The Otterbury Incident

by C. Day Lewis

  You may be surprised that nobody had thought of this before. But there is a strict rule at our school against going up the Abbey tower, in case some nitwit should take it into his head to jump off or to drop heavy objects on the heads of people below, I suppose. And it so happened that none of those present had ever felt an urge to break this particular rule.

  At this point Ted made a false move, though I must say he can hardly be blamed, since Toppy persuaded him into it.

  ‘Call in the sentries,’ Toppy said. ‘Let’s all go up after him.’

  Ted looked a bit dubious about this. But Charlie Muswell said the Wart obviously must have gone up to the tower, and he couldn’t get down again past us on the narrow spiral staircase. And Toppy emphasized the importance of numbers, for their psychological effect on the Wart. So Ted gave way, the sentries outside the Abbey were called in, and we all began to make our way, a chain of boys like some giant centipede, slowly creeping up the winding stairway. Ted was leading, then came Toppy, Peter Butts, and myself.

  After climbing what seemed like three miles of steps, round and round and round, I felt as dizzy as if I’d been on a roundabout at a fair. The leaders paused for breath on a sort of gallery overlooking the belfry. I’d no idea the bells would be so huge. They were like buoys at sea, and I could imagine them tumbling and rocking when the ropes were pulled. Just at that moment, there came a deafening clash, which made my heart stop dead. It was the chimes striking for four o’clock. As if it was a signal, reminding us that we only had a few hours left to wring a confession from the criminals, to get our money back and pay for the window and save Nick from having his puppy sold by that stinking guardian of his, we moved off again, faster now, running up the stone stairs, bumping against the walls, brushing through cobwebs, our feet clattering like hammers.

  Then we were at the top. A stone landing and a wooden door. Ted turned the handle, pushed. The door opened a little, then slammed shut again. All the boys, pushing up from behind us, forced it gradually back. It gave way suddenly. Ted and Toppy were hurled through it and went sprawling across the leaden floor of the tower. Close behind them, I came out into the open air. When my eyes had stopped dazzling with the sunlight, I saw the Wart, his face sickly white as a slab of half-cooked veal, pressing himself back against the coping in the far corner of the tower.

  Now we had him! He’d come to the end of his tether all right. For the last time we formed our semi-circle, cutting him off from the door. For the last time, Toppy began:

  ‘I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time there was –’

  ‘Ow, cheese it,’ interrupted the Wart. ‘What d’you little twerps want?’

  ‘We want our money back.’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  ‘On my ruddy oath, I don’t –’

  ‘Charlie, go and fetch that policeman who’s waiting,’ snapped Toppy. The bluff worked. We helped it by narrowing our semi-circle round the Wart, who gave one glance over the coping: the ground was very far below.

  ‘Yurr, wait a minute. You don’t want to go dragging the cops in. It was only a game, see? A joke, like.’

  ‘OK. Well, the game’s over now. Shell out,’ said Toppy.

  ‘But I haven’t got it. Me and Johnny shared out, see? And I bin and spent a bit of it.’

  ‘You’ll have to get the money for us, then. We’ll give you till six o’clock,’ said Ted.

  A look of stupid cunning flickered over the Wart’s face.

  ‘Sure, I’ll get it for you. Five pounds odd, eh? You just let me down off this ruddy tower, and I’ll get it. Gives me the creeps.’

  ‘And just to make sure, you horrible specimen,’ said Toppy, ‘you’ll sign a confession here and now that you took the money. We’ll tear up the confession as soon as you hand us the cash. And it was £5 8s. 6d., in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Why, chums, a confession? Draw it mild. Don’t you trust me?’

  We all roared with laughter. I whipped out my notebook and pen, and handed them to him.

  ‘Well, go on,’ said Toppy. ‘You can write, I suppose?’

  ‘Now don’t you go getting offensive. What d’you want me to write on this paper?’

  ‘I’ll dictate,’ said Toppy. ‘Ready? “I, Joseph Seeds, hereby confess that –” ’

  ‘Go a bit slower, chum. I didn’t have your education,’ muttered the Wart, laboriously writing.

  ‘ “– hereby confess that, in company with Johnny Sharp, I stole –” ’

  ‘Leave me out of it, buddy,’ came a soft, cold, poisonous voice from behind me.

