The Lies of Fair Ladies (10 page)

From Prammie Joe's shack. I saw the shack when my feet felt suddenly
cold. My shoes were water sogged. I could see the hut door. Open? I'd never
seen it open without Prammie Joe here.

"Prammie?" Nothing. The hum continued. "It's
Lovejoy."

The humming rose and fell. Zzzzz. A sleeping giant. Always
inhaling? A faint blur hung about the doorway. Dark, shifting, a feeble shadow
trying to become something definite.

And an aroma. No, a smell. Not smell, even. A stench. A stench of
something having . . .

"Joe? It's me. Lovejoy."

Something came at my face. I brushed it away. It came again,
troubling me. I brushed it off. A bluebottle. Flies. The hanging shadow was a
cloud of buzzing blowflies. Which breed—

"Joe!" I screamed. "For Christ's sake,
Prammie!"

Maggots breed in soldiers' shot legs, in cattle wounds. I drew
breath, moaning, took my jacket off, covered my head with it, ran at the hut,
paused a second and stepped in, gagged, saw Joe's face one heaving mass of
maggots and bluebottles that actually dripped, dripped onto the wood floor
beside him, things squirming in his eye sockets. I turned and ran, retching,
swiping madly at the bluebottles that followed. Some were even in my jacket. I
waved it round my head fifty yards up the field. My hands were shaking. I felt
my eyes streaming. I was going "Argh, argh ..." I tried not to, but spewed
and retched and wept. I was pathetic, disgusting. I found two blowflies buzzing
in my sleeve, stamped one to death like a madman and chased the other round the
universe until I collapsed, sobbing, on the marshy ground. When I’m a prat, I
go for gold.

As penance, I made myself walk home, nearly getting myself killed
by every night joyrider. After the pubs closed it was a nightmare. Hardly any
pavements in East Anglia.

Two o'clock in the morning I reached my cottage. All night long I
heard buzzing, buzzing. I didn't sleep. Fault is everybody's for everything,
people say nowadays. It didn't feel like it. It felt like mine.

Came dawn, bluetits were tapping for their bloody nuts, the robin
was flirting for his cheese, the hedgehog wondering what had gone into me. I
shut them all out. Let them get on with it. I'd had enough Nature.

"Morning, Lovejoy."

Luna was an atrocious call on my resources this early after a
non-night night.

"Notice anything?" she asked, shy with hidden glee.

"Rain coming?" The tide turns our weather to the
opposite of its dawn doings. I wondered for a ghastly moment what bluebottles
do in bad weather.

"No, silly. Electricity! Water! Phone! They're coming!"

There was a van in the garden. Boiler-suited blokes were milling,
unloading ladders.

"Your television license is paid, Lovejoy." She was
especially thrilled at this, hugging herself. "A TV set will be here soon.
And radio." Radio? Joan Vervain really would be pleased. We could shag
during hubby Del's radio show.

"Who paid?"

"Why, we did!" She drew me aside as boiler suits marched
in.

A horrible feeling was growing within me.

"Where did we get the gelt, love? Money," I explained,
to smooth her forehead.

“I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck, Lovejoy!" She
drew me to the divan and sat us down, breathless with delight. "No sooner
had I bought the troll tray than a gentleman offered me a good profit. I sold
it there and then!"

Carefully I didn't strangle her. "Don't tell me. You only
made one bid, and Acker—the rival bidder—folded?"

"Yes! Wasn't I clever?"

"You silly bitch."

She gasped thunderstruck. "But that's what we do! Buy and
sell!''

It's called the lop. Only happens at antiques auctions. When
somebody does the shuff—that is, what me and Luna had planned, one partner displacing
another to confuse bidders—a cunning opponent does the lop. This means he stops
bidding, allowing the shuffer to win the item. No sooner is it knocked down to
her than the lopper's colleague pants up and says, "Missus, did you get
Lot 18? Parking is such hell in Penny Lane. Will you sell? I'll give you a good
. . ." Et predictable cetera. Duckeggs get lopped. I don't.

