Dubious Deeds

by Philip Ardagh

  It was to Mr Dickens’s study that Even Madder Aunt Maud now went. She would sometimes spend time annoying her nephew whilst he was trying to sort out the bills, by a variety of different means. Sometimes she would simply hum loudly or shout out random numbers when he was trying to add up a column of figures in his head. Sometimes she would stand behind the curtains and stick Malcolm’s head out with a cheery, ‘Peekaboo!’. Occasionally, she’d drink the water from the vases, gargling loudly before each swallow. If this failed to gain Mr Dickens’s attention, she’d sometimes end up eating the flowers in the vase, too. (They’d die soon anyway, once she’d drunk the water.)

  It was whilst she’d been involved in such activities that she’d spotted where he kept the brown paper, so now she was able to go straight to the relevant desk drawers and to gather it by the armful.

  Hurrying back to the chaise longue where Mr Dickens lay, she almost collided with Mrs Dickens who was carrying an enormous earthenware jar of home-made chutney.

  ‘I couldn’t find the vinegar,’ Mrs Dickens explained.

  ‘I’m sure that’ll do nicely,’ said EMAM.

  They proceeded to cover Mr Dickens with the apple-based chutney and then applied the brown paper (the chutney acting as a remarkably effective glue, in much the same way that the marmalade had on the breakfast plate).

  Somewhat surprisingly, Mr Dickens found the treatment quite soothing. So much so, that his wife and aunt decided to try the same healing approach on Dawkins, still bent double from his ‘locked’ back. Unfortunately for the gentleman’s gentleman, they only succeeded in attracting a swarm of bees that stung him repeatedly, whilst he was in no fit state to run away.

  In all this excitement, Eddie’s absence was put to the back of everyone’s mind.

  Episode 6

  The Game’s Afoot

  In which Fandango Jones plays detective and Even Madder Aunt Maud plays the bagpipes

  Whilst the others were concerned with Mr Dickens’s injuries, Fandango Jones had been investigating the scene of the crime, for that’s what he was sure that it was: a crime. He was convinced that the chimney falling on Mr Dickens had been no accident. Perhaps Mr Dickens hadn’t been the intended target, but the engineer was sure that the chimney had been deliberately dropped from the roof of Awful End on to the cluster of people below, which was why it was on the roof that Fandango was now standing.

  The little man was re-checking the calculations he’d made from the ground and had reached the same conclusion. There was no way that the chimney could have landed, or even been pushed, from its original position and fallen where it had. Someone must have lifted the chimney on to or over the parapet and pushed, dropped or thrown it over the edge! And whoever had done that must have seen the members of the household below, so must have intended them harm.

  ‘Most interesting,’ said the engineer, for he was one of the very few people in the world who really did speak to himself out loud (unlike characters in books, who seem to do it all the time).

  Fandango Jones was used to standing on tall things because he’d built so many of them. He built the Tottering Tower at Totteridge, for example, and the Scarbourne Lighthouse. I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of either of them – unless you live in Totteridge or Scarbourne, and are interested in local history – because neither is still standing. They both fell down a long time ago. Quite a few of Fandango Jones’s taller structures did, many in his lifetime; a fact not mentioned in his pamphlet Bridging the Gap.

  Jones was about to go back through the tiny doorway which led to and from this section of roof – Awful End was a very higgledy-piggledy building with roofs of different heights and designs – when something caught his eye: a flash of colour against the grey of the stone edging. He went to investigate and picked up a piece of faded gold brocade (a rich fabric woven with a raised pattern, like you used to get on military uniforms). It was caught on a peg holding a damaged roof tile in place.

  Perhaps the person who’d dropped the chimney over the edge had snagged his clothing on the peg when walking past.

  Fandango Jones slipped the brocade into the back of his notebook for safekeeping. This looked very much like a clue to him.

