The Sleepers of Erin (13 page)

Somebody up the street was shouting so I broke into a trot, still coughing. I couldn’t afford to get into trouble with the Gardai. The main road was fairly busy with cars. It was easy to slow to a brisk walk among the pedestrians – easy, that is, until Sinead stepped in front of me.

‘Er, hello, Shinny,’ I said brightly. ‘Fancy seeing—’

‘My car’s here.’ She had it parked by the kerb. For a second I dithered, but here was suddenly a free way out. A lift from Sinead, and as long as she got me away from the district pretty fast, I could ditch her and be on my own.

‘Why, thanks, mavourneen.’

‘And you can stop that.’ She was giving me the critical once-over as she slid into the driving seat. I must have looked as though I’d been in an accident, covered in dust with my knuckle skinned. ‘Where to, Lovejoy?’

‘Oh, anywhere. I’m in a hurry.’

We drove past the street where folk were beginning to congregate to goggle at those grotesque rear wheels. Shinny slowed, but I ahemed in annoyance and she accelerated past. I drew breath to make some cheerful crack about parking being such hell in Dublin, but thought better of it.

‘We can’t just drive anywhere, Lovejoy.’

‘The National Museum, then.’ That would be as good a place to ditch her as any. To show I honestly had no such intention in mind I said, ‘If we get separated, meet at the Book of Kells, right? And I’ll pay your entrance fee,’ I finished grandly, remembering I owed her from the pub the night Joxer got done.

She shot me a mistrustful glance. ‘Are you all right for money?’

‘Thank you,’ I replied gravely. ‘Just been to the bank.’

The museum didn’t look much, but its displays were out of this world. A uniformed bloke sold me catalogues and let us in. ‘Here, Shinny,’ I whispered, ‘did he get the prices right?’ Some of the costlier-looking booklets were priced absurdly low. Sinead told me to keep quiet or the civil servants would put them up double. ‘Got them here too, eh?’ I was commiserating, when we hit the Derrynaflan display. It occupied almost the whole of the central recessed floor, case after case of the fabulous treasure with comparison pieces from earlier finds. I should have said it hit me, because my chest banged and quivered at the sudden impact and the floor sailed from under.

‘Lovejoy!’ Sinead had hold of me, grunting with strain under my weight. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying, ‘thank you,’ to an attendant who came helping. My legs went funny again as I tried to struggle away towards that dazzling display but she hissed abuse in my ear and obediently I sat on one of the benches. An arrangement of Irish glass impeded my vision of the cases, but the vibrations thrummed out into my whole being. I was shivering like a newborn foal and sweating cobs. ‘He’s not long from hospital,’ Sinead was excusing to the attendants. ‘He only needs a minute or two.’

‘And not a drop in the place,’ the senior uniform soulfully deplored, obviously burned up about a longstanding issue. People all about nodded understandingly.

‘He’ll be fine. A quiet sit.’

Heads shaking at this proof of an unmet need, they drifted and left us. While the museum resettled to torpor, Sinead delivered me a furious lecture in a suppressed hate-filled whisper. She called me callous, thoughtless, stupid, hopeless, bone-headed, selfish and ignorant. All I could do was sit there in the bliss-giving glow of that miraculous treasure find set in the glass cases.

‘And furthermore, Lovejoy,’ Sinead hissed into my poor old worn-out earhole, ‘you haven’t even asked how it is I’m here.’

‘How is it you are here, alannah? I thought you’d written me off.’

‘I’m sorry I called you all those things in the Priory ruins. The night sister told me later you’d rung up asking for me and she had refused to give my location.’

‘Then Tinker, I suppose?’

‘Tinker sent me to Lyn. The twins told me.’ She sounded close to tears.

‘Gabby little sods.’

‘And what’s between you and Lyn, Lovejoy?’

‘Help me up, love.’

She did, but crossly. ‘You get five minutes gawping at this rubbish, then it’s eating quietly you’ll be for a while.’

Well, five minutes was better than none.

‘It’s thankful I am to you, mavourneen.’

‘And you can just stop that.’

I said gravely, ‘Would you be knowing where the other verbs are in Ireland?’

Sister Morrison at last revealed her true colours. ‘Just shut up, Lovejoy,’ she said.

* * *

Irish nosh bars are as grotty as ours any day. We found this side-street one full of guitar-laden posters and stained tables, just like home. Beans inedible, bread soaked to extinction. Lovely. Sinead had tried to insist on a posher place but I won by pleading queer legs so we slurped together in unison, trying for silence.

