and sister step through the gap in the wall and scrambled over to greet them, flinging her arms around Aidy and hugging her tightly.
‘I was so scared being left on me own after George chased after you. I’m sure I heard rats.’
‘You shouldn’t be in here, it’s dangerous,’ Aidy scolded them.
‘We play here a lot, Sis. It’s safe, honest, and we have loads of fun,’ George told her.
It was far from safe. One of the long gabled walls was buckled and looked to be in serious danger of caving in at any minute. But Aidy had too much on her mind at the moment to waste time discussing safe and unsafe places for the children to be playing.
Moments later they were all squatting in the den. Aidy hugged the children to her for warmth and said to them, ‘As far as I know from what Gran told me, Dad sent you on an errand to a house in Cobden Street, so how come you landed up in here, waiting for me to get you and take you home?’
‘Well …’ they both began together.
‘Just one of you tell me,’ she interrupted them sharply, by now desperate to make sense of all this. She saw they were about to argue the toss over it so made the decision for them. ‘George, you tell me.’
‘As soon as we got in from school, Dad told us he’d an errand we had to run for him. We was to go to a house in Cobden Street, go in the back way, and when a man opened the door, we was to tell him Arnold sent us. Dad said the man would give us a shopping bag and we was to take it where he told us to. He would give us an envelope and we …’
‘No, that’s not right,’ cut in Betty. ‘When we deliver ed the shopping bag to where the man told us to, that’s where we’d get the envelope from.’
‘I’m telling it,’ he snapped at her.
‘Well, get it right then,’ Betty snapped back.
Aidy snapped at them both: ‘That’s enough. What were you to do with the envelope when you were given it, George?’
‘Take it back to the man in Cobden Street, and then he’d give us half a crown which we’d to take straight back to Dad. He told us he’d give us a penny each, and said we’d get a penny more every time we did these errands for him. We told him we weren’t allowed to go that far from the house, honest we did, Sis, but he shouted that he was our dad and we were to do as he told us.’
Aidy’s face was set tight, her eyes ablaze with anger. So their father’s pub tricks weren’t reaping him the rewards they had any longer and he’d found himself another way to line his pockets: by farming his children out to no-good types to act as messengers, delivering their contraband to customers and collecting the payment in return. Who would ever suspect two children carrying a shopping bag of being up to no good? And how low did a man have to be, to trade his own children’s involvement in a probable criminal act rather than make the effort to get himself some honest work? Well, he’d gone too far this time.
She hugged the children closer and said to them, ‘We’d best get back before we freeze to death. Dad will be waiting for his money.’ She noticed a look pass between brother and sister and a horrible thought struck her. ‘Oh, no, you haven’t lost the money, have you? Is that why you were both waiting for me, because you daren’t go home and face him alone?’
‘No, we ain’t lost the money, Sis, but we ain’t got it,’ said Betty.
‘I don’t understand?’
‘Well, we ain’t got it ’cos we never went on the errand at all,’ George told her. ‘After you told us what you thought Dad was up to, showing us his tricks, and said that if he did anything else like that then we was to tell you, well … we thought we ought to ask you before we went on the errand, just in case you wasn’t happy about it. That’s why we’ve been waiting here, ’cos we knew if we weren’t home when you got back, you’d come looking for us. We know you don’t like us out when it’s so cold and dark and that you’d be worried.’ His little face creased in worry.