Death in the Devil's Den

by Cora Harrison

  ‘We’re here!’ shouted the balloonist. ‘Hop out like a good lad and hang onto the rope with all your strength. Don’t let it go, whatever you do.’

  Alfie did as he was told. He wrapped the rope around his waist for double security, and looked up.

  And looked straight into the eyes of the man with the gun.

  CHAPTER 21

  SHUFFLEBOTTOM

  In a flash, Alfie understood what had happened. The man with the gun must have seen him go up in the balloon, found out where it was heading and taken a cab to Vauxhall Gardens.

  Instantly Alfie hopped back into the basket.

  ‘Need any help, Mister?’ he asked. ‘Anything you want doing? It’ll save you getting more sand.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ said the balloonist. ‘I’d be dumping a couple of bags now. I’ll be taking up passengers soon.’ He looked at Alfie. ‘Anything the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a man with a gun after me,’ said Alfie, trying to sound tough.

  ‘That’s a nuisance,’ said the balloonist absent-mindedly, fiddling with the cords coming from the valve. ‘And you don’t have a gun, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Alfie, wondering if the man was mad.

  ‘And you want to get away? Quite right, too. I’d do the same in your place. Frankie!’ He shouted the last word and a man in the blue and white uniform of a waterman came forward.

  ‘Frankie, take this lad back to Westminster, will you? Did me a favour. Game lad, plenty of courage. Never batted an eye when we went into a tree. He’s a bit worried about a man with a gun after him, though. And who could blame him?’

  The balloonist was in good humour. A long queue of people to buy tickets to go up in the balloon was forming.

  Alfie took one look at the man called Frankie. He looked tough and Alfie decided to trust this stranger. He clambered out of the basket and took his place beside the waterman.

  He looked behind him a few times as they walked together through the crowds, but the man with the gun was keeping well out of sight. My lucky day, thought Alfie and said no more until he was in the wide, low boat moored beside the Vauxhall Steps.

  ‘Westminster?’ asked Frankie with a lift of an eyebrow.

  ‘Westminster,’ repeated Alfie in a loud, clear tone of voice. Let the man with the gun take a cab and be waiting at Westminster Steps. Alfie had another trick up his sleeve.

  ‘Temple Stairs suit you as well?’ he asked quietly as Frankie pulled strongly on the oars and set the boat on its course right down the centre of the River Thames.

  ‘You didn’t say that back there.’ Frankie made the observation but he continued to pull strongly against the oncoming tide and his broad, placid face was unchanged.

  ‘Don’t ever say where you’re going when there’s a man with a gun around,’ said Alfie. His voice, to his pleasure, sounded calm and unworried.

  ‘Puts you off, don’t it, having a gun pointed at you,’ agreed Frankie. He drove his oars deeply into the water and made the boat leap forward before saying, ‘What’s he after you for, then?’

  ‘Police business,’ said Alfie, looking directly into the waterman’s face.

  ‘Won’t meddle in it, then,’ said Frankie. He was silent for a moment before saying, ‘You should get yourself a gun.’

  ‘Should, indeed,’ said Alfie grandly. ‘I’ve been taking shooting lessons at a place near Leicester Square,’ he added. ‘Don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Called George’s Shooting Gallery.’

  ‘Good fellow, George,’ said Frankie. ‘Know him well.’

  ‘Good fellow,’ agreed Alfie. ‘You take lessons from him, then?’

  Frankie gave a grunt. ‘You must be joking,’ he said. ‘Where would I get the money for something like that?’ He steered expertly around a dredging barge and said nothing for a moment or two and then resumed.

  ‘Naw, sometimes I row some toffs to Hungerford Steps and that’s where they’re bound. George gives me a shilling if I send a customer to him. Straight as a die is George. Sent him a man last Friday night. And there he was, Saturday morning, punctual as a clerk to his desk, shilling in his hand. Nice fellow, George. A lot of others would have pretended that the man never arrived.’

