PearlHanger 09 Page 10

  Taurus? I wasn't thinking anything. I had to nip this junk in the bud, so interrupted. "Bea. Did Owd Maggie keep records of her, er, customers?"

  "No need, Lovejoy." Beatrice glanced into her glass and sighed. Empty again. I rose quickly to fill it and keep the flow of information coming.

  "Somebody else kept them for her?"

  "Of course. Cardew."

  I gave her the drink, one glug of gin and two of lemonade. Barney glowered suspiciously. Clang. I'd blundered. "Erm," I said, "I hope that's how you like it,

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  Beatrice. I'm not very good at, er, drinks. Did you say Car- dew?"

  "Yes." Beatrice was unmoved. "It's quite logical, Love- joy. Madame Blavatsky's memory was awful."

  Silly me. Another headache loomed. "Look, love. You know I'm not into this seance jazz. Just tell me. Can Car- dew be reached?" For all I knew it might be like phoning up.

  "Oh, that'd be hard." Her eyes .were shining with interest. This was a challenge. "It has been done, but, . ."

  Well, if you can't beat them. I said carefully, "The reason is, Owd Maggie had a message for me. She told Lydia to contact me urgently."

  "And you didn't," Beatrice said gently.

  "No," I barked. Then said again, "No," but quieter. If Barney hadn't been there I'd have given Beatrice a bloody good hiding. There was no need for her to go on about it. I felt bad enough.

  "Oh, Lovejoy." Her eyes filled.

  "I know, I know. Somebody must have told Owd Maggie I was back. I have wood carving lessons with old Connally in his studio down the Dutch Quarter."

  Barney's mind moved momentarily off Beatrice. "How did they know to say the Dutch Quarter?"

  "They didn't," I guessed. "They just probably said Lovejoy's around, and followed her until it was opportune to ... to ... So if there's a chance of getting her message," I ended weakly. Barney snorted in derision, embarrassing me. I felt a right twerp.

  "Why not simply ask Madame Blavatsky herself?" Beatrice suggested.

  "Owd Maggie?" I tried working that out, failed. "But ..." My words stuck.

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  "Ifs so much simpler. And," she added brightly, "you can say you're sorry, Lovejoy. Think how nice . . ."

  Now I'd got a blinding headache. "Can I have that drink, please, Bea? And an aspirin?"

  Later I left Beatrice's and phoned Lydia from Charley's, the pub next door. This local nickname means any pub called the Black Buoy. Black Buoy because it sounds like Black Boy, meaning the dark-haired escaped Prince Charles, and that the pub's regulars were secret royalists. Later Charles II of Nell Gwynne fame. She told me to ring a number about ten o'clock for Sandy, and that Tinker had at last reached the cottages at Salcott marshes.

  "Oh, aye?" I hadn't forgiven him for the police-cell episode.

  "He wants to know can he please go home?"

  My helper. "He's got no home," I said sourly. He currently lives in a derelict market van near the flour mill. "He'd only get sloshed. He can get just as drunk on the waterside," I argued, getting even more narked at the lazy old devil.

  Lydia hesitated. Here it came, the seductive wheedle. "He hates it out there, Lovejoy. He says it's spooky."

  "Where?" I asked. I'd told the old nerk anywhere within reach of the old creek cottages near Salcott Knights. I know it sounds like a spot marked X but it's really half a solar system wide.

  Then in the gloom she spoke an old, old name that suddenly chilled my nape. It haunts me yet. Not on any map. But I knew instantly it was the trysting place toward which we'd been journeying all along. The long-dead anciet

  106 .

  name rose like a hand from black water.

  "Pearlhanger," she said.

  *

  Just before ten I phoned Sandy about the arrangements about Mrs. Sutton's painting. He spent twenty demented minutes criticizing her. ("Lovejoy I mean have you ever seen such teeth before I mean and what hair. Oh the government should do something . . .") More time wasted.

  "Have you got the stuff so far?" I asked hopelessly into his chatter. Talking to Sandy's like shouting at a typhoon, all effort and no use.

