Rainstone Fall (26 page)
I let the Land Rover crawl slowly down the slope to where Gemma’s old Volvo was parked. The narrow beam of my headlights picked out her car, with its hatch at the back wide open, the shepherd’s hut and the caravan in sharp, rain-glistened detail, while appearing to pour black ink over everything else. When I had brought the two cars nose to nose I killed the engine but left the lights on and cranked down the window. Earthy smells of dank vegetation rushed into the cab, replacing the oily fug thrown up by the engine. All I could hear was the thrumming of rain on the cab’s roof and the splashing and trickling all about. I got out into the mud and rain, pulled the blanket closer around me and approached the caravan. The door was wide open, a rectangle of blackness against the dirty white of the exterior.
‘That’s close enough,’ came the commanding voice from inside. ‘Stay right there.’
The surge of a powerful engine behind me made me turn around. Headlights on full beam dazzled me as I tried to make out what and who was approaching from behind. What eventually slowed and stopped close to the Land Rover was a black luxury van with wide tyres and permanent four-wheel drive. The engine stopped, the lights remained on, sending their beams deep into the plantation.
‘Who said you were allowed to wear a blanket?’ the voice from the caravan demanded as quiet returned. ‘Drop it!’
I let the blanket slide into the mud.
‘I see. Give us a twirl then, we all saw
Die Hard
.’
‘No, that’s all right, love, he hasn’t got anything squirrelled away up his backside,’ came the much-loathed voice of Detective Inspector Deeks from the side of the van. He coughed. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to speak in that stupid voice any more.’
Jill stepped out of the caravan, wearing a blue plastic rainproof and jeans with knee-high boots. She was holding a big lump of a revolver with both hands and gestured with it towards the Landy. ‘Go on, fetch the Rodin and stick it in the van.’
‘Watch where you’re pointing that gun, love, keep it on him.’ Deeks slid open the side door of the van.
To say that I felt exposed, cold and narked would sum it up neatly. ‘ Where’s Gem Stone, Deeks? What have you done with her?’
‘I’m all right, I’m in here.’ Gemma’s voice came muffled from inside the shepherd’s hut. ‘Sorry I couldn’t warn you, the bitch said she’d shoot you on the spot if I did.’
‘That’s okay then,’ I called back. I turned to the bitch in question. ‘Your son, Louis?’
‘There’s no such person, thank God.’
‘Jill’s not the least bit mumsy,’ Deeks said cheerfully. ‘Good at amateur dramatics, though. Go on, you heard what she said. Move the statue into the van.’
Jill gestured with the big revolver which seemed a little heavy for her. I stared at it hard.
Deeks noticed. ‘Looks familiar, doesn’t it? Stuff goes missing from police stations all the time, you know. Like your confiscated gun.’ Jill was pointing my own Webley at me. How annoying were these people?
‘You’ve given up on being a copper then? I’d heard you were bent but this is insane. You’ll never get away with it.’
‘That’s exactly what I’ll do, get away. Internal affairs have been sniffing about, I was warned by a loyal soul at Manvers Street. Time to get out, we thought, with a good starting capital. You’d be surprised what sterling still buys in some countries. Just a sec.’ Deeks tore a hole into the covering of the Rodin bundle and felt about until he had the envelope containing the Penny Black. ‘Carry on.’
I lifted the Rodin off the back and squelched across to the van. ‘You might find that the proceeds from this lot won’t go very far,’ I hinted.
‘That won’t matter much. I only wanted the stuff in Telfer’s safe because after we put his brother away he claimed to have video evidence he would use against me if he was ever arrested. Which was possible since I’d taken a bung from them more than once. I hate that arrogant shit so I came up with the idea of killing two birds with one stone, and you’re just as arrogant a shit as Telfer.’
The van was crammed full of boxes and one or two small pieces of antique furniture but there was just space for the Rodin near the door. I dropped it heavily into the van. ‘That haul disappeared into the night, presumably back to Telfer’s. So where’s your starting capital coming from?’
Jill waved the gun towards the shepherd’s hut. Deeks pulled an irritated face and took it from her, then pointed it firmly at me. ‘Go on, in the hut. Speed is of the essence, as they say. Amphetamines, Honeysett, is what they made at Lane End Farm, supplying Bristol and half the West Country. A nice little laboratory hidden among all those shipping containers. Only they’re a load of chemistry nerds, so Blackfield and I managed to rip them off to the tune of half a million each. Then I managed to rip Blackfield off, only he doesn’t know it yet, and now it’s time to go.’
