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suitors are in fact entirely reputable”—you two, in particular, but we don’t say that because we want everyone to feel nice and safe and not disposed to rash action—“so I’d rather prefer to deal with you. If the price is right, of course.”
    He cringes a bit, inwardly. Joe Spork—new and improved and all grown-up—doesn’t think that way. Not any more. There was a boy once, who did—a kid who picked pockets and stood lookout; who tumbled through the tunnels of the Tosher’s Beat in search of pirate treasure, in the certain knowledge that there actually was some; whose nefarious uncles nipped up a drainpipe in the blinding dusk to relieve a duchess of her jewels, while Mathew Spork charmed and smiled and kept her on the hook and his one begotten son leaned against a wall and yoyo’d and kept an eye out for the Lily, as in Lily Law, as in Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police—but Joe had imagined that person no longer existed. He had no idea he could summon the pattern so easily.
    Mr. Cummerbund closes his book, and glances at his partner.
    “I’m quite sure,” Mr. Titwhistle murmurs, “that some accommodation could be reached for the full collection.”
    “I’m so glad. Your good fortune, of course, is that I’ve begun to assemble it all. Mine is that now I have someone suitable to sell it to.”
    “We should greatly prefer to avoid anything like an auction.”
    You don’t care in the slightest. This is another test. Why is everyone testing me? I don’t have anything you want. Except, somehow, I clearly do.
    Mathew is bubbling in Joe’s brain, commenting and advising:
    Don’t sell. Not yet. If you make it easy, they’ll see through you
.
    To what?
    To whatever you’re actually going to do
.
    Am I not selling, then?
    Apparently not
.
    Cover. Conceal. Hide. Deceive.
    A day of ghosts, most unwelcome and unawaited.
    “Then I shall expect your pre-emptive offer to be quite striking. I’m sure it would have been anyway! And if you’ll be so kind as toexcuse me, gentlemen, I have another client appointment—on an unrelated matter, I assure you—at ten-thirty, and I really need to go. Shall we say, same time on Monday?”
    There is a long pause. Jesus, Joe thinks, are they actually going to jump me? And then:
    “Ideal,” Mr. Titwhistle says. He reaches into his jacket and produces, between two meagre fingers, a crisp white business card. “Do call if you have any trouble—the Museum has a good many friends. We can help in all sorts of ways.”
    Yes. I’m sure you can.
    Joe watches them walk away down the road. Neither one looks back. No car stops to pick them up. They seem entirely rapt in conversation, and yet somehow he feels observed, spied upon.
    Fine. Then I’m very boring, aren’t I? I do boring things. I live a boring life and no one can say I don’t. I deal in antiques and curiosities, and I don’t do surprises. I’m recently single and I’m about to leave the 25–34 demographic for evermore. I like Chelsea buns the way they don’t make them these days and I fall in love with waifish, angry women who don’t think I’m funny.
    I wind clocks like Daniel.
    And I won’t turn into Mathew.

    “Billy, it’s Joe. Call me, please. We’ve got something to discuss.”
    He sighs, feeling the need for some consolation and knowing that he has no one from whom he can easily require a hug, and goes back to work.
    Joe winds the clocks every day after lunch. He does not, as is the practice of many in his trade, set them all to different times so that there is always one about to chime. He gets his clients by appointment, by referral. Spork & Co. is what is known in these days when everything is studied and taxonomised as a “destination business.” His customers, for the most part, already know what they want when they come, and they are unlikely to be soothed or cozened into buying something else just because it goes
bong
while they’re having a quiet cup of tea and a jam tart with the