Rainstone Fall

Chapter Eighteen

‘Pack everything in the right order, so what you’ll need first is at the top.’

‘Yes, Grandma Bigwood.’ Now that we were definitely going Tim had decided to stop dispensing gloom and be helpful instead. I wasn’t sure what I found more irritating, but I realized how helpless he felt and I also knew that despite his myriad objections to the scheme he would eventually have done it, and done it well.

‘Cereal bars? What, are you going to hold a picnic in there first? What other nonsense are you taking?’

Annis sighed. ‘Ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, camping stove for making hot soup and a gramophone, if I’d have let him.’ Annis was long ready and only waiting for me to see that really, so was I. It was three o’clock in the morning, the city centre would be as quiet as it would ever get, and there was no moon. We were dressed in black, with black trainers, and I’d be carrying a black waterproof rucksack I deemed large enough to carry the little Rodin in. Outside, the dinghy on its trailer, disguised with cardboard boxes and tarpaulin to give it a different shape, was hooked up to the Landy.

I thought I had everything. I thought I was ready. ‘Let’s do it.’

Annis knelt down to kiss Tim goodbye. A bit longer than was strictly necessary, I thought. Then we were off. We hardly spoke on the way. We’d gone over it countless times and in my experience it never paid to labour your plans. Nothing ever worked out quite the way you’d imagined it anyway. We met few cars on the London Road and soon turned off, crossed the river and disappeared into the quiet suburbs. Here for a while we were at the mercy of insomniac neighbourhood watch schemers but it wasn’t long before we left the houses behind and Annis manoeuvred the Landy down a narrow lane that ended at a gate set into the low stone wall bordering the riverside meadows. It was only held shut with a loop of nylon rope. I opened it and stepped back to let Annis drive in. She killed the lights and bounced past me towards the river, far into the boggy meadow. I wasn’t convinced of the merits of this; the last thing we could afford was to get stuck in the mud here. I ran after her in the thin rain and was relieved when her brake lights came on at last.

‘I checked it out, it only gets really soft closer in,’ she said when I protested. ‘We don’t want to have to lug the boat any further than absolutely necessary. We’ll be all right from here.’

‘You’re the expert.’ Which she was. Annis could manoeuvre a Land Rover with dreamlike ease. Learnt it on a driving course somewhere.

Untying the tarpaulin in the rain was harder than tying it on, especially since my rope craft was nil. Those beautiful secure knots that untangle themselves when you pull on them were quite beyond me. My knots were the muttered-curses-and-broken-fingernail type. Everything took longer than expected, was more difficult, wetter, windier, colder. When eventually we managed to get the thing off the trailer the RIB proved spectacularly heavy. Fortunately dismounting the engine was easy. We first carried, then dragged the inflatable to the water’s edge, aiming for a dead-looking tree in the gloom. The river was in noisy spate; I had to use my torch to make sure we didn’t slither down the steep bank and pitch straight into its swirling waters. Launching the boat didn’t look to be at all easy. We were in the middle of a shouted discussion about it when the thing displayed a watery will of its own and launched itself, aided by the wind and me slipping in the mud. We both dived for the long trailing rope and managed to stop the boat from disappearing into the darkness. After we managed to tie it to a fallen branch of the dead tree we trudged back and got the engine. By the time we had carried it to the boat and mounted it again I was too wet, scratched, bruised and narked off to even complain about it and Annis was grimly quiet. She got the engine started easily and ran against the current while I untied the rope from the log and climbed back in.

As we turned away from the shore the current swiftly pushed us along into the wet darkness. The engine puttered bravely but at this stage was mainly used to provide steering. Any legitimate night traffic on this stretch of the Avon would run navigation lights of course, unlike us, but there was nobody out on the water. Not running navigation lights was the flotsam: the fallen branches, the wooden crates, the plastic dustbins blown into the river, some of which we bumped into on the dark water. It doesn’t take much to pierce the skin even of a RIB — what can inflate can deflate — but so far we were lucky. The current brought us downriver much faster than I had anticipated. The centre of town with its lights, police patrols and security cameras suddenly reared up out of the dark. If anything, the current speeded up. Now it was possible to see just how much debris the river was carrying downstream with us. The three arches of Pulteney Bridge loomed dark and low above us as we inexorably drifted towards it on the swollen river. The roar of the weir beyond echoed through them. The black water swirled and eddied, producing a wave against the mossy stone of the bridge. Not until it was nearly too late did I see that the right-hand arch for which we were aiming was blocked with a plug of massive branches and an assortment of flotsam.

