Derby Day (27 page)

‘Now,’ Mr Pardew said equably – he might have been assisting Lythgoe to negus at a buffet – ‘there is nothing you can do here. You had better go back the way we have come and wait in the street.’

‘And what am I to do if a policeman comes?’

‘You may stop looking like a rabbit when it sees a fox. The police come by each half-hour. I have made a study of it. Up from Leadenhall Street. When you see one, give a whistle and then find an alley to hide in until he has passed.’

‘What if you don’t hear?’

‘Why then, we shall find ourselves in Pentonville,’ Mr Pardew said, more equably than ever. ‘Now be off. In five minutes I intend to begin.’

Lythgoe disappeared. Mr Pardew heard the noise of his retreat: the door slamming in the passage; a faint pattering of feet below; a distant scuffling which seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, but which he knew marked his descent into the poulterer’s cellar. Mr Pardew waited until the sounds had faded away almost to nothing and then, with a sigh that had something in it of pleasure mixed with profound anxiety, turned his attention to the safe. Like the lock he had disposed of a few moments before, it was not unknown to him. Unlike the lock, he did not quite know at first what he should do with it. He had a suspicion that his cylinder, and his metal contrivance, would be useless with this behemoth of Mr Milner’s devising, and so it proved. The first cylinder he pushed into the lock snapped when he tried to extract it. As for the metal plate, he could not even insert it between the door of the safe and the cast-iron frame. Listening all the while for noises from the street, Mr Pardew reached into his carpet-bag and drew out a small hammer and a couple of thin iron wedges, so thin that they were no more than the size of wafers. These, by dint of a prodigious blow or two, he succeeded in driving into the gap between the door and the wall of the safe. The lock naturally held firm, but Mr Pardew thought that he saw an inconsiderable space where the gap might be thought to have widened.

Encouraged, Mr Pardew took out three more wedges, put the first two in his mouth and hammered in the third, a little further down the door-frame but still not within a foot of the lock. As he did this, a low whistle sounded from beyond the wall, and Mr Pardew instantly dropped to his knees and shuffled away to what he judged to be the safest part of the room – the area immediately below the observation slit. Presently there came a sound of footsteps, a silence, and then the noise of the same footsteps moving away. Mr Pardew counted to thirty, wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the flat of his hand and then went back to inspect the safe. In the soft light it looked unblemished, but Mr Pardew’s eye, turning repeatedly on that tiny gap between door and frame, saw that it had widened. For the next half-hour, until another whistle sounded from the street, he went on hammering in wedges. Then, when he went back to examine his handiwork, he saw that the space between door and frame was perhaps a quarter of an inch.

Mr Pardew glanced at his watch and found it was nearly ten o’clock. A part of him told himself that he ought to rest, that he had a whole day and another night before him if he wanted it, but another part of him counselled urgency. He fancied that Lythgoe, if left to his own devices for too long, might very well lose his head, or at any rate draw attention to himself in a way that might imperil the whole enterprise. There was a mirror near at hand, and Mr Pardew stared at his face in it, saw his red eyes and jutting jaw and wished himself at home at Shepherd’s Inn. Then he took another handful of wedges and began to hammer them home. In this way a great stretch of time seemed to pass, but still Mr Pardew hammered, aware as he did so that that there had been no whistle from the street. Then, almost at once, three things happened: a clock began to chime the midnight; the gap between the uppermost part of the door and its frame was found to have widened to half an inch; and, advertising his arrival by way of a series of scuffling noises down in the building’s heart, Lythgoe appeared in the doorway.

‘What is it?’ Mr Pardew demanded, his mouth full of wedges.

‘There hasn’t been no policeman for an hour and a half,’ Lythgoe said. ‘So I thought I should come back.’ He seemed utterly woebegone, saw the safe with the gap opening up in its frame, and shrank back from it with a look of absolute terror.

‘There are some nights when the police stop their patrols,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘Very shocking to a law-abiding man, I know, but there you are. If no one has gone by for an hour and a half, I should think we are pretty safe. Great heavens, man, what is the matter?’

