The Body in the Fog (16 page)

CHAPTER 23

Alfie woke early on Saturday morning. They had gone to bed very late last night, celebrating the successful arrest of Flash Harry and his mob. Inspector Denham had promised to
pay over the fifteen pounds on Monday morning and, for once, Alfie had not hesitated to raid the rent box a little in order to provide a celebration supper.

Tom and Jack had gone to sleep soon after the bells of St Paul’s had chimed midnight – Tom deliciously full of smoked eel and veal pie and Jack looking very happy that he had
persuaded everyone to give five pounds of their reward money to Charlie Higgins’s widow for herself and her children.

Alfie and Sammy, however, had stayed awake for a long time, talking over the strange business of the beggar man’s body that they had found in Trafalgar Square.

‘None of our business, I suppose,’ said Sammy, before he went to sleep and Alfie, tired after the excitements of the day, had agreed with him then.

But now Alfie was wide awake and full of energy. He knew that if he did not solve the mystery of Jemmy’s death once and for all, it would haunt him in the years to come. ‘Curiosity
killed the cat,’ his mother used to say to him in exasperated tones when he was about three years old, and Alfie had not changed. He had to know the truth about what had happened that night
in Trafalgar Square.

He took a mouthful of the pie, a quick swallow from the remains of the beer, wiped his mouth, smoothed down his hair and went to the door.

‘Come on, boy,’ he said to Mutsy. ‘Let’s be going.’

The streets were still dark and very foggy when they went out. Mutsy caught a rat lurking among the discarded cabbage stalks in the corner of Covent Garden market and made a good breakfast from
it. Alfie strolled along, confident that the dog would overtake him as soon as he had left nothing but a scaly tail lying on the pavement. He was conscious of a great feeling of relief that Flash
Harry and Sid the Swell were now behind bars. When he came to Trafalgar Square, he was joined by Mutsy and they immediately crossed over towards the large statue of King Charles on horseback.

A quick look around was enough to tell him that no one was looking.

Ten minutes later, Alfie surfaced through the hatch in the cellar of the White Horse Inn. He had proved what he suspected. A quick exit from Trafalgar Square to the White Horse
Inn could have been made on that fateful night by a man who knew about the underground rivers and sewers of London. There were a few old sacks lying around and he rubbed his own bare feet and legs
clean of the traces from the sewer and then did his best with Mutsy’s hairy paws.

There was no one around when he reached the top of the cellar steps. Everyone seemed to be at breakfast. Alfie stole up the stairs, followed closely by Mutsy. He knew where he was heading
– remembering the scullery maid’s words about the dirty boots:
‘They’re belonging to the gentleman that’s sick in bed in number fifteen.’
He paused at the
door numbered fifteen and then decided against knocking.

The door handle turned quietly and boy and dog were in the room before the man at the window turned around.

For a second Alfie hesitated. For a second he wondered whether he had made a mistake. This was a gentleman, a gentleman dressed in a good tweed suit with well-polished boots, a heavy silver
watch-chain over a well-cut waistcoat, a neatly trimmed ginger beard and moustache.

Mutsy, however, did not hesitate. In an instant he was across the room and had flung himself onto the gentleman with the ginger beard and moustache. The big affectionate dog was so excited that
his wagging tail swept a small ornament, a china shepherdess, off a low table by the window. He was panting with excitement as he licked the well-washed hands, twisting his hairy body around the
man now known as Ned.

‘He’s been missing you, Jemmy,’ said Alfie quietly. And then as the man opened his mouth, Alfie shook his head at him. ‘No good trying to deny it, Jemmy. You’ve
said it yourself often enough. A dog always knows his friends. He never forgets.’

The man who was called Ned sat down heavily on a chair by the window.

‘How did you guess?’ he asked.

‘Guessed something was wrong as soon as I saw the body,’ boasted Alfie. ‘I noticed that the cheeks and the neck were shaved and that the beard was trimmed. Never knew you to be
so fussy about things like that, Jemmy.’

‘Was that all?’ Jemmy stared at Alfie.

‘Let me tell you what happened.’ Alfie was enjoying himself. He liked that look of respect in Jemmy’s eye. He carefully replaced the china shepherdess on the table and sat down
on the rug in front of the window. Mutsy lay down beside him, placed his heavy head on Alfie’s knee and wagged his tail again at Jemmy.

‘Jack told me that you had a twin brother called Ned. You was adopted by one aunt and he by another,’ began Alfie.

‘He had all the luck,’ said Jemmy bitterly. ‘The aunt that adopted him got married and moved to Birmingham. She and her husband didn’t have any children of their own so
they gave Ned a good education and he became an engineer and was called by their name, Batson.’

‘And he told you all that when you met in Trafalgar Square that night. Who recognised who first?’

‘I recognised him; he didn’t want anything to do with me,’ said Jemmy angrily. ‘But he couldn’t deny it. We were always like two peas out of a pod. Our own mother
could hardly tell us apart. And there he was walking past me in his fancy clothes and even after I told him who I was – well, he was just looking through me, like I was a piece of
dirt.’

‘You asked him for money, of course.’ Jemmy would ask anyone for money. That was the way that he lived.

‘And he refused!’ Jemmy’s voice was choked with anger. ‘He had neither kith nor kin, lived by himself in a big house – boasted about it – and about all the
money that he had.’

‘And you lost your temper and punched him.’ That would be the way of it, thought Alfie. Jemmy had a terrible temper.

‘I never meant to do it . . . got an awful shock when I found he was dead . . . I just punched him, but he fell hard against that statue and hit his head.’

