I quickly summed up the situation. ‘Blimey!’ I looked back. I couldn’t make out much detail in the rain but imagined I could see two figures peering down over the balustrade of Grand Parade into the spume and foam of the weir. We had come a long way very quickly and the current was still pushing us along. We added paddle power to that and soon disappeared from sight under North Parade Bridge, the curve of the river taking us all the while further from the museum.
‘Now what?’ I complained. ‘If we keep going this way we’ll end up in Bristol. Home’s the other way.’
‘Typical. A minute ago we nearly drowned but already you’re quibbling about my driving. We’ve got to get off this river pronto or they’ll scoop us up like a rubber duck.’
‘There’s bound to be a landing place coming up soon.’ At the moment the sheer sides of the river banks didn’t offer the faintest hope of getting out. The old railway bridge hove into view but when we passed under it there wasn’t even a handhold. Annis was right, we had to get off the river quickly and disappear into the night. As the Avon gently curved right I spotted an irregularity in the uniform dark of the left bank. ‘On the left, let’s make for that darker splodge.’
‘Dark splodge coming up.’
I recognized the place. ‘I know where this is, an arm of the Kennet and Avon joins here, there’s a lock on the other side of that opening.’
‘You want to go in there?’
‘No, a bit further, is that steps? Up ahead.’
I was right. Only a few yards beyond the gloomy arch of the lock a series of concrete steps led up to the towpath. Kneeling in the bows I managed to grab the handrail and steady the boat while Annis heaved the rucksack on to the steps and climbed out after it.
‘What about the boat? We can’t leave them the boat. They find that, they find us.’
‘I know. Shame though,’ I answered and started stabbing the dinghy with my pocket knife. It deflated quickly and crumpled under me. I made it on to the safety of the steps just before the weight of the outboard pulled the entire thing bubbling and hissing into the murky depth of the Avon. The two paddles took off downriver into the darkness.
‘Jake will be pleased.’
‘Perhaps not. His wife might be though.’ Yet I couldn’t help feeling that Jake would be unsurprised at the outcome. He tended not to expect things he lent me to come back in any usable format.
‘Now what?’ Annis asked as we gained the towpath.
‘Now? Now we’ll take the long way home.’
She shouldered the rucksack and expressed her disapproval of Monsieur Rodin in words of extreme yet eloquent economy.
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?’