‘More coffee, Lovejoy?’
I jumped again. ‘I wish you’d stop that,’ I snapped irritably.
‘Sorry, dear. Penny for your thoughts.’
‘How many men does it take to build a tunnel, by hand?’
‘Won’t Gordon know?’
I already knew roughly the price of silver, but only for mid-1850s when it stuck at 61 pence an ounce, say five old shillings. At a rough guess a labourer got twice this a week. So translated into ounces of silver one man got equivalant to maybe a third of an ounce of silver a day. How wonderful it must have been when money was real. And how strange. I made a quick calculation. Ten labourers meant the Contrivance was three ounces. If they employed a hundred men it weighed thirty ounces. On the other hand, if they meant all the men on their bit of the nation’s railways . . . I realized I was moaning softly and tried to turn it into a cough.
‘Lovejoy. We must tell the police.’ Moll had finished the article. She spoke full of determination. We were both sitting dangling our bare feet in the water now.
‘Eh?’
‘About the tunnel in there.’
‘What have the police to do with it? The newspaper’s nearly a century and a half old.’
‘Well,’ she said breathlessly, ‘it’s what police are for. Keeping order. That sort of thing.’
‘No, love.’
‘Tom says the police give us a code to live by.’
There’s only one way to stop this kind of crap, so I said, ‘Like they did for Leckie?’
She said nothing else. We sat side by side in silence, staring at the hillside. The big swan came and looked us over angrily from time to time. As if anybody would want to pinch any of its little grey ducks.
I think Moll knew then that we were going to try to find the way into the hill. How else to get back at Fergus and Jake? Getting the Contrivance when they wanted it was the only means I had of striking at them. And I’d laugh in their faces when I sold it for a fortune. It would be known as the Lovejoy Contrivance. Or maybe the Lovejoy Trove? The Lovejoy Treasure? At Claridge’s Reception today, in the presence of the Keeper of the Royal Museums, London Society paid glowing tribute to Lovejoy’s bravery and ingenuity. The Coroner, in handing over a cheque, stated –
‘Can’t we hire a potholer to dig it up for us?’ Moll demanded.
‘No. Whoever finds it first gets its full market value.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s got to be me.’
‘Us, darling.’
Oh, well. ‘Us, then,’ I said after a pause.
There was no point in putting it off. The mist had cleared. The hill stood mild and benign above the small hamlet. It was so bloody pastoral and innocent.
‘Come on, love,’ I said. We dried each other’s feet on a towel and set off for the bridge.
Chapter 15
YOU CAN SMELL precious antiques. I swear it. All that day as Moll and I climbed the hillside I could feel that lovely sexy exquisite Contrivance beneath us, inside the living breast of the Mount. I felt its glowing strength radiate up through the rock and the hill’s bones into my chest. There it set up a chiming and a clanging lovelier to me than any peal of cathedral bells. Antiques are life. They are everything. Allow me a digression, folks.
There are more stolen antiques than there are straight ones. And there are more lying buried, waiting to be found, than both those put together. I can show you the precise spot in a sandbank off our coast here – you can stand on it at low tide – where it is known for certain that scores of ships lie sunken in the sands. Their cargoes were merely valuable centuries ago, but now they’re beyond utterance. There’s no word beyond priceless, is there?
The trouble is we all want these precious things. So we buy what’s available. And think a moment: what is available, to be exact? Well, stuff for sale, as in antique shops or auctions, and stuff we dig up ourselves. And that’s all.
The main difference is that stuff we dig up – should we be so lucky – is free. And nothing else in this life ever is, nothing else at all. Think, therefore, how wonderful it would be actually to dig up a ship like the Viking King’s tomb in Sutton Hoo, and claim the lot. Naturally, it goes into the national museums, but you get the gelt and the prestige.
But hold hard. Before you rush out with bucket and spade, ponder how much more wonderful it would be not to do any digging at all, yet still finish up owning real genuine priceless (or even pricey will do) antiques. This equation has preoccupied Mankind since Adam dressed. It has been solved by two kinds of people. They are the crooks, and the rich unscrupulous collectors.
