Gold By Gemini

CHAPTER IV

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I LIVE in this cottage, often alone, on the edge of a village a few miles from our main town. There's a garden, a copse, blackthorn hedges good for purple sloe gin at Michaelmas, and a muddy path I keep meaning to macadam over. The village lane begins at my gate. Further down there's just a path to the river's shallow watersplash at Fordleigh. I always set my break-in alarm because we dealers are forever being burgled. It has to be flicked before unlocking the door or Police Constable Geoffrey, our village Sherlock, gets hauled out of his tomato-ridden greenhouse to pedal over and tell me off again for causing false alarms.

Once in the cottage I was at a loose end. I just couldn't get going. Everybody has a blue patch now and then, I suppose. I'm normally a buoyant sort, but I couldn't settle down to anything. It rained for an hour or two about four, so I washed this week's socks and swept up. The vacuum was on the blink so I did without. The village's one shop had pasties in. I got two for supper and some tomatoes.

Normally I read over a meal. This evening I found myself staring at the same page, reading a paragraph of Dean Inge's essays over and over. Poor old Bexon kept coming into my mind. A forger, but apparently an honest one. Why else that revealing yellow?

So he was honest, the poor innocent. But those Roman golds. Popplewell said they were genuine. The labels said mostly Nero's reign. There were even one or two showing the babes being suckled by the wild she-wolf, Romulus and Remus. Rome's originals. And the famous arched 'DE BRITANN' gold of Claudius the God. Well, all right, but there never was such a thing as a Roman province of the Isle of Man. Everybody knows that. They simply never got there. Even if they'd heard of it they'd ignored it.

A wrong label's the sort of odd mistake you pass off in any museum. A million like it happen every day. But the picture in Mary's house was done with love and almost incredible skill. And gold's gold. And, far more to the point, a Roman antique's a Roman antique. I thought on, guiltily knowing I should have been bringing my notes up to date.

At the finish I gave up and got a map. You can see why they didn't occupy it of course, way out in the middle of the Irish Sea. Not wealthy, not very populous, probably poor weather much of the year. No wonder. I locked the front door, drew the curtains and rolled back the living-room carpet.

The easy way to lift the giant flagstone would have been to use a beam winch rigged to a two-horse-power motor connected to the iron ring set in the floor. That would have been a bit obvious, though, so I lift it with my own lily-whites. There's a switch by the steps leading down into the priest-hole. Nothing had been disturbed. It was probably an old vegetable store, but you'll have noticed by now I'm incurably romantic, if a bit cynical with it. There are a few tea-chests down there for storing my vast stock of priceless antiques (temporarily sold to buy a luxury called food). It's ideal for storing antiques. The old folk had their heads screwed on. Nowadays it's all builders can do to stick houses down straight, let alone include anything useful for the occupants.

I drew out the folding Regency table and opened my card-index. Penniless or not, antiques impose their own demand on any dealer worth a light. I meet it by keeping notes. Paper clippings, book abstracts, catalogued details from sales, hints picked up at auctions, eavesdroppings, museum listings -many horribly wrong, by the way - and advertisements, all get stored away. I searched frantically for any suggestion of a brilliant forger operating locally. Plenty of duds, and one or two not so bad. But brilliant? Not a sign. I looked up names.

I found two Bexons. One's a collector in Norwich. He's hooked on Victorian mechanicals. Three years before he triumphed by snapping up a beautiful late model of Thomas Newcomen's engine. He must still be paying, but I'd bet he was smiling through his tears. Mechanicals are worth their weight in gold, plus ten per cent of course. The second (braver) Bexon was a regular buyer of decoupage - paper cutouts varnished on to surfaces for decoration of furniture, ornaments, firescreens, tableware and such. In itself it's a small antique field, but you can say the same about Leonardo da Vinci's stuff, can't you?

More worried than ever that I'd somehow missed a really golden opportunity, I closed up.

I went out to check my two budgerigars as soon as it stopped raining. The garden was drenched, the grass squelching underfoot. A sea wind had sprung up. As darkness falls my cottage seems to move silently away from the two other houses nearby. One had lights in the window. I was pleased about this, though it was only old Mrs. Tewson and her dog. I checked the budgies' flight with a torch and said goodnight. They fluffed and chirped.

The budgerigars, Manton and Wilkinson, were how I'd met Janie. I'd done over one of the stallholders on our Saturday market. He'd had the birds in an old shoe box covered by a piece of glass, no food or water. Practically accidentally, I'd stumbled against him, breaking his shoulder, poor man, after buying them from him. Worse, I'd accidentally broken his fingers by standing on his hand. The police had come along and tried to make a case out of it, but luckily Janie saw it all and explained it was an accident.

They'd let me go suspiciously, which only goes to show how they're completely lacking in trust these days. I'd taken one look at Janie, smiling and wealthy, and that was that.

She'd given me a lift back, helped me to buy the cage and seed, and matters took their own course, as folks say. Janie says I'm soft about them, but I'm not. At the moment I could only think of Bexon. Forger or not, he was my lifeline back into the antique business.

Inside the cottage I fidgeted and then cleared up and fidgeted again. I even wished I hadn't had to pawn the telly. Isn't it funny how you get feelings. I decided to use my one remaining asset and phone the names Margaret'd given me. Cooney's always in because of his dog kennels. I told him I was interested in the stolen coins.

'You and the rest of us, Lovejoy,' he said, laughing.

'From the Isle of Man,' I explained innocently.

He snorted disbelievingly. 'There's no such thing,' he told me. 'Oh, they've had the odd stray Roman denarius show up, but no hoards or anything like that. The old chap who donated them went about saying he'd found them there.'

'Where?'

'On Man. Wouldn't say exactly. There was a row about the labels, I remember. He insisted on writing his own.'

'Thanks, Cooney.'

I got Pilsen next, the only religious antique dealer-cum-kite-collector in the universe. He blessed me down the phone and intoned a short prayer for my success but couldn't help. He tried to sell me a kite but forgave me when I said some other time. The old magistrate barked that the robbers should be horsewhipped, and slammed the receiver down when I admitted I had no Edward I coinage for sale. The overcoat man after a chat gave me a commission to bid for him at a local auction for an officer's greatcoat of the Essex Regiment, but otherwise nothing.

No use phoning Janie when I had the blues, though she'd be blazing tomorrow. You can't help being on edge sometimes.

Imagine suddenly meeting somebody who believed they could prove there'd been a hitherto unidentified King of England whose existence nobody else had ever suspected.

Or an extra American President. Or an extra moon for Earth. I felt just like that.

It probably didn't matter, I decided. The wrongest guess I ever made.

I decided to sleep on it but tossed and turned all night.