Pearlhanger

by Jonathan Gash

  I’m not proud of that Saturday, though everything went superbly. All right, Olivia showed me round Tierney’s after the rest of the staff had gone. And all right, I was full of good reasons like a con trick and crippling a few people, so morally I was on the firm grounds of justice and whatnot. The trouble is I find there are always unexpected consequences. They’re never my fault, but life has a habit of rapping you over the knuckles even for getting things right. It’s really unfair.

  In the auction firm’s offices Olivia showed me the jewellery trays – metal based, with a locked fenestrated Perspex cover; you can look at and touch items but not move them. They were bad news. The safe was easier, an ancient cube no self-respecting burglar would unpack his toolkit for. Then, with the dreaded tyranny of the garrulous, she decided we ought to stop off at a quiet place on the coast road, to make sure we’d forgotten nothing. We did stop off, and did make sure. She was smooth, assured, pleased and pleasing. I won’t go into details. Enough to say a bond was forged between us most of that night. I’m not grumbling. Worse things happen at sea, as they say.

  Sunday dawned before I reached the cottage, done for. I was practically certain that she still didn’t suspect: to her I was still James Chandler, a bona fide Tierney customer. I think. Anyway, plenty of time before evensong to set my trap and organize the fake. Illegalities are always straightforward. It’s the honest bits that always need bending round odd moral corners.

  I’d had an early breakfast with Olivia. Weak but hopeful, I set to work in the shed with my plan at last in place. Later, I’d phone Big John Sheehan, God help me.

  Faking pearls is as old as man’s love for pearls themselves, but not by this method I was going to try: epoxy resin mixed with mucoidal goo from fish scales.

  As I worked on in the slanting sunshine, I pondered other possible ways. From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, fakers tried wax-covered gypsum or alabaster beads soaked in oil. They sound really gungey but are surprisingly convincing when fresh. Age is the giveaway here; they don’t last. Or you can polish mother-of-pearl into beads – nice from a distance, but they look all little layers close to.

  The French fakers’ favourite method’s glass beads coated with fish-scale scrapings stuck on by parchment glue with a drop of wax. The best fish-scale solution is Canadian, incidentally. It’s oily stuff called guanine. Scrape fish scales into water and you see it glowing at the bottom. People ship it in vinegar or ammonia that burns your eyes. The old fakers’ formulas: 20,000 bleak fish for a pound of the pearly mucus; 1,000 fake pearls from three ounces. Some use a drop of gum tragacanth. Opal-glass ‘pearls’ never fooled anybody, and apart from the new plastic jobs there’s not much else. You see how difficult the faking game is? Life’s a real wind-up.

  Sandy telephoned at an ungodly hour the next morning. He’d ordered the fish. (‘Mel’s absolutely livid! Just because I was having a little chat-à-tête with a such pretty sailor—’)

  In the garden I rigged up a plastic funnel over a winemaker’s glass carboy half-filled with water. Me and a Chesterfield bloke had done it once before so I knew it stank the place out. I’d nip along the footpath, tell Kate they were coming, then hid in the workshed till it was all over. I’m not squeamish, but the less I saw of it the better. She had a nephew who’d take the fish corpses off my hands. Meanwhile it was crank the Ruby out of somnolence and trundle to town.

  Chapter 25

  SITTING ON THE floor in Herbie Belcher’s garret while he fired a dress ring’s mountant, I mentally examined Tierney’s safety procedure. It sounds pretty hopeless security, but think a minute. All small precious items locked into viewing trays. A whizzer always stands by. The senior Tierney alone holds the key. Lovely items, such as jewels, pendants, necklaces, rings, are only brought out under guard ten minutes before the doors open to the rapacious public.

  ‘A simple swap’s the most difficult.’

  ‘What, Lovejoy?’

  Herbie had finished, switching off his jet burner and raising his protective glasses. I must have spoken aloud.

  ‘Nothing, Herbie.’ I grinned innocently.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ he said distrustfully. ‘What you want, Lovejoy?’

