Moonspender

by Jonathan Gash

  "You'll not stop him, son." He sounded so defeated. "Folk like Ryan allus win because they don't care about things, the way you and me do. But good luck with your try anyway."

  For a long hour I sat alone in the Ruby while the town's activity charred lights into black and silence crept out of the stonework.

  Munting was right, but hadn't gone far enough. The moonspenders were the problem. Ryan's plan actually was complete.

  In the Eastern Hundreds, every builder lives in terror—of archeology. When a bulldozer breaks ground, the sight of a Roman tile or mosaic, or an ancient earthenware beaker, strikes fear into the builder. Reason? The dreaded restraint order. All site construction stops while wandering tribes of archeologists inspect the unearthed treasures. The builders sob and complain to Parliament, but they always lose. Culture comes first and wins hands down. Good, eh?

  No. In fact, bad.

  Builders don't like paying men to stand idle while waiting for archeologists—not famed for speed—to excavate one tiny Romano-Celtic amphora. So they slip a few quid to their workmen to say nothing about a find. If the discovery is a mound of ancient silver coins, then extra bribes are called for. Plus, the builder sells the treasure on the sly and splits the proceeds with the finder.

  Hereabouts, builders' men call it silence money.

  You may think this is hyping up the ultimate long shot. It isn't. In one unexceptional year over 300 finds were made in our ten square miles. Most are minor—Roman coins, buckles from the Great Civil War. But two were tombs, and one was a temple, plus, unbelievably, a Roman oyster bar. The great bronze head of Claudius the god came from a local river bed. And gold circlets of Celtic kings whose lineages were old before Rome was born. You get the idea. It's even worse than I've made it sound, because law's involved, and law's always wrong. The law of treasure trove only applies to precious metal. It therefore covers one debased hammered silver coin, but not that exquisite Anglo-Saxon bronze horse-furniture found in Buckinghamshire, which London auctioneers sold to a German collector for a fortune. Worse still is that the poor coroner has to guess why the object's in the ground! God's truth. The law, you see, only covers gold or silver accidentally lost, not burials, or hidden caches. Ever heard of anything so daft? You couldn't invent a loonier law if you tried. Hence, the chances of treasure entering the record books is slight to say the least. Moonspenders, remember, are hunters. And to a hunter all killings must be fast. Courts take a year to make up their cumbersome minds. Okay, so concealment's illegal, but moonspenders say finders keepers.

  Which is where Ryan was one step ahead of Mr. Munting. Simple for Ryan to tell his dedicated estate manager to wage war on all moon-spenders—then only give him two gamekeepers to combat them. And each night slip out word where the gamekeepers would patrol. . . .

  Easy when you own the land. Ryan's clandestine arrangement with the moonspenders was immediate cash for any item found. Naturally, they'd swarm to the estate like wasps to honey. Manor Farm would become Aladdin's cave, Eldorado. Do it systematically enough, and the whole estate would be cleaned out, making a fortune. Ryan, Mister Methodical, would have the moonspenders hunting section by section, like sappers with mine detectors, the swine.

  No impediment to building permits then, eh? And clever old Ryan would net Fortune No. 2. Who'd winked an eye at his wife's indiscretions—all in a good cause. Anything to keep the farm in a state of financial ruin while the moonspenders searched and dug and stole and pillaged. I felt sickened.

  "Your try," Munting had called my involvement. Stuff that for a lark. I got out, cranked the old Ruby awake, and clattered off. Try, indeed. I'd frigging succeed. And one reason was that Veronica Gold was waiting at the Red Lion.

  20

  Veronica Gold was wearing sun specs—this in autumnal East Anglia. Two men paced irritably about her, smoking fags and refilling glasses. An anxious girl in trendy dishevelment scribbled utterances for posterity. I'd been admitted to the room like it was Hernando's Hideaway, three knocks and ask for Millie.

  "If you want me to beg, the answer's no." I'd refused to sit. I was hoping they couldn't really afford a lawsuit. I'd only lose money I'd not got.

