Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

  I sat there in the silent forest in a patch of sunlight while birds and squirrels aped about like they do. Resting is hard work for a bloke like me, but gradually I calmed down. It was an hour before my headache went. I was no nearer making sense of any of it but at least I was able to drive home. I stopped at the station for a plastic pasty, and this time ate it all.

  Chapter 6

  NEXT MORNING, THE cottage looked like a battlefield. Living as I do, occasionally without a woman’s assistance, I can tolerate most shambles with good grace. It’s only when such as Sue are too tired to go home that the fur flies in the dawn. Honestly, I just can’t see the point of moving things to a fixed spot for the sake of mere tidiness. Things only wander about again. I find it more sensible just to stay vigilant, simply keep on the lookout for essentials like towels and the odd pan. In fact, I’d say neatness is a time-waster.

  My cottage is a thatched reconstruction, the sort modern architects deplore as inefficient. The place is not very spacious. There’s a little hall, a bathroom, and a living-room with a kitchen alcove the size of a bookcase. I kip on a folding divan. Sue says it looks suggestive, but she’s only joking.

  Today was my laundry day. Sheets, pyjamas, towels and shirts. I do socks and underpants in separate bits. They have to come round every day or you get uncontrollable mounds if they’re left. I put some wood under the old copper boiler in the back garden and got it lit third go by a fluke. Luckily the cottage is set back from the country lane on its own, so there’s nobody nearby to complain about the smoke. Filling it takes ten buckets. I usually feed the birds before breakfast, otherwise they come tapping on the windows and I get no peace. Today, they got some of Sue’s Batten-berg cake. I’d been trying to get rid of it for days. Her marzipan’s a foot thick. She has this thing about wholesome food.

  That done, I scrambled two eggs and brewed up. On good days I sit outside, though the birds pester me and hedgehogs are always on the scrounge. Today it looked like rain. Anyway, I had several reasons for noshing indoors. They were laid on the carpet beside the doctor’s bag.

  Wilkie had got them into my car as I’d asked. I had some daft idea of leaving them a day or two to collect my thoughts, but I’m not strong on resolution. I’d stayed up half the night looking at this crummy book and the contents of the bag, and I was still no wiser.

  The doctor’s instruments turned my stomach over. Even clean and shiny they’d have been gruesome. Patchily rusted as they were now, I could hardly look. Some of the needles were five inches long. And they weren’t your average darning needle for lovely innocent cotton. They were for people, and seemed to be triangular in section, with cutting edges along the length like those frightening short Land Pattern socket bayonets collectors are all after nowadays. Some were curved, others slender and tiny. The old quack also had a mask, rather like a fencer’s, covered with gauze. For dropping ether anaesthetic, I guessed. I’d seen one of those before in the medical museum in Euston. A pair of curved forceps big enough to . . . I hate to think what they fitted round. Lancets, all shapes and sizes. And some scissors that curved and others that didn’t. A stethoscope like an ear-trumpet. A group of lenses in a leather slot-box, with one spare lens coloured like you see in those children’s kaleidoscopes. I tried fitting it into the slots with the others but there was no room for it, so I chucked it into the bag and forgot about it. With instruments like this bagful I’m glad the old doctor was on the side of health.

  As I mopped my plate with some bread I read the card Wilkie had slipped in the bag. The same address as inside the doctor’s bag. I knew the village, having been on the knocker round Six Elm Green during one of my bad spells. Old Dr Chase’s ageing widow, I guessed, had put her late husband’s effects up for sale to eke out the groats during her winter years. I’m naturally full of sympathy of these cunning old geezers but I’m usually poorer than they turn out to be.

  The book was only twenty years old, privately printed for the author. It was that well-known world-shattering best-seller Structural Design of Experimental Carriage-Ways in Nineteenth-Century Suffolk, by none other than that famous quack, Dr James Friese Chase, MD, whose medical bag I now possessed. I’d flipped through it last night, but decided I’d wait for the film. No hidden messages, no beautiful marginal notes by the author which might have increased its value, and no handwritten letters from Shakespeare skilfully concealed in the end papers.

