Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, astonishing myself, but I couldn’t face the Old Bill calling on everybody at all hours asking when we’d last seen Leckie.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Margaret cried suddenly. ‘Whatever’s Patrick doing?’

  Patrick’s paintings and early Victoriana. He was hanging from his car on the other side of the road, flashing his lights and waving his handbag at us to slow down. We could see him being all dramatic in our headlights. He’d seen us come out of the pub yard and stopped to shout across.

  ‘Carry on, Margaret,’ I said. She slowed and started to pull in, winding the window down.

  ‘But Patrick wants to tell us something –’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Oh.’ She dithered and we jerked a bit, then picked up speed. ‘What was all that about, Lovejoy? It might have been important.’

  ‘It would only have been bad news,’ I said, and closed my eyes again to shut the horrible world out. The more you remember the more you remember, especially about a bloke like Leckie. Ever noticed that?

  Chapter 3

  THAT NIGHT WAS odd, really weird. Margaret made me up a bed in her other bedroom and produced some men’s pyjamas. I’ve more sense than to ask. I hate bathing at night because I never sleep after, so I sat reading Keppel’s voyages till Margaret came out all clean and brewed up for us both. She smiled and called me lazy. It’s not true that I’m idle – only her coffee’s a bit less lousy than mine. She made it plain that our past, er, friendship was not to be regarded as much of a precedent for tonight. We had some cheese on toast to fill odd corners.

  ‘Are you in one of your moods?’ she asked me.

  ‘No, love. Tired.’

  The phone rang about midnight. Margaret went down to answer it and was kept talking there for a long time. I heard her come up the stairs eventually and heard my door go. I was still into Keppel and didn’t look up.

  ‘Lovejoy?’ She was in the doorway.

  ‘Mmmh?’

  ‘There’s some news,’ she said carefully, standing there.

  ‘Go to bed, love,’ I told her. ‘There’s time in the morning.’

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘Good night, Margaret.’

  You’ll have gathered we antiques dealers are a varied bunch. Most of that night I lay awake going over the auction in my mind. Leckie wasn’t really a dedicated dealer, not half as good as Patrick, our world-famous pansy, or a tenth as lucky as Helen, or anything like as careful as Margaret. He never had the learning of Big Frank, nor Brad’s dedication, Black Fergus’s money-backers, or the inside knowledge of the Aldgate mob who are said to bribe half the barkers and auctioneers in the known world. Just a dealer, reasonably good.

  I stared at the ceiling, wondering a little about that curious expression. Reasonably good. Leckie is – all right, was – a reasonably good antiques dealer. Funny, but I’d never thought how very odd it was until now. ‘Reasonably good’ in the antiques game means really pretty shrewd and very adaptable. Moderate antiques dealers go to the wall in a millisec. Hopeless ones never even get off the ground. Now here was the odd thing: I couldn’t for the life of me think of a single thing Leckie was bad at. How odd. He had even helped Bill and Jean Hassall, friends of mine who deal in furniture and historic maps, to decorate their new house down on the sea marshes at Peldon. Word went round it was a stylish job, though they seemed ordinary colours to me. He was good with engines, too. Thinking about it, with most mechanical gadgets. And his small garden actually grew things, vegetables and flowers and bushes that managed to keep their berries weeks after birds stripped mine clean. He was good at everything.

  Dozing sounds easy till you’re desperate to do a bit, then it’s the hardest thing in the world. Half the trouble was that I was missing Lydia, my enthusiastic and bespectacled trainee. Prim as any nun, she’d finally moved into my thatched cottage for the best of all possible reasons. Like a fool I’d spent my last groat to send her on an antiques course in Chichester, still thirty days to go, so just when I needed her she was missing. See how unreliable women are? I suppose I ought really to have been longing for the wealthy Janie, but I’ve found that some women creep into your bones.

  Funny how things go round and round. I slept fitfully until the sky turned palish. A car revved distantly. I got up and padded over to draw a curtain. Margaret lives in a flat right in the town centre. You could just see the shops. Yellow street lights were being doused in strings. A bobby stretched an extravagant yawn on the cobbled shopwalk below, probably thinking of a warm bed.

  It was the hour when Chandler’s private eyes light cigarettes, but I don’t smoke. Just my luck. A clatter, suddenly muffled, told me Margaret was up and about. Val’s face misted into my mind. Her and Leckie. Tinker said because I’d taken up with Janie that time. Dear God. If I’m good at antiques, how come I am so bad at everything else?

