I had never before taken a crowd to a goat.
It is more difficult than it sounds. You have to find the right moment, and the right tone of voice. You have to say, "Please follow me," with great confidence, and walk very fast. You have to be very careful not to look back, in case the crowd has decided not to follow.
The crowd followed.
I do not know how it happened. I think it was curiosity. People will do almost anything for a story, and I had just announced, in front of the policemen and Mammy Ansah and the entire population of Highway Road, that I knew where the cash tin was and that it was in a goat compound.
"Don't you dare try to make a fool of me," said Mammy Ansah, pounding along behind. "If this is a trick—"
"It isn't, Mammy Ansah."
"If you're only trying to run away—"
"I'm walking toward the goat."
"I'll have the police—"
"They're right behind you."
"Ah," said the shorter of the two policemen, who had been trying to keep up. "That is correct. We are."
I led them down the little path beside the church, through the gap in the hedge and along the narrow, muddy, overgrown shortcut that I had told James about the day before. It smelled of wet earth and goat. At the far end, behind a rusty fence and a rotting sign that said BEWARE OF NOTHING, lay the compound.
It was a small, flat, tumbledown yard, half-shaded by a fig tree. There was a broken shed and a pile of old tyres. There was a puddle in the middle, large and permanent, the colour of weak tea.
And standing at the edge of the puddle, chewing slowly and gazing at us with profound disinterest, was a very old, very thin, very white goat called Mabel.
* * *
"There," I said.
There was a silence.
"That's a goat," said Mammy Ansah.
"Yes."
"Where's my tin?"
"I believe it's in the shed."
"You believe?"
"I can't be sure. I haven't looked." I turned to the policemen. "Officers. I should like to propose a small test. If I'm right, the tin is there, and it has not been touched by me, because I have never been in this yard. If I'm wrong, you may arrest me, and I will cooperate completely."
The taller policeman scratched his head.
"That seems fair," he said.
"It is not fair!" cried Mammy Ansah. "It's a trick! The boy is—"
"Madam," said the shorter policeman, with a sudden and surprising firmness. "We will look in the shed."
* * *
They looked in the shed.
It took about a minute and a half. There was a clatter, a muttering, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor and then, at last, a long, astonished silence.
The taller policeman came out. He was carrying a small, battered, green metal box. It had a rusty hasp. It had mud on the lid. And across its front, in large uneven letters, somebody had painted: ANSAH. DO NOT TOUCH.
Mammy Ansah let out a scream.
It was not a happy scream. It was a mixture of triumph, outrage and horror, like a cat discovering a mouse in a bath. She snatched the tin. She clutched it to her chest. She wrenched the lid open.
"It's all here! It's all here! Every note!"
"Of course it is," I said.
She whirled. "Then you did hide it!"
"No."
"Then how did you know where—"
"I didn't." I was trying to keep my voice level. My knees were wobbling. "I only worked it out. If you will let me explain."
"No!"
"Madam," said the policeman. "Let him explain."
* * *
I took a deep breath. I looked at the crowd, at the faces, small and red and expectant. I looked at Mammy Ansah, quivering with fury. And I looked at the place just behind her shoulder, where a large, square boy with a very smooth, very innocent face was trying, rather badly, to become part of the hedge.
"There are four things," I said.
"Four?" said the taller policeman, and took out a notebook.
"The first is the mud. Yesterday morning, James fell into that puddle. You can see where it splashed on the fence. I know, because I heard it." A small gasp. "He had mud on his trousers up to the knee. It dried. It's still there. Look."
Everybody looked at James's trousers.
"That's old mud," said James, rather quickly.
"Is it?"
"It's from the road."
"It has a green tinge," I said. "Road mud is brown. That's puddle mud. It comes from this compound, and from nowhere else. It has goat in it."
A longer silence.
"The second is the lid," I said. "You see the stripe across the front? It's wet. It's a dark stripe. If a tin had been sitting in the shed since this morning, the mud on the lid would be dry. But it's still damp. So it was handled recently. Somebody put it down on wet ground not very long ago. At break, perhaps."
