SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (13 page)

Dacre gave a short, barking laugh of derision. Looking at her, as she crouched on the floor waiting for the next coin to be thrown, it seemed to him that she now knew who her master was. Pulling himself up a little, he took a half-sovereign and lobbed it expertly, so that it fell into the concave bowl of the gasolier.

"There's a half Victoria up there," he said with another snort of laughter, "supposing you can get it out before it melts."

She wriggled up the tall brass corner-post at the foot of the bed, "like a monkey up a stick," as Roper had phrased it, reaching perilously close to the white gas mantles and giving a sharp squeal when she once burnt her fingers. Watching the light made Dacre's eyes water badly, so he looked aside at the reflection of her coppery nakedness, as she perched with knees tightly locked round the brass pole.

"You'll do well to remember," he said in h
is most precise manner, "that g
old has to be earned. When a woman is awkward in giving her favours, I can be deucedly tiresome in paying the account."

With that, he took a button from the purse and tossed it to the far end of the room. She could not see it from her perch, though she heard it land.

"And that's the last you'll get," he added, wearying of the sport. He gathered up his clothes and went into the day-room, locking the door of the bedroom to keep her in. When he had dressed again, he rang for more hot water, added it to his brandy, and lit another cigar. Later on, when he went to his own room for the night, he could still hear the girl scrabbling determinedly for the final, non-existent coin. As he closed his eyes, Verney Dacre smiled.

"Why," he said softly but audibly, "the last part, of itself, was worth two and a half sovs of any fellow's money."

Stringfellow stood with his back to the horse and cab, which he had brought round from the mews so that the animal might have its nosebag outside the house.

"Dover?" he said incredulously. "On your own hook?"

"Own hook," said Verity solemnly. "And there's no denying the consequence. I went in for the running and got distanced."

"Superior numbers," Stringfellow shook his head. "What's a man to do against superior numbers, Verity? 'oo was they?"

Sternly, Verity avoided the injudicious question.

"You want to keep the leavings from the last nosebag," he said, with a nod at the horse's bony flanks. "Always scatter them on top of the next feed. Somehow, it gets a 'orse eating. We learnt that in camp before Sebastopol. That creature of yours hardly eats enough to keep the parish cat alive."

S
tringfellow hoisted himself to
the seat of the hansom with his hands and his one good leg. He set his hat right and looked at Verity with gruff disapproval.

"If it was on your own hook, and not for Mr Croaker, you might as well tell a friend," he said, delivering the words as a statement rather than a request.

"It was Roper," said Verity, "and his dollymop."

"Was it?" said Stringfellow thoughtfully. "And what did they do at Dover, this Roper and his woman?"

"Went ratting at the Hope and Anchor," said Verity with irritation.

Stringfellow shook his head, as though Verity should have known better than to offer such an explanation.

"Now you ain't trying to persuade me, Mr Verity, that you went to Dover last night and come back here at six in the morning, all to watch a magsman and his whore catching rats?"

Even in the cool early sunlight, Verity's cheeks glowed the colour of port wine.

"It ain't that," he said: "there's something afoot, and Dover's the place for it."

"I don't sec what you can do at Dover as you mayn't do better in London," said Stringfellow doubtfully, "except catch fish and smuggle contraband. Did they look like they was going smuggling?"

"They watched the dogs killing rats," said Verity. He kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot. "I never lost Roper for a blind second. I only missed the girl for two minutes, when he went out of the room to ease nature and I followed him. Even then she couldn't have got out past the door without me seeing her."

"Ah," said Stringfellow, shaking a finger, "they split I Superior numbers, Verity. That was how they had you before. One man can't follow two, however much he may want to."

"I'd follow those two to 'ell and back to see Roper quodded," said Verity widi a melodramatic tremor.

"Whereas," Stringfellow persisted, "if I'd been there, splitting wouldn't have helped them. And they wouldn't have twigged me, a-cos they don't know my phiz from the Princess Royal's."

"It ain't exactly work for you," said Verity in a huff.

"Ain't it, though?" said Stringfellow indignantly. "Miss Bella may be good enough to cook, and sew, and nurse, but that's as far as the joint stock company's a-going, eh?"

"No," said Verity wearily, "that's all gammon, as you well know, Stringfellow."

"Then we'll try it together."

Verity looked up with some anxiety.

"Try what?" he inquired.

Stringfellow leant down and patted the bay horse, which responded by lifting its tail and depositing a dozen rounds of dung on the roadway.

