Every Last Cent

33

'TINKER'S COMING TOO?' Alanna asked, shocked, as I reached Benjie's Motor Caff.

Tinker, wheezing and bedraggled, climbed in, the lorry drivers still swigging Benjie's outfall, whistling at Alanna.

'He's vital,' I told Alanna, pulling away and giving the drivers a regal farewell wave.

'What about Vestry, Tinker?'

'Got a drink, Lovejoy?' The car filled with alcoholic fumes. He stank of dank.

'We'll stop soon,' I told him, like we were in the Gobi desert. 'Wotcher find?'

'Vestry was daft, son. Into a big export, after that Sotheby's cock-up. Lucy Ann summert. Remember that packing case?'

'Lucien Freud,' Alanna translated.

'Aye, luv.' Tinker sounded pleased. 'You're quite bright for a bird. Here, luv. Isn't that bint Marjorie your muwer? Lovejoy used to shag—'

Thank you, Mister Tact. I interrupted before Alanna could lob him out. 'What big export?'

'The Countess. Vestry'd bought one of her Grade A shipments to the Continong.'

'Who from?' Vestry never, but never ever, had funds.

It was all right for Alanna to hear, even though she was now grafted to her Cambridge plod. She knew enough about the local antiques trade to keep mum – sorry, no pun intended – or I wouldn't have asked her along.

The Sotheby's shambles over Lucien Freud's painting was famed in song and story, and had initiated more frauds than paltry. A simple enough mistake, but horrendous. Two Sotheby's whifflers blithely destroyed a packing case – only to realize, aghast, that its contents hadn't been removed. The contents? Tragically, an original work by none other than the great Lucien Freud. It was worth a fortune. Red faces all round.

Dealers rolled in the aisles, because everybody hates auctioneers. For weeks the lads went about saying things like, 'Get the picture, mate?' and falling about. Their joke meant that forgeries of the destroyed painting would instantly become available by the ton. It always happens, because who's to prove that the original wasn't destroyed? I call it the Anastasia problem. Once Anastasia did die – as she really really did that sad day at Ekaterinberg – impostors sprang up everywhere. Disproving a negative is hell.

'Some geezer from the Div. You knows him, Lovejoy.'

Footballers now, from the soccer divisions? Well, God knows they were rich enough to stash away antiques by the busload. In one ninety-minute Saturday game soccer players earn four times the average worker's yearly wage. I wonder about morality.

'Alanna. Your turn.'

'Vestry,' she began as I turned towards the coast road. 'Suicide, found hanged. Two antique dealers, FeelFree and Horse, were visiting him to propose founding a club for lady antiques collectors. The deceased wasn't in financial trouble, had good insurance, no debts. Divorced, one relative, a sister in Boston.'

Boston wasn't all that far. Me and Alicia had graciously included Neskett and Graceen's Auction Rooms on our sweep through Boston, Lincolnshire. A poor quality heist, though, except for one lattimo beaker. It was well worth Peshy's skill – wherever, I thought bitterly, the wretched glass had been salted away by the brigadier. Lattimo is milky white and virtually opaque. I don't like it much, though Venetian glassmakers claim that it looks like Far East porcelain. It doesn't, but collectors adore it. Greed promotes dross to art, just as love makes a Venus de Milo out of a Plain Jane, and why not?

'Eh?' I asked. Alanna had said something that mattered.

'Your argument with Vestry's sister doesn't help one little bit, Lovejoy.'

'Eh?' I didn't even know Vestry's sister.

'Especially now she's extended her stay at Saffron Fields.'

'Eh?'

'Would you please stop saying that? I've never known a man so infuriating—'

'Not many left from the old Div,' Tinker said wistfully, sputum bubbling up. 'My mate Chalky White passed away last autumn. Frigging chest cold took him. Did I ever tell you about that twenty-five pounder he let roll over that sodding cliff in North Africa?' He gave a cackle that set him off coughing and trying to spit out of the car windows. I stopped in a lay-by.

'You lets me gullet get dry, Lovejoy,' he gasped, choking and wheezing. 'There a pub near here?'

