The Sleepers of Erin

by Jonathan Gash

  THE SLEEPERS OF ERIN

  The Lovejoy series

  The Judas Pair

  Gold from Gemini

  The Grail Tree

  Spend Game

  The Vatican Rip

  Firefly Gadroon

  The Sleepers of Erin

  The Gondola Scam

  Pearlhanger

  The Tartan Ringers

  Moonspender

  Jade Woman

  The Very Last Gambado

  The Great California Game

  The Lies of Fair Ladies

  Paid and Loving Eyes

  The Sin Within Her Smile

  The Grace in Older Women

  The Possessions of a Lady

  The Rich and the Profane

  A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

  Every Last Cent

  Ten Word Game

  Faces in the Pool

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Collins (The Crime Club), 1983

  This edition published by C&R Crime,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Jonathan Gash, 1983

  The right of Jonathan Gash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-293-5 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-295-9 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover illustration: Peter Mac; Cover design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

  A story for Freda and hers, for Susan, Glen,

  Babs, and Yvonne,

  who wanted such a start.

  This book is dedicated as a humble offering to the memory of the ancient Chinese god T’ai Sui, who afflicts with poverty and pestilence all those who do not dedicate humble offerings to his memory.

  Lovejoy

  Chapter 1

  Everybody wants them.

  You want them. I want them. Everybody. The poor in the gutter, famous actresses, millionaires on yachts, robbers clinging to drainpipes, dreamers, hookers, killers. Everybody.

  And what are they, these things?

  They are exquisite. Beautiful. Breathtaking, crammed with soul and love. They also happen to be inflation-proof. They resist monetary devaluation and wars, plagues, famines, holocausts and the Great Crash.

  They’re antiques.

  The trouble is, there’s blood on most. I should know, because I’m an antique dealer. Yes, your actual quiet, friendly, placid bloke who sells you old pots and paintings and things in perfect tranquillity.

  This story starts where I’m bleeding to death.

  Hospitals always stink of ether, though they say it’s not used much now. Like in most places, nothing ever really changes. The ceilings whizzing past overhead looked cracked and unpainted, the bulbs and fluorescents grubby, not a lampshade in sight. All those big lagged pipes still there. The swing doors in Emergency had been replaced by flexible flaps since last time, but they came together with an appalling crash just the same. Hospitals kill me. The nurses had the same massive watches pinned to their bosoms, to put your eye out when they lean over you. I tried telling the prettiest one it was only an accident, honest, and not to call the police.

  ‘You shut up,’ she said crossly. ‘I’ve had quite enough from you in the ambulance. There’s blood everywhere. It’ll take hours clearing up.’

  A detached voice said, ‘Is this the injured tramp?’

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ I croaked.

  ‘You shut up,’ the nurse said again.

  ‘How did it happen?’ that detached voice demanded

  I said, ‘I fell.’

  ‘You shut up,’ the nurse said.

  A house doctor looking like a knackered teenager said bitterly, ‘The bastard’s O rhesus negative.’

  Five faces glared hate down at me, as if blood groups are anybody’s fault. An older voice, just as tired, said anyway it would have to be the operating theatre and to call out the anaesthetist. ‘Take him into Number Three. Another plasma, and do a rapid crossmatch.’

  It sounded horrible. ‘Look,’ I said upwards, trying to be helpful. ‘Don’t go to a lot of trouble—’

  They all said together, ‘You shut up.’ Manners no different, either.

  I woke up some time during the night feeling sick. Somebody had a tin thing under my chin. A fob watch donged my eyeball. Skilled hands mangled my damaged arm so I almost screamed with the pain. A light seared into my skull. Torture’s gentler.

  ‘Yes, he’s conscious,’ a bird’s voice said.

  A pleasant-looking bloke was standing patiently by when finally I came to. He tiptoed solicitously forwards. ‘Lovejoy?’ The kindest voice I’d heard yet.

