Rainstone Fall achm-3

by Peter Helton

  ‘Did he say what he wants?’ Tim asked, looking worried now.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, Chris,’ Annis said, ‘but I think it’s time we went to the police. We’re completely at this guy’s mercy and Jill has had about all she can take, not to mention the boy’s — ’

  ‘Save your breath, I agree.’ It seemed obvious now. I had felt defeated ever since I had lost the ransom loot in Charlcombe.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do.’ It was more than just the logical conclusion of an operation gone so wrong that it could no longer be expected to work out well and it was more than fear for the boy’s well-being. It was a leaden tiredness and a sudden and complete loss of faith in my own abilities. Standing in the middle of the room, uselessly holding on to the phone, with two pairs of expectant eyes on me, I felt like running away. I’m only a painter, I felt like saying, this isn’t my kind of job. Had I volunteered for this? Must have done. Whatever for? Did I really need this much excitement? ‘I’ll take it straight to Needham, personally, no phone calls, it’s safer that way.’ I chucked the phone on to the sofa.

  ‘You want us there?’ Tim asked.

  ‘No, you lot stay here.’

  Half an hour later I was riding the Norton through blustery wind and rain into town, nearly blinded by the moisture on my goggles. The rain stung my face. I was on my surreptitious way to the police station where I would explain to Superintendent Needham how I had got myself into the biggest mess of my less-than-illustrious career as a private eye. It would not count as betraying a client’s confidence since Jill was by no means a client but it was without doubt an admission of total failure. And trust. What if I was laying Louis open to reprisals? I was no longer sure whether I had to take the death threat seriously. Surely that was just something kidnappers said to frighten you?

  Halfway down the London Road I got a bad case of the jitters. I began to feel as though I was caught in the cross hairs in a madman’s rifle sights. I was getting more paranoid by the minute. I checked over my shoulder — the Norton had no mirrors — every few seconds, not knowing what I was looking for.

  I parked the bike in the motorcycle bay in North Parade Passage, locked up the helmet and stuffed gloves and goggles into my pocket. I’d try and see Needham privately. I had to arrange for us to talk outside the station where we couldn’t be overheard. I’d make sure though that someone heard me say that it had to do with the Albert Barrington murder, not that I thought that was any guarantee that our kidnapper, if he had an ear in the station, wouldn’t somehow suspect foul play. Foul play. . Who was I playing foul? The kidnapper? Hardly. But was I breaking a promise to Jill for ‘her own good’ or the boy’s or for my own peace of mind? Did I simply want to abdicate responsibility because I’d had enough? I couldn’t deny that I was planning to heave a deep sigh of relief and hide in my studio for the foreseeable future from the moment the police took charge of this mess.

  I was walking along Manvers Street on the opposite side from the police station and slowed down now to check the cars in the car park in front of it. Needham’s big grey saloon was in its reserved space. Traffic was steady. Just as I got ready to dodge across between two buses a voice behind me piped up. ‘Sir?’

  ‘What!’ I turned around and found myself looking at a young man of perhaps twenty. It was hard to tell because only the small tanned oval of his face was visible as he peered out through rain-blinded glasses from the enormous hooded plastic poncho that covered him and what for his sake I hoped was a rucksack.

  ‘I’m supposed to give you this.’ He breathlessly held out a folded piece of paper. His accent was antipodean and he might have sprinted from the backpackers’ hostel a few doors down.

  It was a lined piece of paper from a notepad, folded into a small rectangle and already damp. I opened it up. It was written in biro in hastily scribbled capitals.

  HOPE YOU’RE NOT THINKING OF TALKING TO THE POLICE. TOLD YOU I’D KNOW. TOLD YOU WHAT WILL HAPPEN. WAIT TO BE CONTACTED.

  ‘Who gave you this?’

  ‘Some guy.’ He gestured over his shoulder.

  ‘Where? What did he look like?’

  ‘I don’t know, only saw him for a moment. Back there at the corner. He wore a hat. Gave me a fiver to catch you up.’ He was already moving on, towards the station.

