bump expensive sports cars over that? Even the deliveries come through the front gate here, though they decidedly go into the house by the tradesmen’s entrance. I think it’s to avoid being on the CCTV recordings.’
‘So what do you think goes on here?’
‘I’ve no idea. He has had me over for supper twice but never when he has other guests, which is about twice a week. And it seems to be the same crowd. I can see the place where they park beside the house from the upstairs bathroom window, and it’s always the same cars: silver Merc, dark-blue Porsche, two Range Rovers and a Ferrari. The parking area is brightly lit; you can see the cars clearly from here.’
