PearlHanger 09 (12 page)

hectic I had to make a pretend dash to the loo in Wickham Market to scribble another cluster of deposit cards.

Within two hours I'd nailed a so-called "toothpick" that was encased in a small whistle. Sounds daft, but Anne Boleyn even had one designed by Albrecht Durer. Neither a manicure instrument nor toothpick, but an ear-scraper. Its miniscoop gives its function away. You scrape out your ear wax with a carefree flourish. It was only base metal and 1760-ish, but unusual enough for me to promise a good price to the hard-up widow of Leiston whose hens flourished near the nuclear power station. No pearls.

We missed an old set of English bagpipes, the mellow sort you work with your arm, but collared a Staffordshire footbath from a young footballer near Woodbridge. He actually wanted to sell his "old pot baking dish" and put money toward a carburetor. I forgave him because it was big, almost nineteen inches long, and both its lifting handles were intact. The vertical sides mean early, say 1805. Anyway, the footballer can't be criticized because I've seen one used in a fancy house where the charming hostess had also guessed wrong about what the elegant dish was actually for. No pearls.

And a Dublin shawl-brooch by West, who, bloody cheek, registered their Celtic design in 1849, a zillion years after the original from which they copied was made for some ancient Celt in County Cavan. The naughty old lady near Orford Ness who'd advertised it tried telling me it was in her family for seventeen generations. By now I was prattling explanations to Donna, but of course boxing clever and still not letting her know I was putting a deposit down on each. Vernon had called at them all and blundered on his way.

And from an Ipswich grocer a copy of a red-glazed

100 .

Ming stem cup, made locally a century back and lovely. And an Indochina Victorian period ultramarine blue glazed octagonal dish with bits of the famed black decoration—the Vietnamese copied the Japanese—that still costs only groats (give it time, give it time). And from a retired baker near Woodbridge's ferry . . .

Just before seven we booked into a Woodbridge inn. We'd planned to meet for supper at nine o'clock because Donna was tired. I said I'd have a glass before I went to rest. Sure enough she came down a few minutes later to say she was really too exhausted to turn out. She'd have a meal brought to her room and did I mind. I said not in the least; I'd have some pasties in the taproom. We were so polite. Enemies are character-forming, aren't they? I wasn't sure who mine were, but if she'd blown the gaff to Sid Vernon or Chatto about Owd Maggie's urgent message, well, she was one of the worst I'd got.

The hire car came two minutes after I'd phoned. Gave me just enough time to telephone my list to Margaret Dainty and tell her to relay the details to Mel and Sandy, wherever they might have got to.

"Are you all right, Lovejoy?" Margaret asked. "You sound bitter."

"I'm fine, love." I told her to contact the
Advertiser
and say I was coming in. I was collecting allies and foes like a harvester does grain. Opponents are okay; it's allies that worry me.

. 101

12

The
Advertiser
offices are three stories tall, which is big for our town. It's a trick, really. They have only five tiny rooms, a shared loo, and a broom cupboard. For a few quid a year they're allowed to hang this enormous neon shingle outside.

Practically the whole
Advertiser
is Liza. She wears a green eyeshade, as a joke, and works all hours. She smokes cheroots, wears gunslinger jeans, bishop blouses, and a Teddyboy string tie. I like her. Liza smiles at people before being introduced, which in most women's book indicates at least a harlot.

"I'm too frigging busy to have you wasting my bloody time, Lovejoy," Liza said in welcome. She prides herself on her breasts and teeth, and is developing this akimbo pose to show off these features. Doc Holliday without the tubercular cough.

"I only want a clipping, Lize. Two minutes. I'm in a hurry."

"I give you shit-stingy locals free fucking adverts. Now you want free everything else."

102 .

I listened patiently. She'd done sociology.

"We've got to read your rubbish, Lize."

"Liza, Lovejoy. With a frigging zed." She unglued her pose and riffled through a cupboard. "Be quick, before the sodding photocopier goes on the frigging blink. Regional or district?"

"Regional. And pretty recent." The
Advertiser
is sent out free with local papers. I started on them, working backward. "How do you make it pay, Lize?"

"Liza, you reactionary pig. Who said it pays?"

"Ah." I waggled a chiding digit and worked the photocopier. They were all there in the one issue. Some, like Joe the parson and Mrs. E. Smith, had given their full addresses. Others had only given phone numbers, yet Donna's address list for the sweep was fuller. And so far we had visited about half.

"Ta, Lize. See you soon, eh?"

"Liza, you imperialist fascist bastard . . ."

Maybe she and Donna went to the same university. I left with two copies of the antique adverts column. How can women be practically the same shapes and turn out so different? It's a rum old world. So one issue of the old
Advertiser
was Vernon's entire source. And no pearls in the list. I drove to the harbor.

