The Judas Pair (9 page)

It made a successful running start eventually. As I drove at maximum speed I worked my journey out. Margaret had given me the names of three places, Minsmere in Suffolk, Blakeney Point and Cley in Norfolk. I would say I’d been to Minsmere if anyone asked, and, engine willing, would look at the other two places in one go. I would reach home before opening time. I had the six significant addresses with me to consider one by one.

I was frankly disappointed with the bird sanctuaries, not that I knew what to expect. Quite a few cars were around when I drove up to Cley. A few folks, rommellized by great binoculars and businesslike weatherproof hats, stood all forlorn in attitudes of endeavour staring towards acres of desolate muddy stuff where nothing was happening. Occasionally, they murmured to each other and peered eastwards. Perhaps they placed bets among themselves to make it interesting. As well as being disappointed I was puzzled. I’ve nothing against birds, feathered or not, but once you’ve seen one sparrow you’ve seen the lot, haven’t you? Occasionally, one particular one might become sort of family just by sheer persistence, like some around the cottage. That’s different. Unless you know them specially it’s a waste of time, like people. I asked one bloke what they were all looking at.

‘Oyster-catchers,’ he said. I stared about but their wasn’t a boat in sight.

‘Oh,’ I replied, and honestly that was it.

There were no stalls, cafés, not even a fish-and-chip shop. As a resort it was a dead duck, if you’ll pardon the expression. I talked the Armstrong into life and we creaked away on ye olde greate mysterie trail. I had more birds in my garden than they had on all that mud. I was frozen stiff.

Now, brilliant Lovejoy had made a plan. Muriel’s memory being what it was, I was down to guesswork – scintillating cunning brainwork of Sherlock type.

To post a case you need a post office, right? Sniggering at my shrewdness, I drove around trying to find one, lurching along country lanes where hedges waved in the gales and animals stooged about fields being patient as ever.

I eventually gave up and some time later drove through Wells into Blakeney, where there was a post office. I was dismayed. What do private eyes do now? I couldn’t just bowl in and say, ‘What ho! Who posted a heavy box about a year ago, give or take six months?’ My plan hadn’t got this far. I inspected it from a distance and then drove to the Point. More desolation with some different-shaped birds bumming around aimlessly, all watched eagerly by enthusiasts. No shops, no stalls, no real scene. I departed shivering.

All this countryside was damping my earlier high spirits. It’s nice from a distance. A few trees and a sparrow or two can be quite pleasant sometimes as a diversion. But you can’t beat a good old town crammed full of people milling about on hard pavements, street after street of houses, shops, antique merchants, cinemas, pubs, the odd theatre and lots of man-made electricity. Bird sanctuaries are all very well, but why can’t they share them with people?

I drove around Blakeney. In case you come from there I’m not knocking it. Charming little joint, with the odd tasty antique shop and a place I had dinner near a tavern. But it’s not a metropolis, is it? And it has no coastal holiday resorts nearby, either. From the way Muriel’s postmistress had spoken I wanted something like Clacton. That cold wind started up again. I decided there were no clues in bird sanctuaries and drove south. What dumps those places are, I thought, feeling a witticism coming. Those places, I sniggered to myself, are for the birds.

I like antiques dealers. We may not be much to look at, but scratch us and we’re nothing but pure unadulterated antiques dealer all the way through. Everything else comes second. This means you’ve only to put us, blind-folded, anywhere on earth, and we home instinctively on the nearest fellow-dealer. When I’m driving, I swear my banger guides itself along a route that has the highest number of dealers along it.

Trusting the Armstrong, I was at my ninth antique shop asking for nothing in particular, when the name
LAGRANGE
accidentally caught my eye. The shop owner, a doctor’s wife, Mrs Ellison, full of painting chat, had gone into the back to find a painting I’d heard of, alleged Norwich School, and to fill in time I was leafing through her invoice file. Lagrange had bought a pistol flask from her about a year before, and paid in groats from what I saw.

I was safely near the door hovering over a box of copper tokens when she returned with the painting. It was a watercolour, not an oil, which was a measure of her knowledge. David Cox had signed it, so the name said. I held it. Good stuff, but not a single chime. I showed a carefully judged disappointment and turned to other things. David Cox taught a lot of pupils watercolour painting, and had an annoying habit of helping them with little bits of their work, a daub here, a leaf there. If their final painting pleased him
he
would sign it, thereby messing up the whole antique business. Worse, his signature’s dead easy to forge – so they say. Beware.

