The Deadly Fire

by Cora Harrison

  Joseph Bishop didn’t move back, but he did hesitate. His eyes left Alfie’s face for a moment. His face turned to one side. With a feeling of triumph, Alfie gave one last flourish with the iron spar, managing to hit the man a sharp blow on the side of the head. The blow should stun him, or at least slow him down as Alfie got away.

  An inarticulate cry of rage burst out from Joseph Bishop. Quickly, he bent down, heaved up the sack of clay and lobbed it at Alfie. Alfie ducked and lashed out with his iron weapon. Another thud, this time just to the shoulder, and the man did not cry out. Alfie struggled to regain his balance. For a moment, he feared that he would lose his footing and be at the mercy of a murderer, but then he straightened up.

  The next moment there was a clang and the white light from the gas lamp had suddenly disappeared.

  But, before it went, Alfie had seen what was in the man’s hand.

  It was a large and heavy shovel.

  Just then he felt the wind whistle past him. The blow had missed him, but the man was so near that Alfie could hear him breathing.

  Crash! This time Joseph Bishop managed to hit Alfie’s weapon. The impact almost broke the boy’s arm. But what was worse; the iron spar shivered to pieces under the weight of the heavy shovel.

  Left in Alfie’s hand was just one small, rusty piece of metal, no bigger than the leg of a chair.

  CHAPTER 16

  FLIGHT FROM THE BODY SNATCHER

  Alfie didn’t hesitate. The dark could work for him as well as for Joseph Bishop. Instantly, he flung the rusty spar, aiming low, hoping to get it tangled within the man’s legs, and then he ran. With no light, he stood a good chance of getting away.

  It was no good going back into Drury Lane. It was brightly lit, but there had not been a single person around. It would be no good screaming: no one in the houses and rooms above the shops there would take any notice. Once the theatres and the shops closed, the inhabitants retreated to their lairs in the cellars and attics. No, he would keep away from Drury Lane. So Alfie flew down through the gloom of Crown Court.

  As he ran, he heard a muffled yell behind him and a string of muddled swear words. That fellow is mad, he thought. Deep within him was an intense fear, but above that was the feeling that he could survive this.

  And Joseph Bishop pounded behind him.

  Ahead, Alfie could see a faint glimmer of light. That was Bow Street. The sight gave him courage and renewed his strength.

  Suddenly he felt a blow and then a stinging pain in the back of his legs. Joseph Bishop had slung his shovel after him. The sharpened edge had struck the bare calf of his leg, but still he managed to run on, gasping with pain, but cheered by the growing square of light from Bow Street.

  But the wound slowed him, and when he reached the end of Crown Court, Alfie could hear that Joseph Bishop was at his heels. With a tremendous effort of will, he rounded the corner without slackening speed and ran down Bow Street.

  There was no time to get the key out of his pocket and open the cellar door – Bishop would catch up with him. So, as he passed the cellar windows, a dull gleam coming from the fire inside, Alfie started to yell.

  ‘Mutsy! Jack!’ He screamed so loudly that a window went up across the road and someone shouted at him to be quiet.

  But that was not the only sound. Dear old Mutsy! Alfie had hardly finished saying his name before the barking began: loud, ferocious barks from the deep chest of a large dog who loved his master. Alfie put his left hand on the edge of the railings and swung himself around, skidded down the steps and hammered on the door.

  Jack had it open almost as soon as Alfie took his hand away. He stared at his cousin with wide eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘It was Joseph Bishop; he was after me,’ Alfie said breathlessly. ‘Quick, let’s get inside.’

  But Jack ran to the top of the steps and looked in both directions. ‘No sign of him now,’ he said.

  ‘Ran off when he heard Mutsy,’ said Alfie carelessly, but his heart did not cease to thump until the door was securely shut behind the three of them. He bent down and stroked the dog, glad of a moment to pull himself together and allow his heart to slow down.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Sammy, sitting up in his bed.

  ‘Wait until you hear the story,’ said Alfie, beginning to feel rather pleased with himself. He reached out a foot and stirred the heap that was Tom. Eventually a tousled head appeared.

