The Tartan Ringers

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘You interrupt school and make me a laughing stock just to ask stupid questions?’

  Women are always narked. You just have to ride out the storm. I nodded. ‘Yes, love. Only it didn’t arrive.’ She’d given me the original address, an Inverness box number.

  ‘Well, I can’t help that, can I?’

  ‘Why did you tell me instead of some other dealer, Jo?’

  Momentarily she coloured deeper. ‘You happen to be the first antique dealer I thought of.’

  I turned to go, and said loudly, ‘Pretend to start teaching, darling, then slip out. I’ll be waiting—’

  ‘Shhh, you fool.’ She was trying not to laugh. A police car pulled alongside the kerb. 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 wagoneer in the privacy of their own vehicles.

  Three days elapsed before reassuring rumours 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, listened 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 which 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 which 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, jewellery, 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 Al2 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 labour 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.

  Chapter 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, that I was currently angling after.

  You’ve seen how light transluces through a lampshade? 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 pi
cture when you hold them up to the light. However, naughtiness crept in to 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.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’ He jerked his chin. Ted the barman nodded and drew two pints. I paid. It’s Tinker’s principal method of claiming his salary from me. I’ve gone hungry before now to get him sloshed, because a barker’s vital. He can winkle and cheat with abandon. Antique dealers must be circumspect.

  ‘Wotcher, Tinker.’ I forked out. I bought us a bar pasty in the euphoria of freedom. ‘News of the bureau? Dutchie?’

  ‘Nar. I got you Dobson.’ He indicated with his eyes the tall lone figure at the bar’s end. Even in a crowd the thin silent barker somehow stood apart.

  Dobson’s a sombre one-off. For a start, he’s the only bloke I know in the trade who doesn’t have a nickname. And he never says much, just hangs around listening, vigilant. Folk say he carries a knife and once did time. He looks fresh from an alley war. On the other hand I like Dutchie, a genial bloke with a word for the cat. He appears out of nowhere once every Preston Guild. He comes like a comet, handles the deals Dobson’s lined up for him, then vanishes for a fortnight or so. But Dobson unsettles me. A few minutes later I was asking Dobson where his wally Dutchie was.

  He never answers immediately, in case there’s another way out. ‘Gone on the ferry. Dunno where.’

  Fair enough. ‘See anything of a bureau, the night that wagon driver got done?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’ Nothing here for an inquisitive dealer fresh out of clink.

  ‘Was Dutchie around that night?’

  He shrugged after a long lag phase. Nothing. I rejoined Tinker, back to hungry reality. So I’d lost a fortune. I couldn’t afford to lose still more by inactivity. ‘The lithophanes, Tinker.’

  ‘Them little pot flaps?’ Tinker’s way of describing artistic genius. ‘Three-Wheel.’

  ‘Three-Wheel Archie? Great. Come on, Tinker.’

  He wailed, ‘But I haven’t had me dinner, Lovejoy.’

  Fuming, I gave him two of my three remaining notes, which left me just enough to breathe. ‘See me tonight, then. The Three Cups.’ The sly old berk was cackling with glee as I left.

  From the call box outside I phoned Ellen to beg a lift. The glass was shattered so I had to stand in the rain and shout over the whistling gale. Unbelievably, she put down the receiver the instant she recognized my voice. Bloody nerve. Next week she’d prove to me, by complex female reasoning, that her refusal to speak was a precaution to help me in some way.

  A call to the Infant School earned another rebuff, this time from Jo. A bad day for loyalty. A stranger gave me a lift in his car to within a mile of Archie’s place, and told me all about astronomy.

  Three-Wheel Archie gets his nickname from a tricycle he rides. He grew up in an orphanage somewhere near Whitechapel. When I say grew up, I mean his head and features did, but the rest of him sort of lagged behind. Mind you, with most of us others it’s the opposite, isn’t it; relatively big over all but very little brain. Archie ended up a thickset titch who walks with a low swagger. He deals in engines, mechanicals, and watches, and lives alone down the estuary. I like him.

  He was cleaning his dazzling new motor car when I arrived. It lives grandly in a brick-built garage, cavity insulation, dehumidifier, air conditioner, the lot. He’d run it out on polished lino. He lives in the near-derelict cottage adjoining.

  ‘Sprung, eh, Lovejoy?’ he panted, sprawled on the bonnet polishing like mad. ‘No way a soft bugger like you could clobber a big Brummie to death. The Old Bill are stupid.’

  ‘I’ve come about the lithophanes.’ I walked round his car, admiring. ‘Posher than ever. How old now?’

  ‘Ten next September thirtieth. She’s Libra.’

  ‘Er, great. Still going okay?’ It has one mile on the clock, in and out of the garage once a fortnight. Five yards a month mounts up.

  ‘Brilliant, Lovejoy,’ he said proudly, sliding chutewise down to the ground carrying his sponges. ‘Glass?’

  ‘Ta, Archie.’ When I said new, I used the term loosely. Archie’s one ambition from birth was owning a saloon car. He bought it a decade gone, and built for it that luxurious garage. Of course he’s so dwarf he can’t reach the pedals to drive the damned thing, but he loves it. He runs the engine every week, has engineers in to service it. Once, a local dealer laughed at Archie for having a new/old car he couldn’t drive. Archie’s never spoken to him since. Nor have I.

