The Mystery of the Cupboard. Lynne Banks Reid

my new room. I just wanted you to know. I’m taking all my other plastic figures too. Not that we’ll do anything about them.

       Hope you’re okay and that your mum has planted a new orchard after the storm. You must come and visit us in the new house. It’s quite fun, lots of old barns and stuff, and there’s hens that the last owner (he died, he was very old, Mum says he was my removed cousin or something) left. Their eggs have very orange yolks, like almost red. A neighbour’s been looking after them and Dad wants to keep them. And there’s a wood and a river and the sea quite close. And Mum says we might have a pony!!

       Bye. Omri.

       P.S. I’m dreading starting at a new school. It’s the local comp, of course. I went to meet the head, it’s a woman. Her name’s Mrs Everest. She wears a wig that looks just like a big tea cosy.

      Two days after the move — two frantic, chaotic days, which followed a frantic, chaotic fortnight packing up — Omri was standing out in the lane that ran alongside their longhouse.

      Both his parents and his brothers were indoors trying to make some kind of order in the various rooms, which were still so jammed with a mass of unsorted furniture and crates that you could hardly move around.

      The reason Omri wasn’t with them was because he was desperately hunting for Kitsa.

      She had come from London in the moving van, in a cat basket. Too near to this (as it turned out) had been a large silk lampshade. When they arrived, the lampshade was found to be in shreds, ripped by Kitsa’s resentful claws, reached through the bars of the cat basket.

      The moment Omri had let her out, Omri’s mother, who was at the end of her rope, shouted at her, “You wicked animal, you’ve ruined my best lamp!” and made a swipe at her. Kitsa had fled, and Omri hadn’t seen her since.

      “She’ll be back,” his mother — who, when things calmed down, felt awful about her — tried to comfort him. But he was frantic with worry. How could she find her way back when she didn’t know this was now her home?

      He had already searched the whole property: the henhouse, the pigsty, the workshop, the barn, as well as the paddock and the wood, which ran down to a little river. He’d called her till he was hoarse.

      He was miserable, absolutely miserable. Nobody could cheer him up, though even Gillon tried.

      “She’ll come back,” he said. “She’s just giving us a hammering because we moved her.”

      Now as Omri stood in the lane and called her, without much hope, up the lane came, not Kitsa, alas, but a red postal van, which stopped at their gate. The postman leant out.

      “Mistle Hay Farmhouse?” he asked.

      Omri said it was.

      “Long time since there were any post for here,” he said. “You moved in, I’spect, bin empty a good while and the old man never got no letters to speak of, real recluse he was. Well, this be for you by looks of it, kid’s writin’.” And he handed Omri a letter. It was addressed to him, and it was from Patrick. Omri read it at once, standing in the lane.

       Dear Omri,

       Thanks for the letter. I looked on the map. Blimey, you’re a long way off. Too bad. Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to meet. I’ll work on my mum to go on holiday near you but I bet she won’t, she likes going over to Calais on the ferry to shop every chance she gets. Dead boring except the boat trip. She spends every minute in the French supermarket buying stuff we can easily get in Safeway at home. Crazy.

       I’ve been thinking. I wish you hadn’t put IT in the bank. I know why you did, but still. Every time I look at Boone, I get lonely for him and wonder how he’s getting on. I sometimes imagine I’m in Texas, or that Boone comes back here and I talk to him. Don’t laugh, YOU PILLOCK. I bet you feel the same about Little Bull.

       Guess what, my aunt came to visit and brought Emma. (Tamsin was at summer ski-camp - yeah!) It was great. We talked and talked about Them. She’d brought Ruby Lou and we played with them and pretended they were alive, only we had to stop cos Em started crying. She’s okay though really. She said the same as me, that she wished you hadn’t put IT in the bank. She said you should have asked us first.

       You couldn’t change your mind, could you?

       Good luck with your new school and the Tea Cosy. Maybe she’s bald underneath it. You’ll have to try to make it fall off and see. My school’s a real toilet. See ya.

       Patrick.

       P.S. Em and Tamsin are still at the old school. Em told me Mr Johnson fell off his bicycle into some prickly bushes. She says he’s never been the same since the day of the storm. Keeps talking to himself, there’s a rumour he’s gone a bit irregular.

      This letter at least took Omri’s mind off Kitsa for a while. After reading it, he went up to his room.

      He’d chosen one of the ‘inner’ bedrooms so that he would be the one who had to pass through Gillon’s room to get to the stairs, and not the other way round. It was not a perfect arrangement, but better than Gillon having right-of-way through his room. He’d made Gillon - who had been desperate for the outside bedroom - promise always to knock, if he did need to come in, which was unlikely. Omri was a very private person. He planned to put a bolt on the door, like his old room had.

      His new bed was up, and his new desk. They were both pinewood. He’d decided to put up loads of shelves, or rather ask his dad to. His dad, however, was overwhelmed with work.

      “Time you learned to put up shelves for yourself,” he’d said shortly, on Day One.

      “Okay! Can I borrow your drill?”

      “No.”

      “So how can I—”

      “Oh, I’ll do it eventually! Give me a chance, I’m up to my neck!”

      Meanwhile, Omri made do with some planks he found - that was one great thing about this place, there was so much junk lying about — laid across piles of bricks. He cleaned them all first and the shelves looked quite good. Since losing all his stuff in the storm he’d collected a few new books and some other bits and pieces, and these he arranged on the new shelves.

      He looked at the top shelf and thought how good IT would look, standing right in the middle, with its new coat of white paint and new mirror in the door…

      No. He mustn’t be tempted. He’d made up his mind. No more of that. He’d promised himself. He must stick to what he’d decided. He fingered a small neat parcel in his jeans pocket. Where to put it? Where would be a really safe place?

      “Ah!” he exclaimed aloud.

      He took four more bricks, and turned them so the indented sides faced each other. Then he opened the packet, put Little Bull and Twin Stars and the baby, and the pony, between two of the bricks, lying down in the little hollow, and on the other side, between the other two bricks, he laid Sergeant Fickits and Matron. He felt there was something faintly scandalous about them lying side by side like that, but after all, they were plastic. Wherever they were in their real lives, they wouldn’t know, and the main thing was for them to be safe from discovery. He laid another plank-shelf across the top.

      Suddenly he stiffened, raising his head. He thought he heard— he rushed to the narrow window and leant out, calling. But no. It must have been another cat.

      *

      It took about three weeks to settle in. Omri and Gillon started school in the local comprehensive. They could get there in ten minutes on their bikes through the country lanes. It was a far cry from Gillon’s predicted ‘tinny country school with eight pupils’; it had over a thousand, and felt strange at