The Ming Vase

By H E Balinovsky

There are some jobs it is better not to take; some vases that are best not stolen to order, and it is sometimes better for a thief to work alone, as The Dutchman discovered when he was inadvertently caught up in a villa rental scam.  For little did he know, as he waited for his client, that several other people were making their way towards the run-down chateau in the French alps, and two of them had their minds set on murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H E Balinovsky
• Release date: Jan 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386222231

H E Balinovsky

Who is Balinovsky - just a writer who enjoys writing. It is said that writing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, well I am a writer who disagrees. Writing may be just 1% inspiration, but I find that it is 99% pleasure. Inspiration comes and brings with it the characters, and it is the characters who lead the development of a story. No formula, no blueprint, just the delight of the story evolving on the page until that final moment that the story says it is complete. However, a story can lead you anywhere, from your own back garden to the ends of the earth, and even into outer space. As you check the backgrounds of your characters, delve further into their motivation, you find your mind - and your world - opens up and leads you to information and places you have never been before. They say you should write what you know, but is that necessarily true? Did HG Wells know about time travel, or Jules Verne about journeying to the centre of the earth; had George Lucas ever visited Tatooine? From the time of Homer, writers have been writing about things that exist only in their imaginations – could the Cyclops really exist? Well, I read somewhere, some time ago, that the ability to work metal was considered magical and the very earliest blacksmiths placed some kind of mark on their forehead, and it is possible that, as tales were told rather than written, this mark turned into an eye. Time and time again, one reads that a few words, or a chance remark, were the idea behind a great work of literature, for it is not where an author starts that is important, but where they finish. When we read fiction, watch a play or a film, we willingly suspend our disbelief. It is not true, but it must seem true. Characters appear from out of the blue and each character is worthy of their past, their motivation and their place in the story. And sometimes when you visit somewhere that is truly important to one of those characters, you can find something that really takes that character, and your story, to another level.

Book preview

The most decisive actions of our life – I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future – are, more often that not, unconsidered.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters

Prologue

Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a painter named Song Qiu.  His workmanship was exquisite and he was much in demand.  In any other time his reputation would have come down to us as a Master, but this was China at the time of the Xuande Emperor (Fifth Emperor of the Ming Dynasty) and he painted not pictures, but pots.

He worked for a potter named Ma Su in the city of Canton and one day in the autumn of the year 4126, which fell under the auspices of the Earth Rooster (1430 A.D.), the potter was approached by Fan Shun, a dealer in silk, who wished to ingratiate himself with the local Overlord whose favourite wife had just given birth to identical twin girls, and so Fan Shun commissioned a pair of almost identical ginger jars which were duly presented to the Lord.

The Overlord believed implicitly in good luck talismans and these blue and white vases were covered in skilfully painted, good luck signs and they themselves became a symbol of the family’s rise to an even greater fortune.  The two daughters were called Du Lan and Du Lia and over the years these beautiful and celebrated vases also became known as Lan and Lia.  The girls married well and departed their father’s house leaving their porcelain namesakes behind. 

But families can fall as well as rise, and by the time the British were knocking on China’s door the Du family had been seriously diminished.  Opium is a drug that saps the purse as well as the mind, and in the year 4516 which fell under the auspices of the Earth Rabbit (1880A.D.), Du Bai, the only son of the family, was a confirmed opium addict.  His first and most beloved wife had died giving birth to a much-desired son and Bai, in his grief, turned to opium as it was only in his dreams that he could be reunited with the wife he loved so much.

Bai’s father, in an attempt to bring some sanity back into the now-wretched life of his son, quickly arranged a marriage with a young widow named Hua, a beautiful and intelligent woman who wanted more from life than tending a man who spent each night on his opium bed, dreaming of his dead wife.  When, on the death of his own father, Bai became the head of the family, it was Hua who decided to sell the vases - but not as a pair.  And so in the year 4519 which fell under the auspices of the Water Horse or 29 before R O C (1883A.D.), Lan was sold to a Russian tea trader and Lia to an Englishman who bought silk.  And so Lan went eventually to St Petersburg and Lia ended up in Hong Kong.  It was said that when parted, the vases wept for each other, although it was probably just condensation or a leaking roof.

