Two Crafty Criminals! Read online

  But all Mr. Rummage was uttering now were the words “The dummy—the dummy—” in a hoarse and broken voice. He pointed a quaking finger at the counter.

  They all turned to look. There on the polished wood, lying full-length, was a plaster dummy wearing a “Dux-Bak” mackintosh.

  P.C. Jellicoe strode up and prodded it with a mighty finger.

  “Well?” he said. “Wot about it?”

  “It sat up! Its eyes! Its face! Horrible! It screamed at me!”

  Under the other side of the counter, unseen by anyone, Angela clamped her hands over Dippy’s mouth while Zerlina whispered in his ear, “Hush! Keep quiet, Dippy!”

  Benny said loudly, “It’s clear what happened, Mr. Jellicoe. Mr. Rummage was going to hide all these snide coins what he’s been passing out, and his guilty conscience got too much for him, and he had an illumination.”

  “Hallucination,” said Thunderbolt.

  “Yeah, one of them. You can tell he’s had a shock. He musta been awful guilty. All them coins he’s been passing out all this time …”

  P.C. Jellicoe, still breathing heavily, turned over one of the sixpences in his fingers and then bit it.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Was this in your possession, Mr. Rummage?”

  “Yes. Yes. I admit it. It’s true. I’m guilty. I confess. The dummy—don’t make me stay with the dummy—take me away—”

  P.C. Jellicoe pulled out his handcuffs.

  “I have no alternative but to apply the full rigor of the law,” he said. “Roger Rummage, I arrest you for the utterance of forged coins …”

  In the excitement, the twins managed to smuggle Dippy out of the shop. A crowd was beginning to gather, and once they realized what Mr. Rummage had been arrested for, they became quite angry.

  “Rich man like him taking money out the pockets of the poor!”

  “He should be ashamed!”

  “Oughter cut his head off, I reckon. If it was good enough for King Charles, it’s good enough for him.”

  “All right, all right, move aside,” said P.C. Jellicoe, guarding the shivering shop owner. “This man is my lawful prisoner, and I’m a-going to take him down the station and charge him according to due process of law, so clear out the way, else I’ll fetch you a belt round the ear.”

  No one wanted to risk a belt round the ear from P.C. Jellicoe’s ham-sized fists, so the crowd made way, and a procession followed Rummage and the constable all the way to the police station.

  At the head of it was Thunderbolt.

  “Mr. Jellicoe, they’ll have to release my pa now, won’t they? ’Cause if you’ve got the real criminal, they’ll see Pa’s not guilty.”

  “I can’t be answerable for the decisions of the magistrate,” said P.C. Jellicoe loftily.

  And the gang had to put up with that. When they reached the police station, the crowd was shut out, but Benny and Thunderbolt were admitted as witnesses.

  The sergeant on duty wrote down all the particulars, and looked very hard at Mr. Rummage when he explained about the dummy.

  “It sat up! It opened its eyes! It screamed at me! I can see now that it was a horrible warning, Sergeant. I should never have given in to temptation. I’ll never do it again. Oh, those eyes! Those hideous eyes!”

  “Hmm,” said the sergeant, writing it all down.

  And after Mr. Rummage had been taken away to the cells and the Gladstone bag and the coins and the “Slysitoff” Silver-Plated Carving Knife had been locked away as evidence, the sergeant looked up to find Thunderbolt still waiting anxiously at the desk.

  “You still here? Wotcher want? There ain’t no reward, you know.”

  “I want my pa,” Thunderbolt said.

  “That’s right!” said Benny. “You can’t hold two prisoners for the same offense. It’s against the law. And you know old Rummage done it, ’cause he said so. And I got a photograph to prove it!”

  He brandished the detective camera pugnaciously.

  “So can I have my pa back?” said Thunderbolt.

  “No,” said the Sergeant.

  The two boys opened their mouths and then shut them again. Thunderbolt suddenly felt very small.

  “Why?” he said after a moment.

  “ ’Cause your pa wasn’t arrested for coining. He was arrested for another offense altogether, and he’s been remanded on bail. Have you got fifty pounds to bail him out? I thought not. So what you going to do now?”

  Thunderbolt just stood and gaped. Then he shut his mouth slowly and swallowed hard. Bail? Fifty pounds? And …

  “What was he arrested for, then?” he said.

