Just Henry

by Michelle Magorian

  ‘Now, you’re not to let on I told you, though you’ll know soon enough when we catch the boat.’

  ‘When’s that?’

  ‘Tuesday, of course.’

  He fell silent, watching her in disgust as she slurped her tea.

  ‘This is just like old times, ain’t it, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry, feeling sick. And then he had an idea. ‘It’d be nice if we had more time to spend together tomorrow too, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You mean lock her in the cellar and leave her there?’ And she began laughing.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he said, struggling to control his anger. ‘What would make me very happy, Gran, is if I knew Molly was going to be safe.’

  ‘All arranged, dear. Those two men are going to leave her outside a church.’

  ‘But she might wander off and get run over by a car. I’ve got a better idea.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘And then if things go wrong . . . ’

  ‘What do you mean, if things go wrong?’

  ‘Ted and Percy might get caught.’ His grandmother looked alarmed. ‘And they might tell the police about you and Dad.’ She began to look worried. Take it slowly, he told himself.

  ‘Suppose we all go out to the shops and I go to a telephone box.’

  ‘You what!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m not listening to this.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Gran. Let me explain.’

  ‘You ain’t making no phone call.’

  ‘You’ll be with me listening to everything I say. That way if anything goes wrong, you’ll be in a good light.’

  ‘What d’you mean, a good light?’

  ‘We all go to the phone box,’ he repeated, ‘and I ring the police.’

  ‘Over my dead body!’

  ‘If I say anything you don’t want me to say, you can stop the call.’

  ‘I don’t like what I’m hearing,’ she protested.

  ‘I ring the police,’ repeated Henry carefully. ‘I tell them that they can find the missing girl, Molly Carpenter, holding her dog in the phone box.’

  ‘No. I don’t like this,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t like this at all.’

  ‘I make out it’s like a game. I tell her that if she waits there, she’ll have a lovely drive in a police car and they’ll take her home to Mummy and Daddy. We watch her from somewhere nearby so she doesn’t run away, or a stranger doesn’t go off with her. Once she’s picked up by the police there’ll just be the two of us.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘It’ll be more dangerous if she stays here and something happens to her.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to her. Your dad’s a clever man. He’s got it all worked out.’

  Henry began to think quickly of every British thriller he had seen.

  ‘I know that, Gran. But Ted and Percy aren’t as clever and I overheard them say they’re going to get rid of her. If you help her to safety, you’ll have saved her life, which means that if you’re caught, the judge will be more lenient with you.’

  ‘Judge?’ she said, looking alarmed.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to be hanged, would you, Gran?’

  Her hands flew up to her throat.

  ‘Don’t say such things. They wouldn’t hang me.’

  ‘They would if you were an accomplice to murder.’

  She shook her head wildly.

  ‘It’d be either that or life imprisonment,’ he added.

  She gave a small moan.

  ‘And like I told you, once she’s being looked after by someone else, it’ll be just the two of us and I can look after you properly.’

  She nodded.

  ‘When do you think we should do it?’ she asked fearfully.

  ‘First thing tomorrow morning, good and early, before it’s too crowded.’

  ‘I hate all that queuing,’ she said, ‘and your dad’s got me registered as Walter Briggs’s wife and it makes me feel peculiar.’

  Henry sat at the table, his eyes on the kitchen window, waiting for daylight. Eventually Molly opened her eyes and burst into tears. She ran over to him and flung her arms round him. ‘Want Mummy,’ she sobbed, ‘want Daddy.’

  ‘You’ll see them soon,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We’re going to take you to a special box with a telephone in it and a nice policeman is going to pick you up.’

  She clung on to him. ‘Henry come too.’

  ‘Yeah. Course I will. Later. There won’t be enough room in the car, see? They’ll come and pick me up after you’ve got home. All right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you’ve got to look after doggie,’ he said firmly.

  ‘And you promise you won’t run off and leave me,’ Gran asked.

  Henry swallowed. He had never broken a promise ever. But if he didn’t do what she asked, he knew she wouldn’t agree to his plan.

  ‘I promise, Gran.’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ she said as they set off down a side street. ‘But I’m still not sure we’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be punished for something you didn’t do, Gran.’

  ‘No,’ said Gran, her voice trembling, ‘neither do I.’

  Henry recognised a little row of shops he had seen out of the car window and he remembered there was a telephone box nearby. He spotted it opposite a café. Perfect.

  ‘We can watch from the café window and I can get you a cooked breakfast.’

  He put his hands in his pocket and gazed at the coins, his Odeon ticket to Treasure Island. Luckily his father hadn’t searched him.

  ‘That’d be nice,’ she said.

  Molly was still gripping his hand. He had placed the Peter Rabbit book in his jacket pocket while she walked with her other arm wrapped tightly round the dog. Every now and then, he gave her fingers a squeeze.

  ‘Look, Molly,’ he said in the brightest voice he could muster, ‘look at the nice telephone box. That’s where we’re going.’

