She told me his foibles, bedtime idiosyncrasies, tame stuff really. I hardly listened. Four in the morning she was still wide awake, answering some incoming call. I left knackered, wanting to kip.
Yet back at my cottage I couldn’t rest. The parcel delivered by a relenting Michelle was inside the door. I’d passed it a couple of times, reeling from the bonging but too worried to’ve taken up its challenge. Now, I opened it with care. Very small, an ovalish velvet box that barely covered my palm. And a note saying sell it on commission in London, not anywhere local. It was from Baff, RIP. Anywhere else but the eastern hundreds, Lovejoy, you have the connections, I have not any more you see how about a 3/7 is that okay with you good luck no questions asked mate, never seen playin cards like these, they seem complete set as far as I can tell, regards, Baff, he wrote with Elizabethan disregard for scriptural refinement.
The velvet case contained fifty mica (thus transparent) oval slivers. At first, I couldn’t work out what the parts of faces and bits of apparel and hats and wigs were painted on them for. Then I saw on the bottom one, painted on solid heavy copper, a Cavalier-like gentleman looking at me, dated 1641. It bonged me stupid. A spy-master’s set of disguises! I’d never seen a complete set before. I picked one mica slice at random, superimposed it on the oval miniature portrait, and the Cavalier had changed into a swarthy turbanned Turk. Replace it with another mica oval, the miniature became an exotic bewigged blonde lady with exquisitely huge breasts tumbling from her bodice. No playing cards these. My hands trembled so badly I had to set them down.
In troubled yore, disguise mattered. A spy-master—like Mrs. Aphra Benn, the heroine I keep on about—wants to send, say, a message to a secret ally. But letters could be opened, like Mary Queen of Scots’s, and you’d be for it. Carrier pigeons could be hawked on arrival, then all was lost. Messengers were intercepted, bribed, waylaid. A problem, no? So your spy-master has an innocent parlour game distributed to secret sympathizers. They look like partially painted mica slices sort of, with roman numerals on each transparency. The secret sympathizers—Royalist, Parliamentarian, whatever—going about their daily business would receive an innocent letter for birthday greetings, some such, bearing a date or some numeral. The sympathizer hastens to the children’s nursery for a merry game of Appearances, and casually notes the matching numbered slice. He superimposes it on the miniature portrait, and finds himself now staring at… at a middle-aged woman pedlar! Get it? He now knows that the next secret messenger must be of that description. They were Flemishmade, usually, and are unbelievably rare. I’d only ever seen one complete set before, and that was on a BBC Antiques Roadshow, where the expert didn’t know what they were for and thought them a simple entertainment. Some entertainment!
But.
This pack I’d actually heard of before. They’d been sold at a local auction a year since. I’d missed them by a whisker, arrived too late to bid. Tinker told me they’d gone to some French bloke who lived near Ladyham. For a fortune.
Had Baff pulled the breakdowner on Troude? And been exterminated for his pains? From then till six o’clock in the morning I sat and thought. And thought.
Then I cast caution to the winds, walked up the lane to the phone by the chapel and phoned Almira.
“It’s me, love,” I told her. “Let’s go.”
“Oh!” she said, brightly gathering her wits. Somebody was with her. “Very well, ah, Claudine. I’ll come right over.”
Two hours later, I was shivering in the minutest aerodrome you ever did see, at Earls Colne. We flew in a thing called a Piper Saratoga, which looked like a sparrow that had swallowed a watch. I closed my eyes, and dozed through a flight, a landing, an interminable drive, and finally came to a rest where oblivion awaited between clean white sheets. It was broad daylight everywhere except in my head.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
« ^ »
Opposites aren’t. I always find this. Murder, when you go into it, tries to be something else, like unwonted killing, not quite murder as such. Motive’s the same; it isn’t anything like an explanation. The only two things that stay what they start out are love and hate. They’re white-hot hundred-per-centers, complete of themselves. Idyll therefore is not idyllic. I could have told Almira that, if she wasn’t a woman and therefore likely to laugh at whatever I said. It’s the way they are.
So, in lovely France, in a pleasant house miles from anywhere, with two lovely ponds in the lovely garden, not another building to be seen from the lovely stone terrace, lovely herbaceous borders to gladden the eye, lovely exciting Almira for the one lovely exciting essential, and lovely food baked or whatever by unseen hands below stairs, I was utterly bored sick. If heaven’s like this, I thought, screaming inside.