  She looked drained. "Drink, Lovejoy?" Her voice said cut the cackle. "Tea, please, if you've got any. What's the incognito bit?" "There'd be hundreds here, ogling. The public's a mob. You just don't know." This to an antique dealer? "I always travel in secrecy." "Why travel?" I was very reasonable. "I'm here to resolve this ridiculous situation." Her and her rotten situations. "You mean lawsuits." She was already on the gin and tonic. "You caused them." I could afford magnanimity. "Then I forgive you, Goldie." "No, Lovejoy." She didn't hope for too much from her story, but did her best. "You misunderstand. I'm here to ask what's in it for me, to get you off the hook."

  A short apparent think. "Nothing, love."

  "What?" they all yelped together, outraged.

  "It's not worth my while." I took the tea from the girl scribbler. "Ta, love."

  Goldie silenced her aides with a gesture. "Why not?"

  "BBC Sues Penniless Pauper." I was thinking of Lize. Her headlines would reach an all-time grammatical low. "Media Mammoth Marmalizes Minion."

  "Daydreams, Lovejoy."

  "Come on, Veronica," I said. "Since when does a cosmic superstar have time to come zooming round the sealands?"

  "Listen, lout," a nerk interposed angrily, but Goldie closed her eyes and shook her head.

  "I'm calling the lawsuits off, Lovejoy," she said.

  "Ta," I said, elated. "What's your proposition?"

  A nerk began, "Who the hell d'you—?"

  "Shut up, Boysie! Can't you see he suspects?" Veronica's voice was a rasp. We all jumped. My cup slopped. I said sorry, because women go berserk if you spill things. She lit a cigarette and puffed a plume with a head-jerk. I gazed admiringly. Women's actions. "If we educate you, Lovejoy, we might be able to use you."

  "That game thing? No, ta." The nerks shuffled agitatedly. The scribess hesitated.

  "We've had a certain amount of rather weird interest," Veronica explained, testy. "It could be worth exploiting." So people had written in about that lunatic antique dealer she'd had on last week's program, boosting her ratings. I felt a surge of cheer.

  "No thanks."

  "There's a fee," Goldie said in her metallic monotone. Relief. Five more minutes and I'd be shaky, hands cold and voice wobbling.

  "Keep your fees, love." I shook the teapot, barely a splash. You can't win them all. The dregs dribbled into the cup. "Promise more tea and I'll talk to you alone."

  She smiled suddenly, possibly her first real one since she'd been a girl. "Algie, Boysie. All of you down to the bar."

  They left in various degrees of outrage. We did that curious seated ritual dancing, ahemming and pretending not to be ready for a scrap. Finally she broke.

  "What are you up to?" she asked. "I can't agree to anything illegal. I'm bound by the broadcasting mandate."

  I went, "Tut-tut. That old thing."

  Her smile was broad, brilliantly full in the lips. If ever this harridan really learned to smile, a bloke would have to be on his guard. I found myself smiling back, fool.

  "About your program, Veronica," I began. "Listen . . ."

  Lize was delighted at the scoop. I tapped it out on her typewriter while she fired questions. Yes, I conceded reluctantly, I'd made the marvelous find on the exact spot where poor George Prentiss had met his death. We worried over the wording.

  "It sounds . . . deliberate, Lovejoy," she said.

  "Like murder? Yes, I suppose it does."

  She drew a sharp breath. "Do you mean it?"

  "Aye, love. But I only want you to hint."

  Then I drew from memory Ben Cox's sketch of that Roman leopard, and let Lize have it.

  "That's it; scoop number one. I'll give you two if you promise not to be rough when ravishing me after supper tonight."

  "Supper? I promise."

  "Scoop two. Lovejoy, now
manager of Ryan's Manor Farm estates, revealed today that in the interests of conservation all campers, ramblers, and vandals will be banned."

  "True or false?"

  I said airily, "Add a few paragraphs about Ryan's determination to help animals and plants, him being an environmentalist." Ryan'd go puce when he read that. It would stop his hiring out acres for hunting and duck shoots. Still, you can't make omelets without a cracked shell or two. And this way Enid and her crew would find out by tonight. "Want scoop three?"

  "Do I!" She was jubilant.

  "Because Lovejoy's heart is in the right place, he will rebury that precious object at the exact death spot, Saturday night. A memento for poor old George, his friend."

  She sat back on her heels. "Are you serious?" "One other thing. Is your car mechanic bloke, er. . . ?" "Not tonight, Lovejoy." She started to smile. "Well," I said. She finishes the day's paper about five. I was meeting somebody—was it Mrs. Ryan?—at ten. Time for at least a quarter of all I planned.