  I laid it aside and sorrowfully repacked the bag. Nothing. After all that, nothing. So, Leckie had been killed for nothing. Some tearaways had believed Leckie had a real find, a priceless antique among the day’s items bought at auction. They’d probably asked him to sell. He’d said no, sealing his doom, and for nothing. You can buy old medical instruments for practically a penny a ton. And a tatty copy of the world’s worst-seller like Dr Chase’s book is even more piteous.

  Outside, the boiler was heating up well. A few more bits of wood and it was ready. I stuffed the washing in and swirled it round to get it properly wet. Sometimes I have to do without soap powder because it’s so dear. I put the iron lid on with a clang and went in. It was coming on to rain. I sat on my stool inside the doorway listening to the raindrops hissing on the boiler’s hot cover. I was supposed to be thinking, but all I could feel was relief. After all, if Leckie had no precious antiques it meant there could be no motive for murder, right? And no motive for killing Leckie meant that Leckie’s loyal old pal Lovejoy couldn’t possibly be blamed for just sitting doing his washing in his safe old garden when he should have been chasing after Leckie’s murderers on his own. Right?

  ‘Right,’ I said fervently, congratulating myself.

  The rest of the morning was great. I milled about, happily sussing out antiques, reading between bits of washing. I cleaned up the cottage in case Sue came later, and put my decrepit mac on to hang my washing out in the rain. I eyed the dark skies hopefully. If it rained all day the stuff wouldn’t dry before tomorrow evening at the latest, with luck. A reprieve from ironing.

  Things seemed to be looking up for Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. A reprieve from ironing, and now safely absolved from chasing after Leckie’s killers, and therefore immune from risk. I whistled happily as I locked the cottage. I’d celebrate by having nosh in Woody’s café, and persuade Erica to let me pay in promises.

  My crate made it proudly into town with only one thrombosis, and that was on the railway slope, which I don’t count. I parked boldly in the town solicitors’ yard because it was pouring.

  The antiques Arcade is a glass-roofed alley between two sets of rickety shops. One end is open to wind and weather. The other’s full of Woody’s obnoxious caff. There’s a dozen leaning tables and scattered chairs. Woody spends his life cooking nosh and losing half-smoked fags in the grease. His idea of nourishment’s to start off with carbohydrate and protein and simply add congealed fat.

  I entered, coughing and spluttering at the first smoggy breath of airborne cholesterol, and signalling for tea. It’s the only thing not fried. To my surprise, Tinker Dill was absent. That’s very odd because, had I been able to see through the solid air between me and Woody’s wall clock, it would have confirmed that it wasn’t yet opening time for the nation’s taverns.

  ‘Over here, Lovejoy.’

  ‘How do, Sven.’ I crossed and sat opposite him.

  A few other dealers were in, already stoking up for the day’s knavery. I gave them my electioneering wave to indicate affluence and ease. Antiques dealers can detect poverty in a colleague quick as light, and everybody knows how contagious poverty is.

  ‘And a pasty, Woody,’ I yelled, to show them all.

  ‘I got a stool, Lovejoy,’ Sven said, grinning. ‘Been waiting for you.’

  ‘Date?’

  ‘About 1720, maybe earlier.’

  ‘Great,’ I said evenly. The chances of Sven actually flashing a genuine stool that age are remote. ‘Sitting on it?’ I joked.

  He made my heart turn over by saying, ‘Yes,’ and pulled this
stool out from under himself. Lucky I wasn’t halfway through my pasty or I’d have choked. Eyes swivelled as the others gazed across like a suspicious herd at grass.

  It had everything, a luscious stool weighing heavy in the hand. I stood it reverently on Woody’s plastic table.

  ‘Do you mind, Lovejoy?’ The waitress stood tapping her foot. ‘Take that dirty little stool off our table.’

  I gave her one of my special stares and took the tea from her in case of war. ‘Not be a minute, Erica.’

  ‘It’s an important deal,’ Sven boasted to her, ever the born optimist.

  ‘Money, Lovejoy.’ Erica tried to keep her voice down, but Sam Denton and his partner Jean overheard and chuckled. I tried not to go red. ‘Woody says,’ Erica told me desperately.

