Rainstone Fall (17 page)
‘Hairy, evil-smelling dwarf –’
‘You know him?’ I interrupted in astonishment.
‘No, restharrow, you twit! It’s a dwarf shrub, grows like a weed all over the place near my parents’ house in Devon, and it stinks. Strange name to give your house but I guess it takes all sorts.’
‘I’ve come to that conclusion myself recently.’
Monkton Farleigh was a pretty one-eyed village roughly halfway between Bath and Bradford-on-Avon. As soon as I’d reached the top of Bathford Hill and the road emerged from the woodland I turned left. After barely a mile I came to a row of three cottages on my left where a tall blonde woman cheerfully herded a clutch of kids into her front garden. I resisted the temptation to ask directions to Restharrow. People would surely remember a man on a vintage motorcycle asking questions once the famous Penny Black had disappeared. Instead I simply rattled along, past church, high street, pub and manor, and before I knew it I was out the other side, leaving the village behind. It took me a while, pottering along various narrow lanes bound by hedgerows, until I found what I was looking for. I was lucky that the place announced itself as Restharrow in faded gilt lettering on a rustic wooden sign stuck to the stone wall that faced the lane. It was not what I had expected. I had been certain a wealthy – even if retired – stamp collector would live in a grander place but quickly reminded myself that any period cottage within a certain radius of Bath was now considered to be worth a small fortune. It was a substantial enough place though and somehow dark, almost sinister, standing alone at a fork in the tree-shaded lane, surrounded by a stone wall just high enough to keep livestock out and sheltered by hedges to the north and west at the back. Two enormous walnut trees teeming with squirrels overshadowed house and garden. There was no garage but a covered car port containing a gleaming blue Jaguar.
Apparently all we had was three days. That didn’t leave much time to establish what the man’s routines were, who else might be living here or coming and going on a regular basis. I allowed myself less than a minute in front of the house with the engine idling, pretending to be answering a text message while snapping pictures of the place with my phone. The front garden was lushly overgrown in the kind of extreme laissez-faire style of horticulture I approved of. I was just about to pull away when a man appeared from the passage between the house and the car port. He was a lean man in his late sixties, had sparse silver hair and wore mustard-coloured trousers, a collarless white shirt and bright yellow Marigolds. He was dragging a bulging green refuse bag behind him.
I put away my mobile. It was that movement rather than the sound of the engine which made him look across. Perhaps I could still have ridden off but the way he adjusted his thin gold spectacles on his nose to scrutinize me made me decide it might look suspicious. Instead I pulled in closer to the open double gate on the drive and parked the bike. He let his bag drop now and surveyed my appearance and the motorbike, screwing up his face with the intensity of a man who has missed several eye-tests. The iron gate was the same height as the wall, about four feet and therefore largely symbolic.
‘I’m a bit lost, I’m afraid,’ I ventured.
He didn’t immediately answer, instead he came towards me and after nodding at my tattered jacket rather than me began inspecting the bike. ‘Norton, thought so,’ he said with the croaky voice of someone who hasn’t spoken a word all day. He elaborately cleared his throat.
‘Yes, she’s recently been restored after a crash. They did a beautiful job,’ I explained.
‘Sorry, you have to speak up, I’m afraid I didn’t put my deaf-aids in this morning.’ He tapped both his ears in explanation.
‘Recently restored,’ I repeated loudly.
‘I remember when they first started making this model. I had an Ariel at the time, the 600 cc side-valve.’
‘The side-valve, right . . .’ Fortunately nothing more seemed to be required of me. Otherwise I’d have been forced to admit that where you stuck your valves on a bike was a matter of supreme indifference to me.
After spending a few minutes in the golden age of motorcycling he eventually came back to the present. ‘Was there something you wanted?’
‘Just directions, really. I was looking for a scenic route to Melksham and got lost.’
‘Ah, well, you’re not so very lost. I have a map of the area, I’ll show you.’
