The Tartan Sell

—— 1 ——

This story starts with criminal passion in a shed. It descends into sordid corruption. But all along just remember one thing: Love and antiques are the same. Hatred and evil are their opposite. I’m an antique dealer, in bad with the law, and I should know.

There’s nothing antique dealers hate worse than fog and rain. Ellen agreed.

Three o’clock in the morning on a foggy rainy bypass, Ellen was tired—only the same as anybody else daft enough to be awake at this ungodly hour, but women are very self-centered.

“How much longer, Lovejoy?” she moaned.

“Couple of minutes.” I’d been saying this since midnight.

We were in Ben’s hut. He’s the vigilant night watchman hired to watch for thieves who habitually steal the roadmenders’ gear. He’s never caught any because he mostly kips in front of the portable telly his daughter bought him last Easter. Me and Ellen had made love and the old bloke hadn’t even stirred from his glowing stove.

“I’ll get into trouble,” Ellen whimpered.

I quaked. “Er, your bloke isn’t…?”

“Of course not. I’ve got a meeting tomorrow. That old bitch from the vicarage has a filthy mind.”

Ellen’s husband is heap-big medicine, being a Customs officer. Mercifully a kind Chancellor had sent him to patrol the coasts and keep a lookout for dark deeds.

Meanwhile my own particular dark deed was thrombosing in the fog while Ben snored his old head off and me and Ellen swilled his rotten tea. Who’d be an antique dealer? I ask you.

“What are we waiting for, a fake, Lovejoy?”

“A reproduction bureau,” I corrected coldly.

Ellen shivered, a lovely sight even when she’s Indianed in a moth-eaten blanket. “Why couldn’t they send it by train?”

She’d reached the repetitive stage. I sighed wearily. Women get like this. They believe that if they say something often enough it becomes true. “Nobody in their right mind sends antiques by proper transport. The whole bloody kingdom uses a night lorry.” For a few quid on the side, of course.

“But isn’t that illegal?” the poor little innocent asked, turning her beautiful blue eyes on me. Old Ben broke wind, as if in criticism.

“It’s safer, and surer.” Most antique dealers have their barkers down on the bypasses all over the country collecting and loading up. This fraudulent system has the merit of being beyond the reach of taxes.

Huddled over the brazier, we waited dozily for the signal from out in the rain-soaked night. I thought of her and me.

Men are amateurs; women are professionals. And that’s in everything: love, life, greed, hate, all the emotions. And why? Because we blokes have animal souls. Oh, I don’t deny that every so often some bird thinks she’s educated us out of being primitive, but it’s only imagination. Women never seem to realize this. Like now.

“We could be somewhere warm, Lovejoy,” Ellen’s blanket muttered. “You make the best fake antiques. Everybody says so. What’s the point of sending to Caithness?”

“Shhh.” I said. Old Ben’s principal asset is that he’s bent. He often helps with loading, especially when German buyers are scouring soggy East Anglia spending like drunks.

His conscience only costs a pint, but I still didn’t want him learning too much. I whispered, “Nobody local’ll know it’s a fake, see? I’ll sell it as genuine.”

“Matthew will be cross if he finds out, Lovejoy.”

See what I mean? She ignores the fact that she’s literally shacked up with a grubby antique dealer riddled with lust and perishing cold. See how they shift the blame?

“Your husband can get knotted.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to—”

Ben stirred, woke, spat expertly into the stove’s grille. “It’s here, Lovejoy. Far side.”

There are two lay-bys down the road. They’re about a mile apart. I shrugged. The lorry should have been coming from the other direction, but I knew better than argue. These old roadmen have a third ear. “Best get going, then.”

“Can we go, Lovejoy?” Ellen asked hopefully.

“No. I need your car.” It has a roof-rack. Ben’s hut always holds ropes and tools for neffie schemes like this. “Drive into Colchester, then back here and into the lay-by this side. I’ll be waiting.”

“But it’s foggy! Can’t I just—?”

“No. The bloody lorry’s stopped on the wrong side.”

“Stupid man.” She cast off the blanket with a whimper.

“Cheers, Ben,” I said, and opened the hut door.

“Here, Lovejoy.” Ben was listening past me into the blackness. “There’s two engines in the lay-by.”

Silly old sod, I thought, and stepped out as Ellen’s car pulled away up the gravelly path.

God, but the night was opaque. The way down the long slope to the road was familiar.

There isn’t quite a footpath. You find bearings by hawthorns and brambles. Usually there’s enough light from passing cars and the distant town’s sky glow. Tonight there was only this horrible graveyard opalescence.

Ellen had thoughtlessly forgotten to bring a torch. Typical. I skittered down, brambles plucking at me, until the level road surface jarred my heel. No traffic sounds, so presumably safe to cross.

Listening nervously, I loped over, climbed the central crash barrier, and thankfully made the opposite verge. Left turn, keep within reach of the grassy slope for safety, and plod until the road margin indented the steep bank. Then a huge car started at me of a sudden, roared off, all in one instant. I had a vague swirly image of two figures, one familiar, then silence. Bloody fools could have killed me.

The wagon when I came upon it looked enormous. Oddly, its lights were dowsed. I almost walked into its radiator in the damned fog. The heat-stink of the cooling engine drifted at me.

“Hello?” Fog muffles sounds, doesn’t it? My call hardly went a yard. No answer. “You there, mate?”

The cab’s door was ajar. I swung myself into the driver’s seat, feeling at altitude. A fumble for the keys, there sure enough, and a half-twist for beam headlights. The dashboard’s fluorescence cast a ghostly apparition on the windscreen, losing me a heartbeat till I realized it was my own nervy face. A square white card was lodged in the corner of the thick glass. I turned the card over. A black capital L. My signal, so this was the right wagon. But stillness is stillness, and there was a lot of it about. The size of these night haulers is daunting. I levered down, leaving the lights on. A car swished by steady and fast, heading for the coast. The driver was probably having a pee, or gone looking for me.

“Hello,” I called. My voice warbled. I cleared my throat, called again as unconvincingly.

No sound. I walked the length of the vehicle. It seemed all wheels. The rear doors were unlocked, one leaf swinging ponderously open at a pull. Interior lights came on, like in a fridge. Empty.

“Hello?” I shouted. The place was giving me the spooks. Now, the one thing a night haulier never does is leave his wagon. Gulp.

A car crawled into the lay-by, spotlighted me in its beams. Ellen to the rescue at two miles an hour. “Darling?”

I walked round and got in, trying hard to disguise my relief. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Charming,” she said bitterly. “It’s hundreds of miles to the Marks Tey turnoff. Where’s your cupboard?”

“It’s four miles. And it’s a bureau. Gone.”

“Then ask the driver, dear.”

“He’s gone, too.” I peered uneasily into that black-gray smirch.

“How very thoughtless. I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”

You have to forget logic with Ellen. She was moved to aggro, actually starting to get out to ballock a vanished lorry driver, when I stopped her. “No, love,” I said piously.

“I’ve kept you out in this awful weather long enough. It’s time I considered your feelings.”

“Darling,” she said mistily. “You’re so sweet.”

True, but I’d better get rid of her sharpish after dawn because Liz was due about ten with a genuine pair of mid-Victorian nipple jewels, sapphires set in diamonds. I joked nervously as we pulled out. “Promise not to ravish me again.”

“Very well, dear,” she said seriously. “Look, Lovejoy. The lorry’s left its light on. It’ll waste its electricity.”

“How careless,” I said uneasily. “No, love. Don’t stop.”

Next morning I had three jobs. First was Liz, chatty antique dealeress from Dragonsdale that I was conning into selling me those lovely nipple drops—think of earrings with bigger loops for dangling pendant-like from the pierced nipples of interesting Victorian ladies. Liz had found a set with their accompanying large gold sleepers. I’d been banking on profit from the bureau to afford them.

My second and third jobs were easy, now I was broke. Two lithophanes of erotic couples, and a pride of tortoiseshell seamstress scissors, 1840, were in the auction. I’d hate seeing them sold to some flush swine, but I could no more keep away than fly.

