Gold by Gemini (21 page)

I stopped to rest on the wall of a shallow stone cistern, wondering what Janie was doing. The great wheel turned silently down in the valley between me and the sea. Lovely.

It was about ten o’clock. The pale sun was catching the wheel’s colours and flicking them about the mountainside. The main beams started out a silvery gold. By the time they flashed on to the dark browns and greens all about me they were a brilliant tangerine, a Thai enamel silver box’s colour. They make these boxes now, real silver but cheap and modern. There are only about six modern designs knocking about so far, basically an opaque white or a translucent tangerine. Dishonest people are said to use deep-heat physiotherapy lamps and two hours’ cooking at the back end of a good quality vacuum cleaner without its filter bag, to mimic the appearance of antique enamel. It works, but only if you look from a mile off. Look with a microscope. Uneven crazed surface = modern, faked.
Even surface, with the occasional large deep ‘bubbled’ area, may be the real thing. Give me the first offer.

A motorcycle skittered into view, way down below on the Laxey road, the rider anonymous in his bulbous helmet. Funny old place to be riding, I thought. I rose and began the climb again. Maybe he was training for a scramble race cross-country. Whatever it was, he was booming up the track behind me like the clappers.

I was only a hundred yards from the most ghoulish of the mine shafts when the bastard nearly ran me down. Now, it could have been an accident. I admit that. The track was only about four feet wide there. Like a fool, I had my eye on the mine ruins, not bothering to glance behind at the approaching rider. Maybe my apprehension was focused uneasily on the workings. Whatever distracted me, I was hellish slow, only managing to chuck myself to one side and not completely escaping. The maniac’s handlebar slammed into my hip, spinning me like a top. There I was, clinging dazed to the stony bank while the dust shower settled. He didn’t even stop.

My shirt and trousers were both torn. You could see the bruise swelling before your very eyes and blueing. Ugly. I was shaking so much it took me three goes to lift a stone and put it on the lump. I wetted it from a hillside ooze and sat there trembling, trying to press the damp cold stone on to my side to stop the swelling. The trouble is, once a person’s inside motorbike gear he becomes unrecognizable. He hadn’t seemed heavily built. Quite slight, encased in leather crammed with insignia and no number plates that I could recall.

Three or four times I fancied I could hear a distant crackle but wasn’t sure of the direction. My hip was murder when I pulled myself together and resumed
walking. I carried the stone to chuck at the swine if he came back. It’s funny what goes through your mind after a bit of a scare. Algernon’s thin. He’s also a bike fiend. The rider was too small for Beck. It was too crude a method for my friend Edward Rink, and anyway he’d only to knock me off
after
I’d found the stuff for him, not before. I wondered if the rider could have been a woman. Not Janie, surely. Kate? The question was, did he/she really attempt to do for me? Or was it just a stray stupid rider showing off?

I was opposite the mine shaft. I stopped to listen. Nothing again. Water welled from the rock and ran along the aqueduct in a steady flow. I was out of sight of the wheel now. No houses, no people. Only derelict buildings, the ungainly beam engine projecting its huge arm, the trickling water and the stone track.

From where I stood the cleft was only forty yards wide. What had they mined in those days? It looked grim on a pleasant sunny day like this, with holidaymakers trekking up to the café and then down to the sea for dinner. On a rainy winter’s day it must have seemed to the miners like a freezing hell.

Old Bexon must have been tough if he’d come all this way. Could an elderly man, gradually sickening in his final illness, climb down from the track, across the cleft and into the mine? I limped back and forth for some time. There seemed no way across. Maybe it would be wise to follow the path to the crest. The miners had had to get over there somehow in the old days, and I could make a quick check to see if that bloody rider was lurking over the hill or not. I was starting to hurt and had to rest a minute. I threw the stone away. Seven long seconds to hit the bottom of the shaft with a faint splash. A hell of a fall, even for a stone.

Bleak places have this effect on me. I get restless and start working out how far’s civilization. Not that countryside isn’t great on a postcard but it needs watching. I only want Wuthering Heights not to spread about too much. A hundred yards further on I found the causeway. A series of small arches had supported it, but now only their stubs stuck upwards from the little valley’s floor. Some wise man had dismantled it. I’d have danced from relief if I hadn’t just been injured. If there was no way across for me there’d been no way across for old Bexon. It couldn’t be done. And lugging a leaden coffin over there would need a helicopter. I was saved. No dark deep hidey-holes for jubilant Lovejoy. Home again, still empty-handed. I turned back, relieved but disappointed.