  Herbie Belcher has more forgeries masquerading in famous museums than any goldsmith I’ve ever met. He used to work in a Whitechapel sweatshop as a kid, rising to Hatton Garden by talent. He works in this creaking attic down the Dutch Quarter, the part of our town I told you about. Herbie’s place is a pleasure to visit: a five-recessed jeweller’s bench straight out of the French eighteenth century, covered in goldsmithy mini-tools. His floor’s covered by caies, those wooden Joliot grills for scraping gold dust off people’s boots. You wouldn’t laugh if ever you see the gold dust Herbie cleans off them every Easter. Lovely to see the old geezer work. I once saw him fake a Roman fertility ring in 22-carat; out of this world. He doesn’t have windows for natural daylight, simply does everything under a bare bulb.

  ‘Seven mounts, one gold, Herbie,’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’ Note: fakers never ask what for. They already know.

  ‘This.’ I passed him a piece cast like the big baroque pearl from the pendant, and my mock-up of the gold Siren mount.

  He squinted at me, his metal files rippling. ‘It’s like that Canning Siren thing Sotheby’s flogged to the Yanks.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ I said evenly. Silence.

  He frowned. ‘How soon? I’m up to my—’

  ‘A fortnight, Herbie.’ I rose, dusted my knees.

  ‘Gawd almighty, Lovejoy.’

  ‘A friend’s bringing the little scotcher baroques.’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Herbie wailed after me as I headed downstairs, ‘doesn’t that pendant have a diamond for a mirror? Where’ll I get them?’

  ‘Heat a few crabby old zirconites from Woolworths,’ I bawled up irritably. ‘Do I have to explain every bloody thing?’ People really nark me. No common sense.

  ‘It’ll cost you, Lovejoy.’

  His bitter refrain followed me as I opened the street door and let myself out by the ironmonger’s. I didn’t even bother to answer. Honestly, you try to throw money into people’s pockets and what thanks do you get?

  The town’s one unvandalized public phone stands in a row of six by the arcade. I went in with a heap of coins. Thugs don’t make me nervous, so I was surprised to see my fingers having a clammy time finding the coin slot.

  ‘Sheehan’s,’ a voice said tunelessly.

  ‘Put John S. on,’ I said, despising myself for a shake in my throat.

  ‘Get knotted.’ Click, burr.

  Another trembled dialling, and the same unstructured voice said if that’s the same berk calling again he’d personally crawl down the wire and spread me.

  ‘Listen, creep,’ I quavered. ‘Keep John S. away from Montwell.’

  Duty done, I slammed the receiver and nervously wiped my hands. Big John Sheehan is a wild Ulsterman who occasionally holidays from his devotions to play North London’s antique trade. He’s a ‘roller’, as we call them. Rollers are very wealthy and don’t give a damn about antiques – as long as they’re genuine. Paul Getty was one. Big John Sheehan is another, and has an army of bad lads who offer to prove it when required. His smoking chequebook causes riots even in hallowed Bond Street. He was sure to have heard of Tierney’s forthcoming auction, because he has a dolly bird just for cataloguing catalogues. Nothing now would stop him burning up the A12 on auction day. Nobody warns John S. off.

  Full of pride at a job well done, I took Margaret Dainty to the Three Cups. She was really pleased and, holding my hand, agreed to sell me an intact William Spooner antique jigsaw The Sugar Plantation for less than its value. Of course I had to pay her by an IOU, but that’s what IOUs are for, isn’t it?

  All I wanted now was to hear word that Deamer would be sending his most valuable fake into Tierney’s auction, because we have a tame cracksman working locally called Fingers. He can open elderly Chubbs without splitting a fingerna
il. The night before the auction I’d simply get Fingers to swap Deamer’s fake Siren for mine. And why? Because the baroque pearl in mine would be fake, and Donna’s mob’s piece had a genuine one, of the huge sort denied me. Big-spending John Sheehan would be there on auction day and buy my fake Siren – and then go after Deamer, Chatto and Donna Vernon to express his sincerest disappointment. And I’d be in the clear.

  With, of course, Deamer’s very, very pricey fake in my grasp. Nothing could go wrong – once Deamer lodged his item in Tierney’s auction.

  No news the first week, but so what? Plenty of time. Five weeks is five weeks, after all. That Tuesday I waited on the bypass, soaked to the skin, at half-three one rainy morning, for a certain long-distance haulage wagon, our nation’s best and cheapest antiques delivery service. And collected two tiny leather bags of freshwater baroques from Perth, lovely little things that had cost Lydia an arm and a leg but which delighted Herbie Belcher so much that he actually smiled. She arrived safely that Wednesday, bringing a bag of Birmingham scrap mother-of-pearl, clever girl. The rest of the week was wasted in joyous reunion, so was uneventful.

