The Body in the Fog Read online

  ‘So we have a new mystery to solve.’ Sammy had a note of satisfaction in his voice.

  ‘And even if you get nothing from Inspector Denham, we’ve got something out of that business tonight,’ said Tom cheerfully. He picked up the man’s weapon from the mantelpiece above the fire and turned it around in his hand, watching the firelight flash from the sharp blade. ‘Good knife,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘So it is,’ said Alfie, taking it from him. ‘Feel the edge of that, Sammy, carefully now. I’ll just touch it to your finger.’

  ‘Knife like that would shave you if you had a beard,’ said Sammy, his sensitive finger feeling the razor-sharp blade.

  Alfie frowned. That word ‘shave’ reminded him of something. He glanced across at Jack. Jack was a good fellow who had just saved Alfie’s life by running ahead and releasing Mutsy from the cellar. He had a disappointed look on his face now – he was upset about Jemmy’s murder and wanted to talk about that, not the post office raid. Alfie decided to try out the puzzle about Jemmy on Sammy.

  Sammy Sykes was eleven years old and he had been blind from the age of two. He has other gifts, the boys’ grandfather used to say whenever his daughter wailed about her son’s blindness. And that was true. Sammy was gifted. He sang beautifully, could memorise any song and reach the highest notes without effort. He also had a brain as sharp as a razor, extraordinary hearing and an amazing ability to tell people’s thoughts from the sound of their voices.

  ‘Sammy,’ said Alfie, ‘what do you make of this? When Jack and me saw the dead body of old Jemmy, I had a good look at him and I saw that his beard had been trimmed. He had a ginger beard. Well, it was sort of neatened off and it seemed to be kind of shaved around the ears and along the line of the cheek.’

  ‘Jemmy went to the barber’s, had a haircut and shave and then dropped dead with the shock,’ said Tom, laughing at his own wit.

  ‘What about his hair?’ asked Sammy.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Alfie. ‘He was wearing that big old cap. Never saw him without it. It didn’t show much in the way of hair as far as I can remember.’

  Sammy shook his head slowly. ‘Can’t think of no reason why anyone would shave him. He must have done it himself.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Alfie, ‘but it don’t make sense.’

  ‘He dosses down in Opium Sal’s place, don’t he?’ said Sammy. ‘Perhaps one of her customers did it to him – for a joke, like.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Alfie. Sal had an opium den down by the Hungerford Stairs. Most of the people who went there to smoke opium were so out of their minds on the drug that they might do anything, but they would be more likely to shave half his beard off, or something like that. And Jemmy was a vicious fighter who would never let those drug-crazed people do anything to him.

  Alfie moved the problem to the back of his mind and looked across at his cousin. ‘Jack, I don’t think we can do anything about old Jemmy,’ he said patiently. ‘He probably had it coming to him. Do you remember him with Bert? You know, Bert the Tosher, the geezer that works in sewers. Jemmy half-killed him over that gold thing Bert found in the Tyburn sewer. And there’s Opium Sal. She hated him. I think that he had some sort of hold over her. Otherwise she’d never have allowed him to doss down in her den.’

  ‘Well, that’s just it – gives us lots of suspects,’ said Jack eagerly. ‘And I heard someone shouting at Jemmy last night as we passed him before we went fishing – someone with a funny sort of voice, not a toff. There was a bit of an argument going on. Don’t you threaten me, Jemmy was yelling. And then he dropped his voice a bit, but I still heard it.’ Jack looked around at the other three boys and continued dramatically. ‘If there’s any murdering to be done, then I’ll be the one to do it, that’s what Jemmy said.’

  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

  DANGER

  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.

  ROBBERY OF MAIL BAGS

  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 courthous
e. 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

  SUSPECTS

  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!’

  Mutsy gave one short bark and everyone laughed. And then there was a gasp from Sarah.

  ‘The window!’ she exclaimed. ‘There
’s a face at the window!’

  Alfie’s head shot up and he saw something move over Jack’s shoulder.

  Sarah was right. There was a face there, someone on the pavement, bending down and looking in on them all, a face that was perfectly round, quite yellow in colour, with eyes that were large and vacant, dotted with tiny black pupils.

  It was Opium Sal.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NOTE

  In a flash, Alfie was at the door and climbing up the steps of the cellar. By the time Sarah came out, he was standing on the pavement by the railings that fenced in the small deep-down yard in front of the cellar window.

  ‘She got into a cab,’ he said when Sarah and Jack joined him. ‘Look, she’s down there. Wonder what she wanted. Never saw her in a cab before. All her cash goes on buying opium.’

  ‘Someone might have given her money to spy on you, to see whether you were at home.’ Sarah felt uneasy, but there was little she could do. Alfie would go his own way. ‘I’d better go to work,’ she said. ‘I’ll be late otherwise.’

  ‘And I’m going down to Trafalgar Square now, while this fog lasts,’ said Alfie resolutely. Was Opium Sal looking in to see whether he had that piece of paper with the drawing on it? he wondered. If so, it showed how important it was – and not just to Flash Harry’s mob. He gave a quick look up at the darkening sky. ‘Looks as though it might be wet and windy later on.’ In his mind was the worry that the sheet of paper might be blown away or washed out of its hiding place and turned into a pulp – that’s if it had not been discovered already.