SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (18 page)

"There was no need to look in the basement again," he said. "Nothing there—nor anywhere else. Mr Tyler took me down there."

"Tyler?" said Verity suspiciously.

"Aye," said Meiklejohn, "I fancy he misunderstood the request at first. But then, why, bless you, he was in such a hurry he quite missed his footing on those dark stairs."

Meiklejohn kneaded the knuckles of his large right hand reminiscently, and favoured his two companions with an unambiguous smile.

The Boulle clock struck three with the sound of a hand gently stirring tiny spoons in a drawer. Suspended in an eternal moment, the gilt figures of an old man drawing away the last garment from a plump girl acted out the charade of Time unveiling Truth.

Verney Dacre, sensing rather than hearing a footfall on the broad, thickly-carpeted stairs, swung his long bony legs from the day-bed and crossed to the tall windows which looked down upon Albemarle Street, with a glimpse of St James's. Below him, the carriages drawn by fine bay geldings moved in an unaccustomed silence through the noon sunlight. On the opposite side of the street, in one of the plain but elegant Georgian houses, the Dowager Lady Spencer was dying, a relic of an earlier society. Since early morning her grooms had relaid the cobbles with straw every hour to muffle the cacophony of hooves and iron-rimmed wheels.

He turned from the window, anticipating precisely the moment of the knock upon the door-panel, and the opening of the double doors themselves by his manservant, Oughtram. Dacre's household was small, consisting of the Oughtrams, husband and wife, and a young female drudge whose very name was unknown to him. As servants, the Oughtrams possessed the unquestionable advantages of being content with their position and apparently incurious as to their master's private conduct. They were not hardworked, since most of Verney Dacre's meals were ordered from the finest cuisine of Stephens' Hotel or the Clarendon in Bond Street, and brought round by a footman. Oughtram and his wife had accepted the addition of Jolie to the
menage
without comment of any kind. She was not the first of Dacre's mistresses in their experience, nor was she likely to be the last. The girl kept out of their way, as she kept out of Dacre's for the most part, by busying herself in trying on first one costume and then another. It was enough for her to lie like a
grande coquette
before a mirror in one of the finely furnished rooms, enraptured by the reflection of her new beauty. The time would come when such self-caressing admiration would not be enough to satisfy her, but Dacre was confident that by then his need of her would be over. To the Oughtrams, it mattered little what the outcome might be. As James Oughtram remarked, when settling down to steak and porter in the evening, what Mr Verney Dacre did was no concern of his, so long as he himself had the easiest lodging that any servant could have wished for.

On entering Dacre's sitting-room, Oughtram drew himself upright, his sallow cadaverous features suggestive of a professional mourner.

"There's a gentleman downstairs insists he must see you, sir. I asked his name but he wouldn't give it. Said you'd know him when you saw him, and that it was a private matter."

Dacre thought for a moment, sniffed, and then said, as though it hardly interested him,

"What sort of person did he look?"

"Sporting gentleman, might be," said Oughtram expres-sionlessly.

"This is all a great bore," said Dacre irritably. "Send him away. No—wait—I suppose I must see him. He may have been sent with a message. Show him up before he steals something from the hall."

He had guessed from the first that this must be Ned Roper, and, having guessed that, it was important to impress upon Oughtram that the man was a stranger and that it was a matter of total indifference to Dacre whether he saw him or not. Once Roper had been shown upstairs and the two men were alone together, it was Dacre who spoke first.

"Oblige me, Ned Roper, by never comin' to this house again, and by tryin' not to act like a
cretin
in future."

Roper sat down, uninvited, on the day-bed, lounged backwards a little, crossed one leg over the other, and took a cigar from a leather case. Then he favoured Dacre with the ferret
-
like smile that he normally reserved for men of Cazamian's type.

"I don't know, Mr Dacre, but what you mayn't thank me for having taken the trouble to step over here. The jacks turned the Langham Place 'ouse inside-out and found nothing. All the same, it ain't the billet you'd like to be found in now, is it?"

