Rainstone Fall achm-3

by Peter Helton

  ‘What’s that awful smell?’ Annis asked in the hall.

  I raced ahead to the kitchen whence the smell emanated and in my eagerness to knock the casserole off the heat managed to burn my fingers twice. At last I got hold of the oven gloves and lifted the lid on the pheasant. One for the forensic students. I’d scatter its ashes later. In the meantime I opened the back door to air the place.

  Listening on the stairs I could hear the faint bleep of the answering machine in the attic office. Out of breath from rushing upstairs I listened to all the messages but Louis’s kidnapper had not left one. I fixed my little voice recorder on to the cordless office phone with a couple of rubber bands (I’m terminally low tech) and sat it on the kitchen table by the fruit bowl. Drinking mugs of tea and coffee we sat and stared at it, willing it to ring and dreading it at the same time. Annis distractedly chewed through a few apples and I tested my dental work on a concrete pear.

  Two hours later we were still sitting there, waiting. From time to time one of us would ask a question or make a remark but it always faded into bleak silence after a minute or two. We had talked ourselves to a standstill. What was keeping him? Was it a him? Was it one person or several? I didn’t suppose it was all that easy to snatch a teenage boy off the street. Could it all be a sick joke? Could the ex-boyfriend be behind it, whatever Jill had said about him? And what if he didn’t get in touch by phone? We’d both drunk too much coffee by now and I had started coughing from chain smoking. Even Annis had absentmindedly puffed through one or two. I didn’t care to remind her that she’d given up years ago.

  I walked to the front door and checked first inside then outside for another envelope. There was nothing but darkness and the smell and sound of soft rain falling. The electronic warble of the phone back in the house made my heart miss a beat. I slammed the door shut and ran back to the kitchen. Annis stood, holding the phone out to me. I started the voice recorder and quickly checked the clock on the wall: it was half past ten. I pressed the talk button. ‘Honeysett.’

  ‘Listen carefully, Mr Honeysett.’ The voice sounded far away, like a long-distance call from the bad old days. It was too scratchy and faint to have much character beyond the tone of impatient arrogance, and sounded almost robotic. ‘We have got the boy, Louis. You do exactly as we tell you and he might just survive this.’

  ‘There’s no money,’ I protested. ‘The mother’s on the dole so you — ’

  ‘Do shut up and listen. We don’t want a pissing thing from the mother. We just needed a kid. It’s you, shithead. We’re hiring you. Get it? The boy’s life is the fee we’re prepared to pay for your services. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s an offer not to be missed.’

  I sat down heavily. Annis did so too, never taking her eyes off me. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I knew you would!’ said the triumphant voice. ‘You’re the caring type, by all accounts. And here’s the little job you’ll do for us. You know Barry Telfer?’

  ‘Know of him.’ One half of the delightful Telfer brothers. Heavyweight villains both of them, only brother Keith was doing time right now. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Know his house up Lansdown?’

  ‘The 1930s modernist pile?’

  ‘If you say so. Clear out his safe. It’s in his office upstairs.’

  I jumped up with surprise and indignation. ‘You’re winding me up. You can’t be serious. I’m not a burglar.’

  ‘Oh yeah? That never stopped you before. You’ve got a reputation for getting in and out of interesting places, so just do it.’

  All through this exchange Annis’s eyes burnt fiercely across the table at me. ‘How is the boy, Louis?’ I asked. ‘I want to know that he’s unharmed. At least let me speak to h-’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Honeysett!’ the voice bellowed. ‘You don’t make any fucking demands ’cause you got fuck-all to bargain with. The boy’s just fine but if you fuck us about, if you as much as think of dropping this one on the pigs, we’ll fucking cut him into ribbons, that clear, arsehole?’

  ‘Crystal. Calm down. I’ll do it. There’s no need to harm the boy. Now, what am I likely to find in Telfer’s safe?’

  ‘You’ll see. Try Thursdays, he goes and plays cards at the Blathwayt Arms. And bring the lot, every sodding little thing you find, I don’t care if it’s old ticket stubs and snotty tissues. When you’ve pulled it off, we’ll know. We’ll be in touch. Sooner you get to work, sooner the boy gets home to mummy.’ The line went dead.

