Paper jobs are highly popular in the antiques game, because everybody profits: dealers, public, buyers, catalogers, auctioneers, the colonel’s widow, the bloke who prints the catalog… The only slight hiccup in it all is that it’s fraudulent. It has to be. Why?
Because if every house were ram-jam packed full of delectable antiques, there’d be no demand. It’d be like everybody suddenly being millionaires. So the “sets” of dining chairs aren’t sets at all; they’re made up from here, there, and everywhere. Vases reputedly brought back from Japan in 1890 were actually fired in Wapping last week.
The delicate Chinese porcelain pillows weren’t shipped home from Canton last century: They were a job lot in a Hong Kong package tour this Easter. The colonel’s campaign medals will be sold—and sold, and sold, and sold, for entire sets will be put together by every dealer in the country and sold as the colonel’s one genuine set. Which explains why the printed catalogs for important house auction sales are always sold out instantly—to market twenty sets of medals you need twenty catalogs, right? It’s cast-iron profit. It’s today’s favorite crime. All you need is a posh address, and you can make a fortune. The customers get diddled, but so?
That’s the paper job. All you need is care, skill, and a team.
After dinner I retired to formulate my paper job, promising Elaine to reveal it in all its glory at the morning gathering. Then, in the cascading rain, I went out for a sly walk.
The death simply wasn’t my fault. Honest.
The drive to the main gate was the only orthodox way off the Tachnadray estate. Stone walls rimmed the thirty or so acres of paddocks, outbuildings, lawns, with a few straggly hawthorn hedges infilling the tumbled drystone stretches. Behind the great house, vegetable gardens were busily reverting to weeds. Glass cloches sprawled higgledy-piggledy. Greenhouses shed panes. Huts flaked planks. Even the outbuildings had joined the disintegration wholesale and gone toothy by extruding stones. I’d asked Duncan why he didn’t grow stuff, market some produce. He’d waxed sarcastic: “I’ll get a dozen retainers in on it immediately.” The poor bloke was doing his best.
Hell of a place to hide, I grumbled inwardly as I drifted through the dark garden. Soon after Mrs. Buchan had blundered by admitting that Hector’s dawn patrol was on the hillside opposite to the main gateway, I’d sussed out a cracked path between lines of old bleached canes. It made stealth clumsy and full of din, but what could I do? The map showed a fairly smooth slope, then a few upland folds. And, in grand solitude two miles off, a cottage marked shooters in a narrow gully.
Climbing the wall was easy, and quieter. Torch in my pocket, I began the long slow climb up the fellside, walking bent and pressing my hands on my knees. The ground was soaked to squelching over my shoes. It made me slip on rocks projecting underfoot. Heather started kicking back at each pace, whipping my legs. There was no moon. How the hell had highwaymen managed? I did my best to follow the direction I’d planned, but within minutes I was using my torch to find the first gale-torn hawthorn and check its position against the faint glow of light from the house below. There were two leaning crags which would be my markers to aim off at a forty-degree angle to the right. The cottage was more or less a mile from there.
Common sense told that Shooters wasn’t Hector’s home. If it had been, why did he need to walk out there? The shepherd had innocently assumed that, being a McGunn, I was in on the cottage thing. Maybe Shooters, I hoped with spirits rising, was in fact a great Victorian shooting lodge and it was there that Duncan/Robert/Michelle or whoever had salted away the missing antiques from Tachnadray, if any.
Maybe nine o’clock when I set out. That made it getting on for ten when I made the first leaning crag. Odd, but I was starting to understand how the nightwalkers had managed. It’s quite easy, really. Once you get used to being away from civilization’s buildings and lights, night resolves into distinct components. Ground underfoot stays pitch-black, but the sky’s dark intensity less somewhat. Tall stones and trees condense the sky’s consistency, so that though you still can’t actually see them as such, you can somehow perceive that they’re there in your path. Tachnadray’s light was more distant, but seemed almost blinding from the hilltop. I stopped looking at it because it lessened my night vision.
From the crags the ground descended and took me out of direct view of Tachnadray for the first time. Even so I wasn’t too worried. The faint sky shine from that direction was enough to show me the hilltop’s sky interface. Every so often I cricked over on the stones that littered the fells, so I developed a trick of walking with knees bent, using short steps, not putting my heels down first. It intrigued me. I’d adopted Robert’s curious gait. A new way of looking, and a new way of walking, all in one go. I felt a real discoverer.
In fact I was so busy praising myself that I was stuck when a building thickened the darkness to my left. I’d actually come upon Shooters. A disappointingly small edifice. A pointless low wall ran from it for a short distance. Something to do with cattle? A snow-break to halt fell drifts in blizzards? I felt my way along it, stepping carefully in case tins or bottles or other fellwalkers’ debris lurked in wait.
Derelict? There was no sound. I halted, listened. In the distance a short deep bark sounded, curt and businesslike. I dismissed it. Hector’s dogs probably wouldn’t be out at this hour. I’d heard Duncan talk of red deer. Perhaps a stag calling its herd, maybe scenting me and resenting intrusion on its patch?
Risking, I took my flashlight and moved off a few silent yards. If somebody saw me I wanted a head start. I wasn’t in good enough shape to sprint the two boulder-riddled miles to Tachnadray without breaking my neck, so I’d have to do a short dash and hide among the outcrops. Escape by subterfuge is really my thing, but it’s easier in towns than out here in all this loneliness. I crouched.
Flash. The beam swept, hit buildings, doused into blackness again. In that instant of brilliance, my eyes beheld a child’s drawing two-story cottage, symmetrical and unadorned. The windows were wood-shuttered. Slate roof. Single chimney. A bare building on a barren hillside. What the hell was I doing out here? I asked myself irritably. One upper-floor shutter had stood slightly ajar, I’d noticed. I thought over the image in my mind. The obvious thing was to wait a minute in case my beam had disturbed an inhabitant, then creep up and simply try the door. For all I knew I might be stalking an empty house.
As I felt around me for a couple of decent-shaped stones, I heard again that deer’s bark. Closer, and only once, but now out beyond the cottage. I actually chuckled to myself. If only that apprehensive stag knew how little it had to fear from me it would get back between the sheets and nod off. God’s creatures are gormless. No wonder.
God was a beginner at creation.
It’s a fallacy to assume that burglars can’t climb a wall without a ladder. A burglar can climb anything, because even a blank wall offers ledges, pipes, rectifying studs, cistern overflows. You might say that such feeble supports might not support a burglar’s full weight—and you’d be right. But they’d support a quarter of a burglar’s weight, and that’s all he needs because he can do the bolus trick, the town burglar’s favorite.
This evolved from sailing ships, I’ve been told. Others say it’s what Argentina’s cowboys do to hobble bulls. The stones make the cord whip-tangle anything hit. I’ve even seen it used to put a rope round untouchable scalding steam pipes along a mill ceiling. You take a piece of strong twine a yard long, and tie stones at the ends. This is the bolus.