The Possessions of a Lady (5 page)

So I made a zillion phone calls while the going was good,
ransacked the place for stray money (found two ten-quid notes and a mound of
coins; Thekla hates change, pollinates every shelf with deposits of the stuff).
I hoped she'd leave her scented soaps, though they made me stink like a
chemist's, because proper soap's expensive and I get sick of stand-up washes in
well water using soap made of bacon fat and ashes. It's cheap, but wears you
out.

The water barrel I drained and filled with clean tap water. No way
to store electricity or gas. I brewed up, noshed everything I could find in a
great hot fry-up, ate a mystifying jar of small mushrooms (quite good really;
the label said they were truffles; I was really pleased; George III was crazy
for them). I slung ajar of Gentleman's Relish because you need a whole meal to
go with it and my prospects weren't that promising.

Thinking of the economic outlook at Lovejoy Antiques, Inc., I
ordered a picnic hamper, instant delivery, from Griffin's Stores ('Emperor Size
Hampers For Celebratory Occasions') on Thekla's credit card, couldn't think of
anything else so told them to send me three pairs of socks. I'm not much of a
thief. I wish I was. I ordered seven pizzas from the fast foodery but they
wouldn't bike them out to the village, lazy swine. Then the credit cards were
stopped. At this point I made the mistake of answering the telephone.

'Who?' I said guardedly. 'No, Lovejoy isn't here.'

It was a northern accent, restful the way your home town's broad
speech always is.

T have the right number, though?' She hesitated, laughed prettily.
Did I know that voice?

'What's it for?' My confidence returned. Bailiffs lack hesitancy,
and don't have pretty laughs.

'To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?'

My heart warmed to her. Who'd she said, Stella Somebody? I'd not
heard such eloquence since I'd left the north. Those Manchester-based TV sagas
ignore the north's politenesses, so they get everything wrong—accents, speech
rhythms, words. There was honest politeness in my native slum. Its speech just
sounds rougher, if you've got the wrong ears.

'Bran Mantle.' I shrugged a mental shrug. Make up names, you don't
get caught. 'Can I take a message?'

'It's the bi-centenary. Would Lovejoy come and give a talk?'

'What sort of talk exactly?' I asked. If they were rich I would
cull a deposit, then not turn up.

'Why, antiques! It's his subject, isn't it?'

'Er, would there be any antiques?'

'Oh, yes!' She gave that disarming laugh. 'We've all got his
little how-to book! It will be quite an antiques occasion!'

The pretty voice instantly moved from a nuisance to adorable. I
went giddy with greed. A whole antiques show? With me the sole arbiter?
Christmas, come early.

'Well,' I said airily, 'I might be able to persuade him. He's
hoping to get to your bi-centenary.'

'He is?’ She was delighted. 'Stupendous!'

She gave me her name and address. I promised to corner that
elusive Lovejoy.

'Er, one thing, Stella.' Time to improvise. 'Lovejoy has special
rules about antiques.'

'I quite understand! We'll agree, of course!' Agree to anything I
might say? I had to sit down. 'Thank you so much. The parish will really
appreciate it. May I call you Bran?'

'Who?' Oh, me. In mutual confusion we rang off.

When you're thrown onto your own resources, you have to sink to a
working system.

We once had a peer of our realm who replied to an invitation from
the (then) Prince of Wales, no less, by telegram: Regret must decline
invitation. Lie follows by post. I can't remember if Lord Charles Beresford got
away with it or ended up in a dank dark dungeon, but there's a lesson in there.
It's this: honesty is so rare it's always a risk, the stuff of exclamation
marks.

With Thekla gone, removing my last financial prop, honesty had to
go. In that next hour I rang several people, including Liza at the local
newspaper, and announced that I was guest of honour at a great antiques
festival to celebrate the bi-centenary of. . . of where? Anyway, I said it was
a prestige slot, said royalty would be there, and rang off before I was forced
to invent precise details. It wore me out, so I gorged a pound of Wensleydale
cheese and two packets of chocolate biscuits I'd missed, brewed my last brew,
and lay on my divan to reflect on the art of sexual flagellation and the very,
very valuable Berkley Horse from the stall of the exotic Aureole. It was mine!

