“ISN’T it stealing?” Lovejoy asked when the plan was made. She asked because Tip was peculiar about stealing. “Love-joy!” he would say sharply when she as much as edged towards a box of seedlings.
“They won’t miss one,” she would say defiantly.
“Love-JOY!”
“Of course it’s not stealing,” said Tip now about the earth. “It’s only dirt. If we took flowers, or broke off branches, it would be stealing, but dirt’s dirt,” said Tip reasonably.
“If it’s not stealing why do we have to come at night?”
“Because we have to get over the railings,” said Tip. “They wouldn’t let us do that. They don’t trust us,” he said with animosity.
But that had its compensations; never, not even in the faraway days with Maxey, had he made such a perfect plot. Had he made it or had Lovejoy? He decided not to go into that, but he was beginning to feel that it was the time he spent away from her that was wasted. He did not, of course, let her know this. “You can’t come tomorrow?” she would say as if the sky had fallen, and Tip would growl, “Can’t I have one day off?”
It was not an easy plot; as Olivia was to say, they should have had a medal for persistence, “And full marks for carrying it all out,” she said.
“Marks for stealing?” asked Angela coldly.
“They are not big children,” said Olivia, “and to wake in the middle of the night, night after night, well, three nights running, shows—enterprise and daring,” said Olivia. “I should have been frightened, at that age, to go out at night into the streets. Then think of the work, those heavy loads; two of them have small arms and legs. And look how beautifully they did up the buckets.”
The buckets were deadened by being wrapped with two thicknesses of sack; the handles were wound round and round with rag. “They’ll make first-rate thieves, no doubt of that,” said Lucas.
The buckets had to be done up each night, undone again in the morning, because one was Vincent’s and one the Malones’; the shovel and sacks were Tip’s, and the rope with which the buckets were let down from the church steps into the garden was, in the daytime, Mrs. Combie’s washing line. “Our line’s too long,” said Tip. “It’s for eleven people’s washing.”
The most difficult part was the waking. Lovejoy had Mrs. Combie’s alarm clock; she fetched it from the kitchen when Mrs. Combie had gone to bed and put it back as she crept out in the morning—“Only it isn’t morning, it’s still night,” she said—but an alarm clock was no good to Tip; he slept on through it even if it were put close to his ear. For two nights Lovejoy waited and he did not come. “It’s no good,” he said. “I’ll have to get Sparkey.”
“Sparkey?” said Lovejoy with distaste.
“Yes. He’ll stay awake if I tell him,” said Tip. “He’ll do anything for me.”
“But—can he?” asked Lovejoy.
“He doesn’t sleep very well, he’s so delicate, you see; if there’s a mouse he wakes up, and he’d be thrilled,” said Tip.
“But would his mother let him?”
“She lets him go with me,” said Tip easily. “She knows that I’ll look after him. I will, you know. We’ll make him put his gumboots on and a thick coat. It’s only three nights,” said Tip. “We ought to be able to take four loads a night.”
“But he won’t have to come,” said Lovejoy. “You can leave him in bed.”
“That wouldn’t be fair,” said Tip sternly.
Tip was woken by the dutiful Sparkey—“I thought you was dead,” Sparkey said to Tip the second morning—but he had to dress Sparkey and then lift him out of the window—they slept in the basement flat—and grope up the area steps to the railings and the pavement. “’F you hear a policeman or anyone, get into a porch and duck down,” ordered Tip. It was light in the Street but a queer colourless light that made them feel as if they were not real; it was queerly cold, and their stomachs were empty, which made them feel more queer; after the first night Lovejoy brought some bread, but what they needed was something hot and their stomachs rumbled loudly. “What’s the use of us being quiet?” said Tip.
“It was on the morning of May twenty-sixth,” Father Lambert was to say when, later, he made his statement to Inspector Russell at the police station. “Priest’s House,” he explained, “adjoins the church steps, and I sleep in a room at the back, overlooking what was the old churchyard. It was a sliding sound, followed by a slithering.”
“Is there a difference between sliding and slithering?” asked Inspector Russell.
“The one,” said Father Lambert, “is an even sound, as of a rope being let down—which is what it was; the other is uneven, like legs.”
“Was it legs?” asked the inspector.
“It was,” said Father Lambert.
It was Tip who let the rope down with the buckets, one at a time; the legs were Lovejoy’s, coming over the wall, groping their way down. She untied each bucket, staggered with it to the garden, emptied it on the beds, took it back, and tied it to the rope again, and Tip drew it up.
“Did you hear anything else?” asked Inspector Russell.
“Not a chink,” said Father Lambert. He also admired the buckets. “They were cleverly muffled,” he said.
He had heard the beginning of a lament from Sparkey, who wanted to see the garden, but that was instantly smothered.
“Did you recognize the children?” asked Inspector Russell.
“I knew Tip Malone, of course, and I recognized the little girl but I didn’t know her name.”
“Did you hear them again?”
“I didn’t listen. I went back to bed.”
“Didn’t you know what they were doing?”
“Not exactly,” said Father Lambert. “What I did know”—and he said this later to Angela—“is that children have to play.”