“Shhh, you fool.” She was trying not to laugh. A police car pulled alongside the curb.
Two Old Bill descended. The children fell silent and gathered at the railings.
“You Lovejoy?” one peeler said.
“Give over, John.” I’ve known Constable Doble ten years. Every Friday night I beat him at darts.
“You’re under arrest,” he said. “Get in.”
“For anything in particular?”
“Murder of a night driver,” he said. “In particular.”
Jo gasped. Thinking quickly, I passed her the note. “To Tinker, please, Jo.” The children’s faces solemnly followed me as I crossed to the car.
Lottie called, “I’m sorry you didn’t escape like you planned, Lovejoy.” Another nail in my coffin.
“Ta, chuck,” I called back, best I could do with my throat dry.
The other bobby was already scribbling this new evidence as we drove off. Education gets everywhere these days, doesn’t it.
Jails have been great literary stimulants. John Bunyan or Oscar Wilde would have used the next dozen days to dash off a masterpiece. Me, I simply languished. Twice I was dragged out to stand before Arthur. He’s our famous magistrate. He writes little stage plays about ghost trains and doubles as Judge Lynch. I was remanded in custody. I didn’t claim my two witnesses because Ben’s lies are notorious, and fornicating with a Royal Customs officer’s wife while illegally transporting a fake antique might not stand up as a character reference.
Maslow came to see me on the first day.
“Your fingerprints are all over the wagon, Lovejoy,” he told me. “The man was found dead a hundred yards up the bank.”
“Ah,” I said, baffled. Maslow’s not a bad old stick for a troop leader, but there’s only a limited amount of truth police inspectors can take.
“That explains why I couldn’t find him. I wanted to give him a message.”
“At that hour in the morning? In the fog? On a lonely road?” He was beginning to glare and breathe funny. “Ben the roadmender said he hadn’t seen you, Lovejoy.”
Thank you, Ben. “I walked to the lay-by. When I got there the driver had gone. I looked about the wagon, wondered if he was, erm…”
Maslow nodded, and left. Three local prostitutes work the lay-bys. Night hauliers find solace for the loneliness of the long distance wagoner in the privacy of their own vehicles.
Three days elapsed before reassuring rumors filtered in. The driver, a big Brummie, had put up a struggle before being bludgeoned. Needless to say the peelers had taken my clothes, scraped my fingernails. The screw told me this news between bowls of porridge and atrocious jokes.
It was Monday evening before a wonderful sound floated in through the bars of my cell.
I brightened, listening as a long cough began, swelled and shuddered the walls. The cough rumbled closer. I ran to the bars grinning all over my face.
“That you, Tinker?” I yelled. “In here.”
“Wotcher, Lovejoy.”
In he came. Small, shambling, in a grimy old beret and tattered army greatcoat. An aroma of stale booze and feet wafted in as he subsided wheezing on the bunk.
“Never been in this one,” he croaked. A connoisseur of jails. “Did we do it, Lovejoy?”
That plural warmed me. Tinker’s not much to look at, but any ally counts one. Since my arrest I’d been solo. “No.”
“Fank Gawd,” he said, rolling a grotty cigarette in mittened fingers. “They’ve been at me three frigging days. Yon Scotch tart got the paper to me in time.”
I nodded. That had warned him to disclose nothing. He gave another cough. I waited.
They seem to start somewhere out to sea, like thunder. “You’ll get sprung, Lovejoy.
That bird you wuz shagging in Ben’s hut’s seeing the Commissioner.”
I sank back, eyes closed in relief. Tinker lit up, coughing. Ellen had come to give me an alibi. “Learn anything?”
“About the bureau? Aye. Word is that frigging Dobson creep’s had it away, to frigging Amsterdam, Antwerp, one of them places through the Hook. Twinned it.”
“Jesus.” An antique that is made into two of itself is “twinned” in the trade. If half of a piece is truly genuine antique, it becomes very difficult to dismiss it as a fake. And of course you get twice the profit. If Tinker’s information was true, the only piece of evidence that could pin the killer had been destroyed as effectively as if they’d burned it to ashes. Dobson is a barker, like Tinker. He works with a pleasant youngish bloke we call Dutchie. Oddly, I thought of that familiar face in that great old car. Had it been Dutchie? Indistinct, but…
“How’d you know?”
“Seen down the hangars, two nights back.”
My bad luck, I thought bitterly. Anybody with stolen antiques takes them to a disused wartime airfield near here. No questions are asked down at the hangars. Jade, jewelry, silver, porcelain, complete suites of furniture, I’ve seen stuff change hands a dozen times an hour. Always at night. No way of backtracking there.
“Here, Lovejoy,” Tinker was grinning toothily in his fag smoke. “If you’d not been shagging that Excise officer’s missus they’d be topping you.” He really fell about at the thought of my being hanged, cackling through his brown fangs.
“They don’t hang people now, stupid sod,” I said icily.
“Maslow always said he’d make you an exception, Lovejoy.” He was still rolling in the aisles, coughing himself apoplectic, when his visiting time was up and they shelled him out.
They released me on two counts. One, the big Midlander had fought his murderers, and I was unmarked. And two, a respectable lady testified that, marooned with a stalled engine on the main A12 during the night of the great fog, she had been assisted by a stranger who started her motor and drove her to safety. As a gesture of appreciation, she had insisted on driving him to his home, a thatched cottage in a little village nearby.
“How could the lady see your cottage, thatch and all, in the pitch fog, Lovejoy?” Maslow asked evenly, with that threatening peace police manage so effortlessly. “And how come you’d forgotten the entire incident?”
“I couldn’t compromise a lady,” I explained nobly.
“One day, Lovejoy. One day.”
Deliberately I let the office door slam on him. I waggled my fingers at the desk sergeant.
He, too, warned, “One day, Lovejoy. One day.”
“Great phrase you police’ve got there, Ernie,” I said. “Stick at it. Might make a full sentence one day.”
And I left happily. In fact, super-happily, because in my languishment the penny had dropped in my cavernous skull. You never twin a fake, right? All that extra skilled labor is only worthwhile if the original piece is a genuine antique. The driver had been done for a valuable piece, not a cheap reproduction.
Now things made sense, I began hurrying.
« ^ »
—— 3 ——
Our ancestors liked to be thought fine, moral folk. Same as us, eh? Flesh being flesh and spirits being weak, they rarely made it. In fact, they were as hopeless at sanctity as we are. Sadly, it bothered them more, but they were better at pretending. Look at lithophanes, for example, which I was currently angling after.
You’ve seen how light transluces through a lamp shade? If you’re a craftsman, you can make porcelain thin enough to show translucency in exactly the same way. Lithophanes are small plaques of super-slender porcelain in which you see a picture when you hold them up to the light. However, naughtiness crept into the Victorian designs. Not all the pictures hidden in the antique porcelain are pretty trees and hillsides. They are often lascivious ladies in mid-frolic, doing scandalous things with sexual abandon. Nowadays collectors pay through the nose for erotic lithophanes—purely for the art, you understand.
Tinker was in the White Hart soaking the day’s calories and coughing so well that people had given up trying to listen to the jukebox. It’s where our local antique dealers gather and pretend to celebrate between failures.