It's easy saying I should've told Aureole the truth. But nobody
ever does. Think of the mighty legend of Yamashita's Treasure in the
Philippines. That World War II Japanese general hoarded a two-ton mega-ingot of
platinum. Every so often this giant blob is discovered—and turns out to be an
unexploded mine, ship's anchor, discarded oil drum, et phoney cetera. Cynics
note that each trumpeted finding sends platinum's market price tumbling in
America, Hong Kong, London. But the legend, and its excited re-re-discovery,
surges on, powered by the 'three-quarters' tax Manila imposes on treasure.

No. People who find treasure—even if they pay only ten-pence in Bermondsey
market—think only 'It's mine! All mine!' Hang sharing, unless you're compelled.
I should have remembered that, but I was in mid-gloat.

My system arrived at, making one mistake after another, I searched
that jacket, and found a message in the pocket somebody had tried to dip at the
show.

It read,

         
'Lovejoy,

         
         
Supper,
my guest, the Quayside, seven?

         
         
Please!
Reason, money.'

No signature. Woman's handwriting, more roundish than a man's. The
paper was one of those sticky squares that you use to remind yourself to buy
mayonnaise today by fixing it on the mound of similar self-messages ignored for
months. This had a headline: Orla Maltravers Featherstonehaugh, phone number,
Mayfair address. If I had a name like that I'd keep quiet. But a free meal was
a free meal. Hunger stirred.

Search for Tinker's lost girl Vyna, poor thing, or go for gold
with this unknown lady? I knocked guilt out cold, first round. As the thunder
did its stuff I rang anybody I knew with a motor. Finally, I got Roger, who had
a scheme. I pretended interest, said give me a lift to town. His greed agreed
for him, said he'd be round in half an hour.

Roger Boxgrove isn't called that but isn't half a million years
old, either. (I'll explain in a sec.) He'd bought a new Jaguar by pure lies. I
like travelling with class.

5

‘Come in with me, Lovejoy,' Roger said, shooting his gruesome
diamond cufflinks to blind other motorists. His motor is the size of our
village hall.

'Ta, no.'

'Easy pickings. Two skulls and a pelvis yesterday. Money for jam.'

Not jam, exactly. Grave robbing is grave robbing. I didn't say so,
because we weren't even at Wormingford and I didn't want to have to trudge
through the rainstorm.

'Any genuine, Rodge?'

'Nar.' He's one of the few people who can do a scornful chuckle.
He honked a tardy Rover on the Horkesley slope. 'Genuine's trouble. Fake is
simple.'

You have to admire a real artist. Roger's scam was almost perfect,
a true perennial.

He'd come across it in an old newspaper, and kaboom! The perfect
money machine! You can try it yourself, but by the time you read this you'll
not be alone.

It happened back in May 1994, when this flashy modern Roger
Boxgrove was born. The original Roger Boxgrove is long dead, but still
around—in bits. Half a million years ago, the prototype Roger walked out in
southern England questing for food. He was everything a man should be: tall,
strong, fit as a flea. He moved with brisk strides, sure of his strength.

Roger carried flint tools—a stone axe, a skinning knife. He was a
highly skilled huntsman; marks on his stone axe prove it. Probably he skinned
the dead prey of lions that then abounded, and made off with the meat. England
was different then. Giant stags roamed, rhino, packs of small vicious wolves.

Life was almost as dangerous as now. It was in Boxgrove Quarry
chalk pit that Roger met his doom. We don't know exactly how. Maybe from a
fall, some predator. Anyway, down went Roger—to be discovered in diggings.
They've only got fragments of Roger. They called him Boxgrove, after the
quarry.

He's dated from secondary evidence: 600,000 years ago water voles
had different teeth; those giant deer and rhinos went extinct some 480,000
years since, those numbers that scientists talk. Sizing and sexing bones isn't
hard.

