Chapter 3
The Pot of Gold antiques shop in Spring Hill Square belonged to Lewis Harley and it was everything he had planned it to be during his months of recuperation. He had created a bygone haven of tranquillity with his choice of decor. The walls were painted in period colours of smoky green, creamy ivory, bronze red, muted gold; the solid display cabinets were predominately dark wood. Clocks charmed the walls, their chimes aged and mellow, bright but gentle lighting complimented everything it touched and the perfume of polish and old books pervaded the air. More than once Lew had been told by customers that they felt as if they had gone back in time when they had crossed over his threshold.
Footfall was building but much more slowly than he had hoped for. It wasn’t viable for the large L-shaped shop to be filled with Lew’s finds alone so he rented out space for traders to sell their goods. Some only leased a single cabinet, a few wanted larger chunks of floor space to display furniture but so far the fees collected didn’t cover the rent that Lew paid out to the landlord Mr McCarthy. Too many units were empty for any profit to be made. He needed customers to attract dealers, he needed dealers to attract customers and he hadn’t worked out yet how best to break the cycle. But he would, because Lew was determined to make it work. The Pot of Gold was a dream come true for him. He loved walking in through the doors every morning to the sight of all the beautiful old treasures, he loved the smell, the noise, the peace of his new world after his fraught, pressured past world of investment banking. There was just the one major fly in the ointment: his sales assistant Vanda Clegg.
It was a very different Vanda Clegg who came in for the interview last year to the one who now worked in the shop. ‘Interview Vanda’ was smiling and genteel, professional and knowledgeable. ‘Shop Vanda’ was moody, moany, lazy and didn’t seem to know her arts from her nouveau. Thinking back to that interview, Vanda had steered the ship of their conversation to waters in which she was obviously safe, sailing in between familiar islands of Clarice Cliff, Cranberry glass and Cloisonné. He’d been too easily impressed by what, he now suspected, was a scripted performance. And, on second reading, her carefully written references looked a little suspect too. ‘Vanda would suit many work environments,’ said one, as if Vanda would suit many – but not theirs. The references supplied were all written with a cold pen, he now felt, filled with telling phrases such as: ‘generally pleasant’, and Vanda apparently had ‘a considerable effect on workplace morale’ in her two months working at Hobbyworld. It didn’t say that effect was a positive one. He also wondered if the same author who wrote ‘full of chatter’ really wanted to write ‘could talk a glass eye to sleep’.
He’d presumed that Vanda, at forty-four – the same age as himself – would have a seasoned work ethic, be reliable, responsible and honest. He had no proof that she was on the fiddle, but a couple of times he hadn’t been able to balance the takings against the ledger and a few items had disappeared without trace, coincidentally from the blind spot area which the security camera didn’t cover, and only the electrician, Lew and Vanda knew that.
The grandfather clock behind the counter, which was the only one in the shop that was set to the exact time, tolled a deep bass note to mark the half-hour which meant that Vanda was over twenty minutes late back from her lunch. Again. Lew had never been a hardline boss; he found that most of his staff respected the leeway he gave them and the ones that took advantage of his good nature didn’t last long. Vanda wasn’t doing his blood pressure any good and he wondered if that might be a sackable offence. He had just stepped into the office to switch on the kettle when he heard the tinkle of the bell above the front door. He doubled back expecting to see Vanda huffing and puffing and apologising for her tardiness because there was a five-mile tailback of traffic/road-block/alien invasion, but instead he found a woman considerably more attractive than the stout, blubbery Vanda. She was of average height, average build with dark-brown hair tied in a ponytail behind her but there was nothing ordinary or average about her eyes which were large, hazel and beautiful.
‘Hello,’ she said, smiling nervously. ‘I’m looking for the owner, would that be you?’
‘Yes that’s me,’ said Lew. ‘How can I help you?’
‘My name is Bonnie Brookland, I’m local and I know it’s a long shot but I wondered if you had an assistant’s job going.’
Oh if only, thought Lew. His face creased up with regret.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’
‘Like I say, it was a long shot,’ said Bonnie, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Oh well. Thank you.’ Her eye caught a painting on the wall as she turned to go which stopped her in her tracks. She leaned over to study it.
‘It’s not an original, hence the price,’ said Lew.
‘Some of the copies can cost a bob or two though,’ smiled Bonnie. ‘You’ll have heard of Percy Lake, of course?’
‘Oh yes.’ Lew nodded, impressed that she mentioned him. There had been a resurgence of interest in old Percy following the unearthing of some of his work in the area. He’d been a genius art forger, as good as the grand masters whose work he copied. ‘This was done by a local artist. Student. She’s very good. She takes famous paintings and gives them her own twist, hence the London skyline under the Starry Night. I said I’d try and sell a few of her paintings to help pay off her accumulating university debt.’