Ellen fried me a good nosh. She brings supplies because I’m always strapped, and leaves little labeled packets in the fridge—“Boil 10 Mins In Slightly Salted Water” and all that. I never do it, because it always goes wrong. I got shut of her at a safe nine o’clock. She always wants to strip the bed and hang sheets on the line, God knows why.

What good are they waving in the breeze? I lied that I’d do it, to make her trip home to Ipswich less of a rush. She said I was an angel. Modestly I waved her off, concealing my relief, and got down to the problem of sussing out The Missing Bureau Problem.

First, however, remember this ratio: five to one. Not a Grand National bet, but the number of phony/fake/reproduction bureaus to the genuine. Five times as many fakes as genuine. And that’s here, in rural East Anglia, where habits—and furniture, and paintings and porcelain—don’t change. I have figures for most antiques. Jewelry is eight to one; pearls twenty; pre-Victorian oil paintings three fakes to one genuine. So, all in all, the odds are heavily against the honest buyer and heavily in favor of the crook.

It stands to reason that you’re on a loser. The dice of honesty are loaded against you, the poor unsuspecting customer.

Lately, though, I’d been having a bad patch. Even though I’m a very special type of antique dealer—tell you more in a minute—it was pathetic. Sometimes, antiques vanish like snow off a duck. Buyers evaporate. Collectors get a collective flu. Money zooms into the Inland Revenue’s coffers untouched by human hands. In other trades things never become utterly hopeless. I mean to say, a farmer at least still has the good earth if his crop ails, and doctors can always look forward to a really great epidemic if their patients strike a depressingly healthy patch. But in the antiques game there’s nothing. An antique dealer with no antiques feels a right prune. A hungry prune, because when you’re broke the Chancellor simply refuses dole. No, subtract antiques from the great equation of life and all is zero.

Well, nearly zero.

Because there’s fakes. And frauds. And counterfeits, reproductions, marriages, twinners, naughties, copies… I finally found my note about the bureau in a heap of paper clippings that makes my tatty armchair a hell of comfort: Jo: Teddy repro b. split m/u, Inv. T. fix Thurs. M.

Roughly translated, an Edwardian-period reproduction bureau was available. I’d agreed to divide the markup (i.e., my hoped-for profit) with the sender, who would ship it from Inverness, a collecting center for the four northernmost counties by these night wagons. I’d told Tinker to fix delivery for the previous night. Jo—Josephine—had been my original contact. Tinker’s my old barker, my message ferret.

I’d better try to catch Jo, then get to the town Arcade where antiques and dealers congregate.

For a second, guilt tugged. I glanced around. The cottage’s interior was a mess: books, newspaper cuttings, a moldering heap of unpaid bills, the divan bed I’d promised Ellen I’d make. I opened the door, masterful with guilt. I was actually smiling from the relief of having triumphed over housework, when my jubilation ended.

“Morning, Lovejoy.” Liz Sandwell stood there in the tiny flagged porch. Pretty as a picture. The trouble is, her live-in boyfriend’s one of those strength-through-joy fanatics who gasp their way through our rain-soaked countryside and finish up where they started. A tough rugby player.

“Morning, love,” I said brightly, slamming the door to edge on past.

“Well? Did it arrive?”

Blankly I stared at her. “Eh?” I never know what the hell women are on about half the time.

“The money. From your Uncle Percy.”

“Ah.” Evidently one of my less memorable myths. Swiftly I switched to heartfelt grief.

“No, love. Uncle Percy’s just sent a telegram. He’s ill and needs me.”

Concern leapt into her eyes. “Oh, how terrible, Lovejoy. Are you very close?”

Not as close as I’ll be to that burke of a wagoner who lost my bureau and disappeared, I thought grimly, but said brokenly, “Yes. Can we postpone the deal over the nipple jewels, love? Only I’m hurrying to town to borrow the fare to, er, Llangollen.”

Liz took instant charge. “Let me run you to the station, Lovejoy. How much is it? You can’t shilly-shally at times like this.” A warmhearted, lovable lass is Liz. Where the hell’s Llangollen? I wondered, getting into her car. Let’s hope it’s a fair distance. Then with that money I’d have enough to split-purchase Margaret Dainty’s Belleek porcelain trelliswork basket—no harp-and-greyhound mark, so post-1891, but lovely…

A few minutes later I was mouthing gibberish at a puzzled railway clerk while watching the reflection of Liz’s departing car in the glass. She’d lent me a real handful of notes.

“ ’Ere, mate. You going any bloody where or not?” A soldier in the queue behind me was growing impatient.

“Sorry, sorry.” Liz’d gone. I stepped aside. “I can’t leave Nellie and the little uns,” I said nobly.

Twenty minutes later the bus dropped me outside Jo’s school. It was playtime.

« ^ »

—— 2 ——

The playground was a screaming turmoil. Through the railings I said to a snot-riddled urchin, “If I give you a million zlotniks, will you give Miss Ross a message?”

“Piss off, Lovejoy.”

I sighed, and looked about. Most of the little psychopaths are from my village and believe I’m a bum. “Lottie,” I called. One of the tinier girls skipped closer, pigtails flying with each bounce. I used to babysit her.

“Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper,” she chanted breathlessly.

“I’m going to elope with Miss Ross,” I said. “Say I’m here.”

Lottie bounced off, chanting. I sat and waited while the playground roared on. Five minutes and Jo came, red-faced and embarrassed. She’s a lovely slender faun of a woman, mid-twenties. Infants flocked round, staring.

“Lovejoy! What on earth?”

“Aren’t you escaping, miss?” a kiddy asked disappointedly.

“Certainly not! And get away, the lot of you!”

They dispersed with that silent scorn only infants can attain, Lottie explaining, “I told you he tells lies.”

“That bureau, love.” I had the scrap of paper out.

“You interrupt school and make me a laughingstock just to ask stupid questions?”

Women are always narked. You just have to ride out the storm. I nodded. “Yes, love.

Only it didn’t arrive.” She’d given me the original address, an Inverness box number.

“Well, I can’t help that, can I?”

“Why did you tell me instead of some other dealer, Jo?”

Momentarily she colored deeper. “You happen to be the first antique dealer I thought of.”

I turned to go, and said loudly, “Pretend to start teaching, darling, then slip out. I’ll be waiting—”

“Shhh, you fool.” She was trying not to laugh. A police car pulled alongside the curb.

Two Old Bill descended. The children fell silent and gathered at the railings.

“You Lovejoy?” one peeler said.

“Give over, John.” I’ve known Constable Doble ten years. Every Friday night I beat him at darts.

“You’re under arrest,” he said. “Get in.”

“For anything in particular?”

“Murder of a night driver,” he said. “In particular.”

Jo gasped. Thinking quickly, I passed her the note. “To Tinker, please, Jo.” The children’s faces solemnly followed me as I crossed to the car.

Lottie called, “I’m sorry you didn’t escape like you planned, Lovejoy.” Another nail in my coffin.

“Ta, chuck,” I called back, best I could do with my throat dry.

The other bobby was already scribbling this new evidence as we drove off. Education gets everywhere these days, doesn’t it.

Jails have been great literary stimulants. John Bunyan or Oscar Wilde would have used the next dozen days to dash off a masterpiece. Me, I simply languished. Twice I was dragged out to stand before Arthur. He’s our famous magistrate. He writes little stage plays about ghost trains and doubles as Judge Lynch. I was remanded in custody. I didn’t claim my two witnesses because Ben’s lies are notorious, and fornicating with a Royal Customs officer’s wife while illegally transporting a fake antique might not stand up as a character reference.

Maslow came to see me on the first day.

“Your fingerprints are all over the wagon, Lovejoy,” he told me. “The man was found dead a hundred yards up the bank.”

“Ah,” I said, baffled. Maslow’s not a bad old stick for a troop leader, but there’s only a limited amount of truth police inspectors can take.

“That explains why I couldn’t find him. I wanted to give him a message.”

“At that hour in the morning? In the fog? On a lonely road?” He was beginning to glare and breathe funny. “Ben the roadmender said he hadn’t seen you, Lovejoy.”

