Pearlhanger

by Jonathan Gash

  Night isn’t much help to the East Anglian burglar. A moving car after midnight in these small townships stands out like a durbar in a desert, and there’s always one nosey dozy Old Bill smoking in some doorway. Wisely I parked under a hedge a mile outside the first lamp – the whole village only had a dozen, thank God – and walked in through a fine drizzle.

  Spendlate Antiques Ltd was a tatty place in the high street. The shopfront had seen no paint for years. The shingle was skewiff as if it had been done by a school-leaver for a quid. There was no sign of life, the village’s few streets empty. A distant car droned into silence on the A-road. Soporific. An alarm-system box gave me a momentary thrombosis, but I guessed it was sham like on most places and paused briefly at the grimy window. One of those orange street lamps shone about sixty feet off, showing the usual clutter of the provincial junk shop: a stool, two chairs, scattered cavalry buttons, a brass pot, some Great War bayonets and medals, some indeterminate crockery, a personal 1725ish sealed wine bottle but faked from recycled glass – one mint original will buy you a fortnight’s free holiday or a thousand pasties, according to your station in life. This junk trove was protected by a Suffolk latch and a cottager-lock which were twice as valuable as the muck inside.

  Feeling that life wasn’t helping me much, I did the wise thing once I’d trembled the lock – the easiest thing in the world with anything bent – and shut the door.

  ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Anybody there? It’s me.’

  Nothing.

  A house tells you if it’s empty, doesn’t it? Scientists, that crowd of aggropaths who make a comfortable living out of fears, tell us it’s hormonal smells that are the giveaway. All balls, of course. It’s simply the inanimate speaking to the animate. The walls and rafters and rooms call a gentle welcome, or howl an implacable hatred, as soon as a person walks within. I really believe this. You don’t need Owd Maggie’s ghostly Cardew to tell you. Your own apartment, bungalow, caravan trailer, will pulse it at you. Some habitations are right for you, others aren’t. That’s all there is to it.

  This dump was friendly, for all its humble status.

  Antique dealers always have a nook. If it’s a lockup shop the nook will never be on the premises. If the dealer lives there, it will be upstairs, and in a wall. Confidently I went up the stairs and put the bedroom light on. Basically a two-up, two-down pad. The nook was behind a small gilt wall mirror, some nerk’s idea of Machiavellian cleverness.

  Three letters. All were signed ‘Donna’. All talked to Darling, Lover, Ken, Sweetheart. Plus a pet name which I won’t disclose because I’m sure they’d want to keep ‘Sex-man’ confidential.

  I wasn’t depressed. No, honest. I’m being really frank about it, because after all people go through phases. Clearly Donna was a victim of some crush on that insipid curly headed oaf called Chatto. Now, women always try to be responsible creatures, stick to patterns and all that. But they lack judgement. And everything’s judgement, right? These letters in my hand were a transparent example of a lovely woman, too innocent, falling for the pretty boy patter of that goon Chatto. A wave of sympathy for Donna swept over me. If she hadn’t majored in academic thought she’d know more about humanity. A tragic paradigm for us all. She’d been enticed into trusting a nerk when there were reliable unselfish blokes like me about.

  No information about pearls, though. They weren’t all that careless.

  ‘So-long,’ I told the house, nicked a decomposing umbrella from the window display, and hoofed it back to the car.

  Everything’s people. It’s true. Forget this and all is lost. Which proves that removing people is the ultimate crime. That’s why I was heartbroken about Owd Maggie. Loony, what with her seances and everything, but still one of us. That contact with all the antiques in the sweep had restored me a bit, given me reassurance about the purpose of existence, but I was still narked. And I was focused on my own area, those tangled woods, rivers, fields and estuaries they call the Eastern Hundreds. It lies beyond the region’s only fair-sized town, which as far as I’m concerned is where civilization ends. But the last few places on the list lay out there. Down one of those creeks Tinker waited. And Vernon and Chatto.

  To the best of my ability I’d done what Donna wanted, gone with her entire charade from that seance down the trail among the antiques.

  From now on I’d do the deciding.

  Chapter 13

  JUST BEFORE 10 I phoned Sandy about the arrangements about Mrs Sutton’s painting. He spent twenty demented minutes criticizing her. (‘Lovejoy I mean have you ever seen such teeth before I mean and what hair. Oh the government should do something—’) More time wasted.

