The Body in the Fog (3 page)

Alfie stared at Jack and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Looks like I was right when I said it were a fight. Jemmy was asking for it and he got it. There’s some very tough coves around
this place at night.’

CHAPTER 5

The four boys were still asleep when Sarah knocked at the door at noon. Mutsy, though, was wide awake and stood at the door wagging his tail while his masters dressed
hurriedly.

Sarah was very small and very skinny for her age. With her delicate bony face and her huge green eyes, she looked more like a child of nine than a girl of twelve. She had been a scullery maid
for a few years when the boys had first met her, but had recently become a parlour maid at the White Horse Inn on Haymarket, not far from Trafalgar Square.

‘Come on, sleepy heads!’ she said impatiently. ‘Have you heard about the post office raid? The whole of London is talking about it. A lot of engineers from Birmingham are
staying at the White Horse Inn and they were all discussing it at breakfast this morning. They saw the whole thing. There’s a poster outside Bow Street police station offering a reward. Come
and see.’

The boys followed Sarah immediately, Tom explaining about how Alfie and Jack had also been there on their way back from their fishing job. There was a big crowd around Bow Street police station
and they had to push their way through to see the poster. Everyone was discussing the robbery excitedly. One tall woman with a basket was the centre of attention because her husband worked in the
post office and she claimed he had come home with his clothes smelling of smoke.

Alfie doubted that. As far as he saw, the smoke on the balcony of the hotel had just been a diversion – something set up to scare the workers loading the mail van and make them run out
into the square for those vital few minutes while Flash Harry and his mob took their places and stole the van.

‘See if you can read it, Tom,’ Alfie said to his youngest cousin. Tom, unlike Jack and Alfie, had not learned to read at the Ragged School; in fact he had hated it, but Jack had been
patiently teaching his brother and now he had begun to make good progress. He read the poster fluently.

AT TRAFALGAR SQUARE

YESTERDAY EVENING.

WITNESSES TO THIS CRIME ARE WANTED.

REWARD OF
£
10 FOR ANY INFORMATION

LEADING TO THE ARREST OF THE CRIMINALS.

Alfie hardly listened. One line danced before his eyes: REWARD OF £10. I could just do with that, he thought. He jerked his head at his gang to follow him, but did
not speak until they had gone around the corner and there was no one to overhear.

‘Sarah, would you do something for me? I want you to go to Trafalgar Square and get something that I hid there last night,’ he said in a low voice and explained to her about the
expensive piece of paper that had fallen from Flash Harry’s hand as he drove the post office van across Trafalgar Square. ‘I’d collect it myself, but I’m thinking that they
might be watching me.’

‘I’ll go there straight away,’ said Sarah. She paused for a moment as her quick brain raced ahead. ‘Better still, I’ll go in the front door to the White Horse Inn
and then straight out of the back door and down the back lane to Trafalgar Square. Then if anyone’s watching me, they’ll think I’m just going back to work.’

‘Let’s all split up and go in different directions,’ suggested Tom.

‘Good thinking,’ said Alfie. He hesitated for a moment. Money was not too flush at the moment, but he had two weeks’ rent saved in the tin box and sixpence in his pocket.
‘I’ll get some sausages and some beer,’ he continued, ‘and we’ll all meet back at the cellar in about an hour and have breakfast and dinner at the same time. Sam, you
take Mutsy and go and do a bit of singing outside St Martin’s church – you might hear something useful, seeing as it’s so near the post office. Tom, you go and draw some of them
mud pictures over by the Strand and keep your ears peeled. Jack, why don’t you go to the fish market at Hungerford? That van last night went that way. Bet they’ll all be talking about
it.’

Alfie waited until his gang had disappeared one by one and then he had a look around. No one seemed to be watching so he slid in through the gate into the yard between the police station and the
courthouse. There was a back door there – he remembered Inspector Denham allowing him out through it on one occasion.

Luckily the door was unlocked so Alfie went in, passing with a shudder the room where the dead bodies were kept. Old Jemmy was probably in there, he thought, as the door to the room opened
suddenly and Inspector Denham almost crashed into him.

‘Lord bless me,’ said the inspector, raising his bushy eyebrows. ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘Took the liberty of coming in by the back door, sir,’ said Alfie airily. ‘A man can’t be too careful when he has Flash Harry on his tail.’

He thought the inspector would smile at this, but the man’s bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown.

‘Come in,’ said Inspector Denham grimly. ‘Now look here, Alfie,’ he began determinedly, then stopped, looking down at Alfie’s feet. ‘Why don’t you wear
those boots I gave you?’ he said in irritated tones.

‘I’d spoil them in the fog and wet, sir,’ said Alfie.

‘Well, come and sit over here by the fire,’ ordered the inspector. Alfie sat down on the small rug in front of the fire and gratefully took the handful of biscuits that was passed
down to him. He warmed his frozen hands and feet, nibbled quietly at the biscuits and waited for the inspector to speak.

‘You’re right, of course,’ said Inspector Denham after a minute. ‘This does seem to be a Flash Harry job. There’s somebody else involved though. We all know Flash
Harry. He comes into London, does a job, hides out somewhere, then disappears down into the country or else goes abroad. One of these days we’ll catch him – find his hideout and clap
him in irons. But this time it’s different.’

Inspector Denham paused, straightened the papers on his desk, and then started to speak again, his voice so low that Alfie had to strain his ears to hear it. It was almost as though the
policeman was talking to himself, sorting out his own thoughts, perhaps.

