Dubious Deeds

by Philip Ardagh

  The story Fabian told was simple enough: ‘When my grandfather, your Great-Uncle George, was on a walking tour of the English Channel –’

  ‘But that’s the sea!’ Eddie protested.

  ‘He had a thing about water,’ said Fabian. ‘And a big pair of lead boots. He met a boy called Jimmy who was a cook on one of the support vessels.’

  ‘What’s a support vessel?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Some kind of large boat or small ship,’ said Fabian. ‘Can I please tell this?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Jimmy worked in the galley,’ said Fabian (which, from his early years at sea, Eddie knew to be the ship’s kitchen). ‘Only it turned out that he wasn’t a he at all but a she.’

  ‘Jimmy was a girl?’

  ‘A young woman,’ said Fabian. ‘She couldn’t get a job on board ship as a woman, so she disguised herself as a boy. I think this happens quite a lot.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eddie. It was the first he’d heard about it.

  ‘Anyhow,’ said his cousin, ‘Jimmy – whose real name turned out to be Jemima – and Grandpa George fell in love and, after a whirlwind romance, got married.’

  ‘How romantic!’ said Eddie.

  ‘But not popular with his father, Doctor Malcontent, and the other Dickenses.’

  ‘They thought that he was marrying beneath his station?’ asked Eddie (which, I’m sure I must have explained in some previous book or other, doesn’t mean attending a wedding ceremony under Charing Cross, Grand Central or any such railway terminus, but getting hitched to someone of a ‘lower class’).

  Cousin Fabian shook his head. ‘It wasn’t that,’ he said, ‘it’s just that the Dickenses had a violent and irrational reaction against anyone whose name began with a “J”!’

  ‘But Mad Uncle Jack’s name begins with a “J”!’ Eddie protested.

  ‘Except for the name Jack,’ Fabian added. ‘They had nothing against the name Jack.’

  Eddie was about to protest that this made no sense at all, when he remembered that this was his own family he was talking about.

  ‘George was always welcome at Awful End and at family gatherings, so long as he neither brought Jemima with him, nor mentioned her name. Fortunately, this wasn’t quite as hard on my grandfather as you might imagine, because he was very absent-minded, and often forgot that he was married.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Sadly, my grandmother, Jemima, died in childbirth, giving birth to my mother Hester. She was brought up by a kind and loving nanny named Nanny Noonan. What’s unusual, is that she was actually christened Nanny Noonan. It wasn’t just her title,’ Fabian explained. ‘Grandpa George never even told his brothers that he’d had a child. When my mother grew up, she felt so rejected by the Dickens family and society that she turned her back on them. When a handsome gypsy turned up at the door of Nanny Nanny Noonan’s house one day, offering to sharpen her knives and scissors, my mother ran away with him. They married, and me and Oliphant were the result.’

  Eddie was bursting to ask a whole series of questions, when they were rather rudely interrupted.

  There was the sound of a stoat-carrying great-aunt in tiny black boots stomping across the stone-flagged kitchen floor.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud stopped and stared at the pair of them, seated side-by-side at the long, pine table.

  ‘Edmund!’ she snapped. ‘I suppose you think it’s clever pretending to be two of you! Stop it at once!’

  Now she too was interrupted, for into the kitchen walked that fairly well-known engineer Fandango Jones beside the once-fat-now-thin Detective Inspector Humphrey Bunyon.

  ‘I was looking for you, Master Edm –’ began the policeman, then he saw that Eddie wasn’t alone. Next to him sat a lookalike.

  Cogs spun in his brain. Lights flashed. Whistles blew. The detective inspector recalled his conversation with No-Sir: the conversation in which the ex-private had sworn he’d witnessed Eddie pushing the barley-sugar chimney over the parapet … whilst everyone else had sworn that Eddie had been down below with them.

  Now it made sense: two Eddies. And one was an attempted murderer.

  Episode 12

  A Conclusion of Sorts

  In which things fall into place, and a rock falls on the floor

  Fabian could spot a policeman a mile off, even one as strange looking as Humphrey Bunyon. He was up and out of his chair before you could say, ‘Hello, hello, hello. What’s going on here then?’, and dashed out of the kitchen door … straight into Mrs Dickens who was carrying what appeared to be a small boulder. She dropped it, narrowly missing both their feet – all four of them/two pairs, I’m not implying that they had one foot each – which was fortunate when you see the dent the rock made in the floor, which is still there to this day (but now covered with a swirly patterned carpet).

