Peter Helton - Rainstone Fall

What we called a studio at Mill House was really a leaky old barn at the top of the meadow, with the rattly windows I’d botched into one side creating on all but the brightest days the kind of medieval gloom Caravaggio would have killed for. It was a stormy afternoon in October and I’d lit the pot-bellied stove for the first time that autumn. Despite rainwater dripping into old pots and buckets here and there it was quite cosy. My world smelled of freshly brewed coffee, of logs and wood smoke and Venice turpentine, and I should have known it was too good to last. The stove was temperamental at the best of times but in this kind of weather it tended to puff smoke at you like a startled dragon. There’d only be a few hours of thin light left today and I was impatient to get on with some work. Simon Paris Fine Art had offered me a show in February. It was the graveyard shift, of course, but since I had missed my usual autumn slot through a complete lack of new paintings I couldn’t really be choosy.

The wind-up radio, never the best of receivers down here in the valley, howled and crackled. I turned it off. The forecast had been for fifty m.p.h. winds with gusts of up to seventy but in here it sounded very much like they had got it wrong. It was a lot worse than that. The whole structure creaked and boomed. Rain hammered against the streaming windows.

The door slammed open and Annis flew in. ‘Blimey, it ripped the door right out of my hand.’ She pushed it shut against the rain and leaf-laden wind, pulled the hood back on her cagoule and the cordless phone out of a pocket. ‘Client for you,’ she announced, holding it out to me.

Annis is a painter, like me. Thankfully that’s where the similarities end since it is mainly the differences I appreciate: unlike me she is five foot eight, female, strawberry blonde, lithe and athletic, has a beautiful butterscotch voice and perfect poise. A few years ago when she was still an art student she simply appeared at Mill House unannounced, a bit like a cat really, and has been living and painting here ever since. What do you expect me to do about it? She works with me on the private eye side of things when she feels like it. And we do share a bed sometimes but it’s by no means an exclusive arrangement since there’s also Tim. Of whom more later.

‘Are you going to answer the phone or just stand there staring at me?’

‘I’m too busy to take on clients right now,’ I protested. I folded my arms in front of my chest like a stroppy kid and refused to touch it.

‘Okay.’ She tossed the phone high in the air and shrugged her shoulders. ‘You tell him that.’

I caught it just before it dashed itself to pieces on the floor, pressed the talk button and acknowledged my presence with what I hoped was a discouraging grunt.

‘Aqua Investigations.’

‘Giles Haarbottle here, I trust you remember me, Mr Honeysett?’

Haarbottle worked at Griffin’s, the insurers, who often came to us to sort out the trickier cases, things they wouldn’t want their own staff to do but were happy enough to let a mug like me take on. I just wasn’t in the mood. And yes, I did remember him but hadn’t been pining for his company.

‘I’m not sure why I still call you,’ he complained. ‘You turned down the last two jobs we offered you recently and we had to find other agencies to fit us in. But we do appreciate the work you do for us, when you can be bothered.’

I walked over to the draughty windows and stared out at the house and the outbuildings through the rain and swirling leaves. All the trees I could see from here were waving at me like overexcited lunatics. Even though I should have known better by now a small part of me still believed that wind was caused by trees waving their branches about. The big oak at the top of the meadow had already dropped several that would eventually end up in the fireplace.

‘It’s a surveillance job that could run for a while, so we need to negotiate rates accordingly. We were judged to be liable for compensation in the case of. .’

I wasn’t even listening. What kind of a moron would want to take a job standing at street corners in this kind of weather? Answer: the kind of moron who watched with disbelief a patch of tiles on the roof of his house come loose, slither and tumble, then pulverize as they hit the ground. Oh, no, please don’t do that, that looks expensive. .

I must have spoken out loud because Haarbottle asked: ‘ Pardon ?’ At the same time a fist of wind picked up the barn roof, gave it a good shake, then ripped off a selection of tiles and corrugated metal.

‘I’d be delighted to take the job,’ I shouted over the sudden noise as debris and rain clattered over everything, including me. Annis was already rushing around, rescuing canvases and covering our easels with sheets and rags.

‘Splendid.’ Haarbottle did sound surprised. ‘Let’s meet tomorrow lunchtime like civilized people,’ he suggested. ‘The Bathtub at one?’

By first light the storm had blown itself out and left behind a damp, bright and messy day to survey the damage in. Both the house and the studio had developed bald patches and debris lay everywhere. Broken tiles had landed on the roof of my black DS21, known alternatively as a ‘fine classic Citroën’ (by me) or ‘that Frog rust bucket’ (by the guy who does the welding on it). Of course if the whole roof had slithered on to Annis’s battered and equally ancient Land Rover you would hardly have noticed the difference. The willows by the mill pond had fared worst, shedding many limbs, several into the pond; that would need clearing now. A collection of branches and a plug of leaves and other debris had accumulated in the mill race too and the stream went noisily through, over and around it. The sagging outbuildings on the other side of the yard hadn’t fared too badly, I thought, or perhaps they were so dilapidated I just couldn’t tell the difference. I had called a firm of roofers first thing in the morning, along with everyone else in Bath, it appeared. Around noon three guys bounced down the potholed track to the house in a shabby lorry densely loaded with planks and ladders. They largely ignored me, spent half an hour fixing cobalt blue tarpaulin on both roofs and got back into the lorry. While the driver performed a twelve-point turn in the puddled yard they said they could only do emergency repairs right now and would be back one day, perhaps, if I promised to hand over my life savings. Which sharply reminded me: I didn’t have any.

I left Annis in the studio at her easel, muttering darkly about ‘blue light’ and ‘subaquatic conditions’ under the snapping tarp, then got into the car and followed the roofers up the track. Everywhere lay twigs and branches and I spotted two more blue tarpaulins on roofs in the valley before I’d even reached the London Road. While I joined the slow procession into town I lost count of the scaffolds adorning house fronts. Keeping two-hundred-year-old houses standing upright was quite a job in itself and high winds didn’t help. Many a decorative urn that in the eighteenth century was firmly anchored to the parapet was now secured by little more than a smudge of rust. And once a few tourists had been flattened by bits of the famous masonry. .

Such cheerful thoughts helped to pass the time pleasantly until I got into the centre. It was too late to be creative about parking so I drove straight into the constipated bowels of the multi-storey affair next to Waitrose. I got lucky and shoehorned the DS into a space just vacated by a car half its size and thirty years its junior and walked out the back door on to Pulteney Bridge, which might look like the Ponte Vecchio from the back but presents a very English front. Then I took a left into little Grove Street.