Spend Game (17 page)

‘Christ.’ Jake was stuck. The goon with the petrol
put it down and nervously backed away from it. I knew how he felt.

‘Now, lady,’ Fergus said. He was less cocky now.

‘Please stand still.’ She was hardly the fastest draw in the West, but it’s wise to do as you are told when being pointed at.

He was moving forward at her, beaming, when she hit him. The ripping sound and the flash set us diving for cover. Moll pulled the trigger three times, swinging wildly. I was screaming for her to stop. I heard this crack and a dull thud but didn’t think at the time. Moll stilled. Jake and the injured goon were lying down. The healthy nerk had scarpered, leaving his petrol tin. I could hear him crashing gears trying to reverse the car in the lane. Fergus was on the ground. It looked like his leg. He was shouting for Moll to stop.

‘Give it here, love.’ I took the pistol.

‘It’s Tom’s,’ she explained.

Even police aren’t allowed to keep guns at home. I knew that. I decided to report Tom Maslow when all this was over. He’s no right evading the law.

‘Off you go, Fergie,’ I said cheerfully.

‘She fucking well shot me.’ He moaned and rolled over to get up. He really was bleeding badly.

‘Sue her.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Moll told me penitently. ‘I only meant to make them nervous.’

‘You did that all right. You frightened us all to death.’ I waggled the weapon uneasily at the three. I’m as useless with these murderous things as Moll. Now, if it had been a lovely Mortimer dueller of Regency days, or a delectable flintlock holster pistol by Sandwell or James Freeman of London, with that luscious browning and perfect balance . . .

We stood there while Jake Pelman and his uninjured tearaway carried Fergus to their car.

‘Take your petrol, lads,’ I called.

Jake came back for it, keeping his eyes on us. For some reason he seemed angry with me.

‘There’ll be another time, Lovejoy,’ he said.

‘Wait a minute, Jake.’ I went over and booted him on the shins, right and left. He yelled and hobbled about. ‘Off home, now.’ I grinned and saw him safely down the path.

‘You wait, Lovejoy.’ Fergus was sprawled across the back seat. The others were crammed in the front, one goon holding his face together still. ‘One day your tame tart won’t be here to hide behind, lad.’

I stuck my head in the open window and we looked eye to eye for a minute.

‘What’s the antique, Fergie?’ I asked him straight out.

‘Dunno. And neither do you, Lovejoy.’

‘True.’

He gritted his teeth because I tapped his shot leg hard with the pistol barrel. ‘The minute you step outside your gate, Lovejoy, we’ll be here.’ He managed a beam, a rudiment of his usual expression. ‘And we’ll take Chase’s clue off you like toffee off a brat.’

‘I’d make it easy for you, Fergus,’ I said. ‘But I can’t forget you killed Leckie.’

The thought made me clout his leg in earnest. He screamed so loudly I reflexly started back. The combination of that scream and this terrible persistent grin was horrifying. I stood there while the motor rode up the slope. Moll came and stood beside me. We listened to the sound. A pause at the chapel, a rev-up on to the main road. Turn right, then descend a few notes as they set off out of the village into town.

The sound faded. I looked about. It was quite dusky now. I saw that Moll had happened to park her car inside the garden halfway up the gravel path, almost as if somebody intended to stay. We walked slowly to the cottage.

‘Did I do right?’

‘More than that, love.’

‘Are you pleased I came back?’

‘Delighted.’

We paused in the doorway.

‘I just wondered about your being safe,’ she explained.

‘Good judgement,’ I said. ‘That’s what it was.’

‘I’d leave you Tom’s pistol,’ she said carefully. ‘Except it’s his licence, you see. So I can’t let it out of my possession.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘But I suppose . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you a spare room? If I were to stay, just over-night perhaps, until you get on your feet properly again

‘Then we could keep the gun here,’ I concluded brightly.

‘Well, yes. It would be . . . legal, then, wouldn’t it?’

‘Why, so it would.’ I switched the hall light on.

‘I’ll just get my things from the car. I usually have a suitcase with me.’ She hesitated. ‘Are you sure this will be all right?’

‘Certain,’ I assured her gravely. ‘Anyhow, my granny always said to share.’

N
EXT MORNING
, M
OLL
answered the phone twice before I could get to it. Both times the other end rang off before speaking.

‘Can’t think what’s got into people,’ Moll announced sweetly.

