Gold by Gemini Read online

  ‘It’s genuine, Patrick,’ I said brokenly. ‘Superb.’

  ‘You perfect dear, Lovejoy!’ he whooped ecstatically.

  ‘Korean, about latish fifteenth century.’

  Excited, he dragged me away and showed me a few other items – a phoney Meissen, a modern Hong Kong copy of a Persian-influenced Russian silver gilt tea and coffee service, supposedly 1840 (it’s surprising, but modern eastern copies always give themselves away by too rigid a design) and suchlike. We had a final row about a William and Mary commemorative plate. He was furious, wanting everything he showed me to be genuine now.

  ‘It’s a genuine blue-and-yellow, Lovejoy!’ he protested.

  ‘I’m sure it is, Lovejoy.’ That from the anxious Lily, unbiased as ever.

  ‘It’s modern,’ I said. I touched it. Not a single beat of life in the poor thing. ‘They always get the weight and colours wrong. The yellow should be mustard. The blue should be very blue.’ The dazzling loveliness of that Korean bottle was making me irritable. I added, ‘You know, Patrick. Blue. Like your frock.’

  He wailed into tears at that. I left, feeling poorer than ever and a swine. For all I knew, ultramarine might have been his colour.

  Still two hours to wait for a bus home. And still all blank. I strolled towards the Castle museum. It was time I saw what sort of antique coins had been stolen, in case. The town museum is in the Castle. Its curator’s a small, tidy man called Popplewell. I got to him by telling a succession of uniformed opponents I wanted to make a donation to the museum. One even tried to charge me admission, the cheek of it. People take my breath away sometimes.

  ‘Donation?’ I told Popplewell, puzzled at the mistake. ‘I’m afraid one of your assistants got it wrong. I said nothing about any donation. I’m here about the robbery.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said dismally. ‘Insurance?’

  Now, to digress one split second. Insurance and I – and I strongly urge this to include you as well – do not mix. As far as antiques are concerned, forget insurance. Concentrate what money you have on the antique’s protection in the first place. Don’t go throwing good money away.

  ‘No,’ I said, rapidly going off him. ‘I’m an antiques dealer.’

  ‘Really,’ he said in that drawl which means, I’ve met your sort before.

  ‘I want to know what was nicked in case it gets offered me.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He eyed me suspiciously, reclassifying me as a lout.

  ‘Yes. They’ll start looking for a fence,’ I explained. ‘They may take the goods to one of us respectable dealers.’

  ‘I see.’ He came to a decision. ‘Very well. I’ll show you. This way please.’

  I didn’t tell him Lovejoy’s Law for the detection of stolen antiques, which runs: any genuine antique offered to you at a third of its known price has been stolen. Blokes like this curator chap are just out of this world. You need somebody like me to amass a collection, not a dozen committees.

  We puffed on to the Roman landing. Popplewell halted at a sloping case. He removed a board and its covering beige cloth. The glass beneath was shattered and the display cards all awry. The legend card read GOLD COINS OF THE ROMAN PERIOD: BRITAIN. Popplewell took my stricken expression for criticism.

  ‘We haven’t had time to establish a substitute display,’ he said. ‘And the police have taken scrapings and photos for prints.’

  ‘Could you be more specific about the items?’

  ‘A set of Roman staters. Gold. Claudius. And some silver.’ He saw me reading the cards scattered in the case. It had been a rough smash-and-grab. ‘Those are Mr Bexon’s own labels.’

  ‘Er, Bexon?’ I sounded hoarse all of a sudden.

  ‘Top right-hand corner.’ He pointed. ‘The donor wanted his own labels retained. Quite incorrect, of course, but . . .’ He shrugged.

  I read them through the broken glass, careful not to touch because police can be very funny about fingerprints. The cards all said the same: GOLD COINS, ROMAN PERIOD. Then a curious sentence on each: Found by the donor, Roman Province of IOM,’ I read aloud.

  ‘Was he serious? Isle of Man? But the Romans –’

  Popplewell shrugged again. ‘He was a somewhat eccentric old gentleman. He insisted that we adhere to that wording exactly, though we all know that the Isle of Man never was colonized.’ He covered the scene of the crime. ‘We have the most amazing conditions appended to our gifts sometimes, t could tell you –’

  ‘Thank you,’ I interrupted hastily. ‘One thing. Were they genuine?’