Sunday 10th May

He had never lived alone, although he had often wished for solitude. 

He had been through six months of hell, and a week after he had moved into the flat, DCI Alex Saunderton discovered the difference between solitude and loneliness.

Where once he had tarried at his work finding any excuse not to return home, now he smiled when he turned off his computer and tossed his car keys lightly from hand to hand as he contemplated the pristine silence of the tiny flat; something that had never been disturbed by a woman keen to quarrel.  He even began to begrudge any work that kept him late at the police station.  After thirty-five years of marriage, the detective learned the difference between solitude and loneliness - that a man could experience loneliness within a relationship and that solitude could be full of promise.

It was a warm spring night and the door to the small balcony was propped open with a pile of books.  Cardboard boxes and black plastic bin liners huddled against one wall of the small room, their contents spilling out onto the carpet.  A foil container, with a fork lying atop the remains of a Chinese takeaway, was perched precariously on the arm of the sofa bed and beside it lay the old linen napkin that had been carefully rolled and inserted into the antique napkin ring (fashioned from solid silver) that he had bought himself at auction just the day before; a purchase that he felt was one step back to where he had been before he married.  A half-empty bottle of beer waited on the floor.  Everything was precisely where he had left it.

At nine o’clock Alex Saunderton finished his shower and, wearing his bathrobe and slippers, entered the room.  He picked up his beer, took a long draught, and looked around at the assortment of receptacles that held what possessions he had been able to extricate from the grasping control of his soon to be ex-wife; boxes and bags that would never be unpacked as the brand-new penthouse had only been loaned to him by his best friend until he could sort out a place of his own.  He smiled at the untidy pile and then raised his bottle in a silent salute to the man who had made his divorce possible.

A front of bad weather had drifted across northern Europe.  A roll of thunder echoed across the Hughenden Valley as Alex stepped out onto the balcony, smiled at the little pots of supermarket herbs clustered expectantly in one corner, and breathed deeply of the air of freedom.  The sky was black with rain clouds and the air crackled with the approaching storm but he stood, leaning on the balcony, looking out over High Wycombe, the town in which he had been born - and in which he had spent his entire life - a town he would have left without a moment’s hesitation had it not been for his wife who refused to move further than a mile away from her family. 

He sometimes felt that his life had become like one of Bruce Springsteen's more reflective songs; that he had just stood and watched as it passed him by, left him standing at the back of the crowd, almost invisible, and, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  Everything he had ever done had been done for others, he'd even joined the Police because his fiancée said it was a stable job and they would be able to get married 'more quickly'.  And if he had really stopped to think about anything other than sex, he would have realised that that phrase summed up the differences between them - as a grammar-school boy he knew that they could have been married 'sooner'. 

And so he had sought refuge in a dream life because there he could go anywhere and be anyone from James Bond to Captain Kirk, though in veritas he sometimes felt more like Harold Steptoe standing in his junk-filled sitting room just wishing he was somewhere else.  And once in a while, he thought ‘I shall die before I have lived’.

There was a sense of adventure in the heart of DCI Alex Saunderton that had never been given full rein; it had, in fact, never even been acknowledged by anyone in his family and it may well have been that, considering the rather racy background of his mother's antecedents, they preferred to ignore it.  Alex had a very clear memory of a family picnic at the local swimming pool; he had come out of the water and rushed back to wrap himself in a towel.  His normally wayward hair had been pushed back from his forehead by the water and his grandmother Alice Saunderton had exclaimed My, doesn't he look like your father, Clarissa, and his mother had replied, Well, just as long as he doesn't turn out like him. 

It was a prohibition he took very much to heart and, as a child, he consciously strove to be as different from his vibrant grandfather as he could and those ten words, carelessly uttered, formed the persona he showed to the world.  He played the part of a dutiful and rather boring son while keeping his own dreams and desires hidden deep within him; and as he grew older, he became more and more like the character who had made his grandfather famous – the Scarlet Pimpernel.  When, in fact, the one person he really wanted to be like was his grandfather, or as he called him, Dedushka.