  As he walked back down the winding staircase to the top landing, he wondered about the chimney itself. If it had been a statue or a stone urn that had been pushed over, that could have been a spur of the moment thing. It needn’t have been planned. Whoever it was could have been looking over the edge and thought, ‘I know, I’ll flatten one of those Dickenses today,’ and then pushed the object over. But not with the chimney. The chimney would have to have been dislodged from its original position on top of the stack – it was one of a cluster of four barley-sugar chimneys sharing a base – and then carried to the edge and over the parapet. Premeditated. That was what they called it in those detective magazines Jones liked to read: ‘a premeditated act’. The dropping of the chimney had been pre-planned. Fandango Jones hadn’t been this excited since … since he’d got all enthusiastic about the suggestion of a bridge made of soup (until he’d come to his senses).

  Jones hurried into the nearest room – about two-thirds of the rooms in Awful End were unused, and most without furniture, remember – sat himself on an old hatbox, and immediately started drawing a diagram. Sadly, this no longer exists but, based on a description from the son of someone who actually saw the original, here’s David Roberts’s reconstruction of what it looked like:

  Thanks, David. Not bad.

  By the time Jones had finished his diagram and made his way back downstairs to the others, a few of them were beginning to wonder, if not worry exactly, about the whereabouts of Eddie and the doctor.

  Unaware of the calamitous events resulting in both Mr Dickens and Dawkins lying flat on their backs in the withdrawing room, Gibbering Jane had emerged from below stairs with a happy baby Ned gurgling in her arms, to ask the whereabouts of Master Edmund. At the mention of his name, it was the general consensus that he should, indeed, have returned by now.

  ‘Perhaps he’s been kidnapped by escaped convicts up on the misty moors,’ suggested Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Unlikely,’ snapped Even Madder Aunt Maud.

  ‘Or been mistaken for an escaped orphan and locked in a police cell,’ MUJ added.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud poo-pooed that suggestion too.

  ‘Or stuck himself to the underside of a circus elephant,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, going all misty-eyed at the memory of when his own dear wife had done that very thing many years previously.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud threw her arms around him, showering him with slobbery kisses from her prune-like lips. ‘You remember, my love pumpkin!’ she cried.

  Mrs Dickens turned away. Not only was this not a pretty sight, but she’d also been side-swiped, in the face, by Malcolm – or was it Sally? – whom Maud was clutching when she threw her arms around her Jack. She decided to go and find something to lessen the bruising.

  Gibbering Jane was now in the withdrawing room, gibbering at the sight of poor Dawkins, covered in bee stings, doing a very good impersonation of a right angle. Baby Ned seemed to find the gibbering amusing, and his face broke into a gummy smile. He dribbled with pleasure.

  The not-so-famous engineer, meanwhile, went in search of Mad Uncle Jack and Even Madder Aunt Maud. He found them emerging from a broom cupboard.

  ‘The family chapel is much smaller than I recall,’ Eddie’s great-aunt was saying.

  Mad Uncle Jack grunted in agreement. ‘Perhaps the whole house is shrinking.’

  Even Madder Aunt Maud nodded. ‘It did rain a great deal in the winter,’ she said, ‘and water does shrink things. Remember your brother George. He shrank in that fish tank, didn’t he?’

  Even Madder Aunt Maud was referring to George Dickens who took to living in a fish tank in a rented space near what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

  ‘He didn’t shrink, my sweet,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘He drowned.’ Which
was also true. Refusing to come up for air one day – a Thursday – he did, indeed, drown. This was the same George Dickens who accidentally burnt down the Houses of Parliament in 1834. (You can read all about it in my book Terrible Times … if you haven’t already done so, that is.)

  ‘But he could have shrunk a bit before he drowned,’ EMAM pointed out.

  At this stage, Fandango Jones cleared his throat to let the couple know that he was there.

  When Even Madder Aunt Maud spotted him, she let out a yelp. ‘It’s the spitting man!’ she cried, leaping behind her husband to use him as a human shield.

  ‘I thought you were the engineer,’ said a puzzled Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Indeed I am, sir,’ said Fandango, ‘but it’s in the capacity of amateur detective that I must speak with you now.’

