The Body in the Fog (6 page)

She limped along the pavement towards it, muttering to herself, and then, suddenly, she stopped. Her eyes met those of the watcher across the road. Sarah held her breath. Were they in
league?

No – the watching man took no notice of the old lady. No sign or look of recognition came from him. But Opium Sal seemed to recognise him. She turned on her heel and went straight back in
the direction from which she had come.

Sarah wondered whether to follow her to see where she went. However, she could not just walk away and leave the boys at the mercy of the armed watcher. She had to do something.

Sarah walked quickly until she reached Bow Street police station. Once inside, she went straight up to the tall wooden counter where a policeman was writing busily in a notebook.

‘I’d like to see Inspector Denham,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘I have some information for him from Alfie Sykes. It concerns the post office raid.’

CHAPTER 10

The stench made Alfie gasp for a moment, but the noise of the cellar bolt creaking was enough to make him drop immediately down into the water that rushed along at the bottom
of the underground passage. He landed on his feet, skidded and then fell into the water, just managing to keep his face out of the slime and filth that floated along on its surface. His hand
grabbed a protruding piece of brick and, as he hauled himself back to his feet, Alfie saw a rat running up the steeply curved wall of the tunnel.

Jack managed better, grabbing an iron ring set into the brickwork of the tunnel and lowering himself cautiously down once he had pulled the cover into position again.

Alfie drew in a deep breath. So this was the sewer below the cellar of the White Horse Inn. Further down the tunnel a faint glow was coming from somewhere. He stood for a minute, allowing his
eyes time to become accustomed to the dimness, and then he began to move cautiously down the sewer. He could hear Jack splashing behind him, but he kept going steadily, trying to hold his breath as
long as he could. The stench was more horrible than anything he met in his daily life – worse even than the stink around Smithfield market. But after a few minutes he no longer noticed and
began to breathe normally, concentrating on the dim light ahead of them.

‘Pitch torches,’ said Jack from behind him. His voice echoed weirdly, bouncing off the brick walls of the tunnel and coming back to them as if ten boys had spoken.

‘How do you know?’ Alfie tried to whisper, but the hissing echo was even more sinister.

‘Bert the Tosher told me. Remember that time I dragged Jemmy off him? When he met me later on he thanked me. He offered me a job working with him and his family. He told me a lot about
working down here. Said that it wasn’t as bad as people thought.’

‘I remember.’ Alfie nodded. He wouldn’t forget easily that spectacular fight down by the river a few weeks ago.

Jack and he had been gathering pieces of coal from the shallow waters of the river and had moved downstream towards Whitehall, as there was not much left around the Hungerford Stairs where so
many poor people scavenged a living. They were nearly there when Bert the Tosher emerged from the Tyburn sewer.

Bert had washed his face and hands in the river water, dabbing with his sleeve at a large cut on his forehead. Then he had taken something from his pocket and cleaned it carefully. Alfie and
Jack had been near enough to see a flash of gold and had looked at each other, wide-eyed. It was known that men like Bert did the dangerous and dirty work of keeping the sewers flowing, not just
for the low wages they got, but for the occasional finds – a gold watch or maybe some jewellery – that were washed down from the privies or carried off with the sink water from the old
inns of London.

But gold! Here was a find! Two large squares of gold, each the size of a sovereign and held together with a gold bar. Bert had been gazing at it lovingly when Jemmy had erupted from the tunnel,
brandishing one of those heavy sticks that toshers carried to drive the rats away from around their feet. In a moment, he was on top of Bert, knocking him to the ground and beating him unmercifully
with the stick.

Alfie had winced at the sound of the blows; each one of them was enough to break the man’s skull. Jack, however, did not hesitate. He launched himself at the tangled figures on the
water’s edge and hung onto Jemmy’s arm with all his might, twisting it upwards while Alfie snatched the stick and flung it far out into the river. And then both of them had moved away
quickly just in case Jemmy turned on them. But he didn’t . . .

‘Funny, wasn’t it, how they lost the gold thing in the mud and then the two of them immediately began searching the mud together like they was the best of friends?’ Alfie
grinned at the memory.

‘Not such great friends,’ said Jack, sloshing through the water behind him, his voice bouncing from wall to wall, every word repeated endlessly, so that they jumbled into each other.
‘The next time that I met Bert, he told me that he was going to kill Jemmy for losing that thing – a gold cufflink, it was, like posh men wear in their sleeves. Bert found it in the
sewer under Buckingham Palace where Queen Victoria lives and then Jemmy half-murdered him, and the cufflink was gone for good. No wonder Bert bore him a grudge. That gold cufflink would have been
worth a lot to Bert – what with all his children and everything. I wonder if he had anything to do with old Jemmy’s murder . . .’ Jack stopped.

Alfie looked over his shoulder to see his cousin standing very still, looking all around him.

‘What’s up?’ asked Alfie. He was getting used to the echo now and not finding the passageway through the sewers too bad. If the toshers did it every day for a living, surely he
and Jack could survive the experience once. Already he was planning how they would clean themselves under the pump at Whitehall, if that was where they emerged.

