But Aidan was returning.
“Just make haste slowly,” Griff whispered.
Having bought Smudger’s games table – he’d actually done such a good job I would have had to look twice to see it was a wrong ’un – all I had to do was deliver it to a smallish, brownish man at another remote location. Having shown him the hidden drawer, a cunning device that made him suck in his breath quite sharply, I gave it a farewell pat, and tried to think no more about it. After all, I had a few questions of my own to ask. Smudger wasn’t the only one with skills he didn’t talk about. There were people out there who could copy the Kohinoor Diamond, others who could knock up a Leonardo cartoon the man himself would have been proud of. I didn’t dare approach them directly, of course, because I wasn’t supposed to know of their existence. But I did discover that a guy known as Provo, since he could even provide a convincing provenance for his fakes, had been especially busy recently, though no one knew why anyone should want a whole load of Nicholas Hilliard miniatures. There was another rumour that there was a glut of games tables up in the north, something I could with a clear conscience tell Will, who made another note and sucked his pencil.
Being trussed up in the back of the van wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal, was it? Not that I’d be trussed up very long. There’s a trick to bracing your wrists when you’re tied up – I told you I didn’t go to school much, but I learned a lot of things not on the national curriculum. While I worked on the rope, I seethed with anger. The police were supposed to have replaced me as I left the auction rooms with a lookalike, because though I may now be law-abiding, I didn’t see that my getting beaten up like Griff needed to be part of the deal. But the cop they sent was a woman who’d played rugby for England, all five foot eleven of her and goodness knows how many stone. Twice what I carry, that’s for sure. Will and a couple of other plain-clothes officers had been hard put not to laugh. So I’d been the tethered goat, after all. I’d seen the table loaded into the back of the van, driven off, and someone had called on our business mobile – the one with its number painted on the side of the van.
Everything had gone more or less according to plan. Possibly less, actually.
The difference was that when I’d pulled over to a layby to take the call and been rushed by a gang of heavies, they hadn’t duffed me up and left me for dead, taking just the table. They’d picked me up and shoved me in the back of their van.
The only light came round the edge of a badly fitting door.
I’d no idea where they were taking me. I couldn’t very well ask them because they’d taped my mouth when they’d tied up my hands. And for good measure one of them had stamped on my mobile phone.
So what would they do with me? They didn’t want me, just the table. What if they decide to dispose of me? I had a sudden vision of disappearing from the face of the earth, never being found for Griff to grieve over and bury. But I couldn’t indulge in tears, self-pitying or otherwise, because something was happening.
The van slowed, went over a cattle grid, drove up a gravelled drive, and stopped. Feet walked round to the back doors. I lay as if I were still unconscious. There was a scrape and a curse as the table was removed. I was locked in again.
While I knew in my head that Will and his colleagues must know exactly where I was, my heart told me I wanted to be free as soon as possible.
Should I get my hands free now?
No. Already footsteps were approaching the van, heavily, as if they were carrying the table, so I went back to inert mode. I didn’t even protest when one of them kicked me to make sure I was still out cold. I just flopped back into the position they’d found me.
But the moment the van started – down that drive and over the grid again – my hands were free. Then my feet. I didn’t bother with my mouth. There wasn’t any time for that. It was time to check out that table.
I had to hand it to Smudger; if I hadn’t known exactly how to unlock that hidden section, I’d never have managed it. But I did. And found the little device, not much larger than a flattened pea, was sharing the space with another small object, small as the palm of my hand, wrapped in chamois leather. It fitted in my bra, not comfortably but at least unobtrusively. The chamois bag went back where I’d found it, a handkerchief inside folded to roughly the right size and shape. It wouldn’t fool anyone taking more than a casual glance, but perhaps that was all they would give it.
Then – miracle of miracles – I realized that you could open the doors from the inside. I could leap out the moment the van stopped. Or I could if it wasn’t locked from the outside.
At last we drew to a halt and I decided it was time to make a run for it. I ran at the doors, pulling on the handles and pushing outwards as hard as I could. Free!
Someone was trying to grab me. Fist-fighting was something I knew all about, and I winded one of them and kicked another so hard he might not need family planning for a week or so. It was only as the red mist in my head cleared that I realized that I’d only gone and assaulted a couple of police officers – and was now pinioned very firmly myself. It was the somewhat breathless arrival of Will that saved me the inconvenience of being arrested.
“Ostensibly they were only exporting furniture, you see,” I explained to Griff on the phone that night, pleased to have used a word he’d spent a long time explaining to me. “No one was interested in the odd bit of Victorian mahogany or burr walnut. And even if Customs had gone poking around, they wouldn’t have found the secret compartment. So the thieves could transport all sorts of small items that would never have got export licences. Some jewellery, but mostly miniatures. I’ve never had a Hilliard in my hands before, Griff. You should see the colours!” I didn’t embarrass him by telling him where else the tiny painting had been.
“Are you sure you’re all right, dear heart?”
“I’m absolutely fine.”
“Which means you’re not.”
“It means this time I am. I might even be in line for a reward. Because not only were the gang using the tables they stole to get priceless stuff out of the country, replacing them with copies, they then used the tables to bring in the drugs that are sloshing around Glasgow and Newcastle at the moment.”
“Well, I’m blowed. So how are you going to celebrate?”
“I shall have a very good haircut. When they taped my mouth they got some of my hair stuck too and I look a bit patchy. Griff, you’re breaking up,” I lied. “I love you!”
And then it was an early night for me and the teddy bear Griff had given me. Will had invited me to dinner, but I never did like threesomes. And in my heart I still resented his wife for being so much larger and taller than me that I’d had a very nasty few hours.
Still, I told myself as I applied cream to my sore face, it’s not every girl who can say that she’s clasped Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to her bosom, and lived to tell the tale.
HANDY MAN by John Harvey
IT WAS HIS hands I noticed first. Really took in. Broad, dependable hands. A ring on the wedding finger, dull gold. And the nails, surprisingly even, rounded, no snags, not bitten down; no calluses on the fingers, such as you might expect from a working man, a man who worked with his hands. Only the suggestion of hard skin around the base of the thumb, hard yet smooth.
Harry.
A simple name. Straightforward, simple.
The things I knew about him later: time he’d spent in the army, Northern Ireland, Iraq. Things he would never really talk about, just hints, nightmares, dreams. His anger. Not so simple really. Harry.
Nine years I’d been living in the house then, the first time I set eyes on him. Nine years since the divorce and then all that business with Victor, and I suppose it’s true to say for the last two or three years I’d let things go. Easy enough to do when you’re living on your own. The cupboard door that won’t open without a tug, and once the handle’s snapped off, won’t open at all; the window that’s permanently stuck; the shower that leaks; the wardrobe rail that keeps collapsing under the weight of all too few clothes.