Pearlhanger

by Jonathan Gash

  I halted, gauging the boat’s distance and counting seconds. ‘Me? You made a prediction about me?’ Everybody in East Anglia seemed to have been seancing or whatever it’s called about me, yet I was the only one who hadn’t heard this prediction. ‘Out with it, Bea.’ I honestly wasn’t worried, but I’d got plenty of time so I dawdled. Only from mild interest, honestly.

  Bea was so matter-of-fact. She was doing her nails. ‘You are the one who sees, Lovejoy. But you will be blinded by power from the past.’ I waited for the punchline, then realized there wasn’t any more.

  ‘That it?’ I yelped. I was risking my neck, if not more vital parts, by staying listening to this rubbish. ‘For Christ’s sake, Bea.’ I gave her a quick buss for thanks and headed out of her bedroom. The pilot boat was now half way across the harbour, travelling at a hell of a lick. I zoomed on to the landing.

  ‘Just death, Lovejoy,’ Bea’s voice added.

  I stopped and said it all in one. ‘Death? Whose?’ Still rubbish, of course, because I’m not superstitious. In fact I may be the only non-superstitious bloke left. But where’s the harm?

  ‘A death. Between the salt water and the sea sand.’

  That old line again, wasn’t it from the ancient song Scarborough Fayre? I said airily, ‘Not mine, then?’

  ‘That was not revealed.’

  ‘Try harder next time. Tara, love.’

  She called after me. ‘Lovejoy. Watch that woman. I don’t like her. Them Scorpios are all the same.’ That was more like it, I thought approvingly. Women’s hatreds are to be trusted.

  I returned a sentence of merry abuse, opened the door and ran straight into Donna Vernon.

  ‘Lovejoy. He said you’d be here.’ She was stiff and white with rage. Tinker was dozing in her car, the old nerk. I went pale – not too difficult to do because Barney was ascending the wharfside’s stone steps behind her. He’s the size of a house. His hands were like dangling shovels. Probably used them for rowing with.

  ‘Wotcher, Barney, me old hearty,’ I chirruped with poisonous good cheer.

  ‘You been seeing Beatrice, Lovejoy?’ he rumbled.

  ‘No. We’re trying to knock her up, aren’t we, Mrs Vernon? There’s no answer.’ Swiftly I gave Barney a roguish leer before somebody told the truth. ‘Maybe she’s already upstairs waiting to say welcome sailor.’ Mrs Vernon gave me the age-old look, guessing that nobody had better say anything.

  Muttering, Barney heaved his hulk inside, lightening the sky for miles. I knew Beatrice wouldn’t reveal all. She has ways of stifling any protest Barnacle Bill could utter. The door slammed behind him, to my relief, good old Donna’s signal.

  ‘Lovejoy, you bastard!’ she yelled in a ladylike manner.

  ‘Be this your sodding car, mate?’ a fisherman called. He had a million boxes of dead silver things. I looked away, queasy. Tinker had nodded off. ‘It’s in our frigging way.’

  ‘It’s all okay, Mrs Vernon,’ I wheedled, thinking fast. ‘I just had to check you out with Beatrice. It sounded so odd to, er, an unbeliever. I’ll come with you. Honestly. And I’ll behave. Oh.’ I made a theatrical gesture of surprise. ‘Hang on. Shall I turn your car? It’s so narrow on the wharf . . .’ I moved swiftly past her and got in. Beatrice was looking down from her upstairs window, still in her sorcerer’s apprentice outfit and smiling down with a silent tut-tut on her lovely mouth. She was about to draw her bedroom curtains now Barney was in situ. Donna Vernon stood waiting, still smarting.

  I smiled apologetically to show that everything wasn’t my fault, gave Beatrice a papal blessing, and drove off.

  Chapter 5

  THERE WAS A list of addresses in the glove compartment which tallied. About five o’clock that same day, me and Tinker drove into Nottingham, top name. He’d been snoring his head off, which was fine by me because I wanted to think about Donna Vernon, seances and vanishing antique-dealer husbands.

  And old songs. I wasn’t so daft that I hadn’t recognized the line. Everybody knows those Early English riddle melodies. Little girls still do rope-skip chants to them in the streets, and nowadays pop groups recompose them for sordid gain. As if they think we’re too thick to notice that everybody’s been singing them for a thousand years. I hummed Scarborough Fayre till I found the stanza:

  Tell him to buy me an acre of land,

  Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

  Atwixt the salt water and the sea sand,

  Then he’ll be a true love of mine . . .