I followed him to his front door. He snapped off the Marigolds. ‘I try and keep the garden going but I find it a bit of a struggle. My wife used to look after that side of things of course. I’m not green-fingered at all, I’m afraid.’
‘You could perhaps get a gardener to look after it for you . . .?’
‘I suppose I could at that,’ he said as though the thought had never occurred to him before. ‘Right, if you wait a minute I’ll get the map.’ He slapped the Marigolds on to the newel post and left me standing by a painted milk urn full of walking sticks while he went upstairs, one hand firmly on the banister. I looked around the gloomy hall. I thought I could detect the so-called female touch in the choice of coloured wallpaper and framed botanical drawings but also sensed a certain edge of neglect in the dirt trodden into the expensive carpet, the layer of dust on everything and even of time slowly running down in the sedate ticking of the longcase clock at the foot of the stairs. Rufus Connabear lived alone and didn’t employ a cleaner or a gardener, I concluded. I tiptoed into the kitchen. This was quite clean and tidy with a simple wooden table playing host to neat piles of letters and other papers, weighted down with clean coffee mugs. Through the window above the sink I could see into the shady garden with its overcrowded beds and overgrown hedge. The old-fashioned back door, I noted with satisfaction, had no security features beyond a simple lock and key.
Back in the hall, while listening for footsteps from above, I peered through the open door into the sitting room. Too many pieces of furniture had been crammed in here; an olive-green three-piece suite, a separate large armchair in a similar colour that nevertheless didn’t quite match. There were underemployed bookshelves on two walls. A sideboard, a small table and several plant stands featuring pots minus the plants completed the clutter. The room had windows back and front, though the back windows were almost completely blocked against the light by the dense foliage of some kind of evergreen outside, making the overstuffed room more gloomy than necessary. Still no sound of footsteps. Now or never. I took a deep breath, crossed the room to the back windows and unlatched the nearest one without actually opening it. Just then I could hear movement above and gained the hall in a hectic bit of tiptoe work around the plant stands as Connabear’s legs appeared on the stairs.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ he said as he descended in a careful fashion. ‘I was sure I could lay my hands on it easily but it proved not to be where I thought it was. I found it in the end, though. Come through,’ he added. In the kitchen he spread out his Ordnance Survey map of the area and pointed out where we were and my best route to Melksham from his front door. It was quite ludicrously simple which made me suspect he had fetched the map simply for something to do, or for a moment of company. Soon he was back on our first subject, telling me more about the development of Ariel and Norton motorcycles than I could possibly hope to remember and laying a papery hand on my arm whenever I made a move towards the door. It was another fifteen minutes until I was allowed outside to mount the Norton again and even then one of his hands remained firmly on the handlebar while he lamented the number of cars on the roads and the discourtesy of today’s drivers. Even though I vigorously agreed with him on this last point I could hardly wait to get out there amongst them once more.
Eventually he let me go and I gave him a cheery wave as I rumbled away down the lane. I would report what little I had found out to Tim and trust to his expertise to get at the stamp, though I hoped I had made things easier for us by opening the latch on the downstairs window. Thanks to Connabear’s directions I was soon back on the A363, returning to Bath. When I drew into the yard at Mill House, however, I could see from Annis’s face as she stood in the door, nodding at what was being said to her on the cordless phone, that we had fresh problems. She handed me the phone.
Tim was at the other end of the line, sounding unusually troubled. ‘I’m being followed. Absolutely everywhere. Go turn your confuser on, I’ll mail the guys to you.’
Up in my attic office I cranked up my computer, then checked my mail. He had sent me three pictures he had taken that day; one, a grainy image probably taken on his mobile of two men, casually dressed, late twenties, early thirties. The location looked like the university car park. The other two pictures were taken with a better camera from Tim’s sitting-room window. They showed the same men on the other side of Tim’s street, about fifty yards to the left. In the first they were sitting in a blue Vauxhall, the passenger with his arm out of the window, adjusting the wing mirror. Both had sharp haircuts and looked wide awake. In the second picture one of them was just returning to the car with a shopping bag from the nearby Co-op.