  ‘Mmmmh?’

  He smiled, full of compassion. ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said. That brought a wash of memory. It made me groan.

  ‘You shut up,’ the nurse said.

  Fingringhoe Church is out on the sea-marshes. Miles from anywhere. In fact, it’s even miles from Fingringhoe, which only goes to prove something or other.

  I’d been in this lonely church, kipping on one of the rear pews after Sal had gone home, and thinking myself alone. A voice woke me, echoing.

  ‘It’s okay!’ it said. ‘All clear.’

  Clarkie’s voice was instantly recognizable. Sensibly, I kept still so I made no noise. Clarkie always was stupid, hadn’t the sense to suss the church casually as if he were just admiring the stained-glass windows. I lay on the pew, tired out after Sal but amused at listening to Clarkie’s ponderous footfalls in the aisle. He’s subtle as a salvo.

  ‘Fasten that bleeding door, Sam.’

  The church door boomed to, sending echoes round the interior. He must have his partner Sam Veston with him, a no-hope knife man if ever there was one. Talk about antique dealers. They say they’re experts on pre-Victorian domestic furniture, which is hilarious. They’re thick.

  ‘What we do first, Clarkie?’ Sam sounded nervous.

  ‘Silver. There’ll be a safe in here somewhere.’

  They were somewhere down the church now. I sat up quietly to watch Clarkie and Sam set to work on the vestry door.

  Sam asked, ‘Whose was that frigging great Bentley?’

  ‘Dunno. Some bird doing the church flowers.’

  ‘She took long enough,’ Sam grumbled.

  I smiled. That would have been Sal, leaving for home. Clarkie and Sam must have waited in the hedgerows while Sal and I made love on the back pew. I’d come earlier on foot so they’d assumed Sal was alone. Incidentally, don’t go thinking that loving in church is the height of blasphemy. It’s God’s full-time occupation. Anyway, Sal has an influential husband who would see me off if we were rumbled.

  This infamous pair were interesting. I’d never seen anybody (else, that is) carrying out a ro
bbery in person before. Clarkie had tried the vestry door and was standing to one side while Sam rummaged in the lock with a spider – that’s an improvised key made of bent wires. You shape it as you go. Very much trial-and-error, but that’s all you can expect from antique dealers these days. Now, if Sam had taken the trouble to learn how a splendid three-centuries-old lock was constructed, or had the slightest inkling of the beautiful workmanship which had gone into it when the ancient locksmith crafted it . . . I sighed. Antique dealers haven’t a clue. Pathetic. God knows why, but dealers always want to prove that ignorance really is bliss. It honestly beats me. I could have turned that lock without breaking my stride. Clarkie is a minor antique dealer who ‘specializes’ in everything. He hangs hopefully on the coat-tails of any dealer rumoured to have a cerebral cortex, and picks up the odd trade swap now and then. Thick as a plank, the biggest deal he’d ever done was a quarter share in a piece of Derby, that costly John Milton figure holding a scroll. (You’ll still occasionally come across Derby pieces in junk shops, but not as often as you used to.) I saw it, a luscious gold-touched white about 1776 or so. It was genuine, but that was entirely miscalculation on Clarkie’s part. He is your actual average antique dealer, which is to say an incompetent, acerebral buffoon whose idea of research is somewhere to the left of guesswork. That deal was a year ago and I knew Clarkie was now on his uppers, though I had never known him do a church over before. It was an interesting sidelight on my colleagues, and I observed their progress with delighted fascination.

  ‘What about a hammer and chisel, Clarkie?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Right. Smash the bloody thing.’

  I wasn’t having that. ‘You dare,’ I said.

  They yelped. Clarkie dropped his bag of tools with a crash. Sam had sprinted halfway to the door before they realized it was only me and screeched to a stop.

  ‘It’s Lovejoy,’ Clarkie gasped.

  ‘Christ.’ Sam was grey-faced from fright. ‘I thought it was the Old Bill.’