*

A light was on in Beatrice's bedroom. Barney came to the door, blocking out the light from the stairs. He wore a Fair Isle pullover and trousers, no shoes. A hasty dresser. I grinned apologetically.

"Wotcher, Barney. Lydia sent me." Well, it sounded more honest.

"Lydia came the other night,' Barney grumbled.

. 103

"Yes, but she wants a couple of, er, zodiac things cleared up."

"It's a nuisance." He reluctantly let me pass. I knew how he felt. Being suddenly prised off Beatrice by an interloper gets you riled. Anybody'll tell you.

Beatrice was disheveled but covered up. She was shoving cushions into a semblance of order. In the light Barney was even bigger. I made a few hearty comments on sailing weather. Beatrice was smiling as she prepared drinks, unasked, and sat opposite me with an alarming display of leg. I had to look away to start my voice off.

"Donna Vernon was with a bloke, Beatrice?"

"When Mrs. Vernon asked me to fix the seance with Madame Blavatsky? Yes."

"Did you see him?" I remembered Beatrice looking down from her window at me.

Beatrice nodded, giving me a knowing wink to show she remembered it, too. Barney was staring morosely into his glass, thank God. "A Sagittarius, I shouldn't wonder."

"Really?" I said politely, trying to look intelligent.

She smiled, emphatically shook her head. "I can see why you'd think Taurus, though ..."

Taurus? I wasn't thinking anything. I had to nip this junk in the bud, so interrupted. "Bea. Did Owd Maggie keep records of her, er, customers?"

"No need, Lovejoy." Beatrice glanced into her glass and sighed. Empty again. I rose quickly to fill it and keep the flow of information coming.

"Somebody else kept them for her?"

"Of course. Cardew."

I gave her the drink, one glug of gin and two of lemonade. Barney glowered suspiciously. Clang. I'd blundered. "Erm," I said, "I hope that's how you like it,

104 .

Beatrice. I'm not very good at, er, drinks. Did you say Car- dew?"

"Yes." Beatrice was unmoved. "It's quite logical, Love- joy. Madame Blavatsky's memory was awful."

Silly me. Another headache loomed. "Look, love. You know I'm not into this seance jazz. Just tell me. Can Car- dew be reached?" For all I knew it might be like phoning up.

"Oh, that'd be hard." Her eyes .were shining with interest. This was a challenge. "It has been done,
but, . ."

Well, if you can't beat them. I said carefully, "The reason is, Owd Maggie had a message for me. She told Lydia to contact me urgently."

"And you didn't," Beatrice said gently.

"No," I barked. Then said again, "No," but quieter. If Barney hadn't been there I'd have given Beatrice a bloody good hiding. There was no need for her to go on about it. I felt bad enough.

"Oh, Lovejoy." Her eyes filled.

"I know, I know. Somebody must have told Owd Maggie I was back.
I have wood carving lessons with old Connally in his studio down the Dutch Quarter."

Barney's mind moved momentarily off Beatrice. "How did they know to say the Dutch Quarter?"

"They didn't," I guessed. "They just probably said Lovejoy's around, and followed her until it was opportune
to ... to ...
So if there's a chance of getting her message," I ended weakly. Barney snorted in derision, embarrassing me. I felt a right twerp.

"Why not simply ask Madame Blavatsky herself?" Beatrice suggested.

"Owd Maggie?" I tried working that out, failed.
"But ..."
My words stuck.

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"Ifs so much simpler. And," she added brightly, "you can say you're sorry, Lovejoy. Think how nice . . ."

Now I'd got a blinding headache. "Can I have that drink, please, Bea? And an aspirin?"

Later I left Beatrice's and phoned Lydia from Charley's, the pub next door. This local nickname means any pub called the Black Buoy. Black Buoy because it sounds like Black Boy, meaning the dark-haired escaped Prince Charles, and that the pub's regulars were secret royalists. Later Charles II of Nell Gwynne fame. She told me to ring a number about ten o'clock for Sandy, and that Tinker had at last reached the cottages at Salcott marshes.

"Oh, aye?" I hadn't forgiven him for the police-cell episode.

"He wants to know can he please go home?"

My helper. "He's
got
no home," I said sourly. He currently lives in a derelict market van near the flour mill. "He'd only get sloshed. He can get just as drunk on the waterside," I argued, getting even more narked at the lazy old devil.

Lydia hesitated. Here it came, the seductive wheedle. "He hates it out there, Lovejoy. He says it's spooky."

"Where?" I asked. I'd told the old nerk anywhere within reach of the old creek cottages near Salcott Knights. I know it sounds like a spot marked X but it's really half a solar system wide.

