by Peter Helton
The lock snapped open under my efforts, the door yielded to the pressure of my shoulder. I stowed the picks, taking the few steps up into the exhibition space at a run. The piercing beam of my torch picked out the exhibits, scowling shapes with jumping shadows. The little Rodin was there, standing in the centre, in pride of place, waiting for me. I grabbed the dancer by the cold scruff of his neck, pulled him off the plinth and lowered him into my rucksack, secured the top with the speed cords and heaved it on to my back. And I nearly staggered backwards. It was surprisingly heavy for its size and one of its sharp angles poked painfully into my back. I wouldn’t get much running done while carrying this load of junk. Crossing the lobby I could hear voices and the nasal whine of a police radio on the other side of the main entrance door. Ignore it. I climbed the stairs steadily, using the handrail, pacing myself. I had a long way to go carrying this thing and it was no use running out of puff halfway to the boat with the police already here.
Back on the upper floor I pulled the double door shut behind me. I fished my cheap combination bicycle lock from my jacket pocket, slipped it through the brass loops of the door handles, wound it round tight and clicked it shut. That would keep them out until they decided to break the door down or send some poor bastard on to the roof.
This was it. I tugged the escape ladder tight, took a deep breath and started climbing. The heavy rucksack made me swing nearly horizontal as soon as I had both feet on it. It was an awkward operation. Halfway up, my left foot got tangled in the links and treads of the ladder. I couldn’t look down to see, it was too dark and the angle was wrong. My arms started to ache while I thrashed about until at last I was free and could start moving again. Still no noise of pursuit, which was puzzling me but I wasn’t about to complain. I heaved myself up on to the beam, breathing hard, unhooked the ladder and let it clatter to the floor. As I stood on the beam and slipped the rucksack off my shoulders so I could push it out of the skylight I could hear noises below me. Ignore. Once rid of the weight I felt featherlight and pulled myself up easily. The sound of hammering came from somewhere, probably the cops trying to get through the upstairs door, as I let the second ladder roll down the side of the building towards the next level down. I shouldered my burden once more and swiftly climbed down. A vigorous shake dislodged the hooks by which the ladder had held on to the masonry with worrying ease. Leaving it lying where it was, I retraced my steps, down another level, then across the semicircular parapet. The extra weight made the mossy surfaces difficult to negotiate and I slipped back twice before I gratefully slithered down into the leaded trough around the cast-iron lights surrounding the central roof structure of the market.
Here I paused and tried to subdue my breathing so I could listen for any sound below. It remained quiet. Reluctance to move on to the edge of the roof rained down on me like treacle. The longer I cowered in the dubious shelter of the roof’s damp valley the harder it would get. I wanted this done, I wanted to be away. Above all, I wanted to be down. I pushed along to the furthest corner. In front and above me the grey giant of the scaffold stood ready to swallow me. I could not afford to stand on the edge of the market roof, in full view of anyone on the ground in the car park, and dither. I’d simply have to do it instantly: line up opposite the hole in the tarpaulin and jump across. Jump. Jump across. Jump across the gap. I stood and stared down into the canyon into which the weight of the sculpture on my back would pull me if I stumbled. The level of the scaffolding was higher than the roof on which I stood, not much but it was enough to make the jump look impossibly hard. Hard. So hard. Too hard. I’d need wings to get up and across with this sodding lump of metal on my back. Unslinging the rucksack I briefly wondered how resilient bronze was – didn’t they once make swords from the stuff? – got a good swing on it and flung it across the gap on to the scaffold. It disappeared into the dark beyond the tarp with a reverberating bang.
‘What? No, I heard something . . .’ Voices below and to the left, coming nearer.
‘Check the back entrance to the market.’
‘I already did.’
‘Well, check it again.’
‘Yes, sarge.’
At this distance the combined noise of the wind, rain and river might mask my jump, if I let them come any closer it might no longer. It wouldn’t be long before they got men and lights on to the roof. I could hear a surge of engine noise from the direction of Grand Parade.
‘Super’s just arrived,’ said the first voice.
I jumped. Before I knew it I’d landed awkwardly on top of the unyielding rucksack. During the jump I had the briefest impression of torches being waved about to the left.
‘Did you just hear something?’
I lay very still. My jump had been in the darkest corner of the yard, where the two buildings met. I had been heard but not seen. Now I had to move on before they got bodies down here. The Super? What on earth was Needham doing down here in the middle of the night? They couldn’t have got him out of bed and down here from his house in Oldfield Park this fast unless these days he travelled with a rocket pack. Perhaps he’d been at Manvers Street anyway working on something else. Perhaps he was one of the Friends of Victoria Art Gallery, if there were any. Or perhaps he’d been expecting me.
It is hard to shrug off your paranoia standing three floors up on a narrow scaffold in the dark with a stolen Rodin on your back and police running around below. I moved slowly, setting my feet carefully each time, until I reached the ladder. I was safe from view and the snapping tarp and drumming rain helped mask my descent. No more voices, no sounds at all while I worked my way steadily down the levels.
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.
An
nis 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.
Chapter Twenty
‘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.
