by Peter Helton
I exchanged my empty brandy glass for a bottle of Pilsner Urquell and started wandering restlessly about the house. I continued the discussion with myself since I had the not unreasonable suspicion that I was going to have to give this talk for real in the near future. By the time I’d climbed all the way up to my cluttered little office in the attic my Accumulated Guilt Quotient had reached a seasonal high. It’s the only explanation for what I did next. When the phone rang again I answered it.
Chapter Five
‘Hello? Can I speak to Mr Honeysett? Please!’ It was a female voice, tearful and fluttering with nerves.
‘Speaking.’
‘They’ve got my son, they kidnapped my son, you have to help me. They’ll kill him if you don’t!’ the voice rushed at me.
‘Is this a wind-up?’ I asked, despite my instant bad feeling that it wasn’t. I just wasn’t ready for another dose of trauma.
‘No, you must believe me, please, Mr Honeysett. You can save him, make them give Louis back. I read about you. You brought that woman back that everyone thought was long dead but you stole her back from the kidnapper. You must get Louis back for me.’
And here was the problem. A while back I had stumbled on a woman being held prisoner in a disused railway station and ever since then my phone hadn’t stopped ringing; people wanting me to find all the stuff missing from their lives, anything from a brother lost in World War II to a iguana called Knut. But until now no one had asked me to bring back a kidnap victim, which was just as well because I hadn’t a clue how to go about it.
‘You have to go to the police, Mrs. .’
‘Farrell, Jill, my name’s Jill. But I can’t tell the police. .’
‘Only the police can deal with abductions safely and professionally,’ I said firmly. ‘They have specialists for this kind of thing. Even if the kidnappers told you not to go to the police you still have to do it. I really cannot help.’
‘But they said to call you,’ she said, crying now. ‘They told me to call you!’
‘What? Rubbish. Who did? The police?’
‘No! The people who took Louis! I got a letter through the door. It says, I’ll read it, it says We have your . .’ Her voice wavered, then recovered. ‘. . son. If you want to see him again alive do exactly as we tell you. Do not call the police. Involve them and he dies. Here is what you will do. You will arrange a meeting with Chris Honeysett, a private investigator, and tell him to expect my instructions. If he refuses to get involved the boy dies. Speak to nobody else. And then there’s your number. I called your number all day.’
‘And what’s the demand?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. There isn’t any. I don’t have any money, Mr Honeysett, I only just got a part-time job, starting next week. We’ve been living off benefits. I don’t know what they want. Perhaps they took Louis by mistake, maybe they got the wrong child, perhaps when you tell them I don’t have any money they’ll let him go. You must tell them that. They must have made a mistake. Please say you’ll help. Can I at least meet you? We only just moved here from Bristol, I don’t know anyone in Bath yet.’
This couldn’t be happening. My stomach turned over, my hands were sweating. And I felt like I’d had a long day already. I rummaged round my desk drawer for some cigarettes. Nothing. I’d given up and thrown them all away during an uncharacteristic fit of optimism.
‘Where are you? Are you somewhere safe?’ I asked.
‘Where is safe? I’m at home. I rang your number all day, I left messages on your machine, I — ’
‘And where is home?’
‘Harley Street. Please say you’ll come, Mr Honeysett. I don’t know what to do, I’ll go mad if you don’t. They’ll kill him.’
‘All right, I’ll come and have a look at the letter. I’m not saying I’ll go along with this but I’ll come over. Now, I might not be alone when I arrive, I might have one of my associates with me. Don’t open the door to anyone but us. I’ve shoulder-length hair, grey-green eyes and I’ll be wearing a leather jacket, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I won’t be long. Just sit tight. What number are you?’
I wrote it all down and hung up with a heavy heart. This needed the woman’s touch. I hammered down the stairs and was going to run up to the studio but Annis was already in the kitchen in her paint-encrusted work gear making tea, adding a few more paint smudges to the kettle. ‘Hiya,’ she said tiredly, then did a double-take. ‘You look. . terrible. What kind of a day have you had?’
