The Sleepers of Erin Read online

‘Throw Sam off the bridge. Now.’

  ‘Christ!’ Sam screeched. I punted him and he whooshed into silence.

  ‘You can’t . . .’ Clarkie whispered.

  ‘Or,’ I said affably, ‘he throws you off. When he recovers consciousness, that is. Be sharp.’

  ‘Please, Lovejoy. For Christ’s sake, it was all a mistake. I swear it.’

  Whirring the sling was tiring me fast. ‘Who made you rob the Fingringhoe church?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I can’t . . .’

  ‘Right.’ I made a sinister show of being about to unleash the sling and Clarkie yelled up, ‘I’ll tell! I’ll tell!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Joxer paid me. He set it up. He was there, signalled when we were to leave the Colchester road lay-by and pull the job.’

  ‘Joxer? You telling the truth?’ I didn’t believe him.

  ‘Honest, Lovejoy. Forty quid and he’d keep watch. He had muscle, Lovejoy. A scarey great bleeder with him who said nowt. We didn’t mean it, Lovejoy. Please.’

  So there I was, torn between mercy and revenge. Sooner or later somebody has to chuck in the sponge on vengeance. Otherwise we’re all at war for ever and ever, and life’s nothing but one long holocaust. I thought angrily, why should that somebody be me?

  ‘Right, Clarkie,’ I said, and turned as if to go.

  Next morning Janet woke me by rolling on to my sore arm. I shot into consciousness with a scream of pain and cursed, full of self-pity, while she rose blearily and brewed up.

  I was still grousing when she came back with a tray, eggs and toast and bowls of those flaky bits with nuts for adding milk. The phone had rung while she was up but I refused to go and fiddled with my dud radio instead. She answered it.

  I asked, ‘Where did you get all this grub, love?’

  ‘Called in at home taking Tinker back to town. Remember?’

  ‘No.’ I’d slept all the way, dozy as an angler’s cat. ‘I remember some stupid bird giving me a blanket bath before she let me rest. And feeding me some rotten broth.’ With Janet’s broth knocking about no wonder there’s all this malnutrition.

  ‘Broth’s good for invalids.’ We started breakfast in a peeved silence.

  It was quite ten minutes before she told me it had been Ledger on the phone.

  ‘Mmmh?’ I asked innocently. ‘How is he?’

  ‘He wanted to know where you were last night.’

  ‘Nosey sod.’

  ‘I said you were resting here. Tinker and I were with you.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll see your honesty is duly rewarded.’

  Janet was slightly pale about the gills as she told me Ledger’s bad news. Poor Clarkie and his partner Sam Veston appeared to have fallen from a footbridge on to the A12 near the Washbrook turn-off. Both were in hospital, with severe internal injuries. Poor Sam was very dicey. And, would you believe it, in the very same ward I’d just left, Sister Morrison’s ward in the male surgical block.

  ‘What a coincidence!’ I exclaimed, meeting her stare with all the frankness and innocence of which I am capable, which is virtually unlimited. ‘Fancy—’

  ‘Lovejoy.’ She gazed at me. ‘When you went to talk to Clarkie and Sam, nothing happened, did it? I mean to say—’

  I chuckled. At least I tried to, never knowing quite what chuckling sounds like. ‘You mean, did I beat them up and throw them off the bridge?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘With one arm? Just out of hospital? And them two big tough men, armed with knives?’ I went all noble and quiet. ‘I see, Janet. So you believe like the rest, that anything bad around here is my fault, even when I’m obviously still weak—’ If I’d been upright I would have put on a convincing limp.

  She put her arms round me, nearly tipping the tray. ‘No, darling. I’m sorry. It’s my stupid imagination.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said brokenly, being all forgiving. ‘Is there any more egg?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ She scrambled out of bed. ‘Half a minute.’

  I shouted after her, ‘Love. Throw my robin some cheese, if there is any. It’s tapping on the window. And when Tinker rings ask him to suss out Joxer Casey for me, sharpish.’

  Janet’s patch was warmer than mine so I edged across the divan to pinch it. My nineteenth-century walnut carriage clock showed a disgraceful ten o’clock. Another hour and the pubs would open, bringing Tinker staggering into the world again. One hour after that and I’d have Joxer by the throat.

