The Mystery of the Cupboard

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “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.

  16

  The Jewel Case

  Omri 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?”

  It was all beyond Omri’s control. His head was spinning, and he could hear the voices of Gillon and Tony coming across the paddock.

  “All right!” he said. “But do it! Swear you will!”

  Bert raised his right hand solemnly and rolled his eyes heavenward.

  “I swear on my mother’s grave, I
will return the jewel case to its rightful owner, Miss Jessie’s sister, at her house on Clapham Common, this very night!” he said, in pious tones.

  “Now, send us back, dear,” said Elsie nervously. “My poor little pussycat will be wanting his tea.”

  “And my old trouble-and-strife will think I’ve conked out for good,” said Ted.

  Omri held Bert’s eyes a few moments longer. The voices were close now, almost under the window. “Omri! Where are you?” Then Gillon’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “Do it,” said Omri. “Goodbye.” And he slammed the door of the cupboard and locked it.

  He just had time to put it out of sight under his bed, and throw a magazine over the open cashbox, when Gillon and Tony burst in.

  For the rest of the day Omri went through the motions of normality with his brain in turmoil.

  Now — no, then — perhaps at this very moment — no, that wasn’t it, but somewhere, sometime, Bert was (or wasn’t) keeping his promise.

  If he took back the jewels, what would happen?

  Nothing would happen the way it did happen.

  Maria might not have to sell the house. She might not have to move to the little house in the East End where Omri’s mother grew up.

  They might not have been poor.

  Perhaps tomorrow, if Omri asked, his mother would look at him blankly and say, “What are you talking about? Of course my grandmother wasn’t poor! We were quite comfortably off.” Perhaps next time she was dressing to go out, he would see her putting on an emerald bracelet, a diamond pin…

  Was it possible that by forcing Bert to take part of his haul back, Omri had meddled once too often? It sounded good, but you never knew. You couldn’t know what even a tiny change in history could cause.

  Omri put his head on the table and groaned aloud.

  “What’s wrong, darling? Have you got a pain?”

  “No - no. I’m okay.” He pushed himself up from the table. “Sorry. I have to go to the—”

  “All right, all right,” said his father testily. “No need for a public announcement.”

  Omri went upstairs to his bedroom and sat down where he had been before. Slowly he pulled the cupboard out from under the bed and opened it.

  The three figures were there. Plastic now, of course. They were different from the ones you could buy today. They were the same figures Frederick had given to Jessica Charlotte when such toys first began to be made. They really were crude, as he had said — you could see where the mould hadn’t fitted together properly and the liquid plastic had made a sort of frill all round the figure. They weren’t painted or coloured, they were just a reddish-brown.

  The other interesting thing was that the people looked young. Ted was wearing the uniform of a policeman from the turn of the century. Elsie was a young girl in a long dress with a bustle at the back and her hair piled on her head, Bert a typical burglar wearing an eye mask that he hadn’t worn when he was real. But the sack was there, a little rough brown lump in Bert’s plastic hand.

  Omri set the cupboard where he’d thought of it being, in the centre of his line of shelves piled on the bricks. He stared at the bricks. Little Bull, Twin Stars, and the others were there in the hollows between, lying as if waiting… It wouldn’t take a second to get them out, and—

  But no. He’d broken enough of his promises to himself.

  He decided it would be best to keep the three figures of Ted, Elsie, and Bert in the cashbox. He lifted off the magazine he’d thrown over it, and raised the lid.

  Only then did he see the fifth package and remember about the aquamarine earrings.

  17

  A Sudden Emergency

  The second he picked it up, he froze. It wasn’t nearly heavy enough. And a faint, living warmth came through the brown paper.

  It wasn’t the earrings! It was another little person.

  He opened the paper in a panic.

  Inside was a tiny lady. She lay in the crumpled scrap of dry paper, apparently fast asleep.

  Through the hastily snatched-up magnifying glass he could see her breathing. She hadn’t suffocated anyway.

  Omri examined her with his eyes, his heart still beating furiously. She seemed to be dressed rather like Elsie’s plastic figure, in a long period dress of a bright crimson-red. It had a bustle, and a very full skirt. Beneath the hem her minute feet stuck out, wearing high button boots. There was a big hat (a tiny big hat) with a huge feather plume, lying near her head as if it had fallen off as she lay there. She was holding something in her hand. Omri looked closer but couldn’t make it out. The only bit he could see was no more than a tiny dark speck sticking out of her fist.

  He couldn’t understand this! Who could she be? The others hadn’t mentioned anyone else besides Jenny, and the sergeant who had died at Trafalgar.

  He put his finger on her shoulder and gave her several very gentle pushes. She stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake.

  What was he to do? Turn her back into plastic for the moment? Leave her sleeping and risk her waking up when he wasn’t there?

  At that moment of decision, there was a sudden commotion under his window.

