The Tartan Ringers

by Jonathan Gash

  George deliberately chose his words. ‘Joseph is a McGunn, so he’s rightly your clan’s responsibility, not ours. But to settle your mind: Joseph worked up at Tachnadray, yes. And left under a cloud. That’s all. Now stop your asking, and stay mute like a canny man.’

  ‘There!’ I said with evident pleasure. ‘Wasn’t painful, was it? And look how relieved you’ve made me. Just for that I’ll drag your wife down into her kitchen, bolt the door and force her to warm up some of her rotten old mouldy pasties.’

  Their expressions lifted and amid smiling prattle Mary started for the kitchen. I don’t know which of us was the more relieved as normality reasserted itself.

  ‘Typical McGunn,’ George mock grumbled. ‘Always thieving.’

  ‘Shut your face, MacNeish. Or I’ll take up golf and thrash you at your own game. Here, missus,’ I said, slamming the kitchen door after me. ‘What’s this about the soft south? I’ll have you know I work bloody hard down there . . .’

  My heart felt sick, though I cleared Mary’s grub quick enough and kept up the rabbiting. The MacNeishes had been generous enough to give me a warning when I’d left for Tachnadray, but now I needed to know something definite they’d handed me a load of codswallop. I didn’t believe that about Joseph leaving under a cloud. He was still around, and I badly needed to find him.

  By eleven o’clock I was at the great Innes emporium, smiling as I entered and hoping to find it empty of customers. It was, but a glance at Mrs Innes’s closed face made it apparent there’d be no joy there. She’d been warned. I put on a show of buying a few things – staples, resin, electric torch, stout twine, wood stain – and asked about the lumber man.

  ‘Why, ye stupid man!’ she exclaimed, clearly glad to be on safe ground. ‘He’s at the pier loading his uncle’s boat.’

  ‘Wrong, Innes. There’s only Jamie there.’ I’d looked towards the water as I’d left the tavern. He’d been loading a small motor ketch, the only activity.

  ‘Aye. It’s him.’

  ‘Jamie owns the lumber yard?’ The only supplier of obsolescent furniture, the antique faker’s raw material, was Shona McGunn’s Jamie. My brain sighed an exhausted sigh.

  ‘Of course, Ian. Didn’t Mary McGunn tell ye that?’

  ‘Mary McGunn?’ I only knew one Mary in Dubneath.

  ‘Mary MacNeish.’ Mrs Innes was bagging up black currants. Her eyes held mine. It’s the best I can do, her careful gaze said, as she joked, ‘You McGunns are all too wrapped up in your silly selves . . .’

  ‘Will ye no be resenting that slur from an Innes, Ian?’ Shona came in the shop doorway behind me, smiling, her great dog beside her. It was enormous with the light behind it. ‘The Inneses are great misjudgers.’

  ‘Glad you came, beautiful,’ I said, joining the spirit of the thing. ‘While Jamie’s busy have we got time to sneak off?’

  Shona laughed. Ranter grinned. ‘For coffee, Ian?’

  ‘I’ve had nothing all morning.’

  ‘Oooh, the lies in the man!’ Mrs Innes exclaimed after us. ‘He’s full of Mary’s cooking!’

  My least favourite headache returned as I walked along the narrow pavement with Shona and her pooch. It comes from fear, which is generated by a terrible realization of ignorance. Mrs Innes had tried a second time to warn me, in her way. I’d just been too slow to appreciate it. There was only one ally left, and that was Shona. After all, I thought, glancing sideways at her lovely bright face, she was the one who’d brought me up here. She alone knew who I was, and kept the secret. She alone had promised me a fair share. And she alone was on my side, however erratic her personality. This clan-loyalty business could surely be safely forgotten, except among the elderly gossipmongers of Dubneath.

  I’d only been allowed back into town when Shona was free. I must have accidentally slipped her by alighting on the outskirts instead of being fetched directly into Dubneath’s centre. She must have gone hunting me after realizing I’d gone missing. Still, an ally is an ally. I wanted to get Tinker because I badly needed things done. In the meantime I’d have to rely on the one natural asset we all possess. Perfidy.

  ‘Darling,’ I said at her gate. ‘Won’t the neighbours talk?’

  ‘No,’ she said evenly, ‘providing you’re quiet.’

