The Tartan Sell

We did the same denial for six other newspapers, including the Glasgow Herald. Mary hadn’t baked that day, having been up at the Hall, so no pasties. I had to make do with a batch of over-sweet Chorley cakes and a leftover cheese-and-onion pie before we hit the road to Tachnadray.

“Anybody in the clan a crooked auctioneer, love?” I said through a mouthful.

Michelle smiled, thinking I was joking. “Ian. How do you remember everything we’re doing? Including all your lies to Sergeant Kerr?”

I said piously, “I didn’t lie, love.”

She gasped a pure innocent gasp, her hair fluffing in the breeze. I was beginning to like Michelle. “There really was a theft? Our catalogs really were stolen? How dreadful!”

“Well, it actually doesn’t happen till tonight.”

“But how can that possibly—?”

“Shut it, love.” Liking her didn’t mean all this explaining wasn’t giving me a headache.

“And don’t admit I know about Joseph. They already know I know, but still don’t.”

She gave a heartfelt sigh. “Hasn’t it been a day?”

She didn’t know it yet, but the poor lass should’ve saved her heartfelt sighs. She’d soon need every one she could get.

« ^ »

—— 21 ——

Just as you can’t outdo the Maltese for door knockers or the Swiss for cuckoo clocks, so you can’t beat Caithness for conviction. Once Tachnadray had declared for crime, it became Fighter Command in a 1940 film, furiously active yet meticulous. Maybe it was their first delicious taste of scamming that gingered everybody up. I don’t know. Within three days it came alive.

At my seminary school they used to set us a perennial problem: given the choice, whether to disbelieve in God or His absence. I never knew how to answer. Similarly, I’m never quite sure whether it’s crime or sanctity that offers the least painful compromise for the human race. I’ve experimented with both, and found little difference. Now, I think perhaps sin has the edge, because it at least provides a decent income. So maybe it was the hope of solvency that spurred Elaine’s retainers on.

At my request Elaine had spread word. Any old objects relating to the clan, or any McGunn, Tachnadray, Caithness, or indeed the Highlands, were badly needed at Tachnadray. Anyone wanting to sell the same should communicate with Michelle McGunn at Tachnadray forthwith. They actually started coming in by that first afternoon. How the hell did news travel? I tried asking an old woman who came trogging up carrying an infantry officer’s telescope—leather-cased, War Office stamp, and arrows—and she merely smiled, “Och, I heard,” which was as far as I got.

Our peaceful scene had a visit from a police car asking if everything was all right. I started my favorite spiel requesting road blocks, helicopters… They drove off in haste. A Glasgow paper’d run a spread showing Alan pointing to bits of broken windscreen on the Ipswich bypass—the result of my phoned instruction to Tinker. Decadent youth, exploited by international financiers, was apparently to blame. More coverage—as the media nowadays term falsehood—was on the way. A TV crew was turned away. They sat sullenly on the hillside until Robert mustered a sortie to persuade.

And the letters came in.

That second day, Michelle was thrilled, rushing to find me in the workshop and holding all three. “And one’s from London!” she cried, beside herself. “From a collector!”

“Get notepaper printed, love,” I said. I was busy engraving Elaine’s coat-of-arms on a mid-nineteenth-century pipe box, silver. It’s murder by hand, but more artistic than the modified dental drills most forgers use. I felt bad about it for the box’s sake, but murder asserts priorities.

“Notepaper? Think of the expense, Ian!”

“All right, love.” I regoggled and resumed my engraving. “Only don’t come wailing I didn’t warn you.”

“Michelle.” Duncan was fretting out some wood sections I’d marked. “Do as Ian says.

Get young Hamish along today.”

“Very well.” Michelle was still doubtful. “But I can’t see why we’d waste money printing grand notepaper when I can just as easily write our address longhand.”

Duncan didn’t glance at me. “We’ve never done anything like this before, and Ian has.”

Hamish McGunn, printer, came on a bicycle about teatime, fingers black and face pale.

He looked subnourished, Charles Dickens in the blacking factory. Michelle brought him across, still in a huff from being told off. She fetched tea in mugs and a bowl of barm-cakes with margarine. No jam, and it served us right.

“Ian wants notepaper printed,” she said, angrily offering the nosh so fast you had to make a dive.

“Embossed,” I said, “if you’ve got that thermal process. Tachnadray’s coat-of-arms left, and address. Put Michelle as auction secretary. And our phone number.”

“Tachnadray isn’t on the phone,” Michelle said.

Hamish wrote on unheeding, squarish writing, hard pencil.

“And then do a flyer sheet. The colors are yours, but choose discrete posh.” I gave him a crumpled paper. “That’s the wording. A thousand of each by tomorrow noon.” I grinned inside as his head raised. “Ten days Michelle’ll give you the full catalog. Two thousand, about sixty pages. There’ll be one score color plates and three score black-and-white. ”

“Ay, there’s just the question, Ian,” Hamish said, embarrassed.

“The money in seven days. But”—I raised a handy maul in threat—“use Linotron Baskerville or Bembo and the deal’s off. We’ve got educated folk coming. Okay?”

He left laughing, pedaling like the clappers.

Michelle stuck to her guns. “Tachnadray’s no longer on the phone.” Poor lass, it was all becoming too much.

“A Telecom van’ll be here soon, love.” I gave her my most innocent gaze. “Could you direct them to Dr. Lamont’s office please?”

“Dr. Lamont?” She stood helplessly.

“Doctors get priority with phones.”

“But is there really a Dr. Lamont—?”

A kilted man staggering under a bookcase from Mac’s lorry shouted, “Michelle. A telephone man’s here asking…” She left at a stumbling run.

“Honestly,” I said to the silent Duncan as we resumed work. “Women. Set them a hand’s turn and they go to pieces. Notice there was no jam?”

The whole of Tachnadray was silent. It was ten-thirty, long past nightfall. Michelle, lustrous as a grisaille-glass Early English cathedral window at sunset, had met me as instructed in our lonely office. Our only light was candles and an oil lamp.

“Ready?” I asked huskily.

“Yes,” she said. Her face glowed, her eyes danced.

Cunning to the last, I dialed and passed the receiver. “Our first phone call from Tachnadray.”

“This is the house auction secretary speaking,” she said. “Could I please have, ah, Tinker?”

I egged her on. “Don’t forget the room.”

“Tinker? This is Mrs. Michelle, auction secretary. You will please transfer to a separate extension in a room away from noise.” An alarmed expression, her hand on the mouthpiece. “He says he can’t, Ian. It sounds like a…”

“It is a pub. Tell the boozy old devil to take his beer and Ted can shoot refills through the hatch.”

“He’s going,” Michelle whispered. “What a dreadful cough.”

“You’re doing great.”

“He said ‘Where’s Lovejoy?’ That’s the name you—”

Tinker’s cough ground out as I took the receiver. “Tinker? Course the seam’s on. Listen: Make sure you remember this bird’s voice, d’y’hear? She’ll be doing the phoning every night. She’s new, so talk slow, understand? And a new pub every night. Treble Tile tomorrow, same time. Make sure she gets the number.”

“Bird indeed,” Michelle muttered.

“And, Tinker. I’ve decided on the auctioneer. Tee up Trembler.”

“Bleedin’ ’ell,” Tinker croaked. “Asking for trouble?”

I lost my rag. “Do as you’re bloody told,” I yelled. “Everybody’s flaming boss until it’s time to pick up the tab—”

“Awreet, Lovejoy. I’ll find him. But Aussie’s free and Flintstone’s out of clink—”

“Trembler!” I bawled, then, smiling, passed Michelle the receiver. “Off you go, love.

Good luck. Tell Tinker to glam Trembler up. And get a typewriter.”

“Glam? A typewriter? Where from?” she was asking, round-eyed, as I took my leave with a candle to light my way. I didn’t reply. Where from, indeed. Did I have to think of everything? I went to see if there was blood on the laird’s old car.

The monster motor was housed in a drystone coach house behind Duncan’s workshop.

Before knocking off as night fell, I’d trailed a cable from the window while Duncan had a final smoke at the door, his closing ritual safe from our volatile solvents. I’d left the switch down.

The cable stretched to the coach house, explaining its length. Robert padlocked the double doors on the motor’s return, always good for a laugh. I opened the door, trailed the cable in after me, pulled the leaf shut. A bulb from my pocket, and I started searching.

Say, forty minutes later, and defeat. No blood that I could see. Blood’s russet after a few minutes, then brown, then black. It was a common-enough art stain in its time, and you can tell the shade. Therefore, Joseph, who was Michelle and Duncan’s son, who’d “betrayed Tachnadray” and was now kept imprisoned at Shooters, had returned without being bludgeoned. Persuaded? Drugged? Gunpoint? I gave up. Lots of puzzles in clan country. Not a lot of explanations.

Two dozen letters next morning, proving my denials to the world’s press were working a treat. Michelle drumming her fingers, saying things like, “Where’s that Hamish got to?” Mrs. Buchan gave me a three-plate breakfast and some scruffy young lass zoomed coffee to our office.

“I like your new nail varnish, Michelle. Women don’t use enough makeup.”

“Thank you,” she said. She was narked because the coffee bird was talkative.

“Shouldn’t we make a start? There’s so much to do.”

And there was. I’d nicked a few old fruit boxes, into which she sorted the letters by postmark. I was pleased. I like evidence of suspicion. It means people are thinking.

“Haven’t you got little feet?” I said. “Has everybody got titchie plates in Belgium?”

“Tinker’s list is completely erratic,” she began, ignoring this banter. “I tried to make him dictate items according to the dealers. He was most abusive.”

“Tut-tut.” I apologized for Tinker, struggling for sobriety. “You’ll have to cross-file, love.”

“And he doesn’t seem to know you as… as Ian McGunn, Ian. Only by that absurd nickname.” She wasn’t looking up. We’d never been closer. I said nothing. She shrugged and began, “First, then. A tortoiseshell—”

“No, love. Give everything a number, starting at one-zero-zero-zero, or you’ll make mistakes. Documentary errors run at four percent among auctioneers.”

“Number one thousand, then. A tortoiseshell armorial stencil, from Three-Wheel Archie.

Then a word: quatrefoil.”

I almost welled up. Putting him first was Tinker’s way of saying everything was normal between me and Three-Wheel, that he was back on my side. I coughed, and covered up my embarrassment by explaining, “Quatrefoil’s the code you’ll use for secretly pricing Archie’s items. No letter recurs; ten letters, see? Q is one, U is two, so on to L, which is nought. It’s called steganography. You can use the letters to denote any amount of money.” Craftsmen serving noble houses cut coat-of-arms designs in tortoiseshell for ease of repainting armorials on coaches, chests, even furniture. Women used them for embroidery.

“Secret pricing? What a cheat!”

“You know anybody who doesn’t cheat?” I asked dryly. She reddened and read on.

“Number thousand and one. A nineteenth-century button die from Helen, eight sides; she thinks the Howard family crest. Sutherland. Another code?”

“Yes. Helen always uses ‘Sutherland’ as her price code. But refuse it, love. Too many wrong crests’ll reveal it’s a papering job. Pity.”

A button die’s valuable because you can strike genuine silver buttons on it till the cows come home. A bit of sewing then converts any period garment into Lord Howard of Effingham’s, with great (but illicit) profit.

“One thousand and two. Fob seal, glass intaglio on gold, Chester 1867. Big Frank…”

Hamish came at nine-thirty, looking even younger still. He was hesitant, definitely guarded.

“Noticed something amiss, Hamish?” I joked.

“It’s this: Sotheby’s ‘Standard Conditions of Sale’ Apply Throughout.” He showed me a copy. “As long as it’s in order.” I reassured him a mite, and he went down to unload.

His bike pulled a tiny homemade cart, a packing case on pram wheels. I went to the window to watch him in the forecourt. What a lot of people.

“Michelle. How many McGunns are there?”

“Thirty-two, but very scattered.”

More than I’d supposed. Yet if you counted them all over the Kingdom…?

“I mean retainers, pensioners, employees at Tachnadray.” Hamish below was hanging a wooden tray round his neck to carry those obsessively neat bricklike parcels printers make. “What is a retainer, love? Is Hamish one?”

“Somebody on a croft belonging, that sort of thing.”

“Tied to Tachnadray by loyalty and economics?”

Michelle hesitated, unhappy at the way my questions were heading. “Yes. But nobody would express it in those terms. Not nowadays.”

“Course not, love.” I gave her a sincere smile.

Still looking down, as Michelle, with ill-disguised relief, recommenced her list checking, and Hamish clumped up the stairs with the stationery, I couldn’t help thinking: thirty-two, probably not counting infants. Say, twenty houses or so. Which is quite a lot of hidey-holes.

At noon I decided to drive into Thurso with Elaine, leaving Michelle replying to the letters and sending out flyers in envelopes. She still hadn’t got a typewriter. I’d refused her baffled excuse that there simply wasn’t one. “Don’t plead unavailability,” I commanded.

“But, Ian—”

“Look, Michelle,” I’d said kindly, tucking a Scotch plaid rug round Elaine’s knees. “We’ve reached the stage where talking’s done. We need action.”

She blazed up at that. I think she really only wanted to come a ride. “Action, is it! Then what about postage stamps? By teatime we’ll have scores of letters to post and no money—”

“A post-office franking machine arrives today, love.”

The post office supplies a little printing gadget that marks your envelopes. It’s the only postage you can get on tick. You pay only when the man comes to read its meter.

“And,” I concluded, “two letters’ll arrive, neither with enough postage. You’ll have to pay a few coppers to the postie.”

Michelle listened, nodded, didn’t wave us off. First time in her life she’d ever shut up.

Swinging us out of the gate, I asked Elaine to issue an order to the vestigial remnants of the clan.

“Not you too, Ian!” she exclaimed. “I’ve noticed it creeping into your bones. You’re careful to say ‘Scottish’ instead of Scotch now, even when ‘Scotch’ is correct. Soon you’ll be fighting drunk at football matches. You’ll believe our stupid tribal myths.” She was watching Tachnadray recede in the wing mirror. I said nothing, making my unresponsiveness an invitation. She began to speak on, quiet and intense. “That lunacy killed my father. He drank himself to death. Failing to become the legend of the Scottish clan chief. You know something?” She gave me a woman’s no-smile smile. “He had a stroke the day after two immigrant Pakistanis registered a Clan MacKhan tartan.

What could that possibly have mattered?”

“Shona thinks you’re a heretic. Paradox, eh? Clan chieftainess as iconoclast.” The giant Mawdslay’s tires made a crackling sound on the track. I could do with these vintage motors, but everything seems on the outside, almost out of reach, with you perched high as a pope in a palanquin.

“Wasn’t William the Fourth the best socialist of his time?” she shot back. “Pride’s for those with money to burn. Pomp and circumstance reduced Tachnadray to penury. The carriages—we had six, matched horses—went, the grooms, liveried servants. And Father entertaining, hosting the County Show, silver everywhere, guests by special trains we couldn’t pay for. Shooting parties. Mother gave up early, passed away when I was two. I saw the whole film round, the dozen pipers on our battlements. One enormous sham. You know what? Father even had battlements built, because Tachnadray had none.”

Her bitterness was getting to me. I knew all about tribal ferocities, having seen Sidoli’s war with Bissolotti.

“Why not simply take the gelt from whoever wants to pay you? Everybody else does.

An ancient lairdship’s marketable—”

“Because,” she said. The little girl’s defiant silencer.

I wasn’t having that. “Because Shona’s mob won’t let you?” It was my pennyworth. I’d wrestled the great Mawdslay as far as Dubneath Water before she answered.

“Whose side are you on, Ian? Tradition’s?” That last word was spat out with hatred.

Well, I couldn’t really say until I’d visited her mother’s grave, but I gave her my best fillin. “The prettiest bird’s.”

“Me?” She was smiling.

“Bull’s-eye.” So far I’d counted two men watching on skylines, plus Robert.

“Then I’ve a problem for you.” A pulse beat, then, “I’m still a virgin, Lovejoy. Which means I require information about sex techniques… Why’re we stopping?”

“What did you say?”

“It’s a golden opportunity. There’s no one else I can ask. Tell me. Do women mostly make love on their sides sometimes, with their leg over the man? Only, with my handicap—”

The lumbering Mawdslay, slightly shocked, resumed its journey. “Look, love,” I said anxiously.

