by Peter Cocks
By him.
We got out of the car and the doors slammed with a heavy clunk, bringing our conversation to an end.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“We’re pulling you out,” Baylis said. I was confused. An instant feeling of relief washed over me, followed by a kind of dumb panic. What? Why? How?
“You mean I’m off the case?” Sophie had become part of my life and I felt I had passed the initiation of meeting the family. Of meeting the boss and coming out alive.
“No, you twat,” Ian replied with his usual charm. “You’re sunk to the nuts in the case. I mean we’re taking you out of sixth-form college.”
“Oh. Why?”
“For a start, you’ve made contact with Miss Kelly – the aim of the exercise. Some would say you have made too much contact.” He chuckled in a leery way and I found it hard not to tell him to eff off. “You only have a couple of terms left and, to be frank, you’re better off working outside now. Anything you need to learn, we can teach you.”
As the idea sank in, I began to agree with him. My mind was not on the college work, and as a result I wasn’t learning anything. I hadn’t really made any friends: Benjy French had pretty much moved on once I had started seeing Sophie, and none of her friends could stand the sight of me. I pictured myself lying in bed in the safe flat, only getting up to watch reruns of American sitcoms on TV, nipping out for a spot of lunch, meeting Sophie a few evenings. Could be worse.
“We’ll have to find you some other work to do, of course,” Ian added, shattering my ‘gentleman of leisure’ illusions.
“Like what?”
“Well, you told Tommy Kelly you’d done a bit on the market stalls, so that’s probably a good way to make your story stick.”
“You heard that?” I asked, incredulous.
“I hear everything,” Ian said. “Except when the dishwasher’s on, you plum. Then we can’t hear jackshit. Didn’t anyone tell you not to put devices on noisy machines?”
“I didn’t get much of a chance,” I protested.
“Put that one down to experience,” Ian said. “At least it’s in the kitchen and we can hear it some of the time.”
“So what about this market stall?” I asked glumly, picturing stupidly early mornings and stacks of cheap white socks, batteries and three lighters for a quid.
“Tony wants to sort it out for you,” Ian said. “He’ll meet you tomorrow morning. A couple of days absent from college will work before they chuck you out.”
He gave me the name of a café near Tower Bridge, where I was to be at midday the following day. I decided to take today off college too if I was getting chucked out, so I got back into bed and flicked the telly on, determined to make the most of my short-lived life of leisure.
I took the bus along the Lower Road from Deptford to Bermondsey and around twelve found the caff, an old eel and pie shop, on the road that led to the Elephant and Castle.
Tony Morris was hunched over a bowl of pie and mash smothered in a thick, green sauce.
“What’s that you’re eating, Tony?” I asked, joining him at the table. “Looks like a bowl of snot.”
“Thanks for that, mate,” he said, unfazed. “Pie, mash and liquor. It’s a dying art. Best in town. Lovely job.” He splashed more vinegar and pepper over his bowl and gestured towards the thin, bearded man who had just come into the caff and slid onto the bench beside me.
“This is Danny,” said Tony. He waved at the man with his fork. “Danny Croucher, Eddie Savage.”
The man held out a wiry hand, an anchor tattoo just visible at the wrist of his waxed jacket. He wore a good watch, a vintage TAG Heuer Carrera, and a couple of interesting-looking rings.
“Danny works with us. He’s going to sort you out some gear for your stall,” Tony explained. He wiped a smear of liquor from his chin. “He’ll set you up with a bit of stock and introduce you to a few places to buy stuff.”
“So, what am I flogging?” I asked. “Socks?”
“Antiques,” Danny Croucher said. “Antiques and collectables. Pictures. It’ll be a mixture of good gear and old toot. I’ll show you what’s what.”
We went to a warehouse by Tower Bridge and Danny helped me to choose some bits: a couple of chairs that looked like nothing special to me, a leather suitcase, a couple of old tin toys. Tony peeled off tenners and we soon had enough to fill a stall. We added it to some bits and pieces that Danny already had in the back of his Transit.
