Derby Day (30 page)

There was a street conjuror at work on the pavement before the Mansion House, and Captain McTurk watched the half-dozen coloured balls that he spun making their variegated descent and thought of the other conjuror and the £6,000 he had spirited away. What struck him about the robbery was not merely the technical skill brought to bear on Mr Gallentin’s safe but the audacity of the person, or people, who had committed it. Captain McTurk was not perhaps a very advanced student of criminal psychology – his interest in wrongdoers extended only to catching them and locking them up – but he believed that most of them were, above all, fearful of exposing themselves. This led him to reason that only a very bold man would have robbed Mr Gallentin’s shop in this manner, and he spent the remainder of his journey back to Northumberland Avenue wondering who that bold man might be.

Arriving back at his office, where the view from the window disclosed the same ostler still apparently forking up the same pile of straw, he instantly routed out the secretary and had Mr Masterson summoned to him from the nook he occupied at the corridor’s further end.

‘I declare’, he said, as Mr Masterson came into the room, ‘the fellow there has been turning over the straw for the last half-hour at least. What can he mean by it?’

‘I believe there is very little for them to do,’ Mr Masterson said apologetically. ‘Do I take it you have been to Cornhill?’

‘Certainly I have been there. So has half the City. It is quite as you say. I wished merely to see the premises. The safe was wedged open, I suppose, or an iron bar driven in. There is no more information?’

‘We have had a report of two men possibly seen in Eastcheap at about half past five in the morning on the Sunday.’

‘And no one arrested them?’

‘The constable who saw them declares that they were some distance off and that he had no reason to suspect their behaviour.’

‘I should suspect anyone’s behaviour that I met in Eastcheap at half past five in the morning. I don’t doubt those were the two men. But there is no use crying after spilt milk. You have asked our people?’

‘It would be difficult, I think, for anyone to offer one of Mr Gallentin’s pieces without our coming to hear of it. Certainly not in London.’

‘They may be in Paris now, for all we know.’ Captain McTurk put his hands in his trouser pockets and jingled the money in them. ‘Well, we had better make out a list. Do you suppose Maggs could have done it?’

‘Hardly. I believe he is very infirm these days.’

‘What about the fellow who took the insurance certificates from Finsbury Pavement?’

‘I think not. The case went unproven, if you recall. Since then he has turned very respectable. Lives in Kensington, I believe, and has set up as a wine merchant.’

This litany went on for some time and was not very enlightening. It was remarkable, in fact, how many of the capital’s criminal fancy had been temporarily detached from their livelihoods. Mr Slater, the great Whitechapel cracksman, had been seized at a West End gaming club six months since and was currently Her Majesty’s guest at Wandsworth. Crewkerne, who had robbed Lord Baker of his rubies, disguised himself as a footman and left the house by the front door in broad daylight, was thought to be in Antwerp. By the time Captain McTurk had reached the end of his catechism, it might have been wondered exactly how the crime had been committed, seeing that there were so few people left in London capable of committing it.

‘That Frenchman, perhaps, M. Jambon,’ Mr Masterson suggested. ‘He could have been brought in from Paris, and no one the wiser.’

But Captain McTurk shook his head, suggesting that whoever had perpetrated the crime would have needed several weeks to make their preparations, and that such an absence from his Parisian haunts on M. Jambon’s part would have been remarked.

‘What was the name of that man who robbed the mail train going down to Dover?’

‘Pardew wasn’t it?’ Mr Masterson offered, who was still determined to prove that M. Jambon, spirited into the country by nocturnal ferry and then spirited out again the following day, was the guilty man.

‘Pardew it was. I recollect the case’ – Captain McTurk remembered every case he had ever had a part in solving. ‘Took a hundredweight of bullion off the train and melted it down … The coolest fellow I ever saw – or didn’t see.’ Mr Masterson nodded his head at this admission of defeat. ‘What happened to him, I wonder?’

‘There was talk of him on the continent. Did we not send a man to Leghorn?’

‘Pshaw. Leghorn!’ said Captain McTurk. ‘If every villain supposed to have gone to Leghorn had been taken there, we should have no room left in any gaol in England. There were accomplices, were there not?’

‘There was a man died in the street,’ Mr Masterson said. ‘Ran into a cart or some such. And another fellow lagged – transported. But Pardew was his own man, I fancy.’

