“Mr. Bunce!” he exclaimed. “You found me!”
“Aye,” said Alfred, touching his hat.
“I was afeared you might have taken a wrong turn.” Mr. Wardle’s small blue eyes swung toward the two boys. “I see you brought your apprentices with you.”
Alfred gave a brusque nod. “Can’t kill a bogle without bait,” he growled.
“Yes, of course.” Mr. Wardle blinked uneasily at Ned, who wondered if the Inspector of Sewers could even remember his name. They had first been introduced to each other only a week before, at the Metropolitan Board of Works, where they had all sat down at a very large, round table to launch the Committee for the Regulation of Subterranean Anomalies.
But more than half a dozen people had been present at that meeting, and a lot of business had been discussed. And since neither Ned nor Jem had made much of a contribution, it seemed likely that Mr. Wardle had forgotten who they were.
“This neighborhood ain’t safe for Jem,” Alfred continued. “There’s a butcher as runs all the rackets hereabouts, and he’s got a grudge against the lad. We ain’t bin troubled thus far, since the butcher don’t know where I live. But the longer we stay, the more likely it is we’ll be spotted by one of his cronies. And I don’t want that.”
Mr. Wardle looked alarmed. “No, indeed,” he said.
“So you’d best tell me about this here job, and then we can set to it,” Alfred finished. “Back at the Board o’ Works, you mentioned there’s three young’uns vanished, and one sighting in a sewer. Which sewer, and where was the kids last seen?”
Mr. Wardle hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps it’s best I show you what was shown to me,” he finally suggested, before heading across the cobbled square toward the central pavilion. Alfred hurried after him, with the two boys in tow. As they approached the dilapidated structure that had once sheltered row upon row of hanging carcasses, Ned felt uneasy. There was no telling what might lurk in that labyrinth of dark, rotting wood. As Alfred had so truly said, bogles might be the least of their problems.
“You don’t think this is an ambush, do you?” Jem whispered, as if he were reading Ned’s mind. “You don’t think Mr. Wardle is in John Gammon’s pocket?”
“No.” Ned was sure of that. John Gammon was a “punisher”—he liked to threaten local shopkeepers with bodily harm if they didn’t pay over a portion of their earnings to him. But Eugene Wardle wasn’t a local shopkeeper; he was a municipal officer who hailed from Holloway. “Ain’t no reason why Mr. Wardle should know Salty Jack Gammon. I’m just concerned them missing boys is all a hum. Mebbe Jack’s bin spreading tales, to lure us into a dark, quiet corner—”
“It ain’t no tale.” Jem cut him off. “There’s at least one kid gone, for I heard it from the barmaid at the Old Coffeepot when I were here last.” After a moment’s pause, he added, “She said the lad passed a bad coin at the inn, then legged it into the market cellars. No one’s seen him since.”
“. . . chased a printer’s devil into the cellars, after he passed a counterfeit coin,” Mr. Wardle was saying as he led Alfred through the gloomy depths of the central pavilion. There was a rank smell of old blood and manure. Water was pooling under leaks in the roof. Here and there a rat would skitter out of the way, frightened by the crunch of broken glass underfoot. “The second child was a young thief who went down to look for scrap metal,” Mr. Wardle continued, “and never returned to the sister he’d left waiting above. The third was a coal merchant’s son who used to play in these stalls, though no one can be certain if he found his way beneath them.”
“And the sighting?” asked Alfred.
“Ah,” said Mr. Wardle. “Well, that didn’t happen up here.” He stopped suddenly, having reached a kind of wooden booth, behind which lay the entrance to a wide room with an opening in its stone floor. “You see, the heads of four sewers meet under Newgate Market. They used to be flushed out regular from a big cistern fitted with iron doors, though it’s not much used these days. I had a team of flushers down there last week, oiling the screws and checking the penstocks. They caught a glimpse of something that scared the life out of ’em. And when they alerted me, Mr. Bunce, I thought about you.” The Inspector stamped his foot, as if marking a spot. “That cistern’s close by, and one of the sewers runs beneath the cellar—which used to be a slaughterhouse, or so I’m told. They had to wash down the floors—”
“And the dirty water had to go somewhere,” Alfred concluded with a nod. “There’ll be drains, then.”
“I believe so.”
Alfred dropped his sack and began to rifle through it, pulling out a box of matches, a small leather bag, and a dark lantern with a hinged metal cover. “You boys stay up here till I call you,” he told Jem and Ned as he struck a match to light his lantern. “I need to look downstairs and don’t want no bogles lured out ahead o’ time.”
Jem grimaced. Ned couldn’t help asking, “You think there’s more’n one of ’em, Mr. Bunce?”
Alfred shrugged and said, “Ain’t no telling, in this part o’ the world. That’s why I had to risk bringing Jem.”
About the Author
CATHERINE JINKS grew up in Papua New Guinea and now lives in the mountains of New South Wales, Australia, with her husband and their daughter. Catherine has written books for children of all ages, including the acclaimed Evil Genius series. A three-time winner of the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award, she has also won the Centenary Medal for her contribution to Australian children’s literature.
www.catherinejinks.com
Catherine Jinks, A Plague of Bogles
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