The Judas Pair (4 page)

A pair of mint – that is, perfectly preserved – cased flintlock duellers would buy you a couple of new cars nowadays, minimum. A mint pair of them with a pedigree – belonging, say, to some hero, a famous dandy of the time, or perhaps some pal of Beau Brummell’s or a member of the then royalty – will virtually buy you anything. If you discover such a pair of old pistols in a dirty old box upstairs, rush to the nearest church and light a candle in thanks to your Maker, Bate, Monlong, Murdoch, Pauly, whoever it turns out to be.
Then retire for life in affluence.

Finally, one point more. Just like Queen Anne silver, each weapon is, or should be, named on the lock. Don’t throw value away. Your famous silversmith’s monogram can double or treble the value of your fruit bowl. So your famous maker’s engraved name can send your find ever upwards in value. The names are too many to give here, but Joseph Manton, John Manton, Wogden who gave his name as a nickname to duelling (a ‘Wogden affair’), the brilliant Joseph Egg, Henry Nock the Great and his younger relative Sam that he had a terrible row with, Mortimer, Tatham who blew himself to pieces on a cannon for reasons best not gone into, Freeman, the fashionable Rigby, the Reverend Alexander Forsyth – who invented the percussion system which did away with flintlocks altogether and doubled the killing speed – are some you should not lose on your way home.

And last but not least, one Durs (nearly as bad as Lovejoy) Egg, flintlock maker to kings and princes, genius extraordinaire, maker – so they say – of the one and only Judas pair of flintlock duellers. Well.

This young man came to London about 1770 to seek his fortune. With another Swiss, Pauly, he became interested in the science of pneumatics and air propulsion and between them they produced a variety of odd but lethal airguns. In later years he lost a fortune by inventing a flying machine, the Flying Dolphin, which he kept in a hangar down Knightsbridge way, to London society’s huge delight and derision. A genius whose habit was to pattern the walnut stocks of his flintlocks with a curiously stippled star design, to aid in the grip. He signed himself always by his nickname, Durs.

The legend is that he made twelve – only twelve – pairs of duelling pistols. The legend goes on to say that he privately made a thirteenth pair, when something terrible happened. What it was the legend fails to explain.

That thirteenth pair, sinister weapons of ill-omen, were his last. They were never found nor heard of except as obscure rumours. Any antiques dealer worth his salt will laugh till he falls down if you ask after them. They don’t exist, and everybody knows it.

That thirteenth pair of flintlock duellers is the Judas pair.

I drew breath.

‘I’ve bad news, Mr Field,’ I managed to get out.

‘Bad news?’

‘The Judas pair. They don’t exist,’ I said firmly, and rose to get my emergency beer. ‘They’re a myth, a legend. The antique trade’s riddled with myths.’

‘Is it really?’ He was oddly calm for somebody who’d just been put down.

‘Really,’ I told him. No use mucking about. He watched me splash the ale as I drove the truth savagely home. ‘Michelangelo’s
Goliath
to match his
David.
Turner’s mysterious set of portraits and industrial paintings. Napoleon’s woodcuts done by his, very own lily-white hands. Sir Francis Drake’s poetry in two breathtaking volumes. Bill Shakespeare’s latest play
King Penda.
Robin Hood’s diary. Czar Alexander’s secret will. The Grail. Excalibur. Prince John’s necklace from The Wash. Friar Bacon’s perpetual clock. Leonardo’s jewelled casket of secrets. Cleopatra’s ruby ring. The Koh-i-noor’s partner diamond, even bigger and better. Nazi treasure chests in those tiresome bloody lakes. Rembrandt’s French landscapes. Chippendale’s missing design books. All myths. Like,’ I added harshly, ‘the Judas pair.’

‘Did Dill tell you how much I was willing to pay?’ he asked.

‘Ten thousand,’ I said bitterly. ‘Just my luck.’

‘Now I believe you, Lovejoy,’ he said, calm as you please.

‘Look,’ I said slowly. ‘Maybe I’m not getting through to you. Can’t you understand what I’m saying? Ten thousand’s too little. So is ten million. You can’t get something if it doesn’t exist.’

‘Before,’ he continued evenly, ‘I thought you were leading me on, perhaps pretending to be more honest than you really were. That is a common deception in all forms of business.’ I took a mouthful of ale to stop myself gaping too obviously. ‘Now I believe you are an honest man. A dishonest dealer, seeing I know little about the subject, would have exploited my ignorance.’

