Pearlhanger Page 14

  Deamer was saying calmly, ‘And he’s what?’

  During which pause I felt queasy. Not because all my non-thinking stupidity had finally proved itself, but because I was here high and dry and somebody else was . . .

  ‘Then he has to go, Kenneth,’ Deamer said. ‘Weren’t you supposed to be following Lovejoy?’

  Oh Christ. I was sickened. Between the salt water and the sea sand all right.

  My dozy cortex yawned itself awake and nudged its alpha rhythms. Ken Chatto had been following me. He knew I was out behind Tom’s boat. So why was he now phoning Deamer so urgently? My heart thumped once in fright as realization struck. Tinker.

  ‘Very well.’ The receiver went down. A scraping sound, old Deamer laughing. ‘Good news, my dear. The old man you detest so much is poaching in the forbidden area. Kenneth is arranging an accident. It will be the usual sort. Two birds with one lucky stone. Marvellous.’

  Then Donna said, ‘Lovejoy wouldn’t go water-skiing, Donald. Never in a million years.’ She was thinking, working it out. ‘Unless . . .’

  I moved, gliding like I’d never done in my life before, out of breath with my heart banging and legs quivering. I fell down that bloody step into the conservatory and scrambled moaning through the window into the fresh dark cold.

  Then I ran, down the drive and across the path now flooding ankle-deep in the tide. I didn’t even think of sharks and giant sea monsters. Of course I’d be too late. The knack of idiots.

  Chapter 21

  SHE WAS THERE, bless her, reading – reading – a book in the car’s interior light when I fell in and gasped for her to drive to the jetty.

  ‘What is it, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Go, go!’

  You wouldn’t think that barely two miles would take an age. My chest was burning and my throat raw. I honestly thought I was dying from panic and effort. That’s what comes from being unfit and running blind. Vanessa was pale, driving down this ordinary rural road, peering ahead in the dashboard’s glow. A car coming the other way shot past in a dazzle, the crammed occupants singing boisterously. Trees, signposts, coloured bulbs strung across a gate for holiday caravans.

  ‘Sound your horn!’ I reached across and pressed on the wheel, blaring the car’s horn into the beams. What was SOS? Three longs, three shorts, three longs, or the short blasts first? At least disturb them, tell them I was coming.

  ‘What are we doing, Lovejoy?’ She was suddenly scared of me. We’d only known each other for a day. Much I cared, didn’t even reply.

  We shot down the hedged lanes making a fearsome racket. The occasional strollers now turned to stare. Honestly, I was thinking we’d made it when a maniac white van squeezed terrifyingly past on a narrow bend. I’d cursed it before the significance of its red cross hit me. Hand off the horn then. The blue strobe blinked busily ahead, heeled into the lane leading to the jetty.

  ‘It’s an ambulance,’ Vanessa said, her face chalk. ‘Billy?’

  ‘No. Tinker.’

  A vacuum flask and a sandwich box rocked away on the rear seat. That was a kindness. She was doing me a kindness. I part dressed, grubbily, falling over.

  Tinker was being carried into the ambulance when we arrived. The driver had driven through a hedge to reach the jetty and was morosely eyeing the gap for his sedate getaway. A nurse was bullying two blokes to be careful with the stretcher. Tinker looked battered, but his face was uncovered.

  ‘He’s still alive,’ little Billy complained.

  ‘Tinker. You all right, mate?’

  ‘You’re bad news, Lovejoy,’ the nerk said. I bent to listen to this abuse. ‘A white boat ran into me like you did.’

  ‘Me?’ That really narked me. Friends don’t strike friends. And I’d actually come to rescue the bad-tempered sod. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘They’d have done for me if Tom Connor hadn’t happened along, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Leave the patient alone,’ the nurse said.

  The ambulance driver lit a fag, stared. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Why’ve you no socks or shoes on?’

  We watched the ambulance crush slowly back through its homemade gap and depart down the track.

  ‘Did you win, Lovejoy?’ Vanessa asked. She had her arm through her dad’s, from relief.

  ‘At the house? No, love.’ I’d lost Donna. I now knew everything but had no proof. Nothing I could do except watch Deamer make a fortune from his scam and see my lovely murderess Donna ride off into the sunset with murderer Chatto to share the spoils. ‘Lost everything.’

  The sandwiches were still there, and the flask. I brought them across to where Tom and Vanessa were standing, and perched on the edge of the wooden jetty.

