Drawing the Line (25 page)

‘We don’t have those resources,’ PC Brown said. ‘But that’s not to say CID aren’t involved with the Kitty Gang. And maybe with this, if we can prove a link.’

‘Couldn’t it be its own little gang? An antiques gang? After something only valuable to a dealer or collector?’ I asked.

‘Such as what?’

‘Such as something CID know all about.’ I crossed my fingers on the lie. At least they would when I’d talked to Dave, who seemed the best prospect, all things considered. ‘But what did the security guard say? The guy I floored,’ I added with a helpful smile.

‘I wouldn’t say that too loudly. Criminals these days like to sue for assault.’

‘But he grabbed me from behind. If I hadn’t had Dave’s car key in my hand, he could have overpowered me. When he put his arms round me, I didn’t think it was a friendly hug. After that, all I did was try to hold him down till someone came to my assistance. And in the struggle I recognised him as someone who said he was a security guard at a big antiques fair in Yorkshire.’

‘Delectable in a green uniform with a battledress top, as I recall.’ Though it had been his bum Griff was more interested in. ‘He appeared, officer, to have been extremely solicitous about my health, claiming he’d
found me unconscious in the open door of the caravan. But he could equally have hit me on the head in order to sift the contents of our home from home. When we go to far flung corners of the country, we take our own accommodation,’ he explained.

‘“We?” Are you related?’

I heard my voice come out loud and clear. ‘I wish we were. Griff’s much better than my real father at taking care of me.’ There, I’d nearly said it. I’d nearly told him how much I loved him. Nearly. One day I would.

As it was, he took and squeezed my hand. ‘What do you think brings the young man down here? He certainly wasn’t invited.’

‘Ah, that’s something we need to find out. It wasn’t to visit you, sir?’

‘When I was staying at the home of my long-term partner? Absolutely not. In fact, I was down here very much to keep out of harm’s way.’ He patted the plaster on his wrist. ‘My last little encounter with Kitty or whatever. I’m sure my partner Aidan won’t have told people I was there, apart from those we met for supper the other night – he’ll furnish you with their name and address. And the only other person apart from Lina here to know my whereabouts is a young charmer called Marcus, who for some reason phoned to tell me he was abandoning Lina, who he was supposed to be assisting in running our business, to return to his cousin and lover, a print and map dealer called Laurence Copeland.’ He reached for my hand. ‘I did hope, my dear, that you’d have realised without my spelling it out, that he dances at both ends of the ballroom.’

PC Brown wasn’t as quick on the uptake as I, nor as thrown by the news. Why hadn’t Griff told me before? It would have explained so much! My face must have said something of what I felt.

‘Ballroom dancing? Why shouldn’t he? Oh. Er…’

Griff squeezed my hand a little tighter: ‘Experiential learning, I think they call it, dear heart. I hope you’re not too upset.’

‘Not so much by that as by the thought that he might be in cahoots with Peachy Bum from Harrogate.’ I sank back into my chair. ‘And,’ I added, ‘by the thought that it may be him who roughed up Lord Elham last night. I wish I could sort the whole thing out!’

Aidan reappeared. ‘I wish you could too, my dear, and quickly too. Griff, your carriage awaits you. The sooner we slip into the anonymity of London, the better.’ He helped Griff to his feet. ‘Meanwhile, Evelina, disregard that last comment. Do nothing, absolutely nothing, because every minute he can’t keep on eye on you our old friend here is in agonies of worry. Now the professionals are involved, for goodness’ sake regard your safety as a priority.’ He patted my hand. ‘Promise?’

I managed to smile back. Perhaps he wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. ‘If I have anything to do with it, my skin will stay in one piece.’

Griff shot me a look: he knew that was no sort of a promise. But he submitted to being led quietly away. Not until he’d had the hugest hug either of us could manage, though. He nodded in the direction of his chair – he’d left a nicely anonymous envelope containing that page.

As he left, in walked Dave Trent, looking as
unpolicemanly
as it was possible to look. The two officers eyed each other. Dave flashed his ID. ‘DC Dave Trent. And who the hell are you?’