“Don’t go all coy, Ian.” She was quite reasonable. “I read once that sexual intercourse…”

Shona’s van caught us up by the first houses. She’d been following us, naughty girl.

And Jamie was waiting in Dubneath’s market square. All smiling friendliness, but very definitely there.

« ^ »

—— 22 ——

Shona’s presence in Dubneath put the kaibosh on any further interrogation—me of Elaine about crookdom, Elaine of me about sex. Elaine had to visit the one bank, and Shona seemed determined to accompany her. Innocently I said I’d sightsee, happy to be squeezed out. Shona’s furrowed brow cleared at that. Jamie went off down the harbor after we’d lifted Elaine’s wheelchair to get her mobile. I walked to the chapel, slow and idle.

Reverend Ruthven was a pleasant balding man who told me, “Two things, Ian. I’m a pastor, not a vicar. And secondly, I’m the exception that proves the rule.” He had to explain that Ruthvens were addicted to assassination over a long and bloody history.

“I’m probably the first peaceable Ruthven on earth!”

“Lineage seems a right pest.”

He sighed. “It can be, Ian, heaven knows. Come. I expect you’re here to see the McGunns. A fated clan, if I may say so.”

“Fated? Everybody’s fated. Why McGunns especially?”

“Conflict dooms life. They say your very name is Norse, gunnr, meaning war.

Etymological pilf, of course. But the war between those wretched Sinclairs and the Sutherland Gordons crushed the poor McGunn clan. It’s a wonder there’s any of you left. The Gordons are a rapacious breed.”

He took me among the chapel’s gravestones, and pointed out Elaine’s mother’s. And the laird’s headstone, coat-of-arms on marble, a little way off. James Wheeler McGunn.

“Elaine was telling me about her mother, Pastor. How very sad.” I shook my head sorrowfully, as if I knew so much.

“Aye, Ian. Isn’t that life all over? Unable to come to terms with The McGunn’s fanaticism. Clan was everything to the poor man. Driven. It’s often the way, with converts. Reasoning erodes. Jesuits call it a state of erroneous conscience.”

“I understand.” I was very knowing, and lied, “My mother and she used to correspond, until matters…”

We both sighed. Pastor Ruthven determined to exonerate Elaine’s mother. “Then you’ll know how hard The McGunn took it. Women tend to blame themselves in those circumstances.”

“And needlessly.” I was busy working out in what circumstances.

After that it was sundry graves, the chapel foundation stone, a list of former pastors, gold lettering on stained mahogany, before I decided it was time to go. “You’ll have had your bite, Ian…?” An Edinburgh man. He said to call again. I promised to, but wouldn’t need. How come Ruthven likened James Wheeler McGunn to a “convert,” when he in fact was The McGunn?

Shona, Elaine, and me sat down for a nosh at the MacNeish tavern. Mary told me that two letters had come addressed to me, care of Michelle, with only half the requisite postage. Elaine looked across. I went all innocent and said my friends were sometimes careless. My granny actually taught me the trick: Registered letters hint at riskily valuable contents. But skimp the ordinary postage and the postman’ll beat a path to your door to recover that outstanding penny. It’s cheaper than registration and far more reliable.

“Just think, Mary,” I told her through a mouthful. “Soon we McGunns’ll be able to start paying for these twopenny pasties of yours.”

She blazed up at that. “Twopence? I’ll have you know, Ian McGunn, that my cooking’s worth more than—” et cetera, et cetera. A pleasant meal, with me prattling away and inspecting Elaine’s and Shona’s respective faces. Faces are fascinating, but I’ve already told you that.

Shona followed the Mawdslay back. I was determined to tell Elaine about attribution.

Elaine was determined to ask about sex.

“When you buy a painting at auction,” I said firmly, “you’ll lose your life savings if you simply believe what’s written in the catalog. Never mind that it clearly states: ‘Giotto, St. Peter Blessing the Penitents. ’ That only means a work of the school of Giotto, by a student or merely some ninth-rate artist who painted in Giotto’s style, and that the date’s completely uncertain. In other words, it could be by the world’s worst forger.

Now,” I waxed enthusiastically, holding the booming engine in up the fell road, “if the catalog gives the artist’s initials as well—”

“About sex,” Elaine interrupted.

“—then you’re on safer ground. It means the painting is of the artist’s period, though only possibly his work, in whole or in part—”

“Have you ever raped anyone, Ian?”

“What you look for,” I shouted desperately, “is the artist’s complete name. That means it’s really by Giotto himself—”

“Who decides that sex will happen?” Elaine pondered. “Does it hurt very much the first time?”

“Knock it off, love,” I begged, hot under the collar.

“How does it end? I mean, do you both simply get tired?”

“You need your bum smacked, miss.” Me, with sternness my next failure.

“Spanking,” said this devil seriously. “A sado-masochistic ritualization enjoyed by ninety-one percent of women. A Salford survey—”

Good old Salford, still hard at it. See what I mean about women? If they find they’ve a problem, their inborn knack makes it yours. No wonder they live so much longer. One day, I promised myself, savagely bumping the Mawdslay along the stone track, I’ll think up some privileges for myself. Then watch out, everybody.

“Why ask me, love?” I pleaded.

“You look lived-in, troublesome. You’re sexually inclined. I can tell.” She was quite candid. “Tell me. I’d like to know how it’s actually done. I mean, a man’s so heavy.

Does the woman bear his weight? And how does a man’s thing feel? I imagine something rubbery. Is this correct?”

“Please.” I was broken. “I’ve one of my heads.”

“How did she know your address?” Michelle was in a high old rage, holding two letters out.

“Eh?” I’d come bolting upstairs for protection, leaving Robert to unload Elaine.

“A woman’s writing. And you knew these letters were coming because you said—”

“Mmmmh,” I said absently. “Is Elaine Aries?” I don’t even know what Aries is.

“Libra. September.” Like Three-Wheel’s motor.

Thanks, I said inwardly, and opened the letter. Margaret could be trusted not to give my location away. She’d sent me the list of Trembler’s usual team, putting asterisks beside those who’d been in police trouble lately. That was all, and best wishes with one discrete cross.

The other envelope, much thicker, held a mass of newspaper cuttings, notes, annotated catalogs, and police notices. I’d told her to get them from my cottage.

Suppertime, the safety of numbers. I informed Elaine that our auctioneer would be arriving in a week’s time, by air from Edinburgh to Wick’s tiny airport, and could I have the car to meet him, please. She said of course, sweet and demure. Her grilling had really drained me. Still anxious about her telepathy trick, I didn’t let it enter my mind that Trembler would of course come by road, and to Inverness, not Wick.

Late that night I pulled another sly trick, though I hated creeping back to our office in that drafty old deserted west wing. It was made for Draculas and spooks. I spent a long time on the phone talking to Doc. He’s a genealogist, been one of my poorer customers, lace bobbins, some three years. He was delighted to be given a difficult problem, tracing a complex family tree. I dictated the dates from the gravestones, and what I knew about Elaine’s family. I bribed him to secrecy. He demanded, and I promised, an Isle of Man lover’s bobbin I hadn’t yet got. See how friends take advantage?

Inspection time. We’d had a run of three days’ warm clemency. Weather helps fakers, or, as I decided we should start labeling ourselves, reproducers and copyists. This meant that stains worked better. Sunshine is an excellent aging factor. And we could move the McGunn clan’s assembled items unafraid of drizzle. Elaine was nervous, for once keeping her thoughts above her umbilicus, as we trooped down to see the three days’ worth.

“They’ve stopped coming in, Ian.” Her tone said therefore this was it, everything her retainers could raise. Pathetic.

It was unfortunate that Michelle had chosen the Great Hall. Our voices echoed. The long stained-glass windows accentuated the space. I’d nigh on thirty rooms and halls in a stately home to fill. This piteous heap was two journeys of Drummer’s donkey cart.

My dismay must have communicated to the others. I looked round, slowly, wanting faces. They were observing me in total silence. Hector, stoic and relaxed, with Tessie and Joey eeling round his feet. Robert’s eyes gleamed hatred from that mass of red hair. Shona silent and dogless, whose heart must be beating faster because she more than anyone here realized it was crunch hour. Elaine, mortified in spite of herself.

Duncan frankly ashamed. Mary MacNeish ticking off which neighbors’d contributed what. Mac patient, waiting orders. My annunciatory cough made us all shuffle.

“Not much, folks,” I said. “Is it?”

Silence.

“Is it?” Still no answer. “How many retainers, Elaine? Thirty or so? And they raise twelve mass-produced pieces of furniture, earliest date 1911.”

“You may have noticed,” Elaine said, pale, “that my people are not well off. And Tachnadray is not Edinburgh Castle.” She had a right to anger, but insufficient reasons.

“True. But why not?”

Shona glanced at Robert. “What does that mean?” she demanded.

“I mean that it was. Once.” I walked towards them vaguely embarrassed by their being in a facing line, a barrister at somebody’s trial. “It’s really quite simple. The clan center, a great house. The laird tried to uphold… tradition. So debts mounted. The estate folded. Produce faltered, finally dwindled to a few flocks of sheep—”

“Here, mon,” Hector blurted. Sadly I waved him down.

“I know, Hector. Nobody could’ve done better, I’m sure. You must have slogged, winning cups at the Gatherings, doing what you could with damn all help. Robert, too.”

The man’s head rose ominously. “Probably the most loyal seneschal on the planet. You all tried. But people were paid off, and the laird finally passed the torch on to Miss Elaine.”

The end of the faces. I started a reverse stroll. Elaine in her wheelchair was the center of the group. It was a Victorian clan tableau, proud before the magnesium flashlight struck their likenesses for the mantelpiece. All it needed was a dead tiger and bearers.

And, in this case, a mantelpiece.

“So you hit on a scheme. I guessed wrong earlier, and none of you corrected me.

Because there wasn’t a bleep of an antique in the west wing, I assumed there weren’t any left. That they’d all been sold to pay Tachnadray’s way. But they hadn’t, had they?”

“What does he mean?” Elaine demanded of the world.

“That there’s really quite a bit left. Right, everybody? Look,” I said, halting in the photographer’s position. “I needn’t stay here. I can push off, leave you to it. You must at least help. Out with it, troops.”

Silence. Elaine’s ferocity glowed, the radiance almost blinding. She was realizing she’d been had, completely, by this ultraloyal mob of serfs.

“All right, I’ll say it for you. You dispersed the remaining antiques among yourselves.

When Elaine sent word for everybody to chip in any relevant salables they had, you very carefully fetched only junk, and are keeping the authentic Tachnadray furniture, silver, God-knows-what, concealed.” I could have told how Shona, realizing I’d begun to suspect, bribed me with herself, failed, then sent Robert to hunt me to my death on the dark moor. I’d have been a fellwalker, carelessly falling down some crevasse. They’d have all told the police the same tale, and cocooned Elaine from the truth. Again.

“Bring it out, folks,” I said. “Tachnadray needs you.”

“Duncan.” Elaine didn’t even turn her head.

“It’s true, Miss Elaine.” Duncan shuffled out of the line to address her, full face. He made to rummage for tobacco, put his pipe away, coughed uneasily. Nobody else spoke. “We indeed did that.”

“I ordered everything sold!” Elaine said.

“You did, Miss Elaine. But it was selling out the McGunn heritage, despoiling your own…” He choked on the word “birthright.” Well he might, poor man.

“Permit me,” I interrupted. “Bring the genuine stuff to the auction. You needn’t lose it.”

Elaine rolled her wheelchair out, spun it with her back to me. “All of you. Go now. Tell the others. Bring everything —every…thing! —back. Forthwith.” A sudden queen.

They dispersed slowly, looking back at the blazing girl. While they were still within earshot, she pronounced loudly, “And on behalf of us all, Ian, I apologize for your shabby treatment.”

“Then can I go places on my own?” I asked swiftly. “Without being confined, or Robert skulking on some distant hill?”

“Granted,” she said regally. “Wheel me outside. And get rid of that rubbish. It’s defacing the Hall.”

“Ah, well.” I pushed. “Old tat’s useful in the workshop.”

That night I rang Tinker and told him to get Trembler up to the railway hotel in Inverness soonest. Antioch had nearly three dozen wagons ready, which news wobbled me. More would be loading up by dawn. It seemed only a few hours since I’d arrived at Tachnadray with all the time in the world. Now it seemed there sure wasn’t any left at all.

« ^ »

—— 23 ——

Trembler came down the stairs holding on to the banister like a beginner drunk. He’s of a tallish Lazaroid thinness, forever dabbing his trembling lips with a snuff-stained hankie. I like Trembler. Always tries to keep appearances, wears a waistcoat, though stained with last night’s excesses, and polishes his shoes. He tottered across the foyer from couch to armchair, from pillar to recliner, exactly as street children play stepping-stones. He knew I’d be in the hotel nosh bar. A porter helped him down the three steps.

“Wotcher, Trembler.”

“Lovejoy.” Shaking badly, he made the opposite chair and pulled my tea towards him. It slopped over the saucer as he sucked tremulously at the rim. His quivering upper lip was dyed snuff gold. Looking at this gaunt wreck, I wondered uneasily if Tinker was right. He looked a decrepit nonagenarian.

“Had a good night, Trembler?”

“Splendid.” His rheumy eyes closed as a server clattered cups. “What day is it?” he whispered.

“You’ve a few days before the off, Trembler.”

“Right.” He opened his eyes, willpower alone.

“Grub’s in front of you.”

Everything I could think of, including waffles, porridge, eggs in a slick fry-up, all on a hot plate. He focused and nearly keeled over. “Jesus, Lovejoy.”

People began looking across to see where the noise was coming from as soon as he started. His cutlery fibrillated, his crockery clattered. He sounded like a foundry. Once he actually did tremble himself off his chair trying to pick up a fallen spoon. A kindly waitress came to ask if my father was all right.

“Yes, ta, love.” I gave her a soul-deep smile. “He improves with the day.” I didn’t tell her Trembler’s age. He’s thirty-one. Wine and women have transformed him. Trembler recovered enough to lust feebly after her. Luckily his vision peters out at ten paces, a spent arrow, so to speak.

“How much do I know, Lovejoy?”

Funny how glad hearing your own name makes you. “It’s a weird place, Trembler. Near derelict. They keep three rooms to impress visitors. The owner’s a lady, seventeen, in a wheelchair. There’s a few retainers still. All are suspect. So far I’ve a heap of rubbish which I’m transforming into salables.”

Trembler nodded his understanding, it seemed to me. He quakes so much normally, it’s difficult to distinguish a nod in his version of immobility.

“Where’ll you get the stuff, Lovejoy?” he quavered.

“Tinker’s organizing a convoy.” I hesitated, giving him time for the unpleasant bit. He managed to slop half a yolk-dripping egg into his mouth. I looked away, queasy. “I want no whizzers who’re in trouble, Trembler. Sorry.”

Normally an auctioneer, crooked or straight, has the final say on staff. Whizzers are those blokes—scoundrels to a man—who hump antiques about. An auctioneer’s whizzers stay with him for life, part of his team, so I was asking for heresy.

“I heard it was special, Lovejoy.” He resumed his idea of eating, with distaste.

“Margaret sent me the list.” I passed it over. “You’ve only two who’re holy enough for this, Trembler. Agreed?”

“A sad reflection on modern morality.”

It’s amazing what good grub and a job’ll do for a man. Before my very eyes Trembler was filling out. His eyes were clearing, dawn mist from an estuary autumn. He drank another pint of tea. I gave him more, sent for another ton of toast, marmalade. Years were starting to fall from him with every mouthful. Even his voice, the querulous whine of an ancient, was becoming the measured and tuneful instrument of a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Auctioneers. I watched admiringly. He only looked fifty now. A couple more breakfasts and he’d be down to a spritely forty, maybe make thirty-five.

“So far, Lovejoy, you’ve told me nothing.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, rearranged the condiments, crockery. All really good signs. “Are you bringing in valuers?”

My laugh made people smile across the tables. “Who on earth can afford five guineas percent, Trembler?” Valuing is robbery, money for jam—indeed, for not even jam. He’s the bloke who comes to value your precious old table, guesses a guesstimate (always wrong), and you pay him a huge percentage of that guess, for nothing. No, never let a stranger into your home, especially if he’s a valuer. They are the antiques game’s equivalent of politicians. “There’s some pinning to be done.”

He smiled. “Thought as much. Who’s the mark?”

