Death of a Chimney Sweep (14 page)

CHAPTER 25

T
HE
T
RAP
I
S
S
PRUNG

Alfie crouched on the rooftop and felt uncomfortable. He didn’t even admit it to himself, but he hated being so high up. It wasn’t that he was afraid of heights
– he had often scaled a high wall to get away from an angry stallholder. No, it was more that it felt sort of lonely up there – nobody around, no voices, no people passing, no funny
things like a toff slipping in the mud to laugh about, no backchat with the road sweepers, no smells of food cooking – even the noise of the carts and carriages on the roads seemed muted.
Only the high, lonely cries of seagulls overhead to listen to and the faint warmth of the chimney stack to cling to.

From his place beside the chimney, Alfie could not see down into the court. That was a nuisance. However, he had set the trap, laid the bait and he just had to hope that it would work.
Goodwin’s Court was a quiet place and every sound made down there floated up to him. He heard a door bang, light, hurried footsteps going across the brick-paved surface – a scullery
maid going out to a shop for something, he thought. He heard a window open and then shut again.

But then he turned his eyes towards the mews at the back of the houses, and heard what he was waiting for. The fog was too thick to see much but there was the whinny of a horse, the noise of
wheels – a cart or a gig, only Sammy would be sure about which it was – and then the click of the gate leading from the mews into the yard.

At that moment the bell from St Martin’s church chimed the half-hour.

Alfie did not hesitate. Like a shadow in the fog, he slipped over into the chimney, clinging on to its edge until his feet found a slight unevenness in its brick lining – somewhere that
his bare toes could cling to until he got the rest of his body inside the chimney. Then slowly and cautiously, one hand at a time, he let go of the parapet.

Alfie wriggled his way, careful not to go too fast. The light grew fainter as he went down and he did not want to risk missing the side passages of the first floor.

His feet felt warm, and then the warmth rushed up past his face, smoke – hot smoke! For a moment he almost panicked, picturing the glowing fire in the kitchen of Number Four. By now they
would have lit a fire in the dining room too; the old lady would have returned to find a fire in the drawing room where she would sit until her evening meal was ready. Fires everywhere and burning,
stinging smoke rushing up the chimney.

Alfie was choking, drowning in smoke. And then his sliding foot felt another opening. The first floor passages. Just in time, he thought, still trying to hold his breath. He turned sharply to
the right, hoping that in the smoke-filled darkness he had not become disorientated.

Alfie fumbled in the blackness, bending down to the level of his knees. There were piles of soot here and the walls were heavily coated with it. This was the place where he had found the bones
of the boy Isaac. This was where Joe had gone wrong – perhaps he had found the bones and decided to go down the passageway next to it. Possibly he had not made a mistake, but was looking for
a place to dump the bones, to get them out of the way, to stop them blocking the chimney at Number Four. Joe would have feared Grimston’s anger if he had arrived down into Number Four with
the bones.

Alfie made a quick decision. The smoke was making him choke. He inserted his head into the unswept passageway, sticking his arms out ahead of him and twisting his shoulders. To his relief, he
fitted well. This was easier. The passageway sloped downwards, so he could move himself along by scrabbling with his hands and edging forward inch by inch.

There was no smoke here! The chimney was stone cold – it hadn’t been used for almost a year!

Now Alfie knew that he was right. That his gamble had paid off.

The end of the sloping passage came quite quickly. He felt the edge of it with his fingers. There was no room to stand up. Still keeping his hands in front of his head, Alfie dived into the
downward passage.

As he had expected, he went quickly at first. Once he felt himself stick, then he went back to his old routine, wriggling and twisting, edging himself, inch by inch. There was no smoke in his
face and he felt none of the panic that had gripped him earlier that day. Now it was just an unpleasant job, rather like skinning eels, something that had to be got through in order to bring a
result.

There was a faint light ahead of him now. Soon he would come out and what would he see then?

The fireplace was wide and the last few yards were easy. As soon as his hands met the hearthstone, Alfie twisted his shoulders and wriggled out.

Beside him was something round and spiky – a chimney sweep’s brush. On the white rug in front of the fireplace were two small sooty footprints.

Poor Joe! He must have left his brush behind in his haste to flee the room when he first discovered it. When he’d gone back for the brush, he’d been seized and strangled. Perhaps put
in a sack, taken out by the kitchen door into the yard behind. A yard which led to the mews where someone had left his gig.

Alfie got to his feet and looked around. He was in a large, beautifully decorated room, well lit by the street gas lamp outside the window.

Sammy and he had guessed correctly. The chimney had been built to serve both Number Four and Number Five. It made sense. The houses had been built as a terrace – ten houses, but there were
only five chimney stacks, each main chimney shaft serving two houses.

He had come down into Number Five, the empty house next door to Number Four, the house where the owners had gone off to Italy, leaving all their valuables.

This was obviously a drawing room. The furniture was all draped with white linen dustsheets, and, beneath the cloths, Alfie could see the shapes of armchairs and sofas, small tables and tall
cupboards.

The walls were covered with green striped wallpaper, made to look like silk. Alfie noticed something strange about them – there were ghostly oblongs of lighter paper, about six on each of
the three walls facing him. Pictures must have hung there, year after year, protecting the wallpaper while the dust and smoke had darkened the rest of it.

In one of the oblongs was a metal door. Alfie, curious as always, crossed over to it. The door had been pushed closed, but when Alfie inserted a sooty finger, it swung open.

