Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

‘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.’

‘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.