  ‘Okay, love.’ I made a show of delving in my pocket. ‘What price do you put on it, Sven?’ That was a distraction. While everybody hung on Sven’s lunatic guess I pressed Erica’s hand, giving her a mute glance of appeal. She knew I was broke again, and gave me a tight-lipped glare, but you could tell she’d square it with Woody again somehow. She slammed the pasty down and stalked off. I thought of yelling to keep the change, but decided better of it, and concentrated on the stool.

  An ancient stool’s practically always worth its weight in gold. A chair isn’t, because stools are much rarer. Oh, they weren’t once, but whereas chairs tended to be carefully preserved stools were just chucked on the fire. People simply replaced them. It’s a modern trick to take a genuine eighteenth-century chair and cut it down to make a stool. The trouble was that my bell was silent. My antennae didn’t give a single quiver. If Sven’s stool was original and genuine I’d have been ringing like a cathedral at Christmas. As it was, not a single chime. My heart sank. I felt underneath the stool and bent to peer. Sure enough it was covered beneath with two layers of hessian, the old giveaway. And Sven was still grinning like a fool.

  ‘The original hessian, too,’ he said, nodding. He’s no idea.

  ‘It’s a fraud, Sven.’ I avoided his eyes as I whispered the terrible news. All this truth hurt me more than him, but I knew how he’d feel. I ran my thumb along the little rails of the stool and felt the telltale Roman numeral incised under the bar. The stool had started life as V, fifth of a set of chairs. A cut-down.

  ‘We could do a special price,’ he offered eagerly.

  ‘No, thanks.’ I can make fakes myself, and cheaper than anybody else.

  The door clanged open and in breezed – well, stumbled – Tinker Dill. He homed in on me and Sven and flopped down.

  ‘We buying that, Lovejoy?’ he rasped, coughing and wheezing, nodding at the stool.

  ‘Not today, Tinker. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Doing as I was told,’ he said with feeling. He slurped my tea and filched my pasty. He meant I’d told him to suss out Jake Pelman and Fergus. ‘Your pal Maslow’s out shopping. I had to come the back way to miss him, the bleeder.’ I grinned at this, then had a sudden thought. Now I felt let off the hook I could go out and rile the Old Bill as any rightfully indignant citizen would.

  ‘Back in a minute. Get some grub, Tinker. On the slate.’

  I left Tinker and Sven and shot out of the Arcade. There he was, sour and useless as ever, talking to his brother Tom near the post office. People were hurrying along the crowded pavements in the rain. Moll was talking prettily under a coloured umbrella. Pity her bloke was huge, and a copper. I trotted over at the traffic lights, sure I’d surprise him.

  ‘You’re supposed to wait till the cars stop.’ Maslow had been watching me out of the corner of his beady little eye.

  ‘Morning.’ I gave a hearty smile, because his sort likes us gloomy. ‘How’s the case?’

  He actually blushed. I mean it. Honestly, he looked down at his feet and shifted his weight. I had a sudden funny feeling things were going to go wrong. Peelers don’t blush easy.

  ‘Er, the case?’ He sounded hesitant.

  ‘Yes. The c-a-s-e.’ I waited a bit. Like a fool I was still beaming. ‘Leckie. Remember?’

  He faced me at last, after a quick glance at Tom. ‘It’s closed, Lovejoy. And before you start –’

  I couldn’t understand for a minute. You can’t close a case without catching the baddie, can you? Everybody knows that, even goons like Maslow.

  ‘Did you catch them, then?’ I was asking, still thick, when Moll broke in.

  ‘Oh, how can you?’ She stamped her foot with a splash, glaring from Tom to Maslow. They hadn’t told her.

  ‘Road accident,’ Maslow said doggedly. ‘It’s closed.’

  ‘But he was murdered,’ I said. It still wouldn’t sink in.

  Moll gasped at the word and rounded on them both.

  ‘There! I knew something was wrong when he came –’

  ‘A road accident’s a road accident, Lovejoy,’ Maslow pronounced. ‘Unless you saw something or have firm evidence . . .’

  We all stopped. People were staying close to the shop front for dryness. Cars swished by on wet tyres. I looked about, clearing my throat. I could hardly see for the red mist in my vision. How I didn’t clock him one I’ll never know. I took two goes to speak.

  ‘You’ve given up? Is that it, Maslow?’ I managed finally. ‘You’ve done your very, very best for Leckie?’