  Remembering Lena Heindrick’s words, Ireland’s the only place that could be described as ‘foreign, but you don’t need a passport’. And Irish Joxer’s a boisterous Dun Laoghaire man who works in a shed near Priory Street in town. I felt quite perky. It was the first link I had.

  The only trouble with confidence is that it never lasts. I was to learn this elementary lesson the hard way.

  Chapter 6

  Janet had to go at eleven-thirty. She made yet another breathless phone call home to explain her absence, drenched herself in gallons of scent from an array of misshapen bottles out of her handbag, and we hit the road just as the rain stopped. She dropped me near the old priory ruins in the town centre and gave me a couple of quid to be going on with.

  ‘Eat, darling,’ she commanded. ‘See you tonight.’ Smiling, I watched her go. She’d told me, ‘I’ll have to call in. We have this Ming celery vase on offer.’ She meant celadon, not celery. Knowing Janet, it could be anything from the Portland Vase to a plant pot, though with her fantastic luck . . . She shares a stall with Sandra Mesham, a lovely girl. Sandra’s pretty good at early Islamic ceramics and calligraphy, and did Arabic, Sanskrit and art at college. She has a lovely figure. Janet hates her.

  Saturday morning turns any town centre into hell. With the crowds and the traffic I was too preoccupied to give Helen more than a passing wave. She’s the only real breathtaker we’ve got among the dealers, and was beckoning me from Jason’s window. Probably she wanted my say-so on that terracotta portrait bust of the Florentine Benivieni, supposedly a genuine article made about 1530 when the great philosopher was getting on for eighty. Tinker had told me the tale during one of his hospital visits, now Helen was keen to buy but uncertain. I knew what was worrying her – the world’s greatest-ever terracotta faker, Giovanni Bastianini, had done brilliant fakes which went for fortunes in the 1860s. I’d sent a message to Helen through Tinker to buy the damn thing outright because, like the famous Billie and Charlie medallion forgeries, Bastianini fakes are now more famous than the originals. And, by that incomprehensible quirk of the public, often more pricey. Helen had obviously got cold feet and wanted me to divvie it for her.

  Full of the comradeship for which antique dealers are famed, I quickly looked away from Helen’s alluring beckon – not easy, this – and ducked into the alley between the music shop and the grocer’s. In a dozen strides you leave the heaving street behind and enter a different world.

  This is the amazing thing about these East Anglian market towns. Their main streets could be mistaken for part of the busiest city in the world. Step a few paces to one side, and you recede centuries.

  The tranquil ruins of St Botolph’s Priory are fairly immense as ruins go. They stand between the huge nineteenth-century brick reconstructed priory and the old churchyard. Several figures were standing among the gravestones talking. Others moved carefully about on the trimmed wet grass. I recognized most of the local dramatic society, including Marcia. Their next open-air production was due soon. They looked perished.

  ‘Morning, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Wotcher.’

  ‘Want a part, handsome?’

  There was a roar at Marcia’s crack. I smiled weakly and edged past the rehearsal. She meant the time when I stood in to read three announcer lines to start a Melville skit and nearly fainted from fright. I’d been going out with Marcia at the time.

  ‘Never again,’ I said fervently.

  ‘We stop in an hour, Lovejoy. Free lunch?’

 
‘Don’t trust you actresses. You’ll give me a part again.’ I tried to keep it light and made the path safely. Marcia was smiling far too brightly. A few of the others shuffled and looked at the grass as Jimmy Day the producer quickly took it up.

  ‘Go again, people. Page thirty of your Fourth Folios . . .’

  A relieved laugh broke the embarrassment and they went easily back into Big Bill’s The Winter’s Tale, saving Marcia from her brief lapse, so I didn’t mind Jimmy’s dig at me.

  Joxer’s shed is a converted chicken coop, and is situated among the nettles and brambles which overgrow tall fencing rimming the churchyard. Some lone heroine was busy scraping lichens from a nearby headstone to record the inscription as I opened the creaky door.

  ‘Top of the morning, Joxer.’

  ‘Hello, Lovejoy.’ He looked up from his workbench. ‘Watch that bleeding draught.’ He is our plate man, and was busy French-plating across a damaged Sheffield plate. He had the silver leaves still in block, thank God, or they would have gone everywhere at a breath, and his agate-stone burnisher all ready with the plastic comb and toothpicks handy on the shelf. He’s a good workman, is Joxer, so it was all the more upsetting for him when I reached across and took hold of his bunsen fanburner and ran it gently up his arm.