I bought a score of her copper tokens, to pay for my journey’s expenses. They are cheap, rather like small coins. Merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, times when copper change was in short supply owing to incompetence at the Mint among other causes, made their own ‘coins’ as tokens in copper. These were given for change, and you could spend them when you needed to go shopping again. It must have been a nightmare because some shops would refuse all except their own tokens, so you might finish up with perhaps thirty
different
sets of copper ‘coinage’ of this kind in your pocket, and still not be able to buy what you wanted from the thirty-first shop. The early seventeenth-century ones are about half the size of those from the next century – an important fact as many are undated. I bought the ‘cleanest’, that is those least worn, no matter how dirty. ‘Buy the best,
then
buy old,’ as we say. Of any two antiques, go for the one best preserved and remember that repairs or any sort of restoration doesn’t mean well-preserved. Then consider the degree of rarity.
Then
, and only then, consider the degree of age. This is Lovejoy’s Law for Collectors of Limited Means. Of course, if you have bags of money, head straight for a Turner seascape, a silver piece made by that astonishing old lady silversmith Hester Bateman, or a Clementi (the London maker) square piano of about 1840, and two fingers to the rest of us. But for other poorer wayfarers, my advice is to have only these three general rules.

I paid up painfully and turned to go.

‘Oh, one thing.’ I paused as if remembering. ‘You’ve not such a thing as a powder flask?’

‘Powder . . .? Oh, for gunpowder?

I nodded.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I had one a while ago, but it went very quickly.’ She’d probably had it on her hands for years.

‘I’m trying to make one of those wretched sets up,’ I explained.

She was all sympathy. ‘Isn’t it hard?’

I hesitated still. ‘No chance of you managing to pick one up, is there? I don’t have much chance of getting one myself.’

‘Well . . .’

I was obviously treading upon that sacred confidentiality. ‘I’d be glad to pay a percentage on purchase,’ I offered, which made it less holy.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘When you have money locked up in stock, trying to move stuff can be so difficult.’

We commiserated for a minute in this style. She told me she’d sold the flask to a local collector. She gave me Lagrange’s address, the one I already had. I expressed surprise and gratitude and handed her my card.

‘He’s a very pleasant padre,’ she informed me, smiling. ‘A real enthusiastic collector. I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.’

‘I’ll either call back or phone,’ I promised, and set about finding the Reverend Lagrange, collector.

Mrs Ellison had given me the usual obscure directions which I translated by a vintage RAC roadmap. He lived about fifteen miles off the trunk road, say thirty miles. I patted my speedster and swung the handle. I’d be there in an hour and a half with luck.

The trouble was I’d not had any feminine companionship for a couple of days. It blunts any shrewdness you might possess. Your brain goes astray. It’s no state to be in.

I drove towards Reverend Lagrange’s place thinking of Sheila as a possible source of urgent companionship. No grand mansion here, my cerebral cortex registered at the sight of the grubby little semi-detached house with its apron-sized plot of grass set among sixty others on a dull estate. Such trees as people had planted stood sparse and young, two thin branches and hardly a leaf to bless themselves with. I parked on the newly made road where there was a slope, a hundred yards away, and walked back among the houses. A curtain twitched along the estate, which pleased me as a sign that women hadn’t changed even here in this desolation. But where was the Reverend’s church? Maybe he was still only an apprentice and hadn’t got one. I knocked.

Ever run into a patch of mistakes? My expectations were beginning to ruin my basic optimism. Just as Muriel had turned out to be half the age I’d anticipated, here was this padre who I’d supposed couldn’t be more than twenty-two. He was middle-aged. Worse still – much more upsetting – I’d seen him before, walking up Muriel Field’s drive as I had left. All this might not matter to you, but to an antiques dealer it’s his life-blood. First approaches are everything. I suppressed my flash of annoyance and gave my I’m-innocent-but-keen grin.

‘Reverend Lagrange?’

‘Yes?’ He was a calm and judging sort, in clerical black and dog collar, not too tidy.

‘I hope I’m not intruding.’ The thought occurred that it might be a feast-day or Lent or something. Worse, he might be fasting. I eyed him cautiously. He seemed well nourished.

