The Tartan Sell

CHRISTYS AND SOTHEBIES

JOINT OFFICIAL GENUINE

ANTIQUE ROAD SHOW!!!

Expert Free Appraisal of Household Objects,

Paintings, Pottery, Furniture, Jewelry, Other Items!

All Valuations Free

As Seen on TV.

Then underneath, in the neatest painting I could manage: This Genuine Antique Road Show Is Guaranteed

By The Trade Descriptions Act

By Parliamentary Law.

By six-thirty I was breathlessly noshing Francie’s fry-up in her caravan with Dan and Betty. They were curious and asking me what I was up to, which made me maddeningly evasive. Francie got quite irritated.

The posters were quite legal, in that fraudulent way law permits. Near-skating, I’d carefully misspelled the names of the two great London auction houses. The correct name of the BBC’s so-called spontaneous antiques sweep uses the plural: “Antiques.”

Copyright. Make it singular, and it becomes legal. The Trade Descriptions Act simply covers trade, and I’d do the valuations free. At least my own particular road show really would be spontaneous, not a put-up job like all the rest. It was basically the old saying about the Mountain and Muhammad. I’d have to move on with the fair, so I wouldn’t have time to scout the area for junk. Now, the countryside would bring their junk to me.

And they did.

Funny, but that first night I was really nervous. Francie pressed my trousers and jacket, and gave me one of Dan’s least gaudy shirts. A maroon silken scrap poking from my top pocket as an artistic touch. My hair got semi-straightened and painfully I scraped my nails with a borrowed emery. I was neat, an all-time first. Francie bought me some new modern sponge impregnated with shoe-polishing wax to do my shoes. I was delighted, because Cherry Blossom thought that ancient idea up long before the modern fairground was born. Nice to see old friends.

Dan found me a corner in the peas-and-spuds tent, and Big Chas and Ern erected a section of green canvas. To the sound of roaring generators and in the fug of black peas I set up my borrowed rickety trestle and switched on Francie’s anglepoise lamp.

Dan’s best cuff links gleaming at my wrists, my frayed jacket cuffs inturned and my scrubbed face frowning with sincere honesty, I was ready for the world.

Dross, when it comes in a deluge, isn’t really dross. It’s really something else, like snow. Look at snow one way and it’s a nuisance, blocking roads and flooding your socks. Look at it another, and it’s brilliant crystals spun into magical mini-webs up there in the heavens. If nobody’s looking, I always try to catch a snowflake on my tongue, outer space’s holy communion… Where was I?

In this tent, waiting. A whole hour.

Another hour. Eight o’clock.

And a half. I was tormented by the aroma of black peas but determined not to spoil my grand image of the London expert.

Nine-oh-five, and in she came, an old lady with the inevitable brooch. I drew breath.

One thing I’ve learned in this mad game is that sinning with a smile somehow detoxifies the transgression enough to make people want to join in.

“Come in, love,” I said, with a smile. She was the first of the horde that came between then and the midnight closing.

For a start, they brought jars of buttons and boxes of foreign coins. Every house has a jamjarful. God knows why. They fetched christening clothes and mysteriously ornate lenses. They wheeled in complex wooden garden structures. They carried in rusting machinery too heavy to stand on my table. They brought tiny pieces of jewelry, rings, bits of pendants that made my heart weep for the loneliness of it, opera glasses, stair-rod fittings, scent bottles, glass inkwells, old umbrellas… Dross is snowflakes. I was in paradise. Until, that is, Francie took a hand. Women have very decided views on paradise, thinking it bad for morale. In days when I was a terrified believer, women saints never seemed up to much. They didn’t deliver the goods.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Francie announced suddenly, appearing brightly. “Our resident antiques expert will be having his break now, for twenty minutes only. Until resumption, please avail yourself of the fairground’s refreshments at reasonable prices…” The queue groaned.

“Wait, Francie,” I began, but she gripped my arm and said with that steel, “This way, sir.” I was hauled out. “My caravan,” she whispered as we left the tent for the light-starred fairground night.

“Look, Francie,” I said, peeved. “Can’t you wait? And hadn’t you better check Dan’s not around?”

She tutted angrily. “Not that, Lovejoy.”

Abducted by a desirable bird, yet not for rape? Could this be?

There was quite a delegation in the caravan. Dan, Big Chas—but for once not singing hymns, Sidoli, Calamity Sadie the black-rooted blonde from the Wild West Show, Big Jon the Eastern Slave Spectacular’s eunuch with the bad teeth, and silent sexy lone Joan the Devil Rider, who crewed the Ghost Train. And Sidoli’s two unshaven henchmen.

I entered, smiling and pleased they’d gone to all this trouble to express their thanks for my efforts. Dan rose, jabbed furiously at me with a finger like a rail.

“What the frigging hell do you think you’re frigging playing at, Lovejoy?”

My grin felt like biscuitware. This was no congratulation party. I’d been summoned before the Supreme Soviet.

“Lovejoy the crowd-puller,” I said, narked.

That made him worse. “Explain, Francie.”

“Priced and advised on twenty-eight items,” Francie said.

“Grass,” I accused, quite pleasant.

“Sod the list, Dan,” Sidoli said. He had one of those stiletto-and-alcove accents, sowed dee leest, Dane.

“There was some very collectible stuff,” I defended, narked. “One bird brought a near-undetectable Sisley copy. And a millefiori glass bowl, 1870. It’ll fetch—”

“Fetch!” Dan barked. He was having a hard time not clouting me. He was still in his spangled waistcoat from his death ride, all hair and brawn. “Fetch? Who for, Lovejoy?”

“For…” Ah. They were worried about the money. “For the punters,” I admitted.

“Any ideas on making it pay us?” Big Chas asked, and sang a phrase, “Each other’s wants may we supply…”

“Shut that row, Chas,” from Sidoli, obviously first pecker.

I said, “Is that what’s bothering you?”

Sidoli’s face darkened. “Don’t bait me, Lovejoy.”

Dan came between us, placating but clearly worried. I realized that to the fairground I was his and Francie’s responsibility.

Francie spoke up. “Sid. Lovejoy’s quite serious. He doesn’t think much of money. It’s old things. Antiques.”

They all stared at me as though I’d just dropped from Saturn. Joan’s eyes penetrated my anxiety. I’d never seen such gray eyes. Steady, still. Ethereal, almost.

“Not care for money?” Sidoli said. “He crazy? He’s making it on the side.” Own eee say-ert, in his exotic syllables.

“Let Lovejoy talk. Please,” Francie pleaded.

“I feel on trial, Francie. What’s the charge?”

Francie said, “If some of the things you valued were so desirable, Lovejoy, say why you didn’t buy them.”

There was silence. Then I said, ashamed, “Because I’m broke, love.”

I’d gone red. Dan looked at Francie, who glared a typical female told-you-so. Sidoli drew breath for more threats, said nothing. Glances exchanged. Despairingly I decided to help.

“There was a silver Taureg ring I could have got for a couple of quid,” I said. It’s hard to suppress enthusiasm. I found myself rattling on, smiling at the memory. “An original Waterman fountain pen, the very first sort—the bloke would have let us have it for a go on the rifles. A pair of silver-and-glass cosmetic powder cylinders, late Victorian. They come in pairs, one for powdering each glove, see? And…”

Sidoli raised a hand. “Shtope, Loof-yoy.” Lovejoy stopped.

In the painful silence that ensued we were all thinking, some of us thoughts quite different from the rest. Everybody shuffled, eyes avoiding mine. Except for that level pair belonging to Joan.

“How many items could you’ve made something on, Lovejoy?” Dan said eventually. The assembled company leaned forward.

“Sooner or later? Ten. Three, if you mean at the next reasonable-sized town.” I spend my life being ashamed of myself. It’s another of my unpaid full-time jobs.

Sidoli gave a low moan. Calamity Sadie uttered one grievous sob. The rest exhaled despair and gin fumes.

Francie spoke to the row of somber faces. I swear three of them were in surgical shock.

She said quietly, “I told you he was honest, even if he is stupid. You wouldn’t listen.”

“Here,” I began indignantly, but Sidoli’s hand lifted to shtope me.

Big Chas had cheered up. “So we must hymns of welcome sing in strains of holy joy.”

“Are you sure that’s right?” I asked Chas. “Isn’t it: And we…?”

Big Chas frowned. “You sure, Lovejoy? It’s the Instantis adventum Deum, isn’t it, where—”

“Ask Ern,” I said helpfully. “It’s Hymns Ancient and Modern.”

“He’s off his frigging head,” Sidoli screamed. “Right! That does it! Francie, you pick a helper to put up the money and rig a punter system.”

Francie examined the faces. “Big Chas,” she decided.

“No,” Sidoli ruled. “Enough hymns in this fairground.” Eeen eess foyergron.

“I will,” Joan said quietly. Her first words all that session. Maybe all year.

“Right,” Sidoli said brokenly. He had his face in his hands. “Now get him out.” Dan jerked his head. I left.

Within half an hour the new system was operating perfectly. By that is meant that the poor public were being robbed blind. Situation normal.

In case you ever take your Sheraton cabinet to one, here are the hallmarks of the Great Antique Road Show Con Trick:

You are put into a queue and given a number (“to make sure of your place…”). The

“expert” values your great-granddad’s Crimean War medals, and off you go. Maybe he’ll even scribble the valuation on your number. As you leave, you’ll be approached by somebody apparently from the public—in the queue, just arriving, just leaving—who will say that his uncle/brother/auntie/granddad just happens to collect medals. And he’ll offer you about a quarter of the valuation marked on your number. “Good heavens,”

you cry, recoiling. “Certainly not! They’re worth four times that!” With great reluctance, the chap ups his offer, and finally, in considerable distress, offers you the sum named by the expert. You’d be a fool to refuse, right? Because the great London expert’s just valued them, right? So you sell your granddad’s medals and go on your way rejoicing with the gelt.

And the passerby takes the medals, grinning all over his crooked face. Why the grin?

Because he’s the so-called expert’s partner. The “expert” of course grossly undervalued your medals. To make it worth their while, the average markdown (i.e., underestimate) must be what crooks call “thirties.” That is, they’ll never pay more than thirty percent of the current auctionable value, not for anything. Anything higher than that is going dangerously close to a fair market price, you see.

Francie used Betty, in a little colored stumper’s booth, to give out the numbered tickets.

She herself scraped the punters, as the saying is, with two youngsters hastily borrowed from the electric generators. Joan, as she’d promised, put up the money, silently fetching the bundle of notes from her caravan in a grocery basket. She gave me her transfixing stare from those opal-gray eyes, and returned to her Devil Riding. I said thank you, nodded to Betty on her perch, and we were off.

Some things ruin pride. I told myself this crookery was all in a good cause, the preservation of Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. That and safely heading north to meet Shona McGunn. But I didn’t feel pleased with myself and my progress any more. Like I said not long since, everybody lusts. I only wish we knew what for.

« ^ »

—— 8 ——

I’m not the only fraud in and around antiques. Look at names, for instance.

“Dresden china” is really a descriptive term. The truth is there never was a porcelain factory at Dresden. The famed Royal Saxony porcelain factory started in 1709 was a distance away, at Meissen. The patron was King Augustus the Strong, whose domain took in Poland and Saxony, which is why the so-called “Dresden” mark is actually his AR

Augustus Rex monogram. There’s a further truth, too: They weren’t up to much at the beginning, mostly copying styles and adopting colors from the more sophisticated Chinese. This is why the early stuff looks eastern—robes on the figures, stiff-looking mandarins and clumsy attendants. Artistically they’re dud, not a patch on the later stuff.

But it goes big among collectors and dealers because it’s rare. The modern dementia for rarity’s a pathetic revelation of how little we know. I mean, this pen’s rare because I made it myself from hawthorn, not another like it in the world, but it’s still not worth a bent groat. Cynics say “Dresden china firstly copied Chinese, secondly Venetian, and after that anybody,” but it’s harsh criticism because once Joachim Kändler arrived about 1730, they really took off. His figures are lively original objects you never tire of: pretty ladies in farthingales and yellow-lined cloaks, hussars, dancers.

The night we left Penrith I sat mesmerized long after the fairground closed and the folk had all gone. I’d bought a broken porcelain figure of a Harlequin. He was seated on a white stump in his checkered costume and grinning mask. Black cap in one hand, the other to hold what had once been a jug, now broken off and lost. A junk bloke had lugged in a great wooden box of assorted porcelains and slammed it on the table.

“Fifty quid the lot, mister,” he said. “Good and bad.”

“For a flyer, yes.”

Without looking, I’d humped the box to the floor, got Francie to pay him. My chest was clamoring like Easter Sunday. Something pure and thrillingly antique lurked down among the clag. It was the Harlequin, when I looked. Harlequins are the most vigorous of Kändler’s porcelains, these and dancing ladies and waistcoated gentlemen. They were often in pairs, but one swallow does make a summer.

“The show’s pulling up, Lovejoy.” Carol and Mike ran the peas-and-mash booth, a noisy homely couple with their six spherical children. Carol had an idea it might advertise her grub if the antiques expert was seen dining off her elegant edibles. “There’s a bowl and a brew-up for you.”

“Oh. Right. Ta.”

As the crews fell on the fairground and began dismantling it, I had the pasty and peas while evaluating the haul. A piteously worn slender wedding ring with the thick broad gold band that Victorians called the keeper ring, to be worn distal to the wedding ring and prevent its loss. There was an old love letter some young woman had told me was her granny’s, and that she needed money for her baby… Her boyfriend, a flashy nerk with gold teeth and a giant motorbike, had waited outside. I’d paid up without a second thought.

“Lovejoy.” Francie was there, with Joan. And Sidoli, and his two stalwart lads off the electric generators. They still hadn’t shaved. “Sid wants to know what the take is.”

“Take?” I said blankly. “You mean gelt? Nowt.”

“No money?” Sidoli’s lads seethed, leaned in.

“Let him tell you, Sid,” Francie said. “I’ve seen Lovejoy work before.”

“What you pay for this?” Sidoli pointed to the letter.

I shrugged. “Fiver. Can’t remember.”

Sidoli paled. “Can’t even remember?”

“He’s been had,” the slinkiest lad said. He held a length of metal rod. “It was a bird, crying poverty. She was dressed to the nines. With a bike bloke in leather. Stank of booze, both of them. She told Lovejoy the tale. He paid her, not a word. They went off laughing.”

“You’re a trusting sod, Mr. Sidoli.” I’m not keen on sarcasm, but it has its uses. This time it stopped him signaling his two nephews to annihilate me. “No need to read the letter. Just glance. It’s in two alphabets. Called ‘messenger writing’—a letter within a letter. Sort of secret code. The young couple who brought it had made the story up, granny’s love letter and all that. Messenger writing of that style was popular during the Great Civil War—sieges, politics, family conflicts, elopements, heaven-knows-what. The subject will determine the price. But 1642, or I’m not me.”

“How much about?” Sidoli asked.

“Twenty quid, maybe more.”

“The percentage’ll reduce the loss, Sid,” Francie encouraged.

“Sooner or later,” Sidoli moaned. “That’s what this idiot said. His very words.” His voice rose to a scream. “The loss is tonight! It rains two days, people stay home and don’t come to the fair! And he’s got a box of old pots.”

“Francie told me about your loss rate,” I said, rising and stretching. “You can forget it this pitch.” That stilled the galaxy. “One of those ’old pots’ will cover you this stop.”

“Jesus,” Sidoli gasped. “Is true?” Eeass threw?

“Yes, Sid,” Francie said. “Lovejoy’ll be right.”

Joan spoke. “Profit or not, it’s my stake, Sid,” she announced quietly. “I have the say.

Give him a week.”

Sidoli was staring into the box with awe. “One of these is worth…? Which?”

Big Chas came and shouted, “Hey. Nobody striking the show or are you going to stand gossiping all night?” And he sang, “Through the night of doubt and sorrow onward goes the pilgrim band…”

“Coming,” I said, peering out at the rain past him. I felt all in, drew breath, and stepped out to join the gang, leaving Sidoli to stew in his own explanations.

We finished bottling up, as they call it, about five in the morning. I spelled Dan and Francie alternately, one hour in three off for a shuddery slumber in Francie’s wagon.

Ern normally spelled Dan, but this stop he and Big Chas were among the rear gang who would clear the generators and heavy machinery and haul on after us by eleven.

Our next pitch was near one of the Lancashire mill towns. I was relieved as we bowled in, because it meant grub and a kip before the rear guard arrived and we’d have to start erecting the fair all over again. After Francie’s fry-up I went straight out and did my poster stint.

When I returned, the cauliflower sky mercifully clearing into a geographical blue, the camp was still. Everybody was kipping. I made my way over the heath to the wagon hoping my blanket hadn’t got damp during the journey, when somebody called my name quietly. Joan was sitting on her caravan steps.

“Coffee, Lovejoy?”

I hesitated. “Well, ta, but I was hoping to sleep my head.”

Joan’s gray stare did not waver. “There’s room for that.” She rose and opened her door.

“Well, actually, Joan,” I began, but she’d already gone inside, so there was nothing else for it. It’s churlish to refuse an offer that’s kindly meant, isn’t it? My old gran used to say that. “Well, if you’re sure…” No answer again, so I stepped inside saying, “Just a cup, then.”

All that month we zigzagged up the country, moving from industrial towns to moorland markets. It was a slog. One heaven-sent pitch was six whole days long, the rest only three or four. The distances were less tiring than striking and pitching, because once you’re on the road, that’s it.

As fairs go, I learned, we were quite a respectable size. Some deal which Sidoli had pulled off meant we stuck to the eastern slice of the country except for parts of Lancashire and bits of the north. I did well and started sending stuff down to auction houses in the south. Of course I used the long-distance night hauliers in the road caffs, mentioning Antioch’s name. Some items I sold locally practically the next day, sometimes in the same town. One I sold to a town museum. It was only a dented lid off an enamel needle case, but the curators went mad when they saw it: a Louis XVI piece showing a sacrificing nymph. They immediately identified it as Degault from its en grisaille appearance (just think gray). It had chimed at me from inside a leather-covered snuffbox—some Victorian goon had ruined a valuable antique needle case to make a dud. I ask you. God knows what they’d done with the case’s body, but there’s a fortune going begging near Preston if anybody’s interested.

By the third stop, tenth day or so, the profit was trickling in. Antique dealers live in a kind of monetary paraworld, always owing or being owed by others. It became nothing unusual for a dealer to wander in, ask around for me, and then shell out a bundle of notes in payment for some item a colleague had received in the south a couple of nights earlier. Often they’d take away one of my items just purchased from the never-ending queue of punters. I always took a quick sale, following the old maxim: First profit’s best, so go for it.

Halfway through the month, the income became a stream, and Sidoli offered me a regular pitch. And more. His percentage was the standard fee from stallholders plus a tenth of the take. For this he did bookings, the pitches, argued shut-out arrangements with other fairmasters, dealt with the local councils, and hotly denied liability when people blamed us for anything. Or, indeed, everything. He brought three old silent geezers in dark crumpled suits who only tippled the wine and listened, and his two menacing nephews.

We talked all one long cold night in Joan’s caravan, them smoking cigars in my face and poisoning me with cheap red wine. His two nephews bent metal pipes in the background, nodding encouragingly. But I declined. I had a job on, I explained. This made everybody frown, which terrified me into useful lies.

“It’s a matter of honor, you see.”

“Ah,” said Sidoli, interested. “You kill someone, no?”

“No,” I explained. “I’ve certain obligations…”

“Ah.” He beamed at this and to my alarm signaled for another bottle. He was desperately inquisitive but I tried to seem noble and uptight and he went all understanding. “But after you have shot this pig and all his brothers, and his father—

assuming he had one…?” The nephews chuckled, lightheartedly bent more pipes.

“After,” I promised, “it’ll be different.”

“Excellent!” He poured more wine. “Lovejoy, I have heard of your police record. Very formidable.”

“Er, that’s all lies.”

“Certo,” Sidoli agreed politely. “Police. The Law. Judges. All are complete liars. Now.”

He leaned forward. It was the Joseph Wright lamplit scene straight out of the Tate Gallery. “My fair will pitch the Edinburgh Festival.”

I looked at him blankly. “Are we allowed?” Francie’d told me the arrangement: Our fair stopped short and our rival Bissolotti did the Festival.

“Ah,” Sidoli said, doing that slow shrugging chairbound wriggle Mediterranean folk manage to perfection. “Well, yes. I did promise. But, Lovejoy, it’s a question of money.”

This sounded like more bad news. “Er, Mr. Sidoli. Won’t the other mob be, er, furious?”

He spread his hands in pious expiation. “Is it my fault if Bissolotti lacks Christian charity?”

“No,” his nephews said. In the pause the three mute mourners shook their heads. We were absolved.

“Er, well, no,” I concurred obediently. “But—”

“No buts, Lovejoy.” He patted my hand. “I misjudged you. I thought you a man of no honesty, a man only interested in those pots. Woman’s things. Now”—he smiled proudly—“I hear you are a multiple killer, who fooled even Scotland Yard. You slew a lorry driver. With your own hands in an ocean you drown an enemy. It is an honor to have so great a murderer, when we fight Bissolotti. His people are animals.”

