A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

11

WE LURKED AT Tower Bridge, if it's possible to do such a thing. Hordes of pedestrians gaped at us. They should have watched the sword swallower performing nearby. An escape artist was wriggling in chains while a drum beat and the crowds cheered. This is one remarkable thing about our creaking old kingdom - you can be stuck miles out in the bundu among rivers and forests, and ninety minutes later among the Tower's tourist crowds.

'Why are we here, Lovejoy?' Lydia asked. She looked so lovely I was ashamed of me.

The throng's glances were full of mystification, Beauty with three Beasts. I pretended we weren't a menagerie. I didn't dare explain about the trouble I was in with Holloway University.

'Because we need to find out three things, love. One is a man called Floggell, whose help I need to, er, find a painting. Tinker, Floggell's down to you.'

'No, Lovejoy,' Lydia persisted. 'I mean we could have gone an extra Tube stop, and saved fare.'

'The antiques dealers would have seen us arrive together, Lydia,' I said, striving for sanity.

Trout's laconic gaze fixed me, clearly thinking we'd do better without Lydia's painful morality. Tinker began coughing, suffering from beer ache.

'I see!' she trilled, delighted. 'Deception! So as not to be noticed!'

'That's it, Lydia,' I said with gravity.

'What do I do, Lovejoy?' Trout asked. 'That pig Gluck knows me.'

'Padpas, Trout. Remember I said Dosh Callaghan got zuzzed when somebody sold him some tsavorites?'

'Right, Lovejoy.'

'Lydia, love, go down the King's Road, Chelsea. The Lovely Colette. Find out what antiques they're buying or selling.'

'Lovely Colette Antiques (Chelsea)?' She has several grimaces, all of them enticing. We watched, lusting in our various ways, as her expression cleared. 'Clocks, Lovejoy. They bid for clocks, plus early scientific instruments. Shall I ask them for a list?'

'No, love,' I said, broken. 'Try subterfuge. Pretend. Surreptitiously.' I couldn't think of any other synonym except disguise, and her wondrous figure made that a clear impossibility.

'Isn't that rather underhanded, Lovejoy?'

'Yes, I'm afraid it is, Lydia.' I avoided Trout's eyes. 'But we owe it to Arthur. He was a friend.'

She was doubtful. 'I shall have to find a way without lying.'

'Right, everybody. Meet tomorrow teatime, Portobello Road antiques market at the Duke of Wellington pub, or the Earl of Lonsdale near the beer garden.'

Tinker coughed explosively. Even the Tower Hill traffic faltered as his rumbling roar quivered through the ancient streets. I sighed. I'd mentioned booze.

'I'll need to clear me bronchials before then, Lovejoy.'

'Oh, do let me!' Lydia rummaged in her handbag. He osmosed the notes without moving a muscle. 'One thing, Lovejoy. Do you mean actually inside a common tavern?'

'No, love,' I said politely. 'I'll meet you at the Corner Market. There's a line of street stalls. One specializes in dolls, a silver stall, then one selling oriental porcelains.'

I warned them all not to get lost. Portobello Road can be a right maelstrom.

'Lovejoy. Where,' Lydia asked daintily, 'shall you sleep tonight? Time is getting on.

Bermondsey market will already be closed.'

'I'll work through the night. Trout has friends. And Tinker knows a pal who keeps a fish and chip shop.'

They knew better than contradict my lies.

'But what if we miss each other tomorrow?'

'Then meet in Camden Passage the day following, same time.'

Camden Passage's unbelievable surge is a stunning antiques success story. It's now the front runner, having outstripped the East End, Portobello, Bermondsey.

Mechanically I leant to buss her cheek as usual but she swiftly gave my hand a solemn shake instead.

'Very well, Lovejoy. Tomorrow, the corner hostelry in Portobello Road. Good afternoon.'

We chorused awkward goodbyes and watched her walk off up Trinity Square towards the Tube station. Trout cleared his throat. I waited. I wasn't going to have any criticism.

'Lovejoy,' he said after a bit. 'Is she real?'

'What's it to you, Trout?' I said evenly.

'Not knocking her, honest. Lovely gal. I mean it, straight up, mate. Only, will she be all right on her own?'

'She's clever and resolute.' We all listened to what I would say. I went for it. 'She's my apprentice. She's down to me.'

'Good she knowed about them clocks, eh?' Tinker said to break the ice, spitting phlegm into the gutter. 'Time for a jar, lads.'

The money was burning his pocket, and pubs abound along the Thames. I left them to it. I wanted results.

Clocks, though? I started south across Tower Bridge. Everybody in the country has an old clock that doesn't go, kept because great-grandad liked it. Or some old watch forgotten in a drawer that the Swiss museums would give an absolute fortune for -

meaning like a hundred thousand American zlotniks, sight unseen if only somebody would take it to be auctioned. I crossed over to see my favourite view, the Pool of London, Wapping Old Stairs facing Cherry Garden Pier.

