Death in the Devil's Den (7 page)

By the time the church bells sounded three in the afternoon, Alfie had dressed Sammy in the clothes that Richard had lent; the clothes belonging to Smith Minor, the boy with
measles. He, himself, was glad to put his own ragged clothes on again. Tom had sneered at his ‘toff’s rig-out’ and they had quarrelled and Tom had flung out of the cellar in a fit
of temper. Jack had disappeared soon after. Alfie was pleased neither was there when it came to changing back.

If it came to a chase he would prefer bare feet and knee-length breeches, he thought
as he brushed the shoulders of the black frock coat and placed the top hat on Sammy’s newly washed blond curls.

‘Sammy and Richard look quite alike,’ said Sarah as she came back from the shop with a pair of thick socks. She looked critically at the blind boy and nodded. They were the same
height and had the same blond curly hair. ‘Try the boots with those socks, now, Sammy,’ she suggested.

And that worked well. The thick pair of socks meant that the boots fitted his feet. Richard straightened the hat, adjusting the elastic to fit Sammy’s head.

‘Take off your hat when you get inside the Abbey,’ he ordered. ‘And then when you get to the place in the choir you’ll have to put on your surplice – just pull it
over your head. I can’t do that for you.’ Richard sounded nervous.

‘Don’t fuss,’ snapped Sarah, who was feeling anxious herself. ‘We’ve got it all set up. If the Abbey is as dark as you say, then Tom can easily make his way under
the seats and be behind the choir stalls before you walk over with Sammy. He’ll help him if necessary. When the service is over, you just change places. I’ll take Sammy out and you go
back into school with your friends.’

‘And I’ll be in that passageway behind the choir stalls,’ said Jack.

‘Don’t forget to sing softly, Sammy,’ said Richard for the tenth time. ‘You don’t want to make old Ffoulkes suspicious.’

‘What are you worrying about? It’s easier than jumping across a four-foot space when you’re thirty feet above the ground,’ said Alfie with a grin and was pleased when
Richard grinned back.

Me, Alfie, friends with a toff, he thought with wonderment. And such a toff, too! He was still amazed whenever he thought of that scene where Richard jumped the gap without hesitating. There was
no doubt that Richard was full of courage – a bit foolhardy, even. Strange that he was so anxious about Sammy taking his place. There must be something about this Mr Ffoulkes that made him
nervous, decided Alfie. He was glad that his new friend had not shown these signs of nervousness in front of Tom. Tom would have been bound to sneer at him.

‘You can walk into the choir stalls with Sammy, Richard, and then you can be sure that he is in the right place,’ ordered Sarah. ‘Keep your head; don’t take any risks. No
point in showing off.’ She sounded severe, and a little worried, so Alfie hastened to reassure her.

‘Richard says that it’s so dark that the choirboys have to feel their way,’ he said and then he turned to Richard. ‘What about me? Where do I go? Where do I wait for
you?’ He could hardly wait to get into the rooms of Boris the Russian organist and spy. What was in that brown-paper wrapped parcel? Even as he listened to Richard’s instructions, he
was wondering about that parcel.

And then there was that strange sentence:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
. Alfie repeated it over to himself again and again, frightened of forgetting it. It must be of huge
importance for a man to eat the paper that it was written on.

The Dark Cloister was very damp and smelled of old, dead things. It had stone pillars set at intervals all the way along it and the ceiling was so low that it was only just
above Alfie’s head. It was very dark, also, and once Alfie had gone a few yards from the entrance he had to grope his way like a blind man, moving from pillar to pillar. After that he stayed
still and waited. It seemed a very long time until the pounding of feet on the stone slabs told Alfie that Richard was coming.

‘Don’t know how you run in the pitch dark like that,’ he grunted as Richard came to a stop beside him.

‘We always do that, Smith Minor and myself. You just get into the middle of the Dark Cloister and then start to run. Some fellows’ nerve fails them – the ghosts of the old
monks from eight hundred years ago are supposed to haunt the Dark Cloister,’ said Richard. Then he added airily, ‘I say, do you believe in ghosts? You can hear them chanting the old
Latin chants sometimes. I’ve heard them myself, in this very place. It’s the oldest building in the place and there’s a cellar beneath it where no one dares to go.’