In countries with a wealth of archaelogical remains – Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Latin Americas, India, Egypt, Iraq, et cetera – there’s a thriving criminality. There are diggers who locate, say, a tomb and dig up the stuff to sell. They’re called tombaroli in Italy, tymborychoi in ancient Macedonia, and ‘scavvies’ around here. The trick is to loot genuine antiques from their place of rest and sell to the highest bidder who’ll keep his mouth shut. Don’t tell me it’s illegal and dangerous – it’s been that since Emperor Vespasian passed his famous law against it. But people still do it. And it doesn’t have to be an ancient building such as a Celtic ring-grave or a buried temple. Nowadays the biggest boom in this kind of illegal knavery is ‘industrial archaeology’. This daft term means prototype engines, whole buildings, clothes, models working and otherwise, engineering drawings, architectural mock-ups, patent copies, navvies’ diaries, sociological records, expense books, legal records, instruments, medical devices, commercial samples, and hundreds of kinds of artefacts. If you don’t believe me, look at the latest price catalogue from your local auction. You’ll find somebody just paid a sum equal to your entire year’s wages for some little clockwork sundry, and maybe ten times that for a big one.
Theft therefore raises its ugly head. Nowadays people will steal rushlight holders from outside your house. Your old street gas lamps. Your elderly car. Your fascinating old garden gate with those quaint old hinges, and Grandad’s old watch and his pince-nez while he dozes at the seaside. Theft, and forgery. The only risk is getting caught.
A legitimately lost antique, though, is different. It’s quite legal to find it. And that’s exactly what is so exciting. And that’s what was exciting me now. Somewhere in the hill was my precious discovery.
Normally I’m not very patient. You can imagine how I was on that bloody hillside. I was almost frantic, hurrying to and fro over the ground and scratching myself to blazes on the gorse. Moll kept on stopping for a rest but I got her up each time. We quartered the ground and walked in waggles, six paces one side and six the other. I knew the contours, very roughly. The hill is a sort of skew-shaped mound, with the river cutting its way round the steeper slope and a road following it until the houses begin almost as soon as the bend is complete. A Roman road runs straight as a die northwards through there, maybe two miles off. But even from the very top there seemed to be no sign of the ventholes. The notes Gordon gave me said seven. It didn’t seem enough to draw air in for a gang of men slogging away knee deep in mud. Maybe they had some kind of wind engine to funnel air down on to the labouring teams.
There was a line of gorse bushes running obliquely across the steeper face of the hill. The growth was interrupted by a small hollow, after which the line began again further down. We sat in the dip and had another glug of Moll’s brew.
‘I’m tired, Lovejoy.’ And she looked it.
‘So am I,’ I said mercilessly. You can’t go stopping for a doze when you’re so near, can you? ‘The problem as I see it is old Chase.’
All we knew about Doc Chase was that he stuck to a routine on his day off. Zip to Scratton’s archaic tunnel for a few minutes, then . down to the river. There, pretending to fish, he would sit on the opposite bank which meant he was facing this way. I scrambled to the downhill margin of the dip and looked out. You could just see the swan’s big flat nest. The sand hill was in clear view but the gorse bushes near me partly obscured Doc�
�s fishing spot.
I slid down and explained to Moll. She was unimpressed. ‘What’s so marvellous? If you sit opposite a hill of course you can see it,’ she said heartlessly, ‘you can’t miss it.’
‘But it explains why he sat there, Moll.’
She shrugged. ‘An angler needs a river or he can’t fish.’
‘He only pretended to.’
‘Lovejoy,’ she said with maddening reason, ‘if the old man wanted to find what’s inside this hill, why didn’t he come up and search like we’re doing?’
Women are exasperating. ‘He was old. Maybe he knew he was close to a stroke.’
‘Then he should have been more sensible,’ Moll said calmly. ‘Leckie would have helped him.’
‘Maybe he tried to tell Leckie, through Leckie’s wife?’
‘I never liked Julia. Mean little eyes. More coffee?’