  ‘Stays open late, then, does he; George, I mean?’ enquired Alfie, in an off-hand way.

  ‘As late as it takes,’ confirmed Frankie. ‘It must have been about eleven o’clock of the evening when I dropped off this fellow.’

  Not very likely then, thought Alfie, that George had anything to do with the death of Boris, the Russian spy. No, it must be Ron Shufflebottom that was responsible for the death of Boris Ivanov. Or was there another possibility? Alfie sat very still as ideas darted through his head.

  ‘So why are they after you, then?’ asked Frankie, looking at him shrewdly. ‘A man with a gun? Why should anyone bother about you?’

  ‘Wish I never got myself tangled in this business,’ groaned Alfie, avoiding the question.

  ‘What business?’ The waterman was gazing at him with interest.

  ‘Any chance you were around Westminster Steps on Friday evening?’ Alfie asked the question with little hope in his voice and was not surprised when the man shook his head.

  ‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Not much business around Westminster in the evening. The cabmen have it all sewn up. But, now that I come to think of it, I did get a fare on Friday – early Friday evening – going to Westminster. Crowd of drunken Yorkshire men. They’d come two hundred miles to London to hear their Member of Parliament speak in a debate about a new law saying that children under nine could only work for twelve hours a day. All mill owners, they were, and said that they could never make a living if the new law was brought in. They was hoping that their Member of Parliament would speak up for them.’

  ‘What was his name?’ asked Alfie.

  Frankie chuckled. ‘Not a name that you could forget. Shufflebottom! What a name, eh?’ His laugh rumbled out.

  Alfie laughed too but he was thinking furiously. If the mill owners had come all the way from Yorkshire to hear Ron Shufflebottom argue about how long children should work – well, then, there was no chance that he could have left the Houses of Parliament early.

  No, thought Alfie, his heart sinking, Ron Shufflebottom was not responsible for the death of Boris Ivanov on Friday night. He had begun to guess what had happened on that night.

  ‘Well, here we are at Temple Stairs,’ said Frankie, interrupting his thoughts. ‘Mind how you go. Remember what I said. Get yourself a gun and some lessons. London is a very dangerous place.’

  CHAPTER 22

  BLACKMAIL

  ‘Thought I’d find you here.’ Alfie used the knee of an angel as a foothold and grabbed its arm to lever himself up beside Richard. The moon was waning, but the night was clear with a hint of frost whitening the roofs and exposing a sky brilliant with stars.

  Alfie sat for a moment looking down on the boats on the river and at the gas lamps lining the streets. The windows of the Houses of Parliament were all dark. The Members of Parliament were spending the weekend with their families all over the country.

  Richard gave him a sidelong glance. ‘You, again,’ he said. ‘So you’re still around.’

  ‘Me, again,’ agreed Alfie cheerfully. And then, he asked, ‘Why do you come up here so often? Don’t you get tired of it? What do you think about when you’re up here on your own?’

  Richard didn’t answer for a moment; he just turned his head slowly, gazing down at the miles of London spread beneath them.

  ‘I think about money,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘You know, London is the richest city in the world. My father told me that and he’s a banker. If you half shut your eyes all the lights down there look like piles of gold. And I think that someday I’ll own them all. But you wouldn’t understand,’ he added, and there was a note of contempt in his voice.

  ‘So your father is a banker,’ said Alfie mildly. ‘Brought you up to the money trade, is that it?’

  Ri
chard smiled. ‘My mother used to tell me that ten minutes after I was born my father put a gold sovereign into my hand and I grabbed it tightly. He was very proud of me, that’s what she used to say.’

  ‘Used to . . .’ hinted Alfie.

  ‘She’s dead, now,’ said Richard, turning his face away again and once more looking down on the rich city of London.

  ‘My father will take me into partnership when I’ve left finished my studies. He wants me to go to Oxford, but I’d like to go straight into the City and begin making my fortune.’ His voice sounded impatient.

  Alfie looked down, too.

