A Slip in Time (6 page)

‘Reward?' demanded the Masher, suddenly pulled up short.

‘Reward?' wheezed Rusty, a dying echo.

‘Better than trying to sell it, eh?' Fadge rattled on. ‘The Police must be onto it by now, if there's a reward offered.'

‘What reward?'

‘There's a poster up outside the theatre,' he told them. ‘LOST, it said, one golden pendant set with red and green stones. Then something about a reward.'

‘Wait a minute! You can't read.' said Rusty.

‘I've got ears. I heard someone read it out,' Fadge said patiently. ‘Lost, it said. And a reward offered. Only if I'd taken it in and told them I found it inside a chicken, they would never have believed me. Where did you find it, Masher?'

‘Find it?' Rusty was still getting his head round the idea of giving the pendant back to the person it belonged to. ‘Wait a minute, Masher. She knows you, don't she? Saw you when you snatched…'

‘Shut up, Rusty! I'm thinking. She saw me stopped and searched and I was clean as a whistle. And I was sorry for the lady – wasn't I? – losing a valuable locket like that. So we hung around and looked, didn't we? And we found it, where the thief threw it away, because they were after him. But we're not telling you, Fadge, where we found it. So you'd better just give us it and we'll split the reward three ways, like you said. That's fair, isn't it?'

‘Fair enough,' said Fadge, hanging on tight to the locket, ready to skip out of reach. Make a run for it if he had to.

‘Hand it over, then.'

‘Which theatre was it?'

‘Don't know the name of it,' said Fadge. ‘Can't read, can I, Rusty? But I can show you. I'll hold onto the goods till we get there, shall I, Masher? I'd like to have it just a little bit longer. Please, Masher?'

Just in case they changed their minds on the way and decided to skip with it after all.

Luckily the Masher was feeling generous. He let Fadge keep the locket all the way back to the theatre.

The Masher peered at the billboard, struggling to make sense of it. ‘L-o-s-t.' That was a good start. He stood back. ‘You read it, Rusty. Read it out loud, so Fadge can hear.'

Painfully slowly Rusty spelled out the words, one speckled finger following the letters along. ‘Lost! Yes. One gol-den…' Years of Fadge's life seemed to pass, it took so long. Some of the words Rusty had to make up, so ‘receive' came out as ‘get' and ‘apply' turned into ‘ask' – but he was close enough.

‘Ba-iley! Right!' said the Masher. ‘Give me that! You wait here, Fadge.'

Meekly, Fadge handed over the prize.
They'd earned it. ‘Whatever you say, Masher.'

He crossed to the other side of the street, so as to have a good view. Then he waited, like the Masher had told him to do, while the two of them walked into Mr Bailey's trap.

‘Beautiful!' murmured Fadge, when they came out again. A sight for sore eyes: Rusty and the Masher collared by a policeman, one in each beefy hand, and both hollering fit to bust that it was a stitch-up! A fit-up! They'd been framed!

‘No sense in all three of us getting caught, eh, Masher?' he grinned to himself. Then he gave a deep sigh, mainly of happiness, partly of indigestion, and made his way round to the stage door, where his broom and his new life were waiting.

Watching from the window of a nearby tavern, young Dr Watson lifted his pint pot and drank a toast to Fadge and his rather odd friend.

‘What happened to your scarf?' said Mum to Jack, as she took the shopping from him. And that was all she said. Nothing about ‘Where have you been gone to all this time?' and ‘I've been worried sick!' like when he went round to Gary's to deliver a geography textbook they'd been sharing and stayed to watch the football.

‘My scarf?'

‘Your Millwall scarf I knitted you. Weren't you wearing it when you went out?'

‘Oh, that! Was I?'

He sure as heck wasn't going out again to look for it! He was back where he belonged, and planning to stay. Still wondering what happened to Fadge, though.

In the front room, Grandad was still
watching
Sherlock Holmes
.

Jack stood in the doorway for a bit. ‘I remember this one,' he said slowly. ‘
The Case of the Blue Carbuncle
, right? The blue carbuncle. It's a stolen jewel. It's hidden inside the chicken, isn't it?'