These find sites are always pandemonium. Interest drives us, of
course, but the main force is avarice. There are fortunes to be made there.
Discoveries don't have to be wondrous troves from Troy like that scoundrel
Schliemann conned and smuggled, no. Human artefacts are the front runners these
days. Why? Because now we're all lost, and want to know who we are. Overnight
'Roger Boxgrove' became as famous as a pop star. Quarries were raided by night.
Museum robberies soared. And a new confidence trickster was born. Guess who.

Enter no-good scrounger Napier Montrose Shelvenham, of no fixed
abode. He immediately called himself Roger Boxgrove—there's no copyright in
titles—and started selling bits of bone, flint chips, 'Stone Age tools' from
Sussex, Surrey, Kent, and anywhere else he could spell.

So this penniless chiseller in those first few glorious months
sold any bone he could get hold of, claiming they were from the world-famous
Boxgrove Quarry. It's an antiques fact that fraudsters get help from
God-fearing truthsayers like you and me. They also get help from
administrators. Proof: some English Heritage geezer actually announced to TV
cameras within millisecs of the Great Find that he'd give more details
when the skull is found next summer
!
Gulp! Everybody assumed that somebody was secretly concealing more skeleton
bits.

This modern Roger provided—provides—more and more bits. I've seen
him sell hippopotamus teeth, any old zoo bones, suitably aged in the Piltdown
Skull manner. Roger uses stains because he hasn't the patience to bury them in
Pittsbury Ramparts, which is how us fraudsters age fake weapons. He sells to
museums overseas. A thousand zlotniks here, two thousand there, mounts up, if
you do seventy-two cash-on-the-nail sales a week. He bribes the Inland Revenue,
usual terms.

'Fakery is always simpler, Lovejoy,' he was saying. 'God help my
business if I ever have to go straight. Poverty's murder. Short of women, grub,
gelt. Who needs it?'

'Mmmh,' I went, knowing the feeling. 'What'll you do if the
museums rumble you?'

'They won't.' He dabbed the dashboard. Treacly music flowed. 'Know
why, Lovejoy? Because they're only inches from fame. One bone turns out genuine
Boxgrove Man, and they're on the TV talk circuit for life.'

You have to admire class, like I say.

'A north Suffolk sexton's coming in. Digs the graves,
tenth-century church. I'll ship out to every corner of the planet.' He eyed me,
conjecture in his gaze. 'We could make a killing, Lovejoy.'

'What could I do, Rodge?' He fought a slow Ford for the middle
lane, the g force dragging my cheeks. We made life by a whisker. 'All I do is
detect genuine antiques. I'd bankrupt you because all your relics are fake.'

He sighed, testy. Con merchants hate reason. 'That's the point. A
Lovejoy certificate of authenticity'd bring in fortunes. My business'd
quadruple! You heard of venuses?' He guffawed, overtook a brewer's dray. The
carthorse shied, its driver hauling and cursing. I shrank in my seat.

'You mean the artefacts?'

'What else?'

It hurts to talk of others' good fortune, always so undeserved.
These so-called 'venuses' are figures of antler, ivory, some of stone.
Grimaldi, from the Menton caves, bordering Italy and France. Everybody knows
the tale, how the French antique dealer Louis Jullien found some little Ice Age
carvings. They weren't much to look at, just dumpy females with steatopygous
bums, crude faces. But, over 20,000 years old, you can't knock them, and M.
Jullien got well over a dozen. Their Museum of National Antiquities collared
half as many. That's how things lay for a hundred years, because Jullien
emigrated to Canada before 1900. The Peabody, Harvard, bought one delectable
venus from Jullien's daughter half a century later, and that was it.

This next bit's even more painful. A Canadian lately bought a
handful of these priceless Ice Age venuses—secret word is for 75 quid—in
Montreal, browsing round an antique shop. News spread. Prime Ministers and
governments became involved. The common danger? Only 150 such Ice Age artefacts
are known for certain, and 'belong to all mankind.' Meaning we're sulking at
the luck of others. Jealousy, in a word.

'Goldbricking every dig,' Roger was enthusing.

'Ta, Rodge.' I got out a strangled, 'No.'

'Provisional?' he asked, grinning.