That fourth day in France was the real landmark. I woke up, came to. Almira was lying beside me on the bed. The house was an odd shape. The main bedroom had the disconcerting feature of being open to the rest of the house, so when you turned on your side you could see down into the hallway and part of the living room. If a door to the left was ajar you could also see the feet of an elderly lady called Madame Raybaud who cooked and gave instructions about where things had to be left. She went berserk when I moved a bag of groceries half an inch. Centimetre.
The place was silent, except for Almira’s gentle breaths whoofing on my shoulder. It was early afternoon. You’ve to go to sleep after noon grub for about an hour. You get used to it, but it’s a terrible waste of effort. I lay on my back, sweating from the heat, and gazed at the ceiling. Shadows on the plaster walls, a portrait of the Madonna, a crucifix, not much furniture, though some quite old, of local rusticity that I liked.
Almira turned over. The thick fluffy mattress clung to you for dear life whatever you did, but me and Almira had conquered that by compelling passion. She was good, vibrant, desirous, didn’t simply lie there waiting for you to get active. She joined in with an eagerness I’d come to relish. Mind you, I relish inert birds too, so there’s no means of telling which is best. I looked at her sleeping form, and felt a warmth that shouldn’t be there. Birds get into you, and then you’re helpless. I’m not afraid of commitment, no. How could a bloke like me be scared of loving one bird for life, to the exclusion? I’m decisive, sure, definite. It’s my character.
The window shutters looked simple but had a folklore all their own. Simple hooks got you mad by staying hooked just as you thought, here comes daylight and a vision of the valley. I wrestled silently with the damned things, finally got them open enough to see out. Windows are for looking from, not blocking up.
Our house was a size, on the shoulder of a vale with a river coursing below. No anglers that I could see. Back home they’d be out in droves with coloured umbrellas and odd hats and flasks, murdering minnows. No other farmhouses. Small fields, I noticed, no cattle in them to speak of. Where the hell did Madame Raybaud hail from? She came on a bike. It made me smile, thinking of Forna’s cousin. She’d have to wait for her fee now.
There’s nothing to see in countryside, is there, so I leaned on the sill, thinking of Baff. East Anglia was as depressingly rural as this, so possibly not far away out there an assortment of strange characters lurked possibly as exotic as ours. Was there a Dicko Chave, perfect gentleman, proposing to any bird who stood still long enough? A Sherry, giving exciting welcomes to hotel guests for a consideration? Glass faker-makers like Phoebe Colonna and Steve Yelbard? Did Gallic versions of Gazza’s Tryste Service trundle these dusty lanes, bearing Dianas to some costly nocturnal lust? I found myself shivering, don’t know why, chucked trousers on and padded downstairs.
The terrace was a longish paved area under vines and clematis, between foliage that fell away down the hillside. No definite edge to the garden that I could see. It blended with scrub. Lazy smoke rose from the greenery. Did we have beavering gardeners as well as a cook? We were complete, a nuclear family or something. I looked at my feet. Very odd, but the strangely new slippers fit me. I’d tugged them on without thought.
These trousers weren’t mine. They were new. I’d brought nothing except what I’d worn when, practically walking in my sleep, I’d stepped out of Almira’s motor. She’d brought none of my things, silly cow. That’s the trouble with women, never… never…
Some fault in the logic halted me. I sat on the wall at the end of the terrace. Nobody’d know I was here. No phone, no nearby village. I’d walked along the lane for a couple of miles, finding only a couple of cottages set back from the verge, orchards, a field or two, woods. It was picturesque rural tranquillity at its most poisonously repellent.
Almira’s motor vanished some time during the first night. I’d heard it go, but not been in a condition to look. I mentioned it to Almira but she said it was going for a service, so that was all right. I find preconceptions go wrong on me, especially about countries. That’s what I meant about opposites. Maybe some old snippet from history was making me uneasy about being in France? Like, Richard the Lionheart got shot while besieging some local town here. With gentle nobility, he died lingeringly, forgiving the enemy archer—who was then literally skinned alive for daring to kill a king. See what I mean? France is gentle, noble. Or France is lies and cruelty. Preconceptions. I’m the same about women, always wrong. Men are easier.