Division as in armed forces, my brain finally reasoned, synapses clanging, not as in football. Alanna emerged to hand Tinker a hanky. A passing motor honked approval, the lads in it whistling. She has this effect.

'We'll stop at the next, Tinker,' I promised. I went to Alanna. 'Who's Vestry's sister?'

She stared, judging the extent of my ignorance.

'Mrs Susanne Eggers. You got her some actors for tomorrow.'

'Course,' I said brightly through a splitting headache.

'Just checking.'

So Vestry's antiques shipment was going to the Continent via the Countess, as was decided by some old army geezer, bankrolled by Sandy who was funding Ferd and Norma, and back reeled my mind into a void where logic couldn't follow.

'How about we stop for a bite?' I said.

'Are you all right, Lovejoy?' Alanna asked.

'I was telling you about Chalky White and this twenty-five pounder,' Tinker resumed affably, splashing back through a puddle and getting into the car trailing a bushel of mud. 'There was our frigging battery on this bleeding cliff, see? The sergeant says—'

'I'll drive, Lovejoy,' Alanna said curtly.

Head thumping, I tried to doze while Tinker's incomprehensible tale rambled on between coughs. Alanna stopped at the Wig and Fidget in Pullingham where Tinker finally stopped moaning while he soaked up enough ale to bath in. Alanna admired the tavern's wisteria and nibbled an Eccles cake. I had sweet tea, three pasties and a stack of toast, and recovered. Not enough to take on Vestry's place, though.

It stood back from a stream. No access for the motor, just a footpath under an old cattlecreep arch. I was unprepared for the sheer rurality. Some maniac had set a stick bearing a notice in case we developed ideas of molesting the undergrowth: Fritillaria Rare Do Not Disturb, like some daffodil should make us all go on tiptoe. Alanna, of course, was in raptures. 'Lovejoy! Fritillaria! So called from its flower's resemblance to a Roman legionary's dice-shaker ...' etc, etc. We followed the path, Tinker grumbling there wasn't a pub within miles and how did folk manage. For me, the despressing thought was, how soon everything was overgrown. Brambles, ferns, tendrils, you'd think nobody had ever been this way.

There stood Vestry's converted barn. I suppose once it had been a sort of stable, but now it was quite a grand house. Its beams and pargetry were restored, the leaded windows good if you like that sort of fake. A set of steps to the stream, and that was Vestry's house. We walked round. I tested the doors while Alanna tutted. Tinker saw the double doors of the workshop before I did, away from the building in a tangled grove. We made it, Alanna exclaiming as she laddered her tights on brambles, the creeping greenery no longer quite so delightful.

The barn didn't hold much. Every antique dealer has delusions of creative grandeur like, I'm told, screen actors get once they've played some bit part and see themselves mutating into directors. Similarly, antique dealers – basically furniture movers, nothing more – get the bug to improve antiques. If they buy a painting they'll cack-handedly try to add to it. A piece of furniture by Sheraton, they'll strip away the surface patina and leave it warping and scratched, then be narked when nobody wants to buy. For this barmy reason every dealer has a neffie assembly of brushes they can't use, jam jars of varnishes they don't know the properties of, and a few tools they couldn't wield in a month of Sundays. Against every dealer's wall there leans a load of old canvases, maybe some planks taken from some wardrobe that they dissected to extinction.

Vestry's was like that. I eyed the beam uneasily. Tinker coughed, spat, babbled, 'Yon middle hook's where he topped himself, FeelFree said.'

'Please, Mr Dill,' Alanna rebuked crisply. 'This is the place of Mr Vestry's demise, let's not forget.'

There was an earth floor, no paving flags, nothing. Alanna winced when Tinker pointed out the marks on the floor where feet had scuffed while somebody'd cut Vestry down. I thought, what a lot of local grief. Ever since Vestry's sister Susanne Eggers had appeared, in fact.

'Is anything different, Alanna?' I asked.

'The stepladder's gone.' She shuddered. 'Vestry had been painting.' Indeed, one wall was whitewashed, nearly finished. 'He wore paint-stained clothes.'