‘Well, they found my car.’
‘Oh good.’
‘With a dead guy in the back.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘They didn’t charge me with anything.’
‘Oh good.’
‘Just now a woman called.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Her son’s been abducted.’
‘Oh shit. Seriously? Abducted? And she’s calling you?’
I widened my eyes at her.
‘Yeah, of course she’s calling you, everyone remembers you found Nikki Reid. You told her to go to the police? You did tell her to go to the police!’ Her fingers tightened around her mug as though she was getting ready to throw it. We’d gone through quite a few mugs recently.
‘Of course I did. She’s not having it. It was the kidnappers who told her to contact us.’ I thought I’d slip the ‘us’ in there early.
‘The kidnappers? Us? What, as go-betweens?’ Her grip on the mug relaxed. ‘That’s really strange.’
‘I know. You’d have thought they’d have preferred someone helpless and panicked. I said we’d be over straight away. She’s all by herself.’
‘Damn, damn, damn. I’ll get showered and changed. Sod tea, make me some strong coffee. Quick mug and we’re on our way.’
I made a cafetière of very black mocha. Once Annis had emerged damp and shiny from the shower we gulped some of it standing up, then rushed across the muddy yard to the Land Rover and rumbled off into the rain. We peered through the two minuscule arcs cleared by the wipers on a windscreen otherwise blind with gunk and rain.
‘Where to?’ Annis asked, cranking the wheel this way and that, avoiding the biggest holes and ruts on the track more by memory than sight.
‘Harley Street.’
‘That’s just one along from where Tim lives, I know it, past that little church in Julian Road. So tell me again what she told you.’
I did.
‘Do we know how old the kid is?’
‘I never thought to ask. Does it matter?’
‘Yeah. A teenager might have more emotional resources to cope with a situation like this. A young child. . it doesn’t bear thinking about. And she says she’s poor? Then what the hell can they want?’
More than anything else it was that question that filled me with dread and foreboding.
Harley Street had a mix of old and new houses, where WWII bombing had left its scars. Annis pulled up in front of Jill Farrell’s house. It was a small, dispirited-looking thing in a row of five similar ones on the steeply sloping street. We passed through a little gate and the tiny front garden of leaf-littered lawn and blown-in rubbish. The door opened before I’d touched the bell.
The woman in her early thirties who opened it looked us over nervously. ‘You gave a good description of yourself,’ she said.
‘I’m Chris. This is Annis Jordan, my associate.’
‘I’m Jill.’ She was a tall and angular woman. Her wide-open brown eyes were red from crying and haunted with fear. Her short hair was a bright henna red which accentuated the pallor and tiredness of her skin. She wore a shapeless grey tracksuit and tired trainers. Her hands shook and fluttered as she guided us in. ‘Come in, through there.’ The narrow front room smelled stale and smoky. It was sparsely furnished with a blue sofa and one blue armchair, a rickety coffee table and a big old-fashioned telly on a stand in a corner by the window. On top of the TV stood several china and glass pigs. There were more pigs and piggy banks on t
he chimneypiece. The walls were bare and white. Cardboard boxes crowded the corners.
‘We haven’t even finished moving in yet,’ Jill said, bewildered. ‘This is it, this is what came.’ She pointed to the white business envelope and the sheet of paper on the table next to a saucer full of cigarette ends. The address read To the mother. I picked up the A4 sheet. Fingerprints wouldn’t matter here. Nobody left fingerprints on a ransom note. Except me just now of course.
It was printed on standard paper in a large font. I read it through, twice. It contained nothing other than what she had read out to me on the phone, yet seeing my name and business number there sent a chill through me and I actually shivered.
Jill noticed. ‘Sorry it’s so cold here. I haven’t figured out how to work the night storage heaters yet. It’s a council place. They said they’d send someone to check them but I’m probably just too thick to use them. We had gas fires before.’
‘When did you first realize Louis was missing?’