It’d be nice to claim that I’d done the same neat job of flooring the man in uniform as I had that hoodie. Or that Dave had been as deft with his footwork as with last night’s driving. But we were both frustrated by an old, old lady, bent as Josie, with a Zimmer frame. Maybe she thought that Dave was a villain, the other man a cop in trouble. No one could have blamed her, after all. Or maybe she hadn’t a clue what was going on, and was simply jammed in the doorway with her frame at a funny angle because she still needed L-plates.

Dave spat into his mobile phone, before turning his attention to me. ‘How come you couldn’t tell the guy was a fake? You must have seen IDs before!’

‘No need to drag up my past.’

He blushed, putting up a hand in apology. ‘I meant with all these burglaries and assaults. Honest. Sorry. But –’

‘Because he did what most policemen do: he gave it a quick flash and put it away.’

‘What did he find out? When he was questioning you?’

‘That Griff and Aidan have gone off to London, leaving both Aidan’s house and our cottage unprotected. That I recognised the man who jumped me last night. Not a lot else. I’m not as green,’ I told his disbelieving face, ‘as I am cabbage-looking. When he didn’t seem to be up to speed, I said I’d told CID everything. Which I suppose I better had. But not,’ I added, ‘till I’ve phoned the William Harvey and told them to tell Lord Elham I shall be a bit late and to look after his headache a bit longer.’

In the end I agreed that Dave counted as CID and that I’d bring him up to speed as he drove, more slowly, this time. But then it seemed we were heading not for Bredeham and the hire car, but Maidstone, and Kent Police headquarters.

‘No thanks.’

‘What do you mean, no thanks?’

‘I don’t do police stations. Not when I can avoid it.’

He accelerated. ‘Looks like this time you can’t avoid it.’

‘Just stop the car, Dave. Unless I’m under arrest?’

He slowed, but only a little. ‘You’re not under arrest. The guy you clocked is. Well, he’s being held for questioning. But they need a proper statement from you, Lina, or they have to let him go. It won’t take long. Just a matter of telling an officer exactly how you met him before, and why you floored him this time. Otherwise, he’ll be free to hound you some more.’

‘He will be anyway. They won’t hold him just because he may have walloped Griff. I told you, I don’t do cop-shops, not unless I have to. Just pull over and I’ll hitch back.’

He swerved into a lay-by. ‘I can’t make you do this, Lina, but I shall think a lot less of you if you don’t. You’ve got guts. OK, you may have had bad experiences in the past, but you won’t this time.’

‘Want a bet?’ I sneered.

‘Why did you have a bad time last time?’

I heaved an exaggerated sigh. ‘Why don’t you just check my record?’

‘You haven’t got one. Some of your mates might have. But you must only ever have had warnings. So you can’t
play that card. In any case, there’s something radically different about this time. You’re the real victim, not the possible perpetrator. So,’ he continued in an aunt-y sort of voice, ‘people will be nice to you, and show you pretty mug shots and bring you nice cups of tea.’

I responded in my best imitation of Aidan Morley: ‘How very charming of them. OK. But you’ll have to get me back pronto to pick up His Nibs.’

‘Promise. Mustn’t keep your father waiting, must we?’

I shook my head. ‘You know something: I might have sprung from his loins, as Griff would put it, but he’s not my father. Never will be. If I’m not careful, he may become my child.’ I meant to think it, not say it aloud, but perhaps that didn’t matter. In any case he said nothing; he just looked at me sideways and put the car into gear.

It wasn’t the promise of cups of tea that finally swung it. It was the thought that I might spot a mug they weren’t expecting me to identify – Dan Freeman’s. I’d had the idea that he might be a pedestrian that our security camera had picked up, after all. I wouldn’t mention at the outset his connection with Oxford: I had an idea police officers might feel the same sort of fear-tinged respect I’d had for brainy academics.

Dave didn’t seem to have said anything about my grubby past. No one sneered at me, or uttered thinly-veiled threats if I didn’t cooperate. In fact they were so polite, I wondered if Dave had mentioned that I was the daughter of a Title. A WPC the same age as me kept me company, worrying a rapidly growing zit on her chin
when she thought I wouldn’t notice. What I did drag out of her as she showed me the photos was that Hoodie couldn’t offer any reasonable explanation why he’d come to Kent, or why he’d grabbed me from behind. Reluctantly I mentioned Marcus; but I kept quiet about Tony. I had no more than suspicions about him, after all, and I had an idea that suspicions wouldn’t do his police career any good, if they proved to be empty. She got more interested when I mentioned what I referred to as our other night visitors, and positively lavished photos and tea on me.

