executive, a gent of renown and probity, whom the Bank forced into Lloyd's in the 1980s, got spat out like a pip? And so on, with emotional overstatement blasting everyone for everything. Skullduggery was everywhere. And in Lloyd's.
Well, it would have been a mere storm in a teacup –okay, pedants, coffee cup – and we could have all got on with wondering about real life instead of the City's greed. Except that investors began to dive out of the windows, metaphorically and actually. Ask around, and everybody knows somebody who'd been touched by the calamity.
Everybody everywhere has a cousin who was a once-wealthy Lloyd's investor, or making a claim for some prolonged ailment, or who was once cheerful but now is haggardly asking questions about the losses at Lloyd's that soared from mere thousands to billions. Heaven alone knew how many lawsuits ticker-taped down onto underwriters, insurance brokers, even ordinary agents in small town offices, but it was plenty. The terrible word fraud – normally reserved for humbler folk like me – was actually spoken. Folk meant Lloyd's.
Deaths began. Newspapers headlined that the suicide toll was to be laid squarely at the financial calamity's door. Some said ten deaths, twenty, then thirty. The Serious Fraud Office, an outfit that does Sweet Fanny Adams, will of course get nowhere as it peeps timidly round those solid double doors. Like those intrepid parliamentary teams that started investigating with drumrolls and fanfares – then finished up harrumphing into their gin and tonics before strolling out to the next round of golf. And Lloyd's?
Shrinking, shrinking. Me, I worried about who was in for a penny or a pound. And who was in for every last cent. All very well to mull over commercial problems on some gigantic global scale, but not when you're worried about some lady you once painted.
28
WE HAD A good day in Bristol –meaning that Peshy nicked a jeautiful series of emeralds from a collector's job lot. I really wanted to see how the little dog did it. A Bichon Frise's ruff looks quite artificial though it's natural froth, and has nowhere else to hide anything. It can't bite its own collar off, for instance. So how did it manage to conceal whatever it picked up? See the problem? And how on earth could it lift things from a tray of gem-stones it couldn't even see? BF is a midget, can't reach a table. And how, once the stuff was in its jaws, did the damned wolfhound . . .?
Anyhow, good day for us in Bristol, but a loser for Merrimale Effend & Co, Ltd (Est.
1631 AD), Antique Auctioneers of that fair city. We won several watches, two small paintings, a set of earrings, and three pieces of Royal Doulton. I was disappointed she'd not stolen a collection of stickpins, Edwardian and late Victorian, that would have sold for a fortune, but you can't steal everything. (Well, actually you can, as I'll explain later.)
Job done, I left Alicia and Peshy resting and drove to East Anglia. I found Mel by three o'clock.
He was at the Fair Hair and Frolic in St Edmundsbury, Market Street. Or, rather, he was sitting beneath the market cross in a sulk while amused shoppers listened to the wails coming from inside.
'Listen, Mel,' I said, sitting beside him. 'Give me my ghost painting, and we'll do a deal, okay?'
What deal, I'd no idea. Worse, I realized uneasily that I'd called it my ghost painting. I'd no notion of what ghost. This is how you get talked into things.
'Just listen to that riot, Lovejoy.'
'Sandy having his hair done?'
Perm time was always Waterloo, girls resigning in tears and things thrown. I'd even seen the plod called to the Hair Poo in Short Wyre Street, with sirens wahwahing and uniformed officers piling out like Fred Karno's army. Once Sandy got going over his forelocks it was war. I can't understand this hair business with women. I suppose I include Sandy.
Mel wept. I looked away. They always nark me, him sobbing white-faced while Sandy hollers 'For ever, you hear me, world?' I think they're not grown up. Yet Mel and Sandy drive the cruellest antiques bargains. Twice I've seen this unlikely pair drive friendly dealers to destitution, Sandy cooing, 'Oh, the joys of usury in springtime!' and so on.
Even Mel's teary episode here on the steps couldn't be taken at face value.
From inside the hairdresser's I heard a shrill howling. Something sploshed white gunge all over the window. I looked at the market clock. Soon he'd go nuclear. This is Phase Three. At least two assistants would be sacked, Sandy hurling coiffure implements after them. The growing pavement audience chatted contentedly, waiting for Sandy's big finish. Ten minutes at a guess.
'I'm seriously thinking of leaving him, Lovejoy. Wouldn't you?'
'Like a shot,' I said mechanically, quickly amending as his eyes went cold, 'Er, I mean I can't really understand your torment.'
'You people can't, Lovejoy,' he said with bitterness. 'Unless you're deeply sensitive like us, aware of the soul's funda ...' et claptrap cetera.
Bored stiff, I saw Shell across the road looking in the window of that oh-so-posh antique silverware place that charges twenty per cent on credit card. Watch out for this, incidentally. It's called the mitt trick and is the worst kind of fraud, meaning a legal one.
You don't find out you've been ripped off until you check your credit card. If you complain, you get reproach but no refund. They just give you the old patter, 'But, modom, you never asked about extra charges! So you agreed!'
I left Mel skryking and hurried across. 'What's good, Shell?'
She didn't turn, smiled at my reflection.
'Hello, Lovejoy. I heard you were on your way to see Sandy about your portrait thing.
Is it really that good? Everybody's after it.'
Shell's nice. She isn't what you'd call pretty, lives in a houseboat with a bloke who composes chants for you to chant for ever more to other chanters. He even operates after-sales, new chants for old, should your first prove a