Boys’ stuff
,
thought Alfie, not bothering to answer. He had no interest in ghosts and no idea what happened eight hundred years ago. Survival was what was important and in order to
survive in London these days you needed three things: food, shelter and fire – in that order. These schoolboys had never had to trouble themselves about having to get these essentials for
life, so they frightened themselves with ghosts.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said. ‘Get that key to the organist’s door.’

As soon as I see what’s in that parcel, I’ll go straight to Inspector Denham and tell him the whole story
, Alfie decided. It was obvious how information was passed to the
Russian Embassy and why Inspector Denham or the men from Scotland Yard had not been able to lay their hands on the guilty Member of Parliament, whether it was Ron Shufflebottom from Yorkshire, Tom
Craddock from Cornwall, or Roland Valentine from Essex. Whichever of these was the spy, they were using Boris Ivanov, the Russian organist at Westminster to make contact with the Russian
Embassy.

‘All the spare keys hang in a little room outside the headmaster’s study. He won’t have locked it before going across to the Abbey. The servants need the keys to bring in the
fresh coal and make up the fires for the evening.’

Richard sounded very carefree and led the way into the school, walking confidently along the dimly lit passageways. Alfie followed cautiously, stepping from one pool of shadows into another and
keeping well back when Richard cautiously turned the handle to a door.

Even Alfie was taken aback when it was suddenly thrown open and a furious voice said, ‘Boy, what are you doing here?’

‘Sorry, sir! Sorry to disturb you, sir! Mr Ffoulkes wanted to know if you were coming to the service, sir.’ Alfie had to admire Richard’s ready imagination. But would it work?
He held his breath.

‘I’ve told him already that I have a headache.’ The headmaster sounded more irritated than annoyed. Alfie drew in a breath of relief, but too soon.

‘Who’s that boy there? Someone’s over there. I heard someone. Who is it?’

Quickly Alfie grabbed a top hat from a shelf in the dark passageway and placed it on his head. The headmaster held up his candle and peered through the gloom. Out of the corner of his eye, Alfie
saw a shadow of a boy in a top hat on the wall behind him. There was nothing he could do about his bare legs and his torn clothes, but in the dim light he might pass for a Westminster scholar.

‘That’s Wilkins, sir. He’s not well; Mr Ffoulkes told me to take him back to the dormitory, sir.’

‘Very well. Now leave me in peace!’ The headmaster slammed the outer door shut and Alfie heard a key turn in the lock.

‘That’s torn it,’ whispered Richard returning to Alfie. ‘He usually never bothers locking that outside door. Now what will we do? Should we get out on the roof and then
climb in through his window? It’s probably locked, of course. We’ll have to smash the glass.’

He sounded quite unconcerned about smashing the glass in the organist’s room and once again Alfie thought how reckless his new friend was. Perhaps if he, Alfie, had always had money and
people calling him
sir
, he would have been as reckless as Richard. As it was, he could see problems in smashing windows. There must be another way.

Alfie thought for a moment and then smiled to himself. It was worth a try.

‘Let’s go up to your study,’ he murmured in Richard’s ear, but said no more until they were safely inside the little room with the door closed behind them. Only then did
he open the cupboard and remove the board and show Richard how he had climbed up the wall to the attic.

‘I know what it was,’ said Richard, holding the candle up high and peering up into the dim, cobwebby space between the wooden panelling and the stone wall. ‘Westminster School
was the old monks’ place in the past, and it was so cold and damp that they built a wooden wall inside the stone to make little rooms. Some master told me that. I say, do you bet all the
rooms are like this? I’d say they probably are. Do you think that we can get into any of the rooms in the same way?’

‘It’s easy to climb up,’ said Alfie. ‘But can we get down into the organist’s room? That’s the question?’

‘Should do,’ said Richard confidently. ‘It’s on the other side of the building; but it’s on the top floor so it should be easy to get down to it, if the other side
is the same as this.’

