The Grail Tree

by Jonathan Gash

  I returned the dish, confident that a responsibility problem will always thwart your stomp-happy Pilt-downer. ‘Beautiful,’ I told the dealer, and obediently followed the Sykes brothers. They were my rejects from that time at the pub when I’d picked Lydia. We passed out of the main concourse, walking steadily westwards until the hubbub of the market faded. Parked cars lined the roads. I chatted to these boyos about Iznik pottery as we went, quite instructively I thought.

  ‘Can it, Lovejoy,’ the elder one said sourly.

  ‘I’m giving you free instruction,’ I complained, and went on doing so until he said, ‘We’re here, Lovejoy. Shut it.’

  He meant my mouth, so I did. We three had come a long way from the Belly. We were under the flyover on one of those sudden desolate spots which modern town planners leave to prove that they too run out of ideas and finally can’t be bothered. Sykes was leaning out of his car, casual as you please. No passers-by, no spectators. I noticed with amusement we had gathered three other minions.

  ‘Morning, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Hello, Sykie.’

  He glanced behind me at his younger son, all knuckledusters. ‘Put them bloody things away, you stupid berk.’

  ‘Tell me, Sykie,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘How the hell do I know what the aggro is?’ he asked, giving me a long quizzical glance. He looked honestly puzzled and sounded peeved. ‘I thought I was doing you a favour, sending my two lads for teaching the divvie bit. First, you sling them out. Then, you’re here on the Belly smoking cinders.’

  ‘Maybe you got narked,’ I said evenly.

  ‘Course I did.’ He gazed at the lads so hard I heard them shifting uneasily. ‘Turned up dolled like a pair of ponces, I heard.’.

  ‘All rings and hair-oil,’ I agreed, grinning. ‘Quite pretty, really.’

  I heard one of them move suddenly forward but he caught his shin on my heel and took a nasty tumble. It was quite accidental. Worse still, his hand got trodden on as I stepped to one side.

  ‘All of you,’ Sykes boomed. ‘Stop it.’ We stopped it. ‘You two piss off. Get in, Lovejoy.’

  The inside of his motor was like a small dancehall. He asked me where I’d left my car and drove me to the nearest surfaced road. He told me to cough up.

  ‘A friend of mine got her antiques place done over,’ I said.

  ‘And you thought of me?’ He tut-tutted. ‘Bloody fool. I’d have done you over, not your bird.’ He was right. He would have. ‘And I’d have done it good and proper, not just broken a few pots.’ He laughed. ‘Hardly worth the journey.’

  I should have stopped to think. Or maybe, I wondered, as Sykes swung us into Westbourne Grove, there was a serious flaw in my thinking.

  ‘You can drop me at the end, Sykie,’ I said, thanking him for a nice ride. ‘I’m talking over an Iznik dish –’

  ‘Not today you’re not.’ He pointed to my crate, still wheezing from its dawn rush. ‘You’re heading for the frigging fens, lad. I don’t want you walking about unmarked after the way you thumbed around. My name’d be mud.’

  ‘All right.’ I slammed his door. He didn’t drive away.

  ‘Here, Lovejoy. My lads. Either of them got it?’

  I thought a minute about how they’d marched me down a street full of the most beautiful antiques on earth and never glanced yearningly at a single one. I shook my head.

  ‘Cold as a bloody frog, both of them.’

  He sighed in weary resignation. ‘I’ll put them out book-making,’ he decided. ‘Go safe, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Right, Sykie. And thanks.’

  He drove to the intersection but I noticed his car stayed there until I’d reversed and turned towards Marble Arch. By the time I’d reached Brentwood reaction set in. I got out quickly and retched and retched on the grass verge. That’ll teach me not to use my nut. I’d never been so terrified in my life.

  So it wasn’t Sykie. Therefore it was another possible contender. I drove wearily on trying to work out who the other contenders actually were.

  *

  Lydia was just leaving as I zoomed up.

  ‘Lovejoy!’ she lectured. ‘I’ve waited two hours.’

  ‘Read Lane, A., on Later Islamic Pottery,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet.’

  ‘Travel sick,’ I said. ‘It’s the speed.’

  She faced me, suspicion emanating from her eyes. ‘A child could run faster than that stupid thing.’

