Kept (37 page)

“Why it’s too bad,” he exclaimed to Grace, who had taken up a position at the pier rail. “The place is closed.”

“We shall have to wait, I suppose,” Grace answered him. “That’s all there is to it.”

Having, as he saw it, established his bona fides—those of a traveller frustrated by the absence of officialdom—Mr. Pardew lingered a foot or so in front of the heavy oak door. To anyone passing it would have seemed that he was studying a notice advertising sailing times and tariffs. In fact, Mr. Pardew was examining the lock. This, as he had suspected, was a substantial affair but primitive, consisting of a narrow opening and a spindle, over which the hollow of the railway officials’ key would fit like a glove over a finger. Round this spindle were eight iron sliders pressed forward to the mouth of the lock by a spring. Each slider, Mr. Pardew knew from certain other investigations he had undertaken in this line, had a tiny knob whose position corresponded with a notch in the central spindle. The key, consequently, would push each slider back to the point where the knobs and notches were in line. Mr. Pardew had no key, but, he assured himself, he had a means of establishing how such a key would operate. Still training his eye on the notice, but reaching the while into his inner pocket, he drew out the tobacco pouch and delved inside. Moving the metal cylinders into his hand, he slid first one then the other into the lock, then turned them slowly against the enclosing metal barrel until he felt them rub against the eight notches of the sliders.

“There is no sign of anybody,” Grace now called out to him. “We had best away, I daresay.”

Mr. Pardew nodded. With the pouch now stowed back in his coat pocket, he stood back and took a last look at the notice. Then he sauntered across to join Grace at the rail, and the two men walked back along the pier. Here they conducted a conversation which, had it been overheard by any passerby, would doubtless have puzzled this eavesdropper by its obliquity.

“Smoked?” Grace enquired.

“A tolerable job, I think,” Mr. Pardew allowed. “I did not care to see whether the marks corresponded. We had better go somewhere out of the way and assure ourselves.”

“Mr. File knows what he’s about,” Grace remarked. “And then if it don’t fit exact, we can always sand it down.”

Mr. Pardew laughed grimly at his clerk’s presumption of expertise. “As you say,” he observed, “we can always sand it down.”

A BRIEF MEDITATION ON KEYS BY MR. ROBT. GRACE

We had come a fair way, I will allow, but not far enough. We had a key that would open the door of the railway office, but that was all we had, and a day spent in there might not have been enough to get what we wanted. But then Mr. P. as is a clever man, whatever else may be said of him, hit upon a plan. It was this: that he should send himself a box of a hundred golden sovereigns by the South-Eastern Railway to Folkestone, to be collected from the railway office on the harbour pier. This to be sent down at the weekend, when there was no shipment to Paris and the safe, as we reckoned, would travel straight back to town. This was done—I took the receipt myself for an old cash box with the money in it—and Mr. P. goes down to Folkestone, in a frock coat and a silk hat, for it’s as well to play the gentleman in a game like this, to collect it back. A quiet Sunday forenoon, you understand, with the folks at church and no one about and just the one clerk—as Mr. P. had wagered—in the office. What has the clerk to do? Why, he has to get the cash box from the safe, while Mr. P. stands and waits in the office. Nothing there for him to steal, is there? In any case Mr. P.’s a fine gentleman in a silk hat, and he ain’t a-going to be taking halfpence out of the charity box, is he? So the clerk fishes a key out of his pocket, unlocks a cupboard on the wall, takes out another key—this one opens the second lock of the safe—and goes off to do his duty. When he comes back, there’s Mr. P. still a-standing at the counter looking as cool as you please. Opens up the box, looks over the gold, sees it’s all there, signs
another receipt and goes back to his ‘otel. What the clerk don’t know is that Mr. P. has the tin of green wax in his coat pocket with the line of the wall cupboard key pressed into it neat as neat.

