PearlHanger 09 (11 page)

With one bound he vaulted free of his artistic chains to the bank beside us. I'd never seen such a tall relic before, living. He was clothed in a series of patches that were vague neighbors rather than closely sewn. "What kind do you want?"

"Didn't you advertise, erm . . .?" I said cleverly.

"Oh, in that free paper. Yes." He wasn't downcast, just hopeful in a newer direction. "It's over here." There was a rickety shed nearby, looking stitched up the middle like a Welsh blanket. Ivy and brambles covered it. Butterflies hung about. Birds twittered. God, it was rural. He pulled a rickety door aside. My chest didn't chime, but my heart jumped. Under a mass of rotting planks and sacks stood a bicycle. It took half a second to lift aside enough debris to reveal all.

A Sanaquizzi bicycle is really rather special—metal wheels with forks of strengthened bamboo, believe it or not. They were continental, made over four slender years from about 1908. Hardly antique, but odd and highly sought. Laugh if you like, but old butcher's boy bikes, post office bicycles, lovers' tricycles for spooning while you pedaled like mad and she struggled to keep her elegant bonnet on, represent the greatest of all modern booms. It took everybody by surprise in the 1960s. These "new antiques," as people call collectibles from 1950 back to 1914, range from a year's average salary to a week's. Please ignore their condition; start bargaining. And, if they're chucking in a suit of granddad's "bicycling apparel" from the wardrobe, sell your wife to raise the ante.

"A man called. Only talked from the bank. Didn't even take a look. Interrupted my painting of a bittern."

"Tut-tut," I sympathized, and looked at Donna. She'd already turned on her heel.

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"Sorry, mate. I'm not interested." I slipped him a scribbled IOU for twenty quid with a wink.

He was quick on the uptake. He glanced after Donna with a veteran's experience of women who criticized his spending the grub money on rose madder and prussian blue. I looped my finger to show we'd settle up later.

No pearls here either. Pattern: Good old Sid was moving faster. Was he sticking to the order of places as listed?

We found the answer in the next two, one in Diss and one in Eye. Lots of jokes about both names, of course, but not from me. Both were misses. I didn't care, because they confirmed my new flaw: Sid Vernon might have nicked Donna's money and be associating with an evil partner called Chatto, but he clearly didn't give a damn about antiques. He was a front, but for whom?

As hunters we too were being pretty lackadaisical, no? Yes. Because when I'd hurried Donna early this morning she'd been almost tardy.

The Diss man was a cheerful bloke talking to his three beehives. He was in his garden smoking a pipe, sitting on a huge inverted earthenware plant pot. Donna hung back, thinking him barmy.

He waved me in, quite unabashed. I'd seen it all before. I whispered to Donna that beekeepers aren't insane, or even sane come to that. They're just beekeepers. Bad luck if you don't keep your bees up with the gossip. When he got round to me it transpired we'd missed Vernon by two days.

"He didn't think much of my antique, I'm afraid," he said amiably. "A local dealer bought it, Jim Prawer. Always thought it was worth a bit. Little five-legged ivory chair only a few inches high. Toy, I suppose. Been in my family years."

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"Christ." I almost wept. It sounded a genuine antique. They made the best in Goa for the Portuguese. I thanked him, said cheerio to his hives.

"They only came about that ivory antique," he started telling the bees pleasantly as we left. Well, whatever turns you on. Still no pearls.

Eye's an ancient old place, the sort you should linger in. Though it pained me, I urged Donna on through. She was becoming a bit ratty by then. I was hearty as a breakfast broadcaster because my very own flawless plan was forming. I'd had enough of other people's.

The chap was a burly aggressive chap, beery of odor and piggy of eye. I knocked and asked him politely if his antique was still for sale. He threatened me by raising his voice and telling me to sod off. The object had been sold to a reliable dealer in Eye.

He reemerged at a second knock and loomed larger. His beer belly shoved me off the porch. "I'll not tell you again," he bawled.

Blokes like him tire me quickly, like a joke on a seaside cup. "Look, sir," I tried pleasantly. "Your fake antique might be worth a . . ."

He went deranged. "Fake?" he howled, forcing me down the garden path by sheer advancing mass.
"Fake?
It was a genuine America's replica. A London silversmith, too, date stamp and everything, 1851.1 told that other idiot that I didn't deal with gypsies, so clear off or I'll have the police on
you ..."

I explained to Donna as we rode between hedges to Saxmundham, "Sid must have been 'that other idiot.' Getting close, eh?"

"My husband's a warm human being," she reprimanded frostily.

