Spend Game (3 page)

‘They came straight here – with Jill.’

Worn out with the worry over Leckie as I was, I just had to smile. Jill was talking slagware to Brad, a real mismatch if ever there was one. Brad hasn’t thought of anything except Regency flintlocks since he learned to read and write, and Jill couldn’t tell one from a ballistic missile. She’d been at Medham and bought a good pair of blue saltboats in that odd opaque slag glass which you either hate or crave. Early Victorian furnace workers were allowed to skim off the metalled surface ‘slag’ at the end of the working day. They used to make what they called ‘foreigners’, little pieces of art to sell or give. The artistry is often pretty cumbersome and really rather crude, but sometimes varies between the merely natty and the exquisite. It was the only perk glassworkers got in those days besides silicosis. Jill has an eye for such knackery, especially when prices are blasting off as they are at present. She also has an eye for the male of the species. In fact, she’s known for it. I’ve never seen her on her own in ten years, nor with the same bloke twice. She carries a poodle the size of a midget mouse, the focus for many a ribald jest.

‘She’s buying,’ Tinker said in a gush of foetid breath from the side of his mouth, still grinning. He nudged
me, cackling. ‘They’ve got some shovelling to do later.’ One of the vanmen was tickling the poodle’s chin. A lot of meaningful eyeballing was going on. I could see Brad was rapidly getting cheesed off. Soon the vannies would have Jill all to themselves, lucky lads.

Good old Tinker, I thought sardonically, still sorting through the crowd. Alfred Duggins was in from down the coast. He’s a benign little chap underneath a bowler. Never animated, never interrupts, just incubates thoughts behind his split lenses and sucks on the rim of a quart tankard. He’ll do prints and hammered coinage up to the Civil War. He gave me a nod and pulled a comical face at the clock. A laugh. For some reason we haven’t yet fathomed he hates going home.

A huddle near the fire caught my attention, gin drinkers all. Two were strangers to me. The man looked a contented sort who had to be a Londoner.

‘Was Happiness at Medham?’ I asked Tinker, carefully looking away from the extravagant bloke.

‘Yeah. You must be blind, Lovejoy.’

‘I didn’t mean her. I meant him.’ The blonde woman had been noticeable in the auction all right. She’d sat on one of the chairs crossing her legs till we were half out of our minds. The auctioneer had even started stuttering and losing control at one point. She happened to glance up as I looked again at her through several layers of pub mirror. Thirty or so, smiling between earrings made of gold-mounted scarabs, original trophies from ancient Egypt. Even without them she’d have been gorgeous. Neat clothes, light fawns and browns. The shoes would match, million to one. Our eyes met. I turned away, but noted the startled air she conveyed. Perhaps it was finding herself lusted at by the peasantry. Maybe I looked as sour as I felt. I
liked her. She didn’t care much for me. Well, that’s the way the Florentine crumbles.

‘That grotty escritoire,’ Tinker told me. ‘Leckie outbid him, remember?’

‘So he did,’ I said. ‘So he did.’

Tinker stared hard over the bar and wagged his eyebrow for another pint. Ted streaked up with it. I watched all this, peeved as hell. I have to wave and scream for service. The slightest gesture from Tinker Dill’s like a laser. My eyes got themselves dragged into the mirror by awareness of the woman through the noise and shouts and smoke. She looked carelessly away just in time, back into the huddle of people she was with. Happiness was tapping knees and cracking jokes. The others were falling about obediently with displays of false hilarity. It had to be sham because antiques dealers are like a music-hall band – they’ve heard it all before. Other people in the bar were looking round at them with each gust of laughter and smiling.

‘Who is he?’

‘Fergus, London. They call him Fergie.’

Fergus, Black Fergus. I’d heard the name. Some trouble a few months back about possession of a silversmith’s ‘touch’, a metal marker for hallmarking. I’ve heard it’s quite legal in the States. Here our magistrates go bananas if you’re found with one. The fuss hadn’t done Fergus any harm, though. If there’d been any bother he looked well on it.

