Authors: Jonathan Gash
‘I will,’ I promised, and did a clumsy rotten introduction in the doorway.
Betty took one road at the chapel and I ran Sarah down to the railway station.
‘I’m sorry about that, Lovejoy.’ Sarah smiled as I dropped her off. ‘How terribly disappointed Mrs Marsham was about her Regency serving tray!’
‘A serious collector,’ I lied casually.
‘I could see that,’ Sarah said sweetly. ‘I’ll endeavour to make it up to you. Good night.’
I watched her move into the station. She bought a ticket, had it clipped at the barrier and descended the steps. Still in sight, but without turning to look back, she raised a hand in an elegant slow wave while walking on down. I drove off. With idiots like me about, no wonder women are so confident.
That night I was so full of bitterness I hardly slept. Poor Henry’s devotion had missed out, founded as it was on mere holiness. The murderer’s love of the mysterious little pewter Grail wasn’t holy. It was pure greed. This battle was my kind of war after all.
I finally dozed contentedly. I may not be much good at holiness, but I’m bloody good at greed. It’s my subject.
L
ONDON HAS NEARLY
as many street markets as it has streets, but the only ones which matter to me are the antique markets. Naturally, London being London and all, some of the most famous ‘antique markets’ aren’t anything of the sort – like Petticoat Lane, which is mostly for new cheap goods. There’s another slight difficulty: famous street markets with a name known the world over aren’t on the map at all, being called something completely different – also like Petticoat Lane, which is officially Middlesex Street.
In case you ever go, take a tip: ask yourself the all important question, What am I going
for
? It’s pretty vital. Supposing for example you are a diehard collector of antique silver or jewellery. Well, you’d turn off Houndsditch into Exchange Buildings Yard near Cutler Street, the world’s grimiest, dingiest and most prolific antique silver market, about eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. And a real collector will be there long before that, when most of the deals are done. If you are only after second-hand modern furnishings, say, you’d go to Cheshire Street, also near Petticoat Lane, and romp there to your heart’s content. A regular ‘trade’ dealer in antiques will do better going to Portobello
Road – be there at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning to get the real flavour of the world’s only antiques scrum. If on the other hand you’ve got a reliable alarm clock, breeze into the New Caledonian market in darkest Bermondsey, but five o’clock on a wet and windy Friday morning isn’t too early because dealing starts long before that. But the ‘ordinary’ collector (pretending for the moment that there is such a thing) should go to Camden Passage for friendliness and merriment. Go on Saturdays, and arrive mid-mornings like I do, because it has its own nosh bars – all better than Woody’s, you’ll be astonished to learn. There are plenty of others.
I’ve left the Belly last. I’ll set the scene first. Time: Saturday about six a.m., and Lovejoy rolling up exhausted in his crate after a nightmarish journey through the early London streets wondering if the engine was going to give out from fatigue. Place: Portobello Road, near Ladbroke Grove tube station, and already people flocking there. Dealers are always on the site an hour before, but my zoomster wasn’t up to it.
By the time I arrived the entire mile-long crush was alive. Seen from the Westway Flyover it looks like a tin of heaving maggots. No antiques market’s pretty but they’re all beautiful, and the Belly’s most beautiful of all. There isn’t a dealer who won’t sweat blood to help anybody selling or buying. It isn’t just a street market, either. Shops, galleries and antique arcades are there as well crammed into the entire glorious stretch, with alleys and crannies bulging with antiques of all periods – and I do mean all. Care is needed, because for every fixed stall or shop you get maybe ten wandering dealers with things to sell. Like I say, careful. A shop-bound
dealer is likely to be reachable next morning, but strolling footloose dealers will tend to be very fleet of foot. Sykes is one of these.
I started at the south end because one’s thirst is naturally terrible at the finish, when by sheer coincidence one arrives exhausted at the Duke.
Overcoated hard nuts were about, playing the ‘casing game’. You do this by ambling, seeming to pay no real attention to anything except your pal’s chat about Newmarket yet actually collecting details of valuable items. You decide which antiques dealer has most desirable stuff. Then you simply tell your minions to either (a) do over that particular dealer’s home or shop, for the money therein, or (b) steal the main items and hold them for a ransom-price – commonly rumoured to be about a quarter to two-fifths of their retail price. Who pays the ransom, the trader or an insurance company, is largely irrelevant. Circuses have other endearing mannerisms, but ‘going on the case’ is their commonest trade. It does need a certain number of lackeys however. Sykes has plenty.
I passed a couple of hard lads and dropped word I was cross with Sykie. They knew my name and said he was about, while I went looking for pots.
That delectable puce colour on Derby porcelain is really rare, especially done with inset roses by William Billingsley. You find them with a blue-and-gilt border, with a landscape in the plate’s centre by Boreman. I got an option on one, a perfect 1790 piece, all before I’d gone a hundred yards, though genuine chimes belled all around. I was almost in despair after another hundred. No cash, and a perfect ‘banjo’ barometer of West Indian satinwood by Broggi of London about 1787 was sounding sweetly across the crowded pavement.
On I went, dropping a word about Sykie and sinking into gloom at the beauty all the way up the Road. Real –
genuine!
– Sheraton wine tables, Hepplewhite elbow chairs, Regency silverware to melt your heart, flintlock weapons by the immortal Nock and Manton, Meissen chocolate pots with the original handles, early blue and white of ‘Worcester Tonquin Manufacture’ – as the original article of June, 1751, termed it – enough apron-fanned serpentine English sideboards to line both pavements, and Islamic and Continental antiques by the boatload.
I was arguing about a piece of Iznik pottery which I craved when the Sykes brothers tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Dad wants to see you, Lovejoy.’
‘Comrades,’ I said over my shoulder, not letting go of the shallow dish, ‘you can wait, or we’re going to hear the sound of shattered elbows.’
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.