  "Yes, but at what cost! Mrs. Teeth-and-Hair was trying to make a salad we watched her my God Mel had one of his giddy spells and you know what he's like about mayonnaise a lunatic . . ."

  This hysteria was actually an argument for another one percent. Wearily I agreed. Anything to keep him and Mel on the move. I couldn't face the thought of the sweep going to waste.

  "Mel says it's a deal," Sandy trilled. His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. "He's absolutely drooling at the sound of that triangular-bird painter, Lovejoy! He's thinking of having his hair done. Do you think he should? I mean I've been

  against his autumn-pink rinse from the very start..."

  *

  Don't get the wrong idea. Just because I burgled Spendlate Antiques that night it doesn't mean I was falling for Donna Vernon. No. I really was still determined to bring Owd Maggie's murderers to justice. I mean, somebody less honest and fair-minded might have weakened by now, and been compelled to raid Vernon and Chatto's antique shop

  . 107

  to find proof that they weren't in league with Donna. So because I wasn't becoming hooked on Donna, I was absolutely certain I was still acting in the interests of truth and justice. See the logic?

  Night isn't much help to the East Anglian burglar. A moving car after midnight in these small townships stands out like a durbar in a desert, and there's always one nosy dozy Old Bill smoking in some doorway. Wisely I parked under a hedge a mile outside the first lamp—the whole village only had a dozen, thank God—and walked in through a fine drizzle.

  Spendlate Antiques Ltd. was a tatty place in the High Street. The shopfront had seen no paint for years. The shingle was skew-whiff as if it had been done by a school-leaver for a quid. There was no sign of life, the village's few streets empty. A distant car droned into silence on the A-road. Soporific. An alarm system box gave me a momentary thrombosis, but I guessed it was sham like on most places and paused briefly at the grimy window. One of those orange street lamps shone about sixty feet off, showing the usual clutter of the provincial junkshop: a stool, two chairs, scattered cavalry buttons, a brass pot, some Great War bayonets and medals, some indeterminate crockery, a personal 1725-ish sealed wine bottle but faked from recycled glass— one mint original will buy you a fortnight's free holiday or a thousand pasties, according to your station in life. This junk trove was protected by a Suffolk latch and a cottager-lock that were twice as valuable as the muck inside.

  Feeling that life wasn't helping me much, I did the wise thing once I'd trembled the lock—the easiest thing in the world with anything bent—and shut the door.

  "Hello?" I called. "Anybody there? It's me."

  Nothing.

  108 .

  A house tells you if it's empty, doesn't it? Scientists, that crowd of aggropaths who make a comfortable living out of fears, tell us it's hormonal smells that are the giveaway. All balls, of course. It's simply the inanimate speaking to the animate. The walls and rafters and rooms call a gentle welcome, or howl an implacable hatred, as soon as a person walks within. I really believe this. You don't need Owd Maggie's ghostly Cardew to tell you. Your own apartment, bungalow, caravan trailer, will pulse it at you. Some habitations are right for you, others aren't. That's all there is to it.

  This dump was friendly, for all its humble status.

  Antique dealers always have a nook. If it's a lock-up shop the nook will never be on the premises. If the a.d. lives there, it will be upstairs, and in a wall. Confidently I went up the stairs and put the bedroom light on. Basically a two up, two down pad. The nook was behind a small gilt wall mirror, some nerk's idea of Machiavellian cleverness.

  Three letters. All were signed "Donna." All talked to Darling, Lover, Ken, Sweetheart. Plus a pet name that I won't disclose because I'm sure they'd want to keep "Sex- man" confidential.

  I wasn't depressed. No, hone
st. I'm being really frank about it, because after all people go through phases. Clearly Donna was a victim of some crush on that insipid curly- headed oaf called Chatto. Now, women always try to be responsible creatures, stick to patterns and all that. But they lack judgment. And everything's judgment, right? These letters in my hand were a transparent example of a lovely woman, too innocent, falling for the pretty-boy patter of that goon Chatto. A wave of sympathy for Donna swept over me. If she hadn't majored in academic thought she'd know more about humanity. A tragic paradigm for us all.