She listened, stricken. Well she might. She'd lost us a beautiful
tole tray. Tole's manufacturing process is beautiful, combining art and
science. The French did it wonderfully in the eighteenth century.

"Tole, not troll. You take sheet iron." I described it
from the pit of a terrible memory. "They discovered a heat-resist varnish
and paint. You put many coats of paint on your iron. Then black it by holding
it in smoke from a torch dipped in pine resin. Any resin for that matter.
Fakers use teak oil on pine twigs."

"Lovejoy?" Luna said, ten miles off.

"Smooth it with brick dust. Many layers of varnish. Then you
paint in colored varnishes. The earlier the date, to 1740, the more beautiful.
They copied Sevres. You get pots, food-warmers, a million household wares in
tole."

She blotted my face with a hankie. "Please don't cry,
Lovejoy. We'll find another one. I'll go to Sotheby's."

"I'm not. Silly mare." I struck her hand away. She took
no notice. They never do.

"Where do these two TVs go, lady?"

A bloke was standing on the porch between two large cases.

She bridled. "I only ordered one television."

"Two, lady. Paid outright. Is there an aerial?"

"I only ordered one ..." And so forth.

Prammie Joe had been killed, head bashed in. Had a cord been round
his throat? Some sort of wire? Country folk have wire like city folk have
rubber bands, plenty and all lengths. Snares, traps, hay, fencing, those rural
things.

Luna's car. In silence I went out, was unsurprised to see her keys
in the ignition. She'd wisely left her motor by my hedge, where wagons used to
rest when clambering uphill from the river crossing below. I got in and headed
for town.

Hereabouts in Ruritania, so to speak, you can't help knowing
people who live up to their umbilicus in fens, marshes, rivers. But

knowing isn't quite the same as a mere nodding acquaintance. I
mean, everybody on earth "knows'' antiques. But not everybody knows
antiques. See the difference? Or we'd all own Christie's and have a British
Museum in the yard.

There were quite a few possibilities for help. One was Brad, boat
repairer down on the estuary, early flintlocks. Except nothing had moved much
in Brad's direction since the Tower of London clearing sale. There was Fesk
Dynson, on the canals. Lockkeeper. Painting is his life. He worships oils, any
Victorian. Not changed much there, either. Antique furnishings I'd already
learned about the hard way—or Prammie Joe had. No mega moves in silver, local
furniture, collectibles, or I'd have heard from our silver man, Big Frank from
Suffolk. No major scam recently, except the great clandestine smuggle to the
Continent after that massive crisp job in Norfolk. In a crisp job, you fake
copies of all the antiques in your decaying mansion house. You replace the
genuine antiques with the fakes. You then burn the manor house to a crisp. You
get insurance money for (a) the manor; (b) the burnt antiques. Naturally, you
also (c) sell the antiques abroad where the prying eyes of the constabulary
never go. Plus, you are relieved of that massive expense, namely your poor old
Queen Anne building. You buy a villa in the sun, a pool and a blonde, and live
stinkingly richly happy ever after. That was six months since.

No. I'd have to explore Prammie Joe's death through the waterways
of this fair kingdom, and trust to luck. There's only one true waterways man in
antiques. Rye Benedict, at ye olde mill by ye stream.

He was in, working the machinery for a group of schoolchildren,
telling the three who listened how the millstones worked. The other thirty were
smoking behind the river wall or groping each other on the embankments.
Education, hard at the learning curve.

"Wotcher, Miss Brewer." Therla once taught in our
village school, but the kids had run her a merry dance and she'd retired in
hysterics. She was fetching, desirable. Why did I never have teachers like her?
I'd been taught by amorphous cylinders of black cloth called Sister Hyacinth for
my first six years. They had no legs. Miss Brewer had legs, and morphology.

"Hello, Lovejoy." Some kids paused, looked across,
sniggered. My name elicits this response. "Interested in water
machinery?"

Therla Brewer is ever hopeful that somebody keen will take her
next lesson.

"No, love. You?"

