Pearlhanger

by Jonathan Gash

It was all great stuff. I listened admiringly, fable after fable trotting out. Or, I thought anxiously, was what she’d told me the genuine lies while Chandler was only getting the fake lies? Or was my version the truly false lie, as a bluff? I got a headache and switched off. There was a print of one of Modigliani’s longish faces hanging behind the police desk. Amazing where culture gets to. I found myself smiling, because Elmyr de Hory forged that very painting, and his fakes go for the price of a house nowadays. De Hory is the greatest of all fakers of modern masters, even if he was Hungarian. I don’t hold that against him. People say that gallery in Santa Fe’s all but cornered the market . . .

  ‘What’re you grinning at, Lovejoy?’

  I came to. Chandler was glaring. ‘Er, sorry. Nice picture,’ I said humbly.

  He let us go then, but clearly still thought we were up to all sorts. ‘Let me know your whereabouts, once daily.’

  We left down a long tiled corridor, steps down between brick banisters, a blue lamp with one bulb gone, a bobby leaning his bike against the kerb. A small street, a few cars and a library over the road. Donna said nothing, drove us out of the main street heading east.

  ‘Lucky old us,’ I said brightly.

  Still nothing. This, I thought with bitterness, is the woman who’d ballocked me for seeing that a beautiful Russian antique received justice and two infants got their dinner. Life’s unfair to me and it’s usually women that see to it.

  ‘Wonder if we’ll catch Sid up before we get to Somerset,’ I speculated. Instead we were heading for Lowestoft, the opposite way.

  Still nothing? A police car in a lay-by watched us go by. I turned, adjusted the wing mirror. Sure enough its headlights flashed once. Broad daylight. An average blue saloon pulled out at the nearby crossroads and settled in our wake.

  ‘How is Chatto these days, Donna?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later, Lovejoy.’

  Terse, but definite progress. An hour ago she’d have castrated me for using her first name. Now we were in deep there were only two choices: I’d get the sailor’s elbow and be nudge-splashed at the next roundabout, or she’d keep me on because now something had gone seriously wrong with hubby Sid’s scam – and the clue lay in that oddly phoney police interview.

  ‘Hey,’ I cackled suddenly, remembering a bagged pasty and some russell rolls I had in my pocket, and hauled them out.

  ‘Have one?’ I offered her a roll. ‘Er, there’s only one pasty, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

  She shook her head, driving steadily, but gave a half laugh. ‘Lovejoy, I think you’re slightly insane. Are you always odd?’

  ‘Do without, then.’ The nerve of the bloody woman. Sod her. I’d have the lot. Anyway, it’s not me that’s odd. It’s everybody else. Including Chandler.

  She gave that incredulous near laugh again. We made the next roundabout and she didn’t sling me out. Odder still.

  The unmarked police car drifted off our tail in Old Nelson Street, Lowestoft. We were left unhindered and found a quiet little tavern pretending it was a hotel. Politely we arranged to meet for supper. I promised on my honour not to make any move without asking her first. It was getting on towards evening.

  Then I slipped out and spent a fortune phoning around as darkness fell and the harbour lights lit up from South Basin to Hamilton Dock. I couldn’t raise Margaret but Lydia was in and the phone mercifully reconnected. Between assurances (no, I wasn’t cold; yes, I was putting my dirty clothes in the plastic bags provided for the purpose; no, I wasn’t being rude to Mrs Vernon; yes, she was keeping her distance) I got her to search the names of antique dealers. Chatto, K. W. Esq. lived in Nazewell at a shop called Chatto and Vernon. Aha. I told Lydia my address in case Tinker rang, and said to suss this Chatto bloke out.

  ‘Somebody must know him,’ I said.

  ‘Very well, Lovejoy. Oh, could you please get in touch with Madame Blavatsky? Urgently. It must be important, Lovejoy.’

  ‘I promise,’ I said, to shut her up, then went into my act. ‘The police pulled me in for interrogation.’

  ‘That’s utterly scandalous!’ she bleated. ‘I shall protest immediately!’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I cautioned anxiously, but I was delighted because she would, too. Detective-Sergeant Ledger would have to tell her why Chandler had been asking after Chatto and Vernon. My way of finding out.

  ‘No, Lovejoy,’ she said sternly. ‘It’s a citizen’s responsibility . . .’ I could imagine her mouth trying to set grimly, showing how empires were won.

  ‘My coins are gone,’ I interrupted. The call was costing a fortune, but indulging women’s prejudices always does. I’ve found that. ‘Look. Suss out Sidney Charles Vernon too.’

