Kept (25 page)

“As to the letter, I can’t say that it contains anything altogether startling.”

Pearce opened both his eyes to their absolute limit in a way suggesting that had he not been employed by the South-Eastern Railway Company, he could have made a fair living at the dramatic entertainments that are staged at penny gaffs. “That may be your opinion. It ain’t mine.”

“No? Well no doubt it will be of some use, let us say. Oblige me, Pearce, by walking over to that cash box there”—he indicated the metal tin on his clerk’s desk—“and telling me what you find in it.”

Pearce did as he was bidden.

“A ten-pun’ note.”

“Very well. I never saw it there. The box was empty when you came into the room. You take my meaning? There is another box here in this drawer. You take my meaning in that respect? Excellent. Now, about the letter, which to be sure contains nothing altogether startling. The days on which bullion is to be shipped are not generally known to the company’s staff?”

“Stationmaster himself don’t know until the van drives up.”

“In how many safes are they generally contained?”

“There’s three safes. Only one of them is ever used, though.”

“And how many keys to lock it?”

“Two. Superintendent and the stationmaster has one each at the bridge. There’s two more the same down at Folkestone.”

“And who has charge of them?”

“Folkestone superintendent has one. Other one’s kept in the office on the pier.”

“Very well. Is the safe only in use when there is bullion to be shipped?”

“No. It travels down in the luggage van anyhow, whether there’s things in it or not.”

“Is there ever a time when the two keys are kept together? Either in London or Folkestone?”

For the first time since their conversation had begun, Pearce looked if not uneasy then reluctant to vouchsafe the information that had been demanded of him. He took a little turn around the portion of the room in which he stood, peered through Mr. Pardew’s window at the great dome of St. Paul’s, shuffled his feet uncomfortably and looked at the door behind him. Mr. Pardew saw all this and was encouraged by it.

“I assure you we are quite alone. Now, is there ever a time when the two keys are kept together? For an hour even?”

“Last week,” Pearce began, speaking in a low voice and addressing his remarks not to Mr. Pardew but to the inkwell on his desk, “one of the Folkestone keys went missing.” He lapsed into reverie once more and was silent for such a long time that Mr. Pardew felt it necessary to sharpen the tone of his voice: “And what did the directors have to say about that? Come now!”

Pearce, looking up, thought that he did not like the expression on Mr. Pardew’s face, that it seemed to have grown larger and more oppressive in proportion to the rest of his figure, and that he would have given much not to have had it trained upon him.

“Orfice turned upside down to find it. And when they didn’t find it, the talk is that it’s ‘mislaid.’ All the safes to go back to Chubb. New locks, new keys, everything.”

“So at some point two keys—that is, two sets of two keys—will be returned to London Bridge? And to whom will they be sent?”

“Tester, I suppose. He had the writing of the letter.”

Having vouchsafed this intelligence, Pearce looked so enquiringly at the cash box that Mr. Pardew decided to halt his interrogation. He was in any case confident that the man had told him all he needed
to know. Ascertaining from him that Tester lived with his mother at an address in the Borough, he dismissed the man from his office and sat down again at his desk. There was a copy of a financial newspaper before him, which he picked up and affected to study, but I do not think that its contents interested him very much, for his mind was far away brooding savagely. Outside in Carter Lane the promise of the morning had given way to an overcast sky. Rain fell against the window, and Mr. Pardew watched it fall, hating it and the things that lay beyond it. He had reached, he acknowledged, a crisis in his affairs. Either he could proceed with the plan that had been occupying him for the past three months, ever since he had walked into Mr. Crabbe’s chambers and asked him to write a letter, or he could put it aside and make to believe as if it had never been. For the moment, he knew, he had taken no decisive step. He was like a man who, resolving to burn down his enemy’s house, lights a lucifer, holds it to the thatch and then withdraws it. Thinking of his conversation with Pearce, of the opportunity that the mislaid key seemed to offer him, of half a dozen other courses that he must follow if he wished to be successful in his plan, Mr. Pardew found even now that his mind drew back from the task. There was a sudden noise at the door and he started up guiltily, taking his stick in his hand, but it was merely a circular falling airily through the letterbox and he stood looking at it stupidly as the rain fell against the window and somewhere near at hand a clock chimed the half hour. The room in which he sat, he now discovered, had become intolerable to him. Its mass of papers, its unswept floor, the discarded carton from which Grace had eaten his lunch: all these, though glimpsed a dozen times before, oppressed him in a way that he now found almost painful.