My logic started to niggle. I’ve had one or two birds—well, all right, maybe more than that. Experience has got me nowhere but, all the same, women do stick to certain patterns. Like, this holiday was never on Almira’s impulse. It was planned, down to the last detail. And—the vital bit—women are obsessional packers. Go away for two days with a bird, she brings the kitchen sink and eleven suitcases of superfluous tat. Not only that, I thought, watching a bee rummage in some flower, but a woman packs like a maniac. It’s her nature. Agree a weekend away next Easter, she’ll strew luggage all over the bed that very day with seven months still to go. And if you’re slack about your own packing, they’ll furiously start on it for you. I don’t know why. Probably they’ve not got enough to do. You just have to ignore it, like Wimbledon Fortnight. I haven’t got much in the way of clothes, never have. Almira’d brought in a selection of clothes the first day—or had they already been here, waiting? I’d been too knackered to observe. She’d had a thrilling time, kitting me out in new trousers, shirts, a selection of shoes. She said it was a French door-to-door service. I hadn’t found my old crud. Almira had chucked it. “You look smart, Lovejoy,” she said, delighted. Four days… I was now anonymous.
There was a path down the hillside garden. I’d been down it before. It went past one of the pools and finally an old well. That seemed to be it but for a copse further down where the path petered out. I found myself walking down it, for nothing. I was suffering badly from withdrawal symptoms—not an antique shop for a million miles. See what I meant, what’s wrong with Paradise?
Wood smoke drew me among the trees. It was surprisingly near. A smouldering garden fire, a brick cottage, two oddly silent dogs chained to a stake, both looking at me with mistrust, and music trying to suggest Spain concealed beyond the doorway.
“Monsieur?”
I jumped a mile, but it was only a grave-looking, stocky man, clearly some gardener. He held a hoe, was quite pleasant. School French always lets you down, but you’re sometimes forced to give it a go. I tried. His face took on a surly what’s-this-gunge expression. I came to recognize it as a hallmark admix of French scorn and impatience, reserved mainly for me.
“Hello. Je suis Lovejoy,” I said, “Je visite avec Madame, dans le maison.”
We talked similar stuff for a few breaths. He invited me in, gave me some drink that produced an instant headache. He was Monsieur Marc. He was a gardener, I understood. I was not a gardener. What is it that you make like metier, Monsieur Lovejoy? I buy of chairs and of tables, Monsieur Marc, especially plus vieux. French wears you out. I could ask him if he liked apples or poires and how old was his Mum, but replying to counterquestions, ever my bane, was hopeless. I thanked him a million times, because thanks is easy. He saw me off after I’d told him the flowers were much more better comme les fleurs dans England, not is this not? I tottered past his dogs—weird; I thought dogs did nowt else but bark. Maybe stunned at my syntax.
His hoe hadn’t been a hoe at all, I saw as I left. It was a sickle, slotted bayonet-fashion underneath a longarm. But that was all right, wasn’t it? I mean, out here in this rural peace a gardener’d need a weapon, il practically faut, right? Foxes, heaven knows what. Did France still have boars, wildcats, worse? I felt protected, snug even. Good thinking, Monsieur Marc. I returned to the terrace, where Madame Raybaud was setting out tea. She had her own idea of what English afternoon tea was—heavy scones, butter and jam, Earl Grey and a kind of clotted cream in small ramekin pot things. Lovely, but so far we’d not had a single pasty. Almira came down looking a picture in a summery saffron linen and matching shoes, good enough to eat. No problems with her declensions, I noticed. She and Madame Reybaud prattled on about monsieur and talked laughingly of groceries. Clearly old pals. I had the notion that monsieur was not me, but how would I know?
Often I wonder if there’s all that much to do in heaven except look out. Oh, Almira and I were really enjoying ourselves, I thought over mouthfuls of madame’s thick scone. How could it be otherwise? Gorgeous bird, no worries, fine weather—though I’m the rare sort who actually likes rain—pretty garden, passion on demand with a lovely compliant woman, watching her sunbathe and occasionally swimming in the larger of the two ponds. People’d pay fortunes. It was just my festering discontent. Most of it, I decided, smiling across the terrace table at Almira’s lovely face, was simply withdrawal from antiques. I get symptoms worse than any addict. I just can’t help it. Women tend to get narked if you own up, tell them you’re dreaming of some sordid antiques auction. They think you’re criticizing them for making you bored. It’s because women love holidays. I don’t. Holidays, like a number of other things I mentioned a bit ago, aren’t. To me, they’re hard work.