  ‘Of course.’ He got nasty. ‘If you mean to imply this museum doesn’t examine properly and in detail all –’

  ‘Er, fine, fine,’ I said, and moved off. ‘If I hear anything I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Good. You have the phone number?’

  The Castle galleries run three sides of the square, leaving a huge central well crowded with visitors at this time of year. Helen saw me looking and waved upwards quite calmly from where she was inspecting one of the coaches on display there. I waved back. Helen wasn’t thinking of going in for Queen Anne coaches, that was for sure. When I’d climbed down she’d gone.

  I walked thoughtfully across the drawbridge among tourists and children, and found I was worried sick. Bexon isn’t all that common a name. I decided to look in at Margaret’s. I still had time before the bus.

  Hers is the only shop with a good dose of sunshine. She looked up and came limping to welcome me with a smile. I’m too fond of Margaret. There’s a husband somewhere in the background but I’ve never had the courage to ask, though I do know she has a good range of some man’s suitings in her bedroom wardrobe. We know each other fairly well. I like Margaret more than I ought, but you get days, don’t you? I slouched in like a refugee. ‘Stop that,’ I told her irritably.

  Margaret was twisting a pewter burette. On a good day it turns my stomach. You can imagine what it does to me on a bad one.

  ‘Hello, Lovejoy.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m seeing if it’s genuine.’

  ‘Trust its appearance,’ I growled. ‘Why torture it just because you’re ignorant?’

  ‘Charming,’ she said, but she had no right to get nettled.

  Dealers get me sometimes. We’re all as bad. Pewter’s the most maligned, crippled and assaulted of all antiques. Dealers who reckon to show they know a thing or two twist pewter, actually grab hold and twist it hard. When you do it hard enough it screams, screams from its poor little soul. Well, wouldn’t you? Really tears you apart. It’s a. terrible, wailing scream like a child in intractable pain. Only pewter does it. Dealers, the bums, think it’s clever. People do similar sorts of things to jade. Ignorant collectors say that if you can scratch it with a key it isn’t genuine, which is rubbish. Any reasonable jewellers will give you (free) a card showing Mohs’ Scale of hardness for semi-precious stones, which tells you all you need to know about what can scratch what. There’s no excuse for simple ignorance. Never be cruel to antiques, folks. They’ve done nothing to you, so don’t go about massacring them. And pewter’s got a fascinating history. Of course, it can be very difficult to collect, though you can still buy good pre-Conquest specimens. It was actually forbidden in churches at the Council of Westminster after 1175 AD, but the French allowed it by their Council of Nimes, 1252, so there’s plenty around, and eventually our lot saw the light again. More sense in those days.

  I took the little wine vessel from Margaret. It looked like the mark of Richard Marbor, 1706 – a Yeoman and therefore fairly well recorded. Good old Henry VIII took a little time off from attending to Anne of Cleeves in 1540 to encourage the York pewterers to record their touchmarks on their wares, so a lot is known. I told her all this, and added that there’s no reason to go throttling these delicate antiques when you can learn twice as much by reading and just looking.

  ‘Tea?’ Margaret offered by way of thanks.

  ‘Er, no, thanks.’ Margaret’s tea’s a legend among survivors. Who’s best with Roman coins round here, besid
e Cooney?’

  Cooney’s a mad half-Spanish dog-breeder who lives down on the marshes. He’s been divorced six times and he’s only twenty-eight.

  ‘There’s him,’ she said, ‘and Pilsen. And that magistrate.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘And that overcoat man.’

  We have a few eccentrics hereabouts. The man with the overcoats is a local living legend. Like Charles Peace, he’s rumoured to have a fatal attraction for women, which of course may just be him boxing clever, it being well known that women are oddly attracted by such stories. He collects overcoats and Stuart coins. The magistrate is an elderly man who fought at Jutland or somewhere. He’s hammered Edward I silver coins. Pilsen’s a dealer with a one-room lock-up shop on the Lexton village road. He makes kites and has religion.

  ‘Thanks, love.’ I rose to go.