We rested for a few more minutes, then started on the summit and worked downwards, heading towards the southern slope. It took a long time but I reached the end of my area before Moll did, and whistled to her. She looked up and waved. I pointed to show I was coming up. That was another quarter of an hour. We met on the lip of our hollow. I looked around to see where the cigarette smoke was coming from.
‘Found anything, Lovejoy?’
Jake Pelman and his nerk were lounging in the dip. They had Moll’s hamper open.
‘Caught you,’ I said lightly.
‘You didn’t leave us much,’ he complained, grinning.
‘Next time you’ll get less, Jake.’
Moll was furious. ‘How dare you! You’ve eaten the salmon!’ she blazed. ‘Lovejoy, I had some lovely salmon –’
The nerk kept his eyes on me. They rose as Moll and I came down slowly. I’d quickly scanned the rest of the hillside. They seemed to be all the enemy there was. For the moment. I had to hold Moll back. She was all for taking a swing at them.
‘You’ll get yourselves in trouble,’ I told Jake.
‘That’s what Fergus sent us to say, Lovejoy.’ Jake blew fag smoke at us. ‘Trouble. You’re in it.’ He nudged his goon to share the joke. ‘Somebody’s just paged a certain CID man. Passed word his wife’s shagging Lovejoy in the long grass.’
‘You –’ Moll started for Jake but I yanked her still.
‘I’ll ask you again, Lovejoy.’ I’d never seen Jake smile properly before. ‘Found anything?’
‘No,’ I admitted candidly. ‘But I know what I’m looking for.’
I hit the goon with a stone. I’d picked it up on the edge of the hollow on the pretence of helping Moll down. His teeth splintered and he staggered on his heels. Splashes of red radiated over his countenance and blood drooled down his chin. He fell back with a gratifying thump, dazed. Jake was instantly ten feet off. He had one of those knives. I just, had to laugh. He looked like a staid amateur dramatics showing of a Parisian apache.
‘Put it away, Jake,’ I told him, still amused. ‘You’ll frighten the life out of me.’
He stayed where he was, eyeing me warily while his mate groaned. ‘Fergie’s getting mad, Lovejoy.’
‘Message received, Jake.’ I still held my stone. The nerk was spitting and feeling his teeth.
Jake gave his pal a nod. They made their way out of the dip. For a second they stood looking down at us both. I could tell what they were thinking, and smiled nastily.
‘You dare,’ I chided, all friendly.
They glanced at each other and went. We gave them a few minutes to get clear, collected our stuff and then cut through the zigzag line of gorse bushes towards the Three Tiles. As we walked through the cobbled yard Fergus merrily raised a glass to us from the window. He was still beaming.
That night, Moll phoned Tom from my cottage while I went out and sat on my unfinished wall, thinking. It was a long conversation.
And that night, too, a crowd of blokes disrupted the usual gaiety of the pub in town where Val’s husband George works. They injured George and the two other barmen, but not too much. There was a good old-fashioned rumble. Several customers were hurt. By all accounts the public bar and the taproom were left in an absolute shambles. And all the windows in Val’s house were broken, front and back. Not one other house in the street was touched. Margaret phoned me to tell me all this about midnight. Tinker had just got the news to her. Maybe he had been trying to get through when Moll and Tom were speaking. I asked if Val was hurt. Margaret said no, just frightened. Inspector Maslow was there now, and asking questions. I wonder he doesn’t get a job and go to work like everybody else.
Moll drowsily asked what’s the matter when I got back to bed.
‘Nothing,’ I told her. ‘Go to sleep.’
Chapter 16
THE NEXT FEW days were hard work. I combed the library for maps of the Mount. I plagued the history department in a local college. I kept on at the Folklore Club, which meets every Sunday in the Hole-in-the-Wall, our oldest pub for miles. I even got on to the University, but finally wrote them off. I finished up knowing more about the geology of our district than anybody I know. And I was no wiser.
Of course, what was narking me was that I knew precisely what the precious Item was. It was almost certainly a working model of the first engine due to come along the new railway line. And I knew precisely what it was made of because silversmiths work in silver, right? And even who made it. And I knew where it was – somewhere inside one of East Anglia’s very few definite hills. When you say it quick it sounds easy. If you know where and what and that it’s free . . . The galling thing was getting my claws on it.