"Bella! " roared Stringfellow. "Brush and shovel! Sharp's the word and quick's the motion!"

The girl hurried out of the doorway, swept up the droppings, and scuttled indoors again.

"Let that dry and the air's thick with the dust of it by suppertime," said Stringfellow ruefully. "But seeing as you spent half the night in Dover, travelled by a train at some unholy hour
..."

"Ferry train," said Verity gruffly, "a very decent sort of train."

"...
and then walked from London Bridge to Paddington Green at daybreak, I'm a-going to make an exception for you. Today you goes to Whitehall Police Office in the 'ansom."

Verity puffed and grumbled.

"Not a word more," said Stringfellow steadily.

At the Cumberland Arch, he looked down through the little hatch on to his plump passenger.

"Care killed a cat, Mr Verity."

"No doubt," said Verity, and they rumbled without speaking past the houses and gardens of Oxford Street. At Regent Circus, Stringfellow lifted the hatch again.

"I don't suppose," he said half-diffidently, "it ain't possible, I suppose, that this Roper and his blowen went to Dover just to do what you saw them do?"

"What's that?" asked Verity with suspicion.

"Catch rats," said Stringfellow hopefully, flicking the horse.

"No," said Verity in his sourest manner, "it ain't possible."

Stringfellow shrugged, and the elderly horse ambled the rest of the way to Whitehall Place without another word being spoken by either man.

10

The blonde hair that normally hung loose to her shoulders was now put up in an elegant coiffure. Ellen Jacoby was in mourning. Her boldly flared dress and its cape were of black satin, heavily trimmed with crape. Yet with her coquettish little parasol, in black with a white silk lining, and the sweet trail of perfume diffused by the heat of her young body in the warm vestibule, she displayed a perversely intriguing combination of the costume of death veiling an animal eroticism. As she held up her skirts a little, to climb the grand staircase in the wake of the footman, she offered a furtive glimpse of ankle and calf in the patterned silk of black stockings. But the gesture betrayed her. A born lady would have sailed confidently up the broad stairs, not clutching at her skirts like a housemaid.

It seemed that the gaze of every man and woman in the vestibule of the Grand Pavilion Hotel was drawn by the tall girl in her narrow-waisted funeral dress, her broad hips swelling more fully as she laboured in her climb. Even the long veil, anchored by the back bonnet with its silk bands, marked her out as a young woman of intrigue rather than a cast-off widow. It was just as Verney Dacre intended. The witnesses, if they were ever asked, would remember his charming visitor as a tall girl in fashionable mourning. Whether she was Ellen Jacoby, or Laura Bell, or the Princess Louise, they would have no idea.

The men, in their black or bottle-green evening coats, glanced wistfully upwards at her retreating shape, and then continued their slow promenade towards the public dining-room. At the first landing, with its Indian carpets in burnt red and its palms in fat-bellied bronze jars, Ellen paused. The bewigged footman tapped at the door of Dacre's rooms and murmured an inquiry. Then the girl was admitted and the flunkey withdrew. As soon as it was safe, she lifted off her bonnet and veil, still breathless from the stairs.

"Roper's on the Parade, by the bandstand, 'e's tooled up and ready, 'e said to tell you that."

Silently, Verney Dacre put out a bony hand and touched her face with the back of it. There was no affection in the gesture, he merely wished to feel her skin, in case there should never be another time. Ellen smiled awkwardly, and rubbed her cheek against his knuckles like a kitten. She was Roper's girl, but where was the harm in obliging the young soldier who was going to make them all rich? So, at least, Ned Roper had hinted.

"What's tonight's game, then?" she asked softly, though not as if she expected to be told.

Dacre almost snorted with derisive laughter.

"It won't be
vingt-et-un
at sixpence a dozen, my girl, you may be sure of that much."

She drew back from his touch. Dacre swung round, looking from her to Jolie, who sat in an elbow chair by the
fire,
which was lit despite the heat, watching the play of hot coals between the bars of the grate, as though absorbed in some secret drama that was being acted out there.

"And I want it understood," resumed Dacre, fastening his cape and adjusting his hat, "that neither of you is to leave these rooms, nor ring for the servants, until Ned Roper or I shall come back."

He picked up his white kid gloves in one hand and a small sealed package in the other, addressed to the Credit Etranger in the Rue Royale, Paris. Then he gave a final glance at the two girls, who seemed anxious to look anywhere but at him, and went out. Once on the landing, however, he turned a key softly in the lock of the door. With Jolie's continual fidgeting to show off her new clothes, and with Ellen whimpering like a filly for a stallion, it seemed wise to him to take such a precaution.