  I let the receiver clatter on to the table. ‘They hung up. They said the boy was fine but they wouldn’t let me talk to him.’ I somehow felt that this, and every sodding little thing, was my fault, that somehow, through what I was, through who I was, I had made this happen.

  Annis clearly read my mood. ‘What do they want us to do?’ she asked quietly. ‘Did I hear something about burglary?’ I noted the ‘us’ with relief.

  ‘You heard right. Nothing too strenuous though,’ I lied.

  I quickly dialled Jill’s number before I had too much time to think about things. She answered immediately and I explained, tried to reassure her.

  Her voice steadied. ‘I know I have no right to ask you to do anything criminal but I’ll ask you anyway. I’m his mother, I have to ask you. In fact I’m begging you.’

  ‘I already agreed to do it.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Honeysett. You just have no idea — ’

  ‘I think I probably have, actually. And don’t be so quick to thank me. If it wasn’t for me you and your son might not be in this situation. We’ll keep in close contact. But prepare yourself for a wait. It will be days, perhaps longer.’

  ‘I think I might call my sister now,’ she decided.

  I terminated the call and repeated to Annis all I’d been told. ‘It shouldn’t be a huge problem,’ I concluded. ‘But it definitely puts us into Bigwood country.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘This is a seriously naff idea, Chris,’ was the considered Bigwood opinion, forcefully expressed the next afternoon in my little attic office. Tim shook his head. ‘I know nothing about this Telfer guy but if he’s a heavy hoodlum like you say then cleaning him out isn’t the healthy option.’

  ‘Which is probably why they’re blackmailing us into doing it,’ Annis told him.

  I held the receiver out to him. ‘So, would you like to tell Jill we’re chickening out because it’s unhealthy?’

  ‘Hey, hey, I didn’t say I’m not going to help.’ Tim made dampening motions with his hands. ‘I’m just having a moan, all right? I’m not in this for my health. Remind me, Chris, what am I in this for? Best not answer that. So who exactly is Telfer and who is doing the arm-twisting?’

  ‘I’ve no idea who set us up. I didn’t recognize the voice. But the goon was short- tempered and had skipped charm school. The voice was very distant and scratchy, which might of course have been deliberate. “Caller withheld number”, as one might expect, and definitely a mobile or a satellite phone, a hint of warble. There’s no way we could trace it. Even the police could have trouble doing that. I dare say they’d try but there’s a waiting list and all they’d probably find is a cheap mobile in a skip somewhere. Because if you plan a caper like this then you get yourself twenty stolen mobiles and chuck each one on a passing dustcart after you’ve made your call, or simply drop it in the river.’

  ‘Do you have any suspicions?’

  I didn’t. It came out of the blue. It could be anyone, anywhere. The boy could be long dead, the phone call could have been made from a poolside lounger of a villa on the Costa Brava for all I knew and there was little I could do except comply. I shook my head. ‘Could be anyone but they’re quite ruthless and they thought it out well. They obviously know all about Aqua Investigations and what kind of a rep we have. And they didn’t kidnap one of us so that we’d have a full team to play with.’

  Tim ran a hand over his eyes and seemed to come to some kind of conclusion. He sat up straighter. ‘Okay, so who exactly is
this Telfer guy?’

  ‘We’re talking about Barry here,’ said Annis. ‘His brother Keith got put away for aggravated this and that last spring.’

  ‘What did he get, just out of interest?’ Tim asked.

  ‘Five years.’

  ‘Out by Christmas,’ all three of us bleated in unison.

  ‘On the surface they’re successful businessmen,’ Annis continued. ‘Proud, self-made men, a bit uncouth and ostentatious, a bit too loud and badly dressed in an expensive way. Bad taste in women and cars — ’

  ‘What’s bad taste in cars?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Yellow.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Anyway, they run scrap yards and hire out heavy plant, diggers, bulldozers, rollers, etc., but they probably also hire out heavy muscle and apparently scrap cars they shouldn’t, like shiny new Mercs wot don’t belong to them.’

