The Body in the Fog

by Cora Harrison

  ‘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.

  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

  DROWNED RATS

  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 tol
d 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

  BLOCKED

  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 ahe
ad 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.

  ‘Alfie!’ the shout came again and this time he located it, looking upwards. Jack was on top of the storm gate, clinging on. He was pointing to the side of the gate, and it took Alfie a few moments to make out rusty chains hanging down. The gate must be raised and lowered with these chains. Alfie was reluctant to let go of his safe hold on the broken plank, but what Jack had done, he could do. Clenching his teeth and keeping his courage up with thoughts of Sammy and Mutsy waiting for him, he launched himself into the seething water, kicking his legs frantically and clawing with his arms.