“Are,” I corrected. “Tell you nearer the day.”

“Pinning” is a noble art practiced by auctioneers ever since time began. It means manipulating the bidding so as to land a particular lot on a poor unsuspecting member of the public who doesn’t want it. When the Emperor Caligula auctioned off his dud antiques—he’d wasted a fortune buying forgeries—he ordered his auctioneer to pin Aponius Saturnimus. This rich Roman had nodded off during the bidding. He woke up poor.

“And I want a phone bank. Two.”

“Right-o.” He knew I meant false ones, because otherwise I’d have asked the phone people. Big bidders phone live bids in as the auction progresses.

“About the money, Trembler.”

He shed another two years. “I’ve put this hotel on my credit card, Lovejoy.” He carries only phony credit cards, but he was trying to help me by deferring the cost of his stay.

“Good lad. You stay here and enjoy the… facilities. Now, Trembler, when I call, there’s to be no delay. Get it? Ten minutes’ notice, you move out. There’s a code word. It’s Lovejoy.”

“Your name’s the codeword?” He was puzzled.

“That’s because I’m under an alias; Ian McGunn.”

He repeated it to prove he was back among thinking men. “One thing, Lovejoy. Can I bring my own tallyman?”

“No, Trembler. Sorry.” Trembler always picks some gorgeous tart without a brain in her head. I saw him once at an auction near Southwold where he’d hired a bird who actually couldn’t count or write. Talk about a shambles. “I’ve already got you a tallywoman. She’ll need training in, the day previous.”

He brightened. The deal done, we had another breakfast each to celebrate, seeing it was getting on for coffee time. Then I rang Doc the genealogist and had my suspicions confirmed. Couple of good bookshops in Inverness. I got some paperback reprints for Duncan’s benefit.

Michelle was working flat out now. Letters were coming in so fast, the postie had graduated to a van. She was becoming conscious of the pressure. Each night we phoned up the list of antiques et al from Tinker. Next morning we sifted through them, and next night she’d tell Tinker which I’d accepted and which were refused. Tinker gave her nightmares: “He doesn’t seem to make any notes!” she complained. I’d go,

“Mmmh.”

There was a growing body of cards filed in old shoeboxes, a card for each collector writing in, and a spare list of antiques for which people, mostly genuine collectors, were writing, urgently wanting special lists. These are almost always coins, medals, hand weapons, clothes, or paintings. Then there was the catalog file, the biggest. Michelle tried talking me out of one card per antique, thinking she’d discovered a quicker way.

She tried the wheedle, even the vamp, to no avail. I made her stick to my scheme. I also made her keep an nth file, of those antiques which I’d told her to reject. She again played hell. “What’s the point of recording details of antiques we’ll never see—?”

I clapped a hand over her mouth. This was the alluring lady who’d so joyously rushed to find me when the first letters came. Now we were inundated, she was falling behind and inventing ever-dafter ways of ballsing up the documentation. A born administrator.

“You, Michelle, are attractive, desirable, and rapidly becoming a pest for other reasons, too. Get help if you like, but do as I say. And hurry up.” I let go. I had to sort the last of Tachnadray’s genuine stuff out in the Great Hall. “I’ve a job for you to do, later.”

This time the items arranged at the far end of the Great Hall were superb. Among them I recognized Shona’s—well, Elaine’s—double snuff mull. Some things make you smile.

The silver wasn’t plentiful. One triumph was a bullet-shaped teapot. Not a lot of people admire the shape (“bullet” meaning spherical, as an old lead bullet), which is a ball with a straight spout. The lid completes the roundness, with a mundane finial topping the lid off. They were made from the late 1700s for sixty years. The engraved decoration of these characteristically Scottish teapots is one pattern carried round the join of lid and body. It sat among the rest glowing like, well, like Elaine smiling. Edward Lothian of Edinburgh, 1746, before the fluted spout came in. There was also a silver centerpiece.

These so-called épargnes (it’s posh to give things French names) usually weigh a lot, so you’re safe buying one by weight alone, never mind the artistry. This was 1898, Edinburgh, a dreadful hodgepodge of thistles, tartan hatching, drooping highlanders, wounded stags. It was ghastly. It’d bring in a fortune.

The furniture was dominated by a genuine Thomas Chippendale library table. It was practically a cousin of the mahogany one at Coombe Abbey, mid-eighteenth century, solid and vast. I honestly laughed with delight and clapped. You see so many rubbishy copies that an original blows your mind. Five Hepplewhite-design chairs (where was the sixth?) with shield backs and an urn-pattern center splat were showing their class. A few good Victorian copies of the lighter Sheraton-style chair were ranged along one wall. In the catalog I’d call them something like “Louis Seize à l’Anglais,” as Tom Sheraton designs were termed in Paris at the time. Only I’d be sure to put it in quotation marks, which would legalize my careful misattribution. It’d give Trembler a chuckle.

Predictably the porcelain was anything. The retainers had clearly preserved what impressed them most. They’d gone for knobs and colors, hoarding with knobs on, so to speak. A few times they’d guessed right. A royal-blue Doulton vase, marked “FB 1884,”

indicated that factory’s famous deaf creator whose wares Queen Victoria herself so admired. It might not bring much, but it’d “thicken” the rest. A lone Chelsea red anchor plate in the Kakiemon style—here vaguely parrot-looking birds, brown and blue figures on white, and flowers—would bring half the price of a car, properly auctioned. I loved it, and said hello, smiling at the thrilling little bong it made in my chest. The stiltmarks were there, and those pretty telltale speckles in the painting. The rest were mundane.

Sadly, sober George the Fifth stuff. Not one Art Deco piece among them. That set me thinking.

The paintings were ridiculous recent portrait travesties, some modern body’s really bad idea of what a “gen-yoo-wine” Highland chief would have been wearing. Talk about fancy dress. These daft-posh portraits are so toffee-nosed, they become pantomime.

The one painting I did take note of was a little scene of Tachnadray, done with skill in, of all things, milk casein paint. These rarities give themselves away by their very matt foreground. (Be careful with them; they water-splash easily.) You let skim milk go sour, and dry the curd out to a powder. Then you make a paste of it with dilute ammonia (the eleventh-century monks used urine), and it’s this which you mix with powder paint.

“Pity you’re very new, though,” I told it. The painter had varnished it to make it resemble an oil painting.

This is quite needless, because casein is tough old stuff. You can even polish the final work to give it a marvelous lightness. It’s brittle, though, so you paint on rigid board… I found myself frowning at the painting. Two figures were seated on the lawn, quite like statues. Modern dress, so there was no intent to antiquize.

A wheelchair’s tires whispered. “What now, Ian?”

“I think some painters must have frigging good eyesight, love. This casein painting’s too minute for words.” Casually I replaced it. “Pity it’s practically new.”

“Is it any good?” She was oh so detached.

“High quality. The artist still about?”

“Me.”

I nodded, not surprised. Now I knew it all. “You’re a natural, love. Who taught you about casein paint?” No answer, so under her steady stare I decided to swim with the tide. “Your dad? Or Michelle?”

“Yes. Michelle.”

“And egg tempera? You’ve a great career ahead of you, love. Copy a few medieval manuscripts for me and—”

“Stop that!” Michelle came in. “I’ll not have you inveigling Miss Elaine into your deceitful ways!”

With Elaine laughing, really honestly falling about, I escaped into Duncan’s workshop for my stint with the paneling. Michelle had come a fraction too late.

Later that day Mrs. Buchan brought up two candidates to help Michelle in the office.

One was a plump lass, fawnish hair, beneath a ton of trendy bangles and earrings, lovely eyes. The other was Mrs. Moncreiffe, an elderly twig scented with lavender and mothballs.

Michelle chose the twig.

About ten o’clock I was working my way through a bottle of white wine in my garret, racking my two neurones to see if I’d forgotten anything, when the stairs creaked.

Michelle came in with the woman’s purposeful complicity, placing her back to the door edge and closing it with hands behind her. This maneuver keeps the woman’s face towards the occupant. They have these natural skills.

“Come in,” I said. “Have a seat.”

“I… I just wanted to say that the catalog’s up to date.” She made to perch on the bed, rose quickly at the implications. I gave her my chair and flopped horizontal. “We only have this evening’s list to do. Mrs. Moncreiffe has proved a godsend.”

“I’m glad. Out with it, love.”

“How many more days before…?”

“Soon.” I didn’t want to be tied. “Michelle. Your son Joseph sent down an original antique, didn’t he? Shona sent Robert after it in the Mawdslay, Tachnadray’s one car.”

“Yes.” Her voice was a whisper.

“I don’t know quite what happened, but Joseph was fetched back. He’s hidden at Shooters, because he’s supposed to have killed that driver. Dispute over the money, was it?”

Michelle nodded bravely. “They… assumed so.” I watched admiringly. Women lie with such conviction.

“Tough for you, love. Torn loyalty and all that.”

“You’re… you’re really nothing to do with that London college, are you?”

“No.” I pretended anger. “Have you been phoning people?”

“No, no. I just… surmise, that’s all.” She regarded her twisting hands for a moment.

“You’re not police. And you talk to things. You’re a bit mad, yet…”

“Thank God for that ‘yet’—” I gave her a sincere smile. “Don’t worry, love. I’m on Elaine’s side. I’ll honestly do the best I can when the time comes.”

She nodded and stood, watching me. “I wish,” she got out eventually, “we’d met under other circumstances. Better ones.”

“We practically did.” I shooed her out. “I’ve got to think. Do Tinker’s call on your own tonight, love.”

Eleven o’clock I went with a krypton handlamp and a small jeweler’s loupe to look at the painting. It had gone. That told me as much as if I’d studied it for a fortnight in Agnew’s viewing room. One of the two figures gazing so soulfully in the painting had been Michelle. The other had been a man slightly older, but not Duncan. He’d looked in charge, attired in chieftain’s dress.

Which called for a long think to midnight. To one o’clock. To one-thirty. More deep thoughts for another hour.

Tinker was still swilling at the pub by the old flour mill. I told him to phone Trembler early tomorrow morning and just say, “Lovejoy.”

“Right,” he croaked, anxious. “Here, Lovejoy. When do we come? Antioch keeps asking.

There’s frigging trucks everywhere—”

“Now,” I said, throat dry. “Roll it, Tinker.” I lowered the receiver on his relieved cackle.

« ^ »

—— 24 ——

Economy’s always scared me. Or do I mean economics? Maybe both, if they’re not the same thing. I mean, when you hear that Brazil is a trillion zlotniks in the red, the average bloke switches off. Mistakes that are beyond one man’s own redemption simply go off the scale, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that was why I’d run from Sidoli’s rumble. Plus cowardice, of course.

The books I’d got from Inverness, paperback reruns, showed Duncan a few more possibilities. He was hard to persuade.

“This pedestal sideboard from Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of 1833,” I told his disbelief.

“Plain as anything, simple. Never mind that architects call it cabinetmaker Gothic—”

“Make it? Out of new wood?”

“Out of that.” A wardrobe, slanted and damp-warped, leaned tiredly in the workshop.

“By suppertime.”

“What about those great pedestals?”

“The design’s only like a strut across two bricks,” I pointed out. “So cut those old stairs Robert’s trying to mend in the east wing. The wood’s good. The pieces are almost the right size, for God’s sake.”

We settled that after argument. Two new lads had come to help Duncan, relatives of relatives. One was a motor mechanic, the other a school-leaver. That gave me the idea.

Motors mean metal, which means brass rails, which with old stair wood means running sideboards.

“Make a pair of running sideboards. They’re straight in period, Duncan. All it is, three shelves each with a brass rail surround, on a vertical support at each end. Put it on wooden feet instead of casters, French polish to show it’s original, and it’ll look straight 1830.”

Grumbling, I did a quick sketch. Sometimes I think it’d be quicker to do every frigging thing myself. “Finish all three of these by seven-ish, then I can age them sharpish.”

“All this haste’s not my usual behavior,” Duncan said.

“Times,” I said irritably, “are changing at Tachnadray.”

Honestly. You sweat blood trying to rescue people, and what thanks do you get?

Michelle’s first lesson in the perils of auctioneering. Explaining an auction’s difficult enough. Explaining a crooked one to an unsullied soul like Michelle was nearly impossible. We were in the Great Hall.

“Auctioneers speak distinctly, slowly, in this country, love. It’s in America they talk speedy gibberish.”

For the purpose I was the auctioneer, she the tallygirl with piles of paper. She listened so solemnly I started smiling. Older women are such good company.

“There’s a word we use: stream. Always keep a catalog in front of you clipped open, no matter what. The cards from which you compiled the catalog are in your desk. Those two, the catalog and cards, are your stream. Right?”

“Maybe I should have the cards on my desk,” she mused.

“You think so?” Casually I leaned my elbow over so one card pile fell to the floor. “See?

A customer could accidentally do that, and steal a few cards while pretending to help as you picked them up. Then he’d know what we paid.”

“But that’s unfair!” she flamed.

“Look, Michelle.” I knelt to recover the scattered cards. “The people coming are all sorts. Some’ll be ordinary folk who’ve struggled to get a day off from the factory.

Others will come in private planes. But they’ll all share one terrible, grim attribute: They will do anything for what we’ve got. They’ll beg, bribe, steal.” God give me strength and protect me from innocence. I rose, dusted my knees. “Cards,” I reminded her, “in the desk. Catalog on top.”

“Now I’m a customer.” I swaggered up. She got herself settled, penciled a note. “I ask, Where’ll the stream be at twelve-thirty, missus?”

She thought. “You’re asking what lot number the auction will have reached by then?”

“Well done.”

“But how do we actually sell things?”

“Say I’m the auctioneer. Tallygirl’s on the left, always, except in Sotheby’s book sales, where they know no better. Not real gentlemen, see.” I chuckled at the old trade slight.

“I call out, Lot Fifty-One, Nailsea-type Glass Handbell—”

“No. Fifty-One is a gentleman’s Wedgwood 1790 stock pin, blue-dip jasper with a George Stubbs horse in white relief—”

“Michelle,” I said, broken. “I’m pretending.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“The auctioneer calls out the catalog number, Lot Whatever, and then says, ‘Who’ll start me off?’ or something. The bids commence, and finally Trembler calls, ‘Going, going, gone!’ or, ‘Once, twice, gone!’ depending on how he feels. Once he bangs a hammer, that’s it. He’ll also say a name—Smith of Birmingham, say. It’s your job to instantly write out a call chit. It’s the bill, really. Lot Fifty-One, two hundred quid, Smith. So you get that chit across to Mr. Smith quick as a flash. That entitles Smith to pay Mrs.

Moncreiffe. Her only job is to accept payment, stamp the call chit ‘Paid in Full,’ and tick her list.”

“Must I provide Mr. Trembler with a hammer?”

“No, love. Auctioneers always have their own. Trembler’s isn’t a real gavel. It’s only a decorated wooden reel his sister’s lad made him.”

“How sweet.” She smiled, scribbling like the clappers.

Apologetically I cleared my throat for the difficult bit. “Er, now, Michelle, love. There’s a few rules.”

“Never issue a call chit unless I’m sure?” she offered knowingly.

“Eh? Oh, yes. Good, good.” This was going to be more difficult than I’d supposed.

“Ahm, sometimes, love, you might not actually hear some of the bids. If so, you mustn’t mention it. Trembler will see them, because…” I tried to find concealing words. Because he’d be making them up, “taking bids off the wall.” “Because, he’s had special training, see? Bidders have secret signs arranged with Trembler beforehand. It’s silly, but that’s how they like doing it. They’re all rivals.”

I ahemmed again. “And there’s another thing. There’ll be two telephones against the windows. People will be telephoning bids in for particular lots. The, er, assistants bidding from the phones are treated as genuine—er, sorry, I meant as if bidders were genuinely here.”

“Telephonists to receive call chits,” Michelle mouthed, pencil flying.

“I’ll draft call chits with you when Trembler arrives. One last thing, love. Never, never contradict Trembler. Never look doubtful. Never interrupt.”

“What if I think he’s made a mistake?”

I took her face in my hands. “Especially not then, love.”

She moved back, looking. “All this is honest, isn’t it?”

“Michelle,” I said, offended. “Trembler’s a fellow of a Royal Institute. We’ve already certified that Sotheby’s and Christie’s rules govern every lot. We’ve certified compliance with Parliament’s published statutes.” I gave a bitter laugh, almost overdoing it. “If our auction isn’t legal, it won’t be for want of trying.”