I went over the possibilities on the way down. A list of named spots – nothing at any of them. The most likely spot was here, near Lady Isabella. But I’d got no vibes near the wheel herself. And in any case she was well-maintained, cleaned and painted. Obviously had plenty of vigilant engineers about and was, from what I’d seen, a popular tourist spectacle. The wheel seemed far too public. Yet some place near Lady Isabella was obviously the place a man like Bexon would remember best.
Wasn’t it?

Janie was sitting on a big flat rock near the car park chucking stones into the water. She’d taken her sandals off and her feet were wet. Her frock was up over her knees.

‘Hussy,’ I called down from the bank. I was still delighted about the mines. ‘I can see all up your legs.’

‘Cripple,’ she said angrily. ‘I heard you limping. I told you to be careful.’ She was mad again. ‘Did you fall?’

‘Now, don’t start, Janie lovie,’ I said. Why do women keep getting so mad when they should be all worried? I honestly don’t get it.

‘Don’t you lovie me, Lovejoy.’

‘Where’s Algernon?’

She looked up curiously. I’d tried to sound casual.

‘Off on a bike. He told you.’

‘Of course,’ I said, easy still. ‘So he did.’

She pulled herself up the river bank and stood inspecting me.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ I complained. ‘I feel for sale.’

‘What happened up there, Lovejoy?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’d better have a look at it.’ She pulled my torn trouser away from my side. ‘Dear God.’ A family passing to their car exclaimed and tutted sympathetically, I moved away from Janie’s fingers.

‘Don’t show my bum to everybody.’

‘We’d better call at a chemist’s for some ointment.’

Inside the car was hot. Janie put the air-conditioner on.

‘Where to, b’wana?’ she asked. I put my head on her.

‘Love,’ I said, ‘I just don’t know.’

That night I couldn’t sleep. When that happens I always think, well, so what? Okay, so I’ll be a bit tired next day. All the better rest you get the night after. There’s no need to be so distressed as some people get. But Janie was tossing and turning too. Maybe it was the lingering effects of my grub.

Fitful patches came, blurred and then left me starkly conscious. I’ve heard that people mostly worry, about work during the dark hours. With me it’s faces.
They came gliding into my mind like characters from a Kabuki play. Some just wouldn’t go. Helen, for instance. Maybe I’d imagined her down at the shops yesterday, result of a subconscious longing, perhaps. We’d been very close but only briefly. The stress of competing for the same antiques had torn – well, snipped – us apart. What was she doing here? The antique shops, possibly. But ‘possibly’ also means possibly not. Then Kate the Wicked Sister, with her single-minded message not to help Nichole. Not surprising, really, because womankind occasionally has been known to be slightly tinged with the sin of jealousy, so it’s said. But how could I possibly help Nichole, when she insisted on going about with that murdering pillock Rink, instead of a lovely hunk like me? Algernon’s too thick to be anybody’s ally, I told myself, isn’t he?
Isn’t he?
I got up at one point and padded in my pyjamas to peer through the back-door glass towards his bungalow. No lights. Well, three in the morning. But was he in there? Or maybe he was stealing back that very second to Big Izzie, having seen something I hadn’t. I cancelled that possibility and slipped back into bed. The idea of Algernon stealing anywhere’s an absurdity. Even when he brews up it’s like a fife band. Janie stirred. I let my legs get warm before closing in on her.

Then there was Rink the Fink. No good wondering why a rich man like him wanted to bother with a possible find of possible valuables. Greed knows no rhyme or reason. I’ve actually seen a real live millionaire cover his face and weep uncontrollably in a famous Bond Street auction for carelessly missing a Penny Black – admittedly these stamps aren’t all that common, but you can find them if you look carefully. I got up again.