  ‘You’re beautiful when you’re angry. Come in.’ The cottage looked untouched, still suspiciously neat from Lisa’s tidying. ‘Brew up, love.’

  ‘You aren’t organized, Lovejoy.’ She stepped gingerly towards the kitchen alcove.

  ‘Go home,’ I said, slumping on the divan. ‘Or shut up.’

  ‘What happened today?’ She was standing there when I opened my eyes. I’d told her to go home or shut up and she’d done neither. That’s typical too.

  ‘I got frightened.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Don’t bite your lip like that or I’ll tell your mother.’

  ‘I’m very cross with you, Lovejoy.’ I felt her fingers loosen the zip at my throat. ‘You need putting in some sort of order.’

  ‘I’m in some sort of order,’ I told her. You have to stamp on this sort of thing as soon as it raises its treacherous head. ‘In fact, I’m in a very orderly condition, though to the casual observer –’

  ‘What help do you want?’ Her weight sank the divan succulently to a tilt. I honestly believe women make this unsettling approach deliberately. You’re expected to notice yet to take no notice, if you know what I mean. It’s very subtle. And they’re supposed to be moral. I concentrated, safe behind my closed eyelids. Relatively safe, that is.

  ‘A barge blew up, killing a friend of mine.’

  ‘I read about it. Go on.’

  ‘I believe he was murdered.’ She got up in the quiet. A tap gushed water. A lid. A click, the switch. The divan tilted. See what I mean, how insidious it all is?

  ‘What had he done? Another woman?’

  ‘No. Maybe for something he had. I don’t know.’

  ‘And you need help to . . .?’

  ‘To search the barge.’ There. It was out. I felt clammy and trembling. I’m not scared of heights or depths, or water. And I can swim like a fish. No, honestly. It’s just that a deep hull sunk at the bottom of a muddy river’s a difficult place to get into, isn’t it? And out of. I’m honestly not scared. I told Lydia this about eight times.

  ‘And today?’

  I explained my suspicions about Margaret’s place and Sykes.

  ‘Yet you were willing to risk thugs –’

  ‘Antiques dealers, not thugs.’ A silence. Pregnant, as they say.

  ‘You must be very fond of Margaret.’

  This too was dangerous ground. Still is.

  ‘Well, compassionate,’ I conceded. ‘Old acquaintances, mutual help –’

  The blessed kettle mercifully did its stuff. The untilt, nearly as seductive as the tilt. The cups, the click, pour, aroma, spoonish tinkle. Seductive tilt again. You have no real defence against it all.

  ‘I dive,’ Lydia said.

  ‘So can I.’ But that doesn’t mean I want to, especially in deep dark waters where an entombed barge lurks in the murky depths.

  ‘Not into. Under. Underwater diving. So does Col.’

  ‘Col?’

  ‘You . . . rejected him.’ Years of criticism in the verb. ‘We belong to the same underwater club.’

  ‘You? And Col?’ I sat up, recovering fast.

  ‘Nothing like that.’ She was red. I happened to open my eyes. ‘We swim at the same place, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ll search the barge?’ I never look a gift horse and all that.

  ‘Any time you want. Col will come with me.’

  ‘An hour?’ The untilt.

  ‘I’ll phone him.’ She happened to have his number, not only a stroke of good fortune but an especially interesting one. />
  ‘He’s delighted,’ she reported back. ‘He’ll come round.’

  ‘Check there’s no bloody fishing match,’ I told her drowsily. ‘I don’t want you nibbling some hairy angler’s bait.’

  ‘You can just stop that sort of talk, Lovejoy,’ She said. Her voice sounded smiley. Her shy fingers rubbed my forehead. I never thought fingers could be shy before, but they do funny things to skin. ‘What are we to look for?’

  ‘A pewter cup. In a miniature crystal, gold and silver tree. Boxed. Maybe, that is. I’m not really sure.’

  ‘I’ll tell Col. He’s good in the sub-aqua club. He won last month’s prize for . . .’

  I dozed, dreaming of a sunken barge with its back broken over a small golden Grail.