Michelle stood to embrace me, misty. “I didn’t mean anything, really I didn’t.”

“Am I interrupting?” Shona, silhouetted in the door light.

“Sealing a bargain.” I thought I was so smooth.

“A … gentleman’s just arrived in Dubneath, calling himself Cheviot Yale. He told Mary he’s for Tachnadray. He’s just waiting, saying nothing.” She was still being accusing.

“His name sounds made up. Is it?”

“No.” I’d not felt so happy for a long time. “That’s the name he was born with. People call him Trembler.”

No way of stopping it now.

The Caithness National Bank manager was delighted with us. A big-eared man with a harf-harf laugh he made political use of during Trembler’s curt exposition. Trembler was doing the con with his Episcopalean voice, always a winner.

“In requesting a separate account,” he intoned, “I don’t wish to impute criticism of the Mistress of Tachnadray.”

“Of course not, sir.” On the desk lay Trembler’s personal card and personal bank-account number at the august Glyn Mills of Whitehall, London. Even when starving, Trembler keeps that precious account in credit. It doesn’t have much in it, but the reputation of an eight-year solvency in Whitehall is worth its weight in gold. Trembler gave a cadaverous smile straight out of midwinter.

“In my profession,” he said grimly, “it falls to me sadly to participate in the demise of reputations of many noble families. Normally, it would be regarded as natural to use the lady’s own account. But international collectors and dealers from London…” Trembler tutted. The banker shook his head at the notion of wicked money-grabbers. “… are of a certain disposition. They demand,” Trembler chanted reproachfully, “financial immediacy. The young Mistress’s authority would carry little weight.”

“Sad. Very sad.” The banker’s portly frame swelled, exhaled a sigh of sympathy.

“Mr. McGunn here tried to persuade me to agree for the auction sale to be administered via the Tachnadray account in Dubneath.” Trembler paused for the manager to shoot me a glance of hatred. I smiled weakly. “I insisted on coming here. Tomorrow morning, first thing, a number of small sums will be paid into the new account.”

“Very praiseworthy,” the banker smirked.

“One check will then be soon drawn on it. A small credit balance will remain. I will require a late-night teller on auction day to accept much larger sums.”

“Certainly, sir!” The man was positively beaming.

“I will require a special deposit rate of interest.”

The beam faded. “Sir?”

“It will be a relatively vast sum.” Trembler didn’t so much as get up as ascend, pulling on his gloves. “Possibly the largest your… branch has ever handled. I would be throwing money away not to demand the interest. Have the checkbook ready within the hour, please.”

We left, Trembler striding and using his walking cane so vigorously I had to trot beside the lanky nerk. You have to hand it to crooks like Trembler; always put on a great show.

“Here, Trembler,” I said. “Notice that geezer’s name? Only, I heard they were all assassins once.”

“Ruthven? Garn.”

“No, honest. Local vicar told me. Incidentally, Trembler. What do you think of openly cataloging a couple of fakes in the sale? Reinforce confidence in the rest of the stuff…”

We went to celebrate. I promised Trembler his advance money and asked if he could manage until tomorrow. He said all right, which only shows how good friends help out.

He really can’t do without exotic women and drink. Same as the rest of us; he’s just more honest. He orders the birds from a series of private Soho addresses. They’re very discreet, but not cheap.

As we drank, me a lager, him a bathful of Scotch, I stared out over Thurso harbor.

Antique dealers would now be booking the night-rider trains from King’s Cross. The London boyos would have their cars serviced tomorrow for the long run north. Phones would be humming between paired antique businesses. Syndicates would be hunched over pub tables, testing the water. Auction rings would be forming, dissolving, reforming, illegal to a man.

And the convoy this very minute’d be rumbling on the Great North Road, coming steady, a long line of weather-stained wagons carrying the beauty and greed of mankind. Soon they would swing left over the Pennines, then haul northwards for the motorway to Carlisle. Then they’d come to Glasgow, Inverness… My mouth was suddenly dry. “Have another,” I offered. “Against the cold.”

« ^ »

—— 25 ——

Nothing an antique dealer hates worse than fog and rain. Me and Michelle were for once agreed.

At three o’clock in the morning in a foggy, rainy lay-by, it seemed to me that the wheel had come full circle. We were in the giant Mawdslay on the main A9 which runs northward from Bonar Bridge. Forty miles to Tachnadray. Not long since, it’d been Ellen and me in old Ben’s hut, while a man had died bloodily outside. Then the disaster over Three-Wheel Archie, my escape with the traveling fair, my panicked flight from the fight between the rival fairground gangs… I’ve spent half my windswept life recently on night roads. I shivered. These old motors sieve the air. Michelle’s breathing had evened. I nudged her awake.

“Watch for the lights.”

“Will they come? Only, Mr. Tinker doesn’t seem very reliable.”

I wiped the windscreen. Not a light out there. Nothing moved. “He’s the best barker in the business. Anyway, Antioch’s running it.”

“Tell me about Antioch.”

“Eh?” I said suspiciously, but she was only trying to make up. “Antioch and me’s old mates. He was a Ghurka officer.”

“You know so many different sorts of people.”

“Everybody’s into antiques, love.”

“Can’t be.” She was smiling in the darkness. “I’m not, for instance.”

“Aren’t you?” I said evenly, which shut her up.

There came first a faint row of dot lights. Ten minutes later the convoy approached, a slow switching queue of lorries revving on the incline, the ground shaking as they came. Even in the night it was impressive. I heard Michelle gasp. I stood out, collar up against the drizzle, and held up the krypton lamp. Characteristically, the lead wagon merely flashed, slowed to a crawl. I smiled, recognizing Antioch’s trademark. The double blink went down the whole convoy. The last lorry pulled out, overtook at a roar into the lay-by.

“There are so many!” Michelle was beside me, shoulder up to ward weather away.

“Love, if I could have done it by correspondence,” I said, going forward to greet Antioch in the din of the passing lorries. He saw me, waved at the column. It churned on past.

“Lovejoy.” We both had our backs against the roar.

“Wotcher, Antioch. Any trouble?”

He grinned. He enjoys all this, driving about in all weathers. He loves nothing better than a catastrophe, a breakdown, a flash flood washing a road bridge. You feel you want to arrange an avalanche for the frigging lunatic.

“Police query near Carlisle, but I’d the consignment notes. A caff dust-up with some yobbos. Peaceful.”

“Antioch. About your drivers.”

“We’ll unload, then can you feed them? I’ve compo rations, but they’ll need more before daylight.”

“Yes.” I’d already warned Mrs. Buchan, who’d been delighted at my threat of dozens of voracious appetites. “Then?”

“We’ll run to Aberdeen, the oil terminals.”

“Your destination’s a place called Tachnadray.” He likes directions military style, eastings and westings and that. I’d forgotten how, so I chucked in my own map with Tachnadray ringed. He shone his light, grinned and shook his head. His lorry’s cabin door was open. Michelle was looking in.

“There’s a tramp inside,” she said reprovingly to Antioch.

The ragged figure coughed, a long gravelly howl that silenced the roars of the last lorries passing us. Michelle clutched my arm. Recognition had struck.

It opened one bleary eye. “Gawd, Lovejoy. Where the bleedin’ ’ell?”

“Hiyer, Tinker. Go back to sleep. We’re nearly there.”

Antioch climbed into the cabin, revved and joined the convoy’s tail. I stood, smiling, watching the red lights wind into the fog.

Michelle got her voice back. “He’s… he’s horrible!”

“Please don’t criticize Tinker.” We made for the Mawdslay. “He’s the only bloke who trusts me. A lot depends on him. Me. Tachnadray. Joseph. And,” I added, “maybe you.”

Ten o’clock on a cold wet morning. At eight we’d waved off the empty convoy, and I was just back from depositing a mixed bag of checks, money orders, and notes into the Caithness National. Me and Trembler had drawn Antioch’s draft. He’d set off following the convoy. There’d been enough to give Antioch’s drivers a bonus. Michelle had opposed this, exclaiming that it left hardly any. I didn’t listen. You have to pay cash on the nail sometimes, and this was one of them. She was still at it when we found Tinker happily trying out Mrs. Buchan’s home brewed hooch in the long kitchen.

“Giving away all that money!” Michelle was grumbling.

“Listen, love,” I said. Trembler strode past, discarding his gloves, ready for his third breakfast. “How many men would you say Antioch brought?”

“Forty-six,” Mrs. Buchan called, in her element. The tubby lady had two crones and no fewer than four youngsters all milling obediently to her orders. “Like the old days! You poor English, starving to death.” She wagged a spoon to threaten me. “This poor auldie’s never tasted a drop of home brew in his life. The crime of it.”

Tinker raised suffering eyes long enough to wink.

“Forty-six,” I repeated. “Look around.” The kitchen was like a battlefield. “They aren’t choirboys, love. What would have happened if they hadn’t been paid? After loading, driving the convoy the length of the country? They’d have torn the place apart.”

Michelle shivered. “It’s all so violent. I mean…” She was bemused at the scale of things.

“Suddenly it seems, well, out of our hands.”

“It is, love. We’re halfway down the ski slope. No way of strolling back to the start, not now.” I patted her shoulder kindly. “Have some nosh, love. We’ve a lot to do.”

She stared. “But we haven’t slept a wink. And everything is here. Isn’t that the end of it?”

Tinker guffawed, his mouth open to show partly noshed toast and beans. Trembler tutted and asked for more eggs, bacon, and perhaps just six more slices of fried liver, please. The women rushed, pleased.

A lass laid a place and poured tea as I said, “It’s the start, love.”

Michelle sank in the chair, pale.

“ ’Ere, Lovejoy,” Tinker said. “Notice yon Belfast geezer, tenth truck, fetched them frigging Brummie gasoliers?” The gaslight chandeliers had delighted me, genuine Ratcliffe and Tyler sets of three-lighters, 1874, with sundry wall brackets for the extra singles. They are valuable collectibles now, especially pre-Victorian versions. Tinker was falling about, cackling. “He got done at the sessions. Selling tourists parking tickets!

Magistrate went berserk.”

Trembler joined in the reminiscing. “Nice to see Antioch Dodd again,” he said. “We last met when I auctioned that old mill down Stoke way. Antioch owffed it on canal barges.

Even pulled a special police guard…”

Michelle was shaky, superwhelmed by all this criminology. Mrs. Buchan on the other hand was oblivious, keeping her assorted team busy. Aren’t women different? They’re a funny lot. We talked on, preparing for the grind ahead.

By midday Trembler had made up his mind. All fixtures and fittings were to be assembled in the corridors for security, but I was downcast.

“What’s the matter?” Michelle had left Mrs. Moncreiffe in the office bombing out the checklist.

“It’s not elegant.” I’d had visions of using the retainers—four more by now—to maybe redecorate the house. “But Trembler’s right. Bidders have sticky fingers.”

Trembler drew an outline plan on an improvised blackboard. He likes to talk to everybody at once. We were called to the Great Hall, crowded in among the furniture.

Schooltime.

“This is where I’ll hold the auction itself.” He pointed with his cane. “There are all sorts of problems: security, money, catering, a bar, parking cars. But the most difficult is people. You’ll all have a number. Anybody who hasn’t memorized everybody’s number by tomorrow must leave Tachnadray until the sale’s over.”

People shuffled, looked askance, nodded. Tinker snored. He was on an early Georgian daybed, cane-backed. I guessed it was from Jake Endacot’s shop in Frinton.

“Hector, you’ve got dogs. Patrol outside, and check cars in. One of you men will photograph, obviously as possible, every car arriving. One or two people might complain or turn away. Let them. Remember, these people are mostly townies. They don’t know sheepdogs are harmless.”

Two of the girls nudged when Robert glared my way. More knew of Shona’s missing dog than I’d thought. It still hadn’t been mentioned openly.

“You will be in two groups.” Trembler notices everything, pretending not to. He’d have spotted those meaningful nudges. He’d ask me about it later. “One group will help with the auction itself. The others will be stationed at a doorway, a corridor’s end, wherever.

Stay there. No matter what—a lady customer fainting, a man having a heart attack, a sudden shout for help, a customer telling you that Miss Elaine, me, or, er, Ian wants you urgently—stay there.” We all paused while Tinker coughed a majestic mansion-shaker of a cough. It faded like distant thunder. Trembler resumed. “And nothing must be taken away. Suppose a bidder in fine clothes comes up to you with a receipt bearing my signature, saying they’ve got special permission to remove their lot an hour early.

What do you do? You stop them. They’ll be thieves, robbers, crooks who make a superb living.” He smiled his necrotizing smile. “My rules never change: Stay at your post. No exceptions. Everything, sold or unsold, stays until five o’clock. Then a bell sounds, and it’s all over.”

“Sir,” one red-haired girl piped up. I liked her, our coffee lass. “What if we need…?”

“There’ll be a floater. One of you circulates, takes the place of each of you in turn, for ten minutes at a time. Your list will give the order in which you’ll have a break. And when your break time comes, you must take it. No deviation.” He did his wintry smile. I watched it enviously. “We have a rehearsal. It’s called Viewing Day, which is Tuesday.

Wednesday is Sale Day. Last point: Take no bribes, accept no explanations, and don’t talk to people. If they insist on talking, simply smile past them.”

Robert had been fidgeting. Now he rumbled. “If you’re so clever spotting the thieves, why not bar them? It’s stupid, mon.”

“Then we’d bar all. They’re all crooks.” Trembler looked down his nose at Robert, who flushed in fury. “Rich Swiss, showy Yanks, suave Parisians, pedantic Germans, cool Londoners. The lot. Remember they work in groups. They’ll lower jewelry, even furniture, out of a window to friends outside. They’ll try all sorts.”

“But we know this place,” Duncan protested.

“Not you. Once, a lady carried an oil painting in. The guard let her pass. A minute later she left with her picture, saying it was the wrong room after all. They discovered she’d arrived with a worthless fake, and swapped it for an Impressionist painting worth a king’s ransom. No. Do as you’re told, and we’ll profit. Do what you think is best, and we’ll be rooked hook, line, and sinker.”

Robert was still glowering, so I chipped in. “Mr. Yale is right. It’s obvious you have no idea of the forces we’re up against.” I hesitated, but Elaine nodded me to continue.

“The best experts in the country are on Tachnadray’s side. They’re me, Mr. Yale, and Tinker there. Tachnadray’s crammed with valuables. Your job is to contain them until the money’s in. That’s all there is to it.”

Trembler tapped the board. “Those who will obey my orders without question, please rise.”

Slowly, in ones and twos, they stood. Elaine spoke once, sharply, when Robert rose. He remained standing determinedly. She nodded to Trembler.

“Very well,” Trembler said, smiling. “Mrs. Michelle will issue your numbers. From now on you’ll wear them. And remember one vital truth: It’s Tachnadray versus all comers.

Everybody understand?” He had to insist on a reply before they sheepishly concurred.

He gave a warm smile as they shuffled out. “The game starts now.”

I called, “Mrs. Buchan has coffee and baps for everybody downstairs.” She fled with a squawk, driving two girls before. I hadn’t warned her. “Then back here for Mr. Yale to allocate your groups.”

Tinker woke at the third rough shake. We were a tired quartet, but we started a quick tour of the house.

“It’s not bad, Lovejoy,” Trembler said. The furniture was parceled, as auctioneers say, meaning arranged in categories.

“It’s bleedin’ great,” Tinker corrected indignantly. They were both seeking my approval.

I said nothing, though I sympathized. It’s always a difficult time when the scammer, he who arranges the entire ploy, does the appraisal. “We wus runnin’ about like blue-arsed flies. I give more bleedin’ scrip out than the friggin’ Budget. Christ, in one afternoon—”

“Shut it, Tinker.” I walked quickly, the three of them in my wake.

Trembler had opted for the ground floor. Ropes were tied across each staircase and crude notices forbade entry. We’d have more imposing barriers by View Day. Heavy furniture stood along one wall of every corridor. Light stuff and assorted massive beds were in the larger drawing rooms with musical instruments. The library was half full of books; books are most trouble when rigging an auction because booksellers want the highest markups. That’s why country-house sales always lack books. It isn’t because squires don’t read.

“Frigging booksellers.” Tinker hawked phlegm. I raised a finger. He went to the window and spat out.

