For a while, it looked as if she would not step on the clay. Her loud, hoarse voice rose up, the stallholder wept, her henchmen wrote in their notebooks with no sign of emotion, other stallholders nearby kept their heads down, averting their eyes, and Mary Robinson stood there, her men’s boots planted firmly on the ground.
And then the flower seller, in desperation, snatched a ring off her hand and held it out towards Mary Robinson. Mary Robinson took a step forward in order to look more closely . . . And placed one heavily booted foot right on top of Alfie’s carefully prepared mould.
But what Alfie had not taken into account was that Mary Robinson was a woman who, despite wearing exactly the same outfit of men’s clothes and boots every day, was very particular about her dignity. She looked down with annoyance and then took a closer look. There was the piece of wood and there was the piece of clay with the perfect imprint of her boot on top of it.
‘Where did this come from?’ Her deep, husky voice was suddenly shrill.
‘It was that boy over there. I saw him put it down.’ The flower seller pointed immediately at Alfie.
‘This boy, ma’am?’ The apple seller decided to curry favour from Mary Robinson. Before Alfie could escape, she had knocked his cap off and grabbed him by the cluster of curls on the top of his head. Rapidly one of the two henchmen came around the back and grabbed him by the arms.
‘Trying to break my leg, weren’t you?’ Mary Robinson looked at him sourly. Bending down she picked up the clay mould with the perfect imprint of her foot, reversed it and stamped on it, smashing the wood and reducing the clay to a piece of mud.
‘You’re the varmint that was giving out the leaflets a few days ago!’ She peered closely at him and looked around. The market was full of people. He could see her wondering whether to try choking him again and then deciding against it.
‘Take him down to Bow Street police station, George,’ she said to the man who was holding him. ‘Swear out a statement that he tried to break my leg. You’re a witness and you are, too.’ She swung around and glared at the flower seller, who nodded in a terrified way.
Alfie allowed himself to be dragged along, taking care to give no trouble to George. He had no worries, now. He would be taken to the police station and he had no doubt that he could convince Inspector Denham that he had not intended any harm to Mary Robinson.
‘Shut that door,’ shouted the duty sergeant when the constable pushed Alfie inside. The fog entered with them and swirled around the gas lamps. Despite the fire the room was icy cold.
‘Accused of harassing a lady in the course of her business,’ explained the constable, jerking a thumb at Alfie.
‘Put him in a cell,’ grunted the sergeant, busily engaged in inserting wads of paper into the ill-fitting window frames.
‘Inspector Denham won’t be too pleased if you do that without consulting him,’ warned Alfie. He was confident that he could explain himself to the inspector.
‘He’s not here. He’s in St Bart’s Hospital with pneumonia,’ said the sergeant. ‘Take him in to Inspector Bagshott, then. He’s a troublemaker, this one.’
Alfie’s heart sank. Without his ally, what would become of him?
CHAPTER 18
THE NEW INSPECTOR
The man behind the desk looked with disdain at Alfie. Inspector Bagshott was nothing like Inspector Denham. He was an extremely tall, very thin, very upright man with a beak-like nose, a harsh face and cold, grey eyes. His voice was as harsh as his appearance.
‘So what were you up to, if you were not trying to lame the poor lady?’ he asked aggressively, after the constable had given his report.
Alfie studied him. He kept his face blank as his mind raced through the possibilities. He could say that he didn’t mean any harm, that he had just dropped a clay-covered piece of wood by accident. He was unlikely to be believed, though, and what could be his explanation for carrying the object in the first place? In the end, he decided to tell the truth. This inspector didn’t look amiable, but he might be open to reason.
‘I was doing a job of work for Inspector Denham,’ he said eventually. It wasn’t exactly true, but it was the best he could think of.
‘Rubbish!’ Inspector Bagshott made an angry gesture across the table as if he were on the point of punching Alfie in the face.
‘It’s the truth.’ Alfie stared back at him. The man looked aggressive, but not stupid. Perhaps he could make him understand. ‘That lady might be a suspect in a murder case.’ Alfie tried to make his voice sound as confident as possible.
