Kept (41 page)

EASTON HALL, NEAR WATTON

A Jacobean
E
plan house with three bays in each recess of the
E
and a bay beyond the
E
at each end. An hexagonal tower to the rear. The Jacobean house faces west and includes the library and the dining room. Fenestration later Georgian, and a bow window was added at the south end, with a new Georgian fourth bay at right angles, incorporating the drawing room. Todhunter’s print, in
Fastes Norfolkenses,
predates this addition. A fine early C18 staircase has three twisted balusters to the tread and carved tread ends. It was here that James Woodforde upset himself on a winter’s evening, having indulged too freely in his host’s milk punch (“a vexatious incident, fair to embarrass me in the eyes of my host, yet Mr. Benny, an exceedingly courteous gentleman, received my apology very civilly”; James Woodforde,
The Diary of a Country Parson,
17 November 1784). Thomas Percival Benny was the seventh descendant of the hall’s original owner. Eventually, Easton passed into the Dixey family, connections of T. P. Benny on his mother’s side. An aquatint by Gandish, RA (1818?) shows the property in relation to an artificial lake, subsequently drained, commenced in Waterloo year. It was for some years the home of the celebrated naturalist James Chatterton Dixey, until his death, in mysterious circumstances, in 1866. Subsequently, the house was inherited through the Beresfords by the Kenyons. A Dornier bomber crash-landed in the outer park in 1942. At this point the property was in use as a boys’ school. Now empty.

BURKE’S AND SAVILL’S
Guide to Country Houses
,
VOLUME 3: EAST ANGLIA

 

T
he sensation caused in polite society by news of the train robbery did not die down in nine or even ninety-nine days. It was talked of at every dinner table in England and not a few outside it. The daily newspapers, naturally, could not be kept from it and devoted countless leading articles to the audacity of the villains, the boldness of the crime and the negligence of the authorities in allowing it to be committed. An august royal personage read of it in her great rooms at Windsor and summoned her ladies-in-waiting to discuss it. The Prime Minister heard of it as he sat at breakfast in the bosom of his family, shook his head and looked very grave.
Punch
satirised it most awfully in a burlesque in which the Home Secretary was kidnapped from a meeting of the Cabinet without anyone’s noticing and a ransom then demanded for the sum of eleven pence three farthings, which his colleagues declined to pay. And subsequently that gentleman, made even more wrathful by a caricature of himself being abstracted in a sack by three footpads, summoned Captain McTurk to a meeting at the Home Office from which the police commissioner emerged two hours later with a look in his grey eye from which the very coachman recoiled. There had been nothing like it in the annals of metropolitan life for a decade, Captain McTurk was assured, and there would continue to be nothing like it until such time as the villains were caught, arraigned, rebuked and put behind bars.

As to the catching, however—let alone the arraigning, the rebuking and the putting behind bars—Captain McTurk was altogether at a loss. Assembling such fragments of evidence as could be found in the days following the robbery, he was aware that he knew almost nothing of its circumstances. Three chests of bullion, when taken from a safe in Paris and opened by the representatives of a French banking house, had been found to contain a quantity of lead shot. And yet when had
the lead shot been placed in them? The chests had been weighed at London Bridge, at Folkestone and again at Boulogne and nothing amiss found. The seals of the chests had certainly been tampered with and the boxes forced open, but nobody could say for certain when the tampering and the forcing had taken place. The driver of the train and the guard professed to have seen nothing. In addition, Captain McTurk had interviewed such passengers on the train as could readily be assembled, the ticket collector who had taken their tickets and various other officials who had been in the vicinity, and discovered…nothing.

Having drawn, as it were, a blank in this preliminary investigation, Captain McTurk set out, as was his professional wont, to assemble the course of the operation in his mind. Having questioned the officers of the steamer and the officials who received the safe at Boulogne, he was certain that the crime had been committed in England. But how? Clearly, those who had taken the bullion must have smuggled it from the train in the guise of ordinary passengers. How had they done so? Captain McTurk had been assured by the bullion merchants that the weight of contraband was more than a single man—two men—could carry without difficulty. Had any passenger or passengers quitting the train at Folkestone been seen to possess cases or valises of an abnormally large size? Captain McTurk had demanded of those he interviewed. Here again he could get no satisfactory answer. The people had noticed nothing out of the ordinary course of events. The ticket collector deposed, mournfully yet righteously, that it was the custom of gentlemen who arrived at Folkestone late at night either bent on travelling to France or staying in the town to carry large cases. All this, Captain McTurk acknowledged to be true.