  Laughter is frighteningly close to terror. Time after time it comes to me that fright and giggling are nearer to each other than they really deserve. I mean, I almost rolled in the aisles seeing Col emerge from his estate car with his aqua gear on – flippers, mask, eyes goggling and a pole thing pointing heavenward from his mouth. And Lydia hauling a few tons of cylinders and tubes. One glance at the water cooled my merry chuckles. It was deep and black. The barge’s front poked ominously up, still tied to the balustrade with one short rope but the steel hawser now trailing on to the grass. The rapidity with which Nature gets its own back scares me. The seeping willow was already encouraging long grass to cover the crescent of hawser about the foot of its trunk. The lawn was still muddied but starting to grass the denuded bits. It’s the sides of a sunken thing which unnerve me, going down and down.

  I looked towards the house on the opposite bank. No sign of visitors or inhabitants. A fairly warm afternoon but no tea on the lawn today. Maybe no tea on the lawn any more.

  ‘Okay, team.’ I sat nearby on the pile of stuff. Col sank back into the water with a wave. He wore cylinders and had left the black stick with the ping-pong ball.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t ogle me so, Lovejoy,’ Lydia reprimanded, fastening her bathing cap. ‘Think of Col’s signals.’

  ‘I can’t even see him. How the hell can I see his signals?’

  ‘You just aren’t trying.’

  ‘Anyway, I was only interested in your, er, valves and things.’

  ‘Oh. Really?’ She apologized for having misjudged me. I accepted with grace and listened attentively while she told me about air cylinders. Apparently, the mouthpiece is sometimes difficult. ‘There’s Col.’ The hull was being tapped. She stepped gracefully into the water and lowered slowly. For a few seconds she swam about the hull then dived. Once, I glimpsed her orange cap, then nothing.

  The bushes along the river bank had spider’s webs shining in the dull sunlight. It’s the moisture glistening which gives you the outline. Scientists call it the Tyndall effect, where oblique light allows you to see particles gleaming against an empty background which therefore remains dark. Like the sawn end of the hawser lying over there on Martha’s lawn. The weak sun even picked up the severed end around the willow’s base. Probably when the firemen cut it they’d had to step back sharpish in case it snapped and flailed across the grass, injuring somebody. What a risky job.

  Col and Lydia had been gone a minute, maybe two. I walked about a bit, seeing if any spider’s web was perfect enough to preserve. That may seem strange, if you’ve never seen one in a junk shop. Mostly, people don’t look when they come across this double square of glass sealed along the margins and possibly varnished. You may have to clean it free of thick brown copal varnish to see that, faintly retractile between the two small glass panes, glistens the outline of a spider’s web. I always feel it’s rather a gruesome hobby. They are made by waiting until the day’s dried out the web thoroughly, and in windless air carefully and slowly clapping the web between the glasses. Make certain it’s absolutely entire and not eccentrically placed. If it sticks to the glass skewed, give that one up and look elsewhere. You’ll never rearrange it in a month of Sundays. For Christ’s sake leave the spider to build again. Antique ones are mainly Victorian, about 1840 or so.

  I screamed and scrabbled on my bum up the bank like a lunatic because a slimy hand shot out of the swirling water and grasped my ankle. Col was on the wrist end.

  ‘You bloody idiot!’ I screeched. My heart was thumping. ‘You nearly frightened me to frigging death, you stupid –’

  ‘About how big is this cup, Lovejoy?’ He stood there like a weedy Neptune.

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ I could still feel my face prickling from fear, the moron.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Lydia streamed up beside him.

  ‘Keep on looking,’ I said disgustedly. ‘I’m going for a country amble.’

  I’d told them the general layout of the longboat as far as I could remember, where cupboards were and where Henry and I had sat when tippling that time. Pausing only to rifle Lydia’s purse for small change, I hurried down the bank towards the village. It’s the little things that worry you, isn’t it?

  There’s a telephone kiosk near the tavern. I rang the fire station. The head man was an age coming to the blower.

  ‘Are you the one who gave evidence at Reverend Swan’s inquest?’ He said yes, cautiously. ‘My name’s Lovejoy.’

  ‘I see.’ He’d obviously been warned by Bloodhound Maslow, but I’d had enough smarm to last a lifetime and cut in.

  ‘Never mind what Maslow said about me, Chief,’ I said in my most pleasant voice. ‘Why the hell did you make your firemen saw through the barge’s mooring hawser?’

  ‘We released the stern rope only,’ he said after a pause.

