THE JUDAS PAIR

THE JUDAS PAIR

JONATHAN GASH

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55-56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in Great Britain in 1977

This paperback edition published by Constable Crime,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2013

Copyright © Jonathan Gash, 2013

The right of Jonathan Gash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 9-781-47210-282-9
eISBN: 9-781-47210-283-6

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cover illustration: Peter Mac; Cover design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

Chapter 1

THIS STORY’S ABOUT greed, desire, love and death – in the world of antiques you get them all.

Just when I was in paradise the phone rang. Knowing it would be Tinker Dill, I pushed her into the bathroom, turned all the taps on and switched the radio on.

‘What the hell’s that noise?’ Tinker sounded half sloshed as usual.

‘You interrupted again, Tinker,’ I said wearily.

‘How am I to know you’re on the nest?’ he said, peeved.

In the White Hart they only had one record that worked and it was notching up the decibels in a background muddle of voices.

‘What is it?’

‘Got somebody for you,’ he said.

I was all ears. You know that tingling a sexy promise gives? Double it for religion. Treble it for collecting. And for antiques dealers like me, hearing of a customer, multiply by infinity to get somewhere near the drive that forces a man over every conceivable boundary of propriety, common sense, reason – oh, and law. I almost forgot law. I’d been on the nest two days with Sheila (was she Sheila, or was that last Thursday? I couldn’t remember) and here I was, quivering like a selling-plater at its first race. All because one of my scouts was phoning in with a bite.

Scouts? We call them barkers, in the trade. An antiques dealer has scouts, people who will pass information his way. Tinker Dill was one of mine. I have three or four, depending on how rich I’m feeling at the time, paid on commission. Tinker was the best. Not because he was much good, but because he was loyal. And he was loyal because he judged every deal in terms of whisky. Or gin. Or rum.

‘Buying or selling?’ I said, quite casual. Twenty years dealing in antiques and my hands sweating because a barker rings in. It’s a right game.

‘Buying.’

‘Big or little?’

‘Big.’

‘You having me on, Tinker?’ That stupid bird was banging on the bathroom door wanting to be let out.

‘Straight up, Lovejoy,’ he said. All right, all right. I was born with the name. Still, you can’t forget Lovejoy Antiques, Inc., can you? The ‘Inc.’ bit was pure invention, brilliance. It sounds posh, reeks of dollars and high-flying American firms backing that knowledgeable antique wizard Lovejoy.

‘Got enough copper in case the bleeps go?’ I asked.

‘Eh? Oh, sure.’

‘Hang on, then.’

I dropped the receiver, crossed to open the bathroom door. There she was, trying to push past me into the room, blazing.

‘What the hell do you mean –’ she was starting to say when I belted her. Down she went on the loo amid the steam.

‘Now,’ I explained carefully. ‘Silence. Si – lence. Got it, luv?’

She rubbed her face; her eyes glazed at the enormity of these events. I pinched her cheek, making the nails bite.

‘I’m waiting,’ I said, ‘Got it, luv?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice barely made it.

‘I’ve got a deal coming in. So – shut your teeth. Sit there and listen to all my lovely hot water going to waste.’

I slammed the door on her, locked it again and found Tinker hanging on by the skin of his alcohol-soaked teeth.

‘Big? How big?’ I demanded.

‘Well –’

‘Come on.’

‘S and four D’s,’ he said shakily.

My scalp, already prickling and crawling, gave up as the magic code homed in.

‘Give over, Dill.’

‘Honest, Lovejoy. God’s truth.’

‘In this day and age?’

‘Large as life, Lovejoy. Look – this bloke’s real. He’s here now.’

‘Where?’

‘White Hart.’

My mind took off. Computers aren’t in it. Speed they’ve got and memory too, so people say. I have both those attributes and a bell. This bell’s in my chest. Put me within a hundred feet of a genuine antique and it chimes, only gently at first, then in a clamour as I get nearer the real thing. By the time I’m touching it I can hardly breathe because my bell’s clanging like a fire engine. It’s never been wrong yet. Don’t misunderstand – I’ve sold some rubbish in my time. And lies come as natural to me as blinking in a gale. After all, that’s life, really, isn’t it? A little half-truth here and there, with a faint hint of profit thrown in for good measure, does no harm. And I make a living, mainly from greed. Not my greed, you understand. Your greed, his greed, everybody’s greed. And I want no criticism from self-righteous members of the indignant honest old public, because they’re the biggest school of sharks on this planet. No? Listen:

Say you’re at home, relaxing in your old rocking chair. In comes a stranger. He’s heard of your old – or indeed your new – rocking chair. Could it be, he gasps, that it’s the one and only rocking chair last used by Lord Nelson on his flagship the Golden Hind? Good heavens, he cries, clapping his eyes on it in ecstasy. It is!