‘Murder case? What murder case? PC 22!’ the inspector roared.
The door opened instantly, almost as though the constable had been standing just beside it.
‘Have we a murder investigation going on here?’ demanded Inspector Bagshott.
‘No, sir.’ The constable sounded shocked. ‘You would have been informed of the matter the minute you arrived, sir, if anything like that was happening.’
‘The murder of Mr Elmore, teacher at the Ragged School,’ said Alfie, looking directly at the inspector.
‘Unfortunate death through fire, sir,’ said the constable smartly, sending a glare at Alfie.
‘Murder!’ contradicted Alfie. ‘Inspector Denham took it seriously.’ Alfie, who never minded telling a lie in a good cause, arranged his face to look serious and trustworthy. ‘There was a footprint baked into some clay at the scene of the crime,’ he went on, ‘and Inspector Denham asked me to try to match it. Since Mr Elmore had published a leaflet about Mary Robinson ruining the stallholders by charging so much interest, she hated him.’
The inspector opened his mouth and Alfie rushed on. ‘And she tried to murder me, to strangle me because I was handing out the leaflets. She got her hands around my throat. Inspector Denham was interested to hear about that.’ He wasn’t quite sure whether that was true or not, but obviously the friendly inspector wasn’t around to contradict it.
The same thought seemed to cross Inspector Bagshott’s mind. He leaned across the desk, both fists planted solidly in its centre and his face a couple of inches from Alfie’s.
‘I’ll give you ten seconds to get out of here,’ he said, speaking between his teeth with a hissing sound. ‘And if you are ever reported to me again, for any reason whatsoever, then you’ll see the inside of a cell – and you won’t talk your way out of that so easily.’
Alfie did not stay to argue. The constable flung open the door and Alfie found himself running up Bow Street as fast as his sore leg would carry him.
When he opened the door of the cellar, Mutsy came flying up, his tail wagging frantically and then, his nose going to the sore leg, he sniffed at it gently, looking up into Alfie’s face. Alfie looked all around. Everyone was there, including Jack. He had bumped the old wooden barrow down the steps and was just unloading some coal.
‘What we need now is some bricks or something like that,’ said Charlie, surveying the fireplace with a professional eye. ‘We can build a sort of bridge with them and light the fire on top of them – make it really hot and then stick the marbles under the fire on this old tin tray.’
There were plenty of marbles already made and Sammy was adding to them rapidly, placing the smooth, pale green spheres with great precision, with one finger marking out the space between them.
‘What about me hauling in a bit of a broken iron pot from the yard?’ asked Jack. ‘We could cover the tray of marbles with it and heap the fire on top. The metal would get very hot – much hotter than bricks. What do you think, Alfie?’
‘Should work,’ said Alfie in an authoritative way. He hadn’t much idea about what heat was needed to bake marbles, but he was not keen on sending Jack out to steal some bricks. Jack wasn’t good at that sort of thing and he himself did not feel like any more encounters with the police.
‘This tray will soon be full,’ said Tom, coming back from the window, where he had been peering up at the few people who were hurrying home through the freezing fog
.
Be full quicker if you worked a bit more, thought Alfie, but he said nothing, just busied himself with boiling up the two pieces of rag and thoroughly washing the cut on his leg. Was the blood beginning to turn a little watery, a bit yellow?
Charlie joined Sammy and began to roll out the marbles, working quickly and efficiently, and Tom did his best to equal his speed as Alfie tied the rag over his wound. Perhaps it would feel better tomorrow.
‘Need any help with that, Jack?’ he asked when his cousin had arrived back with half an iron cooking pot.
‘Just a one-man job,’ said Jack. In his neat way, he shovelled the coals aside, took the tray of marbles, put it in the centre of the embers, placed the curved shell of the broken pot on top, piled up the glowing coals on either side until they were slightly higher than the pot and then filled in the centre with more coal. After a few minutes there was a roaring fire going.
