The Sleepers of Erin (17 page)

‘And you heathens think we are quaint! You’ll serenade me with no tune at all?’

Her incredulity made me laugh and we returned slowly to the hotel calmer and happier than I’d felt for days. We looked in the bar but there was no sign of Gerald – or of Johno Storr, Jason, Kurak, the Heindricks, which was even better – so we settled down for a drink in the fug.

We laughed and chatted a good deal. Some time during that evening she took my hand to look at it for a minute and asked me to promise we would all stay together, Gerald, her and me.

‘Promise,’ I said, still in good humour. We’d got away from our pursuers, hadn’t we?

‘You’ll keep your word, Lovejoy? It’s important. Gerald’s worried about something. I can tell. And I know you’re on edge.’

‘Hand on my heart,’ I swore. ‘Here. Keep my dumb violin as security.’

Pleased, she took the thing and put it on the seat between us, me ordering more drinks and thinking Lovejoy and my big mouth. That would probably be the last I’d see of it.

‘Thank you, darling,’ she said mistily. ‘Now your money.’

‘Eh?’

She said sweetly, ‘I’ll create a disturbance and get the Gardai called unless you do. As a token of your trust, darling.’ I heard this in silence, was thinking, the mistrustful bitch. She leant over and bussed me, a cynical creature of no illusions. ‘You can have it back at breakfast.’ In silence I handed my gelt over. She bought the next round, which was big-hearted. That’s women for you.

Gerald did not return before the bar shut.

The hotel gradually quietened, which meant Gerald must be miles off. I lay back and watched the ceiling.

Funny old place, Ireland. I mean, who’d guess that hotels organize the nation’s baby-sitters? Or that the townships were all straight out of the old North Riding design of Yorkshire – a wide straight street of terraced stone houses? Or that obviously new graves were in evidence in practically every ruined abbey we’d seen, an indication of locals maintaining their familial right to monastic burial? Or that nobody much spoke Gaelic in everyday life? Or that you got money for actually living and working in the Gaelteacht, the Gaelic-speaking parts? Or that the museums and churches had such a wealth of antiquities that set your breathing wrong even as you drove past? Or that there was so little noise?

Times like this, waiting for people to simply get out of the way, I wish I still smoked. Something to do. It was getting on for midnight. A few people used the stairs, one couple making me smile by talking loudly with the impervious good cheer of the tipsy. After that it got very quiet. I dozed a little, went over in my mind the possible antiques good old Tinker was hoovering up in East Anglia. I’d given him no money to slap deposits down on things, but locally they knew I was good for debts – useless with gelt, I thought wryly. If only I’d had a bit of credit. If I came this way again I’d bring every groat I could scrape up.

In a closed antique shop window Shinny and I had seen a folding ivory fan. Closed, it was made exactly like a miniature 1780 musket, the unmistakable Short Land Pattern weapon. Only last year, such a mint treasure was an average weekly wage or less. Now it fetches half a year’s salary in anybody’s money. Look out for ivory fans in their original box if they’re Cantonese, because that doubles the value, and remember that the fashion for Chinese stuff which followed MacCartney’s embassy to the Court of the Imperial Dragon did much to stimulate copying Chinese art, but not much for imports. The almighty boom came around the time of the Opium Wars when Chinese (mainly Cantonese) bowls, carvings, screens, porcelains, statuettes, jewellery, clothes – much of it made in Kwantung mimicking Western fashions, to order – poured into England. I’ve yet to see an auction in any English town without a genuine piece of such date (1820–1850, give or take an hour) and origin.

Japanese influence, on the other hand, came . . .

My mind froze. ‘Who is it?’

I could have sworn somebody scratched at the door of my room. Nervously I got off the bed and padded slowly across, wanting something handy to use as a truncheon. Nothing, of course, just when you want it. My throat felt funny.

The hotel corridor was empty when I managed to screw up courage to open the door and peer out. But that quiet sound had been very definite. An envelope lay on the carpet just inside the door.

Familiar scent and addressed to me in a woman’s handwriting. Worse, the note was on hotel notepaper.