  ‘You silly sod, Lovejoy.’ Clarkie mopped his face. ‘Made me come over queer. What you doing here?’

  I scoffed, ‘I wouldn’t pay you in marbles, Clarkie.’

  ‘We’re just . . . just doing a lift,’ Clarkie said apologetically. Sam looked from Clarkie to me and began to edge towards the church door. That was in case I ran out yelling for the peelers.

  ‘And you’re not going to stop us,’ Sam added. He pulled out his knife and held it loosely at waist height, a really sinister threat calculated to strike terror into the most savage nun. You have to laugh. No wonder antique dealers have a bad name.

  ‘Piss off, Sam,’ I said, getting up and walking past him to join Clarkie, my footsteps echoing from the stone-flagged flooring. I noticed the church was not as bright now. The daylight was seeping from the sky and the hard sun shadows were ashed into a sad grey.

  Clarkie backed off as I approached. ‘Now, Lovejoy, mate,’ he began nervously. ‘This scam’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You’re right.’ I toed his bag of tools. It clanked like a shunting yard. They must have brought every tool they owned. ‘And it’s nothing to do with you, either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean get lost, Clarkie.’ I grinned. ‘I’ll count to ten and you hide, eh?’

  Sam spoke up. ‘It’s only a cloth job, for Chrissakes.’ I should have listened to the despair in his voice and saved myself an operation, but maybe I was too clapped out. Anyway, I didn’t. ‘Cloth job’ means robbing a church, an enterprise with a very respectable history if you think about it. Nowadays it’s so common it’s almost routine. There’s hardly an antique dealer in England who bothers to ask any more where you got that old chalice or ciborium. Auctioneers are twice as bad, having no reputation to lose.

  ‘Not today, Sam,’ I told him. Honestly, to this day I don’t know why I was taking this attitude, especially over a run-of-the-mill cloth job. Even priests are hard at it, flogging their own church silver on the side. Maybe it was the lingering sense of Sal’s loving, whatever. Anyway, right or wrong I decided not to let them do it.

  ‘You know we’ve got to, Clarkie,’ Sam wailed. Which should have alerted me even more.

  ‘You’ve got not to, Clarkie,’ I corrected. ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘Erm . . .’ He swallowed, eyed me.

  I was honestly surprised, yet another warning bleep. Clarkie had seen me angry once, and I know for a fact he was very, very glad to be neutral on that occasion.

  ‘Clarkie,’ I warned gently, and he nodded. The bag clonked against his thigh as he picked it up and walked towards the door.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Sam squawked, but he trotted obediently after Clarkie. Smiling, I shut the door gently behind us and crossed the gravel with them to where their old van was parked. They must have left it in a lay-by up the lane towards the village until Sal left.

  ‘Now, lads,’ I said as the engine coughed into action. ‘You two nellies leave this place alone, right?’ I shook a warning finger at them as the van began to roll. ‘I’ll count the teaspoons. Cheers, Clarkie.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Clarkie muttered, but I could see he was dismayed. I wouldn’t have thought a mere interruption would have him terrified as all that, but then I wasn’t thinking.

  I’d actually turned away when I heard Sam yell, ‘You bastard, Lovejoy!’ Like a nerk I paused affably, and felt a searing pain swipe through my left arm above the elbow. Sam bawled, ‘Off, Clarkie!’ The van scattered gravel. Its wheels spun and the engine roared, and there I was, left standing in a country churchyard fifty million miles from anywhere, staring stupidly at my arm with my brilliant scarlet blood spurting out into the air in front of me going shish-shish-shish.

  For one instant I was quite unconcerned, wondering mildly what had happened and casually touching my arm where the blood was spouting. There was no further pain. Then, in a horrid cold terror, I realized. Sam had flung his knife. My artery was cut – my fucking artery was cut and I was frigging dying.

