Dovetail
Page 1
DOVETAIL
Bernard Pearson
Copyright © 2018 Bernard Pearson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, persons living or dead is coincidental or they are used fictitiously.
Cover design Ian Mitchell. Typesetting Amanda Cummings.
Printed by Rose Mills Print Finishers.
Note from me:
This book is all about friendship, it is woven into the plot.
This book could not have happened without the help of my friends:
Jean Tillson whose Herculean task was to mentor me as she edited the damn thing. Elin Woodger Murphy who eagle-eyed proof read and my mate Ian Mitchell who created the cover design.
There was also Terry Wright who was bullied into printing it and Amanda Cummings who said yes and typeset it. Friends, all of them and I hope after all my mithering they still are.
So to them who made it happen and to you who are reading this – thank you.
No 41 Publishers is an entirely anarchic and irresponsible publishing house that will put anything into print to make a shilling.
www.No41Publishers.cosm
ISBN 978-1-5272-2331-8
Rose Mills Printers Limited
This is a novel about good and evil and the darker side of the antiques business. It is also a story about the power of friendship that spans generations.
Like the antiques he restores, master craftsman Bill Sawyer knows that his interesting past could lead to a fragile future. In the autumn of his life, as his body begins to betray his skill, his dwindling days are about to become very interesting. The value of Bill’s experience has not gone unnoticed, because things of value often attract dangerous attention.
But it’s no use growing old if you don’t get artful.
There is an old adage in the antiques trade that says ‘not all that glistens is gold’. So you better believe that not all that’s said to be Elizabethan is old. It might well be have been made yesterday.
Other publications
The Discworld Almanak (2004)
Terry Pratchett
with Bernard Pearson
The World of Poo (2012)
Terry Pratchett and
the Discworld Emporium
The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide (2012)
Terry Pratchett and
the Discworld Emporium
Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook (2014)
Terry Pratchett and
the Discworld Emporium
The Compleat Discworld Atlas (2015)
Terry Pratchett and
the Discworld Emporium
To Isobel – of course.
Dovetail, dovetail joint: n. A mortise joint formed by interlocking tenons and mortises. Difficult to make, requiring skilful and practised craftsmanship. An impossible joint to break without destroying the construction.
Prologue
THE FIRE
The match flared, and its phosphorus smell overcame for an instant the pungent odour of petrol. The man stepped back and dropped the burning match onto the ground. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion: the match falling to earth like a comet, the silent explosion as the petrol vapour ignited, then a dull whoomph as the line of petrol made a fiery trail through the open door of the huge house. The man walked away quickly, the night sky now illuminated by flames.
‘Any moment now,’ he thought, as he drove his van quickly down the gravelled drive and into the lane beyond. Almost at once he heard a violent blast from behind him and sighed with satisfaction. The Calor gas cylinders he had left gently hissing into the room had definitely made a difference. The fact that everything on the ground floor of the house – including the bodies – had been doused in petrol had made quite a difference, too.
The house was a long way from its nearest neighbours and set back from the road along an extensive drive, so no one saw the flames until they lit the area like a beacon. On any other night this would have caused calls to the emergency services from miles around, but not tonight. Not November the fifth. And if the burning mansion was the brightest light that shone out in the darkness, many others only slightly less brilliant were to be seen on the soft round hills of the Somerset landscape.
About a mile from the burning mansion the man stopped his vehicle in a field entrance and got out. The smell of petrol was making him gag; some of it must have splashed onto his clothes. He opened all the doors to let the fumes disperse, then leaned over and vomited, the revolver in his jacket pocket making dull thunking sounds against the van as he wretched.
Resting against the side of the vehicle, he admired the glow in the distance. Breathing cool, fresh air at last, his adrenalin levels began to return to normal. This left him leaving him feeling weak and exhausted, but the thought of what he had done was seared into his brain as bright as the flames that now engulfed the house. Eventually he gathered enough strength to drive home, the events of that evening playing over and over like a movie behind his eyes.
Chapter 1
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
Bill Sawyer lived a very simple life and, in some ways, was a very simple man. Not simple as in stupid, but simple in the single-minded way of a fine craftsman. At sixty-seven, with decades of experience, he could take a piece of indifferent furniture of any era from Medieval to Regency and turn it into something collectors would clamour to own. He did this by ‘simply’ selecting the right woods, using the right glues (even if that meant rendering rabbit skins down to an evil-smelling broth), hand-making screws and pins to fit the age of the piece, and, finally, anointing the work with stains and polishes made to his own very secret recipes.
Stocky, broad-shouldered, balding, and with the ruddy face of the countryman, Bill had an easy grin and soft Somerset burr that lulled those who didn’t know him well into believing he was indeed simple. People who did know him well, however – and these were very few – sometimes noticed a sparkle in his eyes like the gleam on the honed edge of a chisel.
