CHAPTER I
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ANTIQUES is a lovely but murderous game.
Some bits of this story you won't like. I'm telling you now just in case, but that's the way it is in the world of antiques. It's crammed with love, fear, greed, death, hate and ecstasy. I should know - I'm an antique dealer. And don't chuck this book away in disgust just because I've owned up and told you the truth.
I'm the only person in it you can trust.
I was with Brenda on her sofa.
For nearly a month I'd been scouring the surrounding villages without even a sniff of an antique except for a ninth-rate copy of a Norwich School painting, and a Bingham -
imagine a blue glaze on the daftest exotic porcelain dreamed up in a nightmare - and I'd had to sweat blood for those. Both were left for collecting later. Both were still unpaid for. The knack is to look fresh and casual when the woman (ten to one it's a woman) opens the door. I've only one suit I try to jazz up with a splash of red, a plastic flower. Then I knock and give them my patter, smiling like an ape.
On the day this story begins I had staggered my way from knocker to knocker, sofa to sofa, my bladder awash with coffee, my mouth sore from snogging, my pockets crammed with phone numbers and dates, but life undeniably grim on this torturing day.
Antiques seemed to have vanished from the earth. And they are everything. Everything.
Women and antiques are very similar - they come either in epidemics or not at all.
Where all this starts I was in the middle of an epidemic of women, and an antiques drought. The situation was really serious.
When you think of it, making love is rather like picking blackberries from a dense and tangly hedge. You need both hands and a lot of skill to do it properly and get away unscathed, yet your mind can be miles away. As long as you're up to the job in hand, as it were, you need not really concentrate very much. And none of this how-about- her-tenderest-emotions jazz. All the blackberry knows is it's being picked. If it's being picked properly, that is. Preferably by me. And as for me, well, I can only think yippee.
This particular blackberry's name was Brenda, a real goer. Her husband was out -
wonderful what a taste of treachery does for the appetite. And it was beautiful, heavenly, ecstasy.
It was even better than that, because from where we were… er… positioned, I had a perfect close-up view of the antique painting on her wall.
I could hardly keep my eyes off it.
We were downstairs in her living-room. Only lovers get the bedroom, and only idiots go up there unless there's a good reason, such as a granny nodding off in the kitchen or a baby somewhere which mustn't be disturbed. Wandering antique dealers like me get gratification at ground level as a reminder that the affair is temporary. That doesn't mean temporary's bad or even brief. It can be marvellous, like on Brenda's sofa.
But this picture.
If the picture hadn't been clearly visible from her front door I would already have been halfway up the next street. I was just beginning to fear I was losing my touch when she'd hauled me in and started ravishing. She shyly drew the curtains, really quaint.
A glimpse (I mean the picture, folks, the picture) set my heart pounding. It seemed really genuine late Carolean. A dark, splendid canvas. Original, too, but somehow… A smiling woman was presenting a little boy to his father in 'cavalier' dress while adoring yokels grovelled in the background. The painting's composition was right. The dresses were accurate. Most dealers would have leapt at it. Not me.
'Oh, God,' Brenda moaned, eyes closed and brow damp.
It was a superb forgery. Quality. The canvas I knew would be authentic, not just modern and aged by alternately oven-heating and fan-drying. (A penniless young Austrian painter perfected this particular method when forging pathetically bad copies of Old Masters. Name: Adolf Hitler. He eventually packed it in and turned to other interests.) I guessed the stretcher would be seventeenth century, though naturally pinched. After all you don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar. Brenda lurched and shuddered. Puzzled, I loved on.
It was in our climax that it hit me, maybe from the exploding colours in my mind. The lady's dress had a graceful crenellated peplum of citrus yellow, a clear yet quite witty give-away. Yellows have always been in since Roman days, but citrus yellow's essentially a modern colour. I'm quite fond of yellows. While Brenda and I geared down to that quiescent afterglow in which the woman murmurs and the man dreams, I couldn't help wondering what genius had executed a brilliant forgery and then betrayed his work with such knowing elegance. Talent like that doesn't get a whole colour wrong.
So it was wit, but expensive wit. He could have bought a new yacht with the proceeds.
Honesty can be very inconvenient. Still, I liked him whoever he was. Certainly I couldn't have done a better forgery. I know because I've tried.
She made us coffee afterwards, working steadily towards getting my name the way they do. She laughed at Lovejoy (not the first) but you can't forget Lovejoy Antiques, Inc., can you? It sounds huge and expensive American. It's actually only me and three sets of different phoney visiting cards saying respectively that I'm from Christie's, Sotheby's and the National Gallery. People will believe anything. Never mind what the man said. You can fool all of the people all of the time. It's practically my job.
'You have good taste,' I told her.
'Really?' She blossomed. 'I got the curtains from -'
In antiques,' I said firmly, refusing to be sidetracked. 'That lovely picture, for instance.'
