Ten Word Game (5 page)

“Please remember your life-jacket. F Deck is down, centre lifts.” Marie handed me a card for Cabin F 188.

I found myself saying thanks, like I was here for the duration and everybody wanting to make me welcome. I could hardly feel movement, but when I looked out of the window – was it a porthole now? – it seemed to be going at a hell of a lick. I blundered about a staircase, quite lost, until a steward ushered me into a cabin.

“I’m Emil. Anything you want, sir, it’s that button on the phone. Life-jacket talk in twenty minutes.”

The cabin was a mere nook compared with Lady Veronica’s. Shower, bed, cupboards, drawers, a little television, a miniature armchair, a place to write, and a safe. No Blue John fruit bowls here. I wondered about
Embarkation. I hadn’t seen the forms or documents in that folder. The grim nurse had done it all.

“Champagne, sir?” Emil beamed at me. “It’s
traditional
.”

Them and their bloody tradition. “No, ta.” I sat on the bed. The suitcases I’d seen Gloria buy stood there, rainbow ties on them labelled F 188.

He handed me an orange life-jacket, telling me he’d wait outside to take me to the muster station for
safety
practice.

They’d finally caught me. Fright made me feel queasy. It wasn’t from bobbing on the briny. Some
tannoy
system made the ship quiver, warning about
life-jacket
practice. I took my orange thing and trooped among a cast of millions to a lounge. There, pretty stewardesses taught us to strap ourselves into the
cumbersome
things and told us to blow a whistle if the ship sank. Everybody in the crowd was laughing. I felt silly. No sign of Gloria.

After the talk, we dispersed. I went to the cabin and fell on the bed and slept. I dreamed horrors.

The worst dreams are real ones, dreams of what’s actually happened. I knew I was dreaming, even felt the ship thrumming slightly, but couldn’t stop.

Dawn broke over the Fenland. I was dangling from a gargoyle praying the night would last until I got clear. Robberies always make me sweat. I hate doing them. Other blokes in antiques never feel half as frightened.

In the gloaming below, I could just make out Belle’s huge four-by-four vehicle, a toy with a glittery roof from this height. The sky’s early pallor reflected in the ornamental pond, showing me which way to run if I ever made it down. I had tied the stolen painting round me. In theory, women should be the best
burglars
because they have a waist. I’m basically
cylindrical
. The painting had started to slip.

Belle’s pale face looked up from in the box-hedge maze. She never shuts up. She was endlessly
whispering
on a cell phone.

“You okay?” she kept saying. I should have lobbed her damned phone into the Koi carp pool. It kept pinging like a death knell.

The painting belonged to the Marquis of Gotham. (Please don’t write and complain; it’s a real place in Nottinghamshire, not just Batman’s nickname for New York.) It wasn’t an Old Master, simply a forgery done by my own lily-whites. A superb work of art, though I say it myself. I shouldn’t have been in this mess. It was not fair.

I clung on. The Marquis’s mansion was an
enormous
baronial hall, with barmy Tudor brickwork chimneys, really a mini-Hampton Court, all parapets
and mullioned windows. Skeggie, a night-stealing cat burglar, had walked the building for me on a Public Open Day, taking photos, pretending to be a mature student from Norwich. Skeggie mapped out every inch. In these lord-of-the-manor places there’s no real security. They can’t afford it. Trouble is, cranky old retainers tend to have old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, and use double-barrelled shotguns before asking burglars to please vacate the premises. I’d taken advice from night-stealers before. I was ready. Forging antiques isn’t half so much trouble.

The reason I was in peril was Drogue. A drogue is actually a sea anchor, a canvas thing you throw
overboard
to keep your boat from drifting. Drogue’s
nickname
is a joke. He maims people with a walking stick he carries. Friends say there’s a sword inside, but if you’re near enough to worry about such things it’s too late. I’ve seen Drogue batter a bloke senseless. It’s got gold and silver mounts.

Once a boxer, he looks a real gent and wears a
monocle
, very Brigade of Guards, waistcoated, suit, George boots, a toff. He hires thugs, never keeps a bodyguard, and trusts no one. He said he’d pay me if I stole my forgery back, and punish me if I didn’t. Different words, of course.

The pub was crowded, football night.

Drogue rents his smiles out to women of a particular character. At me, he frowns.

“Break in tonight, Lovejoy. The Marquis is at a London premier. Two old retainers, no gamekeepers, it’ll be a doddle. Off-season, see?”

“I’ll take Belle.” She had a Land Ranger, good on rustic roads.

“Best time’s four in the morning, Lovejoy. Do it right.”

“Okay, Drogey. You paid Skeggie? He did a good
job, maps and everything.”

“Use the cran in Dragonsdale.”

