Slim Chance

  Slim Chance

  Peter Helton

  © Peter Helton 2006

  Peter Helton has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2006 by Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Jess

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  “Give me a quid, man, or I’ll puke all over you.” Charming. Though I had to admit it was a refreshing departure from the usual refrain of “Got any spare change?” On second thoughts, “refreshing” was probably a misnomer. His blood-rimmed eyes, swaying stance and evil breath suggested he was quite capable of making good his threat to deposit his stomach contents on my favourite shirt and freshly laundered jeans. Not to mention my cinnamon toast and Earl Grey. How had he got into the Pump Room, anyway?

  “Save your ammo, Chucky. You know it won’t work on me,” I said casually, being far from certain that it wouldn’t.

  He refocused his bleary eyes and brought up an apologetic smile instead. “Oh, it’s you. You’re all right. What’s your name again?”

  “It’s Chris, but you can call me Mr Honeysett.”

  He shrugged inside his sodden overcoat and spattered drops of water from his lanky hair. Behind him, a waitress in regulation black and white had finally spotted Chucky as an unlikely customer amidst all the Georgian splendour and made a speedy beeline towards my table.

  “I wouldn’t pull your stunt in here, they’re likely to call the cops. Wait outside until I’ve finished my breakfast, I’d like to pick what’s left of your brains. Might be a few quid in it for you.”

  “You asked me some stuff a while ago. Didn’t know nothing then.” He looked past me through the french windows at the rain-driven shoppers hurrying through the Abbey Church Yard.

  “I know, but you still got a couple of cans of Special Brew out of it, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I s’pose.”

  “Is this man bothering you, sir?” The waitress addressed me without taking her eyes off Chucky.

  “He’s just leaving.”

  He switched to the pathetic routine. “It’s fucking pissing it down out there,” he said sweetly. And rasped out a continuous burp for a full five seconds. Free sample. “Can’t I wait inside somewhere?”

  The waitress offered him a deep-frozen look. The Pump Room Trio finished their inoffensive piece of Mozart to polite applause. I replenished my cup of Earl Grey from the pot.

  “All right, but don’t be fucking ages,” Chucky said, “I’ve got things to do.” Like puke on tourists who mistake his threat of disgorgement for an empty boast.

  The waitress escorted him away from a downwind position, not just out of the Pump Room but off the premises of the Roman Baths. Then she reappeared at my table with an interesting smile. So I ordered a Danish pastry and coffee.

  Being a painter (the arty type) as well as a private detective has its upsides and downsides. Upsides: expense accounts, flexible hours and an excuse to get really mucky whenever I feel like it. Downsides: everything else. And those flexible hours can drag interminably on a grotty night parked outside some place or other, waiting for things to happen or people to show up.

  Living in an unpredictable kind of world, I hold breakfast sacred, especially one taken so close to the sacred spring of Aqua Sulis, which is the raison d’etre of Bath after all. I even named the business after it: Aqua Investigations. This one, admittedly, was a second breakfast, purely to escape the rain. This morning, I had been “instructed” (not asked nicely or hired, mind) by Messrs Longbottom, Prangle and Fox (Solicitors), to ascertain the whereabouts of Billy, and had already been out for hours in his damp pursuit. Billy the tramp.

  Not Billy the homeless person, or Billy the street person, as Mr Prangle of LP&F put it. Billy was a tramp of the old-fashioned type, and would have described himself as such if he did much describing. Chucky might know where Billy was hanging out, but if he got bored and left before I finished my breakfast I would soon find someone else to ask. There were harsher and much uglier towns to be homeless, in which made Bath a popular place for beggars, Big Issue sellers and anyone pretending to play the penny whistle.

  The pastry was fresh and moist and the coffee piping hot and drinkable, which was one of the reasons the Pump Room remained high on my shortlist of okay-places to have breakfast.

  Chucky’s face told me that I had tested his greed for money to its outer limits. It was still raining steadily so I joined him under the awnings of the antique jeweller’s across the church yard where he’d been sheltering.

  “Come on, man, whatcha wanna ask me? It’s wet and I’m freezin’ my arse off here,” he complained.

  “Billy the tramp, you know him?”

  “Not really. I know who you mean, but I’ve never had anything to do with him. Keeps himself to himself. Probably thinks he’s better than the rest of us. Flies off the handle at nothing. No wonder he’s got no mates,” Chucky concluded.

  I myself had “known” Billy for quite a while. And Chucky was right. Though Billy was a fixture, almost a feature of Bath, he never appeared to have company. When I had last seen him, the steel wool of his beard was as white as the remaining wisps of his hair, and the missing chunk in his left earlobe gave him the air of an old and tired family dog. He’d asked me for money for a bottle of wine. Billy was always scrupulously honest about the reasons for his begging, which is why I didn’t mind subsidizing his habit from time to time. I hadn’t seen him around for a few weeks but Bath is a compact city and I was confident of finding him without great effort.

  “Seen him lately?” I asked.

  Chucky screwed up his eyes and stared into the rain, thinking about it. “Don’t think I have, now you mention it. What d’you want him for, anyway?”