Then in the gloom she spoke an old, old name that suddenly chilled my nape. It haunts me yet. Not on any map. But I knew instantly it was the trysting place toward which we'd been journeying all along. The long-dead an
ciet

106 .

name rose like a hand from black water.

"Pearlhanger," she said.

*

Just before ten I phoned Sandy about the arrangements about Mrs. Sutton's painting. He spent twenty demented minutes criticizing her. ("Lovejoy I mean have you ever
seen
such
teeth
before I
mean
and what
hair.
Oh the government should do something . . .") More time wasted.

"Have you got the stuff so far?" I asked hopelessly into his chatter. Talking to Sandy's like shouting at a typhoon, all effort and no use.

"Yes, but at what cost! Mrs. Teeth-and-Hair was
trying
to make a salad we watched her my
God
Mel had one of his giddy spells and you
know
what he's like about mayonnaise a
lunatic . . ."

This hysteria was actually an argument for another one percent. Wearily I agreed. Anything to keep him and Mel on the move. I couldn't face the thought of the sweep going to waste.

"Mel says it's a deal," Sandy trilled. His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. "He's absolutely
drooling
at the sound of that triangular-bird painter, Lovejoy! He's thinking of having his hair done. Do you think he should? I mean I've been

against his autumn-pink rinse
from the very
start..."

*

Don't get the wrong idea. Just because I burgled Spendlate Antiques that night it doesn't mean I was falling for Donna Vernon. No. I really was still determined to bring Owd Maggie's murderers to justice. I mean, somebody less honest and fair-minded might have weakened by now, and been compelled to raid Vernon and Chatto's antique shop

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to find proof that they weren't in league with Donna. So because I
wasn't
becoming hooked on Donna, I was absolutely certain I was still acting in the interests of truth and justice. See the logic?

Night isn't much help to the East Anglian burglar. A moving car after midnight in these small townships stands out like a durbar in a desert, and there's always one nosy dozy Old Bill smoking in some doorway. Wisely I parked under a hedge a mile outside the first lamp—the whole village only had a dozen, thank God—and walked in through a fine drizzle.

Spendlate Antiques Ltd. was a tatty place in the High Street. The shopfront had seen no paint for years. The shingle was skew-whiff as if it had been done by a school-leaver for a quid. There was no sign of life, the village's few streets empty. A distant car droned into silence on the A-road. Soporific. An alarm system box gave me a momentary thrombosis, but I guessed it was sham like on most places and paused briefly at the grimy window. One of those orange street lamps shone about sixty feet off, showing the usual clutter of the provincial junkshop: a stool, two chairs, scattered cavalry buttons, a brass pot, some Great War bayonets and medals, some indeterminate crockery, a personal 1725-ish sealed wine bottle but faked from recycled glass— one mint original will buy you a fortnight's free holiday or a thousand pasties, according to your station in life. This junk trove was protected by a Suffolk latch and a cottager-lock that were twice as valuable as the muck inside.

Feeling that life wasn't helping me much, I did the wise thing once I'd trembled the lock—the easiest thing in the world with anything bent—and shut the door.

"Hello?" I called. "Anybody there? It's me."

Nothing.

108 .

A house tells you if it's empty, doesn't it? Scientists, that crowd of aggropaths who make a comfortable living out of fears, tell us it's hormonal smells that are the giveaway. All balls, of course. It's simply the inanimate speaking to the animate. The walls and rafters and rooms call a gentle welcome, or howl an implacable hatred, as soon as a person walks within. I really believe this. You don't need Owd Maggie's ghostly Cardew to tell you. Your own apartment, bungalow, caravan trailer, will pulse it at you. Some habitations are right for you, others aren't. That's all there is to it.

This dump was friendly, for all its humble status.

Antique dealers always have a nook. If it's a lock-up shop the nook will never be on the premises. If the a.d. lives there, it will be upstairs, and in a wall. Confidently I went up the stairs and put the bedroom light on. Basically a two up, two down pad. The nook was behind a small gilt wall mirror, some nerk's idea of Machiavellian cleverness.

Three letters. All were signed "Donna." All talked to Darling, Lover, Ken, Sweetheart. Plus a pet name that I won't disclose because I'm sure they'd want to keep "Sex- man" confidential.

I wasn't depressed. No, honest. I'm being really frank about it, because after all people go through phases. Clearly Donna was a victim of some crush on that insipid curly- headed oaf called Chatto. Now, women always try to be responsible creatures, stick to patterns and all that. But they lack judgment. And everything's judgment, right? These letters in my hand were a transparent example of a lovely woman, too innocent, falling for the pretty-boy patter of that goon Chatto. A wave of sympathy for Donna swept over me. If she hadn't majored in academic thought she'd know more about humanity. A tragic paradigm for us all.

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