  ‘Have you got the stuff so far?’ I asked hopelessly into his chatter. Talking to Sandy’s like shouting at a typhoon, all effort and no use.

  ‘Yes, but at what cost! Mrs Teeth-and-Hair was trying to make a salad we watched her my God Mel had one of his giddy spells and you know what he’s like about mayonnaise a lunatic—’

  This hysteria was actually an argument for another 1 per cent. Wearily I agreed. Anything to keep him and Mel on the move. I couldn’t face the thought of the sweep going to waste.

  ‘Mel says it’s a deal,’ Sandy trilled. His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He’s absolutely drooling at the sound of that triangular-bird painter, Lovejoy! He’s thinking of having his hair done. Do you think he should? I mean I’ve been against his autumn-pink rinse from the very start . . .’

  The journey gave me chance to think. Donna’s whole search was a fraud. Vernon had no real idea about antiques. I’d seen it all, good antiques, duff, frauds, neffies, replicas, ringers, rubbish, and some that we should be buying tickets to look at. Vernon hadn’t bothered with a single one. Nor had Donna. It only struck me today that if we’d really wanted to find him we should have done it the other way round: started at the last place on the list, Salcott marshes.

  Then why did she hire me? And why was she so distressed when Chandler faced her?

  It had occurred to me that Owd Maggie’s seance could have been a useful way of sussing me out. But everybody knows me anyway. Ten minutes in Woody’s nosh bar would have done as well. Unless they really did believe this seance stuff? That at least would explain why Owd Maggie was done in. But there was something missing. And I had a feeling that Donna Vernon didn’t believe this seance stuff any more than me.

  Then there was Pearlhanger.

  Names have a ring to them, don’t they? A curious atmosphere even though you’ve never seen the place.

  Pearl as in pearl, but hanger in the old speech means a steep wood, a loop of dress, a belt, or an ancient short sword. There’s a sea village not far off called Goldhanger, named for where a gold-handled sword was found centuries ago. The same must have been for Pearlhanger. We got a lot of marauders in olden days, tourists’ ancient forerunners. The famed Battle of Maldon was on this coast, and the treasure of the Viking king at Sutton Hoo. It’s a universal law that warriors get gold. For gold read gems, diamonds, silver.

  And pearls.

  Pearls have magic in them, simply because there’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ pearl. Each one seems to have a right to legend. Coco Chanel – yes, that one – once heaved a perfect pearl necklace into the briny, displeased at Bendor Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster. Aren’t women odd? All because he’d done a little two-timing. Well, sixty-five timing. But ditching a priceless necklace of gemstones in a temper is still basically an unreasonable act. Adverts for Chanel No. 5 make me wince at that memory. But then, a grandad’s age ago, Kentucky anglers used to chuck freshwater pearls back in the river if they hooked a mussel by mistake.

  Funny thing, but some gems – and the pearl is a classified gemstone, remember – are special. They appeal to something in the mind. The pearl is one. Passion and ignorance have haunted it. Like the Inca of Peru used to cook oysters just to extract the pearl. I ask you. And Sir Thomas Gresham drank Queen Bess’s health in wine containing pearl powder made b
y grinding up a huge and precious pearl. Well, Sir Thomas was only doing what Cleopatra and Clodius the famous Roman glutton used to do. Celtic freshwater pearls, and oyster pearls from the untended Roman oyster beds, were always desirable. There seems to have been plenty knocking around in those days, enough to cause the Paris goldsmiths in 1355 to forbid ‘setting Scotch pearls with the Oriental’. Long before that the Egyptians thrived as middlemen between Rome and the ancient Macedonians’ pearl fisheries in the Red Sea. You see how romance and pearls go together? But it’s often romance of a peculiar and oddly rather sinister kind. Like, you can’t call Caligula’s huge pearl necklace romantic, because it was for his favourite horse. And his wife Lollia Paulina’s craving for pearls was too passionate for sanity, though that was par for the course in Caligula’s household. They were all loony.