  “Didn’t they tell you, son?”

  He could only shake his head. His heart was beating fast. The sergeant was looking serious, and Thunderbolt could tell from his expression that he was about to say something terrible—but he didn’t, because there was an interruption.

  Someone was banging and shouting. A voice he recognized—Bridie’s—was raised in anger, and when Bridie raised her voice, the whole street knew about it.

  The sergeant opened his mouth to protest, but another voice joined in. A foreign voice. A Frenchman’s …

  The sergeant and the two boys all turned to look as the door burst open. P.C. Jellicoe, who’d been outside arguing, was nearly knocked to the ground as Bridie rushed in, with Sharky Bob at her heels and the mysterious Frenchman only a foot or two behind.

  Her face was as red as her hair, and a beam of triumph lit her up like a lighthouse. She forced her way to the counter and slammed down a cotton shopping bag.

  “I done it!” she cried. “I found him!”

  “Woss all this?” said the sergeant. “Constable, what d’yer mean letting all this crew in?”

  “She’s got a … relic, Sarge,” said P.C. Jellicoe, looking pale and nervous.

  “A what?”

  “A … yuman ’ed,” gulped the constable.

  Bridie scoffed, and opened the shopping bag to reveal the head of the waxwork Dippy. The sergeant recoiled in horror.

  “What in the world—”

  “It’s made o’ wax, ye great baboon!” she cried. “Except it isn’t wax! Thunderbolt, it’s all right! Ye’re rich, old feller! Tell him, Sharky!”

  “It’s amblegrease!” shouted Sharky Bob, joining in as Bridie whirled Thunderbolt in a jig.

  And suddenly everyone was talking at once, including the Frenchman. But no one’s voice was louder than Thunderbolt’s as he shouted:

  “SHUT UP!”

  “Just what I was about to say,” said the sergeant. “You, girl, what’s-yer-name, you talk. No one else.”

  So Bridie breathlessly said, “It was all them fellers trying to steal our waxwork. And Monsewer here, I didn’t think he was a thief, but we never let him talk. And it got me thinking, and me and Sharky opened up the dummy and found nothing bar straw and old bits o’ rubbish, so it had to be the head, ye see? And it was Thunderbolt’s lump of wax! Except that I remembered his homework …”

  And she spread out a filthy piece of paper on the counter. The sergeant read:

  “Ambergris: fatty substance of a marmoriform or striatedappearance exuded from the intestines of the sperm whale, and highly esteemed by perfumers … What the blazes does that mean? ‘Striated’? ‘Marmoriform’?”

  “Dunno,” said Benny. “No one’s gonna know till we get to S and M in the dictionary. We’re only on A.”

  “That’s not important,” said Bridie impatiently. “It’s the perfume bit that matters. So I found Monsewer here, ’cause I reckoned that’s what he was after, and I was right! I was right!”

  The little Frenchman, who had been twitching with excitement, said, “Yes! Mademoiselle is correct! I am Gaston Leroux, parfumeur! I am the maker of the finest, the most exquisite, perfumes and scents in the weurld! And when my neuhse—this organ so delicate and sensitive”—he touched his nose with the fingertips of both hands, as if he was making sure it was stuck on properly—“when my highly trained and irrepla
ceable neuhse caught the fragrance of ambergris, I followed it. Then I lost it. Then it followed me. This is the finest—and the most profoundly beautiful—piece of ambergris I have evair seen! I meust have it! My genius demands it!”

  The sergeant rubbed his eyes.

  “What d’you mean, you must have it? It belongs to young Thunderbolt here, by the look of things. If you want it, you’ll have to buy it off him. What’s it worth? A couple of quid?”

  “More’n that!” said Bridie. “Tell ’em, Monsewer! Go on!”

  “Ah weel peh,” said M. Leroux with dignity, “the market prahce for this. And that is six pounds per ounce.”

  No one spoke. No one moved. No one could.

  Finally Thunderbolt uttered a squeak.

  “Six pounds? An ounce? But there must be …”

  He goggled at the battered head, with its horsehair mustache, its blood-alley eye, its cracked and stained teeth. Then the sergeant blew out his cheeks.