Dearest Lovejoy,

How very keen you are to get started! And wasn’t that an absolutely lovely journey?
Such
pretty countryside! My husband has formed the strong belief that the fishing will be absolutely superb here this year, and is already talking of the salmon. He
so
hopes you will join him. We have a delightful place away from that dreadful new trading estate. Kurt would value your opinion on our recent acquisitions. They include a splendid sugar castor, Lamerie I am told. You’ll love it. We will expect you in the morning for breakfast – say, nine o’clock? Our country house is on the old Ennis road, twenty minutes away. Kurak will call for you in good time. Please feel free to bring that scrawny female and her strange young man.

Love,

Lena.

My overworked sweat glands panicked into action.

That leaf-on-a-flood nervousness returned. Everybody else stirred up tides. Good old Lovejoy just drifted helpless. Lena’s message was clear and manifold: Limerick is home territory to us Heindricks; we are big in the land with many mansions and even our sugar sprinklers could buy and sell all the Lovejoys of this world put together. Not only that; the Heindricks’ scam was so big that even zillionaires were keen on its successful execution. That last worried me. I dwelled wistfully on Paul de Lamerie, and knew that there had been one such 1719 piece of his up in a recent Dublin antiques fair for a mere 29,700 quid. Lena said I’d love it – as a bribe?

The phone rang.

Once I’d subsided and got my heart back I said, ‘Yes?’ A bloke said, ‘Ah, just to check you’re still there, sor. I’m to say if you want anything urgent the two of us will be down in reception.’

‘Is this from Mr Heindrick?’ I asked.

‘His compliments.’

That did it. I slammed the receiver down. Enough’s enough, even for pathetic creeps like me. I switched the light off, saw I had everything – in fact not a farthing, not a weapon – and looked out.

Nobody in the corridor. Terror lends wings to others, but stealth to me. I floated towards the stairs past Sinead’s room – two along from mine. The passageway lights were still on, and stair wall-lamps so artistic you could hardly see a bloody thing. But in the well-lit lounge two tweedy blokes were swilling that black foamy drink in comfortable armchairs. The desk bloke was with them and the talk was all horses. No way past them, that was for sure, but I was past caring. The floor above had an end window and a fire escape, which squeaked from disuse when I trod on the fenestrated metal steps. Well if they heard me all that could happen would be they’d send me back to my room till ‘Kurak’ zoomed up.

Gerald’s van was in the tiny car park. A single neon lamp gave shadows everywhere. Its light showed that Gerald’s weird glass bubble had gone from the van’s roof. As I climbed in and groped for the wiring I saw his long thin case had vanished, too. The rope lashings and the old tarpaulin had been chucked in a heap. The silly sod had probably gone fishing, at this time of night. Or maybe he and Sinead were, erm, upstairs and . . . A bloke like him is really beyond me. I shrugged off the irritating image of him and Sinead and got the engine going. In the quiet night of Limerick City it sounded like a spaceprobe blasting off. Naturally I couldn’t guess reverse and had to climb out and push the bloody crate myself to get room to turn. As I did so I noticed a white Ford saloon, about three cars off. Its front offside wing was badly damaged, as though it had run into a wall somewhere. I went and had a peer at it. Maybe it really was the one which had been parked next to Michael Fenner’s grand posh Rover outside his bookseller’s place. So it hadn’t been Jason driving after all. Well, birds of a feather and all that.

Mulgrave Street was the direction I wanted out of town, parallel to the railway and heading for Tipperary. Only one headlamp worked so I was fortunate to see the turn-off. Within minutes the lovely safe city had ended, and horrible countryside was all around. Rain made it more difficult, speckling the windscreen. The wipers didn’t work, and I couldn’t get top gear. The fuel gauge showed Empty. The wind whistled in through the holes in the bodywork. Wrestling with the wheel, I bungled the lunatic vehicle through the worsening weather, peering blearily out for the signs I knew would be there.

The dawn came up on the lake shining right into my eyes and the surface glittering. An entire picture of innocence with blandness all around.

The rain had packed it up about three hours before dawn, thank God. It was quite picturesque, really, if you weren’t drenched, shivering under a filthy old wet tarpaulin and hungry. A fish plopped somewhere and a bird chirped happily, bloody fool. Time to look around and see precisely where Lena’s merry mob were going to hide the repro gold torcs and pull their miraculous ‘find’. There couldn’t be many places, not here in all this remoteness. So I thought, though a duckegg like me can be wrong without even trying.