  ‘Wait a second, I need a better description than that.’ I tried to hold him back by the arm but he shook himself loose.

  ‘Look, mate, I can’t stop, I gotta make the fuckin’ train to Heathrow. I’m outa here, your weather’s turned to shit, mate, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  I trotted beside him. ‘What kind of a man was he? I mean was he young, old, tall, short, fat, slim?’

  ‘Just normal, like. He wore a hat. I only saw him for a second and I can’t see much through wet specs anyway. Rain’s always a pain in the ass.’ He peered at me over his wet glasses.

  ‘What else was he wearing?’

  ‘Jeez, if I’d known you’d give me the third degree I’d have told him to forget it. Some coat I guess, nothing so it’d stick in your mind, all right?’

  That always depended on the mind, I thought, and let him get on. I watched him weave his way through the traffic between bus and railway station. I looked around, behind me, along Manvers Street, scanned the pavements full of pedestrians pushing hurriedly through the rain in both directions. Where was the dark sinister stranger in a hat watching from a street corner? Where was the threatening soundtrack that always helped TV detectives to know when they were being watched with ill intent? The rain stopped abruptly. A long row of faces in a passing tourist coach looked up; I followed their gaze. The dark clouds were being rolled back by a high wind and bright, broken cloud followed from the west. By the time I had squelched my way back to the Norton the sun had made an appearance. Good, my jeans might dry off eventually. I used my sleeve to wipe the water off the seat, started the engine and rode off towards the unfamiliar sunshine.

  There was not much else I could do. I had to be seen to be leaving. Nothing could have better reinforced the paranoid feeling that I was constantly being kept tabs on than the note that seemed to burn acidly in my pocket. Told you what will happen. Go here, don’t go there. Stop, start, fetch. Wait to be contacted. The impersonal phrase did nothing to hide the very personal nature of the relationship: I’ve got you by the balls and you will do my bidding. His bidding, his robbing. A man in a hat.

  How long would I let myself be blackmailed? Wasn’t it in the nature of blackmail that it never stopped, that the blackmailer never went away? Would it be all over, would Louis have been reunited with his mother by now, if I hadn’t let myself be mugged of the ransom? Who had held me up in the lane after the burglary? All three of us had sworn blind that we hadn’t told a soul. That almost certainly meant that either the kidnapper himself had bragged about it in the pub or he had himself staged the mugging. I was not in a position to steal it back, whichever scenario held true, because I didn’t have the first idea who I was dealing with and I had the distinct impression that shouting ‘Who are you?’ down the phone might not make him give me his name, address and National Insurance number. It was beginning to dawn on me that not only did I have Louis’s abductor on my back but very likely a third party that knew what I was doing and when I was doing it (one which might soon be joined by Mr Disappointed of Lansdown demanding his stuff back, possibly with menaces).

  While I was furiously chewing this over and without giving it much thought I’d hustled the bike up Lansdown Road and turned into Charlcombe Lane. I didn’t know what I was hoping to find as I rumbled past the scene of my humiliation and indeed I didn’t see anything that might be of use. But not so much further on stood a cast-iron signpost pointing towards the village of Woolley and the Lam valley where I had strange and unfinished business. I slowed to a less ferocious pace, took the turn and began to enjoy the sun as it dodged in and out of clouds as though desperate to dry the steami
ng land below. I passed small orderly farms, fields of grazing cows and sheep, yards full of scratching chickens and a herd of alpacas eyeing me as curiously as I did them. In the tiny village of Woolley the Norton’s growl brought children out into the single track lane that connected the small community with the outside world. I turned a corner and immediately a steep descent brought me down to the bottom of the valley where I crossed the Lam brook via a narrow bridge near the old gunpowder mill. Following the undulating lanes I soon reached Spring Farm where I’d met Jack Fryer struggling with his subsidy application. The gate to the yard was firmly closed and there was no sign of life. But the unmistakable smell of several thousand chickens reassured me that he hadn’t yet packed it all in. I shunned the muddy turn-off towards Grumpy Hollow and Gemma Stone’s ramshackle herb farm and rode on along the deserted lane. A horse poked its head over a hedge and snorted. I rode on until I came to a fork in the road and instinctively took the left; it was narrower and the road surface was nearly worn away. After I had passed a long and dilapidated structure made mainly from corrugated metal and girders, the tree-lined road lazily rose and fell for a quarter of a mile. Then it suddenly climbed steeply before broadening out as I approached what simply had to be Lane End Farm. One minor clue of course was the fact that the lane ended here at a high and substantial modern gate set into a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The fence ran up the side of the hill to my left where it disappeared into the trees. A sign fastened to the chain link advertised the fact that there was 24 hour Security, illustrated with the drawing of an uncommonly ferocious-looking dog. To the right the fencing seemed to run across the entire end of the valley, which was much narrower here. The other clue, keeping in mind what Jack Fryer had said, was that beyond the fence lay what looked like a mix between junk yard and building site.