‘Not at all. Can I help?’

‘Er – I only called on the offchance.’

‘Do come in.’ He stood aside and in one stride I was in his living-room. There was a cheap rolltop desk and a scatter of Co-operative furniture. He had a one-bar electric fire for the chill winter evenings. My heart went out for him.

‘It isn’t anything to do with . . . er . . . the soul,’ I faltered. ‘I’m interested in antiques, Reverend. I was at a shop –’

His eyes, lit up and he put his black Bible inside his desk, sliding the lid closed.

‘Do sit down, Mr . . .?’

‘Lovejoy.’

‘Splendid name,’ he said, smiling. I was beginning to quite like him. ‘The shop was –’

I told him and he raised his eyes heavenward.

‘Ah, yes. I bought a pistol flask there, quite expensive it was,’ he said.

May heaven forgive you for
that
, I thought nastily. It was a steal. I would have asked five times what he paid.

‘Er,’ I began, weighing out those grains of truth which gospel fables, ‘don’t I know you from somewhere?’

‘Do you?’ He seemed as careful as I was.

‘You couldn’t by any chance know the Fields?’

‘Ah, yes.’ We unbent, full of reassuring rioises. ‘My poor friend.’

‘I visited Mrs Field. I
thought
I saw you arriving –’

‘– and you’re the gentleman in the long car. Of course. I
thought
I recognized you. Did you manage to get it seen to? I’m no mechanic myself, but I could tell from the noise and all that smoke –’

I wasn’t taking that from any bloke. ‘You’re a friend of Eric Field’s?’ I interrupted, peeved. My speedster might stutter a bit, but so did Caesar.

‘An old friend.’ He went all pious like they do. ‘I try to visit Muriel – Mrs Field, that is – as often as I can, to lend solace.’ He sighed. ‘It’s been a very difficult time for her, seeking readjustments.’

‘I do appreciate that, Reverend,’ I said, considerably moved for a second or so.

It’s pleasant being holy, but isn’t it boring? Holy duty done with, I got down to business.

‘I know you’ll think it a bit of a cheek, Reverend,’ I began apologetically. ‘But I’m trying to complete a set of accessories for a pistol I have, in a case.’

‘Oh.’ His eyes glinted. I was on to a real collector here, no mistake. ‘Any special variety?’

‘Very expensive,’ I said with the famous Lovejoy mixture of pride and regret. ‘A pocket Adams revolver.’

‘Oh.’ His fire damped. ‘Percussion.’

‘Yes, but almost mint.’ I let myself become eager. ‘There’s one nipple replaced, and a trace of repair –’

His lip curled into an ill-concealed sneer. ‘Well, Mr Lovejoy,’ he said, still polite. ‘I’m afraid percussion’s not my first choice.’

‘Flinters?’ I breathed in admiration.

‘It so happens . . .’ He controlled himself and said carefully, ‘I am interested. If you ever do hear of any flintlocks, I would be most happy to come to some arrangement . . .’

‘They’re pretty hard to find these days, Reverend,’ I told him sadly. ‘And the prices are going mad. Never seen anything like it.’

‘You’re a dealer, Mr Lovejoy?’ he asked, as if he hadn’t guessed.

‘Yes, but only in a small way.’ He would check up with the shop lady as soon as I was gone. Always admit what’s going to be found out anyway. ‘I’m mainly interested in porcelains.’

I got another smile for that. ‘I’m glad we’re not flintlock rivals.’

‘I only wish I had the money to compete,’ I confessed. ‘What I came about –’

‘The flask?’

‘If you still have it,’ I said, carefully measuring my words in case this all turned into a real sale, ‘I’d like to make you an offer.’

To my surprise he hesitated.

‘They’re fairly expensive,’ he said, working out private sums.

I groaned and nodded. ‘Don’t I know it?’

‘And you’ll require a flask more appropriate to a percussion –’

‘Oh, that’s detail,’ I interrupted casually. ‘It doesn’t matter too much. Anything goes these days.’

I sank out of sight in his estimation. As far as he was concerned, I would forever be a tenth-rate dealer of the cheapest, nastiest and most destructive kind. Even so, he still hung on, hesitating about selling me his flask. It was only after a visible effort he steeled himself to go on further, and courteously refused. I tried pushing him, offering a good market price, though it hurt. By then he was resolved.