  ‘Tom,’ began Alfie and then stopped. He had been about to say in his usual, commanding fashion, ‘Tom, old son, put some sausages on’, but then he changed his mind. Things had to change between himself and Tom. For too long he had been telling Tom things to do, ordering him to do the cooking, giving him tasks that he felt were beneath his own dignity.

  ‘I was just thinking of putting on some sausages,’ he amended hastily.

  ‘Did you get the clay?’ Charlie rolled over and tossed back his blanket.

  ‘Joseph Bishop has got it at the moment, down outside the burying ground,’ said Alfie casually.

  ‘What!’ Tom was on his feet, staring at him. Alfie grinned back at him and made a quick motion with his hand to his mouth. Automatically, Tom unhooked the frying pan from the iron bar across the top of the fireplace and took the string of sausages from the tin. Jack took down the pewter mugs from the shelf and fetched the jug of light ale from its position by the draughty window. Alfie settled himself down to tell his story. He was beginning to feel a lot better.

  * * *

  ‘And what about my clay?’ asked Charlie when Alfie had finished.

  ‘We’ll collect that in the morning from outside the burying ground,’ said Alfie nonchalantly. He would make very sure to have Mutsy with him, he thought, although Joseph Bishop wasn’t often seen in the mornings. He was one of the many in the parish of St Giles that worked by night and slept by day. ‘I’m going to have a sleep now and tomorrow we’ll take a bit of clay and see if we can get Mary Robinson’s footprint,’ he finished. ‘We have to solve the murder of Mr Elmore; we can’t forget about that.’

  ‘Why Mary Robinson’s footprint? Don’t you think that Joseph Bishop did it?’ Jack stared at his cousin in surprise.

  ‘After all, he nearly murdered you,’ added Tom. ‘Don’t you think that he was the one that burned down the school? He seems like the obvious one.’

  ‘What do you think, Sammy?’ Alfie felt confused and uncertain. His leg was hurting him. He transferred some water from the bucket into the kettle that hung over the fire and set it to boil. The doctor who had come to see his mother when she was dying of cholera had given him very good advice. Drink ale if you can and don’t even wash in water from the public pump without boiling it first, was what he’d said. Alfie didn’t go in for washing too much, but he did think that the filth from Joseph Bishop’s shovel was not a good thing to be in an open wound. He took a piece of cloth from the basket of rags and added it to the water in the kettle; when boiled, it would serve to wash out the muck from the deep cut on his leg.

  Sammy took his time to answer. His blind eyes were fixed on the fire. It was strange how often Sammy seemed to be looking into the fire. It was almost as if he had copied that habit from his dead grandfather, who had so often said, ‘I can read every-one’s fortune in that fire, there.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling that Joseph Bishop is not too right in the head,’ said Sammy in the end.

  Alfie looked at him with interest. ‘Why do you say that, Sam?’

  ‘You said it yourself,’ grunted Sammy. ‘I’ve just been sitting here and listening to you. You think to yourself – remember what you told us. What did you say? “I think he’s mad.”’

  ‘I suppose you think that he’s not a body snatcher?’ snapped Alfie, fishing the rag out of the kettle with the top of his knife. He allowed it to drip for a moment and then squeezed out some more water. It was as hot as he could bear and he had an idea that would be good for cleaning the wound of filth.

  Sammy shrugged. ‘I woul
dn’t know about that,’ he said. ‘I’m just sitting here and listening to what you say. His words sound mad – that’s all that I know.’

  Alfie mopped out the cut on his leg, leaving a large clean patch all around it. He stared at the blood on the rag. Already he could imagine the yellow pus issuing from the wound, the deadly symptoms of sepsis, the high fever and the lapse into unconsciousness. His father had died of blood poisoning a year before the fever took his mother. Alfie still remembered the unbelievable speed of his father’s decline. He tried to dismiss from his mind the memory of his monstrously swollen arm and the ominous red splotches running down from his armpit. But he could not blot out the picture of his father’s dead body with the blackened face. He had been carried from the cellar on an old trestle board, and his weeping widow and children had followed him to the burying ground.

  Alfie was beginning to feel rather depressed. He seemed to be no nearer to the solution of the mystery. Perhaps he would never solve it. Perhaps he would not be alive to solve it.