Some lunatic scientist once proved that headaches are actually useful. He should share mine.

“Eliminate Bissolotti,” a nephew prophesied.

“More wine, Lovejoy?” Sidoli invited. “I say nothing about you in Joan’s caravan.” He smiled fondly. “And call me Sid.” Cow-all meey Seed.

“Thanks, Seed,” I said. Out of the frigging frying pan into Armageddon. Headache time.

« ^ »

—— 9 ——

Better explain Sidoli’s crack about Joan before going on. Joan was the most reserved bird I’ve ever met. Even for a sensitive bloke like me she was a puzzle: thirty-two or so, smallish, hair permanently fading from mousy, face unremarkable in daylight, and eyes that lovely gray. She’d be what other women call plain, except the first night I saw her by candlelight, and then I knew. Her beauty hit me like a physical blow.

We’d pitched that night after Joan gave me tea and a liedown, me working with Big Chas and Ern. Joan had asked if I wanted to use one of the spare bunks in her caravan.

I checked with Francie, who said it’d be fine. Betty asked if Joan would be my mummy now. Dan fell about and slapped his thighs. After the midnight dousing I went over to Joan’s caravan and knocked. She called me to come in.

For her devil-riding on the Ghost Train she wears a crash helmet with horns and a bone-and-spangle costume, bat wings, and a forked tail. Sparks shoot from her head and her suit belches colored smoke and radiates a green fluorescence. Because of this she always has her hair in a tight bun and flattened on her head. It was the only way I’d seen her.

The caravan was in darkness, except for slits of wavering yellow light showing from behind a cross curtain. Hesitantly I called, “Joan?” and she said to come through.

Making plenty of noise in case—she might after all be shacking up with Big Chas or somebody—I coughed and pulled the curtain slowly aside. The sight caught at my breath. Her face was looking obliquely back at me from the dressing mirror. A single white candle in an old pewter candlestick, the only illumination, stood to one side. Her hair, enormously long, hung down her back to her narrow waist. It was now a lustrous brown, even russet. Her skin was smooth, her lashes long and dark. She wore an old lace nightdress—some would have said wrong by reason of its age, but not me. In the mirror’s frame she was a living Gainsborough.

“Sorry about the light,” she said.

“Eh?” I thought: It spoke.

“My father was strong on the right light for makeup,” she said calmly, doing something to her face with folded tissues from a jar.

“You’re beautiful,” I heard myself say, to my alarm.

Her so-gray gaze returned to the mirror for a quizzical second, then she nodded slightly. “If the beholder says so, Lovejoy.”

That was the start of what Sidoli meant. From then on I, well, lived in Joan’s caravan.

Francie still scraped the queue from my Christys and Sothebies Great Official Genuine Antique Roadshow, and Joan still banked it. But henceforth Joan also banked me as well. I owned up to little Betty that, yes, Joan and me were family.

The night before we hit Edinburgh was the week working up to the Festival. The city was already bubbling, teeming with actors spilling over into street theater. We pitched a mile or so south of the center. All the world and his wife had turned up. Bands, orchestras, dancers, artists, poets, jugglers, the lot. You had to have your wits about you or you found yourself frantically hip-hopping among bedecked Morris teams. Sidoli was beside himself with glee. “Bissolotti is late!” he exulted, frantically exhorting us to greater speed as we threw the fair into one glittering noisy mass.

By now Sidoli’s advance agent—a near-legendary figure called Romeo who got ballocked every time our cavalcade rested long enough for Sidoli to reach a telephone—

had learned of my road show, and was papering the towns for me two days before we hove in. This made life much easier.

Tinker did his part of the antiques scam, fixing sales, and organizing transport through Antioch. He was getting a regular screw through money drafts—essential, because he can’t even remember his name when he sobers up. Get him sloshed and instantly he’s the Memory Man. It was my plan to jump ship at Edinburgh, preferably before Bissolotti’s “animals” cruised in and wanted their rightful share of the Festival crowds.

Also, Maslow would be very, very cross indeed if I blackened his district’s reputation up here among the dour provosts of jolly old Edinburgh. Sidoli had as good as admitted that he himself would take any blame, but from vast experience I knew only too well who’d carry the can.

So my plan was to do a moonlight as soon as I’d done one night’s pitch, then head off north to net Shona McGunn. In any case, this was as far north as the fair would travel.

For me it had outlived its usefulness.

I found a phone in a pub near the little green and reached Tinker contentedly imbibing his daily swill in the White Hart. He sounded mournful.

“Lovejoy? Here, where the bleedin’ ’ell are you?”

“Mind your own business.” I was a bit sharp with him. The White Hart’s never without a mob of dealers. All along I’d been ultragalactic careful, not wanting neffie people following me with unkindness in their hearts. I wanted no baddies lurking to catch me when I leapt from the fairground. “Ready? Here’s the list of stuff I’m sending during the night. Most to Brum and London; a few bits and pieces to you.”

“Yeh, Lovejoy, but—”

“Shut it and listen.” Patiently I read him my list, adding which dealers to try and minimum prices to accept. “Right?”

“No, Lovejoy.” The old burke sounded really down. “It’s Three-Wheel. Remember?”

For a second I had to rack my brains. Of course. I’d told Tinker to phone me Archie’s message. It seemed so long ago. Days, weeks even. I felt a hand close on my chest.

“They did his motor, Lovejoy.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Smashed it to smithereens. Windows, bodywork, set fire to the inside. Some boat geezer down the estuary saw the smoke and wirelessed the fire brigade.” Long pause, me mechanically feeding the slot coins. “Lovejoy?”

“How’s Archie?”

“Knocked down on his trike hurrying home. He wuz at the auction when they brung the news. But he’s only a little bleeder. He rolled clear, scooted through the hedge. Says he saw nothing. Not bad hurt.”

“Did the Old Bill have any luck?”

He snorted. “Them idle sods. Archie’s trike’s a write-off, Lovejoy. Sorry, like. Archie says now he never had any message for you at all.”

“Any chance of finding out what his news was?”

“You think I’m not trying?” He was very aggrieved. “You’re a grumpy swine, Lovejoy.

I’m sweating my balls off while you’re…”

We slang-matched abuse for another costly minute before going over the payment—

part into Sidoli’s numbered account, part into Joan’s with my commission. I told him to pass the word to Jo somehow that I’d be trying to reach her during the early hours.

“She won’t talk with you, Lovejoy,” he was warning me as I rang off. I’d had enough of people explaining why everybody else was even more narked than me. I felt it was time I began to be justifiably narked instead, and decided to work out a scheme.

My scheme was temporarily interrupted by World War III. The Bissolotti convoys arrived that night.

Joan’s Ghost Train wasn’t due to open until the following noon, as was usual with the bigger rides. They drank too much electricity, needed extravagant cabling up. And Joan, being nominally without a feller, so to speak, depended on the main fairground: She paid her percentage to the fairmaster and received help with striking and pitching from Sidoli’s mob, hefty blokes. All except Big Chas, and Ern, his toothy walnut-faced mate, seemed to be Sidoli’s nephews, and dined at Mrs. Sidoli’s tent.

After fixing the antiques shipments with Tinker I went to Joan’s caravan. She had some stew thing frying or whatever it does. She was a good cook. Once, some days previously, I’d asked her what was worrying her. She’d smiled beatifically and said seriously, “Would you hate lentil soup?” which made me realize you can be somebody’s lover for a million years and never really know her.

“Wotcher, love,” I said, coming in. “Sid’s ordered no break tonight. We’re to open at eight in the morning.”

“Big Chas and Ern will be on the Caterpillar in an hour, Lovejoy.”

“Eh? That’s back to front.” We normally got the Little Giant Wheel and the generators centered first after the sideshows.

“Sid’s ordered.” She placed an aromatic dish for me and sat watching as I made to dine. I waited a bit. She was alongside me, elbows on the table, gray eyes and soft skin shining in the candlelight, like the first time I’d…

“Here, love. Are you not having any?”

“Not yet.” She sprinkled pepper on my grub, watching me nosh. This was typical Joan, guessing condiments for you.

“And you’re not in your working clothes,” I observed, mouth full. “You seem…”

“Ready for bed,” she completed. She was smiling but not in a way I liked.

“What’s up, chuck?” I said.

She gave that curt nod at my hands. It was a gesture I recognized and had come to love. It meant: Carry on, my reply will be along in a minute. Obediently I did, but sussing out the caravan. Joan’s home. It was her place. Where the outside wheels had stopped for the night didn’t matter. Inside, the candlelight, the soft furnishings, the old photos of her parents who’d started the Ghost Train, the romance books she read in quiet times… I stilled, waited. This feeling is one I mistrust. In antiques there are enough terrible risks without heartache.

“You’re leaving tonight, Lovejoy, aren’t you?”

How women do it beats me. I’d not said a word. “Maybe, love. I’ve a job on.”

That abrupt nod. “On the door mantel,” she said quietly. “I’ve guessed how much you’re due. Not wanting to ask Francie direct.”

There was an envelope on the shelf over the speer. “Look, Joan, love,” I tried uncomfortably, but she shushed me with her other characteristic gesture, a tiny handshake with a blink.

“Don’t, Lovejoy.” Her eyes climbed from the table to mine. “I’ve no illusions. Life is a lone business, isn’t it. Nobody’s permanent. We’re like places.”

Places? “Will you tell Sidoli?” That’d stop my flight for certain.

“There’s no way of keeping a… partner if he’s going anyway. Even the best affair is only half a film. You get the movie up to the interval.”

I could have clouted her for making me feel bad. Women always blame me. Why should I be the one who ends up with this rotten bloody sense of being ashamed? She put her hand on mine gingerly.

“Don’t feel like that, darling. It’s nobody’s fault.”

I pulled my hand away. “I wasn’t feeling like anything,” I said bluntly. “Silly cow.”

She smiled properly then. Her eyes were wet. “No, Lovejoy. Of course not.” She rose, took my hand, pulled me to the curtained alcove.

“Look, love,” I said weakly. “There won’t be time…”

She slipped a breast into my hand, then slowly raised her arms to shed her gown. “Yes, there is, Lovejoy,” she said quietly. “It’s tomorrow there won’t be time.”

Past one o’clock on a cold frosty morning, fed, loved, and enriched in material ways, I left Joan’s caravan and started work with Big Chas and Em hauling the cables for the generators.

“You’re late, Lovejoy,” Em said, grinning. We worked by paraffin lamps until the electric’s set. “I worried you’d miss the scrap.”

“Scrap?” I ragged up my hands, took hold of the cable.

Big Chas sang piously astride the generator, “Mighty are your enemies, hard the battle ye must fight.”

Over the other side of the green, strange wagons were pulling in. Even the vehicles looked sullen, hateful, as their engines revved and their headlights swathed us.

“Bissolotti?” I croaked nervously, thinking, hellfire. The new convoy was forming a crescent. The green was on a slope, and we were below them. Even as I paused to look, another set of headlights rummaged the darkness to our right. “Hell, there’s a lot of them.”

“Big mob, Bissolotti’s,” Chas agreed cheerfully. “What weapons do you usually use in a rumble, Lovejoy?”

My legs, mainly, I thought shakily. Or a Jaguar. I’m not proud.

“I heard he’s a gun man,” Ern said.

Those lunatics were actually pleased at the notion of an all-out battle with Bissolotti’s. I felt sick. This wasn’t my scene. A peaceful fairground, yes. But a military column tearing to a private El Alamein, a thousand times no. Soon I’d go for say a pee, and vanish.

For about an hour we worked on. Every few minutes I sussed out the growing arc of lights about the green. Bissolotti’s wagons began to pitch. We were only a hundred yards apart.

“They’re pitching,” I said apprehensively to Ern.

“Aye, Lovejoy,” he called laconically.

“Will we share the pitch?” I was hopeful.

Big Chas roared with laughter from somewhere under the Caterpillar’s railed wheels.

“Lovejoy’s worried there’ll be no rumble,” the idiot bellowed.

“Don’t worry, Lovejoy,” Ern said consolingly and caroled, “Ye that are men now serve him against unnumbered foes…” Big Chas joined in the hymn. I worked on, sane in a world of lunatics.

They hadn’t finished that particular hymn when negotiations began between the two fairmasters. Bissolotti with ten blokes met Sidoli near where we worked. Our fairmaster also had ten nephews. They stood in two cagey crescents, the bosses talking vehemently for quite a time before our lot returned, chatting animatedly.

“Ready, Lovejoy?” Sidoli called. Ray-dee, Luff-yoyee? He’d caught a glimpse of me on the Caterpillar bolting the hub’s canopy roof. “You get your wish!”

“Great,” I called back. That one wobbly word took three swallows.

“Come on, then,” Big Chas said. “Fight the good fight.”

Men were gathering into small groups from our wagons. The pitch was falling silent as the hammering and clattering ceased. Our people were talking. Groups formed. Tactics were being discussed. It was eerily happy, and here was I frightened out of my skin.

Madness. Sidoli was among a cluster of paraffin lanterns lecturing strategy. Heads nodded. Some maniac was dishing out steel rods. I thought, for God’s sake.

“Just finish this, Chas.”

“Won’t let a scrap interrupt work, eh?”

He and Ern left to join the nearest group, laughing and shaking their heads. “He’s a cool bugger,” Ern said admiringly.

“Good night, lads,” I muttered. I checked the scene once more, then slid off the wood on the dark side, nearest the enemy camp. “And good luck with the war.”

Across the damp grass the Bissolotti mob’s lanterns were wavering as their men assembled. Behind, our own lamps showed where clusters of blokes were being positioned. I crouched indecisively near a pile of wooden facades from the Caterpillar.

What were the rules for a rumble? From what little I’d learned, fairs were pretty orderly along time-honored lines. Maybe they were as set in their ways when it came to all-out warfare. Apprehensively I darted a few yards towards the Bissolotti vehicles, then hesitated. Surely the thing was to avoid both gangs, never mind the wagons?

Our own pitch was a circular layout on the green’s downslope. Ahead and above stood the Bissolotti crescent, all flickering lamps and din. A wall, terraced houses, and some sort of iron railing formed the perimeter where streets began. There were three exits for vehicles, but for an enterprising slum-trained coward, spiked railings were hardly an obstacle.

Suddenly the lights in the Bissolotti camp vanished.

In ours, there arose a subdued murmur, then somebody called a nervous order and the glims doused here and there until Sidoli’s pitch was black. I heard Sidoli yell. A hubble of voices responded, one panicky shout stilled by a threat. We’d been caught napping.

Only a sort of air-pallor from the nearby street let you see a damned thing. I went clammy, cursing myself for not having escaped sooner. If it hadn’t been for Joan’s loving farewell I’d be miles away by now. Bloody women. No wonder I’m always in a mess.

Somebody shouted, “Fan out, lads,” and somebody else shouted, “No. Two lots. Over there…” Then a third, “Bunch up. Get in line…” So much for Sidoli’s confidence. His men were a shambles. I began to move instinctively to my right. I’d once been in a real army and recognized only too well the authentic hallmarks of disorder. Time Lovejoy was gone.

I froze in mid-slink. Nearby there was a steady touch of movement. The night air somehow pressed on my face. A hoary old sergeant—a survivor—once told me, “Never effing mind what you frigging see,” he’d said. “Survivors feel. “ So I felt, lay down with my head towards the Bissolotti camp, and stayed still.

A line of men crept past and over me. One boot squelched an inch from my hand. I swear it. The guilty thought came that a true friend would behave like a Roman goose and cackle the alarm. Not me. As soon as the silent line of assaulters had passed I rose and moved tangentially right. No more than forty slunk paces and I came against a giant wagon. I felt my way along its flank. My heart was throbbing. I’d not breathed for a week.

The wagon’s side seemed to go on forever and I cursed Sidoli for a lying swine. He’d represented Bissolotti’s as a small vulgar outfit. If they could afford massive new transformer-generators like this supersize it was no cardboard cutout job. And the chug of new Bissolotti arrivals in the next street showed that enemy reinforcements were at hand.

Smoke. Cigarette smoke. And nearby. Somebody was probably cupping the fag into his palm the way convicts and soldiers do. I’d nearly eeled into them in my fright. I edged beneath the enormous generator wagon and crawled out under the other side. Even then I nearly brained myself by standing up. My shoulder caught on the cab’s open door.

“How much longer?” a man’s voice muttered.

“Five minutes. Then we shout the rest up.”

Hellfire, I thought. There must have been thirty or so in that assault line. Plus those vehicles I’d heard nearby. Sidoli’s fair—not to mention me—was caught between two aggressive mobs. A classic pincer movement. I almost moaned in terror. As soon as the rumble started, Bissolotti’s would switch on every light they possessed. I’d be spotlighted like a prisoner against a wall. That explained the Bissolotti tactic, of lining his wagons facing down the slope towards our pitch.

This wasn’t for me. I lay down and wriggled under the vehicle’s vast bulk. The next wagon was smaller, probably a slab carrier, to transport the wooden facades. I heard two more men muttering by the tailboards, found the driver’s cab of the slabber, and lifted myself up. Somebody said, “What’s that?” as I slipped the gear lever into neutral and the handbrake off. I dropped and crept behind my transformer wagon’s quadrupled rear wheels and wormed towards the front. The slab lorry creaked. Its bulk drifted past.

“Christ. It’s moving.” Somebody ran past, grunting with exertion as he tried to swing into the cab. A man shouted for a torch. Two men cursed. “Over here! Over here!”

I was up and into the transformer’s cabin. A flashlight jumped the gloom. The slab lorry was trundling slowly down the slope, three blokes clinging to its sides and one man already in the cab struggling with the wheel.

Headlights sprang. The green showed brilliantly. I snicked my wagon’s gear and the handbrake, then saw there were no bloody keys. As my vast wagon began to glide down the slope I fumbled desperately with the dashboard, failed to find the wires, crouched and fiddled. The sodding vehicle went faster. I fiddled faster. Somebody yelled. Boots clashed on the door. I dived, clobbered a bloke’s face and he fell off.

Something clanged on the truck. Glass shattered. Men were yelling, running, throwing.

I finally shorted the wires with my teeth as the giant vehicle shuddered and careered down the slope. The engine boomed. I struggled up, cast the headlights, and gave an appalled moan.

It was like a battlefield. The slab carrier had caught some of Bissolotti’s assault men on the green. Two lay strewn. A third was pinned against the Caterpillar’s gearing where the lorry’s front had nuzzled itself to rest. Blokes were tearing about here, there, everywhere. I gunned the engine. Two strange faces appeared, one on the windscreen, I yelled at him in terror, drove crazily to shake him off. They vanished. I jolted round the field, slammed back through the Bissolotti convoy and glimpsed a street lamp in the distance.

Putting the big wagon at the narrow street took courage, or terror. I remember bawling in panic as the wagon thundered through and out into a brightly peaceful main road. A line of waiting fairground lorries to my right, so swing left to traffic lights, green—so on through, to anywhere. Behind was death in that ludicrous war zone.

It’s hard suddenly pretending everything is normal, but I did my best, stuck up in that tall cab and trying to look like I knew what I was driving, where I was going. It was an interminable cruise in a puzzled Edinburgh, until I found a road that finally promised north by following the arrows. I was forty miles away before I stopped shaking.

Telling myself I’d done it, I relaxed and let the road decide what happened next, meekly following the headlights to my fate.

Quiet old life, antiques.

« ^ »

—— 10 ——

Before I invented sex, when the world was flat and weather constant, I had all sorts of ideas. Cycling round the entire country in a record-breaking week; going for gold in mountaineering; discovering uncharted continents; rescuing damsels. A lad does a lot of this daft imagining, never grows out of his dreams. Girls do, but don’t ever realize that the male is often miles away in his silly head, being anointed king of a lost tribe in the Andes or what-not. Women never learn to see us blokes as we actually are, namely incurable dream-spinning romantics, because early in what passes for development women trade perception for appearances. The bird learns that her bloke could only go for Olympic gold in flower arranging. She starts assuming he’s only what he seems—a portly geezer wheezing when tying his shoe. The point I’m making is that people aren’t merely things. Never mind what politicians say. You can gaze at stones and tarmac, rivers and fence posts with complete dispassion if you want. They’re no big deal. But you have to think when you look at people. You have to. If you don’t, you become a robot.

One of my old dreams was knowing every town in the Kingdom, so that if some stranger mentioned a tiny village in, say, the Shetlands, I would casually say, “Ah, yes.

Population eighty-one. Stands on the tributary of…” I failed geography at school.

Dubneath was therefore a mystery.

The big transformer wagon’s petrol ran dangerously low in Clackmannan, though when I got out and inspected its container drums, they showed half full. Perhaps you had to switch to reserve? Anyhow I decided to ditch it, before daylight revealed me in all my glory as the non-secret thief of the known world’s largest fairground transformer-generator. I entered Fife, and drove across Kinross in a stealthy manner in the least inconspicuous of vehicles, with BISSOLOTTI THE FAIRGROUND FOR THE WORLD gaudy on its side. I started admiring myself. After all, it takes skill to nick a thing this big.

