Derby Day (19 page)

‘I never knew a fellow for flying off the handle so much,’ said Captain Raff, almost piteously. Evidently he had come to Shepherd’s Inn prepared to meet Mr Pardew’s demands, for he took a notecase from his pocket, and with a kind of sigh, as if he could not hold himself responsible for any circumstances that might arise, began to count out four five-pound notes onto the table before him.

‘I shall need assistance, you know,’ Mr Pardew said as he gathered up the notes with what, Captain Raff could not help noticing, was a kind of disdain. ‘Should you like to come with me?’

‘Come with you!’ Captain Raff gave a look of stark horror. ‘No, I should not. That sort of thing ain’t in my line at all, you know. Lythgoe will do it, I dare say.’

‘Lythgoe?’

‘The little chap as we sent to Boulogne in search of you. Mr – that is, we have his paper, you know.’

‘Do you indeed?’ Mr Pardew gave him a look that made Captain Raff glance at the door and measure his distance to it. ‘Well, you had better let Lythgoe know that he’s needed. But there is one thing you can tell me, Raff. Who’s your principal, eh?’

Captain Raff looked yet more stricken. There was a wild look in his eye. ‘You shall have your money,’ he said. ‘A promise is a promise, you know.’

‘I don’t doubt I shall have my money. But I want to know who’s giving it to me. It ain’t you, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t me,’ Captain Raff said, very humbly, all the while measuring the distance to the door.

‘Well then, who is it? To whom do I apply if, well, let us say, if things ain’t to my liking? Why – let us be straight about this – should I have to deal with you, eh?’

‘As to that,’ said Captain Raff, recovering something of his dignity, ‘I suppose I can carry a message as well as the next man?’

‘I don’t doubt you can, but what if the message ain’t to my liking? Why, I might have to shoot the messenger, if you take my meaning.’ But all this was lost on Captain Raff, who looked more terrified than ever. Mr Pardew grinned. ‘No, don’t alarm yourself, Raff. I’m not going to shoot you. Nor yet anyone else, I hope. You had better go back to your Mr ——, give him my compliments, and tell him the thing will come off. But there’s to be no splitting, mind.’

‘Certainly not,’ Captain Raff said, so relieved that the interview was over that he walked down the stairs quite proudly with his head in the air, telling himself that he had brought the business off with a flourish, and that Mr Happerton would be pleased. ‘No splitting eh?’ he said to himself as he passed through the gate and went out into Oldcastle Street. ‘Well, we shall see about that.’

Once Captain Raff had gone, Mr Pardew made as if to fling himself into a chair and resume his cup of tea. Then, setting down the tea cup, he went and stood by the window, where Captain Raff’s receding figure could be seen approaching the lodge. Picking up his stick, and regretting the smell of roasting meat which continued to pervade the room from beyond the kitchen door, Mr Pardew walked down the staircase and by moving very rapidly across the courtyard contrived to emerge into Oldcastle Street just as Captain Raff could be seen turning into a side alley thirty yards away. Fortunately Oldcastle Street and its surrounding thoroughfares were full of people, and by keeping himself to a safe distance and trusting to the Captain’s lack of observational powers Mr Pardew had no difficulty in holding him within his sights without himself being seen.

In this way, face well down under his coat collar, and with sundry excitable flourishes of his stick, he followed Captain Raff along the southern edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, watched him saunter negligently across Chancery Lane, where he was abused by a crossing-sweeper and nearly knocked down by a hay-cart, and then shadowed him eastward along Cursitor Street and into Plough Place. Just as Mr Pardew was beginning to think that the game was not worth the candle and that Captain Raff might walk all the way to Whitechapel without stopping, his quarry paused, stood uncertainly on a street corner and darted into a building whose doorway was ornamented with a brass plate that read BLUE RIBAND CLUB. Mr Pardew retired to the other side of the street to a print-seller’s displaying views of Old London, and amused himself by examining the passers-by while keeping an eye on the club’s doorway.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour went by in this way when Captain Raff appeared in the doorway with a tall, stoutish man arrayed in a pair of top-boots who looked about for a cab, and then had himself and Captain Raff carried away in the direction of Fleet Street. For a moment Mr Pardew wondered about summoning a second cab – there was one moving up towards him from St Andrew Street – and renewing his pursuit, but then it occurred to him that the information he sought might be more readily to hand. Accordingly, tucking his stick up under his arm, he marched off across the road, stalked into the doorway of the Blue Riband Club and buttonholed the servant who kept guard over the vestibule.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr Pardew very mildly. ‘Was that my friend Captain Raff just stepping out of the club? I fear I must have missed him.’

