Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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Everything’s luck. Who you end up loving, finding that priceless Old Master painting, getting away with murder. And you get no help. I mean, set up infallible rules to guide you in life, and you’re still as baffled. There’s a group of nations called G7—they do things with international money. They met in England a bit since. Would you believe, a Japanese collector paid a fortune for the blinking crappy modern chairs they sat on? I understand less and less as time goes by. They could have bought some antique chairs for half the price.

It’s my own fault. I’m a mine of pointless fact. Like, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s wedding cake was nine feet four and a half inches tall (can’t help you into centimetres if you’re a decimal nut). Also, Equatorial Guinea hasn’t a single cinema, tough on local film buffs. Furthermore, Engels, Marx friend-of-all-mankind’s sidekick, wanted “ethnic trash” exterminated—he included Basques, Scots Highlanders, South Slavs, anybody he called “backward”. Aristotle was first translated into English in 1620… See? Mind like a ragbag, all contents useless—except, when some bit’s oddly not.

There’s one old dear in our village says we all know what’s coming, that we prepare for it the whole of our lives. I tell her she’s a daft old coot. She says I’m unwilling to believe the obvious, which is ridiculous because my mind’s always crystal clear. It’s just that occasional flukes sometimes make you think, good gracious, how lucky I knew that odd scrap about Mrs Hannah Glasse’s cookery book being worth well over a hundred times more than its look-alike contemporary pirated edition! Or when you’ve just looked up the measurements of a loo table—nothing to do with lavatories; for the Georgian game of lanterloo—only to land on one the very next day. The trouble is, sometimes you discover which bit’s the important one in the most unpleasant way, or when it’s too late.

Sandy was all over the front page, I saw from the evening edition. I was in Gazza Gaunt’s yard, having some grotty machine coffee, when I caught sight of the headline in Mercy Mallock’s paper. I asked for a look.

“Sandy’s invented a new political party, Lovejoy,” she said. I read, gave it back. “Europe Time, it’s called.”

“What’s up?” she wasn’t smiling.

“My bloke’s left me, Lovejoy.”

“Barmy sod.”

Mercy Mallock’s the only woman driver Gazza employs, presumably on the grounds that blokes are macho tough and can defend his clients should the need arise. It’s a laugh. I’m off like a hare at the first hint of trouble—to call on somebody like Mercy, truth to tell. She used to be some notable’s bodyguard, believe it or not. Her hobbies are kendo, karate, all those martial arts that sound like food additives and consist of kicking people in white pyjamas. She is of surprising daintiness for all that, graceful and always groomed, looks a stunner dolled up. Now, she was in some sort of boiler suit.

“He was never satisfied, Lovejoy.” She was sitting on the running board of her van. “Not that,” she added quickly at my look. “I was area champion two years running, trained with him every night. He left me for a woman shot-putter from Stourbridge, built like a sumo. How can I compete?”

Impossible. “He’s a nerk, love. Any bloke’d give his eye-teeth.” I didn’t run him down too much, because women are odd. I didn’t want her rounding on me in his defence. “Want the night off?” Mercy’s passion wagon was the last in the yard, waiting to go. I was the only driver without a van.

“No, Lovejoy. I’d better keep going.” She gave a wan smile in the yard’s lights, fluorescents of ghastly pallor. “Is it this hard for a man who gets rejected?”

“Dunno yet,” I said, to give her a smile. Didn’t work.

Ten months since, I hired her—nothing illicit; Mercy’s honest—to eavesdrop on some antiquarians at the London Antiques Fair. It was really disappointing. They were meeting to decide what antique books they’d bid a million dollars for (surprisingly only six: Shakespeare’s First Folio, 1623; the American Declaration of Independence, 1776; Audubon’s Birds of America, 1827-38; Don Quixote’s First, 1605; the Gutenberg Bible, 1455 or so; the Bay Psalm Book, 1640). They commissioned a counterfeiter, Litho from Saxmundham, to forge the twenty-pound notes to buy the books with. Litho forges by lithography, a printing process using stone developed two centuries ago by Aloys Senefelder, a mediocre playwright wanting to facsimile his plays on the cheap. I made nothing of it, but it drew me and an excited Mercy together for the one time we ever made smiles.

Gazza came over, the big business. “Nothing for you, Lovejoy. Mercy, here’s your ticket. Pick up at the moorings by the Black Boy, code word Heaven. Forty minutes.”

“Thanks, Gazza.” She gave me an apologetic look. Her van was the newest and most luxuriously appointed of the lot.

I sulked, to get Gazza’s mood right, then left dejectedly, but not as dejectedly as all that because it was all working out just as I wanted. I flagged Mercy down at the intersection to cadge a lift. It’s not allowed—Gazza sacks you for less—but I’d once been especially kind to Mercy and it worked.

“Did Gazza say the Black Boy, love?”

“Yes, Fremmersham.”

