‘Not always,’ he answered unrepentantly. ‘He sells some to other traders as well.’

‘And they know where they’ve come from?’

‘No. They don’t know where they’ve come from,’ he told me firmly, ‘but they know they’re not genuine antiques.’

His cheerful dishonesty shocked me. I must have looked flabbergasted.

Paul laughed. ‘Look, Juno, I’m not a forger. I don’t put real signatures on those paintings, I just make them up.’ He shrugged. ‘And if it makes you feel any better, my criminal career can’t go on much longer, anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘Darkolene is getting very difficult to come by. I buy up old tins of it wherever I can find them but one day the supply will run out. And modern polyurethane varnishes are no good at all. They don’t have the same effect.’

‘I see.’ I didn’t know what to say, really. I suppose I’ve led a sheltered life.

‘I’m not the only one who makes their own antiques,’ he told me. ‘Did you notice a stall selling Victorian panoramas?’

‘Oh, yes I did!’ I remembered a display of glass-fronted boxes, each a little larger than a shoebox and painted inside like the room in a doll’s house, with peg dolls and tiny teddy bears sitting on miniature furniture; charming – if you like that kind of thing.

‘That’s Carol. I bet you she’ll be round later, asking if we’ve got any taxidermy.’

‘Taxidermy?’

‘Stuffed animals come in glass cases.’

I suddenly thought of Nick’s shop, of the glaring owl. The light began to dawn.

‘Old glass cases,’ Paul nodded, seeing I was catching on. ‘Carol’s very careful. She paints the backgrounds in watercolour, uses vintage fabrics to dress her dolls, and she never puts too many of her panoramas’ – he made quote marks in the air with his fingers − ‘on display at once.’

‘I must go back and have a closer look,’ I said.

‘If anyone asks, she’ll be perfectly honest about the fact she makes the things. But very few people do ask …’

‘And they’re happy to pay a high price because they think they’re buying something old,’ I completed for him. ‘And stuffed animals are unfashionable, so I suppose she can pick up the cases cheaply?’

‘That’s right.’

Clever Carol, I had to admire her ingenuity.

Our conversation had to stop then, because a couple came up to look at Nick’s balloon-back chairs. Whilst they were examining them in minute detail and Paul was filling them in on their history, I had my second customer of the day.

‘How much for the celery glass?’ a pleasant lady asked me, holding up a wide-necked vessel with a pedestal base.

For a moment I stared like an idiot. I hadn’t realised it was a celery glass.