Bill’s expertise with old furniture was second to none. To call him an antiques restorer didn’t do justice to his almost mystical ability to commune with the pieces he touched, to listen to the songs of time the wood sang to him as he held it. Furniture was brought to him to establish its age and identity or, occasionally, for a very specialised kind of restoration. A restoration that could defy time, define a maker, and fool even the best museum curator, let alone a buyer in an antiques shop. He was never short of work if he wanted it, but now only took on projects that really interested him.
If a stranger had happened by his place today, however, all they would have seen was an old man sitting at a bench in an enormous workshop that had once been a large barn. The stones that made up the walls were of a size that would not have disgraced a castle, nor indeed the abbey they had originally come from. A massive arch that once held a great oaken door was now made up of tar-washed timbers set with grimy glazed windows. Instead of one massive door, however, there were now two that created an opening about ten feet wide. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship sadly hammered by time and gentle neglect, but it did the job, which was all Bill wanted of anything.
Once upon a time the barn had been the heart of the farm, where wagons were brought in and grain was stored and threshed. Huge timbers held up a roof that would have done justice to a medieval hall and probably once had. The roof itself was lost in gloom, but the lower beams were festooned with cob
webs still holding wisps of ancient straw along with the more recent wood dust that coated almost everything else.
A bench ran the entire length of the long wall, its various surfaces of marble, slate, and timber stained and disfigured by chemicals. At one end was a melamine kitchen worktop in which was set a butler sink with a tap above it. Dominating that corner of the room was a vast cast-iron stove, its black shape liberally sprinkled with wood dust like dandruff on an undertaker’s collar.
Great piles of cut timber were stacked against one wall: oak, beech, ash, and mahogany in planks. Piled everywhere was furniture of all ages resembling the carcases of dead animals with their skeletal structures on display. Innumerable shelves held myriad jars, tins, and boxes.
Under various low-hanging lights stood machines of all sorts and ages. Planes, finishers, routers, saws, and drills, each one in its own unique bed of sawdust or chippings like strange metal birds in nests of wood.
Bill no longer traded in antiques himself as getting stuff to and from the auctions was quite literally a pain these days. The ache in his chest was getting worse, he seemed always to be short of breath, and just of late he had noticed spots of blood on his handkerchief after he had had one of his increasingly frequent coughing fits. He occasionally thought of going to see his doctor, but each time he managed to convince himself his problem was just the ever-present dust.
Normally, Bill didn’t stop for lunch, but today his chest was playing him up something rotten, so he set his current project aside and started to do what he always did at the end of a working day: put away his tools. This routine activity did more to quieten his mind than anything else could have done. Some of the small tools went into a box he had made for them at least forty years before. The box itself was a work of art, with his initials carved on the top and the smallest dovetail joints it was possible to make holding the panels together. Each tool had been known to his hands for decades, and they were more a part of him in some ways than people ever had been.
He picked up the claw spike that had been given to him by his first boss, the man he had been apprenticed to. Shaped like some medieval instrument of torture, it was designed to take pins out of upholstery, or at least that was what he used it for. It had been hand-forged and was old, but still worked despite being worn.
‘Just like me,’ Bill thought. ‘For now, at any rate.’
He sat back in his chair. The familiar sensation of the piece of steel in his hand brought to mind his first big break and the man who had unwittingly provided it so long ago.
~~~
Harry Pexton was a short, squat, grizzled man to whom Bill had been apprenticed as a school leaver at age 16. An upholsterer, Harry had a workshop in one of the back streets of Bath that he had started up with the gratuity he had received from the army when he was demobbed in 1946. Harry’s business was all about taking in furniture and repairing or re-stuffing it with whatever he could get his hands on, then covering it with a material based on what the client could afford. Sometimes this turned out to be curtains that had been ‘liberated’ from some empty house in the county. Harry had a cavalier regard to private ownership and was a great one for liberating stuff.
It was the late 1950s, Britain was still buttoned up tight, even the television stopped at 11 pm, and none of the local girls seemed to be interested in a spotty youth who smelt of leather and glue. Bill spent his days stripping rotting upholstery off furniture that exuded nose-clogging dust and the odour of dogs long dead (he sometimes even found fossilised turds, turned by time into small black pellets that broke apart as his fingers encountered them). But he enjoyed the process of making something new from sagging wrecks with broken springs poking out of rents in their coverings. He felt he was helping them come alive again.
Bill knew that once his apprenticeship was over, Harry would fire him and get some other poor sod to do all the shit jobs rather than pay Bill a man’s wage. There was no formal agreement, nor any bit of paper at the end of it, but three years in that workshop had taught him a lot. Most importantly, it taught him that he had a way with wood and a feel for antique furniture. When not working, he haunted the many antiques shops in Bath and got to know the trade from the inside out.