  Funny old place, London, he thought with surprise. He would never have guessed that it was the richest city in the world. Anyone who thought that had never been down the streets of Devil’s Acre or wandered around St Giles. Not much richness there.

  He turned his attention back to Richard. ‘So you don’t want to wait till you leave school, that’s it, is it?’ he asked casually. ‘Gone into business on your own, while you’re waiting, like.’

  Richard opened his mouth and then shut it.

  ‘The blackmail business – that was it, wasn’t it?’

  And that was it, Alfie thought sadly. An easy way of making money – blackmail. You got hold of someone with a secret and threatened to tell the secret unless they gave you money to keep silent. Richard had not been helping him just for a lark, as he had thought. Richard must have been using information from Alfie in order to blackmail the Russian organist. Richard would have threatened Boris that he would tell everyone that the organist was giving British secrets to the Russians.

  Boris would have been desperate. He wouldn’t have wanted to go to prison. He probably wanted to keep his job at Westminster Abbey. He might have loved his job, thought Alfie, remembering the organ notes that had streamed out from the church into the winter’s air.

  ‘Why did you kill him?’ he asked casually.

  ‘I didn’t!’ There was a note of alarm in Richard’s voice. And something else, too. Something that made Alfie brace himself and grab the tight curls on the angel’s head.

  ‘How could I have the strength or the height to do that?’ Richard moved a little closer and eyed Alfie’s clenched hand. ‘You know yourself that someone broke off the flagpole and hit him over the head with it,’ he added. ‘The police say that it had to be a very tall and very strong man who did it.’

  ‘That’s what the police from Scotland Yard say? Is that right?’ enquired Alfie with a tolerant chuckle. ‘Not too bright, are they?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Richard moved a little closer still.

  ‘Stay right where you are.’ Alfie kept his voice friendly as he went on, ‘I got a gun here in my jacket pocket. I’ve been taking a few lessons from George at the shooting gallery. Won a bet from him and he gave me this old pistol.’

  It was pure bluff; but Richard, he was glad to see, had hesitated. He couldn’t take the chance, thought Alfie as he poked his finger through the threadbare material of his coat, hoping that it looked like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Go on then, tell me how I could possibly kill Boris,’ challenged Richard.

  ‘You pushed him off the roof, of course, and he hit his head against the flagpole, breaking it off as he fell. I saw straightaway that was how it happened,’ boasted Alfie.

  ‘And why should I kill Boris? What was he doing on the roof in the first place?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Alfie calmly. ‘I’d say this is what happened. You passed him a note, after choir practice probably, and asked him whether he wanted to sample some sweets that you had in your room. He came, of course; you knew that he would. When he was there you showed him a small box, the same size as the one we took from his room, all wrapped in brown paper. Poor old Boris would have been shocked that anyone knew about these sweets and how he was spying for the Russians. You said that you would give it back to him if he paid the price. Then you took the money and, before he could do anything, you shoved the box out of the window. It slid down the roof into the yard. I saw it myself when I saw the body – nearly skidded on it.

  ‘The body, ah,’ said Richard suavely. His eyes were on the baggy pocket in the torn jacket and Alfie moved his hand slightly, making sure that his finger was poking out stiffly through the jacket like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Boris must’ve gone onto the roof to get the box back . . . I guess it didn’t fall into the yard straightaway,’ Alfie continued. ‘Once he was out there, you gave him a push. I suppose he’d threatened to tell your father, the banker, about the interesting way that his son was making money. I don’t suppose that he was the first person you’ve blackmailed.’

  ‘You can’t prove anything,’ said Richard. He gave a yawn, but his face in the starlight looked very white. ‘No one would believe you.’

  ‘I could put the idea into the heads of some of them dumb policemen from Scotland Yard, though, couldn’t I?’ Alfie’s voice hardened. ‘There’d be questions. Things would come to light.’

  There was a long silence and then Richard said abruptly, ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill him.’