  ‘Be careful, you frigging lunatic? You burned me! What—’

  He dropped everything and tumbled off his stool.

  I leaned on his workbench. ‘You never do get these seams right, Joxer,’ I lectured sadly. ‘Genuine Sheffield plate has seams. Electroplated stuff is uniformly coated pure silver. How many times do I have to tell you to follow the seams when you do cuivre argenté?’

  ‘What’s up, Lovejoy?’ He was scared, which was fine by me, because I was in a temper.

  ‘People say French plating’s only good enough to repair Sheffield plate worn down to the copper, Joxer.’ I snuffed the bunsen and slung a hammer into the plank wall beside his head. He yelped and jumped. ‘About a certain church at Fingringhoe, Joxer.’

  He licked his lips, looking at the door. ‘What about it, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Poor Clarkie and poor Sam. Make sure you send flowers.’

  His shoulders sagged in surrender. He’s not daft. ‘I knowed it was you did them over, Lovejoy. Only you could be that cruel.’

  ‘Me?’ I’m honestly astonished by this kind of accusation. No other antique dealer contributes to the Lifeboats Appeal like I do. And it’s always other people force me into violence. If only everybody would leave me alone I’d be an angel.

  ‘Yes, you.’ He righted the stool and lit a rolled fag. ‘I told them to look for somebody else, only they were hooked on this Kilfinney thing.’ He gave a wry wink at me. ‘A Dun Laoghaire man helping those Limerick people’s a terrible thing, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Really?’ I said politely. For me these places might as well be on Saturn.

  ‘It was a woman and a man. Rich, Rolls motor, the lot. She’s boss, I think. Called him Kurt, talked like Froggies in some language to each other. Hardly any accent.’ He blew smoke. ‘It had to be Fingringhoe, that church, that day, that hour. They wouldn’t say why. I’m no cloth-job man. You know that, Lovejoy. Clarkie jumped at it for forty quid.’

  Which sounded like the Heindricks all right. The top silver leaf lifted gently on the bench beside me, which meant that somebody with the strength to lift the creaky door into silence as it opened was coming in behind me. I saw Joxer hide a smile in his glance at me, and smiled openly back, which meant he knew I knew he knew about that somebody.

  ‘Wotcher, Kurak,’ I said without turning round. ‘You touch me and so help me I’ll do the opposite of what you want. Otherwise, I’ll come quietly.’

  ‘He means it, sor,’ Joxer said quietly towards the door.

  The door groaned as the giant bloke let it go. ‘Then come,’ he growled.

  ‘Say please,’ I said, still not looking. My spine felt crinkled.

  After a silence, ‘Please,’ landed across my shoulder like a cross.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Cheers, Joxer.’

  I was to remember what happened next for a long, long time.

  Suddenly Joxer said, ‘Lovejoy. Can’t you watch a minute with me?’ He’d gone quite pale, as if realizing something horrible.

  ‘No,’ I told him. I was in enough trouble, and he’d done me no favours. His expression was abruptly that of a man looking at the end of the world.

  ‘Cheers, boyo,’ Joxer said. His voice was fatalistic but quite level.

  If I were not so thick I’d have expected trouble of the very worst kind. But I am so thick. So cheerfully I walked with Kurak up to the street, waved to Marcia among Jimmy Day’s acting crowd, and was driven off in grand style.

  That’s how wars begin, by not thinking. My kind, that is.

  Chapter 7

  The Heindricks’ house was even more imposing than their motors. It stood overlooking the Blackwater estuary. The gardens had that scrubbed look which only a battalion of dedicated gardeners can give, and the drawing room where we sat had that radiance which unlimited wealth imparts.

  ‘You travel in four days, Lovejoy.’ Kurt could have been one of his own antiques, he was that polished. He was clearly monarch of all he surveyed, and possibly of everything else as well. Standing before his log fire and issuing directives, he caused a weary sinking feeling in my belly. All my life these bloody people have been giving me orders with complete disregard of the consequences – for me.

  ‘Will I?’ I said sourly.

