One of those huge Scandinavian wooden sheds had been erected by the dwelling. A new shingle drive had been laid. Notices proclaimed FERNORM ANTIQUES, INC in flashing neon. Two lasses dressed as Edwardian housemaids were busily enticing customers in from the main road while pretending to arrange antique furniture on the cloistered forecourt. A week ago, note, it had been the usual unkempt grassy shambles of the impoverished sinking classes. I wondered where the buildings and curved drives had sprung from. We alighted.

  'Ferd's inside arranging antiques,' Norma said a little breathlessly, leading the way. A fortnight ago they couldn't afford to run their TV.

  The maids chorused a welcome. Two dealers I recognized stalked among the antiques, hardly gave me a glance when I called a hearty wotcher.

  'Hello, old friend!' Ferd boomed, advancing.

  He too had changed. From a morose shaky old man he'd filled out, smartened, become the village squire in tweeds and plus-fours. Everything he'd ever dreamed of, in fact.

  'Wotcher, Ferd. No painting session today, then?'

  He boomed, actually boomed, a hearty guffaw and shook my hand in a grip of iron. I yelped, lacking manly pride.

  'Heavens, no, Lovejoy. I'll show you some antiques, old fruit!'

  As I followed I marvelled. Norma avoided my eye, said she needed to see the housekeeper, and left me to it. Servants, wealth, new buildings, a thriving antiques business, all in a matter of days?

  'Look at these, Lovejoy!' Ferd was intoning. 'Who says you can't make a splendid living from antiques, hey?' He actually said that, Heyyy? like calling the first round at boxing.

  'Well, I do,' I said, but it was a weak quip. I stared.

  The main shed – grander than the word tells – was about twenty strides square, crammed with antiques. There were two small back rooms. One was an office, the other he opened with a flourish.

  'Seen anything like this, Lovejoy?'

  There's a saying among antique dealers that 'before 1750 nothing came out of Ireland, but that after 1750 everything did'. Meaning that older Irish antiques are virtually nonexistent, whereas after the mid-eighteenth century you find plenty of Irish artefacts.

  Irish furniture isn't to my liking, not unless you like massive masks on your Georgian yew-wood furniture, weird faces carved on to table edges and the like. They went in for bog oak, even dyed mahogany to resemble it. Can't understand it myself, but whatever turns you on. The room was crammed with Irish furniture. I gulped, sweated, felt my chest thump and my hands go clammy. It was genuine. I reeled, made the door and onto the grass, inhaling cooler air.

  He followed.

  'What, Lovejoy?' He hadn't lost confidence. 'You're not saying it isn't genuine?'

  'No, Ferd.' I gradually came to. 'Antiques do that to me, set me off.' I edged away from the shed, glancing back at it as I did so. The place must have cost him a fortune. The Rolls, the assistants, Norma's clothes. The main room was also thickly strewn with mixed antiques and junk, fifty-fifty. I was witnessing a resurgence, a miracle. 'Where'd you get the pier tables?' There'd been two.

  'Oh, around. Got a backer.'

  He smiled modestly, waved, and a maidservant approached with a chilled bottle of white wine and two glasses. Ferd led the way to a wrought-iron table with matching chairs. We sat. He raised his brogues, placed the heels on a chair, graciously allowed the lass to light his massive Cuban cigar.

  'You'd need a backer, to afford them.'

  Pier in antiques doesn't mean that thing sticking out of a seaside town into the sea, for the populace to stroll and take the air. It's the architectural term for a bit of the wall between two windows in your withdrawing room. From Queen Anne's time on, ladies became specially concerned with it as a feature. So 'pier glasses' were produced by London craftsmen. These were mirrors especially designed to occupy that wall space and give an illusion of space. A lady's talent could be gauged by her adept use of furnishings that didn't make her parlour piers look daft. So pier tables came into being, small semicircular pieces that stood against the pier, unfolding into round tables with a superimposed leaf. And very lovely they are. Now, in Ireland, walls of Dublin's town houses lent themselves to slightly different pier tables, so you find 'typically Irish'

  (meaning exquisitely rare) pier tables that are more of an ellipse than half a circle. Find one in mahogany, mint, you're into your next world cruise, three times round. Find a pair, you can retire.

  'Got a superb backer, Lovejoy!' He tasted the wine, nodded so the serf could withdraw to her slavery. 'See my potato rings? Two!'