Then over a good cup of tea she asked me about the crowd in That Street, and wouldn’t be deflected when I tried my beam of dumb innocence. ‘That street with the car sticking out of the shop window,’ she added pointedly.

‘Really? Honestly, the sights these days.’

‘Fenner and Storr,’ she went quietly on. ‘Printers and antiquarians, near the park. You mentioned they owed you.’

‘I did? Ah well, I just dropped in.’

Her eyes were on her cup. ‘You might have been killed.’

If she’d seen me do it, what the hell. I explained how I’d sent them the money for a genuine first edition of Milton and been posted a shammer, a copy the two rogues had fake-printed themselves. The sheer absence of vibes had told me it was dud.

‘And you didn’t even need to
look
?’

‘Right.’

She glanced out towards the museum and gave a shiver. ‘So your performance in the museum . . . ?’

‘Too many vibes all at once.’

‘It’s spooky.’

Angered, I grabbed her coat with my good hand. ‘It’s nothing of the kind, Shinny. It’s detectable love, the love the craftsman had for his creation, the love instilled into an antique by its admirers over the centuries.’

Her hand reached up and held mine, locked on her lapel though it was. She seemed suddenly shy, not furious at all.

‘Everybody else looks at antiques and sees only money, Lovejoy.’

‘That’s only their excuse. Money’s respectable, love’s embarrassing. So they say it’s investment. Deep down, they all know it’s love.’

She had my hand in hers now. ‘Don’t trust your belief too far, darling, will you?’

‘Me? Trust? An antique dealer?’ I was still laughing at her innocence when we rose to go. Honestly, the blind folly of women.

‘I’ll pay,’ she said evenly. ‘Then you can tell me all about the Derrynaflan hoard.’

Everybody must know of it by now. The real treasure, and the legends which have sprouted in so very short a time. Already there’s a million versions of the story. Here’s only one:

Once upon a time, this angler goes fishing in County Tipperary. His son has one of these metal detector things for his birthday and gets a bleep. Naturally he shouts his dad, who comes to look. They dig down to an inverted bronze dish, which covers an enormous decorated chalice, a strainer, a communion paten and a circular stand. Okay, maybe the clear stunning similarities with the great Ardagh find a century back escaped our intrepid angler, and maybe the shattering artistic evocations of the Tara Brooch did not spring instantly to his mind that day, but he clearly knew his duty. He rushed to report – and legend has him variously hawking his news about all Saturday and Sunday trying to find some authority to tell, or forlornly going back to the field to sit on guard till some bureaucrat sleepily came to.

Well, there’s no stopping Irish storymakers with such a plum. You can imagine the hilarious accounts that have been invented or passed on – how at last the penny dropped, the message got through and teams of archaeologists cavalcaded across Ireland to the monastic site of St Ruadhan of Lorrha and collared the lot. And how the Dublin papers grimly reminded everybody of recent notorious scandals where archaeological treasures had been flogged to the highest (and in the antiques game that usually means the quickest) bidder.

Of course, the Derrynaflan hoard is almost beyond belief. Precious in its own right, it ranks high in the ranks of the discovered treasures anywhere.

‘Look at Gallows Hill,’ I enthused, my eyes misting at the thought of all thirty-three Roman silver spoons, the gold hinge-bow satyr buckle and the partially completed eight-stone rings, the engraved gems and the preciousmetal ring blanks, the emeralds, the silver strainers, the gold necklaces and bracelets, the garnets and amethysts. ‘A Roman goldsmith’s entire workstore.’

We were back in the museum by then, among the museum’s crowd, me going on nineteen to the dozen about other finds even more weird and almost as wonderful. The little brass token in a box of rubbishy old buttons and scrap coins in North Yorkshire – which turned out to be a unique hammered gold Tudor Saint George noble of Henry VIII’s reign, previously unknown except for a mention in a Flemish merchant’s sixteenth-century handbook. Everybody finds the bloody things but me.

‘You don’t have to dig for Troy, love,’ I said, husky from being in the vicinity of that breathtakingly lovely chalice, huge and embellished. ‘I’ve seen a Gujerat medal from a button jar. A valuable group of
ojime
– a Japanese bead to hang on the end of a cord which suspends an
inro
carrying box for seals or medicines – sewn on a school kid’s bean bag. And fortunes in old slung-out handbags on street barrows – a Saxon silver penny, a mint and valuable boxlet of ladies’ cheek patches straight out of Beau Brummel’s period, and gold buttons, gold necklets, gold toothpicks . . .’