  Beside the insubstantial and neglected-looking farmhouse and the few outbuildings I could make out, there stood a mass of shipping containers, by the looks of it simply plonked into the muddy grass of the field, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards from the fence. Many were blue, some white, but most of them were rusty. They seemed to have grown up there like a small hideous village around the L-shaped farmhouse’s grey and utilitarian shape. I glimpsed one or two Portakabins and a blue Portaloo among the containers. It was a depressing sight. Lane End Farm occupied nearly the entire end of the valley and as far as I could see nobody farmed it. The containers, apart from being ugly in themselves, looked out of place in a field many miles from the nearest port. To the left the hillside was covered in what looked like the remains of ancient woodland. Far to the right of the ‘farm’ snaked the other fork of the lane, disappearing into the distance. There was no farming machinery to be seen but a large van was driving along a track on the far end of the property and beside the furthest container a mobile crane stretched its telescopic arm skywards in a mute salute. I dismounted and leant the bike against the fence. After giving the gate, which was topped with razor-sharp spikes, a futile pull I decided to do a little exploring on foot. Judging by the path worn alongside the fence to the left I wasn’t the first to take this route up into the wood, in fact there was evidence that someone walked here quite regularly. I just hoped it wasn’t a patrol of dogs. The place looked like it should have guard dogs tethered to overhead wires patrolling the perimeter, then all it needed was a watchtower to make the stalag impression complete.

  The fence curved sharply away and I left it behind for a while, just enjoying my walk. It wasn’t much of a climb from the gate before I stood on the crest of the hill. The woodland was dense here but wind and rain had done their bit to thin out the autumn foliage. I could see below me that the fence skirted the edge of the wood for a while, running east while it did. I made my way downhill again through the pathless strip of woodland. Halfway down I nearly slithered into something on the damp leaf litter: a dead dog. It was Taxi, Gem Stone’s old mongrel. There wasn’t even a second’s hesitation before pronouncing him dead, his head was such a bloody mess. Had I found him on the road I’d have assumed he’d been run over but here, in the middle of the strip of woodland? I knelt down and forced myself to take a closer look. I’d have made a bad crime scene technician, or one that threw up a lot over the evidence.

  The blood was dried and there were ants crawling all over the beast’s fur. It quickly became obvious that his skull had been bashed in, even without the spatter of blood on the surrounding leaf litter. All that told me was that it happened right here.

  I thought I could smell death too, despite the strong breeze that pulled the last leaves off the trees and sent them dancing around me.

  I slithered further down the hill until I reached the fence. It cut at an angle here which brought me closer to the containers, allowing me to get a better view of the set-up. Walking on I kept close to the fence, which turned out to be a mistake. A gravelled track ran north out of what was really quite a small farm, through another gate and then disappeared over the rise where it would eventually connect to the Lansdown Road. A large van in the unmistakable red livery of the postal service made its way towards the gate. At the same time a skinhead on a quad bike appeared from between the rows of containers and took a fast and bumpy ride straight towards me. Who said there was never one around when you needed one? Pretending not to have noticed him I walked on along the fence.

  ‘Oi, you!’ He started shouting from twenty yards away. I kept walking.

