PearlHanger 09 (18 page)

Wrong. All this was wrong.

"If it hadn't been for that filthy old man . . ." Donna sounded really regretful. She meant Tinker.

Don't say any more,
my mind pleaded with her. The phone rang in the study, very close. I jumped, by a miracle not knocking anything over. Deamer's old man's steps came nearer. I even heard him wheeze. They meant me, me the fool, me not worth a light. And Donna was no poor innocent. She was actually deploring that Tinker had sprung me from the nick when they'd done her husband in.

Deamer was saying calmly, "And he's what?"

During which pause I felt queasy. Not because all my nonthinking stupidity had finally proved itself, but because I was here high and dry and somebody else was . . .

"Then he has to go, Kenneth," Deamer said. "Weren't you supposed to be following Lovejoy?"

Oh, Christ. I was sickened. Between the salt water and the seashore all right.

My dozy cortex yawned itself awake and nudged its alpha rhythms. Ken Chatto had been following me. He knew I was out behind Tom's boat. So why was he now phoning Deamer so urgently? My heart thumped once in fright as realization struck. Tinker.

"Very well." The receiver went down. A scraping sound, old Deamer laughing. "Good news, my dear. The old man you detest so much is poaching in the forbidden area.
Kenneth saw him near where Lovejoy was waterskiing.
Kenneth is arranging an accident. It will be the usual sort. Two birds with one lucky stone. Marvelous."

Then Donna said, "Lovejoy wouldn't go waterskiing, Donald. Never in a million years." She was thinking, working it out. "Unless ..."

I moved, gliding like I'd never done in my life before, out of breath with my heart banging and legs quivering. I fell down that bloody step into the conservatory and scrambled moaning through the window into the fresh dark cold.

Then I ran, down the drive and across the path now flooding ankle-deep in the tide. I didn't even think of sharks and giant sea monsters. Of course I'd be too late. The knack of idiots.

160 .

21

She was there, bless her, reading—
reading
—a book in the car's interior light when I fell in and gasped for her to drive to the jetty.

"What is it, Lovejoy?"

"Go, go!"

You wouldn't think that barely two miles would take an age. My chest was burning and my throat raw. I honestly thought I was dying from panic and effort. That's what comes from being unfit and running blind. Vanessa was pale, driving down this ordinary rural road, peering ahead in the dashboard's glow. A car coming the other way shot past in a dazzle, the crammed occupants singing boisterously. Trees, signposts, colored bulbs strung across a gate for holiday caravans.

"Sound your horn!" I reached across and pressed on the wheel, blaring the car's horn into the beams. What was S.O.S.? Three longs, three shorts, three longs, or the short blasts first? At least disturb them, tell them I was coming.

"What are we doing, Lovejoy?" She was suddenly

scared of me. We'd only known each other for a day. Much I cared, didn't even reply.

We shot down the hedged lanes making a fearsome racket. The occasional strollers now turned to stare. Honestly, I was thinking we'd made it when a maniac white van squeezed terrifyingly past on a narrow bend. I'd cursed it before the significance of its red cross hit me. Hand off the horn then. The blue strobe blinked busily ahead, heeled into the lane leading to the jetty.

"It's an ambulance," Vanessa said, her face chalk. "Billy?"

"No. Tinker."

A vacuum flask and a sandwich box rocked away on the rear seat. That was a kindness. She was doing me a kindness. I part dressed, grubbily, falling over.

Tinker was being carried into the ambulance when we arrived. The driver had driven through a hedge to reach the jetty and was morosely eyeing the gap for his sedate getaway. A nurse was bullying two blokes to be careful with the stretcher. Tinker looked battered, but his face was uncovered.

"He's still alive," little Billy complained.

"Tinker. You all right, mate?"

"You're bad news, Lovejoy," the nerk said. I bent to listen to this abuse. "A white boat ran into me like you did."

"Me?" That really narked me. Friends don't strike friends. And I'd actually come to rescue the bad-tempered sod. "Who were they?"