  CHAPTER 17

  BLOOD POISONING

  Next morning, Alfie carefully boiled the rag once again and cleaned his wound with the boiled water. It didn’t feel too bad, but he knew that the worst, if it was going to happen, would probably not happen for a few days.

  In the meantime, however, he had to keep his mind off it. After breakfast, he decided on the plans.

  ‘You and the others stay here,’ he said to Jack. ‘I’ll take Mutsy and go and fetch that clay. We won’t be long.’ He spoke briskly, trying to conceal his fear and horror at the idea of going back to that burying ground again.

  ‘Why don’t you take Jack with you, too?’ asked Sammy. ‘Me, Tom and Charlie will be all right here.’

  ‘Are you giving the orders around here?’ snapped Alfie. It annoyed him that his brother was so easily able to read the fear in his voice, a fear that he hoped to conceal from everyone.

  ‘Just thought it might be a good idea for Jack to have a look at Joseph Bishop’s boot print, if there is one. Two heads are better than one.’ Sammy was unconcerned by his brother’s moods, but Alfie felt a bit ashamed.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said after a minute. ‘I’ll leave Jack, though. He needs a good warm-up before he goes down to that river. It’s perishing cold out there. Will you come with me, Tom?’

  Tom gave a careless shrug, but he looked pleased.

  ‘Won’t be long,’ said Alfie. ‘Keep the fire going, Jack. We’ll set up a marble-making factory here and we have to keep the workers warm.’

  There was no one in the narrow lane of Crown Court. It was a dark place where the sun never penetrated and with the fog it almost seemed like night once they had gone a few yards down the alley. No doors opened on to it; it was just a narrow slit between houses until you came to the burying ground beside an old ruined church. Alfie gulped nervously as the stench hit his nose. He glanced down at his leg. It was throbbing painfully. Perhaps he should tie something over it. Perhaps even this smell was enough to infect an open cut like this.

  The sack-load of clay still lay on the ground in front of the gates. The other piece of clay, the lump that he had thrown out, was also still there. It was useless, though. Joseph Bishop had trodden on it, but during the fight with Alfie he had walked on it again and again. The whole piece of clay was just a muddle of different marks.

  ‘That’s not much help,’ groaned Alfie.

  ‘What about inside the gate?’ asked Tom. ‘We couldn’t take anything back, but we could see if he’s left a print.’

  ‘We should have brought the hardened piece of clay to compare it with,’ said Alfie, feeling annoyed with himself. His mind didn’t seem to be working properly.

  ‘Wouldn’t do much good – there’s nothing there to see,’ said Tom, glancing around at the almost liquid mud. He took one step towards the gate and then stepped back again, his face white. A wisp of white vapour was floating about six feet above the surface of the ground and it was coming towards them. Suddenly the air seemed to smell even worse.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, picking up the bag of clay and shouldering it.

  ‘That’s just fog,’ said Alfie, but he, too, was anxious to get away.

  They were about halfway back down the alleyway, when Alfie stopped and looked back. The ghost-like shape had disappeared and things looked more normal.

  ‘Should we have taken the piece of clay from the ground? It would do to make marbles,’ he asked.

  Tom gave him a surprised look. Alfie didn’t often ask his opinion. ‘Nah, leave it,’ he said. ‘It stinks. It’ll have picked up the filth that oozes from that ground.’

  Alfie glanced down at his leg and said no more. He would be happy never to go near the place again, he thought. But what about Joseph Bishop? Despite Sammy’s remarks, they could not rule out the possibility that Joseph Bishop was the murderer of Mr Elmore.

  Ten minutes later, they were back in the cellar. Alfie decided to wash his leg again. This time he boiled two pieces of rag and kept one to tie around the wound. He felt better when the deep, jagged cut was hidden from view. Then Alfie counted the money in the rent box and decided that they could afford to have a day off from the continual efforts to earn money. Jack had already gone off with a sack to get some more coal, but it was probably useless for Sammy to sing in the street, or for Tom to take Mutsy out to do some tricks, as the freezing fog would drive everyone straight into the shops.

