by Peter Helton
‘No big grey Ford, though?’
‘You’re thinking DSI Needham? No. You don’t think he’s involved somehow?’
‘I got a bit paranoid out there.’
‘What you need is some art therapy.’
The sun had already set when we stepped outside the gatehouse. Cars were arriving by the side of the house; we could see the headlights appearing and turning. Annis led me through the landscaped gardens, towards a pond. It looked big enough to float narrowboats on. Above it stood the colonnaded walkway, the back wall of which now sported an original Annis Jordan mural.
‘It looks a bit out of place,’ I commented.
‘I know.’
‘I mean, it’s brilliant, of course.’
‘I know. Come on. I’ll show you the one in the pool house. We can get in from the gardens. But we’ll have to be quick before it gets completely dark or we’ll set off the alarm.’
The pool house was a converted coach house connected to the main building. It stood on the opposite side to the parking area where another set of headlights appeared as we made our way across the sloping lawns. A moment later we heard a growling engine noise.
Annis pulled me into the shadows under a stand of enormous pine trees. ‘That’s Reuben’s Bentley.’ She whispered it as though he might hear over the roar of his exhausts. With its headlights on high beam, the car screamed along the narrow drive towards the house, accelerating most of the way before breaking with an agonized squeal. ‘Looks like he’s having another soirée. Now you are here, I think we should find out what’s going on.’
‘D’you think?’ I felt I was as close to Reuben and his strange friends as I ever wanted to be.
The door to the pool house was keypad-controlled. Annis entered the number and the lock clicked open. It was quiet inside, not a drip or a hum. Annis’s whispering echoed around us. ‘I won’t put the lights on; someone might see. What do you think? Nearly done.’
Moonlight fell through the enormous skylights into the pool house, shimmered on the still water and cast a ghostly light on to the mural. It was truly monumental, gloriously colourful, and could only be appreciated fully from the opposite side of the pool where we stood under giant potted palms. Paint pots and bunches of brushes lined a long trestle table in front of the enormous painting. We discussed her work in hushed tones in the fading light until Annis began pulling me towards a door at the other end. ‘They didn’t give me the code for the door to the house but I watched Popik several times and they are not very imaginative with their pin numbers.’ Her index finger poked the keypad: 1, 2, 3, 4. ‘How lazy is that?’ The door fell ajar. It was dark on the other side.
‘Erm, are we sure about this?’ I enquired.
‘I think the answer to a lot of things lies on the other side of this door. We might find out why all these guys are after Verity and what she has on them.’
‘All right, but remember they burn people who make a nuisance of themselves.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
Behind us we left the door to the pool house open and moonlight and warm chlorinated air followed us down the short, narrow, lightless corridor to another door; it was unlocked. On the other side we stepped into the house proper. We stood in a broad, carpeted corridor full of giant potted ferns in hideous brass pots. Moonlight fell through the enormous sash windows. The smell of chlorine had been replaced with that of cooking. ‘Roast lamb?’ I suggested.
‘We must be near the kitchen. I’ve not been in this part.’ For someone who had never been there, Annis skipped confidently along the corridor.
‘What’s our excuse if we get caught?’ I asked.
‘Let’s not get caught.’ Somewhere far away a door slammed. We took a right and a left turn. ‘Ah, this looks more familiar: the entrance hall, I know where we are now; the dining room is over there.’ As we reached the hall, from which rose a broad, gloomy staircase past equally gloomy wall hangings, we could see a thickly carpeted, brightly lit corridor lead away. The murmur of voices and the unmistakable clink of glasses came from there. Several closed doors led off the corridor, but the left leaf of a double door stood ajar. Very bright light spilt from it and the voices came from there. We tiptoed closer; as we did, we heard, among the voices, the bleating of a lamb.
‘That lamb’s not cooked,’ Annis whispered.