"They'd have done for me if Tom Connor hadn't happened along, Lovejoy."

"Leave the patient alone," the nurse said.

The ambulance driver lit a fag, stared. "Here," he said. "Why've you no socks or shoes on?"

162 .

We watched the ambulance crush slowly back through its homemade gap and depart down the track.

"Did you win, Lovejoy?" Vanessa asked. She had her arm through her dad's, from relief.

"At the house? No, love." I'd lost Donna. I now knew everything but had no proof. Nothing I could do except watch Deamer make a fortune from his scam and see my lovely murderess Donna ride off into the sunset with murderer Chatto to share the spoils. "Lost everything."

The sandwiches were still there, and the flask. I brought them across to where Tom and Vanessa were standing, and perched on the edge of the wooden jetty.

"Keep up our strength," I suggested, unwrapping the grub in the gloaming. "There are pearls, aren't there? In the river."

Tom sighed, plumped down with a grunt. Vanessa sat on her heels, still recovering from her fright. "How did you know?"

"My superb powers of reason," I said bitterly. Billy had nicked one of my sandwiches. I pulled the rest closer.

"You nearly took his head off with your skis, Lovejoy," Tom said. "I went back to warn him off. It's an unlucky stretch of river, that. A white motor yacht had clobbered him."

"Not accidental I presume."

Tom shrugged. "Who knows? I shouted. They took off toward the estuary. I fished Tinker out and raised the alarm."

"Ta, Tom," I said.

"Deamer has men all along the banks through his estate, day and night. He says it's to stop anglers after bream, but. . ."

"You do it with a bucket thing, right?"

"Pearl fishing? Yes. A mask, made out of any old tin.

...
263

Put leather round the rims, shaped to your face, and bend yourself into the shallow river."

"Freshwater mussels are secret," Billy explained. "Nobody's to tell."

I said, "Real pearls? This far south?"

"Them musselbones are here all right," Tom said. "Except, ten years ago there was a sudden plenty."

I'd heard this kind of thing. Sometimes pearls suddenly vanish from a river, then just as abruptly become plentiful, one mussel in every four. A pearl epidemic. Deamer had bought the estate when the owner died, and had a ready- made source of pearls for faking antique jewelry by the ton. I should have realized when Tom said that Deamer let the woods rot, yet guarded the river with obsessional fury. So whatever Deamer wanted had to be in the river. I'm thick.

"Local pearls used to be little funny-shaped things, until they came plentiful. Now they're marble-big. Some bigger, even."

Christ. No wonder. Worth anybody's murder, almost. Guiltily I canceled the thought. Deamer had a real winner here. Enough fantasy-baroque pearls to copy practically every famous historical brooch and pendant known.

"The river must have had an outbreak of a parasite that stimulates the mussels to make whoppers. Any fancies?" Fancies are unusual colors, deep golds to greens to purples to blacks. But be careful. Absolutely jet black pearls are difficult to sell. It's the nearly blacks—brown blacks, greenish blacks and blue blacks that bring in the collectors and jewelers like wasps to fruit.

"Only now and then," Tom said.

"Lovejoy. What
has
Deamer to do with you?" Vanessa's voice was quiet. Tom glanced back up the track where a car's lights were jolting toward us. "Were the pearls so im
portant

164 .

that you'd send Tinker poaching them while you went to burgle Mr. Deamer's house?"

"Oh, aye," I said. No good explaining to women. "I'm to blame sure enough."

The car stopped. Doors slammed. Torches flashed. Somebody said, "This where they pulled him ashore?" and a servile at-attention voice fawned, "Yes, sir."

Another man was saying, "I couldn't avoid him, Ledger. The river hereabouts is so narrow."

"So it is, sir." Ledger's voice, all assurance. They paused then, because they were upon us.

"Wotcher, Ledger," I said, friendly to break the ice.

"Lovejoy? What're you doing here?"