  The punchline being that there’s no land at all between the ocean and the sand, so the girl singing it thinks the bloke’s a dud lover. As a song it’s nowt special, but that haunting line held a terrible hint of permanence. I shut up singing and drove.

  Nottingham’s one of those bright towns, like York and Lancaster, which look as if even their rain’s shinier than every place else’s. I quite took to it. Of course their council’s battered its priceless architecture into rubble on which they’ve built car parks and council offices of staggering dullness, but that’s only par these days. On the outskirts I stopped and checked Mrs Vernon’s walletful of valuable information, then followed the map. Once, I stopped to phone. Tinker got on my nerves, keeping on rousing to ask blearily where we were, as if it mattered to him. It’s worse when he’s kipping. He sucks and blows through his few grotty brown teeth continually. It’s a gruesome business when a bean gets lodged between his fangs. I decided to ditch him, for a useful purpose of course.

  The house was about seven miles out of town in a smallish place where Nottingham’s buses were beginning to worry about getting back and motors rested in garden driveways instead of out in the road. For a long minute as the engine cooled I waited. The garden notice, St Peter’s Rectory, worried me, but no good sitting on my bum. After all, there’s no way of judging wars that never start; wars that actually happen are easy. I had to find which sort of war this rectory represented.

  ‘Have a zuzz, Tinker. Back in a sec.’

  ‘Right, mate.’

  The postage stamp of lawn, weak-kneed rhododendrons and the reeling trellis with a back-combed firethorn were entirely predictable. St Peter himself opened the door. I admired his massive beard, though to me beards always look full of dandruff.

  ‘You’re Lovejoy, who phoned. Do come in. Thank heavens you’ve brought no children.’ He wrung my hand. ‘They scream.’

  ‘The beard’s new, eh?’ I guessed, following him in. He wasn’t quite as gnarled as vicars were when I was a lad, and wore quite a natty grey jacket. ‘Nottingham’s Oberammergau? Who’re you playing?’

  He gave an unexpectedly toothy grin. ‘You’re sharp. I actually grew it for the village dramatic society. I’m a murderer. My wife has designs on her sister’s fortune. She makes me stab her lover and poisons her family’s banker.’

  ‘Great plot,’ I said gravely. He’d brewed up as soon as I’d phoned and had cups laid on a tea tray. The living room was a small cube crammed with modern furniture-shaped gunge. My eyes tried to stay away from the cardboard shoebox on the mantelpiece where a Victorian pop-up card rested in calm superiority. That little card was slumming, and knew it. ‘I expected an antique shop, actually, er, Reverend.’

  ‘Call me Joe,’ he said, passing me a cup. ‘When you rang I was just on my way to rehearsal, so I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘I’ll only be a minute. An antique dealer called recently, didn’t he, er, Joe? Mr Vernon.’

  ‘Ah yes. Nothing wrong, I hope? He was very disappointed the aigrette had been sold – I think that’s what they’re called. One of our ladies bought it before he arrived.’

  Aigrette. So hubby Vernon was real, had been here, and had been right to be disappointed. An aigrette is a hat brooch, usually eighteenth century, shaped so as to hold a feather, and made of gold or silver. Often they themselves were feather shaped – an egret is some sort of bird – or fashioned as a spray of wayside flowers. I felt relieved. The trail was no longer imaginary. ‘It had little stones in it, thoug
h I’m afraid it was coming loose.’

  I suddenly felt ill. ‘You mean part of it wobbled?’

  ‘Mmmh,’ he said. His beard wobbled sympathetically in sorrow. ‘I tried to fix it but there was some spring thing inside. I reduced the price, of course,’ he added hurriedly, in case I got the wrong idea. ‘You don’t think nine pounds too much, Lovejoy? It was really very pretty.’

  The stupid old bastard. I could have strangled him. Let’s hope the stage crew got carried away and did away with the moron at tonight’s dress rehearsal, for the tremblant type of aigrette is rarest of all. It’s cleverly made to quiver with every toss of a fair lady’s head, thereby setting the jewels flashing and attracting amorous admiration away from less expensively dressed rivals.

  ‘No,’ I said, choking, keeping control. ‘Nine quid’s really quite fair.’ Whoever owned it could now pay off that troublesome mortgage and still offer crumpets for tea. His anxiety evaporated in a grin, silly loon.