‘Straight away this morning when he didn’t come back. I sent him to the shops to get me a packet of ciggies and a pint of milk and he never came back. I went down the shops myself after a while, furious, because I’d given him my last tenner and had to get money from the cash point. I looked everywhere up and down Julian Road but it started raining. So I went home.’ Her face crumpled. ‘I was so angry with him,’ she wailed. Annis offered her arms and they hugged awkwardly, Jill sobbing. They sank on to the sofa together, Annis keeping a supportive hand on her arm. I emptied the armchair of newspaper-wrapped crockery and put it all on the floor, then sat down myself.
‘Sorry about the mess.’ Jill dabbed her eyes furiously with a wad of tissues from inside her sleeve. ‘I was still unpacking.’
‘No problem. How old is Louis?’ I asked. These sober questions made me feel like a police constable and bought some thinking time, yet at the same time I knew they were probably fruitless.
‘He’s just turned fifteen in August.’
‘You had him very young,’ Annis said.
‘I was only nineteen when I had him.’
‘The father’s not around?’ I said, still sounding like a policeman.
She shook her head. ‘He’s never been around. And just as well.’
‘Does Louis go to school?’ Annis asked.
‘No, he quit school, he hates it. He’s thinking of going to catering college, though. He’s a bright kid. Wants to be a famous chef on TV. He cooks for me sometimes but it always costs a fortune, he can’t cook anything simple.’ She looked up at me. I was here, therefore I was in charge. It didn’t feel like it. It felt like being sucked out to sea by a treacherous, unseen current. ‘You’ll get him back for me, won’t you?’
‘Do you have a picture of Louis?’ I kept on asking the kind of questions I thought I ought to ask, though quite what I was going to do with Louis’s photograph I had no idea.
‘Just a minute.’ Jill left the room and we heard her footsteps on the stairs.
Annis puffed up her cheeks and let out a lungful of air. ‘What a nightmare. What a depressing place. It’s freezing in here.’
‘Do you know how the night storage heaters work?’
‘Yes. They store electricity at night when leccy is cheap then heat the house during the day while you’re away at work and stop working the moment you come home.’
‘Ingenious,’ I conceded.
‘It’s a crap invention. I’ll see what I can do.’ Annis fiddled with the heater under the window for a minute. ‘That should do the trick.’
Jill returned with a small picture in a chunky, brushed metal frame. It showed Jill with a boy on a park bench with dense foliage behind. She had her arm around her son and was smiling. The boy looked at the camera with a stop-embarrassing-me face. He looked like a happy kid with straight dark hair cut very short, wearing jeans and a plain grey sweatshirt.
‘That was a couple of months ago at Bristol Zoo, so it’s quite recent.’
Inspector Honeysett would have said, ‘Can we keep this, Mrs Farrell? I’ll make sure it’s returned to you,’ but I just set it on the table and mumbled about him being a good-looking boy. Annis had a look at it too. I noticed both of us handled the picture gently, reverentially, as though the kid was dead already. If I didn’t make the right decision now then he soon might be. I had to buy myself some time until I could see what this was all about.
I gently quizzed Jill about herself. She’d left another council place in Bristol’s Fishponds area behind, along with an ex-boyfriend, and had struck lucky being rehoused to Harley Street.
‘Did you break up with him?’ I asked.
‘Yes. None too soon neither. Stew’s a lazy sod who does a bit of gardening work when it suits him and watches telly all day when it doesn’t and Louis was beginning to pick up bad habits from him.’
‘How did the two get on?’
‘A bit too well, actually. Stew constantly undermined me when it came to Louis. Filled his head with his crap home-baked philosophy, turned him into a difficult boy. That’s one of the reasons I dumped Mr Stewart Tanner.’ She spat the name out with considerable force.
‘Could he be behind this? As a kind of revenge? Could he have taken Louis to get back at you?’