Shivering and dripping, with Deeks prodding me from behind with my own revolver, I stumbled up the little steps and into the shepherd’s hut. Gemma, wearing nothing but black knickers and T-shirt, had been firmly tied with rope to the narrow armchair in the corner. Her black eye had turned a hellish shade of yellow now but I was glad to see there was no fresh evidence of violence on her face.
‘Take a seat, Honeysett,’ Deeks invited me.
I sat on the chair by the little table full of books. Jill squeezed into the overcrowded hut with a roll of nylon gardening twine and started by tying my hands behind me, then winding the thin but strong twine around me with an irritating grin on her face. ‘There you go, you can keep each other company for a while.’
Deeks growled. ‘Stop enjoying yourself and get on with it.’ There came a dull rumble, like distant thunder. ‘There goes the lab. Bit early. Time to go.’
‘Okay, I’m done.’ Jill ruffled my hair. ‘Nice knowing you.’
‘Just one thing,’ I asked. ‘Who killed the old guy, Albert?’
‘No time to chat, I’m afraid, that little woomph was the speed factory catching light.’ Deeks scooped up an armful of Gemma’s books. ‘You won’t need these any more.’
The moment the door was slammed shut, leaving us in semi-darkness, we both started trying to struggle out of our bindings. Jill really had enjoyed herself too much, the cord cut deeply into my chilled skin.
‘It was Blackfield,’ said Gemma.
‘What was?’ I was too busy wriggling to pay attention. I hadn’t liked the sound of ‘You won’t need these any more.’
‘Blackfield hit Albert to discourage him from cycling along his fence in search of mushrooms. He came off his electric bike. But he didn’t kill him, at least that’s what Deeks said.’
I could hear van doors sliding and slamming, then the sound of the big engine starting. Deeks and his girlfriend were leaving.
‘I’m a bit ahead of you in the wriggling game,’ Gemma said, grunting with effort. ‘I had a lot of time to try and get out of these while they were waiting for you and this is rope, there’s always some give. I think I’m nearly there.’
The engine of the van surged outside as Deeks turned and churned it up the hill, taking most of the light that fell through the little window with it. I had stopped shivering, not feeling quite so cold now. It took me only a few seconds to realize why when the first wisps of smoke rose from the floorboards.
I stated the obvious. ‘Shit, we’re on fire. I can smell paraffin, too.’
‘I use it for heating the greenhouse. At least it’s not petrol.’
The nylon cut my skin as I pulled and pulled. I didn’t manage to snap it but the twine stretched a little around my ankles. ‘It’s still raining, that’ll slow it down a bit.’
‘It’s not raining under the hut, though, is it?’ Gemma argued.
‘Good point.’ The hut began to fill with smoke and both of us started to cough. We’d die of smoke inhalation about five minutes before burning to a cinder. ‘Those gas bottles outside, they’re empty, right?’
‘Yup. All except one.’
‘Great. If I know Deeks at all then he’ll have stuffed it under the hut. At least it should be quick.
‘ I rocked the chair back and forth on to the front legs, hind legs, front legs, until on the last swing I ended up on my feet with the chair attached to my behind. I waddled the short distance across and threw myself at the cast-iron stove as hard as I could. I heard an encouraging crack and despite the pain joyfully threw myself at it again. One chair leg came adrift. It was enough to loosen the entire net of twine around me and I managed to kick and pull myself free. I opened the door. Flames were kindling the steps. The inrush of cold air helped me breathe easier, though every lungful made me cough. I grabbed Gemma’s armchair and dragged it to the door, yanked it outside with one big heave while the flames licked about us and we both tumbled over.
An eerie light reflected on to the Hollow from the rim behind the polytunnel, far too bright for just one burning laboratory. I ran into the caravan.
‘On the draining board!’ I heard Gemma call. I grabbed the bread knife and seconds later had cut her free of the tumbled armchair. I was trying to drag her away from the fire while she dragged me the other way. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘The gas bottle’s not in the fire, we can save the hut!’
She ran off towards the nearest water trough while I cut off the rest of the twine from my limbs, then I followed her.
‘What are those lights?’ she asked, throwing an empty watering can at me.