  No news the second week. Fine, though. Four weeks is four weeks. Long time, no? By then I had pressed imprints of Tierney’s office key. I cut the key myself from sheet brass, taking great care.

  My faked massive baroque pearl was finished. A couple of the trial pieces even looked great. The rest were manky. Before I let Herbie have the best I would give it one last coat, then touch it up on Finger’s big night.

  Three weeks gone. Still no news of Deamer’s sending his pendant into Tierney’s auction. But why worry?

  Tierney’s had typeset the sale catalogues. Olivia let me see the proofs. I booked Fingers to do the swap, sixty quid down and a percentage.

  Thursday of that week I had a blazing row with Mel, who’d taken the lid off a silver wax jack. It’s a cylindrical cup-like thing with a waxy taper uncoiling through the conical lid. ‘Ignorant bloody fools like you give idiocy a bad name,’ I yelled at him. How I didn’t hit him I’ll never know. ‘Just to stretch the lid into a small dish? You frigging nerk. Any goon can detect a stretcher case.’ Especially when the silversmith’s mark is the famous tall rectangle of the Hennells, 1802. Sandy frantically tried to calm me but I told him to get that ugly daubed scrapheap of a car out of my bloody way, and drove off, leaving him sobbing and Mel with one of his heads.

  All in all, the usual scene of Lovejoy waiting patiently.

  * * *

  Fourth week. No news. I was broke, on edge. Tierney’s had sent out the sale catalogues. I couldn’t concentrate. Tinker moaned that we were missing bargains right, left and centre. I owed everybody for everything.

  Friday night I walked past a genuine Valenciennes lace sampler – you wear out two sets of eyes to make those lace edgings. Only a yard long and not two inches wide, but skilled lacemakers did one inch slogging non-stop 4 a.m. to dusk.

  Saturday I stared unseeing in the arcade while Vera Spelman and her new bloke Trevor bought a collection of six Victorian miniature baptismal fonts, replicas in stone copied from Lincolnshire churches, the sort collectors search a lifetime for. I tell you I was really on form.

  Herbie Belcher finished the last of the mounts, a lovely job. The best was brilliant.

  Fifth week. A week to go. And no news from Olivia. I was seeing her nightly now, ratty as hell, still pretending I was somebody called James Chandler but with my stories about Lord Eskott’s dippy family more confused than ever. And she was wearing me out. They now expected us as a routine at her bloody motel. Lydia was becoming suspicious. East Anglia was agog about the forthcoming auction at Montwell. Tierney’s had taken massive double spread adverts locally and quarter boxes in the London dailies. Syndicates were forming, breaking, re-coalescing. All known antique dealers were everywhere, up to everything.

  Word came of two London mobs preparing to lam in on auction day. The Cambridge dealers were already arriving. The Brixton and Southend mobs were in the two major hotels, snooker and gin till all hours. The Norwich dealers would arrive on the day, their sly habit. Rumour spread wider, faster. A Birmingham ring’s lawyer was seen lunching with the senior Tierney. Big John Sheehan was coming. Christ. I couldn’t sleep. When I wasn’t with Olivia I was in my workshed checking and rechecking my fake pendant.

  Herbie Belcher presented me with his bill. I nearly infarcted. Great. I’d now ruined myself, having had seven fakes made for nothing.

  Two days left. No news but molto rumour.

  Debts everywhere, and a pocketful of fakes. Big John S. was lodged in Colchester, ready for the grand drive to Montwell on the day. His Rolls puddle-splashed me by the war memorial. Lydia gave me a stern lecture on morality. Olivia lectured me mistily on togetherness. I’d have given anything for a kip.

  One day left. I was done for. Display day, when all items go on show. Fingers, my cracksman swap-merchant, was drinking at the George, poised.

  Disconsolately I drove over to Montwell on my own and just about made the hundred-yard walk to Tierney’s auction rooms. I’d never felt so washed out. It was the usual sordid scene, antiques crammed higgledy-piggledy into the aroma of must, age and cheap new wood. Normally I’d be thrilled at the turmoil. Today it was a throng about my scaffold.

  The main display cabinet was surrounded by a mass of dealers, Big John Sheehan’s red head showing tallest. I sat wearily on a small oak monk’s chest, depressed and exhausted by the whole thing. Olivia was at her desk listing postal bidders. She tried to give me a secret loving smile but I was too done and pretended not to see.

