The Rich And The Profane (9 page)

‘Not this, Lovejoy. Prior Metivier is chairman. I am secretary.’ She indicated Summer. ‘We have senior police. The charity will be registered.’

‘We rattle tins in supermarkets, sell flags or what?’ ‘Nothing so exhausting,’ she said, loving this. ‘We advertise for antiques - however small - from parishioners,

friends, churchgoers. We have already published in the religious press. You evaluate the antiques.’

‘And who sells them?’

She sighed. I was being tiresome. The cat raised its head and stared with malice at unthinking peasants who had the nerve to intrude at food-and-lap time.

‘You, Lovejoy. Or you arrange an auction.’

‘I’m sick of arranging auctions.’

This is trouble. Because of BBC TV’s
Antiques Road Show,
and a million
Road Show
lookalikes that tour every village and drill hall, there’s a growing conviction that you’ve only to tack up a notice announcing one, and up bowl waggonloads of Rembrandts and Wedgwoods and Chippendales. It’s greed. You want proof? Watch the TV show. You’ll hear an expert waffle on about some porcelain piece. Nobody pays much attention, for who cares? Then he says, ‘You want to know how much it’s worth!’ All conversation stops. You can hear a pin drop. See? Greed, more greed and nothing but greed, swelp me.

‘Of
course
it must be you, Lovejoy. Ably assisted,’ she said evenly, ‘by Mr Summer. You are said - forgive me, Lovejoy - to need somebody beyond reproach to be close by.’

‘Meaning I’m a crook, and Mr Summer’s not?’

She smiled. ‘I
did
entrust myself to your care.’

Well, if she put it like that. She meant driving me home. ‘I found that thing at the priory,’ I said, eyeing the grub. I was starving. ‘That should keep Prior George in holy water for a week.’

‘What thing?’ Summer and Crucifex asked simultaneously, then quickly looked away to dissociate.

I told them about the Chinese handle. ‘Pity there wasn’t a pair. See, one is always less than half the value of a pair.’

There was silence. Martin looked at his wife. She started an immediate chatter about which friends might help, volunteer committees she’d written to.

‘Er, any chance of... ?’ I asked the trolley.

‘Good heavens!’ Mrs Crucifex trilled, relieved at the diversion.

She beckoned. I leapt an Olympic leap. It’s very hard not to grab grub when you’re hungry. Summer only picked, which is unusual, because the Old Bill are famous cadgers of grub and booze. We talked of this and that. I said a boot fair was hopeless and that asking antique dealers for gifts would provoke derision.

‘It’s the fancy,’ I concluded. ‘Meaning your level of society. You’ll have enough money to advertise once you sell that Warring Period bronze.’

‘Don’t underestimate the problem, Lovejoy.’ Crucifex spoke sombrely. ‘Albansham Priory has fallen on hard times. We fear closure.’

‘I heard about the holy pool.’

‘Yes.’ He heaved a sigh. I collared a plate of fishy circular things, only cavity fillers. I pretended to listen and got on with devouring. ‘It’s a long-term project, Lovejoy. Pilgrims mostly go to Walsingham, Lourdes.’

‘Why not try something phoney, like Knock, in Eire?’ ‘Don’t blaspheme, Lovejoy. Such places might be specially chosen.’

Well, OK, Martin sounded vaguely holy, but his wife? About Mr Summer I harboured not the slightest doubt, and me I knew all about. We were a mixed bunch all right. The priory had had it. I finished the chocolate things, so small your fingers met in the middle. They had crinkly paper round each morsel. If they hadn’t been tasty they’d have been a nuisance.

‘Oh, aye.’ I wasn’t convinced. ‘How much debt are we trying to blot up?’

‘The debt is confidential, Lovejoy,’ Martin said, frosty. ‘How soon do I scan the antiques, then?’ The trolley had run out of grub. Time to go.

‘We’ll let you know. Two days or so, probably.’ ‘Lovejoy,’ Mrs Crucifex said. Her foot was gently oscillating, up and down, up and down. I tried not to look, but women make politeness hard to come by, so to speak. ‘You
are
committed to us, aren’t you?’

‘Er, yes, missus.’ I did a gruff throat clearance. ‘Just send word.’

No sign of her niece Irma. No feeling of genuine antique Rockingham pieces littering the house, no vibes of bliss-giving antiques clamouring away.

‘I’ll be off. It’s quite a way back,’ I hinted, helpfully giving them all the chance to hurtle forward with an offer of a lift home.