  Margaret came in, smiling at my modesty as I hurtled back into bed. She left the light off.

  ‘You’ve forgotten I’m part of your Dark Past, Lovejoy.’

  ‘I’ve not,’ I said. ‘I remember you. Rapist.’

  ‘Cheek.’

  She put the tray on a chair and faced me from the bucket seat. Oho, I thought. Here it comes. Coffee and grill.

  ‘Leckie’s dead. Tinker phoned to tell you last night.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said, even-voiced, taking the cup carefully. Margaret goes mad if you spill things.

  ‘A road accident.’ Her eyes never left my face.

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Will the police be round?’ she asked, too casual.

  ‘Late as ever, I suppose.’ I can be as casual as her any day.

  She rose and twitched the curtains back for more light. ‘Are you in trouble, Lovejoy?’

  That’s all people ever say to me. I shrugged.

  ‘How did you know?’ she pressed.

  ‘Who says I did?’

  ‘Me.’

  I slurped her gunge and collared all four biscuits to avoid her challenge.

  ‘Do me a favour, Margaret,’ I said. ‘If Old Bill calls, act surprised.’

  ‘How did it happen, Lovejoy?’

  ‘When did Leckie leave the auction?’ First things first.

  ‘He was still there when I left.’

  ‘Talking to anybody?’

  ‘Loading his stuff, like always.’

  I’d forgotten that. Leckie took his purchases with him after auctions, the big stuff strapped under plastic covers on his roof rack. But he hadn’t put them in Val’s cran, and he didn’t have them when he’d crashed. The two tough nuts had gone off empty-handed. So where had Leckie been, between leaving Medham and hitting the tree? Answer: where his escritoire, book and doctor’s case now reposed. But where the hell was that? Val’s was his only cran.

  ‘Come back, Lovejoy.’ Margaret adjusted the curtains and put the lights on.

  ‘If you played your cards right,’ I said fluttering my eyelids temptingly, ‘you could have me. I’d not tell.’

  ‘Cheek,’ she said. ‘Breakfast in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Then drive me,’ I called after her. She paused to ask where. ‘Past a ditch I know,’ I said.

  Margaret went quiet at that, but finally said all right.

  St Osyth village has pretentions to class, but its recent marriages of styles show, so to speak. Bungalows designed in 1930 council meetings, hopeless wartime forgetfulness in architecture and latish fifties concrete styles are jumbled about the feet of great Tudor houses and this ancient Priory, making a posh shambles. People go there for holidays, presumably under sentence. There are lovely walls, though, flint and mortar. I got Margaret to take me to Leckie’s house. I knew where it was from dropping something off there for him once, but that was all. It’s a windmill. It’s not as daft as it sounds. It is set back from the road on an ancient mound, looking vaguely like a large dome-topped shed with a rectangular base and steps up to its one door. It only has two sails now, projecting at right a
ngles to the main building. They never go round. Margaret tried dissuading me from going in but I wasn’t having any.

  ‘The police, Lovejoy,’ she tried soulfully.

  ‘You’ve missed the point, love,’ I said unpleasantly. ‘They’re not here.’

  I swarmed up the struts to the door, to save leaving any signs of me on the steps. Leckie’s alarm’s the same as mine. I unkeyed it easily and stepped inside the place. I waved Margaret up but she wouldn’t come, which was a pity. Women have this instinctive ability to judge if anybody’s been in lately, if anything’s out of place. I’d have to manage on my own.

  Apart from a small Continental clock with a rare platform escapement (you can still pick them up for less than a day’s wages) there wasn’t an antique in the place. And it hadn’t been done over, either. Neat, fairly clean; signs that some resident obsessional woman came in to dissect the joint every morning. There was a note from a daily help explaining something complicated about the groceries and wanting a weighty decision on the fish delivery next Thursday. I read it for background, but got nowhere.

  I must have been in there an hour. Margaret was on tenterhooks all this time, and hooted her horn several despairing times. Nothing. I re-set the alarm and swarmed my inelegant way down the windmill’s running struts to ground level.

  ‘Ta, doowerlink,’ I told her. She was mad at me for taking the risk, but drove us back to the side road where I’d seen Leckie done in last night. We went in silence, me staring politely at the countryside and Margaret changing gears noisily to show me how mad she was at me.