  ‘Then spit it out, man!’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘What’s troubling you?’

  ‘Be quick about it, mind,’ said EMAM. ‘This house is shrinking and something must be done!’

  ‘You were in the broom cupboard, madam,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You weren’t in the chapel. That is through the door over there.’ He pointed. (Mrs Dickens had given him a tour of Awful End when he’d undertaken to build the bridge in its grounds.) ‘You and your husband entered the broom cupboard in error.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that I don’t know the Dickens family chapel when I see it?’ demanded Even Madder Aunt Maud.

  ‘Are you suggesting that we don’t know a place for storing brooms from a house of God?’ Mad Uncle Jack bellowed, his beakiest of beaky noses quivering with rage.

  Fandango Jones squirmed. He’d never seen his employer so angry, and this had been of his making. ‘I – er –’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ Mad Uncle Jack shouted, turning to the broom cupboard and yanking open the door. ‘Are you telling me that this doesn’t contain some of the finest examples of wood carving since Grinning Gibbons?’ (None of them, including Mad Uncle Jack, had any idea who Grinning Gibbons was.)

  Fandango Jones didn’t know what to say. Certainly the family chapel at Awful End – which was just behind that wall, there – had some very fine wooden carvings … but the only wood he could see in this dingy cupboard were the handles of the mops and brooms, and (rather oddly) a small log next to a large piece of rock.

  ‘Er, very nice,’ he said lamely.

  Mad Uncle Jack looked in the cupboard. ‘Great heavens!’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but a broom cupboard.’

  ‘What did you think it was?’ Even Madder Aunt Maud snorted. ‘A slice of cheese?’

  ‘It’s your nephew –’ said the engineer, in a desperate bid to steer the conversation back to the fallen chimney.

  ‘My nephew is a broom cupboard?’

  ‘A slice of cheese?’

  ‘Preposterous!’

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘No …’ protested Fandango Jones. ‘It’s your nephew, Mr Dickens, about whom I must speak!’

  ‘Spit, more like,’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud.

  Jones felt happier to be back on more familiar ground. ‘I believe that the accident with the chimney was no accident at all.’

  ‘Then why refer to it as an accident?’ asked EMAM.

  ‘Exactly!’ said MUJ. ‘Are you some kind of an idiot? A buffoon?’

  Jones tried again. ‘I meant, of course, that which we took to be an accident was no accident at all. I believe that the chimney was deliberately dropped upon our party below.’

  ‘Party? I don’t recall a party,’ protested Even Madder Aunt Maud. ‘Where were the jellies? The ices? The most-amusing of party games?’

  ‘Party as in assembled group, madam,’ spat Jones. ‘I believe that the chimney was deliberately dropped upon us and is, therefore, a case of attempted murder … and a matter for the police!’

  There always seems to be police involvement in an Eddie Dickens adventure, doesn’t there?

  Episode 7

  Caped Capers

  In which the author makes an apology and Brother Gault makes a potion

  Let me start by way of an apology. It’s not the first one I’ve had to make and I doubt it’ll be the last. So here goes: Some of you will have spotted that the previous chapter begins with the lead-in: ‘In which Fandango Jones plays detective and Even Madder Aunt Maud plays the bagpipes.’ Well, we certainly had the Fandango-Jones-playing-detective part (what with his diagrams and clue-collecting, and clambering about the roof), but what about Even Madder Aunt Maud and the bagpipes? Now if it had said, ‘In which Fandango Jones plays detective and Even Madder Aunt Maud plays the fool’ or even, ‘plays about in a broom cupboard’ that would have been fine. But ‘plays the bagpipes?’ I think not!

  You see, the thing is, I was going to get to the part where Maud plays the bagpipes and then I thought, NO! HANG ON! THAT’LL HAVE TO WAIT! This book is the second of the Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens, so I think we should get back to Eddie – even though he doesn’t know that he’s Eddie, of course – and we can come back to Even Madder Aunt Maud and her bagpipe-playing later on. OK? OK. Good. Thank you for being so understanding.

