“Just how fascinating people’s faces are,” I lied. “I’m good at faces.”
“Women’s especially?”
“Mind your own business.”
She was back to laughing then, swaying in her wheelchair. It was one of those oddish moments when the environment conspires. She was there beside the fountain. The sky behind her had darkened. Thunder rumbled. Yet a watery sun picked up the gray-yellow gravel, her white blouse, the colors of the old tartan. Lovely enough to mesmerize. Lucky I’m not easy to manipulate, or a girl this lovely could have me eating out of her hand. A terrible desire rose within me. My body’s a hostage to hormones, but with a lass who couldn’t walk—
“Actually,” she said, as we parted, “we cripples have different ways of making… music, Lovejoy.” Another super-correct guess what I’d really been thinking about.
She left me so preoccupied that I hardly noticed Duncan playing hell with me for skiving instead of getting the bureau’s drawers undone. Elaine was disturbing. Weirdly swift to guess what you were thinking—far too swift for my liking. Only supposition, of course. I don’t believe in telepathy or whatever it’s called. But I didn’t like this idea of not being alone in my own head.
Duncan put me at the old piece. He watched me like a hawk as I tapped and listened and set about marking the wood components. I’d got some self-adhesive labels from the Innes stores in Dubneath.
“A waste of money, Ian,” Duncan disapproved.
“Oh?” I cracked back sardonically. “So you’re the daft faker who pencils his illegal intentions all over the finished product, eh?”
He surrendered with a chuckle and lit his pipe to watch. He’d had to concede. Simplest tip on earth: When you’re thinking of buying antique furniture, take a glance at its inner surfaces. There you might see measurements indicating the faker’s reduction factor—
inches cut off, even types of wood to be used.
“One goon I know in Newcastle even writes it on in felt-tip,” I told Duncan. “I ask you.”
“You know a lot, for a wandering cousin.”
Caught. “Ah,” I stammered. “We had to learn all that. At the London College.”
“Very thorough. Have you a family, Ian?”
“No. Except now you lot. My erstwhile spouse had found my transparent honesty too much to cope with.”
Duncan helped me to upend the bureau. The base was in a better state than I’d hoped.
“You should use Newcastle, Duncan,” I panted, struggling to tilt it on a block support.
“Handy for Liverpool, without being too direct.”
“Aye, we tried…” He ahemmed and reamed his pipe. I’d caught him, but absently worked on. Aye, we tried and failed, is what he’d been about to say. He’d discovered, like many antiques fakers, that there are folk pathways in dirty deals. New dirt’s distrusted. Old schemes have a kind of inbuilt security. That’s why a woman chooses a particular color, fancies a special perfume: It swept Cecil off his feet, so why not Paul?
It’s the reason crooks stick to a particular modus operandi even when they know it hallmarks their particular chain of robberies. And a painter faking Cotman’s genius, like Big Frank’s mate Johnnie does in Suffolk, would rather polish off a dozen Greta Bridge phonies and sell them to that same fence in Hamburg than paint different ones every time.
Clue: Tachnadray’s fakes had only one outlet, and that was through my own stamping ground, East Anglia. Which meant also I could easily find out how much Duncan’s replicas had made lately. I whistled, irritably searching for tools on the bench.
“No wonder you got rid of Joseph,” I grumbled. “Messy sod. I’ll rearrange this lot when I’ve a minute.”
Duncan stilled. “Joseph?”
Unconcerned, I began rearranging the tools into some sort of order. “I knew a bloke once was so bloody untidy that—”
“As long as you do better than he did, Lovejoy.” Duncan went down to the other end of the workshop to mix varnish. An unpleasant reprimand, that, with its hint of threat.
Come to think of it, where was this Joseph? I decided I’d better find out. Tactfully as ever, of course. That’s my way.
It was three days before I had a chance of talking to Elaine without being upended by Robert the Brute. Which doesn’t mean they had passed uneventfully. Duncan and me’d argued nonstop about our next opus. I favored faking a series of small Georgian tables from scratch; Duncan stuck out for modifying— “putting back” in the antique- fakery slang—some tired Victorian bureau, very much as we were doing now. It was evidently his thing. And we had burdensome mealtimes, with Elaine teasing us all, over Michelle’s table. Her grub was Frenchified, by which I mean tangy of taste but ethereal. It tended to dissolve before you got it swallowed. We had suppertime visits from Shona, and a couple of flying visits from Jamie, who dropped us some materials in his van. This, plus a shepherd bringing two sheepdogs to prove they were topnotchers, was it. I quickly got the hang of life at Tachnadray, or thought I had.
But getting the hang of a scene doesn’t mean tranquillity. It can mean just the opposite. There were just enough worry points to disturb my beauty sleep. Like, Michelle and Shona smiling their hundred-percent hatred smiles. Like everybody knowing about Joseph but nobody saying. Like Tachnadray’s pose as a glamorous laird’s mansion complete with loyal retainers yet having barely enough furniture to dress out two rooms, a stage set in a ghost palace. Like Duncan’s lone wilting attempts to provide the crumbling estate with an income. When at my noon break Elaine called me over to meet the shepherd’s wriggly black-and-white dogs I thought, here’s quite an opportunity.
“Er, great,” I said, trying to sound full of admiration.
The shepherd grinned, said something in Gaelic. The dogs gave each other a sardonic glance as if saying, here’s another idiot townie who hasn’t a clue.
