Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

‘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.

I got the distinct feeling that Tim had done this before. Annis and I dutifully pulled away what he passed out to us and cursed quietly as thorns and prickly leaves pierced our fingers through our gloves.

Eventually Tim backed out again. ‘I’m through. There was a fence in there once but most of it’s rusted away. Who wants to explore?’

‘You guys go,’ Annis whispered. ‘I’ll get rid of the cuttings in the hedgerow and snuffle round the outside a bit more.’

‘Okay, I’ll go with Tim. If you hear any commotion, don’t come in, get away,’ I advised her and got down on all fours. Immediately my hands were pricked by the debris of the cuttings. As I crawled into the dark scratchiness of the hedge I tried not to think of rabbit droppings and to work out instead when I’d had my last tetanus jab. Despite Tim’s pruning expertise my face was scratched by the time I got out the other side. Our tunnel opened on to a long border, five or six feet wide and full of dripping evergreens standing in mud. The house, uphill to our right, showed a diffused glow on the ground floor and the light escaping from the edges of curtains upstairs gave it the impression of a partly obscured glass lantern. Enough illumination spilled into the enormously long garden to see that the upper half had been terraced, with rectangular ponds or pools on each level. Clumps of dwarf conifers and tall grasses looked grey and dispirited, as though no one had told them they were back in fashion.

‘After you, boss,’ Tim invited. I waddled up the slope in a duck walk to the next island bed. Even though I had my hood down in an effort to hear something beyond the drumming of raindrops I couldn’t make out anything apart from the rain slanting into the stone-bordered, weed-choked pool to my left. We made it to the next level of the garden unmolested. My biggest fear was a patrolling Dobermann or two but who would send a dog out in this? We were still at least twenty-five yards from the back of the house. I was just about to waddle on when the garden erupted into ice-bright light. I fell flat on my face and scrabbled backwards to the incomplete shelter of a stand of pampas grass. Tim was already there. ‘We set off the security light,’ I hissed. ‘What now?’

‘I don’t think we did,’ he hissed back. ‘We weren’t actually moving when it came on.’

For a moment it seemed that nothing else would happen. Then I heard faint footsteps. I lifted my head and risked a look. A bulky figure had appeared on the top terrace, pacing first one way, then the other, then it came down the first set of broad stone steps that led to the next level down. When he reached our level I could see he was a big bloke in his twenties, squinting against the rain and looking decidedly unhappy. He made straight for the water feature on the other side of the grasses we were hiding behind. I had a view from below him now as he stood by the pool just fifteen feet away from me. If he didn’t spot us it would be a miracle. But then it appeared he wasn’t really looking any more. ‘Come on,’ he chanted into the rain, rocking on his heels. ‘Come oooooon.’ Eventually the security light went off. ‘Thank fuck for that,’ he offered up fervently. In the fresh darkness I could make out his silhouette against the glimmer from the house. He bent down and fished round at the edge of the pool for a moment, then lifted out a bottle. He shook it, uncapped it, took a draught and let it plop back into the water. A noisy sniff, hawk and spit into the pond seemed to complete the ritual since he turned back towards the house, triggering the security light again as he set foot on to the steps to the next level of the garden.