  ‘Keep up our strength,’ I suggested, unwrapping the grub in the gloaming. ‘There are pearls, aren’t there? In the river.’

  Tom sighed, plumped down with a grunt. Vanessa sat on her heels, still recovering from her fright. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘My superb powers of reason,’ I said bitterly. Billy had nicked one of my sandwiches. I pulled the rest closer.

  ‘You nearly took his head off with your skis, Lovejoy,’ Tom said. ‘I went back to warn him off. It’s an unlucky stretch of river, that. A white motor yacht had clobbered him.’

  ‘Not accidental, I presume.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Who knows? I shouted. They took off towards the estuary. I fished Tinker out and raised the alarm.’

  ‘Ta, Tom,’ I said.

  ‘Deamer has men all along the banks through his estate, day and night. He says it’s to stop anglers after bream, but. . .’

  ‘You do it with a bucket thing, right?’

  ‘Pearl fishing? Yes. A mask, made out of any old tin. Put leather round the rims, shaped to your face, and bend yourself into the shallow river.’

  ‘Freshwater mussels are secret,’ Billy explained. ‘Nobody’s to tell.’

  I said, ‘Real pearls? This far south.’

  ‘Them musselbones are here all right,’ Tom said. ‘Except, ten years ago there was a sudden plenty.’

  I’d heard this kind of thing. Sometimes pearls suddenly vanish from a river, then just as abruptly become plentiful, one mussel in every four. A pearl epidemic. Deamer had bought the estate when the owner died, and had a ready-made source of pearls for faking antique jewellery by the ton. I should have realized when Tom said that Deamer let the woods rot, yet guarded the river with obsessional fury. So whatever Deamer wanted had to be in the river. I’m thick.

  ‘Local pearls used to be little funny shaped things, until they came plentiful. Now they’re marble-big. Some bigger, even.’

  Christ. No wonder. Worth anybody’s murder, almost. Guiltily I cancelled the thought. Deamer had a real winner here. Enough fantasy-baroque pearls to copy practically every famous historical brooch and pendant known.

  ‘The river must have had an outbreak of a parasite that stimulates the mussels to make whoppers. Any fancies?’ Fancies are unusual colours, deep golds to greens to purples to blacks. But be careful. Absolutely jet black pearls are difficult to sell. It’s the nearly blacks – brown-blacks, greenish-blacks and blue-blacks that bring in the collectors and jewellers like wasps to fruit.

  ‘Only now and then,’ Tom said.

  ‘Lovejoy. What has Deamer to do with you?’ Vanessa’s voice was quiet. Tom glanced back up the track where a car’s lights were jolting towards us. ‘Were the pearls so important that you’d send Tinker poaching them while you went to burgle Mr Deamer’s house?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ I said. No good explaining to women. ‘I’m to blame sure enough.’

  The car stopped. Doors slammed. Torches flashed. Somebody said, ‘This where they pulled him ashore?’ and a servile at-attention voice fawned, ‘Yes, sir.’

  Another man was saying, ‘I couldn’t avoid him, Ledger. The river hereabouts is so narrow.’

  ‘So it is, sir.’ Ledger’s voice, all assurance. They paused then, because they were upon us.

  ‘Wotcher, Ledger,’ I sai
d, friendly to break the ice.

  ‘Lovejoy? What’re you doing here?’

  ‘You’re a duck-egg, Ledger,’ I said. ‘This the gentleman that creased Tinker?’

  ‘Accidental, Lovejoy,’ Ledger said. ‘We have an independent witness. A gamekeeper from Mr Deamer’s estate.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ I looked at the pale-haired man beside Ledger. ‘Chatto, I presume?’

  Good old Ken Chatto was taller than I remembered, and happier than a murderer has a right to be. But then he’d won the fair lady and the fortune. He and his avaricious old partner Deamer could now turn out fakes till doomsday and be in the clear.

  ‘Never forget a face, Kenneth.’ I ignored the outstretched hand. ‘What were you doing dashing upriver so fast?’

  ‘It’s a tenancy rule,’ Chatto said. ‘I must assist in patrolling the river with the employed gamekeepers.’

  Ledger had marched to the end of the jetty and stared at the water for clues. He came back, nodding. ‘Nothing here for us,’ he announced. ‘Show me the boat you brought Dill in with, Tom. And you, miss.’