  We whipped round. Unheard, Johnny Sharp had come up the spiral stairs. He was standing now with his back to the door, and an expression on his face I had never seen there before. His right hand was in his coat pocket.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind me. I just happened to be passing when I saw some of you kids at the church doors; and then you went in. So, having heard you was chasing my old buddy Jose around, I ses to myself, I wonder what they’re up to: they wouldn’t be going to chuck my old buddy Jose off the tower by any chance, would they?’

  ‘Yurr, Johnny, these little perishers ’ve –’

  ‘Because if they was going to chuck him off the tower,’ Johnny Sharp continued remorselessly, ‘I thought maybe I’d lend them a hand.’

  ‘Turn it in, Johnny,’ said the Wart. ‘You can’t do this to me. Get me out of here. Let’s go for these little –’

  ‘Why should I? You were just writing a confession, weren’t you? OK. Go ahead. Only don’t bring me into it, that’s all. If you pinched some money off these kids, that’s your look-out. Guess you’ll have to give it back. Nothing to do with me.’

  The Wart swore a string of absolutely unprintable oaths, and made a lunge for his accomplice. But we were between the pair of them; and the next moment the Wart was huddling back against the coping, his face grey as yeast.

  Johnny Sharp had flashed his right hand out of his pocket. He had a yellow suede glove on it, and his fingers held an open razor. He said, in a slow caressing sort of way:

  ‘Now don’t let’s get rough. Somebody might hurt himself on my razor.’ Then suddenly his voice had an edge on it like the razor’s. ‘Hand over that notebook, Jose, and move fast!’

  Ted tried to snatch it first, but Johnny Sharp gave him a cuff that sent him reeling aside.

  ‘Don’t any of you interfere,’ the man warned. ‘Stand back over against the wall, the whole pack of you! Get moving!’ His razor-blade flickered out like a snake’s tongue, flashing in the sunlight. What could we do? He tore out of the notebook the page on which the Wart had begun to write his confession, and crumpled it in his pocket. With another flash of the venomous blade, he motioned the Wart to precede him down the stairs. He backed towards the door himself; then cocked his hat at a jauntier angle, grinned at us all, and said:

  ‘Thanks for the memory, you kids. You’ve had a good game. But I shouldn’t go on with it, if I was you. You forget about it, and little Slasher here will forget about it too. But if I have any more from you, if one of you should whisper a word of what’s happened, little Slasher will make him sorry he was ever born. Got the idea? OK. And just so that you can cool your silly little heads for a bit, I’m going to lock the door at the bottom of the stairs when I go out. Maybe that’ll teach you not to interfere with Johnny Sharp again.’

  Johnny Sharp and his Slasher intervene

  9. The Secrets of Skinner’s Yard

  ‘He can’t really do anything, can he?’ Young Wakeley, in a slight quavering voice, broke the silence which followed Johnny Sharp’s departure.

  ‘Of course he can’t.’

  ‘Only carve us up into strips.’

  ‘The trouble is, we can’t do anything either,’ said Toppy. ‘It’s a stalemate.’

  Ted’s Anglo-Saxon temper, smouldering for some time, now burst into flame. ‘We’re not going to be beaten. We’ve got them on the run. Let’s
go through with it. Hands up anyone who’s windy.’

  All our hands shot up as one man’s. Ted grinned. ‘What I mean is, hands up who wants to chuck the whole business.’

  Not a single hand went up.

  ‘Good show. We go ahead with our plans for the Commando raid on Skinner’s yard, then. We’ve got to get hold of that box. It’s our last chance. And Johnny Sharp’ll never expect us to take action so quickly: he thinks we’re cowed by his threats.’

  ‘I bet he’s wondering if we’ll go to the police,’ said Nick.

  ‘So we will. When we’ve got the box.’

  ‘What you don’t seem to realize,’ said Toppy, whose mercurial spirits had sunk to zero, ‘is that we’re prisoners on top of a tower. We’re marooned. Isn’t that so, Charlie?’

