Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER TWELVE

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A book was published in 1869 entitled, Autograph of William Shakespeare… together with 4,000 ways of spelling his name. Which may sound loony, but represents some bloke’s unstinted endeavours. You have to respect it. Some other bloke wrote the longest poem in the language, five ponderous volumes on Alfred the Great—as unreadable as it sounds, as neglected as it ought to be. Pure endeavour. The Eastern Hundreds has more than a fair share of endeavouring eccentrics—this in a nation of eccentrics—so we’re belly-deep in weirdos. It was therefore no problem to find the world’s greatest sexponent, at one-thirty on a sleepless frosty morning. I wasn’t surprised to find Forna Lux wide awake and lusting. Everybody knows Forna Lux, but is especially wary of her because she knows everybody back, which isn’t good news if you pretend holiness.

“Lovejoy, babbikins!” she screamed into the phone. I held it a mile from my ear, but was still deafened. “What’ve you got?”

Forna is her own invention—I mean her name. She denies ever having received any cognomen. I don’t believe her. Obscure of background, indeterminate of accent, no known family, Forna has a serene individuality that defies pinning down. She lives alone, on information culled from anywhere. She says she’s written seventy-nine books under that name, all on sex and ways of doing it. I like her. She’s a slender yet blowsy middle-ager with glittering teeth, peroxide hair, and wears more gold than a jaunting gypsy.

“I need your help, Forn,” I said into her screech. “Sorry about the late hour.”

“It’s early, babbikins!” Her voice is that shrill noise chalk makes on a school blackboard, if you remember that far back. Sets your molars tingling. “You know me, always at it!”

The laughter almost melted the receiver. I waited it out. Forna works harder at her records—perversions, lists of clients seeking ecstasies of a hitherto unpublished kind—than most antique dealers do theirs. I like a professional. No, honest. Standards mustn’t be allowed to fall.

“A certain bloke, Forna.”

“Can’t be done on the telephone, babbikins,” she cried. “Come round if you’re desperate. Same position, same old place!”

She has a knack of making the most mundane phrase suggestive.

I sighed, got dressed, found matches for the Ruby’s headlights. Twenty-past two I was chuntering into Forna’s Furnace.

Lest I give the impression that all the Eastern Hundreds are mad on surreptitious goings-on, what with Gazza’s outfit and all, I ought to explain that Forna runs her own publishing house. It’s respectable, as such places go, with a logo, two secretaries and a small printing works near Aldeborough. She’s the dynamo and prime mover, though, and runs it from her cottage in Sumring, a hamlet trying hard to be noticed for something else besides Forna. She has automatic locks on the doors, successive stages of entry under banks of hidden cameras.

“Enter my inner sanctum, babbikins,” she screamed.

Several locks later, I passed through the last of the reinforced doors. A sitting room, with one Turner seascape, watercolour, testifying to her taste among a load of Art Deco nymphets and erotica statuettes you can’t keep your eyes off. Forna wore pink satins, impossible pink lace flounces, synthetic pink furs. She always wears a ton of make-up, which I admire. I chose a chair at a distance, got nowhere. She cuddled me on the sofa, poured me a drink I didn’t want.

“Wants, babbikins?” she shrilled in my ear. “Every man’s got those. I want yours, that’s all!”

“Ha ha, Forn,” I said gravely, hoping for fewer decibels so I could at least hear the answer. “Any news about a bloke called Jervis, or Jay, related to Mrs Almira Galloway?”

“Cost you, Lovejoy.” A trace harder now, but still octaves above top C.

“What?”

She contemplated that for a full five minutes. When I first knew her she was quite soft-hearted and had a dog called Frobisher, but it got killed when somebody ran over it. She abandoned business for a six-month, then resumed with a heart of flint and a disguise to match.

“There’s a young artist I know, Lovejoy,” she shrilled. I leaned away, hoping my auditory acuity would survive. “Has an old bike. My cousin, actually. He needs money for art school. Is there much of an antiques market in old bikes, Lovejoy?”

This was the squeeze. Forna always wants to help her cousin’s lad who’s always manfully striving to better himself. Her bloody cousin must breed like a frog, the number of times I’ve helped him with antiques. Were there other clients, bankers helping this same unfortunate striver with fiscal problems, clerics helping him over theological humps, engineers giving useful tips about his gas turbines?

“Bike? Tell me, and I’ll tell you, Forn.”

“No, dear,” she screamed. “You run down the different sorts. I’ll stop you when you get to the one he wants to sell.”

“A German baron produced the first bicycle, a walking machine with a steerable front wheel, back in 1817. Your, er, cousin can’t have one of those, just on probability,” I began. Give her her due, Forna listens intently, takes it all in.

“Wood, were they?”

“Mostly, but very popular. A Dumfrieshire bloke invented workable levers to drive these walking machines about 1840,” I said, watching for a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. Nothing. “You’ll know the velocipede, Forn. Pierre Michot made about two hundred a day in the 1860s, but sold out for filthy lucre. They’re not too rare, but cost.”

Her eyes sparked. “Maybe it was one of those, babbikins?”

“The penny-farthings are the best known,” I went on, heart sinking at the price I’d have to pay, but I desperately needed to know more, and I’d scraped the barrel for information. “James Stanley was the genius, a little Coventry chap who made fixed pedals for the front wheel.” I got carried away. “Posh bicycle clubs became all the rage, with bright uniforms and personalized bugle calls. Labourers were barred—muscular strength was unfair, you see, to effete aristocrats in the team.”