For Clarissa Saunderton's father was the great silent film actor Lamont Ladyman, and because of this, her life could have been described as exciting or a nightmare.  He was a man who went after what he wanted rather than being content with what he had been given.  Quite the opposite of his daughter who simply accepted what life dished up to her and secretly blamed her father for the difficulties she experienced.  He was a dashing figure whose marriage to her mother, Galina Lermontov, in St Petersburg in 1920 was not actually legal as he was still married to a woman in Leeds; a marriage he had been conned into and regretted almost immediately.  He had been but nineteen years old and he wanted more out of life than working in a mill and coming home to a meal of bread and dripping washed down with a cup of strong tea served up by a woman who was simply using him, and so he made his escape. Six months later, in August 1914, the British Government called for volunteers to serve in the army and he joined up immediately.  He fought his way through Europe and, when the Armistice was signed, he simply stayed there.  He made his way to Paris where he found a job delivering sacks of coal and, just like they say in the story books, he was spotted by a film director and offered a job.  He had a natural talent and success came quickly; as quickly as love when he visited Russia to discuss working with Eisenstein, and there met, and married, the beautiful Galina Lermontov. 

He was offered work at the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin and it was in this city that his two children were born.  His career more or less ground to a halt with the introduction of talkies because of his thick Yorkshire accent, and he decided that he would return to Paris and direct rather than act.  However, he was persuaded to team up with a producer named Sigismund Dobileit to make a version of Frankenstein, but this was abandoned when the Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act of 1933 and Sigi, who had been against Adolf Hitler, was arrested and transported to the new Konzentrationslager which had just opened in an old munitions factory near Dachau.  The Ladyman family fled Berlin with little more than the clothes on their backs as Lamont feared that, as he had entered Germany after August 2nd, 1914, there would also be a knock on his door in the small hours and he, his Russian wife and his technically stateless children would disappear.

He ended up on the French Riviera and went from rich to broke - from a rented villa in Juan-Les-Pines to a cheap pension in the back streets of Nice - in the space of only a year as he tried to beat the odds at the roulette tables of Monte Carlo.  In the early spring of 1935 both Galina and the youngest child, Ivan died of diphtheria and Lamont, now widowed and broken both financially and spiritually, sat on the Promenade des Anglais and wondered what the hell he was going to do.  At that moment a well-dressed couple dragging a small dog on a lead walked by.  The dog walked over and sniffed Lamont who automatically stroked its head.  The woman opened her mouth to apologise for her dog but recognised the old man as Lamont Ladyman, a man who had helped and encouraged her when she was just starting out as an actress.  On hearing his story, she immediately offered him a job as her driver (small flat provided above the garage of a large house in Beaconsfield).  So he packed up his daughter and returned to England.  Clarissa worked as a part-time housemaid while training as a shorthand typist and spent her youth looking after her ageing father.

The young girl's dreams died in that small flat above the garage in Beaconsfield.  The smell of wild herbs and sun-baked earth, of garlic and freshly-baked bread, was replaced by the faint, by the all-pervasive odour of petrol rising up through the old ceiling.  She put away the simple uniform she had worn to her school in Nice and instead wore the second-hand clothes with which she had been presented - and for which she was expected to show gratitude.  When one of the other girls broadcast the fact that Clarissa was poor because she was wearing one of her old dresses, Clarissa swore that when she grew up she would never again wear anything that had belonged to someone else.  Another thing she put away was her dream of being an artist.  She knew she would never rank with the best, as she had more enthusiasm than talent, but her work was not bad.  However, her school teacher had no comprehension of the work of Seurat or Matisse and insisted she paint only 'pretty things'.  Fifty years before she could probably have made a decent living painting fairies but who cared about such things as the world approached war.  When the authorities learned that she spoke German and French as well as Russian she was put to work as an interpreter.

Clarissa Ladyman and William Saunderton had married late in life - for the time.  They were an unlikely couple; she was 28 and illegitimate (a fact which had scotched her engagement to the film producer Michael Chisholm many years before); he was 30 and divorced, facts they kept very quiet as they gave happiness one last shot. 

The now ageing actress gave them an old MG two-seater sports car that had been up on blocks for most of the war, more as a nudge to remove her father than a wedding present.  And it was in this elegant little car that the newly-weds sped off for their short honeymoon on the Norfolk coast.  It sometimes crossed their mind that if they sold the MG they could buy a more substantial saloon car that would seat three, but this was a thought that did not linger for long.

