A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

14

SORBO'S HOUSE FACED a school in a leafy lane three furlongs from Streatham Hill station. The area was quiet, apart from restaurants resounding to competing Elvis impersonators, traffic sedately trundling goodnight London.

Steps ran up between huge pot plants that ought to have lived honest lives in Kew Gardens. Lights were on. I knocked, and here came Sorbo, sloshed as a newt. He's like Tinker, never drunk, never sober.

'Jesus H,' he said, swaying in the paltry light. 'Or is it Lovejoy?'

He cackled, heaving his immense girth up and down, a Mr Bumble in an old bottle green frock coat straight from Dickens. I've known Sorbo years - well, five - since he engraved some Victorian drinking glasses for me with tendrils and grapey things, converting them from the tenpenny cheapos (incidentally, never pay more than one zlotnik per dozen) to a week's wage each. Sorbo's old-fashioned, meaning skilled. He's also dishonest, also meaning skilled.

'Of the two, it's probably me,' I said, causing him further mirth. 'Still got your Samuel Nock?'

'I have. And I'm keeping it, Lovejoy.'

He's been bragging about this delectable double-barrelled flintlock pistol for years. He knows I'd kill for it, given a chance. Browned under-and-over barrels, worth a king's ransom, truly beautiful. I could feel it in the room, in an old leather bag by the window.

It has its tiny powder flask, flints, and two spherical lead bullets. He's a selfish blighter, doesn't deserve an antique of such beauty.

Sorbo's like many bachelors. He exists downstairs in one crammed room. He also cooks there - one gas ring - washes in a tin bath, dines there (folding stool for a table), has a small sink, and kips on a truckle bed. This, note, in a four-bedroomed house a family could romp through. I don't understand it. His room is also his factory, with a pride-of-place bench, racks of miniature tools, a kiln, easels that drop from the ceiling on pulleys. For a moment I wondered uneasily if it was Jane Eyre all over again, some lunatic wife up there in her nightie with candles, itching for arson. I shook myself and sat on some reference tomes stacked at bum height.

'You took your time coming, Lovejoy.' It was blame. He sat in a wicker chair, and swilled from a Rodney flask. 'For a friend.'

'I didn't know about Arthur, Sorbo.' I eyed the flask. A Rodney always looks as though it started out a proper bulbous shape but began to melt. Its base is massively flat.

Admiral Rodney got it right, because no storm at sea would ever cause it to spill. But it was too light. 'Soda glass?'

'Polystyrene sheet. I found a way to mould it. Only good for distant views of multiple fakes. Still, it has possibilities.'

One thing about Sorbo, he's active, questing. He's called Sorbo because he once bet that any antique on earth could be faked from Sorbo, a rubbery synthetic. He's almost right, any antique can be faked from anything.

'Dieter Gluck, Sorbo. I found Colette among the bagsters, St Anne's in Soho, but got dusted by that Bern.'

He swigged, didn't offer me any. My Gran had an earthenware bottle behind her speer.

She called it her 'bronchial beverage'. We children hadn't to touch it, on pain of a sip bringing instant death and a coffin on a handcart. I mention this not because it has to do with the story, just to show how envious I am of people with stern principles. I'll invent my own soon, and be the envy of the world.

He sighed. 'Bad news, Lovejoy. It was soon after you and Colette.' He shrugged, an immense business that took time. I noticed a good long case clock, silent, standing against the wall behind him. The room wasn't well lit, just one old oil lamp burning.

'Where'd Gluck come from, Sorbo? A dealer?'

'Selling various old instruments, clockworks, automata, navigational brasses. Colette was flattered, him randy as a duck. They did it even in the shop. I seed them at it.' He shook his head, baffled at the ways of people. 'Arthur was a proper gent. Said nothing.'

'Hard to believe, Sorbo.'

His rheumy eyes fixed me. 'Why? He did the same over you and Colette. Gentleman is as gentleman does. You can't call a gent a lowlife just because you're dross, Lovejoy.'

