Solomons Seal (10 page)

‘Sydney, Australia?' He looked at me with sudden interest. ‘That could be very helpful. But before I promise anything, let's have another look at those die proofs. It's the die proofs that make the collection unique.'

‘Because they're ship stamps?'

‘No, because they could explain something that has always puzzled students of the Perkins Bacon printing house. Come on, open it up and let me have another look at them.' And he added as I undid the wrapping, ‘The catalogue description would have to be very circumspect, but we could certainly say enough to bring every major GB and Commonwealth dealer running to have a look at it.' He opened the albums, searching out the two pages with the proofs, placing them side by side on the desk in front of him. ‘Forgeries, fakes,
re-entries, inverted watermarks, doubled surcharges, there are examples of every vagary of stamp printing. But stolen dies that were later used to prepare the transfer roller for a plate of ship labels – that's something quite new. Hard to believe in connection with a firm like Perkins Bacon.' He put the glass to his eye, peering closely at the seal in its frame. ‘Solomons Seal. That's right, isn't it? That's how Berners described it to you.'

‘Yes.'

He nodded, still examining the proof. ‘Tubby rang me about it, said he thought the label on the cover auctioned a couple of years ago must have had the word “Solomons” on it – Solomons Shipping Company, something like that.' And he added, ‘I checked with a friend of mine at Robson Lowe. He couldn't remember what was on the label, so I asked him who had put the cover up for auction. He rang me later to say that it had been sent to them by a dealer in Sydney.' He reached to a box file on the window ledge behind him, searched out a card and copied an address on to a slip of paper. ‘Cyrus Pegley, that's the dealer's name.' He handed me the slip. ‘Since you're going there, do me a favour, will you? Go and see him when you're in Sydney, find out all you can about that cover, where he got it from, what was printed on the label – anything at all that will help establish the provenance of these die proofs.'

The address he had given me was Victoria Street, King's Cross, presumably a suburb of Sydney. ‘I won't have much time,' I murmured.

‘Then make time. It's important if you want these die proofs to fetch the sort of figure I think they could.' He was leaning forward again, peering intently at the pages, the jeweller's glass back in his eye. ‘Solomons Shipping Company,' he murmured, and shook his head. ‘I don't believe that would fit. Berners didn't tell you who his client was, I suppose? No, of course not.' He sighed. ‘A pity. We need to know a lot more. It's so incredible, so incongruous.'

‘What is?'

‘The seal. Particularly the seal on its icefloe. Do you have the
Perkins Bacon Records?
' he asked without looking up. ‘The first volume dealing with the Colonial issues. You'll find it in that, towards the end. A very odd admission for a firm of security printers that was known chiefly for the printing of banknotes.' And when I told him I hadn't got the books, he said, ‘You should have. Those two volumes are the meticulous record of every letter, every transaction connected with the design, printing and delivery by Perkins Bacon of stamps for the colonies, and for several foreign countries, too. It took Percy de Worms years to compile it, and he died before he had completed the work. Every collector of early line-engraved issues should have them.'

‘Well, I haven't,' I said. ‘So perhaps you'll tell me what it's all about.'

He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Better ask Tubby. He spotted it first, not me.' He took the glass out of his eye, closed the albums and leaned back in his chair. ‘He'll enjoy telling you, so I won't spoil it
for him. And now, having had another look at the proofs, I have a suggestion to make, bearing in mind your client's needs and the fact that you'll be out of the country for a time.'

What he proposed was to have the collection entered on the books of his partner in Zurich, who would then advance Miss Holland the equivalent of £2,000 in Swiss francs. This would be paid into an external account at her Southampton bank, thus enabling her to draw on it for payments in any currency. The only stipulation he made was that I sign an undertaking on her behalf that the collection would be put up for sale at his Birmingham auction house. ‘We'll put it up in the autumn, when I hope to have a really big sale, and I won't charge her any interest on the monies advanced. Okay?'

It was as good an arrangement as I could have hoped for, and with my departure for Australia so imminent I was relieved to have the whole thing settled. It was only when I was out in the Strand again that I remembered what Tubby had said about the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp having been printed by an American banknote company. It couldn't have been anything to do with Perkins Bacon. But that was Keegan's problem now. As far as I was concerned, the collection was out of my hands. Perenna Holland had £2,000 spending money in the form of a guaranteed minimum, and the prospect of at least double that if he was right about the interest the collection would arouse.

As soon as I got home, I wrote to her care of the
bank. Then I rang Tubby. There was no reply. I rang him again later that night, when I had broken the back of the things that had to be done before I left. There was still no reply. My curiosity unsatisfied, I got out my own collection. It always gave me a feeling of satisfaction to look through the colourful print mosaics of my careful lay-outs and to realise that most of the stamps had been acquired long before inflation had got into its stride. But not this time, for I was very conscious that there was nothing in my collection that was in any way out of the ordinary, nothing that would get Josh Keegan talking the way he had about the Solomons Seal.

In the end I locked the albums away and went to bed. It was after one. An owl was hooting from the big cedar across the moat, and though it was already Saturday, and tomorrow I would be on my way to Australia, the forlorn sound of it seemed to reflect my mood.

A new country, the possibility of a fresh start – I should have been feeling eager, full of anticipation. Instead, the feeling I had was one of despondency, almost foreboding. And that night I had a very strange dream. I was back in that empty house, and everywhere there were masks and strange obscene figures staring at me, and a voice was calling. I don't know whose voice it was or what it was trying to say; it just boomed meaninglessly around the empty rooms, and I woke with the feeling that somebody, something had been trying to get through to me.