  Men wore them too, hung as a little clapper in a tiny gold bell earring. It became such a craze that Caesar put a stop to these crotalia, little rattles, because unmarried women were wearing them as a sexy invitation. Some say that Julius Caesar invaded us simply to capture the Old World’s best source of freshwater pearls.

  I returned the hire car about 2 in the morning. The night man drove me to the inn. He was grinning. ‘Lot of business at the Drum and Fife tonight. My brother dropped a fare here not ten minutes gone.’

  ‘You jest,’ I said, but feeling odd.

  ‘Straight up.’ He grinned even wider. ‘Be funny if it wuz your missus, eh?’

  ‘Hilarious,’ I agreed, and stealthily climbed the stairs. No light under Donna’s door. Life was becoming a Restoration comedy without the laughs.

  Badly knackered though I was, sleep was long coming. I’d worked out everything for Lydia to do and told her on the blower. Now I wanted Tinker, please God, to be waiting somewhere handy down Salcott. I wanted Lydia to have made the right contacts. I wanted Beatrice to arrange a seance to contact Owd Maggie, RIP. I wanted Mel and Sandy to get a move on. I wanted to catch Sid Vernon and his crooked mate, Chatto, and I wanted Ledger to lay aside the Sporting Chronicle and arrest the pair of them. I wanted Donna.

  Did I mean Margaret? Helen? Lydia? Must have done . . .

  ‘Two more,’ Donna said. ‘Then the last. We’ll catch Sid up at the speed we’re going.’ She said it like a line from a play. Odd how often that thought recurred.

  ‘No real hurry now, is there?’ I was all innocence. She’d let me drive. There was an end-of-term air about. ‘He’s spent nothing. So your savings will be intact.’

  She remembered to nod. ‘It’s that policeman, and the other man he mentioned. Whatever was he called?’ Another line, quite well spoken.

  ‘Kenneth W. Chatto,’ I said, ‘I think.’ Her husband’s partner, and she’s pretending she didn’t know his name.

  ‘Only, they assumed he was some sort of crook.’

  I tut-tutted. ‘Terrible. They’ll forget. Police always do.’

  They might, but not me.

  That morning I bombed us through the remnants of the antiques sweep like a blue-bummed electron. They were easy, the way everything is when you’re sure of yourself and stupid. One was a councillor living up to his principles by flogging grotty junk to the electorate in support of social equality, which includes his ten-acre mansion, and his dark-haired mistress. (She’s secret; lives on the left, first floor, that steep road going up from the river in Maldon, Essex.) I don’t have much truck with George’s sincere principles because all politicians are failed people. They have a right to expect exactly the same sincerity and care they give us, so I felt absolved of morality. I knew him of old, and actually laughed aloud at the reproduction cabinet he showed us, most sincerely of course. Fakes are his hobby.

  ‘You bloody fool, George. You didn’t even make it out of an old wardrobe. And a genuine china cabinet has two different heights, shelves on top behind glass and a cupboard underneath. You’ve made the sides from one slab, frigging nerk.’

  ‘That other dealer liked it, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Vernon? Did he buy it?’

  George shook his head glumly. ‘Short of cash.’

  Maybe Vernon wasn’t so thick after all. ‘Look, George.’ I couldn’t resist pointing out the astragal bars, the wood lattice he’d put across the glass. ‘You must dovetail astragals into the bloody frame, not just stick the glass in with putty.’

  ‘I mixed the putty with dust,’ he defended.

  Honest to God. ‘You nerk. And old glass must warp outwards. It can be done quite easily—’

  ‘Don’t be narked, Lovejoy . . .’

  I gave up and left. Even a faker has a right to life.

  ‘No good,’ I told Donna, getting in the car. ‘Just a politician redistributing wealth.’ I leant across and called up, ‘Regards to Pat, George. Hope her leg’s better.’

  ‘Shhh,’ he was saying desperately, glancing furtively into the house in case his wife heard.

  We’d done the second call by 11. I’d got going again. If I hadn’t been so conscientious we’d have been late for the murder, but how was I to know I should have been thinking ahead? Anyway it too was a fake, though you could have guessed that from the Advertiser’s description of a genuine set of fretwork mahogany wall shelves ‘by Chippendale’. Old John Tansby makes these down in Colchester, and he’s never forged a set right yet. I’ve told him a million times that Chippendale hated leaving round corners on his fret and insisted they be filed square, but you might as well talk to the wall. I ask you. What chance has an honest fake got?

