The Tartan Ringers

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Shut it, Tinker.’ Maybe he was only three-quarters sloshed, I thought hopefully. I hate to chuck money away on incoherence. ‘You sober?’

  ‘ ’And on me ’eart, Lovejoy. Not a drop all bleedin’ day.’

  ‘Listen. That driver who got topped. His name Joseph something?’

  ‘Dunno, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Find out from Antioch. I’ll ring tomorrow. Any news?’

  ‘Nar, Lovejoy. That bleeder’s still round the Hook.’ He meant Dutchie hadn’t returned on the Hook of Holland ferryboat. ‘But there’s some Eyties hangin’ round.’

  ‘Italians?’ My soul dampened.

  ‘Aye. Millie’s youngster Terry reckons they wuz circus rousters or summert. Two big buggers. They come soon after that tart.’ Millie’s a barmaid. Terry runs pub messages, bets for the two-thirty at Epsom and that. Terry’d know, if anybody would.

  ‘Tinker.’ I’d not had a headache all day. ‘Which tart?’

  ‘The one you used to shag down Friday Wood before—’

  ‘Tinker.’

  ‘—before that little blondie you had went for that shoe-shop manageress you fancied in the White Hart—’

  That’s what I need, I thought bitterly, hearing Fat Bert roaring laughing in the background while Margaret lectured the stupid pair of them. Friends. ‘Clear them out, Tinker.’

  Mutter, mutter. ‘They’ve pissed orf, Lovejoy.’ Tinker’s drunken idea of subtlety. ‘You remember her, lovely arse—’

  ‘What did she want?’ I’d already identified Francie.

  ‘She come in hell of a hurry, after midnight. Said nothing, only asked where you’d got to. Her nipper told me it’d been in bed on a train.’

  All children are ‘it’ to Tinker. Betty Blabbermouth, my erstwhile helper at the Great Antique Roadshow. Francie must have hoofed into East Anglia on a night express, and reached Tinker a few millisecs before Sidoli’s killer squad came a-hunting. I swallowed. In spite of Joan, Francie still felt something for me and had rushed to warn.

  Well, I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to reason that various folk were cross, simply because I’d injured a few blokes, damaged a wagon or two, shambled a fairground’s livelihood and nicked their vastly expensive generator. And now they wanted repayment in notes of the realm, my blood or other equivalent currency. I quavered, cleared my throat.

  ‘Sure there was no message?’

  ‘Only she’d be at the Edinburgh Tattoo.’ A long pause. ‘It’s north of Selkirk,’ he added helpfully.

  Francie’s way of saying steer clear of Edinburgh until that vast military Tattoo closed the festival? Well, I was already in Edinburgh’s black books, and there must be enough guns in two fairgrounds to make a jury think that one accidental shooting of a no-good scruff like me was a permissible average . . . No. Francie’s message was a very, very useful hint indeed.

  ‘News from Jo?’

  ‘That teacher bint? She visits Three-Wheel Archie.’

  A glass clinked, Tinker finding Fat Bert’s reserve bottle.

  ‘And, Lovejoy. There’s money from your sweep. We made a killin’. Margaret says as she’ll send your slice to a post office if you’ll say where the bleedin’ ’ell you—’

  Click and burr. I didn’t want anybody knowing my address after that lot. Escape’s like murder, a private business. I stood indecisively, then walked out of the tavern into Dubneath’s cool watery day for a deep ponder. Life’s got so many risks, you’re lucky to get out of this world alive. Wherever I looked, enemies lurked. Back home in East Anglia fairground heavies dangled ominously in the trees. The long roads between Caithness and my village were filled with irritated night drivers whose colleague had got done in. I strolled down Dubneath’s empty wharf to examine the vacant harbour.

  Hell is people, somebody once said. He forgot to add that so’s heaven. The more I thought about it, the safer Tachnadray’s claustrophobic solitude seemed.

  Two hours I walked about the somnolent town. For ten minutes I stood with Dubneath’s one layabout and watched the traffic lights change, really heady excitement. A tiny school loosed about four o’clock, pretty children much tidier than East Anglia’s, with twisty curling accents. I thought longingly of Jo, a lump in my throat. And of Joan. And Francie. And Ellen. And, a startling pang, little Betty. I felt deprived of all life. Maybe it wouldn’t be too long.

