Moonspender

by Jonathan Gash

  "John Dowland?" I guessed. She plays in the foyer, forever complaining about the cold.

  "A pavan from his Lachrymae, Lovejoy." Dorothy is always dreamy, playing. The passion's always a Dowland giveaway, like lust in John Donne's religious poems.

  "Lovely, Dorothy." I scanned the crowd, maybe twenty people. Not the right time for confidences about black magic.

  Dorothy could see my expression in the window glass, and gracefully improvised a coda to the pavan. Her instrument was a kit assembly, based on an early seventeenth century Flemish maker called Ruckers. New, it costs half the price of a new car.

  "Break time, folks," I announced, shuffling people into the street. They clapped a bit, moved out. Her jealous husband Les glowered from the side window. I grinned and pulled the chain so his roller shutter descended on his distress.

  "About witchcraft, Dorothy. You still one?"

  "Are you serious, Lovejoy?" She was curious but muted her voice. "What on earth are you asking things like that for?"

  "Are you. . . ?" What the hell do you call a witch? Do they go in leagues, like football? . . . "you all the same, love?"

  Passing shoppers gazed into the foyer. I pretended to be a sober harpsichord purchaser. If Ledger heard I was boning up on witchcraft in the High Street he'd have me certified.

  "Of course not, Lovejoy. There are four white covens locally. If you want a black coven the nearest's beyond Wormingford—" "Hang on. White? Black?"

  "White roughly equals good. Black equals—"

  A nod shut her up. "Where do you meet, love?"

  "Please don't ask me anymore." She closed the keyboard and rose. I grabbed her arm.

  "Dorothy. Please, love." I was in agony. "Answer me one question." She hesitated. I cast about, put my hand on the imitation Ruckers harpsichord. "I swear I'm on your side; on Dowland's original keyboard."

  Out stormed Les to sling me out of his grottie foyer. "Piss off, Lovejoy, or I'll—"

  "Dorothy. Please." My eyes held hers. "Is it in Pittsbury Wood, on the four old days? Lammas? Candlemas—?"

  She hesitated, gave a discreet nod. I kissed her coldish cheek and left, an inch nearer truth.

  17

  Oliver Hennessey was the bloke I'd seen in Woody's caff with Clipper the gypsy. He's proprietor of Vesco's supermarket. I caught him supervising the checkout tills.

  "Only four girls turned up today," he said bitterly, giving a girl a tin of pineapple chunks. "Put that through a few times, Tracy."

  "Yes, Mr. Hennessey." She mouthed to a pop tune wafting over the hubbub, rolled her eyes at me in mock exasperation. The put-through is the checkout con trick. I watched Tracy for a minute, for old time's sake. She rattled customers' figures into the till then, with a casual, "This yours, love?" got a denial, lifted the tin to one side and carried on. But the price of the chunks would be on the shopper's bill. The old dears pay up unthinkingly. At the end of the day Ollie keeps the extra. It's always the tills nearest the walls where the put-through is worked, so beware. It only takes new girls three attempts to become perfect con merchants. Says a lot for mankind.

  "Any old tills, Ollie?" I asked in his office. "Old adding machines?" They chuck them out free. Form a small collection and in a year or so you'll be able to sell them at a convincing profit. It's not antiques, but it's bread.

  "Mmmmh." He stared morosely at the mayhem of people smashing into each other's heaped wheelies. "Thought you were on the scrounge. Coupla quid each? They're in the stores."

  "Ta. I'll collect them on the way out." I went to stare with him. God, I hate shopping. Whichever way I put my plastic bags down they fall over. A proper pre-Edwardian shopping bag stands up on its own. Our ancestors weren't thick. It takes modem civilization Like us to be gormless to the highest degree of efficiency. You might say we've raised incompetence to a modem art.

  I said, "Here, Ollie. Did you get your car back? I heard it was nicked down by the river while you were fishing."

  He started then, as I knew he would, snapping right out of his gloomy inspection and really seeing me for the first time. "Who told you?"

  "In the paper. Only, I thought I saw it yesterday. Manor Farm way."

  "Blue Cortina?" he asked, too casually.

  "No. An old Montego. Light red, four-door?"

  "You didn't report it or anything?"

  "Your business, Ollie, not the peelers'."

  "Thanks, Lovejoy." Desperately he began maneuvering me out. "Take two old tills. Tracy'll show you where."

