The Tartan Ringers

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Ian’s the one I spoke about, Michelle.’ Shona walked ahead with her, ever so pally. Neither tried to stab the other, with visible restraint. ‘A furniture craftsman. He trained at the London College.’

  ‘Oh.’ Michelle placed her dark eyes on me. ‘You’re going to be marvellously useful, Ian.’

  French? Belgian? Her accent matched her dark hair, wavy and lusciously thick. She seemed about fifty. She wore that continental dressiness which our women only manage on Derby Day. I blame those rotten hats the royal family keep wearing.

  ‘Eh?’ Somebody’d mentioned antiques.

  ‘Duncan will show you later on. I’ll arrange it.’ Michelle rotated those deep eyes. ‘But we’ll expect excellent output, Ian. We can’t afford passengers.’

  Shona drew breath. Evidently multo double meanings were hidden therein for somebody not me. Between the two women I felt as nervous as a Christmas nut.

  The house was a giant of a place, with those lovely Victorian wooden panels nobody does properly any more, and even the glass bowls chained over each hanging ceiling light. They’ve become a fantastic source of profit – nowadays builders clearing old housing estates let you have them, five for a quid. They’re collectors’ items. Tip: look in ‘redevelopments’ (as our psychopathic town planners now term vandalism). I once got a small cast-iron staircase, circular, with the Darby Ironworks stamp on and everything, thrown in because I took sixty glass light bowls off a builder’s hands while he battered a priceless 1695 building to smithereens in East Anglia for a car park. I’d dined in superb elegance for six months on the profit . . .

  ‘Ian McGunn, darling,’ Michelle announced, showing me into the tallest sitting room on earth.

  The girl paused a second – surely not for effect? –and spun her wheelchair. I honestly gasped. She was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. About sixteen. Limpid eyes, pale skin with that translucency you instinctively want to chew. She was so slight in her lace blouse. A tartan blanket covered her legs. Pearl earrings, a beautiful black velvet choker with a central silver locket, probably late Victorian, and hair pale as her face. She honestly did seem lit from within.

  ‘Come in, Ian McGunn,’ she said. ‘I’m Elaine.’

  ‘Elaine’s—’ Shona started, but the girl silenced her with an abrupt gesture and propelled herself forward.

  ‘Don’t listen to Shona’s old clan nonsense,’ she instructed. ‘Somebody get us coffee, to convince this refugee from East Anglia that we’re civilized in the north. I’ll show him the house.’

  Lame people always disconcert me. I never know what to do – help? push the handles? let them get on with it? It’s a problem. Not only that, but here was the boss all right. I began to long for this Duncan to crash the party.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ian,’ Elaine said, spotting the difficulty. ‘Trail somewhere I can get a good look at you.’ She smiled mischievously. ‘This leg thing is permanent, I’m afraid, but I manage most things. It’s only temporary disableds need assistance.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘You’re English,’ she said, like giving absolution. I followed her from the room, heading down a panelled corridor. ‘And you bought some of our reproductions?’ The furniture we were passing was all reproduction. I listened to my chest, hoping for a dong of antique sincerity, but no. Not a genuine antique in sight, though some of the work was really quite skilled.

  ‘Er, one. Through a friend.’

  Michelle had disappeared. Shona was walking by Elaine. She caught my eye and nodded. I was doing all right so far. Unhappily I met Elaine’s delectable eyes in a hanging mirror. She was smiling, a naughty girl enjoying interplay. I sighed. Even peaceful women are trouble enough. Bravely I followed on down the longest corridor in the world.

  Once, I went into an Eastern bloc capital city. It was in the dark hours. The opera house was perfection, all brilliance and glamour. At half time, I strolled out to clear my brain of all that recitative, and realized with a shock that the lovely old street was a giant façade. Literally, the house fronts were shored-up replicas with only rubble behind. Since then I’ve never believed in appearances. The same sense of shock overcame me as Elaine turned to me and asked, ‘Well, Ian?’ We’d finished the penny tour.

  ‘Er, yes. Lovely house,’ I said lamely. Apart from two anterooms and the sitting room the entire place was bare. Not merely relatively bare, note, but completely empty. Some bygone gas-mantle fittings remained, but with new-fangled electricity points hung on. And it was only in the main hall and reception place that the great old house kept up the pretence of past grandeur with any conviction. Uneasily I got the point. An unexpected visitor could be welcomed, even entertained, and be sent on his way praising the manor house’s majesty, without realizing he’d been deceived. No living face behind the death mask. I felt sick. All this way, all that fairground shambles, and not a sniff of antiques. What little furniture the house possessed was simply heavy Victorian.