  ‘You will.’ He smiled with benevolence. ‘Mrs Heindrick will meet you at the destination.’

  His missus clapped her hands – and I do mean actually clapped them, as they once did for slaves. Instantly a rather surly bird appeared with a tray of those small cakes. She had already done one circuit but I’d had all the savouries. I was still famished and tried to be casual reaching for the fresh plate. God knows who invented manners. Whoever it was had never felt hunger, that’s for sure. It’s desperately hard taking less than you want in other people’s posh mansion houses – and everybody, honest and dishonest, knows that’s the truth.

  ‘The terms will be excellent, Lovejoy,’ Lena said. She had spotted my glance at the retreating bird’s shape, which is typical of women’s sly behaviour, but I was only interested because I’d never seen another slave before. Mrs Heindrick’s lips thinned with displeasure. She must have detected the same kind of lust when I glanced at the oil painting, but she wasn’t as narked at that. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s—’

  ‘A copy.’ I wasn’t really glad, but it was one in their eye. The pair of them exchanged significant looks.

  ‘But laboratory tests show it to be an original early eighteenth-century oil of a seafarer, Lovejoy.’ That from connoisseur Kurt, whose untold wealth had always gained perfect grovelling agreement to any banal utterance he chose to make. Until now.

  ‘Oh, John Tradescant was a seafarer all right.’ I rose, touched the oil’s surface reverently and found myself smiling as the warmth vibrated in my fingers. ‘And it’s old. But a famous building off Trafalgar Square’ll be very cross if you go about telling fibs, mate. They’ve got the original.’

  ‘John who?’

  I was enjoying myself. ‘Tradescant only sailed about to nick seeds, bulbs, plants, anything that grew. His dad was as bad. He even raided the Mediterranean pirates to get a bush or two. Between them they introduced a load of stuff – apricots, Persian lilac, Michaelmas daisies, the larch. They did Russia, the American colonies, North Africa. Tradescant’s collection became the Ashmolean at Oxford.’ The old copyist had got Tradescant’s wryly wicked smile just right, but the date of 1612 was a shade earlyish.

  ‘A copy?’ Lena Heindrick spat out a vulgar curse, which made me blink.

  ‘Don’t knock copyists. Turner himself started out as one.’ It’s a daft joke we play on ourselves, really. Find a genuine flower painting by Palice and it’s not worth a fiftieth of the price of
a Turner copy. ‘Copy and original are linked by greed, Mrs Heindrick.’

  ‘Don’t be so bitter, Lovejoy.’ She was smiling again and the thought crossed my mind that she had only been goading me. ‘Let’s get back to that subject, then, shall we? Money.’

  ‘A good daily rate, all expenses paid, and a share of the profits.’

  I weakened at the thought of money – which meant antiques and food, in that order. ‘Four days? Why so soon? You said I could get better first.’

  ‘Because if you stay here you will be in even more trouble.’ Kurt exposed his pearly teeth. I just couldn’t imagine him ever growing stubble. The hair follicles just wouldn’t dare.

  ‘I’m not in any trouble.’

  ‘Oh, but you are. Detective-Sergeant Ledger’s phone call to your . . . consort Janet this morning was quite explicit.’

  The mansion was plushily furnished with a skilled admix of antiques old and new. I couldn’t help feeling sad, having been at the original auction some years ago. The old East Anglian manorial family had sat there in pained dignity while us dealers and auctioneers had robbed and fiddled them blind. Here’s a free lesson: promise me you’ll never, never, never sell up by means of an in-house on-site auction. This or any other doorstep selling is ruinously wrong. You might as well just throw the stuff outside to the rag-and-bone man. At least he’ll give you an honest donkey stone for it. A shoal of antique dealers and auctioneers won’t.

  ‘More blackmail?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled and decanted sherry – the Kurts of this world do not simply pour – while Lena pressed the cakes on me. She was watching me nosh with a kind of appalled awe, but it was all right for her. Women don’t get hungry, only peckish. ‘It has become a matter of urgency. If you will go about throwing people off footbridges and talking to the careless Joxer . . .’

  ‘Have you had me followed?’ There was even a peacock on the lawn, radiantly displaying its fan. Lena Heindrick saw me looking and smiled.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Okay. Where do I go?’

  ‘You’ll find out when you arrive.’