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More socialspeak. As if everybody should have a knighthood for breathing. I settled back, having learned all I wanted from the boatmending baddie: He had said "America's," so he was a true yachtsman who knew 1851 was the date of the first America's Cup Race, exactly right date for a fashionable replica. To me the man was exactly in pattern: a nonantique nondealer, who'd advertised an antique from a home address.

She drove on in silence, more worried than ever I'd seen her, me smiling and nodding encouragement. We were catching up with the bastard.

None of this was my fault to start with, so what followed when I caught him wouldn't be my fault either, right?

·f

At a tavern in Saxmundham we separated for a few minutes before having a late nosh. I couldn't get Lydia on the blower and I knew Helen was having a big thing with a moneyed civil servant so she'd not be up yet—Helen in love wakes late and smokes her first packet of fags to dog- ends before brewing up. Luckily Margaret was at the White Hart. She was all ready for a long chat but I cut that short and made her take down the details, the Russian gedanite rosary at Michaela French's in Lincoln, the genuine Wilson landscape I'd reserved and its neffie companion the glass plaque at Mrs. Sutton's, the genuine Sanaquizzi bike, the miniature ivory chair at dealer Jim Prawer's shop near Diss, and that America's Cup replica now in "some reliable dealer's hands" in fine reliable Eye.

"I've reserved some, Margaret," I told her. "Mrs. Sutton's stuff, the bike. The others will have to be bargained for. Get me somebody to do a fixed sweep on a split."

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She went doubtful. "That'll be difficult."

"For God's sake, Margaret, I'm on a divvie streak," I yelled frantically. "It's money for jam. You?"

"I'm stuck, Lovejoy. I'll search about. Lydia's gone to see Beatrice over something."

"Drink up and get looking," I said. I didn't want Lydia. "I'll ring you at the Arcade in an hour."

At the right time I gave Donna the slip and got the news from Margaret: She'd got Sandy and Mel for basic expenses and twenty percent of the gross. I went berserk but she said there was nobody else. They'd already left for Lincoln. She rang off in tears, me blazing. Now I was in even more of a hurry.

My stealthy search round East Anglia was becoming like Trooping the Colour. First Vernon, followed by Chatto, then the police, me and Donna, then Tinker, all now followed—last and noisiest—by Sandy and Mel in the universe's least secret sequin-toting motor car. Jesus, but I had a headache. At first it was only terrible, but got much worse two seconds later.

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11

Information, like statistics, is rubbish, yet I'm a mine of the stuff. I have an irritating knack with pointless facts. Napoleon perfumed his horse. One acre supports forty-seven thousand tons of air. Richard the Lion-Heart could play every known musical instrument. The painter Turner drank a bottle of sherry a day. I can go on and on.

Connecting facts is different. I'm naturally hopeless.

So at the time I didn't see much significance when police met me in the car park, asked me if I was Lovejoy, and drove me about twenty miles to one of their many clinks. Donna, loyal as women always are, pretended she wasn't with me and watched my abduction in silence. I could have been kidnapped for the Turkish galleys or anything. That's women. I kept telling the Old Bill I was heading in the opposite direction and could they please put me down at the next bus stop.

Twin constables looking prepubertals took me to the cells. These places always have sickly niffs of disinfectant and night soil battling for supremacy. Keys clanked and

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bars clanged. I was just getting nervous when the leading Old Bill said to me, "He's in here, sir." Me. Sir?

"Who is?"

"Wotcher, Lovejoy. Sorry. I wuz nicked." Tinker was sitting on the cell bunk, grinning apologetically.

"You old sod," I exploded. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Drunken vagrant," the constable said.
"Lucky Sergeant Chandler remembered you, Lovejoy, or this old bugger'd be up before the beak by now."
He unlocked the cell and jerked his head. "He's let him off in your care."

Sergeant Chandler actually doing me a favor? I revised my opinion. Until then I'd thought Chandler a right measle, one of those peelers whose mind is frozen into a permanent sneer. Chandler was playing some game.

"Right. Ta. Come on, Tinker."

Chandler was at his desk when I knocked, the same carefree sprite as always. I heeled the door shut and groveled my gratitude.

"Think nothing of it, Lovejoy," he said in his muted foghorn. ."Cheerio."

I didn't move and said, "It's cheaper, of course." He raised his bushy eyebrows. "To let Tinker go," I explained.

"Aye?" He sat with fingers interlocked, pious as an oil magnate justifying prices.

God, but peelers are slow these days. No wonder most of them never get promoted out of the billiards room. I helped. "Isn't this where you show me a photograph of K. Chatto, Esquire?"

"Is it, indeed? For what purpose?"

"So at least one of us will know what's going on."