  All the way to last call – Salcott – I chatted about antiques, fakes, twinned bureaux, crass ‘marry-ups’ (posh books call them ‘marriages’, but nobody living uses the word) made from two dissimilar chunks of genuine pieces. I didn’t stop talking, even made Donna laugh. I felt great. She looked lovely, breeze blowing her bright hair and her pretty face free of that metallic look she’d once had. A pleasant ride.

  The motor halted of its own accord on a raised brow. We scanned over sea marshes, a few houseboats of all shapes and colours on the mudflats, colourful sails slowly sweeping the reedy hay. A low creek gleamed to our right with a few whitewashed cottages in a row marking the end of Salcott. A cluster of houses formed a small harbour. A pub’s sign swung the sun’s reflection at us, flash, flash.

  ‘End of the road, Donna.’ I consulted my list. ‘Antique brooch. A Mr Deamer.’

  ‘Pretty little place,’ she said, straight out of summer rep.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I agreed, and decided to try it out. I’d been saving it up. ‘Pearlhanger, locals still call that end stretch.’

  ‘Do they really?’ she replied evenly.

  We drove down and booked in at the one tavern. Tinker was getting pickled in the taproom. He saw us come but didn’t call hello, as instructed. I carried our bags up to our rooms, thanking my lucky stars that something was going right at last.

  Pearlhanger. They’d be here.

  Chapter 14

  DEAMER, WHEN WE finally reached his vast rambling house out on a small peninsula, was an angular warped old gentleman scholar, all wheezes, with tufts of hair sprouting sideways from all round his head. The effect was monastic. He’d be sure to get credit from tradespeople.

  ‘Do come in,’ he gasped, shuffling ahead of us. ‘I don’t get many visitors these days.’ So? We closed the door and followed. Tiled floors, echoes. A barn of a place with the old sprung bells still glimpsed down the servants’ hallway for indicating which room had fallen into thirst.

  ‘We came,’ I said in procession to his rocking kyphosis, ‘on account of—’

  ‘The other gentleman’s just deciding,’ Mr Deamer quavered. We angled into a passageway lined one side by stained glass. A glassed-in cloister. You know, a Victorian house really has quality. The corridor’s wooden panels were delectable, the lintels matured and the ceiling plaster could have been laid yesterday – correction: no, it couldn’t; modern stuff’d have fallen off. ‘In the withdrawing room. Do please enter.’

  We ent
ered and there stood a vaguely familiar man, lanky tall, close-cropped hair, still that tatty anorak. We faced each other like scruffy bookends. He was examining a pendant.

  ‘Hello again,’ I said. ‘Lovejoy. Mrs Donna Vernon.’

  ‘Smethurst,’ he said. ‘Again? I don’t recall . . .’

  ‘We bumped into you in Jackson’s restaurant.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Mmmmh.’ He turned to the old man. ‘I’ll take it. At the price you asked.’

  ‘Splendid, splendid.’

  We all paused. Now, two small points. Antique dealers, collectors, nobody pays an asking price just like that. And my chest had not even clanged a single chime. If the brooch was any sort of antique I’d have felt at least a dong. Well, I wasn’t going to argue over a crummy modern piece of jeweller’s tat, valuable or not.

  ‘Look, dad,’ I said to break the deadlock. ‘Can I use your loo?’

  Gracious permission received, I roamed away from that strange tableau and sure enough was delighted to find a valuable collectible. Lavatory collecting might sound a bit eclectic, but you can make fortunes from this prestigious art form. It was a real joy, an item to be used with respect. You yank on a handle to work the valve. To my delight it had the now renowned Looking Glass Bottom Valve. Pontifex made these during the 1890s in London’s Shoe Lane, presumably for folk with complicated ailments. Not bad for five bob, which is what they cost then. Nice glaze, and three lots of floral decoration in blue, set in best carved beechwood.

  They had moved apart when I returned. ‘Great loo, dad,’ I told old Deamer. ‘If you want to sell it, let me know. Incidentally, has a Sid Vernon called?’

  ‘No,’ Donna said for him. ‘I’ve already asked.’