‘Steer left, quickly, left!’ I shouted to Annis.

‘It’s called port!’ she shouted back irritably as we just missed colliding with the cutwater. We were speeding up alarmingly as the middle arch swallowed us. ‘Grab the chain or we’ll go over the weir, the current’s too strong.’

Leaning as far as I dared over the edge I managed to get my right hand on to one of the chains hanging from the masonry. I gripped one of the handholds on the rib hard as the drift tried to pull me out of the boat. I felt my joints pop but managed to stop us racing ahead.

‘I can’t hold this long,’ I shouted over the roar of the weir. Its thundering mouth seemed to be inches away. A plastic beer crate shot past us and seconds later disappeared into the swirling, sucking waters.

‘Well, you’ll just have to!’ Annis wiped strands of wet hair from her face with a gloved hand. ‘We’re pointing the wrong way, I need to run full throttle against the current to get us across to the other side. I’m not sure we can do it!’

‘I’ll let the boat turn round on the current, get ready for when I let go!’

First slowly, then rapidly as the current caught the starboard side, the boat swung round as I pushed. Annis opened the throttle further and further. ‘Let go!’

We slipped backwards, away from the bridge. As soon as we cleared the cutwater on the downstream side she opened the throttle all the way. The little engine strained and screamed. We were suspended in mid-stream, unmoving despite our bow wave. I refused to turn around and stare into the roaring waters behind us. Then, hardly perceptibly at first, with agonizing slowness, we began to make headway. But after only a few seconds of progress the boat slipped sideways, caught by a different current, and got pushed back several yards before Annis managed to bring it under control. Our engine was battling away, just ten yards or so from our objective, a rusty old landing stage and a set of iron steps that led up to the colonnaded walkway. Normally well above the waterline, it was in danger of becoming swamped.

‘Just aim for the wall, we can pull ourselves along!’ I had spotted a garland of cables running along the base of the walkway, just above the waterline.

Annis did as I asked and the slimy walls seemed to advance on us rapidly. We rammed inelegantly against the side and the manoeuvre had pushed us another few yards back, but with the engine going at full throttle and me pulling hand over fist we reached the landing stage after only a couple of minutes. I hastily tied the painter to the ironwork.

The plan had been for Annis to set me down, retreat and then return at my signal but it was obvious that it took both of us to land the boat. ‘I’ll be here!’ she assured me. ‘Just don’t be bloody ages. It only takes one copper with good eyesight to come along and look over the parapet and we’ve had it.’

She stopped me as I made to climb out, grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me goodbye. I ran up the steps, climbed over the little padlocked gate and moved along swiftly in the deep shadows of the walkway. I reached the slipway’s wrought-iron door and half unslung the rucksack. Subtlety costs time. I’d bought the biggest bolt cutter in the shop and made short work of the padlock. I flung it into the river, stowed the bolt cutter and moved into the slipway. It was dark down here in the narrow canyon into which the jetsam of Garfunkel’s cellars had spilled. Once I had negotiated the gas bottles, kegs and crates I arrived at the elevated end in front of another locked door. This one had its original lock, though well maintained and used, as I discovered when it surrendered to my picklocks after less than a minute.

The car park was cluttered with building materials, mobile toilets, a corrugated metal lockup, a portable shelter for the work gang and heaps of stuff under tarpaulins, all of it only dimly lit by the distant street lamps. I hugged the left side and peered through the porte cochère into Orange Grove. Not a soul to be seen. I hurried across the exposed expanse and gratefully slipped into the shadows at the foot of the scaffold. From the bottom to the top it was covered with pale blue tarpaulin, bleached of colour by the orange glow from the little street lighting that reached into this sea of grey. The scaffolding had swallowed both security cameras that used to cover the car park. Nobody had thought it worthwhile to have them repositioned while work was being carried out. Heads would roll. .