Now, you put your pipe down, astonished. What the hell’s going on? you demand. And who the hell is this stranger butting into your house? And what’s he babbling about? And – take your hands off my old rocking chair!

With me so far? Good.

The stranger, confronted with your indignation, turns sincere and trusting eyes to you. I’ve searched all my life, he explains. For what? you demand suspiciously. For Lord Nelson’s famous old rocking-chair, he confides. And here it is, at last. It’s beautiful. My lifelong search is over.

See what I’m getting at? At everybody’s dishonesty. At mine. And at yours. No? Yes! Read on.

Now, if I were a trusting soul, I’d leave you to complete the story, give it a proper ending, so to speak. How you smile at the stranger, explain that the chair’s only a second-hand mock-up your cousin Harry’s lad did at night school, and how in any case Nelson, who is pretty famous for rocking on the cradle of the deep for years on end, was the last bloke on earth ever to need a rocking chair, and how you kindly proceed to put the misguided stranger right over a cup of tea with gay amusing chat. But you can’t be trusted to end the story the way it really would happen! And why? Because the stranger, with the light of crusading fervour burning in his eyes, reaches for his wallet and says those glorious, magic words . . . How much?

Now what’s the real ending of the story? I’ll tell you. You leap off your – no, Lord Nelson’s! – rocking chair, brush it down, bring out the Australian sherry left over from Christmas, and cod on you’re the hero’s last living descendant. And you manage to stifle your poor little innocent daughter as she looks up from her history homework and tries to tell the visitor that Nelson missed sailing on the Golden Hind by a good couple of centuries, and send her packing to bed so she won’t see her honest old dad shingling this stupid bum of every quid he can.

Convinced? No? Then why are you thinking of that old chair in your attic?

Everybody’s got a special gift. Some are psychic, some have an extra dress sense, beauty, a musical talent or have green fingers. Some folk are just lucky, or have the knack of throwing a discus. But nobody’s been missed out. We’ve all got one special gift. The only trouble is learning which it is we’ve got.

I had this pal who knew horses – they used to come to him even when he’d no sugar. He and I once collected a Chippendale from near a training stables and we paused to watch these, nags running about like they do. ‘Quid on the big one,’ I said, bored. ‘The funny little chap,’ he said, and blow me if it didn’t leave the rest standing. It was called Arkle, a champion, they told us. See what I mean? To me that tiny, gawky, ungainly brute breathing all wrong was horrible. To my pal it was clearly the best of the lot. Now, to him, a Turner painting – screaming genius over every inch of canvas – would look like a nasty spillage. Not to me. I’ve only to see an 88 bus labelled TATE GALLERY and my bell goes like the clappers. Like I say, a gift.

Once, I bought this dirty old monstrosity for ten quid. It looked for all the world like a little doll’s house with a couple of round windows stuck on, and a great sloping piece of broken tin fixed to the back. The boys at the auction gave me an ironic cheer making my face red as fire. But my bell was bonging. My find was eventually the only original Congreve clock ever to be exhibited within living memory – a clock worked on a spring controlled by a little ball rolling down a groove cut in an inclined plane, designed and made by the great inventor William Congreve almost two hundred years ago.

If you’ve got the courage, find out what your own particular knack is, then trust it. Obey your bells, folks. They’re telling you about cold stone certainties.

Where was I?

Tinker Dill. S and four D’s, and he’d sounded frantic. Ten thousand.

S and D’s? Look in any antique shop. Casually, you’ll find yourself wanting some lovely little trinket, say a twist-stem drinking glass. The more you look the more you want it. So you search it for the price, and find a little ticket tied on, marked HA/-, or some such.

