The Sleepers of Erin (26 page)

‘Equal?’

‘Agreed. But look. Kurt Heindrick promised me one repro torc as payment.’

I’m not a greedy bloke, but fair’s fair. We argued a bit, really quite mildly but meaning it. Gerald said payment for what. I countered that without my divvie sense there could be no sleeper scam at all.

‘Like just now,’ I insisted. ‘How would you have known which torc to show Sebastian if I hadn’t pointed it out just now?’

We settled – some more reluctantly than the rest – on my taking one from the delectable row of gold crescents. ‘Only until we all meet after Sebastian’s given us the certificate of authenticity, after his tests,’ Gerald warned. ‘Then we argue it out, you, and me and Sinead.’

‘All right.’

He made me turn my back, mistrustful sod, face the toffee shop across the road and pick one without looking, on account of their possible slight variation in size. Which only goes to show how people trust people. I uttered a few harsh expletives on his attitude, which delighted him.

‘Sebastian’s tests will take three days, Lovejoy,’ he said, wrapping the rest carefully. ‘Look after Shinny till then, you wicked Englishman.’

‘See you, then.’

He drove off, me waving at the clattering smoking hulk. I crossed the road as he’d instructed to catch the bus, smiling at the weight in my jacket pocket.

He’d told me to be at this restaurant dead on eight. I wasn’t fooled any more – or thought I wasn’t. Gerald was really a ball of fire, just made of hinged bits of angle-iron.

Shinny and I reached the restaurant simultaneously. There were a few awkward minutes looking at one another through candle flames while she asked what had gone on and I made blundering explanations praising Gerald to the skies.

‘He’s got the torcs,’ I explained. ‘A valuation by weight.’

She smiled. ‘Couldn’t you have done that, Lovejoy?’

‘To the last farthing, but you know. Partner’s foibles.’

‘Yes.’ She seemed sadder than yesterday’s bunting. ‘Gerald got a message to me through Kathleen. She’s—’

‘A cousin?’

‘Mmmh. Our Patrick’s side of the family. Joe’s in hospital.’

‘He might make it?’

‘Oh, he will, Lovejoy. Gerald will take care of the bills and everything. He already has a job for him when he comes out.’

‘What if he’s maimed for life?’

‘Trust Gerald.’

‘If you say.’ Though I couldn’t see Joe doing anything but the con trick. Once a sleeper man, always a sleeper man. ‘Erm, were you all right, love?’ I cleared my throat and watched the waiters for a bit. ‘I had to, erm, borrow your car after . . . that accident.’

‘Of course you had, darling.’ She touched my hand sadly. ‘I understand.’

I didn’t think she did but let it pass.

‘Erm, Jason and the other bloke. Were they both . . . ?’

‘Both. I waved down a motor and they phoned the ambulance.’

Thoughts of what might have been sometimes make you go green, so I focused on grub and gelt. We ordered a mound of food then I asked the question uppermost in my mind.

‘Will Gerald be okay with those torcs? They’re worth a fortune.’

‘Trust Gerald.’ She held my hand and gazed at me with those eyes through the golden flames between us. ‘You can’t beat an Irishman in a shilling race.’

We drove to the strand to watch the Howth lights and walked the dark streets. She was in the mood for reminiscing and talked of her childhood abroad, the dresses she hated and how shivering cold she’d been at school. I made her laugh once by telling her to teach me that Gaelic turf-cutter’s song Gerald had sung while at the turf diggings. She fell about, helpless. I had to hold her up.

‘Gerald? Him? Oh, Lovejoy, darling! Gerald hasn’t a word of the Gaelic. He makes everything up. Everything. All the time. Don’t you understand anything at all?’

So Gerald was a non-Gaelic Gael as well as a nonpoetic poet.

I mused, for her sad soul’s sake, ‘What else is he not? Better tell me now before our partnership really gets under way.’

She laughed at that so much she cried.

We walked over the little river and into somebody’s garden. She was on their steps while I dithered at the gate.

‘Come in, Lovejoy.’

Keys clinked. The door opened and she was silhouetted there, looking down the steps at me as the hallway light came on.

‘Er, is it all right, Shinny?’

‘There’s nobody here, darling. It’s my cousin Maureen’s. She’s away for three days.’

I went up the steps. ‘Caitlin’s side of the family? Sean’s? Patrick’s?’

‘Mary’s. You know, Mrs Heindrick’s head maid.’

