A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair l-21 Page 19

  'Got anything with it?'

  'Only four little metal L things, very rusted. My boyfriend Mat has a metal detector.'

  She coloured slightly. So Mat was illicit. Bad news for me, though. I'd never get these gaming counters off her now without a king's ransom. When all else fails, try honesty.

  'Highly valuable, Lize. It's the Roman game of "soldiers", a sort of draughts. I think latrunculus means a highwayman. Those metal angles are the board's corners. Tell Mat to suss the whole area. Nobody's ever found a complete Roman counters game.' I looked, weighing my chances with her. 'Lucky Mat. I'm jealous.'

  She reddened more. 'Don't start, Lovejoy.'

  Worth a try. Love sometimes works, and passion has been known to make friends and influence people. 'Here. Your Mat really into detectors?'

  'He's an electrical engineer.' She sounded resigned. 'Talk of it night and day if I'd let him. Are these bits worth reporting in the newspaper?'

  'Do a special article, love. Be photographed with them. Ask Carr at St Edmundsbury, tell him I sent you. He'll give you the history.'

  'Thanks, Lovejoy.'

  With a pang I returned her Roman counters, stealing them honestly far from my mind.

  'Does Mat want a treasure-hunting job? Only take one night. Tell him,' I said carefully,

  'it'll be a cert.'

  At last I'd got my team together, and replaced Sorbo, requiescat in pace. Time I got to Camden Passage, met the troops and got on with it. I knew enough - I thought. I was sure of my next move. I said so-long, swore undying devotion, and fled.

  On the train I dozed, woke blearily in London, caught the Northern Line from Moorgate to the Angel, Islington, where all antiques, they say, pass. Stand near the old green clock of J. Smith & Sons, still saying the metal firm can be found at 42-54, St John's Square, London EC1. In a year you'll see every antique in the world, stolen or legit. It's not true, but what is? It's the gateway to the great - I mean great - antiques market of Camden Passage.

  Pleased at the proximity of antiques in The Mall (ugly building; so what?) and the York Antiques Arcade, I felt optimistic. I had the crucial ingredient - Dieter Gluck's desperate need for money, and his snobbery. Lize had confirmed it. Her boyfriend Mat, lucky swine, was the electronic seek-and-bleep treasure hunter I could get to help Mort with the sunken aircraft in the estuary's sand marshes. My full team would avenge Sorbo and Arthur. Victory was in sight!

  Making an outing of it, I had a lovely time wandering the shops, noshing a bit, sussing out antiques. It's the best free day in London, doesn't cost a groat. There are difficulties. One is Camden Passage itself. Take Islington High Street and Upper Street.

  Which do you think is the more important? Answer: Upper Street. Because the grandly named Islington High Street starts off as a splendidly wide thoroughfare, then astonishingly gives up, dives into a miserable little ginnel you wouldn't even glance down. But Upper Street, which sounds like a leftover from some manky Lower Street, is wide, busy, and important. That's where Camden Passage is. It looks alley thin, but is the centre of the universe.

  Upper Street's called that because it was more elevated than nearby Lower Street. I like it. (Incidentally, never mind what history says - Good Queen Bess really did visit Sir Walter Raleigh there in his Upper Street house across the road. Mind you, she also nipped round the corner to spend candle hours with the Earl of Leicester. I never did like him, untrustworthy sod.)

  'Lovely!' I exclaimed at the scent and throb, mobs of agog hunters.

  'Ain't it just, Lovejoy!' Sorbo said.

  'Honest to God, Sorb,' I said, bliss in my soul. 'This place…'

  My mind went, Sorbo? Dead Sorbo? I saw Trout between the dense traffic, and Lydia, smiling in anticipation. I heard Tinker's cough resounding mightily near the Camden Head pub.

  I went dizzy. 'You're frigging dead, wack.' I'd put my hand on his dead face in the dark.

  His eye had been beaten into a bloody mess.

  He stood there just as I remembered him in life. His eyes widened. 'Here, Lovejoy. You didn't think…? Catch him, mate!'

  A passing bus inspector got me under the arms. I swayed about for a year or so, came to in the corner nosh bar with Sorbo telling an outraged Lydia how I'd keeled over when all he'd done was say hello. She was all for whisking me to Guy's Hospital for brain surgery. ('Everybody's conduct is disgraceful,' etc.) I settled for a quiet stroll up past St Mary's church and the fire station to the Hope and Anchor pub facing the long thin gardens near Canonbury Lane. I wanted tea, a wad, and explanation.