Ouch. I sat, vision hard to come by. It cleared, me blinking like in a gale. Okay, so Colette was enamoured by this new handsome dealer, so clever at mechanical antiques.

My question was, what happened to Arthur's feudal lordship of Saffron Fields? How come Dieter Gluck owned everything, so tightly that poor Arthur couldn't even be buried under his own mulberry tree? I asked it.

'The old ploy, Lovejoy. Gold bricking, the Yanks called it in my day.'

I was astonished. 'Arthur would never fall for a con trick!'

'He didn't. But Colette did. Hook, line and sinker.' He examined the Rodney flask in the lantern light, swigged from it with abandon.

'What was the brick?'

The gold brick con trick got its name from the time of the USA gold strikes. You're on a train, puffing across the prairies. Along comes a suave bloke, very Mississippi, waistcoat, cigar. Gets talking. He's made a fantastic gold strike, and look! Here are the very deeds to his claim! And assayer's reports, the gold yield a ton an ounce. All he needs is investors. Fancy an investment, stranger? If you look especially gullible, he'd even show you a gold brick, nugget, powdered ore, take you to his mine, where you'll discover, surprise, real gold nuggets buried in the scree.

Nowadays the bait is more likely to be one genuine antique Russian ikon, plus the promise of thousands more. Or one genuine Impressionist painting plus promise of a hundred. Or a four-carat diamond plus the promise of et enticing cetera. The gold brick con trick is always one tempter plus a promise. Remember to say no. It's still done on stock exchanges the world over and works like a dream. I've seen the Gold Brick work brilliantly well even when executed by duds. Because of something truly terrible called greed. Sorry if it sounds like an accusation. I'm in there too.

Once, I knew a woman, very cool professional lady, who advised banks on investments.

Cynicism on shapely legs, Maisie was. Maisie was good. She could swap outdated yen into extinct lire and back into dollars without changing wheels. Yet this same cynical hardliner Maisie paid a barrowboy an entire month's salary on the promise of three hitherto undiscovered manuscripts by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's pal. She didn't know the vendor, hadn't seen the manuscripts, knew nothing about Ben Jonson, had never clapped eyes on the barrowboy before, couldn't tell parchment from pawpaw. See?

Greed, like murder, will out. Never mind those famous sayings about fame being the spur; greed's the biggest mover on earth. It's horrible.

I've seen the coolest individuals fall for a non-existent cache of non-Sheraton furniture in a non-existent garden shed. I've seen clergymen fall for fake Dead Sea Scrolls. I've known widows in an investment club lose everything, including reputations, when buying a non-existent Caribbean island. And seen a Munich millionaire go to prison for frantically buying the six-acre greensward of a nonexistent Oxford college. Don't think you can't fall for the same con more than once. The widows' investment group I mentioned did it again two years later, buying imaginary salmon-fishing rights to a mythical river.

The rush of emotional memories gave me a headache. I'd have killed for a cup of tea. I told Sorbo, but he's bad at hints.

'Brick? Clocks, Lovejoy.'

Well, I groaned out loud.

'Everybody on earth fakes clocks, Sorbo. Boy scouts find rare Early English movements in steeple belfries. It's like furniture. Everybody's got a rotten old clock that won't go, so greed naturally enters.' Hence the honest old public pretends that some hacky Woolworth alarm clock is a priceless Carrier discovered in Grandpa's attic. It's as natural as breathing. My respect for Colette's instincts plunged.

'She was actually taken in by an antique clock scam?'

'To the hilt, Lovejoy. That was how Arthur died, see. It was his canal.'

Canal? Sorbo drained the Rodney flask with a roustabout's glug, then withdrew a new bottle of Graham's vintage port from a cupboard, decanted it carefully into the fake flask.

He spoke with love. 'Port takes time, Lovejoy.' Then switched to hate. 'If I could kill Dieter Gluck and get away with it, I'd do it.' I listened, dry as a bone, the port maturing before my eyes in the glow. 'Everybody could see it except Colette.'

