by Anthony Read
He thought about the problem all the way home, hardly speaking a word to Beaver. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he did not notice the Italian organ-grinder’s monkey rattling his tin cup at him in the hope of another penny. And he did not hear the cheery greetings of their friends in the street. But by the time they got back to HQ, Wiggins had the beginnings of a plan.
“There’s something very peculiar about this murder,” Wiggins told the other Boys. “Nobody knows how the killers got into the house. And I don’t see how they could have got out of it, neither.”
He held the lapels of his coat and looked hard at his audience, waiting for someone to say something.
“P’raps they didn’t,” suggested Queenie.
“P’raps somebody helped them,” said Rosie.
“Exac’ly!” Wiggins replied. “Either way, it could have been what they calls an inside job.”
“Inside what?” asked Shiner.
“Inside the house of course, stupid,” said Sparrow.
“Sure and don’t we all know that?” said Gertie, sounding particularly Irish. “Wasn’t he in his bedroom when he was murdered, poor fella?”
“Who you callin’ stupid?” Shiner squared up to Sparrow, giving him a shove in the chest.
“Hold it! Hold it, both of you,” said Wiggins. “It don’t mean that at all. What it means is, the crime was done by somebody who was in the house, somebody who has what they calls ‘inside knowledge’.”
There was silence as the other Boys took this in.
“Unless there was somebody in the house what let ’em in,” Beaver suggested.
“And locked up again after they done it,” said Sparrow.
“What, with everybody rushin’ about all over the place?” asked Queenie.
“Exac’ly!” said Wiggins.
“So who done it?” asked Beaver. “You think p’raps it was that butler? He didn’t like the look of us, did he?”
“I didn’t like the look of him,” Wiggins grinned. “Snooty old so-and-so. But that don’t make him a murderer.”
“Well, who is, then?”
“I dunno. All we know for sure is that somebody in that house is either the murderer or in league with the murderers. If I could question everybody, I reckon I’d soon find out who. But we ain’t allowed back in there, so I can’t.”
“What we gonna do, then?” Queenie asked.
“We’re gonna keep an eye on ’em from outside. Watch to see who goes in and who comes out, and where they go.”
“But won’t they spot us?”
“They’d spot you and me and Beaver, ’cos they know us. But they ain’t seen Sparrow, nor Shiner, nor Rosie, nor Gertie. So they don’t know them. Now, Shiner, I want you to take your box with your brushes and polish, and set yourself up opposite the front door. And Rosie, you take your tray of flowers and work the other side of the street.”
“What about Gertie and me?” asked Sparrow. “What’ll we do?”
“We got a few of Madame Dupont’s leaflets left. You can be handing those out. I’ll go see if she’s got any more.”
“Right!”
“If you see anything interesting, come and report to me. But make sure there’s always at least one of you on sentry duty.”
Fired with fresh enthusiasm now they had something useful to do, the younger Boys collected their things and hurried off to their posts.
Madame Dupont was happy to give Wiggins more leaflets, especially when he said the Boys would not want to be paid for distributing them.
“I’m a bit busy just now, dearie,” she told him brightly, “but you remember where they are, don’t you? Help yourselves – there’s plenty there.”
Wiggins and Beaver walked through the exhibition to the far corner of the gallery and found the hidden door. It opened quite easily. Just inside the dark storeroom was a pile of neatly wrapped parcels containing the new leaflets. Behind them in the gloom they could just make out a clutter of odds and ends and the dim shapes of old waxwork figures loosely covered with dust sheets. There was something spooky about these human shapes standing so still and silent, and the two Boys were glad to take a parcel of leaflets each and leave.
Walking back through the streets to his watchers, Wiggins was happy to be investigating again. He found a penny for the organ-grinder’s monkey, and stopped a little further on to pat two great shire horses standing patiently at the kerbside, attached to a heavy coal cart. The coalman, wearing a leather helmet with a long flap that stretched down behind him to his waist, was lifting the heavy sacks down from the cart onto his back, then bending forward to empty them through a circular hole in the pavement into the house cellar below.
