THE ROBBERY

Poor Oliver! First it was the death of his father, and now this....

Mrs Jocelyn Anchovy was a kindly and rather plump woman with a nose for trouble, which is why she found the young boy in her care quite fascinating to her. Oliver Bramwell ought to have been troubled, what with his father dead, murdered brutally and interred in a cellar until a policeman found him, and his mother convicted and sentenced to a horribly long time in jail for the crime, along with her boy-fried, the loathsome Terry Allbright. But Oliver seemed to be a carefree, happy child and Mrs Jocelyn Anchovy wondered why.

He ought, she thought, to be sulky, moody, introverted, troubled deeply by an unhappy start in life, but he wasn’t. She and Bert had been fostering him for almost three years and all that time he’d shown a huge amount of respect for them, a happy disposition about just about everything and the delightful beginnings of a genuine, actual love for them. To put it bluntly, he was the perfect foster-child.

Bert particularly liked the boy, and took him to the lake down past the common and on the way to the odd village of Swanspottle whenever he had the time, with fishing rods, keep nets and all the paraphernalia needed for a few hours of masculine interaction. Bert had always wanted a son of his own but that hadn’t happened on account of a disgracefully low sperm count on his part, and Oliver (or Olly, as he liked to call him) was a life-enhancing substitute for what could never be.

So they were happy together until one June day when the happiness went away, snatched, as it were, so cruelly.

“I’m off to Brumpton,” Bert had said when the day dawned, and I use the definite article there quite advisably. It was to be the day.

“You’re off to get it engraved, then?” asked Jocelyn, polishing a trophy or two that they kept in a cabinet in the front room where anyone suitable enough to be invited in could see them. They were mostly from Bert’s fishing competitions, though there was a small selection of older mementoes from when he had been a lad himself and played cricket for the Swanspottle team. These mementoes had no intrinsic value, yet a great deal of sentimental worth. They took Bert back to days when he could race across the outfield and catch an almost certain six as it threatened to lob across the boundary, or turn a quick single into a quicker two. He’d been nifty, had Bert, and he was proud of his souvenirs and Jocelyn knew that they needed dusting with almost astounding regularity as well as affectionate care.

It was while Bert was away having a recent addition to the trophy cabinet engraved with his latest angling victory (it was usually done by the club before it was handed over, but he was the club president and it fell to him to see to matters like engraving) that a lovely, harmonious and untroubled world came tumbling down for ever.

A lot of people knew about that trophy cabinet and a lot of people made assumptions that they really shouldn’t have made, like the cups and such like that gleamed inside it were of incalculable value, being wrought from pure silver. Amongst those who made that assumption was a group of scumbags.

The assumption was, of course, quite wrong. Village anglers and cricketers might win trophies, but at the best they’re merely silver plated.

These scumbags were, to a beating heart, reprehensible thieves and vagabonds and liked nothing more than taking what wasn’t theirs so that they didn’t have to do anything as arduous as seek proper employment, and they got to hear that Bert Anchovy was off to the engraver’s works in Brumpton, and as it was a Thursday they also believed that his lovely wife was at work, in the school as a teacher’s assistant, unpaid but willing.

And this set of beliefs was the backdrop to tragedy.

“I feel poorly,” Oliver said that morning, and Jocelyn, being handy at determining such things as temperature, pressed her hand against his forehead and knew with a huge amount of certainty that he had a temperature, and quite a high temperature at that. He was burning up, and she sent him straight back to bed after pouring a teaspoon of something medical into his mouth.

“You poor wee mite,” she whispered, tucking him in and dropping a kiss onto his forehead (from a great height … the didn’t want to contract that particular lurgi herself from actual physical contact.)

And she telephoned the school where she went in order to listen to small people reading and said she wouldn’t be able to work that day. And so the scene was set.

It was a group of three scumbags who smashed the back door down when she was least expecting anything like that to happen, and who rammed themselves into her front room with a great deal of raucous bashing and thumping where she was polishing a shield made of wood and silver-plate.

She did what any sensible woman would do, and screamed a loud and piercing scream.

One of the scumbags decided the best way of dealing with the unexpected presence of a middle-aged woman screaming and polishing something shiny must involve a fire-iron, and Mrs Anchovy was duly battered several times over the head with it.

All this made quite a lot of noise, much of which found its ways up the stairs and into Oliver’s bedroom, and the kerfuffle was so extreme that he decided he really ought to see if he could help. Maybe, he thought, his mum (he called her that) had fallen and was actually bleeding all over the floor. He didn’t like to think of her being hurt, so he struggled out of bed.

“Mum!” he called, and he made his poorly way down the stairs, almost falling down the last three.

“Sod it!” exploded a scumbag.

“Grab the stuff!” ordered a second.

“Let’s get out of here!” decided a third, and “it’s all junk anyway!” he added.

Oliver was standing at the bottom of the stairs and shouting for his mum again when he saw one of the scumbags, and that scumbag saw him. The sight of a small boy in pyjamas staring at him enraged that scumbag, and he launched something heavy from the trophy cabinet at his head.

The boy collapsed in a heap and lay suddenly still and right next to Jocelyn, who was bleeding profusely on the floor.

The scumbags made their getaway with half the contents of the trophy cabinet, racing over the smashed back door and disappearing like scumbags can until there was no trace anywhere of them.

There was stillness in the broken room, silence like the silence of death, which was quite reasonable seeing that the woman had stopped breathing and the boy was in a coma.

And that was the scene when, two hours later, Bert arrived back home with his newly engraved trophy and a smile on his face.

That smile didn’t last long.

© Peter Rogerson 15.12.16