  "Ta, Ollie. Oh, still at the old hobby?"

  Another start, but more deeply shocked this time. He looked stricken. When he heard I was Mrs. Ryan's estate manager he'd have to do something. Him and his nongypsy mates, that is. I gave him a knowing wink.

  "Fishing?" he said, meaning something different.

  "Yes," I said, meaning what he meant.

  "No, Lovejoy. Too busy."

  We parted in mutual apprehension, me to raid his stores and chat up the succulent Tracy, him to phone his mates and say I signified trouble. I drove to see Clipper. Start as you mean to go on.

  Driving to the gypsy site with six obsolete electronic calculators and three old mechanical spring-tills in the Ruby, I should have been pleased. I wasn't. Tracy had turned out to be simply what she seemed, an all-time first for womankind. She was an ordinary checkout lass. No special relationship with Ollie—in fact she thought him a worm. I'd learned nothing new, but fixed a date with her at the sports club, Saturday. Any port in a storm, and life's one long storm.

  Our local gypsies are distinguished by being nongypsies. They neither sow, spin, reap, nor tinker. They couldn't mend a kettle to save their lives. Mostly they exist on social security supplemented by nicking anything metal. They masquerade as poor downtrodden vagrants so they can plead victimization if anybody threatens to stop their many illegal scams.

  Clipper was predictably surprised to see me.

  "Good scrap in Woody's, Lovejoy." He laughed, but watchful. "Over that stuttering whore."

  I didn't rise to his goading. "Down to a mere ten cars, eh, Clipper?" Four or five caravans and a scattered herd of semiderelict cars. "Catch much the other night?"

  "What other night?" he asked, cutting a stick into the fire and not looking.

  "You and Ollie Hennessey. Going fishing."

  "Better than selling hankies." He was inspecting my Ruby. "Sixty quid for that crate of yours?" "Ollie's motor no good, then?"

  "None of your cracks, Lovejoy." He stared up angrily. He could make three of me.

  "Only a joke, Clipper." I waved him down. "You're big for your boots, gaffer."

  A man nearby snickered. There were four of them talking over a battered car. Clipper meant my new job. A few children ran wild. A woman hung out washing on an improvised line. No red Montego was among the motors.

  Deciding on a guess, not quite random, I said, "That's what I came about, Clipper. I heard your mates were sniffing around the end of Pittsbury Wood."

  The air stilled. Clipper looked at his hands. Of a sudden his knife seemed a foot longer. His patch is near the railway station. Traffic was nudging past a hundred yards off". Broad daylight, so I felt under no threat. Not much.

  "Doing no harm even if we were," Clipper said evenly. "Which we weren't."

  "No. Course not." I smiled pacifically at his mates. "But my job's got responsibilities, Clipper. The nature conservancy people are complaining about you lot killing wild birds, uprooting flowers and whatnot."

  Clipper relaxed. "Everybody's got a down on us poor gyppos, Lovejoy. You know that." His mates laughed.

  "Well, just be warned. I'm setting a gamekeeper by the gravel pits for the next few nights. Cheers."

  I'd done well. Clipper called after me, "Ta, Lovejoy. I owe you a favor."

  To keep up the deception I laughed along and called back, "Aye. Tell any real gypsies you meet to let me have some caravan ware." Caravan ware is the type of metal buckets, tins, pans, and suchlike, graphical
ly painted in florals and rustic scenes. You will see them on canal longboats, and occasionally genuine gypsies will sell you one.

  I drove off in high good humor. Two of the men even waved, all friendly. My hands were damp. I was certain that over the past two or three days I'd spoken with the killer, and I was still breathing.

  At the farm Mavis had a phone message. "Councillor Ryan agreed to the proposed building project." I phoned Suzanne York to prepare for invaders that afternoon. Then I warned Doc Pryor at the rehabilitation unit that he was not to notice if suddenly a gang of navvies gently stole the facing brickwork of his building.

  "Are you serious, Lovejoy?" he asked.

  "They'll replace it with new, Doc, and repair your damage."

  "But, Lovejoy," he tried. I talked over him.

  "Don't worry. Doc. It's complicated, but it all comes right in the end." Fingers crossed.

  Before Mrs. Ryan dragged me into the woods and wreaked her sordid lusts on my poor defenseless body, I summoned Robie. I had Mavis digging through the files for notable public criticisms of Manor Farm over the past year, and got the district map out.