  Dubneath was static. Not even a shrimp boat a-coming. The wind was rising, wetting my eyes. I tried the obstinate child’s trick of staring into the breeze until your eyelids give up of their own accord. Of course, I’d have to lie low. That much was plain. I didn’t relish this on-the-run bit, even though it’s the only rational course for a coward. It tends to throw you willy-nilly into weird folks’ company. Like that lot up in Tachnadray.

  Six o’clock I went for my last meal – no blindfold or cigarette – at the MacNeish pub.

  Providentially, the television was on in the snug, a pleasant girl giving out the news. I caught the last of it: ‘. . . the theft of a vehicle from an Edinburgh fairground. Six men are in hospital, two of them critical. A police spokesman today deplored the increasing violence . . .’

  The surface of my beer trembled. The glass rim chattered on my teeth and I saw George MacNeish glance slowly along the bar from where he was wiping up. I tried to make my momentary quake resemble thirst.

  ‘Nice drop, George.’

  ‘. . . search moved north. The vehicle was found abandoned but undamaged at a roadside halt frequented by long-distance . . .’ She read it so chirpily, holiday camp bingo. I went to do the best I could with Mary’s calories.

  Seven o’clock Jamie brought his van. Shona, he said, was tired. I left the tavern clutching my curtain material, a hermit to the wilderness. It could always make bandages.

  ‘Can we stop at the, er, klett, Jamie?’ I said as we trundled inland. ‘Lovely view.’

  ‘You’re keen on our bonnie countryside?’ Jamie waxed enthusiastic, changing gears. ‘There’s grand scenery beyond that wee loch . . .’

  Ten points on the creep chart, Lovejoy. The trouble was I’d painted myself into a corner. Crooks in East Anglia trying to do me in. Maslow would put two and two together when the police report stimulated his aggressive mini-brain, and hasten into Edinburgh to help his neffie brother peelers. All the travelling folk on the bloody island were out. And here I was at the very tip. Hardly possible to run any further. That’s the trouble with being innocent. You get hunted by cops and robbers. Even the worst crooks on earth only get chased by one lot. No wonder people turn to crime.

  Chapter 14

  HOUSES ARE FASCINATING, aren’t they? The house at Tachnadray was superbly positioned for light, setting and appearance. Grudgingly, during the first few days of labour on Duncan’s Sheraton lookalike, I came to admire the place. Catch it any angle and you get an eyeful. The old architect might have had delusions of grandeur, but he’d got it exactly right. Pretty as a picture, was Tachnadray. It brings a lump to my throat just to remember how it all was, in my serene encounter with the clan-and-county set. The surrounding moorland somehow seemed arranged for the purpose of setting off the great mansion’s style. Hardly ‘antique’ in the truest sense of the word, pre-1836, but lovely all the same. The creation of an artist.

  Very quickly I learned that routines were almost Teutonic in Tachnadray. The first afternoon I wandered across the grand forecourt to chuck some crumbs into the stone fountain. Goldfish sailed in its depths. I’m always sorry for fish because they have a hard life, no entertainment or anything and scared of every shadow. I’d saved a bit of russell roll and was busy shredding it into the water livening up their wet world when my own dry world was suddenly inverted. I do mean this. It honestly spun a hundred-and-eighty degrees and I was crumbing the atmosphere.

  ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ a cavern rumbled in my ear. Giant hands had clutched my shoulder and spine and tipped me upside down.

  ‘Feeding the fish,’ I yelped. ‘Please.’


  ‘Who the fuck said you could?’ the cavern boomed.

  ‘Down, Robert.’ Elaine to my rescue. Wheels crunched gravel. ‘Down!’ Like you say to a dog. Then something in a language I didn’t understand, slidey smooth.

  The world clouted my left knee. He’d simply dropped me.

  Groggily I clambered upright. My trouser leg was ripped. The big kilted man stood skywards over me. Another McGunn, I supposed wearily, making yet more instantaneous assumptions about good old cousin Ian. He marched off on his great hairy legs. A knife hilt protruded from his stocking.

  ‘You came just in time, love.’ I was wheezing. ‘I’d have put him in hospital.’

  She laughed, applauding. Robert turned his maned head, but kept going.

  ‘Don’t mind Robert, Ian. He’s big for the cause.’ She wrinkled her face at the scudding clouds. ‘Rain soon. The anglers’ll be out as far as Yarrow Water.’

  A distant clanking tapped the air, Duncan calling work on the iron rod which hung by the workshop door.

