A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

22

STANDING IN THE woodland, where the big river didn't quite reach the sea estuary, I reflected that everybody does the unexpected. A man marries the wrong bird. A girl takes the wrong subject at college. You order the wrong meal. Women especially don't do what I expect - which only means I'm thick, I suppose. I turned to the offshore wind. I love air. It makes me remember how wrong you can be about people.

There was this woman, Leanne. Leanne was the most meticulous bird on earth. Ever. It took me two years to become her friend. I'll be honest. I wanted an antique pasglas she had. This is an unusual cylindrical beaker Rhineland pubs kept for jovial conviviality when drinking groups gathered. You get occasional ones with enamel designs on that sell for a fortune. This valuable drinking vessel has a kind of groove, sometimes a thread, that shows where old Heinrich is allowed to drink to. Share and share, you durstn't gulp beyond your mark. Well, Leanne had an enamelled pasglas with an external notched spiral decoration on it, marked with the insignia of some Bavarian shooting club. Its value was a row of serious noughts. I met her while helping our parson to mend his gate. I ran her home in my Austin Ruby. She invited me in. I saw the pasglas, asked to buy it. She refused, so I fell in love with her and started wheedling.

Not, I can admit, casually. If Leanne said coffee at ten, she meant literally ten of the clock. Arrive at nine-fifty or ten past, your knock remained unanswered. And only coffee, no hanky panky. As months passed, she slowly unbent, so to speak. The trouble was, I actually began to like her. In antiques, fondness is bad news. Keep your eyes on the prize. In fact, when I finally reaped the pasglas, we were making regular smiles behind her drawn chintz. So there was Leanne in her cottage, pleasant, plump, and pliant, when the sky fell in.

She won the lottery.

Instant multi-millionairess. Only person I'd ever heard of who did it. The world veered on its axis.

Leanne instantly bought a yacht, to sit idle in her minuscule garden. It never sailed.

Day Two, she bought an ostrich farm in Devonshire, never went to see it. That first weekend she shopped like a maniac, ran London's prestigious stores ragged. We made love in her bedroom among seventy-one new hats. Oxford Street sent two huge pantechnicon trucks full of new shoes. She bought three stone fountains for conservatories she didn't have, bought motor cars she couldn't drive. As for clothes, they arrived in roomfuls.

This, note, was my meticulous Leanne, who once sternly asked me to leave for dropping my teaspoon. And the same Leanne who wrote to the Home Secretary whenever the post girl came later than six-forty a.m. 'Standards, Lovejoy,' she'd say primly, 'must not fall.' She even said it in bed.

Three months, she'd spent up. I tried to stem the spending tide, and failed. Penniless, Leanne sat in her tiny thatched cottage among her purchases, on her face a look of utter rapture. A remote cousin hurtled in to dispose of the loot. Leanne smiled on, replete. By autumn she was back to her pernicketty self, scolding village shopkeepers for dusty shelves. I still see her, by precise arrangement. She embroiders samplers for me, two hundred stitches each afternoon. I sell them every Lady Day. My point is, I'd have staked my all on Leanne investing every groat of her lottery windfall, and following the Stock Exchange indices on the TV noon bulletin with graphs pinned on her parlour wall. I could imagine other winners going instant fruitbowl, but Leanne? Never.

See what I mean? I get things wrong.

'Hello, Lovejoy.'

I leapt with a squawk. 'You scared me stiff.' I calmed sweatily. 'Hello, Mort.'

He looked crestfallen. We stood looking over the fields to the sea. I didn't know quite what to say. Well, you don't.

'This is where I got your dad wrong,' I said, starting where my thoughts had left off. 'It was the only time Arthur ever shouted at me. I'd only cursed, said it was a horrible place.'

'You fell in the mud.'

'I didn't see you. Were you there too?'

Wind ruffled his hair. 'I hide. I like being among trees. I like here, not just because Dad guarded it so. Because.' Mort pointed.

I peered along his arm. Nothing. 'What?'

