Pearlhanger Read online

  ‘Silly bitch, Margaret. I told you to bid for it if I was delayed.’ I spoke loudly for Jeb’s benefit. His barker – Doris, a rheumy old doxy with radar ears – was shuffling innocently nearby.

  Margaret looked harassed, not sure if I was pretending. ‘You never said definitely, Lovejoy.’

  I kept up the gripe. ‘Bloody hell. Do I have to decide every single time there’s a Constable copy around East Anglia? We’re knee-deep in the sodding things . . .’

  Doris trundled innocently back into the throng to report that I’d used that doom word ‘copy’. I breathed again. We were now in the space near the tea bar at the back. Margaret was curious, wondering what was going on. She’s early middle age, lovely, has a gammy leg from some marital campaign or other, and loves me. We’ve been intermittently close for years because of our unspoken agreement: I never ask after her husband, and she doesn’t demand honesty from me. This is why older women are best by miles. I’d swap ten popsies for one thirty-plus any day of the week.

  ‘Get somebody to bid for 228,’ I muttered, still pretending anger for Jeb Spencer’s benefit.

  ‘Who?’ Margaret knew better than to glance back to where 228 lay. Idly I scanned the mob of dealers. God, but we look horrible in a group. Tinker was there, an old bloke milling about a cluster of over-coated dealers. He’s my own barker, paid in solid blood to sniff out antiques, rumours of deals, any news at all, and sprint – well, totter – to me with the news. He’s a filthy old soldier. His cough can waken the dead.

  ‘Flag Tinker down. Tell him to get one of his old mates in from the betting shop, sharpish. His mate can have the rest of the job lot, but keep the Arita dish.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit Chinese for Arita?’

  The big dish had the Dutch East India Company ‘VOC’ mark among its stylized pomegranate designs – the O and C each bestriding one limb of the V in a central circle – all in underglaze blue. The Dutch wanted replacements for the Chinese porcelains they couldn’t get after 1658, and began their Japanese Arita shipments about then. A genuine one like 228 can keep you two months in sinful luxury.

  ‘You women always bloody argue. Dutch VOC Arita’s supposed to be Chinese Wan Li style. Japanese potters spent half a century perfecting the phoney look.’

  ‘Did it feel genuine, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right.’ And from the way she spoke I knew she’d now arrange a serious bid. She trusts my divvying skill implicitly, though not much else. ‘Is Gwen’s Constable sketch genuine?’

  ‘Genuine old, not genuine Constable.’

  Margaret pulled a face. ‘People were saying it was a Tom Keating fake.’

  ‘I know.’ I knew because I’d started the rumour to lower the price. Tom was one of East Anglia’s great modern success stories in fakery.

  ‘Bernard will he pleased,’ Margaret pronounced sweetly. Gwen’s husband gambles every groat Gwen brings home. It’s quite an arrangement. Actually I like Gwen, but she gets on Margaret’s nerves. ‘Seances, Lovejoy? Not Beatrice, I trust.’ Beatrice is our one antiquarian occultist and lives down on the wharf with a giant mariner. She and I used to, erm, before the Navy arrived.

  ‘No. Owd Maggie. Some bird wanting news of an overdue husband.’ I kept half an ear on Wheatstone’s meanderings. ‘A ghost told her to hire me.’

  Margaret was interested. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘The ghost presumably; the husband hardly. Owd Maggie said he was living it up at the seaside.’

  ‘And you won’t go?’

  I shrugged. ‘Got fed up. No point. He’s probably just shacked up with some tart, keeping his head down and his—’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Margaret reproved, taking my arm all the same. I shook free and gave her the bent eye. In antiques there’s no time to be pally.

  ‘They’re at Lot 203. Get a move on.’

  She tutted in annoyance and moved over to the mob for Tinker. The old bloke was the right choice. Nothing daunts porcelain experts more than finding a scruff bidding confidently alongside. For a few pints Tinker’d bid serenely for the Mona Lisa. Probably had, in fact, more than once.

  Pleased at having rescued the day from total waste, I ambled, grinning, to get a cup of tea and be ready for the fun. The other dealers were all suspicious. Helen lit a cigarette and eyed me sardonically, knowing something was up but having to guess exactly what. She’s the shapeliest legs in the business and coughs in her sleep from so many fags. Patrick, our most extravagant local, was also suspicious. He looks and is decidedly eccentric, but he and Lily – a wealthy married lady he archly describes as his procuress – are a pair of formidably shrewd dealers. Big Frank from Suffolk, terror of local silver collectors and marriageable spinsters, feverishly rummaged through his catalogue in case he’d missed something. He’s our most-married dealer, seven on the trot plus one foreign bigamy on a Beirut package tour, though we’d all warned him not to go.

