Derby Day (26 page)

‘Help you do what?’

‘Lift the carpet – there, by the ends.’

The carpet was an ancient drugget, much frayed and in places no more than a quarter-inch thick. Peeled back to perhaps half its extent, it revealed a yet more ancient floor, boards stained almost to black by some long-ago exposure to wax. Mr Pardew looked at the boards for a moment, quite judiciously, as if he were a pork butcher planning his first cut, took a piece of chalk from the carpet-bag, which he now put down on the floor beside him, and drew a rough circle, perhaps a couple of feet in diameter, over the wood.

‘What’s that you’re about?’ Lythgoe wondered, leaning forward with the lamp in his hand.

‘Why, I am sending a telegram to Windsor requesting an audience of Her Majesty. What does it look as if I am doing? You had better give me that bag of yours.’

Mr Pardew’s expression as he took up the bag was quite wonderful to see. The manager of a penny-gaff who had happened to pass by would probably have engaged him on the spot, in the certainty that the bag contained a dozen bunches of violets and a brace of pouter pigeons. Instead Mr Pardew took out a short hatchet, with which he instantly made a deep incision in the area of the floorboards within the chalk circle.

‘Why, the wood is half rotted,’ he exclaimed. ‘We should be thankful we haven’t already fallen to our deaths.’

Again, it was wonderful to see Mr Pardew at his work. He made one or two dextrous motions with the hatchet, and chopped out a little more of the wood. Then he took an iron spike out of the bag, jabbed it under the protruding surface and twisted it a little more. Somewhere in the middle distance – in Leadenhall Street, say, or Bishopsgate – a clock was striking the hour, and he listened to the chimes with his head on one side. It was six o’clock. There now lay exposed before him an area of off-white plaster, not quite approximating to the area of the chalked circle but perhaps eighteen inches across at its widest point. ‘It will do, I daresay,’ Mr Pardew said, almost to himself, reaching once more into the bag. The reason why Lythgoe’s shoulder had sagged as he picked it up now became clear. Inside, neatly wrapped in a coil of rope, was a twenty-pound hammer. Seizing it in both hands, and bending over the floor like a man hewing wood, Mr Pardew gave the plaster a couple of sharp blows, stepped a pace or two back and, taking the lamp from Lythgoe’s outstretched hand, gazed into the jagged hole that had opened up beneath him. This done, he took the coil of rope, bound one end round the stanchions of the heating apparatus, and let the other end down into the hole.

Lythgoe, who had watched these manoeuvrings with mounting unease, and now understood what was afoot, said suddenly: ‘I’ll not go down there. You’ll not make me.’

‘Maybe I shan’t make you,’ Mr Pardew said, still playing out the rope in his hands. ‘But you’ll go all the same, I fancy.’

There was a wild look in Lythgoe’s eye. ‘I’ll——’

‘You’ll what?’ Mr Pardew said easily. ‘Run out into Leadenhall Street and fetch a policeman? What’s in that bag alone would be enough to send you to the hulks. You’d do much better to stay here. Now, just take a hold of the lamp – like that, do you see? – while I go down. If you don’t care to bring the bag with you, you may lower it.’ So saying, Mr Pardew took a firm grip on the rope and with an agility that was surprising for a man of his years began to lower himself into the murk.

Down in the poulterer’s shop it was nearly pitch dark, with only a thin shaft of light penetrating the shuttered windows. Mr Pardew felt his boots brush against the stone floor, almost blundered over, but regained his balance and stood taking stock of his surroundings. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he made out the shop’s long wooden counter and the assortment of hooks and wires that ran across its further wall. Something blew against his hand and he reached down and saw that it was a feather.

‘Are you there? What’s amiss?’ Above him he could see Lythgoe’s pale, lamp-lit face peering through the hole in the ceiling.

‘Nothing is amiss. But you must turn down that lamp. There is a crack in the shutter. Now, you had better send down that bag.’

Lythgoe made as if to do this, hauling up the rope and attempting to secure it, but lost his grip and sent the bag crashing down onto the stone floor, very nearly taking off Mr Pardew’s head in the process. Mr Pardew swore softly under his breath. As he waited for Lythgoe to descend, which was done with painful slowness, he moved over to the wall of the shop which adjoined Mr Gallentin’s premises and struck it hard with his fist.

‘What are you doing?’ Lythgoe wondered, very dishevelled and with his hair white with plaster.