‘You see, Alfie,’ he said. ‘Very few people knew that a consignment of jewels was being sent to Amsterdam in Holland last night. There was nothing to alert Flash Harry or any
of the crowd that he hangs out with. And the decision was only taken at the last moment to send them by the midnight post. Only the top men at the jewellers and a few people at the post office knew
of that plan. How did Flash Harry get to know about this?’

Inspector Denham didn’t appear to expect an answer to this and Alfie said nothing. He was thinking hard. He decided not to mention the dropped piece of paper. It would be best to solve the
problem first, and the drawing of the clock and the moon still did not make sense to him.

‘But we do have one lead,’ continued the inspector, ‘and perhaps this is something that you can help me with. That old beggar man was savagely killed last night –
apparently just before the robbery took place. Now, he must have known something. There is no reason, otherwise, for him to have been murdered. Keep away from Flash Harry and his mob, Alfie, but if
you could bring me any information about the beggar man, well, I’ll make it worth your while.’

The inspector rose to his feet, fished in his pocket, produced a shilling and handed it to Alfie. ‘Here’s something to be going on with,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll let you
out the back door – you might as well go the way you came.’

Inspector Denham did not speak again until they were at the back door and, to Alfie’s relief, did not take him into the room where the dead bodies lay. But when Alfie stood on the cobbled
yard, the inspector looked at him in a worried way.

‘Now remember,’ he said emphatically, ‘keep away from Flash Harry and his mob. The last man who informed on them ended up in the River Thames with a lead weight tied to his
feet.’

CHAPTER 6

Alfie had the sausages fried and the beer cooling beside the draughty window of the cellar by the time his gang arrived home.

‘Eat first and talk afterwards,’ said Alfie. He knew by their faces that there was nothing much to report. He carefully poured the beer into the old pewter mugs while the sausages
kept warm on the stone slab beside the fire. Alfie always insisted that everyone drank beer. His mother had died from cholera and a doctor had told him that she had got it from the water in the
local pump. ‘Drink beer, lad,’ he had said to Alfie. ‘People who drink nothing but beer don’t get cholera.’

‘Haven’t got anything for you, Alfie,’ said Sarah, spearing a sausage from the pan and popping it into her mouth. ‘I got down to Trafalgar Square without anyone following
me, but when I reached the statue of King Charles there were two men there and they were sweeping around it and levering up a manhole cover. I thought they might be workers, but then I saw that one
had a pistol bulging in his back pocket so I took myself off.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Alfie. ‘I’ll go down there later on myself. I’ll wait until it gets dark. By then they’ll either have found it or
they’ll have given up.’ He felt quite cheerful as he chewed on his sausages and handed Jack his beer. ‘Inspector Denham wants us to solve Jemmy’s murder,’ he said
casually to his cousin. ‘He thinks it might hold the key to the post office raid.’

Jack’s face lit up. ‘That’s good,’ he said, gulping down his beer and shooting a sausage in to follow it down his throat. ‘Poor old Jemmy! If he has a funeral,
I’ll go to it.’

‘I won’t,’ said Alfie with a shudder. ‘Don’t like that burying ground. Jemmy’s not worth it.’

‘Mutsy liked him,’ Jack reminded him, tossing half a sausage over to where Mutsy lay dozing by the fire. Mutsy swallowed it down and sat up, his brown eyes bright behind the heavy
fringe of fur.

‘Now then, Mutsy, my boy, just you listen to the facts.’ Alfie popped another piece of sausage into the dog’s mouth and playfully held the shaggy locks on either side of
Mutsy’s face. He tried to imitate Inspector Denham’s dry voice. ‘Pay attention now, young man, and never mind about sausages.’

‘How many suspects?’ asked Sammy.

‘Well, that’s the problem,’ said Alfie. ‘You see, he probably had lots of enemies. Like, when we was talking about it last night, I thought of Bert the Tosher, because
Jack and me saw them have a terrible fight over a piece of gold.’

‘And then there’s Opium Sal,’ said Sarah. ‘You said he lodged free with her.’

‘He told Jack that, didn’t he, Jack?’ Alfie looked over at his cousin.

‘That’s right. I asked him did he have to pay much and he just laughed. He said that she didn’t have the nerve to ask him for a penny.’

‘She asks for her money from those coves that take her drugs,’ said Alfie. ‘If she didn’t ask Jemmy to pay for his lodging, she must have been scared of him for some
reason.’

‘And there’s the fellow that I heard quarrelling with Jemmy last night. And Jemmy threatened to murder him,’ said Jack.

‘Three suspects,’ said Sammy with satisfaction. ‘I like three. Not too many and not too few.’

‘It might just be two,’ put in Sarah, helping herself to another sausage. ‘Jemmy was a big man. Opium Sal is a little woman and she’s got the shakes as often as not. She
could never have struck him on the forehead so hard that she killed him. But she might have hired someone to murder him. That might be the man that Jack heard quarrelling with Jemmy.’

‘Might be,’ said Jack dubiously. ‘He didn’t sound like he was from around here.’

‘I like the idea of Opium Sal,’ said Alfie slowly. He was thinking hard. ‘You see, we need to find some sort of link between Jemmy and Flash Harry’s mob, or else a link
between him and some toff high up in the post office or one of them jewellers.’

‘I don’t think Jemmy would have anything to do with a toff,’ said Jack doubtfully. ‘He were a pretty rough sort of cove.’

‘What do you think, Mutsy?’ demanded Tom. ‘One bark for a toff and two barks for Flash Harry’s mob. Speak, Mutsy, speak!’