Ricky must have spotted the van coming up the drive because the front door swung open as I approached. ‘The goddess of Arsehole-in-the-Moor!’ he declaimed, bowing low as I walked past him into the hall. ‘Bless you for coming, my angel!’ he added devoutly.
In his youth, Ricky had what might be described as Byronic good looks. Even now, somewhere in his seventies, his iron-grey curls fell becomingly, if not quite so thickly, over his noble brow. He had an aquiline nose, a strong jaw and looked as I imagine Mr Rochester might look, except, in his case, Jane Eyre would have been sadly disappointed on her wedding night.
‘What’s up?’ I asked, eyeing the four wicker laundry hampers standing open in the lofty hall.
‘Amateur company in Leicester are doing Wizard of Oz next week,’ he explained rapidly, ‘and their costumiers have let them down. They’ve asked us to help them out. So we have to get everything ready for the morning − the couriers are coming to fetch it all at nine.’
‘Good job I’ve got the afternoon free.’ I would normally have been cleaning for Mrs Berkeley-Smythe, but she was away on a cruise.
‘Maurice is up in the workroom,’ Ricky went on, ‘you go on up. I’m just printing off the paperwork on the computer and I’ll be with you.’
I negotiated my way around the laundry hampers, and climbed the curving staircase, unable to resist running my hand up the smooth, polished bannister. Morris was in the workroom, shaking out a jumble of fur fabric and muttering to himself.
If Ricky was Rochester, then Morris was Pickwick. If Ricky’s features were carved in granite, Morris’s were moulded in clay, all roundness. He peered over his little gold specs and grinned at me like an elderly baby. ‘I swear this lion’s got moth—Hello, Juno! Good of you to come.’
I bent down and planted a kiss on his soft cheek, ‘My pleasure.’ I could see the Wicked Witch of the West was already occupying an otherwise empty clothes rail, her black pointy hat hanging on elastic.
Ricky came up the stairs, puffing slightly, clutching a sheaf of actors’ measurements that the Leicester theatre company had emailed through. ‘Wizard of Oz isn’t a huge show,’ he told me as he ran an eye over the lists. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Their Dorothy’s a bit of a porker! I doubt if that blue gingham will fit.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Find the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man!’ He thrust sheets of actors’ measurements at me. ‘And make sure the Tin Man’s got all his bits!’
‘If you don’t mind, Juno,’ Morris added, more politely.
For the next two hours the three of us hunted, sorted and packed, but the Tin Man had lost his funnel hat, we could only find one of Dorothy’s ruby slippers, and we’d lost Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, altogether. We decided to stop for tea.
‘You got any time tomorrow, darlin’?’ Ricky lit one of his menthol cigarettes as we sat around the breakfast-room table, lifting his chin to aim his puff of smoke above our heads.
‘’Fraid not. Busy day tomorrow and I’m seeing a new client at lunchtime – well, he may turn into a new client … Mr Nickolai.’
‘You don’t mean Old Nick?’ Ricky gaped at me.
‘Is he still alive?’ Morris frowned. ‘He must be older than God.’
‘Mr Nickolai,’ I repeated. ‘He runs an antique shop in Shadow Lane, although it always seems to be shut whenever I go by.’
‘All his business gets done at the back door,’ Ricky pulled a face suggestively. ‘What’s he want you for?’
‘To clean his house, I imagine.’
Morris wagged a warning finger. ‘You be careful, Juno.’
I was used to their theatrics but, in spite of myself, I had to ask. ‘Why?’
‘He’s been inside, more than once.’
‘For receiving stolen goods,’ Ricky added in a stage whisper.
‘Really?’ I asked, in what I hoped was a pinch-of-salt type voice.
‘And other stuff,’ Morris added, nodding like an old woman.
‘What other stuff?’
‘Nickolai isn’t his real name either.’ Ricky flicked ash from his cigarette with a shoulder-shrugging elegance any Hollywood movie-queen would envy. ‘It’s short for … Nickoloviza … something longer.’
‘He sounded vaguely Russian on the phone,’ I admitted. ‘Sort of middle European. What other stuff?’ I asked again.