  Cheerfully I sank back on a Windsor wheelback chair – modern copy, real gunge, not even a proper yew-wood hoop to grace its poor little back – and felt my spirits rising. What with a chipped cup of grotty peat-coloured tea, a warehouseful of antiques and junk, amid a mob of idiot dealers and the scatterbrained old public, I felt able to reflect on the perfection of life.

  ‘Here, Lovejoy. I’ve an old print covered in candle-grease.’ Rudyard Mannering had sidled up from the intense mob of dealers. He’s a bloke who always looks suspicious even if he’s doing nothing wrong, although I like him. He’s quite harmless. All he thinks of is old manuscripts. He hovered furtively, a Bolshevik bomb carrier if ever I saw one.

  ‘Scrape it with a paperknife, then soak it in petrol a few minutes. Use BP Five Star. Have you a camel-hair brush . . . ?’

  Absolute bliss.

  My ecstasy ended exactly at Lot 217, a Victorian chaise longue with faded upholstery and one leg missing, because Donna Vernon found me, like a whirlwind. See what I mean about women being really selfish? Just because her husband’s gone missing she comes and interrupts my day.

  From then on it was downhill to doom all the way, and no turning back. God knows I tried.

  Her abuse and threats came about half-and-half. Of course everybody had a laugh at my expense, especially when Wheatstone had his whizzers – auctioneer’s assistants, even more cretinous – bundle me and the blonde into the glass-partitioned office. My mates kept grinning through the glass pulling flat-nosed faces. Chris Bonnington, he’s coins and Tudor domestic crafts, even opened the door to call some good-humoured jest but by then I’d had enough and gave him one of my looks. He left in silence.

  No silence about Donna. She threatened me with subpoenas, writs, lawsuits, hate, poverty, and took a swing at me. I countered by shoving her into Wheatstone’s one chair.

  She yelped, squirming. ‘That’s assault and battery! Chauvinist pig! I’ll sue you—’

  ‘Law’s irrelevant to such as me, love.’ I kept her pinned down with Lot 331, silver-headed walking cane, quite nice but a bit late with its Birmingham hallmark of 1883. Her belly was too soft to damage the tip so that was all right. ‘Just get somebody else.’

  ‘I’ll see you never work again, Lovejoy!’

  ‘Thanks.’ I’ve not done an honest day’s work for years. Somebody on my side at last.

  The door opened, and in wafted Lydia on a cloud of babble from the auction, her face screwed up to denote how sternly she was taking this spectacle.

  ‘What’s going on, Lovejoy?’ She’s only my apprentice, but you wouldn’t think it from the way she goes on sometimes. She’s a born nuisance, but great. Heart of a sinner, soul of a nun. Martin Luther knew his stuff. This voluptuous maid wears morality like an erotic gymslip.

  ‘You’re a witness!’ cried my blonde. ‘Lovejoy attacked me.’

  I transformed instantly. ‘Mrs Vernon wants me to go away with her, Lydia,’ I said meekly. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Pull yourself together, madam,’ Lydia commanded, cold. ‘I will not hav
e hysteria.’

  Mrs Vernon stopped wriggling at the wintry tone. I’d chosen my phrases carefully. Ben, one of Gimbert’s whizzers, rapped on the glass for the cane. Gingerly I relaxed pressure and passed Lot 331 out of the door, spotting the relief on Big Frank’s face. Women always like hearing that a man can’t stand another bird, even if it’s only one of those telly newsreaders with disastrous hairdos.

  ‘Lovejoy’s under contract to me and’s trying to default.’ Mrs Vernon rose to do battle. I was happy to see she was now furious at Lydia instead of me. I edged out of the door. Women, especially real ones like Lydia, have this knack of quelling opposition by simple turns of phrase. It’s a gift. God really knew His stuff with spare ribs.

  Jeb Spencer and Chris were closer to the glass partition than they needed to be, and moved aside with studied casualness. The sods had been trying to listen.

  ‘A rich London buyer,’ I lied casually.

  They tried to nod disbelief but I could see they were unsure. Pleased, I saw Margaret leave carrying a bag. Tinker must have nobbled the job lot with the Arita dish. That meant 10 per cent, say, a week’s living expenses from the VOC plate alone after the split. I’d see Margaret got her favourite reward. Now to con the near-Constable oil sketch out of Gwen Pritchard before husband Bernard pleasured it off her and gambled it on some lame nag, and I’d be laughing.

