Free Rainstone Fall by Peter Helton Page B

There seemed to be nobody else up there. I looked through the glasses again. By the time I found him once more he was disappearing behind a stand of trees just above the manor.
    ‘Something stinks,’ I concluded eloquently.
    ‘You think this is a trap of some sort?’ Annis asked.
    ‘I don’t know what I’m thinking yet,’ I admitted. ‘Just now I thought I saw a bloke watching us from the other side of the valley. The whole thing is just weird. Let’s not do anything too predictable. Let’s come back later.’
    They grumbled but let me herd them into the car. On the way back to Mill House we bounced around ideas about how to get into Telfer’s place but I had infected us all with my feelings of doom. What excitement there had been was gone. It had all turned back into the dangerous job of rescuing Jill’s son, and secretly I was glad of this. We might all be a bit more careful if we had a little less fun.
    Nightfall. While Annis and I changed into black clothes and trainers we wondered about the kidnapping. How did you pick a victim? Was it really random? How did he get to know about Jill and Louis in the first place? What were the criteria for a useful victim? The same as always, we decided – vulnerability, isolation, powerlessness, loneliness. Unemployed single mother was a perfect fit.
    It only slightly worried me that Tim, who hadn’t known what this was about when he came over, had found in the boot of his car a convenient set of black clothing to change into, including a pair of black trainers I’d never seen him wear before. It did sometimes cross my mind that I had no way of knowing just how retired a safe breaker he really was, despite his protestations that it was only me who led him astray from the path of righteousness he chose when he wrote himself a fantasy CV and started working for Bath Uni.
    We set off into the dark in Tim’s car. All the way there, when we spoke at all, we did so in hushed voices, as though we needed to practise stealth. This time I made Tim approach from the opposite side, up Lansdown, turn off right when the watchful spire of St Steven’s suddenly loomed, and drive slowly along the narrow and unlit lane until it briefly widened near Charlcombe Manor.
    We left the car squeezed against the steep bank and all got out of the driver door into the cool, dark silence. I found a few stone steps leading up the hill and in the absence of anything better stomped up those as though I knew where I was going. The slithery steps soon stopped and turned into an uneven narrow path that ended at a stile in a wooden fence. We clambered over and found ourselves in a plantation of young trees. Every nine feet in any direction stood a spindly tree tied to a stout stake. We used the stakes to pull ourselves up the steep slope into the hill fog. Once through the narrow belt of saplings we came to another barrier, this one an overgrown fence of wire strung between wooden posts. We scrambled over as best we could with as little use of our torches as possible. Thick cloud obscured the stars. The only illumination came from the reflected glow of the city beyond the hills, which allowed just enough light to see which way was up. We hadn’t gone far into the meadow before the rain started its maddening dance again. I headed for the dark line of the hedgerow to my left. It ran uphill in an unsteady diagonal which I hoped would bring us within yards of Telfer’s property. With the rain tap-dancing on the hood of my rainproof I led us in a puffing and squelching trudge uphill until a deeper darkness loomed in front.
    I let the others catch up with their breathless leader. ‘This is it. That’s the hedge . . . that runs round . . . the entire property. Let’s walk round to the right.’
    Soon the house itself came into view above the line of vegetation, a silhouette like a decapitated pyramid. There were lights on upstairs beyond the picture windows behind what had to be enormous blinds or curtains.