'Did nobody say?'

He swung on me. I'd never seen him angry before. It shook me. 'You think I didn't?

And where were her sodding friends, Lovejoy? You quick-prick hick. How often did you phone, visit, drop a postcard? She had others, fine. They were all vanishers, just like you.'

Insults have to be swallowed. I've found that. 'How'd he do it?' Trout had more or less said the same, Dieter Gluck kills people. 'And what canal?'

'Arthur's position seemed enviable, to Gluck. Nobility, lineage, land, plus a wife who played at being the grand Chelsea antiques dealer. A plum for the picking! Gluck had no money of his own, so he wheedled in. Became a partner by foregoing.'

You can do this in the antiques trade. Foregoing always makes me a bit uneasy. If you want to become a partner in a small antique dealer's shop, you go through three phases. First, you work there for nothing, make yourself indispensable. The owners get to depend on your wit, help, luck even. Then you sadly but tactfully hint that you've got an excellent offer from a rival. This may not be true, but so? Avarice spurs you on.

Phase Two comes along. The owner says, 'Hey, don't go. How about I give you a salary?' You say, 'Ta, pal. I really don't want to go because I've been so-o-o happy working with you. How about I stay, take no payment, but take the salary in equity?'

That is, you become a junior partner, however fractionally small the increments. Phase Three, you're the cuckoo. You ditch the owner.

You're in. You've made it, name on the notepaper. Foregoing.

'His expertise was automata, clockworks, all those?'

'Has a good knowledge, give him that.' Sorbo hated admitting this. He took a long pull at the port, set it down, eyes watering. The fumes wafted across.

'Genuine?' I'm always scared some enemy's going to turn out a divvy like me.

'He pulled off one or two successes. Astrolabes, navigationals, spheres, microscopes. I got the feeling it was all breading, but who can prove that?'

'Breading is what anglers do. They chuck bread balls onto a river so the fish will congregate. It means putting an enticing antique into somebody's path. This way, they're inveigled into making offers for other items you've got. Many dealers bread at a loss, to increase a buyer's trust.

'And Colette thought—'

'The sun shone out of the bloke?' Sorbo completed for me. 'Yes. Then he put the gold brick in. It needed a guarantee, see?'

It was like a bad dream. I was aghast. 'Didn't Arthur say no?'

'You know - knew - Arthur, Lovejoy. He went along, put up the shop and his manor as guarantee when Colette said.'

'And didn't think to ask me?' I almost shouted it.

He said nothing. Then, 'You never answer letters, Lovejoy. Your phone's always on the blink, or you're in trouble somewhere. I told Arthur to send for you. He just smiled and said, "First catch your hare, Sorbo." Like Mrs Beeton's recipe.'

'It wasn't Mrs Beeton. It was Mrs Hannah Glasse.' Dr John Hill's pen-name was Mrs Hannah Glasse - he being embarrassed, you see, at writing the brilliant Cook's Oracle cookery book. Born in 1716, he first wrote that most famed phrase Take your hare when it is cased… Which became scatched, then catch. Arthur knew this. He often talked in local dialect, and 'scatch' is an old East Anglian word meaning to skin. In fact, we'd once had a mock argument about the authorship of this very saying. My eyes watered. I wondered if it was a message, from Arthur to an absent friend. Me, say.

Because Arthur had been well and truly skinned.

'Arthur had a canal, Lovejoy. He wanted to link it with the sea estuary. Always on about it.' Sorbo showed guilt at having been bored stiff by Arthur.

'Like the Ribble, wasn't it?'

Sorbo sniffed, maudlin. 'Make a new lock gate from Saffron Fields canal into the estuary, you'd be able to sail a longboat barge from the North Sea up the heart of the country to the Lake District.'

'These schemes are always resurfacing, now that leisure is big money.'

'I think Colette just wanted to give Arthur the money to build his canal's sea gate.

Repay Arthur for all the lovers she'd had over the years.'