Lythgoe was still staring at the safe. ‘I am innocent of this,’ he said. ‘It was you that made me do it – you and that Captain Raff. And that’s what I shall tell anyone that asks me.’

‘You had better hand me that bag,’ Mr Pardew said, ‘and stop talking about your innocence.’

And so the night went on. No doubt the police had stopped their patrols. By two o’clock the gap between the door of the safe and the wall had widened to the point where Mr Pardew could begin to insert a series of much larger wedges into it. By three, the wall of the safe had been forced substantially apart from the lock, and Mr Pardew brought out his ‘alderman’, the sectioned iron bar against which it was thought that no safe in Christendom could hold out. Lythgoe lay sprawled asleep on the floor, insensible to the noise of the hammer blows, with the red brick-dust still sprinkling his face. Outside there was pale early summer light gently diffusing through the City streets. At ten minutes to five, when the contents of the safe could be plainly seen through the all but shattered door, Mr Pardew gave a final blow and then laughed. Mr Chubb’s finest, that no cracksman had ever been able to get the better of, sprang open.

Another man would have instantly plunged his hands into the safe, but Mr Pardew’s composure held and he sank down into a sitting position. He was immensely tired. He knew, too, that there was no reason for him to hurry – that hurry, in fact, might be fatal to his chances of avoiding detection. Accordingly he was very prudent and careful. He tidied up the floor a little and removed one or two odd pieces of debris. He counted the wedges back into his carpet-bag and turned up the gas jets. Finally he turned his head towards the safe, inspected what he saw there, gave a little snort of exaltation and began to fill his pockets from the trays of jewellery that lay within. Occasionally he held a particular item up to the light, the better to appraise it. This done, he pushed the door of the safe – very battered it was now, and altogether knocked out of shape – back into position. Mr Pardew wondered whether the extent of its damage would be visible to anyone looking in from the street and decided that the answer was very probably not. With luck, no one would be any the wiser until the strongroom was opened the following morning. As he stepped back from the safe, patting the pocket of his coat, Lythgoe came awake.

‘What? Is it all done?’

‘All done,’ Mr Pardew said. He was examining the strongroom door and wondering how that, too, might be made to look as if it had sustained no hurt.

Ten minutes later – it was half past five in the morning – anyone walking down Cornhill into the dawn (but that there was no one) might have seen a tall, grim-looking man and a small, shabby-looking one, each very pale-faced and somewhat dishevelled, coming smartly along its southern edge in the direction of Leadenhall Street, and that, in addition to the carpet-bag slung over his shoulder, the tall man carried two braces of pheasants on his arm.

‘Here now,’ Mr Pardew remarked, as they reached the corner of Leadenhall Street, and prepared to go their separate ways, taking down two of the pheasants. ‘You had better have these.’

It seemed for a moment as if Lythgoe might refuse them, but then he thought better of it and let the birds slide into his grasp. ‘But where am I to say I got them?’ he asked. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Where did you get them?’ In the distance the sun was coming up over the pediment of St Paul’s. There was violet sky behind it. Mr Pardew laughed. ‘Why, say that Lord Fairhurst gave them to you.’

Part Three

Hounds upon the Scent

Dear me, London is the queerest place. A man can live in it twenty years and not understand the spirit that animates it, or the odd conjunctions that bring the people who journey through it fleetingly together …

London: Its Haunts, Homes and Habitations: A Compendium
(1867)

ALL MORNING AND for much of the afternoon a harsh April breeze had been blowing stiffly across Clipstone Court. Now, in the early evening, it had grown subdued. The cinder-dirt lay in piles where the wind had carried it, and the fragments of packing case had been swept away to form a matchwood reef that blocked up one of the entrances. A drunk woman sat on a doorstep with her head in her hands, shrewdly observed by the proprietor of what had once been the tobacconist’s shop – now a desperate grocer’s – who stood in his doorway with a look of puzzlement on his face. Beyond the drunk woman and the shopkeeper, the four figures of a street acrobat and his family went slowly over the north-west corner of the court to the culvert that leads into Goodge Street, with the voice of the man occasionally breaking over the noise of their footsteps as he upbraided his little son.