‘I don’t recognize them,’ said Annis, looking over my shoulder.
I called Tim back. ‘Yeah, I got them but we don’t know them. When did you pick them up?’
‘Oh, they were here when I drove to work but of course I didn’t suspect anything then. When I spotted them again at my lunch break I started to take notice, and when I had to cross the campus in the middle of the afternoon and they were there, waiting, I got suspicious. Took a picture of them on the phone. They followed me home, though to give them their dues I didn’t spot their car behind me, so they know how to follow people. They’re still down there, still sitting in the car, eating. Man, you know you’ve landed a shit job when all your food is triangular and your drinks come in plastic bottles.’
‘Don’t tell them that. Did you see them talking into phones or radios?’
‘No. And they seem to have run out of things to say to each other. Most of the time they’re just sitting there.’
‘Are they trying to be discreet or do they want you to know they are there?’
‘Oh no, they’re pretending not to be there.’
‘They’re probably fuzz-balls then,’ I concluded rashly. ‘There’s two ways to go about it. You can pretend you haven’t noticed and then give them the slip or you go out there and confront them.’ I couldn’t see any other possibilities because right now I wanted Tim here at Mill House so we could make a move towards getting at the Penny Black.
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Chris.’ Tim spoke slowly, still thinking. ‘If they’re fuzz then they could only be here for two things, the break-in at Telfer’s house or something I pulled off a very long time ago. The best thing is to pretend I haven’t noticed them and do nothing suspicious at all. I’m just an IT guy at Bath Uni, doing my normal day-to-day stuff and I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Did Annis tell you about the new job the bastard has lined up for us?’
‘She did.’
‘Well, then you know I need you here right now. There’s not much time. Try and give them the slip.’
‘I don’t like it, Chris. I thought I’d lost them on the way home and yet they reappeared.’
‘That’s because they know where you live, dummy.’
‘And do you think they don’t know we’re mates and where
you
live? If we go breaking into the stamp-man’s place together it’ll be like bringing my own arresting officers with me. We can’t risk that. You’ll have to do it yourself.’
‘But I’m rubbish at that kind of thing.’ Eloquent silence at Tim’s end. ‘Feel free to contradict me at any point. And he’s bound to have the thing in a safe.’
‘You won’t know that until you’ve been looking. But even if he has . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I could perhaps lend you my gear, show you how to work it . . . but I think it’s best we don’t have direct contact at the moment. You had a look at the house, did he seem to have lots of security?’
‘None, as far as I could see,’ I admitted. Rufus Connabear didn’t even have double glazing to shut the draught out, let alone locks on the windows to keep out burglars.
‘There you go. You can have a stab at it then. A kid could do the place over. Only be careful, just because you can’t see security doesn’t always mean there isn’t any, though most people make it obvious to discourage you from even trying. How many people live in the house?’
‘I think the guy lives alone. He’s retirement age and a bit deaf.’
‘There you go, if it’s in a safe you can use dynamite. Just kidding. You’ll have no problems, mate, it’ll be a doddle . . .’
Tim was right of course but breaking into people’s houses, even though I’d done it before, all in a good cause, you understand, wasn’t a task I relished.
‘I’ll come with you if you like,’ Annis offered. ‘As long as we don’t have to climb up ladders or go up drainpipes.’ Annis was fearless at sea level but couldn’t stand heights.
‘No, there’s no point. The fewer bodies on this journey the better.’ Especially with someone as accident prone as me at the helm. ‘I’ll do it by myself and I’ll do it tonight.’
