The Tartan Ringers (2 page)

It stands to reason that you’re on a loser. The dice of honesty are loaded against you, the poor unsuspecting customer.

Lately, though, I’d been having a bad patch. Even though I’m a very special type of antique dealer – tell you more in a minute – it was pathetic. Sometimes, antiques vanish like snow off a duck. Buyers evaporate. Collectors get a collective flu. Money zooms into the Inland Revenue’s coffers untouched by human hand. In other trades things never become utterly hopeless. I mean to say, a farmer at least still has the good earth if his crop ails, and doctors can always look forward to a really great epidemic if their patients strike a depressingly healthy patch. But in the antiques game there’s nothing. An antique dealer with no antiques feels a right prune. A hungry prune, because when you’re broke the chancellor simply refuses dole. No, subtract antiques from the great equation of life and all is zero.

Well, nearly zero.

Because there’s fakes. And frauds. And counterfeits, reproductions, marriages, twinners, naughties, copies . . . I finally found my note about the bureau in a heap of paper clippings that makes my tatty armchair a hell of comfort:

Jo: Teddy repro b. split m/u, Inv. T. fix Thurs. M.

Roughly translated, an Edwardian period reproduction bureau was available. I’d agreed to divide the mark-up (i.e. my hoped-for profit) with the sender, who would ship it from Inverness, a collecting centre for the four northernmost counties by these night wagons. I’d told Tinker to fix delivery for the previous night. Jo – Josephine – had been my original contact. Tinker’s my old barker, my message ferret.

I’d better try to catch Jo, then get to the town arcade where antiques and dealers congregate.

For a second, guilt tugged. I glanced around. The cottage’s interior was a mess: books, newspaper cuttings, a mouldering heap of unpaid bills, the divan bed I’d promised Ellen I’d make. I opened the door, masterful with guilt. I was actually smiling from the relief of having triumphed over housework, when my jubilation ended.

‘Morning, Lovejoy.’ Liz Sandwell stood there in the tiny flagged porch. Pretty as a picture. The trouble is her live-in boyfriend’s one of those strength-through-joy fanatics who gasp their way through our rain-soaked countryside and finish up where they started. A tough rugby player.

‘Morning, love,’ I said brightly, slamming the door to edge on past.

‘Well? Did it arrive?’

Blankly I stared at her. ‘Eh?’ I never know what the hell women are on about half the time.

‘The money. From your Uncle Percy.’

‘Ah.’ Evidently one of my less memorable myths. Swiftly I switched to heartfelt grief. ‘No, love. Uncle Percy’s just sent a telegram. He’s ill and needs me.’

Concern leapt into her eyes. ‘Oh, how terrible, Lovejoy. Are you very close?’

Not as close as I’ll be to that berk of a wagoneer who lost my bureau and disappeared, I thought grimly, but said brokenly, ‘Yes. Can we postpone the deal over the nipple jewels, love? Only I’m hurrying to town to borrow the fare to, er, Llangollen.’

Liz took instant charge. ‘Let me run you to the station, Lovejoy. How much is it? You can’t shilly-shally at times like this.’ A warm-hearted, lovable lass is Liz. Where the hell’s Llangollen, I wondered, getting into her car. Let’s hope it’s a fair distance. Then with that money I’d have enough to split-purchase Margaret Dainty’s Belleek porcelain trelliswork basket – no harp-and-greyhound mark, so post-1891, but lovely . . .

A few minutes later I was mouthing gibberish at a puzzled railway clerk while watching the reflection of Liz’s departing car in the glass. She’d lent me a real handful of notes.

‘ ’Ere, mate. You going any bloody where or not?’ A soldier in the queue behind me was growing impatient.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ Liz’d gone. I stepped aside. ‘I can’t leave Nellie and the little uns,’ I said nobly.

Twenty minutes later the bus dropped me outside Jo’s school. It was playtime.

T
HE PLAYGROUND WAS
a screaming turmoil. Through the railings I said to a snot-riddled urchin, ‘If I give you a million zlotniks, will you give Miss Ross a message?’

‘Piss off, Lovejoy.’

I sighed, and looked about. Most of the little psychopaths are from my village and believe I’m a bum. ‘Lottie,’ I called. One of the tinier girls skipped closer, pigtails flying with each bounce. I used to babysit her.

‘Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper,’ she chanted breathlessly.

‘I’m going to elope with Miss Ross,’ I said. ‘Say I’m here.’

Lottie bounced off, chanting. I sat and waited while the playground roared on. Five minutes and Jo came, red-faced and embarrassed. She’s a lovely slender faun of a woman, mid-twenties. Infants flocked round, staring.

‘Lovejoy! What on earth?’

