Spend Game

Spend Game Read Free

Book: Spend Game Read Free
Author: Jonathan Gash
Tags: Suspense
Ads: Link
and they’re still those old gas-mantle standards kids can climb up or use for cricket stumps. I hurried round the back street and went into the little stone-flagged yard of the house next to the pub. A knock on the window like a clandestine lover.
    ‘It’s Lovejoy,’ I said. The light came on over the yard door. Val let me in, her face disapproving.
    ‘You know the time?’ she said. I nodded and shook rain all over the carpet.
    ‘I’ll not be a minute, love. Has Leckie been?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Not to leave anything? No messages?’
    ‘No.’ She was right to look puzzled. ‘Should he have called? You didn’t tell me. Is anything wrong?’
    She gave me a nip of rum for the cold. Val and I had been friends in the roaring days of youth, learning our adolescent snogging techniques in joint training sessions in school lessons quaintly called ‘Agriculture: Methods and Theory’. Education’s gone downhill since then. She’d married George, who’s the barman at the next-door pub, an arrangement which saves on fares and leaves Val sufficiently free to run an antiques sideline. She does no dealing herself, only guards what’s given her until it’s collected. Posh London dealers have their own depositories. Lone antiques dealers either do without or have a safe lock-up arrangement with some trustworthy soul like Val.
    ‘Can I look?’
    ‘I’ll get the key.’
    These older terraced houses are admittedly small, but whoever built them had his head screwed on. There’s a narrow stone-flagged cellar under each. You enter through a doorway set below a few steps leading down from the yard. There’s no window, only a solid wooden door. Val had persuaded the publican to have it metalled with iron strips and linked by a warning bleep in case he ever needed it for extra storage of bottled spirits. When I met up with Val again and incorporated her in my famous arrears system of payment I let Leckie use the same facilities. Antiques dealers call this sort of arrangement a ‘cran’, just as other gangsters call it a drop.
    Val and I went down with a flashlight. She always takes time fumbling with the lock because there’s no outside light. Only a few weeks before, George had rigged up a light bulb on a perilous flex to cast a feeble glimmer on our valuables. My phoney eighteenth-century oak chest was ageing usefully still. Unless my luck changed I’d soon have to auction it, a terrible admission of failure for any self-respecting antiques dealer. There was an ebony flute in its case, distinguished by that grim little-finger D-flat key, the size of a small springboard, they had before the Boehm system let the modern instrument makers have some restful nights. Flautists must have had digits a foot long before 1850. And there was my famous non-painting, an oil copy of Il Sodoma’s ‘tailor’ portrait, of that skilled type which abounds in the country areas of England. I’d bought it for a song from a German tourist who had paid the earth. (Tip: never buy a painting without measuring it. If the size of the real thing is well known, and the painting you’re considering buying is thirty square inches too small, it follows that the latteris probably a copy – a legitimate copy perhaps, but still a copy.)
    Leckie had a few pieces of lustreware on the one shelf we’d rigged up and two of those Lowestoft jugs I hate. But no escritoire, no doctor’s bag, and no book. Now there’s a thing, I thought. How very odd.
    ‘Lovejoy. Is anything the matter?’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘What’s wrong?’ She pulled me round to face her. ‘I’ve never seen you like this, except for that time.’ That time was a dust-up everybody ought to have forgotten by now. Only women remember fights, their own included.
    ‘Nothing, love,’ I said jovially.
    ‘Lovejoy?’ She kept hold of me. I saw her eyes change. ‘Dear God. Is . . . is it Leckie?’
    I felt my chest fall a mile. Her face was suddenly white as a sheet. Things clicked horribly into

Similar Books

Empathy

Sarah Schulman

Down to the Sea

William R. Forstchen

Maxwells Smile

Michele Hauf

Angela Nicely

Alan MacDonald

The Mothering Coven

Joanna Ruocco

Half-Price Homicide

Elaine Viets

Empire of Lies

Andrew Klavan

Betrayal

Margaret Bingley