Ten miles outside Perth my brain had another megarhythm. Mentally shelving a niggling reminder that my previous brain wave had nearly got me killed in a night riot, I knew I’d now got a winner. Find a reasonably sized transport caff, park my giant wagon, and get a lift into Perth where trains and buses lived, and zoom to find the enigmatic Shona McGunn. No road map in my nicked wagon, of course. Typical.

By dawn I was noshing among the hunched leather shoulders of the night hauliers in a caff near Perth, rather sad at thoughts of leaving my monster.

A walk of three miles along the road when the lorry convoy had departed, and I became a poor motorist whose car had broken down. A kindly motorist gave me a lift to the Perth turnoff, and I got a bus into that lovely city just as the shops opened.

Pausing only to sell a Hudson Bay Co. folding rusty penknife pistol that I’d kept back from Francie—flat horn sides, percussion, two blades—for a giveaway price which still rankles (these 1860-70 collectibles go for twice the average weekly wage nowadays), I phoned the police, anonymously reporting that a Sidoli wagon was ditched in the night caff. Then I got on the train and dozed. I’d got a cold pasty and some rotten crumbly cake I couldn’t control. They fetch tea down the corridor just as you’re on your last legs, so I eventually made it, though weakening fast.

Painful thoughts of Three-Wheel came to me while I nodded on the journey. And Joan’s gray eyes and long-term philosophy—maybe she was the one bird whose perception had made it? And Jo. And Tinker would be bewildered with a score of deals waving uncompleted in the breeze. And poor dead Tipper Noone under the coroner’s hammer.

And yon driver, poor bloke. Naturally, a twinge of fear came with the haze. I’d started the journey north towards Caithness with a whole fairground full of tough allies, and ended it with two fairs bulging with enemies: Sidoli’s for leaving them in the lurch, and Bissolotti’s for, er, borrowing their vehicle.

Not much of a social record, you might say. But I felt that all in all I was entitled to pride. So far I’d reached Sutherland. I was in one piece, and being alive is always a plus. I had money in my pocket, and was heading for a mine of antiques, those precious wonderments whose very existence is proof of something more than the brute Man. And good old Shona knew where they were.

The last part of the journey was by bus. Our little local trains have been abolished in the interest of greater efficiency, so now nobody can get anywhere except by public yak. Dubneath’s version of the yak was a bus carrying smiley basket-toting women and distant-eyed men. Before we bowled into minuscule Dubneath I’d revealed all, grilled by the clever interrogation of a pally little rotund lady. I confided that I was a visiting writer. Not going anywhere in particular, just traveling. And I might look up some possible ancestors… Oh, my own name, yes. That’s what I wrote my poetry under.

What name would that be? “Oh, sorry, love,” I said absently. “McGunn’s the name. Ian McGunn.” Cunning, no?

It was the last bus that day. I was put down in Dubneath. The sea was there in the late evening. It earned a word of praise from me, which pleased my companion, though the little town was poorly lit and somnolent. Bonny place in full day, I supposed. My plump pal was going on to Lybster farther up the coast, but she said there was an inn in Dubneath. “Where,” she added darkly, “folk drink.” We both agreed, tut-tut, sin gets everywhere these days. She’d told me that McGunn was not an uncommon name hereabouts. I said fancy that, and waved the bus off into the night.

The tavern, replete with drinkers, instantly recognized me as a fellow sinner and agreed to put me up. I’d bought a cheap cardboardy case in Perth, plus a skimp of clean clothes, so I could portray respectability. I was so thrilled at myself I offered to pay in advance. A huge meal, and I tottered exhausted to bed in a long narrow room.

Came daylight, I saw that it was Sunday. In that part of the world they go big on the Sabbath. Nothing happens. By that I mean nil. Even the bloody sea gulls didn’t seem to fly, except a couple of backsliders that reveled unrepentantly in the clear air squawking their silly heads off. I walked down the quay, examined the sea. Yep, still there, all the way out to the skyline. Back to the tavern, two streets from the edge of the known world.

The surrounding countryside was uncomfortably close. As long as it stayed loomingly over there and didn’t ride into town to take over, I’d be happy. The shops were closed.

The harbor boats looked at prayer. A few people emerged blinking into daylight, hurried away bowed as if under curfew.

I walked down the quay, Dubneath’s vortex. Two old geezers were there, eyeing the sky. A lone kid fished off a wall. I bade the blokes good morning; they said good morning. A riot. I sat on the harbor wall. Got off after a minute, and walked the streets of the metropolis.

And back.

About eleven a saloon car of baffled tourists—French registration—whined miserably through. It was all happening today in Dubneath.

High noon, and a man strode out with a spyglass, notebook, knees showing above elasticated socks. God, I was overjoyed to see him. We spoke. He was disappointed that I wasn’t a bird watcher. I was disappointed that he was. We parted, him off into the countryside, smiling in happy anticipation. You get these nutters in East Anglia too.

The tavern creaked awake. By that I mean they served up at dinnertime, after which Dubneath plunged back into the twilight zone. Of interest: a few badges, glass-framed, in the taproom, wartime memories now worth enough to redecorate the downstairs rooms; a brass racehorse doorstop of Crowley & Co., Manchester, about 1860—go for these if you’re wanting cheap Victoriana with class, and by the bar mirrors, a trio of little match-strikers. Go for these too: Many pubs have them left over from times when every smoker used unboxed matches. You can get them for a song because pubs hardly change, and people have forgotten what they’re for. The most desirable are German porcelain figurines by Conte and Boehme. A good one, with a humorous inscription, will keep you in luxury for a week. Three should pay for a modest continental holiday.

“You know about those?” I couldn’t help explaining their value to the taverner, a husky bloke called George MacNeish.

“Is that a fact,” he said.

“They’re highly sought after, you see.”

“Aye, but I like the wee things.”

My heart warmed to him. I’m always pleased to hear this. I offered him a drink, but no.

The Sabbath.

A few hours later as I was strolling somewhere, or back, merely waiting for the world to reopen, George called me from the inn steps.

“There’s a body to meet you, Ian.” He waved towards the quay. I felt pleased. A kindness shown, a kindness sown. Swiftly remembering that I was temporarily Ian McGunn, I waved thanks and went down the stone harbor front. A youngish bloke was sitting on the wall. His pipe was unlit. The Sabbath again, I supposed knowingly.

“How do.” I stood a second. “I’m Ian McGunn.”

“Hello,” he said, smiling. “Jamie Innes.”

“Not angling,” I observed, glad.

“Not on Sunday.” He grinned, blue eyes from a tanned young leather face. “You?”

“No. Fish never did me any harm.”

“Hunter? Deer? Nature watcher?” He ran down a list of lethality, earning a constant headshake.

“Ah, well. Poetry. One slim volume, a few here and there in obscure journals.” How obscure only I knew.

“I’m not a very educated man,” he confessed. “But at least I can tell Shona I met you first.”

Shona? “Shona?” I said as blankly as I’m able.

“We’re engaged. She’s a McGunn. She’ll be pleased to meet you, seeing you’ve possible relatives here.” He rose and invited me to accompany him by tilting his head. “You were saying on the bus. Old May Grimmond from Lybster’s a cousin to Mrs. Ross who keeps the shop, who’s related to George MacNeish at the inn, who…”

Until that moment I’d assumed that the Highlands were a large underpopulated expanse of differing counties. Illusions again. Now I could see a strain of blood ties ran strongly round somnolent old Dubneath. What worried me was that here I suddenly was, Ian McGunn, urgently needing an entire clan’s genealogy, addresses, and photographs.

We walked a few hundred yards before Jamie stopped outside a terraced cottage and pushed open a wooden gate. The cottage door was pulled, and a melodious voice said,

“Welcome, Ian McGunn! You’ll stay for tea.”

“Shona,” Jamie introduced. “That beast’s Ranter.” A dog the size of a horse stared at me with less than ecstasy.

“Er, hello,” I said. The impression was swirling blue, gold, yellow, and a smile. The bird, not the dog. “I, er, trust I’m not inconveniencing…”

“Come in, man. Us here waiting and you so long to call I’ve to send Jamie Innes combing the town seeking you out, wandering all the county before setting foot in the house…”

Gasp. “Erm, thanks, er, Shona…” I honestly believe that a woman meeting a man only takes him in piece by piece—eyes, height, age, smile, face. But a man’s different. We take in the complete woman at one swallow. That’s why particular points—

remembering the color of her eyes, for instance—aren’t really important to a man. It’s also why women get very narked, because they assume we use their scoring system. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Shona, and struggled to keep from being too obvious. She was lovely.

The cottage was prepared for action. Linen tablecloth, plates just so. The most formal tea table you ever did see, while Shona swung her long bright hair and spun herself fetching the teapot and piles of sandwiches. She told Ranter to wait outside. It left calmly, giving me a warning glance.

“And what’s this about you in a common lodging like that MacNeish’s tavern, no more than a pub and you not even bothering to knock on a door—” et cetera.

“Give the man a chance, Shona,” Jamie pleaded.

“Aye, well, if he’s come through the south he’ll only be used to them Edinburgh folk…”

Jamie winked. “We blame Edinburgh for giving us all a bad reputation. There’s a joke.

Edinburgh folk tell callers: Welcome—you’ll have had your tea!”

“What did that MacNeish give you for your dinner, Ian?” Shona demanded from the kitchen.

And we were off into woman chat. By sheer skill I managed to keep off my relatives for the whole visit. Shona was lovely in that spectacular way some women are. Jamie Innes obviously worshiped her, laughing appreciatively at her stories of the schoolchildren even though I’m sure he must have heard them all before.

Getting on for six, Shona rose to shoo Jamie away and summoned me to walk her out.

“Time for chapel,” she commanded. “The Innes clan being famous heathens, Jamie doesn’t go, so you’ll walk me down, Ian.”

“Er, if you wish.”

“And while we do,” she said, bright with anticipation, “I’ll exchange tales of the McGunns with you.”

“Shouldn’t I go with Jamie…?” I tried desperately.

Jamie said, “But I’m outnumbered, Ian. You McGunns use unfair tactics.”

We parted at the gate, Jamie turning up the road, leaving me and Shona to start towards the chapel by the waterfront. She slipped her hand through my arm. There was a low rumble behind us, Ranter stalking. Its eyes were almost on a level with mine. A stair-carpet of a tongue.

“Take no notice of the beast, Ian,” she said happily. “Now we can have a really good gossip.”

“Gossip?” This was it. My heart sank. I invented desperately. “Well, er, I think my granddad came from Stirling…”

“Not that, silly.” She was laughing prettily at me. “What I really want to know is, are you and Jo lovers, Lovejoy?”

« ^ »

—— 11 ——

That stopped me. She was rolling in the aisles laughing.

“Your face!”

Women really nark me. “You’re sly.”

“Oh, whist, man! I guessed when I heard you’d been telling George MacNeish about his old things. And you couldn’t take your eyes off my old father’s mulls.”

These are peculiarly Scottish containers for snuff, made of horns, silver, sometimes bone or stone. It’s easy to pay too much for these, because usually they’ve bits missing. The complete ones have a decorative chain holding tiny tools—a mallet, scoop, prong—also of silver, and of course it’s these that have casually been nicked or lost.

Mulls come in two sorts, the larger table mull with casters for use after posh dinners, or the personal mull. Antique dealers invent wrong names, being too thick to learn the right ones, and call the portable sort a “baby” mull, it being small. I’d never even seen a matching pair of snuff mulls before. But Shona had such on her mantlepiece, lovely horn and silver shapes with all the accoutrements. I’d only given clandestine glances, but should have remembered that women can always recognize a drool.

She was enjoying herself. “Handed down. Family.”

“From about 1800,” I said with a moan of craving.

She fell about. “Well, you can’t have them,” she said at last, recovering. “Jo said you’re a terror for old things.”

“Jo said I was coming?”

“Yes. She’s been ringing every couple of days.” Shona grimaced at me. “That’s why I suspect you and she of—”

“None of your nosy business.”

She hugged herself as they do. “I like you, Lovejoy. Secretly, I’m glad you won’t tell.”

“Only women gossip about lovers.”

She thought a bit before beginning an argument about diarists. I was too impatient to listen. “Where did you get the bureau from?”

“The one Jo said got lost? Oh, a place I know.”

“A place with antiques?” I asked evenly. I’m not devious like other people. I honestly say exactly what I mean practically always.

She gave me a look, women being of a suspicious nature. “Very well,” she said at last, some decision made. “You’ll come up to Tachnadray with me tomorrow.”

Tachnadray? I said great, never having heard the name. For the sake of propriety, off she went to kirk and I went to read Untracht’s monograph on jewelry. Each to his own religion.

That evening I had a demure supper ritual in the hotel lounge served by Mrs. MacNeish.

It was like a barn. Dead fish and stag heads on wall plaques and sepia photographs of ancient shooting parties proudly dangling dead birds. I’d have to send somebody up here to buy these exhibits on a commission job. Someone else. I’m not a queasy bloke; I just can’t rejoice in extinction. Mary MacNeish laid up for major surgery. I’d never seen so much crockery and cutlery in my life. I told her cheerfully, “Just met Shona.”

“Aye, I heard,” Mrs. MacNeish said.

We bantered a bit while I tried to keep my knees together and hold off the slab cake till the starting gun. Politeness is a killer. Also, something wasn’t quite right. In the woman’s prattle a discordant note was sounding. You can always tell. The publican’s wife was open-faced and friendly, but she was having her work cut out to stay so when Shona was mentioned. Yet Shona was pally and really something to see. I wondered if it was me, and like a fool put it out of my mind.

During the gluttony I had the sense not to mention Tachnadray, and eventually returned to reading Untracht’s methods of inlaying silver strips in English boxwood bracelet carving. Maybe for once I should have thought deeply instead.

Next day I consulted the Register of Electors. They’re those cob-webbed, yellowing, string-hung pages of local names in every village post-office-cum-stores. Pretending idleness—nothing new—I found that Tachnadray listed umpteen McGunns, plus one ectopic: plain James Wheeler. Yet even here somebody had inked in the McGunn surname, converting him to clan. Odd, that. Amending electoral rolls is illegal, even if you changed your name lawfully. I checked its date: Printed twenty years previously, and that ink had faded. I wondered if Lovejoy McGunn sounded better than Ian, then decided to let ill alone.

Shona brought Jamie’s van about ten o’clock. She drove as fitted her personality, with good-humored extravagance, and asked if MacNeish’s pub was comfortable.

“Grand parlor,” I said. “Are those places only used for funerals? It felt like the dust covers were just off.”

Shona laughed. “In the Highlands the best room’s always kept for occasions, Lovejoy.”

“Tachnadray got one too?”

She sobered swiftly. “How much do you know, Lovejoy?” We turned uphill inland.

“This Tachnadray’s where the antique came from?”

“Yes.” She faced me defiantly. Odd. Defiance is for enemies. “I arranged it.”

“But down in East Anglia we’d been told to expect a reproduction.” I cleared my throat, not wanting to seem a crook. “You see, if a genuine antique had showed up we, er, might have only paid you for a repro.”

“And claimed that a reproduction had been delivered.” Shona nodded, getting the point quicker than I really wanted. “And then, Lovejoy?”

“Then?” I said blankly. “Well, I’d have flogged your genuine antique.”

She was so patient. “And then, Lovejoy?”

“I’d have come here to…” I slowed, nodding.

“…to find who was stupid enough to sell off expensive antiques thinking them reproductions.” She gave me a satisfied smile. “You’ve found her. It’s me. It was bait, Lovejoy.”

Expensive bait. “But why?” We’d gone half a mile and already the houses had vanished.

We were on an upland moor and still climbing, the van laboring and coughing.

“Because I need a divvie. Jo had mentioned you. I’d heard of one in Carlisle, but it’s so difficult to trust anyone in antiques, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes, love,” I agreed piously. “Why didn’t you tell Jo to ask me up without all this?”

“It hadn’t to be me that procured you, Lovejoy. You had to wander in on your own. You pretending to be a McGunn simply made it easier for me.”

Therefore she wanted ignorance, which meant I’d have to get a move on to suss her game out. Antiques were at stake. If I allowed her to distract me they’d slip through my fingers. It happens to me every time when women are around. “I’m part of your plot?”

“A plot for survival. We McGunns are a lost tribe, Lovejoy.”

“Here. I thought you’d given up pretending—”

“Be quiet and listen!” She blazed it out fiercely.

For a few minutes she drove, winding us away from the coast into bleak countryside.

Rocks, gullies, a little rivulet or two, heather and a few trees having a desperate time.

There was even a big-bellied bird noshing some heather. Funny life for a pigeon, I thought, though whatever turns pigeons on in Caithness… Shona had cooled enough for her sermon.

“You picked an august name, Lovejoy. We McGunns are Picts, inhabitants here long before the rest of these… people came.” She meant anybody else was a serf. “Yet now we’re dispossessed. The Highland clearances of two centuries gone, the clan rivalries, everything in history has been against us.”

The sky was gray, cloudy. A distant gray house glided along the horizon. Wuthering Heights. A small lorry drove past us towards Dubneath. Shona beeped her horn in reflex salutation. A few sheep watched us, hoping for a lift to civilization. I hid a yawn. Nice place if you were an elk.

“We were driven to the coastal villages,” she continued. “People who’ve heard of Armenians, the Jews and Tasmanians, would think you mad if you classed us with the likes of them.” She shot me a hard glance, waggling the wheel the way women do for nothing. “Wouldn’t they?”

I thought a bit. For all I knew she might be a nut. “Well, yes,” I said. “But it’s life.

Families come and go. Names peter out, get revived.”

“In 1821 we tried,” she said bitterly. “The Clan McGunn formed a society—like those Gordons and Grants.” She spoke with hate. “But our last clan chief died and we were finished.”

“And you’ll reunite the clan and march on Rome.”

“No,” she said, choking down an impulse to chuck me through the windscreen. “But the loyals among us must share some feeling of… pride.”

Odd word, I thought; I’ll bet that sentence was surprised when it ended like that. “By giving away what genuine antiques you’ve got left? Slinging them on the first lorry heading south?”

“You’ll see, Lovejoy.”

For a while she drove us angrily on into ever bleaker countryside without speaking. Just as I was wondering if she’d brought any nosh she screeched us to a jolting stop above a chiseled glen. There was a muddy-looking lake off to the right, seemingly on a tilt.

Can lakes actually slope like that? Trees, clearly unwelcome tourists, clustered around a large gable-and-turret building of gray stone. Ranked windows and disguised chimneys, a long drive with drystone walling, and a bare flagpole. It could have been uninhabited except that the main door stood open and somebody was standing waiting in shadow at the top of the steps. I thought it was a woman. A man with a wheelbarrow near outhouses stood peering up the hillside at our van.

“Tachnadray, Lovejoy. Isn’t it beautiful?”

“The architect read Jane Eyre.”

“During your visit, Lovejoy,” Shona said after a moment with careful coolth, “you’ll refrain from sly digs. Understood?”

“Not really, love,” I said, opening the van door and sliding down to stretch my legs. It was time me and Cousin Shona got a few things straight before hitting the old homestead. “I’ve gone to a lot of bother to get here. Right now I could be out of your hair, and home in peace. I sympathize with your diaspora, but we Lovejoys never had a posh dynasty.”

“So?”

“Explain why you’re Pretty Miss Welcome down in Dubneath, and Boadicea as soon as we see that phony Victorian castle. And,” I said on as she drew furious breath, “why you think you have the right to ballock me as soon as we’re out of Jamie’s earshot.”

She said quietly, “So it’s money you want.”

“Or antiques. Or both.”

“Very well, Lovejoy. You’ll be paid.” Pause. “Enough.”

A minute’s reflection, and I nodded. We rolled as I got in. She nearly took my toes off with the wheel. Our relationship was deteriorating fast.

“The… owner of Tachnadray agreed with my idea of having copies of the antiques made and selling them. We have two men doing it.” She turned us between two tall stone gateposts bearing carved coats-of-arms. “I believe we—Tachnadray—are being defrauded.”

Such disloyalty, I thought, but didn’t say. “And I’m to prove your suspicions?”

“Much, much more, Lovejoy.” She’d recovered her smile. However daft her dreams, she really seemed to come alive again in Tachnadray. She’d recovered all her sparkling good humor as soon as we made the glen. “You’re to prove who’s doing it.”

“Here, love,” I said uneasily. “You’re not wanting anybody buried at midnight in the crypt, are you? Because hunting’s not my game—”

“Here we are, Lovejoy,” she said gaily, stopping the van below the steps. “Tachnadray.”

The woman waiting in the shadows of the main door stepped forward into view. She walked with grave composure to the top step and stood to welcome us. I got out and went forward. For half a step I was a bit uncertain. After that there was no question.

Between the two women the air had thickened with utter hatred. It’s not fair that hunters last longest, or that prey wear out fastest. Somebody should change the rules.