  There was no sign of Leckie’s motor. One ugly set of tyre burns marked the camber. A horrible whitish scar showed vividly on the elm trunk. Two bobbies measured and mapped. I told Margaret to stop, and wound the window down. We were the only vehicle except for a police car blinking its blue light for nothing, as usual.

  ‘Good morning,’ I called. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘What are you doing here, Lovejoy?’

  Oh, hell. I’d not seen Maslow, lurking behind the car. Burly, aggressive, and being all geriatric macho with a pipe and overcoat.

  ‘No, Maslow.’ I stayed pleasant. ‘Let’s begin again. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Leckie had an accident.’ He peered in at Margaret and walked round to memorize her number. I seized my opportunity, quickly got out and went over to the ditch. A photographer clicked away in the undergrowth. I was beside him in a flash, trampling about among the white tapes laid carefully along the ditch bottom. He yelped and tried to push me off.

  ‘Keep back there . . .’ A bobby flapped his arms hopelessly.

  I tut-tutted and trampled a bit more before climbing out. Maslow was glowering. He does it really well.

  ‘You stupid burke, Lovejoy. We’re photographing the footprints.’

  ‘Where is Leckie?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘It was last night. Leckie’s dead.’ He paused, glanced shrewdly at the ditch. I saw it coming. ‘Where were you –’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Maslow,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t sound like a proper detective in a million years.’ He’s head of our local CID. ‘I’ve alibis even –’ I smirked – ‘even for breakfast.’

  He glanced towards Margaret as she got out of the car.

  ‘You aren’t very surprised to hear the news.’

  ‘I’m more than that. I’m astonished. Why is the head goon doing spadework for a routine crash?’

  He smiled, bleak. Margaret had joined us nervously.

  ‘I know you, Lovejoy, you bastard,’ he said, all ice. ‘You’re always bother, and I don’t like it, lad. I have more trouble with you than all the antiques dealers in the kingdom. Tell me what you know.’

  I thought a bit. ‘No,’ I answered calmly. He eyed me.

  ‘Then you’re in trouble, Lovejoy. And I’m nasty.’

  ‘I know.’ I paused. ‘Oh. One thing, Maslow. You must make a real effort to find the baddies. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Yes, Lovejoy?’ Quiet and dangerous. The constables were suddenly still, listening.

  ‘Otherwise, keep out of my frigging road,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘While I do it for you.’

  ‘One day, lad, one day.’

  ‘Don’t fret,’ I told Margaret loudly. ‘He’s all talk.’ She made a shaky start, but that didn’t stop me squeezing my eyes at Maslow in coy friendliness as we passed. He watched us go between the tyre marks.

  ‘Why do you do it, Lovejoy?’ Margaret was furious, slamming her gears. ‘Why?’

  ‘Shut it.’ I watched the trees flit past. ‘Leckie’s not going to be shelved in some crummy office file and forgotten. The poor sod’s taxes paid Maslow’s wages. It’s time Maslow earned some of it.’

  ‘You frighten me.’ She was quite pale.

  ‘Then get out and let me drive.’

  We coursed into town like tiffed lovers, lips squeezed and not speaking.

  Margaret dropped me by the War Memorial. I’d seen Tinker as we passed, waiting outside the Sailor’s Return on East Hill, twenty minutes before opening time. I wonder where he waits if it’s raining.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy,’ he croaked, a horrible lazaroid spectre so early. It looked touch and go whether he’d last out.

  ‘Get my crate from the cottage, Tinker.’

  ‘Bleeding hell. Right now?’ He kicked the pub door in distress.

  I relented. ‘In half an hour, then. Look. Who told you?’

  ‘About Leckie? Patrick. I phoned Margaret.’ He was peeved I’d taken no notice.

  ‘Where’ll he be now?’ Knowing this sort of thing’s a barker’s job. He rummaged around in his mind.

  ‘Just left Lily’s,’ he decided finally. ‘You’ll catch him at St Nicholas.’

  That was odd, but I know better than argue with Tinker’s mental radar. I hesitated.

  ‘Black Fergie,’ I said. ‘Suss him out, eh?’

  ‘And that bird?’ He was grinning all over. ‘Her with the big knockers?’

  ‘Charmingly put, Tinker. Her too.’

