Death in the Devil's Den (8 page)

‘You go first,’ he said. ‘Get straight up onto the roof. I’ll count up to six to give you a start. I’ll let him have a sight of me so that he doesn’t suspect
you.’

Then they had some bad luck. Just below them in Dean’s Yard was a gas lamp and, as Richard climbed onto the windowsill, it was lit with a
pop
. The lamplighter moved on back out
through the gate without looking upwards, but now the two would be visible. However, there was little that the headmaster could do to a ragged boy climbing out of the window, reckoned Alfie. He
would make a great fuss. He would shout, yell and send for the police; but by that time he and Richard would be on the roof of the Abbey and could climb down on the far side.

The roar of
Stop, thief!
came almost immediately. Alfie glanced back and saw a red-faced man wearing a mortarboard leaning out of the widely-opened window. Luckily he was looking down,
not up. Alfie did not wait any longer. Richard was probably on the Abbey roof by now. Quickly he dragged himself up, holding onto the stone ledge at the end of the roof.

In a moment he was on the roof ridge. There was no response to the headmaster’s cries and Alfie guessed that most of the servants took their rest during the service at the Abbey. In any
case, the organ was now playing very loudly and the booming notes filled the little yard with noise.

Alfie stayed where he was for the moment. A few seconds later, he saw the silhouette of a black hat against the night sky. Richard was over at the north side of the Abbey. There was a small door
there. If Richard could get down quickly, he would still be in time to swap places with Sammy in the choir stalls.

Then the sound of singing came to him. Someone must have opened the west door. Soon the people would be coming out.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’
sang the high, sweet voices of the choir, and Alfie almost thought that he could distinguish Sammy’s voice from amongst them. He
listened intently. There was no sign of Richard now, so hopefully he would have got down before this hymn had finished.

Then the organ began to play again and the voices of all the churchgoers, deep and high, mingled in the words.

Alfie had often heard Sammy sing this and he mouthed the words to himself as he jumped the gap and landed on the roof of Westminster Abbey.

‘
Glory to thee, my God, this night,’
sang the congregation as Alfie edged his way across the roof of the south cloister.

‘
For all the blessings of the light,
’ he hummed tunelessly as he made his way past the devil’s head.

‘
Keep me, O keep me, King of Kings,

Beneath thy own almighty wings.
’

Now the sung words were getting fainter as he reached the centre of the Abbey roof.

Everything seemed easier this time and soon he was over on the north side of the Abbey, listening to the organ thunder out the last few notes and then suddenly fall silent.

Did that mean that the service was finished, wondered Alfie. And if so, had Richard had time to change places with Sammy before the choir had to file their way out of the church, and back down
the Dark Cloister? Each boy would be holding a lighted candle, so it was important that the swap was made before the procession took place.

Alfie stood up beside a statue and peered down. The people were beginning to stream out of the Abbey. Some were talking and others were just looking for cabs. There was no air of excitement
about them, though. No sign of anything unusual happening.

And then he saw a pair of figures that he recognised. One was a girl in a thick, respectable-looking black cloak and the other was a blond boy wearing a suit and carrying a top hat. The two were
linked together, the girl’s arm tucked into the boy’s arm. Alfie smiled as he looked. Sarah would walk with Sammy as far as Trafalgar Square and then she would hand him over to Tom and
Jack while she went off to her evening’s work at the White Horse Inn. They would have to get Smith Minor’s suit and top hat back to Richard but in the meantime, thought Alfie proudly,
Sammy looked a treat in it.

As for me, thought Alfie, I’m better off staying where I am for the moment. There seemed to be a lot of policemen around the Abbey tonight and he would stay for an hour or two on the roof
to give everything time to calm down.

‘Richard was great, wasn’t he?’ Alfie burst in through the door of the cellar, giving Mutsy a quick pat on the head. They were all there. Sammy, though still
looking unusually clean and tidy, had changed out of the smart clothes and was wearing his own ragged breeches and torn coat. He turned his head eagerly when Alfie came in, but turned back to the
fire again when he heard his brother’s words.

‘
Richard, Richard, Richard
,’ sneered Tom. ‘What’s so great about Richard? Just a toffy-nosed, flash- talking swell. Who cares about him? We’re sick of him,
aren’t we, Jack?’

Jack said nothing, just looked troubled.

‘I suppose you don’t need me tonight, then,’ said Tom. ‘Is your precious Richard going to hang around street corners getting freezing cold? I can just see him! You know
what he’s going to do, don’t you, just as soon as he gets tired of you? He’ll play the informer, and then you’ll find yourself in hot water. If ever I saw a snitch, well,
he’s one.’

‘You shut your mouth and get out of here,’ said Alfie hotly.

‘C’mon, Tom, I need a hand,’ said Jack, the peacemaker. He steered Tom quickly past Alfie and they could be heard arguing on the cellar steps.

‘He’s just jealous,’ said Sarah, as the voices disappeared. ‘He likes working with you.’

Alfie said nothing. He frowned at the fire while Sarah told him all about how well Sammy had done and how a lady beside her in the Abbey had whispered to her that she had never heard the choir
sing so beautifully as they sang that night.

Then Alfie recounted how he and Richard had stolen the box of sweets from the organist’s room. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do now?’ he continued when neither Sarah nor
Sammy responded. ‘I’ve just decided, I’m going to wrap up a parcel that looks just like that and tie it to a key in just the same way as they did before and I’m going to put
it into the postbox and see what happens.’ He looked at Sarah. ‘What do you think? Will it work?’

‘What do you hope will happen?’ asked Sarah, narrowing her eyes.

Alfie clicked his tongue in an annoyed fashion. If he had said that to Richard there would have been an immediate response of ‘What a lark!’

