SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (11 page)

The superintendent of traffic shone his bull's-eye into the cavernous iron safe and lifted out a small package the size and shape of a cigar box. He handed both the package and Dacre's receipt to the inspector of railway police, who signed the receipt as witness. The two men locked the safe again, handed the keys to the boy and the package and receipt to the escorting constable. Then, with the policeman leading the way and Dacre bringing up the rear, the little procession marched back down the planking of the Harbour Pier towards the railway office.

Inside the office, as the boy offered the receipt for his signature, Dacre called to the clerk.

"Have the goodness to open the box for me first, will you
.
I don't feel called upon to put my name to something I haven't seen. And I can hardly open it myself with one arm bound up like this."

The clerk bobbed his head and took the tiny key, which Dacre laid on the counter. Then, under the gaze of the boy and the constable, he unlocked the little box and eased back the lid to display thirty neat pillars of gold sovereigns in paper tubes. There was an intent silence. Dacre was prepared to bet that for all their dealings with the safe and its bullion boxes they had never seen so much gold in their lives before. Each of them looked on more money than he might hope to earn in the whole of the next ten years.

"Very well," said Dacre softly, "you may close it again."

He signed the receipt clumsily with his left hand. Then, refusing all offers of help, he managed to hold both the little box and his stick in one set of fingers. He stepped past the door, which the wondering clerk held open for him, and smiled in the darkness. Best of all, he thought, the constable who acted as escort for the keys had seen the gold coins and the Union Bank receipt. Whoever should subsequently be suspected of the bullion robbery, it would certainly not be a well-dressed cavalry subaltern with a carriage and pair, a handsome young woman, and a ready supply of money from a bank in Pall Mall. What need had such a man to rob anyone? As the liberal-minded readers of the
Morning Chronicle
and the landed supporters of the
Morning Post
knew equally well, criminals were the poor who robbed the rich. "The poor who fought back," someone had called them. A railway constable and a traffic clerk were unlikely to notice the slight flush of exultation that betrayed the rising excitement in Dacre's breast. By the time that he reached the carriage, his heart was almost bursting with jubilation.

"By George, old girl, it's a real starter," he murmured to Jolie. She looked vacantly at him, since he had thought it best to keep all details of the scheme from her. However, in his temporary good humour he so far forgot himself as to give her a playful pat on the face.

9

Above the long bar of the Hope and Anchor, the tubs of spirits were scorched by the flaring gas brackets, the gilt of their hoops and lettering blistered by the heat. Blond-whiskered subalterns of the Royal Horse Artillery, in camp on Dover's Western Heights, shouldered their way in the crowd against tradesmen's apprentices and coach boys. There was an impatient and frustrated surging towards the upstairs parlour, where the "Grand Sporting Trial" was to be held. Men with small albino-white bulldogs under their arms, and others who nursed Skye terriers curled like balls of hair, elbowed their way forward with expressions of
business-like
priority. Around the feet of the crowd, the little brown

English terriers strained at their leather collars, as if tried beyond endurance by the faint, sour smells from the room above. Well apart from the general scrimmage, a great white bulldog with a head as round and smooth as a clenched boxing-glove slept and snorted on an old hall chair in total indifference.

The aproned proprietor of the Hope and Anchor bawled himself red in the face above the shouted conversations of the fanciers.

"Orders upstairs, gemmen, if you please. Leave the bar clear, gents, if you please."

Verney Dacre, tall and sharp, settled his steep silk hat more firmly on his head and folded his white gloves into his left hand. Fortified by brown sherry and game pie, he surveyed the heads of the crowd with eyes devoid of anxiety or self-consciousness. There was no sign of Ned Roper or Ellen.

"I'll be shot if I can see our friends, old girl," he said, as though hardly bothering to address the words to Jolie. "I shall be in the very deuce of a way with 'em if they ain't shown up."