“Right,” said Tony. “Just need to call in on an old friend of Danny’s and you should be set up ready for Friday.”
TWENTY-NINE
Our next call was to an ordinary-looking house off Camberwell Road. A hunched old man with a paint-spattered shirt invited us in. He was bald, with wisps of white hair on the sides of his head and a straggly white beard. His accent was foreign, German maybe. Danny introduced him as Barney Lipman. He waved a paint-stained hand at me and Tony, and eyed us up for a moment through thick glasses. Then he led us through a kitchen piled high with dirty plates and jam jars, and out into an overgrown garden.
At the end of the garden was a large shed, tatty and patched up with sections of corrugated steel. It was hot inside, warmed by a fan heater, and smelt of putty, meths and smoke. Canvasses and frames were stacked everywhere. There were pots bristling with dirty brushes and ashtrays stuffed with cigarette and cigar stubs, their packs scattered on the floor. On an easel, buried among paint rags and newspapers, was a large picture I sort of recognized. Something I’d seen on a poster for an exhibition. Or rather a half-finished copy of it. There was an orange background and a grey, snake-like figure reared up its head, baring human teeth.
“Francis Bacon?” Danny asked.
“That’s right. Study for a figure at the base of the Crucifixion,” said Barney. He sounded like a museum curator. “The missing study. Damian Hirst bought the other one for twenty-five mil. This one has been painted to order for a Russian gentleman.”
“Spot on,” Danny said. “What have you got for me?”
“Depends what you’re after.”
“Dunno, something small to slip in at Bermondsey. Nothing too flash.”
Barney pressed his finger to his lips for a moment, then flicked through a heap of pictures on the floor. He came up with a small one, about thirty by thirty centimetres, framed under dirty glass. Danny looked at it closely and then showed me. It wasn’t much of a picture, just a bit of creamy paper with a bus ticket and a couple of numbers cut from newspaper. In the corner it was initialled KS ’47. I turned it over. There was some faint pencil writing on the faded brown tape that held the picture in at the back. Whatever it was, it looked as if it had been in this frame for a long time.
“What do you reckon?” Danny asked me. I shrugged. It meant nothing to me.
“Kurt Schwitters,” Barney said. I assumed he was talking a foreign language and looked blank. “Kurt Schwitters,” he repeated. “The Dada artist. He came over here to escape the Nazis. Worked in the Lake District for several years till he died in the fifties. Gave bits of work away.”
“So, this is one of his?” I asked, still none the wiser about Mr Shitters or his dad or whatever.
Barney laughed, a sort of gurgling noise that turned into a cough. “No, boy, not one of his. Didn’t Danny tell you? It’s one of mine.”
“Isn’t it quite old, though?” I asked.
“I finished it last week.” Barney chuckled. “I checked out the cartridge paper, which came from a batch I bought out of an old office supplier in the City. The watermark put it at nineteen-forty-something. The bus ticket is right, nineteen forty-seven, and the newspaper the same date. It would all check out, including the frame and the glass and the tape, as something made in the late forties.”
“Genius,” Tony said. He’d been quiet, probably not wanting to show his ignorance. He looked at the picture closely. “I still can’t tell,” he said. “It looks like a few bits of scrap paper to me.”
“That’s the grea
t thing about Kurt Schwitters’ work,” Danny said. “You have to know a bit about it to know what it is, so it’s not a mug punter’s buy. Not like a piece of moody Chinese Staffordshire or a fake Picasso etching. Anyone who half knows their onions will get excited about a piece of work like this, because they know there’s actually a chance of one being found on a market stall.”
“So what would one of these be worth?” I asked.
“Well, an auction estimate could be anything from twenty-five to seventy-five grand for a collage,” Danny told me.
Shit, I thought. Serious wedge.
“The earlier ones, made in Germany in the twenties, fetch as much as two hundred and fifty thousand,” Barney pointed out. “But we need to make English-period work so the story looks good.”