Some effort had been made to secure access to the bottom of the scaffold by building a twelve foot cage around it, but since it was only as secure as the padlock on the wire door it could only keep out the opportunist climber. I kicked the cut padlock out of sight. From the inside I replaced it with a similar one I had brought by sticking my hands through the wire mesh, just in case someone decided to check while I was up there. I stashed the heavy bolt cutter out of sight. Then it was time.

I took a deep breath and gripped the bottom of the first ladder. My strategy for coping with my fear of heights was to take everything in stages. This was just one ladder. Nothing to it. Nothing. I took it steady and stepped out sideways on to the first of the four levels. It was dark in here but relatively dry under the tarpaulin, which creaked and snapped and dripped with the wind and rain. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see that the next ladder was at the opposite end. I traversed the level on the narrow boards, which moved ominously under my weight as I walked on them, by pulling myself from handhold to handhold until I made it to the other side. At the bottom of the next ladder I stopped to collect myself. If I started each climb in a calm frame of mind I would be fine.

Level two. Perhaps I could treat it like a computer game. It occurred to me just how cosy the world of virtual adventure was. It also occurred to me that scaffolders the world over would laugh at my palpitations as I climbed further into the darkness.

Level three. The wind was stronger up here and made me grip my handholds harder each time the tarpaulin filled with air like a giant sail threatening to pull me from the wall. I was sweating with the exertion of the climb and my breathing never seemed to slow down even when I paused. There was definite movement in the structure when the wind freshened and I wished there was someone to ask whether this was normal or not.

Last ladder. There was no longer any point in trying to calm myself, I was panicked and listening to my heart pounding as I stood there didn’t help at all. My legs, unused to climbing, had acquired a slight tremor. I might stand here all night, it wouldn’t get any better. I simply couldn’t turn back. I had to go forward. Last ladder, last ladder. Surely this one was longer than the others. There was more construction above me, looking complicated in the dark as it stretched away towards the cupola of the Guildhall, where the storm damage had occurred, but I knew I was now level with the roof of the covered market to the right of the scaffold. With my pocket knife I simply slashed through the tarp from head height to the bottom and carefully stuck my head through the gash. I was staring into a yawning chasm. I had climbed too high and was an entire level above the market roof. I withdrew my head sharpish and worked my way hand over hand along the side of the building to the ladder and climbed down. I was happy about no longer being so high up — though falling from the third floor wouldn’t be much more fun than from the fourth — but it was merely a cerebral happiness I didn’t feel in my diaphragm, and was very short-lived. I cut a hole into the tarpaulin on level three. I stuck my head through. There was the market roof. And there was the gap. There shouldn’t have been a gap, a four-foot gap between the scaffold and the neighbouring roof, a black gap into which rain and people and darkness fell and disappeared from view for ever. The roof was glistening with wet and might as well have been twenty feet away. I withdrew my head into what suddenly felt like a cosy protective shell, before the view could scare me witless. Calm down, it’s not a big gap. Four feet. Four feet was nothing. It was just. . the width of a man with a full rucksack.

I fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, sucked on it hard. Sod forensics. There was no chance we’d pull this off and get away with it anyway. Even if I’d ever manage to leave this scaffold. My legs screamed for me to sit down, just for a little while, just for a minute, but I knew it would make it worse. It seemed ages since I’d last eaten and the cigarette made me a little dizzy. In a side pocket of my rucksack were a couple of cereal bars but perhaps Tim was right, this was not the time or place to be picnicking. I teased the glowing tip off my cigarette and stepped on it as it fell and pocketed the fag-end. Time to have another look. Just a look, no obligation. I pulled the flapping tarp aside. I looked at the roof opposite. I looked down. I suddenly slipped, grappled hopelessly for a handhold, fell into the darkness, my head smashing against the boards as I passed on my way into the chasm. I could taste blood in my mouth, my flailing legs grazed the side of the building, the air rushed past and didn’t leave me enough breath to scream before I dashed myself to pieces and crumpled on the tarmac below and died.