  ‘I trust Mr Vernon isn’t in any trouble?’

  ‘None. I’m just trying to find him, you see. An urgent family matter. I’m in the trade, chancing to be nearby.’

  He tutted. ‘I’m afraid he was only one of a hundred or so people who came to the sale. We don’t normally—’ his eyes twinkled good-humouredly in the undergrowth of his hairy halo ‘—enter the marketplace, Lovejoy!’

  Faintly I moaned, ‘A jumble?’ Everybody else flukes a fortune except me.

  ‘We prefer to call it a bring-and-buy,’ Joe said primly. ‘Emphasizes the role of the providers.’

  ‘Did he come specifically for the aigrette?’

  ‘No. As far as I can remember he just asked our organizer if the best brooch had been sold. My wife Janice said she was sorry but it had – she’s our secretary. We chatted a little because he wasn’t one of our own flock. He didn’t really seem very interested in our wares.’

  ‘Best brooch?’ Funny phrase, I thought. And funnier behaviour from a bloke doing an antiques sweep. We have a saying in this lunatic game of madness and money: one look’s never enough. Yet here was a geezer who couldn’t even bother to walk round a church hall where any of a dozen stalls could hold yet another Koh-i-noor diamond. I rose to go, smiling thanks, and still pretending not to notice the Victorian pop-up card.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any items left over, Joe? Just in case somebody’s missed a Rembrandt by mistake.’

  ‘Ah, you dealers!’ He laughed, waggled a roguish finger. ‘There’s only the remnants. Like that box of old cards.’

  Casually I stepped across and gave as convincing a chuckle as I could manage.

  ‘Why, it’s a Victorian greeting card!’ I said, delighted. ‘My old gran’s got a boxful at home too.’ The one on display showed a little girl carrying a red heart, sitting on a coloured tissue-paper airship. Fold it, and it would flatten for posting. The card was worth anybody’s weekly wage. Some are even dearer. As well as pop-ups you get ‘sliders’ – push a protruding tab and the scene changes from, say, a nursery of prancing infants to a snowy scene of lakes and sledges.

  ‘That’s the best of them,’ Joe confessed. ‘The others are just old Valentines and things.’

  I turned jokingly to him. ‘All right, Joe. I’ll take them off your hands, as a contribution to your church and its murderous drama. Don’t show me what there is inside the box. Come on, drive a hard bargain now!’

  Grinning with toothy shyness, he extorted a couple of notes from me. I chucked in a quid extra to obviate any comeback if he ever discovered their true value, and took my leave with the shoebox under my arm. I was elated, because I was suddenly wealthier than I’d been for a long time. Too much to hope for a Horsley original, the very first Christmas card – Sir Henry Cole began it all in that chilly December of 1843 when he discovered himself embarrassingly late with his Christmas letters and got his pal John Horsley to design a jolly printed card, bless them both. Horsley only printed a thousand, but still there might be an 1848 Egley card, the first with holly and mistletoe.

  In the car Tinker was coughing himself awake, the car trembling at the unleashed bronchitic energy. I guessed it must be around opening time. ‘Where to now, Lovejoy?’

  ‘A nice quiet pub. I’ve a boxful of old cards to look at.’

  The old duck-egg gave a snort of derision at my pleasure. I drove us off reflecting on the differences in people. Tinker really can’t see the point in actually loving antiques. I can’t see the point in loving anything else.

  That evening I’ll remember for a long time, with Tinker reminiscing about antique auctions and swilling ale, and me divvying through a glorious collection of old hearts-and-flowers.

  I’d won thirty-odd Valentines, a few First World War postcards, and several early Christmas cards. Tip: never pass a box of rubbishy old tat. There’s one outside every old junk shop. Remember that Queen Victoria sent over 2,500 Valentines with her very own lilywhites. On the law of averages alone any one dusty old heap of dog-eared cards will conceal a small fortune. The card-sending habit’s fairly new, but Valentine wishes in the form of letters or poems goes back much further – naturally, since Henry VIII established Valentine’s Day by royal charter in the 1530s, naughty old devil.

  Nottingham’s taverns did us proud that night for hot grub. Going on for ten o’clock I carelessly put the motor in the central car park and gave Tinker my last notes for a dosshouse somewhere. By then I’d found a pub whose landlord had a brother who was an antique dealer. We did a ‘provo’ – a firm deal with prices agreed but provisional on condition of the items sold. I kept ten mixed cards enveloped up for myself. The landlord’s brother, one Josh Thompson, would join me at breakfast to close the deal.