He smiled and Bonnie noticed his even square teeth, his strong chin, the sunray wrinkles spanning out from the corners of his eyes. This was a man who had smiled a lot in his life, she thought. Stephen owned no such marks.
There was a rack of old pipes on the table underneath the picture.
‘You obviously haven’t had the Pied Piper in here then?’ Bonnie said. ‘You wouldn’t still have those Petersons if he’d seen them.’
‘Sorry?’ said Lew. He was aware that some of the dealers had nicknames – Starstruck, the autograph seller, for instance – but he hadn’t come across the Pied Piper.
‘The Pied Piper. He collects pipes and especially likes Petersons. I’ll send him your way the next time . . .’ Bonnie’s voice trailed off. She was going to say that she’d send him this way the next time he came into the shop, except that she didn’t work there any more and so she probably wouldn’t see him again. She sighed and Lew heard it and wondered why the sound was so deep and sad.
Curious of the depth of her knowledge he picked up one of the other pipes from the rack.
‘What about this one? Any good, do you think?’
Bonnie took it from him and immediately raised her eyebrows. ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘A Dunhill Bruyere. Early 1970s. You’ve priced it too low at seventy-five pounds. If the Pied Piper came in here, he’d offer you one hundred and fifty pounds for that but he’d pay two hundred and ten, maybe twenty, depending on how desperate he was to own it.’
‘Really?’ said Lew. Pipes weren’t his speciality. He’d been sold a job lot of them and he knew that he would have made a profit at seventy-five pounds for the Dunhill, but maybe he should have gone back and done his research properly.
He noticed the ring that Bonnie was wearing on her middle finger when she passed the pipe back to him. An eye-shaped piece of amethyst mounted on a gold twist. It looked identical to one which he’d had in the jewellery cabinet a couple of months ago, until it disappeared into the ether.
‘I see Stickalampinit Stuart is renting some space from you.’ Bonnie pointed to a large cabinet where various lamps were displayed.
‘Is that what he’s known as?’ grinned Lew.
‘Stickalampinit for short,’ Bonnie grinned back. ‘Although it’s not that much shorter, is it? Anything he can find to make into a lamp and he will do: telephones, bottles, radios, pigeon clocks, even an old mannequin torso once. It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. Not surprisingly it didn’t sell and it took up a ridiculous amount of space.’
‘Quite a character, isn’t he?’
That was one way of putting it. Stickalampinit was like Tigger on Prozac. Lew had never met anyone as full of beans.
‘He’s convinced that one day he’ll win the Turner prize,’ chuckled Bonnie. ‘And, of course, if he’s displaying here, you’ll have had his friend in – Butterfly Barry. He doesn’t sell but he buys anything with butterflies on. He’s obsessed by them.’
‘Velvet jacket, quiff ?’
‘That’s him.’
‘Yes, he has been in and bought a few things.’
Bonnie flicked at a stray hair that had fallen over her face. The ring caught his eye again. ‘That’s pretty,’ he said.
Bonnie spread her fingers and looked at it. She’d fallen in love with it as soon as it had come in to the shop. Ken said she could have it instead of a wage if she came in on her weekend off so he could go to the races with his cronies. ‘I thought so too,’ she smiled. ‘I got it from the place where I work.’ Used to work, her brain reminded her.
‘Oh, where’s that?’ asked Lew.
‘Grimshaw’s Antiques,’ replied Bonnie.
‘Oh, you work there, do you?’ Lew had paid it a visit once, eyeing up the competition, but found only badly displayed rubbish in a freezing environment. He hadn’t seen the woman in front of him in there though, just a swarthy, miserable-looking man reading a newspaper which was laid flat out on the counter.
‘My dad used to be the joint-owner. I’ve worked there since I could reach the till. It was very different back then, of course.’
Lew did a quick calculation of how many years that could be. He thought she might be late thirties, so quite a few then. Plenty of time to build up considerable knowledge. He nodded, impressed.
‘I didn’t even know this place existed until today,’ said Bonnie. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘We had our six-month anniversary a couple of weeks ago,’ replied Lew. ‘I took an ad out in the Daily Trumpet to invite people along for a celebration but they printed the wrong date, the wrong place and the wrong everything else. They promised to send a “roving reporter” for their radio station, but she never turned up so the article she was going to write for their supplement the following week didn’t appear either.’
‘The Daily Trumpet are useless,’ said Bonnie.
‘You’re telling me. They printed that I was once an investment bonker.’
