“So when was it stolen?”
He went to scratch his head but evidently thought better of it. “I can’t… yes, I remember! My mobile phone rang, and I pulled into a layby to answer it.” He flashed an almost impish smile – how many times had I had to shout at him when he’d tried to use his mobile when he was driving? “Someone opened the driver’s door – and Bob’s your aunt.”
“How did they know the number?” I asked, looking for a conspiracy.
“Because it’s painted on the side of the van, of course! Oh, Lina – it’s I, not you, who had the bang on the head.”
The door opened to admit a young man pushing a wheelchair.
“Ah, my transport of delight!” Griff exclaimed, submitting to having a nurse check that the number on his wristband matched that on the young man’s paperwork. Lest I feel a frisson of alarm, with wild fears of the attackers taking him where they could finish off what they had started, Aidan made a dramatic appearance, pressing me to somewhere fairly near his bosom and then hindering rather than helping the porter in his efforts to get Griff into the wheelchair. Aidan would go with him in the ambulance. I would follow in my car.
As soon as DS Barnes had finished with me, that is. He had just pulled his unmarked car up alongside mine, and was checking for the right change to feed to the meter. He pulled a face when I told him Griff was no longer at the hospital, but listened disbelievingly when I told him what had been stolen.
“Try and kill an old man just because he’s bought a table you wanted?” he squeaked. “You’re joking. Was it made of gold and lined with silver?”
“Wood inlaid with more wood, from what I can gather. There’s a picture of it in the auction catalogue – and that, according to Griff, should be in the glovebox of the van.”
“Which is currently in one of our car pounds. If you came with me, you could tell me all about it.” His smile was agreeable, but I had this rule never to trust anyone till I’d had Griff’s opinion of them. So I muttered something about not affording any more time in the car park – well, they charged as if lives depended on the parking fees – and told him I’d follow him, provided he would phone one of his police cronies to make sure Griff had arrived safely. He looked at me very hard. “You really are worried they’ll have another go at the old guy, aren’t you? OK, I’ll get on to it.”
The Tripp and Townend, Antique Dealers van sat rather sadly in the corner of the pound, as if it felt personally responsible for the trickles of blood on its paintwork. DS Barnes had already donned disposable gloves and was fossicking round inside, displaying a neat bum to the world. But he came up with nothing, and, seeing me the far side of the barrier, waved to his mate to let me in.
“Are you sure about the catalogue?”
“Griff was. But then, he’s over seventy and has been beaten about the head, so he might have got it wrong. In any case, it hardly matters – the auctioneer must have loads left over.”
“If I get hold of a copy and bring it over to your shop, can you tell me all about the table? Not until you’ve seen that Griff’s all right and tight, of course. And he has arrived safely – well, he would, with a couple of our lads riding shotgun, as it were.”
“You set up motorcycle outriders?” Forgetting my manners, I reached up and gave him a smacking thank-you kiss – but only on the cheek.
Much as I would have liked to spend the day holding Griff’s hand, he pointed out that we had a business to run. As luck would have it, it was a very quiet day, and I could have stayed. However, since I had time on my hands, I could spend a lot of it texting or emailing fellow-dealers, asking if they had ever had similar experiences to Griff’s. Of course, the police were probably checking through their records for exactly the same information, but I had an idea that some of our colleagues would only have called in the fuzz if they’d had the Crown Jewels stolen.
I never spent much time at school, and Griff’s best efforts to help me write what he called a lady-like script had failed. But he had taught me keyboard skills, so I could run off a list for DS Barnes. Neat columns: items stolen; when; where; value; from whom (I nearly typed who from but that would have made Griff grind his teeth); police action. As I’d suspected, only about half of the twenty or so robberies had been reported to the police, and none of the objects had ever been recovered. Nor had they shown up elsewhere in the UK, at auctions or at antiques fairs.
Just as I was locking up for the day, Barnes appeared, looking, in a much more expensive suit, rather sleeker than he had yesterday. His expression of concern told me that I didn’t. Well, the floor beside Griff had proved harder than I’d expected so I’d not slept a lot.
“What I thought was,” he began, “is that I could run you over to see Griff, we could all have a chat, then I could run you back here and we… Well, maybe we should have a bite to eat somewhere.”
I didn’t directly reply but said, “If Griff sees me looking like this he’ll have an instant relapse. Can you give me five minutes to change?”
“An hour if you like. So long as you leave me in here to look round… it’s like a museum, isn’t it? An Aladdin’s cave?”
But he still hadn’t had Griff’s approval so I said, truthfully, “It’ll be freezing in here in five minutes. Come into the house – there’s some nice stuff in there, too.”
And I didn’t let him see what burglar-alarm code I tapped in either.
What we kept in the house was stuff we couldn’t sell in the shop because it was slightly damaged or the provenance was dubious or else was so lovely neither of us had the heart to sell it. So while I was taking a risk, it was smaller than leaving him with all the highly collectable items in the shop. In any case, I hadn’t told him about the CCTV that operated even inside the house if we wanted it to, so I could watch him while I was putting on a better top and applying what Griff, after years in the theatre, always called slap. It took longer than five minutes, but no more than eight, and I even had time to brush my hair. Will had done no more than gaze with what looked like open-mouthed wonder at a couple of small Impressionist oil paintings – standing back, getting close to, but never touching. Which was fortunate, since they were wired into a very loud alarm system indeed.
It only took forty minutes or so to reach the nursing home, which looked and smelled far more like a posh hotel than the repository for incontinent old codgers Griff had always feared ending his days in. He had a single, en suite room, with a TV and couple of easy chairs, in addition to the upright one on which he was enthroned and a bed that did its best to disguise its high-tech lifting and tilting mechanisms. The décor was almost as bland as that in the bad-news room at the other hospital, but the standard of the reproductions on the wall was much higher.
Aidan was sitting beside him reading aloud, something his consciously mellifluous voice was well suited to. He stopped, inserting a bookmark and closing the volume with just enough of a snap to show he was not used to being interrupted in mid-paragraph. My smile and his were as bland as the wallpaper, something I suspected Will noticed.
He shook hands first with Aidan and then very gently with Griff. “The bruises are coming out, I see.”
“Why not? I did years ago,” Griff said with a beam. Then he touched his cheek. “I’ve not seen my face yet – they sent a minion to shave me and throw in a haircut as a bonus.”
The expression on Aidan’s face told me he expected to see the freebie added to his bill. But he had the decency to make himself scarce so that both Will and I could sit down. Will produced the auctioneer’s catalogue.
“My reading glasses hurt my nose,” Griff complained. “That’s why dear Aidan was reading aloud.”