Two Crafty Criminals!

by Philip Pullman

  He found his voice getting quieter and quieter. He wanted to help the gang in their detecting, but he might only be helping convict his father. What he really wanted to do was shut his eyes and hide in the dark forever.

  But Bridie was impatient to talk.

  “They been getting snide coins down St. George’s Road and London Road,” she said, “and one or two at the Elephant, but none down Newington Butts. Nor the New Kent Road. Nor Walworth Road.”

  “Did you get any?” said Benny.

  “We got three.” She tipped them out of her sticky hand and into Benny’s. He looked at them closely before putting them with the rest on the orange box. “And,” she went on triumphantly, “we talked to Snake-Eyes Melmott, the bookie, and he told us where Stamper Billings lived! Guess what? He lived just off the Cut, under where Rummage’s is now!”

  “Under it?” said Thunderbolt.

  “He had a basement. Most coiners work on the top floor of a house, Snake-Eyes told us, ’cause then they can hear the coppers coming and they got time to sling everything in the fire. But Stamper worked in a basement in a row of houses where Rummage’s Emporium is. Old Rummage bought up the whole row.”

  Thunderbolt was listening as if his life depended on it. If most coiners worked on the top floor … And Pa was working in the basement … But Stamper Billings had worked in a basement, after all.

  Benny, meanwhile, could hardly sit still. He was bursting to tell them what he’d found out.

  “I’ve been to Grover and Cohen’s in Peacock Alley,” he said. “Them detectives—you remember.”

  Grover and Cohen were two extremely dingy private detectives (not in the Sexton Blake class by any means) for whom Benny did occasional jobs. It turned out that he’d spent the afternoon with them, learning about snide-pitching in general and this outbreak in particular.

  “But they didn’t know much,” he said. “Course, I had to promise to do a job for ’em. They got to find an old lady’s cat what’s done a bunk. But I know where to find plenty of cats, that won’t take long. Oh, and I got half a dozen snideys this morning down Lambeth Walk.”

  He fished them out and put them with the others on the orange box. He was fizzing and twitching with excitement, so Thunderbolt knew that something else was coming.

  “And,” Benny said, “I solved the crime!”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “It’s true! I solved it!”

  He couldn’t restrain himself from getting up and doing a little jig like Paddy Phelan the Spoon Dancer. Sharky Bob joined in, shouting with glee.

  “He’s got a mouse in his drawers,” said Bridie. Then she hit him. “Stow it, ye half-wit! Sit down and tell us, if ye’re such a Sexton Blake!”

  So Benny stopped and said, “All right. All right. When did Stamper Billings get caught?”

  “Ages ago!” said Bridie.

  “It was the year—the year …” Thunderbolt hit his head, trying to remember what the butcher had said. “It was the year Sefton won the Derby!”

  “1878,” said Bridie at once.

  “Look at the coins!” said Benny. “Look at the date on ’em!”

  A moment’s stillness, and then three hands reached out to the pile of shiny silver coins.

  “1878!”

  “All of ’em.”

  “It’s true!”

  “They are! They’re all Stamper’s!”

  “It wasn’t Thunderbolt’s pa at all!”

  “But …”

  The “but” was Thunderbolt’s, and then he began to believe it. Feverishly he turned all the coins over, and they all looked new, and they all had the date 1878 firmly in the right place. He felt a great bubble of joy rising in his chest and it nearly became a sob, but he made it into a hiccup and turned the coins over and over, letting them fall from one hand to the other like dazzling water.

  “We can prove he’s innocent now!” Benny was saying.

  For a moment the others clapped and cheered; but then Bridie said, “No we can’t,” and they fell quiet. She went on, “This doesn’t prove anything about Mr. Dobney, does it? All it proves is that whoever made ’em used an 1878 coin to make his mold from.”

  “But who’d do that, in 1894?” said Thunderbolt desperately. “1878 coins is sixteen years old. They’re bound to be worn a bit. These uns must’ve been made back then.”

  “And anyway, if Stamper Billings did make ’em, why’ve they only started turning up now?” said Bridie.

