Maskerade

cleaners’ cupboard backstage.”
    “Then I’ll borrow it and keep an eye on things,” said Granny.
    “Hey, he’s my cat, I ought to be looking after him—” Nanny began.
    Granny stepped aside, revealing a huddled shape sitting hugging its knees. “You look after Walter Plinge,” she said. “It’s something you’d be better at than me.”
    “Hello Mrs. Ogg!” said Walter, mournfully.
    Nanny looked at him for a moment.
    “So he is the—?”
    “Yes.”
    “You mean he really did do the mur—?”
    “What do you think?” said Granny.
    “Well, if it comes to it, I think he didn’t,” said Nanny. “Can I have a word in your ear, Esme? I don’t reckon I should say this in front of young Walter.”
    The witches bent their heads together. There was a brief whispered conversation.
    “Everything is simple when you know the answer,” said Granny. “I’ll be back soon.”
    She hurried off. Nanny heard her shoes clattering on the stairs.
    Nanny looked down at Walter again, and held out her hand. “Up you get, Walter.”
    “Yes Mrs. Ogg!”
    “I expect we’d better find somewhere for you to lie low, eh?”
    “I know a hidden place Mrs. Ogg!”
    “You do, do you?”
    Walter lurched across the roof toward another trapdoor, and pointed to it proudly.
    “That?” said Nanny. “That doesn’t look very hidden to me, Walter.”
    Walter gave it a puzzled look, and then grinned in the way a scientist might after he’d solved a particularly difficult equation. “It’s hidden where everyone can see it Mrs. Ogg!”
    Nanny gave him a sharp look, but there was nothing but a slightly glazed innocence in Walter’s eyes.
    He lifted up the trapdoor and pointed politely downward. “You go down the ladder first so I will not see your drawers!”
    “Very…kind of you,” said Nanny. It was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to her.
    The man waited patiently until she had reached the bottom of the ladder, and then climbed laboriously down after her.
    “This is just an old staircase, isn’t it?” said Nanny, prodding at the darkness with her torch.
    “Yes! It goes all the way down! Except at the bottom where it goes all the way up!”
    “Anyone else know about it?”
    “The Ghost Mrs. Ogg!” said Walter, climbing down.
    “Oh, yes,” said Nanny slowly. “And where’s the Ghost now, Walter?”
    “He ran away!”
    She held up the torch. There was still nothing to be read in Walter’s expression. “What does the Ghost do here, Walter?”
    “He watches over the Opera!”
    “That’s very kind of him, I’m sure.”
    Nanny started downward, and as the shadows danced around her she heard Walter say: “You know she asked me a very silly question Mrs. Ogg! It was a silly question any fool knows the answer!”
    “Oh, yes,” said Nanny, peering at the walls. “About houses on fire, I expect…”
    “Yes! What would I take out of our house if it was on fire!”
    “I expect you were a good boy and said you’d take your mum,” said Nanny.
    “No! My mum would take herself!”
    Nanny ran her hands over the nearest wall. Doors had been nailed shut when the staircase had been abandoned. Someone walking up and down here, with a keen pair of ears, could hear a lot of things…
    “What would you take out then, Walter?” she said.
    “The fire!”
    Nanny stared unseeing at the wall, and then her face slowly broke into a grin.
    “You’re daft, Walter Plinge,” she said.
    “Daft as a broom Mrs. Ogg!” said Walter cheerfully.
    But you ain’t insane, she thought. You’re daft but you’re sane. That’s what Esme would say. And there’s worser things.

    Greebo pounded along Broadway. He was suddenly not feeling very well. Muscles were twitching in odd ways. A tingling at the base of his spine indicated that his tail wanted to grow, and his ears definitely wanted to creep up the sides of his head, which is always embarrassing when it happens in company.
    In this case the company was about a hundred yards behind and apparently intent on moving his ears quite a long way from their current position, embarrassment or not.
    It was gaining, too. Greebo normally had a famous turn of speed, but not when his knees were trying to reverse direction every few seconds.
    His normal plan when pursued was to jump onto the water-butt behind Nanny Ogg’s cottage and rake the pursuer across the nose with his claws when it came around the corner. Since this would now involve a five-hundred-mile dash,