Gordon and Bern came over to the cottage twice. I had to keep up the pretence of developing an interest in their hobby. It’s very difficult, especially when a train to me is just a long box on wheels. And real antiques only start from 1836, backwards of course. Which means that railways and their gadgetry should properly be called modern, apart from the short run from 1813 when first William Hedley courageously replaced a pit pony by a travelling thing called a steaming engine in Wylam Colliery.
Still, I pretended enthusiasm as much as I could, and tried not to nod off or yawn too obviously. I kept trying to get us round to the structure of that horrible tunnel. They kept trying to tell me where I could travel on our few remaining steam trains. There was another problem. If Jake and his nerks were watching out for my movements I’d not be doing Bern and young Gordon any favours by associating with them. Jake’s thick, but with application and a bit of luck even he might work out about two and two being four.
The gorgeous Nurse Patmore took my stitches out the following Friday. Moll dropped me off at the surgery while she went shopping for us. Pat hurt me like hell, but told me with breezy determination that it didn’t hurt at all and that I’d soon be as bad as new again. I called her heartless. Elspeth poked her clipboard in then and asked if Lovejoy was able to run yet. Pat ignored my frantic eyebrow signals. She said, smiling with sadistic glee, that I could run tomorrow, exercises as well.
One of Elspeth Haverill’s teams was already lumbering across the countryside. I sat with her on a form waiting for any chance survivors to return. During my unstitching I’d pumped Pat for more information, until she got worried. They both knew I was asking too much, too often, but I wouldn’t say why.
A local historian like Chase would naturally be fascinated by his ancestor Jonathan Chase’s gruesome experience on that terrible day. Maybe tales had been passed down through the family. But the old doctor’s trick of hiding his little railway pass, and his determinedly hopeless fishing, told me a great deal about the man. He was a thinker, a clever and quiet man. He wasn’t the sort to go babbling to Mrs Leckworth, his clerical assistant. There was some obvious clue here, a clue as big as a barn. And I couldn’t see the bloody thing for looking. I got to work, skilfully nudging Elspeth’s attention off her list of atherosclerotics.
‘Is that somebody?’ I pointed, smiling and eager.
‘Not yet.’ Elspeth had a stopwatch. It was, I noticed with di
sgust, modern, accurate, and dull as ditchwater. ‘Say five more minutes.’
‘I’m looking forward to joining in,’ I lied cheerfully.
She was pleased. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come round to our way of thinking, Lovejoy. Such a benefit.’
‘Were you working with old Chase when Mrs Leckworth was here?’ It was too sudden a switch. Elspeth shot me through with a glance.
‘No.’ She said it primly, with dislike. ‘And I’m quite glad.’
‘Isn’t, er, wasn’t she very nice?’ I was all innocence, peering towards the distant wood for her runners.
‘She didn’t have a very good reputation. Nurse Patmore found her bossy and . . . unprofessional.’ Elspeth’s eyes were on her lists, but her mind wasn’t. ‘Look, Lovejoy. I’m not stupid. Don’t treat me as if I am.’
‘Eh?’
She doodled idly on her paper. ‘I know you’re not really interested in our health scheme. I can feel it.’ I tried to start an indignant denial but she got in first. ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there? To do with Doctor and Mr Leckworth. I sensed it in your cottage.’
I gave in, shrugged. ‘Maybe, love.’
She turned her eyes full on me. ‘Is Moll a policewoman?’
It was a horrible thought. See how devious women’s minds are, deep down? That possibility hadn’t even crossed my mind. I swallowed uneasily. Dear God. Moll a peeler. And in my divan, earlier and earlier every dusk.
‘No. I hope not.’
A tubby runner trundled flabbily into view from the edge of the wood. Another tottered feebly after him. We watched without speaking for a second.
‘You’re in trouble with the police, aren’t you, Lovejoy?’
So many people kept asking me this I was beginning to wonder. I made a face. ‘Dunno.’
She put her hand on my arm. ‘Inspector Maslow came here yesterday. He asked a lot about you. We aren’t supposed to tell you. He said . . . he said criminal charges were pending.’
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