  “ ’Cause where did Stamper live?” Benny demanded. “Under Rummage’s, that’s where! What I reckon is, Stamper made hundreds of these snideys, and hid ’em, and they was never found. Then Rummage bought the place and turned it into a big shop, and found the loot in the basement or in a secret hole in the wall or summing. And it’s been him passing ’em out.”

  “But Mr. Rummage is rich,” said Thunderbolt. “What would he want to pass out snide tanners for?”

  “ ’Cause he’s mean as well as rich,” said Benny. “We know he is. And he’s got the perfect place to do it! In a big shop like that, what’s always busy, it’d be dead easy to slip a dodgy tanner in someone’s change. And we know that Rummage’s is dead plum smack in the middle of the area they’re going round in. The further from Rummage’s, the less there are. We just proved that today.”

  “It could be …,” said Bridie. “And the first time we saw one it was just outside Rummage’s. I bet someone had just got it in their change and paid Dippy with it.”

  “And they opened that new department in Rummage’s basement last month!” Thunderbolt remembered. “He could have found Stamper’s coins when they did the alterations.”

  “And he’s a scurvy miserable old git,” said Benny. “It’s bound to be him.”

  Mr. Rummage certainly was a scurvy miserable old git. He was famous for it. The gang had been excluded from the Emporium after that unfortunate business in the Camping Department, but Mr. Rummage didn’t only exclude helpful people like them; he excluded all sorts, grown-ups as well. He got the taste for it soon after he’d had an electric lift fitted in the shop, one of the first in London. He had an attendant standing by on each floor with smelling salts and brandy in case the customers felt faint after this new experience. Naturally, the lifts were soon crowded with customers pretending to stagger out fainting, and Mr. Rummage lost his temper and excluded them. Then there was old Molly Tomkins. She was mad, but perfectly harmless. She fell in love with one of the window dummies and wanted to climb in the window to be with him. The poor old soul thought Mr. Rummage had taken him prisoner. She was excluded even from walking up and down the pavement outside the window, and she used to stand across the road and signal to the dummy until they came to take her away to Bedlam.

  So Rummage was a bad-tempered bully, and now he was passing out snide coins as well, or so it seemed. Thunderbolt thought of his pa, locked in a cell. He could almost feel his thoughts beating at the prison bars like a carrier pigeon with a message of hope.

  “We’ll have to get him!” Benny said. “We’ll have to catch him red-handed.”

  “But how?” said Bridie. “He won’t let us in the shop! Why don’t we just go and tell the police?”

  It seemed the obvious thing to do, but Thunderbolt felt a drizzle of fear at the very thought. He’d forgotten about his own crime for a few moments.

  “Maybe,” he said wildly, “maybe we ought to get in the shop and find the hiding-place.”

  “That wouldn’t take long, would it?” said Bridie. “There’s only twenty-two departments, after all. And only about ten thousand places to hide things in each one. We could probably do it in about ten minutes.”

  “Well—” Thunderbolt began, but Benny held up his hand and said, “Shh.”

  They all fell still.

  Benny tiptoed over to the trapdoor and crouched to listen. Then he looked up. “There’s someone down there,” he whispered.

  A spy!

  They looked at one another, with a namele
ss thrill shivering its way up their backs. Silently each of them picked up a weapon—a slingshot, a bit of stick, a clasp knife, anything that came to hand—and resolved to sell themselves dearly.

  Jasper was moving about restlessly below. And then into the stillness came a creak. It was a familiar creak: it was the sound the fifteenth rung of the ladder made. The intruder was nearly at the top.

  Thunderbolt, Bridie, and Benny tiptoed in utter silence to the trapdoor. Sharky Bob scowled fiercely from the orange box. A draft from somewhere made the flame in the little lantern quiver, and the shadows flapped around the loft like great dark flags.

  Beneath the trapdoor they could hear a scratching, scrabbling sound as the intruder fumbled for the bolt.

  He was muttering, too, and in a foreign language. Thunderbolt thought it might be French. He made out the words “Morbleu! Que diable ont-ils fait avec le … Ah! Voilà …”

  The bolt slid open.

  The trapdoor lifted.

  And there in the guttering lantern light was the face of a stranger. He had a little pointed beard and a neat pearl-gray hat and kid gloves, and whatever he expected to see, it wasn’t a ring of fierce faces glaring down, an array of dangerous weapons all pointed at him. He gave a startled gasp.