As he swept the spilled coal dust into the hole before replacing the ornate cast-iron cover, the coalman gave Wiggins a friendly greeting. The Boys knew him well – he sometimes managed to “accidentally” spill a few lumps of coal into the gutter, which they could salvage and carry back to HQ. Today, however, Wiggins was too busy to bother with collecting fuel. He had more important things to do, and he went on his way with a quick wave.
At first, the four Boys watching the outside of Lord Holdhurst’s house found their task quite exciting. But as the hours passed and nothing unusual happened, time began to drag. A posh grocer’s van, drawn by a high-stepping black horse with a glossy coat, brought baskets of food, which were carried down the steps to the kitchen door in the basement by a delivery man with a long white apron over his green uniform. The postman called twice, to push letters through the front door. And once, a telegraph boy pedalled up the street on his red bicycle, rang the doorbell and handed over a telegram in a buff envelope. But the Boys had no way of knowing if the message he brought was urgent or if it had anything to do with Ravi or the murder.
“I’m bored,” Shiner grumbled to Rosie as she walked past him with her little tray of posies. “I ain’t had a single customer all the time I’ve been ’ere.”
“No,” Rosie agreed. “I ain’t done much better.”
“If I’d been in the station, I’d have done half a dozen shines,” he went on. “And got paid for ’em.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t why we’re here, is it?”
“Waste of time, if you ask me. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen.”
Rosie was inclined to agree with Shiner but said nothing. It was getting dark, and her empty stomach was starting to rumble. Shortly afterwards, however, the front door opened and the portly figure of Uncle Sanjay appeared. He trotted down the steps and set off along the street. Sparrow and Gertie signalled to each other and set off after him, keeping a little way behind but making sure they did not lose sight of him. He turned off the main street and entered a shop.
“Same as last time,” Sparrow told Gertie. “He’ll only be buyin’ his cigars again.”
“Better keep an eye on him all the same,” said Gertie.
They waited outside the shop until Uncle Sanjay came out, carrying a small paper bag. To their surprise, he did not head back towards the house but hurried off in the opposite direction. They followed, cautiously, and saw him turn into a back street, where he stopped at one of the mean little houses, knocked at the door and went in.
“Now what would a bloke like him want in a house like that?” Gertie asked.
“Search me,” said Sparrow. “Let’s go and take a look.”
They strolled nonchalantly over to the house and then, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching them, crept up to the window and peeped inside. The gaslight had been lit in the room. Through the grimy glass and a tattered lace curtain, they could see Uncle Sanjay speaking to someone out of their sight. They saw him take a large packet of cigarettes from the paper bag and place it on the table in the middle of the room. Then he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a purse, and counted out a small pile of coins. As the Boys watched, two men stepped forward into view, to pick up the money.
“It’s them!” Sparrow gasped. “It’s the Thugs!”
; A SECRET PASSAGE
“What was they like, these two geezers?” Wiggins asked. “Was they English?”
“No,” said Sparrow. “Not ’less they been out in the sun.”
“Indians, I’d say,” said Gertie.
“They was wearin’ long shirts.”
“Outside their pants.”
“Baggy pants,” said Sparrow.
“Cotton. Grey cotton,” Gertie added. “And bits of cloth wrapped round their heads.”
“Turbans,” said Beaver.
“Sounds like our blokes,” said Queenie.
Wiggins nodded. Sparrow and Gertie had hurried back to HQ to report, after following Uncle Sanjay back to Lord Holdhurst’s house, where Shiner and Rosie were still on guard. They were buzzing with excitement at what they had discovered.
“Anything else about ’em?” Wiggins asked.
“Well,” said Sparrow, “one of ’em had a dirty great scar on his face.”
“All the way from his eyebrow to his chin,” added Gertie.
“That settles it,” said Wiggins. “They’re the Thugs what tried to do Ravi in.”
“But what’s his Uncle Sanjay doin’, givin’ them money?” asked Queenie.
The Boys stared at each other, aghast, as they realized the awful truth. There could be only one explanation.
