Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

Unencumbered by any Rodins the constable gained on me quickly, no longer shouting but saving his breath for the sprint and leap. I skidded against the little gate and had to step back to give it room to open and squeezed through. The dark shape of the officer filled my vision as I put the gate between us and fiddled the bicycle lock through the iron staple. He threw himself against it, breathing hard, just as I managed to shut the lock and twist the combination lock. He reached through the bars of the gate and made a grab for my jacket but I yanked myself free and staggered on along the colonnade, with the shouts of police and the roar of the weir in my ears.

Annis was waiting for me at the end of the walkway. ‘You got the damn thing then. You’ve been ages,’ she hissed and vaulted lightly back over the balustrade. I didn’t dignify her comment with an answer since, as usual, I didn’t have the breath to argue. I clambered over and gripped the handrail hard to steady myself. Everything seemed to be moving in the wind, the dinghy bucked, the river swirled. I practically fell into the boat and simply wanted to lie where I was but had to shrug out of the rucksack to untie the painter. Annis pulled the starter on the engine. There was no time to fiddle with the knot so I cut the rope. Annis pulled the cord again. Nothing. I lunged at the landing stage but it was too late, we were slipping away, accelerating fast in the current. Annis ripped the starter cord ever more frantically, again and again. Against the backdrop of the thunderous foaming of the weir it looked a soundless, futile exercise. The boat started its unstoppable race. It slewed sideways towards the drop of the weir. There were two paddles at the bottom of the boat. We both grabbed for them simultaneously while exchanging monosyllabic comments on the situation and started shovelling at the black water.

‘Not upstream, that’s hopeless!’ Annis called. ‘We can’t get away, the current’s too strong. We’ll have to go over the weir, but bow first or we’ll capsize!’

She was right. Without engine power we had no hope of fighting the greedy suction pulling the boat into the dark. We had to ride the chaotic white water that boiled and thundered and waited to engulf us.

It happened in a matter of seconds. Both of us paddled on the same side now, trying to point the boat bow-first at the weir, but we were carried across the side of the horseshoe before we had managed to change direction even a fraction. It felt like being swallowed by a screaming monster with an excess of saliva. For a moment I was deaf and blind and the boat appeared to be completely submerged. I gasped for air, swallowed water instead and reappeared coughing and spluttering, with a coughing and spluttering Annis next to me. By some miracle we were both still in the boat. Then we seemed to skate across the surface, the swirling waters twirling the dinghy round and round until we hit a calmer stretch alongside the bank of Parade Gardens. The boat was brimful of water but still floated on.

I quickly summed up the situation. ‘Blimey!’ I looked back. I couldn’t make out much detail in the rain but imagined I could see two figures peering down over the balustrade of Grand Parade into the spume and foam of the weir. We had come a long way very quickly and the current was still pushing us along. We added paddle power to that and soon disappeared from sight under North Parade Bridge, the curve of the river taking us all the while further from the museum.

‘Now what?’ I complained. ‘If we keep going this way we’ll end up in Bristol. Home’s the other way.’

‘Typical. A minute ago we nearly drowned but already you’re quibbling about my driving. We’ve got to get off this river pronto or they’ll scoop us up like a rubber duck.’

‘There’s bound to be a landing place coming up soon.’ At the moment the sheer sides of the river banks didn’t offer the faintest hope of getting out. The old railway bridge hove into view but when we passed under it there wasn’t even a handhold. Annis was right, we had to get off the river quickly and disappear into the night. As the Avon gently curved right I spotted an irregularity in the uniform dark of the left bank. ‘On the left, let’s make for that darker splodge.’

‘Dark splodge coming up.’

I recognized the place. ‘I know where this is, an arm of the Kennet and Avon joins here, there’s a lock on the other side of that opening.’

‘You want to go in there?’

‘No, a bit further, is that steps? Up ahead.’

I was right. Only a few yards beyond the gloomy arch of the lock a series of concrete steps led up to the towpath. Kneeling in the bows I managed to grab the handrail and steady the boat while Annis heaved the rucksack on to the steps and climbed out after it.

‘What about the boat? We can’t leave them the boat. They find that, they find us.’

‘I know. Shame though,’ I answered and started stabbing the dinghy with my pocket knife. It deflated quickly and crumpled under me. I made it on to the safety of the steps just before the weight of the outboard pulled the entire thing bubbling and hissing into the murky depth of the Avon. The two paddles took off downriver into the darkness.

‘Jake will be pleased.’

‘Perhaps not. His wife might be though.’ Yet I couldn’t help feeling that Jake would be unsurprised at the outcome. He tended not to expect things he lent me to come back in any usable format.

‘Now what?’ Annis asked as we gained the towpath.

‘Now? Now we’ll take the long way home.’

She shouldered the rucksack and expressed her disapproval of Monsieur Rodin in words of extreme yet eloquent economy.

‘Dysentery, cholera and dengue fever is what you’ll get,’ presaged the oracle by the fire. ‘How much river water did you swallow?’

‘Enough to last me a lifetime, thanks.’ Annis shivered theatrically and followed it up with a very real sneeze and a trumpeting blow into a wad of tissues.

It had taken us hours of staggering about in the rain through dark side streets, hiding from every car engine we heard, before we eventually made it back to the Landy and finally home. What we had feared most during our wanderings, the sound of a helicopter overhead, never materialized. Perhaps the weather was too bad to fly, perhaps they’d been attending elsewhere. By the time we got to the Land Rover we were both frozen and shivering.

‘I’d happily kill you for a mug of hot soup,’ Annis admitted. I gave her a muesli bar and told her to drive us home before we perished from hypothermia.

After a shower, some hot coffee and an awful lot of toast I was beginning to revive but Annis seemed to have come off worse. As she pointedly pointed out she’d waited around in the cold and rain for me for ages while I clambered all over roofs and scaffolds, keeping warm .

‘Is it too early to try Jill again?’ she asked. ‘I worry about her. If she hasn’t been home as you say then what can have happened to her?’

I dialled her mobile again. This time I got her voicemail service and left a message. ‘Hi Jill, just letting you know that everything went fine. We got the. . item and hopefully we’ll swap it soon for. . something more interesting. But we’re a bit worried, not having heard from you at all. Give us a call when you get this message.’ I put my phone away and shrugged, but secretly I’d been worrying about Jill’s nerves.

‘She might have gone to stay with her sister,’ Tim suggested. ‘It must be lonely for her in Harley Street, with her son’s stuff all over the place and no one to talk to.’

Annis nodded. ‘True. Her sister’s in Trowbridge, that’s not so far. Or she could have gone to stay with friends in Bristol. She might even have decided that Craig, her ex-boyfriend, had his uses after all. Have we got an address for him? We haven’t, have we?’