Thank you, Ben. “I walked to the lay-by. When I got there the driver had gone. I looked about the wagon, wondered if he was, erm…”

Maslow nodded, and left. Three local prostitutes work the lay-bys. Night hauliers find solace for the loneliness of the long distance wagoner in the privacy of their own vehicles.

Three days elapsed before reassuring rumors filtered in. The driver, a big Brummie, had put up a struggle before being bludgeoned. Needless to say the peelers had taken my clothes, scraped my fingernails. The screw told me this news between bowls of porridge and atrocious jokes.

It was Monday evening before a wonderful sound floated in through the bars of my cell.

I brightened, listening as a long cough began, swelled and shuddered the walls. The cough rumbled closer. I ran to the bars grinning all over my face.

“That you, Tinker?” I yelled. “In here.”

“Wotcher, Lovejoy.”

In he came. Small, shambling, in a grimy old beret and tattered army greatcoat. An aroma of stale booze and feet wafted in as he subsided wheezing on the bunk.

“Never been in this one,” he croaked. A connoisseur of jails. “Did we do it, Lovejoy?”

That plural warmed me. Tinker’s not much to look at, but any ally counts one. Since my arrest I’d been solo. “No.”

“Fank Gawd,” he said, rolling a grotty cigarette in mittened fingers. “They’ve been at me three frigging days. Yon Scotch tart got the paper to me in time.”

I nodded. That had warned him to disclose nothing. He gave another cough. I waited.

They seem to start somewhere out to sea, like thunder. “You’ll get sprung, Lovejoy.

That bird you wuz shagging in Ben’s hut’s seeing the Commissioner.”

I sank back, eyes closed in relief. Tinker lit up, coughing. Ellen had come to give me an alibi. “Learn anything?”

“About the bureau? Aye. Word is that frigging Dobson creep’s had it away, to frigging Amsterdam, Antwerp, one of them places through the Hook. Twinned it.”

“Jesus.” An antique that is made into two of itself is “twinned” in the trade. If half of a piece is truly genuine antique, it becomes very difficult to dismiss it as a fake. And of course you get twice the profit. If Tinker’s information was true, the only piece of evidence that could pin the killer had been destroyed as effectively as if they’d burned it to ashes. Dobson is a barker, like Tinker. He works with a pleasant youngish bloke we call Dutchie. Oddly, I thought of that familiar face in that great old car. Had it been Dutchie? Indistinct, but…

“How’d you know?”

“Seen down the hangars, two nights back.”

My bad luck, I thought bitterly. Anybody with stolen antiques takes them to a disused wartime airfield near here. No questions are asked down at the hangars. Jade, jewelry, silver, porcelain, complete suites of furniture, I’ve seen stuff change hands a dozen times an hour. Always at night. No way of backtracking there.

“Here, Lovejoy,” Tinker was grinning toothily in his fag smoke. “If you’d not been shagging that Excise officer’s missus they’d be topping you.” He really fell about at the thought of my being hanged, cackling through his brown fangs.

“They don’t hang people now, stupid sod,” I said icily.

“Maslow always said he’d make you an exception, Lovejoy.” He was still rolling in the aisles, coughing himself apoplectic, when his visiting time was up and they shelled him out.

They released me on two counts. One, the big Midlander had fought his murderers, and I was unmarked. And two, a respectable lady testified that, marooned with a stalled engine on the main A12 during the night of the great fog, she had been assisted by a stranger who started her motor and drove her to safety. As a gesture of appreciation, she had insisted on driving him to his home, a thatched cottage in a little village nearby.

“How could the lady see your cottage, thatch and all, in the pitch fog, Lovejoy?” Maslow asked evenly, with that threatening peace police manage so effortlessly. “And how come you’d forgotten the entire incident?”

“I couldn’t compromise a lady,” I explained nobly.

“One day, Lovejoy. One day.”

Deliberately I let the office door slam on him. I waggled my fingers at the desk sergeant.

He, too, warned, “One day, Lovejoy. One day.”

“Great phrase you police’ve got there, Ernie,” I said. “Stick at it. Might make a full sentence one day.”

And I left happily. In fact, super-happily, because in my languishment the penny had dropped in my cavernous skull. You never twin a fake, right? All that extra skilled labor is only worthwhile if the original piece is a genuine antique. The driver had been done for a valuable piece, not a cheap reproduction.

Now things made sense, I began hurrying.

« ^ »

—— 3 ——

Our ancestors liked to be thought fine, moral folk. Same as us, eh? Flesh being flesh and spirits being weak, they rarely made it. In fact, they were as hopeless at sanctity as we are. Sadly, it bothered them more, but they were better at pretending. Look at lithophanes, for example, which I was currently angling after.

You’ve seen how light transluces through a lamp shade? If you’re a craftsman, you can make porcelain thin enough to show translucency in exactly the same way. Lithophanes are small plaques of super-slender porcelain in which you see a picture when you hold them up to the light. However, naughtiness crept into the Victorian designs. Not all the pictures hidden in the antique porcelain are pretty trees and hillsides. They are often lascivious ladies in mid-frolic, doing scandalous things with sexual abandon. Nowadays collectors pay through the nose for erotic lithophanes—purely for the art, you understand.

Tinker was in the White Hart soaking the day’s calories and coughing so well that people had given up trying to listen to the jukebox. It’s where our local antique dealers gather and pretend to celebrate between failures.

“Wotcher, Lovejoy.” He jerked his chin. Ted the barman nodded and drew two pints. I paid. It’s Tinker’s principal method of claiming his salary from me. I’ve gone hungry before now to get him sloshed, because a barker’s vital. He can winkle and cheat with abandon. Antique dealers must be circumspect.

“Wotcher, Tinker.” I forked out. I bought us a bar pasty in the euphoria of freedom.

“News of the bureau? Dutchie?”

“Nar. I got you Dobson.” He indicated with his eyes the tall lone figure at the bar’s end.

Even in a crowd the thin silent barker somehow stood apart.

Dobson’s a somber one-off. For a start, he’s the only bloke I know in the trade who doesn’t have a nickname. And he never says much, just hangs around listening, vigilant. Folk say he carries a knife and once did time. He looks fresh from an alley war.

On the other hand I like Dutchie, a genial bloke with a word for the cat. He appears out of nowhere once every Preston Guild. He comes like a comet, handles the deals Dobson’s lined up for him, then vanishes for a fortnight or so. But Dobson unsettles me.

A few minutes later I was asking Dobson where his wally Dutchie was.

He never answers immediately, in case there’s another way out. “Gone on the ferry.

Dunno where.”

Fair enough. “See anything of a bureau, the night that wagon driver got done?”

“No. Sorry.” Nothing here for an inquisitive dealer fresh out of dink.

“Was Dutchie around that night?”

He shrugged after a long lag phase. Nothing. I rejoined Tinker, back to hungry reality.

So I’d lost a fortune. I couldn’t afford to lose still more by inactivity. “The lithophanes, Tinker.”

“Them little pot flaps?” Tinker’s way of describing artistic genius. “Three-Wheel.”

“Three-Wheel Archie? Great. Come on, Tinker.”

He wailed, “But I haven’t had me dinner, Lovejoy.”

Fuming, I gave him two of my three remaining notes, which left me just enough to breathe. “See me tonight, then. The Three Cups.” The sly old burke was cackling with glee as I left.

From the call box outside, I phoned Ellen to beg a lift. The glass was shattered, so I had to stand in the rain and shout over the whistling gale. Unbelievably, she put down the receiver the instant she recognized my voice. Bloody nerve. Next week she’d prove to me, by complex female reasoning, that her refusal to speak was a precaution to help me in some way.

A call to the Infant School earned another rebuff, this time from Jo. A bad day for loyalty. A stranger gave me a lift in his car to within a mile of Archie’s place, and told me all about astronomy.

Three-Wheel Archie gets his nickname from a tricycle he rides. He grew up in an orphanage somewhere near Whitechapel. When I say grew up, I mean his head and features did, but the rest of him sort of lagged behind. Mind you, with most of us others it’s the opposite, isn’t it; relatively big over all but very little brain. Archie ended up a thickset titch who walks with a low swagger. He deals in engines, mechanicals, and watches, and lives alone down the estuary. I like him.