  He could hear a woman’s voice that he knew from somewhere, saying something to his father in a breathless, frightened voice. Omri left the little figure lying on the table and went to his window.

  Seen from above, he couldn’t at once recognize the newcomer. But then she turned and he saw her face. It was Peggy, Tom’s daughter.

  “…Would go and do it… always was stubborn…” she was saying. She seemed to be on the verge of tears, and was twisting her hands together. “I told him not to — then the very minute my back was turned, it’s up with the ladder, and…”

  Omri forgot everything else and dashed down the stairs and out into the garden.

  “What? What’s happened? Is it Tom?” he cried even before he reached them.

  She turned. Her face was mottled red and white.

  “It’s him all right,” she said. She sounded more angry than anything. “Went up on our roof to put back a tile that’d come off… thinks he’s still up to roofing, at his age, silly old man, and of course his foot slipped—” She gave a harsh sound like a sob.

  Omri’s father said, “Is he badly hurt?”

  She looked at him and nodded.

  “I’m really sorry. But, er - what can we do?” asked Omri’s father.

  “I called the ambulance but they said they can’t come for a bit, so I called the doctor, and he’s made Dad comfortable on the floor, like, till they can take him to hospital, but he looks terrible, and he keeps on saying he wants the young lad who come on Sunday. Mistle Hay Farmhouse, he said, I didn’t want to leave him but he said ‘Go now’. So I got on my bike and come.”

  The whole family had come out now and was crowding round.

  “Why does he want you, Omri?” asked his father in an odd voice. “Why you?”

  “Got something to tell him, seemingly,” said Peggy. “Please, do come, it’ll put his mind at peace.”

  “But he’s - he’s not going to die, is he?” asked Omri.

  Peggy only stared at him with her mouth open.

  Omri’s father said, “Just let me turn the car round in the lane, and we’ll take you home. Leave the bike here.”

  Tom was lying on the living room floor of the little house, his head turned to face the open door. As soon as Peggy pushed Omri in ahead of her, the old man’s face seemed to change.

  “I remembered,” he croaked out. His face twisted with pain.

  “How are you, Dad?” Peggy asked.

  Tom groaned for an answer.

  “They’ll be comin’ soon,” she said comfortingly. She gave Omri another little push. “Go and speak to him,” she whispered. “Don’t be frightened.”

  Omri hadn’t realized he was frightened, but he was. Tom looked really bad. His face was contorted and there was a big black lump on one side of it. There was a bad smell in the room, and as Omri slowly appr
oached, he saw that Tom had been sick.

  Omri tried to ignore that. He knelt down beside Tom, who was lying on a folded blanket, avoiding the mess as well as he could. The old man moved his hand as if he wanted Omri to put his own hand into it, but somehow Omri couldn’t. It was hard enough just looking at that hurt, swollen face.

  “I done for m’self this time,” muttered Tom. “Should’ve listened. Poor Peg. Old fool, me. Right on my silly head.”

  “Why - what did you want to tell me, Mr Towsler?”

  Tom moved his head a little, and winced. “Get them others out. Her too.”

  Omri looked over his shoulder. Peggy and his father were in the doorway. Peggy looked baffled.

  “I got to clean you up, Dad—”

  “Not now! Go out. Good girl.”

  Omri’s father touched Peggy’s arm. They went out and shut the door.

  Tom’s hand, rough and rather dirty, had crept to Omri’s shirt. Now it clutched it and pulled his face down.

  “I remembered. As I fell, like. There was somethin’ else.”

  Omri stared into his eyes. He didn’t know if he was really dying, but he looked very strange, quite different from before. Omri could hardly breathe, not just for the bad smell but for fear. He had never been so close to someone badly hurt.

  Tom’s voice came out in jerks.

  “She told me. What she wanted. It was hard. Hard to find it. Shops… Local no use. Too small, see. Take the bus, she said. Dorchester. No good again. Too small. Came back. Told her. She give me money. London. Train. All that way… First time, me! Had to ask… big shops…”

  He closed his eyes and his head rolled over towards the floor. Omri could only watch, helplessly. The rough hand had released his shirt, but he couldn’t lean back because when the words started again, he could barely hear.

  “Bought dozens of ‘em,” Tom said. “How could I know…”

  “Dozens? Of what?” Omri asked sharply.

  The urgency in his voice seemed to recall Tom to consciousness, from wherever he was slipping away to. His head jerked, his eyes opened. He grasped Omri again and now his eyes were piercing.

  “Brought ’em back in a box,” he said with a strange, grim urgency as if giving him a vital message. “Showed ’em to her when she — on her own — she looked at ’em all — picked one. Is that the one, I said. Yes, she said. I’ll throw the others out, I said. Then she give, like, a cry. No, she said. Don’t do that. Take care of ’em. This one’s me but everyone is someone.”