The Sin Within Her Smile

by Jonathan Gash

  The place was deserted but for Loafer. Even so, the very air of the dingy Antiques Arcade was like wine to me. It’s nothing more than a corridor under a glass canopied roof. The lighting’s quite wrong, fluorescent strips that go flickery at the wrong time. The dealers have partitioned nooks. The poshest belongs to Loafer Pod, a wino with no means of support except Verola whose work station (sic) is a yard near the Welcome Sailor, a tavern at East Gates where merry lads go to enjoy her, er, companionship.

  ‘Wotch, Loafer.’

  ‘How do, Lovejoy?’ He wasn’t surprised. Winos aren’t, by anything. He was trying to sweep up. His area’s the size of a confessional without the holiness.

  Loafer Pod would be a friend if he wasn’t a dealer. Women say he was handsome, past tense. Starts out impeccably dressed every morning, looks like nothing on earth by the time the pubs open, and is a shattered relic by late evening, as now. I took the brush from his shaking hands. ‘Nobody about, Loafie?’

  ‘Verola’s at employment.’ He says it like she’s at a vicarage party. ‘The rest are gone an hour.’ He made a pretence of searching for a glass. I shook my head, and he guzzled a bottle with relief. ‘Heard about your auction. What was she like, your white slaver?’ He belched while still swilling. I watched the bubble of eructation ascend into the liquid. If I tried that I’d choke. ‘She’s a right cow, she.’

  ‘Oh, she was okayish.’ I observed his imbibing skill with admiration. He hadn’t stopped swallowing while speaking. Was it a trick? Ventriloquists do it all the time. Or maybe they . .. Hang on, my mind demanded sternly. How come Loafer Pod, kept by the nocturnal doings of his Verola, knew my erstwhile opulent boss? ‘How come you know her, Loafie?’

  ‘Come in here last week, she. Tried it on over a piece of porcelain. I’d done a scoop, ground out the maker’s mark and enamelled in a new one. Should I have used gold, Lovejoy?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. I knew the plate, a Spode copy he’d tried for weeks to sell as genuine Josiah Spode of 1814. They say it’s still in genuine production, so watch out. (To scoop: to grind out the modem mark, then draw the false mark on; the giveaway is the little roughened hollow instead of a glaze-smooth surface. Never buy without running your finger pulp over the mark.) ‘She had some expert trolling along. Writer for a drossy glossy. Went through the Arcade like senna pods.’ He shook his head in sorrow. ‘Know what, Lovejoy? Antiques’ll get a bad name. Look at the finds lately.’

  There had been a recent spate - not too strong a word - of finds of Roman weaponry and Early Christian silvers locally. We usually get dribs and drabs hereabouts, being Rome's first colony in Britain. But the shoal of finds had brought every moonspender in the country bleeping our fields with their electronic wizardry. Naturally, there’d been trouble. Two knifings had made the local bobbies paranoid. They always blame drugs to newsmen, but know it was antiques all right. They’d busted into six dealers in town, plus others in the villages. I said, ‘The shivers were the Brighton circus, Loafie. It wasn’t us.’

  He spat expertly into the flagged floor. A shiver is one who uses a shiv, a stabbing knife, to further private arguments. ‘Try telling the peelers that,’ he said with feeling. ‘They caused this mess.’

  I suppose I ought to explain about the Arcade. There’s maybe a score or more dealers. Some have a curtained plank and a chair, no more, while others, like Loafer Pod, have a glassed bay off the main thoroughfare. Verola has an arrangement with the owner. At the time of going to press the owner is Woody, a caff proprietor bent on corrupting East Anglia’s nutrition with fry-ups of solid saturates thinly disguised as food. He makes a killing, Tinker jokes of Woody’s nosh. The Arcade has no locks that any decent burglar’d notice. The last out’s supposed to key up, to stop couples fornicating in the Arcade after the town’s lone cinema closes. The council’s Watch Committee, morality-riddled vigilantes who thwart reproduction among all known life forms except bloodstock horses and gun dogs, pays a hireling to check the dud Yale hourly through the night vigil.

  Happily, he’s bribable. Verola knows to what degree, ’tis said.