  They crossed the road. Henry’s legs were shaking by now and the roof of his mouth seemed to have lost all moisture. He began to sweat. Keep calm, he told himself. He pulled open the door. They squeezed into the box but the door wouldn’t close properly and his gran was beginning to look flustered.

  ‘Here goes,’ he said cheerfully and he lifted the receiver. He dialled the first nine and watched the silver dial crawl with painstaking slowness back to zero. He dialled the second nine. His mouth was growing even drier and the calm smile he was struggling to keep on his face was making it twitch. And then he was dialling the third nine.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Gran, moving nearer to the phone.

  He grinned even harder as the dial returned to zero for the last time. The phone was ringing. It rang and rang for a lifetime. And then a female voice said, ‘Which service do you require? Fire, Police or Ambulance?’

  ‘Police,’ he said croakily.

  His gran held her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Your name?’ said the voice.

  ‘John Smith.’

  ‘And where are you phoning from?’

  Henry had seen enough films to know that this was what they would ask and he had taken a good look as they were crossing the road.

  ‘A telephone box in Arthur Street,’ and he gave the woman his number. ‘Opposite the Mayflower café, outside Pearson’s hardware store.’

  There was a click and then a man said, ‘John Smith?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What seems to be the matter?’

  ‘I know the whereabouts of the missing girl, Molly Carpenter.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said the policeman slowly. ‘Where is she, sonny?’

  ‘She’s in the telephone box beside me holding her dog.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Henry, his voice trembling. He turned to his sister. ‘Molly, say hello to the nice policeman,’ and he held the phone to her ear.

  �
��Hello,’ she said. There was a long pause. ‘Molly,’ she said eventually. ‘Auntie cross.’

  Henry snatched the phone back.

  ‘That’s it!’ snapped his gran. ‘Why should we help the little horror?’

  ‘Hello,’ said Henry quickly.

  ‘I heard your companion,’ said the man quietly. ‘Are you her half-brother, Henry?’

  ‘What’s he sayin’?’ Gran asked.

  ‘I take it you can’t say much,’ said the policeman.

  ‘That’s right,’ answered Henry. ‘In Arthur Street.’ He then turned to his gran, holding the receiver but acting as though the call was finished so that the policeman would be able to hear him at the other end.

  ‘That’s done now, Gran. You go and wait in the café opposite and save us a seat. There’s still a table free in the window.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she protested. ‘I promised yer dad I’d keep an eye on you all the time. It’s more than my life’s worth if you got away.’

  ‘After the police pick Molly up and you have a nice breakfast, I’ll help you with the shopping and then we can go back to that bombed house.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Are you glad you’re with me and yer dad now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘You need a few edges knocked off you, though. You’ve been getting a little bit lah di dah, you know, a bit above yourself. I know you’re disappointed about that job you wanted but all boys have silly ideas about what they want to do, and then they have to grow up and do what their dad tells them.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ain’t you goin’ to hang up?’

  Henry nodded and put the receiver down.

  He took the little book from his pocket and handed it to Molly.

  ‘Read it to Molly tonight?’ she said, looking up at him.

  Henry nodded. He was afraid that if he spoke, his voice might betray the pain he was feeling. If the police didn’t find him before he left the country, he might never see her again.

  ‘Molly,’ he said steadily, ‘we’re going to play that game I told you about now. And if you’re good at it you’ll have that drive in the police car.’

  Suddenly she hung on to him.

  ‘You come,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Later. I’ll be watching you from over there.’ He could see she was frightened. ‘If you’re good, the policeman will give you an ice cream. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  She nodded vigorously.

  ‘You’re a clever girl,’ he said.

  He hated letting go of her. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Look after doggie,’ he whispered.

  ‘You come soon?’

  ‘Very soon.’

  As he walked away from the telephone box, he felt a lump so large in his throat that he thought he would be sick. He prayed she wouldn’t follow him. As if reading his thoughts, Gran said, ‘If she comes after us, we’ll have to take her straight back to the house.’

  The table by the café window was still empty. Henry stared out at Molly standing in the telephone box, small, frightened and alone, while his gran wittered on about her shoes hurting her. He sat and watched and waited, willing the police to arrive soon. Suddenly Molly spotted him and pushed against the door.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he whispered inside his head.

  And then a police car arrived and within seconds a policeman was beaming down at her. As he picked her up in his arms Henry watched the dog fall to the ground and then he was gone.

  ‘She’s dropped her dog,’ he said, standing up.

  Gran gripped his arm fiercely.

  ‘Sit down,’ she hissed.

  ‘She won’t sleep without her dog.’

  ‘Let her stay awake, then. She won’t be disturbing us, will she?’

  Henry watched the police car drive away. He gazed despondently out of the window, unable to look at her in case he betrayed his feelings. No one would ever see the photographs of Ted and Percy now. A woman with a little boy opened the door to the telephone box. Immediately the boy gave an excited cry and picked up the dog. Henry could only look on helplessly.

  As if from nowhere, another policeman appeared, threw open the door and spoke to the mother. He saw the woman say something to the boy. The little boy handed the dog up to him and the policeman walked off and out of sight.