  In that perfect tavern's interior Lydia looked like fresh from Westminster Steps, her loyal skiff doubtless waiting on the Thames. Dealers were lusting away. She, of course, was oblivious.

  'What'd I do?' Sorbo was giving indignantly. The caff was crowded. 'Lovejoy said be here, so I come.'

  Tinker swigged his bottled nourishment, lying to Lydia that he badly needed fluid, being a diabetic under doctor's orders.

  'Lovejoy thought you'd been croaked, silly bleeder,' he grumbled.

  'Me? It was Bern. It's in the frigging papers.'

  They all looked accusingly at me. Dauntless leader of the pack, I'd discovered a body and not read all about it.

  'Listen, everyone.' Lydia rapped the pub's grotty table. 'I must remonstrate. This atrocious language must stop. We each have certain essential information. Sorbo's is that he is not yet deceased.' Her luscious mouth set in a firm line. Nearby West Country dealers groaned. She turned to Sorbo. 'We are delighted to welcome you back to, ah…'

  We waited. 'To us,' she ended lamely.

  The dead face in the tabloid was Bern's, Gluck's oppo. So who'd killed him? I couldn't help looking at Sorbo. He didn't usually wander this far from Streatham Hill. Had I told him to come? I couldn't remember.

  'I was to investigate the paintings sold by Holloway University.' She placed her gloved hands on her lap. 'Gainsborough, Turner, and Constable. They are already successfully sold, via London auction houses.' She beamed. 'Isn't that wonderful? So much money for the poor struggling students!'

  'Idle bleeders,' Tinker growled. 'Drunken moronic sods.'

  'Mr Dill!' Lydia scolded. 'I shan't tell you again.'

  'And Shar the lawyer?'

  Lydia held a brief antagonistic silence. 'I was pleased. She acts for Dieter.' Meaning she wasn't pleased at all. 'Dieter tried to buy a Gainsborough from Holloway on credit. They declined.'

  Shar acted for Dieter Gluck? Trout caught my eye, his glance saying: Lydia's a liability, so get rid. I wished he'd stop signalling that.

  'Shar is very concerned about you, Lovejoy. The magistrates—'

  I quickly stifled that. 'Ta, love. Tinker?'

  'Dosh Callaghan wants to know whyn't you got whoever stiffed him over the padpas yet. Funny, he didn't seem concerned, Lovejoy. Are they worth much?'

  The stout bowler-hatted gent had arrived, and was chatting up the serving lady. He had all my bad habits, glancing into wall mirrors, speculating. Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Third time, it's a plot. How often had he been nearby unnoticed?

  'Dosh dursn't be scorned. The lads'd crucify him.'

  'Then why did he order so few?' Trout persisted. 'Five small gems aren't worth much.'

  'Five? Was that all?' Trout was right. If you're going to bother, you want a hefty shipment to make profit. I'd been slow.

  'If I were you, Lovejoy, I'd see Sturffie. He must have asked that same question when Dosh placed the order, right?' Trout was sympathetic. 'I know Sturffie's your pal, Lovejoy, but you gotter tackle him.'

  'Trout,' I said earnestly. 'If ever I want a Tarzan-O-Gram, I'll see you're hired.'

  'Ta, Lovejoy,' he said modestly. 'I do a good job. I'm also a Snake-O-Gram. I got a cobra suit.'

  'Some other time,' I said faintly. Snakes make me queasy. 'So we go for it, okay?

  Gluck's the mark. Snobbery and greed are the prod. The question is, what antique's the carrot?' I'd already made my mind up.

&nbs
p; Sorbo said. 'We'll need fair money, and a couple of pretty birds.' He eyed Lydia. 'Got a sister, love?'

  'Lydia's out,' I told him, thinking of Gloria Dee's antiques. 'I'll get the money. Let's hear it, Sorbo.'

  The stout man was arguing with the bar lady while lighting his pipe. I wasn't taken in.

  He was here because we were.

  'And keep your voice down,' I added. We bent to listen.

  24

  THEY TOLD ME at the manse that Mrs Dee was out painting. It meant a trudge of a mile before I found her at her easel by a river's oxbow bend.

  You never know with artists. They mostly hate gawpers, especially those who say, 'Hey, you've got the clouds wrong.' So I stood there like a spare tool. In countryside, everything's hunting. A heron standing on one foot, a kestrel flicking the sky, a crow on a branch, all itch to slaughter. An angler downstream proving that fishing is a good doze ruined.

  'Thank you,' she said eventually. 'Others can't resist talking.'

