The Body in the Fog (5 page)

Almost before the words had left Sarah’s mouth, Alfie was through the door like a streak of lightning. Behind him, he heard Jack close the door quietly and then run
after him, his bare feet slapping the rough cobbles of the yard.

But they could not escape. Standing at the gate, looking out on to the street, was another man, a mob member no doubt, and he had his right hand in his pocket. No, he and Jack must hide until
the men had gone and Alfie knew just the place to do so. They had lowered enough beer barrels down from the yard during the last half-hour.

Made desperate by fear, Alfie managed to lever up the iron cover to the cellar, leaving his fingerails broken and bleeding.

The chute where the barrels had rolled only twenty minutes ago was still in place. Alfie curled himself into a ball, head tucked under his arms, feet drawn up to his chest, and rolled rapidly
down. As he landed on the bristly mat, he looked back and saw Jack at the top of the chute, carefully edging the manhole cover back into place above him. It seemed to take an agonisingly long time,
but eventually it was closed and the cellar was thrown into total darkness. Alfie held his breath, listening to the sounds of Jack fumbling his way down the chute.

At first he could see nothing and he took tiny steps forward, feeling the space in front of him with his hands. It would never do to blunder into a barrel and knock it over. Thick cords of
spiders’ webs clung to his face and his hands. He held his breath to avoid filling his lungs with the dust clouds that clotted his mouth and nostrils.

Then Jack sneezed vigorously and Alfie’s heart nearly stopped. Nothing happened, so after a minute he went on moving, his bare feet feeling the rough wooden floor beneath, listening so
intently that his head hurt with the strain of it.

However, there was no sound from behind them or the yard. No shouting, no rattling of the metal chute cover. He hoped that the man with the pistol would think that they had gone back out on to
Haymarket.

So far all was going well. Alfie took no chances, though. Someone might just have the brains to think of the cellar. Giving Jack’s sleeve a quick jerk, he edged his way across towards what
he hoped was the centre of the cellar, planning to find a hiding place among the beer barrels that were stored there, well away from the damp cellar walls.

Suddenly Jack touched Alfie on the shoulder and spoke directly into his ear. ‘There’s the door up to the bar.’

Alfie turned back and saw a line of light dimly illuminating a rectangular door shape and a keyhole. He stopped. Now they were halfway between the door and the chute. If anyone came in from
either of these two entrances, at least they might be able to escape through the other.

There was a sudden scuffle in front of them. Both boys jumped in alarm – there must be rats around. Alfie shuddered, wishing that he had Mutsy with him – he hated rats as much as
Mutsy loved them. If we get out of this alive, thought Alfie, I’ll take him to Covent Garden market – plenty of rats there. Smiling at the thought, he settled down with his back to a
barrel, and Jack did the same.

From upstairs came roars and guffaws of laughter and the raucous sound of drunken men singing ‘Pop goes the Weasel’. Someone was banging on the bar shouting, ‘We want beer! We
want beer!’ Someone else was yelling, ‘Ned, Ned, where are you? C’mon, what’s got into you, Ned? Never knew you to be so unsociable!’

After a while, Alfie ceased to listen and drifted off into a deep sleep. From time to time he stirred sleepily, but Jack, by the sound of his breathing, was also sleeping, so he settled back
again, and only woke when a tinge of dawn light came through the small window of the cellar.

Jack was already awake and was standing up, his head on one side. ‘Alfie, do you hear something?’ he whispered.

Alfie listened. For a moment, all he heard were a few cries of seagulls out in the yard. In the dimness, he saw his cousin kneel down and put the side of his face against the floor.

‘There, hear that,’ he said.

Alfie crouched and lowered one ear towards the floor. ‘There’s something under there,’ he breathed as quietly as he could, ‘something’s moving under there just
below us.’

‘Listen again,’ whispered Jack.

He didn’t sound worried, so Alfie took in a deep breath. For a moment he had thought it might be a swarm of rats moving along beneath them, but now he realised that it was something else.
‘There’s water down there,’ he said.

‘That’s what I reckon.’

‘What is it? Where does the water come from?’ whispered Alfie.

‘Could be one of them underground rivers – there’s rivers all over London, someone told me. London used to be once just fields with rivers running through them and then the
houses came and there were so many houses they started to build roads over the rivers and then they took to building houses over the roads and making new roads. That’s what I heard,
anyways.’ Jack’s voice was as placid as ever and did not change when he added, ‘And, of course, people empty their drains and their cesspits into these underground rivers.
That’s why London is such a smelly place and why it has so many rats.’

Alfie felt the floor of the cellar, shuddering. It was made of wooden planks. Not good, he thought, remembering the woman in the privy in one of those crazy, half fallen-down houses in the slums
of St Giles. She had fallen through the rotten floorboards and had drowned in the cesspool beneath. And her child had gone with her.

‘Who told you all that stuff?’ Alfie hoped that his voice did not betray how nervous he was. He wished he was out of that dark cellar which smelt of mould. ‘Bert the Tosher,
was it?’ he added.

‘No, it were old Jemmy that told me about the underground rivers. He knew a lot, did Jemmy. He used to work in the sewers when he was a bit younger, but then he gave it up after he had the
cholera. He said that when he was sick he swore if ever he recovered he would never go down a sewer again. Dead now, poor old fellow, and not from the sewers neither,’ Jack sighed.

‘Wouldn’t like going down there myself,’ said Alfie with a shudder. ‘Too many rats down there for me! They say that some of them are as big as cats and as fierce as
bulls.’

‘There’s a manhole cover, here.’ Jack’s hand was feeling around.

‘Leading down to the river?’

‘That’s right. The drains from the cesspits lead down into it. Places like inns often just put their rubbish straight down into sewers.’