  Henry almost cried with relief.

  7. Facing the consequences

  NO POLICE CAME TO THE CAFÉ TO PICK THEM UP. AS HIS grandmother ate her way noisily through her breakfast, Henry kept glancing out of the window, but it was as though he had been abandoned. He couldn’t understand it. He knew the policeman he had spoken to had overheard where he and his gran would be sitting, so why didn’t they come? When it was time for them to leave, Henry cursed himself for the promise he had made not to run away from her. But if he hadn’t made it, he reminded himself, Molly wouldn’t be safe.

  For the rest of the day, he waited hand and foot on Gran in the bombed house while she talked about the old times or complained about her legs. And as Henry listened, smiling and nodding, he knew there would be trouble. His father was a violent man and expected to be obeyed.

  By the time she had gone to bed he felt sure that the film would have been discovered. In spite of his promise to her, as soon as he heard her breathing deeply he tried to open the kitchen window, but it was stuck. Even if he had managed to break the glass without waking her, he still wouldn’t have been able to climb through. It suddenly occurred to him that not only had the house been carefully chosen, it had also been prepared for his captivity. He crept past the sitting room, moved slowly up the staircase on to the jagged landing and stared at the exposed sky. He could have jumped but it was a long fall and if he had broken an ankle he would be even more at the mercy of his father.

  The landing began to shudder under his weight and he retreated and sat for a while at the foot of the stairs, thinking. Eventually he returned to the kitchen, made a rough bed for himself on the stone floor and attempted to fall asleep, but every time he closed his eyes he found himself trying to work out where his father might be taking them. It couldn’t be France, otherwise his gran wouldn’t have said that learning French was a waste of time. He had tried to worm more information out of her earlier that evening but she had refused to give anything else away.

  The only thing she had told him was that it wasn’t worth lighting the range in the morning, as his father would be coming to collect them early. It was then that Henry realised that Molly would have been left on her own, locked up in the house until the afternoon, when Ted and Percy came to pick her up. He had done the right thing, whatever the consequences.

  Once daylight fought its way through the grimy window, he began to feel sick with dread. He jumped. The key was being turned in the front door. He pulled his jacket up to his nose and pretended to be asleep. Footsteps moved across the hall.

  ‘Time to get up, Mum,’ his father said, and then he heard the feet come stamping into the kitchen.

  ‘Get up, you little tyke!’ he shouted, and the jacket was flung off him.

  As Henry hauled himself to his feet, his grandmother shuffled into the room. His father slammed some official-looking papers and passports on to the table.

  ‘When did Ted and Percy come, then?’ he asked Gran.

  She stared at him and then glanced at Henry.

  ‘Ted and Percy?’ she repeated faintly.

  ‘They come last night or this morning? I told them to come this afternoon for the girl. I got to give them some instructions. Why’d they come for her early?’

  ‘They haven’t been yet,’ whispered Gran.

  ‘Where is she, then? You didn’t lock her in the cellar, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where is she, Mum?’ he asked with unnerving quietness.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘I can see that. Gone where?’

  His gran pointed to Henry.

  ‘He heard Ted and Percy say they was going to
get rid of her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Murder her.’

  ‘Where is she, Mum?’

  ‘In a church. I did what you wanted them to do before they got their hands on her.’

  ‘When did you leave her there?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘Yesterday morning.’

  ‘Yesterday morning!’ He paused. ‘Hang on a minute, what church?’

  ‘The one near that café.’

  ‘What church near the café?’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s called. Can you remember, Henry?’

  ‘Saint something. Saint er . . . ’ He thought wildly and then he remembered the film with Ingrid Bergman in it. ‘Joan. Saint Joan.’

  ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Alfred?’

  He gave a brief nod.

  ‘And you locked Henry up in ’ere?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she faltered.

  ‘Molly wouldn’t have gone without me,’ said Henry quickly. ‘I told her to sit in a pew and wait till she saw a man wearing a white collar back to front.’

  ‘You went out with him and the girl, Mum?’ exclaimed his father. ‘You might have been seen.’

  ‘We went early,’ said Henry.

  ‘That’s right,’ added his gran.

  ‘If she’s been picked up, she’ll have been taken to a police station. The police will know she must have been hidden somewhere round ’ere. It’s a wonder the place isn’t crawling with cops. We’d better scarper. I was going to leave you ’ere for a couple of hours while I went and had a chat with Ted and Percy but you’ll both have to come with me now.’

  Henry stared at them, hardly able to breathe. The thought of being stuck with them for years made him feel desperate.

  ‘I’ll just have a quick dekko in the other room,’ said his father, ’make sure we haven’t left anything we wouldn’t want the police to find.’

  Henry watched him leave the room. His gran quietly closed the door after him. She was beaming at him.

  ‘It’ll just be the three of us,’ she whispered. ‘I’m glad you changed your mind about coming with us. You and your father can look after me in me old age,’ and she took hold of his arm and squeezed it.

  And then Henry saw the most extraordinary diamond, a diamond which a few months ago he would have considered a dungheap.