Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

I hesitated. ‘How d’you know I have reading glasses?’ I’d only got my first pair recently and was still a bit shy about it.

‘Annis told me. Let’s see ’em.’

‘The traitor.’ I took the glasses from their case and stuck them on my nose. I’d gone for the old-fashioned horn-rimmed specs. Well, it had worked for Cary Grant.

‘Annis was right, they do make you look intelligent. Okay, let’s go in.’

We crossed the road, dodging traffic, and entered through the heavy double doors. As soon as I stood in the foyer I felt like a schoolboy planning a prank. Tim pushed through the next set of double doors and into the downstairs exhibition space. I sauntered in after him, trying to look as though I wasn’t part of a double act. Immediately to the left was a counter where catalogues, slides and postcards could be bought. Thankfully the blue-suited, tightly permed woman behind the counter didn’t give us a second look. Along with half the planet she was too busy looking at a computer screen. There were a fair number of people walking about, silently or talking in low voices. I tried to appear casual and bored but failed miserably. The Rodin bronze in the centre of the room was all I saw. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed to get bigger the longer I looked at it. We were going to steal that? A limb at a time perhaps. .

It was a male dancer, nude, yet curiously sexless. He stood on tiptoe on his right leg, with his other leg improbably high in the air, the right hand holding the foot; the left arm was flung into the air and his gaze appeared to be following that movement. I tried to imagine making that move and the thought alone made my tendons ache. The dancer’s face was deeply serious, which was hardly surprising; the model must have been trussed up like an oven-ready broiler to be able to hold that pose and it must have hurt like hell. It was simply called The Dancer and on loan from the foolhardy Rodin Museum in Paris. The bronze was very dark, nearly black in places, and looked extremely heavy. The foot of the figure that was in touch with the ground grew out of a highly polished mahogany base and the whole thing stood on a standard painted museum plinth in the centre of the long room. Several spotlights were trained on it from the gantry above but no particular security features were visible anywhere. It was a tantalizing twelve yards from the door which led to the foyer and the street. Maybe on a couple of skateboards. . a distraction burglary. . I fished out my mobile and took pictures from all angles. Photography was not allowed inside the museum, it said so everywhere, but there were enough people making enough noise to mask the annoying little ‘ketchee’ sound the camera made.

I tore myself away and looked around. The windows in this gallery were blocked off with advertising for this and forthcoming exhibitions. I took pictures of the windows and the position of the cameras. Not that I really thought we could smash our way in and out of the windows. As Tim said, this wasn’t Norway and the people living on the other side of Bridge Street might show some curiosity if we tried it. I took a turn round the entire exhibition again and when I’d completed it there was no sign of Tim. It was hard not to look straight into the CCTV cameras once I had spotted them. I walked out into the foyer with its chequerboard marble floor and busts of local worthies and climbed the stairs, past some well-painted trifles. On the first floor another chequerboard foyer gave room to two tables, six black armchairs, a pour-it-yourself coffee bar and three white marble sculptures of women in robes holding aloft meaningful stuff. I turned my back on the marble horrors and walked into the permanent exhibition. Another information desk with another blue-suited attendant, a middle-aged man this time. He looked up but his gaze didn’t linger. Tim was there, slumped on the green upholstery of a bench, looking half asleep. I ignored him and wandered about. There was only one other person in the upstairs gallery, a bloke in a Barbour and wide-brimmed hat who was studying a large Gainsborough. I took out my mobile. It was deadly quiet in here. I’d have to mask the sound of the camera. I sneezed unconvincingly while surreptitiously snapping the layout of the gallery. I sneezed up at the enormous skylights. I sneezed at the overhead gantry. I sneezed at the security cameras. The attendant looked up briefly, then returned to whatever he was reading with just the tiniest twitch of the eyebrows. As I walked out Tim came alive and followed me down the echoing stairs and out into the rain.

‘Couldn’t you have tried coughing? That was the most unconvincing sneezing fit I ever heard.’ He stuffed his baseball cap in his pocket and led me to the right, past a takeaway pizza joint and into the shelter of the covered market that adjoined the museum. ‘This whole thing is a nightmare and I need a mug of tea. It’s your round,’ he added as he dropped on to a free chair in the little market café. I queued up and eventually got us two mugs of beige liquid from a tiny serving hatch. I’d forgotten all about this place. Time had forgotten all about this place. Since about 1959. We sat opposite each other at a narrow table and blew on our steaming mugs.

‘Told you taking pictures was a bad idea,’ I moaned.

‘Taking pic. .?’ He waved his hands helplessly in the airspace between us. ‘The whole thing is a bad idea, Chris. A stupendously bad idea. A fantastically idiotic plan. A desperate, hare-brained venture. And can I just remind you here. .’ He looked around at the shoppers eating and drinking at other tables and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hiss which I was sure carried further than his normal volume. ‘May I remind you that I’ve been going straight for several years now, except for the stuff I do for you, of course. And I’ve never been charged, never even been nicked, I have no criminal record whatsoever. But there just happens to be a string of unsolved safe breakings out there and if I get caught in this madness and they fingerprint me. .’

‘You left fingerprints?’ I asked indignantly.

He squirmed in his seat and shrugged. ‘Might have done. . And anyway they’ve got DNA sampling and all sorts of new technologies. You so much as sneeze at a crime scene and they can identify you,’ he said meaningfully. ‘I had a good look at the place just now and I tell you, robbing the museum is complete lunacy, nobody in their right mind would do it.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘I suppose that’s why their security is twenty years out of date.’

I returned from the lands of doom and gloom. ‘You mean. .’

‘I mean nothing, you can stow that silly grin. Yes, we might be able to get in and, yes, we might even get our hands on The Dancer . But even twenty years ago alarms meant big and nasty noises and look at where we are: six hundred yards from the police station, smack in the centre of town. . I bet you my collapsible crowbar they’ve got silent alarms in there but the moment you trigger it uniforms will gleefully pile into cars in Manvers Street and hare across here to relieve us of the Rodin and our liberty.’

‘So don’t trigger it. You’re the expert.’

‘I am. And I say it again: I don’t like it. Is there no other way? I mean, are you absolutely sure we can’t go to the police behind Jill’s back?’ He kept his eyes on his mug of tea while he waited for my answer. It was my decision, he had nothing to do with it. You’re the boss. And he was right.

‘Pretty sure. I think they’re local, that’s why they picked on us and the police always leak like a sieve, someone’ll get a whiff of something. For instance, if suddenly all leave is cancelled, which is what would probably happen, that affects a lot of people and their friends and relatives and even if they didn’t know what it was all about, anyone with their ear to the ground will know something’s afoot. And I think the guy has demonstrated that he knows what we’re up to. Not to mention you being followed.’ Something I didn’t tell Tim was the spooky feeling I had that we were being watched even now. I’ll be watching . I looked around. Sometimes the safest place was in a crowd. Nothing but shoppers everywhere, and no one I’d seen more than once today. I shrugged deeper into my jacket.