  Robie said, just short of outrage, "I should be with the herd, Lovejoy; south pasture. You're another of them, doing wrong by the land."

  I'd had enough. "Shut up, you miserable old bugger. See this map?"

  He was really miffed. "I don't need no map."

  "But I do. Which farms are productive?"

  His wizened face split in a grin. "All on um, Lovejoy."

  "Except us?"

  "Aye. We're mostly Grade Two land. There's only bits of the farm country Grade One. They can grow anything along there."

  "Why can't we?"

  "You'm an idiot, son. This land's goodhearted, till you mess it about. Now it costs a fortune in fertilizer chemicals and we get a big yield—of idiot subsidy crops. You're a jack-in-office, lad. Not a clue."

  "But you have?"

  That staunched him. "Aye."

  "Suppose I set you to grow old-fashioned on ten acres, Robie."

  "The councillor'd scupper it."

  "Never mind him. Where would you choose?"

  He pointed to the field abutting Pittsbury Wood's northern boundary. "There."

  "New Black field. Why there, Robie?"

  "Black earth, not the local red. It'd grow anything, New Black."

  "Has it always?"

  "Not been there long, lad. Barely two hundred years."

  "That can't be true." The farms in the Eastern Hundreds have been the same shapes since before Domesday Book was written by William the Bastard's one patient scribe. Robie saw my disbelief and tapped the map.

  "Till then it was part of Pittsbury Wood. Trees mulched that field since time began."

  It was a quadrilateral extending between our wood and the estate's apple orchards. Where they killed poor George Prentiss. They'd then carried his body half a mile, to be gored by Charleston the bull. A good way of shifting the blame.

  "Robie. Think up a list of best crops. You'll grow nine-tenths for public sale, and one-tenth special stuff."

  "What special stuff?"

  I lost my rag and yelled, "How the hell do I know?" People expect me to do every bleeding thing. "Get gone. Fetch your crop list to the Treble Tile about nine."

  "Right, gaffer." He was looking at me. Just then Mavis came trotting in with some files.

  "But, Lovejoy," Mavis wailed, "Sir John's secretary's just phoned a supper invitation for tonight and—"

  I took her shoulders. I was due to meet Mrs. Ryan for a woodland rape or else, and suddenly everybody wants to chat. No wonder you get narked. "Mavis, doowerlink. Your job depends on my performance during the next hour. Contain yourself till I return."

  "What does he mean?" I heard her asking Robie as I hit the road. He didn't answer either. He'd now got problems of his own. High time.

  Mrs. Ryan lay over me, penciling my features with a grass blade. Tiny women often do this, I've noticed. Heavier, taller women he and give horizontal pillow glances. I suppose there are statistics somewhere. But all talk afterward. Why? I was away in the dozy death, so tragically full of dismay, which affects the man's detumescent soul. Women think a man just nods off. But if ever one senses that terrible grief and knows the right thing to do, she can have me for life. I'd love her for nowt.

  "Lovejoy?"

  Here we go. "Mmmmh?"

  "You've had a lot of women, haven't you?"

  "You made that blade of grass a corpse. No wonder conservationists are out to get me."

  She laughed, her breasts shaking. Her blouse was over her shoulders, agape, like her jacket. A cynic would have said she'd come prepared, pleated plaid riding skirt so's not to show a crumple from being rucked up. We were deep in Pittsbury Wood. I'd sent the two gamekeepers along the river on some wild goose chase.

  "Tell me about your other women."

  This called for my purest he. "You're my first, Mrs. Ryan. I was a virgin until you."

  Another laugh, an admonitory tap on my face. "You're an innocent, Lovejoy. But feral. Therianthropic. A born theriac."

  What was the woman on about? "One day I'll nick a dictionary and give you a mouthful back, Mrs. Ryan."

  She prized my eye open to see in. Her indignation was genuine. "You see? You never call me anything but Mrs. Ryan."

  "You told me to."

  Another minislap, this time more impact. "That was ages ago." A pause. Cunningly I slid my eye shut. "Lovejoy. What's my Christian name?"

  "Erm. Jane?"

  Silence. Well, bound to be close. "Jean?" Silence, but with threat. "Joan? Joanne?" Maybe it didn't begin with J. "Florence?"