  “Where’s them postal scales?” he said. “Look sharp, Constable!”

  P.C. Jellicoe handed him a little brass set of scales from the desk.

  “I don’t weunt the mustache,” said M. Leroux. “Or the eye. Or those teeth. Ugh! Remove them!”

  Benny dug them out, and the Sergeant tenderly lifted the head onto the scales and balanced it with the little brass weights.

  “I make that four pounds, fourteen and a half ounces,” the sergeant said. “That correct, Monsewer?”

  “Perfectly!”

  Out came a notebook. The sergeant licked the point of his pencil and began to work out the sum, and so did M. Leroux, and so did P.C. Jellicoe. The constable gave up after a minute and waited for the other two to finish. Finally the sergeant showed his sum to M. Leroux, and they nodded.

  “Four hundred and seventy-one pounds,” said the sergeant.

  “Absolutely correct,” said M. Leroux.

  “But … Sharky must’ve ate about fifty quid’s worth!” said Benny, overawed. “And old Ron the terrier—he ate the nose—”

  And they all looked at Thunderbolt. First he went bright red, then he went pale, then he sniffed very hard and said, “Well … blimey. That’s … that’s enough to pay Pa’s bail! I can get him out!”

  “He’s a lucky man,” said the sergeant.

  M. Leroux paid some gold on account, and the sergeant offered to put the head in the safe until the check had cleared so that everything was aboveboard, and then P.C. Jellicoe took Thunderbolt along to the magistrate’s to see about the bail. Thunderbolt was feeling so dizzy, he could hardly think.

  When the magistrate heard what it was about, he said, “Oh dear me—Mr. Dobney, yes, I remember the case … Dear, dear! Out at last, is he? Bright spark, that fellow! Shocking case! Ha-ha-ha!”

  Thunderbolt didn’t understand it at all, and he was far too nervous to ask. Then there came another walk, to the prison in Renfrew Road, down past Bedlam, where the poor lunatics were locked up.

  P.C. Jellicoe saw Thunderbolt looking up at the dark bulk of the hospital.

  “Pity the poor fellers in there,” he said. “Take more’n amblegrease to get them out.”

  The Prison Governor took the magistrate’s order and sent for a warder, who left the room jingling a bunch of keys. And much sooner than Thunderbolt had expected, there was Pa, in prison overalls, blinking and rubbing his hair. The Governor left them alone for a minute, and neither Thunderbolt nor Pa knew what to say.

  Then Pa put his arms out, and Thunderbolt hurled himself at Pa and pressed his wet cheeks against his father’s chest, squeezing him round the middle tight enough to hurt. He felt he was hurting both of them: himself for ever thinking that his dear pa could do anything as mean as forge money, and Pa for not telling him what he was doing, and himself again for being afraid to go to the police because of that silly lump of lead.

  His father patted his shoulder over and over again, and ruffled his hair.

  “ ’S all right, old son,” he said. “I’m free now. We’ll get out in a minute and go home. Cor, I’m starving. They give us gruel in this place for what tastes like wallpaper paste. And you ain’t et for days, by the look of yer.”

  “Mrs. Malone’s been looking after me,” said Thunderbolt, his face still muffled in Pa’s chest. Then he let go, and while Pa got his proper clothes on, Thunderbolt blew his nose and wiped his eyes so they could both pretend he hadn’t been crying.

  They said goodbye to P.C. Jellicoe and good riddance to the prison, and strolled along the midnight streets towards home. There was a coffee stall in St. George’s Circus, outside the Surrey Theatre, and they stopped and had a cup of coffee with two toffs in top hats, one sailor who was lost, and two brightly painted young ladies.

  “This is my son,” Pa announced. “He’s just sprung me out o’ captivity. And in honor of my release, I’m going to stand coffee all round. Serve it up, my man, and raise your cups, ladies and gentlemen, in a toast to my son, Thunderbolt.”

  The toffs and the sailor and the young ladies all drank Thunderbolt’s health, and he felt as proud as the Prince of Wales.

  Later, when they’d got home and locked the door and lit the fire to make some cocoa on, and Thunderbolt had told Pa all about the ambergris, he asked what he’d wanted to ask ever since the whole business began.

  “Pa,” he said, “what did they lock you up for? Was it to do with them batteries in the basement?”