Quickly I stepped to one side, put on my most sincere smile, and went bravely up the steps. This new woman couldn’t give me a bigger pack of lies than Shona.

« ^ »

—— 12 ——

Caithness is one of those places you think of as perfect, full of plain wisdom, isn’t it.

The simple life: dawn porridge, down to the trickling burn to brew up the day’s malt whisky or whatever, then highland reels all evening. Idyllic. Instead here I was ascending these wide steps, grinning hopefully at the elegant older woman smiling down at me, with a lovely bird like Shona smiling away at my side, and me wishing I was in battledress being fired at. It had felt safer.

“Morning,” I said pleasantly. “I’m…” Who the hell was I?

“Ian McGunn, Michelle,” Shona introduced in her lovely brogue. “We stopped to admire the klett.”

“Isn’t it a lovely view, Ian? Welcome to Tachnadray.”

Klett? “Thanks. Yes. Lovely, er, klett.”

“Do come in.”

“Ian’s the one I spoke about, Michelle.” Shona walked ahead with her, ever so pally.

Neither tried to stab the other, with visible restraint. “A furniture craftsman. He trained at the London College.”

“Oh.” Michelle placed her dark eyes on me. “You’re going to be marvelously useful, Ian.”

French? Belgian? Her accent matched her dark hair, wavy and lusciously thick. She seemed about fifty. She wore that continental dressiness which our women only manage on Derby Day. I blame those rotten hats the Royal Family keep wearing.

“Eh?” Somebody’d mentioned antiques.

“Duncan will show you later on. I’ll arrange it.” Michelle rotated those deep eyes. “But we’ll expect excellent output, Ian. We can’t afford passengers.”

Shona drew breath. Evidently multo-double meanings were hidden therein for somebody, not me. Between the two women I felt as nervous as a Christmas nut.

The house was a giant of a place, with those lovely Victorian wooden panels nobody does properly any more, and even the glass bowls chained over each hanging ceiling light. They’ve become a fantastic source of profit—nowadays builders clearing old housing estates let you have them, five for a quid. They’re collectors’ items. Tip: Look in “redevelopments” (as our psychopathic town planners now term vandalism). I once got a small cast-iron staircase, circular, with the Darby Ironworks stamp on and everything, thrown in because I took sixty glass light bowls off a builder’s hands while he battered a priceless 1695 building to smithereens in East Anglia for a car park. I’d dined in superb elegance for six months on the profit…

“Ian McGunn, darling,” Michelle announced, showing me into the tallest sitting room on earth.

The girl paused a second—surely not for effect?—and spun her wheelchair. I honestly gasped. She was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. About sixteen. Limpid eyes, pale skin with that translucency you instinctively want to chew. She was so slight in her lace blouse. A tartan blanket covered her legs. Pearl earrings, a beautiful black velvet choker with a central silver locket, probably late Victorian, and hair pale as her face. She honestly did seem lit from within.

“Come in, Ian McGunn,” she said. “I’m Elaine.”

“Elaine’s—” Shona started, but the girl silenced her with an abrupt gesture and propelled herself forward.

“Don’t listen to Shona’s old clan nonsense,” she instructed. “Somebody get us coffee, to convince this refugee from East Anglia that we’re civilized in the north. I’ll show him the house.”

Lame people always disconcert me. I never know what to do—help? Push the handles?

Let them get on with it? It’s a problem. Not only that, but here was the boss all right. I began to long for this Duncan to crash the party.

“Don’t worry, Ian,” Elaine said, spotting the difficulty. “Trail somewhere I can get a good look at you.” She smiled mischievously. “This leg thing is permanent, I’m afraid, but I manage most things. It’s only temporary disableds need assistance.”

“Ta.”

“You’re English,” she said, like giving absolution. I followed her from the room, heading down a paneled corridor. “And you bought some of our reproductions?” The furniture we were passing was all reproduction. I listened to my chest, hoping for a dong of antique sincerity, but no. Not a genuine antique in sight, though some of the work was really quite skilled.

“Er, one. Through a friend.”

Michelle had disappeared. Shona was walking by Elaine. She caught my eye and nodded. I was doing all right so far. Unhappily I met Elaine’s delectable eyes in a hanging mirror. She was smiling, a naughty girl enjoying interplay. I sighed. Even peaceful women are trouble enough. Bravely I followed on down the longest corridor in the world.

Once, I went into an Eastern Bloc capital city. It was in the dark hours. The opera house was perfection, all brilliance and glamour. At half time, I strolled out to clear my brain of all that recitative, and realized with a shock that the lovely old street was a giant facade. Literally, the house fronts were shored-up replicas, with only rubble behind. Since then I’ve never believed in appearances. The same sense of shock overcame me as Elaine turned to me and asked, “Well, Ian?” We’d finished the penny tour.

“Er, yes. Lovely house,” I said lamely. Apart from two anterooms and the sitting room, the entire place was bare. Not merely relatively bare, note, but completely empty.

Some bygone gas mantel fittings remained, but with newfangled electricity points hung on. And it was only in the main hall and reception place that the great old house kept up the pretence of past grandeur with any conviction. Uneasily I got the point. An unexpected visitor could be welcomed, even entertained, and be sent on his way praising the manor house’s majesty, without realizing he’d been deceived. No living face behind the death mask. I felt sick. All this way, all that fairground shambles, and not a sniff of antiques. What little furniture the house possessed was simply heavy Victorian.

Barren. A wilderness where I’d expected a harvest. She’d told me that upstairs the west wing still housed a considerable store of valuable antiques. “That’s why it’s closed off,”

she’d said. Odd, really, because I’d not felt a single chime. And upstairs was clearly one place she couldn’t get to, not on her own in a wheelchair. How neat.

We returned to find Duncan waiting. I was glad. Elaine introduced us pleasantly enough. “Duncan, meet Ian. No prizes for guessing surnames.” She looked at me while saying this, that mischief smile again.

“Wotcher, Duncan.”

“Welcome, Ian.” He was a chunky elderly bloke, his compact form slow but full of that sedate dynamism the born worker possesses. I realized that he must be the man who produced the reproductions. So who was Michelle? Elaine chipped in.

“You’ll be wondering who Michelle is, Ian.” She emitted that beautiful smile and said,

“Michelle is Mrs. Duncan McGunn. And our voice of sanity.”

“Then there’s two of us,” I said companionably.

“Indeed? A cup of welcome, and we’ll let you start work. Duncan needs all the help he can get.” She lit Duncan with a glance. “You’ve guessed right, man. Ian no has the Gaelic.”

The way she spoke the words made it a skit. Duncan managed a wry grin, though the beautiful lass’s mockery obviously stung.

“I’ll give the man a wee dram, then. It’s our own malt.” He meant whisky.

“Er, ta, Duncan, but coffee’ll do.”

That halted the gaiety, except that Elaine fell about. In fact she laughed so much that tears rolled down her cheeks and she had to be helped to a hankie. Mentioning coffee had never seemed hilarious to me before, but each to his own giggle. I waited patiently for the girl to recover. Michelle was taking all this in her stride, Elaine merely a mischievous child. It was Shona whose cheeks showed bright-red spots of suppressed fury. Our hostess was getting to her, and delighting in her success.

“Er, what’s the joke, love?” I asked to clear the air.

“A Scot, Ian! One of the clan. One of us. Preferring coffee to our own malt! Isn’t that an absolute scream, Shona?”

“Well, no,” I said to save Shona. There were clues here if only I could spot them. “I’m not big on spirits.”

“Sure you’ll not prefer tea?” Elaine gasped.

“Please,” I said politely. “If it’s no bother.”

Another winner. During the ensuing paroxysms Michelle gave Duncan the bent eye for us to withdraw to let the three of them get on with it.

Duncan’s genteel exit line was “I’ll show Ian the workshop. We’ll be a minute or two.” I followed, really quite happy.

We walked out by the front steps towards the outbuildings near where the red-haired man with the wheelbarrow had stood peering. Nobody else about now, though.

“What was so funny, Duncan?”

For a little he said nothing. We passed between two silent stone buildings, leaving left the carefully tended forecourt.

“Well, y’see, Ian,” he said finally, “it pleases Miss Elaine to needle Shona about Scottishness.”

“And everybody else about their own particular fancy, eh?”

“Maybe,” he said drily. ’Yon’s my wee factory.” We paused outside a low stone barn, slate roof tethered by large flat slabs against winter storms.

“Is that what Elaine needles you about?” I asked.

“O’course.” His honesty was disarming. I began to like Duncan McGunn. “And my Michelle about being Belgian.”

“The question is why,” I prompted.

“Not so, Ian.” He did things to a padlock to let us in. “The question is what will Miss Elaine find irks you, isn’t it?” I didn’t think much to what he said. I wish now I had, honest to God.

The place’s interior was a hundred feet by forty, give or take, and daylit from a couple of long slender windows running much of the length. Its scent was exquisite to a born faker—oils, varnishes, sawn woods, glues, sweat. Duncan’s current opus stood on a low metal bench.

“Sheraton copy,” I said. I could tell I was grinning from the sound in my voice.

“Where’d you get it?”

Cagey silence. I didn’t blame him. No trader gives his sources away. It was a battered Victorian chest of drawers imitating Sheraton. Three big drawers below two “half”

drawers, with slightly curved short legs. Some nerk had given each drawer wooden bulb handles. The Bramah locks were a giveaway because that locksmithing genius wasn’t around in 1780, the pretended age of this poor relic. I walked around it, pleased to be back in the real world.

“You’ll reduce it, of course?”

He filled a pipe slowly. “How?”

“It looks pretty well made.” I pulled a drawer and inverted it to check the wear and patination of age. Some wicked modern fakers add these small convincing details. It’s terrible to buy a piece like this, only to find once you’ve got it home that it’s phony. We have a saying in this rottenest game, that you can never make anything good from a bad fake. But this was some skilled Victorian carpenter’s forged “Sheraton.” It had once glowed, been really quite stylish.

“Any ideas?” Duncan asked.

All right. He’d a right to expect proof I knew what I was on about.

“Only one,” I said, and tapped its top. “Lose the two smaller drawers. Settle for the bottom three. They’ll need cutting down in size, of course. Replace the handles with brass reproductions. Leave the Bramah locks; when you advertise it, admit quite openly that they’re later additions.”

“Aye, but if a buyer looks at the base he’ll see where the curved front’s been cut through the middle.”

“Then don’t sell it to a skeptic, Duncan.” I’d given him the best recipe and he knew it.

“Fancy your chances?” he said. A challenge.

“Yes.” We got chatting then about some good “reproductions,” as I politely termed them, which I’d seen fetched through East Anglia. It transpired that he’d forged a Hepplewhite pot-cupboard I’d bought and sold on to Dortmund (think of a box with tall straight unadorned tapering legs).

“So you made that torchère I bought last autumn?”

“Aye.”

“God. Was it worth it? It must have cost the earth.”

He sighed, nodding. “It did, Ian. Days and days of work. But it convinced reluctant buyers that somebody up here could do the job as well as most.”

“Well done.” I love a craftsman. The tall torchère had had a tripod appearance—three elegant mahogany legs, with three slender central supports up to an everting triple for the six-sided tray that would hold the household’s oil lamp. Some antiques are too expensive to fake commercially. The decorative torchère is one, because there are plenty of cheap pole screens about—genuine antiques, too—which fakers can buy to make them out of. “Pity you killed a Queen Anne pole screen to build it, though.”

“How’d you spot that?”

I checked myself in time. “Oh, the mulling top and bottom ran different ways, I think.”

“Did they now,” he said evenly, faithless sod.

“Mmmh.” Quite honestly I couldn’t remember. It had been the sad little bleat of the genuine mauled antique that had brought tears to my eyes.

“One thing, Duncan. I thought clans had lairds. Isn’t a chieftainess unusual?”

“The Laird James passed away a few years since.”

Aha. I’d save that bit up. Had plain James Wheeler become The McGunn? Maybe he married into the position. Well, it happens in business empires. Why not?

A bell clonked on the wall. I was glad to see it was an original spring-suspended clapperbell and not some shrill electric foolishness.

“Time to join the ladies,” he said, making for the door. He added scathingly, “For tea.”

“I’ve nowt against your whisky, Duncan.” I went with him.

I felt three goals down.

Before Shona drove me back to Dubneath for my things, we settled my job amicably.

This means I listened to Elaine and agreed with whatever she said. My terms were a fraction of the profit and all found—free nosh and bed in a stableman’s loft among the outbuildings. They showed me a bare cube with a single bed, a cupboard, and one uncurtained window with a view of the barren fells. Great if you’re Heathcliff waiting for Cathy, but I played along. Duncan was there too, ruefully swigging what he conveyed was his first and last nonalcoholic drink.

“We’re assuming Ian proves capable, Miss Elaine,” he put in gently. That caffeine was getting to his brain.

“Are you capable, Ian?” Elaine asked innocently, looking across at Shona, a tease.

Shona turned aside, busied herself with the sugar for Duncan.

“Your bills for plastic wood will take a turn for the better, Elaine,” I said. Duncan had the grace to laugh at the gibe. Plastic wood’s the poor forger’s friend.

They came out to see us off, talking casually. I turned to admire the house’s clinging splendor, and saw the big ginger-headed bloke among the outbuildings. He was kilted, strong, and stridey. Just as long as he was on our side.

“I can trust Robert,” Elaine said to answer my thought.

“Thank God for that.” I climbed into the van. “Back before evening, then?”

“Ian.” Michelle came to my window as Shona hung back saying so long to Elaine.

Duncan was already off, anxious to be at work. His wife spoke softly, perfume wafting in. “I’m so relieved you’re here. It’s time all was… resolved.” Her fingers, probably accidentally, rested on mine. But the pressure and that faint scratch of her nails down my hand was communication. I swallowed, too near her large eyes to think straight.

What was she saying?

“Oh, er, ta. I’ll do what I can.”

“We’ll make sure you exceed your potential, Ian,” Elaine called. She rippled her fingers in a child’s wave. She must have hearing like a bat.

Shona marched up, flung in and revved noisily. She hadn’t liked seeing Michelle speaking to me in confidence. She reversed at speed with a crash of gears, but Michelle anticipated the maneuver and glided away in time.

We made Dubneath at a record run, with Shona not speaking a word. Disembarking, I was jubilant at how things had gone. I was in. My thin disguise was holding. I was blood cousin umpteen times removed to this barmy load of clannites. Very soon I’d have the lion’s share of a sound antique fakery scheme, at least. Stupidly overconfident, I decided to buy some curtain material before phoning Tinker.

Now the bad news, as they say.

« ^ »

—— 13 ——

The best about little towns is that most things are crammed into a few shops. I found the drapery/general/household stores by spotting the only building in Dubneath with more than two parked cars. Women are the trouble, though. They immediately sensed I was curtain-hunting and started eyeing the swatches. The stores lady, Mrs. Innes, hung about itching to decide for me.

“A pastel,” I hazarded, playing it close.

“You’ll be Ian McGunn,” she said smiling. “That converted loft’s a drafty old place.”

So much for secrecy. How the hell did they do it? “You shouldn’t know that. Naughty girl.”

She laughed, coloring. “I meant, Joseph was always complaining. No wonder the poor man drank.”

“Joseph?”

Instantly she changed back. “And that poky little window. You’ll only get one pattern if you choose a large floral.”

“Boss me about and I’ll go elsewhere.”

“You can’t. The Wick bus left an hour gone.”

Her brass measuring rod was screwed to the counter. She fell about when I offered her eight quid for it and laughingly told other customers how I’d started to buy her out. I settled on a bright oriental print, bamboos and japonicas, and ballocked Mrs. Innes for not knowing the window’s dimensions. We parted friends. I crossed to the tavern.

Joseph? Who had been my predecessor at Tachnadray. Something had driven the “poor man” to drink. Not the draft, that’s for sure. I didn’t like the sound of all this.

I told Mary MacNeish I’d be leaving. By purest coincidence she already happened to have me booked out.

“You guessed,” I said dryly. If they introduce gossip at the next Olympics we’re a cert.

Dubneath’ll get the gold.

“Eat your fill before you go, Ian.” It was the mildest of mild cautions, a very natural expression. So why the Mayday hint? “Tachnadray’s bonny but can chill a man’s marrow.”

“I’ll slink back for your pasties, Mary.”

“I’ll be pleased.”

On the spur of the moment I tried a flyer. “Don’t suppose it’ll be easy taking good old Joseph’s place. Is he around? Like a word with him.”

She was shocked that I knew, and the cake stand just made it to the table. Her face suddenly went abstract, as women’s do for concealment. “Now what did I do with that butter dish…?” she said vaguely, and that was as far as I got.

Margaret finally landed Tinker for me in Fat Bert’s nooky shop in the Arcade. I’d wasted a fortune trying different pubs. Absurdly I was really pleased to hear his long rasp.

“Where the bleedin’ hell you got to, Lovejoy?” he graveled out, wheezing. “ ’Ere, mate.

We in trouble?”

“Shut it, Tinker.” Maybe he was only three-quarters sloshed, I thought hopefully. I hate to chuck money away on incoherence. “You sober?”

“ ’And on me ’eart, Lovejoy. Not a drop all bleedin’ day.”

“Listen. That driver who got topped. His name Joseph Something?”

“Dunno, Lovejoy.”

“Find out from Antioch. I’ll ring tomorrow. Any news?”

“Nar, Lovejoy. That bleeder’s still round the Hook.” He meant Dutchie hadn’t returned on the Hook of Holland ferryboat. “But there’s some Ities hangin’ round.”

“Italians?” My soul dampened.

“Aye. Millie’s youngster Terry reckons they wuz circus rousters or summert. Two big buggers. They come soon after that tart.” Millie’s a barmaid. Terry runs pub messages, bets for the two-thirty at Epsom and that. Terry’d know, if anybody would.

“Tinker.” I’d not had a headache all day. “Which tart?”

“The one you used to shag down Friday Wood before—”

“Tinker.”

“—before that little blondie you had went for that shoeshop manageress you fancied in the White Hart—”

That’s what I need, I thought bitterly, hearing Fat Bert roaring laughing in the background while Margaret lectured the stupid pair of them. Friends. “Clear them out, Tinker.”

Mutter, mutter. “They’ve pissed orf, Lovejoy.” Tinker’s drunken idea of subtlety. “You remember her, lovely arse—”

“What did she want?” I’d already identified Francie.

“She come in hell of a hurry, after midnight. Said nothing, only asked where you’d got to. Her nipper told me it’d been in bed on a train.”

All children are “it” to Tinker. Betty Blabbermouth, my erstwhile helper at the Great Antique Road Show. Francie must have hoofed into East Anglia on a night express, and reached Tinker a few millisecs before Sidoli’s killer squad came a-hunting. I swallowed.

In spite of Joan, Francie still felt something for me and had rushed to warn.

Well, I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to reason that various folk were cross, simply because I’d injured a few blokes, damaged a wagon or two, shambled a fairground’s livelihood, and nicked their vastly expensive generator. And now they wanted repayment in notes of the realm, my blood or other equivalent currency. I quavered, cleared my throat.

“Sure there was no message?”

“Only she’d be at the Edinburgh Tattoo.” A long pause. “It’s north of Selkirk,” he added helpfully.

Francie’s way of saying steer clear of Edinburgh until that vast military tattoo closed the Festival? Well, I was already in Edinburgh’s black books, and there must be enough guns in two fairgrounds to make a jury think that one accidental shooting of a no-good scruff like me was a permissible average… No. Francie’s message was a very, very useful hint indeed.

“News from Jo?”

“That teacher bint? She visits Three-Wheel Archie.”

A glass clinked, Tinker finding Fat Bert’s reserve bottle.

“And, Lovejoy. There’s money from your sweep. We made a killin’. Margaret says as she’ll send your slice to a post office if you’ll say where the bleedin’ ’ell you—”

Click and burr. I didn’t want anybody knowing my address after that lot. Escape’s like murder, a private business. I stood indecisively, then walked out of the tavern into Dubneath’s cool, watery day for a deep ponder. Life’s got so many risks, you’re lucky to get out of this world alive. Wherever I looked, enemies lurked. Back home in East Anglia, fairground heavies dangled ominously in the trees. The long roads between Caithness and my village were filled with irritated night drivers whose colleague had got done in. I strolled down Dubneath’s empty wharf to examine the vacant harbor.

Hell is people, somebody once said. He forgot to add that so’s Heaven. The more I thought about it, the safer Tachnadray’s claustrophobic solitude seemed.

Two hours I walked about the somnolent town. For ten minutes I stood with Dubneath’s one layabout and watched the traffic lights change, really heady excitement. A tiny school loosed about four o’clock, pretty children much tidier than East Anglia’s, with twisty curling accents. I thought longingly of Jo, a lump in my throat.

And of Joan. And Francie. And Ellen. And, a startling pang, little Betty. I felt deprived of all life. Maybe it wouldn’t be too long.

