Drawing the Line (10 page)

‘And slipped the key into the lock?’

‘I rather fear so. And then pocketed the key and – oh, Lina, I’m a stupid old soak, and I promise to sign the pledge and everything so long as you’ll forgive me.’

‘Nothing to forgive, Griff. I’ll get a locksmith round first thing. So long as one of us stays put and bolts it when the other one goes out, we shall be all right.’

‘We should be anyway, dear heart. There’s nothing to steal in here after all, except
Sanditon
and
Northanger
Abbey
, neither exactly irreplaceable.’

I nodded. Any dealer would know you don’t keep anything of value in your caravan. Or in the van. And at a show like this, as at Detling, security would be very tight indeed.

I’d like to say I lay awake for hours puzzling it all out. But, as usual, as soon as my head touched the pillow, even on a board of a bed like this, I fell straight asleep and didn’t wake till Griff brought me my morning tea. Except this time he didn’t quite bring it. His head was still so foul and his shakes so bad he spilt it all over me.

Although I organised a locksmith, who grumbled about the weekend call-out but not about his extra fee, it was Griff who had to stay in for him. I put my foot down. There was no way he was fit to handle anything breakable, as he eventually had the grace to admit. So I went on the stall on my own. There was a steady trickle of customers from the first, and though there seemed to be less money changing hands than yesterday, people were soon touting little carriers and strange shapes in
bubble-wrap
. No one had yet bought anything from us, but people were hovering. I reminded myself that likely customers wanted to see a calm, positive face, not a sulky one. And I could have done sulky for England. The very day I wanted to take off and hunt for my ancestors Griff had to have the shakes and the mother and father of a headache. Headache spelt h-a-n-g-o-v-e-r.

Not wishing to scare off punters by looking – what was the word Griff used? – predatory, I sat down with a trade mag and tried to look cool and professional. It was difficult with damp hair. Griff had reminded me that once women had used tea to rinse their hair, but I knew it was chamomile, not English Breakfast, and I didn’t think milk and sugar were involved either.

But someone was more than hovering. Someone was coming in to land.

I didn’t pounce. Not when they were looking at eight hundred pounds’ worth of hideous Royal Worcester. Let them feast their eyes on the twirls of gilt before I smiled and suggested they pick it up and have a closer look.

‘Eight hundred and fifty pounds! You sold it for eight hundred and fifty pounds! I’d have been happy with six hundred. Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!’ Griff crowed. Aside, he added, ‘You may not recognise it as a quotation, dear heart, but that was how Schumann announced Brahms’s arrival on the musical scene. Or was it Chopin’s?’ He stroked his chin. Yes, he’d managed to shave.

I smiled and nodded, even if I didn’t see how the comment applied to me. I breathed a sigh of relief: Griff was more or less his usual self again. He’d sauntered up at about one, looking as if he’d managed to iron his skin as well as his clothes. The suggestion I’d picked up from a magazine – teabags on the eyes – had worked. Or maybe I was so chuffed by my success I didn’t take off my rose-tinted specs.

‘Time to celebrate!’ he chortled, heading off again before I could stop him, the old bugger. It wasn’t that I minded being on my own – I’d quite enjoyed my morning, to be honest, practising charming the punters myself instead of watching Griff perform all the time – but I did need the loo. And I was very hungry.

But I was soon busy again. More smiles, more banter, more sales: that was the way to do it. I felt quite smug. Until I realised the next face I’d switched the smile on for was Larry Copeland. It might better to leave it in place, so see if it would bring a matching expression to his face.

It didn’t.

‘I hear the old bugger got pissed again,’ he observed.

It was one thing for me to call him that myself, but quite another for someone else to.

‘I don’t know –’

‘Yes, you do. The whole site knows.’

‘There was a bit of a problem,’ I admitted.

‘And an even bigger problem with the bloke that brought him back home – knocked him out and stole his keys. Did he take much?’

‘Not much in a caravan to take, is there? It’s all bolted down.’

‘You don’t keep anything in there?’ He sounded quite concerned.

I shook my head. ‘Just a kettle and so on.’ His nod encouraged me to ask, in a tone meant to show I expected the answer to be no, ‘Do you in yours?’

‘Clean as a whistle.’ He glanced over at his stall. ‘But then, you’ve already given it the once over, haven’t you?’

Was this a not very subtle attempt to keep me out? I grinned. ‘I was just a visitor: I wasn’t exactly looking for masterpieces under the bed.’ He snorted. ‘Come on, Copeland, we just had a meal and went to the disco: nothing wrong with that, is there? After all, you were out as well.’