  The detective inspector seized the opportunity, and Fabian’s collar, lifting the boy off the ground. ‘I think you’ve some explaining to do, young man,’ he said.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud looked from Eddie at the table to Fabian at the door, and then back again. ‘So he isn’t you?’ she demanded.

  ‘No, Aunt Maud,’ said Eddie. ‘I’m sitting over here … and he isn’t.’

  Even Madder Aunt Maud studied him between half-closed eyes. ‘This isn’t another one of your tricks, is it?’ she demanded. ‘Like that time you wore those stilts and tried to frighten me at my bedroom window.’

  ‘Your bedroom doesn’t have a window, Aunt Maud,’ he sighed, knowing that she’d imagined the whole thing. ‘You live in a cow.’

  Even Madder Aunt Maud seemed momentarily stumped by this, then added triumphantly: ‘But I see you don’t deny it!’

  ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ shouted Fabian, to which he would probably have added ‘I ain’t done nuffink’ if it weren’t for the fact that he’d been so well brought up by his mother Hester Grout, née Dickens. So what he actually said was: ‘I haven’t done anything!’

  ‘Then why run?’ spat Fandango Jones, his stovepipe hat quivering with excitement. This was like living out one of those penny dreadful detective stories he so loved to read.

  ‘Because no one has a good word to say for gypsies!’ he protested.

  ‘Gypsum?’ cried Even Madder Aunt Maud prodding Mrs Dickens’s dropped lump of rock with Malcolm. ‘This isn’t gypsum. It looks more like granite to me.’

  Very sensibly, the detective inspector ignored her. ‘Now just exactly who are you, my boy?’ he asked Fabian. ‘There’s no denying you have a remarkably strong resemblance to Master Edmund, except, of course, for having different coloured eyes.’ (Trust a policeman to spot something like that. Though, of course, Chief Fudd must have spotted the same thing at the monastery to know, at a glance, that Eddie wasn’t Fabian.)

  ‘He’s the cousin I never knew I had,’ said Eddie. He turned to Mrs Dickens. ‘Mother, this is Great-Uncle George’s grandson Fabian.’

  Mrs Dickens, who was busy trying to pick up the chunk of rock, looked up at Fabian who was now wearing the desk sergeant’s brand new shiny pair of handcuffs. ‘So you’re a Dickens?’ she asked.

  ‘My mother was, ma’am, before she married,’ said Fabian politely, even stopping struggling.

  ‘Well I never!’ said Eddie’s mum. ‘I never even knew George had a daughter. Welcome to Awful End!’ She seemed oblivious to the fact that the poor boy was in handcuffs and in the clutches of the law (in the guise of a very skinny man in very baggy clothes).

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fabian.

  ‘Why are you arresting Fabian?’ Eddie demanded. ‘What’s he supposed to have done? Trespassed in the wood?’

  ‘Oh, much worse than that, Master Edmund,’ said Humphrey Bunyon. ‘An eyewitness saw this lad push the chimney over the parapet onto your father.’

  Eddie was stunned. ‘Is that true?’ he asked Fabian.

  ‘It was an accident!’ Fabian protested.

  ‘It was a premeditated act!’ spat Fandango Jo
nes. ‘Don’t tell me that you accidentally got the chimney from the stack, down the roof, up on to the parapet and over the edge by mistake!’

  ‘I know my rights!’ said Fabian to the policeman. ‘Stop that man spitting all over me!’

  ‘The chimney fell off the stack and rolled down the roof,’ said Mrs Dickens, who had now managed to lift the boulder to waist height. ‘No one moved it. Things like that often happen. This house is in constant need of repair.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked the detective inspector.

  ‘And how did the chimney get up on to the parapet and over the edge?’ asked Fandango Jones.

  With a grunt of exertion, Mrs Dickens was now holding the rock in her arms again, pressed against her stomach. ‘I put it on the parapet,’ she said. ‘What’s this all about, anyway?’