"At break?" said the shorter policeman.
"The third is that James told his mother he saw me running out of the back gate with something under my shirt. But I was in the market at break, as Seller will tell you. And there is a very simple way to check it. I weigh about as much as a bag of rice. If I'd gone over the back fence with a metal tin under my shirt, I'd have broken the fence. Look at it. It's in perfect condition."
Somebody laughed.
"And the fourth," I said, and pointed.
I pointed at Mabel.
* * *
She had been standing quietly, chewing, throughout this whole performance, with the placid air of a very old lady who has been to many trials and expects no surprises. But as every head turned toward her, she lifted her long narrow face and looked at the crowd with mild interest.
There was something hanging from the corner of her mouth.
It was a little scrap of paper, torn and wet. It was white, and it had writing on it. It flapped gently as she chewed.
"Mabel eats paper," I said. "It's well known. She eats anything. If there was something in that shed, a note, a receipt, a wrapper, she would have found it."
"What is it?" breathed Mammy Ansah.
The taller policeman bent down. Mabel regarded him, without alarm. He gently, with two fingers, drew the scrap from her mouth.
He read it.
He read it twice.
He turned slowly, very slowly, and looked at James.
"This," he said, in a voice like a closing door, "appears to be a school fees reminder. Addressed to Mr. J. Ansah. Fourteen years old. Class Seven. It says, and I quote, Unpaid balance: forty thousand. It is stamped with the school's seal." He lifted his head. "It was folded up inside the tin."
"No," said James.
"The tin was in your mother's wardrobe."
"It wasn't me!"
"Then how did your school fees reminder get from your mother's tin to a goat's mouth?"
James opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again. His large, smooth face had gone through three colours already and was now moving into a fourth, which looked like old porridge.
"It was an accident," he said, in a very high voice.
"An accident?"
"I was only—I mean, I only wanted to—" He swallowed. "I only wanted to borrow it."
"Borrow?" screamed Mammy Ansah.
"For the fees. You never paid. You always said next month. And everyone at school keeps laughing and—" His voice cracked. "I only wanted it for a week. I thought I could give it back."
"By blaming JJ?"
James didn't answer.
He did not need to. His whole big body had folded in on itself like a collapsed tent. His eyes had gone wet. For one moment he looked, not like a bully, but like what he was: a frightened fourteen-year-old boy with a fat pink face, crying in a goat compound in the middle of a crowd.
I looked away. I did not enjoy it. I thought I would, but I didn't.
* * *
Mammy Ansah stood quite still.
She held the tin to her chest. She stared at her son. Her face worked. It went through anger, and shame, and something very close to grief. Her mouth opened.
And the old lady with the stick, from the back of the crowd, said, in a clear, dry, carrying voice:
"I always said it was the boy with the mud."
"Which boy?" said somebody.
"That one," said the old lady, and pointed her stick at James. "I saw his trousers last week. Nobody listens to old women."
It was all I could do not to laugh.
But then something else happened. It was a very small thing. It happened at the edge of the crowd, where the road came in from the market, and at first nobody noticed it at all.
A tall, broad-shouldered figure had appeared at the mouth of the shortcut.
He was standing with his hands behind his back and his dark glasses pushed up on his forehead. Beside him, Danny was pulling at his sleeve and gesturing wildly toward the goat. The man did not seem to be listening. He was looking, instead, at me, with an expression I had never seen on anyone's face.
It was pride.
Not the polite kind. Not the sort you give a pupil for a good answer. It was a deep, warm, enormous thing, like the sun coming out after rain. It filled his face from jaw to hairline, and it lit his eyes like windows, and I understood, all at once, that he had been standing there for a long time.
He had seen the whole thing.
He lifted his hand and gave me, very slowly, a small and solemn salute.
I looked down. I could not meet it. My eyes had gone hot.
And that, of course, was when a hoarse, slurring, familiar voice roared from the other end of the compound:
"JANAH!"