‘Yes, sir. The capting’s gone this instant. Him and Mr Happerton both together.’

‘Ah, with Mr Happerton is it?’ said Mr Pardew, almost to himself, and walked back into the street.

Mr Pardew was a resourceful and sometimes a studious man, and in the course of the next week he marshalled his resources and made a study of Mr Happerton. He enquired of the Blue Riband and found that it was a club for sporting men; he consulted an ostler or two, and turned up a saddler’s shop which Mr Happerton was thought to patronise; he spent at least one morning in a library examining back-numbers of
The Times
newspaper; and before long he had assembled a little dossier about Mr Happerton that would have done credit to a police detective. He knew how Mr Happerton had made his money. He knew about his marriage and his trip to Rome. He knew a great deal about Tiberius. All this information Mr Pardew stowed away, not having any immediate use for it, but thinking that it might very well prove to his advantage in future days, when certain other schemes had come to fruition.

It might have been said of Mr Pardew in these days by anyone who knew him – and there was only Jemima to notice where he went and how he occupied himself – that he was very restless. When he sat in the room at Shepherd’s Inn he was always writing little notes to himself, considering them as he ate or drank or tapped his stick, and then tearing them asunder and casting them away. He took great long walks – north, south and west of the city, to Hampstead, St John’s Wood and Kilburn – which never seemed to tire him or bring him ease. There was a particular street in St John’s Wood, very quiet and secluded, with the houses all huddled up behind laburnum hedges, which he walked down several times with a very longing look. He walked down St James’s Street looking in at the windows of the gentlemen’s clubs there and gnawing at the end of his stick, and along Piccadilly glaring at the shopfronts like a Scots divine who thinks the whole of the West End frivolous and can’t for the life of him see why it is permitted.

Once, about this time, as they were sitting together in the room at Shepherd’s Inn, looking out at the statue of the shepherd boy behind his iron fence, Mr Pardew said, in such a soft voice that he might have been speaking to himself: ‘I was done a bad turn, but it will all come out right again, you shall see.’

And Jemima, not quite understanding the words, and not having heard him talk in this way before, wondered at them, and smoothed her hands very demurely down the folds of her dress, and went away to infuse the tea.

‘By the by,’ Mr Pardew said, when she returned, ‘how should you like to go to Richmond one day?’

And so they went to Richmond, on an April day that was not quite spring and not quite summer, and walked by the river, until it became too cold for comfort, and ate whitebait at the Ship, and looked at the people, and perhaps in the end enjoyed themselves. There was a fog starting up over Richmond Hill as they came back, with the gas lights winking through it and a dull grey twilight descending, and Mr Pardew thought it was like the fog that covered his own affairs and resolved that the bold stroke he was now meditating should blow it away.

Captain Raff called again, and they had a very intimate conversation, at the close of which Mr Pardew sent the Captain away down the staircase with perhaps the haughtiest look he had ever minted. The scheme on which he was now embarked promised a great deal – if it succeeded. But if it were to fail Mr Pardew knew that even little dinners at Richmond, out of season, with the wet grass fouling his boots, would be beyond him. And so life went on quietly at Shepherd’s Inn and Mr Pardew continued to meditate on the bold stroke that would blow the fog away.

One Saturday morning towards the middle of April, when there was a faint suspicion of gillyflowers in the Shepherd’s Inn window boxes, Mr Pardew dressed himself with more than usual care in a suit of black-cloth taken from the trunk he had brought with him from Boulogne and, with Jemima (who assumed from his appearance that he was going off to dine with a duchess) bidding him farewell, walked off under the arch and into Oldcastle Street looking like an old black rook. The sun had been out and the crowds flocked over the pavement, and it may be that Mr Pardew was troubled by the conspicuousness of his suit – which close inspection revealed to be not of black-cloth but of Oxford mixture – and the silk hat he had on his head, for he seemed to step in and out of doorways and into those places where the crowd pressed thickest. He headed, not north towards Hampstead and St John’s Wood and the usual course of his wanderings, but eastwards towards the City, walked down Newgate Street and Cheapside and came presently to Cornhill.