As I didn’t get an answer, I strongly suspected this was just theatrical embellishment, until Morris mouthed the word ‘blackmail’ at me. ‘You make sure he pays you properly.’ He winced as he bit into a biscuit. ‘He’s been a right old chiseller in his time.’
‘I haven’t agreed to work for him yet,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m just meeting him tomorrow.’ I glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘What time’s your concert?’
‘Oh my God! Half past five already!’ Ricky hastily stubbed out his cigarette. ‘And we’re not finished yet!’
‘I’ll finish putting the costumes together,’ I volunteered, ‘if you two want to rehearse.’
‘We do need to run through a couple of things,’ Morris admitted apologetically, hastily gathering up cups and clattering them in the sink. ‘Can you cope, Juno?’
‘Don’t worry. You carry on.’ The concert was a fundraiser for the local hospice. For years Ricky and Morris had performed as a double act. Sauce and Slander, they called themselves. They’d begin the evening with light operatic songs and witty repartee, gradually progress to biting satire and descend into scurrilous filth. They were very, very popular.
Ricky had already disappeared into the music room and commanding chords rang out from the grand piano. ‘C’mon Maurice, get your fat arse in here!’
Morris grinned at me and bustled off to join him.
‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’ − his mellifluous tones followed me as I climbed back up the stairs − ‘take a tender little hand fringed with dainty fingerettes …’
Gilbert and Sullivan is not my thing. I resisted the temptation to put my dainty fingerettes down the back of my throat and applied myself to playing hunt the ruby slipper. By the time Ricky and Morris had run through their material and got themselves ready, I’d found the missing items and had packed up most of the costumes. Each one was on a hanger, labelled with the name of the actor it was destined for, and sheathed in a thin polythene bag. Instead of lugging them all downstairs to the waiting hampers, I’d used the time-honoured method of dropping them over the bannisters on to the immaculate marble of the hall floor, then picked each one up, folding it and packing it neatly.
‘Everything’s labelled,’ I told them, struggling to do up the leather straps of a hamper as they appeared, bow tied and cummerbunded, in the hallway. ‘I’ve just got to put the address labels on the hampers for the courier tomorrow.’ Fortunately, the hampers were on wheels. When I’d finished labelling, I could roll them up to the front door, ready for the morning. All Ricky and Morris had to do was push the hampers straight out to the waiting courier’s van.
‘Where did you find Glinda?’ Morris asked.
‘In with the Cinderella costumes. Remember last year, the lady who couldn’t fit into Fairy Godmother? We gave her Glinda instead.’
‘Juno, you’re a marvel!’ Ricky pressed a wad of notes into my palm, about twice my hourly rate. ‘Don’t argue!’ he added, before I could protest.
‘You don’t need to pay me this much …’ I began.
‘What else can we do, if you won’t let us adopt you?’
I gave a crack of laughter. They’d offered me a permanent job on several occasions, but much as I love ’em, I couldn’t work with Ricky and Morris all the time. Half an hour in their company is usually enough to drive me insane. I glanced at my watch. ‘You’d better get going. I can finish here and let myself out.’
Morris stood on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Just drop the latch. And you be careful with Mr Nickolai tomorrow,’ he added. ‘They don’t call him Old Nick for nothing!’
I was ravenous by the time I
got home, my hunger pangs made sharper by the cooking aromas that always hang around in the hallway downstairs waiting to mug me. At the sound of my arrival, Kate poked her head out of the kitchen door, her dark plait swinging over her shoulder. She has the hair I’ve always longed for: dark, sleek and straight, hair you can actually drag a comb through.
‘Curry any good?’ she asked, smiling.
‘I’m about to find out.’
‘Well, let me know what you think, it’s a new recipe,’ she said, and she and her plait disappeared.
Bill was sleeping in my chair when I got in the living room. As I swung my bag down from my shoulder, I heard Adam calling him downstairs. ‘Sounds like your dinner time too,’ I told him, scooping him up. ‘You’d better go.’
By the time I opened the door, Adam was already standing outside it. ‘Get your own cat, Juno,’ he told me, taking a struggling Bill from my arms.
‘My landlord won’t let me.’
He nodded sadly. ‘It must be tough.’ Bill was wriggling in his grasp and he tucked him firmly under one arm and marched him downstairs.