  Barren. A wilderness where I’d expected a harvest. She’d told me that upstairs the west wing still housed a considerable store of valuable antiques. ‘That’s why it’s closed off,’ she’d said. Odd, really, because I’d not felt a single chime. And upstairs was clearly one place she couldn’t get to, not on her own in a wheelchair. How neat.

  We returned to find Duncan waiting. I was glad. Elaine introduced us pleasantly enough. ‘Duncan, meet Ian. No prizes for guessing surnames.’ She looked at me while saying this, that mischief smile again.

  ‘Wotcher, Duncan.’

  ‘Welcome, Ian.’ He was a chunky, elderly bloke, his compact form slow but full of that sedate dynamism the born worker possesses. I realized that he must be the man who produced the reproductions. So who was Michelle? Elaine chipped in.

  ‘You’ll be wondering who Michelle is, Ian.’ She emitted that beautiful smile and said, ‘Michelle is Mrs Duncan McGunn. And our voice of sanity.’

  ‘Then there’s two of us,’ I said companionably.

  ‘Indeed? A cup of welcome, and we’ll let you start work. Duncan needs all the help he can get.’ She lit Duncan with a glance. ‘You’ve guessed right, man. Ian no has the Gaelic.’

  The way she spoke the words made it a skit. Duncan managed a wry grin, though the beautiful lass’s mockery obviously stung.

  ‘I’ll give the man a wee dram, then. It’s our own malt.’ He meant whisky.

  ‘Er, ta, Duncan, but coffee’ll do.’

  That halted the gaiety, except that Elaine fell about. In fact she laughed so much that tears rolled down her cheeks and she had to be helped to a hankie. Mentioning coffee had never seemed hilarious to me before, but each to his own giggle. I waited patiently for the girl to recover. Michelle was taking all this in her stride, Elaine merely a mischievous child. It was Shona whose cheeks showed bright red spots of suppressed fury. Our hostess was getting to her, and delighting in her success.

  ‘Er, what’s the joke, love?’ I asked to clear the air.

  ‘A Scot, Ian! One of the clan. One of us. Preferring coffee to our own malt! Isn’t that an absolute scream, Shona?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I said to save Shona. There were clues here if only I could spot them. ‘I’m not big on spirits.’

  ‘Sure you’ll not prefer tea?’ Elaine gasped.

  ‘Please,’ I said politely. ‘If it’s no bother.’

  Another winner. During the ensuing paroxysms Michelle gave Duncan the bent eye for us to withdraw to let the three of them get on with it.

  Duncan’s genteel exit line was, ‘I’ll show Ian the workshop. We’ll be a minute or two.’ I followed, really quite happy.

  We walked out by the front steps towards the outbuildings near where the red-haired man with the wheelbarrow had stood peering. Nobody else about now, though.

  ‘What was so funny, Duncan?’

  For a little he said nothing. We passed between two silent stone buildings, leaving left the carefully tended forecourt.

  ‘Well y’see, Ian,’ he said finally, ‘
it pleases Miss Elaine to needle Shona about Scottishness.’

  ‘And everybody else about their own particular fancy, eh?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said dryly. ‘Yon’s my wee factory.’ We paused outside a low stone barn, slate roof tethered by large flat slabs against winter storms.

  ‘Is that what Elaine needles you about?’ I asked.

  ‘O’ course.’ His honesty was disarming. I began to like Duncan McGunn. ‘And my Michelle about being Belgian.’

  ‘The question is why,’ I prompted.

  ‘Not so, Ian.’ He did things to a padlock to let us in. ‘The question is what will Miss Elaine find irks you, isn’t it?’ I didn’t think much to what he said. I wish now I had, honest to God.

  The place’s interior was a hundred feet by forty, give or take, and daylit from a couple of long slender windows running much of the length. Its scent was exquisite to a born faker – oils, varnishes, sawn woods, glues, sweat. Duncan’s current opus stood on a low metal bench.

  ‘Sheraton copy,’ I said. I could tell I was grinning from the sound in my voice. ‘Where’d you get it?’