On the instant an idea came to him. Lying in a drawer of his desk was a letter addressed to the Earl of——outlining that nobleman’s melancholy dealings with the firm of Pardew & Co., and it occurred to him that it would be a relaxation to deliver it to the Earl at his club. Accordingly, he placed his hat on his head, drew on his coat, seized his stick, placed the letter in an inner pocket and stepped out into the street. Here Mr. Pardew did what for him was an unusual thing. He walked to the cab rank on Ludgate Hill and had himself carried
away by hansom along Fleet Street and the Strand towards Trafalgar Square and the West End. Almost immediately, though, having seated himself in the cab’s interior, with his stick drawn up under his chin, he found that this mode of conveyance was no relaxation at all. He tried fixing his gaze on the people milling by in the rain—on an immensely tall man who rose a foot or more above the crowds, on a very miserable street clown dancing a hornpipe near the crossing opposite St. Bride’s Church—only to find that his eye continued to bore inward and that he scarcely saw the sights that lay before him. Constantly, his mind turned on the information that Pearce had given him, devising half a dozen little schemes by which he might press his plan forward. Then, almost immediately, he would acknowledge to himself that it would not do, that half a dozen different stratagems were likely to prove more successful. Then again, shifting his attention to these new possibilities, he would decide, again on the instant, that they too were flawed in conception or beyond his power to execute. In this way Mr. Pardew spent a thoroughly miserable quarter of an hour, gnawing on his stick, staring out of the cab window with such ferocity that the passers-by might have thought him a madman being carried off to the Bedlam on the instructions of his heir, and altogether wishing that he stayed at his office where there were letters to write and work in which he might have immersed himself thoroughly. Reaching Trafalgar Square, he could stand his situation no more and so, paying off the cab, walked hastily along Pall Mall before turning into St. James’s Street, where he knew the Earl of——’s club was to be found.

It was by now perhaps half past one, the sky turned slate-grey and the rain continuing to fall. Having walked a brisk half mile in which he had concentrated on the transit rather than the problems that oppressed him, Mr. Pardew felt somewhat more at ease with himself. Yet a second, more immediate, difficulty now presented itself. It was Mr. Pardew’s intention to mount the steps of the Earl’s club, where experience told him that his lordship would most probably be found, and absolutely confront that nobleman in the card room or the library or wherever he might have taken refuge. And yet Mr. Pardew was not a member of this establishment (his own club was a modest affair in Covent Garden, where he went to play whist with six or seven retired
barristers and discreet tradesmen), and he rather fancied he would have difficulty in gaining entry. Nonetheless, having ventured all this way, he would have despised himself had he not made the attempt, and so, with the letter in his pocket, he fairly skipped up the steps and plunged into the club’s hallway. It was Mr. Pardew’s hope that he might pass through this entrance undetected. Almost immediately, though, a majordomo in livery and with a tremendous floured wig came stalking across the tiles to enquire how he might assist him.

“I was hoping very much to have a word with the Earl of——,” Mr. Pardew said blandly. “That is, of course, if His Lordship is available.”

The majordomo, regarding Mr. Pardew as he stood there on the marbled floor with the letter in his hand, did not quite like the look of him. He rightly suspected that Mr. Pardew was up to no good in the matter of the Earl of——, that he had come, additionally, from the City, and that the envelope in his hand contained a bill. Therefore he placed himself squarely in the path that Mr. Pardew imagined that he might have taken towards the staircase and remarked that he didn’t believe His Lordship was in the club.

“Not in the club!” Mr. Pardew exclaimed. “Why, he told me himself that he would be here this afternoon.”

