Rainstone Fall

Chapter Twenty

‘Dysentery, cholera and dengue fever is what you’ll get,’ presaged the oracle by the fire. ‘How much river water did you swallow?’

‘Enough to last me a lifetime, thanks.’ Annis shivered theatrically and followed it up with a very real sneeze and a trumpeting blow into a wad of tissues.

It had taken us hours of staggering about in the rain through dark side streets, hiding from every car engine we heard, before we eventually made it back to the Landy and finally home. What we had feared most during our wanderings, the sound of a helicopter overhead, never materialized. Perhaps the weather was too bad to fly, perhaps they’d been attending elsewhere. By the time we got to the Land Rover we were both frozen and shivering.

‘I’d happily kill you for a mug of hot soup,’ Annis admitted. I gave her a muesli bar and told her to drive us home before we perished from hypothermia.

After a shower, some hot coffee and an awful lot of toast I was beginning to revive but Annis seemed to have come off worse. As she pointedly pointed out she’d waited around in the cold and rain for me for ages while I clambered all over roofs and scaffolds, keeping warm.

‘Is it too early to try Jill again?’ she asked. ‘I worry about her. If she hasn’t been home as you say then what can have happened to her?’

I dialled her mobile again. This time I got her voicemail service and left a message. ‘Hi Jill, just letting you know that everything went fine. We got the. . item and hopefully we’ll swap it soon for. . something more interesting. But we’re a bit worried, not having heard from you at all. Give us a call when you get this message.’ I put my phone away and shrugged, but secretly I’d been worrying about Jill’s nerves.

‘She might have gone to stay with her sister,’ Tim suggested. ‘It must be lonely for her in Harley Street, with her son’s stuff all over the place and no one to talk to.’

Annis nodded. ‘True. Her sister’s in Trowbridge, that’s not so far. Or she could have gone to stay with friends in Bristol. She might even have decided that Craig, her ex-boyfriend, had his uses after all. Have we got an address for him? We haven’t, have we?’

‘She never mentioned it. Somewhere in Bristol.’

Annis looked thoughtful. ‘Unless. .’

‘Unless what?’ Tim propped himself up on one elbow and pulled a pained face as his back reacted.

Annis took her time answering. ‘I don’t know. Unless she no longer believed that her son was alive. Perhaps she gave up.’

‘Give up, how?’ I asked.

‘How would I know? As she said, none of us have children of our own, so perhaps she did feel that something had happened, something changed.’

‘And chucked herself in the river.’

‘It’s possible,’ she admitted.

There was another possibility that began nagging at the back of my mind but seemed too remote to give it much house room. All three of us looked thoughtfully at the little Rodin. At the museum it could inspire hushed voices and admiration on its spotlit plinth, here it looked prosaic standing next to a potted yucca on my floor. Context was everything and as ornaments went I preferred the yucca.

The morning drifted on and slipped into afternoon while I ghosted about the house and studio, carrying both cordless phone and mobile, waiting for the call, listening out for the crunch of police cars braking hard in the yard. I was getting increasingly worried about Jill not being in touch.

Tim had been right about the newsworthiness of the stolen Rodin: it got top billing on the lunchtime news. Hearing my rooftop antics being described as a ‘daring raid’ and Annis and myself as a ‘well-organized gang’ would have been almost funny if the bulletin hadn’t started with the words ‘A nationwide police hunt is today under way’.

I tried to distract myself by clearing up in the studio. The painting on my easel had been only half finished when the storm and Haarbottle’s call had interrupted. Looking at it now I could barely make out my own intentions, even less feel the emotions that had driven the image across the canvas. It would never be finished now. Too much had happened since then.

The Stanley knife is the painter’s best editing tool; four slashes quickly empty a stretcher of canvas and make sure of rigorous quality control in his oeuvre. But I was under no illusion that I could start a new canvas before this mess was resolved. The pointed blade slid seductively from the grip of the knife. The phone rang and effected a stay of execution. I slid the blade back in, dropped the knife into the tool box and pressed the talk button on the phone with a heavy heart.

‘Well, congrats, shithead, told you you could do it.’ The grating voice held a sour edge of feigned amusement. ‘And now listen very carefully to what I have to say. The handover will happen tonight. You will be by yourself. There will be nobody with you, there will be no police and none of your mates. And you know why you’ll do exactly as I tell you? Because now I’ve got the brat’s mother. That’s right, shithead, mother and son reunited, only not the way you expected. And you don’t want anything to happen to her, because how could you live with yourself? You still listening, shithead, or did you faint?’

I sat down heavily on my painting stool. This was exactly what I had feared but hadn’t allowed myself to say out loud. But the question that weighed heavier on me was this: why would the kidnapper go to the trouble of snatching Jill if he already had the boy? Why would he need another victim, unless. . ‘I’m listening.’

‘You’d better. Because now I’m ready for you. Here’s what you do, very simple. One: you’ll secure the Penny Black inside a padded envelope, reinforced with cardboard. Then you’ll tape it safely to the statue. Two: you’ll wrap the lot in several bin bags and secure them with tape so they don’t flap about. Three: you load it on the back of your Land Rover and drive out of your yard at eight o’clock precisely, with your mobile phone charged up and switched on, ready to receive instructions. Four: you talk to no one. You’ll be by yourself and you’ll bring no weapons and no wires. Oh yes, and just so I’ll know you’ll have no weapons or microphones, you’ll be wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Just to make sure there are no hidden surprises. Do anything differently and the woman dies.’

I drew breath to answer but he had already hung up.

Jill. We should never have left her alone all these days. What happened to the sister. .? This might still come out right of course but there remained one question that seemed to make this unlikely: why would the kidnapper bother to take Jill, when he already had the boy? Unless the boy was dead.