He was cleaning his dazzling new motorcar when I arrived. It lives grandly in a brick-built garage—cavity insulation, dehumidifier, air conditioner, the lot. He’d run it out on polished lino. He lives in the near-derelict cottage adjoining.

“Sprung, eh, Lovejoy?” he panted, sprawled on the bonnet polishing like mad. “No way a soft bugger like you could clobber a big Brummie to death. The Old Bill are stupid.”

“I’ve come about the lithophanes.” I walked round his car admiring. “Posher than ever.

How old now?”

“Ten next September thirtieth. She’s Libra.”

“Er, great. Still going okay?” It has one mile on the clock, in and out of the garage once a fortnight. Five yards a month mounts up.

“Brilliant, Lovejoy,” he said proudly, sliding chutewise down to the ground carrying his sponges. “Glass?”

“Ta, Archie.” When I said new, I used the term loosely. Archie’s one ambition from birth was owning a saloon car. He bought it a decade gone, and built for it that luxurious garage. Of course he’s so dwarf he can’t reach the pedals to drive the damned thing, but he loves it. He runs the engine every week, has engineers in to service it. Once, a local dealer laughed at Archie for having a new /old car he couldn’t drive. Archie’s never spoken to him since. Nor have I.

“Here, Lovejoy.” He gave me some homemade wine. “Last autumn’s blackberry.”

“Mrnrnmh.” I smacked my lips. Dreadful.

“The lithophanes’ll cost you, Lovejoy.” We sat on packing cases beside the glittering vehicle.

“Archie. If you wanted an antique bureau twinned up, who’d you get to do it?”

“You, Lovejoy, on that rare occasion you’re not dicking some bint. Otherwise Tipper Noone at Melford. He’s done lovely stuff lately.”

“I mean a rush job.”

“So do I.” Archie drained his glass. He knew what I was asking, the crafty devil.

“Somebody said Tipper did one a few days back, for shipping to the Continent.”

I sighed. That’s the trouble with East Anglia. Most is coast, inlets with busy little ships steaming to and fro. And continentals spend like lunatics when they’ve a mind.

“I’m the one who told Tinker, Lovejoy.”

Useless. That was as far as we’d got before a car pulled in and Jo descended. I introduced Archie to her. He rose, shook hands gravely. I knew she’d behave properly, thank God.

“Good of you to come, Jo.” I was mystified.

She stood in the mucky yard, hands plunged into the pockets of her floppy coat. Her collar was up, framing her face. Women stand with elegance, don’t they, one foot slightly averted so they’re all one lovely composite shape.

“Won’t you sit down?” Archie offered her a crate. She sat without a trace of hesitancy. I really like Miss Josephine Ross. More, she gravely accepted a glass of Archie’s wine and said reflectively that it was possibly a little too dry, like her father’s recipe. Archie adored her.

“Don’t let me interrupt, Lovejoy,” she said, smiling. “I only wanted to say sorry, cutting you off on the phone just because you’d been … seeing the police. It was mean of me.”

Her color was high. “We shouldn’t be swayed by public stigma.”

“Don’t mix metaphors,” I said, to get us off ethics. “Give me a lift and I’ll forgive you.”

Me and Archie settled the deal over the lithophanes while Jo admired the car, wisely not touching it. She had quickly registered the difference between Archie’s grotty residence and the opulent garage, but said nothing. Archie came to see us off. The swine wouldn’t let me have the lithos on approval.

“Four wheels on your motor,” Jo said. “Why Three-Wheel?”

“Come on, Jo.” I got in her car irritably.

“Tell her, Lovejoy.” Archie was grinning, saw I wouldn’t budge, and walked over to a shed. He pulled the door open to reveal a beautiful tricycle with an elegant canopy.

“How lovely, Archie!” Jo exclaimed. “Do you ride it?”

“Makes me mobile, Miss Ross. Courtesy of Lovejoy, five years ago now.”

She looked at me. “Really.”

“Can we go?” I called wearily. “Bloody time-wasters.”

Archie waved to us. By the time we left the yard he was already buffing the car’s hubs.

We drove a couple of miles before she said anything. “Lovejoy?”

She wanted to prattle about Archie, but I wasn’t having any. “You only gave me the box number for that bureau, Jo,” I said. “Is there more?”

She took a while to answer. “Very well,” she said finally. “Grammar apart, Lovejoy, you’ll have to sing for your supper.”

It was Jo’s free afternoon. She stayed and I made tea for her. Ellen had washed up, so I had clean cups. I made some sandwiches and cut their crusts off to make natty triangles. A bit thick, but all the more nourishing. The tomatoes had gone pappy so I blotted them on newspaper first. I felt posh serving up, like the Savoy chef. I had to use a towel for a tablecloth because I can never find anything when Ellen’s tidied.

“I’m impressed, Lovejoy,” Jo said, smiling.

“Ta,” I said modestly. I knew she would be. I can really lay on the elegance when I want. I’d even found the teapot lid.

She wore a beige twin set, tweed skirt, but mainly a black opal ring, Edwardian setting, heavy and gold. Beautiful.

“It was my friend I was at school with, Shona. We’ve kept up correspondence.” She colored, proving rumor right: a farm manager, a passionate holiday affair, and her coming to a teaching job in East Anglia to be near his fertile acres.

Shona was a teacher in Caithness, which is almost as far north as you can go. In a recent letter Shona had mentioned selling some furniture. By pure chance, Jo said, carefully avoiding my gaze, my name entered the correspondence.

“It was soon after I’d met you at the Castle show,” she explained. Farmer Bob had been away. Jo and I had met on that local gala day—everybody goes to our Castle’s flower displays. We saw quite a bit of each other for a fortnight until her favorite yokel homeward plodded his weary way.

“You told Shona I was a divvie?”

“I may have mentioned it. In passing.” She spoke offhandedly. “Maybe. I can’t remember. Shona insisted on selling through a box number. I passed it on to you. You wrote, and… and now that poor driver…”

My mind wouldn’t stop nudging me, but I’d have scared her off if I’d started a serious interrogation.

“Wasn’t it lucky, you meeting that woman in the fog?” Jo said, too casual. She’d reached the suspicion bit, about Ellen.

“A fluke,” I agreed.

“You deserved it, Lovejoy,” she said, smiling. “For giving Archie that grand tricycle.”

“It isn’t his fault his legs can’t reach the car throttle.”

“Of course not.” Still smiling, she put her fingers to my face. We were suddenly close.

My hopes of examining the true worth of Farmer Bob’s black opal engagement ring were dashed when Jo found her hand on a pair of Ellen’s stockings. They’d treacherously crept out from behind a cushion. She was up and vehement in a flash.

“Lovejoy! And to think that I was about to… oh!”

“Honestly, Jo. They’re my sister’s…” Tra-la, tra-la. Good night, nurse, with Jo storming out in a ferocious temper and me shouting invented explanations after her.

Women really get me down sometimes. They’re so unreasonable. You’d think they’d learn sense, having nothing else to do all day. I watched her car burn off up the lane, then went in disconsolately.

The sight of her unfinished grub cheered me up and I sat down to finish it. My spirits began soaring. Where one valuable antique came from, there were bound to be more, right? And if the sender was dim enough to send a pricely article thinking it a mock-up, I was in for a windfall.

Give Jo a day to come round, wheedle Shona’s address off her, then hit the high road.

Or the low road. I’m not proud.

Between mouthfuls I burst into song.

« ^ »

—— 4 ——

Jill was at Gimbert’s infamous auction rooms. This emporium of wonderment and infamy is lodged between a row of ancient cottages, a ruined priory, two pubs and a church. She was inspecting the assorted junk in her time-honored way, which is carrying a microscopic poodle and trailing a knackered seaman. Jill’s tastes are catholic, as they say. She wears furs, grotesque hats, rings, brooches, pearls, the lot. I like her.

She saw me pushing through the dross and screamed.

“Lovejoy, darling!” She drenched my face with a kiss. Quickly I pulled away. Her embrace is a dead risk. Either the poodle gnaws your earhole or you stink like a boutique. “How clever to escape from jail! Meet… the name, lover?”