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  She'd been enticed into trusting a nerk when there were reliable unselfish blokes like me about.

  No information about pearls, though. They weren't all that careless.

  "So long," I told the house, nicked a decomposing umbrella from the window display, and hoofed it back to the car.

  »

  Everything's people. It's true. Forget this and all is lost. Which proves that removing people is the ultimate crime. That's why I was heartbroken about Owd Maggie. Loony, what with her seances and everything, but still one of us. That contact with all the antiques in the sweep had restored me a bit, given me reassurance about the purpose of existence, but I was still narked. And I was focused on my own area, those tangled woods, rivers, fields, and estuaries they call the Eastern Hundreds. It lies beyond the region's only fair-sized town, which as far as I'm concerned is where civilization ends. But the last few places on the list lay out there. Down one of those creeks Tinker waited. And Vernon and Chatto.

  To the best of my ability I'd done what Donna wanted, gone with her entire charade from that seance down the trail among the antiques.

  From now on I'd do the deciding.

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  13

  The journey back to Woodbridge gave me a chance to think. Donna's whole search was a fraud. Vernon had no real idea about antiques. I'd seen it all, good antiques, duff, frauds, neffies, replicas, ringers, rubbish, and some that we should be buying tickets to look at. Vernon hadn't bothered with a single one. Nor had Donna. It only struck me today that if we'd really wanted to find him we should have done it the other way round, started at the last place on the list, Salcott marshes.

  Then why did she hire me? And why was she so distressed when Chandler faced her?

  It had occurred to me that Owd Maggie's seance could have been a useful way of sussing me out. But everybody knows me anyway. Ten minutes in Woody's nosh bar would have done as well. Unless they really did believe this seance stuff? That at least would explain why Owd Maggie was done in. But there was something missing. And I had this feeling that Donna Vernon didn't believe this seance stuff any more than me.

  Ill

  Then there was Pearlhanger.

  Names have a ring to them, don't they? A curious atmosphere even though you've never seen the place.

  Pearl as in pearl, but hanger in the old speech means a steep wood, a loop of dress, a belt, or an ancient short sword. There's a sea village not far off called Goldhanger, named for where a gold-handled sword was found centuries ago. The same must have been for Pearlhanger. We got a lot of marauders in olden days, tourists' ancient forerunners. The famed Battle of Maldon was on this coast, and the treasure of the Viking king at Sutton Hoo. It's a universal law that warriors get gold. For gold read gems, diamonds, silver.

  And pearls.

  Pearls have magic in them, simply because there's no such thing as an "ordinary" pearl. Each one seems to have a right to legend. Coco Chanel—yes, that one—once heaved a perfect pearl necklace into the briny, displeased at Bendor Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster. Aren't women odd? All because he'd done a little two-timing. Well, sixty-five timing. But ditching a priceless necklace of gemstones in a temper is still basically an unreasonable act. Adverts for Chanel No. 5 make me wince at that memory. But, then, a granddad's age ago, Kentucky anglers used to chuck freshwater pearls back in the river if they hooked a mussel by mistake.

  Funny thing, but some gems—and the pearl is a classified gemstone, remember—are special. They appeal to something in the mind. The pearl is one. Passion and ignorance have haunted it. Like, the Incas of Peru used to cook oysters just to extract the pearl. I ask you. And Sir Thomas Gresham drank Queen Bess's health in wine containing

  pearl powder made by grinding up a huge and precious pearl. Well, Sir Thomas was only doing what Cleopatra and Clodius the famous Roman glutton used to do. Celtic freshwater pearls, and oyster pearls from the untended Roman oyster beds, were always desirable. There seem to have been plenty knocking around in those days, enough to cause the Paris goldsmiths in 1355 to forbid "setting Scotch pearls with the Oriental." Long before that the Egyptians thrived as middlemen between Rome and the ancient Macedonians' pearl fisheries in the Red Sea. You see how romance and pearls go together? But it's often romance of a peculiar and oddly rather sinister kind. Like, you can't call Caligula's huge pearl necklace romantic, because it was for his favorite horse. And his wife Lollia Paulina's craving for pearls was too passionate for sanity, though that was par for the course in Caligula's household. They were all loony.