  “Yeah,” Pa said.

  “Well …,” Thunderbolt went on. “What were you doing?”

  Pa twisted his mouth under his mustache. Then he rubbed his hair again so it stuck out in all directions.

  “It’s a bit embarrassing,” he said. “I didn’t know how to tell yer, ’cause you might think … I dunno what you might’ve thought. It was electric ladies’ corsets.”

  “What?”

  “Electric corsets for ladies with backache. See, I had this notion of a corset with wires in it, and a battery, and you could regulate—well, I don’t mean you, I mean the lady—she could turn the current up or down and keep herself warm and ease the backache. Only the first ladies what tried ’em kept getting awful shocks, and it was costing me more and more to insulate it proper …”

  He had to stop because he was smiling, and so was Thunderbolt, and then the thought of electrically heated ladies leaping in alarm with sparks flying out of their corsets was too much for them, and they burst out laughing.

  “So I borrowed some money to cover it, and I couldn’t pay it back …,” said Pa eventually, wiping his eyes. “Fizz! Crack! Hop!”

  And that sent Thunderbolt off again. He kept waking up in the night and finding a broad grin on his face, so he knew he must be happy.

  But the gang still had some unfinished business to attend to, and no one was more aware of it than Benny.

  “We promised Dippy,” he said. “We promised the old boy we’d get him in the Waxworks, and we ain’t. Here! When’s Monsewer coming back for the rest of the head?”

  “This afternoon,” said Thunderbolt. “The money’s cleared all right now, so the sergeant said he could have it any time he likes, and he’s going to fetch it at three o’clock, he says.”

  “Right,” said Benny. “You leave it to me.”

  And whatever Benny said to M. Leroux must have worked, because when the others came out of school that afternoon, Benny met them by the sweetshop, smiling proudly.

  “Follow me,” he said, and led them round the corner to the Waxwork Museum.

  Professor Dupont, the proprietor, welcomed them, to everyone’s surprise, and showed them into his office, which was lined with shelves containing rows and rows of wax heads.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said the Professor, “my eminent compatriot M. Leroux has told me of the gallant deeds of our friend M. Hisspot.”

  “Hitchcock,” said Bridie.

  “Exactly. Well, in view of his great fame and valor, I am prepared to exhibit a figure of M. Twitchlock.”

  “Hitch
cock!”

  “Just as you say. M. Leroux showed me the head you made, and I must say I revised my opinion of your skill. In fact, I have never seen so remarkable a work of art before.”

  Benny was glowing with modesty. “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon I could do anyone. I could do Sexton Blake for yer—”

  “We will stick to M. Fishdock for now,” said the Professor. “What color are his eyes?”

  He opened a drawer full of eyes, and while the gang argued about the precise color of Dippy’s, the Professor took a secondhand head from the shelf.

  “Take this wax,” he said, “and make me a portrait of M. Hitchpot, and I will give it a place of honor in the Museum.”

  So they took the head, and they chose some eyes, and they set to work.

  Actually, of course, it was Benny who did the sculpting. He felt he had to redeem himself, because the picture in the detective camera, when it was developed, showed nothing but a murky glimpse of Benny’s own stomach; he’d had it on back to front. Still, that didn’t matter, as Mr. Rummage had confessed.

  So he got to work, and life got back to normal. The twins were busy getting racing tips from the stableboys in Hodgkins’s Livery Stables, and Thunderbolt had to catch up with his homework. They’d got to C now: “cataplasm,” “chatelaine,” “cochineal” … As for Bridie, she’d fallen in love with Edmund Fitzwilkins, an actor at the Surrey Theatre, and she hung around the stage door, weak with longing.

  Pa paid back the money he’d borrowed, and the magistrates let him off with a caution, once they’d managed to keep their faces straight enough to do so.

  “No more electric corsets,” they said. “Shocking idea.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Pa.

  So Benny worked alone; but being a genius, he didn’t mind that. The others got hold of Dippy from time to time and dragged him to the hideout to model. He still felt a bit odd from the effects of the horse reviver, but he didn’t want to refuse in case they made him do something else dangerous.

  And after three days of concentrated work, the head was ready. Benny unveiled it proudly, and Dippy and the others stood around, dumb with admiration, almost.