The Marine Parade lay in a forlorn and sunless gloaming. Unkempt horses were rattling the last of the bathing machines over the shingle and away from the glimmer of the flooding tide. Ned Roper saw Dacre coming and took the lead, easily recognisable in his brown sportsman's suit and tall, pale grey hat. Dacre walked carefully a dozen paces or so behind him. At the approach to the Harbour Pier, Roper dropped back, and when the two men drew level, he emitted a loud, barking belch.

"Ease afore convenience," he remarked unapologetically.

Dacre's thin dry lips twisted briefly with anger. Though he had the taste of East Indian sherry on his own tongue, always preferring a warm belly for a job like this, it was clear that Roper had been drinking steadily for most of the day.

"I'll be fucking smothered if our ferry train ain't in already," said Roper foolishly.

"It's of no consequence," said Dacre, not trusting himself to look at his companion. "Follow me at a distance, and do exactly as I order, unless you want to ride back to London between a pair of private clothes constables."

Ned Roper
seemed to steady himself a littl
e. Dacre, striding ahead down the platform, recalled with dismay that he had once thought of letting Roper play the part of cracksman on this preliminary job. He opened the door of the luggage office, leaving Roper to wait in the shadows. The same traffic clerk and the same boy were on duty behind the broad wooden counter. The boy, with pop-eyes and fullblown cheeks, looked at the little parcel in Dacre's hand.

"All them packets is gone down to th
e steamer, sir," he said earnestly, "you'd have to catch the carriers down there."

Dacre ignored him and turned to the thin, balding clerk.

He held a sovereign between his finger and thumb, the little coin glowing a deeper and richer gold in the light of the oil lamp.

"It's a matter of some importance that this packet should be in Paris tomorrow night," he said languidly. "Oblige me by seein' to it at once."

The clerk's expression hardly altered. Dacre gave him credit for that. A whole sovereign was as much as the man could expect in six months of normal bonuses and gratuities. He entered the details of the packet in his ledger and held the page for Dacre's signature.

"Ain't no bother, sir," he said softly. "She don't sail for more 'n half an hour yet. Chaffey! Down to the post-van with you, and see the gentleman's packet goes in with the mail."

Dacrc waited until the boy had gone out before putting the sovereign on the counter.

"That boy'd eat 'isself silly, if he wasn't found something to do," said the clerk self-consciously, pocketing the coin. With the pride of one who was not entirely a menial, he could not quite bring himself to acknowledge the gift directly. Dacre nodded to him and went out, elbowing his way across the platform through the straggling groups of passengers, and the evening strollers with nothing better to do than to watch the Boulogne steamer come in. Among the tall hats and parasols, he watched the
Lord Warden
blowing off gusts of steam from her paddle-boxes. Now it was up to Cazamian and Roper to give him time for the job. Roper stood a few yards from the door of the luggage office. He looked so obviously furtive, with his quick eyes and rodent smile, that Dacre regretted bringing him. Of Cazamian there was no sign. Dacre turned his gaze on the guard's van in the distance; his habit of running the safety chain of his watch between fingers and thumb was the sole betrayal of his nervousness.

At last he saw a cropped, grizzled head, and Cazamian shouldered his way through the crowd towards the luggage office, a sheet of paper in his hand. Within a few minutes he reappeared with the clerk, Cazamian talking insistently and the other man looking puzzled. The clerk locked the office door, tested it, and then they both set off towards the end of the train, their heads bent in argument.

A single railway policeman, easily distinguishable by his stovepipe hat and long, belted tunic, stood about forty feet away. That at least was no problem, and in any case the man was looking in the opposite direction. Dacre reached the door and faced it, his exact movement covered by his cloak. Yet this was the easiest part, so long as his silk hat, his cloak with its deep blue lining, and his clothes immaculately cut by Mr Sporrer of Bond Street, afforded their necessary protection. Even a railway constable might hesitate to challenge a man who looked and acted so obviously like a director of the railway company. Each director, in return for his investment, had the personal power to appoint, promote, and even to dismiss, such individual employees as he chose. The servants of the company were not over-anxious to quarrel with their directors.