And so the three of them made the best of it in a tiny, two-bedroom flat in High Wycombe.  William worked as a clerk at the Gas Board, Clarissa worked for a solicitor, and Lamont cleaned the flat and prepared the meals.  He was, in fact, a very good cook.  He had been used to the best for so long, that when he fell on hard times he taught himself to cook from a battered old copy of Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine.

Being a sensible couple, Clarissa and William waited until they could afford a child.  Alex was born when they had been married for four years and when he arrived they again contemplated selling the car, but William, who did not drive (but loved the car) was perfectly content to sit with the baby on his lap, so the car stayed and they all made the very best of it in that small flat, saving every penny they could, until that glorious day in 1957 when they won the incredible sum of £15,000.00 on the football pools.  They believed they were set up for life.  They bought themselves a comfortable (if rather run down) house just off Amersham Hill, big enough for the four of them and not too far away from the Gas Board where his father was now the under-manager; furnished it frugally, painted it one room at a time and placed the rest in the savings bank 'for their old age'. 

When Alex was five, and rather too big to be sitting on anyone’s lap, the sports car was finally sold and a beautiful, second-hand Armstrong Siddeley was purchased.  William did gaze wistfully as the new owners of the little MG drove it down the street; and Alex, whose earliest memories were of being driven around Buckinghamshire held tightly in someone’s embrace, his hair blown back by the wind, promised himself such a car when he grew up. 

Strangely, both Clarissa and William seemed to age after the sports car was sold.  Maybe their newfound wealth deemed that they should be staider, or that the Armstrong Siddeley required a more sober demeanour; perhaps it was just that, as Lamont said, some of the fun had gone out of life; most probably it was because they were actually middle aged.

Old age never came to William Saunderton; he died of a heart attack in 1960 while walking briskly up that very steep hill.  He had never been particularly strong, as he had been badly wounded during the war, and Clarissa blamed the young doctor who told her husband that he should walk to work rather than drive because exercise was good for him.  As they had paid cash for the house, he had never taken out any sort of insurance or assurance policy and when he died his salary died with him.

So Alex, his mother and his grandfather were left with sufficient money on which to live comfortably - although this did depend on the class of person defining comfortably, a quip Clarissa often murmured under her breath as she got ready for her part-time job as a secretary to one of the local solicitors.  Whereas once this money had been spent on luxuries, it now supplemented her widow's pension and the small amount of interest still received from the building society.  In her spare time, she produced rather old-fashioned illustrations for children's books, a small income she referred to as 'pin money'.  Clarissa, being a stickler for good manners and protocol, did not believe in dwelling on the misfortunes (or riches) of the past as she felt that constantly reminding people that her father had drunkenly thrown away his fortune on the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo, was like a dog revisiting its own vomit, something a lady - or that particular lady - did not do. 

For some people, death takes a little longer to come.  It could have been that the Grim Reaper did not want to listen to Lamont Ladyman’s oft-embroidered tales of his past; a life lived to the full in the glittering capitals of Europe and the beautiful French Riviera.  Tales that Alex loved to hear, even though Clarissa would often chide her father for filling the child’s head with nonsense.  And it was on a sunny afternoon as they sat together in the garden of the house on Amersham Hill, and he told a story of meeting Marlene Dietrich for dinner in Antibes, that Lamont Ladyman closed his eyes against the bright sunlight and let out a long sigh then, almost as an afterthought, he sat up suddenly and spoke directly to his grandson; Just make sure you do what you want to do, my lad.  Don't let the bastards grind you down.  Then he leant back, smiled and finally died at the age of 66.  Very few people remembered him; indeed most of the prints of his films had been recycled for their small silver content or simply thrown away to make space for the new talking pictures.  And perhaps there were a few people who remembered the scene where he dramatically took off his cloak and changed from the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney into the Scarlet Pimpernel; or that beautiful and rare poster, that had become a collector’s item, in which he, as Quasimodo, stood on the roof of the cathedral of Notre Dame, looking out over Paris, one arm draped around that most famous of gargoyles.

