Dovetail

by Bernard Pearson

  They were able to work in the open again as the weather was still dry. Lucy and Sid cleared out a space in the open-sided cart shed. It was near enough to the workshop to run a power line across, which meant they could put up a few lights to help them see better. Once again Bill took an advisory role until there was something that needed his particular hand skills and experience to finish off.

  The day drew to a close and the landscape around the farm softened in the twilight. Sid stayed for supper, during which they discussed the day’s work and how everything was progressing. Bill was very pleased and said it certainly beat doing it all himself as he used to do.

  Lucy got out a jug of cider she had picked up on her way home from the supermarket. It was good stuff and, at eight percent, very powerful. Sid drank sparingly, but Bill did not and, as a result, became jollier and more garrulous than Lucy had ever known him. Sid got him reminiscing about some of the jobs he had done in the past and the various tricks of his trade, ancient and modern.

  ‘In the real old days,’ Bill told them, ‘fakers would make reproduction furniture out of green wood, just as the originals were made. Then they would tether them on the sea strand to get battered by waves and rolled against sand and rocks, which would add years of wear in only a month or two. There was one harbour near West Bay that was used by two different families of fakers, and if any poor sod tried to do a bit of fishing around there, he would be chased off right quick. And one time someone saw all this furniture being tossed about on the strand, thought there had been a shipwreck, and cycled miles in foul weather to alert the Coast Guard!’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Lucy, laughing.

  ‘Oh, back in the thirties when antique furniture was becoming sought after by the middle classes. The upper crust always used the great inheritance merry-go-round method of furnishing their homes. There were some real first-class fakers in those days. Men like George Furnley, who was known as ‘Flashy Furnley’ because when he died in 1960 he was still wearing the same suit they gave him when he left the army in 1919. Harry Tasker was another one. He was known as ‘Nailer’ because he would knock you up a bag of 16th-century nails and screws at five pounds a dozen. All hand-forged and, if you wanted them that way, nicely corroded.’

  ‘What would you want with corroded nails and screws?’ asked Sid, a bit confused, though that may have been the cider.

  ‘If a thing ain’t right, it’s wrong, Sid. A modern nail or screw in a supposedly old chair, that bugger would be as out of place as you in a convent.’

  They all laughed, and after another drink, Bill went on thoughtfully, ‘Speaking of things that ain’t right, I’ve been giving some thought to where Skates might have come by those chairs of his. The last time any of the Blakeneys was ever mentioned was when Simon Morse sold his two in 1953, and I think the buyer was one Lord Deverill. He had two obsessions, this lord: one was collecting anything related to Elizabeth I, and the other was gambling. A friend of mine in the trade told me it was believed Skates had acquired some valuable Elizabethan furniture from Deverill as payment for a gambling debt, and I think the two-and-a-bit Blakeneys were included in that payment. Morse always said he never could find the other two chairs, but I reckon Deverill already had the damaged one and was still searching for the fourth.

  He probably even told Skates all about them. It’s unlikely he’d find out about them any other way.’

  ‘Well, that’s as may be,’ said Lucy, getting up, ‘but now I think it’s time we were all in our beds.’

  She could see that, despite the cider, Bill was weary and in pain. He refused to take any morphine, though, because he wanted to be up in good time to get things under way for when Hugh arrived. ‘And him being a farmer,’ he said, ‘I’m guessing it will be bloody sparrow fart o’clock.’

  Sid said he would walk Clive and check over the place, then drop the dog back in before he left. The night was cold and there was autumn mist in the air. The light that came from the kitchen window barely illuminated the doorstep, and his white transit van was just a ghostly shape. He walked in a silent world, his boots on the concrete making the only sound. Clive wandered off for a crap and a sniff around; Sid stood waiting for him and smoking a roll-up. His mind went back over the day and then, as if summoned by the remembered sound of gunfire and the smell of cordite in Bill’s barn that morning, old memories put their boots on and marched behind his eyes. He was back in Belfast doing what he was trained to do and doing it well. He had been a soldier, he had been a killer, and he knew that it had changed him.

