Every Last Cent

I turned my head to align with her face, see directly into her. She looked sincere. But birds defending their blokes always are.

'Ask me about any antiques crime, Lovejoy. Including your theft from that place by the Minories.'

'Here, nark it.' I did my best indignation, but it didn't wash. Her triumphant gaze saw she'd hurt me. 'Nobody knows I did that!'

'You stole a sixteenth-century linenfold-patterned jointed chest. It was Thursday night.

Tinker your oppo didn't bring the motor on time, so you had to leave the chest in the monastery garden until Colin Service went for it.'

Suddenly I wasn't laughing. Nobody knew about Colin. He's an ambulance driver, uses the health authority's wagons to collect stolen antiques.

'You're guessing,' I said feebly.

'Am I? Then I won't know that you complained to your dipper about the way the muntin to the left of the chest's lock had been damaged. You swore blind you didn't do it. You whined that Colin must have done it, collecting the chest from the herb garden before the rush hour.'

I think I paled. If I didn't, I should have. A dipper's a contact man, the one who checks up after you've done a job. He decides if you've obeyed right, so that you get paid.

Antiques are stolen to order nowadays. The raj tells the dipper. The dipper tells you.

You do the steal, and that is that. A muntin is the straight vertical piece of wood between panels in a joinery chest front. Before that came in, in ancient times, everything was made of plain planking. That's why so few of the old pre-Elizabethan boarded chests survive. I gaped, partly because I didn't know that Maud knew a single antiques term.

'How the hell?'

'How the hell could I know that, Lovejoy?' Her voice didn't even waver. 'The same way I know about the Ashmolean Museum's cat snatch. Remember that? The whole country was aghast. New Year's Eve celebrations. Fireworks. Dancing in the streets of Oxford.

Students in fancy dress.'

'You saw it in the papers.' Feebler and feebler.

'He used a smoke bomb. Single-handed, shifted nine roof slates to cut a hole. Dropped through with a nautical rope ladder. Let off the bomb, wafted the clouds with a battery-driven fan. He visited no other room. Cut the Cezanne from the frame. Left his holdall, scalpel, gloves behind. And danced off amid the crowds.'

No laughs now.

'The raj told him to penetrate the Ashmolean Museum through the new Sackler Library building site, because the University of Oxford can never – and I quote, Lovejoy –"make up its mind about agreeing with its benefactors". The raj deducted twenty per cent of his thiever's fee because he dropped his gloves.'

Now I was gaping. The nine slates hadn't been in the papers, nor the nautical rope ladder.

'The painting?' I croaked.

'Auvers-sur-Oise, by Paul Cezanne. The only Cezanne the Ashmolean had. He ignored the Leonardo da Vinci because the raj ordered him to. And the Picasso. You want measurements? Dates? Anything else?' She smiled, power to womenfolk.

For a second I had a terrible urge to scarper, clear off and never see her again. I must have looked shaken because her eyes took on that hard glaze when a woman sees a man's terror. I'm not a coward, honest, but the raj tops people for eavesdropping.

Actually kills. I could name names. All dealers could. Maud smiled.

'Lovejoy. Why d'you think he's in a wheelchair? There's more technology in it than the parson preached about. Everything he says is recorded. He has transmitters to spare.

Get the joke?'

'No.' I didn't get any joke.

'His phoney cups, trophies, all his fake awards. People laugh at him. The joke's on them, because nothing they own is secure. Any instant, he could simply advise the raj, and somebody would lose every penny piece. I mean you, the British Museum, America's Metropolitan, anywhere that owns anything.'

I sank back, laid my tired head on the pillow. She came over me, smiling down, her breast in view.

'Are we being broadcast?' I bleated, frightened.

'No, darling.' Her face clouded slightly, then cleared. 'No. Impossible. Quaker wouldn't do that.'

What man wouldn't keep track of his missus, though, if she kept sneaking out to see a scrounging ape like me? My throat dried. Quaker could say the word and I'd get found in a ditch, victim of some hit-and-run. Nobody would know. I'd be forgotten in an hour, that old Lovejoy, serve him right.

'Come on, darling,' she said, smiling as her confidence returned. 'You're forgiven. I know you're Quaker's friend. The only one he's got, truth to tell.'

Thank God for that, I thought but did not say.

'Course I am,' I said instead. 'I always am. Always will be.'

I said it for a gillion hidden cameras and tape recorders in my fertile and terrified mind.

We joined, Maud and I, and made smiles. My smile was weak, but no less heartfelt.

'Tea, Lovejoy?' Maud asked, teapot poised, as Quaker smiled fondly and decided where his new trophies would go. 'Scone or cake?'

Ten of each was the right answer. 'Please.'

Quaker laughed. I kept my eyes off his electronically loaded wheelchair. Probably emitting signals to Planet Mongo, where menacing minds were judging every syllable. I felt weak so fell on Maud's grub. I love a bird like her.

'Wish I could eat like you, Lovejoy,' Quaker said wistfully. He slapped his protruberant belly. 'In training, see.'

'Ever think of retiring, mate?' I asked, mouth full.

'No.' He looked sad. 'I know what people say about me, Lovejoy.' I hoped I didn't look stricken with terror. Even Maud froze for an instant. 'That it's an addiction, me striving to achieve things when most blokes just have on hobby.' He sighed at his dazzling array of awards.

'Well,' I said heartily, 'they expect it.'

'True,' he agreed eagerly. 'Today, there'll be TV cameras all along the river to watch me scull. Interviews after. That Frenchman has a reputation.'

His opponent had been a Bavarian minutes ago. He'd forgotten. Too much on his mind, cluttered up with antique robberies? I wondered for a second whether there was a way of finding out where all his information was kept.

'Next week I'm boxing.'

'You're fighting again?'

'Lovejoy,' he said gravely, the light of lions in his eyes. 'I couldn't let the Lonsdale Belt go to Czechoslovakia.'

'But you might get clobbered.'

He smiled nobly. 'Then I'll go down fighting.'

We made similar merry chat until it was time to go. I said ta for Maud's grub. He never shakes hands, says that's for Americans and other foreigners. Nor do I, come to think.

'Oh, Quake,' I said, clumsily bringing in my panic as I rose to leave. It was the reason I'd come, after all. 'I hope you don't think less of me.' It was awkward. I shifted from foot to foot. 'Over my, er, lad. They're saying,' I explained for the recording devices Maud had told me about, 'that this lad Mortimer from Saffron Fields is my son. He's causing trouble, telling tourists which antiques are genuine and which aren't.'

'Your what?' he said, playing astonished well enough for the Old Vic.

'Your what?' Maud exclaimed, with hatred.

'It's said,' I amended. 'He's fifteen.'

'Good heavens!' Quaker almost offered his hand in congratulation. Maud did no such thing.

'Who is she, Lovejoy?' she asked in a voice of sleet.

'Only, I have no friends as such.' I almost moved myself to tears. 'Not ones I could trust.'

'It's all right, Lovejoy,' Quaker said. 'We understand.'

'He's not poor or anything. I'd like to think somebody like you might look out for him if... he needed anything. His mother frolics full-time in Sohor. His dad – who brought him up – is dead. He might need somebody.'

'Tell him we will, Lovejoy,' Quaker said. 'You're our friend. If a cripple and a cook from the soup kitchen will do?'

'Ta, wack.' I was really – I mean really really – moved, and retreated as Maud showed me out. They could have said go to hell, but hadn't.

'Lovejoy,' Maud said urgently on her doorstep.