  ‘Thought he would bounce, did you?’ asked Alfie with a smile.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t see why you care – he was a spy, wasn’t he? I did it for my country.’

  ‘Ah, but you went a bit further, didn’t you?’ Alfie replied in the same calm tone of voice. ‘You went to the Russian Embassy and told them that I had the box. You didn’t want any chance of them being after you. They might have been a bit too much for you to handle. So you sent them to me.’

  ‘Might one enquire how you know this?’ Richard had a sneering note to his voice, but his eyes were sharp and he shifted his position to just a little nearer to Alfie.

  ‘They knew what my name was and where I lived, and about my brother being blind and about me having the box,’ answered Alfie promptly. ‘You told them to aim at Sammy, didn’t you? You’d have been glad to have him killed, wouldn’t you? Jealous that he had a better voice than you, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ said Richard in a lofty tone. ‘But I’m sorry for you. Living in that terrible place and wearing those awful dirty clothes and having a blind brother. So I’m going to give you a little present, if you swear never to say anything about this to any living creature for the whole of your life.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a folding purse and opened it. Alfie gasped. It was full of sovereigns and at the back were folded bank notes. One of them was a twenty-pound note.

  ‘I can see that your father is going to be very, very proud of you,’ Alfie said sarcastically.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Richard. ‘What will it take? One sovereign? Two . . .’

  Alfie hesitated but not for long. He had been to see Inspector Denham that morning. The five pounds was safely stashed away in the rent box and in his pocket were five silver shillings sent down by Scotland Yard and delivered to the cellar by PC 27. He took a deep breath and looked Richard steadily in the eye.

  ‘I’d rather have nothing more to do with you, or your money,’ he said. ‘But you don’t need to worry. I’m not bringing this story to the police. I’ve done my job and you did help – and I believe you when you say you didn’t mean to kill. Just a spot of blackmail.’

  Richard’s eyes flickered. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Better be going,’ he said uncertainly.

  Alfie gestured towards the parapet. There was no way he was going first. He didn’t trust Richard. ‘After you, sir,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE GANG

  Alfie looked around the cellar. The task was over and the spies had been uncovered. Inspector Denham had told Alfie that Ron Shufflebottom had been arrested for passing secrets to the Russians. Apparently he had confessed very quickly. The reward had been claimed and the gang were safe from the rent collector and would have a roof over their heads for the months to come.

  And yet, there was something wro
ng.

  There wasn’t the same air of excitement, the same sense of achievement as at the other times they had solved mysteries. Alfie thought that he knew why. For once it was not a solution that the gang had worked together to produce.

  Alfie had gone out on his own – gone with a strange boy – with Richard Green from Westminster School. Alfie winced. He did not want to think of Richard and he turned his mind to when he had floated over London in a balloon.

  That was it. An idea seemed to float from the balloon into his mind and once more he counted out the money in his pocket.

  ‘It’s your half-day, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Let’s treat ourselves to an evening out at Vauxhall Gardens.’

  Frankie was at the Temple Stairs with his boat when the five of them trooped down, followed by Mutsy.

  ‘Here, I don’t take dogs,’ said Frankie as they approached.

  ‘Very good guard dog; better than any gun; available free of charge to any obliging waterman,’ said Alfie smartly.

  ‘He’s really good at catching rats, too, if you want your mooring place cleared,’ put in Jack.

  ‘Go on, get in,’ said Frankie. ‘Keep him still. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Vauxhall Gardens’ said Alfie grandly.

  ‘I’ll pay half; I got some good tips from customers last night,’ said Sarah in a low voice when they reached the gardens, and Alfie allowed her. This would leave money for a slap-up supper.

  It was beginning to get dark when they arrived and Vauxhall Gardens, all decked out ready for Christmas, was a wonderful sight. The trees and colonnades that lined the paths were strung with two thousand coloured lamps and in the background there was a sudden flash as fireworks sped up into the sky. Mutsy stared in astonishment and had to be prevented by Tom from howling with amazement.