“Please,” I said politely. “If it’s no bother.”
Another winner. During the ensuing paroxysms Michelle gave Duncan the bent eye for us to withdraw to let the three of them get on with it.
Duncan’s genteel exit line was “I’ll show Ian the workshop. We’ll be a minute or two.” I followed, really quite happy.
We walked out by the front steps towards the outbuildings near where the red-haired man with the wheelbarrow had stood peering. Nobody else about now, though.
“What was so funny, Duncan?”
For a little he said nothing. We passed between two silent stone buildings, leaving left the carefully tended forecourt.
“Well, y’see, Ian,” he said finally, “it pleases Miss Elaine to needle Shona about Scottishness.”
“And everybody else about their own particular fancy, eh?”
“Maybe,” he said drily. ’Yon’s my wee factory.” We paused outside a low stone barn, slate roof tethered by large flat slabs against winter storms.
“Is that what Elaine needles you about?” I asked.
“O’course.” His honesty was disarming. I began to like Duncan McGunn. “And my Michelle about being Belgian.”
“The question is why,” I prompted.
“Not so, Ian.” He did things to a padlock to let us in. “The question is what will Miss Elaine find irks you, isn’t it?” I didn’t think much to what he said. I wish now I had, honest to God.
The place’s interior was a hundred feet by forty, give or take, and daylit from a couple of long slender windows running much of the length. Its scent was exquisite to a born faker—oils, varnishes, sawn woods, glues, sweat. Duncan’s current opus stood on a low metal bench.
“Sheraton copy,” I said. I could tell I was grinning from the sound in my voice.
“Where’d you get it?”
Cagey silence. I didn’t blame him. No trader gives his sources away. It was a battered Victorian chest of drawers imitating Sheraton. Three big drawers below two “half”
drawers, with slightly curved short legs. Some nerk had given each drawer wooden bulb handles. The Bramah locks were a giveaway because that locksmithing genius wasn’t around in 1780, the pretended age of this poor relic. I walked around it, pleased to be back in the real world.
“You’ll reduce it, of course?”
He filled a pipe slowly. “How?”
“It looks pretty well made.” I pulled a drawer and inverted it to check the wear and patination of age. Some wicked modern fakers add these small convincing details. It’s terrible to buy a piece like this, only to find once you’ve got it home that it’s phony. We have a saying in this rottenest game, that you can never make anything good from a bad fake. But this was some skilled Victorian carpenter’s forged “Sheraton.” It had once glowed, been really quite stylish.
“Any ideas?” Duncan asked.
All right. He’d a right to expect proof I knew what I was on about.
“Only one,” I said, and tapped its top. “Lose the two smaller drawers. Settle for the bottom three. They’ll need cutting down in size, of course. Replace the handles with brass reproductions. Leave the Bramah locks; when you advertise it, admit quite openly that they’re later additions.”
“Aye, but if a buyer looks at the base he’ll see where the curved front’s been cut through the middle.”
“Then don’t sell it to a skeptic, Duncan.” I’d given him the best recipe and he knew it.
“Fancy your chances?” he said. A challenge.
“Yes.” We got chatting then about some good “reproductions,” as I politely termed them, which I’d seen fetched through East Anglia. It transpired that he’d forged a Hepplewhite pot-cupboard I’d bought and sold on to Dortmund (think of a box with tall straight unadorned tapering legs).
“So you made that torchère I bought last autumn?”
“Aye.”
“God. Was it worth it? It must have cost the earth.”
He sighed, nodding. “It did, Ian. Days and days of work. But it convinced reluctant buyers that somebody up here could do the job as well as most.”
“Well done.” I love a craftsman. The tall torchère had had a tripod appearance—three elegant mahogany legs, with three slender central supports up to an everting triple for the six-sided tray that would hold the household’s oil lamp. Some antiques are too expensive to fake commercially. The decorative torchère is one, because there are plenty of cheap pole screens about—genuine antiques, too—which fakers can buy to make them out of. “Pity you killed a Queen Anne pole screen to build it, though.”
“How’d you spot that?”
I checked myself in time. “Oh, the mulling top and bottom ran different ways, I think.”
“Did they now,” he said evenly, faithless sod.
“Mmmh.” Quite honestly I couldn’t remember. It had been the sad little bleat of the genuine mauled antique that had brought tears to my eyes.
“One thing, Duncan. I thought clans had lairds. Isn’t a chieftainess unusual?”
“The Laird James passed away a few years since.”
Aha. I’d save that bit up. Had plain James Wheeler become The McGunn? Maybe he married into the position. Well, it happens in business empires. Why not?
A bell clonked on the wall. I was glad to see it was an original spring-suspended clapperbell and not some shrill electric foolishness.
“Time to join the ladies,” he said, making for the door. He added scathingly, “For tea.”
“I’ve nowt against your whisky, Duncan.” I went with him.
I felt three goals down.
Before Shona drove me back to Dubneath for my things, we settled my job amicably.
This means I listened to Elaine and agreed with whatever she said. My terms were a fraction of the profit and all found—free nosh and bed in a stableman’s loft among the outbuildings. They showed me a bare cube with a single bed, a cupboard, and one uncurtained window with a view of the barren fells. Great if you’re Heathcliff waiting for Cathy, but I played along. Duncan was there too, ruefully swigging what he conveyed was his first and last nonalcoholic drink.
“We’re assuming Ian proves capable, Miss Elaine,” he put in gently. That caffeine was getting to his brain.
“Are you capable, Ian?” Elaine asked innocently, looking across at Shona, a tease.
Shona turned aside, busied herself with the sugar for Duncan.
“Your bills for plastic wood will take a turn for the better, Elaine,” I said. Duncan had the grace to laugh at the gibe. Plastic wood’s the poor forger’s friend.
They came out to see us off, talking casually. I turned to admire the house’s clinging splendor, and saw the big ginger-headed bloke among the outbuildings. He was kilted, strong, and stridey. Just as long as he was on our side.
“I can trust Robert,” Elaine said to answer my thought.
“Thank God for that.” I climbed into the van. “Back before evening, then?”
“Ian.” Michelle came to my window as Shona hung back saying so long to Elaine.
Duncan was already off, anxious to be at work. His wife spoke softly, perfume wafting in. “I’m so relieved you’re here. It’s time all was… resolved.” Her fingers, probably accidentally, rested on mine. But the pressure and that faint scratch of her nails down my hand was communication. I swallowed, too near her large eyes to think straight.
What was she saying?
“Oh, er, ta. I’ll do what I can.”
“We’ll make sure you exceed your potential, Ian,” Elaine called. She rippled her fingers in a child’s wave. She must have hearing like a bat.
Shona marched up, flung in and revved noisily. She hadn’t liked seeing Michelle speaking to me in confidence. She reversed at speed with a crash of gears, but Michelle anticipated the maneuver and glided away in time.
We made Dubneath at a record run, with Shona not speaking a word. Disembarking, I was jubilant at how things had gone. I was in. My thin disguise was holding. I was blood cousin umpteen times removed to this barmy load of clannites. Very soon I’d have the lion’s share of a sound antique fakery scheme, at least. Stupidly overconfident, I decided to buy some curtain material before phoning Tinker.