  Then Ledger, bless him, made my day. Never say our policemen aren’t wonderful, because this angel was suddenly beside me.

  ‘Outside, Lovejoy,’ he said.

  ‘What for now, Ledger?’ I didn’t move. I was too tired from losing. Usually only women make me feel like this.

  ‘Because I said, that’s what for.’

  I looked towards the crowd of dealers. Then I looked up at Ledger. This important peeler had made a special trip to Montwell to warn me off. A faint glow began to spread through me. My memory searched and doubtfully diagnosed the glow as optimism, the stuff I once felt every single day. Would Ledger go to all that trouble, unless . . . ?

  ‘Can’t I have just one look at it, Ledgie?’ I cringed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Up. Out.’

  My spirits rose. I’d said ‘it’. He knew I meant Deamer’s fake, the Siren ringer. It was here.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, smiling beatifically and heading for the street. I walked for the sake of appearances but I could have flown.

  Suspicious at my good humour, he stood watching at the exit. ‘Lovejoy, you don’t come near this place. Hear me?’

  ‘I promise, Ledgie,’ I told him. My heart was singing, because my scam was on. ‘Oh, will you pass Chandler a message, please? Tell him no hard feelings.’

  That ended his satisfaction. I went off whistling the difficult bit in Purcell’s Rejoice, the slow rising crescendo bit that everybody in our choir gets wrong except me.

  That same night I was in paradise. My forgery was beautiful. Old Herbie deserved a peerage, and my fake baroque pearl which formed the mermaid’s torso would fool anybody – at first. The small dangling baroque pearls were Lydia’s genuine scotchers, so no worry there. The gold chains and the Siren’s body were Herbie’s gold. Herbie had copied the medieval Italian goldsmith’s VD mark with loving care. The whole piece dazzled. The other six were marred by slight defects here and there, which was only to be expected for trials. Once the scam was over I’d sell them to some bone-headed roving dealers as they passed through.

  Those small cardboard boxes that they sell digital watches in are the only really useful things you can buy from watchmakers nowadays. I’d had a nice one ready some time. Covered in imitation blue velvet, these cost about fivepence, wholesale. I’d lined it with felt over recessed polystyrene to hold the pendant tight but not rigid. Finally the whole
lot was wrapped in a piece of black slub silk for ease of handling during the dark hours. I left the rest of the pendants in a safe floor hole.

  Fingers would need cash for tonight’s work. Early that evening I drove to Dragonsdale and offered to sell Liz Sandwell two precious antiques I hadn’t got.

  ‘Tomorrow’s jewellery auction at Montwell?’ she guessed, smiling. She’s a luscious bird, but her bloke’s one of these rugby maniacs the size of our church. She also has that special woman’s smile which eggs a man to try it on. ‘The whole world’ll be competing.’

  ‘Mind your own business, wench,’ I rebuked. ‘I’ve a coconut chalice made in a debtors’ prison, 1830, bone rimmed and inlaid, with a coconut ladle. That’s one.’ She gasped gratifyingly, knowing the rarity of these Dickensian artefacts. ‘And I’ve a Queen Anne period kitchen spoon rack, eighteen inches tall.’

  ‘What about—?’

  ‘My fingerstocks?’ She’d only been about to ask if I’d any spoons to go with the rack, but I chose to misunderstand. ‘You heard of them, eh? Those children’s fingerstocks are all I’d have left, Liz.’

  Our dear great-grandparents must have been hell-raisers as infants. Their Victorian schoolteachers carved flat wood into bean-shaped pieces, each four-inch crescent with four holes and a thong. You used the leather thongs to tie troublesome pupils’ hands, fingers rammed into the holes, thereby creating more disturbed personalities to educate the next generation. I knew Liz was specially interested in infant welfare. ‘No deal, Liz. I’ll give them as a christening present for your first.’

  We bantered lightly over prices. I got a good deposit out of her for all three, fingerstocks included, and a guarantee of the balance payable at the Swan in Montwell immediately after Tierney’s auction was over. I said my thanks and drove off. God knows where I’d find antiques that rare, but that was tomorrow’s problem. Maybe Sandy and Mel would help. Finding such genuine rarities was a long shot. I’d only ever seen one set of children’s fingerstocks, in York years ago.