  Charlie Muswell, who had gone down to see if Johnny Sharp had really locked the door at the bottom of the tower staircase, had just returned. ‘Yes, it’s locked all right. I banged on it; but there can’t be anyone in the Abbey to hear,’ he said.

  As if by common consent we all moved to the side of the tower overlooking Abbey Green. A dizzy cliff of stone fell away beneath. People walking below were like ants dragging unwieldy shadows behind them.

  ‘Yell for help,’ said Ted. ‘All together. Now!’

  We gave a terrific yell. One or two people looked up, and waved. Just a jolly party of schoolboys having fun on the dear old Abbey tower. We yelled again and again. We made signs. We tried shouting in unison ‘We’re locked in! Open the door!’ But it was no good. Our words must have sounded like the confused babble of rooks to the people below.

  ‘We might starve up here if no one comes,’ said young Wakeley.

  ‘Don’t be a wet. We’ll get off all right.’

  ‘What? By parachute?’ asked Toppy.

  ‘Look here, why don’t we all go down to the belfry and swing on the bells,’ exclaimed Nick. ‘That’d give the alarm.’

  ‘No need for that,’ said Peter Butts, who had been silent till now. ‘Trust your uncle Peter, the scientific wizard. We’ll use a parachute, like Toppy said.’

  ‘Just one parachute for the lot of us?’ sneered Toppy.

  ‘Yes.’ Peter Butts turned to me. ‘Write a message for help in your notebook, George. Tear out the page and give it to me. Now will some kind lady or gentleman oblige me with the loan of a small penknife, some string, and a large handkerchief, preferably dirty.’

  We crowded round him. In less than a minute he had made a handkerchief parachute; the penknife was attached to the corners of it by four lengths of string and the message was firmly clasped by the blade.

  A message for help

  ‘Now,’ said Peter. ‘Wait till a boy passes. Grown-ups wouldn’t be bothered to wait for it to come down.’

  We waited about a minute. Then we saw an errand boy crossing the Green with a basket on his arm. We yelled fit to burst. He looked up. Peter hurled the parachute as far ahead over the coping as he could. Leaning over we shouted again, all of us pointing like maniacs at the handkerchief parachute, which opened beautifully and went swaying and floating down towards the Green. The errand boy was gazing up at it, open-mouthed. It came to earth, looking no bigger now than a flake of snow, quite near him. I suppose of all the prayers which through the ages had ascended from the venerable pile of Otterbury Abbey, none was more fervent than the silent prayer which went up from us at this moment, that the errand boy should examine our parachute.

  We watched him, in dead silence now, walk up to it. He dabbed at it with his foot. He looked up at us again. He made as if to move off. Then the bit of paper fixed in the penknife must have caught his eye, for he bent down. The next moment he was waving to us and running towards the Abbey door. We hustled down the winding stairs. Fortunately, Johnny Sharp had only turned the key of the door below, not taken it away with him. We were free! Toppy gave the errand boy half a Mars bar he had in his pocket, and ushered him politely out of the Abbey, asking him not to tell anyone about our being rescued from the tower, as it was against the school rules to go up it at all. Of course his real reason was that, if the boy talked, it might conceivably get round to Johnny Sharp and the Wart, and we wanted them to think we were still marooned up there. Then we settled down in the bell-ringers’ loft for a last council of war …

  The narrative that follows, since I have no supernatural powers and cannot be in a dozen places at once, is compiled from the evidence of a number of eye-witnesses. But, even allowing for Toppy’s well-known exaggeration, it is pretty accurate. At any rate, it satisfied Inspector Brook, sceptical though he was at the start.

  When we left the Abbey, we broke up into pairs, so as to avoid giving the impression, if by accident we should meet the criminals, that the gang was still on their trail. Our instructions were to go home first and pick up any weapons we could muster, then to rendezvous at 17.30 hours in Ted Marshall’s house. Ted had been rather against carrying weapons, but Toppy said they might come in handy if Johnny Sharp got free with his razor.