‘It happens,’ I admitted weakly.

‘I accepted that risk when I came to you.’ Field stared thoughtfully at me.

‘So you knew about the Judas pair being legendary?’

‘From various sources.’

‘And it was a try on, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Mr Field.’ I rose. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now, before you leave, is it worth your while to tell me what you
do
want?’ I stood over him. To my surprise he remained unabashed. In fact, he seemed more cool as the chat wore on.

‘Certainly.’

‘Right. Give.’ I sat, still exuding aggression.

‘I want you to do a job.’

‘Legal?’

‘Legal. Right up your street, as Dill would say.’ So he’d listened in on Tinker’s call as I’d guessed. ‘You’ll accept? It will be very lucrative.’

‘What is it?’

‘Find me,’ he said carefully, ‘the Judas pair.’

I sighed wearily. The guy was a nutter.

‘Haven’t I just explained –’

‘Wrongly.’ Field leaned forward. ‘Lovejoy, the Judas pair exist. They killed my brother.’

It was becoming one of those days. I should have stayed on the nest with Sheila, somewhere safe and warm.

E
LIZABETHAN LADIES
– the First, I hasten to add – had fleas. And lice. And gentlemen suitors, who came courting, also suffered. If these heroes were especially favoured, they were allowed indoors to chat up the object of their desire. If they were really fancied, though, matters progressed to poetry, music, even handclasps and sighs. And eventually the great flea-picking ceremony. You’ve seen baboons do it on those unspeakable nature programmes. Yes, our ancestors did the same, uttering rapturous sighs at all that contact.

What I am getting at is this: if you see a little (one and a half inches maximum) antique box, dirty as hell, that
should
be neat and enamelled to be a proper patch-and-comfit box and somehow isn’t quite right, it can be only one of two things. The first is a battered nineteenth-century trinket or snuff box, in which case you can generally forget it. The second – oh, dear, the second – is an Elizabethan flea- and louse-box. Don’t shudder. Don’t boil it to kill any remaining creepy-crawlies. Lock it carefully in the biggest, safest safe you can find, swallow the key, and then scream with ecstasy. These little jewelled boxes were used by lovers, for holding fleas and lice that they captured on their paramours’ lovely chalk-powdered skin. It was an exquisitely charming pastime of those days. We don’t advertise them as such, these boxes. We call them anything: ‘Early antique, sixteenth-century lady’s minute toiletry box, heavily inlaid, made by . . .’ and so on.

Remember Adrian? I spent part of the night cleaning the lumpy box – it was a genuine flea-box. I kissed it reverently, drew all the curtains, doused my lamp and rolled up the carpet. Underneath was the hinged paving stone. Down I went, eight wooden steps underground into my secret cave. Eight feet by eight, cold as charity, dry as a tinderbox, safer than any bank vault on earth. I laid the box on a shelf and climbed out, replacing the stone flag and making sure the iron ring lay in its groove – it wouldn’t do to have a visitor tripping up over an unexpected bump in a carpet, would it? I smoked a Dutch cigar to celebrate, though they make me sleep badly, and went to bed. It was four o’clock.

Field’s brother was a collector, apparently. One of the indiscriminate kind. To his wife’s dismay he filled the house with assorted antiques and semi-antiques and modern junk, a mixture of rubbish and desirable stuff. In short, a collector after my own heart.

Somewhere, somehow, Field’s brother found the Judas pair, so Field told me, not realizing they were anything more special than a pair of supreme antique flintlock duellers made by any old passing genius. He seems to have mentioned to all and sundry about his luck and I dare say let interested callers click the triggers – knocking guineas off their value at every click. Tender-hearted as I am, by this point in Field’s narrative I was getting the feeling his brother might have got the same fate from me, but I suppressed it.

Anyway, one night several months ago, Field had a phone call from his brother, who told him very excitedly that the flintlocks were very special, unique in fact, if not world-shattering. He would bring them over next day, it being Saturday, and show him.

‘He never came, Lovejoy,’ Field told me.

He was found by Field himself, at noon. Field drove over to see why he hadn’t turned up. He was in his living room among all his clutter. Blood seemed to be everywhere. He seemed to have been shot through his eye but the bullet was never found, not even at the postmortem.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said, ‘but did the pathologist say what bore?’

‘About twelve, but he wasn’t sure.’

‘Could be.’