  Some dealers default on payment of Woody’s extortionate rent as a protest against his policy of dereliction maintenance. I’m one, if not two. I use Margaret Dainty - lame, pleasant, a husband vaguely somewhere, respectable - and Loafer Pod, to ‘hodge’, as the trade says. To hodge is to give one’s antiques to another dealer who simply keeps them to pad out his own inferior stock. Should your hodged stuff sell, why, he’ll honestly give you a pre-agreed cut, usually half to two-thirds (we don’t go in per cents, tradition being more trustworthy than anything decimal). I provide occasional services, about which more anon. The Arcade works pretty well, though it’s a dead-and-alive hole. You wouldn’t go there hoping for your genuine astonishing find of a John Constable, but you might chance a buy for an antiques-loving uncle. My point is, I know everything there about the local antiques scene. My barker, Tinker Dill, antiques snooper in tramp’s clothing, sees to that. Except suddenly now I didn’t.

  ‘She’s into gold, Lovejoy. Silver at-a pinch.’

  ‘She? That woman peeler?’ East Anglia had suffered a series of five police promotions in a twelvemonth. One was a career lady called Melanie Laud, of impossibly high police rank. Inevitably she’d been dubbed Maudie Laud. She came with the ‘mother’ - slang, meaning the warning word - of having pulled some major antiques bust in the Midlands. Local lads blamed her for absent friends.

  ‘Maudie? Not her. I mean the cow who hired you. Gold mad, she. Her tame expert put her to rights.’

  ‘Was he any good?’

  ‘Not bad. Mrs. Dainty said he wasn’t just a woman.’

  A ‘woman’ is any prospective buyer, not a dealer or collector. Odd for Loafer to talk up a bird like Mrs. Arden. I’d known him years, and he’s a dour ‘caller’, as we say of a dealer who denigrates everybody.

  How come I knew nothing of this? ‘She come in often, then?’ ‘She was everywhere this past fortnight. Homed in on gold, then left no matter what colour the rest of us fetched.’ Colour is a load of showy antiques to catch a potential purchaser’s eye.

  Curiouser and very narking. I put his brush away after sweeping the gunge into the corridor with a flourish. It’s difficult to judge tidiness. I mean, Dolly keeps tidying my cottage up. She’s always hard at it. Tidiness to me is like weather, there somewhere but not worth mentioning. I looked about.

  Yes, somebody seemed to have gone through Loafer’s stall. And they’d done damage. They’d smashed a small Lowestoft jug, now worth less in smithereens. Loafer had the bits on a piece of brown paper. Some travelling ‘antiques fayre’ might give him a couple of quid if he stuck it together. He’d be better off having it enlarged, by forming a fake of it on the outside, to contain the damaged pieced- together jug. A clever forger would leave a small area showing, to entice the unwary.

  ‘What’ll I do with that, Lovejoy?’ Loafer asked. He uncorked another bottle of wine somehow with his teeth. I really envy people like Loafer. He fell, still drinking.

  ‘Tell you in the morning, Loafie.’ I helped him up. ‘Christ, pal,’ I said, gasping. ‘How far you got to go?’

  ‘To the Welcome Sailor. Verola’ll be finished soon.’

  ‘I’ll get you there.’ I didn’t want to promise, but was trapped.

  We locked up. I posted him into the Welcome Sailor ten minutes later. Another odd thing, though. As we blundered past the Priory ruins Loafer said something else about Mrs. Arden. I’d mentioned her country estate near Lamarsh.

  ‘Her didn’t always live there, booy,’ he said. He still carried his bottle. ‘Lived Upchurch way. I met her first husband in the dox shop.’

  Dox shop, the detoxification centre for hardened drinkers. ‘He still about?’

  He spat across the road into a shop doorway. I’d have applauded if I hadn’t been holding him upright. ‘No. Passed on. Some sort of chemist.’

  And that was that. I caught the last bus to my village, made it home b
y half eleven. All the way I was thinking, I didn't know. Where was Tinker, the idle old nerk?

  She was waiting for me.

  My cottage stands on our village’s outer edge. The narrow lane descends to a little vale - copse, a stream, some fields - and a farm valley of obnoxious rurality. I plodded up my path and was fumbling with the Suffolk latch when I paused. I thought for a second I’d heard Tinker cough. It’s a salvo, roaring up from his diaphragm into the universe to silence life forms for three leagues around. I stood on tiptoe to see the roof lights of the Queen’s Head but they were out. Tinker doesn’t hang around shut pubs. The racket must have been some badger or hedgehog. I shrugged and went in, lit the lantern with a match. My electricity was cut off, the electricity company mad about some bill, the selfish swine.

  I stirred the ashes in the grate. Hopeless. The fire was out. I went to the workshop for my primus paraffin gadget (I use it for annealing silver alloys when forgeries or repairs to antiques are needed). Ten minutes, and I had a pan of boiling water. I’d no milk, because the milkman had caught the Scrooge complex. I shook a piece of cheese in hot water, getting a milky fluid in the lantern glim. I used that. Two tea bags left, a lump of sugar miraculously surviving on the bluetits’ string in the porch, and I was in paradise. Tea, at home. The place isn’t much. One main room, a curtained alcove of a kitchen, a small bathroom and loo, a thatched roof. It looks abandoned from the road, not altogether a disadvantage.