There were certain other questions, too, which he urgently wished to answer. How many felons had there been? Given the weight of the gold, Captain McTurk was inclined to think two or even three. And having abstracted it (and how had they abstracted it?), where had they gone? The newspapers confidently asserted that they had fled on the steamer to France, but Captain McTurk rather thought not. By his reasoning the men had either remained in Folkestone that night or departed it immediately for some other place in England. And here
the trail, which had threatened to turn cold, grew suddenly warm. A policeman indeed, stationed at London Bridge very late on the night in question, remembered assisting two gentlemen lately debouched from a railway carriage with what had seemed to him an inordinately heavy piece of baggage, but the hour was late and the gentlemen so caparisoned in travelling cloaks that he could recollect nothing of them. A cabdriver, too, recalled picking up two men—again with pieces of heavy luggage—and depositing them on the edge of the City. Again, he could remember nothing other than both were tall, one stout and one with a prognathous jaw. Finally, there came a money changer near Blackfriars to reveal that very early on the following morning he had changed into sterling a quantity of Napoleons offered to him by a burly man in a travelling cape speaking in a low voice and showing every indication of wishing to conclude the transaction as swiftly as possible. Though he gave no outward indication of disquiet, these three pieces of information excited Captain McTurk very much. He ensured that representations were made to others of the capital’s money changers. Banks were asked to examine their records for that day and the day following it in search of unusually large cash deposits. Nothing further came to light, however, and again the trail ran cold.

All these enquiries proceeded during the course of the summer. Though the sensation did not die down in nine or even ninety-nine days, it could not, by its very nature, be maintained at the same high pitch. Polite society was by this time in any case decamped to Baden-Baden or taking its ease on the grouse moors. The public likes variation in the criminal accomplishments offered up for its delectation, and it was thought that the murder of a nobleman by certain burglars engaged in the plundering of his ancestral seat rather had the edge on the robbing of the Folkestone mail. All this was observed by Captain McTurk, who did not apparently take holidays, sitting in his office in the square beyond Northumberland Avenue, sending Mr. Masterson out on his little errands and continuing to ponder the suggestions offered up by the day’s post.

It must not be supposed that the other enterprises on which Captain McTurk had been engaged before the scandal of the bullion robbery had now been placed in abeyance. On the contrary, he
continued to revolve them in his mind even as he sat attending to the Home Secretary’s wrath or questioning the Folkestone ticket collector. It could be said, in fact, that Captain McTurk’s mind, or that part of it which did not contain his wife, family and acquaintance, was a single stage populated by an ever-shifting cast of criminal actors, this one now moving audaciously into the light to say his lines, that one now subsiding gently into a throng of scene swellers. To this end, he had continued to take an interest in the death of Mr. Henry Ireland, had summoned a craftsman who might know something of the manufacture of life preservers and sent Mr. Masterson once more to Suffolk with instructions to submit all the evidence in the case to the closest reinspection. At the same time, he had recalled to mind the circumstances of certain other murders in which gentlemen had been bludgeoned to death. None of this, however, was of the slightest avail. The craftsman, bidden from his workshop in Mile End, shook his head over the bludgeon, agreed that it was a remarkable piece, speculated that it might have come from Prague or the region of the Danube, but could say no more. Mr. Masterson, though he spent a further week in Woodbridge and retraced his steps along the Wenhaston Road, was unable to add to the stack of lore he had brought back from his previous visit.

And then there came to Captain McTurk a stroke of luck of the kind that were it to arise in a work of fiction would have mesdames and messieurs the critics wagging their fingers at its improbability but that is nevertheless a welcome concomitant to many an official enquiry. The public had lately become somewhat exercised by the imputation of dishonesty to certain representatives of the metropolitan force charged with the supervision of police cells. It had been alleged, to put the matter bluntly, that no watch, wallet or personal item placed in the pocket of a suspect left in such accommodation at dusk was likely to be there at dawn, and an evening newspaper had caused much amusement by suggesting that any citizen who wished to know the time should hasten right away to a police constable, as that gentleman was certain to be in possession of a watch-and-chain. Captain McTurk had, of course, read these claims, or rather they had been shown to him, and been made angry by them. He did not dispute that some
of them were true, but by no means all of them, he thought, and he determined when the chance fell to him to conduct certain investigations of his own.