“I think maybe it was one of those,” Forna said, eyes now brilliant with pleasure. For pleasure read financial relish.

“His brother’s son, John Stanley, made the one you’d recognize today, Forna. Equal wheels, chain drive, brake and bells. These Safety Bicycles were a terrific advance, highly sought among modern collectors. The Rover design was the pattern…”

“That’s it!” Forna cried. I heard no more until I’d watched the midnight cops-and-robbers film while she searched her records in some secret cupboard with a whirring door. I kept wondering where I’d get the price of one of John Stanley’s original Rover bikes from. Of course, the bike itself wouldn’t show up. I’d pay for it, then she’d promise it, promise it, promise… Then, by mutual agreement, the antique bicycle and her artistic protégé would turn into slush and vanish down the gutters of time. For a bird who lived on hard news, Forna’s income fed on fiction.

“Here, babbikins!” She emerged and sat, pouring a new drink.

“Jay for Jervis Galloway, Lovejoy,” she shrilled. “A Parliamentarian, not going to stand at the next election—an expected large windfall from some unspecified new business. Politician of mediocrity. Turncoat. Conservative to Social Democrat to Labour. Wealthy by his missus, a dick-struck cow who fox-hunts.”

“That it?” Almira would love her description.

“No.” Her voice sank a little. “Heavy money into coastal development, Lovejoy. A syndicate of antique dealers funnels money through him into Mentle Marina. Philippe Troude I know.” She smiled. “He buys more love potions than a wizard. Stuck on some French woman with high connections.”

It matched, but added a little. “He your client, Forna?”

“Did I say one bike, Lovejoy?” she cried. “I meant one of those velocipede things as well!”

“Good heavens,” I said evenly. “What a lucky lad your cousin is! Troude your client?”

“Has been since he opened his marina complex, Lovejoy. No harm in the man, not really. Pays on the nail, pleasant with it.”

She told me his foibles, bedtime idiosyncrasies, tame stuff really. I hardly listened. Four in the morning she was still wide awake, answering some incoming call. I left knackered, wanting to kip.

Yet back at my cottage I couldn’t rest. The parcel delivered by a relenting Michelle was inside the door. I’d passed it a couple of times, reeling from the bonging but too worried to’ve taken up its challenge. Now, I opened it with care. Very small, an ovalish velvet box that barely covered my palm. And a note saying sell it on commission in London, not anywhere local. It was from Baff, RIP. Anywhere else but the eastern hundreds, Lovejoy, you have the connections, I have not any more you see how about a 3/7 is that okay with you good luck no questions asked mate, never seen playin cards like these, they seem complete set as far as I can tell, regards, Baff, he wrote with Elizabethan disregard for scriptural refinement.

The velvet case contained fifty mica (thus transparent) oval slivers. At first, I couldn’t work out what the parts of faces and bits of apparel and hats and wigs were painted on them for. Then I saw on the bottom one, painted on solid heavy copper, a Cavalier-like gentleman looking at me, dated 1641. It bonged me stupid. A spy-master’s set of disguises! I’d never seen a complete set before. I picked one mica slice at random, superimposed it on the oval miniature portrait, and the Cavalier had changed into a swarthy turbanned Turk. Replace it with another mica oval, the miniature became an exotic bewigged blonde lady with exquisitely huge breasts tumbling from her bodice. No playing cards these. My hands trembled so badly I had to set them down.

In troubled yore, disguise mattered. A spy-master—like Mrs. Aphra Benn, the heroine I keep on about—wants to send, say, a message to a secret ally. But letters could be opened, like Mary Queen of Scots’s, and you’d be for it. Carrier pigeons could be hawked on arrival, then all was lost. Messengers were intercepted, bribed, waylaid. A problem, no? So your spy-master has an innocent parlour game distributed to secret sympathizers. They look like partially painted mica slices sort of, with roman numerals on each transparency. The secret sympathizers—Royalist, Parliamentarian, whatever—going about their daily business would receive an innocent letter for birthday greetings, some such, bearing a date or some numeral. The sympathizer hastens to the children’s nursery for a merry game of Appearances, and casually notes the matching numbered slice. He superimposes it on the miniature portrait, and finds himself now staring at… at a middle-aged woman pedlar! Get it? He now knows that the next secret messenger must be of that description. They were Flemishmade, usually, and are unbelievably rare. I’d only ever seen one complete set before, and that was on a BBC Antiques Roadshow, where the expert didn’t know what they were for and thought them a simple entertainment. Some entertainment!

But.

This pack I’d actually heard of before. They’d been sold at a local auction a year since. I’d missed them by a whisker, arrived too late to bid. Tinker told me they’d gone to some French bloke who lived near Ladyham. For a fortune.

Had Baff pulled the breakdowner on Troude? And been exterminated for his pains? From then till six o’clock in the morning I sat and thought. And thought.

Then I cast caution to the winds, walked up the lane to the phone by the chapel and phoned Almira.

“It’s me, love,” I told her. “Let’s go.”

“Oh!” she said, brightly gathering her wits. Somebody was with her. “Very well, ah, Claudine. I’ll come right over.”

Two hours later, I was shivering in the minutest aerodrome you ever did see, at Earls Colne. We flew in a thing called a Piper Saratoga, which looked like a sparrow that had swallowed a watch. I closed my eyes, and dozed through a flight, a landing, an interminable drive, and finally came to a rest where oblivion awaited between clean white sheets. It was broad daylight everywhere except in my head.