  ‘What’s this all about?’ spluttered the policeman in absolute amazement. ‘This is about a police investigation. Were you not aware, madam, that I’ve spent heaven-knows-how-long trying to get to the bottom of how your husband came to be flattened by a chimney, and you neglected to tell me that it was you who put the chimney on the parapet in the first instance!’

  Realising that she wouldn’t be able to get on with her current task uninterrupted, Mrs Dickens dropped the chunk of rock on the kitchen table, sending an uneaten bite of devilled kidney flying through the air. As it neared EMAM, the old lady batted it aside with Malcolm, and it came to rest in the rim of the fairly well-known engineer’s stovepipe hat. He didn’t notice, and there it remained for the rest of the day until his wife Clarissa spotted it that evening.

  As for the table, the damage caused by the rock knocked quite a significant amount off the reserve price when it was auctioned in the 1960s.

  ‘All I knew was that poor Laudanum had been squashed by the chimney and that you two gentlemen,’ she was referring to Bunyon and Jones, ‘were convinced that it had been dropped. You even told me that you had an eyewitness who saw someone push it over. That certainly wasn’t me, so what relevance did anything else have?’

  The detective inspector sighed. ‘Sit!’ he commanded Fabian, who did as he was told and sat back down at the kitchen table. ‘Mrs Dickens,’ the policeman continued. ‘Mr Jones calculated that the chimney could not have fallen from the stack, down the roof and over the edge, something that my later inspection of the scene confirmed. This then led me to suspect that someone had deliberately lifted the chimney on to the parapet with the sole intention of pushing it on to the assembled company below.’

  ‘Us lot below?’ asked Even Madder Aunt Maud, who was wondering why Fandango Jones was walking around with a bite-sized piece of devilled kidney in the brim of his extraordinary hat. What was he? Some kind of weirdo?

  ‘You lot below,’ nodded the detective inspector. ‘Only now you’re telling me that it was you who placed the chimney on the parapet in the first instance, Mrs Dickens.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eddie’s mother.

  ‘May I ask why?’ asked the detective inspector.

  ‘Yes, you may,’ said Eddie’s mother, rinsing her hands under the kitchen tap.

  ‘Why?’ asked the detective inspector, obligingly.

  ‘So that I could push it over the edge.’

  ‘Push it over the edge?’

  ‘Push it over the edge,’ said Mrs Dickens. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it was too heavy to carry down all those flights of stairs, Inspector. I really don’t see where you’re going with these questions.’

  Detective Inspector Bunyon was doing his very best not to burst into tears. He wanted to be lovely and fat again and as far away from the Dickens family as possible. He hated cases involving the Dickens family. He’d rather be investigating a grizzly murder in a sewer than spending another minute with these infuriating people … but he was a good detective inspector, and there was a job to be done.

  He tried again. ‘Why? Why? Why, Mrs Dickens? Why did you want the chimney on the ground when a chimney’s rightful place is on a chimney stack? Why, once you’d got as far as putting the chimney on the parapet, didn’t you then push it? Why, Mrs Dickens?’ He found it impossible to keep the air of desperation out of his voice.

  ‘You may not be aware of it, Inspector, but my husband is a very fine amateur sculptor,’ said Mrs Dickens. ‘He mainly carves bottle corks and wood, but I’ve recently suggested that he try stone. He briefly tried carving in coal, but that proved to be a very messy business and also –’ she paused to glare at Even Madder Aunt Maud, ‘– someone, naming no names, kept on eating it.’

  ‘Even better than charcoal biscuits,’ EMAM muttered.

  ‘I’ve been collecting various different types of stone for him to experiment carving with. I got this piece, for example, from the edge of the ornamental lake where Eddie found Ned.’

  ‘Oliphant,’ Eddie corrected her, now that he knew the baby’s true name.

  ‘Ned?’ asked the detective inspector.

  ‘Oliphant?’ asked Mrs Dickens.

  ‘Oliphant?’ asked the detective inspector.

  ‘The baby,’ said Eddie.

  ‘The baby?’ asked the inspector. Everyone had still neglected to mention him.

  ‘We found a baby in the bulrushes.’