  'Aye. You've done well, mate.'

  Dealers call them that, but they're properly termed dish rings. They're never much to look at, just a curved circlet of silver a few inches tall. You put them on tables then lodge your hot serving dishes on top, to stop the table getting scorched. What goon first called them potato or spud rings I don't know. They're hollow, of course, the silver quite thin, cut to depict flowers, birds and villeins doing their stuff. One dealer I knew sold one cheaply, thinking it was merely a dressing-table stand for ladies' necklaces.

  While Ferd expounded on life's gracious turns of fortune I heard motors drive up, car doors slam. Norma came to sit with us. I noticed her gold ring, her lovely sapphire and diamond. She'd had to pawn them three months since. Now they were back. Affluence is as affluence does. She looked brilliant. I wanted to eat her, but the thought of chewing her thighs honestly never crossed my mind.

  'Who's the backer, Ferd?' I asked.

  He smiled and wagged a finger roguishly. 'Now, now, Lovejoy.'

  'Sorry.'

  You don't ask three things of any dealer: how much, where from, and who else. (Why, is always self-explanatory, for we all know why, or so we believe.) Norma was smiling. I noticed she'd donned a lovely cold green pendant in gold. Risky, but on her effective. The gem was demantoid, a semi-precious garnet. (God, how I hate that term. You wouldn't call a diamond a semi-opal, or dawn a semi-day, so why are gemstones called semi-precious? We think of everything as money, that's why. I reckon it's an insult to gemstones.)

  Demantoid: think of an emerald trying hard to be peridot, wash out more than half of the colour you have left, and there you have it. I love demantoid. It's actually a very pale clear green variety of andradite, but has a luscious lustre. Heaven knows why women don't go more for this exquisite stone, but they don't. Maybe they don't like the name. She caught me looking and had the grace to blush. She carolled a covering laugh.

  'Lovejoy's noticed my new pendant, Ferdinand!' She fingered it. 'I got it from a maiden aunt who died.'

  Possibly in the Soviet Union, when there was such a country? Because that's where demantoid and andradites mostly come from. The gold mount was devised to resemble niello, a Russian form of decoration.

  'God rest her,' I said politely, as if I believed her. Ferd looked amused, full of himself.

  Some pleb called out for him and he waved nonchalantly. Mortimer was right; this was a transformation the like I'd never seen. From defeated relic to a mercantile prince all in a week.

  'Can I help, Ferd?' I asked. When I'm broke I start whining. I'm rubbish. 'I'll sort your incoming. I'll divvy for you,' I added recklessly, though it always gives me a terrible headache, sorting genuine antiques from fake.

  'No, thanks, Lovejoy.' He rose, stretched, waved to his minions that he was coming.

  'I've got everything I need.' And strode off to his burgeoning empire, monarch of all.

  'Leaving two green bottles hanging on the wall, love.' Norma said, 'Shhh. I told you, Lovejoy. No more.'

  'I'm glad he's got a money partner. Is it permanent?'

  A shadow crossed her face. You can always tell. No clouds in the skies, yet something darkened her eyes very like a portent. It happens more with women's eyes than men's, because women look close. Men gaze afar. 'Yes. As near as we can tell.'

  'At great cost, love? Or does he come free?'

  'It's a partnership, for heaven's sake!' She rose angrily. 'I knew you'd start the minute I heard you on the phone. You'd better go now. And take your ridiculous daubs with you!

  You're never anything but trouble!'

  Off she stalked, leaving me alone. My ridiculous daubs? She meant my watercolours that I tried to cheer Ferd up with when he was ailing. No need of them now. I looked after her. She even moved alluringly in high heels on her greensward, which takes some doing. I waited until she was gone, then cadged a lift back to town with Openers, a shabby little geezer from the street barrows. He makes lunatic starting bids at auctions to rile the auctioneers. 'Penny-farthing for openers, guv,' is his usual squawk.

  He never laughs, though others do.

  On the way I asked him what he'd bought from Ferd's magnificent new storehouse.

  'Nil,' he groused, surly. 'Where the hell could I get money to buy that sort of kite?' Kite is antique-speak for quality. 'Especially with Sandy and Mel buying everything for Ferd that's not nailed down.'

  'Eh?' Now, Ferd and Norma hated Sandy, wouldn't do business with him for a knighthood, yet here was Openers saying that Randy Sandy was Ferd's new backer. A headache began.