“Dave,” the young sailor said.

“Dave,” Jill repeated, trying to lock the name in. She always forgets. “Dave’s just into port, aren’t you, honey?” In or out is her only criterion.

“Yes.” Dave was bemused, like all Jill’s Jolly Jacks. Coastal ships docking at our town’s minuscule port take turns lending Jill nautical manpower. The names change, to protect the innocents. I’ve never met the same one twice. Tinker says they don’t dare land again.

“Hello, er, Dave,” I said heartily. “Jill. You sometimes commission Tipper Noone?”

“Not lately, Lovejoy. I’ve been absolutely rushed off my feet!” Big Prank from Suffolk, silver dealer among the Regency ware, snickered at the unfortunate turn of phrase. A couple of other dealers upending furniture politely disguised their guffaws as coughs.

“Dobson gave him a twinner, Patrick said.”

Tinker’s tale was beginning to sound true, despite Dobson’s reticence.

“Ta, Jill. Tell him to bell me, eh?”

I evaded another soak, gnaw, and scenting by eeling among heavy suites of 1910

furniture to where Patrick stood. He always looks crazy to me—crocodile handbag, silken bishop sleeves, and enough mascara to black your boots—but he’s a hard-line dealer. I was swiftly getting narked. This bloody drudgery’s Tinker’s job.

“Hiyer, Pat. Where’s Lily?” Lily’s a married woman who loves Patrick while her husband’s away and sometimes when he isn’t. I’d say more but it’s too complicated and I’d get it wrong.

“Patrick,” he corrected. “That stupid bitch brought the wrong checkbook, Lovejoy! Can you imagine?” He swore extravagantly in falsetto. “I made her go right home!”

“That’s the spirit, Pat. Look. Where’s Tipper Noone?”

“To each his own, dear heart. You won’t find him in my boudoir.” He boomed—well, trilled—a gay laugh.

“Don’t help, then,” I said evenly. “See if I care.”

Other dealers sieving through the gunge on display paused at the implied threat. Even Patrick abated somewhat.

I may not be much to look at, but among antique dealers I’m special. Very few dealers know anything about antiques. In fact, most are simply Oscar-minus actors highly skilled at concealing their monumental ignorance. Try one out, if you don’t believe me.

Offer an antique dealer a Rembrandt—he’ll hum and ha and won’t offer you more than eighty quid. It isn’t because he’s miserly. It’s because he can’t tell an Old Master from an oil slick, which is why you can still pick up fortunes hidden among loads of old tat.

Ignorance being endemic, it follows that antique dealers need somebody to help them, not only with reading and writing, but also with knowing antiques. I don’t mean somebody who’s simply read the right books. I mean somebody whose inner sense tells if that fifteenth-century Book of Hours is a brilliant sequence of illumination from the unsullied monks of Lindisfarne, or a newspaper and starch. Easy? Yes, for somebody like me, who quivers and trembles when that Roman oil lamp radiates its honest ancient little soul’s vibes out into the universe, or when that antique Chinese jeweled fingernail cover emanates gleams under the auctioneer’s naked bulb.

The people distributed in Gimbert’s showrooms had paused with alert interest because I’m the only divvie for many long leagues. I’m gormless with money and women, which is why I’m always broke, but I’m the only one of us who isn’t gormless with antiques.

Patrick’s venom is legendary. But if I called his antiques fakes, he too would be broke.

Mostly I’m honest because special gifts aren’t for monkeying about with. So, wisely, he turned sulky and pulled his mauve silk-lace gloves on.

“Don’t be nasty, Lovejoy. I positively sweated blood arranging for Tipper to give me an estimate for mending a Chippendale fret. He didn’t turn up, did he, Lily?” Patrick’s admirer had just breathlessly returned, proudly bearing her checkbook.

“Tipper? Yes. Here you are, darling.”

Patrick dropped the checkbook, demanding icily, “Do I have to carry everything, silly bitch?”

Lily was picking it up, saying, “Sorry, sweetheart…” as I left. They’re both on a loser, but neither thinks so. It’s hard proving people are wrong when they’re doing what they want.

There on the pavement stood Antioch. He’s a slim, quiet bloke. A friend, thank God.

(You’ll see later why I’m glad on that point.) He waits motionless, never lolls. He’s the contact man for the night wagoners. As I hesitated, he nodded hello.

“How do, Antioch,” I said, nervous. “Look. That driver.”

“You’re asking around, Lovejoy?” he said quietly.

“Aye. No luck so far.”

“You find out who did for him, don’t do anything. Understand?”

“You know me, Antioch,” I said heartily. “Scared of my own shadow.”

He looked into me. “Just tell me who, Lovejoy.”

“Right, right.” I watched him go, my nape chilled.

Then I phoned Jo, trying to sound urgent. “The police, Jo.” There was a background din. Some school. “They pulled me in for questioning but I didn’t let on about your involvement, love.”

“My involvement?” she said faintly.

“I’m just reassuring you, in case you were anxious. I’ve said nothing.” Pause, for her to say nice of me. Not a word. I’d have to be even nicer. “And I’m sorry the jumble-sale stuff made you mad. I’ve not had a minute to clear up since—”

“What jumble-sale stuff?”

“Those women’s clothes lying about. Old Kate brings them. I collect for the, er, hospital charity. Next time you come it’ll be tidy. Honest.”

“Oh.” Uncertainty at last. Belief might not be far behind.

I gasped indignantly. “Jo! You didn’t think those underclothes were…”

We agreed on the Tudor Halt restaurant, six o’clock. A bit posh for me, but I’d scrape the gelt together somehow. And Jo might give me a lift home afterwards, during which dot-dot-dot to the sound of the waves upon the shore, with any luck.

I don’t blackwash people, because what’s the use? All reputation is just whitewash carefully applied. So for me gossip, the sole means of communication among antique dealers, is valueless unless it’s filtered by an expert.

Tinker, my only employee, is that all-time gossip-filtering expert. He was hard at work becoming paralytic in The Ship tavern when I arrived. I wheedled Sandra the barmaid into letting me slate his next few pints. She blames me for having stood her up once, and makes me earn my badges back every now and then. Women never forget what you owe. On the other hand, they’re great at forgetting repayments. Swings and roundabouts.

“Ta, Sand,” I said. “Don’t give him more than six.”

Tinker cackled. I leaned away as his alcoholic fetor wafted past and moved him from the bar. He was with a group of barkers boozily trading rumor. I kept my voice low. The barkers had shut up and were oh-so-casually inclining their ears at an eavesdropping angle.

“Tinker. Where the hell’s Tipper Noone? Gimbert’s viewing today and he’s not showed.”

“Not been in the Arcade more ’n a week.” He drained his glass. I sprinted for a refill.

“Listen. Here’s what I think, Tinker. That bureau we had shipped down was nicked. The driver protested, and got done. They owffed it to the hangars. It changed hands a few times as usual. Then—”

“—Dutchie got Tipper Noone to twin it, shipped it out.” Tinker nodded. “Benjie bought it, then Nacker Hardie, then Alison Verney, but nobody remembers how it first come.”

He’d done well to find all that out. “Tipper’s a home bird,” I reminded.

He said nothing, stared at his empty glass. Sprint, smile at Sandra, refill. Resume. “Aye.

Never goes anywhere, doesn’t Tipper. But he’s not in the Eastern Hundreds any more.”

This was making me uneasy.

Tinker suddenly looked sober, a novel but alarming sight. “It’s bad news.” His rheumy old eyes were on me. “Are we in trouble, Lovejoy?”

“Yes,” Maslow said, sitting down beside me. There was a faint stir In the taproom smog. I looked across. The mob of barkers had vanished as if by magic.

“Another false arrest, Maslow?”

He grinned from behind his pipe. The match tufted flame so bright I turned away.

“False arrest isn’t trouble, Lovejoy. Trouble’s the body of a man washed ashore off the estuary.”

I drew breath to ask the question, but Tinker was clobbering my arm with his glass. I took the clumsy hint and rose for another refill.

