"Where?" My mouth dried.
"Part exchange, though." This was Tinker creating tension. "Not a straight sale."
"What the hell does that matter?" I snarled. "Who the hell does a straight sale for the good stuff these days anyway? Get on with it."
"Keep your hair on." We chatted airily about mutual friends while an innocent housewife racked herself over a chest of drawers before marking it carefully on a list and pushed off steeling herself for tomorrow's auction.
Tinker drew me close. "You know that boatbuilder?"
"Used to buy off Brad down the creek?"
"Him. Going to sell a pair of Mortimers, cased."
"I don't believe it, Tinker."
"Cross my heart," he swore. "But he wants a revolving rifle in part exchange. Must be English."
I cursed in fury. Tinker maintained a respectful silence till I was worn out.
"Where the hell can I get one of those?" I muttered. "I've not seen one for years."
I actually happened to have one in my priest hole, by Adams of London Bridge, a five-chambered percussion long arm. There's bother with a spring I've never dared touch, but otherwise it's perfect. I cursed the boatbuilder and his parents and any possible offspring he might hope to have. Why can't people take the feelings of antique dealers into account before they indulge in their stupid bloody whimsies? Isn't that what all these useless sociologists are for? I came manfully out of my sulk.
Tinker was waiting patiently. "All right, Lovejoy?"
"Yes. Thanks, Tinker." I gave him a couple of notes. "When?"
"Any time," he answered. "It'll be first come first served, Lovejoy, so get your skates on. They say Brad's going down the waterside early tomorrow. Does he know—?"
"The whole bloody world knows it's me that's after flinters," I said with anguish.
When a punter puts money on a horse at two-to-one odds, as you will know, nothing happens at first. Then, as more and more punters back it, the odds will fall to maybe evens, which means you must risk two quid to win only two, instead of risking two to win four as formerly. In practically the same way, the more people want to buy a thing, the dearer it becomes. Naturally, merchants will explain that costs and heaven-knows-what factors have pushed the price up, but in fact that's a load of cobblers. Their prices go up because more people want a thing. They are simply more certain of selling, and who blames them for wanting to make a fortune?
Gambling is a massive industry. Selling spuds is too. Buying flintlocks or Geneva-cased chain-transmission Wikelman watches is not a great spectator sport, so the field is smaller. A whisper at one end therefore reverberates through the entire collecting world in a couple of weeks, with the effect that those already in possession of the desired item quickly learn they are in a position to call the tune. They can more or less name their terms. Hence the indispensable need of a cunning barker.
"I'll go and see him," I said. Nothing makes humanity more morose than an opportunity coming closer and closer as the risks of failure simultaneously grow larger.
A toddler gripped my calf crying, "Dadda! Dadda!" delightedly. I tried unsuccessfully to shake the little psychopath off and had to wait red-faced until its breathless mother arrived all apologetic to rescue me. The little maniac complained bitterly at having lost its new find as it was dragged back to its push chair. Sheila was helpless with laughter at the scene. The fact that I was embarrassed as hell of course proved even more highly diverting.
"Oh, Lovejoy!" she said, falling about.
"You can go off people, you know," I snarled. "Very funny. A spiffing jape."
"Oh, Lovejoy!"
"Mind that apothecary box!" I pushed her away just before she knocked it off a side table.
This gave her the opportunity to ask about it I saw through her placatory maneuver, but for the life of me I couldn't resist. It gave me an excuse to fondle the box, a poor example it was true, but they are becoming fairly uncommon and you have to keep on the lookout.
Watch your words. Not an "apothecary's" box. It wasn't his, in the sense that he carried it about full of rectangular bottles and lovely nooky felt-lined compartments for pills and galenical "simples," as his preparations were called. It belonged usually to a household, and was made to stand en a bureau, a medicine cabinet if you like. You dosed yourself from it, or else hired an apothecary, forerunner of the general practitioner, to give advice on what to use from it. The current cheapness of these elegant little cabinets never ceases to amaze me. I wish they would really soar to a hundred times their present giveaway price, then maybe the morons who buy them and convert them into mini-cocktail cabinets would leave well alone and get lost.
You find all sorts of junk put in by unscrupulous dealers and auctioneers besides the bottles. This one had a deformed old hatched screwdriver thing with a flanged blade and a pair of old guinea scales imitating the original physic balance. I dropped them back in, snorting scornfully Sheila heard my opinion with synthetic attention and nodded in all the right places.
"If I catch somebody doing it, darling, I'll smash it on his head," she promised as we strolled around.
"You'll do no such thing."
"No?"
"Smash a brick on his head, and bring the apothecary box to me."
"For you, Lovejoy, anything."
After an hour Sheila was protesting Inspecting stuff's best done by osmosis. Don't rush, stroll. Be casual. Saunter, wander, learn.
"We keep going round and round, Lovejoy," she complained, sitting to take off a shoe to rub her foot like they do.
"Shut up," I said, wandering off.
Jim, one of the elderly attendants, guffawed. "Chivalrous as ever, eh, Lovejoy?" he said, and I was in with an excuse.
"This junk's enough to make a saint swear," I groused. "Never seen so much rubbish since Field's stuff came through."
He was aggrieved at that. Nobody likes their own stuff being recognized for the rubbish it is.
"We sold some good stuff that day," he said, quick as a flash. "If you hadn't gone to Cumberland you'd know better."
That explained why I'd missed it. I was beginning to feel better as things clicked into place.
"Nothing still around from it, is there?" I asked casually.
He grinned. "Do leave orf, Lovejoy. It was donkeys' years back."
"Oh, you never know," I said, hinting like mad.
He shook his head. "No, we played that one straight," he admitted ruefully. "Practically all of it went the same week we got it."
"Just a thought, Jim. Some things do get left behind occasionally."
"Pigs might fly," he said.
I played casual another minute, then collected Sheila and we made it back to the car.
We pulled out, rolling against protesting traffic to get started.
"We have one more call to make before home," I told her. "Game?"
She sighed. "These places always make me feel so grubby. I need a bath."
"Same here." I shrugged. The motor coughed into eraphysematous life and we were under power. "What's that to do with anything?"
"Where are we going?"
"Down the creek."
"Is it a tip from Tinker?"
"You guessed, eh?"
"It was pathetically obvious, Lovejoy."
"You're making me uneasy."
And she was. Tinker was loyal, wasn't he? I paid him well by comparison with other dealers' barkers. I never disclosed a confidence. Twice I'd bailed him out. Once I'd rescued him from Old Bill, and once saved him getting done over by the Brighton lads. But you could never tell. Was it this suspicion that was worrying me? Something niggled in my memory, something I had seen.
We were out of town and down on the estuary in no time. It's not much of a place—four small boatbuilders in corrugated iron sheds, the usual paraphernalia of the pleasure-boating fraternity, and a few boats hauled up on the mud by the wharf. Those big Essex barges used to ply between here and Harwich in the old days, crossing to the Blackwater and even London, but the two that are left are only used for showing tourists the Colne estuary and racing once a year, a put-up job.