‘The goose,' said Grandad, without turning round.

‘Whatever. The thief hid it inside the goose.'

‘The goose swallowed it.'

‘Oh, right. Grandad?'

‘What?' Grandad punched the pause button. ‘You got something to say, then say it.'

‘Sherlock Holmes. You said there was no such person.'

‘That's right.'

‘What about Dr Watson, though? I mean, it's quite an ordinary sort of name. What if there really was a Dr Watson?'

‘Bound to have been. Lots of them.'

‘That's what I thought. And who wrote the stories?'

‘Arthur Conan Doyle.'

‘Dr Arthur Conan Doyle?'

‘Yes! He was a doctor. Started off with a practice in – where was it?'

‘Southsea?'

‘That's right. Why all these questions?'

‘Just making sure I remembered it right.'

As Jack climbed the stairs to the attic, he heard the programme getting underway again. Dr Watson's voice sounding gruff and kind of elderly, not very bright. Nothing like the Dr Watson he'd met.

He sank down onto a moth-eaten tapestry foot stool, beside an old tin trunk painted an unlovely shade of green. For want of anything better to do, he flipped open the lid of the trunk. Inside were stacks of yellowing paper. Old account books. Letters tied up in bundles. Postcards and brown photographs. Theatre programmes. Pages of old newspapers. As he rifled through, a single photo fluttered out from among the rest and lay upside-down on the floor at his feet, waiting for him to pick it up.

The back was printed like a postcard. No writing. No stamp. Jack turned it over. There was a picture on the front. A picture of a boy about his own age. Underneath, it said: Master Jack Farthing, as ‘Jo, the Crossing
Sweeper' in
Bleak House
. Looking sternly up at him was Fadge.

Jack grabbed the photo and went tumbling down the stairs again. ‘Grandad! Grandad!'

Grandad sighed and pressed the pause button again, ‘What is it now?'

‘Grandad, were you ever on the stage?'

‘No.'

Jack thrust the photo under his nose, ‘Is this you?'

The old man shook his head, disgusted. ‘I'm not that old. That's my grandad.'

‘You never told me about him.'

‘It was a long time ago. Anyway, you never asked.'

‘I'm asking now. Everything you can remember.'

‘That's not much.' Grandad took the photo. ‘He was just a little feller. Smaller than you when he was full-grown, so he never got to play the hero, just what they call character parts.' He thought for a bit, chewing on nothing. ‘I saw him in a play once.' Another pause for thought. ‘He made me laugh and he made me cry, I remember that. Oh, yes! What was that play called?'

Jack said, ‘There's a load of programmes and stuff upstairs. Shall I bring them down?'

‘Yes,' said Grandad, still half lost in memories. ‘You do that.'

From the kitchen, Mum heard a rumbling like thunder down the stairs, but nobody yelled, so she didn't go out. After that, a long silence. No telly. That was worrying.

When she eased open the front-room door, she saw Grandad still in his chair, with Jack sitting on the floor at his feet, the two of them marooned on a little island in a sea of paper.

Grandad was saying, ‘Jack Farthing – that's my grandad – he had three children, Young Jack, Bella and George.'

George, thought Jack: after the Prince George Theatre, where he had his first acting job? Bella. After Mrs Bella Bailey?

Grandad went on, ‘George was my dad. Young Jack – who would have been my uncle – he was killed in the First World War. A place they called Wipers. He was just turned twenty.'

Poor Fadge. After all the knocks he'd taken. Picked himself up, dusted himself down.
Life, eh? He was going to lose his eldest son. ‘Poor Fadge!'

‘Fadge, yes. That's what they called him. I don't know why. Something to do with him being so small.'

‘A fadge was a farthing.'

‘Was it? I didn't know that.'