“Some boating accident?” I said sympathetically, returning after telling myself to watch my big mouth. Sometimes Tinker’s worth his weight in gold.

“Possibly, Lovejoy.” Distastefully Maslow watched Tinker slurp the ale. “You know, you repel me, Dill. A doss-house fusilier. I’m sick of the sight of tramps like you.”

Tinker said humbly, “Yes, Mr. Maslow.”

“Tinker’s the best barker in the business,” I said. Maslow narks me.

“And you, Lovejoy. Pillock. You could have made something of yourself. Instead you haunt junk shops, shag your way through women’s handbags. You’re pathetic, you know that? You’re too cunt-struck, Lovejoy.” He was really motoring now, glaring and practically yelling. “You two burkes—”

“Get stuffed, Maslow.” I can bawl as good as him. “You frigging peelers should be out there finding who drowned poor bloody Tipper Noone instead of—” I paused, aghast.

Tinker groaned, head in his hands. Maslow smiled.

“How did you know the body was Tipper Noone, Lovejoy?” he asked gently. “Fancy a ride to the station?”

« ^ »

—— 5 ——

They let me go, shaken but not stirred, about four that afternoon. I’d seen poor Tipper’s horrendous mortal remains. A fishing line had entangled his legs. His head was stove in, but Maslow said the pathologists never learn anything from drowners. Tipper must have been in the water some days. His drifting dinghy was found a couple of miles out to sea. I’d been in clink at the time, a fact I mentioned every chance I got.

“You see, Lovejoy,” Maslow said, staring morosely at the traffic from the police steps.

“This isn’t a game, is it? And you’re deep in because as soon as you’re sprung from one problem you’re asking after a furniture restorer who lo and behold comes bobbing in without a boat.” He added his pipe’s carcinogens to the lead-soaked traffic pollution.

“You’re no killer, Lovejoy, not really. You fancy yourself, but you’re brimful of cowardice, cant, and crap. O’course you didn’t do for Tipper. Never believed you did.

Any more than I believe that Tipper accidentally drowned.”

He wouldn’t let me reply, just reamed his pipe like they do. Pipe smoking’s a job.

“I’m telling you all this by way of warning, Lovejoy. Witnesses are a public’s protection of innocence. Consequently they’re at risk. They tend to get eliminated. Now you’re tied in with the wagoner’s death and Tipper’s. So stay in the company of friends, close to that Customs officer’s pretty wife, or Mrs. Dainty, or yon Scotch lass, or—”

“Here,” I said defensively. I didn’t know he knew.

“And stay off the bypass. Stop contrabanding old wardrobes till I clear this up. Okay?”

Which is why I spent an anxious hour in the library with a gazetteer, and the next hour divvying for Francie to earn some money to feed Jo to get Shona’s address to leave the district. A process of elimination was going on, and I wanted out.

Francie’s rarely around, but always is, if you follow. She travels with her husband and sixty-seven others. They’re a fairground, the sort with roundabouts, Roll-a-Pennies, sideshows, and a Giant Caterpillar that whirls round and covers you over for a quick snog. They’ve even a Galactic Wheel and a Ghost Train. It’s marvelous, lights and action and people. I like fairgrounds, always have. Francie collects antiques on the side, eroding the whole enterprise’s meager profits year after year. I used to make smiles with Francie before she went a-gypsy roving.

The place they land is Castle Heath, a greensward where centuries ago some baddies shot some heroes to death, or the other way round. They come like night-thieving arabs, suddenly there in full swing. It’s one of the most exciting scenes to see an early morning fairground with wagons and tents and fanciful structures. I love their colors, for the same reason I love them on canal boats; they are the brilliance of an earlier century showing through modern grot.

Francie welcomed me as always as I shouted at the steps and climbed into her caravan, which is to say with hardly a glance. In her tribe it’s an insult to dawdle at the door.

She immediately put the kettle on.

“How do, love.” I bussed her and quickly sat down uninvited, another must. “How’s it among the oppressed nomads?”

“How is it among the static fascists, darling?”

“Bloody grim. Better for seeing thee, though.”

“So you got off.” That always makes me blink. The fair only arrived a day ago, but here she was knowing everything.

An infant came in, looking vaguely familiar, fetched a toffee out of the fridge.

“Is this good for your teeth?” I demanded, obediently unwrapping it for her.

“Ta.” The kiddie left to join six others milling about outside. Fairground children are always so businesslike.

“Yours, Francie?”

She didn’t look up. “Mmmmh. And you got off today from Tipper Noone’s accident, Lovejoy. Two out of two.”

That explained the familiar feeling I’d got from looking at the little girl. Family likeness.

“Eh? Oh, aye. I’m a master of escapology.” She came and sat on the bunk seat, facing me so our eyeballs practically touched. Odd that I’d never seen her kiddie Betty before, though I’d been to her caravan a few times. Shy, I suppose.

“Still trying to fit two days into one, Lovejoy? Still hopeless with women, with money?”

“Don’t talk daft.” The kettle was whistling. She rose to see to it. Women are always narked when they find somebody who understands them better than they know themselves. And as for being useless, they should bloody well talk. “You got much to divvy?”

“Maybe.”

These caravans are modern trailers, windows and bunks in tiers, a kitchen at one end.

Francie’s is small, but mirrors cunningly exaggerate the space she has. Tables fold out of walls, all that. She saw me looking.

“Fancy the life yet, Lovejoy?”

“Among the raggle-taggle gypsies o? When the Mounties are after me, happen I will.”

She was bringing out the stuff while we spoke.

“Over there,” I told her, nodding at the table across from where I sat. A reasonable light falling semi-obliquely across my field of view. Francie knows the drill.

“Yes, love,” she said. “I’ll be quiet.”

Eyes closed, I relaxed and waited until she told me, “Right, Lovejoy.” I faced the heap of items and began reaching, touching, stroking, listening, feeling.

It seems daft to say things actually speak, doesn’t it, but they do, they do. Correction: Antiques speak, and do it with a resonance that tremors through your very being.

Gunge—and I do mean everything modern—is inert, lifeless. It deserves to remain so.

The explanation is that you can’t trick Nature. Humanity gets back exactly what it puts in. Passionate learning plus artistic creativity are what made little Tintoretto a bobby-dazzler instead of simply a paint-mixer for his dad. Look at a great oil painting, and then at the front cover of a magazine. Just as many colors, maybe the same size and even the same subject. But there’s a difference.

The caravan’s interior was hot. I lifted objects, peered, sniffed, fondled, laid them aside and went on to the next.

Feeling—I mean touch—is the great modern omission. People dance apart. Even old lovers merely wave hello. It was different when I was little. You got a thick ear for not remembering to kiss even your most wrinkled auntie. Folk embraced, patted, impinged.

Human contact was in. Nowadays everybody intones catchphrases proving we’re hooked on togetherness, yet we run from contact. Talk loudly enough of love, and you conceal from yourself the terrible fact that you’ve forgotten the human act of loving.

That wondrous joy of loving is everything, everything…

Headache. God, it was terrible. The interior was suffocating, the watery sun blinding. I felt old, drained, weary. There were three objects left on the table. The caravan’s floor was littered with junk. Francie was sitting with her little girl watching me.

“You talk to yourself,” the little girl said.

“Shut your teeth and brew up.” I didn’t need criticism from a neonate.

“Are those genuine, Lovejoy?” Francie asked.

“Yes.” Pulling myself together, I priced them. “This tatty watercolor’s not much to look at, Francie, but it’s worth a bit.” No known artist, admittedly, and a crudely drawn row of Georgian shops. “Mid-eighteenth century. He’s painted the three balls on the pawnbroker’s sign blue. They didn’t change to brassy gold until modern times.”

The little girl said, “Mam said you’ll mend my doggie bell.”

I tried to sip the tea but it was scalding. Francie remembered, quickly rose to cool it by pouring it into a bowl.

The doggie bell was a bell-shaped silver fox’s head. “It’s a cup, sweetheart. Posh people drink from them before, er, going riding.” Ritual drinks are still taken when the unspeakable pursue the inedible. These marvelously embellished cups are the best thing that ever came from fox-hunting. “Don’t let anybody stick a clapper in it, for Gawd’s sake.” The AB and GB initials were probably the Burrows, a rare husband-and-wife team of silversmiths in Old London. Francie would have the sense to look them up.

