SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (3 page)

Mr Croaker must solemnly remind Sergeant Verity that the use
of
a plain-clothes detail is confined to detecting crime and is not to extend to espionage upon men who may be in contemplation
of
a crime. This limit is imposed by the good sense
of
the Home Office.
If
Sergeant Verity feels unable to perform his duties within this limit, Mr Croaker will expect to be informed at once.

If
Sergeant Verity should possess knowledge
of
a
crime to be committed and should alloio such crime
to
be committed for the purpose
of
a
pprehending the criminals, he w
ill be in danger
of
being charged as accessory before the fact. Mr Croaker hopes that Sergeant Verity will think
of
this.

Mr Croaker lakes this opportunity
of
returning
Sergeant Verity's enclosures and begs to remain his obedient servant.

H. Croaker, Inspector of Constabulary,
26th
of
May, 185J.

3

Below the level of the pavement, William Clarence Verity sat on a tall counting-house stool and finished posting up his books. The air of the warm Saturday evening filtered a pervasive smell of horse dung and soot through the open window above his head, while the crash of cartwheels on cobbles was drowned only by the occasional hearty cursing of a drayman.

Sergeant Verity was a portly, youngish man with a pink moon of a face, well-flattened black hair, and moustaches lightly waxed at the tips. The little room seemed all the smaller for his bulk and the tall stool on which he perched at his desk appeared in danger of collapsing like dolls' furniture under his tightly-trousered buttocks. With a little groan of satisfaction he dipped his quill judiciously in t
he ink
well and laid it on a scrap of paper. Then clenching his plump fist round a cylindrical ruler and holding it like a truncheon, he ruled the final line under a faithful record of his week's work.

Beyond the little window above his head lay Sergeant Verity's Westminster. A curious mixture of the verminous courtyards and alleys of the Devil's Acre, and the airy Gothic palace, newly rebuilt for Britain's Imperial Parliament. It took every effort of the Whitehall Police Office to protect the silk hats and gold hunter watches of parliamentary gentlemen from brutal attacks by starving ruffians, or from the nimble fingers of street girls, educated only in selling their thinly-clad bodies for two or three shillings a time.

Sergeant Verity shut the ledger, closed the little window, adjusted a tall stovepipe hat on his head with the aid of
a
cracked mirror, and drew on his gloves.

"And now, sir," he said cheerfully. "Damn your eyes, sirl"

The eyes to be damned were narrow, glittering ones belonging to Inspector Croaker, with his frock coat buttoned up to his leather stock, and his face the colour of
a
fallen leaf. The Inspector sat in a more spacious office, above Sergeant Verity, while Superintendent Gowry sat higher still, in celestial opulence, high above the horse dung and the soot. Whitehall Police Office had once been a gentleman's house and even in the 1850s it still retained a proper distinction between those who lived above and below stairs. Inspector Croaker lived above stairs. What could he be expected to know about men like Ned Roper? Croaker was an ex-artillery lieutenant who had never so much as been in the same room as a gonoph or a magsman. Who was Croaker to send disparaging memoranda to Verity?

"No one," said Verity aloud. "No one whatsoever, sir."

He patted his smooth red cheeks with an even redder handkerchief and climbed the stairs from his dungeon.

In the front office, Swift, the night inspector, sat preoccupied with his own ledger, apparently deaf to the screaming weekly delirium of old Carrotty Jane in the cells. Verity reported for permission to go off duty. The night inspector consulted a roll of names.

"A warm evening, sergeant," he said, looking through the list again.

"It is warm, sir, yes," said Verity sincerely. "Warm for May, that is."

"Yes," said the night inspector, nodding and putting away the list. "The river stinks tonight. You can smell it the length of Parliament Street away."

"So I believe, Mr Swift, sir," said Verity respectfully.

"And the streets! " sighed the night inspector. "Forty-two pounds of horse dung every day from each cab horse
1
Did you know that, Sergeant Verity?"

"No, sir, I cannot say I did. Not know it as a fact, that is."

"Ah!" said Inspector Swift. "You should read
a
little more, sergeant. There's no knowing what a man may do, if he'll only read."

"I believe that is very true, sir," said Verity, fingering the brim of his hat, which he had removed on seeing the inspector, and lowering his head a little in a gesture of humility. Then he wished the inspector a good night, put his hat on his head, and set off in his usual manner, shoulders bowed and hands behind his back, one resting in the palm of the other. Swift watched him go. Verity's rotundity gave him an air of prosperity which his threadbare frock-coat and shiny black trousers denied. He looked to Swift like a dubious man of property who had disguised himself as a clerk in order to accost young women in the Waterloo Road or along the Ratcliffe Highway.

The evening air was oppressive, even for the end of May. Every stretch of pavement from Westminster to Trafalgar Square, and on to St Giles's Circus, was hot and gritty under the worn soles of Sergeant Verity's boots. The smoke of the day's fires had left a deposit of soot in the air, giving the entire city the taste and smell of a railway terminus. Coal wagons drawn by teams of heavy, ungroomed horses, rattled down Whitehall and Parliament Street towards the Whitehall Wharf. Verity soon felt the hard black dust between his teeth.

What he longed for more than anything else just then was a veal cutlet wrapped in a cabbage leaf, such as they sold from the stalls in Paddington Green. And an onion. Saturday was the day for an onion. But this was no ordinary Saturday. He strode past the wine vaults with their faded gilt lettering, and past the bootmaker's with its display of "The Wellington Boots" in a bow window. He walked in a lumbering manner, like a badly trained performing bear. It was just as he was passing the little jeweller's near the turning of Whitehall place, with its discreet notice that "ladies' ears may be pierced within," that he finally decided that Inspector Croaker could go to the devil, if the devil would have him.