It was by now about a quarter past twelve and the press of people about the Mansion House was very great. Carriages stood waiting on the kerb to scoop up City lordlings as they came out of their temples. A cab-horse had gone down on the corner where Cornhill runs into Leadenhall Street and half a dozen passers-by were offering suggestions as to how it might be righted. All this Mr Pardew saw and noted as he marched up Leadenhall Street. Anyone who saw him pass might have taken him for a gentleman off to see his broker about share-dealings, or a lawyer about his will, but Mr Pardew had no interest in stockbrokers or lawyers. Coming to Mr Gallentin’s shop, a vast expanse of plate glass with a hundred rings and gold chronometers winking in the window, he turned in at the door, went straight to a tray of silverware and began looking at it quite as if he meant to buy something. One of Mr Gallentin’s polite young men, dressed in a suit of black quite as decorous as Mr Pardew’s own, stepped up and, having engaged him in conversation, Mr Pardew intimated that he wished to buy a gold brooch of a kind that might ornament a lady’s hat. As he made this request, and as various brooches and pins were brought on a tray for him to inspect – Mr Gallentin himself stood by the doorway and looked on approvingly as the tray came up – Mr Pardew looked carefully around him.

The shop consisted of three separate chambers: the showroom in which he now stood with Mr Gallentin’s young man and his tray of brooches; a second room behind it, in which Mr Gallentin presumably sat when he was not rallying his troops; and a third room, away to the right, connected to the shop by a metal-plated door. This Mr Pardew assumed to be the strongroom, and his assumption was confirmed when another of Mr Gallentin’s young men, carrying a second tray of medallions, passed into the shop, closing the metal-plated door behind him, but offering for a second the glimpse of a small, shadowy chamber dominated by the outlines of what Mr Pardew knew was a cast-iron safe. Fascinating as all this was to Mr Pardew, he was careful to keep his gaze trained for the most part on the tray of brooches before him. Secretly he was calculating the extent of the strongroom, which he reckoned to be about twelve feet square, and the thickness of the metal plate that separated it from the rest of Mr Gallentin’s premises. Something seemed to strike him, and, looking at his watch, he announced that there was no helping it, he would have to consult with the lady for whom the brooch was intended – Mr Gallentin’s young man would appreciate the difficulty? – and there was nothing for it but to return post-haste on Monday. Whereupon Mr Pardew had himself bowed out of the shop, with even Mr Gallentin condescending to hold the door open for him as he went.

The lunch hour was fast advancing, and the throng of people had begun to lessen. Mr Pardew stood on Mr Gallentin’s doorstep for a moment with his thumbs pressed into the lapels of his coat, and an expression of supreme nonchalance on his face, as if his time was entirely his own and he could buy up the entire City for his private fiefdom if he chose. Then, still with the same casual air, he crossed over to the other side of Leadenhall Street to a point exactly opposite Mr Gallentin’s doorway. Mr Gallentin’s plate-glass frontage, he saw, extended for perhaps twenty feet. To the right was a patch of bare wall, which Mr Pardew assumed to include the strongroom. This suspicion was confirmed by the presence of a single, slit window built into the wall at a height of about six feet and designed, as he knew, to allow any passing constable the means of assuring himself that all was well within. Taking care that there was no one in sight of him, Mr Pardew took out a notebook and made a little sketch of this somewhat unprepossessing vista. Then he stood back and examined the part of Leadenhall Street in which Mr Gallentin’s shop lay in its entirety. To the right of the wall that concealed the strongroom lay what seemed to be a steam-laundry, and beyond this a staircase with a number of brass plates by the door leading up to a suite of offices, the profusion of whose windows suggested that they formed an upper storey beyond Mr Gallentin’s shop.