Dubneath was static. Not even a shrimp boat a-coming. The wind was rising, wetting my eyes. I tried the obstinate child’s trick of staring into the breeze until your eyelids give up of their own accord. Of course, I’d have to lie low. That much was plain. I didn’t relish this on-the-run bit, even though it’s the only rational course for a coward. It tends to throw you willy-nilly into weird folks’ company. Like that lot up in Tachnadray.

Six o’clock I went for my last meal—no blindfold or cigarette—at the MacNeish pub.

Providentially, the television was on in the snug, a pleasant girl giving out the news. I caught the last of it: “…the theft of a vehicle from an Edinburgh fairground. Six men are in the hospital, two of them critical. A police spokesman today deplored the increasing violence…”

The surface of my beer trembled. The glass rim chattered on my teeth and I saw George MacNeish glance slowly along the bar from where he was wiping up. I tried to make my momentary quake resemble thirst.

“Nice drop, George.”

“…search moved north. The vehicle was found abandoned but undamaged at a roadside halt frequented by long-distance…” She read it so chirpily, holiday camp bingo.

I went to do the best I could with Mary’s calories.

Seven o’clock Jamie brought his van. Shona, he said, was tired. I left the tavern clutching my curtain material, a hermit to the wilderness. It could always make bandages.

“Can we stop at the, er, klett, Jamie?” I said as we trundled inland. “Lovely view.”

“You’re keen on our bonny countryside?” Jamie waxed enthusiastic, changing gears.

“There’s grand scenery beyond that wee loch…”

Ten points on the creep chart, Lovejoy. The trouble was I’d painted myself into a corner. Crooks in East Anglia trying to do me in. Maslow would put two and two together when the police report stimulated his aggressive mini-brain, and hasten into Edinburgh to help his neffie brother peelers. All the traveling folk on the bloody island were out. And here I was at the very tip. Hardly possible to run any farther. That’s the trouble with being innocent. You get hunted by cops and robbers. Even the worst crooks on earth only get chased by one lot. No wonder people turn to crime.

« ^ »

—— 14 ——

Houses are fascinating, aren’t they? The house at Tachnadray was superbly positioned for light, setting, and appearance. Grudgingly, during the first few days of labor on Duncan’s Sheraton look-alike, I came to admire the place. Catch it any angle and you get an eyeful. The old architect might have had delusions of grandeur, but he’d got it exactly right. Pretty as a picture, was Tachnadray. It brings a lump to my throat just to remember how it all was, in my serene encounter with the clan-and-county set. The surrounding moorland somehow seemed arranged for the purpose of setting off the great mansion’s style. Hardly “antique” in the truest sense of the word, pre-1836, but lovely all the same. The creation of an artist.

Very quickly I learned that routines were almost Teutonic in Tachnadray. The first afternoon I wandered across the grand forecourt to chuck some crumbs into the stone fountain. Goldfish sailed in its depths. I’m always sorry for fish because they have a hard life, no entertainment or anything and scared of every shadow. I’d saved a bit of russell roll and was busy shredding it into the water livening up their wet world when my own dry world was suddenly inverted. I do mean this. It honestly spun a hundred and eighty degrees and I was crumbing the atmosphere.

“What the fuck you doin?” a cavern rumbled in my ear. Giant hands had clutched my shoulder and spine and tipped me upside down.

“Feeding the fish,” I yelped. “Please.”

“Who the fuck said you could?” the cavern boomed.

“Down, Robert.” Elaine to my rescue. Wheels crunched gravel. “Down!” Like you say to a dog. Then something in a language I didn’t understand, slidey-smooth.

The world clouted my left knee. He’d simply dropped me.

Groggily I clambered upright. My trouser leg was ripped. The big kilted man stood skywards over me. Another McGunn, I supposed wearily, making yet more instantaneous assumptions about good old Cousin Ian. He marched off on his great hairy legs. A knife hilt protruded from his stocking.

“You came just in time, love.” I was wheezing. “I’d have put him in hospital.”

She laughed, applauding. Robert turned his maned head, but kept going.

“Don’t mind Robert, Ian. He’s big for the cause.” She wrinkled her face at the scudding clouds. “Rain soon. The anglers’ll be out as far as Yarrow Water.”

A distant clanking tapped the air, Duncan calling work on the iron rod which hung by the workshop door.

“My free hour’s up, Elaine,” I said, but hesitated before sprinting back to the treadmill.

“Another time, Ian,” she said. “Not on your first day. Turn me round, please.”

“Chieftainesses of distinguished clans shouldn’t have to ask.”

She glared up at me. “Oh yes, we should!”

Some women have a terrifying knack of seeming to move their faces suddenly nearer you without stirring a muscle. They do it in love or in fury. I’ve noticed that. Elaine was the best at it I’d ever encountered. The images of physical love and the poor paralyzed girl juxtaposed in my mind.

“Penny for your thoughts, Ian,” Elaine said slyly as I obediently set off along the drive to Duncan’s workshop.

“Just how fascinating people’s faces are,” I lied. “I’m good at faces.”

“Women’s especially?”

“Mind your own business.”

She was back to laughing then, swaying in her wheelchair. It was one of those oddish moments when the environment conspires. She was there beside the fountain. The sky behind her had darkened. Thunder rumbled. Yet a watery sun picked up the gray-yellow gravel, her white blouse, the colors of the old tartan. Lovely enough to mesmerize. Lucky I’m not easy to manipulate, or a girl this lovely could have me eating out of her hand. A terrible desire rose within me. My body’s a hostage to hormones, but with a lass who couldn’t walk—

“Actually,” she said, as we parted, “we cripples have different ways of making… music, Lovejoy.” Another super-correct guess what I’d really been thinking about.

She left me so preoccupied that I hardly noticed Duncan playing hell with me for skiving instead of getting the bureau’s drawers undone. Elaine was disturbing. Weirdly swift to guess what you were thinking—far too swift for my liking. Only supposition, of course. I don’t believe in telepathy or whatever it’s called. But I didn’t like this idea of not being alone in my own head.

Duncan put me at the old piece. He watched me like a hawk as I tapped and listened and set about marking the wood components. I’d got some self-adhesive labels from the Innes stores in Dubneath.

“A waste of money, Ian,” Duncan disapproved.

“Oh?” I cracked back sardonically. “So you’re the daft faker who pencils his illegal intentions all over the finished product, eh?”

He surrendered with a chuckle and lit his pipe to watch. He’d had to concede. Simplest tip on earth: When you’re thinking of buying antique furniture, take a glance at its inner surfaces. There you might see measurements indicating the faker’s reduction factor—

inches cut off, even types of wood to be used.

“One goon I know in Newcastle even writes it on in felt-tip,” I told Duncan. “I ask you.”

“You know a lot, for a wandering cousin.”

Caught. “Ah,” I stammered. “We had to learn all that. At the London College.”

“Very thorough. Have you a family, Ian?”

“No. Except now you lot. My erstwhile spouse had found my transparent honesty too much to cope with.”

Duncan helped me to upend the bureau. The base was in a better state than I’d hoped.

“You should use Newcastle, Duncan,” I panted, struggling to tilt it on a block support.

“Handy for Liverpool, without being too direct.”

“Aye, we tried…” He ahemmed and reamed his pipe. I’d caught him, but absently worked on. Aye, we tried and failed, is what he’d been about to say. He’d discovered, like many antiques fakers, that there are folk pathways in dirty deals. New dirt’s distrusted. Old schemes have a kind of inbuilt security. That’s why a woman chooses a particular color, fancies a special perfume: It swept Cecil off his feet, so why not Paul?

It’s the reason crooks stick to a particular modus operandi even when they know it hallmarks their particular chain of robberies. And a painter faking Cotman’s genius, like Big Frank’s mate Johnnie does in Suffolk, would rather polish off a dozen Greta Bridge phonies and sell them to that same fence in Hamburg than paint different ones every time.

Clue: Tachnadray’s fakes had only one outlet, and that was through my own stamping ground, East Anglia. Which meant also I could easily find out how much Duncan’s replicas had made lately. I whistled, irritably searching for tools on the bench.

“No wonder you got rid of Joseph,” I grumbled. “Messy sod. I’ll rearrange this lot when I’ve a minute.”

Duncan stilled. “Joseph?”

Unconcerned, I began rearranging the tools into some sort of order. “I knew a bloke once was so bloody untidy that—”

“As long as you do better than he did, Lovejoy.” Duncan went down to the other end of the workshop to mix varnish. An unpleasant reprimand, that, with its hint of threat.

Come to think of it, where was this Joseph? I decided I’d better find out. Tactfully as ever, of course. That’s my way.

It was three days before I had a chance of talking to Elaine without being upended by Robert the Brute. Which doesn’t mean they had passed uneventfully. Duncan and me’d argued nonstop about our next opus. I favored faking a series of small Georgian tables from scratch; Duncan stuck out for modifying— “putting back” in the antique-fakery slang—some tired Victorian bureau, very much as we were doing now. It was evidently his thing. And we had burdensome mealtimes, with Elaine teasing us all, over Michelle’s table. Her grub was Frenchified, by which I mean tangy of taste but ethereal. It tended to dissolve before you got it swallowed. We had suppertime visits from Shona, and a couple of flying visits from Jamie, who dropped us some materials in his van. This, plus a shepherd bringing two sheepdogs to prove they were topnotchers, was it. I quickly got the hang of life at Tachnadray, or thought I had.

But getting the hang of a scene doesn’t mean tranquillity. It can mean just the opposite. There were just enough worry points to disturb my beauty sleep. Like, Michelle and Shona smiling their hundred-percent hatred smiles. Like everybody knowing about Joseph but nobody saying. Like Tachnadray’s pose as a glamorous laird’s mansion complete with loyal retainers yet having barely enough furniture to dress out two rooms, a stage set in a ghost palace. Like Duncan’s lone wilting attempts to provide the crumbling estate with an income. When at my noon break Elaine called me over to meet the shepherd’s wriggly black-and-white dogs I thought, here’s quite an opportunity.

“Er, great,” I said, trying to sound full of admiration.

The shepherd grinned, said something in Gaelic. The dogs gave each other a sardonic glance as if saying, here’s another idiot townie who hasn’t a clue.

“They like you, Ian,” the shepherd said. “But they think you’ll no be a countryman. I’m Hector.”

We nodded. Another cousin. Were I the genuine article, I’d feel safe up here, even from Sidoli’s vengeance-seeking mob of circus hands prowling the Lowlands.

“They’re right, Hector,” I said. “What do they do?”

“Best working pair north of Glasgow.” He waited, then explained, “Sheep, Ian. Tessie’s four, Joey two.”

“You bullies.” The dogs grinned and waggled round me, noses pointing up.

We talked about dogs for a minute while Elaine did one of her prolonged smiling stares at me. I felt her attention like a sunlamp, and listened while Hector listed his dogs’

excellences. Dogs are all right but doggy folk are real bores, aren’t they? Hector was confident about some sheepdog trials.

“How do you train them?” I asked. “And what do you feed them on?” Much I cared, but Hector was loving all this in his grim Presbyterian way.

“You must come over and see them do an outrun or two,” he said. “It’s but a short step. Mornings I walk to check the cottage—”

Elaine interrupted brightly, “Och away, Hector. Can’t you see Cousin Ian’s not really interested in your ould dogs?”

“True,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.

We all parted friends, me patting the dogs and seeing them off but thinking, the cottage, eh? Immediately Hector was out of earshot, Elaine said, spinning her wheelchair to accompany me back towards the house, “The cottage is an empty crofter’s place on the fells. We use it for winter shelter. There’s quite a few about.”

It’s that sort of nimble guesswork that makes you give up trying to outthink a female. I plodded along pushing her until she told me to walk beside her.

“Tachnadray must have been a lovely estate once, Elaine.”

“But…?” she prompted.

“It could be developed. Tourists. Fishing. Build huts for nature cranks. Campsites. Tours round the baronial hall.”

She halted. Thinking I’d struck oil, I enthused, “Have your own Highland Gathering.

Tents, pipers, dances, folksong evenings, original tartan kilts, Ye Olde Clan McGunn whisky-making kits. McGunn-brand genuine Scottish bagpipes—”

“And breed hordes of McGunns? Repopulate the Highlands?”

She spoke with such quiet sibilance you had to strive to hear the venom. We’d stopped, her luminescent face white with anger.

“Well, er, not all of it.”

The nervous quip failed. She motioned me to sit on the wall and listen.

“Fall off a horse and lose the power of your legs, Ian. Myths are never the same again.

They stand out with a certain clarity.” She laughed, an ugly spitting ejaculation I wouldn’t like to hear again. “So we should join the great Folklore Industry? It’s the road to insanity. A social mania.”

I said, narked, “I was only trying to help. A little profit—”

She pointed a finger at me. “Don’t interrupt. Just pay heed. Original tartan? There’s no such thing. Listen: Three centuries ago the Grant ordered his entire clan into his standard tartan.” She put on a cruel brogue to mock the words. “And his own family turned up wearing a dozen different. You see? It’s all fraud.”

“But tartan’s—”

A French word, Ian. Tartaine is a material, nothing to do with patterns. But then the Irish were great cloth weavers. The bagpipes? —the only invention ever to come out of Egypt. Scotch poetry?—our earliest indigenous one is in Welsh, for God’s sake. The kilt?—invented by Thomas Rowlandson, an English iron-smelter, in 1730. All tartans indigenous to our Scotch clans?—nonsense; there’s even an authentic Johore tartan.

Didn’t you know? With a royal imprimatur, too!”

“I wish I hadn’t come to see your bloody dogs.”

“We rhapsodize about Robert the Bruce and his spider, conveniently forgetting that he was an Anglo-Norman whose favorite method of murder was a stab in the back while the victim was unarmed and at prayer. Ask John the Red, whom he killed in the Franciscan church at Dumfries. And our fantastic Bonnie Prince Charlie?—a drunken Pole who thieved every penny his loyal followers possessed. And our famous Rabbie Burns.” She rolled her r’s cruelly to mock. “Don’t tell anyone—his famous dialect is pure Anglo-Saxon. Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you pretend it’s a pure something else. When adherents trump up clan loyalties and urge me to ‘develop my clan’s potential,’ I begin to ask what they’re really after. You understand?”

“You mean what I’d get out of it? Twenty percent—”

“Twenty percent’s out of the question.” She’d actually said her first three words in time with my last. Did she guess every bloody thing I thought? “Five.”

“You mean bugger.”

She laughed, clapping her hands, and that terrible vehemence was gone as suddenly as it had come. At an imperious wag of her finger I trundled her obediently towards the ramp. Michelle emerged to see Elaine back in.

“Duncan’s sounding for you, Ian,” Michelle called.

“What else is new?” I said irritably.

Elaine laughed. “I’ve been telling Ian that we owe our tartans to Lowland machinery makers,” she announced. “I think he’s really upset.” She called after me: “Still, Ian. At least our patron saint is real. Your English one’s pure imagination.”

“Sensible bloke,” I said with feeling. “If I were him I’d stay that way.”

Her musical laughter followed like a hound on my heels.

« ^ »

—— 15 ——

That evening I struck out of my mental cocoon. It was definitely becoming time to rock the boat. Over a frothy frozen thing which tasted of lemons, I asked about Robert. I badly wanted a phone but wasn’t even sure if Tachnadray had one.

“It’s a question of money, folks,” I announced, mostly to Elaine. “We ought to get Robert in to help us.”

Shona looked up quickly but it was Michelle who countered. “He’s no furniture man, Ian.”

“He’s a pair of hands, love,” I corrected, thinking: So Michelle wants Robert kept out of Duncan’s hair. Does Shona?

“No,” said Elaine as Duncan drew breath to chip in. “Robert’s already got too much to do.”

Duncan subsided. Happily I clocked up another fact: Robert was busily occupied, on Elaine’s orders.

“Money,” I said. “There’s a lesson here. Me and Duncan have labored long and hard, and finished the ‘antique’ piece this afternoon. It’s good, but now we’re stuck. We must start looking for wood, materials, decide on the next—”

“You can’t start one till the first’s finished, Ian,” Elaine said.

“Wrong. It’s bad fakery, Elaine.” I leaned forward on the mahogany, eager from certainty. “Even genuine workshops work by overlapping. Sheraton, Chippendale, Ince, Mayhew, Lock. Do one at a time and you end in the workhouse.”

“It’s dangerous, Elaine,” Michelle said. Shona gave her a look, normally not this quiet.

“Ian’s inclined to be bull-at-a-gate,” Duncan added. I don’t like being apologized for and said so.

“Let him speak.” Elaine was in a lace blouse with a blue velvet neck ribbon. Some pudgy lady serf was helping tonight. New to me, but she was clearly a Tachnadray veteran and called Elaine “pet,” to Michelle’s evident annoyance. “I’ve already disappointed Ian once today. He wants to make us an Olde Worlde Disneyland.”

“How much does running the estate cost?” I asked, ignoring Duncan’s warning frown to go easy. “Say it’s X, for rates, wages, food, heating, clothes. And what’s the income?

Say it’s Y, from Duncan’s reproductions, sheep, crops—do you grow crops?” I enthused into their silence, “It’s Mr. Micawber’s famous problem: Happiness is where X is less than Y. What’s wrong with not being broke?”

Duncan cleared his throat. “Like you, Ian?”

“Touché,” I said, beaming. “We hire a promotions man for plans to make the estate solvent.” I gazed round at them all. “It’d take one single phone call.”

“I won’t have Tachnadray a mere tourist stop.” Elaine had spoken. “I couldn’t have dinner ogled by tourists at so many dollars a head.”

“It’s degrading for a noble house,” Shona said.

“Not even a Clan McGunn coat-of-arms on head scarves, wooden plaques?” I pleaded.

“Pride’s expensive. Christ’s sake, Elaine. Have you never seen a Manchester mill on the go? For a percentage they’d do thousands a bloody day—tea towels, traveling bags, all in McGunn tartan. Cups, mugs, silver brooches, Tachnadray deer. And Duncan’s workshop’d turn out phony shields—” I was in agony. “Can’t you see?”

“No.” Elaine calmly pronounced over my distress, and with utter serenity gestured the serf to pour coffee. “I’m becoming rather tired of your schemes, Ian.”

One last try. “Then it’s your dreaded Tachnadray secret.”

Everybody stilled, even the beverage-toting peasant.

“Secret?” Michelle made a too-casual search for sugar, which anyway was within easy reach.

“What secret?” It wasn’t until Duncan demanded point-blank, his voice harsh and his pipe like a clutched weapon that the penny dropped and I thought in sudden jubilation, God, there really is something.

“Wine,” I explained, cerebrating at speed.

“Establishing a vineyard,” from dear innocent Michelle, “takes centuries.” She’d dressed in lovely harebell blue.

“So we don’t,” I explained, thinking, Give me strength. “We never even see the bloody wine, see? A vineyard simply bottles us up Tachnadray Special. Prints new labels, ships it to a distributor.”

“Outsiders!” Shona spat.

“No, Ian.” Another royal imperative. “Too long-term.”

“Then you don’t need money,” I concluded with angry finality. For a second I thought I’d overacted, but not for Michelle.

“You’re wrong, Ian. We’re in dire straits.” She really did say it, “dire straits,” straight out of her English lessons.

“Michelle,” Duncan warned, too late.

I said, acting driven to the brink, “Then we sell up.”

Outrage. Horror. The lackey almost dropped the coffeepot. Duncan almost swallowed his pipe. Michelle gave a Gallic squeal of turmoil-powered indignation. Shona paled.

Even Elaine’s smile wilted somewhat, a case of needle reversed. Robert would have inverted me in the nearest soufflé.

“At an auction. Here, in Tachnadray.” It was my turn to smile now. “We sell every damned thing. Even,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “even some things we haven’t got.”

Well, what works for Sidoli’s traveling fairground can work for Tachnadray’s immobile gentility, right? Elaine looked and said nothing. The rest tried to argue me into the ground. They hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I’d said, so I just noshed, nodded, muttered “You’ve got a point there” sort of responses, and started working out the scale of the operation. Barefaced robbery, lies, and immoral usury are the tools of the work world’s greatest auction firms. They’d be just as useful in Tachnadray.

Because of Elaine’s telepathic swiftness in mind guessing, I carefully didn’t think of my other scam, which was to find this oh-so unimportant cottage and raid the damned thing.

Theft, I often say to myself, is often in a good cause. It’s especially beneficial when it happens to somebody else. Oh, I don’t mean the great Woburn Abbey silver haul, though even that netted mind-bending reward money when those two workers found the cache in that Bedfordshire water-pumping station. Somebody always does well out of it, even when theft goes wrong. One problem is Finance Law, the great rip-off of modern times. Those lucky enough to be in on it—police, lawyers, estate agents—are of course all for it and want us, the oppressed majority, to join in their hearty approval.

We don’t. Reason? Because the Law costs us a fortune. All we can do is try to exist in spite of it.