“One of Barney’s got authenticated by Christie’s a couple of years ago,” Danny said. “We made sixty-five grand, which wasn’t bad.”
“Not for a week’s work,” Barney added. His big eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses and he picked a lump of oil paint from his beard.
“So, what’s the deal if we take this one?” Tony asked. I couldn’t help but feel that he was out of his depth here. After all, here he was doing business with a forger. It didn’t sit right with him.
“OK,” Danny said. “Here’s the deal. We’ll give Barney a few quid as a deposit. Then you put the picture out on the stall for as long as it takes to fetch a minimum agreed price, say two hundred, hopefully more. Then it’s a fifty-fifty split.”
“Why would you want two hundred for it?” I asked. “You said you could get sixty-five grand.”
“We can’t put another one into auction so soon,” Danny explained. “Besides, Tony wants a bit of bait to put on the stall, so we’ve got to price it right. A loss-leader – knock this one out cheap and see where it ends up.”
“Bait?” I questioned.
“A sprat to catch a mackerel,” Tony said. “I don’t know anything about art, but apparently people look out for this kind of gear. We’ll put it out and see who bites.”
THIRTY
Sophie was really pissed off with me. She told me I was stupid to drop out of college in the last year.
I told her I didn’t have a choice, that my grades so far had been terrible and the college had “invited” me to leave. She said she didn’t want to hang out with a loser. I was genuinely offended. I didn’t like the fact that Sophie could think of me as a loser. But I could hardly tell her that I already had a proper job.
That I had been employed to spy on her, and her family.
So I told her about the market stall that I was setting up at Bermondsey Market from the following Friday. Said that I would prove to her that I wasn’t any kind of flake and I could make a living flogging antiques.
“I admire your enterprise,” she said coldly. “Good luck.”
I decided to leave her alone for a few days while she got used to the idea. She would come round, I was sure.
Danny picked me up in his van at 3 a.m. on Friday morning and drove us to Bermondsey. We drove up along Lynton Road, which Danny told me was one side of the Bermondsey Triangle, an area supposed to house the biggest concentration of villains in London.
At 3.30 a.m. the market was already cooking. It was still dark and traders were unloading their vans and Volvos by torchlight. Other dealers circled and dived into boxes and the backs of cars with their torches, looking for treasures that others might have missed. Danny explained to me that until quite recently, Bermondsey Market had traded under an ancient law that declared that the source of anything sold before sunrise was not questioned. This meant that the market had been a place to freely trade nicked goods for centuries. The law had changed about ten years ago, but the old habits of dealing in the middle of the night seemed hard to break. Personally, I could have waited till daylight.
We paid for a stall and unloaded the van. As I unpacked, the other traders glanced over what we had for sale. The stock looked as if I had been doing it for a lifetime. Danny explained to me what some of the gear was and how much I should be asking for it: a Turkish kelim rug, a Georgian silver candlestick, a Victorian moneybox, a ship’s compass, a top hat and an African mask. I put Barney’s collage at the front of the stall, stacked among a few cheap pictures of boats and a rusty enamel sign for Woodbine cigarettes.
Danny bought me a tea and a bacon roll, then went off in search of bargains, leaving me to mind the stall. The sun came up around 7 a.m. and a few more people started to fill the market. Some were obviously American, wearing duvet jackets and baseball caps and talking loudly, but there were also Italians and Japanese, who spilled out of cabs that had brought them from their West End hotels.
I sold two metal toys to a Japanese woman for fifty quid. We had thirty pounds on each, so I did a deal for the two. Then I sold a walking stick with a carved dog’s head to an old American man for sixty-five and began to feel that I was getting the hang of it. By the time Danny got back I had taken nearly two hundred. I’d also turned down a dodgy-looking gold Rolex offered to me for three hundred by a shifty bloke in a cheap suit.
“Good start,” said Danny. “It’s a nice day for it. Crisp, sunny. Any interest in the Schwitters?”