  ‘Lovejoy.’ Here it came. I’d watched her working up to it inch by inch. ‘What’s it about? You aren’t usually uneasy.’

  ‘I’m not uneasy,’ I said.

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘Look. If I wanted to find out how somebody died,’ I asked, taking the plunge, ‘how would I go about it?’

  ‘The doctor, I suppose. But he won’t tell unless you’re the next of kin.’

  ‘What about Somerset House?’

  ‘Better the local registration office. That’s nearer.’

  I gave her a kiss and departed.

  The woman at the registration office was helpful. Poor old Bexon’s death certificate showed he’d passed away without causing the slightest bother or suspicion. Nothing out of the ordinary to hold up wills or bequests. She was pleased at how tidy everything was.

  I stood at the bus stop thinking so hard I almost forgot to get on when it finally came.

  Chapter 4

  I LIVE IN this cottage, often alone, on the edge of a village a few miles from our main town. There’s a garden, a copse, blackthorn hedges good for purple sloe gin at Michaelmas, and a muddy path I keep meaning to macadam over. The village lane begins at my gate. Further down there’s just a path to the river’s shallow watersplash at Fordleigh. I always set my break-in alarm because we dealers are forever being burgled; It has to be flicked before unlocking the door or Police Constable Geoffrey, our village Sherlock, gets hauled out of his tomato-ridden greenhouse to pedal over and tell me off again for causing false alarms.

  Once in the cottage I was at a loose end. I just couldn’t get going. Everybody has a blue patch now and then, I suppose. I’m normally a buoyant sort, but I couldn’t settle down to anything. It rained for an hour or two about four, so I washed this week’s socks and swept up. The vacuum was on the blink so I did without. The village’s one shop had pasties in. I got two for supper and some tomatoes.

  Normally, I read over a meal. This evening I found myself staring at the same page, reading a paragraph of Dean Inge’s essays over and over. Poor old Bexon kept coming into my mind, A forger, but apparently an honest one. Why else that revealing yellow? So he was honest, the poor innocent. But those Roman golds. Popplewell said they were genuine. The labels said mostly Nero’s reign. There were even one or two showing the babes being suckled by the wild she-wolf, Romulus and Remus. Rome’s originals. And the famous arched ‘DE BRITANN’ gold of Claudius the God. Well, all right, but there never was such a thing as a Roman province of the Isle of Man. Everybody knows that. They simply never got there. Even if they’d heard of it they’d ignored it.

  A wrong label’s the sort of odd mistake you pass off in any museum. A million like it happen every day. But the picture in Mary’s house was done with love and almost incredible skill. And gold’s gold. And, far more to the point, a Roman antique’s a Roman antique. I thought on, guiltily knowing I should have been bringing my notes up to date.

  At the finish I gave up and got a map. You can see why. they didn’t occupy it of course, way out in the middle of the Irish Sea. Not wealthy, not very populous, probably poor weather much of the year. No wonder. I locked the front door, drew the curtains and rolled back the living-room carpet.

  The easy way to lift the giant flagstone would have been to use a beam winch rigged to a two-horse-power motor connected to the iron ring set in the floor. That would have been a bit obvious, though, so I lift it with my own lily-whites. There’s a switch by the steps leading down into the priest-hole. Nothing had been disturbed. It was probably an old vegetable store, but you’ll have noticed by now I’m incurably romantic, if a bit cynical with it. There are a few tea chests down there for storing my vast stock of priceless antiques (temporarily sold to buy a luxury called food). It’s ideal for storing antiques. The old folk had their heads screwed on. Nowadays it’s all builders can do to stick houses down straight, let alone include anything useful for the occupants.

  I drew out the folding Regency table and opened my card-index. Penniless or not, antiques impose their own demand on any dealer worth a light. I meet it by keeping notes. Paper clippings, book abstracts, catalogued details from sales, hints picked up at auctions, eavesdroppings, museum listings – many horribly wrong, by the way – and advertisements, all get stored away. I searched frantically for any suggestion of a brilliant forger operating locally. Plenty of duds, and one or two not so bad. But brilliant? Not a sign. I looked up names.

