'The risk is I might need to get a van from somewhere.'
'Silence.' He actually said that, like a schoolmaster. 'It will be dark. You will have the excess items covered. No vam.
Okay, I was to see it didn't rain. 'Right, Mr Gluck. When you have all the antiques, you will leave the lad and the rest of us alone?' He said of course. 'Where do we meet?'
'The end lock, in three hours.' He sniggered. 'I shall be strolling on my canal path, looking for trespassers.'
Don't sniggers sound unpleasant? I was wet with sweat. I went to get the longboat from Kettle.
'Going far, captain?'
'Avast me hearties.' Normally I'd ignore repartee because I'm no good at it, but as I clambered aboard I had a crazy impulse to ask the old man to come too.
'You all right, son?' He passed me the heavy iron key. 'Don't lose it.'
The engine started first time. The best thing about these old canal longboats is they stay put. Until you engage gear there's no motion, because a canal isn't a river. No current, no parking problems. You want to stop, just glide to the bank and switch off.
Best holiday in the world, a canal longboat. Every mile there's steps up to some tavern for your dinner. And canals pierce our towns and cities. Go up canal stairs, you're astonishingly in the middle of, say, Birmingham, Manchester, with glittery shops.
Hell, but a canal's quiet in the country. And black. Apart from the muted thump of the engine, nothing. Fields invisible, trees looking at you thinking who's this interloper. It's like night unmasks countryside's hidden menace. I had a torch, shone it all about.
Nobody. Something splashed ahead. I hate night splashes. I hate daytime splashes too.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all splashes are bad news.
Longboats on canals, some old law, are restricted to four miles an hour, the walking speed of a barge horse, so all engines are governed. Two miles from the boatyard, I passed a pub and chugged under a disused bridge. I knew the bridge. Only cows use it, crossing between pastures.
By then I'd remembered how to steer. The tiller's just a stick. Move it slowly.
Remember that the barge weighs tons and has no brakes.
I came to the first lockgate, cut the engine. A canal lock's a place for lovers. Maybe that's why night travel's against the law?
'Night travel's against the law,' somebody told me a yard away.
I screeched in fright, almost dropped the huge lock key.
'You stupid sod!' I shouted. 'Scared me witless!'
There was an angler on the bank. It wasn't Clatter. I shone my light. He was encased in oilskins. Rod, folding stool, wicker baskets, keep net, and a small green tent. Maniac, at this hour.
'Night barges spoil fishing,' he groused. No lovers, only mad anglers. I ignored him.
A canal lock is basically a box of water, doors at each end. This box was empty. Open the uphill door, it fills and you can sail into the box. Close the uphill and undo the lower door, and out you sail. Into more empty darkness.
In five minutes I was missing the bad-tempered loon angler. A car went along a distant road, bouncing jauntily behind its cone of light. Lovers off, I thought bitterly, to heavy breathing among the bulrushes, selfish sods.
The second lock came and went. I began to glimpse seashore lights through trees and heard the long moan of a distant ship. Under another bridge. Nobody. Then the straight overgrown stretch, so long my torchlight wouldn't reach to the end. Trees closed in, the waterway becoming silted. Logs, branches, scraped my longboat's tin hull. Twice I felt the longboat tug on the canal bed. I was near the canal's sealed extremity.
No more lights now, just the skyglow from a town miles up the coast. A faint yellow sheen reflected on a cloud as the Hook of Holland ferry headed inshore. But space and time are a coast's deceivers. What looks like a mile can be a few paces or a league, and a short friendly path can be an endless quagmire. Give me streets every time.
The keel grounded. I reversed the engine, managed to slowly back away. Ahead, my beam revealed only tangled foliage with maybe a hint of a solid structure somewhere within. I'd reached the last lock, where ancient builders had finally lost to the railways.
No need to moor the longboat. I struggled ashore into a mass of brambles, branches nearly poking my eyes out. No footpath. I just had to flounder. The lock wasn't even completed, its seaward gate bricked up, like everyone had wearily thought oh what the hell. Beyond, a small copse and the dark closed fields between the canal and the estuary. The tide was in. I could hear it. I stood on the mound watching a river cruiser's lights about a mile away. I could hear music, screams of laughter. It turned south, following the coast, lights and noise receding. Lucky folk.
Three hours, was it, since I'd spoken to Gluck? I let the torch lead the way directly to the sea. I was there in no time. I know an old poacher who counts his steps, reckons he never gets lost.
The hard was rimmed with sea. The tide now covered the mud flats, a few boats bobbing in the bay. One or two wore lights, thank God, but nobody was about. The cottages further along looked in bed, with a couple of lamps as reminders.
No cars. No sign of Gluck. Had there been some mistake, me misjudging the time?
Maybe I ought to have listened to the traffic news for congestion on the London road.
One niggle: I'd rung Gluck on his mobile phone. Maybe he was already in East Anglia. I looked about, saw nobody. I walked slowly along the foreshore by the line of hawthorns. And back.
About here, was it? I stood looking at the waves. Strange to think the sea covered that lonely dead pilot in his plane under the mudflats only a few strides away. I shone my light, just making sure no ghostly figure was rising from the waters. I noticed that a pram, a small rowboat, and a nearby river coracle were no longer moving. The tide must be on the ebb. A cutter too was listing idly, ready to flop over like a dog for a kip until the next tide.
'Lovejoy.'
'Hello, Gluck.' He must have approached from the bushes. Where was his car? And his bruiser? I wanted him here mob-handed, all in one bag.
'Where are my antiques?'
He ought not to sound so amused, holding in a laugh.
When people do that it's always at my expense. He should be worried sick, sensing treachery. I suddenly felt alone, but had to go along with it and say my prepared line.
'I've got them, Gluck. Where you'll never find them.' My plan was simple - tell him that Wrinkle's collection was stashed in our town's crummy Antiques Arcade. Anybody tried to rob it, the lads would descend like the Keystone Kops.
'Really, Lovejoy?' He clicked a cigarette lighter, lit a fag, inhaled, still suppressing chuckles. He had something in his other hand. It glinted in my beam. Gunmetal blue.
He palmed it, smiling. 'Only a two-two, but hollow-drilled nose rounds. Well? Where are they?'
When I said nothing, he tutted. 'You wouldn't betray me, would you? The arrangement is you provide me with the oriental antiques you showed me. I write a promissory note to pay for them.' He looked about, really enjoying playing his part. 'Yet you have no antiques.'
'You've checked the longboat?' I knew he would have. Was that angler his new bruiser, Kenelley, the one who'd done Trout and Tinker?
'Of course. It is empty. We watched you arrive, Lovejoy.'
We is plural. I didn't like the thought of being followed in the gloaming.
'I've already hidden the antiques, Gluck.'
'Dear me.' He wasn't at all distressed. 'What's your price?'
Stick to your plan you can't go wrong. I kept telling myself that.
'Tomorrow, you sign over the manor house and Saffron Fields to Mortimer, Colette's son. In exchange you get the antiques.'