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control at one point. She happened to glance up as I looked again at her through several layers of pub mirror. Thirty or so, smiling between earrings made of gold-mounted scarabs, original trophies from ancient Egypt. Even without them she’d have been gorgeous. Neat clothes, light fawns and browns. The shoes would match, million to one. Our eyes met. I turned away, but noted the startled air she conveyed. Perhaps it was finding herself lusted at by the peasantry. Maybe I looked as sour as I felt. Iliked her. She didn’t care much for me. Well, that’s the way the Florentine crumbles.
    ‘That grotty escritoire,’ Tinker told me. ‘Leckie outbid him, remember?’
    ‘So he did,’ I said. ‘So he did.’
    Tinker stared hard over the bar and wagged his eyebrow for another pint. Ted streaked up with it. I watched all this, peeved as hell. I have to wave and scream for service. The slightest gesture from Tinker Dill’s like a laser. My eyes got themselves dragged into the mirror by awareness of the woman through the noise and shouts and smoke. She looked carelessly away just in time, back into the huddle of people she was with. Happiness was tapping knees and cracking jokes. The others were falling about obediently with displays of false hilarity. It had to be sham because antiques dealers are like a music-hall band – they’ve heard it all before. Other people in the bar were looking round at them with each gust of laughter and smiling.
    ‘Who is he?’
    ‘Fergus, London. They call him Fergie.’
    Fergus, Black Fergus. I’d heard the name. Some trouble a few months back about possession of a silversmith’s ‘touch’, a metal marker for hallmarking. I’ve heard it’s quite legal in the States. Here our magistrates go bananas if you’re found with one. The fuss hadn’t done Fergus any harm, though. If there’d been any bother he looked well on it.
    He was sitting on a fender stool. Facing him was Sven, a Scandinavian originally. Sven was literally washed ashore after one of those terrifying winter storms we have here on the east coast. His ship was a diminutive freighter plying across the North Sea. They put our lifeboats out, and Sven and six others weresaved. Sven refused to go home once he was ashore, just simply refused point blank to cross either by air or boat. ‘I’ll go home when they’ve built the bridge,’ he jokes when people ask what does he think he’s playing at. They say he’s still got a wife and two kids over there, writing the same sad questions to him in every Monday post. He scratches a living as a free-floating barker, side-trading as a flasher. A flasher’s not what you’re probably thinking. Nothing genital. He’ll go around antique shops sussing out what he supposes to be a bargain – say it’s a necklace of carved rose quartz. He agrees to buy it as a present for his girl or wife (note that: a flasher
never
says he’s buying for himself). He then gives the least possible deposit, or perhaps ‘pays’ by a dubious credit card or cheque, and goes into a nearby pub where he tries to sell it at a profit to a tourist or a dealer. If he’s successful he returns to settle up, and simply keeps the balance. If not – and it usually is not, especially with Sven – he brings it back, complaining the woman doesn’t like it or it won’t go with her new orange blouse. If necessary he’ll break a link and claim he’s returning the goods as faulty. That’s a typical flasher. It’s a hopeless game, operated entirely by useless goons who have even less clue than the rest of us. Sven’s the world’s worst, but I’ve a soft spot for him. He got me out of some complicated trouble I was having with a woman once, so I owe him a favour.
    Madge was with them, dark-haired, swingly and flouncy in a bluish swingback swagger coat and those shoes that seem nothing but thin straps. She’s furniture and porcelain in her shop on East Hill near the Arcade and is probably the wealthiest dealer