I could now see two blinding light sources shining down into the valley further on where Blackfield’s stalag amphetamine lab was. Had been. I wondered if the chemists had been inside when that went up. ‘No idea what they are.’ We ran back and started throwing water on to the fire, Gemma from a bucket, me with the plastic watering can. The floor of the hut was completely on fire now.
‘What’s that sound?’ she asked.
‘Helicopter.’ Even as I spoke the word a helicopter swooped across the Hollow, turning night into day with its powerful night-sun focused on us. I presumed it was friend, not foe, so I gave it a quick wave, then went on firefighting. A combination of rain, mud and Gemma’s determination to save her hut eventually defeated the fire. The helicopter remained hovering above the rim of the Hollow, shedding light on our labours. At last we realized we had done it and stopped. We were both still coughing, we were wet, covered in mud, and steam rose from our bodies in the cold light of the night-sun. We sank against each other, not quite in an embrace, just keeping each other from falling over. I was still too hot from running back and forth to feel the cold, despite being half naked. There were emergency sirens in the air.
A leather-clad Annis arrived on the Norton only half a minute ahead of her pursuers, slithering the Norton to a stop beside the Land Rover. ‘Blimey, looks like your usual style, Chris,’ she called over the helicopter noise. ‘I won’t ask why you’re both half naked but where’s Jill? Where’s the
boy
?’
My answer was drowned out when the helicopter swept closer and Detective Superintendent Needham and his convoy roared into the little herb farm, doors opening even before the cars had squelched to a halt.
I shivered as the cold began to get to me, but before I could even suggest to Gemma the loan of a towel Needham’s irate form hove into view from among the cars. ‘Chris Honeysett, you’re under arrest. And you, and you,’ pointing at Annis and Gemma. ‘Sorbie,’ he called to his Detective Sergeant who was following in his considerable wake, ‘read them their rights and arrest them properly, I just can’t be arsed today, I cannot be arsed.’
At least this time we hadn’t shot anyone. But that was about the only law we hadn’t broken, according to Detective Superintendent (‘Two-sugars’) Needham. The shock was not of being arrested – I had always expected that – but being arrested for all the right offences: breaking and entering, theft of the Rodin, obviously, the attempted theft of the Penny Black from Rufus Connabear, and the Telfer burglary. My suspicions were aroused even more when DS Sorbie seemed to have more detailed memory of the items we had nicked than I did.
Needham admitted it. ‘Deeks was bent. He was under investigation but we didn’t want to spook him by suspending him. We wanted to find as much evidence as possible and catch all his contacts, in and outside the force, that’s why I gave him DS Sorbie to run with, who did an excellent job of pretending to be his loyal sidekick. Deeks was under constant surveillance, of course. And then suddenly, though not atypically, I might add,
you
turned up in the middle of it all. We had to find out what was going on. So we put you and your lot under surveillance too for a while. I couldn’t really see you and Deeks working together. So we took a step back. I wanted whatever you got out of the Telfer place but had to make it look like a mugging. We got some of our esteemed colleagues from Bristol to do the job and I’m afraid they went a bit over the top, sorry about that. But amongst the crud you stole was a secretly filmed video of Deeks accepting money from Telfer, which will be enough in itself to put Deeks away for a while.’
‘Glad to have been of service.’
‘His involvement with the amphetamine factory on Blackfield’s land and six counts of attempted murder and two counts of arson is going to age the man even more.’
‘He tried to fry the drug chemists too?’
‘Tied up just like you. They were lucky we’d decided to give them a tug that very night. But it’s a huge place to raid. We had brought searchlights and generators on flat-back lorries and sixty officers, but Deeks and his woman had already rigged the place to burn and he was sitting in his van, waiting for you to drive into the Hollow, where Jill was waiting for you. The helicopter crew realized that your lives might be in danger when they detected the fire and stayed overhead to direct us to you. Otherwise Deeks would never have managed to give us the slip.’
‘You let him get away?’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him. I’d worry about myself and my mates if I were you.’
‘Hey, without me you wouldn’t have the video. I was helping.’
‘As they say: tell it to the judge.’ Needham was in suspiciously high mood which led me to conclude that he was once more lacing his cop shop coffee with the sweet white poison.
‘Deeks and his woman conned me. I believed I was saving a boy’s life. Isn’t that moral coercion or something like that?’
