It made a successful running start eventually. As I drove at maximum speed I worked my journey out. Margaret had given me the names of three places, Minsmere in Suffolk, Blakeney Point and Cley in Norfolk. I would say I'd been to Minsmere if anyone asked, and, engine willing, would look at the other two places in one go. I would reach home before opening time. I had the six significant addresses with me to consider one by one.
I was frankly disappointed with the bird sanctuaries, not that I knew what to expect. Quite a few cars were around when I drove up to Cley. A few folks, Rommelized by great binoculars and businesslike weatherproof hats, stood all forlorn in attitudes of endeavor staring toward acres of desolate muddy stuff where nothing was happening. Occasionally they murmured to each other and peered eastward. Perhaps they placed bets among themselves to make it interesting. As well as being disappointed I was puzzled. I've nothing against birds, feathered or not, but once you've seen one sparrow you've seen the lot, haven't you? Occasionally, one particular one might become sort of family just by sheer persistence, like some around the cottage. That's different. Unless you know them specifically it's a waste of time, like people. I asked one bloke what they were all looking at.
"Oyster catchers," he said. I stared about, but there wasn't a boat in sight.
"Oh," I replied, and honestly that was it.
There were no stalls, cafes, not even a fish-and-chip shop. As a resort it was a dead duck, if you'll pardon the expression. I talked the Armstrong into life and we creaked away on ye olde greate mysterie trail. I had more birds in my garden than they had on all that mud. I was frozen stiff.
Now brilliant Lovejoy had made a plan. Muriel's memory being what it was, I was down to guesswork—scintillating, cunning brainwork of the Sherlock type.
To post a case you need a post office, right? Sniggering at my shrewdness, I drove around trying to find one, lurching along country lanes where hedges waved in the gales and animals stooged about fields being patient as ever.
I eventually gave up and some time later drove through Wells into Blakeney, where there was a post office. I was dismayed. What do private eyes do now? I couldn't just bowl in and say "What ho! Who posted a heavy box about a year ago, give or take six months?" My plan hadn't got this far. I inspected it from a distance and then drove to the Point. More desolation, with some different shaped birds bumming around aimlessly, all watched eagerly by enthusiasts. No shops, no stalls, no real scene. I departed shivering.
All this countryside was dampening my earlier high spirits. It's nice from a distance. A few trees and a sparrow or two can be quite pleasant sometimes as a diversion. But you can't beat a good old town crammed full of people milling about on hard pavements, street after street of houses, shops, antique merchants, cinemas, pubs, the odd theater, and lots of man-made electricity. Bird sanctuaries are all very well, but why can't they share them with people?
I drove around Blakeney. In case you come from there, I'm not knocking it. Charming little joint, with the odd tasty antique shop and a place I had dinner near a tavern. But it's not a metropolis, is it? And it had no coastal holiday resorts nearby, either. From the way Muriel's postmistress had spoken, I wanted something like Clacton. That cold wind started up again. I decided there were no clues in bird sanctuaries and drove south. What dumps those places are, I thought, feeling a witticism coming. Those places, I sniggered to myself, are for the birds.
I like antique dealers. We may not be much to look at, but scratch us and we're nothing but pure unadulterated antique dealer all the way through. Everything else comes second. This means you've only to put us, blindfolded, anywhere on earth, and we home instinctively on the nearest fellow dealer. When I'm driving, I swear my banger guides itself along a route that has the highest number of dealers along it.
Trusting my Armstrong, I was at my ninth antique shop asking for nothing in particular, when the name "Lagrange" accidentally caught my eye. The shopowner, a doctor's wife, Mrs. Ellison, full of painting chat, had gone into the back to find a painting I'd heard of, alleged Norwich School, and to fill in time I was leafing through her invoice file. Lagrange had bought a pistol flask from her about a year before, and paid in groats from what I saw.
I was safely near the door hovering over a box of copper tokens when she returned with the painting. It was a water-color, not an oil, which was a measure of her knowledge. David Cox had signed it, so the name said. I held it. Good stuff, but not a single chime. I showed a carefully judged disappointment and turned to other things. David Cox taught a lot of pupils water-color painting, and had an annoying habit of helping them with little bits of their work, a daub here, a leaf there. If their final painting pleased him he would sign it, thereby messing up the whole antique business. Worse, his signature's dead easy to forge—so they say. Beware.
I bought a score of her copper tokens, to pay for my journey's expenses. They are cheap, rather like small coins. Merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, times when copper change was in short supply owing to incompetence at the mint among other causes, made their own "coins" as tokens in copper. These were given for change, and you could spend them when you needed to go shopping again. It must have been a nightmare, because some shops would refuse all except their own tokens, so you might finish up with perhaps thirty different sets of copper "coinage" of this kind in your pocket, and still not be able to buy what you wanted from the thirty-first shop. The early seventeenth-century ones are about half the size of those from the next century—an important fact, as many are undated. I bought the "cleanest," that is those least worn, no matter how dirty. "Buy the best, then buy old," as we say. Of any two antiques, go for the one best preserved and remember that repairs or any other sort of restoration doesn't mean well preserved. Then consider the degree of rarity. Then, and only then, consider the degree of age. This is Lovejoy's Law for Collectors of Limited Means. Of course, if you have bags of money, head straight for a Turner seascape, a silver piece made by that astonishing old lady silversmith Hester Bateman, or a Clementi (the London maker) square piano of about 1840, and two fingers to the rest of us. But for other poorer wayfarers, my advice is to have only these three general rules.
I paid up painfully and turned to go.
"Oh, one thing." I paused as if remembering. "You've not such a thing as a powder flask?"
"Powder? Oh, for gunpowder?" I nodded.
"No," she said. "I had one a while ago, but it went very quickly." She'd probably had it on her hands for years.
"I'm trying to make one of those wretched sets up," I explained.
She was all sympathy. "Isn't it hard?"
I hesitated still. "No chance of you managing to pick one up, is there? I don't have much chance of getting one myself."
"Well…" I was obviously treading upon that sacred confidentiality.
"I'd be glad to pay a percentage on purchase," I offered, which made it less holy.
"I know," she said. "When you have money locked up in stock, trying to move stuff can be so difficult."
We commiserated for a minute in this style. She told me she'd sold the flash to a local collector. She gave me Lagrange's address, the one I already had. I expressed surprise and gratitude and handed her my card.