  ‘Will you be all right, Lovejoy?’ Vanessa asked me. Chatto had made no move, and the bobby was following Tom and Ledger.

  ‘Yes, ta. I’ll shout if Kenneth annoys me.’

  We watched her follow them, me sitting on the jetty and the murdering woman-stealing bastard standing beside me smiling in the gloaming.

  ‘Well, Kenneth,’ I said finally. My tea’d gone cold in all this. ‘Pity about Owd Maggie and Vernon, eh?’

  ‘It was, rather.’ I stared up at him. He actually sounded sincerely sorry. ‘You see, Lovejoy, Maggie’d received a spirit message. Donna overheard you phoning. There was no other way.’

  So he was the nut. ‘Tut-tut,’ I said. ‘Forced into it, eh?’

  ‘I’m glad you understand.’ He sighed, all the cares of the world. ‘And I never did get on with Sidney. Especially when Donna chose between us. Did you know we were at school together? He was quite sound as a youngster, victor ludorum and all that. But spineless in later years. He lost his nerve over the old woman. Positively weak.’ He sounded merely mildly put out, an elderly vicar when tea’s late.

  ‘And you did him in, so they’d arrest me?’

  ‘Why, certainly. I had to. Mr Deamer has every right to expect reliable service. You can see that, Lovejoy.’ He sounded so bloody earnest.

  ‘I can see you’re off your frigging nut.’

  ‘How dare you!’ He quivered like a pointer dog. For a second I thought he was going to boot me into the water. ‘How dare you! You . . . tramp! You’ve lost, Lovejoy. Don’t you understand? We’re already spreading the word, saying your motive for killing Sidney was the pendant. Once the trade hears that, everybody will believe our products are genuine. Then we can sell fakes as genuine a hundred times over – all in under compulsory secrecy, to dealers and collectors from all over the world. It’s beautiful. It can’t fail, Lovejoy. Thanks to you.’

  ‘I’d approve,’ I said, ‘if it weren’t for Owd Maggie, Sid, me nearly getting topped. And Tinker.’

  ‘You, Lovejoy,’ said this upper-crust example of gentlemanly enterprise, ‘are simply envious of my success.’

  My baffled silence was still matching his affronted petulance when Ledger led the others across to say polite goodbyes. Ledger told me to make sure to report in at the police station in the morning.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ I said irritably. ‘Oh, Kenneth.’

  ‘Yes, Lovejoy?’ He paused, still annoyed at me for not admiring his murderous cleverness.

  ‘I spoke to Owd Maggie today. You’ve not won at all.’

  Chatto recoiled and actually moaned as he turned and blundered away. Ledger glanced, followed. I lifted a hand for Tom to pull me to my feet.

  ‘Look,’ I said, as they drove off. ‘I know I’m a pest, but is there any chance of a pint and a pasty? I’ve something on my mind.’

  There was a big auction not far off. Maybe there was something we could put in . . .

  ‘Lovely. Between one-and-a-half and three grains in weight.’

  Tom was reminiscing and fugging the warm sleepy kitchen with his pipe. Vanessa was listening. Billy was sleeping upright on her lap, sometimes leaping into wakefulness with a startled murmur. I’d got the old bloke talking about his gamekeeping days as soon as we’d started on Vanessa’s meat-and-potato, concentrating loosely on the local pearls of course. Natural pearls are measured by weight, four grains equals one carat. It’s only cultured pearls that are measured in millimetres, because their centre is a solid mother-of-pearl bead made from a Mississippi River Valley clam.

  ‘Oh, some whoppers,’ Tom went on. ‘I’ve seen a perfect sphere brought out when I was a lad. Size of a sparrow’s egg. My grand-uncle was a poacher,’ Tom explained disarmingly. ‘It was his pal culled it. Forty-one grains. He bought his house with that, Lowestoft way.’

  ‘You’ll not see them often, eh?’ Pearl size is all-important. Not surprising, really. It takes a poor old mollusc three years to thicken a pearl’s coat a single millimetre.

  ‘Not likely. Twisted and bent. Fishbones. When I was gamekeeping there used to be six poachers, as secret as hell. Tinker’s uncle was one, the bugger. They pass it down in families.’ Served me right for being too besotted with Donna to even talk with Tinker. Tom went on, ‘Since Deamer took the estate and fetched in his gamekeepers we’ve had two poachers go.’