His voice seemed friendlier. ‘That’s just it, Lina. I was out. Marcus was supposed to be in. All evening. Just in case.’

I wasn’t at all sure how much to believe. So I just said, ‘We weren’t late back.’

‘He shouldn’t have gone out at all. That’s part of our deal, Lina – he’s out, I’m in. I’m out, he’s in. See? But you come along flashing your tits and he’s off, leaving the place unguarded. Mind you, seeing what was on offer, I can’t really blame him.’

Subject-changing time. ‘But if there’s nothing to
guard?’ I cast a mental eye round his caravan. If only I could trust my memory. No, no books or finished maps. Marcus’s paint box and a jar with brushes drying upside down. A couple of dirty mugs. A laptop computer.

Now, if you just sold a computer like that down in the pub, you’d get a couple of hundred for it. True. But we were dealing all the time in things worth far more than that. All of us. And we dealt on trust. So what on earth could he have tucked under mattresses or slipped behind fold-down tables? Things like priceless maps or forged pages from books?

He looked at his stall again. ‘You know yourself – if they find there’s nothing to steal they’ll trash the place. Anyway, if you two want to go on the razzle tonight, that’s OK by me. Because I shall be staying in. And if anyone tries anything funny, they’ll get more than they bargained for.’

‘Especially dodgy security men,’ I said, with another affable grin, as if we were mates seeing eye to eye after a silly tiff. ‘So you want me to take Marcus over the hills and far away. OK. I’m sure I can manage that.’

But even as I smiled, I was trying to work out what the hell he was up to. I didn’t believe a word. I didn’t trust Copeland in general and in particular when he was apparently being nice and open.

We could have gone on fencing like this forever, I suppose, but there was another little rush of customers. A lot of them had gathered round Marcus. Copeland might have managed to say goodbye before he dived off, but I wouldn’t have testified in a court of law.

At this point Griff bustled up, suspiciously as if he’d been waiting for Copeland to go. He produced with one
hand a pair of plastic glasses pretending to be flutes, with the other a bottle of champagne. I had a cold feeling I’d never had before. After my sale, he could clearly afford to pay for even an extravagance like this – but could his liver? I’d never thought before about how much he drank.

‘Oh, come on, dear heart. Smile! It’s not poison!’

As usual, the bubbles got up my nose. But I wasn’t going to let him swill the whole bottle. Especially when he pressed his hand to his stomach and went pale. Please God, not a heart attack.

Apparently not. He gave an enormous, echoing belch. ‘Wind, you see. Nothing serious. It’s just the tummy finds shampoo a mite acid.’

He turned his back so I wouldn’t see him popping one of his indigestion tablets, but even if I hadn’t seen the smell of peppermint on his breath would have given it away. I took the bottle firmly and shoved it behind the stall’s skirt. ‘No more till you’ve had something to eat. I mean it, Griff. If you won’t look after yourself someone else will have to. And I think that someone’s me.’

So I dosed him on baguette and black coffee. Would that hurt his stomach? There was bound to be a second-hand home doctor encyclopaedia on one of the bookstalls: when he wasn’t looking, I’d check. Meanwhile, the champagne wouldn’t go to waste. I’d read somewhere that if you put a silver spoon down the bottle’s neck it’d stay fizzy. Despite our dear old lady shoplifter, we weren’t short of spoons. Marcus and I could check later that evening if the theory worked.

‘Going out? Of course he’s going out. He’s got this friend in Knaresborough. Can’t think why he came back last night: he doesn’t usually.’

‘He doesn’t want us in the caravan, that’s for sure,’ I said, breaking off a bit of chocolate and passing it over.

He took it with painty fingers. ‘I don’t see why.’

‘Marcus: invite me to the caravan this evening and I’ll bet you fifty pence I can show you why.’

‘What about food?’

What a weird question when I was almost offering myself to him on a plate. Only almost. It wasn’t my knickers that would be got into, but, if I could manage it, Copeland’s computer. I’d bet my teeth that he didn’t want anyone to see what was in his database of customers and sources. That was why he’d pasted together such a weak story.

‘Slip out and get something to bring back?’

‘Harrogate’s a bit respectable for your average Chinese take-away.’

‘In that case perhaps they’ll run to an above average Thai.’

In the end he started talking about an Indian, which surprised me, because there’s no way you can get rid of curry smells from a caravan, and much as I love coriander chicken I’m not sure I’d want to wake up in the morning to its perfume.

We stood outside the restaurant arguing.

‘No worse than the smell of beer and fags my coz’ll bring home with him on his clothes.’

‘But he won’t notice them: sure as God made little apples he’ll smell curry.’

‘We could eat at your place.’

