There isn’t quite a footpath. You find bearings by hawthorns and brambles. Usually there’s enough light from passing cars and the distant town’s sky glow. Tonight there was only this horrible graveyard opalescence.
Ellen had thoughtlessly forgotten to bring a torch. Typical. I skittered down, brambles plucking at me, until the level road surface jarred my heel. No traffic sounds, so presumably safe to cross.
Listening nervously, I loped over, climbed the central crash barrier, and thankfully made the opposite verge. Left turn, keep within reach of the grassy slope for safety, and plod until the road margin indented the steep bank. Then a huge car started at me of a sudden, roared off, all in one instant. I had a vague swirly image of two figures, one familiar, then silence. Bloody fools could have killed me.
The wagon when I came upon it looked enormous. Oddly, its lights were dowsed. I almost walked into its radiator in the damned fog. The heat-stink of the cooling engine drifted at me.
“Hello?” Fog muffles sounds, doesn’t it? My call hardly went a yard. No answer. “You there, mate?”
The cab’s door was ajar. I swung myself into the driver’s seat, feeling at altitude. A fumble for the keys, there sure enough, and a half-twist for beam headlights. The dashboard’s fluorescence cast a ghostly apparition on the windscreen, losing me a heartbeat till I realized it was my own nervy face. A square white card was lodged in the corner of the thick glass. I turned the card over. A black capital L. My signal, so this was the right wagon. But stillness is stillness, and there was a lot of it about. The size of these night haulers is daunting. I levered down, leaving the lights on. A car swished by steady and fast, heading for the coast. The driver was probably having a pee, or gone looking for me.
“Hello,” I called. My voice warbled. I cleared my throat, called again as unconvincingly.
No sound. I walked the length of the vehicle. It seemed all wheels. The rear doors were unlocked, one leaf swinging ponderously open at a pull. Interior lights came on, like in a fridge. Empty.
“Hello?” I shouted. The place was giving me the spooks. Now, the one thing a night haulier never does is leave his wagon. Gulp.
A car crawled into the lay-by, spotlighted me in its beams. Ellen to the rescue at two miles an hour. “Darling?”
I walked round and got in, trying hard to disguise my relief. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Charming,” she said bitterly. “It’s hundreds of miles to the Marks Tey turnoff. Where’s your cupboard?”
“It’s four miles. And it’s a bureau. Gone.”
“Then ask the driver, dear.”
“He’s gone, too.” I peered uneasily into that black-gray smirch.
“How very thoughtless. I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”
You have to forget logic with Ellen. She was moved to aggro, actually starting to get out to ballock a vanished lorry driver, when I stopped her. “No, love,” I said piously.
“I’ve kept you out in this awful weather long enough. It’s time I considered your feelings.”
“Darling,” she said mistily. “You’re so sweet.”
True, but I’d better get rid of her sharpish after dawn because Liz was due about ten with a genuine pair of mid-Victorian nipple jewels, sapphires set in diamonds. I joked nervously as we pulled out. “Promise not to ravish me again.”
“Very well, dear,” she said seriously. “Look, Lovejoy. The lorry’s left its light on. It’ll waste its electricity.”
“How careless,” I said uneasily. “No, love. Don’t stop.”
Next morning I had three jobs. First was Liz, chatty antique dealeress from Dragonsdale that I was conning into selling me those lovely nipple drops—think of earrings with bigger loops for dangling pendant-like from the pierced nipples of interesting Victorian ladies. Liz had found a set with their accompanying large gold sleepers. I’d been banking on profit from the bureau to afford them.
My second and third jobs were easy, now I was broke. Two lithophanes of erotic couples, and a pride of tortoiseshell seamstress scissors, 1840, were in the auction. I’d hate seeing them sold to some flush swine, but I could no more keep away than fly.
Ellen fried me a good nosh. She brings supplies because I’m always strapped, and leaves little labeled packets in the fridge—“Boil 10 Mins In Slightly Salted Water” and all that. I never do it, because it always goes wrong. I got shut of her at a safe nine o’clock. She always wants to strip the bed and hang sheets on the line, God knows why.
What good are they waving in the breeze? I lied that I’d do it, to make her trip home to Ipswich less of a rush. She said I was an angel. Modestly I waved her off, concealing my relief, and got down to the problem of sussing out The Missing Bureau Problem.
First, however, remember this ratio: five to one. Not a Grand National bet, but the number of phony/fake/reproduction bureaus to the genuine. Five times as many fakes as genuine. And that’s here, in rural East Anglia, where habits—and furniture, and paintings and porcelain—don’t change. I have figures for most antiques. Jewelry is eight to one; pearls twenty; pre-Victorian oil paintings three fakes to one genuine. So, all in all, the odds are heavily against the honest buyer and heavily in favor of the crook.
It stands to reason that you’re on a loser. The dice of honesty are loaded against you, the poor unsuspecting customer.
Lately, though, I’d been having a bad patch. Even though I’m a very special type of antique dealer—tell you more in a minute—it was pathetic. Sometimes, antiques vanish like snow off a duck. Buyers evaporate. Collectors get a collective flu. Money zooms into the Inland Revenue’s coffers untouched by human hands. In other trades things never become utterly hopeless. I mean to say, a farmer at least still has the good earth if his crop ails, and doctors can always look forward to a really great epidemic if their patients strike a depressingly healthy patch. But in the antiques game there’s nothing. An antique dealer with no antiques feels a right prune. A hungry prune, because when you’re broke the Chancellor simply refuses dole. No, subtract antiques from the great equation of life and all is zero.
Well, nearly zero.
