Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

And there was. It might not be directly relevant to the Torringtons’ case but it was pretty damn important to me and now was as good a time as any.

I took the Tube to Kensington and went looking for a knife-man.

‘It’s not as old as it looks,’ said Caldessa, in a quavery voice ridged with tempered steel. On the whole she made that bland comment sound pretty scathing. But then in her business old is good, and new things trying to look like they’re old are beneath contempt: lamb dressed as mutton. When I reached out my hand to take the knife back, though, she didn’t give it to me. She turned it over in her hands again and sighted along the blade in a way that was downright unsettling for such a respectable, tweed-wearing senior citizen.

My knife-man had turned out to be a woman. That was fine by me: when I’d turned up in Kensington Church Street, I’d had only the vaguest notion of what I was looking for – but I was fairly sure that this was the best place to find it. You just walk down Knightsbridge, past Kensington Gardens and hang a right, and you find yourself (predictably, maybe, given the price and provenance of the surrounding real estate) in the densest concentration of antique shops in the civilised world. Okay, some of these places are mainly dedicated to the painless extraction of the tourist dollar, which means they sell Victorian milking churns at a thousand quid a pop, but in among the purveyors of over-priced, elegant tat there’s a sprinkling of people who are well worth getting to know: fanatics with insanely narrow areas of specialisation like Belgian tea cosies of the Merovingian dynasty or left-handed field altars from the Spanish Civil War.

One of the biggest shops is Antik Ost, run by a distant relation of Pen’s whose name I have to look up and memorise again every time because it’s so damn long: Haviland Burgerman. He was my first port of call, and he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar. But he pointed me across the street to Evelyn Caldessa’s, and Caldessa had the goods.

She was something of an antique herself. Her skin had that faint, pearly-white translucency of the very old, her features were finely sculpted and her build was thinner than a stick: looking at her, you felt reasonably sure she’d ring like bone china if you flicked her with your thumb. The scarf she wore tied over her long grey hair, peasant-style, gave her an Eastern European look, but her accent was pure Roedean.

I intimated that I had something to sell, and that it fell within her area of expertise. ‘A knife. I found it among some things that belonged to my uncle.’

‘Belonged?’

‘He passed away.’

‘Oh, you poor thing.’ Space of a single heartbeat. ‘Let’s see it.’

I took out the cardboard tube, carefully slid the knife out into my palm, and handed it across to her hilt-first. Caldessa exclaimed under her breath when she saw it, then held it a long way away from her to get a better look. That blade didn’t look any nicer in daylight than it had in Soho Square after midnight: it was very much a weapon that was made for actual incision and slicing, in a context a long way away from the Sunday roast.

‘The blade is hollow-ground,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s so thin and sharp – and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn’t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn’t have a bolster – most modern knives do.’

‘A bolster?’

‘The thickened part just above the handle.’

‘It wasn’t machine-milled, though,’ I pointed out.

She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. ‘What makes you think that?’ she asked.

I pointed. ‘When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind-marks on the steel. They’re not evenly spaced.’

Caldessa nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I’d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as persuading the buyer that he’s getting a handcrafted item.’ I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson-style, and she smiled dryly. ‘Yes, it’s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.’ She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. ‘This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

‘Now the wood . . .’ She rubbed the handle appreciatively. ‘That’s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. South-east Asian. You’d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red lustre to it. The bark is as grey as I am.

‘But here’s the give-away.’ Caldessa tapped the design at the tang end of the blade – the delicate floral motif which was the thing I was most interested in. ‘Machineetched,’ she said. ‘The electrolyte solution leaves a minute amount of staining on the steel which gets worse over the course of a few years and then stabilises unless there’s a fault in the steel itself or it wasn’t properly neutralised in the first place. In this case there’s a green sheen at the base of the major lines in the design – here. This was done with an industrial-standard etch-a-matic, using copper and bronze electrolyte and a sodium-based neutraliser. It’s letting the side down, really, because overall this is a nice piece. But –’ she laid the knife down on the counter, reversed it and slid it across to me ‘– no more than fifty years old, in my opinion. And not worth as much now as it was when it was new.’

I tapped the heel of the blade. ‘Have you ever seen this design before?’ I asked her.

She frowned. Possibly she registered that as being an unusual question to come from a tragically bereaved nephew. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not on a knife blade, in any event. I recognise the actual plant, of course.’

‘You do?’ I was impressed. ‘Why?’

‘Because I deal in antiques, dear. There’s always at least some degree of stylisation in floral motifs, so they’re easy to memorise. And they’re very useful in identification, so it’s worth the effort. This is belladonna – deadly nightshade, to give it its more poetic name. You can tell by the asymmetrical leaf pairs.’

‘Right, of course. Asymmetrical leaf pairs.’

‘With the flower coming out of the larger leaf. Look.’

It was quite distinctive, now that she mentioned it. Pretty, too. ‘But does it mean anything?’ I demanded, looking her in the face.

Caldessa looked back at me, world-weary and a little disapproving. ‘You’re not a policeman, are you, young man? I positively despise policemen. Rabid little rodents, the lot of them.’

‘I’m not a policeman, Mrs Caldessa.’

‘Just Caldessa will do, thank you very much. Very well. I’ll get my book.’

The book was called Identifying Marks in Cutlery and Metalware , by Jackman and Pollard, it was dated 1976, and it was thicker than a telephone directory. Caldessa leafed through it with one hand, holding the knife in the other and muttering to herself under her breath the whole time. There didn’t seem to be an index of any kind, although there were headings at the top of each page which consisted mainly of words like ‘inflorescence’ and ‘lanceolate’, and numbers that might have been ranges of dates.