  ‘And then sawed through that great steel hawser?’ I heard a rustle of paper. Somebody had got the file out for him.

  ‘It was already fractured when my men arrived.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘It’s here in the report, Lovejoy. Now, one moment.’ His voice went sterile again. ‘State the exact purpose of these questions –’

  ‘Ta.’ I plonked the receiver down and hurried back along Martha’s side of the river. They hadn’t looked as carefully as I had. Not fractured. Sawn.

  Bubbles were still rising in the water around the wreck when I climbed on to Martha’s wharf. The hawser was thick enough to have moored a cruiser. An explosion tends to rip and fray the toughest steel ‘rope’ and blacken it. But a hacksaw cuts through a steel hawser leaving it shiny, with the serrated marks showing clean and gleaming. Now, why cut? Well, a hacksaw’s silent.

  I walked down to the balustrade and peered down into the river. The longboat’s prow was about ten yards off. I kicked the hawser until Col’s head emerged.

  ‘I’m over here. On this side.’

  He de-goggled, treading water. ‘What are you doing over there? You gave the wrong signals.’

  ‘Is Lydia all right?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Can you look at the front end where this hawser’s tied?’

  ‘I think we should finish –’

  ‘No. Right away, Col. Both of you. See if there’s a cupboard or a space where something could be hidden at the hawser’s join.’

  I was thinking, now supposing a longboat was securely moored and can’t move away. Why go to all the trouble of having a huge steel hawser between the bow and a nearby solid tree?

  ‘Hey, Col,’ I shouted.

  ‘What?’ He was climbing up the sloping deck, steadying himself by holding the gunwale.

  ‘When I kick the hawser, what happens underwater?’

  ‘I get the message you tap out. We use a variety –’

  ‘Great. But is it just a vibration or do you actually hear a sound?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘And if it’s a rope that somebody taps?’

  ‘No use, Lovejoy. Ropes dissipate the vibration. We’d not hear anything.’

  Metal carries sound. Ropes do not. I stumbled back up the bank, suddenly breathing hard. It had to be in the frigging tree. The reason you have a steel hawser wrapped round a tree is to keep safe
ly locked a hollowed-out space in the trunk. And the slightest touch on the hawser quivered vibes into the world’s largest sounding-box, Henry’s old metal-sided barge. It was all just one big receiver.

  I streaked over to the weeping willow. The hawser had been round the trunk so long that the bark had begun to grow over the outside of the metal, almost as if it was eating into the living wood. Quite high up, though, which explained why nobody had noticed the faint squared mark on the bark once the hawser was cut free. I scrambled up, clung to a low branch and dug my comb into a crack. A square section of bark fell out on to my face. The hollow had been very crudely dug out, maybe big enough to hold a small dinner plate. Empty.

  I replaced the square tidily and signalled to Col and Lydia.

  ‘We haven’t finished looking underneath the front,’ Lydia called. ‘What are you doing to that tree?’

  ‘There’ll be nothing there. Dress up and collect me on the bridge.’

  I waited a few minutes before Col’s estate car drew up. Somebody had cut through the hawser to get Henry’s precious Grail, which was hidden in the hollowed space in the tree, protected by the steel binding. Henry had been awakened by the vibes. Martha had said he was a light sleeper, always up and down in the night listening on his wires for animal sounds. A convenient covering hobby for somebody with the Holy Grail stuck in a tree.

  So somebody had been sawing away, been caught by Henry. Maybe even been recognized. Henry was injured after a brief struggle or a sudden blow. He’d been lifted into the longboat. Then petrol or oil. A match, and run like hell to where a car was waiting, clutching . . .? It fitted.

  ‘Look, pals,’ I said. ‘We know now what we’re looking for. We haven’t quite obtained it, but I owe you both a favour.’

  ‘What –’ Col began, but I shut him up.

  ‘Only please don’t ask for your favour immediately, unless it’s desperate. You’re in a queue.’

  ‘How sweet,’ Lydia said, smiling.

  I wish women wouldn’t keep saying that. Col dropped Lydia and me at the cottage. She had a bath while I made some notes on people I’d met recently. Such as Honkworth, Leyde, Dolly, even Martha, Sarah and Thomas. Though sorely tempted, I didn’t include Maslow. While Lydia trilled a trendy folk song in the bathroom there was a knock at the door.