Take a pound of lead. Divide it into twelve equal balls. They are then twelve-bore bullets for flintlock or percussion weapons. No cartridges, remember, for the period we’re talking about. The impetus comes from your dollop of gunpowder and the spark. Flintlock weapons range from two-bore or even one-bore monsters which throw a bullet as big as a carrot, to narrow efforts like the eighteen-bore or less. Duellers went with fashions, but twelve-bore were not unusual.

‘Where did he buy them?’

‘He never said.’ Wise man.

‘Nor how much he paid?’

‘No.’ Wiser still.

‘Were they cased?’

‘Cased?’

‘In a special box, the size of a small cutlery box, maybe up to two feet by one, maybe four inches deep.’

There
was
a box that went with them.

I stirred from desire.

‘And the accessories?’

‘As far as I remember, there were some small screwdrivers and a couple of metal bottles, and pliers,’ he said slowly, ‘but that’s as much as I can recall.’ He meant a flask and mould.

‘So you actually saw them?’

He looked surprised. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘And . . . you didn’t notice if they were of any extra quality?’

‘To me they were just, well, antiques.’ I eyed him coldly. You can go off people.

‘Did you notice the maker?’

‘Eric – my brother – told me. It’s such an unusual name, isn’t it? Durs. And Egg. I remarked on it.’ He grinned. ‘I said, I’ll bet his mates pulled his leg at school.’

‘Quite,’ I said, knowing the feeling well. ‘And of course you searched for them?’

‘The police did.’

‘No luck?’

‘Not only that. They didn’t believe me about them.’

No good looking for a gun – of any sort – if there’s no bullet.

‘They said he’d been stabbed with a metal object.’

‘Through the eye?’ It sounded unlikely.

‘It’s hopeless, as you no doubt see.’

‘What theories did they have?’

‘Very few – they’re still searching for the weapon.’

‘Without knowing what sort of weapon it was?’ I snorted in derision.

He leaned forward, pulling out an envelope.

‘Here’s five hundred,’ he said. ‘It’s on account.’

‘For . . .?’ I tried to keep my eyes on his, but they kept wandering towards the money in his hand.

‘For finding that weapon.’ He chucked the envelope and I caught it, so the notes inside wouldn’t bruise. Not to keep, you understand. ‘My brother was shot by one of the Judas weapons.’

‘The Judas pair don’t exist.’ My voice sounds weak sometimes.

‘They do.’ For somebody so hopeless at pretending to be a collector he was persistent. ‘I’ve seen them.’

‘They don’t,’ I squeaked at the third try. It’s funny how heavy a few pound notes can be.

‘Then give me the money back,’ he said calmly, ‘and tell me to go.’

‘I could get you a reasonable pair for this,’ I said weakly. ‘Maybe no great shakes, not cased, and certainly not mint, but . . .’

‘Yes or no?’ he asked. Some of tiiese quiet little chaps are the worst. Never give up no matter how straight you are. Ever noticed that?

‘Well,’ I said gamely, feeling all noble, ‘if you really insist . . .’

‘If you’ve got a pen and paper,’ he said, smiling in a rather disagreeable way, ‘I’ll give you all available details . . .’

I’d tried, hadn’t I?

Adrian brought Jane Felsham along. I handed him a cheque.

‘You’re flush,’ he exclaimed. ‘Come across a Barraud?’ Barraud, a London watchmaker, about 1815, made some delicious flat-looking watches. Only the central sun decoration and the astounding nineteen-line movement and the sexy gold and enamel surface and the beady surround (pearls) tell you it’s somewhat above average. The highest artistic imagination crystallized in a luscious context of brilliant science. I smiled, I think. People shouldn’t make jokes. I’d once missed a Barraud by five minutes, late for an auction.

‘Steady progress,’ I replied.

‘Will it bounce?’ He draped himself elegantly across a chair. Both he and Jane couldn’t help glancing sharply round in case any of my recent finds were on display.

‘Don’t you want it?’ I brewed up to show we were still friends.

‘I must confess little Janesy and I were discussing whether you’d have the wherewithal, dear boy.’

‘It was touch and go.’

‘Business going a bit slow, Lovejoy?’ Jane lit one of her long cigarettes and rotated her fagholder. ‘Not much about for the casual visitor to see.’

‘I have these two warehouses . . .’

They laughed.

‘That chap last night,’ Jane pressed. ‘A client?’

‘Trying to be,’ I said casually.

‘After anything we could help with?’ from Adrian.

‘I doubt it.’ I rattled a few pieces of crockery to show I was being offhand.