Rainstone Fall

Chapter Fifteen

Waiting.

Waiting, smoking, making tea and waiting. The four of us around the kitchen table, the Penny Black, Louis’s passport to freedom, lying in the centre. Smoking, waiting, coughing, clock-watching.

Waiting, they say, is the worst part of it, but I wasn’t so sure. Could no news really be good news? Would there ever again be good news for Jill?

Tim, who had simply out-raced his shadowers in the TT to get here, dabbing a moistened finger at tiny breadcrumbs on the table and absentmindedly transferring them to his lips; Annis turning the empty coffee mug in front of her between thumb and middle finger, round and round; the nameless cat digging his claws into my sweater every time I moved slightly to make myself comfortable on the hard wooden chair; me, tapping a cheap biro against a notepad where I would write down the next set of instructions. Waiting.

The phone trilled. Tim’s finger arrested halfway to his mouth, Annis gripped the mug. I reached for the phone and the cat held on tight.

‘Honeysett.’

‘Did you get it?’

‘I did, but it wasn’t easy.’ I was thinking of the cheque in Connabear’s desk.

‘Stop whingeing. Okay, sit on it, and make sure it doesn’t get nicked. I’ve got another little task for you.’

‘What do you mean, another task? The deal was that I steal the Penny Black and you let Louis go. Stick to our bargain, I fulfilled my side of it, now y-’

‘Shut up, Honeysett! I told you before, I make the rules and you do as you’re told. Now listen carefully. Your next job. Your last job. I really don’t think you’ll need to write this down, I’m sure you’ll remember this. You will nick the little Rodin sculpture from the Victoria Gallery.’

I stood up and my chair skittered noisily across the tiles. The cat jumped off my lap and galloped away. ‘Is this a bloody wind-up? You can’t be serious.’ Worried faces looked up at me. I bit my lip.

‘Oh really.’ The voice softened dangerously. ‘I somehow thought you might say that. So maybe you would like to write this down so you can remind yourself any time you need to: so far the boy’s in one piece. If you don’t want me to send you bits of the annoying brat in the post to stiffen your resolve, Honeysett, then you’ll do as you’re told. You got that?’ The faint voice had become poisonous with anger. However much I tried I found it impossible to place it. It could be anyone, anywhere. I had always presumed the owner of the voice to be male, but the more I thought about it the less sure I could be even of that.

‘Got it,’ I confirmed.

‘You’re the one who fucked up the Telfer thing, so you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. So here it is: the exhibition is on for another week. That’s how long you’ve got to get the Rodin out and I’ll swap you the kid for it.’

‘That’s what you said when you told me to get the goddamn stamp.’

‘I’m not bloody ready for you. You keep that stamp safe, get the Rodin out and by then I’ll be ready to do the swap and I’ll be out of your hair. I’ll be out of everyone’s hair and gone for ever.’

‘I can’t see how it can be done. It’s a museum, not some two-bit private gallery. They’ve got excellent security, I presume.’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. And you have a reputation to live up to, Honeysett. You got into the Telfer place all right. Just a bit careless on the way home, I’d say. You got the Penny Black out of Connabear’s place. You’ll manage this one too. And if not then you haven’t lost a thing, all you have to do is explain to mummy dearest that you fucked up and her boy is toast.’

‘Let me talk to the boy. I must have confirmation that he’s alive before — ’

‘You don’t need a fucking thing, all you need to do is shut up and deliver. You do as you’re told and that’ll keep your letter box free of nasty surprises.’

‘I won’t need any reminders, thanks,’ I assured him.

‘Good boy. Now get cracking, you got work to do. I’ll be watching.’ The connection was cut.

‘Well? What did he say?’ Annis asked impatiently. ‘What does he want now?’

I sat down heavily. ‘They want me to steal a sculpture in exchange for Louis.’

‘What?’ Tim and Annis said almost together.

‘There’s a temporary exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery. It’s got a bronze of a dancer by Rodin in it and they want me to nick it.’