‘It is as I thought,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘They have reinforced the dividing wall. A metal plate, if I’m not mistaken. I wonder if it goes the whole way?’ He made three or four more assaults with his fists at various points along the wall and shook his head. ‘Well, we had best explore a little.’

The poulterer’s shop was found to consist of the central chamber in which they stood, a smaller room behind it, containing a safe, which Mr Pardew, on examining it, found to his regret to be unlocked and empty, and a flight of steps leading down to a cellar. Turning up the lantern, Mr Pardew went down the stairs. Since he had dug out the hole in the poulterer’s ceiling – a long age ago now, it seemed – his mind had not ceased to calculate. It was now, he thought, about half past six in the evening, but time meant nothing to him. No key would be turned in Mr Gallentin’s front door until Monday morning. He could spend the whole of Sunday there if he chose. The cellar was dark and airless, but not untenanted. In fact, thirty or forty pheasants in various stages of ripening hung from its walls, together with a brace or two of Norfolk turkeys and several geese. Mr Pardew set down his lantern at a point where he judged it would provide maximal illumination and began to inspect the further wall. This, he was pleased to discover, was made of soft red brick, crumbling in several places and not more than five or six inches thick.

‘What is it we’ve to do?’ Lythgoe wondered uneasily. He was breathing heavily. Stepping too close to one of the birds and feeling the touch of its claws upon his shoulder, he recoiled in horror.

‘What are we to do? Why, we are to break through that wall,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘That is, unless you want to use a powder charge which would very likely bring the roof down on us.’ He saw a flash of the little office in the continental town and the people walking past the window, and a lake set amid green hills with a far-off view of mountains, and he wondered at the distance between the boy he had been and the man he now was. He remembered, too, a house in Kensington and a woman who, unlike Jemima, certainly had been his wife, and the carriages in the street beyond, and the recollection hardened in his mind and made him angry, and he picked up one of the metal spikes that had come from Lythgoe’s bag, pushed it into a soft part of the wall where the mortar had crumbled away, took the twenty-pound hammer and struck it with all his force. Still the memory of the house at Kensington played on his mind – the little study where he sat and read his books, and the little kitchen where he ate his breakfast – and he struck at the wall again, while Lythgoe watched and put his fingers in his ears and the lamp danced and all but fell over and the pheasants looked indifferently on.

Presently he came to his senses – how many blows had he struck? He could not quite tell. He laid down the hammer and inspected the damage he had caused. The brickwork was even weaker than he had first imagined. He wondered why no one had attended to it, and told himself that if he had possessed a cellar it should have been regularly looked into. Three or four bricks now lay on the cellar floor beside him. Lythgoe coughed at the brick-dust and passed his hand over his face. ‘This will never do,’ Mr Pardew said. Reaching into the pocket of his coat, he drew out a bandanna handkerchief and tied it around his mouth. A scrap of paper came fluttering out of the pocket along with the handkerchief, but in his haste he did not see it. The vision of the house at Kensington had almost faded from his mind, but there was no mistaking the fury with which he once more began to attack the wall.

In this way perhaps an hour or two passed, Mr Pardew alternately striking at the brick and resting with his hands on the shaft of the hammer and inspecting the damage done. Lythgoe stood, or occasionally sat with his hands on his haunches, regarding him with an ever more piteous expression. All this Mr Pardew saw, to a certain extent sympathised with, but was also very much amused by. Putting down the hammer once and brushing the red brick-dust off his shirtfront, he asked:

‘Are you a religious man, Lythgoe?’

‘Certainly I am.’

‘And might I enquire’ – the red dust was very troublesome and had got in his watch chain – ‘how you square what we’re engaged upon here with your conscience?’

‘It’s no fault of mine. I was pressed into it, and shall not be judged for it.’ Lythgoe’s voice, as he said this, was unusually firm.

‘No fault of yours! I suppose you made that fellow Raff a present of your paper, just to give him an income?’

‘It is not Captain Raff who has the paper, but that Mr Happerton who directs him.’

‘Oh yes, Mr Happerton,’ Mr Pardew said, with an attempt at vagueness that very nearly succeeded. ‘I have heard of Mr Happerton. And how will he be judged, eh?’