They climbed the stone wall, Alfie leading the way, finding footholds on the wooden beams. Despite Richard’s confidence, they went into quite a few wrong rooms until they eventually
arrived at Boris the organist’s room. By this time the two boys were covered with cobwebs and streaked with dust and dirt. Richard gave a worried look at the clock on the mantelpiece.

‘Just twenty minutes to go,’ he grunted as he lit a candle from the embers of the fire. ‘I say, if we find something perhaps we should try blackmailing him. We’ll just
get a pat on the back if we hand him over to the police.’

‘I’ve been promised five pounds,’ said Alfie. He wondered whether he should share it with Richard and was relieved when the Westminster boy laughed.

‘Five pounds?’ he said. ‘That’s just a fleabite! My father would give me five pounds just to get me out of his sight. We’d get more than that from Boris.’

Alfie did not answer. For him, five pounds was a fortune, but he didn’t want to admit this. Quickly he looked around the room. The table was covered with grubby piles of notebooks and many
loose sheets of paper. There was a tray with inkpots filled with black, green and red ink and a pile of neatly trimmed feather pens.

But there was no small, brown-paper wrapped parcel.

Where would the owner of the room put something important, wondered Alfie. He searched the cupboard, but only clothes and a musty old gown hung there. A quick hunt through the top shelf only
turned up a mortarboard and a few tattered books of music.

Richard crawled under the bed, but came out with empty hands.

Then Alfie had an inspiration. He went to the bookcase and pulled out the books in clusters of five or six at a time. There was nothing on the top shelf, but then, on the second shelf, he struck
lucky. There was something behind a set of dictionaries.

‘Come on,’ groaned Richard. ‘We’ve got to get back to the Abbey. If Sammy is discovered I’ll be flayed alive.’

‘Here it is,’ said Alfie. He pulled out the wrapped parcel. It had been opened and then re-wrapped; he could see that. The red wax seal had been broken. Quickly he took the box to
the table, undid the knot on the string and spread out the paper, waiting eagerly to see what was inside it.

It was a box of sweets!

Alfie pulled up the lid and smelled them. ‘Real sweets,’ he said, baffled.

‘Let’s have one each,’ said Richard with a grin, though he still looked nervous. He recited some of the names of sweets that he recognised aloud: chocolate, truffle, Turkish
Delight, fudge.

‘Better not,’ said Alfie. ‘Might be poisoned.’ He spoke absent-mindedly, because a slip of paper had fallen from the lid of the box of sweets. Picking it up, he saw it
had a series of numbers on it.

‘Write these numbers quick,’ he said to Richard and, with one more worried look at the clock, Richard copied the figures onto a scrap of paper, using black ink and shaking some sand
over the paper when he had finished. Alfie shoved the paper into his pocket, giving a hasty glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. Only fifteen minutes to go!

‘We’d better not take them – too risky,’ he said, making sure that the slip was placed back in the same position inside the lid and then folding the brown paper over the
sweet box. He was just about to tie the twine when he saw Richard’s eyes widen with horror.

There had been a click from the lock.

And a sound of the door handle turning.

And the heavy velvet curtain hanging in front of the door moved in the draught.

‘The headmaster!’ whispered Richard.

Alfie froze. There was no time to escape.

And then suddenly . . .

‘Headmaster!’ called a voice from the corridor outside.

‘Who’s in there?’ said an irritable voice. And then, ‘Yes, yes, Mr Irwin. I’ll attend to that in a moment. I just want to find a book that I lent
to Mr Ivanov.’

‘It is the headmaster!’ Richard looked around wildly. White-faced, he blew out the candle. ‘Let’s get up to the attic,’ he whispered.

‘No, we’ll be trapped there. Let’s get out of here.’ Instantly Alfie acted.
Might as well take these things now – the headmaster will tell Boris that someone was
in his room
, he said to himself. He shoved the box of sweets into his pocket and went over to the window, feeling his way in the darkness. He fumbled for the handle and pushed it open. A damp
draught of foggy air streamed into their faces. Alfie climbed out onto the slates.