  ‘I don’t want any lip from you . . .’ He began a lecture about public co-operation.

  If I owned up to seeing the killing Sue would be roped in. And witnesses, even in dear old England, get crisped by tearaways who feel that evidence is often undesirable. So me and Sue would ‘accidentally’ get done, same as Leckie, soon as I opened my mouth.

  ‘How does it feel to be utterly useless, Maslow?’ I said the words politely because my face was tight and my voice shook. Tom looked uncomfortable. Moll was being furious with them both, but pretty women are handicapped in a way.

  ‘One more word out of you . . .’ Maslow threatened. I watched a cluster of kids clatter past into a toyshop. Their dad was laughing, trying to keep up and fold his umbrella at the same time. Some hopes.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said kindly. The words were out before I could control them. ‘I’ll do it, Maslow. You just go home and put your feet up. Watch telly football or something.’ I leaned towards him, my voice just about keeping going. ‘I’ll see the bastards off. You rest.’ And I turned and left them there.

  I don’t remember much about the next hour, except that I splashed about the town pavements and got wetter still looking in shop windows. There seemed to be so many people about. I kept having to say sorry for bumping into folk going in and out of shop doorways. Once a couple of girls nearly put my eye out with the prongs of their bloody umbrella. They spent a whole giggly minute apologizing. I said I was fine, and we parted friends.

  When I came to I was outside the Arcade again, standing at the same traffic lights in the pouring rain and just looking across at the stalls under the glass roof opposite. Twice cars stopped to wave me across, but I wouldn’t move. I realized I was on a traffic island half-way across the main road. People were looking. Tinker was bawling at me from near the Arcade. I went over in case he’d accidentally left some of my grub.

  ‘You’ll get yourself bleeding run over,’ he grumbled as I approached. ‘Then what?’

  ‘You’d work for Elsie.’ I try to give as good as I get, but I was feeling really down. He cackled, and pushed ahead of me into Woody’s. Elsie’s rumoured to make most of her antique deals in bed.

  ‘Seen Elsie’s thighs?’ He was chuckling as we crossed over to where Moll was sitting. ‘One of those would drive me in like a tent peg.’

  ‘Charmingly put,’ I said, staring. Moll?

  ‘At last!’ she squeaked, rising. Her face was pink. She’d been braving Woody’s tea. ‘Lovejoy! You’re soaked! Now just sit right down here and we’ll get some lovely hot food –’

  ‘Eh?’

  She pulled me into a chair and rushed at the counter. I heard her prattling away to Woody sa
ying not too well done and things women say like that about grub. Tinker shrugged, all bashful.

  ‘We’ve been talking,’ he said. I saw he’d taken one of his mittens off, revealing a row of blackened digits and filthy bitten nails. I’ve never seen him eat without this horrible woollen mitten before. This was obviously an occasion. ‘Talking about what?’ I was thinking how I’m always ten moves behind these days.

  ‘You. She keeps on.’

  ‘What have you been telling her?’ I grabbed his evil throat.

  ‘Nowt.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing. She’s a gabby cow.’

  ‘Now!’ Moll flounced back and settled her elbows on the table in a conspirator’s attitude. She whispered, frowning, ‘Is this gentleman to be trusted, Lovejoy? Implicitly?’

  I looked about, but she meant Tinker, so I nodded. She squealed jubilantly and clapped her hands.

  ‘Marvellous!’ she cried. ‘Then we are . . . Three Musketeers! Isn’t this deliciously exciting?’

  ‘Er . . . What, exactly?’

  ‘Why!’ She gave me a blinding smile. ‘You setting out to do battle with Leckie’s murd—’

  I clapped my hand over her mouth, frantic.

  ‘Here, Lovejoy.’ Tinker had that shifty look about him. ‘It’s not like last time, is it? I don’t want any bother.’

  ‘How despicable!’ Moll wrenched herself free from my hand to turn on Tinker. ‘And you with so many medals! All that brave war experience –’

  I gave Tinker one of my sardonics. He had the gall to simper. This is what a pretty bird does for a bloke, saps strength and sense. Look at Samson. Then look at Tinker. I decided on the spot I’d have no allies.