Along Whitehall the gas lamps were burning against a
pale blue twilight. Whores in their cloaks and feathered bonnets were sidling like a plague of rats, bearing disease and poverty from Union Court and the Westminster slums. None of them approached him. A few even shuffled further away. They knew a private-clothes peeler as sure as he knew them. In any case, Verity's habit of beginning to talk aloud to himself was, to say the least, discouraging.

"You do not follow a man all the way from London to Meerut, and then contrive his death, just because you dislike his face. No, Mr Croaker, sir, you do not! You do not employ an expensive young harlot and carry her to the Punjab to assist you in the scheme, unless it is a desperate important secret that McCaffery can give away!"

A ragged boy of nine or ten, with a broom taller than himself, swept a path for Verity across the Strand, whisking aside the refuse of costers' barrows and the horse dung. Verity dropped a copper in the boy's hand. The copper was not for the sweeping but for information regularly received. Down the Strand, towards Exeter Hall and Southwark Bridge was a confusion of carts, cabs, twopenny buses, barrows, and coffee stalls. A pair of horses pulled a huge portable placard on wheels, advertising a new waxwork show, a firework display at Vauxhall, a Derby night supper at the Cremorne Gardens, and a masked ball at the Holborn Assembly Rooms.

Verity threaded his way through the top-hatted crowds outside Morley's Hotel and St Martin-in-the-Fields.

"The Bank of England," he said firmly. "They meant to rob the Bank of England. And now that McCaffery is in his six-by-two, by God they will do it. But how?"

Several heads turned and looked disapprovingly at the man who was talking to himself. Verity shook his head, puzzling over the problem, and turned north towards the great criminal "rookery" of Seven Dials. He was a walking self-advertisement, whose behaviour was so odd that he had twice been arrested by the uniformed constables of other divisions before he could prove to them who he was. Small wonder if Ned Roper and his friends were certain that they could "cook Verity's goose for him," as Roper called it, whenever they chose. But wiser brains than Roper's had decided that the chosen time had not yet come. "The quality of vengeance is not strained," one of the abler brains had said. Ned Roper did not know precisely what this meant, but every time his able friend applied it to Verity, Ned Roper laughed even louder than fat old Mother Martileau, who kept the "French Introducing House" off Soho Square.

Saturday night street-markets stretched north along the Tottenham Court Road and south towards Charing Cross. Stalls were packed into every adjoining alley and courtyard from St Giles's Circus onwards. At pay-time the area was thronged like a fairground. The white glare of self-generating gas lamps on the cake stalls faced the red flare of grease lamps on the fish barrows. Hot coals shone through the gaps of the roast-chestnut stoves. Verity sniffed at the misty air, as the soot of the great city was overlaid by the aromatic scent of roasted nuts and hot nougat. Candles stuck in a haddock or turnip on the vegetable stalls competed with the butchers' open gas-lights, streaming and fluttering like flags of fire.

Picking his way fastidiously though the crowd, Verity pushed aside the starved urchins who held up bunches of onions and begged him, in whining tones, to buy. On every side rose the babble of the Saturday night markets. "Eight a penny, stunning pears! Now's yer chance!" "'aypenny
a
skin, blacking!" The woman at the fishmonger's stall plucked his sleeve, brandishing a Yarmouth bloater on a toasting fork. "Come and look at 'em! Here's toasters!"

He shouldered his way determinedly towards the ground-glass globes of the tea dealer's shop and the dazzling row of gas-lamps outside the bootmaker's. An old man stood in the glare, which was no inconvenience to him, since he was blind. He held a bamboo flute to his lips and played "Villikins and his Dinah" in a mournful tremolo. Verity had no need to touch the old man's sleeve. The beggar, sensing his presence, lowered the flute and turned up the whites of his eyes.

"Can you tell me," said Verity, breathing heavily and confidentially over the man's ear, "where Miss Ellen Jacoby does business tonight?"

The old man's mouth twisted, as though he were gathering saliva to spit.

"Ellen Jacoby, you mean," he said.

"Just so," said Verity humbly.

"She don't do business at all," said the beggar. "Least, not in the Dials. You want her, you go to St James's Street with five or ten sovereigns running loose."

Verity sighed heavily and dropped two pennies in the cap. The chapped hand slid down, examined them, and then withdrew. The beggar nodded.

"That's not to say," he continued thoughtfully, "as you mightn't find her in the palace. Not that she does business there, but more as she might oblige a friend."

Then, gathering up the saliva in a final twist, he spat accurately past Verity and into the gutter.

The lights of the market fell away behind him as Verity entered the first of the twisting alleyways which led to the heart of Seven Dials rookery. The narrow path was unlit and, for all the warmth of the day, a stinking moisture lay in a film over the footway. Tall, rat-ridden houses overhung the alleys, monuments to two hundred years of relentless decay. The sharper and the cracksman, the magsman and his poll, lived in uncongenial squalor behind the boarded windows and cracked masonry. At some points the houses clustered so close together that a man of Verity's bulk had to squeeze sideways to pass between them.

Shadows and quick footsteps moved along the edges of the ill-lit alley.

"Why, Mr Verity," said a voice from the darkness. "You're a way off your beat, ain't you? All alone, as well! "

"It won't do, Jack Flash," said Verity magisterially. "Don't try it!"

"I bin in stir afore for muzzling a peeler." The voice was closer.

"Hook it, sharp! " said Verity, plodding onwards. "What am I a-doing, then?" asked the voice indignantly

"I'll let you know pretty quick, if you don't hook it!" answered Verity softly.