A finer end - Deborah Crombie [135]
CHAPTER ONE
Portobello took on a different character once the shops closed for the day, Alex Dunn decided as he turned into the road from the mews where he had his small flat. He paused for a moment, debating whether to go up the road to Calzone’s at Notting Hill Gate for a celebratory pizza, but it wasn’t the sort of place one really wanted to go on one’s own. Instead, he turned to the right, down the hill, passing the shop fronts barred for the night and the closed gates of the café run by St. Peter’s Church. Bits of refuse littered the street from the day’s traffic, giving it a desolate air.
But tomorrow it would be different; by daybreak the stallholders would be set up for Saturday Market, and in the arcades, dealers would sell everything from antique silver to Beatles memorabilia. Alex loved the early-morning anticipation, the smell of coffee and cigarettes in the arcade cafés, the sense that this might be the day to make the sale of a lifetime. As he might, he thought with a surge of excitement, because today he’d made the buy of his lifetime.
His step quickened as he turned into Elgin Crescent and saw the familiar façade of Otto’s Café—at least that was how the regulars referred to the place; the faded sign read merely Café. Otto did a bustling daytime business in coffee, sandwiches, and pastries, but in the evening he provided simple meals much favored by the neighborhood residents.
Once inside, Alex brushed the accumulated moisture from his jacket and took a seat in the back at his favorite table—favored because he liked the nearness of the gas fire. Unfortunately, the café’s furniture had not been designed to suit anyone over five feet tall. Surprising, really, when you looked at Otto, a giant of a man. Did he ever sit in his own chairs? Alex couldn’t recall ever seeing him do so; Otto hovered, as he did now, wiping his face with the hem of his apron, his bald head gleaming even in the dim light.
“Sit down, Otto, please,” Alex said, testing his hypothesis. “Take a break.”
Otto glanced towards Wesley, his second-in-command, serving the customers who had just come in, then flipped one of the delicate curve-backed chairs round and straddled it with unexpected grace.
“Nasty out, is it?” Otto’s wide brow furrowed as he took in Alex’s damp state. Even though Otto had lived all of his adult life in London, his voice still carried an inflection of his native Russia.
“Can’t quite make up its mind to pour. What sort of warming things have you on the menu tonight?”
“Beef and barley soup; that and the lamb chops would do the trick, I think.”
“Sold. And I’ll have a bottle of your best burgundy. No plonk for me tonight.”
“Alex, my friend! Are you celebrating something?”
“You should have seen it, Otto. I’d run down to Sussex to see my aunt when I happened across an estate sale in the village. There was nothing worth a second look in the house itself, then on the tables filled with bits of rubbish in the garage, I saw it.” Savoring the memory, Alex closed his eyes. “A blue and white porcelain bowl, dirt-encrusted, filled with garden trowels and bulb planters. It wasn’t even tagged. The woman in charge sold it to me for five pounds.”
“Not rubbish, I take it?” Otto asked, an amused expression on his round face.
Alex looked round and lowered his voice. “Seventeenth-century delft, Otto. That’s English delft, with a small “d,” rather than Dutch. I’d put it at around 1650. And underneath the dirt, not a chip or a crack to be found. It’s a bloody miracle, I’m telling you.”
It was a moment Alex had lived for since his aunt had taken him with her to a jumble sale on his tenth birthday. Spying a funny dish that looked as if someone had taken a bite out of its edge, he had been so taken with it that he’d spent all his birthday money on its purchase. His Aunt Jane had contributed a book on porcelain, from which he’d learned that his find was an English delft barber’s bowl, probably early-eighteenth-century Bristol ware. In his mind, Alex had seen all the hands and lives through which the bowl had passed,