‘And then you got the bright idea of changing clothes with him.’ So I was right when I said to the constable that it was the stone horse that done it, thought Alfie.

Jemmy gave a reluctant grin. ‘Didn’t think of that at first,’ he admitted. ‘When no one was looking, I got the manhole cover open, dropped down into it to make sure that
Bert the Tosher wasn’t around and then dragged the body after me. I had a bit of a search around his pockets for any loose change or bank notes or anything like that and then I found the key
to this room here. Big label it had on it.
Room number 15; if found, return to the landlord of the White Horse Inn
. That started to give me ideas. Thought I’d have a few days at the
inn and if that worked out, if no one suspected me, well . . .’ Jemmy faced Alfie defiantly. ‘I thought I might just turn my life around, live respectable – do something with
myself.’

‘So you turned yourself into Ned.’ Alfie stood up, took a quick look out of the window and then sat down again. There was no sign of the stagecoach yet.

‘How did you guess about the sewer?’ asked Jemmy again.

‘I noticed the manhole, just beside the statue of the horse and the king, and I guessed the sewer was under there. There were lumps of ice around the body as if water had run off it, as if
it had got very wet, but there had been no rain that night – just frost and fog – so the body must have been in water. And old Mick said he saw Jemmy come up from hell.’

‘What are you going to do? I’ll kill you if you try to tell anyone.’ Jemmy stood up abruptly.

‘And, of course, you knew all about the sewers and the underground rivers,’ continued Alfie calmly. He did not take much notice of Jemmy’s threat. Mutsy would not let Jemmy lay
a finger on his master. ‘You told Jack all about them,’ he continued. ‘You probably knew all about that hatch in the cellar of the White Horse Inn – when you worked on the
sewers you would have seen rubbish being thrown down there. You would have known that you could hide in the sewers until most people in the inn had gone to bed and then get quietly into number
fifteen without anyone seeing you.’

‘That’s right,’ admitted Jemmy. ‘I decided that I would pretend to be ill – have a sore throat. I didn’t see myself talking with that Birmingham
accent.’

‘Should have cleaned your boots a bit better; the boot boy was complaining about them. That gave me another clue.’

‘It was one of them interfering maids took them. I just lay down and pulled the blankets over my head or looked away when they came in. Just muttered at them.’

‘Hard to get the smell of the sewer out of boots. Should have tied them around your neck. The trouble with you, Jemmy, is that you couldn’t wait to be a proper gent,’ said
Alfie in a friendly way. ‘Couldn’t fool Mutsy, though, could you?’ he added as he rose to his feet and went to the door, his hand on the dog’s collar.

Jemmy’s eyes followed him. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked and his voice was suddenly hoarse.

Alfie didn’t reply, but opened the door and stood for a moment, looking back. ‘Glad it was an accident, though. Jack thinks a lot of you and so does Mutsy.’

‘Will you tell the police?’ The man’s face looked strained.

Alfie gave a reassuring grin. ‘The jewel robbery is solved,’ he said ‘and that’s all that they were interested in.’ He watched the look of relief come over the
man’s face, and, in a slightly louder voice, he said, ‘Have a good trip, sir.’

Then Alfie, with Mutsy at his heels like a well-trained servant, swept down the stairs, past the landlord, past the engineers and out on to Haymarket.

‘C’mon, Mutsy,’ he said. ‘I think a promising young Scotland Yard detective like yourself deserves a good breakfast.’

He wouldn’t go to the ordinary breakfast stalls along the Strand or around Covent Garden, he decided. He and Mutsy needed a man’s place, a place that would be fitting for a pair that
had solved a mystery that baffled the top policeman in Bow Street and all the best brains at Scotland Yard. He knew just the place to go to.

He turned down Orange Street and there it was in front of him: the Racquet and Handle. Painted a deep midnight blue with the decorations picked out in gold, it was one of the most splendid
public houses in the area.

Inside, the place was dimly lit by a single gas lamp, but there was a delicious smell of fried eggs, rashers of bacon, herrings, black pudding, slices of beef and hot muffins. Most of the
polished dark oak tables were occupied by toffs on their way to work, each with a starched white napkin tucked under his chin, but there was one table empty in a dark corner near to the fire.

Mutsy discreetly disappeared under the table while Alfie sat down and took up a menu card.

‘Yes?’ The waiter didn’t look too happy. But then he noticed the silver shilling that Alfie had carefully placed in the centre of the table. ‘Yes, sir?’ he said
more respectfully. ‘See something you fancy, sir?’

Alfie scanned the long list and then put the card down. ‘I’ll have two of everything on the breakfast menu,’ he said. ‘I need to keep my strength up with the job that I
have.’ From under the table, against his bare leg, he could feel an emphatic wag from a hairy tail.

‘Oh, and one of them napkins,’ he added as the waiter moved away. He sat up very straight, feeling the warmth of Mutsy’s head on his bare feet. He fancied the life of those
toffs with the napkins, he thought. Perhaps he would be a toff himself one day. Start off as an ordinary copper, work his way up to Scotland Yard, wear a smart suit, have breakfast in the Racquet
and Handle, carry a pistol in his back pocket.

And wherever he went, everyone would call him ‘sir’.

Many thanks to my agent Peter Buckman of Ampersand Agency and to my editor Anne Clark, both of whom have helped me to tighten up the narrative of this, the fifth
‘Alfie’ book.

Thanks are also due to the team at Piccadilly and to family and friends.