‘Oh no,’ returned Bonnie, covering her mouth and once again showing Lew that unusual ring. ‘I hope you got your money back for the advert.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And are you busy?’ Bonnie asked. This shop deserved to be. It had that indefinable feeling of a place that could attract treasure, plus it was warm and browse-friendly.
Lew bobbed his head from side to side in a ‘so-so’ gesture. ‘Not as much as I’d like, but I suppose it takes time to build up a new business. I gave the present dealers a rate they couldn’t refuse for six months to bring them in. But I know I’ll lose them very soon if we don’t get more customers.’
‘Do you—’
Then the bell above the door gave a mad jangle, cutting off Bonnie’s question and in thundered Vanda, wheezing like an asthmatic steam engine. Lew prepared himself for the words, ‘Sorry I’m late because . . .’ but instead it was Bonnie who spoke next, and to Vanda.
‘Hello there. I nearly didn’t recognise you. You’ve changed your hair.’ Bonnie smiled, not having the slightest clue of the impact her words would have on the woman she had just addressed.
Vanda momentarily froze, then she dropped her head and scurried quickly into the back room without saying anything in reply, leaving Bonnie looking slightly confused and Lew smelling a very large rat.
‘You know my assistant?’ he asked Bonnie.
Bonnie appeared slightly embarrassed. ‘I thought I did, but . . .’ she shook her head then looked down at the ring on her finger as if seeking an answer to the puzzle there.
With a low voice, Lew asked, ‘Did she, by any chance, sell that ring to Grimshaw’s?’
Bonnie was totally convinced it was the same woman who had sold a few things to Ken Grimshaw, including her lovely ring. But from the way the owner of the Pot of Gold was looking at her, there was more than met the eye to those transactions. She nodded slowly and felt the weight of a responsibility she wished she hadn’t been lumbered with.
‘You don’t happen to have had anyone sell you a Bionic Man, still boxed, in the last month, do you?’ he asked her. ‘And a stylophone, a Game Boy, an old Acorn Electron computer maybe?’
Bonnie knew that these were all things that the portly woman with long jet-black hair had sold to Ken. Plus some jewellery – her dead aunt’s, she said; the toys she’d found in the loft of a house she’d recently bought. Even with her short blonde hair, rather than the shoulder-length black, Bonnie would have recognised her face, especially with the protruding brown mole near her upper lip.
‘I ought to go,’ said Bonnie, feeling that she’d inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest. The day was just getting better and better. ‘Thanks anyway.’
As she turned, Lew touched her arm to halt her. ‘Please, leave me your name and number. Just in case something turns up.’
‘Certainly,’ said Bonnie and scrabbled around inside her bag for a pen. Lew picked up a pad from the counter. He had a feeling something might be turning up sooner rather than later now. Bonnie wrote down her details.
He hadn’t caught her name when she’d first introduced herself. Bonnie Brookland, Lew read. Bonnie suited her.
‘Bye then.’ Bonnie flashed a strained smile, hoping she hadn’t caused as much trouble as she thought she might have. She would have liked to have stayed and wandered around the shop but thought it best to leave – and quickly. She’d visit the supermarket before going home so she could delay telling Stephen that she’d lost her job. He wouldn’t be very pleased. But then, was he ever?
Vanda had clearly been waiting until Bonnie had gone before emerging from the back room. She didn’t seek eye contact from Lew but went straight into work mode, and if that wasn’t cause for suspicion, nothing was. Lew didn’t say a word at first, but made sure that she saw him take the book out of the drawer where he recorded any losses. He could feel her glancing at him, wondering when he was going to mention something. He let her sweat for a full ten minutes and didn’t look up when he eventually addressed her but kept his eyes down on the pages of the book.
‘Vanda, quite a few things have gone missing over the past months, wouldn’t you agree?’
Vanda mumbled something under her breath by way of an answer.
‘I hear that some of them have found their way to Grimshaw’s. Imagine that. Someone stealing and selling them stupidly on their own doorstep.’
There was no comment, even though Vanda was listening to his every word as she adjusted pieces on display.
Lew went on, his voice calm, controlled, masking the anger. ‘I think that if that person were so brainless not to realise they could be traced very easily, then she would be as well getting out of the way before the police were called in. Wouldn’t it be a wise move on her part if that person got their coat and left instead, knowing that nothing more would be said about it if she did?’
Out of the corner of his eye, Lew noticed that Vanda had gone into the back room. He opened the drawer and replaced the book. By the time he had closed it again, Vanda Clegg had swept past him with her bag and her coat as speedily as her dumpy little legs could carry her. The bell above the door signified her exit and Lew knew that she wouldn’t be returning. The mystery thief had vacated the premises.