Wandering one night through that part of the station headquarters in which prisoners are confined, he happened to encounter a constable who, it seemed to him, was very anxious to make his way past him along the corridor as quickly as he could. It seemed also to Captain McTurk that, as he came upon him, the man was in the act of transferring some hard, glinting object from his hand to the pocket of his coat. Demanding that the object—as he had foreseen, a watch—should be given up to him, Captain McTurk rebuked the constable and took the contraband up to his room to examine it at leisure. It was a large gold repeater watch, very cunningly wrought and not at all the kind of thing generally to be on display in the labyrinths beneath Northumberland Avenue. But Captain McTurk was less interested in the watch’s provenance than in the inscription engraved on its reverse side. This reproduced the name of the gentleman who had originally owned it, and the name was
Henry Ireland, Esq
. Having read this, the police commissioner put the watch down on the desktop before him and whistled sharply through his teeth. He was not so sanguine as to believe that the discovery of Henry Ireland’s watch would offer him any immediate clue as to how it had been taken from its owner, but he knew that in however small a way the trail had been renewed.

The prisoner from whom the object had been abstracted was fetched from his cell, brought wonderingly into Captain McTurk’s office and ordered to give an account of himself. He was a miserable and wretched-looking specimen who, Captain McTurk now saw from the charge sheet conveniently provided for him by the former’s escort, had been arrested for loitering in a somewhat suggestive manner, together with a package containing two files and a chisel, about the area steps of a house in Notting Hill Gate. His account of how he had come by the watch was offered up with no apparent hesitation. He had been engaged at cards with certain acquaintances of his in a tavern at New Cross and had won very heavily off one of these acquaintances, who, declaring himself short of ready money, offered him the watch in payment. What was this man’s name? Captain McTurk demanded, his
gestures implying, if they did not exactly guarantee, that a softer view might be taken of the files and the chisel were a satisfactory answer to be received. The man thought that his name might have been Pearce, and that he was in addition perhaps five feet nine inches tall and wore a whitish-coloured greatcoat. As to the address at which he might be found or what ravens fed him, the man at first professed himself ignorant, but then, thinking perhaps of the files and the chisel and the awful proximity of his person to the cell where the constable’s hand had fallen upon his shoulder, suggested that he believed he might previously have been an employee of the South-Eastern Railway Company. This fact, though Captain McTurk inscribed it dutifully on the sheet of paper before him, did not immediately strike him as significant, but a description of Pearce was circulated to each police station in the metropolitan district.

And then, within the fortnight, came a second stroke of luck. The public, whose sensibilities at this time appeared to be in a state of permanent crisis, had also been exercised by the dreadful preponderance of illegal boxing matches. Three thousand persons, it was maintained, had recently assembled in some quiet Surrey field to watch the Tutbury Pet belabour the Dorking Chicken for a prize of a hundred guineas, despoiling the crops and trampling down the very fence posts in their eagerness to surround the ring. It was known in the county that a rematch of this Herculean encounter (the Chicken feeling rightfully aggrieved by his initial defeat and demanding satisfaction) would take place in a secluded corner of Epsom Downs. Infiltrating the course—from which the protagonists had already been spirited away in cabs—the police were concerned only to disperse the crowd that had gathered. In doing so they were obstructed by a drunken man who, protesting that he had had twenty pounds on the match and was d——d if he would see it taken from him, eventually became so obstreperous that he was hustled off into custody. The man’s name, it was now determined, was Pearce. Additionally, a search of his clothing produced not only a quantity of banknotes but a pair of Louis Napoleons. Both these discoveries were immediately communicated to Captain McTurk. There may of course be excellent reasons why a man found drunk on Epsom Downs should carry such coins in his
pocket, but Captain McTurk, cynic that he was, thought otherwise. Pearce was ordered to be sent up to London in a police carriage under escort. Captain McTurk, to whom the coins had come in advance, placed them on the table before him together with Mr. Ireland’s watch and began to wonder, as he could hardly fail to do, whether the two might not have some very singular connection.