He was sitting on a fender stool. Facing him was Sven, a Scandinavian originally. Sven was literally washed ashore after one of those terrifying winter storms we have here on the east coast. His ship was a diminutive freighter plying across the North Sea. They put our lifeboats out, and Sven and six others were
saved. Sven refused to go home once he was ashore, just simply refused point blank to cross either by air or boat. ‘I’ll go home when they’ve built the bridge,’ he jokes when people ask what does he think he’s playing at. They say he’s still got a wife and two kids over there, writing the same sad questions to him in every Monday post. He scratches a living as a free-floating barker, side-trading as a flasher. A flasher’s not what you’re probably thinking. Nothing genital. He’ll go around antique shops sussing out what he supposes to be a bargain – say it’s a necklace of carved rose quartz. He agrees to buy it as a present for his girl or wife (note that: a flasher
never
says he’s buying for himself). He then gives the least possible deposit, or perhaps ‘pays’ by a dubious credit card or cheque, and goes into a nearby pub where he tries to sell it at a profit to a tourist or a dealer. If he’s successful he returns to settle up, and simply keeps the balance. If not – and it usually is not, especially with Sven – he brings it back, complaining the woman doesn’t like it or it won’t go with her new orange blouse. If necessary he’ll break a link and claim he’s returning the goods as faulty. That’s a typical flasher. It’s a hopeless game, operated entirely by useless goons who have even less clue than the rest of us. Sven’s the world’s worst, but I’ve a soft spot for him. He got me out of some complicated trouble I was having with a woman once, so I owe him a favour.

Madge was with them, dark-haired, swingly and flouncy in a bluish swingback swagger coat and those shoes that seem nothing but thin straps. She’s furniture and porcelain in her shop on East Hill near the Arcade and is probably the wealthiest dealer in town. Her husband has this trout farm to the north of Suffolk.
Why he sees so little of her nobody knows. Madge is what we call a ‘tea-timer’ in the antiques game – she’ll take up with a knowledgeable bloke, using any means in her power, until she has assimilated most of his expertise. Then she’ll ditch him for a different interest and never again give him the time of day. It’s a very novel and worthwhile form of apprenticeship. So I’ve heard, that is. She currently had Jackson in tow, a rather sad thin elderly man who wears a waistcoat and makes models. He used to do a thriving business in militaria and engineering prototypes, including buying and selling the original designs – now a very profitable line I urge you to buy into as fast as you can. Then he threw himself into Madge’s promotions, scattering all caution to the winds. He moved in with her for a spell and the inevitable happened. He was rumoured not to have done a deal in months, at least not on his own account. Madge has thrived.

‘They friends?’

‘With Sven? No.’ Tinker looked about for some-where to spit but I held up a warning finger just in time. I’d rather him gag than pollute the rest of us. ‘I heard Madge introduce him to Blackie at the auction.’

‘When did they come?’

‘Oh, ten minutes before you.’ He lit one of his home-made fags and coughed. The taproom paused respectfully. One of Tinker’s specials takes a full ten seconds and starts a mile down the road. He subsided. Conversation picked up again.

‘What car?’

‘A bleeding great Humber.’

‘They know Leckie?’

‘Dunno.’ Tinker nudged me. ‘What’s it all about, Lovejoy? You and Leckie had a dust-up over Val?’

Sometimes people amaze me. I stared at Tinker till he grew uncomfortable.

‘Well,’ he said, all defensive, ‘she’s got Leckie going because of you and Janie. Everybody knew that.’

Janie and I had our last holocaust three weeks before all this. She stormed back to her husband in her expensive solid-state Lagonda in a livid temper for reasons no longer clear to me. She was always storming somewhere. We’d been together a long time on and off. Very critical of a man, Janie was. She’d found out about Magdalene staying at my cottage for a few days. Wouldn’t believe she was only helping me to redecorate. Now how had Tinker Dill spotted the Val-Leckie affair when it had taken a killing to push it into my thick skull?

Suddenly I had a headache. It had been a hard day and tomorrow wouldn’t be any easier. There didn’t seem to be any clues here, I thought in my stupidity and ignorance. This was all too much to sort out just now. I cast a final glance round and saw Margaret, a cool middle-aged woman who has a neat corner in the town’s antiques arcade. I mouthed a request for a lift home. She nodded, smiling to her companion, a tall thin priestly-looking character I’d never seen before, and started to fight her way to the door. I gave the keys to Tinker.

‘I don’t feel so good, Tinker. Drive my crate back to the cottage, there’s a pal.’

Outside, the night air was like a cold flannel on my face. Margaret came limping out – some childhood injury that, curiously, makes her fortyish roundness more intriguing. She told me I was white as a sheet. In her motor I lay back and closed my eyes as we moved off and the pub noise receded.