Sorry to go on about holidays being truly boring gaps in life, but I’d noticed a few features of Almira’s behaviour. I knew this place was owned by her schoolfriend—I’d forgotten her name—and guessed that probably Almira had visited before. But a woman walking about her own garden behaves very differently from one who’s merely coming through, so to speak. Even if she’s shacked up with her very own lover with hubby safely slogging elsewhere, she looks totally different. She touches this bougainvillea, that oleander, with possession somehow. Women do it to men as well, so you can tell what’s going on before it hits the newspapers if you keep your eyes skinned. Even if you don’t want to spot unpleasant truths, sometimes you can’t help but see the obvious.
This house was hers.
Certain conclusions are inescapable, once a fact hits home. The Almiras of this world can’t live without a phone. No wires proved nothing nowadays, in the cellular-phone aeon, so there was communication about. Yet I’d been told otherwise. If this was Almira’s secret love-nest, she’d still have electronic wizardry. If it was her husband’s family nook, he’d be even more likely to have wires humming between here and political headquarters.
Once a lie creeps on to a tea table, you’re done for. The scale of the deception scarcely matters. Like contamination defiles a feast, or a stain ruins a dress, it’s spoilage city. Okay, Almira might want to keep me away from contacts, the way a holidaying bird excludes all those clamouring duties she’s left behind. But one fib compounds another. The keys to Almira’s motor had been hanging on the wall of Monsieur Marc’s cottage. She’d only one set. The keyring’s fancy, with one of those dotted inbuilt lights they give you at Sandor Motors. I knew its logo. I’d asked them for one when they mended my Ruby once. They’d told me to sod off. I’d not said anything. So Monsieur Marc was more than a full-time gardener. So what?
“Look, love,” I said brightly as we finished nosh. “How about we have supper out tonight? Maybe see a nearby town?”
She smiled, fond with possession.
“As soon as the car’s back, darling, we shall. I want to walk through to the river down below. Madame’s just been telling me there’s a lovely lake somewhere near. I’ll get directions from her, shall I?”
“Lovely, dwoorlink,” I replied, most sincerely.
One more lovely and I’d go mental. But I smiled, and wondered when they’d come. Our holiday was only supposed to be ten days. If they delayed much longer there’d be hardly any time to shift their antiques. If any. I felt pretty sure I knew who we were waiting for. I wasn’t quite correct, as it happened, in fact not even near.
Incidentally, don’t hide from fraud. Hiding from it’s the easiest thing to do, and always brings disaster. Yet we do it, every single day. The fact is, fraud is always—for always read but always — clearly recognizable. You sense that your husband is deceiving you with another woman? You tell yourself, heavens, no! Can’t be! He’s merely edgy because of things at work… The checkout girl is doubling up your grocery prices? No! She’s a pleasant lass, always smiles… We trick ourselves. Complacency’s so cheery. Facing reality is hell.
Once, I went to a night lift in Cambridgeshire. I’d been in a Cheesefoot Head pub when this maniac wandered in and surreptitiously showed a fragment of shredded silver. My chest bonged like Great Tom’s clapper and I was across the taproom like a ferret. The bloke let me touch it. Honest Early Christian silver, seventh century. I almost wept.
“Look, mate,” I told him. “You a moonspender? Give me three days. Name’s Lovejoy. I’ll have a syndicate together, honest to God. Money up front.”
A massive aggressive hulk shoved me aside and showed me his craggy yellow teeth. The pub went quiet.
“You’re off your patch. I’ve heard of you, Lovejoy. This be local business, boy.” He had two enormous goons for help he didn’t need. It’s always like this, because field finds of Dark Age silver can bring in nearly enough to settle the National Debt. East Anglia’s taverns have this illicit trade sewn up. (You’re supposed to tell the Coroner, who on a good day promises you maybe perhaps some reward money, possibly, with any luck. Whereas illegal syndicates pay cash on the nail, the night your little electronic detector goes bleep. Guess who wins?)
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