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houses that still changed hands with monotonous regularity. Were people so easily fooled, both then and now, when houses were so lacking in quality but full of gimmicks, Andrew wondered? He was equally amazed at his father’s level of business cunning, which diversified his empire entirely as fashion dictated, but always slightly ahead of it. Cornell had once pandered to the overwhelming desire for something new, while never forgetting the dual gods of nostalgia and greed. First, the new houses with an old look, then old furniture made palatable.
    â€˜We’ve got a good lot of stuff coming in this week. There’ll be more after Christmas.’
    Because the elderly died in winter. Andrew had spentalmost eight years of his life nursing his father after a car smash which had never curtailed the drinking or dulled the old man’s wits. Doc Reilly said that this was how the boy had learned his love of a good antique. Both of them had resented it. John was not made kinder by disablement and the youthful Andrew had been poised for flight, which now felt too late for the prematurely middle-aged man he had become. He had never possessed an ounce of his father’s wildness, weighted as he was with the absence of his father’s conscience.
    â€˜What kind of a reserve price do we put on Mrs Jones’s sideboard?’
    â€˜I don’t know. A lot, I would. It’s handsome, like she was, once. It won’t go first time round unless a dealer buys it.’
    Strange the way his father leered over furniture the way he lusted after women and yet, in a public way, was so capable of appearing to treat both with respect. A façade, while his son felt a frisson of pure affection when his blunt fingers ran over polished wood, sorrow when he examined something damaged. Andrew would feel the fracture in a fine chair leg with all the sensitivity of a vet with a favourite lame horse, the Doc said, while with women he was useless: tongue-tied and shy. A clod of a boy, his father confided; a man to waste all his hormones stroking inanimate objects.
    John Cornell lumbered to his feet, leant heavily on his stick and made for the door of the disused church that served as an auction room. He had never had time for the clergy, but he had to admit the buggers couldbuild. The door alone would stop a tank, and if his son’s docility was going to deny him the satisfaction of shouting, then he might as well leave.
    Andrew was fingering a blue vase. Put it back in the cabinet where small items, some they had bought, some for sale on commission, remained.
    â€˜Dad?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Don’t you think you should have asked a few more questions about this?’
    â€˜That was three weeks ago, son. And he seemed a harmless enough fellow: friend of Derek’s. Been in before with the odd bit and piece. Puts his cash in his sock.’
    â€˜Yes, I know, you said. A few small items over a few weeks. Nothing he would ever own himself. How do we know where he got them?’
    â€˜Nothing very valuable. Why worry about fifty quid’s worth? Friend of Derek’s. Bound to be OK.’
    â€˜For Christ sake, since when was being a friend of Derek a recommendation from the Queen?’
    â€˜You know what, son? You’ve got homophobia, that’s your problem.’
    He was halfway to the door, nonchalant about getting the boy to react after all. Good to see him there, stiff with righteous rage.
    â€˜Dad … Another thing …’
    â€˜What now?’ He loved this door, so difficult to shift, a challenge.
    â€˜You won’t get your hands on Serena’s stuff for awhile, you know. Her daughter’s come home to look after her. Your lovely old Mrs Burley could go on for ever.’
    Triumph indeed. John Cornell’s shoulders shook with the kind of mirth that could only be created by knowing more than someone else. It was a source of solace he had perfected in illness. He changed