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We could see him being all dramatic in our headlights. He’d seen us come out of the pub yard and stopped to shout across.
    ‘Carry on, Margaret,’ I said. She slowed and started to pull in, winding the window down.
    ‘But Patrick wants to tell us something –’
    ‘Carry on.’
    ‘Oh.’ She dithered and we jerked a bit, then picked up speed. ‘What was all that about, Lovejoy? It might have been important.’
    ‘It would only have been bad news,’ I said, and closed my eyes again to shut the horrible world out. The more you remember the more you remember, especially about a bloke like Leckie. Ever noticed that?

Chapter 3
    T HAT NIGHT WAS odd, really weird. Margaret made me up a bed in her other bedroom and produced some men’s pyjamas. I’ve more sense than to ask. I hate bathing at night because I never sleep after, so I sat reading Keppel’s voyages till Margaret came out all clean and brewed up for us both. She smiled and called me lazy. It’s not true that I’m idle – only her coffee’s a bit less lousy than mine. She made it plain that our past, er, friendship was not to be regarded as much of a precedent for tonight. We had some cheese on toast to fill odd corners.
    ‘Are you in one of your moods?’ she asked me.
    ‘No, love. Tired.’
    The phone rang about midnight. Margaret went down to answer it and was kept talking there for a long time. I heard her come up the stairs eventually and heard my door go. I was still into Keppel and didn’t look up.
    ‘Lovejoy?’ She was in the doorway.
    ‘Mmmh?’
    ‘There’s some news,’ she said carefully, standing there.
    ‘Go to bed, love,’ I told her. ‘There’s time in the morning.’
    ‘You knew.’
    ‘Good night, Margaret.’
    You’ll have gathered we antiques dealers are a varied bunch. Most of that night I lay awake going over the auction in my mind. Leckie wasn’t really a dedicated dealer, not half as good as Patrick, our world-famous pansy, or a tenth as lucky as Helen, or anything like as careful as Margaret. He never had the learning of Big Frank, nor Brad’s dedication, Black Fergus’s money-backers, or the inside knowledge of the Aldgate mob who are said to bribe half the barkers and auctioneers in the known world. Just a dealer, reasonably good.
    I stared at the ceiling, wondering a little about that curious expression. Reasonably good. Leckie is – all right,
was –
a reasonably good antiques dealer. Funny, but I’d never thought how very odd it was until now. ‘Reasonably good’ in the antiques game means really pretty shrewd and very adaptable. Moderate antiques dealers go to the wall in a millisec. Hopeless ones never even get off the ground. Now here was the odd thing: I couldn’t for the life of me think of a single thing Leckie was
bad
at. How odd. He had even helped Bill and Jean Hassall, friends of mine who deal in furniture and historic maps, to decorate their new house down on the sea marshes at Peldon. Word went round it was a stylish job, though they seemed ordinary colours to me. He was good with engines, too. Thinking about it, with most mechanical gadgets. And his small garden actually grew things, vegetables and flowers and bushes that managed to keep their berries weeks after birds stripped mine clean. He was good at everything.
    Dozing sounds easy till you’re desperate to do a bit, then it’s the hardest thing in the world. Half the trouble was that I was missing Lydia, my enthusiasticand bespectacled trainee. Prim as any nun, she’d finally moved into my thatched cottage for the best of all possible reasons. Like a fool I’d spent my last groat to send her on an antiques course in Chichester, still thirty days to go, so just when I needed her she was missing. See how unreliable women are? I suppose I ought really to have been longing for the wealthy Janie, but I’ve found that some women creep into your bones.
    Funny how things go round and round. I slept fitfully until the sky turned palish. A