The trouble with antique clocks is that fakers love them for two cogent reasons: their complexity, and the ignorance of the buying public. Timepieces, clocks, watches, the lot, are a paradise for forgers. I'd have to see what Lydia came up with. I found something in my pocket as I reached the start of Tower Bridge Road. It was a card.

Sharon J. Butts, attorney at law, of Lincoln's Inn. Good old Shar, who'd sprung me from that eternity of suffering I'd undergone in that infernal dungeon! Well, one night in the cell. The plod had given me tomato soup, slices of bread, and egg and chips.

My spirits rose. It was six o'clock. I went on, a spring in my step.

Shar was at home. I was warily relieved. After all, she might have had some bloke on her rope. I looked penitent. She wasn't glad to see me, but let me in.

'I'm going out soon, Lovejoy.' She was dressed to the nines, that shop-ready look women achieve before the off. 'I expected you in chambers.'

Had she? 'Sorry. I had to see a friend.'

She hesitated. I stood like a spare tool.

'Can't it wait until tomorrow, Lovejoy?'

'Just one thing, love. Is there any way I can find out if some bloke's been in trouble with the law recently? It's rather important.'

That caused her some doubt, but nothing must be allowed to impede a woman on a date. She made all sorts of promises to find out. Then it was goodnight, Lovejoy, don't call me, I'll call you. I left, obviously supplanted by some rich Lothario, but not before the oddest thing happened.

'The name, Lovejoy?' she asked. 'You haven't told me who.'

'Dieter Gluck.' I gave her the address. And just for an instant she paused, but took it down calmly enough. I didn't know how to spell Dieter, but she did. We parted amicably.

I didn't hang around, zoomed into Piccadilly's crowds as I headed towards Shaftesbury Avenue and the office where Caprice Rhodes would be slogging producing stage shows.

Can you believe that people do it for a living?

'Caprice told me to stop by,' I told the girl on the desk. 'The show, see?'

'Right, Lovejoy.' I'd given her my name. She nodded as if she really knew me. It always works. Everybody in theatre is scared stiff of everybody finding out that they don't know everybody else. 'Caprice is on the phone. Take a seat.'

They're always on the phone. I sat and read the posters of past shows. Amazing what some folk do. Phones rang. People with torticollis rushed about the warren of rooms, talking into phones on their shoulders. I can't understand why they do it.

'Lovejoy?' Caprice stood there, smiling.

'Sorry about the time, love.' I followed. She started on the phone while I waited some more.

Caprice is married to a bloke she possibly never sees. Thirtyish, bonny, always looking sort of smooth and dolled up. She has - honest, I'm not making it up - a woman who comes into the office every single day to do her toe nails. I thought queasily of Trout's pal Failsafe's feet, 'two plates of warts'. Maybe Caprice could slip Failsafe in for a free go?

'Look, daaaaahling,' Caprice was ending into the receiver. 'Your poor cow might have got a fortune in Plymouth's pantomime, but that doesn't mean we all must join her parade.' She listened, sighed. 'You piss me off. So your poor cow dated His Royal Highness once, Mori, then got the shunt. Am I expected to pay her a fortune to forget her fucking lines? She's dead in the water.'

She clicked the phone, came and sat on my lap. A secretary dashed in with faxes.

Caprice riffled through them, discarded all but one. The lass dashed out.

'Can't you give the actress a job, love?' I asked. 'She might be great.'

'She can't walk, talk, sing, dance, move, or open her mouth except for two functions, Lovejoy.' She ruffled my thatch. 'Even for an actress this is somewhat limited. What're you after, scrounger?'

I was chastened. 'Sorry. Remember when we met?'

She carolled a pretty laugh. Their faces. Better than a play!'

It had been in the most august London auction. A mad variety of Russian art was being sold. They'd imported a galaxy - their description - of paintings, sculptures. In true auctioneering style, meaning cavalier but mentally dim, they'd forgotten one small fact.

Russian art ranged across a century, but hereabouts feminism had raised its head.

Quick as a flash pickets gathered in Bond Street chanting slogans about sisterhood subjection and degradation of women. Some artists had painted nudes, you see, and such images were imperialist, whatever.

'You stopped me, you bastard!' She laughed, remembering. 'Trying to stab the painting!'

'Maybe I shouldn't have,' I mused. 'Serov's underpainting is duff. Green's essential—'

Caprice shouted for coffee, still falling about on my lap, not without hazards of various kinds. 'You knocked me senseless, you bastard.'

'Well, I couldn't see the point.' I still couldn't. Stabbing a painting is like burning books, always criminal. I hadn't liked the Vladimir Serov painting, a crowned nude, but who am I?

'Thank Christ for that, Lovejoy. It proves you're sane.' She lit a fag. I stared. She didn't use to smoke. Smoking had been a wicked male stratagem promoting women's serfdom. The coffee came. I got a theatrical special, so thick it wouldn't swallow.

Caprice drank hers with a flourish, still on my lap. We talked of changing times.