  ‘Lovejoy?’

  The shock made me drop my hot mug. I leapt a mile. ‘You silly bitch!’ I stormed to where she stood in the doorway, but two constables shone torches in my eyes. I faltered. ‘You made me spill my tea!’

  ‘Wait,’ she told the darkness over her shoulder.

  Maudie Laud was in plain clothes. About thirty-middle, brownish hair, plaid suit a little long, earrings, really lifelike.

  ‘I under arrest?’ I didn’t trust her. She knew it.

  ‘No, Lovejoy. A couple of questions.’

  ‘Me first. Got any milk or sugar?’

  ‘These shivers. Two dealers were knifed over some ancient finds from nearby fields. A small chalice, late Romano-Celtic. A gold tore, pre-Roman British tribal.’

  ‘I don’t help people who spill my last hot drink. Dawns take time coming.’

  ‘They were the cause of the fights. You divvied the finds?’

  ‘Yes, constable.’ She didn’t rise to the insult. ‘In The Ship, East Hill. For three quid and a meal. The fights started after I left.’

  ‘So I believe.’ She came and sat gingerly on the divan. ‘You haven’t made your bed, Lovejoy.’

  See? Another ten minutes she’d be washing the curtains, and I’d not find a thing for weeks. ‘I’ve just got up,’ I said, nasty. ‘I’m usually in bed by ten.’

  ‘How was Mrs. Arden?’ Her smile was all Sweet Ida.

  ‘Your lads carry a tea flask?’ I asked, buying time. This was getting scary. I mean, everybody was in on some game they thought I was playing too but wasn’t.

  ‘She is reputedly Dynamite Lil in bed.’

  ‘Now, Sergeant, I never betray a lady’s confidence.’

  She eyed me. ‘So I hear. But I don’t believe anything I hear.’ ‘Nor me.’ I scuffed about for more hot water. I could maybe rescue a tea bag from the bin. What did they use in wartime, burnt acorns? Plenty of oaks about, but exactly when did acorns grow? Just my luck for it to be the wrong time of year ... She’d said something almost practically nearly vital. ‘Eh?’

  ‘I said what’s this about a holiday trek?’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong bloke, love.’

  ‘The surgery has you listed. Sunday.’

  What now? Charity was proving a right pest. ‘I’ll kill Doc Lancaster.’

  ‘The good doctor says medicine holds out no hope for you.’ When doctors turn comics it’s the end. ‘Ask your grassers, love.’ ‘I told Doctor Lancaster I couldn’t quite see you in a caravan.’ ‘Eh? Oh.’ That was different. I could tolerate a ride in a motorized caravan, a picnic on the lawn then home.

  She tapped her handbag. ‘You didn’t sign up with Mrs. Divine?’ Gone midnight, me knackered, and they come at you with this dross. Is it any wonder you get narked? ‘Tell you what, love. Set one of your Plods on watch at the gate. Let me kip, okay?’

  She thought a moment, smiled, and made for the door. ‘Very well. Lovejoy, why are you so poor, you having the magic touch for antiques and all?’

  ‘Kind ladies help me back to poverty.’

  Her smile faded. ‘Some games are not for innocents, Lovejoy.’ She tells me that? They left, no silent snooper left to lurk at my non-gate gate. Was she bluffing?

  I surveyed my cottage’s interior. No grub, except a mouldy piece of pie under an inverted saucer. No tea, sugar, milk. No acorns. I lodged a chair at the door, dowsed the candle, undressed and went to bed. Caravan trek? She was a frigging nutter.

  Jacko’s coal lorry wasn’t functioning next morning, so I started the forlorn trudge to town. Jaunty pensioners waved at me from the buses wafting past. It was what folk call a ‘nice’ day, as if there’s any other sort - they mean sun, warm, blue sky - and for once I was glad. My usual bum-balls-armpits scour was cold as hell. I’d drunk some warm water, using my pan-on-lantern technique, but water for breakfast doesn’t go far. I walked round to the old church in case Tinker had dossed in its ancient vestry, but no. (You break in, incidentally, by a weighted string, several turns round a piece of wire.)

  The phone box at Braiswick was unvandalized, by some oversight, and I got through to Dolly. She took twenty long minutes to come. She can’t concentrate. Only last week she’d forgotten to lend me the train fare to Norwich and I’d had to hitch a lift on the trunk road. I got in, told her about the police visit.