We use codes, all very simple. One of the most elementary is that based on a letter-number transposition. Each code has a key word – for example, SUTHERLAND. Note that it has ten letters. For S read 1, for U read 2, and so on to N, which is 9. For D read, not 10 but nought, because you already have a letter to denote 1. So the glass goblet you fancied is priced at forty-eight quid. There are several ten-letter codes. A quick look round tips you off.

One further point: X is often used to denote the pound sign, £, or zero. That way, the customer thinks the ticket is something mysterious to do with book-keeping or identification. Not on your life. When in doubt, it’s money. The code-price marked is often what the dealer paid for the glass in the first place, so naturally he’ll stick about fifty per cent on, if not more. And remember you may actually look a mug. In antiques you pay for appearances – yours, the antiques themselves, and the antiques dealer’s wife’s fur coat. So my tip is: argue. Even though it goes against the grain in polite old Britain, never pay the marked price, not even if the dealer offers an immediate discount. Hum and ha, take your time, look doubtful. Spin it out and then, as gently and sincerely as you possibly can, barter.

Listen to me, giving away my next year’s profit.

‘Look, Tinker,’ I said, not daring to believe him.

‘I know what you’re going to say, Lovejoy,’ he said, desperate now.

‘You do?’

‘Trade’s bad. Profits are bad. Finds are bad. Everything’s bad.’

Like I said, some are psychic.

‘Who’s got ten thousand these days?’ I snapped.

‘It’s right up your street, Lovejoy.’

‘Where’s the mark?’

‘In the saloon bar.’

Yet something was not quite right. It was too good to be true.

‘How did he know you?’

‘Came in looking for barkers and dealers. Somebody in the Lane told him We used this pub. He’s done a few pubs at the Lane and on the Belly.’

Petticoat Lane and Portobello Road, the London street markets. To ask after reliable dealers – and I’m the most reliable of all known dealers, honest – was reasonable and sounded open enough.

‘He spoke to you first?’

‘No.’ Tinker was obviously proud from the way his voice rose eagerly. ‘I was at the bar. I heard him ask Ted.’ Ted is the barman. ‘He asked if any antiques dealers were in the bar. I chipped in.’ He paused. ‘I was in like a flash, Lovejoy,’ he added, pained.

‘Good lad, Tinker,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

‘I told him I was your runner. He wants to see you. He’d got your name in a notebook.’

‘Look, Tinker,’ I said, suddenly uneasy, but he protested.

‘No, no, he’s not Old Bill. Honest. He’s straight.’ Old Bill was the law, police. I had licences to worry about. And taxes, paid and unpaid. And account books. And some account books I hadn’t got at all.’

‘What’s he after?’

‘Locks. Right up your street.’

My heart almost stopped.

‘Locks locks, or just locks?’ I stuttered.

‘Locks,’ Tinker said happily. ‘Flinters.’

‘If you’re kaylied,’ I threatened.

‘Sober as ever was,’ the phone said. That’ll be the day, I thought. I’d never seen Tinker Dill vertical in twenty years. Horizontal or listing, yes.

‘Any particular ones?’

‘See him first, Lovejoy. I’ll keep him here.’

‘All right.’ I suddenly decided. A chance was a chance. And buyers were what it was all about. ‘Hang on to him, Tinker. Can you hear a car?’

He thought for a second.

‘Yes. One just pulling into the car park,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘Why?’

‘It’s me,’ I said, and shut off, grinning.

To my surprise the bath taps were running and the bathroom door was shut. I opened up and there was this blonde, somewhat sodden, sulking in steam.

‘What on earth –’ I began, having forgotten.

‘You pig,’ she said, cutting loose with the language.

‘Oh. I remember.’ She’d been making a racket while I was on the phone. ‘You’re Sheila.’

She retorted, ‘You pig.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, ‘but I have to go out. Can I drop you somewhere?’

‘You already have,’ she snapped, flouncing past and snatching up her things.

‘It’s just that there’s a buyer turned up.’

She took a swing at me. I retreated.

‘Have you seen my car keys?’

‘Have I hell!’ she screamed, rummaging under the divan for her shoes.

‘Keep your hair on.’

I tried to reason with her, but women can be very insensitive to the real problems of existence. She gave me a burst of tears, a few more flashes of temper and finally, the way women will, began an illogical assault on my perfectly logical reasons for making her go.

‘Who is she?’

‘That “she” is a hairy bloke,’ I told her. ‘A buyer.’