Porcelain, cutlery, decorative ceramics were in the east wing. We clumped, steps echoing, the length of the corridor and worked backwards to the Great Hall. Fireplaces, fire tigers, gasoliers, pole screens in one room. Conservatory furniture and garden items in another. The big east drawing room, once a light bathhouse green, was now hung with sixty or more paintings.

“Thought that was in France,” I remarked in surprise. A Victorian lady admiring a flower in a pale lavender dress.

“Should’ve been,” Tinker grumbled. “More frigging trouble than a square dick.” Barkers are addicted to pessimism for the same reasons as Opposition politicians: There’s more mileage in it.

Farm implements, machinery, carts outside in the bay between the densely overgrown rose beds and the east windows. “Good old Antioch,” I praised. They were arranged in a kind of Boer lager. The presence of a steam plowing engine explained the bulky carrier in midconvoy.

“Fair old lot, that, lads,” I said.

“Ta, Lovejoy.” Tinker smirking’s a horrible sight, but the old soak deserved praise.

The jewelry was in one strip, a grotesque higgledy-piggledy array spread as it had arrived, in bags, trays, boxes, on wobbly trestle tables. Tinker grumbled at the trouble the roomful had caused him. He hates jewelry. “Fiddly little buggers.”

“Shouldn’t we be examining each piece?” Michelle exclaimed.

“Please, missus,” Trembler said.

“Aye,” Tinker added, “gabby cow.”

The glass was in the east wing’s smoking room. The smaller withdrawing room held the first miscellany.

“You described the laird as ‘that well-known collector,’” Trembler said. “So you’d want the collectibles separated?”

“Right.”

A room of bronzes, statuettes, sculptures. Two of silver. One of arms and armor. I left them chatting in the Great Hall as the retainers returned. Michelle seemed rather put out, par for the course, as I went outside and sat on the steps.

When preparing for a divvying job, I can never keep track of time. It must have been nearly an hour when Trembler emptied the whole house of people, Elaine and all. They came out in twos and threes, giving quizzing glances my way, one or two talking softly.

Robert carried Elaine. She waved. Tinker stood waiting behind me, gruffly shutting Michelle up when she started to speak. Some things must be done in quiet. Women never learn. He knows this sort of thing can’t be hurried. Trembler strolled past with a

“All yours, Tinker,” and got a wheezed “Fanks fer noffin’.” Silence. The great crammed house paused.

Afternoon moor light plays oddly on the rims of high fells. I’d often noticed it as a kid.

For quite a while I’d been watching the hues discolor and blend. According to the map, some Pictish houses stood over to the south beyond the loch. I’d love a visit in peacetime. Miles northwesterly, Joseph languished alone. Behind me a bottle clinked. A gurgle, wheeze, a retching cough. Michelle tutted. A cloud slightly darkened the moor, fawns umbered, ochers into russet.

Maybe it was an omen. I rose and dusted my knees off for nothing. My big moment.

Just me and antiques. Probably all I’m good for, showing off to nobody.

“Let’s go,” I said.

« ^ »

—— 26 ——

The tapestry was hung beside the stair foot. I’d heard Tinker say to Michelle, “Shut it, missus. Just friggin’ scribble,” but I was no longer listening.

Sometimes the best plan is its absence. Like, I never know how I’m going to divvy.

Setting about examining an antique is as individual as making love. Even people who know a little (which excludes all known experts, museum curators, and antique dealers) approach the task differently. There’s a geezer in Manchester who goes through a whole superstitious ritual, knocking wood, hex signs, the lot. Another, a Kendal bird good with amber, always sits on the floor even if she’s in public. Me, I just touch and listen. No particular order, no magic incantation.

Single antiques are easy, in a way, because meeting any one is like meeting a woman.

The love quantum is immediately apparent. Encounter two together, and immediately there’s difficulty. They react on each other, so a man’s bemused. The only way he can recognize that inner essence is by concentrating on one, to the utter exclusion of the other. Society calls it rudeness. In divvying antiques, it’s essential. The trouble is the process is so seductively pleasing that it sucks time from the day. I mean, here was I with hundreds, maybe thousands, of alleged antiques to divvy, and I couldn’t resist touching this tapestry, the first thing I’d clapped eyes on stepping through the porch.

“Hello, Jean,” I said to it, mist blurring the figures. Jean Bérain, Frenchman, once turned fashion upside down. He and his son struck eighteenth-century nerves by depicting naked courtesans reclining provocatively wearing the haunches and legs of a lion. You see Sèvres porcelain with similar figures. It became quite the thing for a famous beauty to have herself erotically depicted thus, like Peg Woffington, the famous actress, for example. “Long time no see.” I touched the lovely tapestry’s texture. Warm.

The feeling was heat, an exalting swirl of energy to the chime of melodious bells. I found myself starting to move, slowly at first, then quicker, quicker still, all else forgotten in a wondrous hedonistic spree. Distantly, Tinker’s emphysematous croak was there, “Hundred ern free, no; eight-six-nine, yeah,” but only for a while.

Battles do it. Orgies do it. Mysticism is said to do it. And women. Maybe it’s true. The experience of beauty leads to a temporary death from recognizing its unattainability.

I’ve never been in a trance as far as I know. I often wonder if it’s the same as recovering from these other things. If so, I don’t envy mediums. Certainly, coming out of one of these divvying sessions is appalling.

There was light intruding everywhere. My head was splitting. People talking in murmurs. A long leathery cough. A bottle, glugging. Somebody spluttered, murmured,

“Gawd.” A woman’s voice, thin as a reed pipe, played out on the water. She was asking about something with numbers. I must have slept.

Headaches are a woman’s best friend. They’re not mine. The kitchen, shimmering. Mrs.

Buchan peeling something, one of her scullions doing mysteries on a cake’s top.

Another minion teasing about hair done different.

This end of the long table was fenced with beer and bottles. The talk was going on, that cough, her still counting. I drew breath.

“Help us up, Tinker.”

Hands hauled, propped. The place swam for a few seconds. I swigged the tea and stared at my hands until the world tidied itself up. Tinker scornfully refuted the women’s suggested medications, clove inhalations, feet up, sal volatile. “He needs a coupler pints, obstinate bleeder,” Tinker said.

“Shut it.” I got out, and winced at his cackling laugh.

“He’s back. Wotcher, Lovejoy.”

“All right?”

“Aye, great. Missus, brew up. He’ll be dry as a bone any mo.”

Michelle was there, weary. I told her she looked like I felt and got a wan smile.

Trembler reached across to pat my shoulder.

“Beautiful, beautiful. A few questions when you’re ready.”

That cheered me up. Auctioneers lust in percentages. Trembler was thinking ahead. As I recovered coherence, he began slowly introducing particular antiques into the conversation.

“That bronze cat, Lovejoy. What’ve you got, lady?”

“One-five-oh-seven.” Michelle’s papers rustled as she worked her clipboard. “It’s one of six from Boy Tony, Winchester. Six reproduction metal sculptures, 1850, Birmingham.”

“As one’s genuine Egyptian, we should delete it, Lovejoy.”

“And?” I prompted. Exquisite tea, strong enough to plow.

Trembler shrugged. “I incline to Phillips, London.”

“No.” I’m never sad vetoing a deal between auctioneers. Once you’ve decided that money’s the name of the game, all is clarity. “No. Make out an addendum list. Have Hamish print it, free issue on the door. Say that One-five-oh-seven’s now only five repro bronzes, that one’s been withdrawn. Bronze cat, Egyptian, resembling Säite period 644-525 B.C. And tell Boy we’ll split the markup one to two.”

“But why take it out of the auction?” Michelle asked.

Trembler answered for me. “If six cheap reproductions are listed, and one is specially withdrawn, it’s as good as announcing that somebody’s realized it is genuine. From ten quid it leaps to maybe ten, twenty thousand. Lovejoy says we ask for a third of that difference. The addendum sheet’s the first thing dealers look at. Bronze collectors will pay on the nail.”

“Will Mr. Boy, er, Tony, agree to share?”

“Lady,” Trembler said gently. “He sent off six grubby old doorstops hoping for a few quid. And gets a fortune. Wouldn’t you agree to fork out the expenses?”

“Sod the explanations,” I interrupted. “How far’d I get?”

“Did it all, mate.” Tinker was pouring himself another pint of beer. From the tomato sauce on his mittens he must have had a meal or two while waiting for me to rouse.

“Lady here hardly kept up.”

“I got all of it,” Michelle said, glaring at Tinker.

“Kiss, then,” I ordered. “Chance of a bite, Mrs. Buchan?”

“I beg your pardon!” Michelle exclaimed indignantly, then quieted when she saw Trembler and Tinker marking an X on each of her pages. I did the same. God, I felt stiff. Something happens to your muscles. I saw her staring and smiled.

“A St. Andrew’s cross used to be put at the bottom of legal documents as a sign of honesty. That’s why it’s still a valid mark from people who can’t write. It degenerated over the centuries into a love kiss. We use it in its original sense.”

“Truth and honesty!” Tinker laughed so much, one of the girls had to bang his back to stop him choking to death.

“The dolls, Lovejoy.”

“For heaven’s sake, split them into single lots, Trembler. Who the hell boxed them into one?”

“Bleedin’ toys,” Tinker grumbled. My answer.

“That tall French bride doll’s the one to milk on the day, Trembler, but there are some good German bisques. Incidentally, d’you reckon that mohair-wig character doll’s by Marque? One went at Theriault’s for over twenty thousand…” We chatted as my grub came. Tinker was by then really enjoying himself. The girls pretended to refuse his request for another jug of Mrs. Buchan’s home brew, liking the scruffy old devil. The divvying had been a real success for him, because the stuff was exactly what I’d asked for. By dusk he’d be justifiably drunk in celebration.

Trembler and me went on, Tinker spraying us all with mouthfuls as he put in an occasional word and Michelle making notes. The set of wooden decoy ducks, retain as likely in this area. The collection of twenty-six fans, accept. The sixty pieces of lace, retain but split into different-sized lots. And the William Morris furniture look-alikes, put into one motif room. The alleged early Viennese meerschaum pipe was a fake, but leave in because some collector might be daft enough…

Late that same night Michelle came across me in the conservatory.

“What are you reading?”

“A real cliffhanger.” I held out the book. Dame Wiggins and Her Seven Wonderful Cats.

I like Kate Greenaway. Can’t help wondering if she had an affair with George Weatherby. Co-authors and all that.” She sat opposite me, composed, hands clasped.

“Yonks ago”— she used the slang self-consciously —“I’d have said you looked ridiculous sitting in that old bath chair. Now it seems so natural, you reading an old book by candlelight when there are comfortable chairs, new books, electric light, television.”

“It’s pleasanter, love.”

“Is it always like that?” She meant divvying.

“Not long back I divvied a few things for a fairground. Took it in my stride. This was a bit of a marathon.”

“And payment, Lovejoy?” First time she’d used my name.

“Money? You fixed the percentage.” I shrugged. “It never sticks to my fingers. A woman I know says it’s because deep down I hate the stuff. Pay me in Roman denarii, love.”

She showed no inclination to go. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I said, “You must be very proud of Elaine. Sad that James Wheeler didn’t live to see how she turned out.”

Women who delay a reply are usually opting for truth. It’s unnerving, like all rarities.

Michelle’s face was pale when finally it lifted.

“I suspected you’d guessed, Lovejoy.” She looked away for the crunch. “He took his…

wife to the Continent. I went as companion.”

“Because you were pregnant with Elaine.” Good planning. “The wife condoned everything?”

“Of course.” She was faintly surprised at my astonishment. “The importance of a clan heir overrode everything. Duncan didn’t know. He stayed to help Robert run Tachnadray.”

“All these dark secrets put you in my power,” I threatened. “Now I’ll exploit you rotten.”

She smiled at that, really smiled. “Anyone else, yes. But not you, Lovejoy.” She rose, hesitated as if seeking something, then bent over and put her warm dry mouth to mine.

“Thank you, Lovejoy.”

“Don’t say thanks yet, love,” I said sadly. “Unless you know what’s coming.”

Her eyes, so close to mine, showed doubt an instant before her woman’s resolve abolished it. She decided I meant gain.

“Duncan won’t expect me for an hour,” she said evenly. Her perfume was light and fresh. New to me, irritatingly. It’s one of my vanities that I can guess scents. “I was on my way to leave this list in your room.”

“See you there, then,” I said, just as evenly as her.

“Don’t be too long, Lovejoy.” Her voice was a murmur.

I watched her recede from sight in the gold glow, then returned for a quick minute to Dame Wiggins. One of the Wonderful Cats would land in the gunge if it didn’t watch out. Like Dutchie and Dobson. Except they’d only two lives between them. A cat’s got nine. Right?

« ^ »

—— 27 ——

One of the worst feelings in the world must be when you throw a party and nobody comes. I mean, that Bible character who dragged in the halt, lame, and blind has my entire sympathy. I began to get cold feet, though all portents were for go. Letters were still arriving. We’d had three calls from Mr. Ruthven, banker, ecstatic because nearly fifty firms or unknowns had transferred sums to the Caithness National out of the blue.

Pastor Ruthven, notable nonassassin, blessed our enterprise. The phone was constantly trilling, bloody nuisance. Mrs. Moncreiffe had her hair done.

Outside was like Highland Games day. Yellow ribbons on metal hooks fenced the tracks all the way from the bridge over Dubneath Water to Tachnadray. Robert and his men, now a staunch six, had put night-glitters on the ribbons, good thinking, and had laboriously mowed a spare field. Five hundred cars and eight coaches, he said. A man was sacked for blabbing in the MacNeish’s pub; drummed out of the Brownies, lost his badge, and got mysteriously convicted and clinked for a week’s remand by magistrate Angus McGunn.

A trailer arrived from Thurso carrying a kind of collapsible canvas cloister. Mrs. Buchan blew up, learning that Trembler was making inquiries among Inverness caterers, but I quashed her campaign when one caterer undertook to run a grub-and-tea tent and give us a flat fee. I agreed the same for a bar, plus a percentage. The catalogs were fetching in six times the printing costs. Hamish, maniacal by now, was doing a color catalog of fifty-one pages with a “research index,” meaning notes, by Mr. Cheviot Yale, Auctioneer and Fellow of this and that. The colored versions were for sale at the door, at astronomic cost to the buyer. Trembler prophesied they’d sell all right. A firm from Inverness brought a score of portable loos for an extortionate fee. They looked space-age, there on the grass, white and clinical. The local St. John’s Ambulance undertook to send a couple of Medical Aid people, in case.

The estate had never seen days like it, not since the laird’s spending sprees. Mrs.

Buchan’s kitchen was going nonstop. Duncan finished his last piece, a pedestal case.

This is the 1820 notion of a filing cabinet, with five hinged leather-covered cardboard boxes in a tier. It sounds rubbish, but with its lockable mahogany frame it looked grand. I explained how to age it with dilute bleach and a warm stove. Duncan’s products, a round dozen by now, would go into the auction as extra lots on the addendum.

It felt like a holiday. Trembler went off south for a well-earned, er, rest after ordering two of his exotic ladies from a Soho number. Tinker was paralytic, but messily filling out in the kitchen. It was there I roused him while Mrs. Buchan’s merry minions were screaming-laughing over laundry in the adjoining wash-house. He came to blearily, hand crooked for a glass.

“Noisy bleeders,” he groused while I poured. Mrs. Buchan’s latest offering was like tar.

He slurped, shook the foundations with a cough, focused. “Yeah, Lovejoy.”

“Dutchie and Dobson.” I waited for his cortex to reassemble in the alcohol fog. “Dutchie back from the Continent?”

“Never.” He hawked, spat into the fire.

“You sure? Our local dealers say you can set your clock by Dutchie’s reappearances.”

“Not this time, Lovejoy.”

“Tinker. I reckon Dobson did that driver, and Tipper Noone. Watch out for Dutchie and Dobson.”

“Fine chance, Lovejoy,” he croaked witheringly. “Them bastards are too lurky.”

They’d both be here. I already knew that. The only question remaining was their attitude towards me. I was pretty confident Dutchie wouldn’t—maybe couldn’t—harm me. But that cunning silent knife-carrier Dobson … I hunched up and sipped Tinker’s ale for warmth. What’s the expression, an angel walking over your grave? I thought, some angel.

View Day’s always a letdown, with added tension, same as any rehearsal. Everybody was keyed up. Trembler returned looking like nothing on earth but steadying as the day wore on. Tinker spent the morning “seein’ the bar’s put proper,” meaning sponging ale.

