pail of sawdust. ‘But we can’t stand talking to you all night. Some of us has got work to do.’
Mr Green found the missing key back on its nail in his cubbyhole two days later. He never found out that Savage had pinched it and had a duplicate cut in Barrowland quick.
‘I’m fly, you see,’ Savage boasted to Specky and Noddy. ‘I didn’t steal that key. I just took a lend o’ it and put it back before wee Greeny had time to miss it. You see the idea is you’ve got to make sure you’re not suspicious.’
‘So you’ve a key to get in by Tulip Place and you’ve a key to get in through the school,’ Specky nodded in admiration.
‘You’re going to cause a lot of trouble,’ Skinny muttered sadly. ‘Percy’ll find out sooner or later.’
‘It was for Percy’s sake I done it,’ Savage grinned. ‘I think he dreams mair nor he sees. But maybe he’s right about somebody watchin the door round the corner. So I can get at the money—’
‘You’re not to say money!’ Skinny cried, anguished.
‘Well, I can find the road to El through the basement then,’ Savage amended unctuously. ‘Is that better?’
‘And how do you get past the janny’s house?’ Specky asked. He was offended that an ape like Savage had managed to do more than an intellectual like himself.
‘I put my sannies on,’ said Savage. ‘I know when wee Greeny and his wife are watching the telly, and I just creep across the playground. It’s as safe as the Bank.’
‘How much have you taken?’ Specky asked bluntly.
‘Enough,’ Savage laughed at him. ‘Do ye want to come in? Percy’s daft. Ye canna leave it all to him, can ye? I’ve got enough put away for life.’
‘Well, don’t you ever boast to Frank Garson or he’ll shop you to Percy right away,’ warned Specky. ‘I think he’s suspicious already.’
Mr Green wasn’t suspicious.
‘Just one of those things,’ he said to his wife when the key turned up. He never made mysteries out of the inexplicable, he never brooded over how, why and wherefore. He simply put aside every anomaly in daily life as ‘just one of those things’, and went on living his busy life. So far as he thought about the return of the missing key at all he supposed one of the cleaners had taken it in mistake for another, forgotten about it, and put it back in its place rather than own up after he had asked questions about it.
He went down to the cellar alone on the Sunday afternoon, not meaning to do any work, just to estimate how much work would be needed to put the place in order and get rid of the lumber – once he was sure what was lumber and what wasn’t. As on his previous visits, a glance was enough to depress him. He went sadly up the narrow steps, shaking his head and far from saying a prayer for the repose of the soul of the late Mr Phinn.
‘What a janitor!’ he muttered as he locked the door. He felt he had an enormous cupboard there, with countless skeletons. ‘It must have been worrying about that place killed him.’
He was quite unwilling to tackle the job of tidying the cellar himself in spite of what he had said to Mrs Phinn. He took her at her word and got her to come in the next Saturday afternoon and work for nothing. To help her, he drafted in another cleaner, Mrs Quick, promising her a few bob out of his own pocket. Mrs Mann heard of the job and offered her services too for a mere tip. Mr Green didn’t mind. He knew Mrs Mann was just being nosey and hoping to come by pickings, but he couldn’t see what pickings there could be in a cellar full of school rubbish. He stood in at the start of what he called jocularly Operation Underground, gave the three cleaners a general idea of what he wanted done, and when they were started he stealthily slipped upstairs and went out for a pint.
The cleaners were good workers. By shifting the position of the various items, putting like with like, marshalling everything along the walls and sweeping and mopping a central area they created an illusion of tidiness. The cellar certainly looked different when they were finished, and to that extent they had made an improvement in it. Mrs Mann found the three tea-chests hidden behind a rank of broken desks along the darkest wall where the roof of the cellar descended to meet the rising floor halfway under the playground, and rummaged in the first of them. Maybe there was something would never be missed.
‘Nosey!’ cried Mrs Phinn, scowling from the centre of the cellar, and drawing the back of her rough hand across her sweating brow. She had a sudden jab of pain when she saw Mrs Mann kneeling over the chest. It reminded her of the way she had found her husband, sprawled just like that, stone cold dead over the very same chest.
‘How are we to know what’s rubbish and what’s not if we don’t look?’ Mrs Mann asked hoity-toitily over her shoulder. ‘That’s what wee Greeny’s paying us for. He wants to know what he can throw out and what he can’t. You’ve got to be nosey to do the job right.’
She plunged into the crate again and surfaced with the fairy wand. She flourished it towards Mrs Phinn and in the voice of a pantomime fairy she chanted. ‘And now I banish the wicked witch! Begone, bugger off, you ugly old bitch!’
‘Ach, that’s the school concert stuff,’ Mrs Quick cried with a wave of her broom.
Mrs Phinn’s scowl narrowed to a glare. It was the sorrow of her life that she had been the belle of the district between seventeen and nineteen, lost her good looks and her figure, and finished up, she well knew, an ugly old bitch. The worries of marriage, the strain of making ends meet and coping with a husband who kept bad company and drank too much, had ploughed her youth’s fair field with furrows of bitterness.
‘It’s an awful pity they stopped doing a concert every year,’ said Mrs Quick. ‘I used to enjoy them. They used to do some rare pantomimes and a kind of variety show. And they were good for the weans and a’. It learned them good to speak right.’
Mrs Mann put the wand across one of the broken desks and dived into another tea-chest, her broad bottom level with the edge of the chest as she delved deeper, her head and torso inside. She came up again and turned round with a top hat in her hand.
‘Oh, I remember that turn!’ Mrs Quick squealed in delight. ‘There was wan o’ the girls came on dressed like a man and she wore that tile hat. Oh, she was a rare wee dancer!’
Mrs Mann crowned herself with the top hat, picked up the fairy wand again as a walking stick and swayed to the swept centre of the stone floor singing in a broad Glasgow voice.
I’m Burrlington Berrtie,
I rrise at ten therrty,
An’ go furr a strroll in the Parrk!
She did a little jig with an ease and lightness surprising in a woman of her colossal bulk, but she was used to it. She performed those steps every year when she marched behind the flute band in the Orange Walk on the Twelfth of July.
‘You’re going back some!’ Mrs Phinn commented coldly.
‘I used to hear ma maw sing that song,’ Mrs Mann explained amiably. ‘She’d be about your age.’
‘Ach, yer granny’s mutch!’ Mrs Phinn retorted contemptuously. ‘You stand there and do a song and dance act but it’s me that’s doing all the work and getting nothing for it and you’re doing nothing and getting paid for it. It’s no’ fair.’
Encouraged by Mrs Mann’s entertainment Mrs Quick delved into the third of the chests and dragged out a brocade jacket.
‘That’s what the Baron wore the year they did Cinderella,’ she screeched, and tried it on.
‘Baron Figtree!’ Mrs Mann howled, clapped her hands, took a front-stage pose and declaimed a couplet from an old Glasgow pantomime.
Tomorrow’s my grandmother’s wedding day.
Ten thousand pounds will I give away.
‘Hooray, hooray, hooray!’