"You're a duckegg, Ledger," I said. "This the gentleman that creased Tinker?"

"Accidental, Lovejoy," Ledger said. "We have an independent witness. A gamekeeper from Mr. Deamer's estate."

"Oh, aye." I looked at the pale-haired man beside Ledger. "Chatto, I presume?"

Good old Ken Chatto was taller than I remembered, and happier than a murderer has a right to be. But then he'd won the fair lady and the fortune. He and his avaricious old partner Deamer could now turn out fakes till doomsday and be in the clear.

"Never forget a face, Kenneth." I ignored the outstretched hand. "What were you doing dashing upriver so fast?"

"It's a tenancy rule," Chatto said. "I must assist in patrolling the river with the employed gamekeepers."

Ledger had marched to the end of the jetty and stared at the water for clues. He came back, nodding. "Nothing here for us," he announced. "Show me the boat you brought Dill in with, Tom. And you, miss."

"Will you be all right Lovejoy?" Vanessa asked me. Chatto had made no move, and the bobby was following Tom and Ledger.

"Yes, ta. I'll shout if Kenneth annoys me."

We watched her follow them, me sitting on the jetty and the murdering woman-stealing bastard standing beside me smiling in the gloaming.

"Well, Kenneth," I said finally. My tea'd gone cold in all this. "Pity about Owd Maggie and Vernon, eh?"

"It was rather." I stared up at him. He actually sounded sincerely sorry. "You see, Lovejoy, Maggie'd received a spirit message. Donna overheard you phoning. There was no other way."

So he was the nut. "Tut-tut," I said. "Forced into it, eh?"

"I'm glad you understand." He sighed, all the cares of the world. "And I never did get on with Sidney. Especially when Donna chose between us. Did you know we were at school together? He was quite sound as a youngster, victor ludorum and all that. But spineless in later years. He lost his nerve over the old woman. Positively weak." He sounded merely mildly put out, an elderly vicar when tea's late.

"And you did him in, so they'd arrest me?"

"Why, certainly. I had to. Mr. Deamer has every right to expect reliable service. You can see that, Lovejoy." He sounded so bloody earnest.

"I can see you're off your frigging nut."

"How dare you!" He quivered like a pointer dog. For a second I thought he was going to boot me into the water. "How dare you! You—tramp! You've lost, Lovejoy. Don't you understand? We're already spreading the word, saying your motive for killing Sidney was the pendant. Once the trade hears that, everybody will believe our products are genuine. Then we can sell fakes as genuine a hundred

166 .

times over—all under compulsory secrecy, to dealers and collectors from all over the world. It's beautiful. It can't fail, Lovejoy. Thanks to you."

"I'd approve," I said, "if it weren't for Owd Maggie, Sid, me nearly getting topped. And Tinker."

"You, Lovejoy," said this upper-crust example of gentlemanly enterprise, "are simply envious of my success."

My baffled silence was still matching his affronted petulance when Ledger led the others across to say polite good-byes. Ledger told me to make sure to report in at the police station in the morning.

"Aye, aye," I said irritably. "Oh, Kenneth."

"Yes, Lovejoy?" He paused, still annoyed at me for not admiring his murderous cleverness.

"I spoke to Owd Maggie today. You've not won at all."

Chatto recoiled and actually moaned as he turned and blundered away. Ledger glanced, followed. I lifted a hand for Tom to pull me to my feet.

"Look," I said, as they drove off. "I know I'm a pest, but is there any chance of a pint and a pastie? I've something on my mind."

There was a big auction not far off. Maybe there was

something we could put in. . . .

»

"Lovely. Between one and a half and three grains in weight."

Tom was reminiscing and fugging the warm sleepy kitchen with his pipe. Vanessa was listening. Billy was sleeping upright on her lap, sometimes leaping into wakefulness with a startled murmur. I'd got the old bloke talking about his gamekeeping days as soon as we'd started on Vanessa's meat-and-potato, concentrating loosely on the local pearls of