  ‘Go?’ I said blankly.

  ‘Die. Accidental deaths. One drunk-drownded.’ He said drown-dead like they do round here. ‘One just lost. All open, like.’

  ‘Of course.’ And it would be all open, like. Deamer would plan that, and Kenneth would execute it. An enormous depression settled on me. All along they’d proved themselves pros. No wonder Deamer thought I’d the brains of a ticket collector. Even Donna’s tempestuous lovemaking had been planned. Anything, including murders, to protect their wonderful pearlmine.

  ‘February’s best,’ Bill was saying. ‘Winter frost kills the weeds, see? Makes the mussels easier to find. But our onshore wind stirs up the silt.’

  ‘Saves a few innocent mussels, though.’

  Tom grinned. ‘For an antique dealer you’re too soft-hearted, Lovejoy.’

  ‘For a gamekeeper you know too much about poaching.’

  He was serious again. ‘Only way to beat them. After all, you’re not allowed to . . .’ He broke off, fiddled with his pipe.

  ‘No,’ I agreed bitterly. ‘You’re not allowed to eliminate people who misbehave. Only Deamer and Chatto are allowed to do that.’ I cheered up as one original thought blundered into my empty skull.

  ‘Penny for them, Lovejoy?’ Vanessa asked over little Billy’s head.

  ‘Just thinking, love. I’ve been stupid. You know why? Because I went out of my natural element. Oh, sure, sure. You were great, getting me to Deamer’s house. But this desperate stuff’s not my scene. What happened to Tinker and Sid Vernon and Owd Maggie proved that.’

  ‘What is your natural element, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Antiques, love.’ I hitched my chair closer to the table for my elbows’ sake. ‘Any more tea?’ I asked, and began, ‘Listen. Once upon a time a lady hired this antique dealer and took him to a seance . . .’

  And my mind was working it out: a few weeks to the big auction at Montwell. It had to be then.

  Chapter 22

  SEDUCTION’S NOT MY greatest skill. Women are always there before me, though I try. The few times I’ve actually set out to make a deliberate ploy have been either abject failures – with the bird rolling in the aisles laughing and me narked as hell – or so astonishingly successful that you begin to wonder who’s seducing whom. I remember one lovely bird, a woman with a wonderful dress sense and a brass Culpeper microscope, Burke and Jones of Bristol about 1780, the best. She had one of those porcelain faces and transparent skin. I sweated blood over her, spent a fortune on talcum powder and a new razor blade. When we’d finally made smiles she said to me along the pi
llow, ‘You know, Lovejoy, this is so overdue I was worrying what was wrong with me.’ See what I mean about them being there first? Makes you wonder what women really think about all day long. Different minds from normal, I suppose.

  But sometimes seduction’s thrust upon you. So I came in from the rain like a drowned rat and stood dripping on the posh rugs strewn about the receptionist’s office of Tierney’s Auction Rooms Ltd, in Montwell. Auctioneers are the easiest of all known ‘marks’ for the con trick, being natural crooks themselves and therefore unable to believe it’ll ever happen to them.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, beaming and making sure the inner office door was closed.

  ‘Good morning, sir. May I help you?’ The woman did the eye trick, an up-and-down glance full of scorn. To women grotty means poor, and they hate poverty with fervour, wealth being their religion.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, deciding to be wealthy. I never have a plan. Spontaneity works best. ‘This is where the famous jewellery sales are?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She didn’t quite melt, but her kilojoule of gratification was a giant step for mankind.

  I shook my plastic mac to irritate. Our relationship couldn’t flower without tolerance. The sooner she learned some, the better. ‘I’ve been sent to inquire into your firm’s auction practice,’ I said.

  ‘Into our firm’s . . . ?’ She was furious.

  ‘By Lord Eskott. I’m his confidential secretary. James, ah, Chandler.’ She paused. ‘A private source may send an antique item in, you see.’ I hesitated to indicate a faint distaste for commerce.

  ‘I see.’ Her mind logged: a peer of the realm, death duties, a fantastically valuable heirloom, shame at things coming to such a pretty pass. Her hand moved towards one of those button telephones that never work. ‘I’d better contact Mr Tierney . . .’

  ‘Ah, no. Confidential, you see.’ Snootily I looked about. ‘I’m first required to make an informal assessment. You do understand?’