  ‘And for committed capitalists they have a curious attitude to competition as a regulator of price: they don’t seem to like it at all. That’s how little brother Keith got himself nabbed, trying to stamp out the competition. With hobnail boots and a baseball bat. Brother Barry is no slouch in the casual violence department either, I hear, and he never goes anywhere without one or two heavies. No children, which is probably just as well, and last thing I heard his wife ran off with one of his bodyguards but she didn’t get far and the goon was never heard of again.’

  ‘Charming family. And we’re relieving them of whatever’s in their safe? I hope you bought us all open tickets to Mumbai for afters. So where does this bundle of fun keep his baubles?’

  ‘Chez Telfer, up in Lansdown. In his safe.’ I dropped the ‘safe’ delicately at the end. Tim often complained that I was leading him astray when he’d been going straight for years but secretly he couldn’t wait to get his hands on a strongbox again. He missed it. He missed the frisson, the challenge of pitting his wits and gadgets against a safe. No gas axe or Semtex for Tim. He looked more interested already.

  I walked to the map by the side of the door. The other two followed and I pointed to roughly where I remembered the house to be. ‘Big place somewhere round here, overlooking Charlcombe Valley.’

  ‘Okay, what are we waiting for then?’ Tim pulled me away by the sleeve. ‘Get your binoculars and take me there.’

  Despite the obvious dangers of the project I couldn’t help feeling the current of excitement that crackled inside Tim’s car as he slowly drove his Audi TT along the narrow Charlcombe Lane. Annis had chosen the back seat and had an elbow each on the backrests of our seats. She was humming to herself. I was cradling the big binoculars and Tim was happily twiddling buttons on his modified dashboard. From the outside Tim’s car appeared like any other black Audi TT but inside it had acquired a lot more dials and gadgets than were strictly necessary for the purpose of locomotion. The thing looked like it had been kitted out by Q and vertical take-off wouldn’t have surprised me much.

  ‘Stop here,’ I told him as we came to a row of low white cottages on our left. We had come up the lane from the Larkhall side and just beyond the last cottage the view opened up across the little valley. Tim pulled into the drive of the deserted-looking place and we got out. I handed him the bins and pointed up at the hill on the opposite side.

  ‘See the large cuboid thing high above Charlcombe Manor? That’s it.’

  He trained the binoculars at the hillside. ‘Ehm. . quite. . gloomy over there.’

  I reached up and took the plastic lens caps off for him.

  ‘Ah, much clearer like that,’ he agreed. ‘Oh yeah, got it. Ugly place. Mostly glass and concrete. Big, though, and the garden is massive. . high hedges all around. . one hell of a slope. No immediate neighbours. What’s it like on the other side?’

  ‘Much the same,’ I said. ‘A private little road, maybe a couple of hundred yards long between hedgerows. I’ve driven past the turn-off but have never been near the actual place.’

  ‘Definitely a night job. Look at all that glass, they’d have to be blind not to see us coming. That’s probably why they bought the place.’ He checked his watch. ‘Dark soon, we’ll go and have a closer look then.’

  Annis took her turn at the binoculars. ‘Best way is up through the fields, I reckon. We’ll have to find out what the routine is up at the house.’ She handed the bins to me. ‘Did you mention something about Thursday?’

  ‘Yes, the voice said he’s playing cards at the Blathwayt Arms, the pub by the race course.’ I put the glasses to my eyes and had a good look at the Telfer house. Tim was right, there was an awful lot of glass, all along the ground floor, facing the garden, then the wrap-around terrace on the first floor was backed by enormous picture windows set between strips of concrete. With all that glass, how difficult could it be to get in there? The garden was very large, giving ample space around the house. There were trees and island beds and ponds, lots of places to hide but also a lot of ground to cover before you got anywhere near the house proper.

  ‘Okay, if Thursday is a good day we’ll do it Thursday. It’s Sunday now, that gives us three days to get ourselves organized,’ Tim suggested.