  There was no regret, though. He had done what he’d had to do, and if he hadn’t, well, he wouldn’t be standing here having this fag right now. But sometimes he missed the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers, and he would dig out his sand-coloured beret with its cap badge depicting Excalibur wreathed in flames. ‘Who fucking dares wins what?’ he would ask himself. And that’s when he would start drinking, not stopping until he was unconscious or all the bottles were empty.

  And now his friend Bill would have to take a gun and kill at least one man, probably two, and maybe even more. What a fuck-up, he thought.

  Calling Clive to him, he walked back to the house, stopping for a moment to look through the small square of light that was the window. He saw Bill moving around slowly, putting glasses onto the draining board. He looked as old and ill as he undoubtedly was. Sid sighed, went into the warm, homely kitchen, and said goodnight.

  As he drove home, his headlights cutting into the blackness and the hedgerows flashing past, he thought again, What a fuck-up. What a right fuck-up.

  Chapter 35

  THURSDAY, 25 OCTOBER

  Hugh Dawlish rattled into the yard at seven the next morning driving a tractor and towing a trailer. At one end of the trailer was a drum-like device and a couple of Calor gas bottles; at the other was a pile of logs, well-seasoned and split, all ready for use. Lucy went out to greet him and soon he was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in his hands.

  They spoke little at first, carefully knocking the edges off the difference between conversing with a stranger and a neighbour. Hugh seemed to be comfortable in her presence, and Lucy felt surprisingly relaxed sitting opposite him, drinking her tea. For her, men were something to be wary of, but soon she and Hugh were talking easily, glad to find they both had the same sense of humour. Bill came downstairs and was very pleased to see the pair of them chatting away.

  Sid arrived, and they all trooped outside to unload the trailer. Lucy had never seen a grain dryer before, and Hugh seemed to take great pleasure in showing it to her. This was not lost on either Sid or Bill. Sid suggested that it might be helpful if Hugh stayed long enough to see the thing working properly as neither he nor Bill had much experience with such complex pieces of machinery. Hugh knew that was a load of bollocks, but he was happy to stay and help.

  After unloading the logs, they set up the grain dryer in the old stable block where the roof was sound and there was enough room to place the chairs in line with the dryer. They rigged up some lights and, putting the machine on a couple of pallets, eventually got a steady stream of warm air blowing through the building.

  Lucy then suggested Hugh might like to stay for lunch. He thanked her and said he would, and she walked off to the kitchen to make some sandwiches. Sid and Bill nudged each other as Hugh’s eyes followed her slender form across the yard.

  ‘Pretty lady,’ said Sid.

  ‘Bloody good cook,’ said Bill.

  ‘Had a tough time,’ added Sid, sitting down on the trailer and rolling a fag.

  ‘Needs to get out,’ said Bill. ‘Have a bit of younger company now and again.’

  Hugh just smiled and headed for the kitchen. Bill and Sid raised their eyebrows at each other and took their time following him.

  When lunch was over, Lucy walked Hugh out to his tractor and watched as he reversed the trailer. He stopped just before going out of the gate; Sid, looking out the window, saw the two of them have a brief
conversation. When Lucy came back into the kitchen, he noticed she had a bit more spring in her step.

  Bill was tired, so they made him sit in his armchair by the stove and doze while they moved the chairs into the stable for staining, which Bill would have to do as it was a very skilled part of the deception. Even though the wood they had used was from about the right period, the colour was brighter and lighter in tone. This showed up against the dark aging of the original chairs’ wood, especially where it had been worked.

  The lights they had rigged up showed all the dirt and detritus that had accumulated in the stalls, including an old horse collar, its leather white with dust and bird droppings. There were cobwebs everywhere and ancient bits of straw trodden into the cobbled floor. Sid and Lucy cleaned up what they could for fear that when the dryer was working the dust would be fatal to Bill.

  When he felt as rested as he was likely to, Bill had Sid set up an old kitchen table in one of the stalls. On this he placed a carboy, several demijohns, and a small, brown stoneware bottle. He poured glutinous grey and brown substances from these into an enamel bowl and carefully mixed them. None of the containers had labels on and all smelled strongly of wood alcohol. The fumes caught at the backs of their throats, and Bill was forced to wear his space helmet. Sid and Lucy stood upwind. Clive hid.