‘You understand me, you bad boy! As long as you’re with me you got to come under collar. And where’ll you be next I
dunno
, a bad creature like you.’ Of the four, only the father was dressed in his professional costume: a pair of very dirty silk stockings, a buff-coloured tunic and old-fashioned buckle shoes. Curiously these articles, together with the fact that, like the lachrymose woman on the doorstep, he was slightly drunk, gave him an odd sense of dignity. He walked with a slow, mincing step, raising the heel of each foot higher than required and placing his toes very slightly out of kilter.

‘You bad boy,’ he said again. ‘I can’t think what’s coming to you. To go and lose a sixpence like that! A creature like you!’

The father loomed above the tiny figure shuffling under his elbow and kept his eyes fixed on him. He was a very thin, sparse boy of seven or eight, who made no sound but cried quietly as he went. He wore a man’s cap, a dirty sailor’s jacket and a pair of button boots that looked as if they might have been given to him by his mother.

‘To go and lose a sixpence!’ the man said. He had a gaunt, raw face, and had spent five minutes that morning accentuating his eyebrows with burnt cork and rubbing up his cheekbones with rouge. This gave him a frightful but exotic look, like a Red Indian warrior that had just climbed out of a coal-scuttle. As they came near the grocer’s shop, with its mournful display of split-pea sacks, candles, potted tongue and dried beef, he caught the boy a cuff with the side of his hand, and the shopkeeper, thinking that these irruptions of spirit ought to be encouraged, cried out: ‘S’elp me father, that’s a good ’un. Wallop his trousers.’ But the man ignored him, as he ignored the noise of the traffic drifting in from Tottenham Court Road, and the sound of the woman behind him.

‘You bad boy,’ he said once more. ‘Where d’you think you’ll fetch yourself, eh?’

The woman, a frail slip of a woman, walked behind them with the smaller child. She took no interest in the lost sixpence, or the view of Clipstone Court or the drunk woman on the doorstep. None of these things disturbed her. Instead she spoke to the child, whom she held by the hand, half a dozen paces behind the man of anger. Then, as they reached the culvert which ran on in Goodge Street, she yelled, ‘George, George.’

The man turned round.

‘Look after Annie,’ she yelled again.

The idea appealed to the man. With a flourish of his arms, and a motion of his front foot that was almost graceful, he swung the child up onto his shoulders and settled her there. As he did so, the boy sidled up to his mother, reached into his pocket and passed her something that only the two of them saw, and the cortège – silk-stockinged father, lofted child, mother and son – moved on and out of Clipstone Court for ever.

*

‘You can eat them, you know, if you’ve a mind, McIvor,’ Mr Mulligan said, very graciously to his friend, who sat deferentially regarding the plate of boiled cockles, ‘for they aren’t to my taste. Rich food ain’t sometimes.’ There was a moment or two’s silence while McIvor applied himself to the shellfish and Mulligan looked attentively around him. In the months since they had last patronised the establishment, an energising brush had swept out some of the antique corners of the Clipstone Arms. There was a sheet of paper pinned to the wall advertising a Whit Monday excursion to Epping, and the posters giving notice of sporting benefits had all been taken down.

‘Ugh!’ Mulligan remarked, noting this access of sobriety. ‘If Tom Huddleston, as was the Dartford Chancer these fifteen years, can’t tell of his benefit here, then where can he tell of it? And a brake hired for Whit Monday at Epping! Gracious. Ginger beer all round, I shouldn’t wonder, and a prayer meeting to follow. I can’t stand these respectable houses. So, McIvor, how has the world been treating you since we last met? What about those books that you’ve been making up at the Bird in Hand?’

McIvor, whose plate was now a wasteland of cockle shells, and from whose teeth fragments of his meal still hung, did not look as if the world had been treating him particularly well. His coat was dirtier than ever, and there was a raking cut, which perhaps ought to have been stitched, across the back of one of his hands. Seeing the cut for the first time, Mulligan whistled through his teeth.