“Do you want to know what I was in trouble for?” he asked.
Of course I did.
“Do you remember when the cricket pavilion burnt down?”
Absolutely! It was the most heinous crime Upper Iffley had seen—the 2006 burglary spree notwithstanding—since Great Beadington stole our bell nearly seven hundred years before.
“That was me,” he said. “No harm meant. I just liked to watch the flames, but it got a bit out of hand.”
I was dumbstruck. For weeks after the pavilion was razed to the ground no one had talked of anything else. There was outrage throughout the village. Mr. Faulkner started a petition to bring back the death penalty and the police warned us not to take matters into our own hands. I remembered someone having been caught for it, but I didn’t remember the name. Now I knew, the name was Rainbow, Artemis Rainbow.
“How long were you in prison for?” I asked.
“Two years.”
It didn’t seem like much, but he was ayoungoffender.
“It wasn’t all bad; it’s where I met Freddie. He was the auctioneer at the fundraiser. He used to make replicas of antiques and sell them as real. Now he works at an auction house. Funny how life turns around. If you want anything else valuing when I’m gone, I can putyou in touch. Or if you wanted to sell any.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” I said.
“When I got out of Young Offenders, it felt like tempers had hardly cooled, even though the pavilion was rebuilt.”
“Well, the old one was a listed building,” I said. “The new one’s not much more than a portacabin.”
“I see,” Arty said. “Anyway, they have long memories around here. I felt like I was being punished all over again when I came back. I’ve wanted to leave ever since, but it never seemed possible until I met my girlfriend. Now we’re off around the world and who knows when we’ll return, or where in the country we’ll go to when we do. I always fancied Scotland.”
“It can be a bit like that around here,” I said. We sat quietly for a minute. Apart from a brief consideration, after my mum died, it had never occurred to me to leave Upper Iffley. Now I wondered for the first time if a fresh start might have been the best thing, and if it might still be possible.
“These jobs won’t take me all day,” Arty said in the end. “Do you have anything else?”
I was about to say, not really, he could have an early dart, or—better—extra tea and biscuits, but then my eyes alighted on the helmet of the Elizabethan suit of armor, and I said, “Would you like to value some more antiques?”
So, Arty went to his car to fetch his encyclopedia and I fetched a notepad and pen and led the way upstairs.
“This is a real goldmine,” he said, as we made our way through the upper rooms. “Is this real?” he was pointing at a vase.
“They’re all real,” I said. “I think.” I’d never questioned it, but now I took it off the shelf and turned it upside down, looking for atelltale John Lewis sticker. There was no sticker. Instead, there was a marking on the base that sent Arty a bit funny.
“They’re not alarmed?” he asked. I felt panicky for a moment and had to remind myself that he wasn’t a thief.
Even so, I erred on the side of caution. “They’re alarmed at night,” I lied.
We worked for a while in silence, until Arty suggested a break.
“It’s very quiet in here,” he said. “Can we play some music?” He took his phone out of his pocket, but I could do better than that. A few minutes later, Boney M was booming out of James’s expensive stereo speakers all across Langley Hall.
The rhythm got into our bones and there, with just Arty’s company and any court trial a long way off, I was able to relax. When Arty started to move to the music, I joined in. I was surprised to see Arty was not a good dancer. He moved as if the floor had suddenly become electrified, which gave me a nervous moment, knowing the state of the wiring. But when I crouched down and touched it, there was no electricity. I suppose no one is good at everything.
I shuffled, then I swayed, I swung and I bopped, while he leaped around as if someone had set a fire underneath him. When we’d had enough of Boney M, we finished with a bit of Abba. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had fun like that. I looked up at the ceiling to check that the noise wasn’t about to bring it down.
By then, time was marching on and Arty had to make tracks.
“Do you have time for one more antique?” I asked.
“Just one.”
I showed him the figurine of a shepherdess with a lamb and a basket of flowers that Mrs. Billings had once taken and subsequently donated to a charity shop, the one I’d bought back for a fiver.