That evening, aware now of the strong differences of opinion around the table, we separated with Elaine saying she’d “take advice” and that we’d have a conference about it all in a day or so. Money was obviously Tachnadray’s old battleground where Shona and Michelle fought daily. Very serious stuff. Solvency’s a perennial laugh, though a rather moaning sort of laugh, at Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. But I’ve always managed by having friends I can rely on, borrow from, or otherwise sponge off, and Tachnadray only had this gaggle of clan innocents.

Up in my converted garret I easily worked out the solution, how to hold an important auction sale of the many valuable antiques we hadn’t got. The idea wasn’t new, but the actual sin would have to be. In immorality, freshness is always important, like in fruit. I shelved it, and settled down to examine the Ordnance Survey map I’d brought. This cottage Hector had mentioned was niggling.

Scattered thinly among the colors and contours of the uplands round Tachnadray were black rectangles that indicated buildings. The mansion was clearly marked. I’d work outwards, and start with the cottage on the valley road. I’d noticed it standing maybe a mile beyond the end of the drive.

Which is how I wasted a couple of hours that night, stumbling along the driveway in virtual pitch-darkness and trudging the Dubneath track to find a miniature collapsed ruin. Some giant bird—at least, I hope it was only a bird—swished past my head and frightened me to death as I felt the fallen stones of the old crofter’s cottage. Maybe the gatehouse, a retainer’s place from the estate’s grander days? Nothing there, anyway.

The bird mooed and swished me again, so I cleared off. One bare porch light was always left burning, on Elaine’s instruction, so returning was less problematic. I just followed that lovely civilized glimmer down below, and made it safely.

A cross mark on the map to show which building I’d investigated—leaving about a dozen isolated buildings within about a five-mile radius of Tachnadray—and I was ready for bed. Nobody had followed me, I thought. I was quite confident.

Some people have a politician’s mind. They’re always highly dangerous because politicians, remember, have a vested interest in doom. Robert was like that. I mean, just because I was up early next morning and strolling a couple of miles across the uplands he decided to follow, obviously longing for me to turn out to be a traitor. Me! I ask you.

There was a light drizzle on a long breeze. It was only when I turned to shake the water off my mac hood that I saw the suspicious swine. He was perhaps a mile off, but covering the ground at a hell of a lick, his enormous hairy redhead topped by a bonnet and nodding like a horse does at each pace.

He saw my pause and stopped. Casually I went on, giving a glance back down the hillside. He started up after me again. I paused. He halted. I moved, and he came on.

No use continuing in these circumstances, so I made a curve along the hill’s contour and fetched up on the Dubneath track about a mile from where I’d started. Robert, by then higher up the hill, realized my intention and stopped to watch me without any attempt at concealment. He simply held the skyline looking down. I gave the hearty wave of the dedicated dawn-rambler, and cheerily whistled my way back to the big house for breakfast.

The building I’d wanted to inspect was over the hill’s shoulder, about two miles off.

Robert was proving a nuisance, especially as it was his terrain, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that if I found that cottage I’d find Joseph. Predecessors are always a nuisance in any job. Predecessors who prove elusive and taboo are even more disturbing.

“Och, the poor wee thing,” Mrs. Buchan said, noisily brewing up. She was the serf-factotum, red-faced, plump, and breathless. I watched fascinated amid the din. All kitchens look like pandemonium to me, but Tachnadray’s was special. It was a vast long hall, sort of Somersetshire-ninepin-bowling-alley-shaped but with huge iron ranges along one side. Mrs. Buchan rushed everywhere. I’d asked about Elaine.

“Can’t the doctors do anything?”

“Don’t ye think they’ve tried, you daft man?” Mrs. Buchan sang, trotting her large mass from table to oven with raw bread. “It was that horse. A stupid great lummock. I’m against horses, always was. But do people listen?”

“Why aren’t you a McGunn, Buchan?”

The far door opened and Robert entered. He sat without a word. With me at one end of the long table and the red-bearded giant glowering at the other, we were a gift for a passing jokester.

“Morning, Robert. Breakfast presently.” She sprinted to the copper porridge pan, panting, “I am. Before Buchan wed me. My two bairns are away in London.”

“Sinners.”

The joke fell flat. “Aye,” she wheezed over the frying bacon. “I pray for them night and day.”

“I walked out this morning,” I said hopefully as the porridge came.

“Aye. You were seen.”

The laconic shutout. I bent to my spoon. “I thought I saw Hector walking Tessie and Joey.”

“No, man. He’d be away in the opposite direction, on the…” Mrs. Buchan’s voice trailed off as Robert’s massive hulk emitted a warning rumble.

“Lovely dogs,” I said casually, reaching for hot new bread.

Eating always cheers me up. And happiness brings luck, though folk mistakenly assume it’s the other way round. Nice knowing that the cottage Hector inspected every morning lay in the opposite direction to the place I’d just tried to reach. Progress in Tachnadray.

Duncan told me when I reported for work that Elaine had called a meeting tomorrow morning. I’d have to get a move on with Plan X.

« ^ »

—— 16 ——

You must have played that imagination game where you can have any woman (or man, mutatis mutandis) on earth? And “have” in any way you like? It used to be my big favorite until matters got out of hand, over this bird called Wilhelmina. She was a drama student and lived on Natural Earth-Friendly Pulses, which means beans. It ended in tragedy when, in the throes of orgasm, somebody (she claimed it was me) uttered a strange bird’s name. She played merry hell and stormed out in a rage. Naturally I missed her almost until the pubs opened, and felt the chill wind of economics because she’d paid the mortgage. Still, I got used to food again. God, those bloody beans. But the point of mentioning that dream game of yippee is, Shona was beginning to figure in my imagination. Disloyal to Jamie, of course, to think hopefully of Shona rapturously savaging my defenseless body. Only a heel would lust like that. Her great dog Ranter was the deterrent.

Duncan gave me permission to go into Dubneath that morning, to see what was available in a small lumber yard. It sounds quick and easy. In fact I had to walk four miles on the track to a cairn of stones and wait there on the bare hillside for a lorry to come by at half past ten. It was on time, driven by a warped old geezer called Mac whose one utterance was “Aye,” in various tones of disbelief. Oddly, I was almost certain I’d seen Robert stalking the upland stones while I’d waited, but looking more intently only seemed to make him vanish actually on the hillside. Clever, that. I got the lorryman to drop me on the outskirts of the megalopolis and walked in.

The lumber yard was soporific. A neat rectangle of sloped planks, a barrow, a wooden shed with a corrugated roof. A few pieces of secondhand furniture were covered by a lean-to on the side opposite the double gate. I shouted a couple of times, wandered a bit. The only rescuable items were a heavy rosewood desk, eastern, and a wellington chest whose top and side panels had split badly. Beggars can’t be choosers. I scribbled a note, offering for the two, and wedged it in the shed door saying I’d call back.

It was too early to phone Tinker, or call on Shona—I wasn’t going to risk that great silent dog without protection—so I went to see George MacNeish. He was doing out the saloon bar with Mary. They seemed honestly pleased to see me.

I pretended to stagger to a stool. “I’m in hell. No houses anywhere, and all the grub’s French.”

“That’ll be Michelle,” Mary said, smiling. “But Gladys Buchan’ll start you off right each day.”

“She tries.” I closed the door because two old anglers in tweedy plus fours were chatting in the parlor. “Look, folks. Who and where is this Joseph?”

The smiles faded. After a moment of still life I said, “I can’t go out and ask Mrs. Innes.

Everybody in Tachnadray shuts up if I mention him. It’s getting on my nerves.”

George was about to say something when Mary put in one breath ahead. “It’s no business of ours, Ian. Maybe you’ve been too long in the soft south. Up here family feelings are best not touched.”

“Seems daft to me. Okay, he drank. Is that enough to launch a bloke into oblivion? And where’s the harm telling me?”

George deliberately chose his words. “Joseph is a McGunn, so he’s rightly your clan’s responsibility, not ours. But to settle your mind: Joseph worked up at Tachnadray, yes.

And left under a cloud. That’s all. Now stop your asking, and stay mute like a canny man.”

“There!” I said with evident pleasure. “Wasn’t painful, was it? And look how relieved you’ve made me. Just for that, I’ll drag your wife down into her kitchen, bolt the door, and force her to warm up some of her rotten old moldy pasties.”

Their expressions lifted, and amid smiling prattle Mary started for the kitchen. I don’t know which of us was the more relieved as normality reasserted itself.

“Typical McGunn,” George mock-grumbled. “Always thieving.”

“Shut your face, MacNeish. Or I’ll take up golf and thrash you at your own game. Here, missus,” I said, slamming the kitchen door after me. “What’s this about the soft south?

I’ll have you know I work bloody hard down there…”

My heart felt sick, though I cleared Mary’s grub quick enough and kept up the rabbiting.

The MacNeishes had been generous enough to give me a warning when I’d left for Tachnadray, but now I needed to know something definite they’d handed me a load of codswallop. I didn’t believe that about Joseph leaving under a cloud. He was still around, and I badly needed to find him.

By eleven o’clock I was at the great Innes emporium, smiling as I entered and hoping to find it empty of customers. It was, but a glance at Mrs. Innes’s closed face made it apparent there’d be no joy there. She’d been warned. I put on a show of buying a few things—staples, resin, electric torch, stout twine, wood stain—and asked about the lumberman.

“Why, ye stupid man!” she exclaimed, clearly glad to be on safe ground. “He’s at the pier loading his uncle’s boat.”

“Wrong, Innes. There’s only Jamie there.” I’d looked towards the water as I’d left the tavern. He’d been loading a small motor ketch, the only activity.

“Aye. It’s him.”

“Jamie owns the lumberyard?” The only supplier of obsolescent furniture, the antique faker’s raw material, was Shona McGunn’s Jamie. My brain sighed an exhausted sigh.

“Of course, Ian. Didn’t Mary McGunn tell ye that?”

“Mary McGunn?” I only knew one Mary in Dubneath.

“Mary MacNeish.” Mrs. Innes was bagging up black currants. Her eyes held mine. It’s the best I can do, her careful gaze said, as she joked, “You McGunns are all too wrapped up in your silly selves…”

“Will ye no be resenting that slur from an Innes, Ian?” Shona came in the shop doorway behind me, smiling, her great dog beside her. It was enormous with the light behind it. “The Inneses are great misjudgers.”

“Glad you came, Beautiful,” I said, joining the spirit of the thing. “While Jamie’s busy, have we got time to sneak off?”

Shona laughed. Ranter grinned. “For coffee, Ian?”

“I’ve had nothing all morning.”

“Oooh, the lies in the man!” Mrs. Innes exclaimed after us. “He’s full of Mary’s cooking!”

My least favorite headache returned as I walked along the narrow pavement with Shona and her pooch. It comes from fear, which is generated by a terrible realization of ignorance. Mrs. Innes had tried a second time to warn me, in her way. I’d just been too slow to appreciate it. There was only one ally left, and that was Shona. After all, I thought, glancing sideways at her lovely bright face, she was the one who’d brought me up here. She alone knew who I was, and kept the secret. She alone had promised me a fair share. And she alone was on my side, however erratic her personality. This clan-loyalty business could surely be safely forgotten, except among the elderly gossipmongers of Dubneath.

I’d only been allowed back into town when Shona was free. I must have accidentally slipped her by alighting on the outskirts instead of being fetched directly into Dubneath’s center. She must have gone hunting me when she realized I’d gone missing. Still, an ally is an ally. I wanted to get Tinker because I badly needed things done. In the meantime I’d have to rely on the one natural asset we all possess. Perfidy.

“Darling,” I said at her gate. “Won’t the neighbors talk?”

“No,” she said evenly, “providing you’re quiet.”

Ranter came in and watched me make myself at home, as the saying is. It was quite unnerving. As matters progressed from the possible to the inevitable, I had to ask Shona to send the dog out. Amused, Shona compromised by ordering it into the little front garden, and led me upstairs after latching the door. After that it was all smooth sailing. If my brain had been functioning, I’d have still talked myself into making love to Shona on the grounds that the worst I could expect was betrayal. After some of the women I’ve known, it would be a small price. I’m fully trained in disaster. As it was, my intellect had hibernated at the first hint of forthcoming ecstasy. I don’t know how sociologists manage all that dispassion they brag about. Women only make me think hooray. With my own brand of logic going full steam, the mere act of lying dazed and sweat-stuck to Shona afterwards was somehow proof that we were more fervent allies than ever.

“Who’s the crook, love?” I said, drifting from oblivion to somnolence. Women are always awake when I come to. How do they do it?

“That’s my question, Lovejoy.” She lay aside, somehow. The pillow had fluffed up between us, making it hard to breathe.

“It’s not Elaine, that’s for sure. Nor Duncan. He’s a naturally nice bloke.”

“Is he a good… antiques faker?”

“Not bad. Certainly not in the same league as some.”

“Michelle?” Her voice was in exact neutral, oho.

“Your pal?” I was unsure. Michelle was one of those lovely succulent women who should be eaten whole with mint. I’ve always been vulnerable. “Dunno. What’s her motive? Money?”

“That. And Elaine.” Shona’s hatred showed now. Her throat thickened. “Michelle’s an intruder. A spider. She’ll take anything she can. Men are blind, Lovejoy.”

“Oh aye,” I said dryly. Fascism gets everywhere, even into lovers’ beds. “So Michelle and Duncan are your guess. Not Robert?”

She still spoke muffled. “Robert does as he’s told.”

“Which leaves Hector, but he’s too busy with his dogs and sheep. And Jamie. Lucky that he runs the wood yard, eh?”

“Essential.”

There are two sorts of pests: Women who never leave you alone after loving, forever inspecting your morphology and asking questions, and women who mentally move out and lie there, eyes closed, disowning the nerk they’ve drained to exhaustion. Shona was clearly of the second category, hunched away in the bed, making me feel a right hitchhiker.

“Look, Shona.” I pulled her over to face me. “Michelle couldn’t pull a scam on her own.

Duncan knows so little about the antiques game that he doesn’t even suss out alternative routes, different fences. He’s a craftsman, but no crook.”

“What are you saying, Lovejoy?” she said towards the window.

“There’s been no crime.”

Which raised her, bedclothes pulled modestly over her breasts. “No crime? Of course there’s been a crime! We’ve been selling furniture and paintings to keep Tachnadray together ever since I can remember. For less and less money!”

“You’d only a limited number to start with. You’ve simply run out of originals.”

“We’ve never relied on lies, Lovejoy! That’s your trick!”

Well, she’d a right to be angry. She was the only person I’d ever met who’d passed a genuine antique as a fake. I spend my life doing the opposite.

“The point is, love,” I said along the pillow into her lovely furious eyes, “there’s no antiques worth mentioning left at Tachnadray. It’s empty. That genuine bureau you sent down was Tachnadray’s swan song.”

“How do you know, Lovejoy?” It was a whisper.

“The house feels dry, all wrong. It’s got a few sticks, and that’s it.”

“You really can tell,” she said with wonder.

“Afraid so, love.” I watched her beautiful blues well up. “The stuff left in Tachnadray isn’t worth a dealer’s petrol for the journey. You made the wrong assumption. You couldn’t understand why so little money was coming in when one or two reproduction pieces were being sent off every month. And poor old Duncan is slogging his guts out to make enough copies, fakes, repros to keep Tachnadray fed. He and Michelle were too tenderhearted to tell Elaine the truth.”

I was up and dressing, keeping an eye out for that bloody great dog. If it ever learned I’d made Shona cry I’d be a chewed heap.

“Where are you going, Lovejoy?”

“Tachnadray. Elaine’s called a gathering tomorrow. I’ve to speak the plan out.” A naked man looks grotesque, so I was glad to be covered. Shona lay there, eyes dulled, pretty.

Nakedness looks good on a woman. “I can offer a reasonable scam, Shona. Only one-off, but it’d bring in a hell of a lot of gelt. If Elaine accepts, I’ll stay and do it. If not, there’s nothing to keep me here.”

“You’d leave? Because there’s no antiques?”

“I can knock up fakes anywhere, love. It doesn’t have to be in Tachnadray.”

For a few moments I dithered. I never know what to say when leaving a woman’s bedroom. You can’t just give a sincere grin and a “Thanks, love,” can you? And women are too distrusting to believe dud promises.

“Will Ranter let me pass?”

She smiled, cold, I thought. She uttered the slow words like a thumbs-down to an arena. “This once, darling.”

I gave her a sincere grin. “Thanks, love,” I said, and left.

« ^ »

—— 17 ——

Shut your gums, Tinker,” I said into the phone, frantic lest Mac’s lorry left without me on the home run. The gabby old sod was woozier than ever. He was in the Rose at Peldon, sloshed out of his mind. The Rose is a pub by the seamarshes, always heaving-full of antique dealers.

“Eh, Lovejoy?” he bawled. The background noise was Grand National Day. “I’m liss’nin’.”

“A month from now I’m doing a paper job. A mansion.”

“Us? Paperin’ a stately home?” Tinker yelled, coughing between syllables.

The distant pub’s racket silenced as if by magic. Some lunatic talking football was instantly throttled.

“Start enrolling the dealers, Tinker. Pass their names on to Margaret.”

“Is it secret?” he howled to the universe. Jesus.

“Not any more,” I said wearily. “Tell Margaret she can chit and chop for me. And get Antioch Dodd to collect the pots. Got that?” “Pots” are lorries, from rhyming slang: pots and pans, vans. It’d be quite a convoy. Chits are IOUs and receipts, chops the stamps of approval. It meant I’d honor whatever deals Margaret decided for me. I might murder her afterwards if she guessed wrong, of course, but fair’s fair.

“Right, Lovejoy. How much do we need?”

Tachnadray was, say, sixty rooms, of which two were still respectably furnished. The rest stood bare. A sixth of the rooms would have been servants’ quarters, say about nine.

“About fifty rooms, Tinker, assorted, but I split half and half.” In its heyday half would have been bedrooms, retiring rooms, and half reception rooms, libraries, smoking rooms, and that.

“Fifty? Bloody hell. Where is it?”

“Never you mind. I’ll phone down every fourth day.”

“Wait, wait! Lovejoy! Who’s to reff the stuff?” Reff, as in referee, to gain some slight assurance of authenticity for the antiques—real or fake’d hardly matter much—as they were loaded up.

“Who’ve you got there?” I could imagine two score dealers frozen in the pub, listening breathless at this news of the biggest scam to hit East Anglia all year.

“Here? Well there’s Harry Bateman, Liz Sandwell, Helen, Big Frank from Suffolk, Sven, Mannie, Jill…” His rubbled croak became inaudible in instantaneous pandemonium. The silly nerks had erupted, grabbed for the receiver to bawl their names and shouting offers, percentages, splits on the knock, part deals—

Click. Burr. I get fed up with other people’s greed when I’ve enough of my own.

It was coming on to rain when finally Mac’s lorry hove in. Somehow he’d heard, God knows how, of the furniture I’d left penciled notes for at the lumber yard. They were on his wagon under a tarpaulin in the back.

Robert met us at the crossroads, pushing a handcart. Mute, he transferred the two pieces without my assistance. I called thanks to Mac and in the driving rain followed the giant’s form along to Tachnadray. I felt a spare tool at a wedding.

This next bit’s about crooked money, and how you—repeat, you— will sooner or later be robbed blind. There’s no escape, so if you’re of a nervous disposition, I’d skip it.

A “paper job”, aka “papering a house,” is one of the commonest antiques tricks in the world. And make no mistake, everybody in the game tries it. Since the Great Antiques Boom, however, it has come to be a speciality of the world’s poshest auction houses. It works thus:

A householder dies, alas. In the ten seconds which elapse between the crusty old colonel’s last breath and his widow phoning the insurance company, several dealers will call, offering to sell the colonel’s personal effects. The widow sorts out what she wants to take to her daughter’s and signs a contract with a respectable auctioneer.

Now an auctioneer can do two things. Either all the auctionable stuff is vanned off by the auctioneer’s respectable vannies (they will be called assistants in the written contract) to the respectable auctioneer’s premises, or else the contents—furniture, cutlery, linen, carpets, the colonel’s campaign medals, paintings, porcelain—will be left in situ, and the house opened for a grand auction.

You can imagine that the final printed catalog might look a bit “thin,” as we say, if old Colonel, RIP, didn’t have much. But oh, how nice it would be, thinks our respectable auctioneer wistfully, if the deceased had a couple of handsome almost-Chippendale tallboys, or an oil painting possibly almost nearly attributable to Turner or Vermeer.

How sad a respectable auctioneer’s life is, he sighs.

Happily, sin slithers in to help out. Within hours of that respectable auctioneer’s naughty daydream, would you believe it but the house’s contents begin to swell, multiply, increase, until finally, on auction day, the colonel’s antiques overflow into the garden, where the respectable auctioneer has thoughtfully hired numerous elegant marquees for the purpose. Isn’t life great? Soon it gets greater.

The cataloger’s erudition helps the thing along. She (catalogers are normally female; more careful, you see) will say of some neffie portrait of a bog-eyed clergyman: “…once attributed to the immortal Gainsborough …” or some such. The fact that the daub was created in an alcoholic stupor by an incompetent forger now doing life on Dartmoor is regarded as a mere quibble, because the words as written are actually true. So Law condones the fraud: The portrait was once so attributed—by a crooked forger. See how it works?