  ‘Lovejoy!’ Lydia exclaimed, scandalized. ‘You aren’t suggesting—?’

  ‘Something underhand? Now, would I?’ I left smiling. And committed a terrible, terrible crime.

  I forgot Owd Maggie’s message.

  ‘Were those beads really worth all that money?’ So much for Donna the dedicated antique dealer. ‘Those beads’ indeed.

  ‘You’d no right to look at that cheque,’ I said. We were slightly befuddled from the wine. Only four other tables were occupied, and the people were not bothered with us. It was an ancient nook-and-cranny place, the sort where lovers go to commemorate anniversaries or start new ones. I needn’t add that we’d chosen it by accident.

  ‘You could have kept it. It was made out to you.’

  Michaela had given me 10 per cent in notes. ‘I’d got my commission.’

  The nosh place was a little dump near The Scores, a tangle of cobbled streets in the old town. I was feeling oddly contented. Donna was defrosting. And we were near my own territory, out on the coastal estuaries where I get to hear of most things by osmosis.

  Neither of us mentioned Sid nor the mysterious Ken Chatto whose name uttered by Sergeant Chandler had sent her pale. Loosened, she talked of this dream she had, of becoming such a good sociologist that she would iron out all the world’s problems. I was polite and didn’t yawn. I’m kind deep down.

  Then I got reminiscing, nearly my only fault. The antique fakes, the old fiddle trick pulled with oil paintings. I told her about the boom in antique musical instruments (and who created it). And, laughing, of a hitherto unknown pre-Raphaelite painting (and who created that). And how frantic the East German currency dealers are, now they’ve learned about Italian middlemen. She was intrigued, her eyes shining. And of a fake called Equal Freedom I’d given to the hospice exhibition. ‘Filled with Polyfilla and old nails and said it was bronze, nothing fancy.’

  She was quizzically amused. ‘Rob the rich to give to the hospice? It has a familiar ring, Lovejoy.’

  I was indignant. ‘People who buy art for investment are the worst sort of criminal. They steal our antiques, then hold them to ransom.’

  ‘You’re a romantic. Can’t you see that antiques are all simply money?’

  ‘Can’t you see they are all simply not?’

  She did her sad 50 per cent laugh again. I had to explain, but why do I bother? Women are rotten listeners. They only hear what they agree with.

  ‘Tell me, Donna. What do you think you’re doing? Not,’ I continued over protest, ‘chasing Sidney or whatever. But this very minute.’ She was puzzled. ‘Feeding your face? Wondering how much that bird at the corner table paid for her frock? Well, there was no such lax moment for the man who made that chair in 1755.’ In the corner stood a lovely old chair with a red cord to stop anybody sitting on it, Chippendale period. ‘That chair-maker had no chance of living to old age. Half his children died before they were one year old. He slogged a hundred hours a week for a pittance in a slum that’d turn our hair, and slept on wood shavings. He could be sacked at whim, and would then starve. He owned nothing except his pants, shirt and clogs if he were lucky.’

  ‘So? Times change.’

  ‘But his chair hasn’t, love.’ I was so narked by her response I rose, hauled her up and yanked her over to the
corner. The other couples watched us in silence. ‘Look at the back legs. They curve in every plane! How thick did the wood have to be? Come on. Answer.’

  ‘Two feet? Four feet?’

  ‘Seven inches, love. A miracle, because he felt the living wood as he went, stroke by stroke. He’d never tasted wine, tea, coffee or sugar in his life, never seen an orange, couldn’t afford any book, never worn a hat, never touched soap or drunk clean water.’ I was so mad I nearly clocked her. ‘You see, Donna? Whoever he was, he loved his work even in hell. His chair’s telling you all this. And I’m proud of him.’

  Donna looked across at the beautiful piece. What a sight a complete set must have been.

  ‘Touch it and you touch him, back across the centuries. See? Antiques are how we hit back at Time.’

  ‘I’ll believe you,’ she said. It was to shut me up.

  Her hand covered mine a moment. She was in midnight blue, with a simple V-neck and a Victorian pearl necklace. I was worried about her larger pearls. One or two were looking a bit barrelled from wear, but they were a good try. I love pearls. Her nails were long and gleaming, her hands and skin good. Maybe this Ken Chatto bloke was her . . . Well. My face must have given the thought away because her hand moved. She rose to pay our bill, saying, ‘We don’t want Lydia turning up to argue the contract, do we?’ From Donna Vernon that was a joke.