We crept closer, Annis just ahead of me. Light and heat streamed from the half-open door. Very carefully, Annis put her head around the corner and froze. Then she withdrew it to stare at me, eyes wide. She pushed me forward so I could look in. The room was brightly lit with photographic lights. One video camera stood on a tripod; another was hand-held by a young cameraman. Two men and two women in various stages of undress were standing and sitting on antique chairs. One man was stroking a lamb that had coloured beads braided into the wool around its neck and pink bows around its hind legs. Watching the scene were several people, all holding mobile phones. Among them were Verity’s ‘aunt’, now wearing only expensive black lingerie, a short fat man putting undue strain on his suit trousers and sucking on an unlit cigar, and a handsome young man who wore only studded leather briefs. And behind him, fully dressed in his usual browns, stood Detective Inspector Reid, taking pictures of the scene on his iPhone. I withdrew my head.
‘Sheep fanciers,’ I whispered. ‘And DI Reid is one of them.’
‘Zoophiles. And they’ve got police protection.’ Just then a door opened at the end of the corridor and two people stepped into the light. The first, an athletic man with short-cropped hair, was leading a pink piglet on a pink collar and lead; the other, a small man in his late sixties, pulled along a giant white poodle with multicoloured ribbons around its ears. ‘Popik and Reuben!’ hissed Annis. ‘Run!’
‘Oi, you two!’ bellowed Popik and started running towards us, letting go of the piglet’s lead.
‘Get them! They mustn’t get away!’ shouted the other.
We ran. The sound of a door flying open behind us and more angry voices announced that the chase was truly on. Annis was trying to retrace her steps but landed us in a place neither of us remembered. We skidded to a halt, but the sound of feet behind us meant there was no time to lose. ‘Sod it!’ said Annis emphatically and sprinted away. At the next turn we found a narrower service corridor that again smelled of roast lamb.
‘You think they eat them afterwards?’ I panted. In the distance I could see a fern in a brass pot. ‘I think the pool-house door is somewhere down there.’ We ran towards it and I was right. We piled through the door and out of the next into the pool house, past the moonlit mural and out on to the lawn. It was after dark and we hadn’t gone five yards when the lawns before us became floodlit and the steel shutters on all the ground-floor windows rattled down with an ominous sound, like a drawbridge lowering across a moat. We sprinted towards the gatehouse, followed by raised voices and barking dogs. By the time we fell against the Land Rover, I had barely enough breath to speak. ‘What’s … the code … for the gate?’
‘Five, six, seven, eight.’
‘Lazy … bastards,’ I panted as I punched in the numbers. Four men and two dogs were approaching fast down the harshly lit lawn. I flung myself into the passenger seat as Annis reversed on to the tarmacked drive. ‘We’ll never … outrun a Bentley … in this heap!’ The Landy agreed and backfired.
‘I can go places a Bentley can’t.’
‘Didn’t you say the dog shaggers had Range Rovers?’
Annis was too busy screeching out of the gate and down the narrow, unlit lane.
I reached across and flicked on the headlight, then looked back. ‘No sign of any cars,’ I announced. Two headlights emerged from the gate, swiftly followed by two more. ‘Spoke too soon.’ We left the hedge behind and entered the narrow lane, bordered by drystone walls. Annis crunched up through the gears; the engine whined and backfired a couple of times. We slowed down. ‘Why are you slowing down?’
‘I’m not. It’s conking out. Did it t
wice on the way here. I think the engine’s had it.’
‘Great timing.’
Annis slewed the wheel around to the left and with the last momentum parked the Land Rover across the narrow lane. She took the keys from the ignition as a memento. ‘Bye-bye, Landy; it was good,’ she said and got out. I found myself on the wrong side of the thing, caught in the headlights of two sports cars. I vaulted (OK, scrabbled) across the bonnet and ran after Annis who was already standing on the other side of the wall, urging me on. ‘We’ll go cross-country; I used to be good at that.’
I followed her across the tufty meadow; she set an ambitious pace. ‘Which way is the canal?’ I asked. ‘We’ll take the boat.’
‘Your boat? It goes four miles an hour.’
‘It’s on the water. It’s like having your own moat around you. And it’s got my gun on it.’
‘I love that gun,’ Annis panted. ‘It’s that way to the canal.’