‘As hot as any furnace,’ said Charlie, licking his finger and stretching out his hand towards the heat.
‘It’s going to use a lot of coal,’ said Jack, looking with satisfaction at the fire.
‘I’ll give you a hand to get some more,’ said Alfie as Jack picked up the handles of the barrow. It was an unpleasant task, but he was glad to be doing something to distract his mind from his worries.
The river was invisible behind curtains of thick yellow fog as they made their way down Drury Lane and then bumped the barrow down the Temple Stairs. Some of the coal boats landed there and there were always some spillages as the coal was shovelled from the barges to the waiting carts. The tide was out and the Thames had shrunken back, leaving a line of objects on the high-water mark: dead dogs, poisoned fish, broken baskets, bits of water-soaked timber and a man’s suit of clothes. The clothes were sodden and torn, but as the two boys approached a woman rushed past them, seized the garments, wrung them out as well as she could and then placed them in her basket.
‘They’ll be on sale in Petticoat Lane next week!’ said Alfie with a grin at Jack.
‘Good lot of coal, here. Dead tide brings everything to the shore.’ Jack was always strictly practical and kept his mind on the job in hand.
By the time that they arrived back in the Bow Street cellar, Sarah was there, sitting beside Sammy and helping with the marbles. Alfie felt his own sense of loss rush back when he saw how tired and ill she looked.
‘Sleep badly, did you?’ he asked, sitting beside her and taking a pinch of clay into his hand and watching how his brother rolled it between his palms.
Sarah ignored his question and he realised that she did not want to talk about Mr Elmore’s death, but to concentrate on solving the murder. ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked after waiting for a response for a minute.
‘Not too good,’ confessed Alfie. ‘Mary Robinson did stand on the clay, but she spotted it immediately and got into a flaring temper. She got one of her bulldogs to take me to the police station. Inspector Denham wasn’t there and the fellow that has taken over threatened me with the cells if he hears any more complaints.’
‘It’s interesting, though, isn’t it, that she got into a temper just to see her bootprint on the clay? Almost as though suddenly she remembered putting her boot on to some clay before . . .’ Sarah’s face was sharp with interest.
‘The clay in the cupboard of the school!’ Sammy turned his head towards Sarah.
‘That’s right – she might not have thought anything of it at the time, but then when it happened again, it suddenly flashed on her and she wondered if you had done it on purpose. She knew you was involved with Mr Elmore.’
‘Tell her about Joseph Bishop, Alfie,’ said Tom. ‘Wait until you hear this, Sarah!’
So Alfie told her about Joseph Bishop – this was the second time that he had told the story and he made it even better this time, spinning the fight out and adding in details about how the thrown spar had given him an advantage and what he had shouted at Joseph Bishop. Sarah listened carefully and gave a shiver, but nodded her head when Sammy gave his opinion that the man was mad – perhaps too mad to plan burning down a building just to get rid of Mr Elmore.
‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ continued Sammy. ‘Why didn’t Joseph Bishop just attack him on the street, that’s what I say? You mark my words, Alfie. When we find who killed Mr Elmore, it won’t be Joseph Bishop. I don’t even think that it will be a drunk like Thomas Orrack. I think it will be someone respectable, someone who wanted rid of him but didn’t want anyone to guess,’ said Sammy confidently.
‘Someone like Mary Robinson.’ Alfie gave his brother a light punch on the arm to show his agreement.
‘Or someone else, someone very, very respectable, someone none of us has thought about,’ said Sarah, a little sparkle coming into her eyes. ‘I’ve got some news,’ she told them. ‘I have found out something very, very interesting indeed. The murder might have been committed by a person that none of us was thinking of.’
CHAPTER 19
A NEW SUSPECT
Sarah looked all around her with a smile on her small, thin face. Jack was looking politely interested, Alfie frowning with concentration, trying desperately to guess, Tom trying to look as though he knew the secret, Sammy placidly continuing to roll out the pale green marbles and Charlie, not so interested, walked over to test the temperature of the fire with a wet finger.
