PearlHanger 09 Read Free Page A

used to, erm, before the navy arrived.
    "No. Owd Maggie. Some bird wanting news of an overdue husband." I kept half an ear on Wheatstone's meanderings. "A ghost told her to hire me."
    Margaret was interested. "Is he dead?"
    "The ghost presumably; the husband hardly. Owd Maggie said he was living it up at the seaside."
    "And you won't go?"
    ... 13
    I shrugged. "Got fed up. No point. He's probably just shacked up some tart, keeping his head down and his ..."
    "Lovejoy," Margaret reproved, taking my arm all the same. I shook free and gave her the bent eye. In antiques there's no time to be pally.
    "They're at lot two hundred and three. Get a move
    on."
    She tutted in annoyance and moved over to the mob for Tinker. The old bloke was the right choice. Nothing daunts porcelain experts more than finding a scruff bidding confidently alongside. For a few pints Tinker'd bid serenely for the Mona Lisa. Probably had, in fact, more than once.
    Pleased at having rescued the day from total waste, I ambled grinning to get a cup of tea and be ready for the fun. The other dealers were all suspicious. Helen lit a cigarette and eyed me sardonically, knowing something was up but having to guess exactly what. She's the shapeliest legs in the business and coughs in her sleep from so many fags. Patrick our most extravagant local was also suspicious. He looks and is decidedly eccentric, but he and Lily—a wealthy married lady he archly describes as his procuress—are a pair of formidably shrewd dealers. Big Frank from Suffolk, terror of local silver collectors and marriageable spinsters, feverishly rummaged through his catalog in case he'd missed something. He's our most-married dealer, seven on the trot plus one foreign bigamy on a Beirut package tour, though we'd all warned him not to go.
    Cheerfully I sank back on a Windsor wheelback chair— modern copy, real gunge, not even a proper yew-wood hoop to grace its poor little back—and felt my spirits rising. What with a chipped cup of grotty peat-colored tea, a ware- houseful of antiques and junk, amid a mob of idiot dealers
    14 . . .
    and the scatterbrained old public, I felt able to reflect on the perfection of life.
    "Here, Lovejoy. I've an old print covered in candle grease." Rudyard Mannering had sidled up from the intense mob of dealers. He's a bloke who always looks suspicious even if he's doing nothing wrong, although I like him. He's quite harmless. All he thinks of is old manuscripts. He hovered furtively, a bolshevik bomb-carrier if ever I saw one.
    "Scrape it with a paper knife, then soak it in petrol a few minutes. Use BP Five Star. Have you a camel-hair brush?"
    Absolute bliss.
    My ecstasy ended exactly at lot 217, a Victorian chaise longue with faded upholstery and one leg missing, because Donna Vernon found me, like a whirlwind. See what I mean about women being really selfish? Just because her husband's gone missing she comes and interrupts my day.
    From then on it was downhill to doom all the way, and
    no turning back. God knows I tried.
    »
    Her abuse and threats came about half-and-half. Of course everybody. had a laugh at my expense, especially when Wheatstone had his whizzers—auctioneer's assistants, even more cretinous—bundle me and the blond into the glass-partitioned office. My mates kept grinning through the glass pulling flat-nosed faces. Chris Bonnington, he's coins and Tudor domestic crafts, even opened the door to call some good-humored jest but by then I'd had enough and gave him one of my looks. He left in silence.
    15
    No silence about Donna. She threatened me with subpoenas, writs, lawsuits, hate, poverty, and took a swing at me. I countered by shoving her into Wheatstone's one chair.
    She yelped, squirming. "That's assault and battery! Chauvinist pig! I'll sue you!"
    "Law's irrelevant to such as me, love." I kept her pinned down with lot 331, silver-headed walking cane, quite nice but a bit late with its Birmingham hallmark of 1883. Her belly was too soft to