The trouble is that nowadays people make them into “nice” things. I’ve seen a silver beagle-head stirrup cup, 1780 or so, made—with great skill—into an egg timer. Clever-daft, my old granny used to call such folk. Leave beauty alone, I always say.

Sometimes.

“Is the dolly’s house yours too?” It was a white porcelain cottage, two stories. Colored porcelain flowers adorned it. Antique dealers the world over call them Rockingham, but you never see these little white cottages marked.

“No. Daddy found it. Mam’ll sell it.”

Daddy is Dan, nice bloke if you like swarthy and tough. He does a motorbike act, Wall of Death.

“Tell Daddy to ask a lot of money, love. It’s a pastille burner.” I showed her the recess that led to the cottage’s hexagonal chimney. “You put a perfume cone underneath, and the chimney smokes a lovely scent all day long. Mam will light it for you. People called them Staffordshire fumiers. This is a lovely one, 1830.”

“Is Staffordshire near Penrith, or Edinburgh?”

“Er, that way on, love.”

“We’re going there.”

Those were the three. Betty and I chatted while Francie sorted the crud. A few good collectibles lay among the discards—fairly recent wooden household implements people call treen (cheap but soaring); a few Edwardian photos but none of the most highly sought kind (military, industrial, fashion, and streets); a recently made pair of miniature wainscot chairs six inches tall (very fashionable to collect these small repros).

“You did well, Francie. Got any grub?”

She made me some nosh, then walked me to the war memorial with Betty. She’d worked out ten percent of my estimates and insisted on giving me a part of it.

“I’ll post the rest, Lovejoy. Buy an overcoat.”

“Er, good idea.” It was coming on to rain. I left them there, crossing among the traffic.

They stood side by side. Betty had a little yellow umbrella up. I acted the goat a bit, turning and waving umpteen times till she was laughing. It was fooling about that saved me.

The traffic had become a sullen and glistening queue like it always does in drizzle. I was moving across the traffic lights, on red, when I did another half-step back, turned to wave. It happened all in a second. The nearest car’s engine boomed. Its side edged my calves and tipped me over. I heard Francie yelp. My trouser leg tore. Its tires squealing, the bloody saloon streaked across against the red light and swung down East Hill.

“Here,” I yelled indignantly. “See that silly sod?”

The lights changed to green. The traffic moved. Witnesses dispersed in the worsening weather. I grinned back at Francie. “I’m all right, love,” I called cheerily. “Lucky, eh?”

If I hadn’t been fooling about to make Betty laugh I’d have been… Keeping up a brave smile for Francie’s benefit, I made the opposite pavement and walked on before looking across the road to where Francie and Betty stood by the war memorial. I waved once, then the museum cut them off from sight. Only then did I start the shakes and lose my idiot grin. Luck’s great stuff, but it’s not stuff you can depend on.

« ^ »

—— 6 ——

Everybody lusts, but differently. And it seems to me that lust’s main function is the pursuit of what you haven’t got. So nuns in their lonesome beds may not all crave similarly. Likewise, me and Jo were panting after different prey when we met at the Tudor Halt. I was superconsciously nervous about having luckily stayed alive. Tonight I’d be the perfect lady’s man.

She was especially pretty, wearing a dark silk shawl and a late Victorian Neapolitan mosaic brooch, neat and minute. Her hair was ringlety, her face oval. Her lovely eyes had dark lashes ten feet long. She glanced about, amused.

“You chose this place because of some antique, Lovejoy. I know you. And I’ve lost sleep achieving this Regency look.”

“It’s not. Honest.”

We bickered all through supper. Lovely candlelit grub in the nooky old joint, with a beautiful woman shimmering opposite. You can’t spend your time better, almost. I enjoyed her company even though I was sussing out the other diners, checking that Karl’s waitresses hadn’t transmuted into thinly disguised mafiosi. Jo explained what the meal was—posh grub comes hidden under sauce—but knows me well enough to gloss over the grub. Finally I got Karl to bring me a cigar so they’d bring me one of the antique smoker’s companions. Jo laughed and clapped her hands.

“I knew it, Lovejoy!”

Found out. My face was red. This restaurant has an entire dozen of these lovely creations. Tonight I’d drawn the silver figure of a frog leaning on a toadstool. Remove the frog’s head and there’s a spirit reservoir. Decorative holes sprout spills for lighting your cigar with a grand flourish. Antique dealers often advertise them as “silver ornaments, incomplete,” thinking they’ve bits missing. Wrong. Buy them even though they’re little more than a century old, which isn’t much. You can still talk them off a dealer for an average week’s wage.

Jo and I left the nosh-house holding hands. Karl’s an old Hanover man whose wry good night was as good as a body search. For six years he’s refused to sell me the smokers’

companions. But one day…

“You love those old things, Lovejoy, don’t you?”

“Yes. Same reason as I love you older women.”

“Cheek.”

She came in for a coffee, and told me enough about her friend Shona. Enough for me to find her, I mean.

“You think it’s worth phoning her, love?”

“It would only worry her, Lovejoy. And her bureau was probably insured…”

Shona McGunn, I listed mentally. Teacher. Near Dubneath, Caithness. Single. House owner, et cetera.

Jo stayed a long, long while. I was on my very best super-romantic behaviour, really gallant. As the fire died into embers and pitch night began, I suffered fantasies about noises outside. Twice I got up to peer nervously into the darkness. Once, too, Jo laughed when something scratched in my thatched roof, probably a bat or some night creature. Jo’s joky question if my cottage was haunted didn’t help either. I’m thankful my garden’s an obstacle course of weeds and brambles.

Hiding my nervousness, I became frantically adoring and, I prayed, adorable. That night I really earned survival. I was the world’s most ardent lover. I became a raconteur, the wittiest humorist, sensitive and worshiping. And, it turned out, the most wideawake sleeper. Not a bloody wink all the dark hours from worry while Jo softly breathed. All right, I’m a coward, but that car business… Anyway, cowards last longer, even if knackered.

“Lovejoy,” Jo whispered as the curtain gained its gray dawn rims. “I must go. Will you see me tonight?”

“Anything you say, er, darling,” I said fervently. After all, maybe I owed her my life, having used her as a night shield against the predators. “Er, sorry about those, er, marks.” Her arms wore bruised fingerprints.

“Silly. I’ll come at nine,” she said mistily. “We must talk seriously. About us. And Bob.”

This sounded bad news. “Of course, love,” I said sincerely.

Cautiously I saw her off into the palish world. I waited until the milk float clattered along the lane, then, calming in the comparative safety of dawn, I fried some bread for breakfast.

That evening, ostentatiously carrying no suitcase, I caught Jacko’s rickety lorry into town.

Once, I saw a famous comedian die—not meaning he got no laughs, but as in death—

on the stage. The newspapers trumpeted that he’d “gone as he would have wished.”

Never. Death is the worst option, and I was going to give it up for Lent. The police would only ballock me if I asked their help because they always do. Flight was the best policy, and where else but to pretty Shona McGunn? And the prospect of that treasure mine of antiques.

An hour of flitting from alleyway to ginnel in town, from doorway to cranny, and I left the place underneath a friendly driver’s tarpaulin bucketing along the A604. He dropped me off at a Sudbury tavern, where I stayed until closing time. I stole a white towel during my sojourn there, and was down on the bypass by midnight among the windblown rubbish cutting letters from the towel with a penknife. When held, a passing motorist could see the name francie quite clearly. Then, soaked to the skin, I crouched miserably in the shelter of the hedge and waited with my improvised sign. God, I was tired.

The fairground cavalcade came through three hours after midnight. Clapped out, I creaked erect, and held up my sign against the driving rain. The seventh vehicle was Francie’s. I was among friends.

“Fairs are creatures of habit,” Francie told me as she drove northward through worsening weather. Husband Dan was driving the big wagon, which carried his Wall of Death sideshow. Little Betty was asleep in a specially made bunk in Francie’s vehicle.