Her almond eyes flickered in
brief understanding, and then she pressed her slender, straight-boned young figure closer to his coat-tails as he pushed his way through the slow-moving press of men. At the foot of the stairs, he dropped their shillings into the hand of the boy stationed there
^-
to take the money. Then, as he began to climb, he reached behind him and took the girl's hand, so that she was literally in tow.

The dingy yellow paper of the upstairs room was hung with discoloured prints of prize fighters from Corinthian Tom to Bendigo, and every hero of the turf from Eclipse to Running Rein. Several heads of dogs, grotesquely distorted by the taxidermist's art, were mounted in square glass boxes above the fireplace. But the great attraction was in the centre of the room, where the first spectators were pressing against the waist-high wooden walls of a white-painted oval arena. This was the pit, about six feet in length and garishly lit by a branched gas-lamp, which hissed and sputtered in a harsh brilliance immediately above it.

"You don't see them?" said Dacre peevishly, half turning to the girl.

"See them?" she whined irritably. "You migh
t as soon see your grandmother!
"

They could hardly hear one another for the squalling and barking of the dogs. The fierce heat of the gas in the shuttered room intensified the sweet scent of hot gin, and the earthy vapour of the sewer which rose from the wooden pit. At Dacre's elbow, a butcher's boy was forcing a peppermint rinse into the mouth of a reluctant puppy to prevent infection if the animal should be bitten on the lips or gums.

Then Dacre saw Ned Roper standing in earnest conversation with Ellen on the far side of the pit. At that moment Roper looked up and stared straight at him without giving the least sign of recognition. Dacre brushed perspiration from his forehead with the edge of his hand and moved cautiously through the crowd, approaching Roper from the back. He was not ten feet away, when Roper swung round suddenly, with the smile of a ferret, and spoke in a loud and swaggering greeting. His words were not addressed to Verney Dacre but to a shorter, fatter man whose shoulder was so close that Dacre could have touched him, but who had appeared to be positioned so that Ned Roper would not have seen him.

"Why, Mr Verity!" said Roper with his sharp neat smile, "you a ratting man? My dear Mr Verity!"

Verney Dacre knew that on the brink of disaster sudden stillness can be as dangerous as sudden movement. He moved with casual ease, turning so that his body was positioned between the plump, dark-haired man and Jolie. Only much later did he feel the cold shock of realising how, by never having seen Verity before, he would have betrayed himself but for Roper's well-timed outburst. For the moment, he fixed his eyes on Jolie and nodded at the doorway, willing her not to raise her voice in a shrill, familiar whine. With his hands on her shoulders, he drove her roughly before him, against the pressure of the crowd coming up the stairs. At the bottom of the flight she turned to face him, a faint flush under the gold tan of her cheeks at being handled in this manner.

"What's this bloody game?"

"It's no game, my girl," said Dacre softly, "there's a screw loose. Ned Roper's got that bastard Verity with him. If Verity sees you with me, then he knows the score and the whole scheme is no bono."

"You been hit a bit heavy, ain't you?" she said with pert satisfaction. "That fool Verity got one over on you!"

Verney Dacre denied himself the inexpressible luxury of feeling the back of his hand smacking her lips against her teeth.

"You stupid little whore," he said softly, "it's your face and Roper's they know at the police office, not mine. Go back to the cab and wait until I come."

"I ain't come here for that," she wailed, "not to sit all night in the cab."

"Then by God you'll sit in a lock-up until they take you before the justices," said Dacre, "you poor fool! It's your neck that's got a rope round it for McCaffery."

She was lost, the fine-boned mask of her oriental beauty stunned with dismay. Behind her, the proprietor of the Hope and Anchor was bawling up the stairway.

"Put up the shutters and light up the pit!"

"Wait in the cab!" said Dacre savagely, and the girl scuttled away like a frightened mouse.