‘Sorry we can’t drive you back, Lovejoy.’ Martin came to show me out. ‘Our major fund-raising supper starts soon. You understand?’

All my life I’ve been told that I understand folk who’re anxious to show me out, so I said sure, fine, ta, and went into the night.

No rain. I went down the drive, cut back and found a niche in the hedge. I stood waiting. ‘Soon’, he’d said. What time was it, half-eight?

Why hawthorns and blackthorn trees drip on you when they’re not even wet is life’s greatest mystery. It narks me. Twenty minutes passed before a large saloon arrived. Outside lights went on. I could see the house’s facade, auto floods, I supposed. Prior Metivier alighted, with him his sister Marie. I watched them go in, wondering if they really were sister and brother. You can’t always tell.

Then Irma, in a ratty little car so near the floor it seemed to snarl at the gravel. She flounced, her coat half off even before she vanished inside. Irma would be a ball tonight. I was glad I wouldn’t be sitting next to her.

Two sedate couples came, dressed to kill, one pair parking their grand old Rolls, the next letting their car go. I tried to see who they were, but got spooked by another, a modem saloon. The bloke who strolled up the steps wore uniform, but not military. Airline pilot, perhaps? I was too far off to see the insignia.

No more came. Could there be a better time to do a burglary?

here the hell
have you been?’ I groused at Gesso when he arrived at the tavern. I was scared Prior Metivier would finish his nosh, zoom back to the priory and spoil everything. I don’t know what priors do at night.

‘Keep your hair on,’ he grumbled back. ‘Ready?’

‘You look dishevelled.’ I eyed him. They were making a real din in the taproom, darts reaching crescendo. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine. Let’s go.’

He looked nervy, more on edge than I’d ever seen him, as we left the Fox and Hounds. Like I say, our paths had diverged when he took up burglary full time and I didn’t. He’d get the job done, I was certain.

‘We leave the motor at the crossroads, Lovejoy.’

‘Won’t people notice?’

‘Not where I put it.’

Good enough. We drove through the night. He cut the lights once, scaring me. Then we’d emerge on some narrow side lane, with distant orange lights strung over trunk roads. I didn’t know where I was when finally we coasted to a stop.

‘Shhh,’ he said when I made to speak. He listened for an age.

He got out, whispering to leave the car door ajar. He’d aborted the interior light. I heard a faint clink of metal as he hefted a bag.

‘Follow me,’ he whispered, and set off.

I couldn’t see a thing. To the right the sky was less than pitch dark. I guessed it was the lights of a town, but which?

Characters like Gesso are really pretty naff people you don’t think much of in cities among the milling millions. Yet put them out here in the dark, among strange night creatures, the ground turning suddenly into quagmires or flint, and they become the man. They’re the ones you have to rely on, or go blundering, night blind, into some river. I bumped into Gesso.

‘Shhhh, Lovejoy.’

I really wished he’d stop saying that. I was being as quiet as could be. We kept coming up against brambles. Twigs plucked at my face, leaves down my neck, and that daft non-rain kept dripping on me. I was fed up. I started off after Gesso, only to crash against him.

‘What?’ I whispered, scared we’d been rumbled.

‘We’re here. Shhhh.’

Where, exactly? All was darkness, no buildings anywhere.

‘Where?’ I whispered.

He made a susurrus reaching back. Slowly he took my hand, pulled it to my left. It touched stone. Brick? I felt further. Another, then another. A wall. I groped upwards. And down, to lovely solid paving. We’d reached civilization.

Then I heard it. Off to my right, a thick plopping sound, very irregular. Plop, suck, pitter pitter. Loud pause, then plop again. It was the hot pond, the pungent sickly fumes detectable as the breeze shifted. The priory wall.

Gesso tapped me twice, the burglar’s universal signal that it’s safe. We advanced, me having kittens. We were moving slowly, ten paces a minute. He stopped. I stopped ‘I’m going in, Lovejoy,’ he whispered, drinker’s breath into my earhole.

‘Here, Gesso. I need to come in too.’

‘Shhhh, you burk.’

I heard a faint muffled clink, as metal wrapped in rag makes on stone. Two scrapes, then down over me gushed warmish air, not the hot pool’s acridity but indoor air, faintly scented with incense. Gesso guided my hand down to his bag of tools, telling me silently not to fall over the damned thing.

Then he was gone. I felt him ascend somehow, with an almost imperceptible grunt of effort. His boot brushed against my shoulder. I felt all around, ahead, to the side, but I was on my tod. He’d climbed in.