  ‘They asked me about Mrs. Arden. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Have I to find out anything, darling?’

  Not bad. I looked at Dolly’s morning prettiness. She moved in different circles, maybe even in Mrs. Arden’s. I needed somebody there. ‘Yes, please. The meadow, love.’

  Before I go on, I’ve nothing against wealth as long as nobody suffers and the rich don’t get uppity. Divisions are really great. They create business, trade, collecting fever, and, truth to tell, antiques. It’s just that folk can get carried away. They really can. When they get so toxic that they burn homes and ride about in funny white sheets and knife rival football supporters, all that carnage stuff that begins in exclusivities of colleges and councils, then it’s time to call a halt. Even patient blokes like me get narked.

  ‘Which meadow?’ She tutted in annoyance. A queue of cars had formed behind us at the station roundabout, all expressing impatience. ‘Can’t they wait a single minute? ‘Sty’s yard, love. A meadow’s a place where antiques are auctioned, impromptu. Not buttercups and daisies.’

  ‘Is Sty’s that incense place under the viaduct? I hate it.’

  See? Already hating a place before she knew we were going there? ‘That’s it, love.’

  She glanced at me. ‘Hand off my knee, please. I’m driving.’

  ‘It was accidental!’ I said, indignant. ‘Look, if this is too much bother, give a friend a lift...’

  We bickered all the way through the villages to Sty’s gungy temple. Today’s meadow. If Tinker wasn’t there I’d throttle him.

  We halted outside the Temple of Relevant Harmony. Its resemblance to a junk yard - bashed cars, chunks off excavators, in a muddy tangle beneath a viaduct - is made authentic by signs announcing discounts for cash. Sty always has a couple or three amateur engineers hunting for special bits. "They sometimes actually buy rusting axles, old batteries. I know one who’s building a replica of Campbell’s Bluebird motorboat, and he lives in a third-floor flat near Edmundsbury. It’s in his living room. Like I say, amateurs are strictly crazy paving. Always interesting, but off the wall.

  The Temple was an adjoining shack, as weird as it sounds. ‘Want to come in, love?’ I didn’t mean it.r />
  ‘No, Lovejoy.’ She recognized the gift in the offer and smiled. ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘Eh? No. Mrs. Arden made me stay the night. She kept me busy.’ I bussed her but she drew away.

  ‘Busy, Lovejoy?’

  It’s stupid trying to kiss a bird when she’s withdrawn to glare, and you advancing with your lips stuck out. Bussing’s not complicated, put your lips together and suck, for Christ’s sake. ‘See you, love.’ ‘Lovejoy?’ She was mad for some reason.

  Big Frank’s old Rover was here, and Liz Sandwell’s motor. I was in for a lift to town. ‘I’ll make my own way, love.’

  ‘What went on, Lovejoy?’ Anger makes women speak metronomically. ‘I want an answer this instant!’

  A familiar cough gravelled into the world. Tinker’s corrugated roar dopplered over the country, quelling the by-road’s traffic sounds. I waited as it finally sank to chugs and whines. It ends with a rasping inhalation, Nature pivots back, and the universe is safe. There he stood.

  ‘Thought you’d vanished for good, Lovejoy. Morning, missus.’ He shuffled across, a relic in a stained old army greatcoat. His trousers were frayed, his wizened old visage a crinkled walnut, teeth like a blackened graveyard amid stubble. The glories of old repasts stained his mittens, chin, garments. He stank of beer. No Beau Brummel, but the best barker in the business.

  ‘Wotch, Tinker. I’ve a bone.’

  ‘Aye?’ he said, as near to a snarl as he could manage on a blood alcohol just breaking its dawn low. ‘I’ve done with you an’ all, Lovejoy. What you mean shacking up with that posh bird as bought you? I had word about the Ipswich gab?’

  He meant the pan. A gab’s an auction. ‘Dolly told me.’ ‘Something’s going on, Lovejoy, and we’re out of it.’

  Dolly called in her nuclear-critical voice. It doesn’t half penetrate. ‘Don’t I just know it, Tinker,’ I said bitterly as we walked into the Temple of Relevant Harmony. Its incense stank to high heaven. Indeed, I hoped it did just that. ‘I cursed you, leaving me in the dark.’ ‘Me?’ He was outraged, fumbled a tin of beer from his overcoat’s poacher’s pouches. He flicked its hooped seal and swilled, his chicken-neck Adam’s apple yo-yoing. ‘I’ve been chasing you like a blue-arsed fly - ’