  'Here, Lovejoy. Can you help me?'

  'Hardly, wack. I'm on my uppers.'

  'It's my wife. I promised I'd pay for her wedding if she'll divorce me. Let me say we're doing some deal, eh?'

  'Oh, right,' I said, blank. 'Er, it'll be her third husband?'

  'Course,' he said, like it was the most usual thing in the world. 'She's fixed on splicing with him before Bonfire Plot. She says it'll be unlucky otherwise.'

  'Okay, if it'll get you out of a hole, Openers.'

  'Ta, Lovejoy. You're a pal. I owe you.'

  Some debtor. Openers had never been solvent. I've always had an eye for a bargain.

  He dropped me at the war memorial, so I decided to go and scrounge from Alanna, a reporter who broadcasts falsehoods to the sealands on local stations, which only goes to show how desperately worried I was.

  13

  I LIKE THE way women look. I mean the way they glance, stare, peer. They look even when they're not looking, if you follow. Mostly they do it at other women, sizing rivals, is she likely to cause trouble or just a stain on the backdrop. They're interesting because they're interested.

  There's a species of frog that lives in trees, if you can imagine anything so daft, that generates chemical molecules called splendipherin. It's a sex pheromone that makes the male frog become gorgeous with tones, hues, colours, so the female Litora splendida gives him a glance and thinks, hey, what a dazzler, and clambers to his branch to make smiles. We blokes need something. We're a pretty dull lot. If I could bottle that stuff I'd make a fortune selling it in our market.

  My actors' army made me sigh. I'd seen better routs. The Duke of Wellington's crack came to mind: 'I don't know what Napoleon will think of our new recruits, but by God they frighten me!' and other anecdotes. They stood there, nervy and shambolic. The nerk called Larch, like me lacking splendipherins, had tarted himself up in dark leathers, obviously borrowed to impress. My gran used to say, 'Fashion today, fool tomorrow,'

  and it's true. Pictures of 1920s flappers in their cloche hats and strapped bodices make you exclaim, 'They wore that?' and roll in the aisles. And those wide Windsor bags, trousers with creases unbelievably pressed sideways – the late Duke of Windsor's only contribution to civilization, 'tis said – make you think, 'God in heaven, who donned those?'

  'You know the drill?'

  I'd gone over it as we'd driven over in Jacko's coal wagon, him my last resort singing bad opera as we clattered across East Anglia. They were still dusting themselves down, Tina and Wilhelmina – mercifully minus her shahtoosh – were angry. So was I, because they'd made a special dress effort when I'd told them not to. On a scale of ten, I felt twice as narked.

  'I thought it was a real production, Lovejoy,' Larch said. Jules was quiet, sensing my desperation.

  'Larch, it's more real than you'd ever imagine.'

  'I'm nervous,' Wilhelmina whispered as Taylor Eggers came to the door and smilingly beckoned us. 'What if I forget the signal?'

  'You won't, love.' If she'd podded off her woollen and done as I said, she must have serious gelt. The thought of all that profit from her granny's shawl made me realize how lovely she was. I felt myself redden as Tina caught me looking. (See? Women's glances.)

  Susanne Eggers was waiting, smoking elegantly, seated in the library. I recognized a silver-framed photograph of Arthur Goldhorn, RIP, and his missus with a bonny baby boy. The boy was, is, Mortimer. His mother lives in sordid but affluent sin among muscle dancers in Soho, Bondi Beach and other exotic climes. I don't really miss her.

  Mrs Eggers was reading a volume set on a wooden Moorish stand, beautifully carved.

  I'd sweated blood carving that from Resak wood for Mortimer's parents' wedding. I don't really like paler woods; the dark brown smooth varieties are a delight. Seasoning Resak drives you mad, of course, but it's the carver's friend for hard, heavy, classy joinery. Her book was modern and therefore gunge, meaning printed after 1939.

  'Wait,' she commanded, not looking.

  We waited. Mr Eggers smiled, bustled, nobly held himself back from offering us chairs or tea. Larch, Tina, and Wilhelmina were frozen in awe of the money lady. Jules used the moments silently sussing out the room's antiques.

