Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

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 the 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.