Sir Ponsonby was sitting on a low wall eating bacon and eggs from a silver tray. He brings his own cutlery, cup and saucer, milk jug. Tourists photograph him in mid-nosh.
His white napkins are monogrammed with his crest, and he affects a George III table screen of walnut, date about 1815, a lovely piece worth more than the entire nosh van.
'Here, Sir Ponsonby,' I asked, wondering. 'Why is it, keen antiques trader that you are, you don't sell that table screen?'
Georgian ladies used them to protect their lovely pale complexions - sign of high breeding, before leathery tans became fashionable. They wrote letters in a sunlit arbour, by firelight or candlelight. There's a daft belief among antique dealers that protecting fair cheeks is the pole screen's only value. Wrong. Why, I can remember my old dad reading by firelight. He'd sit by the hob, one hand holding his book, the other shielding his eyes from the embers. I do it myself when Electricity Board fascists cut the power.
'Sprat to catch a mackerel, old boy,' he boomed. 'They trek me to my barrow, object of all their desires!'
Sir Ponsonby embarrasses me. The lads say glitterati, slitterati. Me, I'm not even sure if he really is who he says, or if he's one gigantic fraud. A cynic would ring the public school, ask outright, but I haven't the heart. Whose business is it but his own? All about, the market milled as only Bermondsey Antiques Market can. I noticed an old lady, struggling to hump boxes of porcelain from a handcart. You see these desperate folk about - past it, hoping to keep Time at bay by reliving a successful youth. I looked away, ashamed for her, for all the greedy lot of us.
Meanwhile, Sir Ponsonby noshed on. I stood awkwardly making conversation while he finished his repast. Seeing I wasn't gainfully employed for the moment here's details of the padparadsha: Deep in Sri Lanka's fruitful mountains, gemstone orchard to the world, an occasional enticing precious stone is mined. The 'padpa', as dealers call them, is of all things a true sapphire. But no plain old sapphire, this miracle. It's a luscious transparent orangey-pink! These lovely wonders aren't common. So, naturally, greedsters thought of manufacturing synthetic padpas. Lo and behold, now they're everywhere. Fashions worry me. I keep warning myself of my homemade law: Fashion today, fool tomorrow. Like, an entrancing orange skirt of last year today looks ridiculous, but who resists fashion?
Nobody, because fraud raises its ugly head. Synthetic padpas (they're actually corundum, if you're hooked on taxonomy) soon became cheap, while genuine gemstones stayed costly. Which is why, back in rural East Anglia, Dosh Callaghan decided to buy some genuine padpas, have them made into ornate 'early Victorian'
jewellery. He'd mount a score of synthetics in similar settings - rings, necklaces, earrings, suites of ladies' jewellery. I guessed he'd got the whole scam planned, fake settings, forged certificates. He'd already had me paint an early portrait of Lady Howarth wearing the settings he was having made. The cost to Doshie would be about eight thousand. Profit? Half a million, played right.
Except the original 'genuine padparadsha gems' he'd bought turned out to be cheapo tsavorites. I was here to suss out who'd done Dosh down. Once I'd fingered the miscreant, he would wreak vengeance. I was unhappy, but beggars can't, can we?
With a genteel dabbing of linen at his lips, Sir Ponsonby concluded his nosh, handed his tray to the noshbar proprietor, and strolled with me into the churchyard among the winos.
'You see the problem, Sir Ponsonby,' I said sadly. 'Dosh Callaghan is well narked. You met him when he collected a thick-skirted late card table, supposedly Hepplewhite only the drop wasn't shallow enough, remember? He's paid me to discover who swapped his genuine padpas for tsavorite.'
'Didn't you ask him?'
'Dosh said they were delivered by a wonker called Chev, who's somewhere in Edinburgh.' A wonker is a driver who ships small antiques, up to about chair size, anywhere in the kingdom, door to door. Very reliable, wonkers are, because they lose their livelihood - maybe their legs - if they default. 'Chev' after his huge American car.
Dosh had given me registration, phone numbers, address.
'Can't you contact him?'
'Tried that. Chev's due back Thursday. Something going down.' Meaning a clandestine robbery, when a trusty wonker is worth his weight in gold.
Sir Ponsonby gazed at me. My scalp prickled, because he wasn't your actual warm-hearted instant mourner. 'Sure you want to know, Lovejoy? Sturffie recently sold some genuine padparadsha gemstones.'
'Sturffie?' Sir Ponsonby grasped my arm in a grip of steel as I turned away towards the teeming market. 'Think, Lovejoy. Sturffie boxed them up last Friday.'
I said, 'Thanks, Sir Ponsonby.' My pal Sturffie? Who'd once saved me a clobbering, if not worse?
'Sorry, Lovejoy.' He knew the consequences for Sturffie. 'Look,' he said kindly. 'Come round for supper, what say? Moiya cooks fairly well for an idiot.'
'Thank you, Sir Ponsonby.' I'd intended to catch the train with my bad news, but suddenly wanted to remain safe in London's mayhem. 'You still live in Dulwich?'
'St James's now, Lovejoy. Give me a bell.'
He palmed me his card. I trudged off, feet heavy.
What the hell had Sturffie been thinking of? Surely to God he'd have known his trick would have been rumbled, and that retribution would follow? When in doubt, go for a nosh, listen to the gossip, feel for a way out. I followed the aroma.
3
MIMI WELKINSHAW WAS at her dad's van, thank goodness. I needed her help. She waved hello with a forged tribal mask, all ebony and exotic feathers, grinning. I signalled yes, I'd buy it. She rolled in the aisles at that, and chucked it into her van among the other dross. It gave me a wry smile.
Antiques foster mysteries. We even encourage them. Look at the Great Dogon Mask mystery, for instance. A queer business, it still drives antique dealers daft.
It began once upon a time when two French anthropologists went a-wandering in Africa. They took recorders, cameras, gadgetry to get the story right. They studied the Dogon, a tribe who did a complicated dance every sixty years. For this, tribal priests stole away to secret caves where they unearthed sacred masks. These masks are megagalactic rarities, and contained information about heavenly bodies - stars, not people - in the night skies. So far so good?
It was interesting - tribal priests, a sacred cult, every sixty years a dancing jubilee. Our own folk do this sort of thing at Stonehenge. The Chinese climb mountains on special days. My own home town trudges up a hill called Sixty-three Steps on Good Friday, for no reason. It's simply what folk do, no harm done.
But these French anthropologists learned that the dance concerned two stars. One was Sirius the Dog Star, famously the brightest. The other star, so necessary to the ancient cult dance of the Dogon tribe was nearby - well, near as stars go. It was called Sirius B.
Bad news for logicians, for Sirius B is all but invisible.
You can see it if you've a modern telescope. But this tribe's been dancing their ritual dance for century upon century upon… See the problem? Ancient African tribe, keeping records on cult masks in concealed caves about an unseen star. The Dogon priests admitted sure, they knew all about the good old invisible star, so what? They danced to a star they could never have seen.
Astronomers take beautiful photos of this star, so we know it's really there. Mystique mongers had a field day, proving the Dogon came from Outer Space, all that. The real impact, though, was on antique dealers who sulked, because they wanted those sacred
- priceless - masks. They couldn't get them by fair means. This meant forging them, making them up. Never mind that none of us has the slightest clue what a Dogon mask looks like. Antique dealers everywhere, especially in Belgium, bought common old (read new) masks from anywhere, decorated them with weird symbols, oven-dried them, then sold them - furtively and with grave warnings to keep them secret - to anybody daft enough to buy.