  I found two Bexons. One’s a collector in Norwich. He’s hooked on Victorian mechanicals. Three years before he triumphed by snapping up a beautiful late model of Thomas Newcomen’s engine. He must still be paying, but I’d bet he was smiling through his tears. Mechanicals are worth their weight in gold, plus ten per cent of course. The second (braver) Bexon was a regular buyer of découpage – paper cut-outs varnished on to surfaces for decoration of furniture, ornaments, firescreens, tableware and such. In itself it’s a small antique field, but you can say the same about Leonardo da Vinci’s stuff, can’t you?

  More worried than ever that I’d somehow missed a really golden opportunity, I closed up.

  I went out to check my two budgerigars as soon as it stopped raining. The garden was drenched, the grass squelching underfoot. A sea wind had sprung up. As darkness falls my cottage seems to move silently away from the two other houses nearby. One had lights in the window. I was pleased about this, though it was only old Mrs Tewson and her dog. I checked the budgies’ flight with a torch and said goodnight. They fluffed and chirped.

  The budgerigars, Manton and Wilkinson, were how I’d met Janie. I’d done over one of the stallholders on our Saturday market. He’d had the birds in an old shoe box covered by a piece of glass, no food or water. Practically accidentally, I’d stumbled against him, breaking his shoulder, poor man, after buying them from him. Worse, I’d accidentally broken his fingers by standing on his hand. The police had come along and tried to make a case out of it, but, luckily, Janie saw it all and explained it was an accident. They’d let me go suspiciously, which only goes to show how they’re completely lacking in trust these days. I’d taken one look at Janie, smiling and wealthy, and that was that. She’d given me a lift back, helped me to buy the cage and seed, and matters took their own course, as folks say. Janie says I’m soft about them, but I’m not. At the moment I could only think of Bexon. Forger or not, he was my lifeline back into the antique business.

  Inside the cottage I fidgeted and then cleared up and fidgeted again. I even wished I hadn’t had to pawn the telly. Isn’t it funny how you get feelings. I decided to use my one remaining asset and phone the names Margaret’d given me. Cooney’s always in because of his dog kennels. I told him I was interested in the stolen coins.

  ‘You and the rest of us, Lovejoy,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘From the Isle of Man,’ I explained innocently.

  He snorted disbelievingly. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he told me. ‘Oh, they’ve had the odd stray Roman denarius show up, but no hoards or anything like that. The old chap who donated them went about saying he’d found them there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On Man. Wouldn’t say e
xactly. There was a row about the labels, I remember. He insisted on writing his own.’

  ‘Thanks, Cooney.’

  I got Pilsen next, the only religious antiques dealer-cum-kite-collector in the universe. He blessed me down the phone and intoned a short prayer for my success but couldn’t help. He tried to sell me a kite but forgave me when I said some other time. The old magistrate barked that the robbers should be horsewhipped, and slammed the receiver down when I admitted I had no Edward I coinage for sale. The overcoat man after a chat gave me a commission to bid for him at a local auction for an officer’s greatcoat of the Essex Regiment, but otherwise nothing.

  No use phoning Janie when I had the blues, though she’d be blazing tomorrow. You can’t help being on edge sometimes.

  Imagine suddenly meeting somebody who believed they could prove there’d been a hitherto unidentified King of England whose existence nobody else had ever suspected. Or an extra American President. Or an extra moon for Earth. I felt just like that.

  It probably didn’t matter, I decided. The wrongest guess I ever made.

  I decided to; sleep on it but tossed and turned all night.

  Chapter 5

  NEXT MORNING, JANIE was waiting, illegally parked, pretending to look at the cutler’s wares in Head Street. I’d caught her by phone just as she was going out for a hair-do. We agreed to make up over coffee. She took one look at my face.

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  We went to a place near Gimbert’s auction rooms on East Hill. I could see them unloading the antique furniture from the window table. Janie paid, pretending to do it absent-mindedly so I wouldn’t take it bad.

  I told her the tale of Patrick’s wonderful find, the Korean vase. She said I should have tried to learn where he’d got. it, but that’s something dealers never do. She listened about Bexon, Popplewell, the Roman golds. I told her that Dandy Jack had got hold of the remnants of old Bexon’s belongings.