“He was paying their wages,” said Wiggins. “They’re working for him!”
“You mean he paid ’em to murder Ravi?” asked Beaver. “Why’d he do that? I mean, he’s his uncle.”
Wiggins took a deep breath and shook his head in exasperation. How could the others not see something that seemed so obvious to him? On the other hand, he thought more kindly, how had he himself not seen it before?
“It’s like this,” he explained. “Ravi’s the Raja, right? And Sanjay’s his uncle. So, if anything should happen to Ravi, who gets to be the next Raja?”
“Uncle Sanjay!” the others shouted in unison, amazed once again at their leader’s brilliance. Only Beaver still looked puzzled.
“Hang on,” he said. “When they tried to kill Ravi the first time, he wasn’t the Raja yet. His dad was.”
“No, Ravi was,” Wiggins replied. “His dad was already dead – only nobody knew it.”
“Uncle Sanjay did,” said Queenie. “He was in Scotland with him.”
There was another silence as they all considered this and thought about what it might mean. At last, Wiggins spoke again.
“Oh, my oath!” he said. “He must have killed Ravi’s dad – or had him killed by them two thugs. Then sent ’em back here to do Ravi in.”
“But I thought the Thugs was s’posed to kill people for their goddess, Kali,” said Gertie. “Like a sacrifice.”
“Or in revenge for stealin’ the ruby,” Sparrow added.
“Yeah,” said Wiggins. “That’s what we’re s’posed to think. That way, nobody’d suspect Uncle Sanjay, would they?”
“Oh, that is diabolical,” said Queenie.
“I bet they ain’t even real Thugs,” said Beaver. “I bet they’re only pretending to be. I bet that’s what that sugar was for – to make people think they was real Thugs.”
“Course they ain’t real Thugs,” Wiggins interrupted him. “Like everybody says, the real Thugs was stamped out fifty years ago. This lot are just killers working for Uncle Sanjay.”
“We gotta warn Ravi,” said Queenie. “They’ve had two goes at him already. We stopped ’em first time. The second time it was Captain Nicholson. If they try again, it might be third time lucky.”
“How we gonna stop ’em?” asked Sparrow.
“The captain. We gotta tell him. Now.”
Wiggins headed for the door, but before he got there Shiner came through it, out of breath and wild-eyed.
“Shiner?” Queenie said. “What is it? What’s up?”
“It’s him!” Shiner gasped. “The bloke what was with Moriarty. The bloke with the boots. I seen him comin’ out of the house. He lives there!”
“Who is he? What’s he look like?” Wiggins asked.
“Tall, near enough six foot. Light hair, fair moustache…”
Wiggins, Beaver and Queenie stared at each other in horror. There was only one person in the house who fitted that description.
“Captain Nicholson!” said Wiggins. “Oh, my word … he’s in on it. Now what do we do?”
“We can’t leave Ravi in that house with the captain and Uncle Sanjay,” said Queenie. “We gotta get him out.”
“Yeah, right,” said Beaver. “But how?”
They all turned to Wiggins for an answer.
“I’ll have to think,” he said.
“Well don’t take too long,” said Queenie. “We gotta get to him afore the stranglers do.”
Wiggins paced the floor. He put on his old deerstalker hat, and even sucked on his curly pipe. He sat in his special chair and thought hard. But still he couldn’t see how they could get into Lord Holdhurst’s house to rescue Ravi.
As Sparrow left for his job at the theatre, Rosie came in, cold and hungry. Shiner said he felt like he had a big hole where his stomach ought to be, and could he have something to eat. Queenie told him to bring in a fresh lump of coal from their little pile in the yard outside, to stoke up the stove so that she could start cooking.
As Shiner dropped the coal into the stove, Wiggins suddenly sat up. Seeing it reminded him of the coalman, emptying his bags into the hole in the pavement. And the hole in the pavement made him think of cellars, and cellars made him think of underground passages. What was it that Sarge had said about Lord Holdhurst’s father, who built the Bazaar? That he used to pop up from nowhere, inside the Bazaar, so he could keep an eye on things. And nobody knew how he got there, but there was talk about underground tunnels. He must have had a tunnel from his house, which was right behind the gallery that now housed Madame Dupont’s waxworks.
