Some twenty dealers and casuals drifted among the furniture and assorted junk. The former always try to look disinterested. The latter - called 'women' in the antiques trade, irrespective of actual gender - always reveal their fascination. It's only when they find what they're hoping for that they pull themselves up, look guiltily around like they've been caught out. Then only do they pretend casual, dart into a corner and make surreptitious notes. People are lovely. You have to smile.
Heaven knows why, but every drossy auction rooms has a tatty notice board with clippings tacked there to brown and curl with age. Today, I stood reading them trying to keep a straight face. 'Up To Ten Thousand Reward', was blazoned in massive type.
Beneath was a line of minuscule print saying subject to the usual conditions. This is the ultimate con trick, because what exactly are 'usual' conditions? Who defines them?
Answer: the advertiser, that's who. He can invent any old conditions he likes. Think of the small print in insurance policies - then distrust 'usual' conditions a little bit more.
Equally wounding was a display from some trade paper: STOLEN from a residential property in St Edmundsbury were a large number of fine antique propelling pencils in gold, silver, porcupine, with various writing ancillaries. These are now highly sought by collectors. Everybody has an old fountain pen they don't want, because maybe it doesn't fill properly or the nib's no good. Take a minute to look it up in the public library, and you might be the proud owner of a Dunhill-Namiki floral-lacquered fountain pen worth at least two months' holiday in posh European hotels. Called 'scribiana' or
'postiana' by those strange folk called collectors, it's anything to do with writing, desks, ink, even postal weighing scales.
'Seeing if your own ill-gotten goods are posted yet, Love joy?'
'Wotcher, Shirley.' I turned smiling. Everybody likes her.
Shirley actually runs the auction. The lads take the mickey, of course, as a means of concealing their inveterate lust while she gavels away on the rostrum. She takes no nonsense. I wish she would. She dresses old-tyme, pinafore dress, high neck, starched white apron, stiff samite cuffs, with a lace bertha and a maid's mob cap. It brings publicity. She's always in the local papers demonstrating treasures. Oddly, she has a degree in economics, and jokes that she's now going straight, har har.
'These aren't the ones nicked from Archway, then?' I asked casually.
'Who knows, Lovejoy?' she said demurely. She meant who cares. 'I hear you're doing Dosh a favour. How come?'
'Poverty, love.' I glanced around at the trestle tables. She had a hundred pieces of furniture in, two dozen paintings, and some ten score 'bandies'. These last are antiques you can hold in a palm, anything from a small carriage clock to a channel-mounted ruby nipple ring, an amber brooch or a necklet.
She smiled. Only women can do this amused I-know-you expression. It's why they're always one up even when they aren't, if you follow.
'Yet you're here to buy, Lovejoy?' She increased the watts in her smile. 'Such trust!'
I nodded at the adverts. 'Chartered Loss Adjusters. Good tide.'
This is the other side of the coin. If you get burgled and want your antiques back, swarms of Chartered, Affiliated or Certified teams will leech onto you. Of course they'll say it's to 'mobilise resources in your interests'. My advice? Tell them to get lost. If your special treasure was a two-handled Sunderland loving cup of 1825 left you by your Auntie Faith and it got stolen in some smash-and-grab, the chances are it'll have been sold three times before tomorrow midnight. So what chance have you? None.
And if it's a collection of antiques - lead soldiery, models, porcelain dolls, jewellery, scent bottles - the whole lot will have been 'sold on' only once, but to a specialist
'wallet', the person who commissioned the robbery. Crooks who fund burglaries of collectors' homes pay a tenth of the burglar's fee up front, and the rest on safe delivery of the stolen goods. Such bludges, as they're termed, are arranged in every tavern in East Anglia. They're talked of loudly in every tap room, no secrecy worth mentioning.
It's a horrible world.
'You're just cynical, Lovejoy.'
She interrupted herself to answer a few questions from Vern Cappuchin, a rogue from Stowmarket who sells antiques he sees in Sotheby's auction catalogues. He's utterly fraudulent, never been prosecuted.
'Wotcher, Lovejoy,' he said. 'Got enough to buy a teapoy?'
'Ta, Vern.' I wasn't having any. 'Nice picture, is it?'
He's always got some moan, which is a nerve, since he doesn't own the things he sells.
Just picks up an auctioneer's catalogue, does a reverse print of any photograph and alters the colours by hand from a paintbox. Then he shows his photo around, hoping to take a deposit. It's astonishing how many people get taken in. I've seen Vern accept money deposits from as many as three customers in one afternoon in the same auction crowd, all for a photographed antique that some famous London auction house hadn't even auctioned off yet. It's as if folk are simply desperate to get tricked.
'No, Lovejoy. It's rubbish.' He showed me a picture, a lovely genuine teapoy. 'I'm honestly wondering whether to write and complain to Christie's. Their colours are simply wrong. It's just not good enough.'
See what I mean? Yet he drives a Jaguar, holidays in the USA, has a yacht on the Deben, golfs at Lytham St Anne's. I'm going wrong somewhere.
'No box, though,' he grumbled.
'They didn't have, at first, Vern,' I told him, from kindness. 'It's only in modern times that hostesses served tea from one table. In the late eighteenth century, each visitor was provided with her own separate small table. Like that one.' I nodded at his - well, Christie's - teapoy photo. 'Lift it with one finger, it's so light. Simple pillar-with-claw construction, two feet six inches tall, the surface's width only half that.' I admired the titchy table's elegance.
Now, though, dealers alter these rarities into a plant stand or a larger table. They do it because they're mesmerized by dimensions. The early, and rare, teapoy table - so light, so plain - is worth a fortune. Cackhanded forgers routinely mangle them into some different monstrosity. The teapoy - originally tipai, 'three legs' from Hindi and Persian -
is among the most common of murdered antiques. Like the pole screen, like the old plain stool. I honestly don't know why the teapoy doesn't make a comeback. They're such lovely pieces. Interestingly, elderly ladies who lived out east in the Raj still provide you with your own little table with everything on it for teatime, but the gracious habit is dying out. Now, all meals are plop, slop and hop.
Vern glumly wended his way. Shirley grimaced.
'Wish I'd one of those to auction, Lovejoy.'
'Want one?' I asked, serious. 'Take me a fortnight, if you'll buy the heartwood.'
'Deal,' she said. 'On commission, or buy outright?'
'Buy.' We shook hands. 'Catalogue it as you want. I'll see it's aged right.' I smiled. 'You know what they say about a fake antique. First auction, it's a forgery. Second time, doubtful. Third time round it's genuine.'
Shirley didn't even blush. She's famous for carouselling antiques, changing their fictional history. This way, nobody's ever quite sure if the 'antique' they're inspecting is the one they saw last week or something completely different. Her catalogues are balderdash, of course.
'I was surprised you're doing Dosh's job, Lovejoy.'
One of her whifflers was signalling, should he ring the bell to start. She gave him the nod.
'How is Dosh, Shirley?' I asked, seeing every dealer in the place was drifting our way, wondering what we'd just agreed. She'd been Dosh's lass for about a year, swapped herself over from a wild Welsh cabinet maker from Carmarthen who got gaoled for hijacking antiques vans on trunk roads.
'Just the same,' she said. A trace of bitterness in there? This was the reason I'd stopped by.