‘One of them men, one of them MPs, will pull it out, of course, and then I’ll know the truth,’ he said impatiently.

‘And what will happen if none of them goes near to the postbox, if none of them touches it?’

‘Oh, pipe down, Sarah.’ Alfie could feel himself exploding with exasperation.

‘I think,’ said Sarah, ‘that you should go straight to Inspector Denham. Tell him everything and let him sort it out. This business is dangerous. Sammy took quite a risk today
for you.’ Her voice rose and shook slightly. ‘If he had been discovered, they might have put him in the workhouse. I was worried sick! I say that you should stop now – stop all
this nonsense, climbing around roofs at night and breaking into schools. Go to Inspector Denham.’

‘I didn’t mind,’ said Sammy firmly.

Somehow these few words from Sammy made Alfie feel worse than ever. However, he was determined to solve the problem and earn the promised reward of five pounds. He turned an annoyed gaze towards
Sarah.

‘Well I’m not going to Inspector Denham yet,’ he said hotly. He went to the cupboard, took out an old rusty key, carefully re-wrapped the brown paper parcel with some twine
belonging to his father, who had been a cobbler, and stuck some cobbler’s wax to fasten the twine and its dangling key securely to the paper. When that was done he gave a brief look around
and said, ‘I’m off. Stay, Mutsy!’

Westminster Abbey was quiet and dark, with only a few pinpricks of light showing through the stained-glass windows when Alfie arrived outside it. He walked around for a while
before approaching the red pillar box with
Victoria Regina
in gold letters just below its slot. He gave one more glance around before dropping the small parcel, attached to the key, into
it.

Then he strolled for a while around the Abbey until he found a shadowy corner and began to climb up to the roof.

It was funny, he thought, how much work the men who built the Abbey, all those hundreds of years ago, had put it into it. Not content with just building walls and roofs, they had decorated
almost every inch with little twists and curls, stone heads, carved patterns, statues of saints and angels.
Must have had a lot of time on their hands to give themselves all that work
, he
said to himself as he grabbed a head and inserted his toes into a stone flower. Still he was grateful to them. It made the roof a joy to climb.

He looked up and down the long line of Westminster Abbey. He had walked around its pavements often enough, during all the hours that he had spent hanging around waiting for something to happen.
The Abbey was about six hundred feet long, he reckoned. Where he stood now was about halfway between the little chapel at one end, and the Great West Door at the other.

The roof over the little chapel was the place to be, thought Alfie. From there, he could look down over the Houses of Parliament and watch its members come out after a late night sitting.

Tonight would be the night! He felt confident about that. Now he knew how everything worked, he would keep a sharp eye on that postbox and with luck he would soon find out which of the three men
was the spy. He would be able to give his name and the name of Boris Ivanov to Inspector Denham.

Inch by inch, Alfie made his way across the roof. There was a low parapet, high enough to hide a six-year-old child, but for a twelve-year-old like Alfie the only possibility was to crawl or to
crouch. The razor-sharp edges of the slates cut into his bare knees, but it was better than the agony of walking bent double.

The climb down was long and difficult and, when he was halfway down, the bells sounded and almost deafened him. And then Big Ben started chiming. The new belltower, Big Ben, was a great service
to Londoners without watches, thought Alfie. Everyone could keep track of time now as its sound echoed all over the town. He looked across at the great clock face: eight o’clock. He hoped
desperately that the MPs would finish whatever they were doing soon. He was cold and stiff, and yawns kept almost dislocating his jaw.

At last he reached the roof of the chapel. This little chapel was no higher than an ordinary London house, and he was now only about twenty feet above ground level. In some ways he was glad to
come down as the immense height of the Abbey had begun to make him feel dizzy.

To his dismay the whole roof of the chapel had been covered with sheets of lead – soaking wet from the fog – and it was as slippery as ice. Once again Alfie had to go along on the
inside of the parapet, but this was even more difficult as this parapet was lower still and the danger of being seen was much greater.

However, it looked as though his wait would not be a long one. The MPs were streaming out, and there was a queue of cabs lined up, ready to take them to their town houses or to the coaching
inns. In ones, or twos or threes they went off, chattering happily.

Some of the last to come out were the three men on the rifle development committee. And there they were, just like before, the three MPs, standing under the gas lamp outside the Houses of
Parliament. Alfie could see them quite clearly: two big men and one thin one. Although the air was still foggy, there were no clouds in the sky and, like the night before, a brilliant full moon lit
up the whole scene.

But there was a difference. No Russian lurked in the shadows of St Stephen’s Tavern; Alfie was sure of that. Boris was probably on his way, even now, to the Russian Embassy. Alfie bit his
lip at the thought of the Russians coming to hunt for him, but stayed very still. He might be in danger, but he was determined to see this matter through.

Yes! One of the men, Ron Shufflebottom from Yorkshire, was standing very close to the red pillar box. Unfortunately Roland Valentine was quite near to him, telling jokes as usual. Tom Craddock
was at the edge of the pavement whistling for a cab.

And then Ron Shufflebottom lifted a hand and pointed towards the gate into the Houses of Parliament. Roland Valentine turned his head in that direction. Immediately his companion turned back to
the postbox and Alfie saw him seize the key and draw up the parcel from its depths. By the time Roland Valentine looked back, the parcel, its thread and its key were safely tucked into Ron
Shufflebottom’s pocket and they had all piled into a cab together.

The man from Yorkshire was the guilty one.

Now Alfie knew almost the whole story.

Now he could go to Inspector Denham and tell him what happened.

But not yet, he said to himself . . .

Only when the place was empty did Alfie slide down from the roof of the chapel and, after a quick glance to make sure that no one was around, he crossed the road and carefully examined the
pillar box.