I shook my head. A couple of people had looked at it blankly and moved on. Then, as if on cue, a man in a smart tweed jacket knelt down and inspected Barney Lipman’s picture. He picked it up and studied the back, the pencil inscription and the old tape that sealed it in. He took a magnifying glass from his pocket and looked closely at the front, reading the scraps of newsprint that had been used to make the collage. He looked up and waved the picture at us with a questioning look.
“I’m looking for three,” Danny told him. “I don’t know what it is, but it looks right.”
The man went back to scrutinizing it. “Any idea where it’s from?” he asked in a posh voice. I got the gist: he and Danny were playing a game of faking ignorance, each not letting the other know how much he knew about the picture.
“It came from a house clearance up in the Lake District,” Danny said, providing the man with the kind of clue he was looking for.
The man licked his lips and put the picture back down again.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll think about it.” And he went away.
“You watch,” Danny said to me. “He’ll walk round a couple of times and the picture will be eating away at him. He doesn’t want to spend three hundred quid this morning, but he thinks he’s on to something. He’s not completely convinced yet, but he’ll be going over it in his head until he is.”
I watched the man in the tweed jacket walking along the next row of stalls, glancing over in our direction. My powers of observation were becoming pretty well tuned. I noticed his hesitant steps, his nervous glances.
“All about psychology, this game,” Danny said. “Here he comes…”
The man in the tweed jacket was trying to look casual as he approached the stall again. “Will you take two hundred for the picture?” he asked. He looked nervous, chewing his lip. Danny shook his head.
“No, mate. Sorry.” The man walked away and Danny grinned. “He’ll be back.”
“Didn’t you want two hundred for it?” I asked. I remembered that had been the agreed bottom line.
“Not from him, I don’t,” Danny said. “I don’t think he’s going to be of use to us. He probably has an antique shop in the Cotswolds, or he’s a bit academic and thinks he’s found something special. Been watching too much Antiques Roadshow.”
I sold a pair of nineteen-fifties kitchen chairs to a young couple for eighty quid. Five minutes later, I saw the man in the jacket circling again. He checked in his wallet and counted out some notes. I nudged Danny.
“Hooked.” Danny smiled. “Watch this.” He leant down, picked up Barney’s picture and hid it behind the stall in a bag. The man approached our stall for the third time. He looked down to where the picture had been. Flicked through the frames, searching for what he clearly t
hought should still be there. He looked up, panicky.
“The picture?” he said. “The one I was looking at earlier?”
“The Kurt Schwitters? It’s sold, mate,” Danny said. “Should have been quicker.”
The man was deflated. “But…” He was sure it couldn’t have been sold because he’d been circling our stall all morning. But he knew he was beaten and shuffled away.
“Bit cruel,” I said. Danny grinned.
“There’s more juice in that picture yet. That bloke wouldn’t have given us any leads. We’ll keep fishing.”
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly midday. I counted what we had taken. Three hundred and fifty pounds.
“Good day today,” he said. “Let’s start packing up and we’ll grab a bit of lunch.”
THIRTY-ONE
Sophie continued to give me the cold treatment.
I had texted her a couple of times, but she had been too busy to meet, she said. I guessed that the best thing was not to make too much of a fuss. Not to look needy and wet. If she could play hard to get, so could I.
Besides, Anna called me up a few days later to see how I was getting on. I told her fine and she suggested we meet up. I took the train up to town and met her in a bar in Soho not far from her office. We had a couple of drinks; she was easy company and always made me feel good about myself. The undivided attention of a woman as gorgeous as Anna was bound to make a bloke feel special. We talked generally, cracking jokes. I told her about my market stall. Then she changed tack.
“How are you getting on with Sophie?” she asked. I was a bit taken aback.
“Er, fine,” I said. “Well, I’m not seeing much of her at the moment. She got the hump when I dropped out of college.”
“Have you shagged her yet?” Anna asked directly. I blushed. Anna continued to stare at me. A smile curled at the corner of her mouth. “Well? Have you?”