  Ranter came in and watched me make myself at home, as the saying is. It was quite unnerving. As matters progressed from the possible to the inevitable, I had to ask Shona to send the dog out. Amused, Shona compromised by ordering it into the little front garden, and led me upstairs after latching the door. After that it was all smooth sailing. If my brain had been functioning, I’d have still talked myself into making love to Shona on the grounds that the worst I could expect was betrayal. After some of the women I’ve known it would be a small price. I’m fully trained in disaster. As it was, my intellect had hibernated at the first hint of forthcoming ecstasy. I don’t know how sociologists manage all that dispassion they brag about. Women only make me think hooray. With my own brand of logic going full steam, the mere act of lying dazed and sweat-stuck to Shona afterwards was somehow proof that we were more fervent allies than ever.

  ‘Who’s the crook, love?’ I said, drifting from oblivion to somnolence. Women are always awake when I come to. How do they do it?

  ‘That’s my question, Lovejoy.’ She lay aside, somehow. The pillow had fluffed up between us making it hard to breathe.

  ‘It’s not Elaine, that’s for sure. Nor Duncan. He’s a naturally nice bloke.’

  ‘Is he a good . . . antiques faker?’

  ‘Not bad. Certainly not in the same league as some.’

  ‘Michelle?’ Her voice was in exact neutral, oho.

  ‘Your pal?’ I was unsure. Michelle was one of those lovely succulent women who should be eaten whole with mint. I’ve always been vulnerable. ‘Dunno. What’s her motive? Money?’

  ‘That. And Elaine.’ Shona’s hatred showed now. Her throat thickened. ‘Michelle’s an intruder. A spider. She’ll take anything she can. Men are blind, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ I said dryly. Fascism gets everywhere, even into lovers’ beds. ‘So Michelle and Duncan are your guess. Not Robert?’

  She still spoke muffled. ‘Robert does as he’s told.’

  ‘Which leaves Hector, but he’s too busy with his dogs and sheep. And Jamie. Lucky that he runs the woodyard, eh?’

  ‘Essential.’

  There are two sorts of pests: women who never leave you alone after loving, forever inspecting your morphology and asking questions, and women who mentally move out and lie there, eyes closed, disowning the nerk they’ve drained to exhaustion. Shona was clearly of the second category, hunched away in the bed, making me feel a right hitch-hiker.

  ‘Look, Shona.’ I pulled her over to face me. ‘Michelle couldn’t pull a scam on her own. Duncan knows so little about the antiques game that he doesn’t even suss out alternative routes, different fences. He’s a craftsman, but no crook.’

  ‘What are you saying, Lovejoy?’ she said towards the window.

  ‘There’s been no crime.’

  Which raised her, bedclothes pulled modestly over her breasts. ‘No crime? Of course there’s been a crime! We’ve been selling furniture and paintings to keep Tachnadray together ever since I can remember. For less and less money!’

  ‘You’d only a limited number to start with. You’ve simply run out of originals.’

  ‘We’ve never relied on lies, Lovejoy! That’s your trick!’

  Well, she’d a right to be angry. She was the only person I’d ever met who’d passed a genuine antique as a fake. I spend my life doing the opposite.

  ‘The point is, love,’ I said along the pillow into her lovely furious eyes, ‘there’s no antiques worth mentioning left at Tachnadray. It’s empty. That genuine bureau you sent down was Tachnadray’s swan song.’

  ‘How do you know, Lovejoy?’ It was a whisper.

  ‘The house feels dry, all wrong. It’s got a few sticks, and that’s it.�
�

  ‘You really can tell,’ she said with wonder.

  ‘Afraid so, love.’ I watched her beautiful blues well up. ‘The stuff left in Tachnadray isn’t worth a dealer’s petrol for the journey. You made the wrong assumption. You couldn’t understand why so little money was coming in when one or two reproduction pieces were being sent off every month. And poor-old Duncan is slogging his guts out to make enough copies, fakes, repros to keep Tachnadray fed. He and Michelle were too tender-hearted to tell Elaine the truth.’

  I was up and dressing, keeping an eye out for that bloody great dog. If it ever learned I’d made Shona cry I’d be a chewed heap.

  ‘Where are you going, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Tachnadray. Elaine’s called a gathering tomorrow. I’ve to speak the plan out.’ A naked man looks grotesque, so I was glad to be covered. Shona lay there, eyes dulled, pretty. Nakedness looks good on a woman. ‘I can offer a reasonable scam, Shona. Only one-off, but it’d bring in a hell of a lot of gelt. If Elaine accepts, I’ll stay and do it. If not, there’s nothing to keep me here.’