'The oxlip. See it? Primula elatior.' He meant a little flower. 'It's not the false oxlip, which is only a cowslip-primrose hybrid. The true oxlip is East Anglian, grows in ancient woodland.'

'Does it really!' I cleared my throat, edgy. The lad wanted to tell me about frigging daffodils, fine. But why meet miles from anywhere on a windy shore?

'The oxlip is rare in hedges,' was his next winner.

'Goodness gracious.' Whatever next?

'It spreads about one stride a year, into modern woodlands that are less than four hundred years old.'

I thought, here I am wanting ways to kill - no, I mean restrain - the homicidal Gluck, and I get the biography of a frond?

'The small-leaved lime's my favourite.' I looked at the floor's greenery. 'No, Lovejoy,' he said patiently. 'Mesolithic wildwood trees. They mark ancient woodland. Also rare in hedges.'

'Rare in hedges!' I repeated, impressed. I was frantic to say something to the lad. This was his special treat, hungering for somebody on his side, telling me this junk. 'Rare like the, er…' Jesus, what was it, primrose?

'Oxlip.' I almost fainted with relief. 'There is the occasional hedgerow of solid small-leaved lime trees. Shelley in Suffolk has one. But it's only the remaining edge of an ancient Mesolithic woodland.'

'Well, it would be,' I exclaimed, trying like mad. Is this how women feel, anxious to say the right thing when some bloke's wittering about carburettors and Gregorian chant harmonics?

'And it's where Grampa is,' he ended.

That shut me up. Grampa? Uneasy, I looked about. We were some distance from the vineyard where Arthur was buried. No headstones among these trees.

Behind us the wooded slope shielded the bend of the river. It was soporific, as all countryside. Cows, a couple of anglers, fields beyond the trees. Facing, the downward slope to the gleaming muddy shore and the North Sea. To the far right, a low headland, houses, a small factory thing with a chimney stub. Left, more trees. This was where Arthur dreamed of cutting his canal, until something had stopped him. Maybe Grampa's grave? I brightened. A link at last? In the distance there was one huge solid tree. I glanced a question.

'Yes, that's Dad's mulberry. King James wanted everybody to grow them, bring the silk industry. Wrong mulberry, of course.'

Silly old King James, then. They say he was a pillock. 'Er, your grandfather?'

'Yes.' He didn't point. 'He's in the sand.'

I wanted to ask why the hell did Arthur bury his dad in the sands of the seashore, but couldn't. There's all sorts of barmy protocol for asking if you want sugar or biscuits, but we've none for essentials.

'Grampa's in his aeroplane.' Mort looked so sad. 'It got shot. He managed to keep it flying, and reached home.'

A small lugger jibed, reaching for the headland. I watched it. In the distance, a low tanker smudged the horizon. I worked out chronology, wartime, dogfights, fighters on old newsreels.

Mort was speaking. 'The old canal locks are a league up-river. Here's the narrowest gap from the river to the estuary.'

So if anybody wanted to link the canal - read the entire inland waterways - with the river and the sea, they'd have to cut through the woodland where we were standing. As if he scanned my mind he added, 'Only two furlongs, Lovejoy.'

Of old woodland and field, blocking the commercial goldmine. I cleared my throat, said nothing.

'Me, Lovejoy. Dad sold it to me, the manor's river rights and navigation rights. Of this little stretch.' He smiled the sort of smile you could easily mistake for a smile, if you weren't careful. 'For a farthing.'

My mind went: but Arthur didn't need to sell it to his son, surely? Ancient manorial rights pass father to son, with the lordship tide, plus the rights to hold village markets and ancient leet courts, the lot.

'He assigned me the title, and this bit of land, before he signed the guarantees Mother wanted to give to somebody. Dad made me buy the lordship, the tide, and this narrow stretch. It's called dryfland. Strictly, anybody wanting even to walk a dog here ought to pay me a copper or two.'

So Arthur kept this ancient piece in Mort's possession, even though everything else -

the manor of Saffron Fields, the estate, the Chelsea antiques firm - went to guarantee Gluck's escapades.

It was hard, but I finally spoke. 'Arthur made you buy it?'

