Drawing the Line Read online

  ‘I hear the old bugger got pissed again,’ he observed.

  It was one thing for me to call him that myself, but quite another for someone else to.

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘Yes, you do. The whole site knows.’

  ‘There was a bit of a problem,’ I admitted.

  ‘And an even bigger problem with the bloke that brought him back home – knocked him out and stole his keys. Did he take much?’

  ‘Not much in a caravan to take, is there? It’s all bolted down.’

  ‘You don’t keep anything in there?’ He sounded quite concerned.

  I shook my head. ‘Just a kettle and so on.’ His nod encouraged me to ask, in a tone meant to show I expected the answer to be no, ‘Do you in yours?’

  ‘Clean as a whistle.’ He glanced over at his stall. ‘But then, you’ve already given it the once over, haven’t you?’

  Was this a not very subtle attempt to keep me out? I grinned. ‘I was just a visitor: I wasn’t exactly looking for masterpieces under the bed.’ He snorted. ‘Come on, Copeland, we just had a meal and went to the disco: nothing wrong with that, is there? After all, you were out as well.’

  His voice seemed friendlier. ‘That’s just it, Lina. I was out. Marcus was supposed to be in. All evening. Just in case.’

  I wasn’t at all sure how much to believe. So I just said, ‘We weren’t late back.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have gone out at all. That’s part of our deal, Lina – he’s out, I’m in. I’m out, he’s in. See? But you come along flashing your tits and he’s off, leaving the place unguarded. Mind you, seeing what was on offer, I can’t really blame him.’

  Subject-changing time. ‘But if there’s nothing to guard?’ I cast a mental eye round his caravan. If only I could trust my memory. No, no books or finished maps. Marcus’s paint box and a jar with brushes drying upside down. A couple of dirty mugs. A laptop computer.

  Now, if you just sold a computer like that down in the pub, you’d get a couple of hundred for it. True. But we were dealing all the time in things worth far more than that. All of us. And we dealt on trust. So what on earth could he have tucked under mattresses or slipped behind fold-down tables? Things like priceless maps or forged pages from books?

  He looked at his stall again. ‘You know yourself – if they find there’s nothing to steal they’ll trash the place. Anyway, if you two want to go on the razzle tonight, that’s OK by me. Because I shall be staying in. And if anyone tries anything funny, they’ll get more than they bargained for.’

  ‘Especially dodgy security men,’ I said, with another affable grin, as if we were mates seeing eye to eye after a silly tiff. ‘So you want me to take Marcus over the hills and far away. OK. I’m sure I can manage that.’

  But even as I smiled, I was trying to work out what the hell he was up to. I didn’t believe a word. I didn’t trust Copeland in general and in particular when he was apparently being nice and open.

  We could have gone on fencing like this forever, I suppose, but there was another little rush of customers. A lot of them had gathered round Marcus. Copeland might have managed to say goodbye before he dived off, but I wouldn’t have testified in a court of law.

  At this point Griff bustled up, suspiciously as if he’d been waiting for Copeland to go. He produced with one hand a pair of plastic glasses pretending to be flutes, with the other a bottle of champagne. I had a cold feeling I’d never had before. After my sale, he could clearly afford to pay for even an extravagance like this – but could his liver? I’d never thought before about how much he drank.

  ‘Oh, come on, dear heart. Smile! It’s not poison!’

  As usual, the bubbles got up my nose. But I wasn’t going to let him swill the whole bottle. Especially when he pressed his hand to his stomach and went pale. Please God, not a heart attack.

  Apparently not. He gave an enormous, echoing belch. ‘Wind, you see. Nothing serious. It’s just the tummy finds shampoo a mite acid.’

  He turned his back so I wouldn’t see him popping one of his indigestion tablets, but even if I hadn’t seen the smell of peppermint on his breath would have given it away. I took the bottle firmly and shoved it behind the stall’s skirt. ‘No more till you’ve had something to eat. I mean it, Griff. If you won’t look after yourself someone else will have to. And I think that someone’s me.’