And there was I assuming Gerald always knew where to be by a kind of instinct.

‘Tell her not to mix the porcelain styles in future,’ I said severely. ‘I was saying to Jason only the other day that Meissen Augsburg would have been ideal—’

‘
Lovejoy
!’ the bandsaw said, but I was already putting my torc in the kitchen’s sugar tin, shoving it deep in the sugar. I found some plaster to stick its lid on tight.

‘Safety, mavourneen,’ I said. ‘In case we sleep heavy, alannah.’

She rounded on me and hauled me close. ‘Lovejoy,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you start your silly rubbish tonight I’ll—’

She was pulling my jacket off, then my shirt, then handing me along the corridor.

‘Mind my arm, mavourneen.’

‘One more word out of you,’ she said in fury. ‘One word, that’s all.’

She slammed me into a bedroom on the first floor where an electric fire already burned. She swung me round to face her and kicked the door shut with a thud that shook the whole house.

‘Ready?’ she said, arms akimbo.

‘I think so,’ I said doubtfully.

‘Right,’ she said, shelling her coat. ‘Get ’em off.’

Once, during the night, I thought I heard a familiar whining scooter engine, but Shinny’s lovely cool breast was in my hand still, so I wrapped my legs over her and went back to sleep.

She was gone.

You will have experienced those moments of disorientation when you wake up assuming you are at home or somewhere, and suddenly every single sense screams
different! different
! and for a sick moment you feel utterly scared and lost. It was like that, opening my eyes into bright ten o’clock daylight with strangeness all around and the big double bed crumpled and . . . and . . .

And Shinny gone.

I shot up, heart banging, dashed into every room thinking of the Gardai and the Fraud Squad and Interpol and Sherlock Holmes, but there was only this envelope.

I thought, This is bloody rubbish. She can’t have left, just when we’d become lifelong partners. The note was on the back of a shopping list.

Darling Lovejoy,

I’m gone with Gerald. I can hear you saying as you read this that women always settle for what they can get. Maybe we are really like that. I don’t know. I do wish I could have got you for keeps, but you will never be the sort.

Gerald wishes you good luck and says to tell you we’ll do the sleepers proud. Last night’s paper is in the kitchen. Gerald said not to show it you till now.

All my love, darling,

Shinny.

The paper had a front page chunk about a gentleman and his wife being seriously injured while involved in an amateur archaeological excavation in the west. The wedge grave had fallen in, the floor crumbling under their weight. In fact, there was doubt whether they would even survive. Gardai were making extensive enquiries. Two local men were missing, with some of the torcs. The Heindricks were highly respected pillars of the community, and there were lessons for us all in the sad events surrounding the accident. Poor them. I didn’t bother reading the rest, and thought of Shinny.

Of course I should have spotted it. Gerald was in partnership with Joe – maybe always had been. He, Joe and Joxer had been in collusion all the time. And of course Shinny. They had all gone along with the Heindricks as a team within a team, to con the conners. I should have known. An Irish poet in East Anglia would have been coals to Newcastle, but a Dublin-trained nurse could arrive, work at a hospital and serve as go-between for Joxer and Gerald. A plan cool enough for Jason, the Heindricks and me to have missed the truth completely. No wonder Gerald didn’t much care how deep his arrows went. And Shinny had the strength to leave me high and dry. As I’d said, I couldn’t imagine Joe doing anything else but antiques con tricks. Once a sleeper man always a sleeper man. They could manage without me. Of all, I was superfluous. Tears came to my eyes. Honestly. Tears. Me. At my age.

And Shinny, lovely eyes sad across the gold candle flames, had said it too: You can’t beat an Irishman in a shilling race.

I’d been had. I’d been done.

Shinny and her team had conned me, conned the Heindricks, and played us all off against each other. Last night’s love had been farewell, a kiss before flying.

Worse, I was broke. Not a bean.

Except . . .

You won’t believe this, but all morning I mooned about the place touching the bed and looking for traces of her and suchlike daftness. Love is a hell of a thing. I felt I would never smile again. I went to find the sugar tin in the kitchen. Gone. Good old Shinny had snatched it as she ran.

The trouble is, I thought, watching the children cross the road towards the school, love has to be made or you’ve got none. Like antiques. And ‘made’ means
made
, formed, laboriously worked into being in that creative act that is the terrible and utter act of loving.