‘It was the parlour maid who gave me the idea,’ Sarah began. ‘She’s a great gossip. She overhears everything when she’s serving at the meals and keeps a straight face when she’s doing it, but then she comes out to the kitchen – you should hear her! Sometimes I think I will die laughing as she mimics all their voices, talking in a really posh way, with deep-down voices for the men, and high, squeaky ones for the women.’
Tom and Charlie laughed heartily at this, but Alfie fidgeted. What had been said? Would they ever get to the bottom of this mysterious fire that killed the man who was doing his best for the ragged children of St Giles?
‘Well, apparently today at lunch time, they were all talking about the fire at the Ragged School and the Missus said what a shame it was and then her sister, who is very rich, said, “Poor dear Mr Elmore. What a terrible thing for him.”’
‘And?’
‘And,’ said Sarah dramatically, ‘she wasn’t talking about our Mr Elmore, she was talking about his father. You know, that old man who was at the funeral? Well, this old Mr Elmore is very, very, very rich and he is dying! His heart is very bad. Apparently no one thinks that he can last too long with a heart as bad as this.’
Alfie frowned. He wasn’t quite sure what Sarah was getting at. Sammy, however, had a smile on his face, so Alfie said, ‘Go on, Sam, you say it.’
‘And this very rich man had two sons a few days ago. Now he has only one.’ Sammy smiled quietly to himself.
‘And a few days ago, if he had died, all of his money would have gone to our Mr Elmore, the eldest son.’ As she said that, Sarah was watching Sammy, who did not hesitate before answering,
‘But now it goes to the brother.’
‘That’s right,’ answered Sarah, nodding vigorously. ‘Mr Daniel Elmore.’
And then there was a loud knock on the door. It was the sort of knock that was not done with the knuckles of a hand, but with the tip of a heavy stick.
There was only one person who knocked like that. The rent collector.
Alfie cast one desperate glance at the rent box and then went to the door. The man couldn’t be going to put the rent up again, could he?
But it wasn’t the rent collector. The man who stood on the doorstep pushed past Alfie and strode into the cellar as if he had a right to be there.
In a second he had taken in everything. The huge coal fire, the six youngsters, the slices of bread and cheese before them and the mugs of ale. ‘Nice and well-off, aren’t you?’ he said, but there was something sinister in his voice.
Alfie looked at him steadily. Thomas Orrack was looking better, he thought. Perhaps he had
given up on the drink. He certainly did not seem drunk at this moment; in fact, his glance was very keen as he looked at everyone in the small room.
‘I saw the girl come down here,’ he said with a nod at Sarah. ‘You want to be a monitor, don’t you, Sarah? Mr Elmore told me that. Well, I’m setting up a new school, two pence a day, or a penny an evening: I’ll be holding it in the parish room next to St Giles Church. The vicar has given me permission. He’ll be the one in charge of the school. You’ll all be welcome. This will take the place of the Ragged School.’
‘Except that the Ragged School was free,’ said Sarah quietly.
Thomas Orrack laughed.
It was a false laugh, thought Alfie, looking at him with interest. ‘Education is worth a few pence,’ he said jovially, glancing around at the six children and then staring hard at Charlie.
It was that stare that determined Alfie. He did not want Charlie’s presence to be commented on, or to have to explain who the boy was. He would get rid of the disgraced teacher as soon as possible.
‘That’s good news, Mr Orrack,’ he said politely. ‘We’ll certainly do our best to attend.’
Tom’s head snapped up, but Alfie gave him a furious frown from behind Thomas Orrack’s back. Politely, he walked towards the door, holding it open for the teacher and even giving a slight bow before he closed the door. Then he walked back and took his place by the fire.
‘Well,’ he said, looking around at his gang.
‘A penny an evening,’ said Sarah sharply. ‘There were about fifty children at the school every evening. He would soon start making money.’
The Deadly Fire Page 8