  There was a commotion by the door. Algernon was arriving in his Martian-style bike rig. Algernon’s my other apprentice, buck teeth, clumsy and mind-bendingly slow, for whom I’m paid a pittance to teach antiques. He has the brains of a rocking horse. He was looking pleased with himself as he blundered through the door and fell over a small escritoire with a crash. The dealers laughed. He’s never done anything right yet, so why change the habit of a lifetime?

  ‘Lovejoy!’ he yelped, grinning delightedly as an old dear hauled him to his feet. ‘That pewter!’

  Disbelievingly I thought: I’ll cripple him. It was supposed to be a secret deal, the nerk. Subtle as the Blitz. This was obviously turning out to be one of those days. I darted through the mob at a breathless run into the safety of Gimbert’s yard.

  Fourteen pubs within a stone’s throw. One gulp of the town’s exhilarating smog and I headed towards the Three Cups and perdition.

  Ten minutes later I was pulling Owd Maggie’s leg about being a witch. She drinks foul black stout until the pub closes.

  ‘Madame Blavatsky, I presume,’ I joshed. ‘What’ll Cardew have? Pint?’

  She spoke without animosity, contentedly hunched in the inglenook. ‘You can scoff, Cockalorum. But he’s as real as you or me.’

  I pretended to be impressed. ‘Is Cardew always right?’

  ‘Never wrong, dear.’ She rattled her glass. I scraped together the odd groat and fetched her a bottle. ‘He was right about you,’ she pointed out. ‘Told that lady straight, Cardew did. Said you were not to be trusted.’

  ‘Then Cardew’s a cheeky sod. Anyhow, he got it wrong. I’m not going.’

  ‘Lovejoy.’ Breathlessly Lydia slid into the seat beside me as I spoke.

  ‘Got rid of her, eh?’ I was really pleased, though surprised Lydia had entered the tavern alone. She usually knocks at the door and waits to be brought in, going red and keeping her eyes on the floor. This time she was ignoring our tawdry surroundings. If anything, she was a bit pale around the gills. My heart sank.

  ‘You’ve sold me to white slavers,’ I accused.

  ‘No, Lovejoy. Please listen. Good afternoon, Madame Blavatsky.’

  ‘Hello, love,’ said Owd Maggie, smiling at me. I could have throttled her, batty old know-all.

  ‘There’s been a prediction. In a dream. Mrs Vernon received a warning. You must go with her, Lovejoy.’

  I tried to push off but Lydia was penning me in. Luscious women are a right pest. ‘For crying out loud. This isn’t the frigging Dark Ages, Lydia. Everybody knows superstition’s all crap.’

  ‘Kindly moderate your language, Lovejoy,’ Lydia said. ‘No situation’s too horrible for good manners.’

  ‘You tell him, dear,’ from Maggie. ‘He can’t go against the guidance.’

  ‘Shut your gums, you silly old crab. You’ve caused enough trouble.’

  ‘Lovejoy! Apologize this instant!’

  I mumbled something to mollify Lydia but I could tell her heart wasn’t in all this.

  ‘You see, Lovejoy. You are our only dealer who has the inner eye.’

  ‘I divvie antiques, not people.’

  ‘Cardew knows,’ from Owd Maggie.

  I wondered for a second if Cardew secretly told her what me and Lydia got up to, blow-by-blow accounts as it were.

  ‘But Mrs Vernon hates me. And she’s going to sue.’

  ‘Not now I’ve negotiated a lucrative rate.’

  See what I mean about women? Sniffing heart-break because I was in chancery, meanwhile briskly fixing percentages.

  ‘Don’t be cross, Lovejoy,’ she urged earnestly. ‘I have ensured that you will reside only in first-class accommodation, receive intermittent emoluments, and any antique purchases—’

  ‘Antiques?’ I perked up in spite of Lydia’s Brontëspeak. Until now there’d only been talk of this tiresome husband.

  Lydia’s eyes opened wide. ‘Didn’t you know? Mrs Vernon’s husband is an antique dealer on an antiques sweep through East Anglia. The idea is you simply find him—’

  ‘—through the antique shops he visited?’ I yelped. My spirits soared. I assumed a quiet courage. ‘Very well, er, darling. If . . . if it will please you.’

  ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said. Because it was true I let her buy the next round. The search couldn’t take long, after all. And if we already had a list of places where he’d gone, it’d be simple.

