The Judas Pair

He slurped in his cup. 'They're nicked!'

'On loan. Jim's good-hearted.' I let him recover. 'Heard anything special about any of these names?'

He flipped slowly through the lot, shaking his head each time. 'Except the two big ones, that sale was a right load of heave-ho.'

'You buy anything, Tinker?'

It hurt him. 'You know me, Lovejoy. Antiques aren't my business.'

I grinned in great good humor.

'Neither of those bought anything? Try to remember, Tinker.' He would. It's like being a football fan. Just as they can recall incidents from games seen twenty years past, so we can tick off auctions as if they'd been yesterday.

You might wonder why I didn't just look at the purchasers' names on the invoices. Well. Invoices, however complete, never tell it all. I wish I had time to tell you what goes on in an auction. For every ten lots sold by the auctioneer, another ten are sold among dealers. We buy a lot from the auctioneer sometimes, and even before he's moved on we've sold it to a fellow dealer. All the time it goes on. 'Ringing' you already know about, I'm sure, where dealers get together and do not bid for a choice item, say a lovely French commode. When it goes to Dealer A for a paltry sum—i.e., when it's been successfully 'ringed'—he'll collect his cronies and they'll auction it again privately in a pub nearby, only on this occasion Dealer A's the auctioneer and his mates are the congregation, so to speak.

You'll probably think this is against the law. Correct, it is. And you may be feeling all smug thinking it is rightly so because whoever's selling her old auntie's precious French antique is being diddled out of the fair auction she's entitled to. Well, I for one disagree. Nobody actually stops the public from bidding, do they? It comes back again to greed, your greed. And why? Answer: You want that valuable commode for a couple of quid, and not a penny more. If you were really honest you'd bid honestly for it. But you won't. How do I know? Because you never do. You go stamping out of auctions grumbling at the price fetched by whatever it was you were after and failed to get. So don't blame the dealer. He's willing to risk his every penny for a bit of gain, while you want medieval Florentine silver caskets for the price of a bus ride. You ring items by your greed. We do it by arrangement. Why your hideous but dead-obvious greed should be quite legal and our honesty illegal beats me.

'That Bible pistol,' Tinker remembered. 'Not too bad. I did drop a note in at your cottage, Lovejoy.'

'I passed it up.'

'Watson bought it.'

'In his usual style?'

Tinker's eyes glowed with religious fervor. 'You bet.' He rolled a damp fag and struggled to set it afire. 'It was in one of his buying sprees. You know him, quiet and hurrying. I reckon he should have been a cop. Busy, busy, busy.'

I wrote a mental tick against Watson's name. He'd attended six auctions that week, and the date matched no fewer than eight postal purchases, all after a ten-month gap. Phenomenal.

'Major Lister buy, did he?'

'Yes, a set of masonic jewels for some museum.' I knew about those and the Stevens silk prints he'd bought as well.

'All in all,' I asked, 'a quiet, busy little auction with more than the average mixture of good stuff?'

'Sure. And not a bad word uttered,' Tinker said, puffing triumphantly.

I let his little quip pass impatiently. 'Is that list of people complete? Think.'

He thought. 'As ever was.' He shrugged. 'The odd housewife, perhaps.'

'Thanks, Tinker. Anything else?'

He told me of the Edwardian postcards from Clacton, the Regency furniture at Bishop's Stortford, that crummy load of silver being unloaded up in the Smoke, and the Admiralty autograph letters being put on offer in Sussex. I knew them all but slipped him a note.

'You got them Mortimers, then,' he said as we parted.

'A hundred quid,' I replied modestly. He was still laughing at the joke as I left to see Margaret's collection of English lace christening gowns.

'Sorry about everything, Lovejoy.' She pecked my face and brewed up. There were a couple of customers hanging around, one after pottery, one after forgeries. (Don't laugh—collectors of forgeries will walk past a genuine Leonardo cartoon to go crazy over a forged Braque squiggle.) As they drifted out she hooked her 'Closed' notice on the door.

'I've had a drink, Margaret, thanks.'

'I saw you.'

'Tinker reporting in,' I explained, looking around. Her lace christening gowns were beautiful, but I always sneeze over them. 'I can never understand why these things are so cheap. A few quid for such work, years of it in each case.'

She smiled. 'Keep plugging that attitude. Genuine?'

'Does it matter?' I said. 'Any forger who does something so intricate deserves every groat he gets.' I felt them. 'Yes, all good.'

'I thought you'd been neglecting me till I heard, Lovejoy.' She brought tea over despite my refusal.

'No matter now.' I took the Victorian Derby cup as a mark of friendship because her tea's notorious. 'All over.'