After an hour of looking at faces, I flung up my hands in despair. ‘It’s all these fixed expressions,’ I moaned. ‘In real life people’s faces move all the time. And they put on glasses, they change the colour of their hair –’

She abandoned the spot to point at the screen. ‘Computers can take off glasses, change hairstyles.’
Remove spots?
‘Forget the inessentials. I always think concentrating on the eyes is best. You can’t change those.’

‘Coloured contact lenses? Sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip. Look, could you really make a few of these guys bald? Because Dan Freeman had so little hair it hardly counts. Very tired skin – I wanted to slop moisturiser all over it. And his eyes – they seemed to cry out for their spectacles. You know, as if he’d taken them off – no, he couldn’t have done, because there weren’t any little marks on his nose. I’d have remembered those.’

Another ten minutes convinced me I was wasting everyone’s time. Dan Freeman was not on their books. Perhaps, after all, the original Dan had been a decent, honest man, simply helping a person in need, and I’d
simply been confused when I thought the Bredeham look-alike resembled him.

They’d follow up the Marcus connection with Hoodie, they said. While I waited for Dave I dithered. Should I phone Marcus and warn him? He’d given me all the information that had enabled me to run Bossingham Hall to ground, so I owed him for that. And for the decanter sale, of course. But somehow he must have had a hand in getting Hoodie to Tenterden – him or someone he’d let into the house. Probably. Possibly. Now I knew why people smoked. To occupy their hands and mouths while their brains did something else.

‘First stop Bredeham to pick up the hire-car,’ I told Dave.

‘Sure thing, Miss Daisy,’ he replied, tugging his forelock, or where his forelock would have been if he’d had one. He added in his normal voice, ‘And then?’

‘Then I thank you kindly and go on to Ashford to pick up Lord Elham.’

He digested that. ‘Aren’t you afraid of Marcus using your spare house keys to get back in and rob you?’

‘I was last night. But then I changed the burglar alarm code, so even if he did get in, he’d waken the dead.’

‘Including Tony, living conveniently opposite.’

‘Including Tony.’ I couldn’t help sighing. But it wasn’t for lost love, it was for lost trust. Whose side was he on? Whose side had he been on from the start?

‘Fancied him, did you?’ He spurted past a Euro-lorry.

I didn’t want to split emotional hairs. ‘For about ten minutes. But now Griff’s given me a teddy bear.’

His laugh was surprisingly gentle. ‘You’d rather take a
teddy bear to bed, is that what you’re saying?’

‘You know where you are with a teddy bear.’

‘But not with human beings?’

‘Not the ones I’ve come across, Griff apart. And he can still surprise me.’

‘His relationship with Aidan Morley, for instance? You don’t seem to like him very much.’

‘Griff says I have this tendency to inverted snobbery. But Aidan and me are from different worlds: him and his public school accent and his posh house and his wonderful Merc and –’

‘And Griff,’ he concluded for me. ‘It’s all right not to like someone – to be jealous of them.’

‘I didn’t say I was jealous of Aidan. I said I didn’t like him. He’s not a very nice man. Lots of people don’t like Griff, which is a shame, because he is a nice man. Much nicer than Lord Elham.’ Yes, I’d change the subject to him – see how it felt to finger my bruises, you might say. ‘I wonder how he dealt with his NHS breakfast. Now, he’s supposed to be a noble, in fact he used to sit in the House of Lords and rule the country, when he could be bothered, but – he’s a shit, Dave.’

‘So why are you being so nice to him?’

‘Because even shits need looking after. And we seem to have a sin – a symb – oh, that relationship where you both need each other. Symbiosis, that’s it. He needs me to stop him dying of food poisoning or something, and I quite like the way he passes antiques my way.’

‘You’re not setting yourself up for an accusation of obtaining goods by false pretences, are you?’ He sounded like one of my social workers. Not the nicest, either.

‘Nothing false, no pretences,’ I snapped. ‘And I keep a record of all our transactions. All signed and sealed.’ I looked out of the passenger window, but had to give up. No point in losing a perfectly good breakfast.

