SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (21 page)

"Oh, my eye!" he said, his happiness entirely restored, "ain't it prime, though?"

"Prime," said Dacre coldly, "since Coggin thinks he's carrying a French doxy back to town in an opium trance, and Tyler and the girl think they've got a load of French prints and figures that came through the customs this morning. Take these boxes and lay them out in two rows. All of them."

With an hour until the train stopped again at Folkestone, there was time to finish the job professionally. Cazamian, on the platform at the back of the train had no access to the interior of the luggage van. He knew only that Verney Dacre was in the van, presumably alone, searching for his "lost diamond." There had been no trouble at Reigate and Cazamian was soon to be richer by four hundred pounds. More than that, he was not to be broken in agony, limb by limb, as one of Ned Roper's welshers.

Dacre's shirt cuffs were twisted and contoured with grime as he settled to the task of emptying the nine bullion-boxes which remained. Squatting at the first of them, he turned to Roper and held a pair of pincers towards him at arm's length.

"Here, old fellow," he said, almost genially, "see if you can't do something about loosening the fastenings of the iron hoops with these. It's the very deuce havin' to beat wedges in with a hammer every minute or another."

Roper, with a job to do, began to recover his self-possession, while Dacre broke open the locks with the wedges and hammer.

"I never could understand bullion coves," Dacre remarked casually, as another bolt was jarred loose from its socket. "Nothing will do but they must have double locks on the door of the safe, and every other sort of nonsense. But their own boxes open easily as a china pig. Uncommon rum, ain't it?"

Ned Roper had put his pincers down and now stood over Dacre, staring down, his eyes wide and his mouth a circle of incredulity at the sight of the little gold ingots laid out in neat rows.

"Sovs!
" he said suddenly. "Yellowboys!" and he snatched up a paper tube of coins packed in one of the boxes. Two or We empty each box in turn and keep the weight exact."

"Have the goodness," said Dacre icily, "to put those back. We empty each box in turn and keep the weight exact."

"Eagles!" Roper picked up the coins from the floor. "Yanke
e Eagles, and all of them gold!
Change 'em in Lombard Street in half a minute, and no one'd look twice! Must
be five hundred if there's five!
"

Dacre's drawl mingled irony and menace.

"If you suppose, Ned Roper, that you will change a single one of them, you are most prodigiously mistaken. Gold ingots can be melted till you couldn't tell 'em from one another. But the man who changes five hundred Eagles, after this dodge comes to light, will have some deep questions to answer. Oblige me by puttin' 'em back."

Roper stood, in
the shadows of the van, apparentl
y reproved and acknowledging the justice of the rebuke. He watched as his companion opened every box and every carpet-bag which contained lead shot. One by one, the ingots were measured against the amorphous piles of shot in the brass scale-pans. Then the lead was transferred to the bullion-boxes, and the gold to the carpet bags. Verney Dacre worked with a care which would have impressed many an honest craftsman. The richness of the joke seemed to Roper, in his tipsy state, "good enough for
Punch."
He began to titter.

"Ob
lige me," said Verney Dacre softl
y, "by not gigglin' like a ninny, and by handin' the courier-bags from your shirt."

Roper opened his brown frock-coat and began to produce the litde wash-leather bags, each with its own individual weight of shot. Dacre added the diminutive streams of pale grey metal to the pile in the brass pan. But when he reached the last of the bullion-boxes, he looked at the row of ingots inside it, and then closed the lid.

" 'ere," said Roper quickly, "what's wrong with them?"

"Nothing," said Dacre coolly, "but that gold stays where it is. We shan't take it."

"Not take it?" Roper looked at him with incredulity, "Three thousand pounds in gold I Not take it I"

Dacre spoke very quietly and with great weariness.

"We've come to the end of the lead shot, old fellow. We can't take any more gold. The boxes would be light at the weighing."

To his disgust, Roper began to whine threateningly.

"But you can't mean to leave it behind, Mr Dacre! You can't. Ain't there something to use instead of the shot? There must be!"

Then he saw something in Dacre's eyes, something which Cazamian had once seen in Ned Roper's, and now Roper was afraid. The whining ceased. Looking at Dacre, he thought that even if the bastard had been kicked out of his regiment for thievin
g, he had killed men at the battl
e of Chi
llian
wallah. To be sure they were black men, but Ned Roper had no intention of trusting to his colour to save him.

"Listen to me," said Dacre, tall and determined. Ned Roper listened.

"These boxes will certainly be weighed somewhere, probably at Folkestone. If the weights don't match the weights at London Bridge, then, by God, the jig is up. The boxes will be open, the hare runnin' loose, and we shall still be on the train. For good measure, you'll have Verity there, too, to put the finger on you."

"Well," said Roper with a half-apologetic smile, "I ain't that keen to have the darbies snapped round my wrists."

"Likewise," said Dacre thoughtfully, "we might take the American Eagles."

Roper's face brightened.

"To throw in the river," said Dacre with a sharp gesture.

"If the coins have gone, you may be sure that the first thing they'll look for is someone
changin' them. And they shall sti
ll be searchin' for that at the Last Trump."

He hammered down the iron hoops of the bullion boxes and adjusted the locks so that even where the sockets were broken a key would still raise the tumblers in th
e lock itself. It was not essenti
al to his plan, but a sense of finesse required it. Finally, he began to melt two sticks of red wax in one of the brass scale-pans, holding it above the lamp and using it as a chafing-dish. A smell of warm tallow and incense filled the luggage van as the mixture seethed like a stiff broth. He took four seals from the carpet-bag and lined them up, ready to stamp the molten wax over the crevices of the bullion-boxes.