  I ignored the question, mainly because I had no idea. I had been told nothing more than that it was “to his advantage” to contact LP&F. “Here.” I handed him my card. “My numbers are on there. Fiver if you find him.”

  “Myke it a tenner. Fiver now, fiver later.”

  “Get real, Chucky.”

  “Bastard,” he burped and trotted off towards Stall Street in search of well-dressed tourists.

  A cold and rainy April day was not the ideal time to go looking for a tramp since he’d be sheltering somewhere but I was going to give it a go for a while. I turned in the opposite direction, across Abbey Church Yard. The steady downpour, which soon found its way down my upturned collar, had washed the paved expanse clean of its usual encrustation of camcordering tourists, fire eaters, recorder players, pamphleteers and jugglers. I love the rain.

  Past the east face of the Abbey and an empty taxi rank – taxi drivers also love the rain – through Orange Grove towards the river Avon. Billy seemed to like water. Not for drinking or washing, mind, or when it fell from the sky like it did now, but rivers, ponds and canals. More often than not you could find him occupying a bench by the weir or the sports centre, or lying on a patch of grass by the boating lake in Victori
a Park, alone, with or without a bottle.

  Despite the wet, a fair few people were lining the Grand Parade, peering down at Pulteney Weir which, since last weekend’s storm and the subsequent almost continuous rain, had taken on a more ferocious roar.

  I joined them at the balustrade. Below, just above the white-water swirl of the river where it rushed over the horseshoe of the weir, a rigid inflatable boat of the fire and rescue service was holding station, tethered to a stout rope on the shore as well as using its engines to fight the current. Two firemen in waterproofs and life vests were in the bow, swinging poles with grappling hooks while a third manoeuvred the RIB. On the colonnaded walkway below us other figures – police and more firemen – were heaving on ropes thrown over a pile-up of debris under Pulteney Bridge. What looked like an entire tree had managed to get stuck under the left arch, where it had turned into a collection point for all the flotsam the storm-swelled waters were carrying downstream.

  “Can you see a person in all that lot?” my immediate neighbour asked her companion. “Someone said there’s a person in the river.”

  “Perhaps it’s the missing woman,” said the lady sharing her minute umbrella. “Gosh, I hope not.”

  “Nah, it’s a cow,” the man to my right enlightened us. “Dead cow. It probably drowned during the storm. It’s upside down in the water, you can just see its legs sticking up. They’re trying to get a rope round it now.”

  “I do hope they find this one alive,” the first woman said. “Not like the last one that disappeared. Brr.” She gave a theatrical shudder inside her plastic raincoat. “Have we seen enough?”

  “Yes, let’s go on.”

  On the opposite bank, a similar huddle of people watched the watery drama. I scanned the group and the area behind for any signs of Billy. A man with a sandwich board, waving a black book as he spoke to the backs of the crowd, got little attention. I couldn’t hear what he was saying of course but I took the book to be a bible or prayer book. It was a fair guess, since the front of his board suggested we all REPENT.

  The recovery of dead cows so soon after breakfast held limited appeal so I walked on. Parade Gardens looked near deserted. I gave the young woman at the ticket booth Billy’s description.

  She shook her head. “We’re not allowed to let in drunks, beggars or homeless people anyway,” she said. “Not that many want to come in. It’s the admission charge.”

  “But it’s free to Bath residents?”

  “It is if you have some kind of proof. But of course you wouldn’t have that if you were homeless.”

  An excellent point. “So how do you spot a beggar?”

  “You can tell, can’t you,” she asserted.

  I didn’t ask about drunks. She probably had a breathalyser kit for those. Further along, the bill board of the Bath Chronicle outside the Bog Island newsagent confirmed the words of the umbrellaed women: NIKKI REID: NEW APPEAL FOR WITNESSES. With the second abduction in six months, the police had to be desperate. And the first woman found dead just weeks before the second was snatched off the street. Happily as a private eye I didn’t have to deal with gruesome cases like these. I wondered if these appeals for witnesses ever worked. OLD WINO DISAPPEARS, POLICE WIDEN SEARCH. An unlikely headline. Who cared about winos coming and going? And if you were truly homeless, I wondered, could you be said to have disappeared if you couldn’t be found?

  Disappeared from where? Your usual doorway?

  I stepped into a deep puddle and my shoe got swamped and my hair stuck damply to my head and neck. My leather jacket was springing a leak. Stupid. In the valley where I live just a few minutes’ drive from the city, I’d have been wearing decent boots, a rainproof jacket and a hat and wouldn’t have minded the rain. The wind picked up as I crossed North Parade Bridge. I checked my watch: noon. I was still half an hour early for my next appointment but since I’d arranged to meet at the Bathtub Bistro that would hardly constitute hardship. At the south side of the bridge, a spiral staircase led down to the towpath. The evil ammonia smell testified to its frequent use as a toilet and made me wonder about the olfactory capacities of those lingering long enough to daub graffiti on the walls. Among the mindless tags and swastikas, I was being assured that Darren was a dickhead. (Yes, but was he stupid enough to hang around in a piss-stained stairwell?)