  So I dosed him on baguette and black coffee. Would that hurt his stomach? There was bound to be a second-hand home doctor encyclopaedia on one of the bookstalls: when he wasn’t looking, I’d check. Meanwhile, the champagne wouldn’t go to waste. I’d read somewhere that if you put a silver spoon down the bottle’s neck it’d stay fizzy. Despite our dear old lady shoplifter, we weren’t short of spoons. Marcus and I could check later that evening if the theory worked.

  ‘Going out? Of course he’s going out. He’s got this friend in Knaresborough. Can’t think why he came back last night: he doesn’t usually.’

  ‘He doesn’t want us in the caravan, that’s for sure,’ I said, breaking off a bit of chocolate and passing it over.

  He took it with painty fingers. ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Marcus: invite me to the caravan this evening and I’ll bet you fifty pence I can show you why.’

  ‘What about food?’

  What a weird question when I was almost offering myself to him on a plate. Only almost. It wasn’t my knickers that would be got into, but, if I could manage it, Copeland’s computer. I’d bet my teeth that he didn’t want anyone to see what was in his database of customers and sources. That was why he’d pasted together such a weak story.

  ‘Slip out and get something to bring back?’

  ‘Harrogate’s a bit respectable for your average Chinese take-away.’

  ‘In that case perhaps they’ll run to an above average Thai.’

  In the end he started talking about an Indian, which surprised me, because there’s no way you can get rid of curry smells from a caravan, and much as I love coriander chicken I’m not sure I’d want to wake up in the morning to its perfume.

  We stood outside the restaurant arguing.

  ‘No worse than the smell of beer and fags my coz’ll bring home with him on his clothes.’

  ‘But he won’t notice them: sure as God made little apples he’ll smell curry.’

  ‘We could eat at your place.’

  ‘We could just walk in here and ask if there’s a free table.’

  He looked as shocked as if I’d suggested he streak down the main street. ‘But you have to pay VAT if you eat in.’

  It might have been my pocket the £850 was burning a hole in, not Griff’s: I nearly offered to treat him. After all, curry wasn’t one of Griff’s favourite things, as it was mine, so we very rarely ate Indian and it would have been a real treat. But I kept my head screwed on. After all, the vase had been Griff’s find. The fact that he kept thrusting crumpled fivers at me as commission was irrelevant as the more he thrust them the more I told him not to.

  Eventually we bought fish and chips, to eat as we walked back to the van. It might be one thing to eat in the street in downtown London; it was quite another to munch in posh Harrogate. So it wasn’t, as Griff might have put it, the best gastronomic experience in the world. And I deeply regretted my curry. I deeply regretted everything about the whole evening, actually. Perhaps Marcus had got so used to looking at his handsome face in the mirror every day he assumed he could simply get by on his looks. He certainly made no effort to talk to me, let alone entertain me in the way Griff’s cronies did. OK, they were mostly older and it was clear that chatting was all we were ever going to do, given what Griff called their proclivities. But they had charm and it was a pleasure to walk down the street with them.

  Why not simply thank him for his company and head back to Griff’s caravan? One reason, to be honest, was that I really hate spending a Saturday night in. Saturday nights are meant to be loud and silly with too much to drink – though having seen Griff
this morning I was having serious doubts about that, and had resolved never, ever, to binge again. Not that I had for some time. Saturdays were either working days or time to prepare for the next day’s fair. Besides which, Bredeham didn’t have a big young population to go on the booze with. From time to time it was invaded by a whole lot of lads in bangers or on bikes, and there’d be a lot of curtain-twitching and talk of calling the police. Mostly the kids smashed a few bottles and had a couple of fights and then treated us to the sight of them throwing up or peeing against lampposts. So while a few local girls joined in, I voted with my feet. I might have felt about ninety-eight as I listened to the radio or read a book, but my halo was so bright I didn’t need electric light.

  As I drove us back to the caravan site, I was almost ready to call the whole thing off. But I knew I had to get hold of Copeland’s laptop. Seducing Marcus was now so low down my list of priorities I decided simply to tell him the truth. Some of it. ‘If Copeland wants us out tonight, and you’re sure he’d going to be out to, and he’s suddenly pretending to be my best mate, I smell a rat, Marcus. Or if not a rat, something in the ’van he doesn’t want me to see.’