'Yes.' Mort crouched, peered at some grassy thing to avoid talking directly. 'I'd never seen a farthing. Dad laughed. It has a robin on it. I had to hand it to him in the lawyer's office. I felt silly.'

Well, you would. Nobody's as embarrassed as a teenager. And nobody as embarrassing as an insistent dad.

'This is where your grandad…?'

'Crashed, yes. Dad knew exactly. He invented a magnet to trawl the waters at low tide.

He was so surprised when it worked. The aeroplane's just there where the sea marsh begins. Nobody else knows, you see.'

My feet felt suddenly as if they were interlopers. Sometimes you want to hover. The flier must have limped his wounded plane homeward, felt relief seeing the coast appear, maybe smoke fuming from his engine, the pistons coughing, losing power, sinking, the gleaming sea marsh edging nearer as the waves rushed up and—

'Are you all right?' Mort was helping me up. 'There's a tea shop down the hard.'

'Course I'm all right, you silly bugger - er, fine, ta. I slipped.'

We walked along the shore, me sneaking looks at the coast. I told Mort the village tea shop would be closed, and it was. Mort knocked on the back door. The lady opened and served us tea and cakes as a matter of course. Mort didn't pay, I noticed. I pondered this.

Glenda was a pleasant lass, had two children watching school television. They shouted hopeful hellos, but Glenda wouldn't let them escape their lesson. Her husband, a coastguard, was digging in the garden. His uniform hung behind the kitchen door. She said Mortimer, never Mort, and served him first.

Well, I'd found my link. I'd have realized what it was yonks ago if I'd been thinking straight. Arthur had deliberately excluded the small stretch of land from the guarantee Colette had forced him to give Gluck. It denied Gluck a vast commercial opportunity.

And it protected the spot where the lone wartime flier had crashed and sunk into the shore marshes. To Arthur, the spot where his dad's plane lay was sacred. No wonder he'd wanted himself to lie beneath the mulberry tree. It was in view of his own father's resting place.

It was also the one place Arthur had lost his temper with me. You don't let somebody curse like a trooper near your brave dad's grave.

'Are you all right, Lovejoy?' Glenda asked. When I said I was fine, ta, she asked Mort,

'Is Lovejoy to stay here the night, Mortimer? He looks decidedly peaky.' She didn't ask me. The children shouted yes, yes.

'No, thank you, Mrs Elgar,' Mort said. The pair instantly quietened. 'Please get Alan to drive him and his bike home.' He wasn't asking, just saying that's what had to be.

Glenda smiled, glad everything was in its proper place.

'Alan'll be pleased to, Mortimer. Say when.'

Alan drove me home, chatting of tides, ships, lifeboats, nothing of importance. I shouted ta from my gate as he drove away, and stood for a long while as dusk drank the day. Now I had the link, what to do with it? I went to the Treble Tile for supper, had a think about snobbery, money, antiques, and how the three might possibly be made into one long unbreakable noose for somebody. Did I mean chain? Handcuff?

Noose was surely wrong. 23

LUCKILY, LISA WAS in the Treble Tile. She's the best newspaper reporter in the business, she says. She's bonny, slim, has a flat down St Leonard's parish by the town's docks. I like her.

'Don't worry, swine.' She plonked herself down. 'I've got my own sodding drink.'

'I would have offered!' I said indignantly. Lisa curses with aplomb. Actually, I'll omit her invective, if that's all right. Her degree was sociology, so she thinks swearing is propriety.

'You want something.' She eyed me narrowly, couldn't keep it up and heaved a sigh. I like women who heave sighs. 'Things are so effing quiet. I need a scoop.'

'Don't you just report Nessie again?'

'Don't muck about, Lovejoy.' But it's true. Since monks reported Nessie in the Middle Ages there's been over five thousand original new sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, which is only three hundred fewer separate paparazzi scoop reports of Queen Liz Two's pregnancies. There's still money to be made in it. I mean, the big-game hunter Montague Weatherall coined it in the 1930s by finding Nessie's footprint - it was only a stuffed hippo's print. And Mussolini, no less, made mileage by broadcasting that his Italian war-planes had bombed Nessie to oblivion on a daring raid. Me? I think Nessie's only various eels, otters, or a whacking Baltic sturgeon having forgotten which way to migrate. Our joke is, Nessie can't be hard to find. She basks on the surface twice a day

- ten minutes before you arrive, and ten minutes after you've gone home.