Michelle checked the numbers, and fought Trembler over sticky labels on the oil paintings. I kept out of it. Robert and Duncan drilled the retainers twice. No hitches.

They came. First a group of three cars, hesitantly following the signs. They’d driven from Eastbourne. Then a minibus from George MacNeish’s tavern with the six overnighters we already knew about. Duncan’s men had erected signs everywhere.

Nobody had an excuse for “accidentally” getting lost. Our people were on station in doorways, corridors, and one on each of the seven staircases. Five hawk-eyed men simply stood on the grass staring at the big house, Hector with Tessie and Joey spelling them in sequence every twenty minutes. One thing was plain to even the casual viewer: Security was Tachnadray’s thing.

Our viewing was timed for eleven a.m. to four in the afternoon. The trickle was a steady flow by noon. By one it was a crowd. Two o’clock and the nosh tent was crammed, the bar tent actually bulging at the seams. A coach arrived. The car park was half full, and filling. But throughout I kept a low profile. From the west wing’s upstairs corridors I could see the main doorway. I had a pile of sandwiches against starvation and a tranny against boredom in case Dutchie and Dobson didn’t show. I sat on the window ledge watching.

There was only one way for them to enter the house, and that was up the balustraded steps. And one way out, the same. As people arrived, I counted with one of those electronic counters. Like watching an ants’ nest in high summer. I recognized many, smiling or scowling as I remembered their individual propensities.

Lonely business. Twice Michelle sent a breathless girl—we had two of these runners, not really enough—with some query, quite mundane. It occurred to me that maybe Michelle was checking on me, rather than proving she was on the ball. Once Tinker came coughing up carrying me a pint of ale. At least, he nearly did. The beer slopped so much on the stairs he didn’t think it worthwhile to finish the ascent, so he drank it and called up that he’d go back and get me another. “Another?” I yelled down. “I haven’t had the bloody first yet.” He clumped off, muttering. That’s friends for you. I mean, I thought from my perch by the leaded window, Michelle was really too attractive, but cuckolding Duncan, whom I liked, hadn’t been my fault. She’d realized how good and sincere I am deep down. That’s what did it. Finer qualities always go over big with women…

Dobson walked from the covered way. He paused to scan the still, kilted figures of Duncan’s five watchers. Undecided, he strolled round the east wing. I smiled. Sure enough, he returned. Hamish’s big cousin Charles, Number 17, was posted there with his shepherd’s crook and his noisy eight-year-old son. Dobson moved more purposefully round the west wing. I waited while the viewers, now a teeming throng, poured about.

And back he came, now surly and fuming. It was Hector’s sister’s lad Andy on that corner with his border collie. Dobson turned, shook his head slowly. No go, he was telling somebody.

My blood chilled. An overcoated man, bulky and still, was standing among the crowd.

He raised his hand to his hat, and five—five, for Christ’s sake; there’s only one of me—

others joined him. They came and ascended the steps, with Dobson’s lanky, morose figure striding behind. I swallowed. Well, I tried to. These were hard nuts, continentals from the Hook. Ferrymen, as Tinker calls them. Pros, the heavies with which our gentle occupation abounds.

They left after two hours, into the nosh tent. At four Duncan’s bell started ringing. At four-thirty the last cars left, carrying the caterers. A lady dealer, one of the Brighton familiars, was winkled out of the loos by a dog. Five o’clock and Duncan’s men raised an arm, Robert’s numbers each holding a plaid flag from the windows. Michelle came out and signaled jubilantly up to me, smiling all over her face. I opened the window and yelled to stand down, everybody. One or two applauded, all delighted. Trembler had one small item missing, a fake Stuart drinking glass. Cheap at the price, but Trembler went mad. Tinker complained the beer tent hadn’t allowed the statutory twelve minutes’ drinking-up period, and went to fill the aching void with Mrs. Buchan’s brew.

Other people haven’t his bad chest. Elaine was thrilled and joined us all in the kitchen for a celebration.

“A perfect View Day!” she exclaimed, congratulating Trembler in the hubbub.

“Absolutely right!”

Nearly, I thought, as the retainers talked, grinning in the flush of success. Almost nearly. But I grinned yes, wasn’t it great, well done. All there was left to do now was leave my promised panic message on Antioch Dodd’s answer phone and wait for the dawn to bring Dobson’s vicious army and the holocaust. When I made my final run from Tachnadray, I desperately wanted Antioch and his merry men waiting and watching for me out there. Loneliness is dangerous. I’ve always found that.

« ^ »

—— 28 ——

Auction Day.

The Great Hall at Tachnadray was crowded. Seats were in rows, three hundred.

Dealers, collectors, and even other auctioneers, plus a few stray human beings were cramming in. The talk was deafening. Michelle was lovely though pale on her podium, with little Mrs. Moncreiffe in place behind her neat blocks of forms. To the auctioneer’s far left, two solemn lasses waited at telephones. Retainers were stationed at the exit and by each window down the length of the hall. Trembler’s two shop-soiled whizzers had arrived overnight. With the eidetic memory of their kind, they hastened once round the entire stock, then went to the beer tent to take on fuel, bored. I entered as Trembler checked the time, made for his podium. He looked great, really presentable, posh.

“Morning, Lovejoy,” somebody said.

“Morning, Jodie.”

“How did a scruff like you get a commission like this?”

She was smiling as she gibed. Jodie Blane’s a bottle-blonde who does business with those clandestine dealers who’re forever in and out of Newcastle. She has genuine watercolors and Regency silver. She says.

“Me? Influential friend of the family.”

We laughed. I said I thought I’d just seen Dutchie. She said no, that I must be mistaken because she’d heard Dutchie was in Brussels. I asked from whom, and sure enough, she replied Dobson. Surprise, surprise. Elaine wheeled in, emitting the ephemeral radiance of the love child, and smiling up at Trembler. Oho, I thought, moving on in the press. Trembler gaveled, and we were off. His two whizzers appeared from nowhere, one in each aisle.

“Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Tachnadray. Please refer to the conditions of sale. No buyer’s premium”—a few ironic handclaps met his wintriest smile—” but otherwise Sotheby’s rules apply. Note that the auctioneers deny responsibility…” Jeers and catcalls, some laughter. In the buzz Trembler summarized all the other escape clauses, making sure we could get away with murder, and went straight in. It’d be a long sale. He begged for haste in the bidding.

“Lot One. De Wint: ‘Dovecot, Derbyshire,’ watercolor.”

“Showing here, sir!” cried a whizzer.

“Who’ll start me off? Two hundred?” Trembler intoned, then in surprise responded to a nod from the farthest telephone girl. All phony. Last Sunday he’d drilled her till she cried. He feigned a bid beyond me, also off the wall, and finally knocked the painting down to the telephone girl. She called the buyer’s name: “Gallery Four, sir.” The fourth private gallery registered incognito with the auction. It indicated big secretive buying interests. The audience’s faces hardened, and settled down for blast-off. The phony telephone wires dangled out of sight below the girls’ desks, of course. It didn’t matter, because the De Wint watercolor was also dud. Elaine had done it, under my guidance.

But it had keyed the audience up to a spending mentality. Trembler’s a real artist. I stepped into the corridor.

“Hector. All the men in position?”

“Aye. Why?”

The dogs panted, grinning up at me. “One bloke yesterday tried sussing out the two wings. Ever seen him before?”

Hector tried to grin. “No, Lovejoy. Should I have?”

“No. Any extra men we can use?”

“No variation,” he said. “Your own rules, mon.” So no extra man guarding the cottage.

I bit my lip anxiously. “Watch out for the blighter. Tall, thin. Looks sour.”

“Aye, I mind him. Dinna fash.” He laughed, thinking I believed him about Dobson.

Apologetically I grinned and left, hands in pockets and pausing for a last look at one of my favorites, a Joe Knibb bracket clock. Simple rectangular, 1720, and worth a fortune.

“Tara, darlin’,” I said to its lovely face, and walked out just as I was. Tinker was in the beer tent, as I’d instructed. I didn’t glance his way, nor he mine. At the corner of the east wing Andy waited with his energetic collie. Why are dogs never still?

“Going well in there, is it?” he asked. Great how the retainers had committed themselves.

“Aye, Andy. Don’t let yon dog nod off.” And I strolled on past, through the unkempt garden. Under a crumpled greenhouse’s door stone lay the two-pound hammer and cold chisel. Heavy, but Joseph was probably bolted in and I’d need something for the door.

Then I trotted away from Tachnadray. I’d miss it.

Distances contract during daytime. I’ve often noticed that. Maybe it’s because you know where you’re putting your feet. I had the sense to follow Dubneath Water from the bridge, moving on the stones and eventually climbing up where I’d been baulked by Ranter. The guard was standing on the skyline a half mile off, facing the house in a patriarchal pose. From there he could see the cars and all the activity. No dog, thank God.

Somewhat muckily I climbed out of the watercourse and moved left, getting the cottage between us before I made a direct move towards it. The main door was on the side facing the distant guard, as was that unlatched shutter. The rear door my side was virtually rusted in place. Using the chisel, I levered off the bolt, and did the old lock with my belt buckle. A push on the Suffolk latch, and I was in. Must, rust, dust. Just to make sure, I peered into the two downstairs rooms, a parlor and a kitchen. Unused for years.

Grime was trodden shiny on the middle of the stairs. A tranny played pop music above my head. I went up, a bit scared—well, not really scared as such. More worried. Maybe I’d got it wrong.

But I hadn’t. Joseph was sitting in the upstairs room with that shutter ajar. They hadn’t even allowed the poor bugger a light, perhaps in case he signaled. He stood, jaw dropping, and stared at me in the doorway with my hammer and chisel. One hand was manacled to the wall by a long chain, and his ankles were chained to a granite cube. He could move, but he’d be noticed in company.

“Dear God,” he said faintly, his face drained.

“Wotcher, Dutchie.”

“I didn’t kill the driver. Honest, Lovejoy. Please.”

“I know you didn’t, silly burke.” I tested the wall chain. With that broken, I could at least get him away. “Gawd, Dutchie. Robert wasn’t mucking about when he stuck you here, was he?”

“Lovejoy…” His voice broke. “Is there a chance?”

“Let’s make one,” I said, and started on the damned thing.

I was past caring by now. He had a towel that I used to muffle the blows. The cold chisel went through the wall link with me banging the two-pounder on it in great sidewise swings. When the wall insert did go, it nearly took my eye out, whizzing past my forehead and pitting the wall opposite.

Dutchie carried his chains over his shoulder, me humping his granite cube. We left Shooters and crawled to the gully. We must have looked a sight by the time we reached the bridge. Dutchie was exhausted. I shoved him so he was in the dry under the arch, and heaved myself up to join him. He tried to gasp what the hell were we doing, but I shut him and whispered that our own private express service would be along shortly.

Cars were still passing overhead, heading towards Tachnadray, but only intermittently.

One of them would be Dobson and his five sociopaths.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon before that ancient engine came thumping down the track and arrested humming on the bridge. Even then I didn’t make a move until a gravelly cough temporarily muted the racket.

“Come on, Dutchie.” I tugged on his chain. We struggled up the bank. Tinker gaped from the Mawdslay.

“Bleedin’ hell, Lovejoy. That Dutchie you got there?”

“Shut it.” I dumped the granite block in. “Drive. South.”

He blasphemed at the gears. “ ’Ere, Lovejoy. Why’s Dutchie in chains?” We slammed forward, skidding wheels spraying earth. “Can we stop at a pub?”

« ^ »

—— 29 ——

We ran into Dubneath, veered south, and started the long run. In the first few miles we hardly spoke, except for me once.

“Give over hammering, Dutchie. The frigging floor’ll fall out.”

“But I’m chained,” he bleated.

Aren’t we all, I thought wearily. I’d lost all track of who I was being loyal to. The shyly elegant Michelle; the lovely Elaine inheriting the sins of her fathers, sic; teacher Jo; Shona the priestess-oracle of a McGunn renaissance; or this lout with whom I was now lumbered.

There hadn’t been much choice of direction. North or east meant splash. West was back to Tachnadray. Within ten miles Tinker drove me mad, complaining about the signs.

“Kyle of what?” he grumbled. “Strath of Kildonan? Here, Lovejoy. Funny bleedin’ names up here.”

“Give us that wheel,” I said irritably. We changed places. Cackling joyously, he fetched out a bottle, the old devil.

“Give Dutchie a swallow,” I told him.

He coughed long and harsh, giving himself time to think up an excuse. “Dutchie shouldn’t,” he wheezed, with rheumy old eyes streaming. “On account of his chains.”

“Tinker.” For half a groat I’d have slung them both out. I was sick of the lot of them.

Everybody was safe except me, heading back into danger.

Morosely Tinker passed his bottle to Dutchie, whose glugs made Tinker squirm in distress. He decided to get at me for enforcing charity at his ale’s expense.

“There wuz only two of them burkes with Dobson,” he said.

“You sure?” I felt my nape prickle. I’d banked on all five, plus Dobson, turning up at the auction. Dobson must have guessed I’d make a sly run for it.

“I waited, Lovejoy. They went in. Eyes all round their heads.”

“Dobson’s here?” Dutchie sounded pale in the rear seat.

“With five goons. Tough lot.”

Dutchie groaned. “We’ve had it, then. They’ll be on the road waiting for us, Lovejoy.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said bitterly.

“Will… they all be safe at Tachnadray?” He sounded like a bloke on his deathbed.

“You mean your mother and dad? Certainly. I’ve got Trembler up. There’s a big auction on the estate. Paper job.”

Tinker belched, hawked. “Mam and dad?”

“Michelle and Duncan,” I explained.

“Dutchie’s?” His eyes widened. “You mean that bird you—?”

“Shut it.” Tinker always knows more about my affairs than I’d like. “And your sister is fine.” Still nothing following in the rear mirror.

That took a minute to sink in, but he tried. “You know about that, then, Lovejoy.”

“Only guessed. She did a painting, your mother Michelle and the laird. Pastor Ruthven gave part of the game away. The laird’s wife couldn’t conceive and he became obsessed with providing an heir for the crumbling clan. Dynasty delusion.”

“He was always like that. Ever since…”

“Ever since he arrived as plain James Wheeler.” I adjusted the mirror to watch Dutchie’s face. “Even had his name changed to McGunn, by deed poll. I had it checked. Which makes Elaine Michelle’s daughter. You’re Elaine’s half-brother.”

“Elaine and me always got on, in spite of all.”

Tinker’s brain buzzed. “Then what she have you chained up for, Dutchie?”

I answered for him. “Remember that bureau? The night of the fog, when the driver got topped? Dutchie was trying to nick it. You were hoping to make a killing of a different sort, eh, Dutchie?”

Tinker put his mouth near my ear to whisper hoarsely, “Lovejoy. If Dutchie kilt the driver, what you give him that frigging hammer for?”

“Dobson clobbered the driver.” I kept checking my accuracy on Dutchie’s face. “When me and Ellen reached the wagon, the bureau had been offloaded. Dobson organized the twinning job, knowing its value. Maybe the driver also realized, so Dobson did him, poor sod. Dobson told Robert that Dutchie’d shared in the killing. With the fog lifting during the night, Robert drove Dutchie to Tachnadray. Dobson had to do in Tipper Noone, who’d done the twinning. He knew it was Dobson.”

Dutchie said, “Robert came up just as Dobson clobbered me because I wouldn’t go along with the driver’s killing. I’d been unloading while he killed him.”

Tinker cackled. “Bet Robert got an eyeful. Lovejoy was in Ben’s hut shagging that Ellen.

Biggest bristols you ever—”

“Tinker.” One day I’ll replace the garrulous burke by a Cambridge MA. I’m always making these vows, never fulfill them.

“There was no hiding place except Tachnadray,” Dutchie said. He sounded really depressed.

“Because one of Dobson’s goons is from Michelle’s home town in Belgium. The continental connection, eh?” I should have realized a million years ago, if only from Michelle’s accent. And Dutchie’s nickname: Anybody from the Low Countries is called that indiscriminately in East Anglia. Thick as ever.

Dutchie was telling Tinker. “… friend of my mother’s side.”

