The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Page 11

  Eddie and Zucchini took the accident far less calmly. You don’t expect to be sitting in the back garden, quietly enjoying the sunshine and occasionally glancing through a hole in the wall created by a gas explosion, and suddenly have a balloon land with a crash right next to you.

  Eddie’s heart was pounding like a steam train and the escapologist looked as white as Mr Dickens had with all that plaster dust on him twenty-one pages ago … but it was the woman from the basket of the balloon who’d come off worse.

  The balloon had come down at great speed, with the basket skimming the tree tops then dragging through the trees before coming to rest on the ground … though ‘rest’ is rather too nice a word for it. ‘Rest’ makes one think of relaxing under cool sheets in a shaded room on a sunny day with ones favourite cuddly toy. ‘Rest’ makes one think of ‘having a little lie down’. No, the balloon didn’t come to rest, the balloon came to a sudden stop, but its occupant didn’t. The occupant of the basket became the occupant OUT of the basket (which, technically speaking, means that she wasn’t really an occupant any more). She went flying through the air and landed in a rose bush.

  Eddie had never seen anyone like her. He’d never seen a woman tangled up in a rose bush before, that’s true, but that’s not what I mean. Eddie had never seen a young woman with such a tight corset and quite so many layers of wonderfully frilly petticoats …

  ‘Daniella!’ cried the Great Zucchini, running forward to untangle her from the thorns.

  ‘Harold!’ cried the woman, in what novelists of the day would have called ‘unbridled joy’. Because a bridle is something you put on a horse, it’s hardly surprising that you don’t find one on joy. And, anyway, this wasn’t Joy but Daniella.

  The name rang a bell with Eddie. What was one of the first things the Great Zucchini had said when he’d stepped from his coffin in the stable – after that bit about ‘Where on earth am I?’ …? ‘Where is my Daniella?’ – that was it.

  Well, here she was, and what an extraordinary effect she was having on Eddie.

  Okay, so crash-landing in a balloon and being catapulted into a rose bush is a pretty attention-grabbing way of making an entrance, but Eddie suspected that Daniella would have had a similar effect on him if she’d just strolled up to him and said, ‘Good morning, Master Dickens.’

  Most of the girls and women Eddie ever met wore dresses in such exciting colours as grey or black, or greyish-black. Not only that, these dresses began just below the chin and ended on the ground. Eddie was about nine years old before he even realised that his own mother actually had legs.

  Yet here was this beautiful young creature – with a face a bit like the photographic plate of a camel Eddie had seen in a book called Animals Other Than Horses Which Kick Too – who had a neck, and ankles and lots of frilly bits under a tartan dress of red, blue and yellow …

  ‘Are you an idiot?’ asked Daniella, removing a snail from her ear and putting it back in the rose bush where it must have come from.

  ‘S-S-Sorry?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘The way you’re staring at me with your mouth open, and all that dribble?’

  Eddie snapped his mouth shut like a clam and wiped the dribble from his chin with his sleeve. There wasn’t that much.

  ‘This is Edmund Dickens,’ said Harold Zucchini hurriedly. ‘He rescued me.’

  Daniella snorted. It was an enchanting snort, thought Eddie. It was the sort of snort that he imagined the beautiful camel in that book would have made. ‘A kid rescued you? The world’s greatest escapologist? I’d keep that quiet, if I was you.’

  Daniella spoke with the sort of voice which shouted ‘Bring out ya dead!’ during the plague, or ‘Who’ll buy me luvverly roses?’ in dreadful musicals about life in ‘Good Olde London’ in the time of Eddie Dickens.

  This sounded strangely exotic to Eddie, who now spent most of his time at Awful End with his family, Dawkins, Gibbering Jane and an assortment of ex-soldiers. (More on them later, I expect.)

  There was a lot of explaining to do, and Zucchini told his side of the story first. ‘So tell me,’ he said at last: ‘how did I end up here in Awful End?’

  Daniella looked at Eddie quizzically. ‘Can I say in front of ’im?’ she asked.

  Zucchini sighed. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘The lad has as good as accused me of cheating anyway. He’s guessed that, in the world of escapology, all is not what it seems.’