'I'll have a scoop for you, Lisa.' She's given up angrily spelling me her name. It's Liza, Leesa, Lisa, or any near combination. 'If you'll help.'

'Soon?' she squealed. Heads turned. She whispered, 'Soon?'

'Almost soon.' I noshed a bit until people stopped listening. 'Tell me about Saffron Fields. Arthur Goldhorn who died.'

'Dieter Gluck got the estate,' she hissed instantly. 'He's hunting loans.'

Thank you, God. 'The scoop's yours, Lize. I'm talking tabloids.'

She moaned, sounding in orgasm. Now heads really did swivel. 'You're fucking beautiful, Lovejoy,' she said huskily. My fork halted. I honestly think reporters are deranged. Lust, for a mere headline? Talking to Lize is like defining north - where you're standing is vital.

'I need more, though. Tell all about friend Dieter.'

'It's yours, darling.' Darling, when so soon a swine?

By now folk nearby were craning at obtuse angles, ears flapping in the pub smog. The tavern of a thousand ears. I finished my grub. 'Let's move.'

We went to sit in the bay window.

'Some folk crave prestige, Lovejoy.' She swore for a few breaths at other people's impertinence. 'Want to be county set. They slog forty years for a tin gong. Or bribe to be photographed with the Monarch ninth footman.' She cursed equality.

'Please concentrate, love. Dieter Gluck.'

She eyed me, curious. 'He nicked Colette from you, didn't he?'

'He's leery.' I'd brought Saunty's file along, in case.

'Okay.' Her features screwed up, Lize the intrepid news hound cerebrating. 'Gluck badly needs funds. He's onto a development scheme.'

'Short of gelt when he owns the Chelsea antiques shop and Saffron Fields?'

Lize raised her eyes in exasperation.

'The mansion house is a protected stately home. The estate is a listed conservation area. Gluck came a real cropper. The instant he took possession, he spent on credit like a drunk thinking he'd snaffled a fortune. Everybody laughed. He assumed the manorial lands could be sold for development. The authorities slammed him like a ton of bricks.

You know Arthur and Colette. Nice folks, but kept poor by inherited obligations. That's why they went into antiques, trying to make a fortune.'

Good news. I rejoiced, but had the sense to look glum. 'Couldn't Gluck raise gelt on the antiques business?'

Scorn showed. 'Don't act, Lovejoy. Gluck knows less about antiques than me, even.

Ever seen his catalogues? His antiques either aren't his, or they're fakes. The bank manager turned the loan down. Can you believe it? Gluck even tried to sell the Lord of the Manor tide - until he realized it was Arthur's son, Mortimer's.'

So Gluck was shrewd, until greed and snobbery made him stupid. Better.

'What's his development scheme?' I already knew, the waterway.

'Container terminal, gateway to Europe, all that.' She brought out a small bag. It slung a million bells into me. I reeled, reached out for it, but she held it with a knowing smile.

'Every coastal village longs to be a European marina linked to the inland waterways.'

A dozen schemes had been floated, only to fade for lack of money. Gluck was into a serious game. I shuddered from the vibes of her bag.

'Please, Lize.'

Lize handed it over. It almost glowed. With trembling hands I undid the purse string, brought out a small blue disc of glass. I shook with excitement.

'Twenty!' I croaked. Ten blue, ten colourless. 'Roman gaming counters.'

There had been a number of local Roman finds, and I mean orthodox archaeological discoveries. One was at Gosbeck's Farm, where they'd unearthed a latrunculus game, almost complete with ten counters a side, but no board.

'Got anything with it?'

'Only four little metal L things, very rusted. My boyfriend Mat has a metal detector.'