  Right?

  Chapter 3

  NEXT MORNING DAWNED wet and gale force across the estuary. A strong turbulence was whistling up the valley tumbling my apples on to the grass. Lydia had arrived early, shivering and complaining whenever the wind gave its chimney moan. Her feet are always perishing cold, worse than Dolly’s and Connie’s even in summer. She’s unreal, a gentle little soul full of vitamins, Victorian manners and bran flakes, and was packing for Armageddon.

  ‘Your brown pullover if it’s chilly, Lovejoy,’ she was saying, folding away. ‘Shirts and underpants. Shaver, Lovejoy. Look.’

  To oblige I looked. Face screwed in solemn concentration, she deposited my electric razor with the deliberation of a stage magician trying to convince a sceptical audience he’s not cheating. ‘Right,’ I said.

  Lincoln. Lowestoft. Manningtree. Surely not in that order? I had drawn rings round the places on the map from the list Donna Vernon had given me in Jackson’s restaurant. East Anglia’s a big place; admittedly no Australia, but more nooks. Purling Lock. Where the hell was Purling Lock? Barnthwaite I’d never heard of and couldn’t find.

  Surprisingly, Donna Vernon appeared almost at ease and really rather presentable when finally she showed. I hadn’t looked too hard at her yesterday. I vaguely remembered an assortment of modern stridey gear, the jeans and duffel sort, all buckles. Her hair now moved a bit instead of seeming clamped. Her coat was actually brightly coloured. Today’s mouth was an obvious red, whereas yesterday I’d only noticed the decibels.

  ‘Good morning, Lovejoy,’ she said to me out of the car window. Lydia got a curt nod.

  ‘A couple of last-minute’s, Lydia.’ I humped my case in. ‘Tell Helen her price is too high for that Ming Dynasty erotic print of that couple on the matting. Get Patrick to go halves with us for Gwen’s Landscape Noon sketch that she got yesterday, and fend Jessica off over that Nabeshima porcelain. She can have our Lowestoft jug, but charge her the earth.’

  ‘Very well.’ Lydia stood there on the gravel outside my cottage door. ‘You have everything.’ Unquestioning statement, that. ‘Travel safely . . .’

  ‘Not be long.’

  ‘Let’s get this show on the road, for God’s sake!
’ from dearest Donna.

  As we slithered out into the lane scattering pebbles I saw Lydia’s hand raised in the minutest flutter. It takes somebody as sensitive as me to realize what an effort that gross demonstration cost her. I cleared my throat. Women get to you. You have to take proper precautions because female means sly. I’d have to watch myself. Antiques is too grim a game for attachments.

  Algernon had just got off the village bus by the chapel. He saw me and flagged us down, spooking a fat pony which was noshing the chapel hedge. He goggled in the car window.

  ‘Lovejoy! There you are! How very fortunate—’

  ‘Cut it. You got the pewter medallions?’

  Mrs Vernon drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

  He was astonished. ‘Lydia didn’t inform you?’

  ‘Of what?’ Foul suspicions welled within my breast – see how catching fancy talk is?

  He stepped back, smirking proudly. ‘I did what you continually instruct, Lovejoy. I checked! The Latin inscriptions were gibberish!’

  ‘And you didn’t fetch them,’ I registered brokenly.

  ‘True!’ Algernon exclaimed in triumph.

  ‘Drive on, missus.’ I wound the window shut.

  The motor moved out on to the main road, leaving the nerk babbling inanities in the exhaust fumes.

  ‘You’re a chauvinist bastard, Lovejoy.’

  ‘What is that?’ I was honestly interested.

  ‘Shakespeare’s daughter wasn’t even taught to write. That’s chauvinism!’

  ‘You mean she never learned.’ I thought: Clever old Judith Shakespeare. Sounded to me as if Big Bill’s offspring had her head screwed on. Everybody’d expect her to produce Hamlet Rides Again the first rainy weekend. I went on the attack to suss Donna out. ‘Where do you Yanks stable your horses if you’ve got no old cathedrals, love?’

  She checked the rear-view mirror. ‘That young man saved you a fortune, and you treat him like dirt.’

  I stared. People just can’t be this dim. ‘Those medallions were Billie and Charlie fakes, eighteenth century, rare, and pricey. A lunatic caftan-wearing lentil-eating clock collector called Mannie down at Wivenhoe had three of them and had agreed to let me have them on split commission. Now Algernon’s ballsed it up.’