Vicious Circle

And there was. It might not be directly relevant to the Torringtons’ case but it was pretty damn important to me and now was as good a time as any.

I took the tube to Kensington and went looking for a knife man.

* * *

“It’s not as old as it looks,” said Caldessa, in a quavery voice ridged with tempered steel. On the whole she made that bland comment sound pretty scathing. But then in her business old is good, and new things trying to look like they’re old are beneath contempt: lamb dressed as mutton. When I reached out my hand to take the knife back, though, she didn’t give it to me. She turned it over in her hands again and sighted along the blade in a way that was downright unsettling for such a respectable, tweed-wearing senior citizen.

My knife man had turned out to be a woman. That was fine by me: when I’d turned up in Kensington Church Street, I’d only had the vaguest notion of what I was looking for—but I was fairly sure that this was the best place to find it. You just walk down Knightsbridge past Kensington Gardens and hang a left, and you find yourself (predictably, maybe, given the price and provenance of the surrounding real estate) in the densest concentration of antique shops in the civilized world. Okay, some of these places are mainly dedicated to the painless extraction of the tourist dollar, which means they sell Victorian milking churns at a thousand quid a pop, but in among the purveyors of overpriced, elegant tat there’s a sprinkling of people who are well worth getting to know: fanatics with insanely narrow areas of specialization like Belgian tea cozies of the Merovingian dynasty or left-handed field altars from the Spanish Civil War.

One of the biggest shops is Antik Ost, run by a distant relation of Pen’s whose name I have to look up and memorize again every time because it’s so damn long: Haviland Burgerman. He was my first port of call, and he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar. But he pointed me across the street to Evelyn Caldessa’s, and Caldessa had the goods.

She was something of an antique herself. Her skin had that faint, pearly-white translucency of the very old, her features were finely sculpted, and her build was thinner than a stick. Looking at her, you felt reasonably sure she’d ring like bone china if you flicked her with your thumb. The scarf she wore tied over her long gray hair, peasant-style, gave her an Eastern European look, but her accent was pure prep school.

I intimated that I had something to sell, and that it fell within her area of expertise. “A knife. I found it among some things that belonged to my uncle.”

“Belonged?”

“He passed away.”

“Oh you poor thing.” Space of a single heartbeat. “Let’s see it.”

I took out the cardboard tube, carefully slid the knife out into my palm, and handed it across to her hilt-first. She exclaimed under her breath when she saw it, then held it a long way away from her to get a better look. That blade didn’t look any nicer in daylight than it had in Soho Square after midnight. It was very much a weapon that was made for actual incision and slicing, in a context far from the Sunday roast.

“The blade is hollow-ground,” she said. “That’s why it’s so thin and sharp—and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn’t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn’t have a bolster—most modern knives do.”

“A bolster?”

“The thickened part just above the handle.”

“It wasn’t machine-milled, though,” I pointed out.

She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

I pointed. “When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind marks on the steel. They’re not evenly spaced.”

She nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I’d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. “That’s true,” she said. “Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Such as persuading the buyer that he’s getting a handcrafted item.” I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson style, and she smiled dryly. “Yes, it’s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.” She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. “This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

“Now the wood . . .” She rubbed the handle appreciatively. “That’s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. Southeast Asian. You’d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red luster to it. The bark is as gray as I am.