  The cow rescuers were still struggling on the other side of the river. The crowd in Spring Gardens had thinned now that the wind was driving the rain harder, and even the sandwich board preacher was wrapping the good book into a Tesco carrier bag, calling it a day. A short tunnel and sharp turn right brought me into Grove Street and the Bathtub Bistro.

  I wished I could shake myself dry like a dog. Instead I slumped my sodden jacket over a chair by the upstairs window table, grunted a greeting at Clive who grinned at me from behind the bar and made for the toilets where I stuck my head under the hand dryer. Relative comfort restored I squelched back to the table where Clive had thoughtfully deposited a bottle of Pilsner Urquell.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, looking up from some paperwork. The place was quiet, only one table downstairs was taken so far.

  “Fine, apart from wet feet.”

  Clive bent down, rummaged behind the bar and emerged with a blow heater. He plugged it in and shoved it under my table. “Anything for the Great Detective.”

  I do love this place. I often meet clients here. It’s central yet nicely tucked away and dead cosy. It had just got cosier, with under-table heating.

  “Are you eating or meeting?”

  I’d just had breakfast. But then it was lunchtime. “What’s good?”

  “Bangers and mash. Venison sausages with a red onion sauce. You’ll like it.”

  “You talked me into it.”

  I was finishing off the creamy mound of leeky mash when my client’s representative arrived. A lanky scarecrow of a man in his fifties lost somewhere inside a pale blue M&S suit, he’d have been six foot four if he’d straightened up. Instead he crumpled himself even further to shake hands with me. “Giles Haarbottle, Griffin’s.” The insurers. I’d done work for them before but hadn’t met this specimen. I knew what this was about, all but the details, that was. He waited until his double gin and tonic arrived before snapping open his imitation leather briefcase and extracting a lemon-yellow file, adorned with the Griffin logo. “I’m informed that you have done similar work for us before, Mr Honeysett, so you’ll be aware of the nature of these unfortunate transactions we are sometimes forced to make. Absolute discretion is imperative of course.” He gulped some of his gin before flipping open the file. “It pains me to give money to criminals but…”

  “…it saves you a lot of dosh.”

  “We are working in our client’s best interest, you understand. And, as you will see, the nation’s,” he said sniffily.

  Insurance companies, in case you hadn’t noticed, aren’t about insurance at all. They are gamblers and their only interest is winning. Insurance companies gamble on the chance of actually having to replace your TV/house/car/oil tanker against the money they can extract from you, based on that promise. They’re bad losers too. So if they can save themselves a bob or two, even though it means bending the rules a little, they will. And then they come to me. Or some other mug who is willing to do what the police can’t and the insurer couldn’t possibly ask of their employees. It’s called “recovery of stolen goods” and goes like this: a valuable item gets nicked. It’s well insured. Instead of flogging it on the open market (where he gets a fraction of the value and can be traced back if someone gets picked up), the crook offers it to the insurance company for less than they’d have to pay out if it stayed lost. The company shells out, the owner gets his valued baubles back, and crook and owner are happy. The insurance company isn’t happy but (a) it saved some money, (b) it can always put its premiums up and (c) it will. The police have learned to turn a blind eye to the whole thing since the victims get their stuff back and because, frankly, there isn’t a thin
g they can do about it.

  Haarbottle handed over the open folder with long fingers. Three laser prints of images, each with a sheet of notes. “Watercolours. Dimensions and descriptions are in the notes. Make absolutely sure before you hand over any money.”

  It was my turn to get sniffy. I’m not a fan of art thieves. Handing over money to them was something I wouldn’t enjoy one bit, so yes, I was going to make damn sure. I briefly examined the images. Two were ink and watercolour jobs of American natives dancing in a circle during an equinox celebration, the third of some sort of plant or rather a seed head. I recognized all this instantly because it said so in the margins. I turned to the notes. As usual nothing had been left to chance. The notes were very precise, down to the flocking of the paper and other superficial damage and where to find it.

  “Okay. Who nicked them, where and when?” I enquired.

  Haarbottle reached for his glass. “That’s none of your concern. Just do the meeting, check that it’s all there and hand over the money.” He sucked up more gin as though the long speech had parched his throat.

  “Wrong. If I do this kind of thing at all I want to know as much as possible about what kind of villain I’m going to meet in a dark alley while I’m carrying… how much?”

  Haarbottle cleared his throat. “£120,000. We beat them down from two hundred.”

  I couldn’t help giving a whistle at the figure. “For three watercolours? Try a bit more beating.”

  “The works in question are by John White and are absolutely priceless.”

  I looked at the photographs again. “John White? The Scottish guy? Are you sure?”

  “Wrong White. This John White was active in the late sixteenth century. Went to America with the colonists. Hence the Red Indians. Very few examples of his work remain. These were part of an exhibition at the American Museum up at Claverton.”

  “They were nicked from the museum?” I hadn’t heard of a break-in at the American Museum. I was sure I would have.