Spend Game by Jonathan Gash

resolution. I’d stayed up half the night looking at this crummy book and the contents of the bag, and I was still no wiser.
    The doctor’s instruments turned my stomach over. Even clean and shiny they’d have been gruesome. Patchily rusted as they were now, I could hardly look. Some of the needles were five inches long. And they weren’t your average darning needle for lovely innocent cotton. They were for people, and seemed to be triangular in section, with cutting edges along the length like those frightening short Land Pattern socket bayonets collectors are all after nowadays. Some were curved, others slender and tiny. The old quack also had a mask, rather like a fencer’s, covered with gauze. For dropping ether anaesthetic, I guessed. I’d seen one of those before in the medical museum in Euston. A pair of curved forceps big enough to . . . I hate to think what they fitted round. Lancets, all shapes and sizes. And some scissors that curved and others that didn’t. Astethoscope like an ear-trumpet. A group of lenses in a leather slot-box, with one spare lens coloured like you see in those children’s kaleidoscopes. I tried fitting it into the slots with the others but there was no room for it, so I chucked it into the bag and forgot about it. With instruments like this bagful I’m glad the old doctor was on the side of health.
    As I mopped my plate with some bread I read the card Wilkie had slipped in the bag. The same address as inside the doctor’s bag. I knew the village, having been on the knocker round Six Elm Green during one of my bad spells. Old Dr Chase’s ageing widow, I guessed, had put her late husband’s effects up for sale to eke out the groats during her winter years. I’m naturally full of sympathy of these cunning old geezers but I’m usually poorer than they turn out to be.
    The book was only twenty years old, privately printed for the author. It was that well-known world-shattering best-seller
Structural Design of Experimental Carriage-Ways in Nineteenth-Century Suffolk
, by none other than that famous quack, Dr James Friese Chase, MD, whose medical bag I now possessed. I’d flipped through it last night, but decided I’d wait for the film. No hidden messages, no beautiful marginal notes by the author which might have increased its value, and no handwritten letters from Shakespeare skilfully concealed in the end papers.
    I laid it aside and sorrowfully repacked the bag. Nothing. After all that, nothing. So, Leckie had been killed for nothing. Some tearaways had believed Leckie had a real find, a priceless antique among the day’s items bought at auction. They’d probably asked him to sell. He’d said no, sealing his doom, and for nothing. You can buy old medical instruments for practicallya penny a ton. And a tatty copy of the world’s worst-seller like Dr Chase’s book is even more piteous.
    Outside, the boiler was heating up well. A few more bits of wood and it was ready. I stuffed the washing in and swirled it round to get it properly wet. Sometimes I have to do without soap powder because it’s so dear. I put the iron lid on with a clang and went in. It was coming on to rain. I sat on my stool inside the doorway listening to the raindrops hissing on the boiler’s hot cover. I was supposed to be thinking, but all I could feel was relief. After all, if Leckie had no precious antiques it meant there could be no motive for murder, right? And no motive for killing Leckie meant that Leckie’s loyal old pal Lovejoy couldn’t possibly be blamed for just sitting doing his washing in his safe old garden when he should have been chasing after Leckie’s murderers on his own. Right?
    ‘Right,’ I said fervently, congratulating myself.
    The rest of the morning was great. I milled about, happily sussing out antiques, reading between bits of washing. I cleaned up the cottage in case Sue came later, and put my decrepit mac on to hang my washing out in the rain. I eyed the dark skies