“Give us a lift, love?” I climbed in quickly, not giving her a chance to refuse. “Console each other.”

“You too?” She gave me a glance, pulled away. A cracking driver, million times better than me. I find almost all women are. London bus drivers rattle you round like peas in a drum, unless they’re women. Birds drive smoother, and just as fast.

“Getting over it, Mercy,” I said, all brave. “Her family’s titled, rich, Oxford. You can imagine the reception I got.”

She squeezed my arm. “Poor Lovejoy. That the blonde, Jocasta, who has the racing-driver brother?”

I was startled. I’d been making up my heartfelt sadness, or so I’d thought. I couldn’t even remember a Jocasta. “Don’t, love,” I said, almost in tears. “It hurts too much. Let’s talk about something different. I might go on a Continental holiday soon. Play my cards right.”

“Where?” She glided through the gears. I wish I could do that. “I love the Continent, Lovejoy. Beautiful weather, lovely scenery. They take an interest in their food, real life, art.”

Honest surprise lit my countenance, I hoped. “Didn’t know you felt like that, love. France, I think.”

“Lucky you, Lovejoy.” She sighed, patiently allowed a cyclist to pedal over the level crossing before the barrier descended. Most drivers I know would have shot the amber and terrified the cyclist out of his pants. “I lived there so long.”

“You did?” More raised eyebrows. I should have gone on the stage. “Oh, aye. Weren’t you a courier or something…?”

“Bodyguard, actually. Didn’t you know, Lovejoy?” She smiled, gave a rather shy titter. “I know I don’t look like one. That was the trouble with Gay.” The cloud settled again. Gay’s her karate feller, but nobody jokes about his name.

“Fancy!” I said, yanking the subject back where I wanted. “I’ve never met a bodyguard before. What did you actually do?”

“They hired me after I became pentathlon champion.”

“Didn’t it feel… odd?”

“Because I’m a woman, Lovejoy?” she demanded, stung.

“Eh? No. I hardly noticed that. I mean, being responsible for some politicians you’d never heard of.”

“Bankers, actually.” We reached the town bypass and pulled out coastwards. Fremmersham’s on an estuary some five miles out. I looked at her face in the dashboard glow. Pretty, composed. Barmy old Gay, that’s all. Swapping shapely Mercy, for a weightlifter. There’s nowt as daft as folk. “I spent my life at airports, shepherding stout men with briefcases.”

“Can’t imagine you doing that, Mercy.”

“They asked me to stay on. Mostly they’re Dutch girls, on account of their languages and because they look the part. I was lucky, on account of Dad.”

“Got you the job, eh? Influence counts in banking.”

She glared at me, touchy. “I got the job entirely on my own merits, Lovejoy! My languages. Just because my hobby’s sport doesn’t mean I have to be thick.”

“Right, right.” I lapse into a modern vernacular when I want to placate folk, trying to sound like I’m just from a disco and full of fast junk food. The rest of the journey was uneventful, because I made it so. We chatted about her loss of confidence now her Gay had given her the sailor’s elbow, her hopes, her sports, her having to give up the flat. Routine incidentals, you might say, that make up life’s plenteous pageant.

At the pick-up, I stayed well out of sight, just watched her lights dwindle from the taproom bar, then merrily tried to get a lift back to civilization, away from the lonely estuary and its one tavern and boats swinging in the night breeze. Mercy Mallock was in my mind. I felt more cheery than I’d done since hearing about Baff getting topped.

Lucky enough to get a lift from Spange, a dealer without portfolio—meaning not an idea in his head—I made it to my Ruby and thence the White Hart, and organized a whip-round for Baff’s missus. A paltry sum, but plenty of IOUs made it seem more. Enough excuse to see Sherry, anyway. So I left smiling. Quite a good evening, really. I’d covered some ground. Oh, and I’d made arrangements to see Mercy again, the point of it all. If France loomed as ominously as it seemed, I wanted allies.

But just how far things had gone was brought home to me as I was leaving for home. Donk came hurtling in just as I made the outer door. He had an envelope. Reluctantly I paid him his message money out of Sherry’s whip-round. Only borrowing. I’d owe.

“Urgent, Lovejoy. Meeting’s in an hour.”

“Eh? It’s bedtime, for God’s sake.”

“You heard.” And off he thundered. I glanced guiltily about, in case any of the antique-dealer mob had seen me misuse their donations, brightened at the good omen when I saw they hadn’t, and opened the envelope. In the solitary light of the forecourt I read Jodie’s rounded scrawl. The meeting with Troude and one other would be tonight, quarter before midnight, outside the George.

Some hopes. I wasn’t their hireling. They could take a running jump. So I lammed it down the dark country road to my cottage, brewed up, sat and read a couple of antique auction catalogues that had come, generally faffed about doing nothing, and settled down by about one o’clock.

Which was how I came to be heading for France. Not quite instantly, but in circumstances definitely beyond my control.