The old drunk was delighted. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “I know it! Nice little place. I blew a bridge there. Up to me balls in water. Lovely little Norman arch it had—”

“One more word from you, Tinker,” I warned him. He shut up. “Tell me if I’m right, Dutchie. Duncan and Michelle hid you at Shooters. You tried to escape, thinking you’d turn yourself in and tell the truth. Elaine supposed they were protecting you against yourself.”

“I tried telling them.”

I said, readjusting the mirror, “Shona discovered my identity because I opened my big mouth about antiques. She claimed then to have deliberately sent a real antique to entice me to Tachnadray. Like a prat I believed her. Here, Tinker, take a glance. Is that motor the one which Dobson and the goons had at Tachnadray?”

“Eh?” He screwed his eyes, peered. “No.”

“It could have overtaken us twice, and hasn’t.” I’d noticed it a mile since. “It has the legs on us.”

Dutchie sounded almost in tears. “There’s no way out, Lovejoy.”

“Optimist.” The trouble with some people is they’re not big-enough cowards. Anyway, they didn’t want Dutchie any more. They wanted me. “There’s nowt they can do until we pass Dingwall. We’re going to double back north for a bit. The A890 to Achnashellach.”

“Funny frigging names round here.” Tinker started a prolonged cough, phlegm and spittle over the side. If his chest would mend we’d be ten miles faster.

The big blue Mercedes stayed on our tail. I took on petrol in Dingwall, as Antioch had told me to do, then left the Inverness road and pretended to try to shake them off by over-desperate demonstration driving.

The day was fading. The road grew thinner and traffic lessened. An occasional car overtook us and a lorry or two passed going east, but that was about it. We left the security of towns as we hurried west. Countryside is rotten old stuff, lonely and ominous. The Government really should do something. I was as worried what was happening up ahead as much as by that bulky saloon dogging me, and kept staring into the middle distance on every rise. The skies abruptly lowered on us, and a drizzle started. The Mawdslay was a tough old thing, booming up each slope with ease, but steering it through the twisting dips was hell. It had a will of its own. Tinker started snoring.

As we ran on and the day ended, there was nothing but hills and woods and lakes to the left. Dutchie started some lunatic suggestion: Drop him off and he would nip down an incline, granite block and all. “I could reach the Strath Bran railway.”

“Ta, Dutchie, but don’t be daft.” He was only trying to help. Bravery’s more stupid than cowardice.

Tinker coughed himself awake and also made a contribution. “Here, Dutchie. How’d you manage to go for a—?”

“The chain was long enough.” Dutchie rattled it as proof.

We were a couple of miles past the chapel near Bran when we saw the man mending a motorbike by a lantern, thank Christ. He didn’t watch us drive past, made no move. I was beginning to worry I’d missed him.

“Hang on, lads,” I said, and cracked on speed. The old giant roared, fast as I could go in the darkening rain.

“Here, Dutchie,” Tinker was rabbiting on. “What percentage d’you give that Dobson… ?”

Here I was sweating, grappling with the controls, and this pair sitting yapping like at a tea party. The road curved, left to right. Down, then uphill. A slow bend, the Mercedes coming fast, its headlights on full beam. It’d be soon. I yelped, cornering too fast, wrestled up straight, cursing.

The tall lorry swept past in the opposite direction. I saw the Mercedes waver as its driver realized. A horn blared. The crash sounded actually in the Mawdslay, and for one crazy instant I thought, hell, it’s us they’ve got in spite of everything, before sense reasserted itself. I was still driving, unimpeded. Something burst. Air rushed along over the Mawdslay, blew on my ears. I slowed. Only the lorry’s taillights in the rearview mirror, nothing moving.

“Gawd Almighty,” Tinker croaked. “See that?”

Head out of the window, I crawled in slow reverse to where the man was standing by his lorry. I disembarked and stood looking over the edge of the camber.

“Ta, Antioch. All right?”

He heaved a sigh, tutting. “No gumption, some people. If he’d braked, he might have got out of it.”

A car was ablaze down below among a haircut of young trees. Even as I watched another bit of it woomphed. The air stank oil, rubber. A big bloke arrived on a motorbike, somehow folded it and lobbed it into Antioch’s lorry’s tailboard with ease. He nodded at the fire on the hillside below, as if acknowledging the inevitable. “Well,” he said in a singy Ulster voice. “They shouldn’t go round killing drivers, should they?”

“Six in it, eh?” I asked Antioch.

“No. Three. They’re using a band radio. They’ve a rover block on the A87.”

“What’s best, Antioch?” Three from six leaves three.

“No smoking, O’Flaherty,” Antioch said absently. The man put away his cigarettes. He had the envious tranquillity of the professional. I’m only glad I’m not that tranquil.

“Look, Lovejoy. I can see you safe partway, say Glasgow?”

“I’ve a better idea, Antioch,” I said. Lovejoy Know-all. “They’ll suspect I won’t touch Edinburgh.” I didn’t give reasons. “Will you put us that way on?”

“Right. I’ve things to do here, so O’Flaherty’ll see you as far as Perth. Then it’s motorway.”

The rain was worsening, but it made no difference to the fire below. A lorry chugged past. O’Flaherty waved.

With difficulty I turned the Mawdslay and followed O’Flaherty’s lorry. Antioch gave a distant nod as we passed. Aren’t people funny? He supports an orphanage in Affetside, then he goes and does a thing like that and stays cool. I kept having to clench my teeth to stop them chattering.

Dutchie’s voice wasn’t all that steady, either. “Where to now, Lovejoy?”

“Down the middle, to Edinburgh.”

Past Balmoral. We could always pop in and check that the royal gardeners were growing enough flowers under the old Queen Mum’s roses. She was murder on ground-cover plants.

« ^ »

—— 30 ——

There’s not a lot of northerly roads into Edinburgh. Unless you’ve a hang glider, this means two accident-prone motorways. O’Flaherty pulled into a lay-by south of Perth, still not smoking as he shook my hand.

“Get them bastards, Lovejoy,” he said.

“Me?” I was amazed. “I’m not like that. Honest.”

“To be sure. But the driver they topped was my mate.” He was so wistful as he said, “I wanted Antioch to let me drive the pusher. Good luck.” I waved him off.

Assassins are pretty cool, and often misunderstood. I’ve often noticed that. I was trying to evade the blighters, not find them. Which worried me, thinking about Mr. Sidoli and the traveling fun-fair. Except Edinburgh’s Festival was still in mid-orgy. Which meant Sidoli and Bissolotti would presumably still be hurdy-gurdying grimly on that green. But, my hope-glands flicked into my mind, where can you hide a Lovejoy best, but in a lovely throng? I shelved the terrible fact that any solution would be only temporary.

Dobson and Company had my home territory sewn up. The north was done for, now I’d sprung Dutchie. Edinburgh was limbo, but a satisfactorily crowded one.

“We’ll leave you in the motor, Dutchie,” I decided. “A cutting file and you’ll be free as air.”

“We’re splitting up?” he asked.

“About Tipper Noone,” I said, concentrating hard on the long strings of motorway lights. I had to be sure. Now that Michelle and me had come together, maybe I was feeling like his dad or something equally barmy.

“Tipper ships for us, Lovejoy. Repros through the Hook.”

Does? No past tenses for poor old Tipper, RIP? Dutchie, for all his gormlessness, was looking better and better. I drew breath to exploit Dutchie’s unawareness, but Tinker said helpfully, “Your pal Tipper’s snuffed it.” So much for tact.

The A90 had most traffic, so I bombed in on that while Tinker cheerfully narrated Tipper’s tale to the stricken Dutchie. Parking the motor would be a nightmare… Too late I noticed the bloody toll bridge. Too tired for any more vigilance, I was in the queue and the man asking for the gelt. He could see Dutchie quite clearly, manacles, chains, block. No hidey nooks in a tourer.

“Fringe?” he said, nodding at Dutchie.

“Eh?”

“Your show.” He shook his head sadly. “The council should provide proper places for the Fringe Festival. It’s a disgrace.”

“Ta. We’ll manage.” I tried to look brave but wounded.

“Good luck.”

And we were through. Fringe? “What was he on about, Dutchie?”

Dutchie chuckled. His first ever. “He thought we were performers. The Fringe Festival’s unpaid art. It makes its way. Streets, bars, even bus stops, living rough.”

I cheered up. We were along Queensferry Road. Civilization and people—God, the people—lights, traffic. “Shout if there’s an ironmonger’s.” Suddenly it was simple. I could buy a cutting file without fear. Part of our show’s props. See how easy towns are, compared to countryside?

Signs directed us a different way than I’d intended. Older buildings, denser mobs, louder talk, songs, turmoil. I didn’t want the old crate trapped in some sequined cul-de-sac.

“There’s a pub, Lovejoy.” Tinker had dried into restlessness.

We were down to trotting pace. I didn’t fancy this at all. I wanted a zoom through the fleshpots, a rapid file session to lighten our load, then to go to earth while Tinker and Dutchie caught the Flying Scot south to safety. I’d follow later, when I’d convinced our pursuers I’d escaped. But sedate traffic in a glare of road lights can be inspected quite easily—as indeed the pedestrians were doing, openly admiring our Mawdslay.

“Tinker. Got your medals?” A brain wave. The cunning old devil always carries them, and a mouth organ, to do a bit of busking if he’s short of a pint and I’m not around.

He obeyed, smoothing them in place. A cluster of stilt walkers followed us, striding and waving. A couple of girls in Red Indian costumes danced carrying buckets. A jazz band led by a pink donkey, I assure you, stomped jubilantly beside us, one of the players drumming on our side panel, a deafening racket. At a traffic light, me grinning weakly and trying to hum along to show we honestly were fringe people too, a lass in a straw boater stuck her head next to mine and screamed, “Seen a gondola?”

“Er, no, love.”

“Soddation.” She climbed into the passenger seat. Tinker cackled. She seemed to wear little, black mesh stockings and bands of snake-skin. “You can drop me off. You in the procession?” She lit a cigarette. Where the hell had she kept that? “Or marching?”

“Well, er, you can see how we’re fixed.”

“Ah.” She gazed round, eyes narrowing as she took in Dutchie’s slavehood. “Good, good. Rejection of imperialistic chauvinisms. The medals are genius.”

“Me wounds still hurt, dear.” Tinker started a shuddering cough. Sympathy always starts him cadging.

“Shut it, Tinker.” No exits down the side streets. All one way now, with the multicolored mob a long, winding tide. Police grinning, waving. A Caribbean dustbin band bonged to our right. A non-band of chalk-faced mimers played non-instruments alongside. Jesus.

We were in a parade. My head was spinning. “Lads, look for a way out.”

“I agree,” the girl groused. “No political motivation. They’re hooked on happiness.

Perverts.”

I’d no idea what she was on about, but I made concurring mutters and simply drove in the worsening press. It was pandemonium. In front were handcarts, a lorryload of Scotch bagpipers. All the shops were lit bright as day. Pirates dangled from lampposts, singing that chorus from Faust. A girl wearing a dog on her hat reclined on our bonnet with a weary sigh and popped a bottle of beer on a headlamp. Tinker whimpered. The dog looked fed up. Two ballet dancers danced outside a shoe shop, Jewels of the Madonna, but I couldn’t be sure because of the other bands. Applause. A youth dragged a floreate piano into the swelling parade, making placatory gestures to me to hold back while he made it. Wearily I waved him on. That said it all—Lovejoy, hot-rodding to escape, overtaken by a pianoforte. A poet declaimed from a girl’s shoulders.

She was dressed as a skeleton and clutched an anchor.

“See what I mean?” Our girl was bitter. “A waste of political potential.” She suddenly burst out laughing. The Mawdslay stank sweetly from her smoking. Oh dear. And Dobson’s gaunt face among the pavement mobs.

“Lovejoy.”

“I see him, Dutchie.”

He was hurrying along the pavement, quickening when we could make a yard or two, dawdling in each hiatus. One overcoated bloke was with him. As long as we stayed with the carnival… A group of tumblers formed a sudden arch. The parade trundled beneath, to cheers. Our snakeskin girl sang tunelessly, head back.

“This bint’s taking tablets,” Tinker croaked, disapproving. To him anybody stoned on drugs is “taking tablets.”

Ahead a regular thumping sounded. A brass band. Correction: a military band, getting closer. Pipes. A cluster of actors froze an instant, took three paces, froze, dressed as vegetables. A pea pod, a cabbage, a possible lentil, a flute-playing celery. Fireworks lit the sky, hitherto the only turn unstoned. A bobby waved us on, veering towards somewhere distantly tall. The thumping of drums at long range. Our pink donkey’s jazzy band bopped past as we got stuck behind the piano. I felt clammy. No sign of Dobson and his goon, but one bloke was stock-still on the pavement, keeping his eyes on us even when jostled. Depression and fear fought for my panic-stricken spirit.

“There’s no bleedin’ notes in that piano,” Tinker said.

“It’s Jan the Judge,” our snakeskin said, happy herself now. “He plays silence. The performance is in its nothingness.”

“What happens if he don’t turn up?” Tinker was puzzling.

“Lovejoy. It’s the tattoo.” Dutchie pointed. Searchlights swept the night. Pipers lined the battlements. A fusillade crackled.

Slower and slower. The parade was practically static now. Sweat poured off me. The Mawdslay, inch a minute, was trapped. Exactly as I hadn’t wanted, there was no way for us to go. Behind us bands jigged, actors twisted and danced. Both sides were thronged with acts and noise. Giant puppets milled. Above us stilted actors and balloons. Something shattered the windscreen. Nobody noticed except me.

“Hey, your gondola!” I grabbed the girl, now floppy-limbed and crooning. “Scatter, lads.” I was crouching below the dashboard, yelling. “Tinker, hop it. Dutchie, stay among a band.” I hauled the lass sideways. More glass cracked. The Mawdslay trembled. The bloody donkey trod on my foot. Its band swayed past.

“Where?” She stood up, peering.

“Over there,” I yelled, fetching her down on me by a yank of her arm. The shots came from ahead but obliquely, so I spoiled a few syncopations by shoving my way through to the pavement. I couldn’t even do that right. I had to step over three actors in evening dress in the gutter. A placard announced that they were the Drunken Theatre of Leigh. I tugged the snakeskin girl along, some protection. You penetrate crowds fastest hunched over and butting along at waist height. The trouble is you can’t see.

After a hundred yards a doorway, people shoving inside with such a tidal rip, I got crushed along.

Brilliantly lit, wall labels and pseudo-Victorian illumination. Red plush, chandeliers. We were in a foyer. Cinema? Theater? Thickset men in dinner jackets on the door directing us, me included.

“No, mate,” I said, breathless in my terror sweat. “You see, me and my bird are—”

He practically lifted me aside. “Dressing room there, laddie. She in the Supper Room?

The Music Hall shares the same accommodation.”

“Where?” My girl’s question was audible. A bell sounded two pulses. People began to hurry carrying half-finished drinks. A theater’s two-minute bell.

Applause burst out upstairs, amid catcalls. A xylophone began. I pulled the door. Two girls were just leaving, all spangles and scales. “Jesus,” one said, disgusted. “Not more?

There’s not room to swing a cat.”

“Sorry, love.”

The room was empty but looked ransacked. A ring of tired bulbs around a mirror, a lipsticked notice pleading for tidiness. Graffiti criticized somebody called the Dud Prospect Company for nicking makeup. My ears worked out what was the problem, finally got there. Silence. My adrenals gave a joyous squirt and relaxed: safety and solitude. I sat at the mirror.

“Right, love,” I said. Hopeless. “Do me.”

“What?” She squinted over my shoulder. “Are you on soon?”

“Five minutes.” I swept all the Leichner sticks and pots closer. “Do the lot.”

“Bastard apolitical theater managers.” She started me.

For the first time ever I didn’t feel much of a clown. No clown’s clobber, of course, except gloves and a weird hat. I’d sliced the fingers so they dangled, and scalped the topper into a lid. My face was chalk-white. Red nose, scarlet lips, lines about my eyes. I looked like nothing on earth. She’d done a rubbishy job, but I was grateful as I left, promising to send along any passing gondolas and vote something-or-other. She was caroling drowsily to her reflection, another smoke helping the mood. I turned my jacket inside out, and nicked some baggy trousers. Being noticeable was the one chance.