We don’t need no Mr. File for that key, bless you. Any die sinker as knows his trade could make you a twin brother of that in half an hour. So now we has the key to the door and the key to the cupboard where they keeps the thing we truly wants. Two weeks later Mr. P. and me are on our way to Folkestone again. It’s remarkable how regular a gentleman like Mr. P. needs a touch of sea air to keep his spirits up, ain’t it? To be sure, Pearce has been with us—that’s a conniving scoundrel as I’m sure you’ll know—and I’ve a railwayman’s uniform over my arm. It don’t fit me, but who’s to know it’s not mine, eh? When we get to Folkestone Mr. P. asks for the use of a bedroom at an inn, and I go up and put it on. As we come down we hear the boom of the steamer horn. Sure enough, hurrying along the pier in the dark it’s to find the clerks gone and the office locked up. Well, Mr. P. gives me the key to the outer door, and before you can say jingo I’m opening up the wall cupboard with the key that lies in its lock. There inside is the key to the safe lying on a little saucer as a man might lay a teacup on. Half a moment later and I’m outside again, looking very serious and official-like. Heavens, I even stop to tell an old lady the time of the next steamer sailing, though my heart’s jumping into my mouth all the time. Mr. P. has his tin to hand, to be sure, and before you can say jingo again I’m locking up the cupboard with it safe back inside. Then I fastens up the outer door, and we’re away off down the pier again like a couple of sports with nothing on their mind but the path to the beer ‘ouse. And yet it was a narrow-run thing, sir—those clerks coming back from the steamer can’t have missed us by more than a few minutes—and I wouldn’t do it again for all the guineas in Christendom.

 

A
bout halfway along Northumberland Avenue, not very far from Charing Cross Station, reached by means of a tight little archway whose ancient flagstones have veered this way and that like pieces of crazy paving, hard by a stable yard whose ostlers must be the least occupied in all London, in that they are never seen to move from the hay-strewn approach to their place of work, waiting for horses that never come, lies a tiny square composed of small buildings in lugubrious grey brick. In one of these, shined by way of two flights of gloomy stairs, a long polished oak corridor and an anteroom tenanted by a neat, side-whiskered secretary, sits Captain McTurk. The public these days has romantic notions of the senior officers of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police Force. If they are not lithe-limbed young men with cold grey eyes capable of wresting a vital clue from a dung heap at a second’s glance, then they are picturesque, snuff-taking ancients, hearty and comfortable yet thinking nothing of pursuing the doughtiest villain across, let us say, a couple of rooftops to grapple with him finally upon the pinnacle of St. Paul’s. Captain McTurk belonged to neither of these categories. He was a tall, somewhat spare man in middle age, clean-shaven, with hair cropped very close to his scalp and with a prominent chin that no amount of razoring would ever quite keep clear of stubble.

How Captain McTurk had conducted himself in his previous life nobody quite knew, but he had occupied his present position for nearly ten years and it was said that his criminal adversaries, those gentlemen whose portraits appear with such startling regularity in the
Police Gazette
, were very anxious that he should cease to occupy it. The public these days has romantic notions of how the senior officers of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police Force spend their time. If they are
not routing out continental revolutionaries from their nests among the Soho attics, then they are attending upon the Home Secretary and establishing the security of the Royal person against the attentions of sundry garroters and pistol-wielding assailants. Again, Captain McTurk was engaged in neither of these duties. Just at this moment he was sitting in his room with a cup of tea on the deal table before him examining the pile of post which, neatly opened, assembled and docketed, had lately been brought in to him on a tray by his secretary.

There was no letter from the Home Secretary. In fact the topmost communication on the first pile that Captain McTurk turned his attention to consisted of a complaint concerning an old woman who kept a toll bridge at Chiswick, which missive I am afraid to say that he crumpled up with his hand and flung into a wastepaper basket. The second packet, however, interested him greatly, so much so that he pushed the tray to one side as a way of making sufficient space to inspect its contents. The packet—in truth a substantial parcel—had been addressed to Captain McTurk by the police superintendent of Suffolk. It contained a life preserver, something over twelve inches in length, fashioned out of a wood that Captain McTurk could not identify, so thick was the layer of varnish, weighted with lead at one end so cunningly that it was almost impossible to determine where the wood ended and the lead began. All in all it was a fearsome-looking weapon. Seeking to test its efficacy, Captain McTurk picked it up in his right hand and tapped smartly on the surface of his desk. To his surprise, for he had put no force into the blow, the glass veneer of the desk broke instantly into a dozen fragments. After this Captain McTurk put the life preserver back into its covering and applied himself to the letter which had accompanied it.

