I turned off the hall light and ran to the small kitchen at the rear. A narrow, half-glazed back door led to a tiny garden. It was locked. There wasn’t the time to try and unpick the lock. I lifted one of the wooden kitchen chairs, hoped it was solid enough to break through the glass, took a good swing back and spotted a key hanging on a hook in the door frame. I put the chair down and tried the keys. Behind me the front door was being rattled, then a powerful torch beam, aimed through the letter box, jumped about on the kitchen furniture. The lock disengaged, I pulled. Bolted. I released the top bolt and pulled. I swore and released the bottom bolt, which was stiff because the wood had warped. At last I managed to get the door open, only to see a police constable’s head bob over the fence to the right. The fence was overgrown with brambles and the copper was looking for a way across without getting shredded. I ran straight down the middle of the strip of garden, cracked my ankle against something in the dark but kept running.
‘Halt! Police! Stop right there!’ The authority of his voice was subtly undermined by the quieter addition of ‘Shit.’ I took a run at the fence at the back, ignoring the padlocked door, and scrambled over it. It landed me in the narrowest of alleyways full of crud. To my right a puffing police officer rattled at the high back gate of the neighbour’s fence. It was topped with rusted barbed wire. I jumped over what looked like a collection of empty paint cans and sacks of rubbish and ran past him uphill. It was a dead end. The back-to-back gardens of Harley Street and the much posher Northampton Street converged and soon I found myself at the bottom of an eight-foot sandstone wall. Fortunately someone had neatly piled large sections of a dead fruit tree under it for me to climb up. Behind me the constable crashed through the pile of paint cans, getting awfully close. I clambered up the pile of logs, which began to move precariously. It seemed to take me forever. When I got one leg on the top of the wall I gave the wood pile a good kick with the other one. I didn’t wait to check the results. I dropped down between a brick barbecue and a glass greenhouse into the sudden glare of a security light high above on the back wall of the house. This was a much larger garden, belonging to the last house on Northampton Street. The light was helpful, though. I spotted the door to the car port on the other side and when I got there found it open and squeezed through the two cars to freedom. No time to hang about. The Norton was parked twenty yards up the road. When I reached it I was so out of breath I wanted nothing more than to bend double and throw up. I worked the kick-starter instead. One of the constables was back in the street in front of Jill’s house and, seeing me frantically trying to start the bike, began running uphill towards me.
The Norton never did like the damp. Only on the fourth attempt did the engine come to life. Realizing that he wouldn’t reach me in time the officer changed his mind and ran back to his car. With the thunderous noise the fifty-year-old bike emitted I had no chance of giving him the slip quietly and I certainly couldn’t outrun him. I pointed the bike left and roared along Portland Street straight at a large complex of council flats. I squeezed the bike past the beam that barred the car park and rode the few yards to the pedestrian underpass. Blue flashes of the police car’s beacon pulsed on the wall above me as I negotiated the metal barriers designed to stop people from driving through it. It was an agonizingly slow squeeze through it but once on the other side I was home free. For a couple of seconds the Norton’s exhaust noise was ear-splittingly amplified in the short tunnel, then I hustled the bike up the curved tarmac path to the top where it spat me out on to Lansdown Road. I turned left uphill and opened the throttle all the way. There was no sign of pursuit, even when I reached the long straight on top of Lansdown.
Taking the long way home along dark and deserted country roads allowed my adrenalin levels to readjust themselves and gave me time to subdue my paranoia. The arrival of the police at Jill’s house had nothing to do with the kidnapping or our planned robbery; someone had watched me spend ages breaking the lock and sensibly called the fuzz. If they’d been after me personally, they’d have been CID.
The much more important question was now: what had happened to Jill? I hadn’t had the chance to search the house but it seemed obvious that no one had been there for a while. Quite apart from the evidence of the junk mail pile what had convinced me that Jill hadn’t been back for a couple of days was the smell. The place smelled uninhabited. Nobody had smoked there for a while and Jill was a heavy smoker.
Had she decided she needed company after all? Had she gone to her sister’s? She said she didn’t know anyone in Bath; had she gone to Bristol, perhaps even back to her ex-boyfriend?
In the valley I approached the turn-off to my house from the east instead of the usual west. I hid the Norton as best I could by the side of the road and walked the last quarter of a mile, this being the approximate distance the bike’s engine sound travelled at night. I was thoroughly wet and tired but kept on my toes by a brain feverishly trying to compute all the possibilities, all the alternatives, any exit strategies or plan Bs. If I found the yard full of police the answers would become painfully obvious. If not, then our plans had to be put into action as soon as possible. I cautiously crept along the last bit of track, darting from tree shadow to tree shadow. The outside light was on, there were no police cars in the yard.
If it was still empty by tomorrow night, I would go and steal a Rodin.
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.