Walking ploshily down to the lake from the roadside was not as easy as it sounds. For a start, you can hardly ever tell where these lakes begin and end. Not like lakes anywhere else, which have definite edges. This had a sort of longish brown grass fringe. You go towards the lake and the ground just gets wetter and this brackeny stuff more prolific, until finally you realize you are up to your calves in water and are actually awash. It’s a rum business. From my position in the van reaching the crannog looked easy, but proved hopeless. A crannog’s a small fortified island – sometimes artificially constructed as a kind of little waterbound citadel. They were made in the distant past and proved highly effective – after all, the powerful Republic of Venice began as nothing more than a kind of posh multiple crannog. I stared across, ankle-deep in water. The little crannog was out of reach on foot and there were no signs of any regular disturbances of the terrain between the road and the lakeshore nearest the crannog. It could have been the obvious place to plant a considerable number of gold torcs even if they had been manufactured by poor old Joxer in his workshed back in the grounds of St Botolph’s Priory last month.

Squelching to drier ground, I went left and began to work round the lake. The size deceived me. From the road it had looked small, coming into the growing daylight from the amorphous slopes of brownish green. Now I realized it was over a mile across, and was indented on the opposite side into large smooth bays, to north and south-west of a fairly considerable hill. There was nothing for it but to go the whole way round.

Our library had pinpointed the known archaeology of the place quite well, though construction diagrams were not available. Still, I could tick off on my mental list the antiquities as I found them. The village of Kilfinney had been even smaller than I’d learned to expect, a mere thirty or so terraced houses asplay a single unlit street, with one shop, a couple of narrow tracks leading off to nearby crofts, and a diminutive chapel. The lake was a handful of miles off. Remoter farms were shown on the map far over the western side of the lake but nothing immediately in view. One stroke of luck was that the main Limerick-Cork road ran over to the east, and you wouldn’t want to reach Mallow or Tipperary by this route. No car had passed once I’d found the lake in the small hours. I was clearly ahead, in a narrowing race.

It took two hours. Between road and lake were two stone circles, nothing like Stonehenge but still the real thing, and a ring fort. If you’ve never seen one of these, they are merely earthworks thrown up in a circle. Archaeologists and other wastrels burn air exchanging theories about ring forts (they were probably nothing more than cattle-pens easily defended against pilferers from neighbouring tribes). They have always disappointed treasure seekers. Stone circles, whatever they were actually for, were certainly too sacrosanct for the ancients to go digging and burying many trinkets.

The ground outcropped stonily when I reached the north-west corner where the foundations of old dwellings stood, maybe nine or ten. Each was double, like spectacles, linked by a narrow strip – maybe cottages with adjacent storehouses. For me they’d be too recent by at least a thousand years. In any case, ruined houses were places people were always robbing in the Middle Ages and later for building material. Moral: too unbelievable that a whole hoard might have remained unviolated. I went on, south now on the sheltered side of the lake. I could see Gerald’s tatty van waiting like a faithful friend in the weak sunshine.

A lane ran a couple of miles east, ducking round Kicknadun, the lake’s hill. The remains here were far more likely candidates for Lena’s sleeper trick. Ring ramparts were only to be expected on a hillside. What interested me more were the Stone Age house, and the lone burial tumulus. The self-effacing mounds are all over the British Isles. They are smooth, sometimes longbarrows, shaped like inverted boats. This one showed no signs of having been tinkered with. I walked a couple of furlongs towards the Stone Age house site, over the rough tussocky hillside, then paused. A horseman was moving along the distant lane, making as if to skirt the eastern side of Kicknadun Hill. He was riding casually, not looking.

The ground was undisturbed round the site. Genuine, though, from the strong inner vibes its lopsided stone mounds emitted. The question was whether Heindrick had the nerve to use a place like this – not quite in the right period, obviously partly excavated. I scanned to the south-west where the two stone fort ruins showed. Well, the hotel’s guide book had explained they’d been occupied till the tenth century at least. No, Heindrick. The forts were out. There was no movement on the hillside. That horse had looked useful rather than racey. A crofter? A riding-school leader sussing out the day’s route? The rider had been carrying a stick.