  Daniella glared at Eddie. ‘It ain’t cheatin’,’ she said, hotly leaping to Zucchini’s defence. ‘It’s the tricks of the trade, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Fuwuwuu,’ said Eddie, looking lovingly at the camel-nosed showgirl and trying not to dribble. Again.

  ‘Are you sure ’e ain’t no simpleton?’ she asked.

  ‘Just tell me what went wrong,’ insisted the escapologist.

  ‘Right you are, Harold,’ said sweet Daniella, wiping her nose across the back of her sleeve.

  *

  Apparently, all had been going fine. The Great Zucchini had been ceremoniously loaded into the back of the glass-sided hearse and taken, in procession, up to the field next to St Botolph’s. Of course, what the unsuspecting punters didn’t know was that this was no ordinary hearse. No, this hearse had been especially constructed by Mr Skillet.

  Once the Great Zucchini’s coffin was on board and the hearse was moving, specially angled mirrors sprang into place that gave the impression that one was looking at the coffin but one was really looking at a picture of the coffin reflected back from the roof of the carriage. Meanwhile, the real coffin was shielded from the outside world. Under Zucchini’s coffin was a secret compartment containing another, identical, coffin, and the two coffins could be swapped – one heightened and one lowered – by means of a rotating floor which Mr Skillet called the ‘flip-flap’. So the coffin which ended up on top of the secret compartment and which was unloaded at the field contained nothing more than a couple of sandbags to give it weight.

  I’m sure a diagram with lots of dotted arrows and ‘Position A’ and ‘Position B’ would be jolly useful here, but the Honoured Society of Escapologists forbids it, and I’m not about to risk waking up to find myself handcuffed in a trunk at the bottom of a river just so that everyone understands Mr Skillet’s flip-flap.

  (The sandbags adding weight to the other coffin had been sewn by the convicts at the nearby prison, by the way. They normally had to sew mailbags, and had sewn the sandbags specially, which was nice of them. Not that they’d had much choice. This had been before the mass break-out, leaving a number of escaped convicts up there on the moors – remember? – and the others locked up in their cells, with no more fun things, such as sewing, to pass the time.)

  Well, you can guess what happened next. The coffin with the sandbags in it was buried and the screens erected around it, with the crowd thinking that the Great Zucchini himself was down there … and this, according to Daniella, was where things went wrong. What should have been happening in the meantime was that, with the hearse parked around the corner and away from prying eyes, Zucchini should have opened his coffin from the inside – just as he’d done in the stable block of Awful End – in the secret compartment, pressed a button flipping him and the open coffin back on top, and sneaked out of the hearse.

  How he was then supposed to have got behind the screen so that he could appear to have come from the coffin and dug through the earth was deliciously simple, but Daniella had no need to reveal that part to Eddie. Why? Because everything had gone wrong before then. As Daniella told Zucchini (and the enthralled, drooling Eddie), the horses leading the hearse had bolted whilst the first coffin was still being buried.

  ‘Suddenly, they rang the alarm bell at the prison because more of them convicts had escaped and it’s really loud even miles away,’ Daniella explained. ‘It gave them poor beasts such a dreadful fright they ran, draggin’ your ’earse behind ’em. John said he saw the back wheels go over such a bump that the mirrors flew back and your coffin shot up ou
t of the hidin’ place like a rabbit out of a hat.’

  ‘Which is when I must have banged my head and knocked myself out,’ gasped the escapologist. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Well, there was the problem …’ said Daniella.

  The problem was that, interesting though a runaway hearse was, waiting to see if the Great Zucchini could escape from a coffin buried six feet underground was far more interesting, so Daniella and the others had to stay by the screens and pretend that he was down there whilst they decided what to do next. It was, as Daniella so neatly put it, ‘a right pickle’.

  ‘Me and Skillet ’ad a discussion in ’ushed tones while I played stirrin’ music on me organ,’ Daniella explained. ‘John went off in search of the ’earse. He even borrowed an ’orse from the landlord of the local ’ostlery, but he couldn’t find ’ide nor ’air of you.’