‘You look terrible, Lovejoy.’

‘I’ve got a bad head.’

‘I’ll make you a hot drink.’ She drove us out of the pub yard into the narrow lane between the hedgerows. ‘Come back with me?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, astonishing myself, but I couldn’t face the Old Bill calling on everybody at all hours asking when we’d last seen Leckie.

‘Good heavens!’ Margaret cried suddenly. ‘Whatever’s Patrick doing?’

Patrick’s paintings and early Victoriana. He was hanging from his car on the other side of the road, flashing his lights and waving his handbag at us to slow down. We could see him being all dramatic in our headlights. He’d seen us come out of the pub yard and stopped to shout across.

‘Carry on, Margaret,’ I said. She slowed and started to pull in, winding the window down.

‘But Patrick wants to tell us something –’

‘Carry on.’

‘Oh.’ She dithered and we jerked a bit, then picked up speed. ‘What was all that about, Lovejoy? It might have been important.’

‘It would only have been bad news,’ I said, and closed my eyes again to shut the horrible world out. The more you remember the more you remember, especially about a bloke like Leckie. Ever noticed that?

T
HAT NIGHT WAS
odd, really weird. Margaret made me up a bed in her other bedroom and produced some men’s pyjamas. I’ve more sense than to ask. I hate bathing at night because I never sleep after, so I sat reading Keppel’s voyages till Margaret came out all clean and brewed up for us both. She smiled and called me lazy. It’s not true that I’m idle – only her coffee’s a bit less lousy than mine. She made it plain that our past, er, friendship was not to be regarded as much of a precedent for tonight. We had some cheese on toast to fill odd corners.

‘Are you in one of your moods?’ she asked me.

‘No, love. Tired.’

The phone rang about midnight. Margaret went down to answer it and was kept talking there for a long time. I heard her come up the stairs eventually and heard my door go. I was still into Keppel and didn’t look up.

‘Lovejoy?’ She was in the doorway.

‘Mmmh?’

‘There’s some news,’ she said carefully, standing there.

‘Go to bed, love,’ I told her. ‘There’s time in the morning.’

‘You knew.’

‘Good night, Margaret.’

You’ll have gathered we antiques dealers are a varied bunch. Most of that night I lay awake going over the auction in my mind. Leckie wasn’t really a dedicated dealer, not half as good as Patrick, our world-famous pansy, or a tenth as lucky as Helen, or anything like as careful as Margaret. He never had the learning of Big Frank, nor Brad’s dedication, Black Fergus’s money-backers, or the inside knowledge of the Aldgate mob who are said to bribe half the barkers and auctioneers in the known world. Just a dealer, reasonably good.

I stared at the ceiling, wondering a little about that curious expression. Reasonably good. Leckie is – all right,
was –
a reasonably good antiques dealer. Funny, but I’d never thought how very odd it was until now. ‘Reasonably good’ in the antiques game means really pretty shrewd and very adaptable. Moderate antiques dealers go to the wall in a millisec. Hopeless ones never even get off the ground. Now here was the odd thing: I couldn’t for the life of me think of a single thing Leckie was
bad
at. How odd. He had even helped Bill and Jean Hassall, friends of mine who deal in furniture and historic maps, to decorate their new house down on the sea marshes at Peldon. Word went round it was a stylish job, though they seemed ordinary colours to me. He was good with engines, too. Thinking about it, with most mechanical gadgets. And his small garden actually grew things, vegetables and flowers and bushes that managed to keep their berries weeks after birds stripped mine clean. He was good at everything.

Dozing sounds easy till you’re desperate to do a bit, then it’s the hardest thing in the world. Half the trouble was that I was missing Lydia, my enthusiastic
and bespectacled trainee. Prim as any nun, she’d finally moved into my thatched cottage for the best of all possible reasons. Like a fool I’d spent my last groat to send her on an antiques course in Chichester, still thirty days to go, so just when I needed her she was missing. See how unreliable women are? I suppose I ought really to have been longing for the wealthy Janie, but I’ve found that some women creep into your bones.

Funny how things go round and round. I slept fitfully until the sky turned palish. A car revved distantly. I got up and padded over to draw a curtain. Margaret lives in a flat right in the town centre. You could just see the shops. Yellow street lights were being doused in strings. A bobby stretched an extravagant yawn on the cobbled shopwalk below, probably thinking of a warm bed.