Free Rainstone Fall by Peter Helton

the considered Bigwood opinion, forcefully expressed the next afternoon in my little attic office. Tim shook his head. ‘I know nothing about this Telfer guy but if he’s a heavy hoodlum like you say then cleaning him out isn’t the healthy option.’
    ‘Which is probably why they’re blackmailing us into doing it,’ Annis told him.
    I held the receiver out to him. ‘So, would you like to tell Jill we’re chickening out because it’s unhealthy?’
    ‘Hey, hey, I didn’t say I’m not going to help.’ Tim made dampening motions with his hands. ‘I’m just having a moan, all right? I’m not in this for my health. Remind me, Chris, what am I in this for? Best not answer that. So who exactly is Telfer and who is doing the arm-twisting?’
    ‘I’ve no idea who set us up. I didn’t recognize the voice. But the goon was short- tempered and had skipped charm school. The voice was very distant and scratchy, which might of course have been deliberate. “Caller withheld number”, as one might expect, and definitely a mobile or a satellite phone, a hint of warble. There’s no way we could trace it. Even the police could have trouble doing that. I dare say they’d try but there’s a waiting list and all they’d probably find is a cheap mobile in a skip somewhere. Because if you plan a caper like this then you get yourself twenty stolen mobiles and chuck each one on a passing dustcart after you’ve made your call, or simply drop it in the river.’
    ‘Do you have any suspicions?’
    I didn’t. It came out of the blue. It could be anyone, anywhere. The boy could be long dead, the phone call could have been made from a poolside lounger of a villa on the Costa Brava for all I knew and there was little I could do except comply. I shook my head. ‘Could be anyone but they’re quite ruthless and they thought it out well. They obviously know all about Aqua Investigations and what kind of a rep we have. And they didn’t kidnap one of us so that we’d have a full team to play with.’
    Tim ran a hand over his eyes and seemed to come to some kind of conclusion. He sat up straighter. ‘Okay, so who exactly is this Telfer guy?’
    ‘We’re talking about Barry here,’ said Annis. ‘His brother Keith got put away for aggravated this and that last spring.’
    ‘What did he get, just out of interest?’ Tim asked.
    ‘Five years.’
    ‘Out by Christmas,’ all three of us bleated in unison.
    ‘On the surface they’re successful businessmen,’ Annis continued. ‘Proud, self-made men, a bit uncouth and ostentatious, a bit too loud and badly dressed in an expensive way. Bad taste in women and cars –’
    ‘What’s bad taste in cars?’ I interrupted.
    ‘Yellow.’
    ‘Quite right.’
    ‘Anyway, they run scrap yards and hire out heavy plant, diggers, bulldozers, rollers, etc., but they probably also hire out heavy muscle and apparently scrap cars they shouldn’t, like shiny new Mercs wot don’t belong to them.’
    ‘And for committed capitalists they have a curious attitude to competition as a regulator of price: they don’t seem to like it at all. That’s how little brother Keith got himself nabbed, trying to stamp out the competition. With hobnail boots and a baseball bat. Brother Barry is no slouch in the casual violence department either, I hear, and he never goes anywhere without one or two heavies. No children, which is probably just as well, and last thing I heard his wife ran off with one of his bodyguards but she didn’t get far and the goon was never heard of again.’
    ‘Charming family. And we’re relieving them of whatever’s in their safe? I hope you bought us all open tickets to Mumbai for afters. So where does this bundle of fun keep his baubles?’
    ‘Chez Telfer, up in Lansdown. In his safe.’ I dropped the ‘safe’ delicately at the end. Tim often complained that I was leading him astray when he’d been going straight for years but secretly he couldn’t wait to get his hands on a