The curry was worth the wait. After I’d eaten, I opened up my laptop in the vague hope that the hub might be working. The witterings on social media only serve to convince me that I’m living in the wrong century. I think the Middle Ages might have suited me better; I’m sure I could have coped with warfare, plague and pestilence better than the irritations of modern life. I scribbled belated happy birthdays on a couple of timelines, cooed dutifully over the latest baby pictures, and reminded a friend, who complained that I’m permanently unreachable because of Ashburton’s erratic mobile signal, that I do still have a landline. All of my old friends from school or university seemed to be either having babies or living in vibrant cities, pursuing dazzling careers. I’m doing neither. Well, good luck to ’em. I care not, I like it where I am.
There was an email from my only surviving relative, my cousin Brian, a diplomat in South Korea, asking if I was still looking after other people’s grannies and other people’s pets and if I was OK for money. It was great to hear from him. I emailed back that I was fine.
Of course this was a lie. I’ve never got enough money. I know I only have to ask but I won’t take advantage of Brian’s generosity unless the wolf has got through the door and is actually sinking its fangs into my thigh.
I hauled myself off to bed; we dog-walkers have to get up early. Before I switched the light out, I consulted my diary for the next day. Owing to the haphazard way my business has developed I see some of my clients once a week, others once a fortnight, a few once a month and the rest only when they feel like it. Without my diary, I am lost. Tomorrow promised something new, it promised a meeting with Ashburton’s master criminal: it promised Mr Nickolai.
CHAPTER THREE
At first glance Nickolai Antiques was not encouraging. For a start, it was definitely off-piste as far as the summer visitors are concerned. Their progress, once they’ve parked or been deposited in the very dinky car park behind the town hall and made use of the toilets nearby, will almost certainly take them on a pleasant meander from tea room to antique shop, to pub to museum to cafe, window-shopping in places selling local art and pottery, handcrafted jewellery and hand-blown glass, moorland honey and even moorland chocolate and gin, and return to their transport without needing to leave the tightly woven heart of the town.
Nickolai Antiques is tucked away around too many corners from all of this, out of sight in Shadow Lane, a narrow, cobbled street that rarely catches any sun and boasts nothing else of interest but a launderette and an undertaker. I peered in windows criss-crossed by security grilling, the glass so filthy and fogged up with condensation that I couldn’t see inside, the surrounding cream paintwork filmed with a grey layer that hadn’t been washed off in years. A cardboard sign on the door, scrawled in crayon, announced that the shop was closed. I couldn’t imagine wanting to go inside anyway.
Down the side of the shop was a narrow alleyway between tall buildings, not one of Ashburton’s famous walled walks, but a convenient nip-through running between Shadow Lane and Sun Street, and somewhere I had never, until that day, nipped myself.
About halfway down I found the door to the flat above. I pressed the bell, which responded with a sick rattle, and waited, staring at the scratched, black paintwork. Sometimes I have nightmares about standing in front of that door, pushing it with my fingertips, seeing it yawn open. But on that morning I just wondered what was taking so long. After a full minute there was a shuffling footstep, a drawing back of heavy bolts and Mr Nickolai opened the door.
I realised I knew him by sight – a shabby little man in a sagging grey cardigan. He was short, but thickset and powerful, as if he might once have been a wrestler.
I reckoned he was at least eighty, with wiry grey hair surrounding a balding crown and a drooping, sandy-coloured moustache. The hand he held out for me to shake was thick-fingered and strong, stained around the nails, not by nicotine, but something like wood stain or preservative. He smelt very slightly of furniture polish, and the smell that old people living alone sometimes have, of neglect. But his handshake was vigorous and his blue eyes were bright, alive and wicked.
‘Miss Browne.’ His accent was strong.
‘Juno, please.’
He smiled and white dentures gleamed below the bushy moustache.
‘Come upstairs,’ he beckoned. ‘We talk.’
I followed him to the floor above, passing what I guessed was a bathroom on the landing, and turned up a few more steps into his living room. It was crammed with dark furniture, the floor a patchwork of faded, patterned rugs. A pretty Victorian fireplace with green tiles and a brass fender surrounded a more modern gas fire, the mantelshelf cluttered with ornaments and what looked like a month’s unopened post. Chessmen were set out ready on a small table between two armchairs. The oldest television set I have ever seen stood in one corner, its twelve-inch screen heavily encased in wood.