  When she said ‘’ostlery’ she meant ‘hostelry’ and, before you get sick to the back teeth of trying to decipher her words with all those letters missing at the front, I’m going to use a narrator’s trick: I’m going to cheat. When I report what the lovely Daniella said, I’m going to use the whole words and leave it up to you to imagine how she said them. I’ll add a sprinkling of ‘’ere, what you lookin’ at, mate?’ now and then to remind you how she actually sounded, but it’s up to you to remember most of the time. Fair enough?

  ‘But the hot-air balloon,’ said the Great Zucchini. ‘Where on earth did you get the hot-air balloon?’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ said Daniella, with a sniff. ‘Merryweather –’

  ‘My manager,’ the escapologist reminded Eddie.

  ‘Yeah, him,’ said Daniella. ‘If you remember, he invited Wolfe Tablet –’

  ‘The famous photographer,’ Zucchini explained to Eddie.

  ‘Him,’ nodded Daniella. ‘Merryweather asked Wolfe Tablet if he wanted to come and take some photographs of your latest escape.’

  ‘But I thought he wasn’t interested? He failed to respond to the invitation,’ said Zucchini. ‘In fact, I seem to recall him saying that he thought I was a fraud and a charlatan.’

  ‘Well, he does,’ said Daniella, ‘which is why he turned up in a balloon so that he could look down on the escape from above and see how it was done.’

  The Great Zucchini’s face reddened. ‘The dirty rotten scoundrel!’ he fumed. ‘The lowdown good-for-nothing … I’d like to knock his block off! I’d like to …’

  Eddie was worried that he was about to burst a blood vessel. The only time he’d ever seen Mr Collins look so angry was when one of the assistant ironmongers had muddled the three-quarter-inch nails with the half-inch nails … but he hadn’t been half so furious as this.

  Daniella mopped Zucchini’s brow with the laciest of lacy handkerchiefs Eddie’d ever seen. He wished that it was his brow that she was mopping. (Sickening, isn’t it?)

  ‘Calm yourself, Harold,’ she insisted. ‘Nosy old Mr Tablet didn’t get to see nothing because you wasn’t there, remember. When his nasty hot-air balloon came sailing over the site where we’d buried you, he couldn’t catch you sneaking behind the screen because you weren’t around to do no sneaking. You was here, or in the hearse or wherever you was. But you certainly wasn’t there.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Zucchini, with a triumphant snort. But Eddie didn’t think it was nearly as pretty a snort as the sort of snort Daniella made. ‘So for all he knew, I really was deep down in the earth inside that coffin!’

  ‘Exactly!’ grinned Daniella.

  ‘Serves him right!’ said Zucchini.

  Eddie noticed black boot polish trickling out of what little hair Zucchini had left, and down his face. He’d worked himself into a right sweat. ‘But how did you get t-t-to be in the balloon, Daniella?’ Eddie asked, excitedly, doing his very best not to dribble.

  ‘Skillet and some of the crowd caught a hold of his guy ropes that was trailing from the basket and they pulled him to the ground. Most people seemed to think it was part of the act and, when they realised that he was none other than the world famous photographer Mr Wolfe Tablet, they was all interested in him and his equipment … Havin’ failed to expose any trickery and feelin’ right welcome, he agreed to go for a drink with Merryweather and leave his precious balloon tied up to a tree.’

  ‘Overnight?’

  ‘He had no choice. He kept on pestering Merryweather to tell him some tricks of the trade, so Merryweather agreed. Well, kind of. He bound and gagged the photographer in his room at the Rancid Rat and said, “Now get out of that!” He’s still there now, I suppose.’

  ‘Pah! More fool him!’ said Zucchini, with a nervous laugh.

  ‘Isn’t he going to be a bit annoyed that you held him prisoner, stole his balloon and wrecked it?’ asked Eddie.

  Daniella was about to say something insulting when Mad Aunt Maud came crashing back through the undergrowth, in the distance, dragging her leg with the sprained ankle behind her. ‘Peelers!’ she cried. ‘The place is overrun with peelers!’ With that, she disappeared behind a compost heap.

  ‘The police?’ sighed Eddie. ‘I wonder who they’re after?’