The feeble beam of the Norton’s headlamp was half drowned by the downpour and illuminated nothing but ten yards of rain bouncing hard off the slickened tarmac on the nightblack lane. I approached the house from the other side, that way I could avoid going through Monkton Farleigh; the otherworldly exhaust note of the machine might stick in the minds of light sleepers in the village. Despite having pored over a map earlier I had no exact idea how far away from Restharrow I was, but when at last I spotted a passing place in the lane that wasn’t filled with several inches of water I gratefully parked the bike, stuffed my gloves into the helmet and hung it on the handlebars. The rain had returned at midnight and had fallen relentlessly out of black skies since then, yet I had eschewed Annis’s offer of the Landy. It was much easier to find a place for stashing the bike than a bulky Land Rover. The drawbacks of using two wheels however became quickly obvious: I was wet, very, very wet. I shivered inside my rain-heavy, sodden gear and set off. My left boot had sprung a leak and before long I had managed to step into a good-sized puddle with it and was miserably squelching along in near total darkness. I had hoped to negotiate my way to the house by starlight but with a hundred per cent cloud cover and pouring rain I was soon forced to use the Mini Maglite I had brought. After five minutes of trudging along the undulating lane I realized I had parked too far from the house. A couple of minutes later I was wondering whether to go back and move the Norton when Restharrow appeared as if out of nowhere, looming darker in the darkness on my right. I killed the light and stood in the big, cold, wet darkness for a while. It yielded nothing. No light was showing at the house. In fact there was no light anywhere and I couldn’t hear a thing beyond the relentless rain. I wondered how weather affected the burglary figures but not for long because this burglary couldn’t wait for a balmy summer’s evening. The only good thing about the heavy rain was that it might help to mask little sounds, like me squelching off the road and walking painfully into a fence I hadn’t seen. I clicked the torch on at short intervals to get my bearings then tried to battle on without it but the darkness out here seemed complete. After slipping and falling once, bumping my knee against the stone wall twice and repeatedly getting my jacket caught on invisible snags I’d had enough and turned on the torch for good. I was bound to make less noise that way.
I managed to scramble over the wall – a child would have done it in half the time – towards the back of the garden and dropped into a muddy flowerbed on the other side. Something hard and thorny travelled up my trouser leg as I did and sliced my calf open as I came down. Before I could stop myself I had informed the darkness in pithy, monosyllabic words of what I thought about this development.
Well, Rufus Connabear was either still asleep or he wasn’t. If he was awake and looking out of his windows then he’d be calling the police about now, if not then I had the smallest chance of getting away with this lunatic effort. I had to keep the torch on all the time now just to avoid big pots full of dead-looking plants everywhere and some concrete bunny rabbits with scary, knowing smiles. At last I got to the back of the cottage and the dense evergreen shrubs that obscured the window I had unlocked on my previous visit. I had to crouch low and come up close to the wall to get through there at all. The windows opened outwards. I put the Maglite in my mouth and got my fingernails under the frame and pulled. Nothing. I pulled harder. More nothing. I got out my keys and used one as a lever. It bent. I trained the torch beam higher to where the latch was. It
looked
open. Of course when I’d unfastened the latch earlier I hadn’t had time to try whether the window actually opened. For all I knew it had been painted shut three generations ago. I fought my way out of the wet and scratchy shrub and decided I was already thoroughly cheesed off with the way my night was panning out. Having squeezed under the tiny ornamental porch of the back door for some shelter I fumbled with muddy hands for a cigarette that was already drooping with dampness when I prized it out of the packet. Miraculously I got it lit. For a brief moment I stood there, pressed against the kitchen door, and enjoyed the illusion of warmth my smoke provided until a large and well-aimed drop of rain extinguished the glow with a hiss. Disgusted, I flicked the wet thing into the darkness; one for the forensic boys.
Plan B: I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tried the door handle. The door was locked, but it was always worth a try.