‘Er, I’d better answer.’ I was thinking of Val, Helen, or Elspeth Haverill with some fresh Olympic programme and, last but by no means least, good old Sue.

Apart from this tiff we adjusted fairly well. I reclined grandly on my unfolding divan because of ‘my condition’, as Moll called it, like I was seven months gone. Naturally we went through a stage of typically English hesitancy, worrying sick about using our knives and forks properly, no elbows on the table and being desperately silent on the loo. In spite of it all we finished up quite well attuned. I was narked at her flashing to the phone first, but what can you do?

I sent her to the Corporal’s on East Hill about nine.

‘I have to pay for services rendered,’ I explained. To you.’

‘There’s no need –’

‘Do as you’re told. Got some money?’

‘Some. I have my chequebook. Will that do?’

‘Almost certainly,’ I answered, straight-faced, thinking, the poor innocent.

‘What are we going to buy?’

‘You,’ I corrected. ‘
You
are going to buy for yourself a small collection of treen.’

‘What’s treen? Is it a kind of antique?’ She got all interested. ‘I do hope so. I’m fascinated.’

I pushed her into a chair. ‘Sit and listen.’

‘I once bought a teapot with a decorated spout. They said it was ever so valuable.’

I put my fingers in my ears to keep out this rubbish. People will keep on talking gibberish. She shut up, and I started to explain. There are fashions in antiques. If you want a tip about profit it’s this: try to
anticipate
the next fashions, and you’ll be well away. I’ll give you some guidance. Firstly, unless you are loaded, go for fairly recent first editions. They aren’t real antiques, but dealers pretend they are for sordid gain. Secondly, I’d go for Victorian jewellery of the semi-precious kind – sombre jet brooches, garnets and so on. Thirdly I’d go for ‘fringe’ household items that are seriously underpriced: pewter, polescreens, soapstone ornaments, decorative glass table bells, that sort of thing. And treen. Treen is dealers’ slang for any wooden kitchenware. You can still, believe it or not, find even the rarest genuine Tudor treen for a few quid. Any old town has a stock of it. I defy any collector with half an eye for antiques to fail to find it, and cheap. You buy it in junk shops, or even these travelling antique fairs which abound everywhere at weekends these days.

The commonest treen is the old family bread-board, with or without knife slots and decoration to
match. That and little peppermills, salt-boxes (made for hanging by the fireside to keep the deliquescent impure salt mixtures dried out), platters, decorative butter moulds and carved cheese paddles, wooden cups, scissor-shaped glove-stretchers, anything from lovely sycamore cooking mortars to ingenious wooden washing tallies for checking that the serfs were hard at it. If you don’t believe me, try it. I did a favour once for Taffy, a local dealer I owed for a lovely illuminated parchment manuscript Book of Devotional Hours. He was getting after me for the price and I hadn’t managed to bring myself to sell it. He was broke and had a buyer. I staved him off by borrowing a hundred quid and taking him round about twenty antique shops in two days. It knackered us both, but he finished up believing me. We bought a luscious little Welsh oak herb chest, an Elizabethan spice grinder, three seventeenth-century lemon squeezers, a basting stick inscribed 1647, gingerbread boards galore, and six square platters with handles and salt ‘sinkings’ (smoothly hollowed recesses). We got a lot more for the same money, but I’ll lose the thread if I go on. Taffy sold the lot as a ‘collection’ of historic treen at an auction by the following week. He made plenty and shut up whining for his gelt. It’s still that easy.

‘Get it?’ I concluded.

Moll was wide-eyed. ‘But what if I buy the wrong things?’

I described the layout of Corporal’s crummy dump on East Hill. He isn’t bad as antiques dealers go. Rough-mannered and a bit greedy, but quite fair on those rare occasions when he’s not sloshed on pale ale. He believes he is a major world authority on Norwich School and Dutch oil paintings, though Christie’s are
rumoured not to have lost any sleep over this claim. Corporal’s thick as a plank.

‘Can’t I just ask Mr Corporal for them?’ Moll was saying.

I closed my eyes. Women like Moll give me a headache. ‘It isn’t done that way, love.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’ll know what you’ve come for. And he’ll increase his price. See?’

She was instantly indignant. ‘How very unfair!’

‘True, true,’ I said with deep feeling. ‘But look for the money code. That’ll tell you if he’s hiked the mark-up.’