  “Non! Non! Ah—”

  The fifteenth step could cope with the kids’ weight, but the Frenchman was plump and well fed, and when he suddenly stepped down onto the cracked rung it gave way completely.

  “Waaah!” he cried as he vanished.

  That’s the same in French as it is in English, Thunderbolt thought, interested.

  The kids all crowded to the rim of the hole and peered through. They knew it wouldn’t have pleased old Jasper to have Frenchmen falling around his feet like hailstones, and a shrill whinny and a loud stamping confirmed it. More shouts of alarm in a mixture of French and panic followed, and then the spy found the stable door and fled.

  The gang looked at one another. Benny shook his head.

  “An escaped lunatic,” he said. “I ’spect they’ll catch him soon. Or maybe he was another art thief … Yeah, he looked like an art thief. Bound to be. But never mind him. I know how to catch Rummage red-handed. Close the lid and I’ll tell you my plan …”

  “Slummin’,” said Benny sagely, once they were all seated round the orange box again. “We gotta get Rummage slummin’.”

  “Eh?” said Bridie.

  “Slummin’. Grover and Cohen told me about it. See, the trouble with snide coins is they look too new. If they was real silver tanners, they’d look more battered. So he’s gotta think that passing ’em out like this is dangerous, and he oughter make ’em look older by slummin’ ’em. You make up a mixture of lampblack and oil and rub it in, and there they are, slummed. See? So he gets the idea that he’s gotta do this, and so he does it, and we goes in and catches him red-handed.”

  “Oh,” said Thunderbolt.

  “I see,” said Bridie.

  “How we going to make him do it in the first place?” said Thunderbolt.

  “We get Dippy to go in and talk about it so Rummage overhears.”

  “Dippy’s been excluded,” Bridie pointed out.

  “All right, someone else, then! Grover or Cohen or someone. Or your uncles,” he said to Bridie.

  “Well, yes, but how are we going to get in?” she said.

  “And how are we going to prove it?” said Thunderbolt.

  “I’ll borrow Grover and Cohen’s detective camera and take a pitcher of him doing it.”

  Bridie looked doubtful.

  “They won’t—” said Bridie.

  “S’posing—” said Thunderbolt.

  “I don’t think—” said Bridie.

  “What if—” said Thunderbolt.

  Benny lost his temper.

  “You don’t deserve me!” he stormed. “You deserve someone like Crusher Watkins tellin’ you what to do! You deserve that bloomin’ dummy leadin’ you! I’m wasted here. You got no more daring nor imagination than a cupboard full of beetles! This is a plan what even Sexton Blake’d be proud of. In fact, I think I’ll go and work for him full-time, ’stead of leadin’ you. I think I’ll be his partner. I think he’d appreciate me. He’d say he wished he could think of plans like that. ‘Yes, but’! ‘S’posing’! ‘What if’!”

  “I was just going to say,” said Thunderbolt, “what if we got Dippy to let us in?”

  There was a silence. Thunderbolt was sitting forward and blinking hard, the way he did when he was thinking, and he dabbed up his spectacles and tried to explain the idea that was wobbling in his mind like a soap bubble.

  “It’s my lead,” he said breathlessly, “my bit of lead what I bought from Harry Fitchett, what came off the statue on the horse trough—and it was Dippy wanting to be a waxwork—and it was the man in the window, that other day, when Dippy got his first snide tanner—”

  “What you talking about?” said Benny.

  Thunderbolt explained. The summer before, the Metropolitan Horse Trough and Drinking Fountain Association had made the mistake of setting up a fine lead statue of King Neptune by the horse trough just across the road from J. Beazley’s, the scrap-metal dealer’s. This was too tempting for the local citizens to resist, with lead fetching the price it did, and thirty-six hours after the statue was unveiled it had vanished for good. Unrecognizable lumps of lead kept turning up at Beazley’s yard for weeks afterwards; in fact, it was one of those very lumps which was causing Thunderbolt such spasms of criminal guilt.

