Of old woodland and field, blocking the commercial goldmine. I cleared my throat, said nothing.
'Me, Lovejoy. Dad sold it to me, the manor's river rights and navigation rights. Of this little stretch.' He smiled the sort of smile you could easily mistake for a smile, if you weren't careful. 'For a farthing.'
My mind went: but Arthur didn't need to sell it to his son, surely? Ancient manorial rights pass father to son, with the lordship tide, plus the rights to hold village markets and ancient leet courts, the lot.
'He assigned me the title, and this bit of land, before he signed the guarantees Mother wanted to give to somebody. Dad made me buy the lordship, the tide, and this narrow stretch. It's called dryfland. Strictly, anybody wanting even to walk a dog here ought to pay me a copper or two.'
So Arthur kept this ancient piece in Mort's possession, even though everything else -
the manor of Saffron Fields, the estate, the Chelsea antiques firm - went to guarantee Gluck's escapades.
It was hard, but I finally spoke. 'Arthur made you buy it?'
'Yes.' Mort crouched, peered at some grassy thing to avoid talking directly. 'I'd never seen a farthing. Dad laughed. It has a robin on it. I had to hand it to him in the lawyer's office. I felt silly.'
Well, you would. Nobody's as embarrassed as a teenager. And nobody as embarrassing as an insistent dad.
'This is where your grandad…?'
'Crashed, yes. Dad knew exactly. He invented a magnet to trawl the waters at low tide.
He was so surprised when it worked. The aeroplane's just there where the sea marsh begins. Nobody else knows, you see.'
My feet felt suddenly as if they were interlopers. Sometimes you want to hover. The flier must have limped his wounded plane homeward, felt relief seeing the coast appear, maybe smoke fuming from his engine, the pistons coughing, losing power, sinking, the gleaming sea marsh edging nearer as the waves rushed up and—
'Are you all right?' Mort was helping me up. 'There's a tea shop down the hard.'
'Course I'm all right, you silly bugger - er, fine, ta. I slipped.'
We walked along the shore, me sneaking looks at the coast. I told Mort the village tea shop would be closed, and it was. Mort knocked on the back door. The lady opened and served us tea and cakes as a matter of course. Mort didn't pay, I noticed. I pondered this.
Glenda was a pleasant lass, had two children watching school television. They shouted hopeful hellos, but Glenda wouldn't let them escape their lesson. Her husband, a coastguard, was digging in the garden. His uniform hung behind the kitchen door. She said Mortimer, never Mort, and served him first.
Well, I'd found my link. I'd have realized what it was yonks ago if I'd been thinking straight. Arthur had deliberately excluded the small stretch of land from the guarantee Colette had forced him to give Gluck. It denied Gluck a vast commercial opportunity.
And it protected the spot where the lone wartime flier had crashed and sunk into the shore marshes. To Arthur, the spot where his dad's plane lay was sacred. No wonder he'd wanted himself to lie beneath the mulberry tree. It was in view of his own father's resting place.
It was also the one place Arthur had lost his temper with me. You don't let somebody curse like a trooper near your brave dad's grave.
'Are you all right, Lovejoy?' Glenda asked. When I said I was fine, ta, she asked Mort,
'Is Lovejoy to stay here the night, Mortimer? He looks decidedly peaky.' She didn't ask me. The children shouted yes, yes.
'No, thank you, Mrs Elgar,' Mort said. The pair instantly quietened. 'Please get Alan to drive him and his bike home.' He wasn't asking, just saying that's what had to be.
Glenda smiled, glad everything was in its proper place.
'Alan'll be pleased to, Mortimer. Say when.'
Alan drove me home, chatting of tides, ships, lifeboats, nothing of importance. I shouted ta from my gate as he drove away, and stood for a long while as dusk drank the day. Now I had the link, what to do with it? I went to the Treble Tile for supper, had a think about snobbery, money, antiques, and how the three might possibly be made into one long unbreakable noose for somebody. Did I mean chain? Handcuff?
Noose was surely wrong. 23
LUCKILY, LISA WAS in the Treble Tile. She's the best newspaper reporter in the business, she says. She's bonny, slim, has a flat down St Leonard's parish by the town's docks. I like her.
'Don't worry, swine.' She plonked herself down. 'I've got my own sodding drink.'
'I would have offered!' I said indignantly. Lisa curses with aplomb. Actually, I'll omit her invective, if that's all right. Her degree was sociology, so she thinks swearing is propriety.
'You want something.' She eyed me narrowly, couldn't keep it up and heaved a sigh. I like women who heave sighs. 'Things are so effing quiet. I need a scoop.'
'Don't you just report Nessie again?'
'Don't muck about, Lovejoy.' But it's true. Since monks reported Nessie in the Middle Ages there's been over five thousand original new sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, which is only three hundred fewer separate paparazzi scoop reports of Queen Liz Two's pregnancies. There's still money to be made in it. I mean, the big-game hunter Montague Weatherall coined it in the 1930s by finding Nessie's footprint - it was only a stuffed hippo's print. And Mussolini, no less, made mileage by broadcasting that his Italian war-planes had bombed Nessie to oblivion on a daring raid. Me? I think Nessie's only various eels, otters, or a whacking Baltic sturgeon having forgotten which way to migrate. Our joke is, Nessie can't be hard to find. She basks on the surface twice a day
- ten minutes before you arrive, and ten minutes after you've gone home.
'I'll have a scoop for you, Lisa.' She's given up angrily spelling me her name. It's Liza, Leesa, Lisa, or any near