A cran is a place – hole in a wall, hollow tree, a
disused
bell-tower in some old church – where thieves leave stolen goods until fuss has died down. It’s
common
practice among people of low repute. (I don’t mean me, or even you, only everybody else.) The lady at Dragonsdale runs an Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe. She lets the antiques dealers use her chicken coop for a small fee. I like Hyacinth because she gives me bags of tomatoes when I’m short of money. She offers me chickens too, but I haven’t the nerve. You have to throttle a hen to eat it, and who can do that?

“Fingers crossed, Drogey.”

“No, Lovejoy. Fingers
broken
!”

He left, chuckling at his clever play on words. I chuckled along because I’m an ingrate. Women smiled at him all the way to the door. If he’d beckoned, any of them would have brushed off their skirts and made after him.

Blind Elsie came over to finish Drogue’s drink. She empties glasses from one end of Suffolk to the other but is never tipsy. She runs antiques from here to the Kent coast. Ugly as sin, heart of gold, she’s not really blind, just pretends because the myth helps her to sell mystic fortunes with the assistance of a toad in a
bottle
called Ape (the toad, not the bottle). She feeds it flies if it has a good run of clairvoyance. I can’t watch her do this. She carries Ape and a tube of bluebottles in her handbag. I think she’s a fraud, but other people say she’s a mystic who really Has The Eye. Claptrap, of course, though 60% of people believe in psychics.

“Find Belle for me, Elsie.”

“Is your robbery tonight?”

Everybody knows my business but me. I nodded. “I need wheels.”

“She’s just back from Llandeilo. Her cousin Stephen’s boy’s been ill.”

Gossip in the Eastern Hundreds is like weather, everybody shares. I sighed. If word had got round this quickly the police would be forming a queue at the Marquis’s gate revving their Black Maria.

“Lovejoy.” Blind Elsie took my hand. “Watch Drogue. He’s dicey. It’s one of your own forgeries, isn’t it?”

See? Gossip weather. “Aye. I’ve to nick it.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s
L’Hiver
is simply a bloke
shovelling
snow in a rural garden. You honestly wouldn’t look at it twice. It’s one of his dour pictures – worth a king’s ransom, of course. I can see why nobody
wanted
it when he was alive. Poor bloke only sold one painting in his lifetime, and that was to his brother Theo. Now, the real
L’Hiver
is in the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Inc. because Americans are all
millionaires
and buy everything.

Some clever girl took an X-ray of it, and found underneath an obscured painting of a woman spinning thread. (This was common, to paint over old canvases. Impoverished artists used one canvas over and over, and nobody was poorer than Van Gogh.) The lady in the picture has bobbed hair, is concentrating on her spinning, treadling away.

This is where I came in, because once I’d seen that mysterious lady in the X-ray I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I like women, so I painted her in Van Gogh style. When forging, I always use the same materials and canvas as the original artist. We have a strange woman who weaves superb canvas in the old style, lives with a cobbler in Southwold.

By the time I finished Van Gogh’s
Spinning Woman
I was strapped for food, rent, money. A dealer gave me a meal and some paints for it: Rose Madder, Yellow
Ochre, Burnt and Raw Umbers, and (apologies to any honest forgers reading this) an ounce of Rowney’s Flesh Tint that real artists hate. I love portraits, and those are the basic colours. I’d just parted from a weird lass who had moved in to my thatched cottage. She was crazy about a racing-car driver, and listened all night to recordings, literally, of his Formula One engine revving up, daft loon. I didn’t get a wink of sleep, what with making smiles with Clara while
listening
to those bloody pistons.

She also ran the Mighty Shrew Rescue Service, which rescued shrews from death and destruction. My cottage was full of the damned things in cages. She finally left, when a lady from the local farm
complained
that Clara’s shrews were nothing less than rodents and should be shot. Clara went berserk and stormed out saying my friends were fascist oppressors of Mother Nature. I slept for three days. The trouble was, Clara was very wealthy – benefactors funded her shrew hospital – and kept me in grub and passion. Shrew-less, I didn’t eat the following week, so I
painted
Spinning Woman
in a hurry. The dealer took it.

Later, Skeggie reported it was in the Marquis of Gotham’s mansion, listed as a genuine Van Gogh. I was proud but, famished and threadbare, I moaned about it at the Treble Tile. Drogue overheard. He insisted I steal it back. Drogue would then sell it as a genuine Van Gogh. This happens more often than you dare think. I’d eeled in (easy, after Skeggie’s research), sliced the canvas from the frame (ten seconds with every art thief’s favourite tool, the black-handled Swiss
serrated
-bladed chef’s knife) and dangled away. Three
minutes
flat. The lads in the Marquis of Granby on North Hill would have a laugh, me taking so long. Dusty Malton robbed Oxford University on millennium New Year’s Eve and took only forty-one seconds. I
knew he’d never let me forget it.

