The Mystery of the Cupboard (16 page)

Omri said, cautiously, “Could you tell me anything about - about Mrs Driscoll?”

“Miss Jessie? She was ever so kind,” said Elsie. “A real lady. We was that upset when she told us how ill she was, I think even Bert piped an eye when we said goodbye for the last time. Jenny was inconsolable.”

“Do you know how she found out — about the magic?”

“Oh, yes! She told us that,” said the policeman. “Y'see, her son give her a few little toy figures made of—-” He stopped. “What was that stuff she told us, Else?”

“Plastic,” said Omri.

“That's it. New stuff she said, and this son of hers hated it because it ruined his toy business and he lost all his money. He brought some plastic toys to show her how inferior they was to the good old tin soldiers he used to make. And she put these little toys all away in the cupboard that we come in. She put them in and she locked the door and said to herself, ‘That's where they belong, where he won't have to see 'em when he comes to visit me.'”

“Not that he did come to visit her, so's you'd notice,” said Elsie. “Not much of a son, if you ask me!”

“Well, anyhow,” went on Ted, “that first time, we — all us five, Jenny and Charlie and us three — we was all suddenly awake in the dark together. Course we didn't know each other, we couldn't see each other, we was just — all of a sudden, like — there. We was a lot younger then, of course. Jenny can't have been more than nineteen, Bert was just a nipper. Charlie'd just taken the King's
shilling, I'd been eight years in the force, Else was—!”

“Never you mind how old I was!”

“And we was all scared stiff. And Charlie started hollering and Jenny and Elsie was crying and I was banging on the inside of the door, and trying to calm everybody down, and suddenly the door opened, and there she was, staring at us - this big face! Cor, you could have knocked me over with a fewer!”

“You could have knocked her over with one, and all,” said Bert with a snigger. “You never saw anyone so surprised in your life! Threw herself into a proper fit!”

“Well, after we stopped having hy-strikes and calmed down a bit,” said Elsie, “we started talking and reckoning it out, what had happened. And she told us this story about the cupboard and the key she locked it with.”

“I know about that,” said Omri.

“Yes, well… Bit out of the common, to say the least, but we had to believe it, because - well. Because it was happening. And she made tea for us and we drank it out of her thimble, which was like drinking it out of a barrel, but she made a good cuppa, I will say that. And we started to get to know each other.”

“Can't say we turned into the best of chinas,” said Bert, “though I liked Charlie well enough, and Jenny - well, she was a dainty little piece. I could have fancied her if she'd've fancied me, but she didn't. She liked Charlie better, him being in the uniform and all that, but what was the use? He'd been born a hundred years too early for her!”

“Yeah, we all had our own lives
back there
to worry about,” said Elsie. “But comin' here and visitin' Miss Jessie made a break, like. Better than a holiday in some ways. She'd feed us special food and tell us all sorts that was happenin' in her time, or had happened between hers and ours — though she didn't tell us everythin'.”

“No. She kept the bad bits to herself. She never said a dicky-bird about the Great War for instance. When that come along I thought, ‘Miss Jessie must've known what we was in for. Too kind to tell us, there being nothing we could do to avoid it.' She was wise in her way.”

Omri thought he could stay here listening to this new lot of little people telling their stories for ever. But soon enough Gillon and Tony would be back and it'd be teatime.

“Do you mind if I send you back now?” he said.

They exchanged relieved glances. “That's all right, duck,” said Elsie. “Can we go back through the cupboard, though, and not that little box thing? I don't like the idea of squashing into that, all of us together,” said Elsie. “Indecent.”

“Okay,” said Omri.

He lifted them carefully one by one onto the shelf of the cupboard. Bert was the heaviest, because of his sack of stolen goods.

They waved to him, and Elsie blew him a kiss.

Omri turned away to extract the key from the keyhole of the cashbox. When he turned back, he
noticed that Bert had fished something out of the sack and was showing it to Elsie.

“Before we part, me old Else, just give this a quick butcher's,” he was saying. “If you can resist making me an offer for this little lot, you're not the dealer I take you for.”

“Now don't tempt me, you bad boy,” she was saying. “Who d'you think I am, Fagin? - Ooooh, look! Look, Ted! Aren't they loverly!”

She and Ted both bent irresistibly over what Bert held in his hand. It looked like a tiny box.

“Lovely red leather,” said Elsie admiringly, stroking it. “Italian, those are. I seen 'em before — loverly.”

“But it's what's inside that counts,” gloated Bert. “Go on, Elsie, have a look, a look won't hurt.”

“I think we ought to be getting back—” put in the policeman uncomfortably.

But a strange, an impossible idea had come into Omri's mind.

“Let me see that, Mr Martin,” he said.

He reached into his desk and found his brand-new magnifying glass that he'd got for his birthday, for his stamps. Levelling it in the slanting rays of the sun, he saw the jewel case opened into two layers of trays on minute hinges.

Displayed before him were a collection of minuscule items of jewellery. By screwing up his eyes and getting the magnifying glass focused just at the right distance, he
could make out what they were.

Among them were a diamond pin, two gold lockets, a pearl necklace, and an emerald bracelet.

O
mri gasped.

There was a long silence. The little people became restive.

“Well, come on then, dear,” said Elsie coaxingly. “Shut the door on us, send us back — why, look at you, you look as if you've seen a ghost! Whatever is the matter?”

Omri was staring at Bert. “Wh — where did you say you — got these?” he croaked at last.

“Nicked 'em from a house in Clapham,” muttered Bert.

“Why did you — pick that particular house?”