Dacre turned his back to the fender and stared coldly down at Ned Roper, despising the coster-boy arrogance and the vulgar clothes which made up Roper's bravery.

"It is inconvenient to me that you should come here," he said at length. "Have the goodness not to repeat this visit."

"Inconvenient?" said Roper, his smile broadening. "Yes, I shouldn't wonder if it was inconvenient, Mr Dacre, seeing as how you're never going to get into the guard's van of the tidal ferry, let alone touch any of the gold."

"Oh?" said Dacre, hardly betraying curiosity.

"Look in the
Morning Post
,
if you ain't done already. Where it says, 'Shocking railway disaster at Lewisham.' Eleven passengers was killed, the night afore last, when one train ran slap into the back of another."

Without taking his eyes off Roper for a moment, Dacre opened the thick soft folds of the
Morning Post
.
Then he began to read. Presently he looked up again.

"Cazamian?"

"No! " said Roper disdainfully. "He ain't dead, nor wasn't within ten miles of it all." "Well then?"

"Well," said Roper, "I've had words with Cazamian this morning. The railway company's setting up an inquiry over the accident, 'owever, it seems the passengers is getting worried about all these trains that keep running one into the back of the other. Orders have been issued. From now on the luggage vans at the end of the train is sealed and the guard don't go into them except at the stations. The guard is to travel on the little p
l
atform at the back of the van so's he can raise the alarm for any other train he sees coming after him. When the train leaves a station, the guard takes his place at the back, and the railway police close up the van, having first seen that all is as it should be. That's the order of the day."

"When does this start?" Dacre inquired, folding his hands under the tails of his coat.

"It started this morning," said Roper with bitter satisfaction. "Wery inconvenient, ain't it, Mr Dacre?"

Dacre said nothing. He walked across the room to a tall French cabinet, an imitation of the style of Louis Quatorze, the arched panels of the upper doors surrounded by a carved frieze with coloured glass and marble let into the dark, polished rosewood. Taking a key from his pocket, he unlocked the upper cupboard, while Ned Roper watched intently over his shoulder. The three shelves were lined with narrow, though deep, bags made of soft leather and threaded with thin body-straps.

"Courier bags," said Dacre flatly. "If he were to attach them to himself properly, a man might carry half a hundredweight of gold under his shirt in those."

He stooped down and unlocked the larger doors of the lower cupboard. Six leather carpet-bags lay across the full length of the space.

"Likewise," said Dacre, still talking as if it were a matter of indifference to him personally, "two men who could fill those carpet-bags and the courier bags might carry quarter of a ton of gold between them. Rather, they might carry such a weight with the assistance of the railway company."

From one side of the cupboard, he pulled out a small canvas pouch, open at the top. It tilted a little and a dull grey stream slithered over its edge. Dacre picked up a handful of the hard little pellets which made up the shifting mass.

"Lead shot," he remarked, displaying it for Roper's
bene
fit. "Enough to replace the exact weight of the gold. It can be bought by the hundredweight from the shot tower in Southwark. The weighing of the bullion-boxes during the journey ain't quite the problem it seems, old fellow. Why, what do they do if the boxes weigh just what they should?"

"Nothing," said Roper hopefully.

"Precisely." Dacre returned the handful of shot to the canvas pouch. "One thing a man learns from a tour of regimental duty is that the more defences there are, the more lazy the defenders become. There's nothin' like being certain you can't be defeated, for making sure that you will be. The railway police know the bullion can't be robbed, so they devise the weighing system, which makes robbery almost certain."

"I don't follow all that," remarked Roper grudgingly. "All I say is, if you open the safe, which you can do, you must open the bullion-boxes. You might do that, but you can't ever replace the bullion merchants' seals. If you was to rob their vaults to take the seals, you might take the gold then and there more easily. The railway police 'ull see the boxes have been tampered with as soon as look at them. And now you ain't going to get into the guard's van anyhow."