Tim groaned with heavy premonition. ‘What next, the crown bleeding jewels?’

‘Our last task, apparently. We’ll exchange the stamp and sculpture for the boy.’

Annis looked straight into my eyes and gave a minute shake of the head. ‘Victoria Art Gallery, that’s. . big.’

‘Big mistake, if you ask me,’ Tim insisted.

‘I told Jill to expect complications and last-minute glitches, but I’m not sure how she’ll take a setback like this.’

‘I’ll tell her, if you like,’ offered Annis. ‘I’m better with the tears and tissues.’

‘Thanks, I appreciate it. Tim?’

Tim had been staring out of the window. ‘Hn? What?’

‘The Victoria Art Gallery?’

‘Oh yes. Utter madness.’

‘This isn’t Norway, you know, where you can just waltz into a museum and help yourself to the Munch painting of your choice,’ Tim complained. ‘How often has it been nicked now? Three times? You get the feeling they don’t like The Scream much. Perhaps we should see if the exhibition goes to Oslo.’

We were leaning on the balustrade that runs along the Grand Parade, occasionally glancing up at the tall façade of the Victoria Gallery, trying to look casual in the annoying drizzle that had returned after a short interlude of broken cloud. Tim thought the guys who had dogged his steps for the past few days had for some reason given up following him. Who they were remained a mystery to him. I had a different theory, but kept it to myself. I thought it much more likely that after having lost Tim twice the incompetent pair had been replaced with a couple of specimens that knew what they were doing. I didn’t hold out much hope that we weren’t being watched right now.

Below us the river Avon fell noisily over the weir, swollen with days and days of near continuous rain.

‘We’ve got a few days,’ I reminded him urgently.

‘So you keep saying.’ Tim’s dense curly hair had plastered itself around his face in the wet, giving him an even hairier appearance. He didn’t look happy. ‘It’s sheer madness. I mean, look at it. The ground floor of the exhibition space is completely shuttered, the only way in is through the front door. So climbing in at street level is hardly going to work, is it?’ He poured scorn over my earlier suggestion that we might just smash a window and be in and out before anyone could shout ‘Thief!’ ‘If it was some piddly item in a glass vitrine then you could try a daylight smash and grab with a stolen motorbike waiting outside and take your chances. Drive the bike into the back of a waiting van outside the CCTV area and Robert’s your mum’s brother. But a statue like that must weigh three stone if you include the plinth. You can carry it but you won’t do much running with it. The first civic-minded art lover’s going to chuck her brolly between your legs and send you sprawling. Nah, not a chance. Well, let’s have a look-see then. But whatever you do don’t take your hat off. They’re bound to have CCTV in there. Once the Rodin’s gone walkies they’re going to have a close look at their videos — they probably keep about three weeks’ worth before they reuse them — and ours are going to be the two mugs CID will recognize.’ He forced a baseball cap on his own woolly curls. ‘Right, put on your reading glasses as well.’

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.

‘Okay,’ agreed Tim. ‘You might be right but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Even in my maddest days I wouldn’t have considered a scheme like this. Clearing out someone’s safe at a private house or an office is one thing. But robbing a museum makes front page headlines. Do you realize that it’ll get flashed round the world? That the French are going to send Froggy Fuzz across the Channel to catch the guys who stole their beloved Rodin dancer? And you definitely do not want to fall into their hands, they have nasty habits by all accounts. Unlike us Brits the French take their art seriously. We could all end up in a chain gang breaking rocks in the Auvergne for thirty years. And I still need a reality check: am I really discussing this with Chris Honeysett, the painter, who hates art theft more than anything?’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said lightly, ‘sculpture is just what you bump into when you step back to admire a painting. And it was a French geezer who said that.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Tim said and rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘And here’s another thing: what’s it for? You can’t sell these kind of things, can you? I mean everyone will know it’s nicked. So what’s the point?’