‘Not quite, I think. Didn’t that File have a hand with the tools?’

‘I believe Mr File lives a very quiet life these days,’ Mr Masterson suggested. ‘Hands round the plate at church. Never sees any of his old friends. That sort of thing.’

Captain McTurk made a little gesture with his hand, showing that he did not at all believe in the idea of Mr File’s retirement. He was, although he did not say so to Mr Masterson, perplexed by the whole affair, perplexed by the audacity with which it had been carried out, and perplexed by the coldness of the trail. Still, he thought there were things he might do and opportunities that he might avail himself of.

‘You had better go and see File at his house,’ he said finally. ‘Don’t, whatever you do, say anything that might alarm him. He may very well levant. He has done that before. Just – well – go and see him and hear what he has to say. And then take this paper’ – he produced the fragment that had been found in the poulterer’s cellar – ‘and see if you can find where it came from.’

‘It is rather a long shot, surely?’ Mr Masterson ventured.

‘And so was the bullet that took Nelson at Trafalgar,’ said Captain McTurk, ‘but he died of it all the same.’

Presently there came a message to say that Captain McTurk was wanted by the Home Secretary, and Mr Masterston took his hat and went off to execute his commissions.

*

Mr Masterson had the reputation of a thorough man, but he became aware, as he went about his tasks, that his thoroughness was of no help to him. Mr File, found by his parlour fire in Clerkenwell, was extremely courteous, but that was all he was, declared himself absolutely in retirement, seeing no one and utterly forsaking the associations that had previously brought him to Captain McTurk’s notice, and was supported in this view by his wife, who declared that Mr Masterson was cruel coming to browbeat folks as had been lying in bed of a quinsy this past fortnight with never a thought for anything beyond it.

‘What about that fellow Pardew?’ said Mr Masterson, thinking to spring the name on him unaware, but Mr File was ready for him. ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I had thought I might be spared this. Really, you know, when one is’ – there was a church over the way from Mr File’s bow-window, and if he did not actually gesture at it he gave Mr Masterson to understand that it was there he knew his duty to lie – ‘when one is, well, I shan’t say any more about it, but, well, it is hard, you know.’ Mr Masterson knew that he was dealing with a hypocrite, but somehow he could not bring himself to say so, with the subscription card from the Distressed Housepainters’ Guild lying there on the mantelpiece to rebuke him.

‘I think Pardew had better look out for himself,’ Mr File suggested to his wife when Mr Masterson had gone.

‘I never did like that Pardew,’ Mrs File volunteered, who was perhaps not very genteel.

‘Maybe not. But I think he had better look out for himself.’ And Mr File went to the church on the next Sabbath and sang the hymns in a very loud voice.

Having no luck with Mr File, Mr Masterson took himself to a stationer’s in High Holborn. Here he had better fortune, for the stationer not only recognised the weave but gave him the address of the firm in Kennington that manufactured it. The paper was of a very superior kind, he learned, in a conversation with the firm’s director. They took pleasure in supplying half a dozen shops in Mayfair and in Kensington and Brompton beyond it. Indeed, there was a move to colonise Fulham and Putney too, as the wives of the clerks who lived there wrote confidential letters to their friends just like grand ladies in Grosvenor Square. And Mr Masterson knew that his enquiry could take him no further, that he could probably compile a list of every stationer in the West End and the City, but that a record of their customers, not to mention samples of their customers’ handwriting, would probably be beyond him.

All this plunged Mr Masterson into a thoroughgoing ill-humour. He had sent his agents out into the highways and byways of London – into Hoxton jewellers’ shops, and discreet little emporia in the Pimlico Road – all those myriad places where the goods offered for sale are sometimes not very scrupulously obtained, and the agents had come back empty-handed. Nobody, least of all the Jewish gentlemen in Hoxton and the Pimlico capitalists who offer limitless credit in exchange for the bearer’s note of hand, knew anything about Mr Gallentin’s safe, who had robbed it, what was in it, and how the items might have been disposed of. There was a rumour come to Captain McTurk from one of his continental spies, and an emissary was sent to Boulogne, but the cottage by the sea was locked up and had part of its roof stove in by the equinoctial gales, and it was soon proved that Mr Pardew was long gone from there, if indeed he had ever been. Meanwhile, Captain McTurk had other things to trouble him. Two off-course bookmakers had knocked each other’s heads in outside a public house in Soho; a veritable epidemic of betting slips had blown out across the West End; and the superintendent of the Surrey Police had written an urgent letter demanding his assistance in frustrating the upsurge of criminality which always attends that great sporting celebration at the Epsom Downs, Derby Day.