‘That's a small brown coin…'

‘I know what a farthing is! Kept all Young Jack's badges he did. And the Bible he gave him.' Grandad was chewing again, on nothing. ‘There was a great trade in Bibles in those days. Small enough to fit in a breast pocket, just over your heart. Thick enough to stop a bullet. They must be in here somewhere.' He was rummaging through the stuff at the bottom of the trunk.

‘There's three or four trunks more up in the attic,' said Jack, starting towards the door. Was it possible he'd met his own great-great-grandad? He wanted proof; proof that he hadn't just dreamed it all. Made it up out of names and scraps and maybe – yes – even a photograph seen once and then forgotten.

He caught a brief glimpse of Mum's back, retreating to the kitchen again, which was
maybe just as well, because she didn't see what happened next. Behind him he heard Grandad still muttering to himself, ‘They've got to be here somewhere. Huh? What's this?'

Turning, he saw the old man, like a conjuror producing the flags of all nations, pulling something from under the debris at the bottom of the trunk. A knitted scarf. The stripes had faded to greyish-white and bluey-grey, during a hundred years or more. But Jack recognised it, from where Mum had counted the stitches wrong and turned the final ‘L' to an ‘I'.

‘His lucky scarf!' said Grandad. ‘That's what he always called it. Odd, though, because he was never a Millwall supporter. He told me once it was something to do with his first acting job.' He sighed and shook his head. ‘I suppose it's just one of those things we'll never know.'

Barrel organ
A small instrument, played by turning a handle.

Cleaver
A tool for chopping meat.

Concertina
A small musical instrument.

Dripping
Melted fat from roasting meat.

Eiderdown
A quilt filled with down.

Farthing
A coin; a quarter of a penny.

Guinea
A coin; one pound.

Home Guard
The British Citizen Army, organised to defend the UK against invasion. Founded in 1940.

Lummox
A clumsy, stupid person.

Sheltered Housing
Semi-independent accommodation for the elderly, with some shared facilities and a warden.

Shilling
A coin; twelve pence.

Siren song
The call of something appealing but potentially dangerous.

Snakesman
A boy skilled at entering houses through small spaces, for criminal purposes.

Wipers (Ypres)
The location of many battles during the First World War.

At any time during Queen Victoria's reign there were around 30,000 children sleeping rough in London. That's not counting those fending for themselves who had somewhere to go at night – which might be just a few square metres of someone else's one-room flat, screened off by a blanket. Some of them cared for younger brothers and sisters, too.

If they didn't work, they starved. So they sold things like flowers, flypapers, peg-dolls, cigars, matches or bundles of firewood; they sang songs or they danced; they scavenged in the gutters and among the rubbish for anything they could sell on for a penny or two: rags, bones, cigar ends, even dog turds (which were used to soften the leather for making gloves).

The alternative was the workhouse, where conditions were made deliberately harsh, to put off scroungers. Even prison was more comfortable, according to one boy who was sent to jail for a month for begging.
The nicest place he'd ever been, he said; next time he'd make sure he was put inside for theft, so they'd keep him a bit longer.

The London fogs known as pea-soupers happened all through the 19th century and up until the middle of the 20th. By this time they were worse, because the exhaust fumes from cars and buses were added to the brew. The smog in the winter of 1952 caused the deaths of over 4,000 people. In 1956, the Government passed the Clean Air Act, which banned the use of coal fires in London and cut down industrial pollution.

There was no such person as Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based him and his method of deduction on careful observation of a professor who taught him at medical school in Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell. Ever since the stories first appeared, people have written to the great detective at 221B, Baker Street, asking for his help.

Other books in the series:

Final Victory • Herbie Brennan

Across the Roman Wall • Theresa Breslin

A Candle in the Dark • Adèle Geras

Soldier's Son • Garry Kilworth

Casting the Gods Adrift • Geraldine McCaughrean

Out of the Shadow • Margaret Nash

Blitz Boys • Linda Newbery

Doodlebug Summer • Alison Prince

A Ghost-light in the Attic • Pat Thomson

Voyage of the Silver Bream • Theresa Tomlinson

Mission to Marathon • Geoffrey Trease

Gunner's Boy • Ann Turnbull