Free The Judas Pair by Jonathan Gash Page A

bird sanctuaries, of which two were in Norfolk. I didn’t say which one I was interested in, but said I’d probably go to the nearest.
    Before she rang off, she asked if I was all right.
    ‘Of course I am. Why?’ She hesitated.
    ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just . . . Look, can I come and see you for a second?’
    ‘Oh, Margaret.’ It was a bit transparent, after all, so I can be forgiven for being exasperated.
    ‘Suit yourself, Lovejoy,’ she snapped angrily, and slammed the phone down. Women don’t like to give up, you see. Seen them with knitting? Yards, hours and hours, years even. And still they’re there, soldiering on. Something pretty daunting about women sometimes, I often think. Anyway, it’s change I like, and that’s exactly what they resent.
    While I went again through my records – locking up carefully as usual – there were two further phone calls. One was Sheila, who complained I hadn’t rung. I said so what else is new, and she rang off telling me I was in a mood. Tinker interrupted me an hour later saying he’d had four possible tickles. Three were the same as I’d got from Dandy Jack and included the Yorkshire auction, plus one further whisper of a man in Fulham who’d brought a load of stuff down from the North and had two cased sets among the items. That could have meant anything including percussion, so I took the address and said I’d speed off there in my speedster some time.
    There were numerous antique enthusiasts in Norfolk. Only a hundred lived near the coast. From the bird sanctuaries Margaret had given me I selected some five or six collectors varying the narrow radius.
    Cross-checking with the auction records I had, none of the six had bought within two years anything remotely resembling a Durs gun. Indeed, most of them seemed to be either furniture or porcelain people, though one particular chap, a clergyman called Lagrange, had purchased a revolving percussion longarm from a local auction not far from the Blakeney Point sanctuary. Adverts didn’t help, except for a run of them from two Norfolk addresses in the
Exchange and Mart
some two years ago, wanting rather than offering flinters.
    I emerged from my priest-hole three hours later fairly satisfied that if Durs duellers had changed hands within the two years before Eric Field’s death, it had been done so quietly nobody had known. Therefore the ones which came so innocently by post from Norfolk were a major find, something newly discovered to
this
century’s cruel gaze.
    My hands were shaking again so I had my emergency beer. If it wasn’t women it was antiques, or vice versa. I put the telly on and watched some little rag dolls talking to each other on a children’s programme. That did nothing for my disturbed state of mind.
    I was getting close to believing in the Judas Pair.
    *
    Look about. That’s all I have to say. Look about. Because
antique discoveries happen.
If in doubt read any book on local history. It’ll set you thinking.
    I’ve come across Minden
faience jardinières
– posh pots for garden plants – being used as garage toolboxes. I’ve seen a set of Swiss miniature gold dominoes making up an infant’s set of wooden building bricks, in the original gold case. I’ve seen a beautiful octagonal ruby-glass hallmarked silver-ended double scentbottle used as a doll’s rolling pin. I can go on all night.
    I’ve seen a Spencer and Perkins striking watch used as a weight on a plumb line. You still don’t believe me? Don’t, then. Go and ask the Colchester labourers who dug out an old bucket a couple of years ago – and found in it the lost Colchester hoard of thousands of medieval silver coins. Or go and ask the farmer who four years ago got so fed up with the old coffin handles he kept ploughing up in his field that he took them to the authorities. They’re the famous solid gold. Celtic torcs that museums the world over now beg to be allowed to
copy.
And while you’re about it you can also ask where the