The Otterbury Incident

by C. Day Lewis

  ‘Well, how do you explain those marks in the flower bed?’ I asked Toppy.

  ‘It’s not for me to explain them. But maybe Marshall made them himself, to divert suspicion.’

  This was too much for Ted. He rushed blindly at Toppy, and in doing so cannoned against E. Sidebotham who was still struggling with the ladder. The man was taken off balance, let the ladder go with a crash, and reeling backwards tripped over it and fell down near the flower bed. Even then, nobody laughed. Ted and I went to help him up. As we did so, he said a very curious thing.

  Our theory collapses

  ‘That’s the second time this has happened.’

  He looked at us in a dazed sort of way, then put his hand to his face, felt the false beard, unhooked it, stuffed it in his pocket, and shambled away out of the yard.

  ‘Come on, Butts,’ said Toppy. ‘We needn’t waste any more time here. It’s quite obvious it was an inside job.’

  7. The Clue of the Bitten Half-crown

  Betimes the next morning, Ted and I set up the Shoe-shine stall again by the traffic-lights in West Street. Charlie Muswell and Nick were to work the Flit gun from the basement of Rose Marshall’s shop. But how different it all was from the high hopes and high spirits of Saturday morning! Even the sky looked different – one of those grey, close, dull summer skies that shuts you in like an enormous dish-cover. I remember I had a strange feeling of gloom: not depression exactly, but a feeling that it was all make-believe, that our theories and detection were just a feeble playing at something which wasn’t a game at all: so why bother to go on with them. Ted hardly spoke a word for some time. He didn’t seem able to keep his mind on the job, even. When at last a man asked to have his shoes cleaned, Ted started off vigorously enough, but then the brush moved slower and slower till it stopped, and Ted was staring at nothing, the brush poised in the air, and I had to take it out of his hand and finish the job.

  Well, the morning wore on, and still there was no sign of Johnny Sharp or the Wart. Finally I told Ted he must go and look for them.

  ‘Tell them their shoes need cleaning?’ he said gloomily. ‘How on earth can I do that?’

  ‘Brace up! Get them along here on some pretext. Tell Johnny Sharp your sister wants to see him.’

  ‘But she loathes the sight of him.’

  ‘He’s far too conceited to realize that. Go on, you’ve got to do something.’

  ‘I don’t know where they live.’

  That was a snag, of course. In real life, the police always know where to lay their hands on a member of the criminal classes whom they want to pull in. It made things seem more futile and make-believe than ever. However, I braced up my morale, and told Ted to try around Skinner’s yard first, as they were so often hanging about there. He went slowly off, as if all the cares of the world were weighing on him. It was terrible to see so bright and resourceful a chap as Ted brought down to this. I felt myself smouldering with rage against whoever it was that had taken the money and left Ted to bear the blame. Things seemed to have reached rock bottom, but worse was to come.

  A few minutes after Ted had left, Toppy and Peter Butts rolled up. Toppy was pushing the wooden handcart which E. Sidebotham uses for delivering his papers.

  ‘We’re just trying an experiment,’ he said in a sinister way, and they disappeared into the alley. When they emerged again, they were looking as smug as sin.

  ‘Poor old Sherlock Holmes!’ said Peter Butts.

  ‘The clue of the detective’s footprint!’ said Toppy: and they both burst into roars of laughter. I asked them what on earth they meant. They were only too delighted to tell me. The evening before, Toppy had been struck by E. Sidebotham’s curious remark, ‘That’s the second time this has happened’. It was reasonable to suppose that the man referred to his falling down in the Marshalls’ back yard. From this, Toppy had deduced that it must have happened when he was delivering papers, as he wouldn’t be there for any other purpose. This gave Toppy the idea which was to wreck my whole theory. He had gone round to see E. Sidebotham earlier this morning, and borrowed the handcart. And now he had just discovered that the marks in the flower bed, which I’d said were made by the ends of a ladder, perfectly fitted the two legs of this handcart. What was still worse, Toppy had borrowed one of E. Sidebotham’s boots, and this boot fitted exactly into the mysterious footprint.