  'Okay.' I felt awkward. She seemed at home amid country carnage.

  'You're dying to tell me what I'm doing wrong, Lovejoy.' Her smile was mischievous. I didn't move to help her pack up. Artists are funny about that, too.

  'No.' Though I was, of course. Why the hell did she use a sable No. 12 brush, her washes so thick on 120 Whatman paper? 'Don't blame people, Mrs Dee. The eye can distinguish six million different hues. Bound to be argument.'

  She smiled, folding the easel, drying the paint wells with tissues. No litter from this lady. Clicked her box. Ready, steady.

  'Did they say when's teatime?' she asked. I took the wooden box, leaving her to tote her priceless works of art.

  'No. They never invite me in, at strange houses.'

  I was glad her hair was long. The Other Woman always has longer hair than The Betrayed Wife. Odd but true. A moral in there? Let your hair grow long, you'll not only keep your own bloke but snaffle some other woman's?

  'I heard they do. Invite you in, I mean.' She seemed to find me funny.

  Had she sussed me out? I didn't like that. Today I wanted everybody to be gullible.

  Especially Mrs Gloria Dee, who had antiques. I needed money to do Dieter Gluck. You can't con a crooked dealer without being at least a bit rich. Those two admirable Italians proved that, with their now fabled 'Walt Disney Scam'.

  They ordered four million dollars' worth of jewels in Place Vendome. Cleverly, they hinted at illicit arms deals, knavish underworld connections, and in France's posh Hotel Intercontinental showed the jeweller two cases bulging with German banknotes. 'Assure us of privacy,' was their line, 'and we'll pay over the odds.' What salesman could resist?

  The jewels and money were swapped, the Italian conmen vanished. The money proved to be marked 'Banknote Walt Disney', with Mickey Mouse logos. This cheeky scam proved the universal law that greed rules us all. And Gluck.

  We came in sight of the manse where her village began and countryside, thank God, ended. She hesitated.

  'The question is, Lovejoy, whose side are you on?' Her blue eyes held me.

  I didn't know what to say. 'In what?'

  'In poor Mortimer versus Dieter Gluck.'

  Women are often ahead of me when I think I'm miles up front. 'Dieter who?'

  She smiled, nodded as if to herself. 'That's sensible. You don't really know me, do you?'

  We entered the short drive. 'I might be an enemy, after all. Do come in. My husband will soon be home.'

  That almost stopped me. I'd assumed that she and Sir Jesson Tethroe, Member of Parliament, were sort of, well, frankly lovers. The housekeeper who'd first responded to my knock took Mrs Dee's clobber and we went through into a homely parlour overlooking a neat garden. Manse indeed. Christian books everywhere. I should have guessed. Mr Dee was a minister.

  We sat to tea and crumpets. No antiques, though. I listened to my chest. Not a thing. I must have looked accusing. She placed herself opposite with that in situ casualness women have. I ate quickly. Survival is timed speed. No antiques meant I ought to be going.

  'Look, missus.' I gestured at her home. Quite posh. Nothing like Clovis's grand manor, but well furnished, good Axminster carpets. 'I came to see antiques. Er…?' I wanted to ask if they were at Tethroe's, but married women's love is thin ice.

  'Yes, Lovejoy. I would like you to assess their authenticity. If they're forgeries, please say. If not, do a valuation.'

  This value thing's a problem. Any antiques dealer can guess what an antique will bring.

  Look at TV programmes, those 'Road Shows' which, the presenters piously preach, 'are not about money; they're about learning'. Watch for five minutes, you soon see whether they're about money or not. Out here in real life, dealers will charge you for

  'valuation'. Their fee's a percentage. Please remember that not one guess is worth a single groat. If some dealer says he charges a Valuation fee', tell him you'll charge him exactly the same fee for a look at your antique, and stalk off. It's a blinking nerve.

  'Thank you, Lovejoy. I didn't think dealers were so honest.'

  'Eh?' I must have been thinking aloud. Better watch that.

  'Robert seems late. Shall we take a look?'

  She rose with that one-move smoothness men can't do. I angled up, a bag of spanners, and followed through the french windows to a small conservatory. No jungles here. The lawn was stencilled, bushes in line, grass swept, trees clinging to their leaves for dear life like nervous visitors scared of spilling crumbs.

  It's a queer thing, this divvying. I suddenly felt truly clammy and shivery, like sudden flu. The conservatory curtains, sap green, were drawn.