  So back to Eddie we go. A good few days had passed and the pock marks where the gorse bush prickles had been pulled out were a lot less painful, and the yellowing iodine-soaked bandages had been unwound from his head. He did, however, still have to walk with a stick, and his memory hadn’t come back.

  That’s not to say that certain memories hadn’t returned in fleeting flashes, including riding on the back of a turtle … removing a large sparkling bauble from a chandelier … leading a gang of scruffily dressed, cucumber-wielding children out of a grim building … digging up a coffin with his bare hands … but none of them seemed to make any sense or give him a clue as to who he was.

  Abbot Po had deduced from Eddie’s clothing, accent and horse that ‘Neddie’ was from the well-to-do classes but, beyond that, nothing.

  One of the problems was that, except for rare occurrences, such as taking part in the upcoming Lamberley Pageant (which would require Brother Hyams to dress as a Welsh dragon), the Bertians had little to do with the world around them. They were what’s known as a ‘slightly ajar order’.

  A closed order (of monks or nuns) is one that has no dealings with the outside world. Then there are the open orders that go out in the community (to do good deeds, I suppose). A slightly ajar order is one that is more closed than open, but not completely closed. In other words, Bertian monks in general, including the monks at Lamberley Monastery, usually kept people out and out of people’s way, except when it suited them.

  This appears to have meant that, in the case of Eddie’s accident, it was only right and Christian to rescue the injured boy and his injured horse, when he was spotted by the side of the road, but not necessarily to involve the authorities. So they didn’t.

  Eddie had quickly adapted to life in the monastery. He didn’t go to all the prayers the monks attended throughout the day but sometimes he sat at the back of the chapel and listened to the brothers chant and sink. Sorry, that should be sing. Of course, the building was sinking, but not right before their very eyes. Not then, at least. Everyone was terribly nice to Eddie/Neddie and he was eager to help out around the place as much as possible: in the kitchens, on the land, or wherever he could lend a hand.

  Brother Gault, the herbalist, concocted a potion designed to speed Eddie’s recovery and he took a spoonful each morning and a spoonful each night. This may not sound a very high dosage until you see the size of the spoon (which you probably have done if you looked at the picture first). It was the biggest wooden spoon Eddie had ever seen in his life, not that he could remember any of the other wooden spoons he’d seen. Fortunately, the medicine tasted rather nice, as medicines go, and this one went in his mouth and down his front.

  Another thing you might have noticed from the picture is that Eddie was now wearing a habit. It’s not that they were insisting Eddie beco
me a Bertian novice or anything like that. (A novice is a monk in training.) It was just that Eddie had only one set of clothes and they weren’t in the best of condition since his accident anyway.

  Eddie’s habit had been made-to-measure from an old (much larger) garment by Brother Henry, who was very good at sewing. Because Eddie wasn’t really a monk it didn’t have a proper hood but, apart from that, it was just like the clothes everyone else wore at Lamberley Monastery (except that, unlike the others, Eddie wasn’t wearing humorous undergarments). It felt very rough and itchy.

  ‘Do you think I’ll ever find out who I am?’ he asked Abbot Po in the monastery library, after breakfast one morning.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be home again in no time,’ replied Po in his kindly voice. ‘When we attend the pageant, I’ve no doubt someone will come forward and claim you.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ said Eddie. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me, Abbot Po. No one could be kinder to me than you and the other monks, and there’s no place I’d rather be with a loss of memory than here, except for home …’

  ‘But home is where the heart is,’ Abbot Po nodded in understanding. ‘Even if you don’t know where home is.’

  ‘Or who’s in it,’ Eddie added.

  ‘Which is why I’ve given instructions that should any of the brothers have reason to be out in the community, they should make enquires about you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘I mean,’ Po explained, ‘that it is against the orders of our order to walk into a police station and to report you missing, but if one of my brothers should be out selling our vegetables and happens to ask if anyone had heard reports of a missing boy –’