  We went for a walk towards the coastguard station for half an hour. She linked arms with me. We didn’t say much more.

  At the tavern she took her key and went straight up because we wanted to make an early start. I decided on a nightcap in the taproom.

  While I was chatting the barmaid up Lydia rang. She’d been trying to reach me all evening. Maggie Hollohan had had an accident. She’d passed away shortly after help had arrived.

  Sometimes it takes a shock to make you realize you’ve just been buggering about doing nothing. I snatched three cheese rolls and a bottle of Bulmer’s from the taproom, and moved. Three minutes flat and I was zooming out of Lowestoft on the A12, driving like the clappers.

  Chapter 9

  THE CAR NEEDED filling with petrol within a few desperate miles, which only goes to show how thoughtless Donna was. Not that she’d known that I was going to nick her motor, but she might at least have filled the damned thing. I was at the mortuary after a fast scary drive along East Anglia’s winding night roads.

  A bobby called Jock Ellis recognized me from encounters with the peelers, but he knew precious little. Nothing new for the Old Bill.

  ‘She was down an alley down the Dutch Quarter,’ Jock said. ‘A couple found her. She’d been duffed up.’

  ‘St Martin’s Lane? Actors?’ It was a guess. The amateur dramatics people always go home through there after rehearsal.

  ‘Who told you? Here, Lovejoy. Never knew Owd Maggie was a friend of yours.’

  One of those terrible moments came when every word seems horrendous. Friend. Yours. Was. Jock got the technician to show me Owd Maggie’s mortal remains. I welled up. The poor old dear had plasters on her veins where the ambulance people had infused them. She’d been battered, caked blood and dirt everywhere on her sparse hair. Her spectacles were in a manilla envelope on the tray beneath. Her feet had come uncovered. I pulled the sheet over her toes and tucked them in. Don’t you do some daft things. St Martin’s Lane is an ancient narrow little alley in the part we call the Dutch Quarter, after Flemish weavers settled there yonks ago. Picturesque, with alleys and lanterns and quietude.

  ‘Couldn’t you at least have washed her hands?’ I heard myself ask in a thick voice. Murder – indeed any death – contradicts all norms.

  ‘Ledger said not to, Lovejoy.’ The man was apologetic. ‘Coroner’s case, see.’

  Police, the law, and medicine therefore scored my question stupid. Well, if they scored me I’d score them. High time that Lovejoy began to use his cerebral cortex, always assuming. Our town’s as peaceable as they come – this murder might even drive fowl pest off the County Standard’s headlines – but the Dutch Quarter leads nowhere. It’s a nook between the castle, our ruined priory, and a hedged park.

  ‘Why the Dutch Quarter?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, why, Lovejoy?’ And there stood Ledger, really great.

  ‘Sly old Jock,’ I reproved. ‘You phoned in, eh?’

  ‘Well done, Constable,’ Ledger said. Jock looked proud but shy. You’d think they’d caught Jack the Ripper. And our safety’s in the hands of nerks like these.

  ‘Stop congratulating each other,’ I said nastily. ‘Explain why you got Owd Maggie killed.’

  Ledger’s a mundane-looking bloke, as these go. He has a doggy moustache, hornrims, a waistcoat and watch chain, and uses after-dinner speakers’ tricks – patting pockets, aheming – to slow up conversations and give his lonesome neurones time to synapse. I have a theory that he’s really a publicity-still from the 1950s.

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Ledger was saying, ex cathedra. ‘You’re coming down to the station to make a statement as to the extent of your involvement.’

  I stared, incredulous. ‘As to the extent of my involvement? It must be these bloody courses they keep sending you peelers on. You all come back talking like the Home Secretary. You ignorant berk. I wouldn’t go to church with you, let alone your neffie clink.’

  He was tough, but law-bound. The mortuary technician was looking in, wanting to close up. Jock had finished his report. He’d made two carbon copies in his alphabet-soup scrawl. I wanted one. Distraction was called for.

  ‘Did you know that Confucius was a police inspector, Ledger?’ I walked across, giving the morose technician a shove into Jock. ‘And Gandhi was a stretcher-bearer like you, berk. Standards are falling.’

  ‘Here, nark it.’ The technician and Jock were in a heap.

  ‘Right, Lovejoy,’ Ledger was saying, but I’d scrambled across them and out of the door. Nobody chased me. I made the hospital car park unhindered and drove sedately out along the road to our village. It’s not far. I made it just as the night’s pitch was weakening. Old Kate’s cottage light was on. Today she would take her joint to be cooked in our village baker’s oven, after the first bread batch was drawn at four o’clock. They still do this in country villages, get the baker’s oven to do roasts and dry the bedsheets on rainy washdays.