Sure enough, when Bill turned nineteen Harry told him he would have to go. To salve his conscience, Harry gave him a last job reupholstering a large, winged club chair that had come in from a lady who had bought it from an auction in London. Harry pompously informed Bill that he could keep the lion’s share of the profits as a parting gift, but when Bill saw the estimate he thought, ‘If there’s anything left over from this I’ll be bloody lucky!’ Still, money was money, and he knew he would need all he could get.
Bill set to work on the gigantic chair, its leather worn smooth on the arms and its deep, rich, red stained to a dull maroon by having countless drinks slopped over it. There were burns from cigarettes, cigars, and dropped matches. The back was not buttoned, which was a blessing as redoing all of that would have taken hours. It was a typical club chair, probably 1890s, mahogany frame, horsehair stuffing under leather worn thin and shiny by the fat backsides of the gentry. It would be a pleasure to turn this back into something lovely. The leather would have to be stripped off – he might be able to reuse that on the back – but the seat was cracked and torn and the inside padding in need of replacement. Also, by the feel of it, the springs under the seat were shot.
Bill used his new claw spike to prize the studs away from the frame. He would keep as many of those as he could and use them again. Slowly the frame of the chair came into view as the horsehair and hessian were pulled carefully away from the strings that bound them down. He would do the removable seat last; that was always the smelly job and by the look of this one it had seen a lot of action. ‘Oh, the tales it could tell,’ he thought, ‘and all from the bottom up!’ He reached the hessian shroud that covered the layer of horsehair now showing through in dirty clumps, and there, in the join between the seat and the back, right down almost out of sight, something shone.
Bill had often found coins when stripping the upholstery from old furniture. Harry regarded these as treasure trove and occasionally shared the spoils, but not very often. He had told tales of finding diamond rings and wallets, but Bill had never come across anything like that before. He reached in now and with strong, nimble fingers brought out a pocket watch of such intricacy and beauty it almost took his breath away. There were the remains of a gold chain attached to the bow. It was a full hunter watch with a spring-hinged front cover to protect the crystal and dial.
He took the watch over to the light. The front cover clicked open, probably for the first time in many years. There was no name on the elegant white dial. It had simple Roman numerals, dark-blue steel hands, and a small subdial marked off into seconds. There was a hallmark on the stem, and going to a dusty chart that hung on the wall, he looked up the symbols. These told him the watch had been made in Birmingham in 1876 and was eighteen carat gold.
He sat down and carefully, very carefully, opened the back cover. One thing about hanging around with antique dealers, you picked up all the tricks of the trade, so he knew just how to prise it open without leaving a scratch. Inside, still as bright and as crisp as the day it was engraved, was the name ‘Woodley, London, St Swithin’s Lane’ in beautiful cursive letters. He closed the back with a gentle pressure and was rewarded with a very crisp click.
He turned it over, extended the stem, and put the time right by a cracked alarm clock that was the only timepiece in the room. The hands moved in silky precision. He pushed in the stem and, as gently as he could, wound the movement a few turns. Putting it to his ear he heard a clear tick evenly marking the passage of time. He took out his handkerchief, put the watch on it, and just stared as the small hand on the second dial went around and around in an even sweep.
He could see no damage on the watch case from its long interment in the bowels of the chair. A slight rubbing perhaps, but apart from that the watch looked
as good as it must have done when it was lost. How long had it been there? Whose had it been? And, most importantly, whose was it now?
He wrapped the watch in his handkerchief, then in a piece of clean rag, and put it in the pocket of his jacket that hung on a nail by the door. Then Bill got on with the job in hand.
He went to the rolls of leather that Harry kept as dust-free as anything could be in that place and, instead of using the skin that had been left out for the job, chose the best there was. Rich, dark green, full-grain leather; the cost of this alone would leave a hole in Harry’s pocket.
Bill left Harry’s employ a bit earlier than he had originally been planned, and with curses rather than a reference, but to the people who knew Harry and his winning little ways, that was a reference in itself.
Bill went to work for the father of a school friend, a joiner and cabinet maker in a nearby village. He learned even more from this kindly and clever man, who recognised in young Bill the makings of a good craftsman. But Bill simply wasn’t interested in new doors and window frames, no matter how well they were made. He missed the feel of old wood under his fingers, of antiques and the treasures of the past.
Bill decided the time was right, and he sold the watch for quite a lot of money. Enough to equip his own workshop and set out on the road he had travelled ever since.
Chapter 2
TUESDAY, 14 AUGUST
When the tools were back in their box, Bill put it on a shelf behind him and turned off the radio. Then he put on his old tweed jacket and started the ritual Packing of the Pockets. Pipe, tobacco pouch, and lighter all went into the same pockets they had done ever since the jacket was new. Bill didn’t give a damn how he looked so long as he was comfortable. He had been a sartorial wreck since the day his wife, Beryl, had left him.