It was the rain that drove me inside as it had others. I normally never queue. Certainly not in a second hand book shop. But I had been lucky and had found a rather delightfully antiquarian book on pre-missionary sexual practices in the Maldive Islands, tucked away in those dusty shelves. Not easy to find, even in central London, these days.
I was bored and as I stood leaning heavily on my stout silver tipped malacca cane, I detected an odd and unpleasant odour, a sharp cheesy smell of unwashed flesh coming from a small shabbily dressed older man standing ahead of me. I looked down on a bald head covered in grime and scaling skin. In his hand was an antique parchment envelope and peeping out was the edge of an ancient map. The spidery hand-written address was illegible but I could clearly see the dark postage stamp with its usual silhouette of the Queen.
Then it was the little man’s turn at the counter. I am a bit deaf because of that damm hunting accident but there was some sort of squabble over the price of the map. The smelly little man turned to me and muttered something about “bloody crooks” and “shouldn’t be allowed” but then turned back to the bookseller to continue in his displeasure. As he turned, the envelope knocked my hand, fell from his grasp and dropped to the floor.
I bent to retrieve it but he was faster. As he snatched up the map he looked at me in a strangely cross but fearful way as if I were going to steal his treasure. I shrugged in that “sorry chum” sort of way and may even have stepped back a little.
And that was really all I could tell the Constable. The police had apparently been called to some sort of fracas in the alleyway behind the bookshop soon after I had left. A vagrant had been bashed, killed. If I’d not bought my book they would never have traced me and I would never have been burdened with my secret nor been lucky enough to end up here living in the relative luxury of Caracas.
Every cloud no matter how dark, my Father was fond of saying, has a silver lining. My silver lining is to be living here in Venezuela. Partly because there is no extradition treaty with Great Britain and partly because of the money I came upon, quite fortuitous, that wet day standing in that bedraggled queue, leaning on my stick and minding my own business.
Luckily the edges of that dark stamp on the old envelope alerted me. The first batch of Victorian Penny Black postage stamps were not perforated and needed to be cut with a pair of scissors. If cut carefully and in pristine condition such stamps are now worth a fortune. I was, of course, sorry to lose my silver tipped cane but there is a price to pay for everything.
At the End of the Day 