  A quick brew up, and I read Owd Maggie’s BID DOA police report which Constable Ellis had typed. It had been no bother to nick a carbon copy while the technician and he tumbled. Brought In Dead – Dead On Arrival. Nothing I didn’t already know. But by the phone in Lydia’s writing were notes I needed.

  Lovejoy,

  Chatto and Vernon run Spendlate Antiques, Nazewell, specializing in antique jewellery, mainly pearls. Remember the Siren rumour. They dried about ten weeks ago; some deals are in abeyance. Take care.

  Lydia.

  About midnight I set off to Lowestoft deep in thought. My mind went: Donna Vernon’s husband Sid embarks on an antique sweep. Off he goes, and is now long overdue. Donna collars me; off we chase. Fortunately we have a list of where he’s supposed to have gone. Partner Chatto seems to have joined him, and this upsets Donna. And she’d pretended ignorance of Chatto. For my benefit, or Chandler’s? And why? Chatto is Sid Vernon’s partner in Spendlate Antiques. Chandler pulls me and Donna to suss out what relationships exist between the four of us, if any. I had this odd feeling that everything – Chandler’s interview as well – was part of a play.

  Flaw One: if Sid’s trying to escape Donna, why is he leaving such a well-marked track? Flaw Two: Sid is even thicker than your average antique dealer, the world’s greatest known epsilon-minus nerks. His performance so far had been pathetic: not caring about a genuine aigrette, not spotting Reverend Cunliffe’s pricey box of genuine cards, dismissing Ellen Smith’s brilliant gedanite rosary when he could have wheedled it off her for a song. Flaw Three: Owd Maggie is killed. Maybe somebody had overheard me phoning Lydia in the Lowestoft pub last night, and actually believed Owd Maggie had received som
e urgent spiritual telecast? I certainly didn’t number Donna among the believers, so she was clear. Funny how that pale thin geezer kept coming to mind. Maybe he’d overheard in the taproom, hurtled south and . . . I shivered.

  Following my headlights northwards on the A12, I thought of Spendlate Antiques. To everybody else they’d look a decent little wandering syndicate of buyers who exported to the Continent, cash on the nail for good stuff.

  But from now on they spelled pearls.

  You’ve got to hand it to oysters and other molluscs. When you think of it, they live a pretty grotty life stuck in the mud until somebody slices through their valve muscle and eats them alive (sorry about this gruesome bit). Not only that, but the whole world hopes they’re diseased, by a speck of a parasite or sand working under the shell or into the mollusc’s body. Why? Because the desperate little creature tries to cure itself by secreting conchiolin and calcium carbonate as tiny prisms of calcite or aragonite. This nacre forms in thin onionskin layers and looks shiny. The entire blob of disease is a pearl. And the poor mollusc never complains. Not that it’s got much to complain with, just a lot to complain about. Seems to me that animal rights societies should care for the downtrodden mollusc, if only they’d bother.

  Lydia’s list of Spendlate’s activities included a lot of Victorian jewellery. Pretty low value, nothing tremendous, yet always there in local auction records. Lydia’d done a good job.

  A year ago somebody put word around of a genuine variant of the Canning Siren for sale. The Siren’s what we call a ‘oncer’: there’s nothing else like it, though crude late Prussian and German derivatives abound. She’s about 1585, Italian. I’ve never seen her though I know plenty who were at Sotheby’s when she was sold for a fortune. It’s a pendant made of gold, jewels and enamel, arranged in the form of a siren, a lovely lady who hangs about rivers and oceans and sings you to your doom. This siren holds a diamond mirror and is doing her hair with a golden comb. Of course the workmanship is dazzling, and of course it’s practically priceless. The point is that the Siren is a single baroque pearl. Baroque means rather bizarre in shape, ‘wrong’ when compared with the spherical pearl that most people think the ‘right’ shape. This one happens to be shaped like a woman’s torso, breasts and all. The pendant’s provenance is impressive, from the time she was given by a Medici duke to a Moghul emperor in 1648 right down to when Lord Canning bought it as first viceroy of India after the King of Oudh got up to no good. You can guess what a splash the story of a Canning Siren variant created among us dealers. A variant’s a genuine similar piece, made in the same materials by the same hands – and costing more or less the same. Think of another Last Supper by da Vinci, and you have it.