  ‘Like Ex-Private Moses in the Bible,’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud, a trifle confused. (Surprise. Surprise.)

  ‘My brother,’ said Fabian. ‘I put him there.’

  The policeman’s brain was beginning to suffer from what, today, we might call information overload. ‘We’ll come to the baby in a moment,’ he said. ‘Would someone please get me a glass of water?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud. ‘Hold this.’ She thrust Malcolm into the startled policeman’s hands. ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘J-Just water, please,’ he said. He turned back to Mrs Dickens. ‘You collected various different types of stone from the house and grounds for your husband to experiment carving with? Is that correct?’

  ‘Exactly, Inspector!’

  ‘And you thought that the fallen chimney would be useful for such a purpose?’

  ‘Too true.’

  ‘But, it being so heavy, you decided to heave it up on to the parapet and then push it over on to the driveway, from where you would then collect it and give it to your husband?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘But, once you’d got it up on to the parapet, you left it there.’ Detective Inspector Bunyon paused. ‘Why was that, Mrs Dickens?’

  Eddie’s mother clearly had to think before replying. ‘Oh, I remember!’ she said. ‘It was about a week before it fell on poor Laudanum. I’d just got the chimney on to the parapet when I spied the postman coming up the drive. I have a cousin in Australia who’d written to say that she was sending me a parcel of books. It was obvious that this was what the man was carrying, so I hurried down to meet him. In the excitement of opening the parcel and sharing the books out amongst the family, I completely forgot about the chimney.’

  The detective inspector was finding it hard to imagine that anyone in Australia printed books. He was under the impression that they were all convicts sent over from England, or people sent over from England to keep an eye on the convicts.

  ‘So there the chimney rested, until you, Master Grout, pushed it on to poor Mrs Dickens’s husband!’

  ‘It was an accident, sir,’ said Fabian, quietly this time.

  ‘I think you’d better tell your story,’ said Bunyon. So he did.

  Life as a gypsy wasn’t all brightly painted caravans, weaving baskets and wearing bright red spotty neckerchiefs. Sometimes things could get tough, wet and cold. And many people, particularly landowners, weren’t always big fans of gypsies turning up on their land.

  At first, Fabian’s mother Hester had loved the life on the open road. Nanny Nanny Noonan had always been kind and considerate, but had brought her up to be a ‘lady’, and Hester Dickens was filled with a real sense of freedom and r
elief when she ran away with Alfie Grout (who’d come knocking at their door to sharpen scissors).

  When their son, Fabian, was born, things got better and better, because the little boy loved the gypsy life and soon became a firm favourite amongst the other gypsies, who loved the way that he got up to such mischief, yet talked ‘so posh-like’.

  Things had got harder for Hester when her husband, Alfie, developed a permanent hacking cough. Medicine was far more primitive in Victorian times and, if you were poor, was pretty much nonexistent except for do-it-yourself herbal remedies.

  This particular group of gypsies, led by Fudd, didn’t include a wise old woman steeped in the old folklore of plants and their magical properties. The best anyone could suggest was that Alfie regularly eat lucky heather. This hadn’t helped his year-round cough, or his indigestion, come to that, but at least it kept his breath smelling nice.

  Then along came baby Oliphant. After all these years on the open road, sleeping under the stars, Hester decided that perhaps there was more to life than this, and that Oliphant, at least, should have the opportunity to lead the life that the older generation of the Dickens family had denied her.

  When Hester’s gypsy band found themselves in the vicinity of the Dickens family seat – no jokes, please, I mean Awful End – Hester made the decision that Oliphant should be left in the care of her uppercrust family.

  She’d wrapped Oliphant in the finest blanket she could find and had written a note, enclosing one of her late father George Dickens’s silk hankies, which had the Dickens family crest embroidered in one corner: a man biting his own leg. This should be proof enough that the child was one of their own.

  Hester didn’t tell any of the other gypsies her plan. Certainly not Chief Fudd, who would probably have forbidden it, and certainly not her husband who, despite getting more and more ill, would have insisted that they bring up their son. The only two people she told were Oliphant himself (who didn’t understand a word of it, being a baby and all) and Fabian, whom she charged with taking Oliphant to Awful End.