  He'd done five years, three with remission for good behaviour, mainly for seducing the Countess, whenever she commanded him to do so. He used to drive her pantechnicon to Eastern Europe. It was loaded with relief supplies to the Balkans after mayhem set people refugeeing all over the place. Sounds rum? Not really, because charities are the biggest ripoffs on earth. (You know the scam: please send us money so we can feed the Hungry Out There, et phoney cetera.) If in doubt, check any major charity. It'll have splendid offices, highly paid staff living in tree-lined suburbs with swimming pools and servants. Think of the United Nations and the World Bank, and there you have it. I call the lot of them Crooks, Inc.

  The Countess is a major antiques dealer near Long Melford. She funds ('from my profits, daaahlink!' she always says at her trials) heart-rending charity runs. Folk –

  meaning you – donate clothes, money, medical supplies, and off the great vehicles go.

  One convoy's leading lorry was driven by Jules. It got stopped because some well-meaning Customs blokes wanted to give some medicines to the convoy, and discovered that Jules's wagon was ramjam packed with antique furniture, silver, porcelain, and paintings, not a single crust or a bandage. The clean lorries went on. Jules earned the villification of the entire nation. The Countess naturally went scotage free ('Ay didn't know a thing, daaahlink!') and still lives on donations nicked from her charities, antiques, and men, more or less in that order. Local dealers felt almost nearly sincerely sorry for Jules, but secretly rejoiced that a rival dealer was removed to where he couldn't compete, namely in nick. Ten minutes after his conviction, the entire trade was back dealing with the Countess. This was why I'd told Tina to pick him, from sympathy.

  Always a duckegg.

  'Right.' Mrs Eggers closed the book with a thud and surveyed us. She looked even better today, a superb royal blue satin dress, with baroque pearls that must be Scotch naturals from Perth, earrings to match, gold bangles. She was worth the county, me thrown in. 'Names.'

  'I'm Lovejoy. This is Tina. Wilhelmina. Larch and, er, Jules.'

  'You're all divvies, I believe. Score these antiques correctly. Some, I'm told, are forgeries, others not.' She crossed to a sofa table, its leaves raised for maximum space.

  On it stood four antiques. Straight off I saw her ploy: choose right, you were in; get one wrong, off with your head. 'Men first, women next, in,' she commanded icily, 'order of age. Cards and pencils.'

  Taylor smilingly handed out cards, beaming. 'They're numbered from the left. Put a tick or a cross,' and retired grinning like a Cheshire cat. I wished he'd frown. I distrust smiley folk the same way I hate charmers.

  Jules stepped forward, walked along the four antiques, marking his card. He initialled the back and handed it to Taylor. Larch took his time. Tina then Wilhelmina followed suit. I didn't like the way Larch posed, swirled and pondered, mmmhing and fingering his chin. Silly melodrama stuff. Wilhelmina tried for some mythical part in Rebecca, hoping the non-existent cameras were catching her best side.

  'Lovejoy?' To my stare Mrs Eggers said angrily, 'Go on, dolt.'

  Me too? I got a card, went along the row. The sofa table was not genuine, though somebody had had a high old time doing french polishing, kidding us it was a genuine sofa table of about 1820 that had been fopped up in late Victorian times. More crud, by definition. To check, I leaned down as if to adjust my shoe, and looked along the grain.

  The surface was entirely without pores. Now, you can't have this, not by the original french polishing techniques, so somebody had cleverly used an alkyd wash. This spreads out of its own accord, giving you the pluperfectly level finish. Then you can polish any way you like to your heart's content, because the lovely table will come up like a genuine table that some Regency lady would use for tea while reclining in languor on her sofa to the admiration of her visitors. I'd signalled it false to the others, but I gave it a tick, for genuine.

  A pewter drinking goblet was early Victorian. Some burke had tried to clean its patina off with potash or soda (some nerks use ammonia; they should be gaoled). It was genuine right enough, but I grew angry for the poor little vessel. Homemade, probably, or recast by some wandering tinsmith. They went from village to village in the old days, remaking battered pewter cups. If you have to clean pewter, and I recommend that you don't, please put it in a simple hay bath – three pints of chopped hay into a big metal pan. Fill it with water just too hot to touch, then immerse the pewter in it for seven or so hours. Please promise you won't use solvents or hot sand, no matter what professional books say. I couldn't help glowering at Taylor Eggers. Mortimer was daily providing fresh evidence of being a true divvy, so I knew he wouldn't be the vandal who'd ruined the goblet. I apologized mentally to the poor genuine thing. I marked it a fake.