‘Aren’t you escaping, miss?’ a kiddy asked disappointedly.

‘Certainly not! And get away the lot of you!’

They dispersed with that silent scorn only infants can attain, Lottie explaining, ‘I told you he tells lies.’

‘That bureau, love.’ I had the scrap of paper out.

‘You interrupt school and make me a laughing stock just to ask stupid questions?’

Women are always narked. You just have to ride out the storm. I nodded. ‘Yes, love. Only it didn’t arrive.’ She’d given me the original address, an Inverness box number.

‘Well, I can’t help that, can I?’

‘Why did you tell me instead of some other dealer, Jo?’

Momentarily she coloured deeper. ‘You happen to be the first antique dealer I thought of.’

I turned to go, and said loudly, ‘Pretend to start teaching, darling, then slip out. I’ll be waiting—’

‘Shhh, you fool.’ She was trying not to laugh. A police car pulled alongside the kerb. Two Old Bill descended. The children fell silent and gathered at the railings.

‘You Lovejoy?’ one peeler said.

‘Give over, John.’ I’ve known Constable Doble ten years. Every Friday night I beat him at darts.

‘You’re under arrest,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

‘For anything in particular?’

‘Murder of a night driver,’ he said. ‘In particular.’

Jo gasped. Thinking quickly, I passed her the note. ‘To Tinker, please, Jo.’ The children’s faces solemnly followed me as I crossed to the car.

Lottie called, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t escape like you planned, Lovejoy.’ Another nail in my coffin.

‘Ta, chuck,’ I called back, best I could do with my throat dry.

The other bobby was already scribbling this new evidence as we drove off. Education gets everywhere these days, doesn’t it.

Jails have been great literary stimulants. John Bunyan or Oscar Wilde would have used the next dozen days to dash off a masterpiece. Me, I simply languished. Twice I was dragged out to stand before Arthur. He’s our famous magistrate. He writes little stage plays about ghost trains and doubles as Judge Lynch. I was remanded in custody. I didn’t claim my two witnesses because Ben’s lies are notorious, and fornicating with a Royal Customs officer’s wife while illegally transporting a fake antique might not stand up as a character reference.

Maslow came to see me on the first day.

‘Your fingerprints are all over the wagon, Lovejoy,’ he told me. ‘The man was found dead a hundred yards up the bank.’

‘Ah,’ I said, baffled. Maslow’s not a bad old stick for a troop leader, but there’s only a limited amount of truth police inspectors can take. ‘That explains why I couldn’t find him. I wanted to give him a message.’

‘At that hour in the morning? In the fog? On a lonely road?’ He was beginning to glare and breathe funny. ‘Ben the roadmender said he hadn’t seen you, Lovejoy.’

Thank you, Ben. ‘I walked to the lay-by. When I got there the driver had gone. I looked about the wagon, wondered if he was, erm . . .’

Maslow nodded, and left. Three local prostitutes work the lay-bys. Night hauliers find solace for the loneliness of the long-distance wagoneer in the privacy of their own vehicles.

Three days elapsed before reassuring rumours filtered in. The driver, a big Brummie, had put up a struggle before being bludgeoned. Needless to say the peelers had taken my clothes, scraped my fingernails. The screw told me this news between bowls of porridge and atrocious jokes.

It was Monday evening before a wonderful sound floated in through the bars of my cell. I brightened, listened as a long cough began, swelled and shuddered the walls. The cough rumbled closer. I ran to the bars grinning all over my face.

‘That you, Tinker?’ I yelled. ‘In here.’

‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’

In he came. Small, shambling, in a grimy old beret and tattered army greatcoat. An aroma of stale booze and feet wafted in as he subsided wheezing on the bunk.

‘Never been in this one,’ he croaked. A connoisseur of jails. ‘Did we do it, Lovejoy?’

That plural warmed me. Tinker’s not much to look at, but any ally counts one. Since my arrest I’d been solo. ‘No.’

‘Fank Gawd,’ he said, rolling a grotty cigarette in mittened fingers. ‘They’ve been at me three frigging days. Yon Scotch tart got the paper to me in time.’

I nodded. That had warned him to disclose nothing. He gave another cough. I waited. They seem to start somewhere out to sea, like thunder. ‘You’ll get sprung, Lovejoy. That bird you wuz shagging in Ben’s hut’s seeing the commissioner.’

I sank back, eyes closed in relief. Tinker lit up, coughing. Ellen had come to give me an alibi. ‘Learn anything?’

‘About the bureau? Aye. Word is that frigging Dobson creep’s had it away, to frigging Amsterdam, Antwerp, one of them places through the Hook. Twinned it.’

