We’d pitched that night after Joan gave me tea and a liedown, me working with Big Chas and Ern. Joan had asked if I wanted to use one of the spare bunks in her caravan.
I checked with Francie, who said it’d be fine. Betty asked if Joan would be my mummy now. Dan fell about and slapped his thighs. After the midnight dousing I went over to Joan’s caravan and knocked. She called me to come in.
For her devil-riding on the Ghost Train she wears a crash helmet with horns and a bone-and-spangle costume, bat wings, and a forked tail. Sparks shoot from her head and her suit belches colored smoke and radiates a green fluorescence. Because of this she always has her hair in a tight bun and flattened on her head. It was the only way I’d seen her.
The caravan was in darkness, except for slits of wavering yellow light showing from behind a cross curtain. Hesitantly I called, “Joan?” and she said to come through.
Making plenty of noise in case—she might after all be shacking up with Big Chas or somebody—I coughed and pulled the curtain slowly aside. The sight caught at my breath. Her face was looking obliquely back at me from the dressing mirror. A single white candle in an old pewter candlestick, the only illumination, stood to one side. Her hair, enormously long, hung down her back to her narrow waist. It was now a lustrous brown, even russet. Her skin was smooth, her lashes long and dark. She wore an old lace nightdress—some would have said wrong by reason of its age, but not me. In the mirror’s frame she was a living Gainsborough.
“Sorry about the light,” she said.
“Eh?” I thought: It spoke.
“My father was strong on the right light for makeup,” she said calmly, doing something to her face with folded tissues from a jar.
“You’re beautiful,” I heard myself say, to my alarm.
Her so-gray gaze returned to the mirror for a quizzical second, then she nodded slightly. “If the beholder says so, Lovejoy.”
That was the start of what Sidoli meant. From then on I, well, lived in Joan’s caravan.
Francie still scraped the queue from my Christys and Sothebies Great Official Genuine Antique Roadshow, and Joan still banked it. But henceforth Joan also banked me as well. I owned up to little Betty that, yes, Joan and me were family.
The night before we hit Edinburgh was the week working up to the Festival. The city was already bubbling, teeming with actors spilling over into street theater. We pitched a mile or so south of the center. All the world and his wife had turned up. Bands, orchestras, dancers, artists, poets, jugglers, the lot. You had to have your wits about you or you found yourself frantically hip-hopping among bedecked Morris teams. Sidoli was beside himself with glee. “Bissolotti is late!” he exulted, frantically exhorting us to greater speed as we threw the fair into one glittering noisy mass.
By now Sidoli’s advance agent—a near-legendary figure called Romeo who got ballocked every time our cavalcade rested long enough for Sidoli to reach a telephone—
had learned of my road show, and was papering the towns for me two days before we hove in. This made life much easier.
Tinker did his part of the antiques scam, fixing sales, and organizing transport through Antioch. He was getting a regular screw through money drafts—essential, because he can’t even remember his name when he sobers up. Get him sloshed and instantly he’s the Memory Man. It was my plan to jump ship at Edinburgh, preferably before Bissolotti’s “animals” cruised in and wanted their rightful share of the Festival crowds.
Also, Maslow would be very, very cross indeed if I blackened his district’s reputation up here among the dour provosts of jolly old Edinburgh. Sidoli had as good as admitted that he himself would take any blame, but from vast experience I knew only too well who’d carry the can.
So my plan was to do a moonlight as soon as I’d done one night’s pitch, then head off north to net Shona McGunn. In any case, this was as far north as the fair would travel.
For me it had outlived its usefulness.
I found a phone in a pub near the little green and reached Tinker contentedly imbibing his daily swill in the White Hart. He sounded mournful.
“Lovejoy? Here, where the bleedin’ ’ell are you?”
“Mind your own business.” I was a bit sharp with him. The White Hart’s never without a mob of dealers. All along I’d been ultragalactic careful, not wanting neffie people following me with unkindness in their hearts. I wanted no baddies lurking to catch me when I leapt from the fairground. “Ready? Here’s the list of stuff I’m sending during the night. Most to Brum and London; a few bits and pieces to you.”
“Yeh, Lovejoy, but—”
“Shut it and listen.” Patiently I read him my list, adding which dealers to try and minimum prices to accept. “Right?”
“No, Lovejoy.” The old burke sounded really down. “It’s Three-Wheel. Remember?”
For a second I had to rack my brains. Of course. I’d told Tinker to phone me Archie’s message. It seemed so long ago. Days, weeks even. I felt a hand close on my chest.
“They did his motor, Lovejoy.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Smashed it to smithereens. Windows, bodywork, set fire to the inside. Some boat geezer down the estuary saw the smoke and wirelessed the fire brigade.” Long pause, me mechanically feeding the slot coins. “Lovejoy?”
“How’s Archie?”
“Knocked down on his trike hurrying home. He wuz at the auction when they brung the news. But he’s only a