Now that her father was dead Clarissa felt she could finally take a holiday, it was not that she was ashamed of him, but people had a tendency to disbelieve his stories; indeed a nurse had once told her that she needed to be careful as he was now living in a dream world, imagining that he was a film star; and someone else called him a liar as Lamont Ladyman was long dead.  Even though she spoke Russian, French and German, Clarissa refused to travel abroad.  When presented with a brochure showing the new package holidays that were available at moderate price sur le continent, Clarissa would wrinkle her nose and murmur that she was grateful that England was surrounded by a sea as that kept the foreigners out.  But this was simply a ploy as Clarissa did not wish to bring up her past nor admit that she was not in possession of a birth certificate (just one of the things that had been left behind when they quit Germany in a hurry) and the only proof she had of her birth in Berlin was an affidavit sworn by her father on his return to England.  Nor did she wish to admit her illegitimacy – something that was not her fault, but for which she was blamed. 

She remembered the day that she had found out about it; a day that was burned into her memory.  It had been hot and her mother had taken her and her young brother, Ivan, to the Tiergarten.  When they returned to their beautiful flat, there was a man standing outside their front door holding a large, brown envelope.  He asked for Lamont Ladyman and so Galina invited him to come in and wait, and soon afterwards her father returned from the studio.  The man was a solicitor, from a place called Leeds, and as he handed Lamont the envelope he said: This is from your wife..  Her father read the paper and looked at the man.  She wants how much?  Then he remembered the children and made a sign that Galina should take them away.  But Clarissa heard what the other man said.  Perhaps you should have changed your name.  I mean, did you think you could become a film star and think your real wife wouldn't recognise you?  Whatever name I could have taken, I still have my face, Lamont made one of his practised, dramatic pauses, but perhaps it should be me that sues her for saddling me with a child that was not mine and for carrying on with a married man after we was wed.

And so, instead of getting a deep suntan on the Costa del Sol, Alex always spent the holidays in the same guest house at the seaside resort of Clacton, in a rather shabby Victorian villa (not dissimilar to his own home) that was run by a couple who had 'returned from the colonies'.  They were friends of friends, and once a year mother and son would get into the Armstrong Siddeley and drive sedately to Clacton where the elderly owners of this down-at-heel guest house provided them with a 'comfortable' holiday. 

Alex had only managed a week’s stay in a hotel in Lido di Jesolo for his honeymoon, something that had never been repeated as his bride had been struck with a case of almost constant diarrhoea on the afternoon they arrived which had, in turn, caused a continual whine of complaint with regard to both foreigners and their food; although there was more than the slightest suspicion in his mind that this was a result of her getting well and truly pissed during their wedding reception and more or less falling asleep as soon as she had collapsed onto the bed where he had, with some difficulty, removed her wedding dress to the accompaniment of her none-to-gentle snores.  And if on the night of their wedding, his dream of romantic love had died, it was well and truly buried on the honeymoon.  He had booked a day trip to Venice for them and after a hushed argument he had gone on his own, ending up footsore and weary sitting dejectedly outside a small café just off the Rialto, watching other couples walk hand in hand through the bright sunshine and wondering if he was the only man never to have had sex on his honeymoon. 

It was one of those unfortunate coincidences that this flat looked down on the very street in which his marital home was situated.  He had often stood in his back garden and watched the building rise from the site of an old factory and even wondered what it would be like to live there.  Now he knew.  He knew what it was like to look down on his old home, the place where his unhappiness had taken root and blossomed like an oriental plant with a sap full of poison.  He had seen such a plant one day when he had taken his sons to visit a stately home.  They had wandered through the walled garden and he had come across a beautiful shrub and, as one does, he had touched its leaves.  But his eldest son, Richard, who had no interest in gardens or gardening, had walked on ahead and seen the notice that informed the general public that this was a poisonous plant and should not be touched.

Are you going to die, Dad, Kevin, his youngest son, had asked.

Alex had wiped his fingers on his jeans and shook his head.  It'll take more than a plant to kill me.  And he'd added silently - 'If twelve years with your mother doesn't do me in, then a plant has no chance.'

So DCI Alex Saunderton raised his eyes to the Chiltern Hills and wondered what it would be like to be looking at the