‘Jesus.’

An antique which is made into two of itself is ‘twinned’ in the trade. If half of a piece is truly genuine antique, it becomes very difficult to dismiss it as a fake. And of course you get twice the profit. If Tinker’s information was true, the only piece of evidence which could pin the killer had been destroyed as effectively as if they’d burned it to ashes. Dobson is a barker, like Tinker. He works with a pleasant youngish bloke we call Dutchie. Oddly, I thought of that familiar face in that great old car. Had it been Dutchie? Indistinct, but . . .

‘How’d you know?’

‘Seen down the hangars, two nights back.’

My bad luck, I thought bitterly. Anybody with stolen antiques takes them to a disused wartime airfield near here. No questions are asked down at the hangars. Jade, jewellery, silver, porcelain, complete suites of furniture, I’ve seen stuff change hands a dozen times an hour. Always at night. No way of backtracking there.

‘Here, Lovejoy,’ Tinker was grinning toothily in his fag smoke. ‘If you’d not been shagging that Excise officer’s missus they’d be topping you.’ He really fell about at the thought of my being hanged, cackling through his brown fangs.

‘They don’t hang people now, stupid sod,’ I said icily.

‘Maslow always said he’d make you an exception, Lovejoy.’ He was still rolling in the aisles, coughing himself apoplectic, when his visiting time was up and they shelled him out.

They released me on two counts. One, the big Midlander had fought his murderers, and I was unmarked. And two, a respectable lady testified that, marooned with a stalled engine on the main Al2 during the night of the great fog, she had been assisted by a stranger who started her motor and drove her to safety. As a gesture of appreciation, she had insisted on driving him to his home, a thatched cottage in a little village nearby.

‘How could the lady see your cottage, thatch and all, in the pitch fog, Lovejoy?’ Maslow asked evenly, with that threatening peace police manage so effortlessly. ‘And how come you’d forgotten the entire incident?’

‘I couldn’t compromise a lady,’ I explained nobly.

‘One day, Lovejoy. One day.’

Deliberately I let the office door slam on him. I waggled my fingers at the desk sergeant.

He too warned, ‘One day, Lovejoy. One day.’

‘Great phrase you police’ve got there, Ernie,’ I said. ‘Stick at it. Might make a full sentence one day.’

And I left happily. In fact, super happily, because in my languishment the penny had dropped in my cavernous skull. You never twin a fake, right? All that extra skilled labour is only worthwhile if the original piece is a
genuine
antique. The driver had been done for a valuable piece, not a cheap reproduction.

Now things made sense I began hurrying.

O
UR ANCESTORS LIKED
to be thought fine, moral folk. Same as us, eh? Flesh being flesh and spirits being weak, they rarely made it. In fact they were as hopeless at sanctity as we are. Sadly, it bothered them more, but they were better at pretending. Look at lithophanes, for example, that I was currently angling after.

You’ve seen how light transluces through a lampshade? If you’re a craftsman you can make porcelain thin enough to show translucency in exactly the same way. Lithophanes are small plaques of super-slender porcelain in which you see a picture when you hold them up to the light. However, naughtiness crept in to the Victorian designs. Not all the pictures hidden in the antique porcelain are pretty trees and hillsides. They are often lascivious ladies in mid-frolic, doing scandalous things with sexual abandon. Nowadays collectors pay through the nose for erotic lithophanes – purely for the art, you understand.

Tinker was in the White Hart soaking the day’s calories and coughing so well that people had given up trying to listen to the jukebox. It’s where our local antique dealers gather and pretend to celebrate between failures.

‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’ He jerked his chin. Ted the barman nodded and drew two pints. I paid. It’s Tinker’s principal method of claiming his salary from me. I’ve gone hungry before now to get him sloshed, because a barker’s vital. He can winkle and cheat with abandon. Antique dealers must be circumspect.

‘Wotcher, Tinker.’ I forked out. I bought us a bar pasty in the euphoria of freedom. ‘News of the bureau? Dutchie?’

‘Nar. I got you Dobson.’ He indicated with his eyes the tall lone figure at the bar’s end. Even in a crowd the thin silent barker somehow stood apart.

Dobson’s a sombre one-off. For a start, he’s the only bloke I know in the trade who doesn’t have a nickname. And he never says much, just hangs around listening, vigilant. Folk say he carries a knife and once did time. He looks fresh from an alley war. On the other hand I like Dutchie, a genial bloke with a word for the cat. He appears out of nowhere once every Preston Guild. He comes like a comet, handles the deals Dobson’s lined up for him, then vanishes for a fortnight or so. But Dobson unsettles me. A few minutes later I was asking Dobson where his wally Dutchie was.