A safe, thought Alfie. The butcher that he sometimes worked for had one of these. He put all his coins into it every day, piling them into little linen bags and taking the bags to the bank at
the end of every week.

But this safe was completely empty. Some safe-breaker had opened it and emptied it while the owners were in Italy. For a moment, Alfie thought of Mavis and her cracksman boyfriend. Maybe Tom was
right, and she was mixed up in Joe’s murder after all . . .

But a professional cracksman would have made a neater job of it, Alfie realised. This safe bore the marks of a hammer and chisel. The lock had been smashed by brute force.

Suddenly Alfie heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He quickly looked for a hiding place, but then decided to stay where he was. He had to be sure that he was right.

The door opened and the man stood there, his tall stovepipe hat in his hand. He wore a pair of strong boots, a waterproof cape, a blue jacket with a turned-up collar. And in that collar, a
badge. PC 27.

It was PC Fairley himself.

CHAPTER 26

M
URDERER

‘Murderer!’ screamed Alfie, and at the same moment PC Fairley hurled his steel-hardened top hat across the floor. It missed Alfie’s legs by an inch.

By this time Alfie had already inserted his head and body back into the chimney. Once he got to the main chimney, he wedged his body into the neighbouring passage.

And then he waited. He did not have long to wait!

A shot from a revolver came up the chimney, the bullet dislodging clouds of soot. Alfie buried his head in his arms and grinned to himself. He was safe here. He was out of the way of any shots
and PC Fairley would not be able to climb the chimney.

And then there was a roar from the drawing room. ‘Put that gun down! By Jupiter, I’ll see you hanged for this.’

Alfie wriggled forward and managed to get his hands, knees and then feet into the main shaft then back into the drawing room flue. He wanted to witness this.

Another roar, even louder this time. ‘Face that wall! Put your hands up! Constable, search him and then handcuff him.’

At these words, Alfie wriggled his way back down into the room.

‘So there you are, popping out like a jack-in-the-box!’ Inspector Denham’s face was red with fury, but a reluctant grin spread over it at the sight of Alfie.

‘Where are Sammy and Tom?’ asked Alfie.

‘I sent them home,’ said the inspector. ‘No place for a blind boy with a dangerous criminal and child murderer around.’ He glared at PC Fairley who stared impassively
ahead. His hands were fastened together behind his back by a pair of iron handcuffs and he had a bruise on one cheekbone.

‘You can’t prove anything,’ he snarled. ‘I came here because of a message that this house was being burgled. Unfortunately I arrived too late.’ His eyes swept the
walls where the marks of the stolen pictures were clearly visible on the silky wallpaper.

‘Nothing stolen today – so far,’ said Alfie smartly. He went up to one of the oblongs and blew hard. A cloud of dust rose from it. ‘That picture has been gone for weeks.
I reckon, sir,’ Alfie went on, addressing the inspector, ‘that Constable Fairley has been nice and quietly removing these pictures ever since the owners gave him the house keys at the
police station for safekeeping, rather than leave them with Arthur Leamington. The constable took them one by one. Much easier to get rid of them that way – Mary the Fence at St Giles told me
that.’ Alfie noticed that PC Fairley gave a start at that name, but he pretended not to notice and carried on. ‘“Two or three pictures might cause questions,”’ he
said, trying to make his voice husky like Mary the Fence’s. ‘“One at a time is the way to get rid of them”.’ He reverted to his own voice and addressed PC Fairley.
‘And you’ve been working on it ever since the owners went on holiday, ain’t you? And then, of course, you had another bit of luck because one of them pictures was hiding a safe.
Nasty job you made of it, too!’ Alfie eyed the damaged safe with an air of scorn.

‘You . . .’ PC Fairley hurled himself at Alfie, who neatly sidestepped, allowing the man to crash to the ground.

‘He was probably banging away at that when poor old Joe came out of the chimney.’ Alfie looked at the prostrate body of the evil policeman with satisfaction. ‘Joe heard the
tapping and came down – or else perhaps he was going to leave the bones of poor little Isaac in this empty house, we’ll never know. Anyway, he went back up smartish when he saw a
policeman. He was so scared that he went right up to the top and when he saw me below in St Martin’s Lane he came down to talk to me.’ Alfie stopped there. If only Joe had not been so
scared, if only he had told Alfie exactly what he had seen. Still, it was no good thinking like that, so he swallowed hard and continued. ‘Joe came down to talk to me, but he was too
frightened to tell me the whole story. And he was so scared of Grimston that he went back to finish off cleaning the chimney of Number Four, and had to come back here to get the brush he’d
forgotten. Nothing much else for him to do, poor little fellow. And of course PC Fairley was waiting for him. He strangled him and shoved the body into his gig. Meant to throw it in the river, but
his aim weren’t too good.’

‘It’s all a pack of lies.’ PC Fairley had struggled to his feet. ‘You killed him yourself.’

‘Inspector Denham is going to get a shock when he finds the amount of money you have stacked up in your house or in your bank,’ said Alfie with a grin. ‘And that tidy little
gig you have. Not too many constables can afford a gig, can they? And, of course,’ he said with a sudden flash of inspiration, ‘Mary the Fence will give evidence against you. Good
friend of mine, Mary the Fence. Told me the whole story. She’d bear witness against her own grandchildren if she thought it would save her skin.’