  "It's Dora." Dora? I could have sworn . . . "Naturally I took the precaution of saying always be formal. James is so quick. A single slip and . . . and ..." She gave a moan of exasperation and rolled over.

  "You see, Lovejoy, it's not only James. It's women too." As she spoke I came to, leaned up and gazed thoughtfully across her lovely form. The ground swelled where we lay, rose in a great sweeping curve through the wood. How wide its diameter, if you completed the half-circle to a full one? A mile? She was prattling on, but tardily and with sorrow. "It's different for a woman, Lovejoy. All other women are at her heels. They'd be on me like wolves if this got out."

  Well, women have these wars. I let her talk, ooohing and aahing to show I was all ears while I thought about this wood. The great King Cunobelin, Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Lived here before the Roman emperor, that clever idiot god Claudius, decided to dust us over. I've no illusions about these earthworks that mark our countryside. They were probably nothing more than cattle compounds, though they're called all sorts of fanciful names: ramparts—hence Biam's Ramparts Comer— dikes, walls. We just don't know. Archeologists don't know most of all. This particular "rampart" on which we lay runs in an enormous half-circle through the wood. Ten feet high, sloping sides, about twelve feet or more thick. Trees grow thickly on and by it, and the undergrowth is densest about its slopes. Robie'd said the New Black Field was formed by clearing the wood and leveling that part of the great ring that continued out there. Mrs. Ryan and I had made love lying on the ridge's slop>e. We'd kept dry in the autumnal cool on her riding cloak. Her horse was knocking about somewhere.

  ". . . not enough any longer, Lovejoy."

  "Eh?" Some ominous tone had snuck in.

  "James lives a marvelous Life—business, great supppers, council work. For me, it's second."

  Thank God I'd come to. This line of reflection was playing into my hands. "But you've got everything," cunning old Lovejoy said, full of thoughtful concern. "You run the estate. You ride, entertain. And then," I added as if I knew everything about everything, "there's your special interest, isn't there?"

  Her head turned, tense. "Special interest, Lovejoy?"

  "Me, Mrs. Ryan."

  She laughed, that disturbing tension easing. "Promise me you'll stay, Lovejoy."

  "I'm not planning a move."

&nb
sp; "I don't mean that, darling." She pulled me down to her throat. Her skin felt cold. She talked softly over my nape. "I'm not stupid. I know you're only between wrongdoings. You'll leave as soon as it suits, back to your silly old furniture and vases."

  Silly old furniture? She was off her nut. I told her so. She didn't laugh this time, just drew the fold of her cloak over my bare shoulder.

  "Promise me you'll stay, Lovejoy." She sounded so sad. "Even if you don't mean it. Promise."

  "Why me?" I don't really care for this sort of talk. The words are the same as always, but it takes more out of you.

  "Because you do what you will, no matter what."

  Oddest reason I've ever heard for a promise, but here goes. "I promise, love."

  "Thank you, darling." She was still speaking misty-eyed as she raised my head so she could peer into me. "Now seal it. I won't mind if you hurt."

  Yet only last week she'd played merry hell because I'd left a mark on her thigh, which quite honestly couldn't be helped and I mean that most sincerely. I was especially obedient as I complied, because I was sure now that Mrs. Ryan wasn't an enemy. Which was far, far more than I could say for most.

  And now I knew what to do. It'd lead to more lawsuits, but hang the expense.

  Then I sent word to Winstanley that I'd got wind of a possible Roman bronze found locally. Then phoned Sykie's sons with the same he. Then I told Mrs. Ryan and Robie that I had to visit the farm employers' federation office—fervently hoping there was such a thing because I made the name up—and went to Gimbert's auction on East Hill.

  18

  Tinker was waiting for me in the delectable aroma of paradise: sweat, dust, and centuries of humanity's grime. Add greed, and it's the nearest to heaven we'll ever get. It's honestly moved me to tears before now.

  The auction had been going about twenty minutes. Old Spurrier was on the rostrum because our regular gaveler was sick. He's precise and slow, for like all auctioneers he has no cerebral cortex. People—meaning dealers—had barely arrived. Auctioneers start with rubbish, saving the best wine for last, so to speak. Only a few adrenalin-drenched hopefuls were breathlessly penciling minuscule bids in their offset catalogs. The current flavor of the month however was jubilation. I was among my own kind, within arm's reach of antiques.