From his pocket, Dacre had slid a key, an exact imitation of the one brought him by Cazamian, except that the metal of this one shone bright and raw, where he had filed the last indentations to make a precise copy. But no key that was made "blind," without the chance of testing it on the lock, was ever perfect. The perfection lay in the bony, agile fingers of a man like Dacre. His key entered the door-lock easily enough, but jarred against a tumbler as he tried to turn it. If the lock were found damaged the whole scheme would be ruined. There must be no force. He drew the key back a little and turned slowly, feeling the tumblers move. It scraped lightly against the barrel of the lock, but there was no harm in that. He opened the door, stepped inside, and then carefully locked himself in. A single oil lamp by the clerk's stool still lit the bare wooden room. The windows were uncurtained, but being of frosted glass there was no danger of his being spied on. He opened the little wicket and let himself through to the clerk's side of the counter, setting eyes for the first time on the cupboard in which the keys of the bullion safe were kept.

It was built into the counter, close to the clerk's stool, and its door was of sheet iron. Dacre folded his cloak into a rough cushion and knelt upon it, taking two small tins from his pocket and a notecase, which unfolded as a wallet of slender metal probes. Pulling off his white kid gloves by the fingertips, he examined the lock, and his heart beat faster with the knowledge that it was a difficult one, but possible for Verney Dacre.

It was not a Chubb, but a Bramah. A few years before, at the Great Exhibition, he had watched with professional sympathy the humiliation of Mr Hobbs, an honest but nimble-fingered American locksmith. Hobbs had accepted a public challenge from Joseph Bramah to open such a lock before an audience. He had toiled for nineteen hours and merely succeeded in breaking the lock, which a common sneak-thief with a drayman's muscles could have done. But Verney Dacre must succeed where Hobbs had failed, and must succeed quickly. If he took nineteen minutes, let alone nineteen hours, he could expect to spend the rest of his life in a prison settlement.

The Bramah offered him nothing but the tiniest mouth with an even tinier tongue of metal inside, over which the key would fit, if he had had a key. And that was all. A solid curtain of iron masked the rest of the mechanism. Dacre felt a physical tightening round his throat, the dry pressure of controlled fear, like a coarse velvet noose. The Bramah used no tumblers and was proof against any single probe or pick known to the criminal world. It worked on a simple and almost perfect principle.

Round the central tongue, which he could see, and lying paralled to it, were eight iron "sliders." When the lock was closed, a powerful spring kept them pressed forward towards its mouth. Each slider had a tiny knob upon it. Within the cylindrical iron barrel of the lock were eight notches, cut at varying depths from the mouth. In order to open the Bramah, the eight sliders had to be pushed back simultaneously by varying distances, until each engaged in its secret and individual notch. Once that had happened, the powerful spring was no longer able to force them forwards. The twist of the key would then turn the barrel of the lock, releasing the bolt. It was easily done with a key which had been cut to push each slider back by the required distance. But the movements were calculated within fractions of
a
millimetre. The cracksman who could not see the inside of the lock (and the iron shield with its tiny keyhole made certain that he should see virtually nothing) might just as well give up the job.

All this and much more went through Verney Dacre's mind, as he wiped his moist palms on his trousers. The heat of the summer day had left the little building intolerably warm under its tin roof, but he felt the exultation that came from the challenge. To enter such a lock and make it move at his command gave him an intensity of pleasure which some of his brother subalterns had claimed to find in the entry and possession of a woman's body.

From the open wallet beside him, he took two slender half-cylinders of metal, each smaller than a hollowed half of the tiniest pencil split lengthwise. Moving cautiously towards the oil-lamp, he held each of them in turn above the flame, twisting them to and fro until they were coated with an oily black carbon from the smoke. There was no time to "smoke" the lock itself, but this was the next best thing. He drew back, mopping the water which started in his pale blue eyes at the heat and smoke of the lamp. Kneeling down again, he slid the first tiny half-cylinder into the hole of the lock, keeping it over the central tongue of metal and away from the wall of the lock barrel. When it would slide in no further, he moved it slowly but firmly into contact with the barrel wall, twisting it gently half an inch or so in either direction, in the motion of a key. Though his eyes were
a
little blurred once more by the nervous watering which the oil-lamp had started, his white, skeletal hands moved with the smooth sensitivity of a watch-maker's or
a
surgeon's. Then he withdrew the first half-cylinder and repeated the operation with its twin on the other side of the keyhole. When the two halves were placed together, they formed something like the shaft of a key.

More important, when they had been brought briefly into contact with the barrel of the lock, it had left its markings on the oily carbon with which they were covered. To the unpractised eye, the scrapes and smears were indecipherable, but Verney Dacre read them as though they were plain as italic script. On each of the half-cylinders there were four tiny patches where the black coating had hardly been disturbed. They told him at a glance the position of the eight notches in to which the eight sliders must go.