  ‘My free hour’s up, Elaine,’ I said, but hesitated before sprinting back to the treadmill.

  ‘Another time, Ian,’ she said. ‘Not on your first day. Turn me round, please.’

  ‘Chieftainesses of distinguished clans shouldn’t have to ask.’

  She glared up at me. ‘Oh yes we should!’

  Some women have a terrifying knack of seeming to move their faces suddenly nearer you without stirring a muscle. They do it in love or in fury. I’ve noticed that. Elaine was the best at it I’d ever encountered. The images of physical love and the poor paralysed girl juxtaposed in my mind.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts, Ian,’ Elaine said slyly as I obediently set off along the drive to Duncan’s workshop.

  ‘Just how fascinating people’s faces are,’ I lied. ‘I’m good at faces.’

  ‘Women’s especially?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  She was back to laughing then, swaying in her wheelchair. It was one of those oddish moments when the environment conspires. She was there beside the fountain. The sky behind her had darkened. Thunder rumbled. Yet a watery sun picked up the grey-yellow gravel, her white blouse, the colours of the old tartan. Lovely enough to mesmerize. Lucky I’m not easy to manipulate, or a girl this lovely could have me eating out of her hand. A terrible desire rose within me. My body’s a hostage to hormones, but with a lass who couldn’t walk—

  ‘Actually,’ she said, as we parted, ‘we cripples have different ways of making . . . music, Lovejoy.’ Another super-correct guess what I’d really been thinking about.

  She left me so preoccupied that I hardly noticed Duncan playing hell with me for skiving instead of getting the bureau’s drawers undone. Elaine was disturbing. Weirdly swift to guess what you were thinking – far too swift for my liking. Only supposition of course. I don’t believe in telepathy or whatever it’s called. But I didn’t like this idea of not being alone in my own head.

  Duncan put me at the old piece. He watched me like a hawk as I tapped and listened and set about marking the wood components. I’d got some self-adhesive labels from the Innes stores in Dubneath.

  ‘A waste of money, Ian,’ Duncan disapproved.

  ‘Oh?’ I cracked back sardonically. ‘So you’re the daft faker who pencils his illegal intentions all over the finished product, eh?’

  He surrendered with a chuckle and lit his pipe to watch. He’d had to concede. Simplest tip on earth: when you’re thinking of buying antique furniture take a glance at its inner surfaces. There you might see measurements indicating the faker’s reduction factor – inches cut off, even types of wood to be used.

  ‘One goon I know in Newcastle even writes it on in felt-tip,’ I told Duncan. ‘I ask you.’

  ‘You know a lot, for a wandering cousin.’

  Caught. ‘Ah,’ I stammered. ‘We had to learn all that. At the London College.’

  ‘Very thorough. Have you a family, Ian?’

  ‘No. Except now you lot. My erstwhile spouse found my transparent honesty too much to cope with.’

  Duncan helped me to up-end the bureau. The base was in a better state than I’d hoped.

  ‘You should use Newcastle, Duncan,’ I panted, struggling to tilt it on a block support. ‘Handy for Liverpool, without being too direct.’

  ‘Aye, we tried . . .’ He ahemed and reamed his pipe. I’d caught him, but absently worked on. Aye, we tried and failed, is what he’d been about to say. He’d discovered, like many antiques fakers, that there are folk pathways in dirty deals. New dirt’s distrusted. Old schemes have a kind of inbuilt security. That’s why a woman chooses a particular colour, fancies a special perfume: it swept Cecil off his feet, so why not Paul? It’s the reason crooks stick to a particular modus operandi even when they know it hallmarks their particular chain of robberies. And a painter faking Cotman’s genius, like Big Frank’s mate Johnnie does in Suffolk, would rather polish off a dozen Greta Bridge phonies and sell them to that same fence in Hamburg than paint different ones every time.

  Clue: Tachnadray’s fakes had only one outlet, and that was through my own stamping ground, East Anglia. Which meant also I could easily find out how much Duncan’s replicas had made lately. I whistled, irritably searching for tools on the bench.

  ‘No wonder you got rid of Joseph,’ I grumbled. ‘Messy sod. I’ll rearrange this lot when I’ve a minute.’

  Duncan stilled. ‘Joseph?’

  Unconcerned, I began rearranging the tools into some sort of order. ‘I knew a bloke once was so bloody untidy that—’

  ‘As long as you do better than he did, Lovejoy.’ Duncan went down to the other end of the workshop to mix varnish. An unpleasant reprimand, that, with its hint of threat.