‘No, you can’t sell it on the open market because it’s too high profile and you’ll never be able to stick it in your front room. Unless it’s already paid for, of course,’ I mused.

‘Stolen to order, you mean.’

‘Stolen to order and destined for some mafioso dacha in Russia or Turkey. To go with the 7-series Beemer in the garage that was probably nicked from a supermarket car park in Hull and driven on to the ferry to Holland before the owner even got his shopping through the check-out. And how damn clever to get idiots like us to do the dirty work. I bet you my spectacles they got the idea from the Japanese. Last year someone wanted to extract a ransom from a Japanese businessman but they didn’t abduct one of his family, they took the son of his chauffeur. Now there’s obligation for you.’

‘Did he pay up?’

‘No, he got a new chauffeur. What do you think? How could he not pay up? Who would have done business with him if he hadn’t? How could he have lived with himself, for that matter?’

And ‘living with it’ would come into it for us too. My Accumulated Guilt Quotient was already going through the roof. Louis had been snatched to get to me, to buy the services of Aqua Investigations. Whoever he was, he knew me, at least by reputation. I myself knew plenty of unsavoury individuals and had paraded their mental mug shots through my private gallery but no one stood out as an obvious choice for the face behind the voice. His voice reminded me of nobody and of nothing, it was too distorted over the phone, and if I really had met the bastard before, then that was deliberate.

The elderly couple at the table next to ours left and their place was taken by a man wearing a waxed jacket and a matching wide-brimmed hat. I looked across at his face. Around fifty and quite a bit paler than a man ought to be. I’d never seen him before, yet I began to feel uneasy and I motioned Tim with my head: let’s get out of here. As we rounded the corner towards the exit I looked back. The man was staring straight at me and from a distance of twenty-five feet our eyes met briefly, then his gaze slid over and off me, not interested, turning instead to the young boy carrying two steaming mugs towards his table.

‘What’s the matter?’ Tim wanted to know.

‘Nothing, paranoia’s setting in, that’s all.’

We had deliberately exited at the back of the market into the courtyard. The old Empire Hotel and the old police station — now thankfully Browns restaurant — the Guildhall and the covered market all backed on to what was now used as a private car park for council workers, restaurateurs and market traders. A man in dirty chef’s whites puffed at a small cigar by a door at the back of the Empire, a seagull flew over and scored a direct hit on a shiny blue Jaguar.

Tim sniffed the air and pulled a face. ‘This really stinks. There might be a way into the museum from back here but it would mean one hell of a climb.’ He turned his back on me and began walking away through the narrow passage between the hotel and the market building.

I went after him and tried to find something optimistic to say. ‘If a couple of guys with a ladder can nick a Munch from a museum in Norway then surely we must be able to pinch an itsy-bitsy Rodin in Bath.’

He wasn’t having any of it. ‘They do things differently in Norway. Must be the long winters. Or perhaps it’s the terrible folk music, but this is different. We can’t even reconnoitre the place properly. We won’t know if there’s a way in until we get there and getting there is probably just as risky as breaking in is going to be. I really don’t like this, Chris. I think it’s one break-in too far. The chances of getting away with it are minimal — and I just mean away from the museum, there’s no way we won’t get nicked for it later. And don’t look at me like that.’ Apparently I was looking at him like that. ‘It’s a lot to ask for a kid you never even met.’

I had never seen Tim less enthusiastic about any scheme I had proposed but I knew that without him my chances were nil. ‘If I didn’t know you any better I’d say you didn’t want to do it.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha. I’ll have a think but that doesn’t mean I’ll do it. Now I’m going to work.’

‘To work on what?’ I asked, too wrapped up in my own problems to function entirely in the real world.

‘Work. To work, Chris. I do have a job at the uni, you know, the kind that pays my bills. But I might be able to get away early today. I’ll come round and we’ll have another talk then.’

I opened my mouth for an answer but he was already dashing across the street through the traffic, waving without looking back.