Plaster Sinners

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Detective Sergeant Sidney Love had that happy degree of appreciation of works of art that is unlikely ever to become soured by scholarship. Nor was he acquisitive by nature, if the single exception be made of a complete set of “Giants of Steam” that was his legacy from an uncle who had smoked himself to death in the cigarette card era. As an aesthete, he was an all-rounder; honest and unpretentious: a sunset man, not soppy over gnomes, but ever ready to be pleased by a waterfall. Of cottages, too, he highly approved.

       It was upon a cottage—or upon a representation of one—that Sergeant Love was gazing at ten minutes to nine one Thursday morning in the Volunteers’ Hall, Flaxborough.

       At half-past ten there was to begin one of the town’s regular sales by auction of valuable antiques, that being the trade term for broken furniture, thrown-out pictures, cracked crockery, out-worn domestic machinery and discarded odds and ends of domestic adornment.

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