The Body in the Fog

by Cora Harrison

  ‘The boy is right. We have to target the correct house instantly,’ said a tough-looking policeman. He shut one eye, aimed a rifle at the portrait of Queen Victoria and then put it into its holster quickly when he saw the chief superintendent’s eye upon him.

  ‘Well, sit by me and keep out of trouble; I don’t want to have to explain to that dog of yours how you got a hole in your middle,’ said Inspector Denham and Alfie gave a polite laugh at the joke.

  There were two steamboats waiting by the river’s edge when they got down the Whitehall Stairs. The fog had lifted a little and a few rays of watery sunshine lit up the clock tower at Westminster.

  Alfie had never been in a steamboat before and he couldn’t believe the speed with which it took off. Under Hungerford Bridge in a minute, then under Waterloo Bridge, and a minute later beneath the iron bridge of Southwark. Before Alfie had even had time to feel nervous, they shot beneath the stone arch of London Bridge and then past the Tower of London. Now Alfie began to feel the palms of his hands getting damp. They were not far from the spot where poor Charlie Higgins had been shot and killed. Their boat was ahead now, and the other steamboat lurked at a little distance.

  Waiting for me to give the word, thought Alfie, sitting up a little straighter. The thought of Charlie Higgins gave him courage, strengthened his determination to get the men who shot the unfortunate fisherman so casually. Which was the house? Yes, it was that one. He remembered the broken shutters, one hanging loose in the wind. Confidently he pointed and immediately he felt Inspector Denham’s hand on his head, pushing down hard, forcing him to duck down between the seats.

  A policeman in front of the boat had taken up a loud hailer and was speaking into it, his voice booming around the water and bouncing off the old wooden houses on Jacob’s Island.

  ‘You are surrounded by armed policemen! Give up and come out with your hands above your head!’ The words must have been heard on both sides of the river. Alfie wished that he could sit up and see the people coming to the banks.

  But there was no answer and no sound from the house with the broken shutters. Peering from under Inspector Denham’s knee, Alfie could see a woman with a baby in her arms come to the window of the house next to it. A small boy with a mass of straw-coloured hair, as untidy as a rook’s nest and dressed only in a man’s ragged jacket which reached to his toes, came out onto the wooden wharf and stared at the steamboat and the armed policemen within it.

  ‘Come out peacefully with your hands raised!’ repeated the man with the loud hailer.

  Again there was no movement or sound from the house. Alfie began to wonder whether the raiders had already left.

  ‘I will count to ten and then we fire,’ announced the loud hailer. And then, slowly, loudly, the count began.

  ‘One, two, three . . .’

  A woman in rags rushed, screaming, out of one of the other houses, seized the small boy by his hair, slapped him hard and dragged him inside.

  ‘. . . four, five, six, seven, eight . . .’ Now the count was going more quickly. From all around the boat came the click-clack sound of guns being loaded. Inspector Denham pressed hard onto Alfie’s head. Alfie went flat on the floorboards of the boat, wriggled under the inspector’s knees and had popped up his head by the time the last number was called.

  Instantly the police began to fire, the men aiming at the loose shutters and shattering the half-rotten wood. The boat was full of the smell of gunpowder. Alfie turned his face away to avoid sneezing and saw that the other police boat had gone over to the south shore and was now advancing towards the back of Jacob’s Island.

  Alfie was not the only one who had seen this manoeuvre. The police in his boat began firing even more fiercely, one man taking up position in the front of the boat while another retired to reload his gun. Those with pistols examined them carefully, checking the ball, closing one eye and squinting along the barrel. They were giving cover to the men in the other boat, thought Alfie, admiring the cleverness of it all.

  And then three shots rang out from the house. A shower of bullets came back. They were well-armed, these men. Alfie tried to sit up a bit straighter. He wanted to be able to see the gun battle. He would have fun describing it to Sammy later on.

  ‘Get down,’ hissed Inspector Denham and he himself ducked as a shot came whizzing over their heads.

  ‘Missed!’ called one of the armed policemen. He sounded like he was enjoying himself – rather like the men who went out ratting, thought Alfie.

  Then came another shot. This time there was a scream from the front of the boat. The policeman in the prow had been hit. His hands shot into the air. He swung sideways. Another policeman grabbed him; eased him to the floor of the boat.

  And then the guns rang out, with shot following shot. All aimed high, Alfie noticed. And soon he saw why.

  The wooden wharf surrounded the crazily tilting houses. And around the corner from the end house a black figure, a policeman, advanced, followed by another and another. The shots from the first boat continued to ring out; splintering the walls of the old house and making neat holes appear in the roof. The shutters had been completely shot away now and the glassless windows gaped open into the rooms beyond.

  There were no returning shots now.

  Suddenly a shout.

  ‘They’ve escaped!’ yelled the boarding party on the wharf.

  ‘Making for a steamer to Holland or some such place,’ grunted Inspector Denham in an exasperated voice. ‘Get out from under my legs,’ he added to Alfie. ‘I suppose you’re safe now. They’ve given us the slip!’

  Alfie scrambled out and stood up. He looked down the river. There was no sign of the small galley boat that he had seen the night before. Where was it? They had been firing up to a minute before. The men could not have escaped as quickly as that. He looked all around.

  Jacob’s Island was on a small piece of land surrounded by a ditch. The ancient houses were about three storeys high and on the top floor of each were crazy broken galleries, with poles stretching from gallery to gallery across the swamp, where the unfortunate inhabitants could hang up their sheets to dry – if they had sheets, and ever bothered to wash them.

  But today something else hung from these poles! Not sheets, but men! They were trying to cross the river gap between the houses by edging their way across the poles.

  ‘There they are!’ yelled Alfie at the top of his voice. And a great shout of joy went up from the policemen in the boat and those on the wharf.

  Five men, one wearing a red silk scarf, all of them murderers and thieves, hung there helplessly from the wooden poles!

  A moment after Alfie’s shout, the police were pounding up the stairs of the house, guns at the ready, then appearing on the gallery, shouting orders to the men to return.

  One dropped down from the pole, falling plop into the water. Quickly two more followed him – all three of them swimming frantically.

  It did them no good, though. In a minute Alfie’s police boat was beside them, grabbing wrists and knotting rope over them, and pulling them on board like sacks of coal. Alfie felt no pity for them. They had strangled the little post office man and shot poor Charlie Higgins, as well as injuring one of the policemen.

  ‘Come back or we shoot!’ called a policeman to the two remaining figures, still hanging from the washing poles, and inch by inch they wriggled back.

  ‘Well,’ said Inspector Denham with satisfaction, ‘it looks as though we’ve finally laid hands on Flash Harry, his lieutenants and Sid the Swell himself. I’ve been waiting for this moment for many a long year.’

  CHAPTER 23

  MUTSY PLAYS DETECTIVE

  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 compla
ining 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.