Mr Nickolai followed the direction of my gaze. ‘Not work,’ he confirmed, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. ‘I don’t care. Crap on TV. I listen to radio.’
Sitting on a desk in the opposite corner was a laptop, looking as if it had landed from another planet and passed through several time zones along the way.
‘Internet I like,’ he told me. ‘Online auction I watch, keep up with prices.’
‘But you don’t open your shop?’
‘Shop?’ He shrugged. ‘Shop full of junk.’
He gestured at a table, which took up the centre of the room, its brown chenille cloth thickly spread with newspapers. Some kind of restoration work was going on.
A well-worn pair of rubber gloves, yellow fingers blackened like ripe bananas, lay amongst a collection of bottles and old jam jars. Scraps of leather, lumps of wire wool, and half a dozen old toothbrushes with frazzled bristles surrounded a gleaming wooden box with a beautiful inlaid lid.
‘Boulle,’ he said.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Boulle,’ he repeated, touching the lid of the box lovingly, ‘is brass, ebony, tortoiseshell.’ He pointed with his thick forefinger to the intricate parts of the design. ‘Boulle work.’ He gave me a searching, sideways glance. ‘You are interested in such things?’
‘Yes, I love old things. You’re restoring it?’
‘For special customer,’ he answered, nodding mysteriously, and I remembered what Ricky had said, about his real customers coming to the back door. Then he added, ‘You not touch. Things on this table, not touch.’
‘Of course not,’ I responded, with a slight bristle of indignation.
‘You not understand.’ He pointed to the bottles and jars. ‘These things − poisons, acids, corrosives − I need for my work. Same under sink, chemicals, you not touch. You get hurt.’
‘Oh, I see! Look, perhaps we should discuss exactly what you want me to—’
‘Tea.’ He silenced me with a wave of his hand. ‘I make tea. Come.’
I followed him into the kitchen where an ancient, chipped enamel gas stove squatted on sturdy legs. There was an original Belfast sink, wooden draining board, and a Formica-topped table so outdated it could almost be considered retro.
‘Sit, please.’ He filled a kettle through its stubby spout and placed it on the gas burner, which he lit with a match. There was a woof of blue flame and he shook the match out, emptied tea leaves from an old china teapot into the sink and fetched a tin of evaporated milk from a sturdy old fridge in the corner.
‘Can I do anything?’ I asked, as much to cover the silence as anything. I watched him pour the thick, yellowish milk into two china mugs with misgiving. I wasn’t looking forward to this tea.
‘No, no,’ he assured me. ‘You sit. I am slow. I break hip at Christmas − in hospital six weeks.’
‘Oh dear!’ I responded dutifully. Could this really be the convicted criminal Ricky and Morris had told me about, this old man, shuffling about in his slippers, making me tea?
‘When I come home, they send woman.’ His face wrinkled in disgust. ‘Social services.’
‘An occupational therapist?’ I suggested.
He nodded. ‘She say to me, take up all your rugs. Rugs trip hazard. I tell her, is my rugs, piss off!’ He chuckled and I laughed. He gave me a long appraising stare. ‘What for you do this job? You beautiful girl, be model.’
I laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not? You tall … red hair is beautiful, like autumn gone crazy.’
It’s important to put things in perspective here. I am tall. I have long red hair, which curls riotously and which everyone, except me, seems to think is beautiful.
I would probably think it was beautiful too, if it grew on someone else. Admittedly, I have nice teeth. Apart from that I am not in any way remarkable. I learnt, as I grew up, that to be a tall redhead is no bad thing, but I am certainly not model-girl material. For one thing, I am too robust, and for another, I’d rather stick nails in my eyes.
To my relief the kettle, which had been warbling gently in the background, began a shrill whistle and Mr Nickolai was forced to turn his attention to making the tea, which he did, very methodically, warming the pot and spooning in four heaped spoonfuls of very black leaves before pouring in the water, and placing a knitted cosy over the pot.
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