  Obviously what had happened was that the man had tripped when coming into the Marshalls’ yard, made the footprint, and driven the handcart’s legs deep into the soil in falling or in pulling himself to his feet again. And no doubt the button he had found on ‘enclosed premises’ was his own, torn off his coat somehow in the process – probably it had got caught on the handcart when he fell. There’s no doubt that E. Sidebotham is a mild case of dual personality – you know, the Jekyll & Hyde thing. A shock, like falling down, switches him from Sidebotham to Sherlock Holmes, or vice versa, as we’d seen yesterday evening. When he was his Sherlock self, he could remember nothing about his ordinary self. And yesterday he’d been detecting his own ‘crime’.

  Toppy and Peter rubbed it in, as you can imagine. I said that at any rate it proved Ted hadn’t made the marks himself, as Toppy had suggested, to divert suspicion.

  ‘No. It just means you’re back where you started, with Ted Marshall as the only possible suspect,’ said Toppy. ‘Well, talk of the devil –!’

  He pointed up the street, and I saw Ted coming along with Johnny Sharp and the Wart. As they came up, Johnny flopped his hand at us and bared his teeth in a foxy smile. Ted got them standing in front of the basement grating for a few moments, while he pretended to show them a book in the shop-window. From sheer force of habit, I called out ‘Shoe-shine, threepence!’ Johnny Sharp, who was cocking his hat at his reflection in the window, looked down at his feet. Then he gave us a nasty leer.

  ‘Coo, what a racket!’ he exclaimed. ‘Think this up yourselves? You ought to be in Big Business, like me, not this small-time stuff. OK, I’ll buy it.’ And he put his foot on the shoe-shine stand.

  I knelt down and set to work with the brushes. Ted was beside me, breathing excitedly, looking to see if Sharp’s foot fitted the cardboard cut-out we’d fixed on the stand with drawing-pins. Naturally, I hadn’t had time to tell Ted the truth about the footmark, so he was all agog. Anyway, Johnny Sharp’s foot was much smaller than the cut-out, and a different shape – he had ghastly, spivvish shoes, with pointed toes.

  When I’d finished them, he called to the Wart. ‘Come on, Jose! Frippence-worth for you. Might as well try and look like a gent when you go around with me. And you can pay for mine too, seeing as you’re in the money.’

  He pranced off into the shop, swinging his padded shoulders. The Wart put his shoe on the stand. And what a shoe! Patent leather gone to seed. Poor old Ted’s face was a study. Of course the Wart’s foot didn’t fit the cut-out either. Toppy and Peter Butts were grinning away like Cheshire cats in the background. And Ted was on hot bricks now, because at any moment Johnny Sharp might come whizzing out of the shop to inquire just what Ted had meant by telling him his sister wanted to see him.

  The Wart put half a crown in the saucer, to pay for Johnny and himself. We hadn’t got enough change, so I popped into the shop to get some from Rose. Johnny Sharp must have left the door ajar, for the bell did not ring when I went in. He was saying to Rose, ‘What’s the idea, sending for me, then? What d’you want?’

  I sidled quietly behind a book-case.

  ‘There’s only one thing I want,’ Rose Marshall replied.

  ‘Name it, ducks, you shall have it.’

  ‘I want you to get out of my shop, this minute.’

  ‘Now don’t go all Roedean with me, beautiful. I reckon I can do you a bit of good.’ Johnny Sharp leant over the counter and began talking out of the side of his mouth. ‘That kid-brother of yours. In trouble, ain’t he?’

  ‘How do you know he’s –’

  ‘I get around, baby. Suppose the flatfeet got to hear o
f it? Sticky look-out for young Ted, eh? Disgrace on the dear old family name. And what’s Mister Richards doing about it?’

  ‘Get out, you overdressed, crawling louse!’ said Rose, in a voice like rusty barbed-wire.

  ‘Overdressed?’ Johnny Sharp sounded quite stung for once. ‘And me paying twenty smackers for this suit? Genuine Savile Row.’ He flapped his hand at her. ‘Nah. Come off it. I can do you a bit of good over young Ted. If you’ll be nice to me. Just a little kiss, to be going on with.’

  I thought it was time to make my presence felt, so I banged the door behind me as if I’d just come in, and asked for change of half a crown.

