'Lovejoy hates engines.' Saunty laughed, digging files. A heap fell over. Yamta knelt to retrieve them. 'But that George Thingy in Surrey's the wizard. No?'
'It's got to be confidential.'
Saunty fell about laughing. Yamta laughed, quivering so much I had to think of Blackpool.
'Nark it,' I said, indignant. 'I want confidential, not another Piltdown.'
The Piltdown Scam is fabled in song and story, when Eoanthropus dawsoni, the infamous Dawn Man of Sussex, was excavated near Lewes in 1912. It's such an obvious scam I wonder they don't teach it in school. There are scores of books written about whodunit. Myself, I blame Smith Woodward of the British Museum. Saunty sobered.
'Never thought I'd hear you use a word like confidential, Lovejoy, especially when you're going to sink a rodent like Gluck. Know what confidential means nowadays? It means Scottish Water customers' 'confidential' details turning up as wrappings on fireworks made in Ceylon. It means secret SAS manuals sold at a boot fair. It means MI5 security documents on a council rubbish tip. And medical patients' laboratory test details found in dustbins. I can list two thousand breaches of confidentiality, Lovejoy.
Want it?'
'No.' I struggled to think. 'It's got to be posh. He's a snob.'
Instant delight. Yamta crowed, hurtled into the stacks.
'Why didn't you say so, Lovejoy? We're home and dry!'
'We are?' I was too tired, scared for Mort.
'Snob means royalty, or rescue. Prestige, see?'
No, I didn't. He sat back.
'Listen, Lovejoy. There was a bloke in the fen country. Declared himself King of Upware, his village, nineteenth century. Renamed his pub Five Miles From Anywhere No Hurry.
Barmy. Guess what? People flocked.'
'That's not for me. I want fake, not flake.'
'Some bloke fifty years back declared his village independent, offered it for sale to the USA, Soviet Russia. No takers. He finally 'donated' it to the Queen, ending the reign of King Len. I've scores of others.'
Saunty scented success. 'Lord This, Earl That, Baron von God-knows-what. It's the oldest con in the world. It's only pretending. And it's legal to invent - and use - a tide.
Anybody can do it.'
'They can?' I was startled.
Yamta was loving this. 'Want to be the Marquis of London, Lovejoy? Just say you are!
You can't get arrested. Want your girlfriend to be the Princess of Whitehall? Just have her visiting cards printed, and presto!'
'What if somebody checks up?'
'You're in the clear. But don't use it to commit a fraud, Lovejoy.'
A long pause. 'Ah,' I said.
Saunty grinned at my expression. 'Ah, indeed! We there?'
'Well done, everybody,' Yamta said. 'I knew you'd do it. Now a little break, I think.'
I escaped an orgy by promising to return when I'd more time. I carried with me a folder compiled by Saunty. The question was how much to tell Mort. I got a lucky lift on a Long Melford furniture lorry, and reached the canal where I'd once fallen in. Teatime in Suffolk's four o'clock. I couldn't help pretending that I'd cycled all the way, so fit that I hardly raised a sweat. Pathetic.
22
STANDING IN THE woodland, where the big river didn't quite reach the sea estuary, I reflected that everybody does the unexpected. A man marries the wrong bird. A girl takes the wrong subject at college. You order the wrong meal. Women especially don't do what I expect - which only means I'm thick, I suppose. I turned to the offshore wind. I love air. It makes me remember how wrong you can be about people.
There was this woman, Leanne. Leanne was the most meticulous bird on earth. Ever. It took me two years to become her friend. I'll be honest. I wanted an antique pasglas she had. This is an unusual cylindrical beaker Rhineland pubs kept for jovial conviviality when drinking groups gathered. You get occasional ones with enamel designs on that sell for a fortune. This valuable drinking vessel has a kind of groove, sometimes a thread, that shows where old Heinrich is allowed to drink to. Share and share, you durstn't gulp beyond your mark. Well, Leanne had an enamelled pasglas with an external notched spiral decoration on it, marked with the insignia of some Bavarian shooting club. Its value was a row of serious noughts. I met her while helping our parson to mend his gate. I ran her home in my Austin Ruby. She invited me in. I saw the pasglas, asked to buy it. She refused, so I fell in love with her and started wheedling.
Not, I can admit, casually. If Leanne said coffee at ten, she meant literally ten of the clock. Arrive at nine-fifty or ten past, your knock remained unanswered. And only coffee, no hanky panky. As months passed, she slowly unbent, so to speak. The trouble was, I actually began to like her. In antiques, fondness is bad news. Keep your eyes on the prize. In fact, when I finally reaped the pasglas, we were making regular smiles behind her drawn chintz. So there was Leanne in her cottage, pleasant, plump, and pliant, when the sky fell in.
She won the lottery.
Instant multi-millionairess. Only person I'd ever heard of who did it. The world veered on its axis.