He didn't smile, just shoved me a photograph. I'd stood all this time, only police being so tired they need

96 .. .

chairs. It was that fair-haired weak-faced bloke from Owd Maggie's seance who'd avoided my eyes.

"This is Chatto? What's he done?"

"Only suspicion." He was trying to sound casual. Little crooks get chased. Big crooks, like Morgan the Pirate, get knighted and freedom. I don't mean bankers and insurance syndicates, incidentally, though if the cap fits . . . "Seen him before, Lovejoy?"

"No. Should I have done?"

He did smile then. It wasn't pretty. "Birds of a feather."

When I reached Saxmundham Donna was furious with me. Not, note, with the police for having snatched me, but me. She came storming up as soon as the police car was out of sight. I felt really narked. I'm the only person in the world who isn't a disadvantaged minority.

"What did they want, Lovejoy?"

"Nothing," I said sourly. "They're still on about your car."

"Are you sure that's all it was?"

I gave her my purest stare. "Would I lie?"

Oh, I forgot to say I'd got the Old Bill to drop Tinker off just before we'd reached the tavern. I'd scribbled him an instruction, to go on ahead and wait at the last place on our list, near the creek houses in Salcott. Then I'd be shut of the boozy old devil. I was bitter. Cost me a fortune and done nowt.

We started off to do our two addresses near Saxmundham. One was a century-old piece of heavy slag glassware, a blue swirly marble-looking dish by Gateshead's George Davidson—only three slag makers are known for sure, so seeing his lion-and-turret mark was a delight. His company's still around. I got it from a retired policeman, would

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you believe, again tipping him the wink and dropping a quid and a card so Donna didn't notice. The second was a youngish couple loving in sin on yogurt and carrots and doing silk-screen printing in somebody's garage. They had a nice finely stitched sampler in a heavy ebony frame showing motifs of birds, flowers, and abstract patterns in reds, greens, browns, and a blue, which is all usual for 1827. Lovely. A bit unusual to combine eyelet, cross, tent, and some Romanian stitches, plus that swinish rococo stitch that always makes you feel a thumb short.

"Unsigned," I said.

The lank-haired girl shrugged. She was stewing lentils while her skeletal accomplice did appalling designs on a sand tray. "Thafs why the man wouldn't buy it."

Sid Vernon's infallible ignorance was getting on my wick. "He's a nerk," I said. Donna gasped. "It's good. How long ago did he call?"

"Two days."

On the sly I'd written a few be-prepared cards saying: "I'll be back and will buy. Deposit enclosed. Lovejoy Antiques, Inc.," each folded with a quid inside. I palmed one to the girl giving her a look to warn her against Donna. "We'll think about it. See you. Thanks."

Exit smiling, resuming journey. Still no pearls.

"We're getting nearer the coast," I said brightly. "Do you notice we're traveling almost full circle?"

Now she should have covered that remark, but no. Silence. She'd been quite tough with the mute blame, but I knew she couldn't keep it up. Women are like budgies— don't trust silence. You have to keep revealing your position and intentions, like a destroyer on the move. I can't understand it because quietness is pretty useful stuff if you want a think. She broke after five miles.

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"Is that what you think of my husband, Lovejoy?"

"Well, he's not much of an antique dealer, is he?" I had to say it straight out or she'd become suspicious.

"I suppose your wife was perfect?"

"Pretty good," I acknowledged to shut her up. The trouble was Cissie always Knew What Was Best, and had

morality like other people have bad breath.

·

That afternoon was gold, pure gold. We found nothing at the house of a retired old violin maker in Halesworth who'd advertised a boxwood diptych—think of a small folding wooden book shape that opens to reveal dinky scenes of saintly doings. From the old bloke's description it sounded Flemish, genuine, sixteenth century, and I could have strangled the old goon for selling it to a dealer who sounded suspiciously like Big Frank from Suffolk. Still, Big Frank's seventh wife was known to be leading him a dance and he was getting desperate for gelt. Please God Mel and Sandy got their skates on . . .

We followed Vernon's trail to Southwold where musicians bulge the boozers and litter the sands, and I turned my nose up at a baby's feeding spoon—pap spoon, they're called—that a pleasant landlady had advertised. Of course I then hurtled back on the pretext of asking if she was related to the Lancashire Charlestons like me, and slipped her one of my deposit cards for the precious little silver object. You can't mistake a pap spoon, with its hinged lid over the bowl and hollow handle for, believe it or not, actually blowing the mashed grub into the obstinate little fiend's mouth. George would have eaten the spoon.

The delectables went on and on as we roamed the estuary villages, tumbling on me in a golden rain. It became so

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