What
The Star
thought about it

‘Paddock Pencillings’ by ‘Captain Crewe’

… There is a mystery about PERICLES. Mr Grant, his trainer will say nothing, and the animal has not been seen. The 100 to 7 being offered is, in these circumstances, money ill-spent. Of TIBERIUS, on the other hand, it can confidently be stated that the horse will run, having distinguished itself – in modest company, admittedly – in Lincolnshire. THE SPARTAN, belying the austerity of his name, has fed a little too well over the winter – gentlemen
will
over-feed their horses: can nothing be done to stop them? – and shall, we hear, do nothing. GUILLEMOT (an extraordinary name, but then the upstart vulgarity of the age knows no bounds) has tumbled over a mole-heap in the Breckland and had to be destroyed. SEPTUAGINT: that noble adherent of the Sport of Kings Lord Trumpington is cautious, which may be an omen. Your correspondent saw PENDRAGON at exercise lately, thought him dainty, well-set-up, an ornament to the Cornish line that sired him, and undervalued at twelves.

At Home and Abroad with Captain Raff

When I hear about a villain and his wiles, my first thought is for that villain’s associate. Where does he lay his head? How does he occupy himself when not engaged on villainy? What ravens feed him, and who launders his clothes? What are his innocent recreations and where are they indulged?

A London Charivari
(1862)

CAPTAIN RAFF LIVED in practised seclusion up three flights of stairs in Ryder Street. The chambers he inhabited were an artists’ rookery, where the gaunt old men in frayed collars marching along the corridors were as likely to be portraitists’ models as duns, and the traffic of the hallway was ripe to be interrupted every so often by a picture being taken downstairs to a waiting cab. There was a general air of bohemian laxity, of which Captain Raff warmly approved. The name beneath the street bell was not, of course, his own; the door of his apartment had a very sound lock; and behind it Captain Raff quietly luxuriated. It was a small room, under the eaves, with a skylight and several yellow-looking plants in pots which he sometimes remembered to water and sometimes did not, so that they dwindled away in consequence. There were sporting prints hung on the walls, and gauzy dancers, and a portrait in charcoal whose frame noted that it had been hung at the Academy fifteen years ago, captioned ‘Head of an Officer’, whose incongruity, in a room given over to bachelor dissipation, grew less marked when one realised that it was a younger version of Captain Raff himself, ‘taken off’ by Anstruther, RA, on a long-ago evening in the regimental mess. When he read about Anstruther in the newspaper, Captain Raff envied him his luck.

It was a Saturday morning in Ryder Street, not at all early, with the bolt drawn across the door and the skylight half-open – each an infallible sign that Captain Raff was at home – and the Captain, very negligently swathed in an ancient dressing gown, with one bare leg dangling over his chair, was making a late breakfast of a plate of oysters brought in from a neighbouring cook-shop and a bottle of soda-water. People who set foot in Captain Raff’s chamber – an inconsiderable number – said that he really should not keep that ‘Head of an Officer’ on the wall as the contrast with the second head that laboured beneath it was so very marked, but Captain Raff was proud of his portrait. ‘Anstruther, sir,’ he would explain, ‘why, he simply dashed it off – just dashed it off. And fellows who know me say it’s the most sovereign likeness.’ Captain Raff liked to say that he was a free spirit and went about as he pleased, but in fact there were several things lying on the table next to the litter of discarded oyster shells and the Tabasco bottle that had the ability to constrain him: a bill from his laundress; a letter or two containing columns of figures and respectful compliments; and a heap of sporting newspapers –
Bell’s Life
,
The Field
and
The Sportsman’s Magazine
– over which Captain Raff was intermittently poring. Every so often, finding some paragraph that interested him, he would take a pen from its holder on the desk, wipe it carefully on the hem of his dressing gown, and make a calculation on the back of the laundress’s bill.