  ‘You’d leave? Because there’s no antiques?’

  ‘I can knock up fakes anywhere, love. It doesn’t have to be in Tachnadray.’

  For a few moments I dithered. I never know what to say when leaving a woman’s bedroom. You can’t just give a sincere grin and a thanks, love, can you? And women are too distrusting to believe dud promises.

  ‘Will Ranter let me pass?’

  She smiled, cold, I thought. She uttered the slow words like a thumbs down to an arena. ‘This once, darling.’

  I gave her a sincere grin. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said, and left.

  Chapter 17

  ‘SHUT YOUR GUMS, Tinker,’ I said into the phone, frantic lest Mac’s lorry left without me on the home run.

  The gabby old sod was woozier than ever. He was in the Rose at Peldon, sloshed out of his mind. The Rose is a pub by the sea marshes, always heaving full of antique dealers.

  ‘Eh, Lovejoy?’ he bawled. The background noise was Grand National Day. ‘I’m lissnin’.’

  ‘A month from now I’m doing a paper job. A mansion.’

  ‘Us? Paperin’ a stately home?’ Tinker yelled, coughing between syllables.

  The distant pub’s racket silenced as if by magic. Some lunatic talking football was instantly throttled.

  ‘Start enrolling the dealers, Tinker. Pass their names on to Margaret.’

  ‘Is it secret?’ he howled to the universe. Jesus.

  ‘Not any more,’ I said wearily. ‘Tell Margaret she can chit and chop for me. And get Antioch Dodd to collect the pots. Got that?’ ‘Pots’ are lorries, from rhyming slang: pots and pans, vans. It’d be quite a convoy. Chits are IOUs and receipts, chops the stamps of approval. It meant I’d honour whatever deals Margaret decided for me. I might murder her afterwards if she guessed wrong, of course, but fair’s fair.

  ‘Right, Lovejoy. How much do we need?’

  Tachnadray was say, sixty rooms of which two were still respectably furnished. The rest stood bare. A quarter of the rooms would have been servants’ quarters, say about nine.

  ‘About fifty rooms, Tinker, assorted, but I split half and half.’ In its heyday half would have been bedrooms, retiring rooms, and half reception rooms, libraries, smoking rooms and that.

  ‘Fifty? Bloody hell. Where is it?’

  ‘Never you mind. I’ll phone down every fourth day.’

  ‘Wait, wait! Lovejoy! Who’s to reff the stuff?’ Reff as in referee, to gain some slight assurance of authenticity for the antiques – real or fake’d hardly matter much – as they were loaded up.

  ‘Who’ve you got there?’ I could imagine two-score dealers frozen in the pub, listening breathless at this news of the biggest scam to hit East Anglia all year.

  ‘Here? Well there’s Harry Bateman, Liz Sandwell, Helen, Big Frank from Suffolk, Sven, Mannie, Jill . . .’ His rubbled croak became inaudible in instantaneous pandemonium. The silly nerks had erupted, grabbed for the receiver to bawl their names and shouting offers, percentages, splits on the knock, part deals—

  Click. Burr. I get fed up with other people’s greed when I’ve enough of my own.

  It was coming on to rain when finally Mac’s lorry hove in. Somehow he’d heard, God knows how, of the furniture I’d left pencilled notes for at the lumber yard. They were on his wagon under a tarpaulin in the back.

  Robert met us at the crossroads, pushing a handcart. Mute, he transferred the two pieces without my assistance. I called thanks to Mac and in the driving rain followed the giant’s form along to Tachnadray. I felt a spare tool at a wedding.

  This next bit’s about crooked money, and how you – repeat, you – will sooner or later be robbed blind. There’s no escape, so if you’re of a nervous disposition I’d skip it.

  A ‘paper job’, aka ‘papering a house’, is one of the commonest antiques tricks in the world. And make no mistake, everybody in the game tries it. Since the Great Antiques Boom, however, it has come to be a speciality of the world’s poshest auction houses. It works thus:

  A householder dies, alas. In the ten seconds which elapse between the crusty old colonel’s last breath and his widow phoning the insurance company, several dealers will call offering to sell the colonel’s personal effects. The widow sorts out what she wants to take to her daughter’s and signs a contract with a respectable auctioneer.