  I left him thirsting and cut across by the remains of the Roman Wall. Pneumatic drills were going. Another car park, more progress. St Nicholas is a late-Saxon church, rescued from destruction by conversion into a museum. It specializes in farm crafts and rural occupations. I’d given it a set of three ladies’ decorated clay pipes, seventeenth-century, to help get it started. I must have been off my rocker. They’re worth a fortune now.

  Patrick was there as Tinker said, arguing in the foyer and stamping his foot. I don’t know how Tinker does it. I waited impatiently for Patrick’s tantrum to subside. Lily was catching it good and proper for buying some old Indian playing-card counters of mother-of-pearl made for some officer in the days of the Raj.

  ‘You won’t be told,’ Patrick was wailing. He spoiled the effect by seeing how dramatic he was being in his handbag mirror. ‘I said don’t pay more than sixty quid.’

  ‘But, darling –’

  ‘Don’t.’ He closed his eyes and reeled about a bit. Lily gasped and propped him up. ‘I can’t bear it.’ They’re partners. She’s married to this engineer but loves only Patrick – and so does Patrick. I’d explain further but it’s too complicated.

  I lost patience with all this drama, partly because sixty quid for a complete vintage set of officers’ 1878 counters is a gift.

  ‘Look, girls,’ I interrupted. ‘About Leckie.’

  Patrick recovered and shook Lily off.

  ‘Lovejoy.’ He glared and shook a finger. ‘I’ve a good mind to smack your wrists. You and that cow Margaret ignored me last night. You – you barbarian.’

  ‘Who told you about him?’

  ‘You don’t deserve to know,’ he pouted. He’s like this all the time. Lily thinks he’s marvellous. Why women go about looking for a crucifix to carry heaven knows. Life’s difficult enough.

  ‘Speak up,’ I said, not smiling. ‘Or I’ll be narked.’

  He looked at me. ‘Well. It was Bill, Bill Hassal
l.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Lily cut in. ‘Patrick’s emotionally disturbed about Leckie. Couldn’t you leave it to some other time?’

  ‘Where?’ I said again.

  ‘The King Hal at Medham. I went back for some stuff and popped in for drinkies.’ He vapoured again, tottering on to Lily’s arm. ‘And you’re a heartless beast, Lovejoy, so there.’

  ‘Come on, darling. Rest.’ Lily gave me a reproachful glance. I left them doing their thing, thinking, well, well. Bill.

  Bill Hassall. Now, how did he come into it? He’d been at the auction too but I’d a vague idea he left early. His was the house I told you about that Leckie painted. I crossed to Woody’s nosh bar for a cup of his outfall. Tinker would be bringing my zoomster in a few minutes. I decided I’d go to Peldon and maybe see if Leckie’s colours had faded.

  Tinker was in a flaming temper delivering my old wheezer opposite the post office. The pub had been without him a full half-hour. I gave him a quid. For once he didn’t sprint off.

  ‘Here, Lovejoy. Are we in trouble?’ That old refrain.

  ‘Not more than usual. Why?’ He’d left the engine running so I wouldn’t have to wind it up. Rust sprinkled the roadway from the vibrations.

  ‘That bleeding grouser niggled me on Bercolta Road.’ Grouser is dealers’ slang for a policeman of nasty disposition. He meant Maslow. ‘Stopped me and asked where you were last night.’

  ‘Bon appetite,’ I said, ferreting into the stream of eastbound cars. There was no sense in stopping to explain to Tinker.

  Half a mile and I was past the turn-off and heading out into horrible open country where no antique shops exist. Most traffic swings due east there towards the Clacton coast. I settled down at a pacy 18 mph on the switchback rural road due south to Peldon marshes. Driving gives you a chance to think.

  I’d been to yesterday’s auction because of the Kashan carpets, a lovely pair. The auctioneer – dumber even than us antiques dealers, which is mindboggling – had written them up as Isfahan. The luscious deep red gave the Kashans away, that and the fine knotting, the double borders, the lustrous feel. See the carpet-dealers in Persia price an antique carpet worth its weight in gold. They do it by a cigarette, counting the number of knots per single fag length. The more knots, the greater the price. Kashans will have two, maybe three times as many as Isfahans. And the coarser Isfahans are usually three times the size, often fifteen by twelve feet. These little darlings were six by four. Helen told me I stood no chance. I said who cares and I wasn’t interested anyway. Seeing them go to a quiet Manchester dealer broke my heart. He paid a brave price, knowing how exquisite they were.