The little thief jerked his shoulders once in a shrug. But he didn't look Omri in the face. The other two were looking at him now, and he suddenly seemed to have lost all his cockiness.

“Did you know it was Miss Jessie's sister's place?” Omri asked. “If you didn't, it's the strangest coincidence I've ever heard of.”

“OOOH! Bert! You never did!” screamed out Elsie. “Why, you little sneak-thief! You knew she was well-off, Miss Jessie told you about her, you
knew
! You — you took advantage of Miss Jessie's confidence—”

Ted broke in thunderously. “I knew you was a wrong 'un, but I'd never have believed you could stoop so low!”

“They'd treated her disgusting. Made her miserable,” said Bert sulkily.

“She never said that!”

“She did. Well - she hinted. Why else wasn't her bloomin' sister around to take care of her when she was peggin' out?”

“But all that was thirty years ago,” said Omri. “What made you rob her now? I mean, then? In — what year did you say it was for you? 1919?”

“Because I worked it out. Thirty years ago, when we used to come here before, it was 1889 for Else and me. Miss Jessie was only a little tiddler, ten years old, and her sister, like, she was only a couple of years older. So I had to wait. Till the sister grew up and got married.”

“And got rich, you mean! You tricky little devil,” said
Elsie. “Biding your time. Counting the years! You had plenty of time to find out where she lived… You must've been planning this one ever since—”

“But how could you rob a poor grieving widow?” asked Ted in a shocked tone. “You know Miss Jessie told us her sister's husband was killed and that it was her fault!”

“Ah!” said Bert slyly, some of his former confidence coming back. “I knew he was
going
to be killed — yeah, I knew that! Me, rob a widow? What you take me for? I got me standards! I chose my moment.
Before it happened
!”

“But it wasn't!” exclaimed Omri accusingly. “Her husband died in 1918, just a few days after the war ended!”

Bert turned to look up at him.

“You don't know that,” he said. He sounded suddenly uneasy.

“Yes, I do, I know exactly when it happened! If it's only 1919 for you now, you must remember - November last year - it was in the papers!”

“I haven't time to waste readin' newspapers—”

“Hasn't brains, he means! It's not that he don't read,” said Elsie cuttingly. “He can't!”

“I could've sworn she said—” Bert began.

“She never said exactly when he died,” said Ted slowly. “She just said ‘after the war'. P'raps Bert really didn't know.”

“I never!” said Bert, his voice rising shrilly. “I swear
on a stack of Bibles - I thought he was still alive, to make more money for her! Anyway, they're always well insured, that sort, she won't have to stand the loss!”

Omri swallowed. All this was more than he could cope with. But one thing he realized. This was the burglary, and this, in front of him, three inches high, was the very burglar (he had
shaken hands
with him!) that had robbed his great-grandmother of her valuables and forced her to sell her home and later, when she was already old, to go out cleaning to keep his mother.

There, in that tiny sack no bigger than a marble, were all the beautiful things — the silver tea service and the rest, the sword stick had probably been Matthew's — that might have changed Maria's life, and his mother's, too.

Perhaps Maria would have had to sell them to live, but if she hadn't, the things in the jewel case should have been Omri's mother's inheritance.

Was it too late?

Could he change history now — the history of his own family?

He crouched down until his eyes were level with Bert's, standing on the shelf in the cupboard.

“Listen to me,” he said fiercely. “You've done a terrible thing. You've changed a person's whole life for the worse. Not just one person! Maybe you didn't mean to, maybe you didn't think, but that's what thieves do, they
cause
things, they
change
things. She wasn't insured. You helped to make her very poor.”

The little robber shrugged his thin shoulders again.

“I can't help it,” he muttered. “I got to live, same as the next man.”

Omri clenched his hands.

“Listen,” he said again. “I'm going to send you back now. You must go back to that house. You must give the stuff back. Now. Today - tonight.”

Bert, who'd been staring at his feet, now looked up sharply.

“I can't do that!” he snarled. “What, give meself away? She'd have the law on me in two shakes of a baa-lamb's waggler!”

“You don't have to see her. Just go to the house and dump the sack in the garden. Or outside the door. Anything. Give it back. Give the stuff back. Especially the case! You must give back the jewel case! Please, Bert! You've got to!”

“If you've got even a shred of decency in you, you'll never know another moment's happiness if you don't!” said Ted.

“I'll see to that, you little tyke!” echoed Elsie. “I'm
contempor-ay-nee-us
with you, and don't you forget it! The robbery will be in the papers tomorrow, I can read if you can't, and if I don't see that the stuff got back all right, I won't rest till you're caught, so help me Gawd, I won't!”

“Else, you wouldn't turn me in, not you! You're no angel yourself—”

“Maybe I done a few things, but nothing like this!
Miss Jessie's own sister, fresh in her widow's black, her poor man hardly cold in his grave—”

“She never come to see her - she was no good - she deserved it—”

“Oh! So you're the shinin' instrument of justice now, are you! Don't make me laugh.” Elsie turned away in disgust.

Bert shuffled his feet. “A professional, handin' back his loot…! If any of me colleagues found out, I'd never hear the end of it!”

Omri suddenly realized he had the ultimate weapon. Without hesitation he used it.

“Maybe you'd rather not go back at all?” he said grimly.

The look Bert threw at him was one of horror.

“If I give back the jewel case,” he whined at last, “can I keep the rest? I got a family of me own! Eight nippers—”

“A likely story!” snorted Ted. “I bet you double the number every time you tell it!”

“I'm not talkin' to you!” Bert appealed to Omri. “What do you say, guv'nor?”