Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

I dared breathe again. ‘That was close. Now what? We can’t get to the house without triggering the lights and bringing one of Telfer’s goons out here.’

‘We don’t need to. Let’s check the pond life instead.’

We squatted by the side of the pool and I did the honours. The water was icy and slimy at the same time. My hand closed on the neck of a bottle and I lifted it up. It was half full. It was too dark to read the label. I unscrewed the top and sniffed. It was vodka, just as I had expected; all secret drinkers imagined that sober people couldn’t smell it.

‘That’s our way in,’ Tim assured me. ‘Put it back where you found it and let’s get out of here the way we came.’

I got thoroughly snagged and scratched on the way out again and was glad when I found myself back in the meadow. Annis was there, apologizing. ‘Sorry about the security light, that was me. I thought I’d found an easier way in when I got to a service gate.’

‘Tut. But we’d only have set it off ourselves anyway and we got away with it. Tim even thinks he knows how to get in now.’

‘Yeah? How?’

‘Well, it depends heavily on me not getting pneumonia so let’s get back to civilization and I’ll tell you.’

Next morning in my kitchen I contemplated how the things that made us feel civilized varied greatly from person to person; with Annis it was going to the theatre, in Tim’s case anything with lots of mayo did the trick. What made me feel civilized was a leisurely breakfast, preferably involving hot croissant, smoked salmon, a five-minute egg and no police. One day I would manage it.

I could hear them crunch their wheels, braking hard in the yard, and knew it meant trouble. Far too early for a friendly chat. Annis hadn’t put in an appearance downstairs yet and I hoped she had the sense to keep it that way. Knowing his way around the place Needham sent someone to every door but the hammering came from the front. No one knocks like the fuzz. You just can’t ignore it, whether your croissants are burning in the oven or not. I did a quick mental check, remembered that my shotgun had been stolen and my handgun confiscated, and walked confidently towards my front door with the traditional ‘All right all right, no need to break it down.’

Apparently there was. It flew open as a large uniformed constable shouldered through. Immediately behind him came a large Needham in Superintendent mode with a look capable of withering any gumshoe wisecracks I might have in mind. As it happened I wasn’t good at that kind of thing before breakfast.

‘Chris Honeysett, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder,’ he rattled off. ‘You do not have to say anything but I must warn you that it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely upon in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. What’s that smell?’

‘Two “all-butter” croissants dying in the oven.’

‘All right: kitchen.’ He waved me on. ‘You don’t touch a thing,’ he warned me off. ‘Constable, get the damn croissants out of the oven, we don’t want them catching fire.’

The constable did his bidding and left the baking tray on the top of the stove. The croissants looked just about edible, I thought, and my stomach growled in agreement.

‘Right, let’s go.’

I took a last hungry look at my breakfast table — cafetière of coffee, a perfectly cooked speckled egg, the smoked salmon waiting for the croissant — and let myself be pushed out of the house.

‘Is this about the old geezer in my car?’ We were being driven by a plain-clothed, plain-faced policeman into town.

‘This is about the murder victim in your car. So save it. Grimshaw still your solicitor?’

‘Do I really need her, Mike?’

‘You’ve just been arrested for murder, Chris, and it’s Superintendent Needham until I tell you otherwise.’ Once, over a few beers, Needham had offered first-name terms and had probably regretted it ever since.

At Manvers Street police station they asked me a lot of questions they knew the answers to already, searched me half-heartedly, took my mobile away and made me wait in an overheated interview room with an elective-mute constable standing by the door. I sat and worked on changing my thirty-a-day habit into a fifty-a-day habit until the door opened and Needham and DS Sorbie turned up with their files and tapes. Sorbie scrabbled the cellophane wrapping off a new tape and did the preliminaries. When the tape recorder stopped bleeping he sat down next to Needham opposite me, told the tape who, when and what, and the ping-pong started.

‘Your solicitor is on her way,’ Needham said. ‘But since you’re happy to start without her. .’

‘What makes you suddenly think it was murder?’ I asked.

‘I don’t suddenly think, Honeysett, the pathologist and forensics tell me. The victim did collide with your car. Whilst riding his electric bicycle. We found the crumpled remains of it hidden under some bushes beside the Lam brook, a few hundred yards from where we found your car. But Prof Meyers’ report says you hit him on the head, then ran him over.’

‘Prof Meyers said no such thing. Professor Earnshaw Meyers probably said something like, “The victim suffered a blow to the head prior to being involved in an accident” or some such carefully worded thing, but did he tell you what killed him? The blow to the head or the accident? Did you find any fingerprints on the bike?’

‘We ask the questions, Mr Honeysett,’ Sorbie suggested with forced boredom in his voice. It wasn’t very convincing. Like this entire arrest thing. Needham on the other hand was a good actor. It was always difficult to unravel his ultimate motives, that’s what made him such a dangerous cop if you sat on the wrong side of the table. Which is where I spent most of my time. But I had the distinct impression that Sorbie’s heart wasn’t really in it. Ignoring him I asked Needham: ‘Have you traced the minicab driver who took me home yet?’

‘Of course not, because there’s no such creature.’

‘There is, but he’s not going to admit to picking up an illegal fare in the street without prior booking. He could get fired or lose his licence.’ Memories of my way home that night were far too hazy to remember what company the cab belonged to or what the driver might have looked like. I couldn’t even remember the make or colour of the car. No minicab driver, no alibi. No alibi, no croissant for breakfast. For an awfully long time. Something had to be done.

The door opened behind me and some kind of signal was exchanged because Needham picked up his file. ‘Your solicitor is here.’

As if to confirm this a clear, precise voice demanded: ‘I’d like to talk to my client alone, if you don’t mind.’

Sorbie did the ‘interview suspended’ palaver for the tape and followed his boss out of the room as my solicitor took a seat opposite me, setting her briefcase beside her on the floor.

There was nothing at all grim about Kate Grimshaw, in fact she was good to look at: she looked a young fifty, had a well-cut face to match her well-cut charcoal grey suit; hair dyed black, red and gold and cut very short; rather forbidding grey eyes, though. Just looking at her made me feel young again. About five, I’d say.

‘All right, Honeysett, start babbling at me like an overexcited infant protesting his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’

‘You misjudge me, as usual.’ I lit another cigarette to dampen down the hunger that kicked about in my stomach, then I rattled off the whole story: Heather and Cairn’s attempt to hire me; the mysterious men Cairn thought he’d heard threaten to let someone called Albert have an accident; how much of that I’d told Needham; what they had told me and the fact that I had missed out on breakfast . I might have laboured that last point a bit.