  Johnny Sharp is called a louse

  The chaps at school once used to call me Professor, because I was so absent-minded. Well, it turned out a mercy I’d been absent-minded again and forgotten to take the half-crown out of the saucer. Rose gave me the change. I popped out again and handed the Wart 2s. He slouched off to lean against a lamp post till Johnny Sharp came out: the Wart always had to prop himself up against something. Toppy took the half-crown and began to spin it.

  ‘Heads I win, tails you lose. Call!’

  ‘Shut up, Toppy, I’ve got to give it to Ted’s sister.’

  He had caught the coin on the back of his left hand and smacked his right palm over it. He was in one of his obnoxious teasing moods; I knew from bitter experience the fatal thing would be to lose my temper or try to snatch it from him. So I just stood and waited. Johnny Sharp emerged from the shop and walked away with the Wart. Ted, who had been hiding in the alley, came out.

  ‘Hand it over, Toppy,’ he said, ‘it belongs to my sister.’

  ‘Not to the Nick Yates Assistance Fund?’ asked Peter Butts nastily. ‘What’s up, Toppy?’

  Toppy was staring at the back of his hand, as if a plague spot had suddenly appeared on it. It gave me quite a turn. After a moment or two of absolute silence, he walked up to Ted, put out his right hand, and said:

  ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong about you taking the money. I know now that you didn’t. Put it there.’

  ‘What on earth –?’

  Toppy always liked to do things the most dramatic way. And he certainly had an audience now.

  ‘I have here a clue to the mystery. A simple, ordinary coin of the realm, vulgarly known as half a crack or a demi-dollar. A less brilliant and alert investigator than myself –’ He couldn’t keep it up any longer – ‘Look, chaps, teeth-marks! My teeth-marks!’

  We were crowding round him, still absolutely in the dark. He went on, his eyes blazing at our mystified faces.

  ‘Don’t you remember? The half-crown the Prune subscribed? I fastened my fangs in it and bounced it on the table, and said it was probably snide. This is the very one. It can’t be a coincidence. I remember my teeth made these marks right across the king’s head on it.’

  ‘Gosh!’ I exclaimed. ‘And the Wart has just put it in the saucer. Which means it was he who stole the money.’

  ‘You’re coming on, Holmes.’

  ‘I don’t see that it follows,’ said Peter Butts stubbornly. ‘Ted could have bought something with it at a shop, and then the Wart might have gone to the same shop later and got it as change.’

  It was my turn to crow. ‘Oh, jolly bright!’ I said. ‘Only, as it happens, the shops were shut before Ted took the money box home on Saturday, and they’re all shut on Sunday, and I’ve been with Ted this morning since before they opened. Anyone but a half-wit would have seen all that.’

  Peter Butts had to admit that Ted’s innocence was proved. We fetched Nick and Charlie out of the basement, told Rose what had happened, then went up to Ted’s room for a council of war.

  Ted was in favour of going straight to the police with the bitten half-crown. But Peter pointed out that this wouldn’t get Nick Yates’s money back.

  ‘They’ve probably spent it, anyway,’ said Charlie Muswell.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ I said. ‘The police can’t compel them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. But we can make them pay the money back by threatening to go to the police with our story.’

  ‘They’d just call our bluff,’ Toppy put in. ‘We haven’t enough proof yet.’

  Nick was up in arms at once. ‘Not enough proof? You mean you still think Ted may have taken it?’

  ‘Kindly do me the favour of dropping down dead,’ Toppy replied good-humouredly. ‘I know Ted didn’t take it. But we haven’t enough evidence to prove that Johnny Sharp and the Wart did.’

  ‘And we never will, unless we find out how they managed to switch the two boxes,’ said Charlie.

  We all stared at one another despondently, chewing the toffee Ted had very decently provided out of his sweet ration. It seemed a hopeless nut to crack.

  ‘Look here,’ I suggested at last, ‘let’s try to work it out another way. Put ourselves in the place of the criminals. Toppy, suppose you were Johnny Sharp –’

  ‘Thanks awfully.’

  ‘– and you wanted to get hold of our wooden money box, to make a replica of it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t climb into Ted’s room in broad daylight, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Well, what follows?’

  ‘Search me.’