‘And you prefer a buyer to me. Is that it?’ she blazed.

‘Yes,’ I said, puzzled at her extraordinary mentality. She went for me, firing handbag, a shoe, and a pillow as she came, claws at the ready. I gave her a backhander to calm the issue somewhat, at which she settled weeping while I found a coat. I’m all for sex equality.

‘Look, help me to find my keys,’ I said. ‘If I don’t find them I’ll be late.’ Women seem to have no sense sometimes.

‘You hit me,’ she sobbed.

‘He’s been recommended to me by London dealers,’ I said proudly, ransacking the bureau where my sales-and-purchases records are kept – occasionally and partly, that is.

‘All you think of is antiques,’ she whimpered.

‘It isn’t!’ I said indignantly. ‘I asked you about your holidays yesterday.’

‘In bed,’ she cut back viciously. ‘When you wanted me.’

‘Look for the keys. They were here the day before, when I brought you back.’

I found them at last under a Thai temple woodcut and rushed her outside the cottage, remembering to leave a light on and the door alarm switched over to our one vigilant hawk-eye at the village constabulary station, in case the British Museum decided to come on a marauding break-in for my latest acquisition, a broken Meissen white I’d have a hard time giving away to a church jumble.

My elderly Armstrong-Siddeley waited, rusting audibly in the Essex night air between the untidy trees. It started first push to my delight and we were off.

‘Antiques are a sickness with you, Lovejoy,’ she sniffed. I turned on the gravel, and the old banger – I mean the car – coughed out on to the dark tree-lined road.

‘Nothing but,’ I replied happily.

‘I think you’re mad. What are antiques for, anyway? What’s the point?’

That’s women for you. Anything except themselves is a waste of time. Very self-centred, women are.

‘Let me explain, honey.’

‘You’re like a child playing games.’

She sat back in the seat, staring poutishly at the nearing village lights. I pushed the accelerator pedal down hard. The speedometer needle crept up to the thirty mark as the engine pulsed into maximum thrust. With a following southwesterly I’d once notched forty on the Cambridge Road.

‘He might be a collector,’ I said. She snorted in an unladylike manner.

‘Collector,’ she said scornfully.

‘The collector’s the world’s greatest and only remaining fanatic,’ I preached fervently. ‘Who else would sell his wife, wreck his marriage, lose his job, go broke, gamble, rob and cheat, mortgage himself to the hilt a dozen times, throw all security out of the window, for a scattering of objects as diverse as matchboxes, teacups, postcards of music-hall comedians, old bicycles, steam engines, pens, old fans, railway-station lanterns, Japanese sword-decorations, and seventeenth-century corsets? Who else but collectors?’ I looked rapturously into her eyes. ‘It’s greater than sex, Sheila –’

‘Nonsense,’ she snapped, the wind from the car’s speed almost ruffling her hair.

‘It’s greater than religion. Greater love hath no man,’ I said piously, ‘than that he gives up his life for his collection.’

I wish now I hadn’t said that.

‘And you make money out of them. You prey on them.’

‘I serve them.’ There were almost tears in my eyes. ‘I need to make the odd copper from them, of course I do. But not for profit’s sake. Only so I can keep going, sort of make money to maintain the service.’

‘Liar,’ she said, and slapped my face. As I was driving I couldn’t clock her one by way of return so I resorted to persuasion.

‘Nobody regrets us having to split more than me,’ was the best I could manage, but she stayed mad.

She kept up a steady flow of recrimination, the way women will, as I drove into the village. It must have been nine o’clock when I reached the White Hart. The Armstrong was wheezing badly by then. Its back wheels were smoking again. I wish I knew what made it do that. I pulled into the forecourt and pushed a couple of quid into her hand.

‘Look, darling,’ I said hastily. ‘See you soon.’

‘What am I to do now?’ she complained, coming after me.

‘Ring for a taxi, there’s a good girl,’ I told her. ‘To the station.’

‘You pig, Lovejoy,’ she wailed.

‘There’s a train soon – probably.’

‘When will I see you?’ she called after me as I trotted towards the pub.

‘I’ll give you a ring,’ I said over my shoulder.

‘Promise?’

‘Honestly.’

I heard her shout something else after me, but by then I was through the door and into the saloon bar. Women have no sense of priorities. Ever noticed that?