  Cagey silence. I didn’t blame him. No trader gives his sources away. It was a battered Victorian chest of drawers imitating Sheraton. Three big drawers below two ‘half’ drawers, with slightly curved short legs. Some nerk had given each drawer wooden bulb handles. The Bramah locks were a giveaway because that locksmithing genius wasn’t around in 1786, the pretended age of this poor relic. I walked around it, pleased to be back in the real world.

  ‘You’ll reduce it, of course?’

  He filled a pipe slowly. ‘How?’

  ‘It looks pretty well made.’ I pulled a drawer and inverted it to check the wear and patination of age. Some wicked modern fakers add these small convincing details. It’s terrible to buy a piece like this, only to find once you’ve got it home that it’s phoney. We have a saying in this rottenest game, that you can never make anything good from a bad fake. But this was some skilled Victorian carpenter’s forged ‘Sheraton’. It had once glowed, been really quite stylish.

  ‘Any ideas?’ Duncan asked.

  All right. He’d a right to expect proof I knew what I was on about. ‘Only one,’ I said, and tapped its top. ‘Lose the two smaller drawers. Settle for the bottom three. They’ll need cutting down in size, of course. Replace the handles with brass reproductions. Leave the Bramah locks; when you advertise it admit quite openly that they’re later additions.’

  ‘Aye, but if a buyer looks at the base he’ll see where the curved front’s been cut through the middle.’

  ‘Then don’t sell it to a sceptic, Duncan.’ I’d given him the best recipe and he knew it.

  ‘Fancy your chances?’ he said. A challenge.

  ‘Yes.’ We got chatting then about some good ‘reproductions’, as I politely termed them, which I’d seen fetched through East Anglia. It turned out that he’d forged a Hepplewhite pot cupboard I’d bought and sold on to Dortmund (think of a box with tall straight unadorned tapering legs).

  ‘So you made that torchère I bought last autumn?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘God. Was it worth it? It must have cost the earth.’

  He sighed, nodding. ‘It did, Ian. Days and days of work. But it convinced reluctant buyers that somebody up here could do the job as well as most.’

  ‘Well done.’ I love a craftsman. The tall torchère had had a tripod appearance – three elegant mahogany legs, with three slender central supports up to an everting triple for the six-sided tray, that would hold the household’s oil lamp. Some antiques are too expensive to fake commercially. The decorative torchère is one, because there are plenty of cheap pole screens about – genuine antiques, too – which fakers can buy to make them out of. ‘Pity you killed a Queen Anne pole screen to build it, though.’

  ‘How’d you spot that?’

  I checked myself in time. ‘Oh, the mulling top and bottom ran different ways, I think.’

  ‘Did they now,’ he said evenly, faithless sod.

  ‘Mmmh.’ Quite honestly I couldn’t remember. It had been the sad little bleat of the genuine mauled antique that had brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘One thing, Duncan. I thought clans had lairds. Isn’t a chieftainess unusual?’

  ‘The Laird James passed away a few years since.’

  Aha. I’d save that bit up. Had plain James Wheeler become The McGunn? Maybe he married into the position. Well, it happens in business empires. Why not?

  A bell clonked on the wall. I was glad to see it was an original spring-suspended clapper bell and not some shrill electric foolishness.

  ‘Time to join the ladies,’ he said, making for the door. He added scathingly, ‘For tea.’

  ‘I’ve nowt against your whisky, Duncan.’ I went with him.

  I felt three goals down.

  Before Shona drove me back to Dubneath for my things, we settled my job amicably. This means I listened to Elaine and agreed with whatever she said. My terms were a fraction of the profit and all found – free nosh and bed in a stableman’s loft among the outbuildings. They showed me a bare cube with a single bed, a cupboard, and one uncurtained window with a view of the barren fells. Great if you’re Heathcliff waiting for Cathy, but I played along. Duncan was there too, ruefully swigging what he conveyed was his first and last non-alcoholic drink.

  ‘We’re assuming Ian proves capable, Miss Elaine,’ he put in gently. That caffeine was getting to his brain.

  ‘Are you capable, Ian?’ Elaine asked innocently, looking across at Shona, a tease. Shona turned aside, busied herself with the sugar for Duncan.