The weapon, he now learned, had been picked up by a farm labourer from beneath a bush on the road between Woodbridge and Wenhaston. Having seen nothing like it before, knowing that such things were not likely to be the property of respectable citizens yet unable to connect it to any misdemeanour of which he was himself aware, the Suffolk superintendent now offered it to Captain McTurk with his compliments. Putting down the letter and at the same time sweeping aside certain fragments of glass, Captain McTurk retrieved
the life preserver from its wrappings and turned it over once more in his hands. He too, though familiar with every kind of nefarious weaponry, had seen nothing like it before, but he was aware that a blow delivered with it to a human limb would result in fracture and a blow to a human skull most likely result in death. Still holding the life preserver in his right hand, Captain McTurk picked up the letter once more and read again the names of Woodbridge and Wenhaston. He was conscious as he did so, without being in any way able to verify the sensation, of some memory stirring within him, of something that he had read or mused over that had some bearing—he did not quite know what—on this discovery. Having pondered this for a few moments more, he pressed a bell on the side of his desk and summoned his assistant to attend him.

The assistant, whose name was Masterson, surveying the broken glass, but knowing that Captain McTurk was not generally prone to offer explanations of his behaviour, remarked merely, “There seems to have been some kind of accident, sir.”

“Accident? I suppose there has been. You had better send someone up here with a broom.”

Masterson having promised that someone should be sent, Captain McTurk placed the life preserver on the desk before him.

“Did you ever see anything like this before?”

The assistant, on whose professional skills Captain McTurk was accustomed to rely, weighed the instrument in his hand.

“Well, no. I never did. It is foreign, I should say.”

“Would you now?”

“Well, I should doubt it was made in Shoreditch. Or anywhere else around London. Look at those hieroglyphics or whatever they are around the base. Where did it come from?”

Captain McTurk explained about the farm labourer and his discovery on the high road between Woodbridge and Wenhaston.

“Do you know where the London Library is in St. James’s Square?”

Masterson acknowledged that he did.

“Well, perhaps you’d oblige me by stepping round there and seeing if they keep a file of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
. Say from the December
of three years past to the December of two. But it may be that my memory is at fault.”

Masterson remarked politely that he doubted it and went off on his errand. When he had gone, Captain McTurk locked the life preserver inside a little safe which reposed in a cupboard on the far side of the room and contained a great deal of material evidence gathered over the years, while placing it metaphorically in a compartment in his mind where it could lie undisturbed but be hastily retrieved when the occasion demanded it, and went back to his letters. Outside the clock chimed eleven, the ostlers in the stable yard continued to linger in the most hopeful manner, a janitor climbed up from the depths of the establishment to clear away the smashed glass and shake his head at the destruction, but Captain McTurk paid none of them any heed. One leg twisted awkwardly over the other, a cigar smoking between his fingers, the bristle on his chin waxing bluer by the moment in the soft spring light that now began to infiltrate the room, he continued to tear through his correspondence and the packets that various of his subordinates had thought worthy of his attention.

At least a dozen other letters—letters relating to specious applications for tide waiterships, letters from gentlemen who considered themselves grievously wronged by the activities of Captain McTurk’s lieutenants—went the same way as the custodian of Chiswick Bridge, but the thirteenth packet Captain McTurk found himself considering with almost as much interest as the life preserver. At this juncture the capital had fallen victim to a succession of fraudulent impostures. All over the City, it seemed, gentlemen had been cashing cheques they were not entitled to possess, drawn on accounts to which they were not party, using signatures that were not theirs to sign. A great commercial concern in the City Road had had one of its cheque books stolen and fifteen hundred pounds lost in this way. A firm of solicitors in Hampshire had been pillaged of eight hundred pounds after retrieving debts for a mysterious client, the cheques used to remit these debts found to be stolen and the client mysteriously absconded. By all of this Captain McTurk was much exercised. He believed that there was a pattern to it, but he could not yet establish what the greater dimensions of the pattern were. The case before him seemed particu
larly suggestive. A solicitor in Bermondsey had been asked to write a letter in pursuit of a sum of one hundred pounds owed to his client by a defaulting debtor. An address had been supplied by the client, the letter had been written and the money very soon remitted—paid in to the solicitor’s bank account and a fresh cheque drawn in the name of the client. Then it was discovered that the first cheque was a forgery. The client, to whom representations were made, had by this time vanished from the face of the earth. The debtor’s address, when visited by the solicitor, had turned out to be a tobacconist’s shop, kept by an old woman who knew nothing whatever about it.