  Bill had a number of offcuts from the wood he had used to construct the new chair, and on these he brushed the mixture from the enamel bowl. The colour looked nothing like that of the wood it was supposed to replicate, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He adjusted the mixture, adding a trickle from this bottle, a spoonful from that one, and then a careful measure of something that smelled of rotting lemons.

  It was like watching some mystical alchemist at work, though instead of robes he was wearing a very stained boiler suit that might once have been white. Over that he had on a red rubber apron and gumboots several sizes too large for his feet. They gave him an awkward, shuffling gate as he moved around the table, dripping here and brushing there. At last, he walked away and sat down on a chair they had brought outside for him. He was absolutely exhausted.

  ‘One last thing to do,’ he wheezed as he stripped off his rubber gloves and threw them in the corner. ‘Lucy, please fetch me that bottle of Jimmer’s applejack.’

  ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘you’re not going to clear your chest with that stuff, are you?’

  Bill gave a wheezy laugh, then coughed hard and long. When at last he had got enough breath back, he told her it was for the stain. Lucy carefully carried out the flagon. Under Bill’s instructions, she and Sid decanted a small amount into an empty bottle. In the bowl, the mixture was now a viscous, dark brown substance that absorbed the light. Bill poured in some of the applejack, stirring as he did so with a wooden stick. Every now and then he carefully lifted the stick out and checked to see how the concoction dripped off it.

  ‘If it’s too thin, it won’t do much. If it’s too thick, it’ll stick like shit to a blanket,’ he said.

  When he was finally satisfied that enough applejack had been added, the resulting stain was very carefully poured from the enamel bowl into a large, wide-necked Kilner jar. It was not nice stuff and Bill made sure no one touched the bottle without rubber gloves.

  ‘Dangerous, is it?’ asked Sid.

  ‘Wouldn’t do you much good,’ replied Bill. ‘The nicotine oil alone would kill you.’

  As he leaned over and hawked noisily onto a bit of newspaper at his feet, Sid patted him gently on the back and said, ‘Come on, mate, you’ve done enough for today. You’re beginning to sound like a fucking bubble pipe.’

  He helped Bill back into the kitchen and the welcoming embrace of his armchair. Sid and Lucy sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of tea in an effort to wash the fumes out of their sinuses.

  When Bill began to nod, Lucy said she needed to get out into the fresh air and would take Clive up the lane to see Miss Templeton. She called on the old lady regularly now, and no longer had any secrets from her. Miss Templeton enjoyed Lucy’s visits and gave her as much advice from her own experiences in love and war as she could. She understood the pressure Lucy was under as well as the danger she was in, and knew they would both get a lot worse before they got better.

  While Lucy was gone, Sid decided he would have a look around the fields. No matter what Bill said, he didn’t trust this bloke Skates or any of his scraggy crew not to come snooping round. Setting off through the passage that led to the meadow behind the barn, he went round the back of all the farm buildings, checking to see if any of the boarded windows had been disturbed. As he neared the stable block, the powerful reek of Bill’s wood stain reached him, and he moved quickly on to the hedgerows that girded the fields beyond. He made very little noise as he went, moving slowly and carefully with the stealth that had kept him alive in the lanes and fields of Northern Ireland.

  The late afternoon grudgingly shed its weak sunshine on the surrounding landscape. Trees that had been a furnace of colour yesterday were now muted. Autumn was getting ready to evolve into winter. But Sid found no trace of any incursion, and that pleased him.

  When he returned to the house, Lucy had not yet come back from Miss Templeton’s. He checked to see that Bill was still comfortably napping, then he headed home. Sid was not a lonely man; a solitary one, yes, but quite comfortable in his own company. Sometimes the pub and local gossip, sometimes a takeaway and a bit of telly, sometimes the whisky bottle and memories of old comrades. Tonight it would be a pasty from the fridge, a bottle or three of cider, and a bit of strategic planning. There was no way he was going to let Bill and Lucy walk into this sort of danger with their eyes wide shut. Just no fucking way.