“That’s it!” he cried, leaping to his feet. “I know how they got in.”
“How?” everybody wanted to know.
“There’s a secret passage. From Madame Dupont’s waxworks.”
“How d’you know that?” Beaver asked.
“Tell you later. We ain’t got time now.”
“But if it’s secret, how come the thugs knowed about it?”
“Moriarty,” said Wiggins. “He’d know about it.”
“Moriarty knows everythin’,” said Shiner gloomily.
“But does he know we’re on his trail?” asked Gertie.
“He does now,” said Wiggins. “We told the captain – and the captain’s in league with him.”
“Oh, lawks,” said Queenie. “What we gonna do?”
“We got no time to lose,” Wiggins said. “You go and see Dr Watson. Take Shiner with you, and Gertie. They can tell him what they seen the captain and Uncle Sanjay doing. And tell him Beaver and me and Rosie are going into the house through the secret tunnel in the Bazaar.”
He hurried over to the shelf in the corner and lifted down his bull’s-eye lantern.
“We’re gonna need this,” he said. “It’ll be dark in there.”
“But where exac’ly is this tunnel?” asked Beaver.
“I dunno yet. But if it’s there, we’ll find it. Queenie, tell Dr Watson to send for Inspector Lestrade, quick as he can. Right, everybody – let’s go!”
It was dark and the evening fog was swirling through the streets as the Boys left HQ on their missions to save Ravi. Queenie, Shiner and Gertie ran up Baker Street to 221b, but when they finally managed to persuade Billy to open the door, he told them the doctor was out and he didn’t know when he would be back. This left them with a quandary. They could make their way to Scotland Yard on their own, but without Dr Watson they knew that Inspector Lestrade probably wouldn’t listen to them. They decided that all they could do was wait on the doorstep.
Wiggins, Beaver and Rosie, meanwhile, hurried to the Bazaar. But when they arrived they found that Madame Dupont’s waxworks were locked up fo
r the night. And there was no sign of Sarge in his lodge.
“Where could he be?” Rosie asked.
“He’s probably took his jug down the pub to get some beer,” said Wiggins. “He does like a quiet pint of an evening.”
“Yeah, but we need him here,” said Beaver. “How else are we gonna get into Madame Dupont’s?”
“Easy,” said Wiggins. “Look.” He pushed open the door of the lodge and shone the beam of his lantern on the rows of keys hanging on the wall. Each key was neatly labelled, and it didn’t take him long to find the one they needed. They ran past the shops and the parked carriages, the sound of their footsteps on the cobbles echoing through the empty Bazaar, and in no time Wiggins was unlocking the doors of the gallery.
“Quiet, now,” he told the others. “You never know who might be around.”
Inside, the Red Indian brave looked more menacing than ever in the dark hallway, and, as the Boys tiptoed through the gallery, the glassy eyes of all the wax models seemed to watch every step they took. Most of the gaslights were turned off, but two or three were still burning, very low, leaving big patches of deep shadow.
“It’s scary in here,” Rosie whispered, staying close to Beaver.
“What we lookin’ for?” Beaver asked. “D’you think it might be a trapdoor or somethin’?”
“Could be. Whatever it is, it’s probably hidden.”
“That room where Madame Dupont kept the leaflets was hidden,” said Rosie. “You wouldn’t have thought there was a door there if you didn’t know.”
“That’s right,” said Beaver. “It looked like part of the panellin’ till she pushed it.”
“Good thinking, Rosie,” Wiggins congratulated the little flower girl. “C’mon, let’s take a look.”
They moved quickly to the hidden door and pushed it open. Behind it, the storeroom looked dark and forbidding. They crept inside nervously and looked around by the light of Wiggins’s lantern. The wax figures under their dust sheets looked even more sinister than Wiggins remembered, and Rosie clung to Beaver’s sleeve, trying desperately not to scream as she thought she saw one of them move.