  There was no way I could contact Lydia but I rang Margaret to pass a message on to say I was okay. Dangerous territory, using women as go-betweens, so I was carefully non-committal about what I was doing and where I was.

  That night I settled down determined to sleep the sleep of the just, but Vernon’s weird term kept coming to mind: ‘the best brooch’. Who on earth uses words like that, for heaven’s sake? As if Vernon was making up some description, not really looking for anything in particular. Yet there was the precise address in what was presumably Donna Vernon’s own handwriting, and Reverend Joe’s name, J. Cunliffe, Rd. The sort of curt abbreviation you often see in local newspaper ads. Aha. Another clue.

  Mystery: antique-dealer Sidney Vernon launches a sweep looking for antiques, respectably enough. He zooms off with a list of contacts, yet doesn’t get heartburn when missing a luscious antique by a whisker, and doesn’t even bother to suss out the rest of the stuff on sale. Really weird.

  Despite all, I eventually slept like a log and was downstairs whistling for breakfast by 7.30. Seeing Donna Vernon drinking coffee in the pub lounge, while motherly women vacuumed the carpets and shook dusters from leaded windows, brought me down to earth.

  Chapter 6

  ‘MORNING, LOVEJOY,’ LA Vernon said, simultaneously calm and furious. Women have the knack of being both, which is why we live in a woman’s world.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Vernon.’

  She held out her hand. I dropped her car keys into the palm and sat. I’d been stupid to assume that she’d not follow. Evading police is easy. Escaping a woman isn’t. Now why, I wondered as a bright lady came to serve, did she need me along? Hiring me made less and less sense. Nobody in his right mind would believe she was guided to me by Bea’s tea-leaf gazing and that seance rubbish.

  ‘Good morning, sir. What would you like for breakfast?’

  I stared at the lady. Sometimes I honestly don’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘I’d like breakfast for breakfast, please.’

  The woman laughed, pinking. She was chained to a notepad. Cold buzzie and cold feet but warm heart, I knew instantly, because this sort always has. ‘No. Do you want continental breakfast, or—?’

  ‘Forgotten what your granny taught you, love? Breakfast is eggs and bacon and toast and marmalade
, and porridge if mice haven’t dumped in the oats.’

  ‘We’ve no time,’ Mrs Vernon rasped.

  ‘See you around then, Donna,’ I said politely. ‘Get a move on, missus. I’m bloody starving.’

  The cleaning women were having a good laugh but keeping a weather eye on my unexpected visitor.

  ‘Don’t tell me, boss,’ I guessed resignedly. ‘You got the train to Nottingham, taxied round, spotted your crate, then asked at the nearest pub for somebody answering my description, right?’

  ‘Quicker than that, Lovejoy.’ She lit a cigarette, which I extinguished in her coffee. She instantly erupted. ‘What the—?’

  ‘There’s a William IV hunting scene on the panelling behind you, love,’ I told her. ‘Your fag’s bad for its chest.’ Might as well talk to the wall. She still glared. ‘Look. Hadn’t you best just give me a photograph of your husband, then get out of my way?’

  She didn’t know which to be maddest at, me, her drenched fag, or being told to get lost. ‘But I hired you, Lovejoy! You’re supposed to do what I want!’

  The world’s full of incompetents crying that tale. ‘Oh, aye,’ I said unbelievingly and waded into my porridge which arrived just in time to save me fainting. I eat it as it comes. Milk makes scarey patterns and sugar makes oats see-through. An old colonel and his missus were having Douglas kippers in the corner, with toast thin as rice paper. They wouldn’t get far on that.

  ‘Let’s get one thing clear, Lovejoy,’ Mrs Vernon ground out. ‘Your sexist attitude’s a propaganda put-down, Lovejoy. It’s oppressionism. It’s totalitarianism. You default on me and I’ll—’

  ‘Sue me? It’ll take ten lawyers a costly year and I’m broke. I’m fed up with you.’

  She eyed me. Slowly, almost with an audible click, her brain began to function. Sooner or later it always happens, though oftentimes too late. ‘So it’s you go on your own, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Why not? I’m unemployed.’ I couldn’t resist putting that nasty bit in. ‘I’ve got the list of places where he’s gone.’