Verney Dacre returned to the far side of the room and stood with his back to the mantelpiece again.

"You ain't a readin' man, Ned Roper," he said coldly, "so it's time wasted to talk about Trojan horses. Oblige me by understandin' one thing, however. I haven't come this far to be turned back by you, nor Cazamian, nor anyone else. The plan will be carried into action within a fortnight from now, the sooner the better."

Roper shrugged, as though Dacre's foolhardiness was beyond all cure. He tapped the side of his boot with his stick.

"It ain't going to be easy for me, not even though
you
can spirit yourself through locked doors like a Cock Lane ghost. Wherever I go, I only have to turn round to find a certain party following a little way behind. I only come here this morning a-cos I know his duty took him somewhere else."

"Very likely," drawled Dacre. "Have the goodness, however, not to frighten Verity by turnin' round and starin' at him too much. I don't care to be waitin' about, any more than you do. Play him on the hook, though, play him, Mr Roper. And oblige me by seein' that when you set out for London Bridge, all tooled up, Sergeant Verity is in attendance."

"In attendance!" said Roper incredulously. "What, me start off on a safe-cracking with a bloody jack walking at my heels?"

"Should y' like to see him come to smash or not?" Dacre inquired with imperturbable patience. He broke off the conversation abruptly as Oughtram brought in the mid-day post on a silver tray. Dacre took up a small blue envelope and then dismissed the man. Roper seemed to forget the problem of Verity for a while as the second object of his visit recurred in his mind."

"When it's all done," he suggested speculatively, "there'll have to be an understanding about the girl you've got 'ere."

"Understand what you please," said Dacre, giving his attention
to a sheet of notepape
r, "there's nothing for her here."

Roper passed a tongue over his thin lips.

"Suppose you was to buy her off me? Two hundred sovs. Take her where you like, do as you like with her. You could have a worse little doxy, when all's said and done."

Dacre looked up expressionle
ssly.

"If you suppose anything of the kind, Ned Roper, you are most stupendously mistaken. When I buy, I choose my own goods."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning," said Dacre, "I'll buy Ellen Jacoby and no other, and you shall have five hundred guineas for her without further argument."

Roper smiled wisely and shook his head.

"No, Mr Dacre, nor for a thousand and more. Not even to oblige you."

"Dammit," said Dacre mildly, "how you fellows do take to a bitch when she whelps. You might be a kennelman with a prime breedin' foxhound."

Roper, having failed to dispose profitably of Jolie, seemed a little downcast.

"You ain't nothin' else on your mind?" Dacre inquired, glancing in the general direction of the door. "It's deuced close to dinner time."

Roper brightened a little at the unintended invitation.

"Well," he said hopefully, "I wouldn't say no to a glass of chain and the wing of a chicken, if that ain't no inconvenience."

Verity and Samson stood shoulder to shoulder in the first rank of the crowd which stretched behind them, twelve or fifteen deep, and extended in a great curve from Hyde Park Gate to the review ground with its large marquees and regimental colours limp in the warm air. In the hazy heat of the June morning, the pale sunlight flashed on the silver helmets of the Life Guards and glowed more deeply on the bronze casques of the Inniskilling Dragoons. Mounted on his horse, at a little distance from the squadrons of the attendant cavalry regiments, the commander of the parade awaited the arrival of the Sovereign and her escort. Even at a distance, however, it seemed to Verity that no soldier of the Crimean expedition could fail to recognise the tall, shaggy-browed, care-worn figure of Sir Colin Campbell whose "thin red line" of Highlanders had held back the attacking Russian cavalry from the port of Balaclava. Behind Sir Colin, the ceremonial squadrons of the nth Prince Albert's Own Hussars were moving towards their review positions, a pageant of deep, vibrant colour in their tight crimson trousers and short blue jackets with gold embroidery. The band of the Foot Guards concluded the slow march, "Coburg," and the squadrons of Prince Albert's Own moved forward at the trot, in time to "The Keel Row."