‘Why, the Lord will find him out,’ Lythgoe said. ‘There are men – discounters, people in the bill-broking line – that buy up paper in the way of their business dealings, and that’s fair enough, for the money’s not certain and no one can be blamed for taking a risk. But this Mr Happerton’ – Lythgoe’s face as he said this was very white in the glare of the lamp and its dark surround – ‘does mischief with his bills. He does. Why, there’s half a dozen fellows like me, very near ruined, that he likes to play with as a cat does with a mouse, never quite striking it dead and never quite letting it go neither. It’s my belief that he don’t want the bills paid up, for then he could do no more mischief.’

‘I have known worse than Mr Happerton,’ said Mr Pardew, whose late partner, Mr Fardell, had been found dead in Pump Court with his brains knocked out and no one any the wiser as to the identity of his assailant.

‘The Lord will judge him, you shall see,’ Lythgoe said, very earnestly, and Mr Pardew wondered at his fervour, and the incongruity of the conversation, here amid the flaring lamplight and the swirling brick-dust, and perhaps thought for a moment of Mr Fardell lying dead upon the Pump Court cobbles. If there was anything on Mr Pardew’s own conscience, it did not seem to trouble him, for he soon after leapt up and attacked the wall again with redoubled fury. A great piece had been torn out of it now, and by means of some dextrous probing of the mortar he was able to widen it out to the point where a man, if he did not care very much about damage to his clothing, could climb through it into the adjacent room.

‘We ain’t going through there, surely?’ Lythgoe asked.

‘You may blame it on Mr Happerton,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘Let him be judged for it.’ Once more, his mind was lost in calculation. He knew that if he broke through the cellar wall of the poulterer’s shop he would emerge into the space beneath Mr Gallentin’s showroom. What he did not know was how far this space extended, whether, in fact, he would be forced to undertake some other strenuous assault upon a second wall, or a locked door, before he could effect an entry into Mr Gallentin’s strongroom. But, as he now saw, taking the lamp from Lythgoe and forcing first it and then his head and shoulders through the ragged gap in the brickwork, he was in luck. The cellar beneath Mr Gallentin’s showroom seemed to extend for a considerable distance. Pulling himself through and getting to his feet, he gazed enquiringly round the vault in which he now found himself. There was not, in truth, a great deal to see, merely the squat outlines of one or two pieces of furniture which Mr Gallentin, or someone else, had thought to store there, and, at the cellar’s further end, a flight of wooden steps leading up to a metal door-frame. Mr Pardew put his head back through the brickwork, instructed Lythgoe to hand him the carpet-bag, heard a complaint from that gentleman that his mouth was full of brick-dust, and assisted his passage into the cellar by main force, so that he tumbled all in a heap on the damp stone floor.

‘Now,’ Mr Pardew said briskly, ‘there is only a short way to go. You had better follow me, and bring the bags.’

‘Gracious heaven,’ Lythgoe said, ‘I think my back’s broken.’

‘It is nothing of the kind. But there may be something else broken in a moment or two. Now, stir yourself.’

The security of his cellar was clearly not one of Mr Gallentin’s prime considerations. The lock on its door was known to Mr Pardew, and he greeted it like an old friend and made short work of it. Thrusting open the door, they found themselves in a tiny corridor, its right-hand exit, Mr Pardew judged, belonging to the showroom, but with a second door, immediately before them, which, he thought, could only lead to the strongroom. Here the fastening was altogether more secure, but Mr Pardew had his cylinder, and an ingenious instrument made of flattened steel but with a ridge along its side, which he inserted into the space between the door and its frame: in another five minutes the lock snapped open and they tumbled into the room.

‘Great heavens!’ said Mr Pardew, almost to himself. ‘Great heavens indeed.’

Lythgoe caught the note of wonder in his voice. They were standing, as they now saw, in a single, windowless room, lit by the blazing lights of half a dozen gas jets turned up to their fullest extent. This, allied to the three or four carefully angled mirrors that hung upon the far wall, gave the place a fantastic air, as if it would not be wonderful to see piles of precious stones heaped on the floor and a dragon coiled beside them. The safe – a squat metal box, four feet square – stood on a plinth in the very centre. Mr Pardew did not at first approach it. He was taking a survey of the room, noting the angle of the mirrors, searching for the observation slit which he knew let out into the street and could be looked into by anyone passing down Cornhill who had a mind to stare. Having located it, six feet up on the further wall, Mr Pardew’s first act was to turn down the gas jets to the point where they made the overall complexion of the room soft red rather than bright orange. This done, he took another look at the mirrors and then at Lythgoe, who was brushing the brick-dust from his shirtfront with stiff little jerks of his white hand.