  'I keep it locked, Lovejoy.' She wore a replica chatelaine, and used a key. We entered the conservatory's encapsulated dusk. I halted. She was speaking. I knew that because her mouth was moving, but I didn't hear.

  Above the very centre, from reinforced struts, hung a chandelier. Now, everybody knows a chandelier. Some are valuable. But, porcelain? A few lustres hung from the limbs to reflect light. I stood looking up, my chest bonging, sweat stinging my eyes. I felt it drip off my chin.

  'Sit, for heaven's sake. Don't you just hate it?'

  She had her hand under my elbow and helped me to a chair. I reached it on the slant before my knees went.

  'I'm fine,' I snarled. 'Leave me alone, silly cow. I'm okay.'

  'Stay still. Is it the antiques?'

  'Shut your row.'

  'I didn't know you would be like this.' She was all anxious. 'I thought it was just a matter of taking a look.'

  Porcelain is a world of history. From porca, Latin for sow, since it suggested pigskin.

  The stuff itself's quite simple - mix the right sort of clay with a fusible fedspathic rock, shape it, bake it in a kiln. The Chinese began it in the eighth century, and perfected it with their usual brilliance during our Middle Ages. China's original clay is the plasticky kaolin. The rock was called 'petuntse' by the French missionaries. This 'true' porcelain was the genuine stuff. It came first to Germany's Meissen, then Vienna about 1720-ish.

  Nearly fifty years later, the great names of France and England got going, and porcelain was king. We English copied the Chinese porcelain, from the 1740s on, by mixing 'frit' -

  glassy bits fused with lime or plain chalk. This made a 'soft' porcelain. There were other

  'soft' porcelains - Bow and Chelsea and Liverpool - made with calcined bone chucked in.

  Soft-paste porcelains I always think are merely beginners' tries. Real porcelain is the hard Chinese type, white, translucent, and lovely. One annoying fad is to speak with bated breath of 'bone china', brought out by Josiah Spode in 1794, but it's only hard porcelain formula with added bones. Purists regard it with contempt as an in-between.

  This chandelier was true hard porcelain of the Vienna factory. This manufactory's products are among the most highly prized and priced. Even at a distance, I could see the coloured onion-shaped churches and steepled roofs of houses depicted on the chandelier limbs. I
must have moaned, because she cried, 'I'll get some water!' I restrained her.

  Rarest of all in those days was the porcelain room. It sounds enough to make you ill, yet it was once all the rage. Great houses and palaces had rooms where furnishings, tables, and even walls, were porcelain. To me it's over the top, but who am I, when wealth defines luxury? The Vienna factory was created by du Paquier in 1719. It had ups and downs, going broke then thriving only to dive again. Empress Maria Theresa herself even had a go in 1744, but it tottered to a close in 1864. This financial swingbacking always provides one of the antique trade's ingredients for desirability -

  rarity.

  'Got a table? Chair with porcelain inset?' I asked, hoarse. This was what I needed, to hunt Gluck.

  'No,' she said simply. 'Only half a dozen mugs with black figures painted on.' She brought out a couple from under a sheet. 'Aren't they just horrible? Fat men sitting on barrels playing bagpipes?'

  So I keeled over. One of us had to.

  'Who is he?' this minister was saying, peering at me. Last rites, was it?

  'Lovejoy,' I grunted, hauling myself upright.

  'He fell when I showed him those pot things.'

  I didn't say, but should have done, that her 'pot things' would buy half her village.

  'Hot sweet tea, he needs,' the housekeeper said. She was a nice old dear with the self-righteousness all women have when somebody's ailing. 'People don't eat right any more. It's not good enough.'

  She poured tea into me until I was waterlogged. Then provided biscuits, cakes, buttered scones, jam. I began to recover.

  'I'm Robert,' said the bloke. 'You saw Arthur's pottery?'

  'Yes.' My mind called a halt to honesty. 'Er, is it for sale?'

  Arthur? The most sought-after porcelain is 'schwarzlot'.

  Collectors go mad for it. They're not all bobby-dazzlers, just mugs or other items decorated with rustic scenes depicting travellers at an inn, pipers playing for a drink.

  Importantly, it's not at all flashy, just monochrome, black. Sometimes du Paquier's men touched up the figures' hands or cheeks with a dab of red, maybe with a little gilding for light relief. These still qualify as schwarzlot items, so don't go chucking any away (joke). One such mug will buy you a brand new car. A full schwarzlot drinking set will buy you a new house, plus a motor, plus a round-the-world cruise with a bawbee left over. Rare, they're out there waiting to be spotted.