‘Good,’ said Alfie, trying hard not to think about rats. ‘Perhaps we could drop down there and go along it like the toshers do. Let’s lever it up now and be ready to
disappear down if anyone comes.’

‘Shh!’ said Jack warningly.

Alfie gulped.

Beyond the gleam of light from the cellar window came the sound of heavy footsteps, the scrape of a key in the lock and then the creak of a door handle. Alfie froze, his shoulder touching
Jack’s, ready to spring.

CHAPTER 9

One of the things that Sarah liked best about her new job as parlour maid at the White Horse Inn was that, as soon as the breakfasts had been served, she could leave the inn
until the time for the next meal came up.

And so it was that she was strolling up Bow Street at ten o’clock in the morning. It was a nice day, she thought. After the storm of last night, the air seemed fresher and cleaner than
usual in London, as though the city had been thoroughly washed by the heavy rain which had not ceased until about one o’clock in the morning.

‘I’ll go and check whether the boys are all right,’ she said to herself. There had been no sign of Alfie or Jack after she had brought the warning to them. They had disappeared
with the speed of lightning.

But there was no one at home in the cellar on Bow Street, not even Mutsy. She knocked again loudly, just to make sure, but there was no bark of greeting, or sound of a large nose sniffing at the
door. Sarah clicked her tongue with annoyance. She was the sort of person who always liked to know whether things were going well, or whether a problem had arisen. Problems she could deal with, but
uncertainty was more difficult. She knocked again just to be absolutely sure and softly called ‘Mutsy’, but no, he was definitely not there.

At this hour of the morning, Alfie and the rest of the gang would usually have gone out, but Jack, who worked by night, would normally still be sleeping – and last night, Alfie had also
been out late. Either they had already gone out, or else Alfie and Jack had not returned the night before.

Sarah shivered slightly as she remembered the hard, dangerous eyes of the man who had been looking for two lads at the inn. Had he found them after all? He and his friend had not returned to the
White Horse with the Birmingham engineers who had accompanied him on the chase.

‘Seen Alfie, anywhere?’ she asked the butcher who was standing in front of his window, supervising a boy who was sweeping out the sodden piles of wood shavings and flood water from
his shop.

‘Haven’t seen him this morning. Saw the blind boy, though. And the other young lad, and the big dog. Dragging some sort of board with him, he was.’ The butcher spoke
impatiently over his shoulder. He wasn’t interested. He was trying to get his shop in order before the customers came.

Sarah was mystified. What was Tom doing with a board? She puzzled over it for a moment, trying to distract herself from the cold fear in the back of her mind that the man with the scarf had
captured Alfie and Jack.

‘Perhaps I’ll go over to Trafalgar Square,’ she muttered to herself. The chances were that Tom and Sammy would be over there, Sammy singing on the steps of St
Martin-in-the-Fields church and Tom searching the fountain for coins that people often threw in there for luck.

The poster was still outside the police station when she came up to it and people were still gossiping about the daring raid on the post office.

‘I heard that fifty gold bars were stolen,’ said a baker, balancing his basket with one arm and staring at the poster.

‘I heard that it were jewels,’ said a bare-footed boy.

‘They’ve never had such a thing happen at that post office before,’ said the woman beside Sarah. Her voice was loud and excited and several people stopped to listen. ‘My
husband was there. They were just loading up the mailbags when someone shouted out,
Fire!
and the place was full of smoke. Of course they all rushed outside. The fire turned out to be in the
coffee room at Morley’s Hotel and they were all standing there looking up when the mail van drove out.’

‘Didn’t they see the robbers go in, then?’ asked a stout lady with a shopping basket.

‘Sneaked in by the side entrance didn’t they?’ retorted the wife of the post office worker. She sounded quite annoyed, as though her husband was accused of not doing his duty.
‘Nobody expected it. Bold as brass, they were. Picked up all the mailbags and drove out and were gone before anyone thought to question them.’

‘Well, they’ll be hanged when they’re caught, that’s certain,’ said the stout lady.

‘
If
they’re caught,’ said a man. He had been standing on the other side of the road, but came across to join the little crowd around the police station. He looked as if
he might be a street beggar, with torn, ragged clothes and eyes bright with starvation or fever. ‘Not sure that I’d like to turn in any of that mob – they say Flash Harry never
forgives and never forgets.’ He looked around and then gave a quick shudder and shuffled away as rapidly as he could.

Sarah looked over her shoulder, following the direction of his eyes as he had looked down the street. There, just opposite the cellar where the boys lived, a man was standing.

And he was wearing a red scarf.

Sarah stared fearfully at the man for a few minutes. Surely that was the man who had come into the bar last night looking for the boys? He was leaning against the wall of a shop, picking his
teeth idly with a straw. She noticed that his eyes only moved from the cellar steps to give a quick hasty glance down Bow Street, and then came back again to focus on the cellar where the four boys
lived. He looked as though he were prepared to wait patiently there all day until his victim turned up.

There was something odd about the way that the man stood there, something rigid about him. His left hand held the straw, but his right hand was stuck deep into his pocket. Sarah narrowed her
eyes and drew in a sharp breath as she saw the shape of a gun outlined within the pocket.

Casually, Sarah crossed the road, taking care not to allow her eyes to meet those of the watcher. He was definitely the same man. He must have seen her last night, but she had been in the
background, loading her tray with drinks for the parlour where the engineers from Birmingham clamoured for more beer. It was unlikely that he would have bothered looking at a parlour maid. She was
safe for the moment.

And then something odd happened. Opium Sal came shuffling along Bow Street. That was the second time she had been seen there. Why would she bother to climb the steep hill from her home on
Hungerford Lane? She, too, seemed to be interested in the cellar where the boys lived.