‘We could just walk in here and ask if there’s a free table.’

He looked as shocked as if I’d suggested he streak down the main street. ‘But you have to pay VAT if you eat in.’

It might have been my pocket the £850 was burning a hole in, not Griff’s: I nearly offered to treat him. After all, curry wasn’t one of Griff’s favourite things, as it was mine, so we very rarely ate Indian and it would have been a real treat. But I kept my head screwed on. After all, the vase had been Griff’s find. The fact that he kept thrusting crumpled fivers at me as commission was irrelevant as the more he thrust them the more I told him not to.

Eventually we bought fish and chips, to eat as we walked back to the van. It might be one thing to eat in the street in downtown London; it was quite another to munch in posh Harrogate. So it wasn’t, as Griff might have put it, the best gastronomic experience in the world. And I deeply regretted my curry. I deeply regretted everything about the whole evening, actually. Perhaps Marcus had got so used to looking at his handsome face in the mirror every day he assumed he could simply get by on his looks. He certainly made no effort to talk to me, let alone entertain me in the way Griff’s cronies did. OK, they were mostly older and it was clear that chatting was all we were ever going to do, given what Griff called their proclivities. But they had charm and it was a pleasure to walk down the street with them.

Why not simply thank him for his company and head back to Griff’s caravan? One reason, to be honest, was
that I really hate spending a Saturday night in. Saturday nights are meant to be loud and silly with too much to drink – though having seen Griff this morning I was having serious doubts about that, and had resolved never, ever, to binge again. Not that I had for some time. Saturdays were either working days or time to prepare for the next day’s fair. Besides which, Bredeham didn’t have a big young population to go on the booze with. From time to time it was invaded by a whole lot of lads in bangers or on bikes, and there’d be a lot of
curtain-twitching
and talk of calling the police. Mostly the kids smashed a few bottles and had a couple of fights and then treated us to the sight of them throwing up or peeing against lampposts. So while a few local girls joined in, I voted with my feet. I might have felt about
ninety-eight
as I listened to the radio or read a book, but my halo was so bright I didn’t need electric light.

As I drove us back to the caravan site, I was almost ready to call the whole thing off. But I knew I had to get hold of Copeland’s laptop. Seducing Marcus was now so low down my list of priorities I decided simply to tell him the truth. Some of it. ‘If Copeland wants us out tonight, and you’re sure he’d going to be out to, and he’s suddenly pretending to be my best mate, I smell a rat, Marcus. Or if not a rat, something in the ’van he doesn’t want me to see.’

Marcus spoke for the first time since I’d started the engine. ‘There’s nothing there, Lina. I know where he stashes things. I’ve actually cased the joint for you. Zilch.’

Perhaps a snog was on the cards after all.

Parking up in our slot, I sent Marcus on ahead just to double-check the coast was clear. I followed more slowly, first checking in at our ’van for the mini-ablutions and a dab of lippie and to collect the champagne, the level of which had gone down so far it wasn’t worth taking. At least Griff had been sober enough to double-lock the door; I did the same when I left. I was strolling along thinking of not very much, certainly not Marcus and a body I’d only recently stopped fancying like mad, when I heard shouts. Someone was running hell for leather towards me, carrying something. I merged into the shadow of another caravan and waited till the psychological moment to stick out a foot.

There was a satisfying thud as a figure in black jeans and hooded jacket went flying. So did something else. A laptop. I grabbed it. Other hands grabbed the figure, but were so incompetent that the hoodie came off in their hands and the thief – I think we’d all decided that was the term by then – sped off. I hung on to the laptop, and Marcus and several others, Titus but not Copeland amongst them, checked the jacket. A professional shoplifter would have been proud of it, it had so many secret pockets. But it wasn’t supermarket loot they found, but jewellery, miniatures and pieces of silver, if not quite thirty. In other words, a lot of goodies dealers had thought too valuable to be left to the protection of the security staff guarding the showground.

One of whom now arrived. Not my acquaintance. This one, solid as an ex-policeman, came armed with a radio, which he used to summon assistance and to tell someone to shut the gates. My sort of guard.

To my surprise, he returned the stolen property with
the minimum of fuss to the owners. Marcus declared the laptop was his cousin’s. No one claimed anything that wasn’t theirs, and identified other stuff as belonging to people not part of the posse. A couple of the older men, but not Titus, were chosen to accompany the guard as he went off to pop it into safe-keeping till it was retrieved. By now a little gaggle of guards had arrived to guard the burgled vans till the locksmith arrived, no doubt grumpier than ever but mentally trebling his prices before kindly offering bulk discount of five per cent.