‘Stew? I doubt it. Not if it means getting off the sofa. And I didn’t leave a forwarding address. I think he’s too apathetic to get worked up about being dumped. Being dumped isn’t a new experience for him. He’s useless but kind of cute, that’s the problem. He’s probably got some other dumb girl cooking his tea already and in six months she’ll dump him too if she has any sense.’
I picked up the note and wandered over to the window with it, trying to think. All kidnappers will threaten to kill their hostage if you involve the police. You ignore it and call the police and comply — or pretend to — and you pray a lot. Yet this was subtly different. There was no ransom demand as yet. The only demand was for Jill to contact me and for me to ‘get involved’. I was here. I was involved.
‘Why have they done this, Mr Honeysett? Why did they want me to call you? You must have some idea!’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t. As I told you on the phone, we’ll have to call the police, it’s the only way.’ I pulled out my mobile.
‘No! No, we can’t, they’ll kill him!’
‘They won’t kill him as long as they think they’ll get what they are asking.’
‘You don’t know that, how can you know that! We’re not getting the police involved.’ Jill stood up, agitated.
Annis rose too and put a gentle arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s the only way, I’m afraid.’
Jill shrugged her arm off. ‘He’s my son. No police! It’s my decision.’
Annis and I looked at each other but for once the silent communication seemed to fail. Jill was right, it was her decision. I couldn’t make it for her. Yet I was here. I looked at the ransom note again. The demands had already been met: get Honeysett involved. I turned my back on the women and looked out on to the street. It glistened darkly in the rain that drummed a violent tattoo across the nests of black swollen bin liners on the pavement. There was a square bit of paper stuck under the windscreen wiper of the Landy. I looked at it for a bit, dismissing the possibility of a parking fine — too late in the evening. I checked my watch: ten to eight. A flyer then. None of the neighbouring cars had one.
‘Do you have anyone who could stay with you? A friend or a relative?’ I asked.
She hesitated. ‘My sister, I suppose.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Trowbridge. But I’m not sure. We don’t exactly get on.’
‘Think about it. Now what’s your phone number here?’
‘I haven’t got a landline yet.’ She gave me her mobile number.
‘Keep that charged and topped up, please. The note says they’ll contact me. I think I should wait at my place. The sooner we find out what it’s all about the better. Perhaps they’ve already left a message. Now, wou
ld you like someone to stay here with you?’ I was aware that meant volunteering Annis but she gave me a nod of approval.
Jill shrugged. ‘It’s okay. I might call my sister. But should I tell her?’
‘That’s up to you, of course.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
Annis and I got ready to leave.
‘About the money, I will pay you, of course. It might take me a while but I’ll pay.’
‘Who said anything about money? Don’t worry about that now,’ Annis reassured her.
There’s always a faint chance that it was a case of mistaken identity.
On the windscreen of the Land Rover waited a folded envelope shoved into a little sandwich bag. I snatched it from under the wiper. Looking up at the house I could see Jill silhouetted against the light. I waved and we got into the cab.
Annis just sat for a second or two, letting out a deep breath through puffed-up cheeks.
I prised open the sandwich bag.
‘What have you got there?’ she wanted to know.
‘I think it’s from him.’ The envelope had Honeysett written across it in large computer-printed letters. I quickly ripped it open and pulled out the single sheet of paper. Return to Mill House and wait for instructions.
Nothing else. I looked around. People with shopping bags from the Co-op round the corner walked along Julian Road. There was no one in Harley Street just now. Blank windows and drawn curtains everywhere. Whoever we were up against was confident and on the ball and was here, had walked past this house a few minutes ago, might even be watching. I tried to look confident and unconcerned in case we really were being watched.
Annis started the engine. ‘Should we get Tim in on this? We could pop in.’
‘Not yet. Not until we know what it’s all about. Just get us back to Mill House.’
‘Okay. But this is serious shit, Chris. It really scares me.’
Chapter Six
The last bulb that ought to have been illuminating the yard had apparently burnt out. We splashed from the Land Rover to the door from memory.