  ‘Here, Lovejoy.’ He gave me some homemade wine. ‘Last autumn’s blackberry.’

  ‘Mmmmh.’ I smacked my lips. Dreadful.

  ‘The lithophanes’ll cost you, Lovejoy.’ We sat on packing cases beside the glittering vehicle.

  ‘Archie. If you wanted an antique bureau twinned up, who’d you get to do it?’

  ‘You, Lovejoy, on that rare occasion you’re not dicking some bint. Otherwise Tipper Noone at Melford. He’s done lovely stuff lately.’

  ‘I mean a rush job.’

  ‘So do I.’ Archie drained his glass. He knew what I was asking, the crafty devil. ‘Somebody said Tipper did one a few days back, for shipping to the Continent.’

  I sighed. That’s the trouble with East Anglia. Most is coast, inlets with busy little ships steaming to and fro. And continentals spend like lunatics when they’ve a mind.

  ‘I’m the one who told Tinker, Lovejoy.’

  Useless. That was as far as we’d got before a car pulled in and Jo descended. I introduced Archie to her. He rose, shook hands gravely. I knew she’d behave properly, thank God.

  ‘Good of you to come, Jo.’ I was mystified.

  She stood in the mucky yard, hands plunged into the pockets of her floppy coat. Her collar was up, framing her face. Women stand with elegance, don’t they, one foot slightly averted so they’re all one lovely composite shape.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ Archie offered her a crate. She sat without a trace of hesitancy. I really like Miss Josephine Ross. More, she gravely accepted a glass of Archie’s wine and said reflectively that it was possibly a little too dry, like her father’s recipe. Archie adored her.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt, Lovejoy,’ she said, smiling. ‘I only wanted to say sorry, cutting you off on the phone just because you’d been . . . seeing the police. It was mean of me.’ Her colour was high. ‘We shouldn’t be swayed by public stigma.’

  ‘Don’t mix metaphors,’ I said, to get us off ethics. ‘Give me a lift and I’ll forgive you.’

  Me and Archie settled the deal over the lithophanes while Jo admired the car, wisely not touching it. She had quickly registered the difference between Archie’s grotty residence and the opulent garage, but said nothing. Archie came to see us off. The swine wouldn’t let me have the lithos on approval.

  ‘Four wheels on your motor,’ Jo said. ‘Why Three-Wheel?’

  ‘Come on, Jo.’ I got in her car irritably.

  ‘Tell her, Lovejoy.’ Archie was grinning, saw I wouldn’t budge, and walked over to a shed. He pulled the door open to reveal a beautiful tricycle with an elegant canopy.

  ‘How lovely, Archie!’ Jo exclaimed. ‘Do you ride it?’

  ‘Makes me mobile, Miss Ross. Courtesy of Lovejoy, five years ago now.’

  She looked at me. ‘Really.’

  ‘Can we go?’ I called wearily. ‘Bloody time-wasters.’

  Archie waved to us. By the time we left the yard he was already buffing the car’s hubs. We drove a couple of miles before she said anything. ‘Lovejoy?’

  She wanted to prattle about Archie, but I wasn’t having
any. ‘You only gave me the box number for that bureau, Jo,’ I said. ‘Is there more?’

  She took a while to answer. ‘Very well,’ she said finally. ‘Grammar apart, Lovejoy, you’ll have to sing for your supper.’

  * * *

  It was Jo’s free afternoon. She stayed and I made tea for her. Ellen had washed up, so I had clean cups. I made some sandwiches and cut their crusts off to make natty triangles. A bit thick, but all the more nourishing. The tomatoes had gone pappy so I blotted them on newspaper first. I felt posh serving up, like the Savoy chef. I had to use a towel for a tablecloth because I can never find anything when Ellen’s tidied.

  ‘I’m impressed, Lovejoy,’ Jo said, smiling.

  ‘Ta,’ I said modestly. I knew she would be. I can really lay on the elegance when I want. I’d even found the teapot lid.

  She wore a beige twin set, tweed skirt, but mainly a black opal ring, Edwardian setting, heavy and gold. Beautiful.

  ‘It was my friend I was at school with, Shona. We’ve kept up correspondence.’ She coloured, proving rumour right: a farm manager, a passionate holiday affair, and her coming to a teaching job in East Anglia to be near his fertile acres.

  Shona was a teacher in Caithness, which is almost as far north as you can go. In a recent letter Shona had mentioned selling some furniture. By pure chance, Jo said, carefully avoiding my gaze, my name entered the correspondence.

  ‘It was soon after I’d met you at the Castle show,’ she explained. Farmer Bob had been away. Jo and I had met on that local gala day – everybody goes to our Castle’s flower displays. We saw quite a bit of each other for a fortnight until her favourite yokel homewards plodded his weary way.

  ‘You told Shona I was a divvie?’

  ‘I may have mentioned it. In passing.’ She spoke offhandedly. ‘Maybe. I can’t remember. Shona insisted on selling through a box number. I passed it on to you. You wrote, and . . . and now that poor driver . . .’

  My mind wouldn’t stop nudging me, but I’d have scared her off if I’d started a serious interrogation.

  ‘Wasn’t it lucky, you meeting that woman in the fog?’ Jo said, too casual. She’d reached the suspicion bit, about Ellen.