'No ladder now. The Soco must've took it. Sep Verner?' Odd. 'See, I'm surprised FeelFree and Horse wanted to deal with him.'

Alanna gave me a moment's frost. 'Forgiveness is something you might learn, Lovejoy.'

Tinker said, 'You think it all comes down to shagging, son, but you're wrong. All comes down to money.'

Thank you, Beau Brummel. Hang on, though. 'Forgive who?' I asked. Then for clarity,

'Forgiveness of what, exactly?'

'Divorced people can be friends, Lovejoy, the consul himself said.'

Consul? I was looking at Vestry's canvas stack, pulling them away from the wall.

Several had been 'cleaned' –meaning that some masterpiece had been sanded off so the canvas could be sold to passing forgers. Vestry sold me some. Genuine antique canvases are valuable, so never never throw them away, even if rotting to bits. New canvas undoes a forgery more often than bad painting.

'Who consul?' Grammar gone to pot.

'The American gentleman. He sent condolences.'

'Decent of him.' The last canvas came away. It was my portrait of Colette as Lady Hypatia. I jumped away.

'In my radio interview.' She sounded proud. 'He promised me an in-depth interview on the American elections.'

'Why did he?'

She bridled. 'Because I have broadcasting talent, Lovejoy.'

'You're the best I've ever heard, love,' I lied. The trouble is that lying tends to grow, like an expanding verbal ladder getting riskier as it extends ever upward. 'Why'd he concern himself with Vestry?' I'd assumed I was the only person who was guessing right about the gorgeous Susanne Eggers.

She stared. 'Mrs Eggers was the consul's first wife, Lovejoy. They're still business partners. Names at Lloyd's. Head of syndicates. Vestry was their secretary. I thought you said you never miss my programme?'

'Well,' I said faintly, 'I can't remember everything.'

I took my painting and the scraped canvases, and we left the sorry place. I just asked Tinker to go over what deals Vestry had made before his passing. Tinker began a litany of deals, defaults, broken promises, sham antiques, humdrum sales, nothing anybody in the trade would think worth a light.

So why did somebody kill the poor duckegg?

Time passes faster than you think. I can remember when actresses closed their mouths instead of acting with that half-idiot gape they all now assume shows inner dynamism.

And when TV extras could dance instead of doing that embarrassed shuffle. And to when actors knew their lines, instead of reading prompt cards held off camera so they all look squinty. And to when police were reliable. And back when occasionally, just occasionally, people were innocent, sort of.

Now, though, everybody's got what Americans call an angle, a craving for sly money.

And it always concerns antiques. Okay, we all know – and the plod condones –that the glorious bulb fields of Lincolnshire are farmed by illegal thick-sweat immigrant labour.

And that priests and nuns aren't holy. And that teachers no longer know what the hell to teach, that parents are sometimes monsters and the honest social services neither honest, social nor services. Did folk ever really go out without locking their doors?

Maybe they did, yonks since, but it's different now. Yet deep in me lingers a faint glim of hope that somewhere sometime somehow out there, maybe a huge fair-minded God thing will shazoom out of the ether and blam the baddies. Just maybe once, to give us all a prayer. You know the feeling. Let some avenging angel black the bully's eye.

It won't happen. It never will, never did, never does.

No good saying that the meek can inherit the earth, that virtue is and has its own reward. They can't and it won't and it hasn't. Shout for help, your echoes shout back louder. Shoot your one pathetic desperate arrow in this life, you get back a broadside. I had this stupid notion that the brigadier – officer and gentleman, after all – might simply want his daughter's eventual happiness like a true dedicated father.

'Here,' I told Alanna and Tinker. 'I've an idea. Drop me by that little quayside nosh bar.

I'll see you at the Old Court coffee place. Make sure that Mrs Domander gets her motor back, okay?'

And walked to Quaker's bungalow along the riverbank. The brigadier, smiling, watched me approach from his picture window.

Smiles cost blood. I've always found that. But somebody had to work things right for once.