Just as theaters are “papered”—i.e., crammed by the actors’ friends, who are given free tickets—so auctioneers swell their offerings at house auctions.

Innocent souls might ask: “But what’s the point? Who gains?” To answer this best, simply buy any item at such a sale, then try to sell it. An old Lowestoft jug, say. First, offer it just as it is. To your alarm, antique shops don’t want to know. Dealers spurn you and your jug. They see a dozen a day, so what’s one more? Tomorrow, however, take along the auctioneer’s lovely catalog. You can now show the dealer your jug’s handsome picture and precise printed description. He’ll be over the moon. Of course he’ll still haggle over the price. The point is he’ll want your jug. You’ve made a sale.

Good, eh?

The reason he now wants it is that magic thing called provenance. He can ascribe your jug, truthfully, as “from the famous sale at Nijgi-novgorod House …” and show your catalog as proof. Appearance, condition, and provenance—they’re the three great selling points in horses, cattle, bloodstock. And, oddly enough, people. Why not in antiques too?

Paper jobs are highly popular in the antiques game, because everybody profits: dealers, public, buyers, catalogers, auctioneers, the colonel’s widow, the bloke who prints the catalog… The only slight hiccup in it all is that it’s fraudulent. It has to be. Why?

Because if every house were ram-jam packed full of delectable antiques, there’d be no demand. It’d be like everybody suddenly being millionaires. So the “sets” of dining chairs aren’t sets at all; they’re made up from here, there, and everywhere. Vases reputedly brought back from Japan in 1890 were actually fired in Wapping last week.

The delicate Chinese porcelain pillows weren’t shipped home from Canton last century: They were a job lot in a Hong Kong package tour this Easter. The colonel’s campaign medals will be sold—and sold, and sold, and sold, for entire sets will be put together by every dealer in the country and sold as the colonel’s one genuine set. Which explains why the printed catalogs for important house auction sales are always sold out instantly—to market twenty sets of medals you need twenty catalogs, right? It’s cast-iron profit. It’s today’s favorite crime. All you need is a posh address, and you can make a fortune. The customers get diddled, but so?

That’s the paper job. All you need is care, skill, and a team.

After dinner I retired to formulate my paper job, promising Elaine to reveal it in all its glory at the morning gathering. Then, in the cascading rain, I went out for a sly walk.

The death simply wasn’t my fault. Honest.

The drive to the main gate was the only orthodox way off the Tachnadray estate. Stone walls rimmed the thirty or so acres of paddocks, outbuildings, lawns, with a few straggly hawthorn hedges infilling the tumbled drystone stretches. Behind the great house, vegetable gardens were busily reverting to weeds. Glass cloches sprawled higgledy-piggledy. Greenhouses shed panes. Huts flaked planks. Even the outbuildings had joined the disintegration wholesale and gone toothy by extruding stones. I’d asked Duncan why he didn’t grow stuff, market some produce. He’d waxed sarcastic: “I’ll get a dozen retainers in on it immediately.” The poor bloke was doing his best.

Hell of a place to hide, I grumbled inwardly as I drifted through the dark garden. Soon after Mrs. Buchan had blundered by admitting that Hector’s dawn patrol was on the hillside opposite to the main gateway, I’d sussed out a cracked path between lines of old bleached canes. It made stealth clumsy and full of din, but what could I do? The map showed a fairly smooth slope, then a few upland folds. And, in grand solitude two miles off, a cottage marked shooters in a narrow gully.

Climbing the wall was easy, and quieter. Torch in my pocket, I began the long slow climb up the fellside, walking bent and pressing my hands on my knees. The ground was soaked to squelching over my shoes. It made me slip on rocks projecting underfoot. Heather started kicking back at each pace, whipping my legs. There was no moon. How the hell had highwaymen managed? I did my best to follow the direction I’d planned, but within minutes I was using my torch to find the first gale-torn hawthorn and check its position against the faint glow of light from the house below. There were two leaning crags which would be my markers to aim off at a forty-degree angle to the right. The cottage was more or less a mile from there.

Common sense told that Shooters wasn’t Hector’s home. If it had been, why did he need to walk out there? The shepherd had innocently assumed that, being a McGunn, I was in on the cottage thing. Maybe Shooters, I hoped with spirits rising, was in fact a great Victorian shooting lodge and it was there that Duncan/Robert/Michelle or whoever had salted away the missing antiques from Tachnadray, if any.

Maybe nine o’clock when I set out. That made it getting on for ten when I made the first leaning crag. Odd, but I was starting to understand how the nightwalkers had managed. It’s quite easy, really. Once you get used to being away from civilization’s buildings and lights, night resolves into distinct components. Ground underfoot stays pitch-black, but the sky’s dark intensity less somewhat. Tall stones and trees condense the sky’s consistency, so that though you still can’t actually see them as such, you can somehow perceive that they’re there in your path. Tachnadray’s light was more distant, but seemed almost blinding from the hilltop. I stopped looking at it because it lessened my night vision.

From the crags the ground descended and took me out of direct view of Tachnadray for the first time. Even so I wasn’t too worried. The faint sky shine from that direction was enough to show me the hilltop’s sky interface. Every so often I cricked over on the stones that littered the fells, so I developed a trick of walking with knees bent, using short steps, not putting my heels down first. It intrigued me. I’d adopted Robert’s curious gait. A new way of looking, and a new way of walking, all in one go. I felt a real discoverer.

In fact I was so busy praising myself that I was stuck when a building thickened the darkness to my left. I’d actually come upon Shooters. A disappointingly small edifice. A pointless low wall ran from it for a short distance. Something to do with cattle? A snow-break to halt fell drifts in blizzards? I felt my way along it, stepping carefully in case tins or bottles or other fellwalkers’ debris lurked in wait.

Derelict? There was no sound. I halted, listened. In the distance a short deep bark sounded, curt and businesslike. I dismissed it. Hector’s dogs probably wouldn’t be out at this hour. I’d heard Duncan talk of red deer. Perhaps a stag calling its herd, maybe scenting me and resenting intrusion on its patch?

Risking, I took my flashlight and moved off a few silent yards. If somebody saw me I wanted a head start. I wasn’t in good enough shape to sprint the two boulder-riddled miles to Tachnadray without breaking my neck, so I’d have to do a short dash and hide among the outcrops. Escape by subterfuge is really my thing, but it’s easier in towns than out here in all this loneliness. I crouched.

Flash. The beam swept, hit buildings, doused into blackness again. In that instant of brilliance, my eyes beheld a child’s drawing two-story cottage, symmetrical and unadorned. The windows were wood-shuttered. Slate roof. Single chimney. A bare building on a barren hillside. What the hell was I doing out here? I asked myself irritably. One upper-floor shutter had stood slightly ajar, I’d noticed. I thought over the image in my mind. The obvious thing was to wait a minute in case my beam had disturbed an inhabitant, then creep up and simply try the door. For all I knew I might be stalking an empty house.

As I felt around me for a couple of decent-shaped stones, I heard again that deer’s bark. Closer, and only once, but now out beyond the cottage. I actually chuckled to myself. If only that apprehensive stag knew how little it had to fear from me it would get back between the sheets and nod off. God’s creatures are gormless. No wonder.

God was a beginner at creation.

It’s a fallacy to assume that burglars can’t climb a wall without a ladder. A burglar can climb anything, because even a blank wall offers ledges, pipes, rectifying studs, cistern overflows. You might say that such feeble supports might not support a burglar’s full weight—and you’d be right. But they’d support a quarter of a burglar’s weight, and that’s all he needs because he can do the bolus trick, the town burglar’s favorite.

This evolved from sailing ships, I’ve been told. Others say it’s what Argentina’s cowboys do to hobble bulls. The stones make the cord whip-tangle anything hit. I’ve even seen it used to put a rope round untouchable scalding steam pipes along a mill ceiling. You take a piece of strong twine a yard long, and tie stones at the ends. This is the bolus.

Then fasten a long length at the midpoint, and coil that length on the ground beside you. Take the midpoint of your bolus between finger and thumb of your left hand, and hold one tied stone in your right. Then start swinging the other dangling stone in a circle.

Clockwise or anticlockwise doesn’t matter. Once it’s going, you simply fling the opposite stone in the opposite direction, and you’ll find you are holding a piece of string by its middle with two stones whirling round in opposite directions. Naked tassel-dancers do it in night clubs from their breasts—er, I mean I’ve heard they do. To keep the bolus spinning, you simply move your hand up and down.

You lean, fling the bolus with a slow overarm cast. The best is that if you miss the chimney you simply reel it in again, or cut your cord and make another bolus. This actually happened. I missed the chimney stack twice. I tried pulling on the twine, but the bolus must have caught on something on the far side of the cottage roof. It’s usually the guttering or a cistern-overflow pipe. I bit through the nylon, let its free end whip away into the night air, and chewed away another one-yard length. By feel, I’d still got enough to stretch from roof to ground, and I was in no haste.

Mostly, I (I really mean burglars who go in for this sort of thing) prefer elongated-waisted stones because they hold the string better. City burglars use spark plugs, partly to assume innocence if they’re caught. I only took a minute finding a decent heavy pair of stones out in all this horrible countryside, and I was in action for another go. I reached for my coiled twine.

And stopped.

Almost beyond hearing, I could just make out a faint yell. “Run! Run!” Quite like a yell heard through glass.

Baffled. I strained to hear. Run? Run where? And why? I actually got up and turned this way and that, head tilted to catch the gnat’s whine of a shout, before it dawned. It was inside the cottage. Somebody was yelling for somebody to run. If I hadn’t been thick I’d have guessed, but I’ve a zillion untrained neurones. I was quite unconcerned, merely puzzled.

My beam cut the night. And something moved, far over to my right, beyond the low wall.

Robert stood there. He looked gigantic in the solid glare from my torch. With him on a leash stood Ranter, its eyes two brilliants against jet. That bark had been no deer. Dogs bark.

“Hello,” I called feebly. “I was just out for…”

Robert fiddled with the huge animal’s neck. Nervously I backed away a pace. Robert stepped aside, a whole dark space between him and the giant hound. He raised an arm and pointed at me. His kilt flapped once in the night breeze.

“Run! Run!” the little insect screamed inside the cottage.

Frightened, I backed off. Run? Somebody was warning me—me—to run. Christ. From what? From…

The giant figure held its biblical pose in my torchlight.

“Kill,” Robert said. He turned and walked away. I turned and ran like hell.

« ^ »

—— 18 ——

For a second or two I thought the damned animal wasn’t coming after me. I fled across the slope I’d climbed, my torchlight flickering ahead on shining angles of granite projecting from the heather. Maybe I even imagined I was going at a speed Ranter couldn’t match.

Then I heard it, breathing like a train. It slobbered as it ran, a flopping sound as its feet landed. It didn’t dash like a greyhound or scamper like a beagle. It simply loped. In that first terror-stricken moment when I’d seen it start, its apparently casual movement said it all. What’s the hurry? its graceful mass announced as it hunched up to start the pursuit. It’s not a race—it’s a hunt. Sooner or later, it seemed to say, the quarry’ll tire, weaken, flake out, and then… I was moaning as I ran. If I’d had breath enough I’d have whimpered, prayed, screamed, anything.

Ahead a roaring sound. I’d say I headed for it except that that expression makes my progress sound like a ramble. Reality was different. I was scrambling, stumbling, gasping across the stony hillside slope, trying to hold my torch out ahead for sight, anything to keep ahead of that dreadful slapping which proved the bloody monster was gaining. I knew I had to keep grip on that torch at all cost.

It could have only been a minute when a roar opened the ground ahead, and I tumbled over an edge. I fell maybe ten feet, more, found myself in swirling water and floundered forward, anything to keep going.

A waterfall. Some sort of gully, with a narrow freshet of water. I’d kept hold of my torch. I splashed across, climbed a tall projecting slabbed rock dividing the swirling course. Maybe I could get to the top, sit there and somehow stop it climbing up after me. A stone, a cobble. I realized I’d got my new untried bolus still in my hands, stuffed it in my jacket pocket and hauled a cobble up out of the onrush.

A flop, flop, behind. Here it came. With a slither Ranter appeared at the margin I’d fallen over and without a pause came bounding on. I saw him hit the water with a ploosh, force his way up to the base of my rock, and try to leap up. I flung my cobble and hit the bugger. He leapt to one side, and halted. I squatted up on my pinnacle, sick from breathlessness and fright.

He looked at me, transfixed in my beam. Ranter’s appearance arrested me. He honestly appeared noble. The strain of chasing hardly showed. He’d cornered me. His teeth would be along in a minute to perform massacre. It was all so serene, this hunting business.

So that’s what a hunter-killer looks like, I thought dementedly. His stance was one of attention, of cool certainty. His tongue lolled. His flanks shone. What I hated most was that he was thinking. I honestly mean it. The murderous beast was actually cerebrating, its great head swinging as it took in the geography of the gully and the pouring beck, calmly working out how to catch and kill the shivering bloke perched ludicrously up there.

Directly upwards from the water my angular granite projected, its faces a mixture of smooth and rough, but on the whole vertical, thank God. The side I’d climbed up had barely a fingerhold. I’d done well to haul myself up. I prayed fervent gratitude that I had hands and Ranter hadn’t any means of clutching.

Its head swung, marcasite eyes glittering. I whimpered. It took no notice and benignly continued inspecting my slab. Don’t worry, its urbane manner informed me; this is only a job. I’ll get you in a minute. Above all, be patient. I moaned. The bloody beast was a real pro.

We were maybe thirty feet apart. The animal—it wasn’t good old Ranter any longer; executioners don’t have names—backed, tried to get space for a run, changed its mind.

My torchlight couldn’t be helping it. I kept the beam trained on its face. Not much of a dazzle, but what else could I do? I found a single loose stone flake, chucked it. The murderer leaned its head an inch and the stone flew by, clattered down the rock wall. It didn’t even blink. For a daft second I thought of persuasion. I said, “Ranter. Good dog.”

It gave me a glance of withering scorn. In fact so compelling was its thorough examination of the stream’s narrow gully that I did it too. We were a weird partnership, quarry and hunter.

Downstream no hope that I could see, the spate frothing on a mincing-machine of large stones. The gully’s sides slanted outwards from the granite bed. My beam flicked, returned to the dog, flicked away for a quick glance, back. I didn’t want the beast doing anything sly while I was being conned into studying the terrain.

The monster moved, one of those sudden tensions, as if about to leap sideways. I yelped in fright. It stayed, splayfooted. I followed its gaze, used my torch to see what it had worked out. The sides of my slab were ripped vertically by ancient geologic forces.

A man could just about climb up there, but no dog. So? I shone back at Ranter. And it was smiling, its stare fixed above me.

Above? I shone upwards and nearly peed myself in terror. There was an overhang.

Barely seven yards above my head the gully’s side leaned in to form a shelf. Ranter could get me. I’d had it. Any creature on earth could get up there, look down on me.

Then leap and… and… I whimpered.

The hound gave one last calculating stare, gauged the distance from the ledge to me, then splashed off downstream, bounding from rock to rock with that casual lethal grace. A mad hope swept into me—suddenly Shona had missed him and whistled one of those dog whistles to call him off.

But no. The overhang was from the side opposite. No way to cross upstream, so it was doing the sensible thing. Downstream, where the gully flattened, it could easily lope upslope to gain the plateau, then reach the projecting granite and leap… I’ve made it sound like miles. It was maybe a couple of hundred yards, at most. I wondered if there was time to make a run for it… But it had nearly caught me when I’d had a start. And now I was knackered. I’m not proud of what I did then. I blubbered and wailed, yelled for help. And did nothing.

Wearily I discarded my jacket, some lunatic notion of wrapping it round my forearm for a last futile aquatic wrestle. It rattled. I felt in my pocket. Two stones. I pulled them out, still tied at opposite ends of the strong twine.

My bolus. That gave me… well, one go. The flopping sounded. I set one stone swinging, set the other going, and stood upright with the thing humming vibrantly in my right grip. Up and down, faster. Eyes on the tip of the overhang, I shone the torch there. It was only when I saw his great head loom above the overhang that I realized my stupidity. Too close. My perch was maybe a square yard wide. Any hit would bring me down with him.

He looked. For a millisec I saw puzzlement in his eyes as I leaned away, the bolus whirring. His head nodded up and down in time with my oscillating hand. Perhaps he could hear the string thrumming even over the torrent’s din. Then his brow cleared.

That humming cord in the man’s hand was irrelevant. Orders were orders. He was to hunt and kill, string or no strings. He gathered and leapt down on me.

My arm came from behind. I was already in mid-throw when he left the lip. The bolus met and tangled. The stones were still whipping round and round him as I flung myself forward to avoid his hurtling mass. Foam pressed into my mouth and I was tumbling over, over. Stones slammed my legs, bum, head, shoulder. Noise deafened me. I rolled, engulfed and retching, too dazed to struggle or wonder which way was up. I was drowning. I lashed out, flailed at everything else not me. I was dying.

Except the pandemonium was now somewhere else, with me no longer part of it. I retched. Air. I was in air, not in the water. I breathed, vomited half of the torrent back where it belonged, breathed and crawled. A vertical stone stopped my crawl. I lay there, done for and too terrified to struggle further in case that damned hound heard me and came for me again. I lay, half hiding, half resting. I must have dozed a few minutes, I suppose, not much more.

Something pressed against my feet. Something floating, pushing. Perhaps a log? I withdrew my legs, shoved them out.

Still there. It was being moved by the onrush. It was therefore inert. I reached out, scrabbled a cobble up from beneath me, and lobbed it at the nudging thing by my feet.

Thud. Not a splash, or a sharp crack of stone on stone. A thick bump.

Laboriously I raised myself, extended a hand. Fur. I recoiled in panic, started away. But it hadn’t growled. I felt. A huge paw. A great head. A metal-studded collar. And, tethering its forepaws to its neck in a stranglehold, twine. One of the stones seemed to have struck its eye. It was my hunter, my personal executioner.

You can only retch a few times, they say, then the body gives up. True.

Countryside is supposed to increase insight, make poets. That’s a laugh. Countryside does nothing but dull your wits. My mind was so addled that I actually started towards where I imagined Shooters to be before I said hey, and sat down for a think. It had emitted none of those chiming vibes, so it was no antiques cache. Whoever was in there had warned me, “Run, run!” An ally. And trapped. Could I spring him/her?

Perhaps, but would I get him/her as far as Dubneath before the clan caught up? Hardly, the state I was in and burdened by a possible ex-prisoner. And I already knew Hector checked the cottage each dawn.

No. The thing to do was turn up at tomorrow morning’s gathering and suss out the reaction to my sudden reappearance. So, typically stupid, I started in the reverse direction, then got lost.

An hour wasted wearying myself even more. See what I mean about countryside?

Finally I followed the tumbling water downhill, going slowly and feeling my way. I was perished. No jacket, no torch, wet through, exhausted. The Tachnadray track crossed a stone bridge over a wide fast stream, probably the same water, about a mile from the gateway. I must have been traveling a good hour before I walked into the bridge arch and almost knocked my silly head off. I’ll never make a countryman if I live the rest of my life.

Which is why I had a fluke, coming at Tachnadray from that direction. Not as daft as all that, I was on the drive’s verge for silence, and moved on the grass round the big house, to reach my pad. There was a light showing beneath the curtain. I thanked my inexpert needlework that had left a wide gap. I slid to the wall and waited.

Shona and Robert came downstairs. The light was off now, but I could hear them clearly. I almost stepped out to warn her.

“Nothing but the map,” Robert rumbled.

“That’s proof enough,” Shona said. Her voice was teasing, provocative. “Ranter should be here now, lazy beast. Doubtless enjoying himself chasing something.” They both laughed. She gave in. “Come, then, man. Let’s lay your head.”

They walked together past the end of the workshop, over to the far outbuilding near the perimeter wall. There was no risk of being overheard. Duncan and Michelle slept in the big house, as did Elaine. Hector was miles off. Mrs. Buchan slept downstairs in the cook’s flat.

A light showed briefly. Robert having his head laid, doubtless. I stood unmoving for quite some time. Shona was a busy, busy girl. Sex as a reward for complicity. The idea wasn’t new. What worried me was its use as an assassin’s weapon.

Feeling a hundred years old, I crossed quietly to my garret, went in, and locked the door. I had a bath in the dark and lay thinking until dawn blew the fright from the eastern lift. I wish I’d told Shona I’d had a headache in her cottage.

« ^ »

—— 19 ——

Morning,” I said brightly to the gathering.

“Morning, Ian,” Duncan gave back affably, pipe ready to stink us out. Michelle was in powder blue, her neat skirt stenciling her waist. She wore a light necklet—not necklace—of a single silver band with a central amethyst, say 1900. Risky, but stunning.

Oh, and she too replied an easy good morning. Robert was silent, glaring. Shona, already pale and worn, whitened even more. She knew what my arrival—indeed, my existence—meant. Old Mac was there, to my surprise. And Hector, waving a cheery greeting. Mary MacNeish sat beside Elaine, who today seemed excitable, less transparent than usual.