  Marcus spoke for the first time since I’d started the engine. ‘There’s nothing there, Lina. I know where he stashes things. I’ve actually cased the joint for you. Zilch.’

  Perhaps a snog was on the cards after all.

  Parking up in our slot, I sent Marcus on ahead just to double-check the coast was clear. I followed more slowly, first checking in at our ’van for the mini-ablutions and a dab of lippie and to collect the champagne, the level of which had gone down so far it wasn’t worth taking. At least Griff had been sober enough to double-lock the door; I did the same when I left. I was strolling along thinking of not very much, certainly not Marcus and a body I’d only recently stopped fancying like mad, when I heard shouts. Someone was running hell for leather towards me, carrying something. I merged into the shadow of another caravan and waited till the psychological moment to stick out a foot.

  There was a satisfying thud as a figure in black jeans and hooded jacket went flying. So did something else. A laptop. I grabbed it. Other hands grabbed the figure, but were so incompetent that the hoodie came off in their hands and the thief – I think we’d all decided that was the term by then – sped off. I hung on to the laptop, and Marcus and several others, Titus but not Copeland amongst them, checked the jacket. A professional shoplifter would have been proud of it, it had so many secret pockets. But it wasn’t supermarket loot they found, but jewellery, miniatures and pieces of silver, if not quite thirty. In other words, a lot of goodies dealers had thought too valuable to be left to the protection of the security staff guarding the showground.

  One of whom now arrived. Not my acquaintance. This one, solid as an ex-policeman, came armed with a radio, which he used to summon assistance and to tell someone to shut the gates. My sort of guard.

  To my surprise, he returned the stolen property with the minimum of fuss to the owners. Marcus declared the laptop was his cousin’s. No one claimed anything that wasn’t theirs, and identified other stuff as belonging to people not part of the posse. A couple of the older men, but not Titus, were chosen to accompany the guard as he went off to pop it into safe-keeping till it was retrieved. By now a little gaggle of guards had arrived to guard the burgled vans till the locksmith arrived, no doubt grumpier than ever but mentally trebling his prices before kindly offering bulk discount of five per cent.

  Or had I been in the antiques trade too long?

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said casually, still holding the laptop to my chest, ‘why don’t we go and check this hasn’t been damaged? It hit the ground with an awful bump.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘You win. So long as you tell me what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Easy. Just the names and addresses of people he buys from. So I can work out who sold him that page.’

  ‘Easy! Just about the most confidential material he has. The decaying aristocracy don’t want folk knowing they’re selling up their libraries so people like us can buy up old tomes and fillet saleable pages from them.’

  ‘You always said you only handled books that were literally falling apart!’ I hissed. ‘Not destroying historical objects!’ I thought of that wonderful volume in the Bodleian, and suddenly, instead of resenting Oxford’s huge wealth, felt a rush of relief that there was at least one old library that wouldn’t throw the odd book to hyenas like Larry Copeland.

  Marcus flung up his hands. ‘Do you want me to check or do you want to hang about in the dark talking ethics?’

  ‘There!’ we yelled. ‘Bingo!’

  Marcus had found Copeland’s address book. Not email addresses – proper snail-mail ones. But I soon stopped chortling. It was long, and most addresses were incomplete, just a name and a postcode. Copeland hadn’t brought his printer, of course, so it was going to be a long, tedious job copying them all by hand.

  At this point my opinion of Marcus took a sharp upwards turn. He provided paper and pencil without asking.

  Suddenly he stopped tapping, resting his hands either side of the computer. ‘This could take forever. We have to use our brains here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed cautiously, never having had much opinion of mine, at least. ‘We ought to narrow the field a bit – is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So we ought to look – say – where I was born.’

  ‘Not many stately homes in London, Lina – well, there are, but stinking rich folk live in them and don’t need to charge a fiver to get punters through the door.’