“The school's Outdoor Activity Interaction Expression. Two
O.A.I.E. sessions a week.'' She gazed about, dispiritedly trying to convince
herself they were all enthused. "Design of waterways last week. The Stour.
One boy tumbled in. Saved by an ocean barge, thank heavens."

"Amen," I said piously, bored. "Rye be long, will
he?"

We stood listening. Rye's really quite good, giving out water
heights, great sailing barges from the Thames, the current mania for petrol
engines. The antiques dealer in me smiled approval. Like I keep saying, passion
rules where antiques hold sway.

Therla eventually herded her brood out, after begging Rye to come
to give her children an hour's lecture on sailing vessels. The duckegg agreed.
Therla has means of persuasion.

"Hello, Lovejoy." Rye looked tired as he came back from
seeing Therla's mob off. He's one of these men people call clean-shaven, as if
he somehow deserves a knighthood for using a razor of a morning.

"Tell me. Rye." I paused. Hang on. Tell what
abou
t?

I gaped because he'd recoiled in sudden alarm, stepped back so
swiftly I had to reach, pull him away from the great millstones. You can lock
the colossal disks by means of a lever. I gave him what for. "You stupid
burke. Rye!" I yelled, mad as hell. "You nearly went into the damned
things! You're always on about safety, you pillock!"

He'd gone white as a sheet. "I thought you meant—"

"What?" The barmy conversation was concluded when he
shook his head in mute denial. We walked to his office for a brew.

The walls were covered with maps, levels of water tables, canal
widths, cross sections of every river in East Anglia. This old watermill's a
hobby. The council give him a pittance to maintain the great quiet engine. Why
him? Because he owns the garden center and plant nursery on the river. His
family's from Wenham, big landowners. To them that hath shall be given. Some
deserving pauper like me should have Rye's job. Makes you sick, but I’m not
jealous.

"I'm after advice. Rye." I saw his guarded look
disappear when I asked if he knew about some big shed, warehouse, anything new
on the rivers.

"Nothing that isn't filled with container loads from the Hook
of Holland, Lovejoy. It's rivalry time since the Channel Tunnel thing."

"Any new stream? A dam? Canal being drained? Workings
reopened like they did at Dedham's Stour? You know, the ones Constable painted
by that teashop?"

That gleam of caution came and went. I put it down to my fatigue
over Prammie Joe. I was seeing things. And I’d selected Rye practically at
random, hadn't I? Well, hadn't I? Near enough, yes. Except Rye was the only
waterman as learned about tides and rivers as Prammie Joe.

We talked a while. He praised our three consecutive bad winters.
Nothing improved the Eastern Hundreds' water table like snow and hard frosts.
He waxed enthusiasm. I concurred, wondering what the hell I was doing there.

"Ta, Rye," I said, bored sick. "Think of anything,
eh?"

He was too casual. "What's the interest?"

"Oh, some old, er, canal tokens are on sale at Wittwoode's
auction. Sometimes a batch comes ahead of a rush."

The relief on his face was a pleasure to see. He came to the car.

"Special edition motor, Lovejoy! Business booming?"

"Not bad," I said modestly. "Want to make an
offer?"

"I’ll soon have enough for something really special."

I drove away, thinking there was something I'd missed. Like a fool
I'd forgotten what Prammie had told me when we were laughing about his loading
up the stuff at Cornish Place.

He'd rescued a schoolboy. From a place . . . Therla said something
about nearly losing a boy. From drowning? In the Stour? But her lad had been
rescued by an ocean-going barge, not a small pram propelled by an old
ex-convict laid horizontal in the thwarts. His last journey, had Prammie Joe
told me? A week ago, had Therla said?

Luna was at the cottage, fuming with the electricity, gas, water,
TV men. I beckoned, pulled her in.

"Luna, love." I drove away immediately. Movement
distracts women; any sort will do. "I want you to—"

"What on earth?" She gaped round. "Leaving all
those men in the cottage? They could steal—"

"We've nothing to steal," I shot cruelly. "You gave
it away."