You can’t do it alone. Try, and all you achieve is a longing, a feeling, desire, hope, fondness. Certainly, to love somebody she has to be there to be loved. I was heartbroken.

Well, almost.

I made some tepid tea, drank it as a kind of St Giles bowl, and watched the women go past with their prams towards the shops near the green where the buses turn at the top of the road.

There wasn’t a crust in the house, not a penny. Shinny had taken every groat. Not that I’d had much. And Shinny had paid for last night’s supper in the posh restaurant by St Stephen’s Green. Still, it showed she was thinking of her present and future comfort, which is practically every bird’s full-time occupation.

About midday I brewed up again, worse even than before, thinking. I was a long way from Dublin’s centre, and me with not even the bus fare. The train from the level crossing would cost a mint because fares always do. Stay here and starve to death? Or move about in hope?

Nothing else for it.

I heaved a sigh, rose and went back into the bedroom. The gold torc, glowing with its ancient splendour, was still underneath the bed where I’d slipped it after lofting it from the sugar tin during the night. Loving Shinny to exhaustion had been a pleasurable duty to protect the torc.

The rare eighteenth-century old flat iron which I’d substituted for it in the sugar tin wasn’t to be sneezed at. The rarer ones – Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale, incidentally, as that one had been – are almost priceless now, real collector’s items. I was very, very narked that Shinny had taken it, thieving bitch. Even if she’d thought the tin contained a gold repro, it was still me she was stealing from. Well, all right, it still belonged to the householder Maureen, but I felt annoyed with Shinny.
I
could have nicked the flat iron instead of her. That’s women for you.

I slipped the torc into my pocket. As long as I gave the whole coat to the archaeologist, he’d be able to spectrograph his way to the undeniable truth – that in my hand was the original gold torc. It had been easy to pick it out simply by its vibes, even while Gerald watched me and I gaped innocently at the toffee shop. Of course, sad that Gerald and Shinny had only umpteen reproductions, but gold’s worth its own weight. They wouldn’t starve. Just get a nasty shock when they found everybody laughed at the claim that at least one of their torcs was genuine. Still, people shouldn’t go trying to defraud friends.

To equal things up, I decided to look round the house. There was a small Henry oil on the wall, faded from stupid placing on the wall facing the window where the sunlight would hit. It was suffering from craquelure because of coal fires in the same room. Careless old Maureen.

The painting came free of its frame quite well without a scratch. I borrowed a pillowcase and folded it over the painting. (Tip: never wrap a painted canvas up with string directly. Fingers are kindest and therefore best for carrying.) Then I borrowed a small white-metal ‘bronze’, 1911 or so when they were all the rage and everybody wanted one of those stalwart heroes leading a prancing nag for the mantelpiece.

Patricia Harvest, the plump lustful sexpot from Goldhanger, like all antique dealers, couldn’t tell whitemetal from dandruff, so I’d get at least half the fare home from her. She was sure to be in the main hotel where the antiques fair was being held. After all, I’d promised to meet her there without dreaming I would actually turn up. In fact, thinking of her winning ways made me feel quite warm inside again.

Finally, I borrowed a small carriage clock from the kitchen. No longer going, but walnut-cased clocks, especially those with typical Belgo-French corner pillars, are highly sought nowadays even though they aren’t much before 1870. Funny how fashions go in collecting. It fitted neatly in my pocket.

I found the right hotel sixth go. Bloody telephones, never any use.

Mrs Patricia Harvest was in suite 108, bless her greedy little heart.

‘Pat?’ I said, all casual. ‘Lovejoy here, darlin’. As promised.’

‘Patricia,’ she corrected. ‘Lovejoy?’ She was already breathing hard. ‘Darling! At last! I’ve been waiting and
waiting
. Where are you?’

‘That’s me at the door now,’ I said prophetically. ‘Be prepared to (a) pay for a taxi at the hotel, (b) rape me in your circular bed, and (c) make a fortune with me at that antiques fair. Okay?’

‘Oooh, darling,’ she said, practically groaning.

Before departing with my loot, I totted up my expectations on a scrap of paper lying around. When I turned it over I realized it was Shinny’s farewell letter. I hadn’t meant to be so casual about it all, still busy being heartbroken for life, but the trouble with heartbreak is it’s not much use. Yet that thieving swine Gerald had nicked all my gold torcs. I felt like strangling him, but hunting the bastard down might leave me full of arrows in some desolate bog. It was either revenge, or immediate solace in Pat Harvest’s sexy wealth.