  • • •

  Brainwaves come easy. The difficulty is carrying the ideas out to good effect. I proved this by doing a bad thing. Like most such, it was based on a totally good and benevolent assumption. I reasoned: Harold Ayliffe had been punished by Ryan, boss of the local moonspenders, because he'd disobeyed orders. On a dark night he'd disobediently gone out with his electronic miracle stick hunting for archeological morsels without Ryan's express permission. He is discovered. He is beaten up by the boss's minions.

  So far so normal. These gang tiffs are like street-prostitute arguments —this area belongs to one group, so other prostitutes steer clear or else. Ayliffe had naughtily jumped the gun, so no wonder he'd finished up in hospital. Things were coming together. Like, what if Clipper, the nongypsy treasure-hunter, had found some common Civil War artifact? Ollie Hennessey, that Civil War enthusiast, simply allows Clipper to "steal" his car in payment. The police'd stand no chance of finding the motor, not after Clipper's lads pulled a disguise job.

  Ayliffe being safe in that clinic, I could easily prove Ryan the nameless bossman. How? Why, simply threaten everybody by phone, and the one who motored round to Harold's house in haste was boss, right? I'd simply wait, watch, take his number. Naturally, I'd like it to be that goon of a major, but he was too thick.

  With a pocketful of coins, I started dialing. My voice isn't particularly easy to disguise, so I was a slithery Lebanese, then a basso profundo Russian. Sir John got a falsetto Prussian.

  "Messich fur Sur Chone," I chanted to his cold but delectable secretary. "Harolt siz cum tonicht or he vill reveal alles. Repeat messich, pleess."

  She told me it was already recorded and rang off, ice. I sighed and dialed the hotel for Sykie. I told the entire known world to call round at Harold's house tonight, or else. That was my good idea.

  The bad thing was the result.

  Ayliffe's house was small and terraced in a street of endless doors.

  The trouble with these old-fashioned streets is there's nowhere to loiter. Lamps aren't those thin towering concrete pillars. They're the gas sort you can climb up, Benjamin Hicks 1820s pattern, which posh executives buy to ornament their barbecue pits. No front gardens, either, so you can't hide. Walk down once and you're just an evening

  stroller. Come back, and chintz twitches while some heavy constable gets off his bike and feels your collar. No, it's no joke. This modem spate of burglaries isn't due to social factors, folks. It's the design of our modem streets. Old streets have a thousand eyes. I got there about eight. A singer in a nearby tavem was wrestling a pop song into a premature grave. I needed a super brainwave.

  A pathetic substitute came in a flash—lurk in the yard! No lights meant Enid was out stalking snapdragons, so I did the old rag-and-bone man's trick of counting the front doors going up the street, the yard doors going down the back alley. Then a quick glance at those houses showing lights, and into Harold's yard with miraculous stealth. I fell over a bloody clothes prop, the untidy swine, and walked into a bucket to set some dog growling. Panicking and sweaty I got in, by rattling the tumblers over with a small crochet hook I happened to have handy.

  A car grumbling its way along the street, tires slow and squeaking. I heard it and thought aha. I shuffled eagerly along the hallway hoping to peer through the front door's letterbox to identify it. I was praising myself for brilliant planning when I noticed two things simultaneously, all in an instant. One was a woman's voice chanting upstairs to a vague thumping. Ayliffe's old mum, perhaps?

  The second thing I detected with my razor-sharp senses was all hell let loose from this firebomb breaking the window and exploding in the front room. I fell over, shoved against the wall by the blast, and slumped for a second, winded. There was one nasty cough of foul petrol-fumed breath, and flame whooshed into the hallway behind me. Slowly I climbed erect, stunned and wobbling. I remember thinking, Where's that come from, for heaven's sake?

  Then a car's tires really screeched and its engine thrummed. Unbelievably, another cocktail splashed in a shower of glass into the room. Lucky I was in the hallway, but even so heat stretched my cheeks and hands. Fire shot along the floor into the hall after me. I heard myself squeal, and in a mist found myself clawing at the front door. It wouldn't move. Locked. I panicked, then tried to elbow the vestibule glass but failed, damned near broke my bone on the safety glass, impenetrable. A second ago, stealth. Now this pandemonium of flames and noise. It'd have to be a leap across the fire now spreading along the walls—

  I heard a scream from upstairs, a high screech of terror. The stair side was aflame, a sickening bluish business, all swift aggression with hardly a glimmer of yellow to light a coward's way out. I heard an answering scream, me, and swore, cursing my festering luck to be here, and upended my jacket over my head to blunder up. The stairs went on for ever, took a Lifetime. My voice was booming out "Ow ow ow . . ." as I charged, knees and feet everywhere. I actually crashed the door open with my head and hands together, always the idiot.