The Earl of——was, as it happened, at this moment smoking a cigar with certain pleasure-loving acquaintances in the billiard room. However, something in Mr. Pardew’s manner of expostulation suggested to the majordomo that the Earl would not wish to be troubled by such a one as Mr. Pardew. Therefore he repeated his denial, at the same time nodding his head to a footman, who now came and stood ominously a yard or so from Mr. Pardew’s side.

Mr. Pardew saw that he was defeated. He saw also that nothing was to be gained from an outburst of temper in the hall of a grand gentlemen’s club in full view of several of its members. “Perhaps, then, you would be good enough to see that this is placed in His Lordship’s hand,” he remarked, extending the letter as he did so.

The majordomo flicked his forefinger in the direction of the footman.

“If you give it to Jeames here, he will see that His Lordship gets it.”

Mr. Pardew, having been relieved of his burden, very shortly afterwards found himself once more upon the steps of the club. He was by this time quite furious. The Earl of——refuse to see him! Who did the Earl of——think he was? Was his money not as good as the Earl’s, seeing that a goodly proportion of the Earl’s was got from other people? Such was the extent of Mr. Pardew’s rage that for a moment he almost raised his stick and beat against the door of the club with it. Indeed he might have done so had he not noticed that a policeman standing on the street corner to which the steps of the club descended was regarding him with more than usual interest. And so Mr. Pardew put away his stick, contenting himself with a sardonic glance at the club’s bow window, behind which three fat gentlemen were staring benignly out. Mr. Pardew knew one of these gentlemen—knew, too, how much he owed—and the recognition fuelled his contempt. The Earl of——! The Earl of——should be damned, and Mr. Pardew stand on the edge of the fiery pit cheering on his judges.

Thoroughly exasperated, he made his way down the steps of the club and into St. James’s Street, aware as he did so, yet not perhaps connecting the two, that the events of the previous five minutes had made the subject of his former brooding clearer in his mind. He continued up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly, where he waited irresolutely for a moment, staring into the doorways of the great shops, into Messrs. Manton, in whose window lay a pair of pistols with which he would quite happily have shot the Earl of——had that gentleman been to hand, and Fubsby’s the confectioner, where a demure young woman presided over a gigantic bridal cake, but coming to no speedy conclusion as to what he ought to do with himself for the remainder of the afternoon. There was his house in Kensington, but Mr. Pardew did not often present himself at his house in Kensington. There was his office, but Mr. Pardew had forsworn his office for the day. There was his club, but all clubs, whether his own or anyone else’s, were anathema to Mr. Pardew in his present mood. “D——n it!” he said to himself, passing a window where a couple of gentlemen in evening dress leaned forward and looked as if they might be about to engage him in conversation but that they were tailor’s dummies, “I shall go and see Jemima, indeed I shall!”

There was a cab rank twenty yards away, but Mr. Pardew had had enough of cabs. Instead, picking his way carefully over the greasy pavement and avoiding a pertinacious crossing-sweeper in search of a penny by almost jumping over his broom, he proceeded to Piccadilly Circus and stepped onto an omnibus. Seated on the lower deck, next to an old lady with a goose in a basket and behind a couple of men discussing the prospects of the Tutbury Pet in the next great sporting contest, Mr. Pardew found himself comparatively at ease. The subjects on which he had brooded on his way along the Strand came back to him, but they did so in a manner that enabled him to deal with them to his satisfaction. And in this way he mulled over certain of the pieces of information conveyed to him by Pearce until he had arranged them into a structure of which he could approve. “I could do that,” he said to himself occasionally, or “But then that would not do at all.” On these occasions his lips moved silently and he shook his stick, and the old lady wondered at him, grasped her basket more tightly to her and edged up nervously into her corner. The sporting gentlemen got up and went away, leaving a newspaper behind them, and Mr. Pardew, picking it up and cursorily examining it, saw that it contained news of a daring burglary recently committed in the metropolis, the burglars now apprehended through the agency of Captain McTurk, and read on with intense interest. If there was one name that Mr. Pardew hated and feared, would not allow to be breathed inside his head while he meditated his schemes, it was that of Captain McTurk, and yet the deliberations of the past few minutes had given him courage, and he fancied that, if the occasion permitted it, he could deal even with Captain McTurk.