Looking over my shoulder, I could see the dark line of the drystone wall silhouetted against the headlights of the cars. More headlights were approaching. I saw a dark figure climb across the wall and soon we could both hear excited barking. Another drystone wall loomed ahead, on the other side a meadow full of dark shapes. Sheep. A few started trotting about as we ran past and I had not even enough breath to shout ‘Mint sauce!’ at them. With her unfailing sense of direction, Annis brought us out on to the road that ran across the bridge where she had picked me up. We jogged along. Headlights appeared behind us just as we slithered down the slope beside the bridge. Without the light of the moon, we would have been lost. ‘Cast off; I’ll start the engine.’ Old-fashioned diesel engines do not like to be rushed. ‘Come oooon, come oooon,’ I urged while I waited, then the engine coughed and started just as Annis jumped aboard.
‘Never seen a boat tied up with a granny knot before. We’re lucky it’s still here.’
A car screeched to a halt on the bridge as I pushed the throttle forward and we got under way. Dreamcatcher’s single headlamp illuminated very little. ‘Is that full beam?’ Annis asked.
‘It’s just for going through tunnels; you’re not allowed to move on the canal after dark,’ I explained.
‘Then what’s that thing behind us doing?’
‘What?’ The twin headlights on Free Spirit were not much better than ours, but their engine was thirty years younger and the enemy gained on us with alarming speed. ‘They must have called them and told them we were coming. We’re lucky they weren’t already on our boat.’
‘Can you not go faster?’
Black diesel smoke belched from the exhaust as I pushed the throttle all the way. ‘Full speed ahead. That’s all there is.’
‘I think even now I could hop faster on one leg!’ complained Annis. ‘What’s that on the right – a turn-off?’ She pointed to the dark opening on our right.
‘It’s just a winding hole for turning around.’
No sooner had we passed it than bright lights appeared inside it. Two searchlights, four side lights and a bar of blue beacons came to life. A police siren wailed and out of the winding hole shot a police launch, a huge RIB capable of doing twenty-eight knots to our five. In the prow stood the familiar shape of DSI Needham, made even bulkier by a bright yellow life jacket. He had a loudhailer and bellowed into it. ‘Cut your engine, cut your engine! We’re coming alongside!’
But for once it wasn’t us he was shouting at. The police boat swooped alongside Free Spirit to allow four uniformed officers to jump across, tazers drawn, shouting. That accomplished, the police launch rapidly approached our stern as I frantically tried to slow the sixty-foot Dreamcatcher before it crashed into the lock gates in front of us. Eventually, both boats stopped swaying enough for the superintendent to heave himself aboard. ‘I seem to remember telling you to keep your nose out of this,’ was his opening shot at me. ‘Evening, Ms Jordan,’ he added in a perfectly normal tone in Annis’s direction before continuing to berate me. ‘You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?’
‘You were away teaching and I didn’t trust Reid. They’re sheep shaggers, Mike, and Reid is involved.’
‘I had long suspected Reid was bent, and I wasn’t away teaching, I was giving Reid and his two stooges rope to hang themselves with. We’ve been following you and them all the way. At Bearwood Manor, did you by any chance see a fat man sucking an unlit cigar?’ I nodded. ‘That was retired Assistant Chief Constable Schofield.’
‘Reid was there, too.’
He nodded sagely. ‘All being rounded up as we speak. Now, is there any chance at all you might make me a cup of decent coffee that doesn’t come out of a Thermos and has real sugar in it?’
‘Sure, just let me park this tub.’
‘Moor it!’ Needham and Annis said in unison.
‘There is something else you should know,’ I said when I handed him a mug of coffee the way he liked it: strong and sweet. ‘There’s a couple of guys on a boat called Moonglow who have been following me.’
Needham gave tiny nods while blowing on his coffee. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s them now. Behind you.’ All I saw was a procession of feet and pools of torchlight coming past the window, although there were at least six pairs of feet. ‘Manchester drug dealers who move around on the canals to avoid our number plate recognition and motorway checks. We scooped those two up a couple of hours ago.’
‘How did you know about these guys?’