  ‘Hey! Get away from there.’ He caught up with me and kept jerkily apace with me on the noisy quad. He was about thirty, dressed in faded black combat trousers, camouflage jacket and army boots. He had a broad, round-featured face and made the quad bike look puny. I was quite glad we had a fence between us. ‘Are you deaf or something?’

  ‘Is this Tony Blackfield’s place?’ I asked.

  ‘What if it is? Are you from the Chronicle? We’ve got planning permission for this so you can shove it.’

  ‘I can? And what is “this”?’

  ‘Storage units. Secure storage units is what they are.’

  ‘They look like clapped-out shipping containers to me.’

  ‘That’s what they were, now they’re storage units for rent. Secure storage units and I’m security. So piss off from our fence. You’re trespassing.’ He gave the throttle an angry twist and jerked ahead a few yards, then stopped the bike and got off.

  I stopped too. ‘I’m trespassing? I presumed the farm started on that side of the fence.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t. Lane End includes the woodland and we’d be obliged if people kept the fuck out of it.’

  ‘Right. Perhaps you should have run the fence around it then.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Have you got any idea how much fencing costs?’

  ‘Not this attractive kind, no.’ I stroked the chain link.

  ‘Well, it costs a fucking fortune. Now are you going or do I have to remove you?’ he said, jangling a bunch of keys clipped to his belt. Until now I had felt quite safe and smug on this side of the fence, now I noticed a small door set into it a few yards further down.

  I changed my tune. ‘Fine, I’m going. I see the Royal Mail use your units as well?’

  ‘Yes, because we’re cheap. They don’t tell us what they store here but I suspect it’s second class mail,’ he said unsmilingly and probably meant it. He got back on his bike. ‘Don’t be fucking ages about it. Go back to the road by the shortest route.’ Then he grabbed a handful of throttle and bumped back towards the container park.

  Secure storage. Not such a daft idea, really, apart from the traffic it engendered and the sheer hideousness of it all.

  Now that I knew it was there I could just make out the dead dog on the slope to my right. I gave it a wide berth on my way back. At the gate I wheeled the Norton about, sat astride it, and was fastening my helmet strap when the sound of a motorcycle engine approached from downhill. At first I presumed it to be the skinhead on his quad, wanting more words; instead it was a figure on a muddy trail bike that appea
red at the bottom of the rise where it came to an abrupt and squelching stop. The rider wore jeans, heavy boots, a red and white jacket and a helmet with blue-tinted goggles; more I couldn’t make out before he jerked his bike around in a ragged turn, while keeping an eye on me. Perhaps he was turning because he realized the lane ended here but I had the distinct feeling the sight of me at the top of the lane was unexpected and had spooked him. One way to find out. I worked the kick-starter. To my immense surprise the engine fired instantly and I shot down the hill in pursuit. If I was wrong about it I would soon know. With my momentary downhill advantage the distance between us quickly closed to only eight or ten yards so that I could easily have read his number plate if there’d been one. No doubt it was hearing the old-fashioned roar of the Norton’s twin peashooter pipes that made him glance over his shoulder. I saw him twist his throttle and he pulled away. I dropped a gear, followed suit and squeezed the last ounce of torque out of the Norton. The ancient technology responded bravely and I kept up with him while we flew past the corrugated iron barn, but as the bend approached I realized that I’d be unable to compete not just with the dirt tyres and modern engine but with the apparent willingness of the rider to risk going arse over tit in order to shake me off. Spattering mud and stones and skating with one foot on the ground, he took the corner at an impressive speed and then sped off in a power slide. By the time I had negotiated the muddy bend and got to the crossroads only the sound of his engine gave away that he had tuned right, towards Spring Farm. Now back on decent tarmac I accelerated with a bit more confidence in my tyres and took the next three bends idiotically fast. It was only the plume of black exhaust the enormous tractor sent skyward as it pulled out of a gate into the lane that stopped me from ploughing into it. Too late to brake. I squeezed myself into the opposite side of lane, foliage whipping my helmet, and shot past the giant machine screaming, with inches to spare. Driving the monster was Jack Fryer.