For old time’s sake, I started counting slowly, like you measure the distance of thunder after lightning. I reached a hundred, then wondered if I’d missed any out, which usually happens to me about sixty. My old Gran used to say my head was full of jolly robins. I tried a second time but gave up. What’s the point?

A pencil torch blinded me for a second, from on high. I almost leapt out of my skin. The dark rushed back, pitch black.

‘Shhh, Lovejoy.’

‘I am, you pillock.’ I leant against the wall until my heart stopped hammering.

A hand descended, felt my shoulder. I grabbed it, hauled myself up, found the edge of the sill and clambered in. He hissed at me to stay still. I crouched down, felt gingerly about. Parquet flooring, that scent of polish. No carpet. I’d once almost got caught by falling over a coal'scuttle in a house in the Midlands.

Curtains did their muted screech along rails. Then, impossibly, Gesso’s pencil torch light came on. There he was, falling about laughing.

‘Your face, Lovejoy!’

‘Nark it, Gesso.’ He shone it round the hallway. I could see the upward curve of bannisters. ‘Is it all right to talk like this?’ But I was mee-mawing like I’d seen mill workers do when a child, lip reading across crowded streets.

‘Yes.’ He whispered that the nuns were in the far wing. ‘Where do we look, Lovejoy? And for what?’

‘How the hell do I know?’ I wasn’t scared, not in the least. And I reckoned I could scarper faster than the monks, if push came to shove. But being in somebody else’s house puts the wind up me. Even when arriving somewhere I’ve been invited, I hum and ha before ringing the bell. ‘Look, Gesso. You said a painting.’

‘I didn’t hear where they’d locked the bloody thing away, did I? I’m depending on you to feel the antiques, like you did when we was partners. You’re the divvy, not me.’ He capped his torch with a hand, letting only the thinnest glim from between red-glow fingers. ‘Honestly, Lovejoy. You’re all ideas and no frigging do. You make me effing sick.’

‘Where’s his study?’ I was a bit disoriented. ‘It’ll be there, won’t it?’

‘How the hell would I know?’

Gesso’s refrain. Tiptoeing to the prior’s study, I began to remember how unreliable Gesso actually was, with his perennial urge to brag to the lads at the pub. He was always keen to show his thefts, explain to anybody how he’d actually popped the bottom lock on a mortised french window.

We creaked open the prior’s study door. It would have to be here, right? I mean, if he’d discovered a da Vinci in some theological seminary, surely to God he’d keep it under his own eagle eye?

But he wasn’t your average mundane prior. How many do you see selling plants at your weekend boot fair? And how many religious leaders send for a criminal like me to help out with antiques, legit or otherwise? None.

‘Gesso?’ I hissed, a brainwave. ‘Is there a chapel?’

That’s what a priory is for, after all.

‘Yes. This way.’

He still shone his torch through his fingers. I saw that his tactics had changed. He used to have a thin plastic glove painted blue, because blue light is hardly visible in the dark. His confidence had grown. We went down a lengthy corridor past a refectory, and Gesso opened a door, miming for absolute silence.

‘Sometimes one prays all night,’ he whispered in my ear.

Great, I thought bitterly. An audience. Just what I needed.

The door, mercifully, was oiled. Not a squeak. A small chapel of a dozen pews, a central aisle. A pulpit, altar dressed in feria green, a red oil lamp giving an amazing amount of light, a central crucifix. That scent of polish, Stations of the Cross round the walls. A statue or two, heroic or mournful according. Too garish for me, but whatever turns God on.

No nuns, no monks at nocturnal penance. Too holy, no doubt.

Gesso silently closed the door. Above was a gallery, presumably the organ loft. Flowers with that rather rankish perfume they get in the candle hours, gleaming brass vases.

‘It’s OK, Lovejoy.’ Gesso spoke almost in an unwhisper, frightening me out of my skin. ‘This is soundproof. I’ve knocked a nail in here a few times.’

‘Wait.’ I listened inside myself, rummaging about my senses. Not a blip. There was no antique here. But Prior Metivier was no normal prior, and this had to be the place. ‘Can I look round?’

‘Don’t be too long.’

Why not, if it was as safe as Gesso said? I walked, silent, down the aisle, round to the sides. A plaque,
in memoriam
for some brother long gone. A list of nuns who’d died overseas in the missions. A brass rectangle commemorating four monks who’d died ‘in service’, dates twenty years since. It was all so transient. Were they in fact remembered, prayed for? I felt so down. This is what life amounts to, a pious memento read by a night-stealing stranger.