  Chapter 36

  FRIDAY, 26 OCTOBER

  On Friday morning the weather turned cold and peevish, and a penetrating drizzle fell from low, grey clouds. Bill was up, but with a wheezy cough from concocting yesterday’s wood stain. Clive had crapped just outside the back door in such a spectacular fashion that Lucy could only assume he had eaten a badger’s arse. She was feeling tired and dispirited, wondering how they would ever finish these damned chairs and get rid of them, to say nothing of Skates and Warren.

  The phone rang. Lucy almost never answered the phone, but she was standing right next to it and Bill had only just got comfortable in his armchair, so this time she did. She picked it up and, before she could say anything, heard a voice that chilled her to the bone. It was Skates, yelling to someone in the background. She let go of the handpiece as if it were red hot. It swung on its cord, banging against the wall as if chiding her for dropping it. Bill got up as quickly as he could and retrieved it.

  While Bill dealt with Skates, Lucy sat down as far away from the phone as she could. The sound of that voice had caused a visceral reaction within her, and just for a nanosecond she had felt as if she were back under his power. She didn’t hear what Bill was saying on the phone, but just sat there, shaking and pale.

  When Bill hung up, he went over and did what he could to comfort her. She wasn’t crying, just closed in on herself, dazed and remote.

  The kitchen door opened and Sid walked in. Seeing Lucy hunched in her chair and Bill with his arms around her, he immediately went and sat down on the other side of her chair and asked what was going on.

  ‘Skates called,’ said Bill. ‘Lucy picked it up.’

  ‘Did you say anything?’ Sid asked her.

  Lucy shook her head. ‘His voice… it was stupid of me, it just brought things back. Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ she repeated quietly to herself.

  ‘No,’ said Bill, ‘you are not stupid. That bastard put you through hell. He hasn’t hurt me nearly as much, yet every time I hear his voice, my flesh crawls.’

  Lucy got up and gave herself a shake as if casting off old memories like dirt from a rug. She smiled gratefully at the two men, and in as steady a voice as she could manage asked what Skates had wanted.

  ‘Just an update on the chairs. I told him I was
on schedule and expected to be finished in a week or ten days, depending on the weather.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’ asked Sid.

  ‘Not much he could say. Bastard must have heard me wheezing ’cos he asked me how I was,’ Bill added with disgust.

  Lucy made toast for Bill and Sid, then more toast for Sid, who had an appetite second to none. She didn’t feel hungry. That voice on the phone had caught her off guard when she was worried about Bill and just generally tired and pissed off. It made her realise how vulnerable she still was, and she didn’t like that one little bit.

  Bill glanced around the table and was concerned by what he saw. Lucy looked rattled, Sid looked dangerous, and he could only imagine what he looked like. ‘What a team we are,’ he said. ‘The good, the bad, and the terminal.’

  His attempt at a laugh turned into a cough, robbing the comment of what little humour it might otherwise have had.

  ‘So what are we going to do to get Skates and his arsehole Warren out of the picture?’ asked Sid, getting down to cases. He had given the problem a lot of thought the previous night, and none of the conclusions he had reached were nice ones.

  ‘I have always said that I would be the one to do for Skates and Warren,’ said Bill.

  ‘Yes, said Lucy, ‘but we need to be realistic. With that ancient shotgun you borrowed, you don’t stand a chance.’

  Bill sighed, held up a finger to signal ‘hang on a minute’, then went upstairs to his room. While he was away, Sid somehow managed to avoid Lucy’s eye. Bill soon returned to the kitchen carrying a large box from which he unpacked the old revolver. Wordlessly, he laid it on the table.

  ‘Bloody hell, Bill!’ exclaimed Lucy. ‘What is this, the Wild West?’ She went to pick up the gun and looked a question at Bill.

  ‘No, it’s not loaded.’

  He broke the breach open to show her, then clicked it back and put the gun down in front of her.

  ‘It’s huge,’ she said, lifting it up. ‘And really heavy. How on earth are you going to lift the damn thing, let alone fire it?’