wearing, providing she didn’t have to get her hands dirty.
‘It’s heart-breaking work,’ she said, with a carefully rueful smile. ‘Nine out of ten of the things we find are just rubbish that people have dumped.’
Two up to Hermione. Who wants to risk their neck for a pram with four bent wheels?
‘But what exactly are you hoping to find?’ Bunny fed Hermione the agreed question. At this point the filming stopped and we moved to my workshop. Which had, of course, been cleared of everything of value, apart from a wardrobe that James was repolishing.
And here was James himself, with the camera panning on to him. He was holding what appeared to be a three-foot-long shallow, narrow dish made up of charred wood. With a tall cylinder sticking up from the middle of it, surrounded by blackened cylindrical objects and wheels.
‘What exactly is it?’ Disbelief and distaste mingled in our own girl-reporter’s voice. James opened his own mouth, preparing an oration . . . oh, foolish James! Hermione had nipped in front of him, before he could draw breath.
‘This is rather pathetic really. It’s Victorian model steamboat – I mean, actually powered by a steam-boiler, with a methylated-spirit stove underneath to heat the water. Unfortunately, in this case, the spirit-stove must have overturned or leaked, setting the wooden super-structure on fire. It burnt the hull right down to the water-line, sadly, before the little ship finally sank. It must have been heart-breaking for the proud child who owned it . . .’
‘But quite a spectacular sight for any bystanders,’ said Bunny callously. ‘Steaming round, going up in flames. Then sinking. Like the Titanic in miniature, really.’ She sounded like she would have liked to have been there with her camera crew. At the real Titanic disaster too. Everything brought grist to her mill . . .
‘What can you do with it now?’
Poor old James opened his mouth again, but once more Hermione nipped in. James was being reduced to a hard-breathing display-stand.
‘Oh, we can dry out what’s left of the woodwork and preserve it. And remove the mechanical parts and polish them up. If we can find a maker’s name-plate, we could possibly look up the model in an old maker’s catalogue, and build a replica – wreck and replica displayed side by side. Or at least the photograph from the catalogue, greatly enlarged.’
‘Oh yes, fascinating,’ said our girl-reporter, without a lot of conviction in her voice. ‘But this . . . wouldn’t be worth anything? In the open market?’
‘Definitely not,’ said Hermione, with a sudden tightening of her jaws. ‘Only of interest to our City Toy Museum.’
‘But we’ve heard you’ve found things of real value, Mr Morgan . . . you’re taking part in this . . . dig . . . but you’re also an antique dealer with a knowledge of prices. Has anything of value been found?’
I was ready, with breath already in my lungs; so I got in while Hermione was still opening her pretty mouth. And I had a carefully-selected table of items beside me. The first was the cheap tin tugboat from Woolworth.
‘That looks exciting,’ said Bunny dubiously. ‘What’s that worth?’
‘Well, to a fanatical collector of tin-plate toys, about a hundred pounds. At a specialist auction – Sotheby’s or something. But it’s not the kind of thing anybody could hope to flog round the nearest pub. I mean, how much would you give for it, in a pub?’
‘Couple of quid?’ asked Bunny, wrinkling up her pretty little nose.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Tin-plate-toy collectors are the maddest folk in the business. And that thing cost sixpence in Woolworth, before the War.’
I went on holding up dreary items for the camera. The crushed yacht, the little fractured fishing-boat, the Star yacht that anybody could buy for ten quid.
The camera watched Bunny’s face fall. ‘So you haven’t had much luck, so far?’
‘We found a loaded revolver. But we passed that straight across to the police. It had been fired twice . . . it could be a murder weapon.’
Oh, how her little face lit up! The camera cut to the local nick, where Sergeant Crittenden said the police were waiting for a lab report.
I really thought we’d got away with it. I drew a deep breath of relief.
But then we were back in my workshop again. And she was opening her sweet girlish lips for the fatal question.
‘But I believe you did find one item of value – a motorbike – an antique motorbike? Which you sold for a