  I tore off my jacket, blood going everywhere, ripped off my shirt sleeve and wrapped it round in a clumsy knot and got the blood stopped. I went back inside and used a candlestick to wind the tourniquet tighter, then ran.

  About three minutes later, I reeled into the church organist’s cottage in a worse state than China but alive. The old geezer had a certificate in first aid. He had a high old time, and nearly killed me enjoying himself doing complicated splints and knots until the ambulance came and took me prisoner and nurses were saying you just shut up.

  Chapter 2

  The police gave me two days before I was officially charged. It was quite a ceremony. My arm was sutured, the artery repaired, thank God. The nurses were behaving abominably, as if I’d done myself an injury on purpose just to annoy them. They’d hardly said a word to me, slamming about the ward and heaving me about like a sack of nuisance.

  The chap in the next bed was a misanthrope, a real prophet of doom called Smith, accused of osteoarthritis. A worse temper, and he could have slipped on to the hospital staff unnoticed. Opposite me was a cheerful little bloke with a gastric ulcer. It was old Smith told me I would be charged that morning.

  ‘You’re for the high jump, old son,’ he said with relish. ‘Nicking stuff from churches.’

  ‘That can’t be right.’ I was so confident. I was a hero. (I’d prevented a crime, right?)

  ‘You wait.’

  ‘Tell ’em the tale, Lovejoy,’ the gastric ulcer called across. ‘I’ll alibi you for fifty quid.’ He fell about at this witticism.

  Sister Morrison, our ward sister, came in then to tell us to shut up. I liked her, really, a quiet if bossy Irish lass, mid-thirties, in dark blue. She brought two coppers in and stood formally aside while they did their thing.

  ‘Lovejoy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re police officers,’ the older one said. ‘I’m Detective-Sergeant Ledger.’

  ‘Congratulations. What’s this arrest
bit?’

  ‘Theft of church property.’

  ‘Please can you be a little more specific?’ I asked politely.

  He smiled a wintry smile over a notebook. ‘More specifically, two chalices, two patens, one ciborium and one monstrance. All precious metals. And,’ he added with relish, ‘one brass candlestick.’

  There was a protracted silence, enjoyed by some more than others. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Erm, wasn’t the vestry door locked?’

  ‘Opened by a skilled hand,’ Ledger said. ‘Yours.’

  I thought, well, well. Odderer and odderer. And I thought I’d been a hero.

  ‘You’re a long shot, Lovejoy,’ he continued. ‘What with your record, and that paten being found in your cottage.’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Gastric Ulcer cracked, ‘our alibi deal’s off.’

  ‘You’ve had it, son,’ Smith prophesied. A nurse hissed at him to shut up.

  Sister Morrison was looking at me. ‘Are you all right, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Mmmmh?’ I’d been thinking. ‘Oh, yes, ta.’

  The Old Bill was in his element. ‘You will be brought to trial—’

  ‘Sure, sure. Look,’ I said, because you can’t help worrying about small things. ‘Don’t mind my asking, but what paten in my cottage?’

  ‘The one in your cistern.’

  ‘We had a search warrant,’ the assistant peeler said with pride.

  ‘Well done,’ I said absently. ‘And the rest of the stuff?’

  ‘Only you know the answer to that, Lovejoy.’

  ‘It’s disgraceful!’ Sister Morrison snapped. ‘A grown man robbing an unprotected church!’

  I ignored her and spoke directly to the Old Bill. ‘What’s your theory, Ledger? That I sliced my arm, ran home in daylight carrying a load of church silver, buried the loot, carefully put one piece in the cistern – the first place you lot would look – then caught the bus back to get a candlestick for a tourniquet? Something like that?’

  ‘Accomplice,’ Ledger said.

  ‘I trust antiques, not people.’

  ‘True, Lovejoy.’ He was really enjoying himself, better than a birthday. ‘The trouble is, what were you doing in a lonely church if you weren’t robbing it?’