I don't often dream, and when I do, my dreams
are usually fairly innocuous. But this wasn't, and I automatically reached out to the next bed for comfort. But it was empty, as it had been for far too long now, and I lay there in the dark, trying to remember some detail that would provide a rational explanation.

In the end I switched on the light, got myself a Scotch and took it back to bed, thinking about that girl, and about Australia. What would she do when she got my letter? The memory of her was very vivid in my mind, and I lay there sipping my drink, telling myself it was nothing to do with me and no chance our paths would cross again. It was finished, but the knowledge that she was gone out of my life for good didn't stop me indulging in fantasy. And all the time I was remembering that booming, unintelligible voice.

Dawn was breaking before I dozed off, and when I finally woke, it was past nine. I rang Tubby, but again I got no answer. I didn't bother about breakfast, but drove straight down to the Crouch. His boat was gone. I went on board my own then, got the anchor up and beat down the river against the tide, tacking through the first yacht race of the day until I was out in the fairway and thumping around in a growing nor'easter off Foulness. It did me a world of good, the voice of my dream and that dreadful little house blown away by the stiff onshore breeze funnelling up the estuary.

Back at my moorings I cooked myself a meal, and afterwards I sat in the cockpit with a drink in my hand, wondering whether I would ever see my boat again. The wind had died with the setting sun, the
Burnham waterfront gleaming white in the fading light, everything very still except for the ripple of the tide against the bows and the waterborne sound of voices from the last yachts drifting up on the tide. No sign of Tubby, so clearly he was away for the weekend. The pale glow of the town, the estuary, the tide … I had lived in East Anglia ever since finishing my National Service, and the thought of leaving it for good filled me with nostalgia. Would I always have to be shifting from job to job? Was that the pattern of my life, some flaw in my character, a lack of stability? Two months past forty, and here I was planning to start all over again.

I finished the bottle, slept the night on board and in the morning drove home, closed up the house and took an afternoon train to London. The following morning I was breakfasting at over 30,000 feet and looking down on the bare arid hills of Muscat and Oman.

It was July 2 that I arrived in Sydney, a southerly buster blowing and low cloud obscuring the harbour as we came in to land. It was Australia's winter, so no problem in finding the people I needed to contact in their offices. I saw little or nothing of Sydney the first two days, moving from office block to office block in the central part around George Street, so that my first impression was of a rather drab, modern, dollar-hungry city full of scurrying raincoats and umbrellas. It took me those two days to decide on Kostas Polites & Co. as the estate agents I wanted to handle Rowlinson's Munnobungle station. They were an old-established firm of Greek origin commonly referred to as Castor & Pollux, and they had a branch office in Brisbane, which would enable the sale to be pushed locally with the farming community in Queensland, as well as with the institutions in Sydney.

It was lunchtime on Thursday before I had settled all the details. I had a word on the phone with Cooper,
the manager of their Brisbane office, told him I would be flying up to see him the following day, and having booked out on the Ansett flight, I took a taxi to the Ferry Terminal. It was only a short walk along Circular Quay to the sail-like complex of the Opera House, and I had lunch there, looking out to the Harbour Bridge and the bustle of ferries coming and going. The wind was still kicking up little whitecaps in the broad expanse of Port Jackson, but it had stopped raining, and the clouds were broken. I should have been in a buoyant mood, everything fixed and fleeting glimpses of sun through the plate-glass windows. But now that I was on my own with time to think about my own future, I found myself depressed by all the stories I had heard of large properties that had broken the backs of their owners. No doubt the estate agents had exaggerated to emphasise the difficulty of disposing of a place like Munnobungle, but the cases they had quoted were undoubtedly true, and I was beginning to realise how huge and hostile the outback of Australia was.

I had intended having a look round the docks on the off-chance I might pick up information about the Holland ships, but then I remembered the stamp dealer Josh Keegan had asked me to visit. The slip of paper on which he had written Cyrus Pegley's address was still in my briefcase where I had put it the night I had packed my things. I paid my bill and walked through the Botanic Gardens and The Domain to the crowded streets of Woolloomooloo.

In just over half an hour I was in Victoria Street,
in a narrow-fronted shop packed with stamps and coins, talking to a little wisp of a man with an untidy mop of black hair and bright birdlike eyes that peered at me from behind steel-rimmed spectacles of extreme magnification. When he heard why I had come, he handed the counter over to a plain young woman with pebble-thick glasses who might have been his daughter and took me through into an office at the back, where two more girls were busy sorting stamps.

Yes, he remembered the cover. He also remembered the lettering on the seal ship label. ‘It was a blue label, deep blue to be exact. The vertical lettering HOLLAND SHIPPING. SOLOMONS at the top and at the bottom a space for the amount to be inked in and the word PAID. I'll show you.' He picked up a pencil and began sketching it for me. ‘A smudged postmark, I remember, the clerk in a hurry presumably and cancelling it when he should have hand-stamped it with a capital T and the amount due of ten centimes. Instead, it was left to the Post Office clerk in Cooktown to slap a Postage Due twopenny red and green on.' And he added, ‘I was reminded of that cover only the other day, something I read in the
Herald.
A Holland ship in for engine repairs. It hadn't occurred to me the company was still in existence.'

‘How long ago was this?' I asked.

‘Last week, I think. It was only a short paragraph, and it caught my eye because it was headed “War Hero's Grandson Sails In”. I read anything about the war. I caught the last two years of it, finishing up at Darwin.'

‘What sort of ship was it?'

‘An old warship. Landing craft, I think it said.'

‘Is it still here?'

‘Couldn't tell you. It was only mentioned I think because of the name and the association with old Colonel Holland. He was one of the coast watchers on Bougainville. Stuck it there until the Americans arrived.' He turned the piece of paper round so that I could see the sketch he had made. ‘There you are. That's what it looked like.