Wilkins’ Tooth. Diana Wynne Jones

Chapter 1

      Frank and Jess thought OWN BACK LTD was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure. The trouble was that they were desperate for money. They had broken a new chair and all pocket money was stopped until the summer. They had to face four penniless months and, somehow, as soon as they knew this, they found all sorts of things they could not possibly do without.

      “I can’t go anywhere,” said Jess. “The other girls expect you to pay your share. It isn’t fair. Just because it was such a badly made chair. The other chairs turn upside down without breaking. I don’t see why this one had to go and fall to pieces.”

      “Nor do I,” said Frank, who was worse off than Jess. “I owe Buster Knell ten pence.”

      “Why?” said Jess.

      “A bet,” Frank answered. Jess was sorry for him, because Buster Knell was not the boy you owed anything if you could help it. He had a gang. Frank, in fact, was desperate enough to go down to the newsagent and ask Mr Prodger if he wanted another boy for the paper round. But Mr Prodger said Vernon Wilkins was all he needed and, besides, Vernon needed the money.

      So Frank came dismally home and, after some thought, he and Jess put up a notice on the front gate, saying ERRANDS RUN. It had been up half an hour when their father came home and took it down. “As if you two haven’t done enough already,” he said, “without decorating the gate with this. When I said no money, I meant no money. Don’t think I’m going to let you get away with immoral earnings, because I’m not.”

      It was the talk of immoral earnings that gave them the idea.

      “I say,” said Jess. “Do people pay you to do bad things for them?”

      “If they want them done enough, I suppose,” Frank answered. “If it’s something they don’t dare do themselves, like pull Buster Knell’s nose for him.”

      “Would they pay us?” said Jess. “If we were to offer to do things they didn’t dare do?”

      “Like what?” said Frank. “I don’t dare pull Buster Knell’s nose either.”

      “No. More cunning than that,” said Jess. “Suppose someone came and said to us: ‘I want something dreadful to happen to Buster Knell because of what he did to me yesterday,’ then we could say: ‘Yes. Pay us five pence, and we’ll arrange for him to fall down a manhole.’ Would that work?”

      “If it did,” said Frank, “it would be worth more than five pence.”

      “Let’s try,” said Jess.

      So they spent the rest of the evening making a notice. When it was finished, it read:

      OWN BACK LTD

      REVENGE ARANGED

      PRICE ACCORDING TO TASK

      ALL DIFFICULT TASKS UNDERTAKEN

      TREASURE HUNTED ETC.

      The last two lines were put in by Frank, because he said that if they were going to arrange things like booby-traps for Buster Knell, then they might as well agree to any dangerous task. Jess put in the LTD to make it look official.

      “Though it shouldn’t be, really,” she said, “because we’re not a proper company.”

      “Yes,” said Frank, “but if anyone asks us something too difficult, we can always say it means Limited Own Back, and we don’t touch things too big for us.”

      The next morning, they pinned

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