  Episode 5

  Appealing to the Peelers

  In which almost everyone is in deep doo-doos

  Now, I’m sure it’s not true nowadays – though some of you are probably thinking ‘He’s just saying that’ – but, in Eddie’s day, most police officers seem to have been sent on a special course called Getting Hold of the Wrong End of the Stick. If it was possible to misunderstand something that someone – a suspect, in particular – was saying, then a peeler/police officer would take the wrong meaning.

  Say, for example, you’re a suspect and you say ‘Good morning’ to a peeler, the peeler will immediately ask: ‘What’s so good about this particular morning, ay? Done something to make yourself feel particularly good, now, have ya?’ and you know full well that the ‘something’ he’s thinking of is something illegal, like stealing a diamond the size of a plover’s egg or kicking a chicken, and that he’s hoping to nail you for doing it, simply because you were being nice and polite and saying ‘Good morning’. For, as well as getting hold of the wrong end of the proverbial stick – which is like a real stick but, somehow, less sticky – peelers were particularly fond of nailing people.

  Now ‘nailing’ in this context doesn’t actually mean nailing as in ‘nailing a bookcase together’ (or even on your own), or even nailing as in ‘nailing poor unfortunate people to crosses’ (as the ancient Roman authorities liked to do), but ‘nailing you for a crime’ or ‘pinning a crime on you’. In other words, being able to say ‘You dunnit’ (even if you haven’t done it, but it’d be a bonus if you had).

  Today people say: ‘You can never find a police officer when you need one’, unless, of course, they have found a police officer when they needed one, in which case, they’ll probably say nothing. In Eddie’s day, people would probably have said: ‘What’s that funny man in the funny hat and the funny uniform?’ and pointed, laughed or thrown stones. Or all three.

  Anyway or anyhow, with Eddie’s limited experience from an earlier adventure, he had little doubt that, whether he told the complete and utter truth or a dirty sackful of lies, the peelers wouldn’t believe him either way. At the station, he, Daniella and the Great Zucchini were taken to different rooms.

  ‘Be brave, Daniella!’ Eddie called out, as he was dragged in the opposite direction from the others. Because he was trying to sound brave himself, and because he was prone to dribble at the mere thought of her, his voice sounded very strange indeed. Daniella snorted and looked more indignant than afraid.

  Eddie found himself in a small room with one table, two chairs and a mousetrap in the corner with a large piece of cheese on it, suitably old and smelly.

  ‘This is the interview room,’ said the peeler, ‘so called because it’s where the interviews take place, see?’

  Eddie nodded, politely.

  ‘Now I have some questions for you,�
� said the peeler, ‘and I expect some answers.’

  Eddie sighed.

  *

  Eddie awoke with a start, and with a starfish on his face. It was a full three seconds before he remembered where he was. When he did, he let out a groan, wishing that the peelers would do the same for him – let him out, that is.

  There was a graunching sound and the door to the cell opened. In walked a peeler with a chipped enamel mug. From it hung a label which read:

  PROPERTY OF HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT

  ‘What you need is a nice hot cup of tea,’ said the policeman.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eddie, accepting the drink.

  ‘What you get is a lukewarm mug of water. What do you think this is, the Fitz?’ The Fitz was a newly opened restaurant in London which was so posh that even the doorman was the Earl of Uffington and the washer-upper was a much decorated soldier – he had three layers of wallpaper under his uniform.

  ‘How much longer are you going to keep me here?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Have you heard of habeas corpus?’ asked the peeler.

  Eddie shook his head. (His own head, that is. He knew that shaking the policeman’s head might annoy him.)

  ‘Then we can keep you here as long as we like,’ said the peeler.

  ‘Would it have made a difference if I knew what habeas corpus was?’ asked Eddie, suspiciously.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the peeler, hesitantly. ‘Look, I must go. I just wanted to tell you that the inspector will be here to speak with you shortly.’

  He left Eddie to finish his drink alone. The minute the door was shut behind him, Eddie felt flushed with guilt. He hadn’t even asked about poor Daniella! What a worthless humbug he was. All he’d been thinking about was himself, when poor Daniella might be languishing in a nearby cell or worse. ‘Wait!’ he cried.