A thought occurred to Captain McTurk, and, taking up his hat from where it lay on a stand near the door, he determined to act upon it. It was now the middle of the morning, and there seemed little chance that Masterson would return before noon. Accordingly, Captain McTurk descended the two flights of stairs, nodded his head to the seneschal at the door, avoided the ambitious stares of the ostlers and walked out through the tight little archway to the street beyond. Here he summoned a cab and had himself driven away across the river towards the Borough and the address to which the original demand for payment had been despatched and from which the fraudulent cheque had subsequently been returned. It became apparent to Captain McTurk as the cab bowled through the remoter quarters of Southwark that he could not expect very much from this visitation, and in this assumption he was correct. The tobacconist’s shop lay at the end of a street of shy little houses, hunched beneath the outer wall of a tanning factory about whose premises hung an indescribable stench. Within could be glimpsed certain melancholy appurtenances of the retail trade: a very little counter—no more than a trestle stretched between two boxes—displaying three or four dingy little tobacco tins, a half bin of Latakia so friable and ancient that it might have been dried pure awaiting distribution to the strawberry fields, and a fierce, dirty, little old woman with her jaw wrapped up in a handkerchief against a toothache and seated in a rocking chair from which the rockers had unaccountably become detached.

All this Captain McTurk saw in a glance, divining as he did so the absolute futility of any interrogation. Nonetheless, he placed his hat
on the counter, rolled around in his fingers a fragment of the Latakia from the bin—very dismal stuff it was, which crumbled away to nothing—looked up at a dangling cage with a stuffed jackdaw suspended in it and announced, first, that he was a police officer, and, second, that he believed the old lady’s premises had lately been used as an accommodation address. Having received the old lady’s cautious assent to this, Captain McTurk further deposed that certain letters had doubtless been received at the address, and wondered who had come to collect them. The old lady remarking that it was a shame she should be so worried when plagued with the toothache and that it was no business of his, Captain McTurk grew suddenly fierce himself, let the handful of Latakia fall through his fingers and gave the gentlest little nudge to the edge of the counter, causing the nearest of the tobacco tins to shake and waver as if it might be about to spill its contents over the sawdust floor. Whereupon the old lady, half rising from her chair and putting out a claw to secure the tobacco tin, recollected that there might have been a man calling himself Carter and that he might have last called six weeks since, or then again he might not. Captain McTurk persisting, and demanding in particular what this Mr. Carter might have looked like, the old lady also recollected that he might have been tallish and elderly-looking, or then again perhaps younger and “queerish.” Had she seen any specimens of the gentleman’s handwriting? Captain McTurk wondered, but the old lady was equal to this, protesting that she could not read and in any case what would she be doing with specimens of gentlemen’s handwriting? At Captain McTurk’s wondering if she expected any further communications with Mr. Carter, the old lady altogether shook her head, and Captain McTurk knew that he had reached the bottom of the particular well he had come to drain, put his hat back on his head, administered a little pat with his hand to the nearest tobacco tin, as if to reassure its owner that his earlier gesture had been no more than a jest, and walked out into the street to the waiting cab, resolving nevertheless that he should have the shop watched and that any further visit by Mr. Carter should be his last.

It was by now sometime after midday. As the cab took him back through the Borough, in sight of the river and the forest of ships’ masts, Captain McTurk stared out of the window at the passersby,
thinking to identify in one of them the outline of Mr. Carter, come to collect his letters and ripe for apprehension. But there was no one amongst the mass of city dwellers, of men and women passing back and forth from their places of work or gathered indiscriminately on street corners, to stay his glance, and he continued on his journey, stopping the cab at Charing Cross and walking the last quarter mile along Northumberland Avenue, through the tight little archway (the ostlers had all disappeared to their dinners) and back to the solitude of his desk. Here he found that Mr. Masterson, who was an efficient man, had returned from his errand and that several bound volumes of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, marked with the crest of the London Library, lay on his chair together with several stray fragments of glass that the janitor’s brush had unaccountably missed. Sundry other missives, communications, packages and even a telegram or two—one with a superscription marked
URGENT IMMEDIATE ATTN. ASST. COMMISSIONER
on its front—had arrived in his absence, but Captain McTurk was a single-minded man and the conundrum of the life preserver, which he now removed again from the safe in the corner of the room, had not ceased to occupy him during his half hour in the Borough. Transferring the bound volumes to his desk, he seated himself in the chair, placed one on his lap and began to leaf through it, paying particular attention to those melancholy pages towards the rear of each number given over to gentlemen’s obituaries.