A little girl tugged at my trouser leg, lifting her arms to be hiked. Still prattling to the amused Sinead – though why women laugh at me like they do I’ll never know – I one-armed the infant up and let myself be steered through the press of crowds and cases. The little girl kicked her heels and imperiously pointed, one hand clutching my nape hair.

‘. . . an ancient Egyptian votive scarab, and
not
a crummy plastic Brit Muzz repro . . .’

Actually, you have to smile. We wound up at one of the cases of Celtic gold torcs quite tastefully arranged, but they could have gone to a bit more trouble over the background.

I was going on, ‘An Inca bead, two Benin dice—’

‘There!’ The little girl was triumphantly banging her tiny flat hand on the case glass. ‘Like mine! See?’

‘Like what, love?’ I asked blankly. She tugged at her hair in exasperation and I saw she wore a hooped thing to keep her hair in place, like the twins. It was gilt plastic. ‘You mean your headband?’

‘Alice band,’ she said with scorn.

‘Beautiful, love. Really great.’ I handed her over to her breathless mother, while Sinead was being all amused nearby. ‘. . . and a piece of an abacus, only seventeenth century but not to be sneezed at, and . . .’

‘Go on,’ Sinead was saying. ‘I’m loving all this.’

‘. . . and . . .’ I looked after the little girl. Then at the torc case. Then after the little girl. Then back.

‘What is it, Lovejoy?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, third go, after a lot of throat clearing.

But it was very definitely something. It’s called knowledge. I knew why we were all here in Ireland, why Joxer had been crisped. And about that phoney Slav they called Kurak – no more Slav than me. And why the Heindricks wanted –
needed
– me. Nobody else would do. No wonder Lena Heindrick had pulled out all the stops. No wonder. The hooped Alice band. The hoop of iron in the ash of Joxer’s shed. And the hoops of gold torcs in the cases around us.

‘No bloody wonder what, Lovejoy?’ Sinead was asking.

‘Eh?’ I must have spoken aloud. ‘Oh, nothing, love. Look. Can you give me a lift?’

‘Where to?’

‘You drive. I’ll direct,’ I said, pushing through towards the exit and leaving her to hurry after.

But I meant Kilfinney.

Sinead’s car was gone. Nicked. I ask you.

Broad daylight, peaceful old Dublin town, people everywhere, and Sinead’s car lifted by some drunken nerk. While Sinead rang the Gardai I perched on the wall outside and looked amiably about. Nobody I recognized, no big black Daimlers, and no sexy over-perfumed ladies with slightly foreign accents.

While Sinead marched out to confront the Garda who motored up and resignedly let himself be harangued repeatedly – women love saying the same thing; they think it’s proof – I let my own mind drift back to the central problem of Kilfinney, poor dead Joxer, and now this business of Sinead’s stolen car. We were stuck, stymied. With the car-hire firms under the eagle eye of Kurak the phoney Slav, and possibly with Jason’s military brain ticking menacingly this side of the Irish Sea, a quick unperceived dash to Kilfinney was out of the question. The only good thing was that Lena and her strong-arm squad couldn’t simply zoom on ahead and hang about till I came, because Lena had no way of guessing I knew that Kilfinney was the place she had rigged the scam. My main aim, now I’d rumbled her, was not to let on. Uneasily I wondered if it might be my one card.

Sinead was heatedly winding up her statement to the weary bobby. I felt sorry for him, but telling the truth would have made him wearier still so I said nothing. Sinead did a big finish, bleating about ruffians and Making Streets Safe For Ordinary Folk. Sundry aged birds nodded and tutted indignantly. One even joined in – exactly the same thing had happened three years ago to her sister’s boy’s motor over in Sligo, and what were the Gardai doing about
that
she wanted to know.

I just sat and thought about Kurak cracking his fingers down in that courtyard.

If I hadn’t been so slow I’d have sussed him long before. What was it he’d answered, driving me home from hospital? ‘Yooorr serffint fur life, modom.’ Yes, Kurak was your actual dyed-in-the-wool grovelling serf – but he’d said lo-iff. Only Cockneys can make two syllables out of a miserable titch of a word like life. I’d even thought of Keats misspelling that sea-spray bit. The smile started on my face, gradually creeping into the corners of me, then splitting into a wide hundred-per-cent grin. And sweat started trickling down my neck, but it was only relief. My whole body sagged. Suddenly I was on holiday, chirpy, restful and happy all at one go. Because I knew Kurak. He was that big knuckle-cracking Cockney bloke who now lived in the Midlands. And it
was
Northampton, that auction where he’d pulled the sleeper trick time after time. I remembered now.