‘Why don’t you ask your solicitor?’
Which I did. Grimshaw gave a withering speech but it was me she was withering. For having failed to inform at least my solicitor before embarking on such imbecilic etcetera etcetera.
Those imbecilic etcetera became less likely to send me to prison when the Rodin was recovered from inside the van as it was pulled from a ditch a mile and a half from the Hollow. There was no sign of Deeks or Jill.
The Rodin Museum got their sculpture back, though were embarrassed when for insurance reasons they had to admit that it had only been a copy they had sent to Britain. I paid for the damage to the museum’s skylight and thus found out that they cost an absolute fortune. In the end the only one who had been robbed was myself, since Deeks had made off with the Penny Black for which I had written a cheque, though to this day Rufus Connabear hasn’t thought to cash it.
The real loser was Albert Barrington, who had died from being knocked over with my car after an attack by Blackfield, who had bumped into him while inspecting his fence one night. Blackfield had also disappeared.
It was shortly after Annis, Tim and I were acquitted of all charges, like obstruction, perverting the course of justice, resisting arrest and littering (deliberately sinking the dinghy), leaving me owing Grimshaw a wealth of paintings, that another piece of the jigsaw fell into place, and again in the Lam Valley.
It was a bright and deceptively mild November day when a microlight plane ran into engine trouble while circling the area. The plane crashed into a shed on Spring Farm and the injured pilot was rescued from the wreckage by Jack Fryer and farmhand. The pilot turned out to be no other than James Lane, whose balance problems, according to him, didn’t affect him in the air. He later admitted to defrauding the insurance company in order to finance a correspondence Open University degree in British and European History. Summing up, the judge suggested he might find it easier to concentrate on his studies in a prison cell. The crash left Lane walking with a real limp.
Late December, and a rare snowfall had dusted the Lam Valley, softening the edges of farmhouse roofs and adding an insulating blanket to the cloches, polytunnel and glasshouse down at Grumpy Hollow. Annis and I had delivered a load of logs, cut from the branches shed by the trees at Mill House during the October storm. We had stacked it under a tarp and now Gemma served scalding coffee in her caravan. The little wood burner, moved into here from the badly damaged shepherd’s hut, singed the air around it. I gratefully wrapped my hands around a steaming mug.
‘I have a couple of things for you,’ Gemma announced.
‘Presents?’ I mumbled something about how it really wasn’t necessary.
‘Found objects, really, and a bit of a mixed bag, I’m afraid.’ She reached up into the cupboard space over the bed alcove and produced two metal items which she set in front of me, one of which I instantly recognized. It was the big lump of my Webley .38 revolver.
‘I found that in the mud when the foliage of my coriander collapsed in the frost. I cleaned it up, it was filthy.’
‘Deeks must have thrown it there. Probably wise, Jill might have accidentally blown his head off with it one day.’ I cracked it open. It held a full complement of rounds.
‘And this?’ Annis picked up the little blue tin, hand-painted with stars and moons. ‘Tobacco tin.’ She shook it. It rattled. She prised the lid open. Inside, among the dregs of hand-rolling tobacco and cigarette papers, nestled the missing keys to the DS.
Gemma nodded her head at it. ‘I found that when I was collecting cob nuts in the hedgerows, on the opposite side of the valley from where Albert died. I thought of giving it to the police, but I’ll leave it up to you. Your call.’
Annis handed it to me and I slid it into my coat pocket. The teenage girl who had lost it was probably better at riding trail bikes than handling left-hand-drive classic Citroëns. Cairn and Heather, rightly assuming that I had really no intention of looking into their story, had pinched the DS and driven it deep into the Lam Valley to make sure I would eventually go there. Irony pushed into their path the very man whose life they thought they were helping to save, stumbling about after having been hit by Blackfield.
I shut the tin and pocketed it. I would take it out later in a quieter moment and think very hard about whether anyone would benefit from Cairn and Heather being dragged in front of the courts.
Gemma walked us through the crunching snow to the Land Rover. Annis performed her arcane start-up ritual and despite the cold the engine started first time.
‘I meant to ask,’ Gemma said, sticking her frozen nose in at the driver window. ‘What name did you give the cat in the end?’
Both women looked expectantly at me.
‘Derringer,’ I said with only the faintest hesitation. ‘The cat’s called Derringer.’