For clarity, here’s a vital question: What percentage of “genuine antiques” are
truly
genuine? Answer: three – that’s 3 – per cent. It means that 97% of “genuine antiques” are forgeries, fakes, duff, dud, Sexton Blakes, sham, lookalikes, replicates, all meaning worthless. And that’s on a good day.

Where was I? Hanging on this mansion wall in the lantern hours, hoping I wouldn’t be seen, while Belle whispered into her cell phone from the box-hedged
garden
maze below. I heard some oldie come creaking along a passage. I wanted to shut Belle’s tinny voice up but she kept on hissing “Lovejoy? You okay?” like a gnat in my ear. I didn’t want a chat. My gran used to say, “Lord, save me from mine helpers!” Mostly she meant me. I knew how she’d felt.

The steps came closer. I tried to flatten myself against the ivy-covered wall. A crone’s voice warbled, “Is anybody there?” A leaded window opened and an old dear’s head poked out into the gloom. She wore a mob cap and held out a Norfolk lantern. It’s really only a candle in a perforated cup. For a second I thought she looked directly at me, but her eyes must have been bad. She withdrew. My hands had gone dead. Slowly I started down.

That night me and Belle delivered the painting – my stolen
Spinning Woman
forgery – to Drogue. He sold it for a fortune to some Dutch geezer. The Marquis claimed on the insurance, saying he’d had a genuine Vincent V. G. stolen, and received another fortune. The underwriters paid up, barely enough to buy two holiday villas in the south of France and another yacht. Everybody rejoiced except me, because Drogue welshed, didn’t pay me a farthing. See what I mean? Where is justice when you need her? A forger does a brilliant job, sells his superb work for a meal and a few
tubes of paint, and everybody else gets everything. I don’t think it’s fair. Quite honestly, it’s dishonest.

Belle’s a kindly soul and I like her. She lives in a trailer home, what used to be called a caravan, out on the Peldon Marshes. Ghosts of Roman soldiers rise out of the sea mists there every high tide, so I don’t visit unless it’s a bright sunny day and the tide’s out. Not that I’m scared, really not, because ghosts are only primitive superstition. It’s just that I don’t like taking chances.

She loves our town’s mayor, a happily married father of two. She lives with an accountant called Vernon who keeps proposing marriage. She turns Vernon down because she’s in love with … Join the dots and make sense of women. She has this dream of discovering some enormous scam – robbery, smuggling racket, bomb threat, whatever. She’ll unmask them with one bound, and the mayor will sweep her up and they’ll ride into the sunset. It will never happen.

Vernon is decent, plays bowls for the county, writes for church magazines and helps in the Hospice. He cares for old folks, and every weekend visits Belle. Don’t get me wrong. They aren’t saintly and celibate, just oddly matched. Between times I fill in Belle’s aching void of loneliness, so to speak, and educate her in the world’s wicked ways. She feeds me pasta and goat’s cheese she creates from two nanny-goats on Peldon’s shore line. I don’t complain. I’ve lived among forty caged shrews, and count my blessings. She lends me a groat now and then, in payment for teaching her about antique jewellery.

After my theft, three nobs got together. The Marquis of Wells, his pal Lord Featherstonehaugh (pronounce it Fanshaw to be classy) and the Marquis of Gotham were sick of their Old Masters being stolen. One had had his prize Titian nicked. Another lost an
Oudry painting, about 1753 give or take a yard, of a duck – no kidding; it doesn’t sound much, but it’s worth enough to stand for parliament, and maybe get elected. The last was the Marquis of Gotham, who waxed eloquent about his stolen Van Gogh. He
actually
sobbed on TV, the lying swine. He knew it was a fake, and where the original was in the USA. I watched him on the six o’clock news, the night before I went on the run.

“I know there are allegations about its attribution,” he blubbed before the nation’s cameras. “But experts say it is genuine Vincent. I’ll pay seven million to get it back…” et lying cetera. I swear my paint was hardly dry. The pig had used phenolformaldehyde to harden it up, plus French craquelure varnishes. See how corrupt folk are?

Then came the fatal words. The TV presenter smiled into the camera and said, “And here’s the man who will lead the noble lord’s bounty hunters. You’re just out of gaol, David, aren’t you?”

This heavily built geezer sat there with a face devoid of expression. I’d never seen him before, but I knew instantly he was the David Buddy who’d got nine years in Durham for nicking Rembrandts.

“Yes,” David said evenly. “The police don’t like it, but is it my fault if they can’t hack it? I’ll catch him.”

And he looked at the camera. I actually shivered.
He meant me.
They say in the antiques trade that every dealer knows everything and newspapers know
nothing
. A uniformed Northumbrian plod came on and said it was morally wrong for criminals to make money out of crime – like the police don’t? What
really
frightened me was the bounty hunter’s final remark.

He said, “Fine. Then let’s see who catches the bloke who stole
Spinning Woman.
Want a bet?”

The lads in the antiques trade were already be laying
odds on how soon David would collar me. He was a class act. I’m not.