“Good morning, Ian,” the boss said. “We were beginning to wonder where you were.”

“Stopped off for a quick snack, love.” Also, I’d actually been to check that my finished fake antique had already gone from Duncan’s workshop. I was very pleased at discovering that.

“I’ve heard about your wee snacks,” Elaine reprimanded dryly. “Mrs. Buchan calls you Dustbin.”

“Bloody nerve.” She always pretends she likes my appetite. “I’ll take my custom elsewhere if there’s criticism. She’s not the only pastry-maker in Caithness, is she, Mary?”

If Mary MacNeish expected me to be staggered at seeing her revealed as a McGunn, she was disappointed.

Elaine began. “Listen, all. Ian suggests we pretend to sell up Tachnadray.” She held a fragile hand to shush the murmurs. “I’ve summoned you to judge the merits. You all know our difficulties. Income’s too little to keep the seat of our clan intact. At best we’ll last a twelve-month. Then it’s the bailiffs and a boardinghouse—”

“Never!” Robert growled, fists clenched, glaring.

“Whist, man! We have some reserve antiques still—”

My cue. I rose, ahemming. We were arranged round the hall on a right mixture of chairs and benches. I had no notes, standing at my customary hands-in-pocket slouch.

The cultural shock had been too much for us all. Truth time.

“Sorry, Elaine. There’s no reserve antiques.” I spoke apologetically, but why? “Not a groat’s worth.”

“That’s quite wrong.” Elaine held out her hand imperiously. “The list, Duncan.”

Duncan’s gaze was fixed on the floor. He made no move as I went on, “The list is phony, love. Duncan and the rest made it up, probably to reassure you. They gave you some cock-and-bull story about the upper west wing being exactly right for storing the remainder of your antiques.”

Everybody tried to talk at once. Elaine cut the babble with a quiet “Go on, Ian.”

“Tachnadray is broke now, not next year. So, with the last genuine antique gone—”

“Well I mind that day,” Mac suddenly reminisced through his stubble. “Aye. Me and Cousin Peter from Thurso took it. Your father’s grand four-poster, Miss Elaine—”

“Shut up, you old fool,” Duncan said. “The past is past.”

“It’s a familiar story,” I went on. “Youngsters drift to the cities, a few adherents cling to the past. We’ve empty villages in East Anglia for the same reason. Tachnadray’s marsupialized. It’s a rock pool inhabited by crustaceans and sea anemones—

yourselves—after the tide’s ebbed.”

“Is this true?” Elaine demanded quietly. Nobody answered. She gazed at each in turn, waiting calmly until heads raised to meet her penetrating stare. She even gave me one.

Suddenly I was the only honest crook on the campus. “Continue.”

“There’s only one way out now. We pull a paper job.”

They listened, doubts to the fore, while I explained the rudiments. Duncan’s pipe went out. Michelle was enthralled, leaning forward and clearly excited by the whole thing.

Robert sank into deeper caverns of hatred. Shona was still getting used to my resurrection.

“We start the papering with a pawnbroker.” Murmurs began, thunder from Robert, but I was fed up with their criticism and raised my voice. “Not to use. To buy from.

Pawnbroking law changes, when items exceed fifty quid. The trick is to find a pawnbroker who’ll value even the Crown Jewels at forty-nine ninety-nine. In other words, the meanest. We take his stock-rings, necklaces, clothes—”

“And pretend they are Tachnadray’s heirlooms?” Elaine asked. “Isn’t that rather hard on the widows and orphans?”

“Yes.” My answer led into a vale of silence. I was a dicey Sherpa in treacherous mountains.

“Will that be sufficient?” Elaine must have been painfully aware of the outraged glances from the others.

“No. We’ll need more. But pawnbroking’s gone downhill these sixty years. There’s only a couple of hundred left in the entire land, which narrows our choice. We’ll want an entire convoy of antiques from somewhere, especially furniture. I’ve already started raising the dealers.”

“And told them here?” Shona was on her feet, furious.

“Don’t be daft.”

She subsided. Twice she’d absently reached out a hand as if about to pat a loyal hound.

Both times she’d looked about, distressed. More grief was on the way, poor lass.

“I’ve one problem, how to bring the antiques in. It’ll be a sizable convoy.”

They waited. Elaine waited. And so did I, examining their expectant faces.

“Well?” Elaine’s telepathy trick had gone on the blink.

“Air, road, or sea?” I asked. “Same as usual?”

And Old Mac, bless him, said, “Och, yon sounds a terrible lot for a…” Hector shut him up by a double nudge.

“. . . for a wee ketch like Jamie’s,” I finished for him, nodding. “And your old lorry, Mac.

I’d better organize a road convoy. The airport at Wick’s too obvious.”

Elaine was smiling. “Congratulations, Ian. We can’t be blamed for trying to conceal our method of delivery. I hope you don’t think us too immoral. The fewer people know, the better.”

“Is it agreed, then?”

“Yes.” Elaine’s pronouncement gained no applause. The atmosphere smoldered with resentment. “How long does this… papering take?”

“A month. First, we need a compliant printer.”

“Hamish in Wick is clan,” Elaine said.

“Next, I’ll need a secure helper. Can I choose?”

“Of course,” said the young clan leader, and everybody looked expectantly at Shona.

Shona spoke first. “I can start anytime.” She gave me her special bedroom smile.

“Thanks,” I said, beaming most sincerely. “But no, ta. Ready, Michelle?”

We were given an office in the empty west wing. Hector and a couple of men fetched some rough-and-ready rubbish for us to use as furniture. Michelle was awarded a desk: a folding baize-topped card table. They found a lopsided canvas chair from somewhere, and unbelievably for me a discarded car seat nailed to a stool. An elderly lady appeared from nowhere and contributed a brass oil lamp. Elaine ordered herself carried upstairs by Robert to inspect our progress.

“I’m ashamed this is the best Tachnadray can offer, Ian.” She directed Robert as an infant does its dad, by yanking on his nape hairs. She held a fistful of mane.

“I’ve done nowt yet, love. Got some carrier pigeons?”

“The phone was… discontinued. I’m sorry. Mrs. Buchan will gong your mealtimes. I’ve sent for writing paper.”

Just then it arrived, two incomplete schoolbooks and half a letter pad, and a bottle with an ounce of ink dregs. Michelle was pink with embarrassment. Even Elaine, who was anti-prestige, looked uncomfortable. But to me rubbish is about par.

“One thing, Elaine. I’ll want to ask questions occasionally. If Robert assaults me every time we’ll get nowhere.”

“Robert,” promised our chieftainess, “will not hurt you. Ask away.”

“Question one: nearest telephone?”

“Dubneath.”

“Two: nearest stores which’ll give us credit?”

“Innes in Dubneath.”

“No, love. I’ve had to pay for everything there.”

“We never shop in Wick,” Elaine said, aloof but mortified.

Lucky old Wick, I thought. “Then I’ll break with tradition. Three: transport. Old Mac’s lorry, I suppose?”

Elaine hesitated. “There’s the laird’s car. It’s old.”

Laird? Presumably her late dad. “Tell Old Mac to siphon petrol out of his wagon, enough for a run to Wick. I’ll manage after that. And four,” I added as Robert became fidgety at my peremptory manner, “I must be given a free hand. Okay?”

An instant’s thought, then Elaine’s see-through gaze turned on Michelle. “Very well.

You, Michelle, will be responsible for his movements. Entirely. You do understand?”

“Yes, Miss Elaine.”

I didn’t, though the threat was evident to all. Michelle and I stood and watched the red-haired giant clump down the corridor. I reached out and shook Michelle’s hand. She was puzzled.

“Yes, Ian? What…?”

“Welcome to the antiques game, love,” I said. “It’s murderous, packed with deceit, wonderful. We begin, you and I, by making a promise to each other. I tell you everything I’m doing, and you do the same for me. Deal?”

That took a minute to decide. She nodded at last, and smiled, but with that familiar despair hidden in her face. It occurred to me that she was as imprisoned as Joseph, in her way. Interesting thought, no? I laughed as she flapped her hand helplessly at the room.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “All we’ve done is put some scraps in a bare room, and you’re grinning all over your face. Why?”

A windowpane had lost a corner. Putty flaked the sills. Patches of damp showed at two fungus-hung corners. Plaster had fragmented here and there, exposing laths and bricks, and powdered mortar lay in heaps ready for a dustpan, if we ever acquired one. An old wall cupboard had lost its doors, its wallpaper blebbing in the recess. Three cavities showed where somebody had wrenched out the gas fittings. How very thorough, I thought. Laird James Wheeler McGunn must have been harder up than me, even. The floor lino was reduced to a torn patch.

“Show-business time, Michelle,” I said. “Start.”

“Start what? How?” She was lost.

“We pretend to drive to Wick, but finish up in the opposite direction.”

“But, Ian,” she said uncertainly.

“Sod Ian,” I told her. “My nickname’s Lovejoy. Ready, steady, go.”

« ^ »

—— 20 ——

The laird’s car was familiar. I’d last seen it on a foggy night a wagoner had died. I said nothing. It was a Mawdslay 17 h.p., which collectors call The Sweet Seventeen.

We drove beside Dubneath Water, my least favorite river, to gain the coast road north from Dubneath towards Clyth Ness. Using the lowering mass of Ben Cheilt for guide, we forked left and made the inn at Achavanich with the huge old motor clattering away. It seemed glad to be out for a run. Certainly it hadn’t seemed to notice the road’s pitch, and took steep hills with hardly a change of note. I phoned from the inn, and got Tinker at Margaret’s nook in the Arcade.

Margaret was relieved. “Oh, thank goodness you’ve phoned, Lovejoy. It’s practically civil war here. The Eastern Hundreds are a madhouse. Everybody wants to know percentages—”

“Don’t we all?” I said with feeling. “Put Tinker on.” I covered the mouthpiece and told Michelle, poised with the inn’s notepaper, “List what I say.”

Tinker’s cough vibrated Caithness. “Wotcher, Lovejoy. Gawd, you started summink, mate—”

“Shut it. Get Tubby Turner, that pawnbroker. I’ll accept maybe three dozen items well over the pawn limit as long as they’re in period. Plus a hundred separates under limit, and half a dozen baskets.”

“Gawd, Tubby’ll go mental. You know what he’s like.” His cough bubbled and croaked.

Michelle had stopped writing. “But you said that there’s a legal limit to what pawnbrokers—”

My digit raised in warning. She wrote.

“Listen, Tinker. Tell Alan the printer that he’s had four hundred sale catalogs nicked.”

“Whose?”

“Catalogs for this sale. Now give me names, Tinker.”

“Right, Lovejoy. Helen wants in. She says you owe her.”

Only I knew how much. Plus there was the money side. She’d have to come in. Why is it women are born with so many advantages in life? Nothing to do all day, and all known privileges. “Right-oh. Helen in.”

“Them two pouffs. Sandy or Mel.”

“Or Mel? Not both?” The exotic couple had never parted since they’d become, in Sandy’s gushy phrase, a real Darby and Joan. Tinker hates them. They’re fast, aggressive antique dealers, though, and that’s what I needed.

“They had a scrap over some menu.”

How can you fight over a menu? “All right. Sandy or Mel.”

“Next’s Big Frank from Suffolk.”

That meant I could safely forget Regency and William IV silverware, thank God. It can be a nightmare. If only the Yanks had worked out a proper five-character hallmarking system…

“Is he out of trouble, Tinker?”

“Him? Some hopes. His second ex-wife’s come.” Bad news for the latest wife, currently seventh, because his bigamies started with Number Two. But that meant he’d accept a lower percentage. “Big Frank in.”

“Sven.”

“Not Sven.” His stuff’s always got a leg missing.

“Margaret, Lovejoy?” Tinker knows about me and Margaret.

“Margaret in. She’ll reff. Next?”

“Liz Sandwell from Dragonsdale?”

“In, but not with Harry Bateman.” Tinker cackled. There’d been sordid rumors.

“Then Hymie. Says you owes him, that pearl scam…”

“How come I owe everybody when it’s me that’s bloody broke?” Tinker cackled himself into a coughing fit. For the first time in his life the antique dealers would be falling over themselves to buy him beer.

Next Lily. And Mannie of caftan and cowbell fame, dealer in antique timepieces. And Jill for porcelain, as long as she didn’t bring her poodle and wandering matelots. And Brad because I needed flintlocks. And Long Tom Church for musical instruments. And Janice, who never smiles, for late antique jewelry…

While Michelle tidied her lists, I telephoned a general store in Thurso, and asked to speak to the manager. I decided to become a cockney trying to talk posh, Harrods-on-Woolworth.

“This is Sinclair, sir,” I announced gravely, which arrested Michelle’s flowing pen.

“Butler to the laird, who is come to stay at Tachan Water. Local purveyors are not to my required standard. I am consequently obliged to send the laird’s motor with his man Barnthwaite and the housekeeper. They are empowered to purchase. An invoice note is necessary for each item, if you please. They will arrive two hours from now.”

Michelle was aghast as I rang off. “You said you were somebody else!”

“So?”

“And you told Elaine’s gathering we’d only have cheap antiques. You’ve just ordered three dozen that could cost thousands. Don’t deny it!”

“All right,” I concurred amiably. “Got money for grub? Driving always makes me peckish.”

“But you’ve not long had breakfast—”

“Stop arguing, woman, and read me that list. Incidentally,” I said as we boarded the motor, “do the mean buggers ever let you visit Joseph?”

That shut her. She took a long time to speak. “What’s going on, Ian?” she said.

“How the hell do I know?” I grumbled. I hate being famished on a journey.

“No,” Michelle finally answered, listlessly letting the wind buffet her hair as we lammed off northwest. “I’ve asked. And Duncan tried to go on strike once. Hopeless.”

“The rotten sods. That’d annoy me, if he were my son.”

“There’s nothing we can do. Not after he’d betrayed Tachnadray.”

The immense bonnet nudged the winding slope, with me trying to hold her below thirty miles per hour. “Look, Michelle. Betrayal’s too big a word. You betray countries and kings, not a bloody house with a few aging retainers. Your Joseph tried to make a few quid on the side by selling Tachnadray’s last antique bureau. It isn’t the end of the world. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had a go.” Feeling my way still, but not doing too badly. “Never mind, love. We’ll see what we can do for Joseph, eh?”

Her eyes filled. She looked away and rummaged for a hankie in her handbag. What on earth do women keep in them? It took a fortnight before she was sniveling right.

“There’s no way out, Ian. We just had to protect Joseph after the incident. Robert saved him from being caught.”

“Check your list,” I said with a cheery smile. “Take your mind off things.”

Thurso’s a lovely old place. Ferries from the north wend to the islands. Its size and bustle surprised me; North Sea oil, I suppose, or innate vigor. Folk might say it’s not up to much, but for me Thurso will always get a medal. It was there that the whole thing fell into place.

Mr. McDuff was pleasantly young, very impressed by our motor. I’d parked it outside in full view, surreptitiously asking Michelle who I was supposed to be.

“You told him Barnthwaite.” She sat, clearly having none of it. I yanked her out, maintaining a charming smile and gripping her arm bloodless.

“Smile, love,” I said through my smile. “You’re Mrs. MacHenry until I say otherwise, or it’s jail for the pair of us.”

I introduced myself to Mr. McDuff while Mrs. MacHenry made her selections. We were told that a separate invoice would have to be signed for every order. I sighed, said Mr.

Sinclair the butler was a stickler for inventories.

It was after we’d loaded up that light dawned. The stores lad carried out the victuals, groceries, wines, and whatnot, while Michelle and I went to sign. Mr. McDuff had the invoices all ready and offered me them. I frowned.

“No, sir,” I corrected. “I’m never empowered to sign. The laird’s housekeeper does it, Mrs. MacHenry.”

He ahemmed, hating being caught out in protocol. He’d rather have died. “Of course,”

he exclaimed, passing her the pen.

Now, one of the most surprising facts of life is that women make bad crooks. Which, when you think about it, is really weird. I mean, they’re born deceivers. Right from birth they’re talented fibbers and conwomen. And their entire lives are a testimony to pretence. Yet how often do you hear of a really dazzling robbery executed by a bird?

No. Birds go for the drip-feed: a zillion minor transgressions, debts created wholesale because trillions of housewives skillfully delay paying today’s electricity bill. Individually, nothing. Totaled, a genuine migraine for Lloyds of London. It explains a lot about the structure of society. Which is the reason I’d warned Michelle every second breath that she wasn’t to forget her true identity, Mrs. MacHenry. And even as she took the manager’s pen to sign I watched her, heart beating in case she absently signed

“Michelle McGunn.” That was how I saw her face when I mentioned the laird. For that fleeting moment, she suffered anguish. But it all passed smoothly, and we left for Tarrant’s.

This was a mine of stuff. Brass, woods, sheet metals, resins, glues, studs, tools.

Aladdin’s cave. I’d had the forethought to ask Mr. McDuff’s opinion of ship-chandlers in Thurso. A phone call from Mr. Tarrant to McDuff established our credibility, which sadly nowadays means mere credit-worthiness. Sign of the times, that the word “trust worthy” now relates only to money.

“The laird doesn’t hold with plastic cards,” I told Mr. Tarrant. “He settles in money, though it’d make it so much simpler for us, wouldn’t it, Mrs. MacHenry? He won’t listen.”

“True,” Michelle sighed. By then, to my relief, she’d stopped that awful inner weeping which started at McDuff’s stores when I’d called her the laird’s.

We got a ton of invaluable materials, promised to call in four days for more stuff, and departed. Luckily Michelle had enough money for us to buy pastries from the market. I pulled in southeast on the A882 for us to nosh.

Michelle gave a rather hysterical giggle, gazing at the car’s contents. We’d had to buy a roof-rack to load the stuff.

“We’ve committed a robbery,” she said, laughing.

“Scrub that plural, love,” I corrected. “You signed, remember? In fact, we’ve got to call in at Dubneath police station and tell all.”

She laughed so much that she finally started to cry. I’m not much use at consolation, so I had her pastry to save it going cold. We weren’t so credit-worthy that we could afford to chuck good stuff to waste. It was faith we lacked. Anyway, there was no time left now for any of this malarky. It was splashdown.

The first splash occurred at the police station, where I spoke to the one bobby in charge.

“It’s rather a serious problem,” I said. “We wish to report a theft.” Which widened Michelle’s eyes even further. She was already frantic, thinking we’d come to surrender over the groceries.

Michelle groaned. I admonished her, “Please, Mrs. McGunn. Do keep calm. The police are here to help in these cases.”

The bobby swelled with understanding and eagle-eyed vigilance. We got Michelle a chair while I explained, in strictest confidence, about the secret auction at Tachnadray.

“Naturally,” I said, leaning anxiously over the constabulary desk, “Miss Elaine wants this information kept confidential. I employed a printer in East Anglia. I’ve just heard that all four hundred printed catalogs were stolen in Suffolk.”

The sergeant put his pen down. “Only catalogs?”

“Only?” I bleated, aghast. “Advance notice to antique dealers is valuable information.

We hope to restrict the sale to a limited number of trusted collectors.”

“And?” He resumed writing, without enthusiasm.

“So we want a twenty-four-hour police guard, please.”

He stopped writing. “A what?”

“Round-the-clock surveillance. Now.” I waxed enthusiastic. “The way I see it is a road block, and a helicopter—”

“Sir,” the sergeant said wearily. “Do you know the size of our area? And the number of officers with which we’re expected to run it?”

“But surely you see the implications for the sale?”

He sighed. “Consider a moment, sir. These booklets.”

“Catalogs,” I corrected, frosty.

“Catalogs. Where would they have gone to?”

“Well, I ordered them posted to collectors as far as Germany, America—”

“And the material in them…?”

“Descriptions of antiques for auction at Tachnadray.”

He put his pen away. “Well, sir. Naturally we’re only too anxious to assist Tachnadray Hall, but auctions are quite legal. And for people to come and buy’s quite legal too. How they hear about it is their own business. The only problem is the loss—you say by theft—of your catalogs. That’s a concern for the Suffolk division. Naturally, if you have any problems about admission on the day…”

Polite, but undoubtedly the sailor’s elbow. Showing profound disappointment with Dubneath’s constabulary, I extracted a promise of complete silence on the matter, then left huffily. Michelle was already bewildered into obedience, so my dragging her into the MacNeish’s tavern to use the phone produced no demur, not even when I feverishly phoned the local Tachan Times and Argos, the district’s Pravda, to issue a denial.

“This is Ian McGunn,” I told the reporter sternly. “There is absolutely no truth in rumors that we attach the slightest importance to the outrageous theft of sale catalogs on their way to Tachnadray.” The girl squealed to hold on, please, evidently scrabbling to snap her Marconi Patent Office Wax-Cylinder Voice Recorder into action. “Furthermore,” I went on, “we deplore the inability of the police to respond to requests for total surveillance, and demand that you omit any mention of this…”