'He is, Lovejoy,' she said firmly, blue eyes looking at me that day in my divan bed. 'So take back what you said about him.'
'Quaker? He's the raj's brainpiece?'
Then I did it, made her mad. I really did laugh, rolling in the aisles at the thought that Quaker, that deluded bloke who lived a total sham, actually was the pivot for a – no, the – biggest club of investors in antiques.
I'd heard of women's devotion to dud blokes, of course. In fact I'd had plenty myself, but that was no fault of mine.
'Quaker?' I rolled in the aisles. 'He wouldn't know what the raj is.'
'No?' she spat. 'There are nine of them. Quaker knows. Who do you think he's seeing now, while you pleasure his wife?' She spoke with bitterness. 'And how come a foolish woman like me puts up with a neurotic like Quaker? Do you think I'd stay with him a minute, if he was only what he seems?'
'Stop it, love,' I said, wiping my eyes. 'You don't have to convince me. I like Quaker.
And you know I worship you.' I propped myself up on an elbow, looking down. 'I take it back, doowerlink.'
She gazed up at me, took a deep breath as she reached some decision.
'You want convincing, Lovejoy? Then listen: the raj decides which antiques to buy. And who can steal which antiques. And who's allowed to get away with it. Who can rob museums and who can't. Big John Sheehan's one.'
My smile faded. Women don't know these things as a rule. She must have read some article in one of those antiques glossies that get names, dates, and antiques wrong.
'Bet you Quaker's never even heard of the raj.'
'No? Ask me, Lovejoy.' She waited. I stared. She was deadly serious. 'That trio of motor car dealers who stole those two Constable oil sketches? They tried to sell them last New Year in a hotel. They were caught, weren't they?'
I turned my head to align with her face, see directly into her. She looked sincere. But birds defending their blokes always are.
'Ask me about any antiques crime, Lovejoy. Including your theft from that place by the Minories.'
'Here, nark it.' I did my best indignation, but it didn't wash. Her triumphant gaze saw she'd hurt me. 'Nobody knows I did that!'
'You stole a sixteenth-century linenfold-patterned jointed chest. It was Thursday night.
Tinker your oppo didn't bring the motor on time, so you had to leave the chest in the monastery garden until Colin Service went for it.'
Suddenly I wasn't laughing. Nobody knew about Colin. He's an ambulance driver, uses the health authority's wagons to collect stolen antiques.
'You're guessing,' I said feebly.
'Am I? Then I won't know that you complained to your dipper about the way the muntin to the left of the chest's lock had been damaged. You swore blind you didn't do it. You whined that Colin must have done it, collecting the chest from the herb garden before the rush hour.'
I think I paled. If I didn't, I should have. A dipper's a contact man, the one who checks up after you've done a job. He decides if you've obeyed right, so that you get paid.
Antiques are stolen to order nowadays. The raj tells the dipper. The dipper tells you.
You do the steal, and that is that. A muntin is the straight vertical piece of wood between panels in a joinery chest front. Before that came in, in ancient times, everything was made of plain planking. That's why so few of the old pre-Elizabethan boarded chests survive. I gaped, partly because I didn't know that Maud knew a single antiques term.
'How the hell?'
'How the hell could I know that, Lovejoy?' Her voice didn't even waver. 'The same way I know about the Ashmolean Museum's cat snatch. Remember that? The whole country was aghast. New Year's Eve celebrations. Fireworks. Dancing in the streets of Oxford.
Students in fancy dress.'
'You saw it in the papers.' Feebler and feebler.
'He used a smoke bomb. Single-handed, shifted nine roof slates to cut a hole. Dropped through with a nautical rope ladder. Let off the bomb, wafted the clouds with a battery-driven fan. He visited no other room. Cut the Cezanne from the frame. Left his holdall, scalpel, gloves behind. And danced off amid the crowds.'
No laughs now.
'The raj told him to penetrate the Ashmolean Museum through the new Sackler Library building site, because the University of Oxford can never – and I quote, Lovejoy –'make up its mind about agreeing with its benefactors'. The raj deducted twenty per cent of his thiever's fee because he dropped his gloves.'
Now I was gaping. The nine slates hadn't been in the papers, nor the nautical rope ladder.
'The painting?' I croaked.
'Auvers-sur-Oise, by Paul Cezanne. The only Cezanne the Ashmolean had. He ignored the Leonardo da Vinci because the raj ordered him to. And the Picasso. You want measurements? Dates? Anything else?' She smiled, power to womenfolk.
For a second I had a terrible urge to scarper, clear off and never see her again. I must have looked shaken because her eyes took on that hard glaze when a woman sees a man's terror. I'm not a coward, honest, but the raj tops people for eavesdropping.
Actually kills. I could name names. All dealers could. Maud smiled.