Fashion alters art. It also does something scary - it changes prices. This is good news and bad news. Before the millennium, 'political correctness' became a stigmatizing accusation shrieked by anyone who wanted media time to air their prejudices, whether barmy or not. The world became miserable. Doomsters were everywhere on radio, telly, the good old tabloids. And the value - the money you actually hand over - of antiques changed. It took a year to happen. (I'm telling you this because it can happen again any time, but the mechanism's the same.)

The bad news? Quite drossy paintings shot up in price. Okay, they weren't artistically up to much - say, some poor quality Ukrainian cottage - but they were the sort of oldie that dealers tend to buy to 'body out', as dealers call it, their shops or next phoney Antiquarian Road Show Travelling Auction. Paintings of some lovely nude plummeted. It became politically incorrect to like some portrait of a crusty old cleric or kindly father.

Even yet these are badly undersold. Thousands of portraits - regimental officers, colonial stalwarts, doddering priests, millmasters - have been cleaned off so the canvas can be used by fakers. Forgers call it 'emptying' an ancient canvas. And the fakers use those genuinely old canvases to paint 'Victorian' scenes that are politically correct -

ladies reading, children at the seashore, or boring old golf. Forgeries, in brief, where nobody has a job.

I call it sinner's stiffness, this move to make everybody glare accusingly at history through modern eyes. It's evil because it kills antiques. Because it burns books. And because it's phoney. Sorry to go on. I once came across a forged painting on an old canvas. I recognized the canvas from the marks a dealer called Tollbooth had made on its reverse (dealers often do this in pencil, so a pal in their auction ring will know how much to bid). He uses the code CRAFTY, the letters' meaning being 1 to 6, because Tollbooth never bids over 666 for anything.

The painting had come from Armenia, and was of an elderly woman coming from a tin bath. It was obvious the artist had seen Rembrandt's painting. It was condemned by political rectitude, and went for a song. Cleaned off, the canvas was used by some forger who daubed on it a golf house in mid-Edwardian style. It went for a relative fortune. See? Fashion slaughters art, and substitutes gunge. Collectors out there, please note: if you want regimental histories, religious allegories, nudes, anything condemned in the great hogwash period of the 1990s, get out there and buy, because they'll never be as cheap again once the world recovers its senses.

'As long as there's a few like you left, Lovejoy, we can identify the norm,' Caprice was saying.

Eh? Whatever it was, I agreed. 'Look, love, I wonder—'

'Get on with it, Lovejoy,' she said. 'We've three shows, all doing bad business. The boss is near bankruptcy, driving us mad. He's got some new tart. I've to find a West End play she can star in. She has the thespian skills of Amoeba proteus and the dress sense of Mrs Gamp.' She sighed. 'God knows what she does in bed, but it must be brilliant.'

She waited. She ahemed. 'Come in, Planet Lovejoy.'

'Oh, sorry.' I'd got distracted by the thought. 'Er, a gun, love.'

That shook her so much she ground out her fag. I watched it die. 'You what, Lovejoy? I never thought I'd hear—'

Caprice Rhodes married this landowner near Grime's Graves. They own heathlands, fields, valleys, there to breed pheasants, quail, and other innocent birds, all the better to slaughter them by twelve-bore shotguns. Saves the old legs, don't ya ken, killing the birds all in one spot.

'There's eleven thousand country guns available, Lovejoy. Why mine?'

A 'gun', incidentally, isn't your actual tubes. The term actually means a place at a shoot.

People pay - no joke -up to two and a half thousand zlotniks of the realm a day for the privilege of going out for a quick massacre. Huntin' and shootin' meets are where cabinet ministers of any political stripe are made, they say. Other, even more passionate, relationships are also fostered.

'It's near somewhere I'm investigating.'

She pondered, posing, chin on her finger. Pretty. I began to wish she'd get off my lap, or sit closer still.

'The Goldhorns?' she guessed, quick. 'They were the only people of our…' of our class who would bother with a lowlife like you, Lovejoy were the words she wanted. She finished, 'district who knew you. Is it them?'

'Yes.'

'Arthur died, didn't he? Broken heart, after some sod took your place when you left Colette.' She nodded. 'Well, since you ask, Lovejoy, I'll get you a gun.'

'Now?'

That gave her a laugh. She shook her hair like they do, as if trying to throw it away over her shoulder. 'Phone this number early tomorrow. Lovejoy?' She looked as I bussed her goodbye. 'You won't disgrace me, will you? I mean, Clovis is a stickler for behaviour.'

Well, so am I. I was just scared I'd shoot so badly I might actually hit one of the creatures. I mean the pheasants.

'I'll behave, love. And thanks.'

'You'll enjoy the dinner, Lovejoy. Tit for tat.'

'Eh?' She'd not said anything about a dinner. I saw her glint.

'The awards night. You're taking me. It's soon. I'll send the invitation.'

'Ta, love. Tarra.' I'd joined the county set.