  ‘OK, I lived in London, but I wasn’t born there. According to my birth certificate I was born in Maidstone.’ Before he’d done more than open his mouth, I added, ‘Don’t ask where I was conceived! But my mother was supposed to be a country girl.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – the classic rich man in his castle and the poor maiden at the gate. You’re sure you don’t know which bit of country?’

  I shook my head. And there was nothing in my little box of treasures to help.

  ‘I suppose we could check through all the parish registers for Townends,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘Everything’s available on the Internet.’

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ I said. ‘And if all the social workers of Lewisham couldn’t find any maternal family, I don’t think it’s worth trying. It’s my father I’m after.’

  ‘No family at all? Really?’

  ‘Orphan Annie, that’s me,’ I said smiling. But it was through clenched teeth. He was wasting time we didn’t have.

  ‘That’s terrible. Mind you, I always wondered how you to have landed up with an impossible old soak like Griff Tripp. Is there any time of day he’s actually sober?’

  ‘Griff is my friend, Marcus, thanks very much. My friend,’ I repeated. No one but me criticised Griff. ‘So does knowing my place of birth help?’

  He nodded. ‘Might do. I’ll start looking for places in the south east, of course.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ I said, mentally kicking myself. Why hadn’t I thought of all this before? Before putting together my itinerary for the whole of Great Britain? God, why was I so stupid? ‘But how do you know which postcodes represent where?’

  ‘Stints on the Christmas post,’ he said, suddenly rubbing his finger on the touchpad and wiping everything.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing now?’

  ‘Setting up a game of FreeCell. So if Copeland turns up out of the blue, we can switch to this window and he won’t know what you’re up to. Those two aces out, and then…’

  ‘What the hell are you two doing?’ Copeland demanded ten minutes later. ‘I thought you were going out.’ His tone of voice said, I thought I told you to go out.

  Marcus stood up, shielding me as I tucked my list up my knickers. ‘We started off just checking it was all right after its fall, Coz. Then I discovered –’

  ‘Fall? I told you not to touch the bloody thing!’

  �
��It wasn’t Marcus who dropped it.’ I thought it was time to add my mite. ‘It was Burglar Bill. That’s why we’re here. We were going to have a drink in Griff’s caravan but there’s been a spate of break-ins. Didn’t you notice the damage to the lock?’

  Evidently not. He dodged back to check. I hitched the list higher.

  ‘We’re still waiting for the locksmith,’ Marcus said, quickly hopping back the database and killing it. ‘And since the computer went flying when Lina tripped the thief, we thought we’d better check it. Like I said.’

  ‘Which is how Marcus came to teach me FreeCell. We only meant to have one game, but we just got hooked. I suppose you couldn’t get us out of this mess, could you?’ I pointed to the screen.

  ‘I think we should restart the game,’ he said, elbowing Marcus aside and sitting between us.

  Chapter Eleven

  Copeland’s advice about restarting the FreeCell game seemed to apply just as well to me and my parent hunt. Especially when taken with Marcus’s theory that I should look local. So everything might be coming together. I thought I’d be too excited to sleep, but the sound of Griff snoring gently – he must be on his side, not his back – lulled me as it usually did. Plus the realisation, of course, that even if I stuck to Kent and Sussex, there were still a hell of a lot of stately homes to check out. The National Trust might have a good crop, but there were many others. If I was lucky I’d find they hadn’t become hotels or whatever. Others were private homes, only opening their doors once or twice a year, if that. Yes, there was a long haul ahead – and a long day ahead, too. Enough of daydreams; it was time for the good old night sort.

  Predictably, the following morning there was a lot of gossip amongst the dealers before the doors officially opened, and I found to my embarrassment that I was a bit of a heroine.

  ‘Indeed, dear heart,’ a mercifully unfuddled, headache-free Griff observed, ‘if only the security folk had actually caught the miscreant you’d be in danger of sanctification. Even so, if you take up all those offers of a drink, you’ll end up with an awful head. And yes, I do speak from experience, and no, I don’t need nagging to mend my ways. Far more tonic than gin last night, I promise you.’