  Nick suddenly gave a yell, which so startled me that I half swallowed my toffee and nearly choked to death.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ he shouted, snapping his fingers. ‘He must have known about the box already!’

  ‘What is this, Yates? Explain yourself,’ said Toppy in the Headmaster’s chilly tones.

  ‘If Johnny Sharp couldn’t have seen the box after the Prune gave it to Ted, he must have seen it before. That’s logic.’

  ‘It’s plumb crazy to me,’ said Peter Butts. ‘How could he?’

  But Toppy was looking as excited as Nick now. ‘You’re right. He could have given it to the Prune himself, to pass on to us.’

  It was so easy. Everything fell into place. The Prune had walked away from the original meeting when it was decided to raise funds for Nick, refusing to take part. But later he had come back with the box. Why had he changed his mind, and where had he got the box? According to the theory we worked out between us, Prune must have met Johnny Sharp and the Wart, mentioned to them what we were planning: the two criminals saw an opportunity for easy money, and told the Prune to give us the box without saying where it came from – bribed him, maybe, for it wasn’t very likely that the Prune could have afforded otherwise the 2s. 6d. he later subscribed. Johnny Sharp either possessed a duplicate box, or made one between then and Saturday.

  ‘How can we prove all this?’ asked Ted.

  ‘Easy. We’ll put the Prune to the question,’ answered Toppy with a sinister glance.

  ‘Yeah. Third-degree him,’ said Nick.

  ‘Skin him alive and hang him up to dry,’ said Charlie Muswell.

  We all tore downstairs and pelted along to the Prune’s house. He wasn’t in, but his father said he’d gone down to the river to fish.

  The Biddle is a fair-sized river, about seventy yards at its broadest where the road bridge spans it on the outskirts of Otterbury. A bit farther west there is a place where you can hire boats, and beyond that a bathing pool. When we got to the bridge, we looked up and down the river. In the distance, downstream, just about where the allotments and shacks peter out into meadowland along the south bank, we spotted a bright yellow object. It was one of those ex-RAF dinghies which the boatman lets out cheap. A figure with a rod sat motionless in it.

  ‘There he is!’ shouted Nick and started haring off the bridge towards the towing-path. Toppy caught him up, and stopped him.

  ‘Don’t be a fool! He’ll take fright if he sees a whole army charging down at him. Leave it to me.’

  The rest of us were to approach the objective by a detour through the town, while Toppy and Peter sauntered towards it along the towing-path.

  Five minutes later, as we crept through the allotments towards the water’s edge, I heard Toppy hail the doomed Prune. W
e took cover behind a shack, some thirty yards away, and I pulled out my notebook to write down the evidence. Round the corner of the shack we could see the Prune very slowly take in his line, lay down the rod, put on the paddle-gloves, and propel the inflated dinghy towards the shore. Ted was stiff as a statue, Nick quivering with impatience like a terrier at a rat-hole. I was feeling pretty strung up myself. We had about twelve hours to solve the mystery, unless we cut school tomorrow. Knowing it was a race against time, and the Prune was only the first hurdle to be jumped, made everything seem to go in slowmotion. The white paddle-gloves dipped so slowly into the water, the dinghy yawed sluggishly from side to side; twice the Prune stopped altogether and asked Toppy what on earth he wanted, interrupting his fishing.

  Finally he reached the bank and scrambled ashore. Toppy was sitting on the bank, kicking his heels, just as if nothing was up at all. He said:

  ‘We’ve got a message for you. From a friend of yours.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Johnny Sharp.’

  I could see the Prune go tense. He gave a half-look behind him, as if he might jump back into the dinghy; but Peter Butts, reaching out his foot, had pushed it away from the bank.

  ‘Johnny Sharp? I hardly know him. What the –?’

  ‘Johnny Sharp wants you to tell us all about the box he lent you – the one you gave Ted to keep the money in.’

  The Prune about to be grilled

  Ted’s name was the prearranged signal for the rest of us to come out of hiding. The Prune looked round wildly, but we and the river hemmed him in on all sides.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’d better come clean, and double quick. We know he gave you the box, and –’

  ‘Well, what if he did?’

  ‘Ah, you admit that. Tell us just what happened, and we’ll leave you alone.’