He swigged, belched. I sat in the gloaming, sick at heart.

'Know what, Lovejoy? I think it's women. Take your average bloke. He sees a luscious bird, old or young, fancies her.'

Sorbo was blaming me for it all. He was right. If I'd stood by Arthur, this wouldn't have happened.

Sorbo went on, 'The bloke either makes love to the bird if he's lucky, or fails. Either way, he lives with it. But women are different. A woman gets the bit between her teeth about a man, something weird happens. She throws everything to the winds. Morality, money, propriety, common sense. Goes crazy.'

I rose and took the Rodney flask from his hand. Unbelievably light, from its synthetic composition. Sorbo had invented quite a fake. I bent to stare into his eyes.

'Sorbo. Gluck's scheme was to rob who of what?'

'Them, Lovejoy. The Clockmakers' Company.'

It couldn't be done. People had tried, and nobody had done it yet. I'd even thought of it myself - not really in true life, but when you're just drifting off to sleep and pleasant thoughts entice. I pulled myself together.

'It would need multo gelt, Lovejoy. Colette made Arthur put up the Chelsea business and the manor, guarantee Gluck a loan.'

'Some loan,' I said bitterly. 'A fortune.'

'Had to be big, see, because Gluck reckoned he'd found a new - I mean antique -

Harrison wooder.'

I swayed away and sat. I still held Sorbo's Rodney and took a long draught, choked a bit. The Harrison wooder would do for a gold brick all right,

'Why didn't Gluck go through with it, once he'd got the money?'

Sorbo retrieved the flask with an air of injury, took a swig to show who was boss round here.

'He found something about the manor. Cheeky bastard went to inspect it, like it was his. Spoke to Arthur. Arthur always did have a weak ticker. Died in hospital that evening. Heart attack.'

'Where was Trout in all this?'

'That little bugger? Gluck gave him the push for lowering the tone of the place. When Arthur passed away Gluck brought in this Bern goon instead of me. Bern's supposed to be an antiques restorer. I got dundied without a bean.' Dundied, made redundant. 'I make do now with — '

'Aye, aye,' I said testily. I didn't want a list of Sorbo's odd jobs. 'You go to Arthur's funeral?'

'No. I was plastered for a fortnight. Anyway, it was out in some forest.'

Where some lad had sung a song for Arthur. There'd been four at the burial in the glade. And somebody had watched me when I'd visited there.

'Arthur died exactly when everything he owned passed legally to Gluck. Convenient, eh?'

'Colette was stunned. Gluck threw her out. All London was talking about it. She can't give antiques up, Lovejoy. Like you, like me, like everybody else with the bug. So she's a scrubber.'

For a long time I sat watching the shadows leap across the workbench, stretch and vanish among his instruments. I cleared my throat.

'Sorbo. We outnumber Gluck.'

'I'm not deaf.'

He took up a small wood-shaper chisel and started to hone it on an oilstone. Seeing other fakers use an instrument always narks me, no matter how skilled they are. We forgers always reckon we can do everything better than anybody else. Robbery, even.

'There's Trout, Tinker, me, you, and my apprentice Lydia. There's only two of him.

Anybody else?'

'To do what?'

Words don't come easy. I didn't want to say kill exactly, because killing's wrong. And punish sounds like school, hands out and this hurts me more than it'll hurt you, the executioner's usual lies.

'To restore the balance,' I said eventually.

He said, 'Sounds fair. What do we do?'

I said, 'We do Gluck's robbery for him. Or a better one.'

'Robberies that good can't be done, Lovejoy.'

'Then,' I said evenly, 'somebody'll get caught, won't they?'

That night I kipped in Waterloo Station, light of heart, thinking what a wonderful place London was. Dick Whittington had found that, and he'd made Lord Mayor, boss of the City of London itself, of all the ancient prerogatives and immense wealth. London truly is a magical place, for somebody with ambition.

Breakfast in the station buffet cost me the earth. London's a lousy rotten dump.