She handled it with reflex skill, towing her caravan. Unless there was a holdup along the Great North Road somewhere, they’d be pitching in Penrith in time to catch the early evening crowds. The fair did the same every year.

“Penrith’s always worth two evenings,” she explained. “We call pitches twoers, fourers, sixers, according to how many days.” She’d put the heater full on to dry me out. “I guessed you were in trouble, Lovejoy. Dan was all for seeking that saloon car that tried to run you down when I told him. He was mad at me, not taking its number.”

Not imagination, then. I cheered up. Even a murder risk becomes easier to cope with when you know it’s really there. “Look, sunshine. I can’t exactly pay for the ride, but I’m good value. Any ideas how I can fund this excursion?”

She was a full minute replying. “I’ll think of a way, Lovejoy.”

I took a further minute. “Ta, love,” I said.

That day I slogged harder than I’d ever done. Illusion’s my main problem. In fact, it’s the one main problem for us all, because illusion does us down. It’s true: Blokes are narked that their bosses turn out to have feet of clay. Birds go sour realizing their lover isn’t exactly the handsome film star they’d imagined. Sometimes an illusion becomes an essential part of life; I’ve told you about Lily loving Patrick. She pretends that his womanlike behavior is just a passing phase. Illusion. It catches you out.

My own illusion in joining the fairground was multiple-wrongth. I’d assumed that a traveling fair is jolly, colorful, gay—wrong. It’s a million laughs a minute—mistake.

Being with Francie meant free journeying… oh dear. Very wrong.

We hit the pitch midafternoon, a big grassy field rimmed by hedges. I was woken by Betty shaking me and saying to come and help. The fair had to be up by seven. After only a cup of tea I slogged with a gorilla called Big Chas and his mate Ern erecting boardwalks and canvases, hauling generators and winching struts and wooden walls. I fetched and carried. Francie wrapped my hands in oily cloths to keep me going. As the fairground took shape I began to peter out, so they put me on netting the dodgem cars. God did great making mankind, but He was all thumbs when He came to antique dealers. I felt useless.

By seven o’clock, parts of the fairground were in action. Customers were strolling among us. Lights came on as generators throbbed. The sideshows were first off, rifle stands, darts for goldfish, chestnuts, hot dogs, an eastern fantasy show with burning torches and seductively moving bellies, quoits for ringing mystery prizes, the whole gamut. Then children’s carousels, opening hopefully to tinny organolium music ninish.

Dodgems, the Giant Caterpillar, the Giant Wheel, and the Great Cavalry Ride (wooden horses) began about eleven.

“Bylaws make us close at midnight,” Big Chas rumbled when I scraped enough breath to ask if we ever pack in for slumber. He was grinning at me with poisonous good cheer, the moron. He and Ern were pestilentially happy, singing hymns while we worked. “Quite a decent crowd, Lovejoy, eh?”

Meek with exhaustion and self-pity, I reeled obediently on, toting dat barge and liftin dat bale among the fairground’s bright pandemonium. Once Betty brought me a bowl of mushy peas when I was halfway up a perilous wooden structure trying to bolt some huge planks to something else, God knows what, among a tangle of great wet ropes.

The din of these music engines sounds positively melodious from a distance, but you try dangling among their pipes screwing bits together and you’re deafened and blinded.

That Big Chas and Ern were alongside happily warbling Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos did little to ease my bitterness.

Oddly, you miss hell when it stops. I was spread on a rain-soaked canvas a million miles up in the night sky near Andromeda when silence struck so suddenly I nearly slid off from shock. Blearily I looked around. Our Zoom Star had stopped careering through its demented ellipse. Whole banks of bulbs plunged painfully into dark. Quietness returned to the land. Thank God for bylaws.

“Finish that rope and we’re done, Lovejoy,” Ern called up, flashing a krypton lamp and warbling, “Lead, kindly light, amid th’ encircling gloom.” Bloody maniac.

A few minutes later I clambered down. Betty was standing there, neat and prim under her frilly yellow umbrella. “It’s dinnertime. I came for you, Lovejoy.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

She pulled my hand. I stumbled down the trampled lanes between the booths to Francie’s caravan. It seemed full of steam. Dan was wolfing a Matterhorn of spaghetti, his elbows flying. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see how he managed his with that enormous mustache. We said hello. Francie dished up for me, and a littler mound for Betty, who prattled all during dinner, telling Dan and Francie how well I’d done.

“Lovejoy’s trouble should soon be over, Dan,” Francie said. “He’ll sleep in the wagon.”

“What job’ll you do, Lovejoy?” Dan managed between yards of spaghetti. I was narked.

Had I been resting?

“I shouldn’t put him selling tickets,” Betty said. “He swears all the time.”

“Shut it, you,” I said coldly.

“Big Chas said he’s not much use,” the little pest reported.

“I’m the world’s greatest antique dealer,” I informed her.

“You’re hiding from the bobbies. Daddy said.”

Dan thought all this was hilarious, the nut, and fell about laughing. “Do the Wall of Death with me!” Another roll in the aisles. I quite like Dan, ever since he got me that tricycle for Three-Wheel, but you can go off people.

“Stop it, all of you,” from Francie.

So, amid Death-Riders and Sky-Bursters, I was relegated to collecting pennies rolled down a groove in a wooden peg.

Big Chas and Ern laughed themselves stuporous when they heard I was second string on the Roll-a-Penny. Dan kept guffawing as he did his bikes. Ashamed, trying to look like a gruff-voiced lumberjack, I helped with the boards on his Wall of Death.

At noon I thought, sod it, slipped away and phoned Tinker at the White Hart, cascading coins into the greedy slot. Mercifully he’d managed to get only slightly paralytic in the first hour. Tinker’s cough quivered the receiver. I held it a mile away till his voice recovered.

“Where the hell you been, Lovejoy? Everybody’s asking.”

“Who?” I badly wanted to know. That was half the point of being with this wagon train to Utah or wherever.

“Helen. Margaret. That Customs bloke’s bird with the big tits. Jill, the slag. Three-Wheel Archie. Liz Sandwell, wouldn’t mind stuffin’ her. That poofy bleeder’s tart Lily.” He means Patrick. “And yon Scotch bint, arse and legs.”

“Charmingly put, Tinker.” Very little wheat in all this chaff. “What’d Archie want?”

“Dunno. Wouldn’t say.” He waxed indignant. “Interrupted our dominoes down the George, the burke.”

Archie dicing with death there. “Dutchie back yet?”

“Nar. Don’t like his neffie barker, that Dobson.”

“Yeh, yeh.” Tinker’s likes and dislikes can get you down. I thought a minute, the delay costing another fortune in the coin box. I heard a gust of renewed hubbub as the taproom door swung. Voices shouted hello, one falsetto. That’d be Patrick making his entrance.

“Tinker. Tell Archie I say to pass the message on. I’ll ring the Spread Eagle after midnight.” I added with brutal calm, “And get going or it’s no beer money.”

That set him coughing from worry, so I hung up. Leaving the phone, I had an idea.

Why not look around for antiques where I was, treat it like an antiques sweep through the countryside? That at least might pay my way and rescue me from the dreaded Rolla-Penny. I walked back to the fairground whistling.

« ^ »

—— 7 ——

I’m one of those whose mind is ablaze in the dawn. It fires again going on for midnight.

In between, though, my intellect becomes a rubbishy zero. During the daytime I just walk among mankind for the sake of appearances. It is very necessary, because in our dark East Anglian villages they start sharpening up long oaken stakes if a neighbor seems too nocturnally inclined. This afternoon, however, I was a ball of fire.

Betty ran me an errand, three dozen large sheets of yellow paper and a box of crayons.

Between customers I made strikingly inept posters. There were six arguments with folk convinced their coins had rolled to victory; I gave in and paid up, to the derision of the entire fairground. By five o’clock I’d done thirty posters. Francie took over with Betty while I literally ran about the town stapling my posters to telegraph poles and bus shelters. I got so carried away, I even paid a baker’s shop my last quid to put one in their window. It read:

AT THE FAIRGROUND NOW!!!