The Judas Pair (17 page)

‘For Christ’s sake –’

‘Peace be unto you too, Jim,’ I said. ‘Now, be a good lad and get me the details.’

‘You’ve broken me ribs,’ he wailed. I nodded patiently. Some people just can’t be hurried. Others must learn.

‘And I’ll break your arm at ten past six if you don’t get me the answers, Jim.’

‘I’ve got to get to a doctor –’ I kicked him down to his knees again and knuckled his face so blood came.

‘No doctors, Jim. No hospitals. You’ve a job to do, right?’ He nodded through pain and fear. ‘Another word, Jim. I’m on the move. It’s not a pretty sight. Now, you can call the law like any decent citizen and turn me in. I won’t deny your allegations. But as God’s my judge, I’ll come back and maim you for life if you do. You just do my little job like I ask and I’ll leave you alone ever afterwards.’

I turned to go while he was sick all over his Afghanistan – he’d have said Persian – carpet, flower-fruit design with that rather displeasing russet margin they adopt far too often for my liking. I paused at the door.

‘Oh, and Jim . . .’

‘What?’

‘Miss nothing out. All details complete, or you’ll have to suffer the consequences. I must know everything about the Field sale. Understand?’

He managed a nod and I departed thinking of at least one task well done for a starter.

There wasn’t a soul on East Hill except for a queue at the baker’s and the car was quite untouched.

Black day. Traipsing from one cop shop to another making bother till they gave in. An inspector went over reports of Sheila’s death word for word in the manner of his sort. Ever noticed how many people talk like union officials nowadays? Anonymous speech is everywhere – politicians, lawyers, priests in pulpits, auctioneers, the lot. Too many maybes. Listen to a political speech. I’ll bet you a quid everything definite he says is cancelled out by something else he says a moment later. Daft. As I sifted through the details I wondered where all the common sense has gone. It vanished about fifteen years ago, about the time those bone ships made by our French prisoners from the Napoleonic scraps vanished. You don’t get either any more.

From Old Bill, I went to Camden Town where Sheila’s pal lived. Betty, fabulous for multicoloured lipsticks, cleavage and a legendary succession of loves, all with wealthy city men. Her husband, twice her age, kept model trains. I leched away as she gave her tale. She’d missed Sheila at home-time that day. Betty, all nineteen years of her, explained she’d had to work late. I pretended to believe her from politeness.

Seeing her old man was playing trains outside, I gave her my deep dark Lovejoy smoulder. I only wished she’d been a customer. I swear, I could have got rid of that tarty Dutch cutlery at last. You get no tax allowance for stock. Bloody Chancellor.

I held Betty’s hand at the door. They measure you with their eyes, don’t they? I said how I felt biological towards her. She liked biological and gave me the address of a little executive cottage she visited at certain times. These places can be a mine of antiques. What more pleasant than searching for antiques, up and down stairs with the help of a huge cleavage? Two birds per stone and that.

But no clues. Maybe the steam was going out of my crusade. It depressed me. I knocked about, saw the Bond Street arcade, did time in Fairclough’s, did a few deals. The 4.30 train was on time from Liverpool Street.

I reached home at ten to six. Jim was waiting, grey-faced, hurting, obedient. I drove up with the now-familiar knot of tension in my belly at the sight of him. It pleased me. My crusading zeal had only momentarily tired because of so many false leads. Here was one I relied on to give me a few more details.

He gave me a photocopied list of the Field sale and every single invoice to do with it. In his own clumsy handwriting was a list of everybody who’d attended, the auctioneers, clerk and his two mates who assisted.

‘There’s a good lad.’ I patted his head. ‘Look, Jim –’

‘Yes?’ He stood mournfully on the gravel.

‘I don’t want to hurry you, but the doctor’s surgery closes at seven. You’ll just make it on the bus.’

‘Aren’t you going to give me a lift?’ His spirits were on the mend. There was a faint hint of the old truculence.

I smiled. ‘Good night, Jim,’ I said, and closed the door.

S
OME PEOPLE KILL
me. You can invent a name for anything and it will be believed. Say anything and somebody’ll cheer fit to burst. I’ll give you an example. There was Dandy Jack looking for cracks on this piece of ‘cracked’ porcelain – and him a dealer old enough to be my great-grandad. Of course, Dandy Jack was as indisposed as a newt, as one politician cleverly said of that minister who got sloshed and shot his mouth off on telly.