  I let the glasses wander downhill from the property. A long line of hedgerow, a couple of solitary oaks, a few fences, three grey horses and a man with binoculars. Looking straight at me. A man wearing some kind of hat and a waxed jacket. Could have been a bird watcher. Could have been that the menace of this solitary figure, which transmitted itself right across the valley, was all in my mind. Yet it sent my heart hammering with sudden anxiety. I took the glasses away from my eyes to get the context. There seemed to be nobody else up there. I looked through the glasses again. By the time I found him once more he was disappearing behind a stand of trees just above the manor.

  ‘Something stinks,’ I concluded eloquently.

  ‘You think this is a trap of some sort?’ Annis asked.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m thinking yet,’ I admitted. ‘Just now I thought I saw a bloke watching us from the other side of the valley. The whole thing is just weird. Let’s not do anything too predictable. Let’s come back later.’

  They grumbled but let me herd them into the car. On the way back to Mill House we bounced around ideas about how to get into Telfer’s place but I had infected us all with my feelings of doom. What excitement there had been was gone. It had all turned back into the dangerous job of rescuing Jill’s son, and secretly I was glad of this. We might all be a bit more careful if we had a little less fun.

  Nightfall. While Annis and I changed into black clothes and trainers we wondered about the kidnapping. How did you pick a victim? Was it really random? How did he get to know about Jill and Louis in the first place? What were the criteria for a useful victim? The same as always, we decided — vulnerability, isolation, powerlessness, loneliness. Unemployed single mother was a perfect fit.

  It only slightly worried me that Tim, who hadn’t known what this was about when he came over, had found in the boot of his car a convenient set of black clothing to change into, including a pair of black trainers I’d never seen him wear before. It did sometimes cross my mind that I had no way of knowing just how retired a safe breaker he really was, despite his protestations that it was only me who led him astray from the path of righteousness he chose when he wrote himself a fantasy CV and started working for Bath Uni.

  We set off into the dark in Tim’s car. All the way there, when we spoke at all, we did so in hushed voices, as though we needed to practise stealth. This time I made Tim approach from the opposite side, up Lansdown, turn off right when the watchful spire of St Steven’s suddenly loomed, and drive slowly along the narrow and unlit lane until it briefly widened near Charlcombe Manor.

  We left the car squeezed against the steep bank and all got out of the driver door into the cool, dark silence. I found a few stone steps leading up the hill and in the absence of anything better stomped up those as though I knew where I was going. The slithery steps soon stopped and turned into an uneven
narrow path that ended at a stile in a wooden fence. We clambered over and found ourselves in a plantation of young trees. Every nine feet in any direction stood a spindly tree tied to a stout stake. We used the stakes to pull ourselves up the steep slope into the hill fog. Once through the narrow belt of saplings we came to another barrier, this one an overgrown fence of wire strung between wooden posts. We scrambled over as best we could with as little use of our torches as possible. Thick cloud obscured the stars. The only illumination came from the reflected glow of the city beyond the hills, which allowed just enough light to see which way was up. We hadn’t gone far into the meadow before the rain started its maddening dance again. I headed for the dark line of the hedgerow to my left. It ran uphill in an unsteady diagonal which I hoped would bring us within yards of Telfer’s property. With the rain tap-dancing on the hood of my rainproof I led us in a puffing and squelching trudge uphill until a deeper darkness loomed in front.

  I let the others catch up with their breathless leader. ‘This is it. That’s the hedge. . that runs round. . the entire property. Let’s walk round to the right.’

  Soon the house itself came into view above the line of vegetation, a silhouette like a decapitated pyramid. There were lights on upstairs beyond the picture windows behind what had to be enormous blinds or curtains. We moved quietly now, probing for openings in the hedge. It was impossible to make out what it consisted of in the dark but it was prickly stuff. The house was still a good forty yards uphill when Tim stopped us. ‘I think I found our way in.’

  I risked a brief flash from my torch. A narrow opening in the bottom of the hedge, no bigger than a foot-and-a-half in diameter. ‘Rabbit tunnel. Bit small for me,’ I concluded but Tim was already down there. He produced a pair of secateurs from his pockets and went to work on the opening, widening it, moving in.

  ‘I pass the stuff back, you put it in heaps to carry away later,’ he whispered.