  Enid was in the front bedroom screaming, when I battered my way in still going "Ow ow ow." I stopped it from embarrassment and gaped. We gaped at each other. Another whumph from downstairs as the creeping blue fire got hold of something. She stepped away, hands out protectively. Mind you, I must have looked mad, crashing in with my hands homed up by my head, hooded in my jacket, with watery flames flickering behind me. But she looked odder.

  She was gowned to the floor in midnight blue. A dark candle stank the place rotten. No bed here, only marks on the floor. Spangles, shiny radii, a kind of writing. Oddly she held a stick and a scroll. A voice yelled outside in the street. A door slammed.

  "The bloody place is on fire," I shouted, countertenor. She didn't move, staring.

  "Come on, you silly cow," was my next contribution to constructive discourse. No movement, so I slapped her stupid wand aside, stepped among those daft scribbles, kicking them all over the place, and dragged her to the top of the stairs.

  A roar met us. Smoke gouged my lungs and scraped sight from my eyes. I recoiled. Every staircase hides a hellhole that stores paint, vacuum cleaners, brushes, and the flames had reached it. The noise increased. I was badly frightened now and dragged Enid by her hair into the back bedroom, slamming the door behind us on that huthering heat. Smoke seeped quite pleasantly up from the floorboards. I tried the light switch. The bulb ht for a second, exploded. The window.

  It was the old sash-and-sill sort, thank God. I hauled Enid onto the sill, her legs dangling. Opening the window had set the fire roaring like in an old draw chimney. Flames were actually tonguing under the door, horrible swines. Smoke clouded out over our shoulders. We set to coughing, having to hunch over to breathe.

  My streaming eyes cleared enough to see how close safety actually was. I was so elated that, before I thought, I'd reached, swung round the drainpipe to stand on the tiled roofing over the back door, and dangled joyously down to the ground in a trembling sweat.

  "Please," I heard some p
est scream.

  Crazy Enid was still sitting up there, smoke billowing out around her. She was choking, swaying to breathe. I yelled a mouthful of obscenities and rushed about dragging buckets, a wheelbarrow, anything to stand on to climb back on to that decorative tiling. I grabbed the drainpipe to keep myself safe—it was only about fifteen feet to fall—and extended a hand. She tried to reach but failed. She recoiled, clutching the sill and spluttering.

  "Enid," I said to the silly bitch, calm now I was safe. "Enid. Let go. Grab my hand as you fall."

  "I can't." She was weeping. "I'm not that degree of perfection, Lovejoy."

  "Eh?" Degree of perfection? I thought, she really is off her nut. She was going to get burnt to fucking death in a few seconds. I could hear the bloody fire growling, gathering itself. A pane beneath us exploded as the obscene glow of unstoppable flames diffused over the yard. We'd all go any minute, and here she was nattering balderdash. How the hell do you talk to a mad woman? Join them.

  "Indeed you are not, Enid," I agreed calmly. "But I am. Jump. You will fly—"

  The silly cow took me literally, closed her eyes and leapt sideways, arms and legs wrapping me in a spider-hold that tore the drainpipe off" its mountings and tumbled us both down the tiles, me cursing. I wedged a foot in the gutter and stopped us plunging headfirst miles to our doom —well, a few feet, maybe even more. I prized her free and lowered her, followed, and cracked her across the face. "You stupid bitch!"

  People were everywhere now, fire engines with bells, gongs, the whole paraphernalia of hysteria mixed with nuisance. Enid was gaping at me, but smiling in her gape, if you know what I mean. Lights were going on. Sirens came closer.

  "Magister. Your anger is just." Enid spoke with the fire reflected on her face. She wore an expression of exaltation mixed with, well, I'd say awe if I had to choose a word. Doubtless some trip she'd been on. High as a kite. I mean, in her nightie singing to a candle?