There was no light from the hillside. I sat in an
armchair after pulling the curtains back. Who was actually doing the watching? Or was there nobody there at all? I had this feeling again. Supposing Rink had two watchers, twelve-hour shifts. Possible, but how the hell would they contact Rink if I made a sudden dash anywhere? Some form of field transmitter? I gazed out into the darkness. Maybe the watcher and me were looking directly at each other, unseeing. Unless he had one of those night telescopes. Was he smoking out there? You can see a match at five thousand yards. That’s what the sergeant used to say, on his belly in the mud, refusing to let the lads smoke two whole leech-ridden days before the ambush. I moved the armchair uneasily. There’s something really rather nasty about being looked at when you don’t suspect. It’s a sick feeling.

Janie was trustworthy, though. I pondered a long time about Janie. Wealthy, lovely, attractive and humorous. Exactly what the doctor ordered. You have to trust the woman you sleep with, don’t you? I mean, if you can’t trust the woman you sleep with, whom can you trust? I mean to say.

It was so dark outside. I could just see the skyline. There were some stars. The forecast said it might rain before dawn.

Yet Janie never trusts me. She keeps saying so. Still, that was easily accounted for – women aren’t very trusting people by nature. They are a very unusual sex, when you think of it. I don’t think they’ll ever be the same as us, reasonable and even-tempered. What lingered unpleasantly in my mind about Janie was her husband. We’d never spoken about him, not properly. And she’d never mentioned him since that night except once to say, when I’d asked, ‘Yes, that was my husband
you heard. He only stayed a minute.’ She goes back to him, though, most of the time. Whenever he returns from abroad she zooms home, the dutiful wife. And what was happening between them now was anybody’s guess. I didn’t even know where she was supposed to be this very moment, with a sick auntie at Broadstairs or what. I suspected she’d made him believe she was legitimately absent on some benevolent enterprise. But husbands get philanderers followed. They’re known for it.

Lastly, Beck. Well, maybe the fact that I’d whittled him for the odd doubloon had filtered down through his cerebral cortex by now and he was doing his avenger thing. Most unlikely, really. Beck was a sort of positive Algernon, a mad bull compared to a gormless spaniel. He’d have crashed in here the minute the ferry docked: Lovejoy, you swine, did you whittle me?

Something moved out in the night. A patch of darkness suddenly became cohesive and shifted slightly. I knew it had been six feet or so to the right a minute before. Dark’s solid where living things are. My hands groped about the armchair. Great. Caught without even a stone or a poker, in pyjamas. The black grew larger. Dear God, I thought, sweating, it’s coming right up to the window. The window darkened to one side. I was so tightened up I couldn’t even screech for Janie. A faint gleam on spectacles drenched me in a sweat of relief;

It was sodding Algernon, the stupid bastard.

I blundered to the window and scrabbled for the catch muttering I’d kill him, frightening me to death like that.

‘Lovejoy.’ A whisper.

‘What?’ I croaked back, third go.

‘He’s out there. Do you want my night glasses?’ He
was whispering where the windows met. This was it. Dandy’s killer had finally come.

I forced myself to push the window gently open. Cold air streamed blessedly in.

‘Where?’ Never mind
where,
Lovejoy, for God’s sake, ask who. ‘Who?’

‘The badger.’ He sounded surprised.

‘
Eh?
’

‘Shhh, Lovejoy!’ he hissed in anguish. ‘You’ll distract him!’

A bloody badger.

He got a three-minute whispered torrent of invective. Once one person whispers, everybody does it and nobody can stop. Ever noticed that? Contagious, like yawning.

I deliberately slammed the window and went back to bed. Once I’d got warm again and my terror had lessened a bit, I began thinking. In spite of myself Algernon’s stalking impressed me. How come that he was normally so clumsy? Maybe daylight did things to his co-ordination. I couldn’t tell Janie about the incident. She’d only laugh and tell me what I should have done.

‘That’s the trouble with hangers-on, I thought bitterly as I nodded off. I’m on a three-seat tandem. We all want to honk the horn but nobody wants to pedal.

It must have been in one of those semi-conscious states that my logic did its stuff. Tandems. My dopey dawn mind saw a tandem ridden by Kate and Nichole. Then it took them away and put the diaries there. Then it put the two sketches there.

I awoke at six stark with cold fear.
All Bexon’s pointers were in twos
, everything from the Roman babes
on the gold coins, Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf. Everything. Except for one lonely horrid decayed nightmare place, one terrible exception. So obvious. Suddenly so clear.

Dear Jesus. The inlet.