" 'ow d'yer do it?" gasped Roper, with eyes that reminded Dacre of his beagle's a
dmiration. "Dear God, Mr Dacre!
Yer got the bullion merchants' seals!"

"No, I ain't, old fellow," said Dacre flatly, "just four seals bought from a stall in Hungerford Market."

Roper's eyes were suddenly overcast with dismay.

"Hungerford Market? What the 'ell's the use of that? Soon's they come to look at them, they'll know it's wrong. They'll know it, Mr Dacre! "

Verney Dacre finished the sealing of the bullion-boxes. Then he stood up, turned round, and faced his companion with his habitual broken drawl.

"Y'may be a devilish fine bully, Ned Roper, but y'lack observation. These fellows that do the weighin' ain't nothing but well-paid counter-jumpers. Even a man who's Superintend
ent of Traffic ain't born a gentl
eman and won't ever be his own master. He'll see the seals are unbroken, but it ain't likely he'll examine them close if the weight of the boxes is right. But suppose he does look close, and suppose he
sees a difference. What th
en? Does he take a hammer and start smashin' open boxes of gold on Folkestone Harbour Pier in the middle of the night? If he does that, he's in no position to show what seal was on the boxes because he'll have broken it to splinters in opening them. But, in any case, Ned Roper, that ain't the way a counter clerk sees his job. First he'd telegraph London Bridge and ask them to please be so good as to discover if the bullion merchants have changed their seals, or whether they mayn't have used the wrong one by accident. There won't even be a reply to that befo
re tomorrow morning, by which ti
me you and I will be back in London. And believe me, Ned, it ain't that easy to tell the difference between seals in a bad light."

Roper seemed unwillingly convinced. They closed the remaining carpet-bags, distributed some of the weight of gold in the sham coffin and carefully closed its bolts. Between them they carried the bullion-boxes to the safe and replaced them in die correct order. At last, Verney Dacre took his two roughly-cut keys and, after a. moment's probing, the two heavy bolts in the locks of the bullion safe fell shut with an audible thud.

When there was no more to be done, Roper began a muffled, squittering laugh, and in a spontaneous release of tension, Verney Dacre joined him. Whether it was the thought of the faces of the o
fficials of the Messageries Impe
riales on opening the boxes, or whether it was sheer relief, neither man could have told. But they sniggered and guffawed and slapped one another on the back until they were beyond Ashford, and beyond Standford, closing fast upon the points between Folkestone upper level and the Harbour Pier.

These points were vital in Dacre's plan. To turn from the main line down to the harbour, the train had first to pass over the points. Then the points were changed and the train, backing over them, turned away from the upper level and down a curved branch of railway track to the Harbour Pier. The tidal ferry train might be advertised as "direct" from Reigate to Folkestone Harbour, but the construction of the permanent way was such that it was obliged to stop for about ninety seconds while the points were changed. According to Verney Dacre's previous observation, it might be more than ninety second
s, it might even be a littl
e less.

Standing close to the off-side door of the van, which faced away from platforms when the train was stationary, Dacre felt the first change in the rhythm of the wheels. The sliding door could not be opened or fastened from the outside, but only by raising or dropping into iron brackets a solid metal bar inside the van. He raised the bar on its pivot and slowly drew the door across, revealing the pale streaks of chalk cliff flashing past them as the train began to lose speed before the points. Of all his tools, the only one which Dacre had not returned to the carpet-bag was a large hammer.

Soon the grinding and screwing of metal signalled that the brakes of the train had been applied, and it passed at walking speed over the points. At the screech which was the prelude to complete braking, Dacre motioned his companion towards the open door, watched him jump and saw him set off along the cutting, running low beside the stationary carriages. Dacre himself remained on the footboard for a moment, gently sliding the door across with as much care as if it had been some delicate mechanism. Once the door was closed, it could be fastened again only if the raised bar inside were dropped into position. Cazamian might do that if he were first to reach the van, but that risk was too great. Dacre judged th
e point at which the pivot of th
e bar would be on the inside of the boarding. Then he hit it a hammer blow with all his strength on the outside of the wood. There was no response. He struck it again, and this time heard the fall of metal. How far the iron bar had lodged in its sockets was a mere guess, but now he found it impossible to move the door from the outside.

And then Dacre jumped from his perch and ran with his head ducked below the pale rectangles of light which were cast by the carriage windows. He could see Roper's head and shoulders in dark silhouette, marking a carriage in which no lights were burning. The engine whistle shrieked and the wheels of the carriages began to turn just as he drew level. Roper flung the door wide, Dacre jumped, and as he pulled, himself into the carriage the rhythm of the train grew loud enough to obscure the sound of the door being slammed behind him.

It puzzled Verity that Roper should have travelled so late, unless he were proposing to spend a night or more in Dover, and that he should have come without his doxy this time. At Reigate he was no more than two carriages' distance from Roper, and had kept such a vigil that no man could have entered or left Roper'
s carriage unobserved. At a littl
e distance from Folkestone, he discovered that he could hear the sound of voices from the other carriages, fragmentarily, by keeping his own window lowered.

Roper was evidently not alone, he caught the strident, bragging tones of the man once or twice, though without being able to distinguish precisely the words that were spoken. Of what was said by one of Roper's travelling companions, he heard little more. The tone of the man's voice was one which Verity had heard often enough before, the languid drawl of the St James's Palace dragoon, still affecting the English of the reign of William IV or even the Regency. Such voices and personalities had come to be thoroughly despised by the riflemen of the Crimea, who compared their own hardships with the easy affluence of the "peacock bastards" in the lancers and hussars.

Verity just managed to hear the voice instructing someone, for God's sake, to "put up some yaller light, or let a fellah have a glim or two," and then to say something about "travellin' on to Paris or Roome and break the Pope's nose." Beyond that, there was nothing.