“They don’t hang people now, stupid sod,” I said icily.
“Maslow always said he’d make you an exception, Lovejoy.” He was still rolling in the aisles, coughing himself apoplectic, when his visiting time was up and they shelled him out.
They released me on two counts. One, the big Midlander had fought his murderers, and I was unmarked. And two, a respectable lady testified that, marooned with a stalled engine on the main A12 during the night of the great fog, she had been assisted by a stranger who started her motor and drove her to safety. As a gesture of appreciation, she had insisted on driving him to his home, a thatched cottage in a little village nearby.
“How could the lady see your cottage, thatch and all, in the pitch fog, Lovejoy?” Maslow asked evenly, with that threatening peace police manage so effortlessly. “And how come you’d forgotten the entire incident?”
“I couldn’t compromise a lady,” I explained nobly.
“One day, Lovejoy. One day.”
Deliberately I let the office door slam on him. I waggled my fingers at the desk sergeant.
He, too, warned, “One day, Lovejoy. One day.”
“Great phrase you police’ve got there, Ernie,” I said. “Stick at it. Might make a full sentence one day.”
And I left happily. In fact, super-happily, because in my languishment the penny had dropped in my cavernous skull. You never twin a fake, right? All that extra skilled labor is only worthwhile if the original piece is a genuine antique. The driver had been done for a valuable piece, not a cheap reproduction.
Now things made sense, I began hurrying.
« ^ »
—— 3 ——
Our ancestors liked to be thought fine, moral folk. Same as us, eh? Flesh being flesh and spirits being weak, they rarely made it. In fact, they were as hopeless at sanctity as we are. Sadly, it bothered them more, but they were better at pretending. Look at lithophanes, for example, which I was currently angling after.
You’ve seen how light transluces through a lamp shade? If you’re a craftsman, you can make porcelain thin enough to show translucency in exactly the same way. Lithophanes are small plaques of super-slender porcelain in which you see a picture when you hold them up to the light. However, naughtiness crept into the Victorian designs. Not all the pictures hidden in the antique porcelain are pretty trees and hillsides. They are often lascivious ladies in mid-frolic, doing scandalous things with sexual abandon. Nowadays collectors pay through the nose for erotic lithophanes—purely for the art, you understand.
Tinker was in the White Hart soaking the day’s calories and coughing so well that people had given up trying to listen to the jukebox. It’s where our local antique dealers gather and pretend to celebrate between failures.
“Wotcher, Lovejoy.” He jerked his chin. Ted the barman nodded and drew two pints. I paid. It’s Tinker’s principal method of claiming his salary from me. I’ve gone hungry before now to get him sloshed, because a barker’s vital. He can winkle and cheat with abandon. Antique dealers must be circumspect.
“Wotcher, Tinker.” I forked out. I bought us a bar pasty in the euphoria of freedom.
“News of the bureau? Dutchie?”
“Nar. I got you Dobson.” He indicated with his eyes the tall lone figure at the bar’s end.
Even in a crowd the thin silent barker somehow stood apart.
Dobson’s a somber one-off. For a start, he’s the only bloke I know in the trade who doesn’t have a nickname. And he never says much, just hangs around listening, vigilant. Folk say he carries a knife and once did time. He looks fresh from an alley war.
On the other hand I like Dutchie, a genial bloke with a word for the cat. He appears out of nowhere once every Preston Guild. He comes like a comet, handles the deals Dobson’s lined up for him, then vanishes for a fortnight or so. But Dobson unsettles me.
A few minutes later I was asking Dobson where his wally Dutchie was.
He never answers immediately, in case there’s another way out. “Gone on the ferry.
Dunno where.”
Fair enough. “See anything of a bureau, the night that wagon driver got done?”
“No. Sorry.” Nothing here for an inquisitive dealer fresh out of dink.
“Was Dutchie around that night?”
He shrugged after a long lag phase. Nothing. I rejoined Tinker, back to hungry reality.
So I’d lost a fortune. I couldn’t afford to lose still more by inactivity. “The lithophanes, Tinker.”
“Them little pot flaps?” Tinker’s way of describing artistic genius. “Three-Wheel.”
“Three-Wheel Archie? Great. Come on, Tinker.”
He wailed, “But I haven’t had me dinner, Lovejoy.”
Fuming, I gave him two of my three remaining notes, which left me just enough to breathe. “See me tonight, then. The Three Cups.” The sly old burke was cackling with glee as I left.
From the call box outside, I phoned Ellen to beg a lift. The glass was shattered, so I had to stand in the rain and shout over the whistling gale. Unbelievably, she put down the receiver the instant she recognized my voice. Bloody nerve. Next week she’d prove to me, by complex female reasoning, that her refusal to speak was a precaution to help me in some way.
A call to the Infant School earned another rebuff, this time from Jo. A bad day for loyalty. A stranger gave me a