Plan C then: I shone my torch through the little glass pane closest to the lock. Sure enough, the key was in the door. I got the glass cutters out and one of those hooks with suction nipples we used for hanging tea towels from. I stuck the nipple on to the pane, gave it a tug to test it was on, then cut a triangle out of the glass. Holding on to the hook with one hand I gave it a tap with the cutter’s handle and it snapped loose. I eased it out and let it fall into the nearest flowerpot. Through the resulting hole I could now easily reach the key. I turned it very slowly, then tried the door handle again. The lock was disengaged but the door still didn’t want to open. There had to be a bolt somewhere. At the top? At the bottom? Both? The bottom one would hold me up for at least five minutes but most people stopped bothering with it after a while because it meant bending down, so made do with the one at the top. Or they installed a cat flap, which rendered the bolt meaningless, as anyone could simply reach through.
I engaged the cutter again at the top pane of glass and it snapped out as easily as the first. Reaching through I found the bolt and wriggled it back, a fraction of an inch at a time, until the door eased open. I looked down. Sure enough, there was an identical bolt at the bottom which had not been engaged. I slipped inside and gently clicked the door shut behind me. The noise of the rain fell away. Standing still in the kitchen I listened: water dripping off me on to the floor; a fridge-freezer humming near the door. The workings of the grandfather clock in the hall seemed monstrously loud. I crept forward and was appalled at the squelching sound my left boot produced. Putting weight only on to the heel stopped the noise but didn’t exactly make me feel sure-footed. First I investigated the sitting room. I had a strong feeling the stamp collection would be upstairs but would feel like an idiot if I had braved the stairs and the whole of the first floor with Connabear asleep only to later find what I was looking for downstairs. Some of the bookshelves had drawers at the bottom. At first I thought I’d hit pay dirt when I found fat albums wedged into one but they turned out to be full of deckle-edged black and white prints of people taking cycling holidays. I closed the heavy drawer carefully, straightened up, turned and swept an ornament off the shelf with the little black rucksack I’d forgotten I was carrying. It hit the thick carpet with a horribly loud thump but didn’t break. I put it back where I thought it had been. It was another bunny rabbit and seemed to have the same evil smile as its larger cousins in the garden. After having managed to squeeze around the sofas, armchairs, tables and plant stands without knocking anything else over I started on the dreaded stairs. I just knew they would creak at some point, no matter how lightly I trod, and sure enough, the last but one groaned loudly as I stood on it. I froze. My breath seemed so loud I was sure it could be heard for miles around. I waited, ready for flight should I hear the slightest sound, but nothing happened. Eventually I gathered the nerve to take the last two steps. I stood in the thickly carpeted upstairs corridor, carefully playing the torch beam about. There were five doors, all of them closed apart from the one at the end. From there vitreous china sparkled in the torch beam, which made it a safe bet for being a bathroom. This still left a bewildering choice of doors. At all times while thinking about the break-in I had firmly held in my mind an image of one closed door – with Connabear comfortably and noisily snoring behind it – and the others open for me to wander in and out of until I’d located the Penny Black.
I crept along the corridor and listened at each door in turn for Rufus Connabear’s breathing or perhaps a helpful little snuffle. Not a sound behind any of them. It suddenly struck me that I hadn’t bothered to check whether his car was sheltering in the port, so for all I knew Connabear and his Jag might be miles away, heading for France on a cross-Channel ferry, let’s say. Dream on.
There was no easy solution, I simply had to open one of the doors and see what I’d find. Obviously I had a one in four chance of getting it right first time, though, not being a betting man, how the odds changed after that was a bit hazy in my mind. Anyway, I told myself as I turned the first brass door knob, my chances sounded pretty good to my non-mathematical brain. Pointing the torch down the hall so that only reflected light would fall into the room I opened the door very slowly. I could make out a kind of padded seat and then the bottom of a bed. Was the bed occupied? I strained my hearing but couldn’t be sure. I stuck my head through the gap. The bed was empty and I remembered to breathe again. Widening the crack I padded inside to have a look around. I could use the torch quite freely now. There were no signs of recent occupation but for a spare room it had some character, with more books on shelves and tiny framed watercolours on the walls, and the ill-judged addition of a rabbit ornament here and there. I went through the chest of drawers to the left of the window – it was full of linen. Under the bed were lengths of curved tubular aluminium, perhaps part of an exercise machine, and fluff. The place smelled unused and dusty. Not bothering to close the door I moved to the next. Even putting my ear right against it I heard nothing above the rain that the wind flung against the blind window in the corridor. It suddenly occurred to me that now I had a one in three chance of opening the wrong door. How had that happened? How had the odds turned so dramatically against me? Perhaps it was simply a ‘glass half-full/half-empty’ situation? Or should that be quarter-empty, I really wasn’t sure . . .