She coloured slightly. So Mat was illicit. Bad news for me, though. I'd never get these gaming counters off her now without a king's ransom. When all else fails, try honesty.

'Highly valuable, Lize. It's the Roman game of "soldiers", a sort of draughts. I think latrunculus means a highwayman. Those metal angles are the board's corners. Tell Mat to suss the whole area. Nobody's ever found a complete Roman counters game.' I looked, weighing my chances with her. 'Lucky Mat. I'm jealous.'

She reddened more. 'Don't start, Lovejoy.'

Worth a try. Love sometimes works, and passion has been known to make friends and influence people. 'Here. Your Mat really into detectors?'

'He's an electrical engineer.' She sounded resigned. 'Talk of it night and day if I'd let him. Are these bits worth reporting in the newspaper?'

'Do a special article, love. Be photographed with them. Ask Carr at St Edmundsbury, tell him I sent you. He'll give you the history.'

'Thanks, Lovejoy.'

With a pang I returned her Roman counters, stealing them honestly far from my mind.

'Does Mat want a treasure-hunting job? Only take one night. Tell him,' I said carefully,

'it'll be a cert.'

At last I'd got my team together, and replaced Sorbo, requiescat in pace. Time I got to Camden Passage, met the troops and got on with it. I knew enough - I thought. I was sure of my next move. I said so-long, swore undying devotion, and fled.

On the train I dozed, woke blearily in London, caught the Northern Line from Moorgate to the Angel, Islington, where all antiques, they say, pass. Stand near the old green clock of J. Smith & Sons, still saying the metal firm can be found at 42-54, St John's Square, London EC1. In a year you'll see every antique in the world, stolen or legit. It's not true, but what is? It's the gateway to the great - I mean great - antiques market of Camden Passage.

Pleased at the proximity of antiques in The Mall (ugly building; so what?) and the York Antiques Arcade, I felt optimistic. I had the crucial ingredient - Dieter Gluck's desperate need for money, and his snobbery. Lize had confirmed it. Her boyfriend Mat, lucky swine, was the electronic seek-and-bleep treasure hunter I could get to help Mort with the sunken aircraft in the estuary's sand marshes. My full team would avenge Sorbo and Arthur. Victory was in sight!

Making an outing of it, I had a lovely time wandering the shops, noshing a bit, sussing out antiques. It's the best free day in London, doesn't cost a groat. There are difficulties. One is Camden Passage itself. Take Islington High Street and Upper Street.

Which do you think is the more important? Answer: Upper Street. Because the grandly named Islington High Street starts off as a splendidly wide thoroughfare, then astonishingly gives up, dives into a miserable little ginnel you wouldn't even glance down. But Upper Street, which sounds like a leftover from some manky Lower Street, is wide, busy, and important. That's where Camden Passage is. It looks alley thin, but is the centre of the universe.

Upper Street's called that because it was more elevated than nearby Lower Street. I like it. (Incidentally, never mind what history says - Good Queen Bess really did visit Sir Walter Raleigh there in his Upper Street house across the road. Mind you, she also nipped round the corner to spend candle hours with the Earl of Leicester. I never did like him, untrustworthy sod.)

'Lovely!' I exclaimed at the scent and throb, mobs of agog hunters.

'Ain't it just, Lovejoy!' Sorbo said.

'Honest to God, Sorb,' I said, bliss in my soul. 'This place…'

My mind went, Sorbo? Dead Sorbo? I saw Trout between the dense traffic, and Lydia, smiling in anticipation. I heard Tinker's cough resounding mightily near the Camden Head pub.

I went dizzy. 'You're frigging dead, wack.' I'd put my hand on his dead face in the dark.

His eye had been beaten into a bloody mess.

He stood there just as I remembered him in life. His eyes widened. 'Here, Lovejoy. You didn't think…? Catch him, mate!'

A passing bus inspector got me under the arms. I swayed about for a year or so, came to in the corner nosh bar with Sorbo telling an outraged Lydia how I'd keeled over when all he'd done was say hello. She was all for whisking me to Guy's Hospital for brain surgery. ('Everybody's conduct is disgraceful,' etc.) I settled for a quiet stroll up past St Mary's church and the fire station to the Hope and Anchor pub facing the long thin gardens near Canonbury Lane. I wanted tea, a wad, and explanation.