‘Give it here, Dandy.’ I took it off him, exasperated. ‘Crack porcelain doesn’t mean it’s got cracks all over it.’ His bloodshot eyes gazed vaguely in my direction while I gave him the gory details.

‘Kraak’, not ‘Cracked’, porselain (note that ‘s’). Once upon a time, the Portuguese ship
Catherine
was sailing along in the Malacca Straits when up came a Dutch ship and captured it, there being no holds barred in 1603. Imagine the Dutchmen’s astonishment when they found they’d bagged, not treasure, but a cargo of ceramics of a funny blue-white colour. The
Catherine
was a carrack, or ‘Kraak’. The nickname stuck. It looks rubbish but folk scramble for it. I priced it for him and said I’d be back.

The town was jumping. I felt on top of the world without knowing why. A bad memory of something evil having happened recently was suppressed successfully in a wave of sun and crowds. No dull weather, kids well-behaved, trees waggling and people smiling, you know how pleasant things can look sometimes. And the little arcade was thronged. Margaret waved from her diminutive glass-fronted shop, Dandy with his incredible luck was swilling down the profits. Harry Bateman was there with a good, really good, model compound steam engine of brass and deep red copper, Robert Atkinson about 1864 or thereabouts, and shouting the odds about part-exchange for a John Nash painting, modern of course, all those greens and lavender watercolour shades. It would be close.

Several real collectors had turned up in the cafe and sat about saying their antiques were honest. We were all in brilliant humour, exchanging stories and gossip. Such a cheerful scene, everybody entering into the act and taking risks in deals. It was one of those marvellous times.

I told you I’m a believer in the gifts people have, and luck. Luck is partly made by oneself. Go out feeling lucky, make yourself behave lucky and you will probably become lucky. Let yourself slip into the opposite frame of mind and you’ll lose your shirt.

There’d been two flint collectors and one flint dealer in Jim’s papers, and both collectors were in my files. The dealer Froude, a pal of Harry’s, wasn’t bad, just cheap and useless, so I could forget him. The collectors were different mettle. One, a retired major called Lister, was a knowledgeable Rutland man who ran a smallholding in that delectable county. He knew what he was about. The second spelled even more trouble, had an enviable record in my card system as a dedicated and lucky collector given to sudden spurts of buying often without relevance to the seasonal state of the market. Brian Watson was by all accounts one of those quietly spoken northerners who seem quite untypical of the usual image people have of cheerful, noisy extroverts laughing and singing round pints in telly serials. I had almost all Watson’s purchases documented but though I’d never actually met him at sales I’d heard he was hesitant, not given to confidences but gravitating with a true collector’s instinct towards the quality stuff. A good collector, Watson, who’d spend what seemed about two years’ salary in an hour then vanish for up to a year back to his native Walkden. Also on Jim’s list were Harry, Adrian and Jane together, Margaret, good old Dandy Jack, Muriel’s Holy Joe Lagrange, Brad, Dick from the boatyard and Tinker Dill, among the dross. And Muriel.

Now, of all these people, Brian Watson was significant because he already had one of the pairs of Durs duellers, and so was Major Lister of Rutland because he’d been making offers to Watson for them ever since Eve dressed. The field was getting pretty big, but I was cock-a-hoop. The pace was quickening. And as I talked in the arcade I smiled to myself at my secret. At the finishing post lay my beautiful unpaid-for Mortimers – loaded. I left the café and wandered through the arcade.

Tinker Dill was at my elbow full of news. We pretended to examine a phoney Persian astrolabe. It was described by Harry Bateman as ‘medieval’ and priced accordingly. My sneer must have been practically audible. Don’t overestimate their value, incidentally – eighteenth-century Continental ones are usually more pricey, though they’re all in vogue, and certain firms in Italy make excellent copies.

‘You’re getting busy, aren’t you, Lovejoy?’

‘Whatever can you mean?’ I was all innocent.

‘Bending Jim like that.’ He enjoyed the thought of Jim’s injuries almost as much as a sale.

‘I’m quite unrepentant.’ I put the astrolabe down, feeling it unclean, and took Tinker back into the nosh bar where we could talk.

I told him of my developing interest, in Watson and Lister.

He whistled. ‘They’re First Division, Lovejoy.’

‘And Froude.’

‘He’s rubbish.’

‘I have this about the Field sale.’

‘Eh?’

Over tea, I showed him Jim’s lists.