Women are good listeners when you mention money, and Moll for once listened intently. We have no ‘fixed’ prices in the world of antiques. Whether we’re dealing for the fabulous Eureka Gem or a mundane Edwardian inkwell,
there is no fixed price
except the one the dealer himself puts on. Always remember that. So every dealer above the junk-shop level invents his own code, or uses somebody else’s. Even famous firms do it. You simply take any word or words totalling ten (or possibly nine) letters, and they become the numbers from 1 to 9 plus 0.

‘Am I allowed to look at each sticker?’ Moll asked.

‘Look?’ I tapped the air vehemently. ‘You must crawl all over the bloody things.’

‘But the code –’

‘Every dealer’s code’s easy to break, simply because no letter can ever recur. Get it? By asking the price of about three items you can deduce the code in practically every shop you come to.’ She looked blank so I made it easy. ‘Corporal uses
Come and Buy
,’ I told her. ‘Copied from a famous firm in St James’s.’ I didn’t tell her which
one, because I’m sure Spink’s of London would prefer to remain anonymous. Continental dealers have their own codes but most of the ones I know use
Goldschmit,
like Münzen & Medaillen secretly used to in Basel.

‘How many do I have to buy?’

‘As many as you can without an overdraft.’

‘Really?’ I could tell she was becoming excited at the thought of a spending spree.

She was gone in a few more minutes. I gave her a wave and streaked to the phone. There was no chance of raising Tinker this early, so I rang Margaret. She was just opening her place in the Arcade. I made her promise to catch Tinker as he reeled past towards breakfast at opening time, and get him to phone in for instructions. In case she missed him among the shoppers I rang Woody’s and told Erica the same thing. She was all set for telling me off but I put the receiver down because women always get necessity in the wrong order. Finally, I rang Bern’s and told his missus I’d be calling round in his dinner hour. Rosie said one o’clock, but earlier if I wanted veal and two veg.

Moll returned so late I was sure we would miss Bern. I was in something of a temper, worried what nasty facts about my railway pass Bern was going to cough up. I told her off, but she was too flushed and excited to notice.

‘Don’t be angry, Lovejoy!’ she cried, rushing in while I said where the hell have you been. ‘I’ve had a lovely time. Done exactly as you said!’

‘Hurry up.’

‘One second.’

I waited, fuming, in the car while she hurtled crashing about the cottage. Bathroom going, her case under
the divan, a door slamming, and out she zoomed. I had to drive because she was breathlessly eating bread and honey. She forgot to set the burglar alarm – all antiques dealers have burglar alarms – and had to dash back while I turned the car round.

‘Where is it?’

‘The treen? Coming this afternoon,’ she applauded herself with delight. ‘You’ll be thrilled!’

That seemed odd; but I said nothing. I didn’t see why she couldn’t have fetched it. The phone started up as I got in gear, but then it always does. I ignored it.

‘Did Tinker catch you?’ He’d eventually phoned in, sounding bleary. I’d sent him to find Moll and stay with her in case Corporal got delusions of grandeur at the sight of a genuine customer.

‘Yes, Lovejoy. He’s a perfect dear, isn’t he?’

‘Er, yes . . .’ Nobody’s called Tinker that before. ‘Putting up with so much from his assistants, and being paid so little.’ She slipped her arm through mine, but only friendly. ‘I do wish he had an easier life, poor soul. Having to go off and do the shopping for his old Mum. Aren’t some people marvellous?’ She prattled on about how Tinker, that noble pillar of virtue, also cared for an old and feeble comrade-in-arms named Lemuel, whose terrible leg condition had caused the Minister of Health mercilessly to write him off, leaving him unprotected in a changing world. ‘Poor Lemuel,’ she said, practically tearful. ‘He waited so patiently while Tinker advised me. Such a bad limp.’

A terrible suspicion was forming. ‘You didn’t give him any money, Moll?’

‘Of
course.
He hadn’t a penny. I gave him the money for his dinner, and a taxi to see his sister’s child in
Lexton. The poor mite’s ill with a terrible disease they can’t –’

I sighed wearily. One day, I really will cripple Lemuel. ‘Love,’ I told her. ‘Lemuel’s fit as a flea. And his sister’s lad is our local champion swimmer. Lemuel’s a dirty old devil who gambles and boozes every farthing he can cadge. He does odd jobs for Tinker, who’s as bad.’

‘How dare you, Lovejoy!’ She pulled her arm away. ‘Typical, just typical!’

I drove doggedly on. ‘And Tinker’s old Mum’s an evil old cow worse than he is. They’re the worst scroungers in the whole of East Anglia, love.’