  In any case everyone seemed enthusiastic about the marble-making. ‘They’d be good if we could colour them,’ Charlie said. ‘One of the blokes at the brickyard got hold of some coloured powder and he mixed that in with the clay. It looked good.’

  ‘What about painting them?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No good,’ said Alfie. ‘Where would we get hold of paint? We can’t afford to buy it and we can’t steal a tinful. Besides, no one is out painting houses in this fog and ice.’

  ‘I know where I could get you some green,’ said Jack, who had just arrived with half a barrowload of coal. ‘There’s green powder all over that broken old copper pot out in the back yard.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Alfie heartily. The back yard was full of broken pots and pans. The huge old wash pot had been thrown out into the back yard by a washer-woman who lived on the ground floor, just above their heads, and had been there for as long as Alfie could remember. The rain, mist and fog had turned its original copper-gold shade to an elegant green.

  So Jack used his knife to scrape as much powder as possible off it into an old tin can. Under Charlie’s direction, they mixed the green powder with some water in a bucket, soaked the clay in it and then each took a lump and began to work the air and the water bubbles out with their knuckles. When that was done, they began to form the marbles.

  Sammy was enjoying the work, thought Alfie, as he looked at the busy scene. It was not often that his brother could do things that the other boys did, but he seemed more skilful than Tom at manipulating the clay. Charlie had made one marble for him to feel and after the first two, Sammy didn’t seem to need to refer to it again, but continued to turn out perfectly rounded marbles. Alfie decided to leave them to the work and carry on with his investigations.

  Mary Robinson was striding around the market, speaking sharply to some unfortunate stallholders, reminding them the money was due the following day, lending a pound to some, crossing others off her list, and followed everywhere by a couple of villainous-looking henchmen who continually wrote in small notebooks.

  Alfie spent a long time dodging around the fair, waiting for a good opportunity to take Mary Robinson’s footprint. He had thought of bringing the baked bootprint, but had decided it was too big and awkward and would only draw attention to himself. He wanted evidence, evidence that would convince Inspector Denham that she was the guilty person. He had to compare the prints and then it would be up to the police to make her produce the boot. Albert, the Ragged School monitor, would testify that a clean, smooth lump of clay h
ad been placed in the cupboard a couple of hours before the fire and that it had been found next morning with a bootprint baked into it.

  Alfie had his plans made. An old sack was thrown over his shoulders as if to shelter his ragged jacket from the worst of the weather and inside that sack was a piece of thin wood with an inch-thick piece of clay moulded on top of it. It would take the print and would be easy to pick up and carry away.

  At last his opportunity came.

  There was a narrow lane between the flower stall and the apple stall. Alfie noticed the woman in the flower stall look apprehensively towards the tall, bulky figure of Mary Robinson and then take some money from a box under her counter and start to count it.

  As quick as a flash, Alfie took the thin piece of board from his sack and set it on the ground, just beside the flower stall’s trestle table.

  And then he moved away as rapidly as he had come and sauntered around the back of the apple stall.

  ‘Give us an apple, will you?’ he appealed to the seller, a fat, glum-looking woman with cheeks as red as her own apples.

  ‘Not on your life,’ she said sourly. ‘Why don’t you get a job and stop trying to cadge things for free.’

  ‘Just one little apple,’ pleaded Alfie. He was anxious to stay near there for a moment.

  ‘You can have this one for a farthing.’ The woman sorted through the pile of shining apples until she found a small, wizened one with a large patch of rot next to its stalk.

  Alfie handed over the farthing. At least now he had a reason to linger and by taking small, infrequent nibbles, he could make the tiny apple last for a long time. He kept his cap well pulled down to hide his face; he had no desire to be seen by Mary Robinson, but he owed it to the memory of Mr Elmore to identify his killer.

  Despite his care, the apple had almost disappeared by the time that Mary Robinson made her way towards the nervous flower seller. It was obvious, straight away, that the woman did not have enough money. She was mopping tears with the corner of her shawl as the moneylender bore down upon her. Alfie froze, the tiny apple in his hand and his mouth opened as he peered from behind the back of the apple stall. Would Mary Robinson step on to the clay? By now, he hated her so much that he wanted to trap her, not just to avenge Mr Elmore, but to relieve the unfortunate stallholders of the London markets of her greed.