'Name and where from?' she asked, suspicious.
'Lovejoy. East Anglia.'
'Code?'
Like those blinking KGB spy stories. 'Buttercup?' I said hopefully. 'Er, antirrhinum?' Dinty Carmichael's girls grow flowers.
Suspicion became hate. 'Arthur!'
A portly gent with a beer belly stepped from the office, slippers, cardigan, specs, smoking a pipe. He didn't look menacing, but the lady clearly expected him to bayonet me at the very least.
'Afternoon,' he said mildly.
'Afternoon. Sorry, I forgot Dinty's code.'
Dinty Carmichael's mad on security. His place is like the Tower of London, everything but the Beefeaters. His wife once had to go to a hotel because she couldn't work his electronic bleepers out. Daft, but there's plenty like him.
'He's one of them, Arthur,' the lady said.
'Who?' I asked, blank. 'Can't you just phone Dinty?'
'We've been robbed before. Don't think you'll get away with it!'
Late forties, hair dyed blonde, her silk dress a mass of coloured rectangles, gold bracelets, thick caked cosmetics, she looked simply beautiful.
'Got you. You bastard.' She locked the door.
Arthur had been inspecting me. 'Colette, you've got this one wrong.'
'Shut it, Arthur. Phone Demure-Secure.' She seized the parcel, and placed it on a marble Victorian wash stand, inspected the seals. She tore it open, brought out a small sauceboat and crowed in fury. 'See? It's a fake! You guttersnipe!'
'It's genuine, missus,' I told her, walking to the door.
'Colette, dear,' Arthur sighed, evidently used to her tantrums.
'Genuine?' She pointed to the seals - Dinty's parcels are all seals, with his own insignia.
'Are these seals Dinty Carmichael's, Arthur?'
I'd had enough of this, and said so. 'Dinty never lets anybody else wrap his antiques.
He never tells smurfs what they're carrying.'
She weighed me up. 'Then how did you know it was genuine?'
'Look at it for God's sake.' I was losing my rag. 'Original Worcester is painted in enamels that sink into the glaze, see? Even in a little sauceboat like that. Samson copies were enamelled thinly on transfers printed on. There'd be a giveaway black outline to the enamels.' I asked its pardon, and held it, smiling at its beauty. 'In torchlight, it will be translucent and slightly greeny. Samson of Paris did them in opaque earthenware, so you'd get no light through at all. And this gilding's golden. Samson's gilding is an ugly brassy yellow… What?'
The man Arthur was shaking his head. Colette was silent. I put the sauceboat down.
'I'm going, love. Keep me here against my will, Dinty Carmichael'll be cross.' The understatement of the year. I was to divvy some Regency silver for him the following day. He's wild about money, not an all-time first.
'Colette,' Arthur said. 'I rather think we have a divvy here. He'd not seen the object before. Yet he knew.'
'divvy?' She walked round me, looking up and down. I felt on sale, bargain basement.
'There's no such thing.'
'I'm not a thing, missus. Nor is this antique.'
'Then what's this?'
She pointed to an early sofa table, genuine old wood with lovely patina. I felt its embarrassment. I tried to smile at it, cheer it up, but couldn't speak without sorrow.
A sofa table is a lovely light thing, two drawers facing you and a small flap each side.
Its bifid legs join by a single stretcher. The genuine article's lovely.
'You poor thing,' I told it. 'Who did it to you?' I rounded on the woman. 'Was it you, you rotten cow?'
'What?' She recoiled, looking to her husband for protection. I'm a fiend, frighten small women any time.
'You took the legs from a cheval mirror, and a plain old Victorian dressing table's body.
You ignorant bitch. You chucked away the dressing table's legs, rims and back. Then added the flaps from a genuine old Pembroke table. And finish up with a bastard hybrid instead of three respectable honest pieces. Just for money? Missus, may you rot in hell.'
'Of all the…' She petered out, aghast.
I crouched down, spoke quietly to the fraudulent sofa table. 'Look, mate. I'm sorry for these oafs. I'll rustle up the money and come back for you. Try to hang on.' I peered at the price tag. It was in the old SUTHERLAND code, one letter for each number. The Goldhorns had stupidly put the GOLDSCHMIT code on the ticket as well, like the Swiss in Geneva secretly use. A kid could read it. I almost fainted at the price, but I'd promised now. 'Keep it for me, please,' I told the Goldhorns. 'Have you still got the pieces of wood you stole?'
'Stole?' Colette Goldhorn cried.
'Lady,' I said harshly. 'You stole the cheval mirror's main frame. You butchered back, sides, and legs of the Victorian dressing table. And you thieved the rest of the Pembroke table. You're a frigging air raid, you horrible bitch.'
Arthur came forward, puffing benignly. 'All right, son. Yes, we did it. We still have the pieces. Pay the market price, we'll sell you the lot.'
'Deal.'
Ten days later, Colette silently arrived at my cottage with the forged sofa table and the remaining pieces of wood. She handed them over, on condition that I divvied some rubbish mock pewter she'd just bought. It was a pretense, though like an ape I worried my way through the pewter, giving myself a terrible headache.
Arthur, it seemed, had gone to the Continent to do some auction buying and Colette was on her own for the next five days. I said she'd have to go to a hotel because I was broke.
'I'll stay, pay, make hay, Lovejoy,' she said. I can see her now, standing there in my candlelight. Odd how women glow in the dusk.
'I've only one bed.' I remember clearing my throat.
'Then we'll share.' She locked the door. A great one for doors. 'I'm older but bolder.'
'Your pewter's junk.'
She started to undress. 'Lovejoy,' she said with a sigh. 'Just shut up. There are other things in life than antiques.'
Clearly a nutter. That was how Colette, er, came into my life. Arthur never suspected, or he pretended. Are they the same thing? Me and Colette even went to Holland together once, and Norway. She was jealous and hated other women sight unseen, but a model of propriety when Arthur was around. I liked them both. Colette was my friend for obvious reasons, mostly the overwhelming gratitude a man feels when a classy lady gives him herself. Arthur was my friend because he was always a gentleman. Now he was dead, and Colette was vanished.
Before the dawn I was up making tea. I drew some well water into a jerry can, dug a small hole in the garden, put old rags in it. I chucked a drop of petrol on, lit it and stood back. I found two old dried-out used tea bags in the waste. No milk, so I crushed garden cob nuts to a paste, and used that the old way. Sitting naked in the garden, I spooned in my last bit of honey. Nectar.
The birds start chirping about five o'clock, and came on the scrounge as usual. Crispin my hedgehog - the dirty little sod lives in the compost heap - ignored me when I explained I'd have some grub for him tomorrow. I thought of Colette.
She had belonged to a minor showbusiness family. But Arthur was a Suffolk scion whose folk owned his land for centuries. It adjoined a vineyard a score miles away. I could do it today, lay Arthur's ghost, and try and help.
Time I did. She'd been good to me, until the Great Farewell. Maybe I'll tell you about that. I creaked upright, washed and dressed, and hit the road to the auction before the village woke.
8
THIS PARTICULAR AUCTION I'd last visited when my don't-get-tricked-in-antiques book came out. I'd gone because of a spate of stolen antiques. Grudgerham and Daughter Auctions Ltd wasn't long established, as auctioneers go, which in East Anglia means this side of Queen Vic. Local dealers joke that Grudgerham is simply the original founder, recycled. He looks it, mistrustful old devil. His daughter Shirley's a different matter. She knows a few antiques especially, rumour has it, those stolen in the Home Counties.