His voice was much kinder when, a few minutes later, he broke the silence. ‘Would you like me to come along with you? Pack him up and take him home? After all, there may be a reception committee waiting for him. And you, of course.’

It was tempting. Very tempting. But I wasn’t sure if he’d be there as my friend, or as a policeman having a good sniff round and finding all sorts of things he shouldn’t. And, yes, I had a bit of unfinished business with Lord Elham, in the shape of the forged page.

‘How dare you ask such a thing? Me, a forger!’ Despite his bandages, despite being crammed into a bright red Ka’s passenger seat (the rental people were beginning to hex me when I went in) Lord Elham did his best to get on his high horse.

‘My colleague was really impressed – said it was the highest quality forgery. It’d have taken real skill to produce anything that good. You could make a good living, he said.’

‘I already have.’ He preened himself. ‘No reason why I shouldn’t carry on.’

I pulled the car over. ‘There’s every reason. No. Sit still and listen.
Natura Rerum
is priceless. As soon as I got hold of what people thought was a genuine page, people have been after me or Griff, my partner. Sometimes they’ve tried to throw sand in our eyes by making it seem like a general outbreak of theft.’

‘Are you sure it’s not?’ So he was listening, after all.

‘After last night? Look, Lord Elham, however I try to tell myself there’s been a whole series of coincidences, I don’t believe it any more. Someone’s been after me, after Griff and now after you. And I’m very much afraid it’s not just one someone. And I’m even more afraid that it’s not just criminals who’ll be taking an interest. The police don’t like forgery, no matter how good it is.’

‘I never claimed it was the real thing.
Caveat emptor
, and all that. Or didn’t you learn Latin at that state school you went to?’

Why was he bothering to be nasty now? Or perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he simply didn’t understand. ‘State
schools
,’ I said. ‘Maybe if you’d forked out for me to go to a posh public school –’

‘Thirty times – no, thirty-one times seven years at –’ He shook his head, then held it still, wincing. ‘Could I have afforded it, Lina?’

‘You’ve no idea what happened to your other children?’ I started the car again, checking carefully for other cars behind me. ‘Never the least bit interested?’

‘Nappies! All that crying and puking. Maybe when they got older. I mean, you’re quite interesting, aren’t you? Tell you what, you should come and live with me. All those bedrooms – no one’d know.’

So he didn’t want me in his own private section. Good job, really. It’d have taken a week to make a room habitable.

‘The thing is, Lina, you’ve made me quite nervous. All these people after me. And now the police, too.’

And there I’d thought he might actually want my company for its own sake. ‘Tell whoever you’ve been
supplying that you’re giving up,’ I said. ‘The antiques trade being what it is, everyone’ll get the message pretty quickly. Get rid off your printing equipment fast – I know someone who’ll probably give you a decent price. And – most of all – get rid of that damned book. It shouldn’t be shut away in one man’s house. It should be there for everyone to see.’ Like the one in the Bodleian, where you practically had to give a sample of your DNA before you could see it? ‘You know, the British Museum or something. But make it part of the deal that the public can have a look.’

‘The deal?’

‘When you give it to them.’

‘Give!
I thought you said it was priceless. How much would they give me for it?’

I swallowed what I wanted to say. ‘Is it yours to sell?’

‘It’s not the Vultures’. No, they own the house and contents, but not the stuff in my wing. That was the agreement. And
Natura Rerum
’s always been in my wing. Ever since the deal was mooted, anyway.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘For God’s sake, so I can put it somewhere safe before we both get killed for it!’ I put the car into gear. The Ka. Whatever. ‘Tell you what, take me back a different route from usual.’

‘How should I know which way?’ He spread his hands helplessly as if I’d asked him to explain one of those Greek things in geometry without a diagram.

‘You live round here. You were brought up round here. You must have gone on walks or pony rides with your governess.’

‘Can’t bear gee gees. Never could. Big hulking things. And yet chaps breed them and race them and bet on them. Seem to enjoy riding them, too.’

I didn’t argue. Come to think of it, I’d seen more horses round here than I’d ever seen, munching their way through fields. There must be a reason for them. ‘What about walking or drives in the car? I only want you to guide me through the back lanes, for God’s sake, so no one tails us.’