One of the evening-suited bouncers said, “Hey. Other way,” but I kept going, down the foyer and out. The carnival was flowing on, over and round the Mawdslay. It stood there forlorn. No sign of Tinker or Dutchie. An overcoated man moved against the flow, finding refuge behind a pillar-box. I capered clumsily into the mob and drew a squad of ghosts trotting with a fife band. A jig. How the hell do you do a jig? I moved faster, advancing up the parade. I even caught up with my stilt walkers, jazz band, the silent piano man.

Then I saw a jolting notice, bulb-lit: carnival procession sponsored by sidoli’s stupendous circus. Instinctively I shrank, but a jovial policeman shoved me back into the stream.

“I reckon you’re late, son,” he said affably over the din. A huge colorful bloke standing near heard and sang, “As now the sun’s declining rays at eventide descend…”

Dear God, I thought, prancing in panic. It was Big Chas. And there too was little Ern, also looking hard after me. And Mr. Sidoli’s two terrible nephews. They were in carnival gear, flashing bow ties and waistcoats, striped shirts, bowlers.

“No,” I bleated in anguish. The bobby’d thought I was something to do with the fairground. Even as I whined and ran, the familiar sonorous pipes of merry-go-rounds sounded.

“Lovejoy!” I heard Big Chas’s bellow.

I fled then, down across the parade, so terrified that cries of outrage arose even from those fellow thespians who’d assumed I was an act. I needed darkness now as never before. If the gunshots from Dobson’s two goons had seemed part of the proceedings, a clown being knifed would seem a merry encore. I hurtled into a small parked van, wrenching the door open, and scrabbling through. Two first-aid men wearing that Maltese-Cross uniform were playing cards. I waited breathlessly, gathered myself to hurtle out of the front sliding door.

“All right, son?” one asked placidly, gathering the cards. “An act, is it?”

“As long as he’s not another Russian.” He gave me a grandfather’s smile. “No offense, laddie. They only come over here to do Dostoyevski and defect.”

“Aye. Always the second week—”

I swung the door out and dived. Somebody grabbed, shouted. Some lunatics applauded. “How real!” a woman cooed as I scooted past, bowling a bloke in armor over. God, he hurt. Another carrying a tray went flying. I sprinted flat out, hat gone and trousers cutting my speed, elbows out and head down. I charged, panicked into blindness, among a mob of red-coated soldiers. They were having a smoke, instruments held any old how, in a huge arched tunnel with sparse lights shedding hardly a glimmer. I floundered among them. A few laughed. There was floodlight ahead, a roaring up there, possibly a crowd. Well, it couldn’t be worse. “Here, nark it, Coco,” a trumpeter said, and got a roar by adding, “Thought it was Lieutenant Hartford.”

A gateway and an obstruction, for all the world like a portcullis. I rushed at it, bleating, demented. An order was barked behind in the tunnel, and I’d reached as far as I could go. I was gaping into an arena filled with bands. Jesus, the Household Cavalry were in there, searchlights shimmering a mass of instruments and horses’ ornamentation.

Lancers rode down one side. I could see tiers of faces round the vast arena. I moaned, turned back. Out there I’d be trapped like a fish in a bowl.

The soldiers formed up, marching easily past, some grinning. The drum major glared, abused me from the side of his mouth. The portcullis creaked. Applause and an announcement over the roar. The back-marker strode past, boots in time and the familiar double-tap of the big drum calling the instruments into noise. Gone. The entrance tunnel was empty. I couldn’t follow the band into the arena, so I turned. Best if I tried to get to George Street. Those Assembly Rooms…

I stopped. My moan echoed down the tunnel towards the exit. Dobson stood there, pointing. Two goons, overcoated neat as Sunday, appeared and stood with him.

“Help!” I screamed, turning to run. And halted. Round the side of the arena gateway stepped Sidoli’s nephews. Two more henchmen dropped from the tunnel archway, crouched a second, then straightened to stand with the Sidolis. Big Chas walked between them. Five in a row. Both ends of the tunnel were plugged. I was trapped.

“Now, lads,” I pleaded, swallowing with an audible gulp. Blubbering and screaming were non-negotiable. “Too many people have been hurt in all this…” The fairground men trudged towards me.

Dobson called, “He’s ours, tykes.”

“Ours,” a Sidoli said. The tunnel echoed, “Ow-erss, owerss.” He was Sidoli’s nephew all right.

No side doors in the tunnel’s wall. I stood, dithering. Big Chas’s line was maybe twenty yards away and coming steadily. Dobson’s pair had pulled out stubby blunt weapons. I thought, Oh, Christ. A war with me in the middle.

“Stop right there, Chas,” I said wearily. “You were good to me. You’ve no shooters, like them. It’s my own mess.”

And I walked towards Dobson. My only chance, really. And it bought me a couple of seconds. It bought me much more than that, as it happened. I moved on trembling pins towards my end. At least I now only had one army against me instead of two. More favorable odds, if doom wasn’t a certainty.

“No!” a Sidoli shouted. “Noh,” the tunnel yelled angrily.

Dobson backed smiling out of the tunnel entrance to where I’d first cannoned into the Guards band, his goons with him. I came on. They were in a perfect line. A stern warning cry, “Loof-yoy! No!” behind me.

If I’d known it would end like this, in a grotty tunnel, I’d have marched out into the arena with the band and hared up through the crowd somehow—

An engine gunned, roared. It seemed to fill the tunnel with its noise. I hesitated, found myself halted, gaping, as a slab lorry ran across the arch of pallor and simply swept Dobson and the two overcoats from view. And from the face of the earth. All in an instant, time stopped. To me, forever Dobson and the two nerks froze in a grotesque array, legs and arms any old how, in an airborne bundle with that fairground slab wagon revving past. They’re in that lethal tableau yet in my mind. Dobson’s expression gets me most, in the candle hours. It’s more of a let’s-talk-because-there’s-always-tomorrow sort of expectation on his face. But maybe I’m wrong because it was pretty gloomy, and Ern didn’t have any lights on as he crashed the wagon into and over Dobson and his nerks.

Footsteps alongside. I closed my eyes, waiting.

Big Chas’s hand fell on my shoulder. “Lovejoy,” he said, friendly, and sang, “Hear thy guardian angel say; ‘Thou art in the midst of foes: Watch and pray!’ ”

“I’m doing that, Chas,” I said.

Mr. Sidoli was overjoyed to see me; I wasn’t sure why. They gave me a glass of his special Barolo while I waited. I’d expected death. Unbelievably, I was left alone on the steps, though everybody I remembered came up and shook my hand. The fairground seemed to have grown. There was no sign of Bissolotti’s rival fair. Instead, a marquee boasted a dynamic art show, periodically lasering the darkness with a sky advert.

Francie rushed up to say everybody was proud of me. Her whiz kid was temporarily running the Antique Road Show. Like Tom the cabin boy, I smiled and said nothing, simply waited for this oddly happy bubble to burst.

It was twenty to midnight when I was called inside. Mr. Sidoli was in tears. His silent parliament was all around, celebrating and half sloshed.

“Loof-yoy,” he said, scraping my face with his mustache and dabbing his eyes. “What can I say?”

“Well, er.” Starting to hope’s always a bad sign.

“First,” he declaimed, “you bravely seize Bissolotti’s main generator, and crush his treacherous sneak attack.” He glowered. Everybody halted the rejoicing to glower. “And restrained yourself so strongly that you only destroyed three men.”

Scattered applause. “Bravo, bravo!”

“Destroyed? Ah, how actually destroyed…?”

His face fell. “Not totally, but never mind, Loof-yoy. Another occasion, si?” Laughter all round. “Then you cleverly tell the police it is my generator, so I can collect it and hold Bissolotti to ransom.”

This time I took a bow. The nephews burst into song.

“And at the arena you bravely tried to spare my nephews then the risk when they go to help you, knowing how close to my heart…” He sobbed into a hankie the size of a bath towel. Everybody sniffled, coughed, drank. I even felt myself fill up.

“And you walk forward into certain death!”

I was gripped in powerful arms. Ern and Chas sang a martial hymn. Fists thumped my back.

When you think of it, I really had been quite courageous. In fact, very brave. Not many blokes have faced two mobs down. It must be something about my gimlet eyes. You must admit that some blokes have this terrific quality, and others don’t.

Joan was watching in her usual silence. Her eyes met mine. Well, I thought, suddenly on the defensive. I’d been almost nearly brave, hadn’t I? I mean, honestly? Joan smiled, right into my eyes, silly cow. She’s the sort of woman who can easily nark a bloke. I’d often noticed that.

They’d have finished the auction in Tachnadray.

It was three o’clock in the morning before I remembered Tinker. Sidoli’s lads found him paralytic drunk busking in George Street, Dutchie doing a political chain dance round his political granite block. Without a bean, or even a hacksaw, they’d done the best they could, which was to scrounge from an affable public to tunes from Tinker’s mouth organ. Tinker said we’d all go halves. His beret was full of coins, enough for a boozy breakfast for us all.

« ^

—— 31 ——

Countryside. No rain, no fog. And, at Tachnadray, no longer only one way out. Me, Duncan, and Trembler were talking outside the workshop. They’d taken on half a dozen apprentices. From the quality of their work I wouldn’t have paid them tea money, but Duncan said they’d learn.

“Make sure you spread them about this time.” I meant the reproductions they were going to mass-produce. “One each to East Anglia, Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, and Southampton. Stick to one route and you’re in the clag.”

“We’ve had enough trouble,” Duncan said with feeling.

“You didn’t have any,” I pointed out nastily. After all, I was the hero. “Okay, your son was a hostage, but safe. He’s a McGunn.”

“There’s no trouble for you now, Lovejoy, eh? I mean, those two men, and the others?”

“Tipper Noone? And the driver? No. Whatever the police find won’t matter a bit. Dobson and his killers are dead.”

The vehicle was fixed by Ern, a spontaneous case of brake failure. The police could enjoy themselves speculating on the guns found on two of the deceased. I, of course, wasn’t within miles. I sprouted alibis, Sidoli’s doing.

“Wotcher, love,” I said to Elaine.

Elaine had a new automatic wheelchair. I said it wasn’t as good as the old garden machine we’d sold at the auction. She’d bickered back that I didn’t have to sit in it.

“Lovejoy,” she said, in that tuneful propositioning voice women use when they’re going to sell you a pup. “How’d you like to become a partner?”

“If that is a proposal of marriage, you’re too plain.”

“Stop fooling. In Tachnadray.”

“It’s not me, love. Trembler here will. It’s time somebody took him in hand.”

That’s what we’d been heading towards all along. Elaine turned her seabed opalescent eyes on Trembler. “Will you, Cheviot?”

“He’s been on about nothing else,” I said irritably. “He’s trying to work out how to word it. Nerk.”

Trembler tried to start a solemn contractual conversation. “I’ll have to think—”

“Me and Tinker did a draft contract for you after breakfast. And,” I added, “my percentage of the auction profits you can split three ways—Tachnadray, and the families of the driver and Tipper Noone. How’s that?” As soon as I’d made the offer I groaned. Still, easy come, easy go.

“Is Lovejoy serious?” Elaine asked.

“I’ll do a list of exploitations. Pottery, prints, pressed flowers of Tachnadray, tartan novelties, photographs of the ancestral home. And you’ll sell inch-square plots to tourists, fortune at a time, each with a great Sale Deed in Gothic Latin lettering, a sealing-wax blob on a ribbon. Postage extra. And ‘coin’ tokens in fifteenth-century denominations. It’s where greatness lies.”

“There’s something scary about all this, Lovejoy.” But Elaine’s eyes were shining.

You have to laugh. For the first time in her life she’d challenged the outside world, and won victory. Now she wanted the thrill of the contest over and over. There’d be no stopping Tachnadray now, especially with Trembler on the team.

“I’ll come and check on you every autumn, Cheviot.” It was the end of an era. There’d be a sudden drop (I nearly said tumble) in Soho’s sexploitation shares tonight.

They had moved away when Elaine paused. “Oh, Lovejoy. Can I ask something?”

I walked over. Trembler moved politely out of earshot. Her eyes were radiantly lovely looking up at me.

“Lovejoy. Did you and Michelle?”

“Eh? Did we what?”

She blushed, a lovely rose-pink. “You know.”

“No.” I was puzzled. Then my brow cleared. “You can’t mean…?” I was mixed furious and hurt. “Elaine! How can you ask that, after… after… you and me…”

“Shhh,” she said. “I’m sorry.” My back was towards the workshop. “I honestly didn’t mean anything, darling. And thank you.” She blew a mouth and left smiling, beckoning to Trembler.

Duncan and I watched them go.

“She’ll take him in hand, Duncan.”

“Aye.”

Michelle was there in the car, waiting to drive to Inverness for the train home. I’d already said my good-byes. Mrs. Buchan had wept uncontrollably at the simultaneous loss of two prize appetites. I’d restored her to normal apoplexy by saying I had to get home because her pasties weren’t a patch on East Anglia’s. Mrs. Moncreiffe was also sad. “It was all so naughty, wasn’t it?” she said, tittering. Tinker hates tittery women.

Dutchie would be down again before long. I’d said so long to Hector, his two dogs, and the others. Robert hadn’t looked up from shoeing a horse. I kept out of range in case he lobbed the anvil at me in farewell.

“Duncan. You’ll say cheerio to Shona for me?”

“Aye. I will.” He knocked out his pipe, cleared his throat. Something was coming. “She’s always been headstrong, Lovejoy. She shared all the clan obsessions. Don’t blame her.”

“I don’t,” I said, with my sincerest gaze. “But the road Elaine’s taking is healthier. More open. More people.”

“Aye.” He sighed. “My sympathy’s with Jamie. It’ll be a sorry union between that pair.”

“One thing, Duncan.” I pointed to the east wing, by far the weaker of the two. “Ever thought of having a fire? Accidental, of course. Just before a sale, like that Norfolk business in the mid-seventies…”

“Och, away wi’ ye.”

He was laughing, as I was, as we left.

“Are you sad to be going, Lovejoy?” Michelle had waved to Duncan, said she’d be straight back after she’d dropped me.

“Not really. No antiques up here, is there?”

She gave a tight smile. After we’d reached that wretched bridge and were cruising on the metaled road instead of shaking the teeth out of our heads on the bumpy track, she shot me a glance.

“Lovejoy. Did you ever… you know, with Elaine?”

“I knew you thought that.” I spoke with indignation. “I could see the bloody question coming. Look, love.” Bitterness now. “If that’s the best your vaunted woman’s intuition can do, I’d trade it in for guesswork.”

“Did you?” She slowed, to inspect my eyes.

“No,” I said levelly, with my innocent stare. I never try for piety because it never works.

“And if you count the tableware, you’ll find it complete. Anything else?”

“I was only—”

“Because I’m a bit scruffy and don’t share your blue blood, I’m the perennial villain. Is that it?” I was looking out at the moors, quite a tragic figure really, I thought.

“I’m sorry, Lovejoy. But you must realize—”

“You and the laird, okay. I did realize, eventually. But your main problem with Elaine is Trembler—forgive me, Cheviot Yale, Esquire—not me.”

She pulled at my hand. “Don’t be angry, darling. It’s only natural anxiety. I didn’t mean to offend—”

We were three hours reaching Inverness. I forget what took us so long. Anyhow, before saying good-bye, Michelle promised in spite of all my protests to accompany Dutchie on the runs to East Anglia with the reproduction antiques. She looked shy, new, voluptuous.

“You don’t want me, love,” I said, thinking of Francie, Joan, Ellen, and Jo, who would be desperate to hear how I’d got on. “I’m even bad at hindsight.”

“Next month to the day, darling,” she said. “I’ll stay with you a whole week. I’m dying to see your cottage, and nobody need know. Here. For you.” She gave me a parcel, quite heavy. I know you’re not supposed to, but I can’t help palpating presents to guess what’s inside. She saw me and laughed. My chest was bonging a definite chime.

The Mawdslay had gone before I remembered. I’d promised Ellen I’d stay on her houseboat down the Blackwater for a few days about then. And Sidoli’s fairground was due through on its run south in that week. And Jo had hinted she’d have three half-term days to spare. And I’d Margaret to thank. And Helen. Oh, God. Why is it that trouble always follows me, and never anybody else?

On the train I unwrapped Michelle’s parcel. The lovely pair of snuff mulls shone as the fading light patched and unpatched the carriage windows. The milky silver gleamed in time with the train wheels, and then blurred. Bloody women. No matter how you try, they always get you at a disadvantage, don’t they.

One day I’ll give everything up, I honestly will. As soon as I find out how.

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