Telling myself to get a grip I turned the brass knob and opened the door a fraction. All I could make out was an ornate secretaire and chair by the uncurtained window but my nose told me that this room had to be occupied. The moist and stale fug of sleep hung unmistakably in the air, together with the sound of my hammering heart. Connabear’s bedroom. With him in it. Was the Penny Black there too? I didn’t want to admit to that possibility yet. Creeping about in his bedroom while the man was asleep had to be the absolute last resort. Needing hearing aids to communicate easily with people was different from being profoundly deaf. I was sure sooner or later he’d hear me rummaging so close to him. Anyway, it was pitch dark, I’d have to use my torch and if nothing else surely that would wake him. If he woke up the shock of finding me there might give him a heart attack. Or me.
The next door seemed different. There was just not enough wall space on either side for it to be anything but a walk-in cupboard or another bathroom perhaps. I moved on to the last door. To make sure, I listened again, in case I had been wrong about the man living by himself. This was it. This just had to be the room where he kept his pet cobras and poisonous jumping spiders. I took even longer turning the knob and easing the door open since I’d been too scared to close the bedroom door again and I felt sure the tiniest squeak might wake him. As soon as the gap was wide enough I squeezed through and gratefully closed the door behind me. I found the light switch and flicked it on. After creeping around by torchlight it seemed insanely bright and scary but would speed up my search. It would probably show under the door so I had to be quick; didn’t old people get up to go to the loo a lot at night?
I was standing in a fair-sized study, the main feature of which was a mahogany desk and dark leather chair. On the tidy desk sat phone, blotter, brass lamp and leather picture frame holding a small black and white photo. Either side of the window stood wooden filing cabinets that matched the wood of the desk, and two bookshelves to my right completed the furnishings. They were stuffed with what looked like reference books and at least one complete encyclopedia. On the wall behind the desk hung a framed landscape painting, done with more enthusiasm than skill in oily impasto. I made straight for it as the likeliest place to hide a safe and lifted it off the wall. No wall safe, I was glad to see. I hadn’t really meant to lift the picture completely off the hook and now I found it hard to marry the hook and nail again. I rested it on the floor, rolled the chair closer to the wall, then picked up the painting again and climbed gingerly up. Then I stopped. What was I doing? I was a burglar, there was no need to clear up after myself, the main thing was to find the daft stamp and get the hell out again. But since I was already up there . . . Before I managed to get the framed horror back on the nail the door flew open, making me scream with surprise and nearly lose my balance.
‘Don’t move, you bastard! Put that down!’ Even in his black pyjamas Connabear looked wide awake. He was wearing both his hearing aids and pointing both barrels of his shotgun at me. And he looked furious. As for his contradictory demands I chose not moving as the safer option. ‘It’s you,’ he said next. The disappointment in his croaky voice was obvious but he seemed to shrug it off quickly. ‘Put that painting back on the wall.’
‘Okay, just don’t do anything rash with that gun.’ I fumbled some more with the hook and at last caught the nail.
‘Now put your hands up and get your filthy boots off my chair.’
I stepped down with my hands up. Something in the way he held the gun convinced me that it was loaded and that old Rufus had experience in handling it.
He nodded his head up at the daub. ‘You weren’t really going to steal that, were you? My wife painted that.’
Now I noticed the initials in the bottom-right corner, P.C. ‘Well, ehm, it’s rather nice,’ I lied. ‘I’m a painter myself, so I have an eye for these things.’