  Now an auctioneer can do two things. Either all the auctionable stuff is vanned off by the auctioneer’s respectable vannies (they will be called assistants in the written contract) to the respectable auctioneer’s premises, or else the contents – furniture, cutlery, linen, carpets, the colonel’s campaign medals, paintings, porcelain – will be left in situ, and the house opened for a grand auction.

  You can imagine that the final printed catalogue might look a bit ‘thin’, as we say, if old colonel, RIP, didn’t have much. But oh how nice it would be, thinks our respectable auctioneer wistfully, if the deceased had a couple of handsome almost-Chippendale tallboys, or an oil painting possibly almost nearly attributable to Turner or Vermeer. How sad a respectable auctioneer’s life is, he sighs.

  Happily, sin slithers in to help out. Within hours of that respectable auctioneer’s naughty daydream, would you believe it but the house’s contents begin to swell, multiply, increase, until finally on auction day the colonel’s antiques overflow into the garden, where the respectable auctioneer has thoughtfully hired numerous elegant marquees for the purpose. Isn’t life great? Soon it gets greater.

  The cataloguer’s erudition helps the thing along. She (cataloguers are normally female; more careful, you see) will say of some neffie portrait of a bog-eyed clergyman: ‘. . . once attributed to the immortal Gainsborough . . .’ or some such. The fact that the daub was created in an alcoholic stupor by an incompetent forger now doing life on Dartmoor is regarded as a mere quibble, because the words as written are actually true. So law condones the fraud: the portrait was once so attributed – by a crooked forger. See how it works?

  Just as theatres are ‘papered’ – i.e. crammed by the actors’ friends, who are given free tickets – so auctioneers swell their offerings at house auctions.

  Innocent souls might ask: ‘But what’s the point? Who gains?’ To answer this, best simply buy any item at such a sale, then try to sell it. An old Lowestoft jug, say. First, offer it just as it is. To your alarm antique shops don’t want to know. Dealers spurn you and your jug. They see a dozen a day, so what’s one more? Tomorrow, however, take along the auctioneer’s lovely catalogue. You can now show the dealer your jug’s handsome picture and precise printed description. He’ll be over the moon. Of course he’ll still haggle over the price. The point is he’ll want your jug. You’ve made a sale. Good, eh?

  The reason he now wants it is that magic thing called provenance. He can ascribe your jug, truthfully, as ‘from the famous sale at Nijninovgorod House . . .’ and show your catalogue as proof. Appearance, condition, a
nd provenance – they’re the three great selling points in horses, cattle, bloodstock. And, oddly enough, people. Why not in antiques too?

  Paper jobs are highly popular in the antiques game, because everybody profits: dealers, public, buyers, cataloguers, auctioneers, the colonel’s widow, the bloke who prints the catalogue . . . The only slight hiccup in it all is that it’s fraudulent. It has to be. Why? Because if every house was ramjam packed full of delectable antiques there’d be no demand. It’d be like everybody suddenly being millionaires. So the ‘sets’ of dining chairs aren’t sets at all; they’re made up from here, there and everywhere. Vases reputedly brought back from Japan in 1890 were actually fired in Wapping last week. The delicate Chinese porcelain pillows weren’t shipped home from Canton last century: they were a job lot in a Hong Kong package tour this Easter. The colonel’s campaign medals will be sold – and sold, and sold, and sold, for entire sets will be put together by every dealer in the country and sold as the colonel’s one genuine set. Which explains why the printed catalogues for important house auction sales are always sold out instantly – to market twenty sets of medals you need twenty catalogues, right? It’s cast-iron profit. It’s today’s favourite crime. All you need is a posh address, and you can make a fortune. The customers get diddled, but so?

  That’s the paper job. All you need is care, skill and a team.

  After dinner I retired to formulate my paper job, promising Elaine to reveal it in all its glory at the morning gathering. Then, in the cascading rain, I went out for a sly walk. The death simply wasn’t my fault. Honest.

  The drive to the main gate was the only orthodox way off the Tachnadray estate. Stone walls rimmed the thirty or so acres of paddocks, outbuildings, lawns, with a few straggly hawthorn hedges infilling the tumbled drystone stretches. Behind the great house, vegetable gardens were busily reverting to weeds. Glass cloches sprawled higgledy-piggledy. Greenhouses shed panes. Huts flaked planks. Even the outbuildings had joined the disintegration wholesale and gone toothy by extruding stones. I’d asked Duncan why he didn’t grow stuff, market some produce. He’d waxed sarcastic: ‘I’ll get a dozen retainers in on it immediately.’ The poor bloke was doing his best.