  ‘Your bills for plastic wood will take a turn for the better, Elaine,’ I said. Duncan had the grace to laugh at the jibe. Plastic wood’s the poor forger’s friend.

  They came out to see us off, talking casually. I turned to admire the house’s clinging splendour, and saw the big ginger-headed bloke among the outbuildings. He was kilted, strong and stridey. Just as long as he was on our side.

  ‘I can trust Robert,’ Elaine said to answer my thought.

  ‘Thank God for that.’ I climbed into the van. ‘Back before evening, then?’

  ‘Ian.’ Michelle came to my window as Shona hung back saying so-long to Elaine. Duncan was already off, anxious to be at work. His wife spoke softly, perfume wafting in. ‘I’m so relieved you’re here. It’s time all was . . . resolved.’ Her fingers, probably accidentally, rested on mine. But the pressure and that faint scratch of her nails down my hand was communication. I swallowed, too near her large eyes to think straight. What was she saying?

  ‘Oh, er, ta. I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘We’ll make sure you exceed your potential, Ian,’ Elaine called. She rippled her fingers in a child’s wave. She must have hearing like a bat.

  Shona marched up, flung in and revved noisily. She hadn’t liked seeing Michelle speaking to me in confidence. She reversed at speed with a crash of gears, but Michelle anticipated the manoeuvre and glided away in time.

  We made Dubneath at a record run with Shona not speaking a word. Disembarking, I was jubilant at how things had gone. I was in. My thin disguise was holding. I was blood cousin umpteen times removed to this barmy load of clannites. Very soon I’d have the lion’s share of a sound antique fakery scheme, at least. Stupidly overconfident, I decided to buy some curtain material before phoning Tinker.

  Now the bad news, as they say.

  Chapter 13

  THE BEST ABOUT little towns is that most things are crammed into a few shops. I found the drapery/general/household stores by spotting the only building in Dubneath with more than two parked cars. Women are the trouble, though. They immediately sensed I was curtain hunting and started eyeing the swatches. The stores lady, Mrs Innes, hung about itching to decide for me.

  ‘A pastel,’ I hazarded, playing it close.

  ‘You’ll be Ian McGunn,’ she said, smiling. ‘That converted loft’s a draughty old place.’

  So m
uch for secrecy. How the hell did they do it? ‘You shouldn’t know that. Naughty girl.’

  She laughed, colouring. ‘I meant, Joseph was always complaining. No wonder the poor man drank.’

  ‘Joseph?’

  Instantly she changed tack. ‘And that pokey little window. You’ll only get one pattern if you choose a large floral.’

  ‘Boss me about and I’ll go elsewhere.’

  ‘You can’t. The Wick bus left an hour gone.’

  Her brass measuring rod was screwed to the counter. She fell about when I offered her eight quid for it and laughingly told other customers how I’d started to buy her out. I settled on a bright oriental print, bamboos and japonicas, and ballocked Mrs Innes for not knowing the window’s dimensions. We parted friends. I crossed to the tavern.

  Joseph? Who had been my predecessor at Tachnadray. Something had driven the ‘poor man’ to drink. Not the draught, that’s for sure. I didn’t like the sound of all this.

  I told Mary MacNeish I’d be leaving. By purest coincidence she already happened to have me booked out.

  ‘You guessed,’ I said dryly. If they introduce gossip at the next Olympics we’re a cert. Dubneath’ll get the gold.

  ‘Eat your fill before you go, Ian.’ It was the mildest of mild cautions, a very natural expression. So why the Mayday hint? ‘Tachnadray’s bonnie but can chill a man’s marrow.’

  ‘I’ll be slinking back for your pasties, Mary.’

  ‘I’ll be pleased.’

  On the spur of the moment I tried a flyer. ‘Don’t suppose it’ll be easy taking good old Joseph’s place. Is he around? Like a word with him.’

  She was shocked that I knew, and the cake stand just made it to the table. Her face suddenly went abstract, as women’s do for concealment. ‘Now what did I do with that butter dish . . . ?’ she said vaguely, and that was as far as I got.

  Margaret finally landed Tinker for me in Fat Bert’s nooky shop in the arcade. I’d wasted a fortune trying different pubs. Absurdly, I was really pleased to hear his long rasp.

  ‘Where the bleedin’ hell you got to, Lovejoy?’ he gravelled out, wheezing. ‘ ’Ere, mate. We in trouble?’