In that perfect tavern's interior Lydia looked like fresh from Westminster Steps, her loyal skiff doubtless waiting on the Thames. Dealers were lusting away. She, of course, was oblivious.

'What'd I do?' Sorbo was giving indignantly. The caff was crowded. 'Lovejoy said be here, so I come.'

Tinker swigged his bottled nourishment, lying to Lydia that he badly needed fluid, being a diabetic under doctor's orders.

'Lovejoy thought you'd been croaked, silly bleeder,' he grumbled.

'Me? It was Bern. It's in the frigging papers.'

They all looked accusingly at me. Dauntless leader of the pack, I'd discovered a body and not read all about it.

'Listen, everyone.' Lydia rapped the pub's grotty table. 'I must remonstrate. This atrocious language must stop. We each have certain essential information. Sorbo's is that he is not yet deceased.' Her luscious mouth set in a firm line. Nearby West Country dealers groaned. She turned to Sorbo. 'We are delighted to welcome you back to, ah…'

We waited. 'To us,' she ended lamely.

The dead face in the tabloid was Bern's, Gluck's oppo. So who'd killed him? I couldn't help looking at Sorbo. He didn't usually wander this far from Streatham Hill. Had I told him to come? I couldn't remember.

'I was to investigate the paintings sold by Holloway University.' She placed her gloved hands on her lap. 'Gainsborough, Turner, and Constable. They are already successfully sold, via London auction houses.' She beamed. 'Isn't that wonderful? So much money for the poor struggling students!'

'Idle bleeders,' Tinker growled. 'Drunken moronic sods.'

'Mr Dill!' Lydia scolded. 'I shan't tell you again.'

'And Shar the lawyer?'

Lydia held a brief antagonistic silence. 'I was pleased. She acts for Dieter.' Meaning she wasn't pleased at all. 'Dieter tried to buy a Gainsborough from Holloway on credit. They declined.'

Shar acted for Dieter Gluck? Trout caught my eye, his glance saying: Lydia's a liability, so get rid. I wished he'd stop signalling that.

'Shar is very concerned about you, Lovejoy. The magistrates—'

I quickly stifled that. 'Ta, love. Tinker?'

'Dosh Callaghan wants to know whyn't you got whoever stiffed him over the padpas yet. Funny, he didn't seem concerned, Lovejoy. Are they worth much?'

The stout bowler-hatted gent had arrived, and was chatting up the serving lady. He had all my bad habits, glancing into wall mirrors, speculating. Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Third time, it's a plot. How often had he been nearby unnoticed?

'Dosh dursn't be scorned. The lads'd crucify him.'

'Then why did he order so few?' Trout persisted. 'Five small gems aren't worth much.'

'Five? Was that all?' Trout was right. If you're going to bother, you want a hefty shipment to make profit. I'd been slow.

'If I were you, Lovejoy, I'd see Sturffie. He must have asked that same question when Dosh placed the order, right?' Trout was sympathetic. 'I know Sturffie's your pal, Lovejoy, but you gotter tackle him.'

'Trout,' I said earnestly. 'If ever I want a Tarzan-O-Gram, I'll see you're hired.'

'Ta, Lovejoy,' he said modestly. 'I do a good job. I'm also a Snake-O-Gram. I got a cobra suit.'

'Some other time,' I said faintly. Snakes make me queasy. 'So we go for it, okay?

Gluck's the mark. Snobbery and greed are the prod. The question is, what antique's the carrot?' I'd already made my mind up.

Sorbo said. 'We'll need fair money, and a couple of pretty birds.' He eyed Lydia. 'Got a sister, love?'

'Lydia's out,' I told him, thinking of Gloria Dee's antiques. 'I'll get the money. Let's hear it, Sorbo.'

The stout man was arguing with the bar lady while lighting his pipe. I wasn't taken in.

He was here because we were.

'And keep your voice down,' I added. We bent to listen.