In the upstairs parlour, the "Captain" had taken his chair and the first swarm of dark brown sewer rats slithered from the upturned wire cages into the arena, like a shoal of leaves tipped from a bag. With wet noses twitching, the creatures settled down to wash themselves, pausing from time to time to sniff at their unfamiliar surroundings. Roper, his hat tilted knowingly and his thumbs hooked in his lapels, acted with all the self-confidence of an
habitue
of the place.

"Now, Cap'an," he shouted to the man in the raised chair, "when is this 'ere match a-coming off?"

"Be easy, gentlemen," said the frock-coated umpire, "the boy's on the stairs with the dog."

A butcher's lad pushed his way round the pit, holding a bull terrier in his arms. The animal wrestled against his grip, maddened by the scent of rats in the arena.

"Lay 'old a little closer up to the 'ead," said a stout, florid woman, "else 'e'll turn and nip yer." She and her shopman stood with several other couples on two or three table-tops for a better view of the killing.

Verney Dacre moved slowly towards Ellen's back, past the troopers of the Horse Artillery in their unbuttoned tunics, and the barrack prostitutes whispering their familiar terms of business to a pair of pock-marked tradesmen's apprentices. He positioned himself where he might view Sergeant Verity, whom Ellen confronted like a familiar acquaintance.

"Me 'n Roper goes a lot to the Queen's Head in the Hay-market," she remarked confidentially. "It's the house as Jemmy Shaw keeps. He has some prime dogs there! Oh, my eye, ain't they handsome, though! Gentlemen meets there to show off their dogs. You mean to say you never been?"

"No, miss," said Verity in an ominous tone, "never been."

Dacre watched the tall girl admiringly. The pale oval of her face with its wide blue eyes, high cheekbones, straight nose and chin, was marred on
ly by her wilful littl
e mouth. With her blonde hair worn loose to make her appear younger, she looked like a delinquent child with a woman's body. She cooed derisively at the perspiring and scarlet-cheeked sergeant.

"Oh! You should go to Jemmy Shaw's Mr Verity! Shouldn't he, Roper? I mean, Mr Verity being so interested in dogs and ratting."

Roper half turned from the wooden pit, the quick ferret-smile flickering again under pale ginger moustaches.

"I fancy Sergeant Verity knows the Haymarket quite as well as you, Miss Ellen. Why, I expect he's had one or two scrapes that way as he never expected."

Ellen smoothed her dress with one hand and then began to stroke her long fair hair, as though this self-caressing gave her physical satisfaction.

"I don't think Mr Verity was quite himself that night," she said softly. "Why, he even wanted to send me to Mr Miles's house of sorrow.

Verity regarded the pair of them, goggle-eyed. His cheeks were flushed the colour of ripe plums, and his jowls trembled with the outrage of it all.

"Be damned to you Roper," he said, barking out the words as though they might otherwise choke him. "Be damned to you for a brawling, boasting, ill-conditioned little reptile!"

"Save it all," said Roper coldly, turning to watch the ratting again. "Take your licking and don't squeal. You ain't the first jack that's been taught a trick, nor you won't be the last!"

Sergeant Verity's blunt, heavy head with its black hair plastered flat over the scalp for neatness, thrust itself forward in the manner of a game cock. Dacre thought at first tha
t he was about to hit Roper with
his clenched fist, but when Verity spoke he seemed to have regained his restraint a little.

"The treadmill in the house of correction ain't called a cockchafer without reason, Ned Roper. The way it makes a man run, he gets the skin took off his privates the first day. And it don't grow there again while the turnkeys have charge of him. And once you're put away there, crows shall sing like Jenny Lind before you see the light of day ag
ain! You'll have littl
e enough left to pleasure your whore with after that."

Ellen elbowed her way between them and turned her blue eyes, in their doll-like innocence, on Verity.

"Don't be such a rummy cove," she said reprovingly, "Roper ain't done you no harm."

"Cross me, miss," whispered Verity, "and you have a reckoning to pay."

"But me 'n Roper's pleased to see you any time at Jem Shaw's," she said, taunting him with her eyes still, and nudging her hips towards him.