‘Seems wrong somehow.’ Jack’s voice sounded uneasy. ‘It’s been pouring rain, could hear it bouncing off the cobbles in the yard all night. But look at the water!
It’s hardly moving.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Alfie impatiently.

‘Too low.’ Jack looked up and down, surveying the green waters and their slow-moving sludge. ‘Bert told me that they have to open gates when there’s heavy rain,’ he
added. ‘Seems like they might have forgot to do that upstream. Hampstead ponds will all be overflowing and pouring down into the drains. There’ll be a gate between here and Hampstead
that someone has forgotten to open.’

‘So —’ began Alfie.

The word was hardly out of his lips when there was a strange sound. It boomed like thunder. It roared like the wild beasts in Astley’s Circus. It bounced off the arched roof. Alfie felt as
though his eardrums would burst. He looked over his shoulder.

And there, in an ear-splitting explosion of sound, an enormous wall of water as high as the ceiling came thundering down towards them.

‘Run!’ screamed Jack.

Alfie ran, stumbling through the sludgy water. He did not need to look over his shoulder to know that he had no hope of escaping the wall of water that roared its way down through the tunnel.
Jack was beside him now, holding his arm. That was the way they would find the bodies, thought Alfie. Two cousins, one’s hand locked in a grip on the arm of the other.

The water was chest-high now. Something thudded against his back and then swept past him. It was a family of drowned rats – ten, twenty, even forty of them. Alfie did not even shudder,
seeing his own fate mirrored in these soaked dead bodies, swirling on the foaming water.

This deadly flood would sweep them along the sewer and spit them out into the River Thames at Whitehall.

And by then they would both be dead.

CHAPTER 11

One minute it seemed as though they might have a chance – if only they had superhuman legs that could stride through the water at the speed of lightning. But the next
minute it was all over.

Alfie had never felt such power in his life. Effortlessly, the roaring water snatched him from Jack’s grasp and he was swept on, turning and twisting as though his body was the size of a
rat’s. The flood was almost ceiling high, now; Alfie felt his head crash against the rough old bricks. He panted like a man running for his life. The water seemed to have taken all the air
out of the sewer. Jack passed him, his body spinning around in the water. Alfie followed it with his eyes. This would be his last sight of his cousin, he thought. Even someone as brave and
resourceful as Jack could do nothing in a flood like this.

Suddenly Jack’s body stopped. Alfie crashed into him and felt a hand grip his coat. He blinked the water from his eyes. Jack had caught hold of one of those iron rings set firmly into the
ceiling. Alfie felt around and inserted his own cold hand beside Jack’s. He hung on desperately as the water tugged at the rags of his clothing, dragged his legs, made him feel as though he
would snap in two at any minute. How long could they manage to hold on? Even after a minute, he felt as though his body was being ripped in two.

And then Alfie realised something else. The heavy iron ring was no longer holding him steadily. It had begun to loosen. One side of it was ripped from the ceiling. The screw had given way. Alfie
felt bits of broken brick fall on his forehead before they, too, were swept away. Every muscle in his body ached with the strain of holding himself taut against the pull of the flood.

Now it was only a matter of time before the second screw was gone. One part of Alfie almost wished that it was all over, but the other part – the tough part – was scanning the arched
ceiling for something else, anything else, to hang on to. This flood had to go down some time. Surely someone would open a gate further down and allow the water to escape into the river.

And then the second screw parted from the ceiling. Alfie let go of the useless circle of metal and allowed it drop down through the water. For a moment, he caught a glimpse of Jack just ahead of
him. His cousin was being swept helplessly on the flood. Then he was gone and Alfie followed him, shooting forwards, his eyes on the brick ceiling above him as he strove to keep his mouth
clear.

Suddenly, the ceiling wasn’t there. A large egg-like space rose up above them. As he shot past he could see that this raised section was where the pitch torches flared in their iron
sockets, lighting up the water below. The air was better here and Alfie managed to draw in a lungful before he was swept on. The sight of that tall arched area gave him a moment’s hope.
Perhaps they were nearing the end of the sewer, were near to the place where it poured out on the bank at Whitehall, where he and Jack had witnessed the fight between old Jemmy and Bert the
Tosher.

But there was no light ahead of them now, just an inky blackness. He could no longer see Jack – and that was the worst moment. Had Jack drowned? And how much longer could he survive
himself?

This is it, he concluded, and he spared a thought for Sammy. How would the blind boy manage without his brother to look after him?

And then, above the noise of the flood, he thought he heard something. He tried to get his head free of the water. Yes, there it was again – a long wail.

‘A – l – f – i – e!’

But the warning came too late.

Alfie felt the blow before he saw anything.

The crash almost knocked him unconscious, but then he rallied. He had come to a full stop against a great barrier made from wooden slabs. One of them was broken – a piece the length of his
arm was missing – which was enough for Alfie to stick his hand through and grab on to the barrier; enough to stop him being swept under the water.

The water flowed through the gaps between the slabs, but it was still violent and Alfie felt blow after blow pummel his body until he thought that he could not bear it any longer.

However, a faint gleam of light came through the broken slab and soon his eyes became used to the darkness and he was able to see a little. This was one of the storm gates, he realised: great
squared-off chunks of wood, piled almost to the height of the ceiling.