He slurped in his cup. ‘They’re nicked!’

‘On loan. Jim’s good-hearted.’ I let him recover. ‘Heard anything special about any of those names?’

He flipped slowly through the lot, shaking his head each time. ‘Except the two big ones – that sale was a right load of heave-ho.’

‘You buy anything, Tinker?’

It hurt him. ‘You know me, Lovejoy. Antiques aren’t my business.’

I grinned in great good humour. ‘Neither of these bought anything? Try to remember, Tinker.’ He would. It’s like being a football fan. Just as they can recall incidents from games seen twenty years past, so we can tick off auctions as if they’d been yesterday. You might wonder why I didn’t just look at the purchasers’ names on the invoices.

Well. Invoices, however complete, never tell it all. I wish I had time to tell you what goes on in an auction. For every ten lots sold by the auctioneer, another ten are sold among dealers. We buy a lot from the auctioneer sometimes, and even before he’s moved on we’ve sold it to a fellow-dealer. All the time it goes on. ‘Ringing’ you already know about I’m sure, where dealers get together and do not bid for a choice item, say a lovely French commode. When it goes to Dealer A for a paltry sum – i.e. when it’s been successfully ‘ringed’ – he’ll collect his cronies and they’ll auction it again privately in a pub nearby, only on this occasion Dealer A’s the auctioneer and his mates are the congregation, so to speak.

You’ll probably think this – is against the law. Correct, it is. And you may be feeling all smug thinking it is rightly so because whoever’s selling her old auntie’s precious French antique is being diddled out of the fair auction she’s entitled to. Well, I for one disagree – nobody actually
stops
the public from bidding, do they? It comes back again to greed, your greed. And why? Answer: you want that valuable commode for a couple of quid, and not a penny more. If you were really honest you’d bid honestly for it. But you won’t. How do I know? Because you never do. You go stamping out of auctions grumbling at the price fetched by whatever it was you were after and failed to get. So don’t blame the dealer – he’s willing to risk his every penny for a bit of gain while you want medieval Florentine silver caskets for the price of a bus ride.
You ring items by your greed.
We do it by arrangement. Why your hideous but dead obvious greed should be quite legal and our honesty illegal beats me.

‘That Bible pistol,’ Tinker remembered. ‘Not too bad – I did drop a note in at your cottage, Lovejoy.’

‘I passed it up.’

‘Watson bought it.’

‘In his usual style?’

Tinker’s eyes glowed with religious fervour. ‘You bet.’ He rolled a damp fag and struggled to set it afire. ‘It was in one of his buying sprees. You know him, quiet and hurrying. I reckon he should have been a cop. Busy, busy, busy.’ I wrote a mental tick against Watson’s name. He’d attended six auctions that week, and the date matched no fewer than eight postal purchases, all after a ten-month gap. Phenomenal.

‘Major Lister buy, did he?’

‘Yes, a set of masonic jewels for some museum.’

I knew about those and the Stevens silk prints he’d bought as well.

‘All in all,’ I asked, ‘a quiet, busy little auction with more than the average mixture of good stuff?’

‘Sure. And not a bad word uttered,’ Tinker said, puffing triumphantly.

I let his little quip pass impatiently. ‘Is that list of people complete? Think.’

He thought. ‘As ever was.’ He shrugged. ‘The odd housewife, perhaps.’

‘Thanks, Tinker. Anything else?’

He told me of the Edwardian postcards from Clacton, the Regency furniture at Bishop’s Stortford, that crummy load of silver being unloaded up in the Smoke, and the Admiralty autograph letters being put on offer in Sussex. I knew them all but slipped him a note.

‘You got them Mortimers, then,’ he said as we parted.

‘A hundred quid,’ I replied modestly. He was still laughing at the joke as I left to see Margaret’s collection of English lace christening gowns.

‘Sorry about everything, Lovejoy.’ She pecked my face and brewed up. There were a couple of customers hanging around, one after pottery, one after forgeries. (Don’t laugh – collectors of forgeries will walk past a genuine Leonardo cartoon to go crazy over a forged Braque squiggle.) As they drifted out, she hooked her
CLOSED
notice on the door.

‘I’ve had a drink, Margaret, thanks.’

‘I saw you.’

‘Tinker reporting in,’ I explained, looking round. Her lace christening gowns were beautiful but I always sneeze looking them over. ‘I can never understand why these things are so cheap. A few quid for such work, years of it in each one.’