  But once the plinth was empty, the drinkers at the Lamb and Flag nearby felt it needed occupying, so one warm evening they each got up in turn and posed for the admiration and criticism of the general public. Tommy Glossop’s Napoleon had been highly praised, and Mrs. Amelia Price’s Lady Macbeth had pleased the connoisseurs of the drama; but Dippy Hitchcock’s Moses Parting the Red Sea had drawn gasps of admiration and a round of applause. Dippy had struck a dramatic attitude and held it for so long that you’d have thought the rest of him was made of wood as well as his head, as Mrs. Fanny Blodgett of the Excelsior Tea and Coffee Rooms put it. The Peretti twins had won two shillings betting on him.

  “Ahh!” said Benny, with a sigh of profound satisfaction. “I’m beginning to get it.”

  “Well, tell me, then!” said Bridie.

  “We get Dippy dressed posh,” said Thunderbolt, “and clean him up a bit, and he goes and stands in the window like a dummy till closing time, and then he lets us in.”

  Bridie began to grin. Benny was grinning.

  “It’s a stunner!” he said. “It’s a corker!”

  “It’s the best one yet!” said Bridie.

  And Thunderbolt began to think that things might not be so bad after all. They agreed to catch Dippy and put the plan into action the next day; no point in hanging around, as Bridie said.

  When they left the hideout, Thunderbolt lingered behind. Bridie said, “Come on home, Thunderbolt.”

  He twisted his lip. “I dunno,” he said.

  “We’re on the right track now! Ye can sleep in yer own bed, and Ma’ll give ye a feed—you can’t stay here another night.”

  “Well …”

  He looked back at the dummy. It looked so forlorn and abandoned that he felt almost bound to stay and keep it company.

  Bridie saw where he was looking.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I got a funny feeling about that. I reckon we ought to hide it. That thief knew where it was, and I reckon the Frenchman was after it as well, and he knows where to come now.”

  “The escaped lunatic? He won’t come back after a trampling from Jasper.”

  “All the same, I reckon we oughter take it with us. Ye never know.”

  “You never know,” said Sharky solemnly.

  So they covered the wax head with an old nose bag of Jasper’s, crammed the floppy limbs together and bound them tightly with a bit of twine that Thunderbolt kept round his waist as an emergency belt or climbing rope or lasso, and then maneu
vered the unwieldy bundle through the trapdoor and down the ladder, homewards.

  It was strange being home again. And not at all nice: the grate was cold and full of ash; there was no oil for the lamp, and only a bit of stale bread to eat. Thunderbolt was on the point of feeling very sorry for himself indeed when Bridie came down and invited him upstairs.

  “Ma says if ye don’t come and have a bite of supper, she’ll box yer ears,” she told him, so he had no choice.

  The Malones’ kitchen was full of five different kinds of noise and three different kinds of smoke. Mrs. Malone was shouting, Sharky Bob was banging two spoons together, Uncle Paddy was playing a tin whistle, Mary and the two middle girls were arguing over a board game called Wibbly-Wob, and a frying pan of potatoes was hissing and bubbling on the range. The three kinds of smoke came from the frying pan, the fire, and Uncle Mikey’s pipe.

  “Here’s the champion!” said Uncle Paddy, who’d seen the famous fight with Crusher Watkins.

  “Have they let yer da out yet?” said Mary.

  “Course they haven’t, else he’d’ve come home, wouldn’t he?” snapped Bridie.

  Mrs. Malone turned her broad scarlet face to Thunderbolt.

  “What d’ye think ye’re doing, skulking in a stable all night, gossoon?” she roared.

  “I thought they’d arrest me as well,” Thunderbolt explained.

  “Let ’em try!” she bellowed. “Bridie! Dishes!”

  She brought the frying pan to the table and a tide of Malones came in: from the floor, from under chairs, from under the table itself. The smaller ones perched on the big ones’ knees; the uncles had a couple apiece, and Thunderbolt shared his chair with Sharky Bob.

  “Mind yer bacon with Sharky!” said someone. “Gobble it quick, else he’ll have it.”

  Mrs. Malone dished out the fried potatoes, and Uncle Paddy cut slices off a vast slab of boiled bacon. For a short while they all stopped talking. The only sound was the clatter of cutlery and the munching of a dozen full mouths.