‘We watched them following you and compared their mugs with our database. Both are known to us. Terry Shard and Keith Mead, a rap sheet as long as my arm and known drug dealers. When Neil Jenkins, who used to own this boat, died in Lock Thirteen in Bath, their fingerprints were all over the boat. So where are the diamonds, Honeypot?’
‘I’ll get them.’ I opened the cutlery drawer. My gun stared up at me. I shoved it to the back and picked up a knife to slash the poor mattress with again. When I eventually handed him the package, he reacted as though he had seen it a hundred times and just stuffed it in his jacket pocket. ‘They hadn’t found it back in Bath and then the boat disappeared from the canals. When they heard it was pottering about on the Kennet and Avon again, they flew into Bristol and grabbed a boat to go after you. So where had Jenkins hidden the diamonds?’
‘Under number three battery.’
‘Ah.’ He patted the bulge in his jacket. ‘Two hundred and fifty grand, apparently.’ He drained his mug. ‘You didn’t find Verity Lake, did you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Would you tell me if you had?’
‘Not sure.’
‘You don’t change, do you?’ he said and pushed out of the door on to the stern deck. I followed. Lots of lights had appeared; a police van and two more police cruisers with blue beacons flashing stood on the bridge. Free Spirit had been moored. Needham was still wearing his life jacket. ‘I think you can take your life jacket off now,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, bloody uncomfortable.’
‘You do know the canal is only four feet deep, don’t you?’
‘Now he tells me.’ He impatiently shrugged out of the thing before climbing on to the towpath. ‘You are cordially invited to visit me at Manvers Street station at your earliest convenience, Mr Honeysett,’ he said and steamed away towards the lights.
I slept beautifully that night, without fear of intruders, and at the entirely civilized time of ten in the morning I served mushroom omelettes in patchy autumn sunshine on the stern deck. ‘I could get used to this,’ said Annis, throwing bits of toast to the ducks. I don’t suppose I’ll get paid for my murals now, or we could have afforded to buy the boat off Jake. And I don’t suppose I’ll get my paints back, either. And the Landy has finally died and I’ll need a new one.’
I dug around in my jeans pocket and dropped a couple of diamonds on to her empty plate. ‘We’ll go halves, shall we? That should ease the pain.’
‘You old romantic, you. Thieving old romantic.’
‘My recovery fee.’
We took our time pootling back towards Bath, stopping off at many pubs and beauty spots on the way as the weather turned cold and the smell of smoke from boats’ wood burners flavoured the air. The season had turned at last, and when we finally approached Bath, it was truly autumn and grey skies threatened rain.
I pointed out the Raft, the floating café in Bathampton. ‘Nice caff that,’ I said as I slowed to a crawl. ‘Excellent cappuccino.’
From the opposite direction a dredger barge came towards. I politely tucked Dreamcatcher in behind the floating café.
‘Hon?’ Annis poked me in the ribs. ‘The angler we just passed?’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, he’s wearing a pearl necklace, pearl earrings and pink lipstick.’
‘What?’ I looked back. About twenty yards behind on the towpath sat one die-hard angler. Even from here I could see a familiar pearl earring. ‘Take the helm!’
In my haste to get my hands on the angler, I nearly slid into the canal as I clambered ashore. They say anglers are mesmerized by staring at the water but not as mesmerized as I was as I carefully crept up on the angler. He was both Janette’s BMW-driving middle-aged girlfriend and Henry Blinkhorn. He was wearing an angling outfit with many pockets but also heavy make-up, thick lipstick, false eyelashes, pearl earrings and necklace. All that was missing was the wig. In its place, Blinkhorn showed just a sparse crown of steel-grey hair.
Well, it worked in The Great Escape. ‘Henry!’ I said jovially as I stood behind him. He turned, smiling up at me, then his smile fell as he recognized both me and his mistake. His hand flew to his throat where it closed on the strand of pearls. I gently laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘My name is Chris Honeysett. I’m a private investigator. And I’m making what is called a citizen’s arrest.’
I was prepared for long explanations when the police turned up, but one of the officers remembered the case of the disappearing fisherman. ‘Well spotted, sir,’ he congratulated me.