  It was just as well that Rose had gone out to tea with Rickie after closing the shop that afternoon, because she might have put her foot down if she had seen the motley array of armed thugs who slipped into her yard at 5.30. Some of us had had considerable difficulty in accounting to our parents for dashing out of the house at such an hour, armed to the teeth. There were air-guns and air-pistols, water-pistols, clubs, wooden swords, wicked-looking sheath knives, scout ropes. Peter Butts turned up with a bow and a quiverful of arrows; in amongst the arrows there were three rockets which he’d been saving up for November 5th. Toppy produced from one pocket a bag of pepper and from another a Mills hand-grenade, which he’d swiped from the mantelpiece in his father’s study; it was a souvenir of the 1914–18 war, and quite harmless without its detonator, of course; but Toppy said it might shake Johnny Sharp’s morale if he lobbed it at him.

  Ted had got the whole raid wizardly organized. At 17.40, two bicycle scouts were sent out with orders to station themselves one at each end of Abbey Lane. Their task was to note any suspicious characters entering Skinner’s yard before the main body arrived at the Incident, and later to give warning on their whistles if Skinner himself should approach while Toppy and Ted were in the workshop. Simultaneously, Ted himself slipped round the corner into a public call-box and rang Skinner’s place on the telephone. In a minute or two he was back: there had been no reply, which meant that the workshop was empty – Skinner had presumably gone home, as he generally did about 5 o’clock. We moved out, down West Street, singly, as far as possible concealing our weapons. By 17.50 hours we had infiltrated over the Incident and taken cover: the bicycle scouts had nothing to report. The task of this main body, which was under Peter Butt’s command, was to cover the Commando party’s retreat should they encounter opposition. If Ted and Toppy succeeded in breaking into the premises, and found the wooden box there, the rest of us would give them an armed escort to the police station. If they got hold of the box, but ran into trouble on the way out, the supporting troops would attempt to hold up or harass the enemy, while Toppy and Ted – whichever had the box – would dash for the end of the lane, leap on to one of the scouts’ bicycles, and pedal flat out for the police station.

  Such were the plans. Just before 18.00 hours, looking up and down the lane to make sure there was no one in sight, Ted and Toppy rushed for the double doors of Skinner’s yard. Four of us helped to hoist them over, then retired to cover again. We heard their footsteps moving stealthily across the yard and fading out of earshot. Then there was silence, a long long silence, broken only by the bumping of our hearts as we lay scattered over the Incident, our heads well down, our weapons ready …

  Ted and Toppy, pausing in the shadow of the high wall, looked round. It was an ordinary builder’s yard, with stacks of timber, bricks, etc., lying about. On their right, facing the double doors and about 20–30 yards from them, was a sort of warehouse place, with a few windows high up, showing that it had two storeys. A
t one side of this warehouse, at right angles to it, was an open shed, used for storing materials. They looked into this shed first. In the middle of it there was a cleared space, with oil on the floor: here, they reasoned, Skinner kept his lorry. And, as Toppy afterwards admitted, they were shaken to the wick to find the lorry was not there; because, unless Skinner had gone away for the night, it meant that he would be returning, any moment. So they hurried up with their reconnaissance.

  The warehouse itself had a big wooden door in front, and a smaller one on the side facing the open shed. Both these doors were padlocked. Hurriedly they debated whether they should break one of the dusty ground-floor windows. They decided to do this only if no other way of getting into the workshop presented itself. Going round to the side again, they found a drainpipe and shinned up it, Ted in the lead. At the top, the warehouse roof sloped gently up to a glass skylight. The skylight, they rejoiced to see, was propped open.

  We who were concealed on the Incident could not see them clambering up the mossy-tiled roof, because the angle of the building cut them off from us. But we heard a faint rattle, which was the sound of the skylight being opened higher to let them through.

  It was lucky that they had borrowed a scout’s rope from one of us, for the floor was a drop of twelve feet at least from the skylight. They made the rope fast to the iron support of the skylight, and climbed down. They were in the workshop all right. Benches, a lathe, carpentering tools, wood shavings, boxes of nails and screws – the whole place was littered with stuff, and they hardly knew where to begin their search. They decided to start at opposite ends of the place, and work towards each other. The search was thorough enough: they turned over all the litter on the benches and in the corners, they opened cupboards, they scuffled in heaps of shavings and in old sacks. Then at last, when they had pretty well ransacked the whole workshop, Ted opened a deep drawer in a bench in the middle of the room, and gave a cry of triumph.