  Men wore them too, hung as a little clapper in a tiny gold bell earring. It became such a craze that Caesar put a stop to these crotalia, little rattles, because unmarried women were wearing them as a sexy invitation. Some say that Julius Caesar invaded us simply to capture the Old World's best source of freshwater pearls.

  I returned the hire car about two in the morning. The night man drove me to the inn. He was grinning. "Lot of business at the Drum and Fife tonight. My brother dropped a fare here not ten minutes gone."

  "You jest," I said, but feeling odd.

  "Straight up." He grinned even wider. "Be funny if it wuz your missus, eh?"

  "Hilarious," I agreed, and stealthily climbed the stairs. No light under Donna's door. Life was becoming a Restoration comedy without the laughs.

  Badly knackered though I was, sleep was long coming.

  . 113

  I'd worked out everything for Lydia to do and told her on the blower. Now I wanted Tinker, please God, to be waiting somewhere handy down Salcott. I wanted Lydia to have made the right contacts. I wanted Beatrice to arrange a seance to contact Owd Maggie, RIP. I wanted Mel and Sandy to get a move on. I wanted to catch Sid Vernon and his crooked mate, Chatto, and I wanted Ledger to lay aside the Sporting Chronicle and arrest the pair of them. I wanted Donna.

  Did I mean Margaret? Helen? Lydia? Must have done . . .

  ·

  "Two more," Donna said. "Then the last. We'll catch Sid up at the speed we're going." She said it like a line from a play. Odd how often that thought recurred.

  "No real hurry now, is there?" I was all innocence. She'd let me drive. There was an end-of-term air about. "He's spent nothing. So your savings will be intact."

  She remembered to nod. "It's that policeman, and the other man he mentioned. Whatever was he called?" Another line, quite well spoken.

  "Kenneth C. Chatto," I said, "I think." Her husband's partner, and she's pretending she didn't know his name.

  "Only, they assumed he was some sort of crook."

  I tut-tutted. "Terrible. They'll forget. Police always do."

  They might, but not me.

  That morning I bombed us through the remnants of the antiques sweep like a blue-bummed electron. They were easy, the way everything is when you're sure of yourself and stupid. One was a councillor living up to his principles by flogging grotty junk to the electorate in support of social equality, which includes his ten-acre mansion and his dark-

  114. . .

  haired mistress. (She's secret; lives on the left, first floor, that steep road going up from the river in Maldon, Essex.) I don't have much truck with George's sincere principles because all politicians are failed people. They have a right to expect exactly the same sincerity and care they give us, so I felt absolved of morality. I knew him of old, and actually laughed aloud at the reproduction cabinet he showed us, most sincerely of course. Fakes are
his hobby.

  "You bloody fool, George. You didn't even make it out of an old wardrobe. And a genuine china cabinet has two different heights, shelves on top behind glass and a cupboard underneath. You've made the sides from one slab, frigging nerk."

  "That other dealer liked it, Lovejoy."

  "Vernon? Did he buy it?"

  George shook his head glumly. "Short of cash."

  Maybe Vernon wasn't so thick after all. "Look, George." I couldn't resist pointing out the astragal bars, the wood lattice he'd put across the glass. "You must dovetail astragals into the bloody frame, not just stick the glass in with putty."

  "I mixed the putty with dust," he defended.

  Honest to God. "You nerk. And old glass must warp outwards. It can be done quite easily . . ."

  "Don't be narked, Lovejoy . . ."

  I gave up and left. Even a faker has a right to life.

  "No good," I told Donna, getting in the car. "Just a politician redistributing wealth." I leant across and called up, "Regards to Pat, George. Hope her leg's better."