  Come to think of it, where was this Joseph? I decided I’d better find out. Tactfully as ever, of course. That’s my way.

  * * *

  It was three days before I had a chance of talking to Elaine without being up-ended by Robert the Brute. Which doesn’t mean they had passed uneventfully. Duncan and me’d argued non-stop about our next opus. I favoured faking a series of small Georgian tables from scratch; Duncan stuck out for modifying – ‘putting back’ in the antique-fakery slang – some tired Victorian bureau, very much as we were doing now. It was evidently his thing. And we had burdensome mealtimes with Elaine teasing us all, over Michelle’s table. Her grub was Frenchified, by which I mean tangy of taste but ethereal. We had suppertime visits from Shona, and a couple of flying visits from Jamie who dropped us some materials in his van. This, plus a shepherd bringing two sheepdogs to prove they were top-notchers, was it. I quickly got the hang of life at Tachnadray, or thought I had.

  But getting the hang of a scene doesn’t mean tranquillity. It can mean just the opposite. There were just enough worry points to disturb my beauty sleep. Like, Michelle and Shona smiling their hundred-percent hatred smiles. Like, everybody knowing about Joseph but nobody saying. Like, Tachnadray’s pose as a glamorous laird’s mansion complete with loyal retainers yet having barely enough furniture to dress out two rooms, a stage set in a ghost palace. Like, Duncan’s lone wilting attempts to provide the crumbling estate with an income. When at my noon break Elaine called me over to meet the shepherd’s wriggly black-and-white dogs I thought: Here’s quite an opportunity.

  ‘Er, great,’ I said, trying to sound full of admiration.

  The shepherd grinned, said something in Gaelic. The dogs gave each other a sardonic glance as if saying, Here’s another idiot townie who hasn’t a clue.

  ‘They like you, Ian,’ the shepherd said. ‘But they think you’ll no be a countryman. I’m Hector.’

  We nodded. Another cousin. Were I the genuine article I’d feel safe up here, even from Sidoli’s vengeance-seeking mob of circus hands prowling the Lowlands.

  ‘They’re right, Hector,’ I said. ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Best working pair north of Glasgow.’ He waited, then explained, ‘Sheep, Ian. Tessie’s four, Joe
y two.’

  ‘You bullies.’ The dogs grinned and waggled round me, noses pointing up.

  We talked about dogs for a minute while Elaine did one of her prolonged smiling stares at me. I felt her attention like a sunlamp, and listened while Hector listed his dogs’ excellences. Dogs are all right but doggy folk are real bores, aren’t they? Hector was confident about some sheepdog trials.

  ‘How do you train them?’ I asked. ‘And what do you feed them on?’ Much I cared, but Hector was loving all this in his grim Presbyterian way.

  ‘You must come over and see them do an outrun or two,’ he said. ‘It’s but a short step. Mornings I walk to check the cottage—’

  Elaine interrupted brightly, ‘Och away, Hector. Can’t you see cousin Ian’s not really interested in your ould dogs?’

  ‘True,’ I said, maybe a little too quickly.

  We all parted friends, me patting the dogs and seeing them off but thinking, The cottage, eh? Immediately Hector was out of earshot, Elaine said, spinning her wheelchair to accompany me back towards the house, ‘The cottage is an empty crofter’s place on the fells. We use it for winter shelter. There’s quite a few about.’

  It’s that sort of nimble guesswork that makes you give up trying to out-think a female. I plodded along pushing her until she told me to walk beside her.

  ‘Tachnadray must have been a lovely estate once, Elaine.’

  ‘But . . . ?’ she prompted.

  ‘It could be developed. Tourists. Fishing. Build huts for nature cranks. Campsites. Tours round the baronial hall.’

  She halted. Thinking I’d struck oil, I enthused, ‘Have your own Highland Gathering. Tents, pipers, dances, folk-song evenings, original tartan kilts, Ye Olde Clan McGunn whisky-making kits. McGunn brand genuine Scottish bagpipes—’

  ‘And breed hordes of McGunns? Repopulate the Highlands?’

  She spoke with such quiet sibilance you had to strive to hear the venom. We’d stopped, her luminescent face white with anger.

  ‘Well, er, not all of it.’

  The nervous quip failed. She motioned me to sit on the wall and listen.