SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

by Francis Selwyn

  Before they left Albemarle Street for Folkestone, he had taken her to Howell and Jones's, and to Sawyer's in Bond Street, to buy such costumes for her as his plan might require. In one of the warm, mirrored salons, heavy with the scent of camelias, she had watched, lynx-eyed, as the demoiselles paraded in toilettes de jours and toilettes de soiree for her choice. At first she had chosen quickly and indiscriminately, as if frightened that she might otherwise lose the beautiful clothes for ever. Then, confronted by courteous shop-walkers and lady assistants, she had grown confused and in her confusion had actually begun to weep. Dacre was intrigued, but not for long. Women, like men, had their uses for him. When they were not being useful they might, for all Dacre cared, laugh or cry as the mood took them. It was nothing to him.

  Back at the hotel, Jolie went ahead of him, moving with bustling little steps up the broad staircase. From the pillared entrance hall, several sets of imposing double doors led to the public dining-room, reading-room, billiard-room, smoking-room, and all the other amenities necessary to a grand hotel. At every door was an elaborate wrought-iron gas pillar with a frosted glass globe that shone like a brilliant moon by dinner time. The centrepiece of the hall was a round ottoman in maroon velvet and gilt wood, which might have sat a circle of a dozen guests. Its tall central back formed a pedestal on which stood the gilded figure of a Grecian girl with a harp, her simple robe having slipped almost to her navel and parted conveniently about her thighs.

  As it happened, there were no guests sitting on the ottoman, but Dacre's attention was caught by a copy of a handbill, which he had seen placarded while the girl drove the Pilentum along the Marine Parade.

  Every Man Has His Fancy,

  "Ratting Sports In Reality!"

  A very handsome silver collar will be given by a sporting gentleman

  to be killed for by dogs under 13 pounds weight

  on Wednesday next at 9p.m. sharp

  at the Hope and Anchor, Dover

  Mr Jack Black, Umpire.

  Competitors to go to scale at half-past 7.

  Rats always on hand for the Accommodation of Gentlemen to try their dogs.

  Dacre folded the bill into quarters and walked into the hush of the deserted and thickly-carpeted reading-room. He chose an envelope from a rack at one of the little tables and slid the bill inside. When it was sealed, he shot back the sling on his arm and addressed the cover to Ned Roper at the house in Langham Place. There was no need to add a word to the handbill. Roper had his instructions and would know precisely what to do.

  Two days being the time allowed, Dacre walked quickly to the post office and sent the letter by express mail. Then he returned, just as quickly, to the Grand Pavilion Hotel. Too much had been invested in the scheme by this time to allow the girl out of his sight for long. He had taken the most handsome apartments that the hotel could offer, including a day-room which served as a private dining-room, so that neither of them should be on public view except when it suited his purpose. The suite included separate bedrooms and a view of the summer sands, where heavily clad men and women sat close together on small wooden chairs, reading the Morning Post or holding tasselled parasols to keep off the sun. Children, like overdressed dolls, trained their penny telescopes on the sailing barges with rust-coloured sails which drifted sluggishly down the Channel in the stillness and the heat.

  At the first landing of the stairway, Dacre slipped a key into the door and let himself into the brightly sunlit day-room. Jolie was standing before the broad ebony-framed mirror of a console chiffonier. She had stripped off the candy-pink dress and bonnet, which lay discarded with her other clothes upon the sofa-table, and she was dressed in the latest Parisian maillot, an absurd creation which she had insisted on having as part of her trousseau for the seaside excursion. It was hardly to be imagined that so fragile a costume would survive a single immersion in sea-water. The little white silk tunic, with its short sleeves and crimson edging, ended in a tight gathering at her narrow waist, subtly emphasising the almost childish slightness of her body there by comparison with the swelling femininity of her haunches which filled out the knee-length pants of the costume. To complete the picture, she wore a pert little cap, and a crimson sash tied with a broad bow, whose ends fell in a tail to the back of her knees. Dacre regarded her coldly.

  "I suppose you like to consider yourself a self-possessed beauty in high condition for flirtin'," he said disapprovingly.

  "Something of that," she said confidently. "I had three seasons of hard training from Ned Roper, didn't I?"

  "Dress yourself properly," he said disdainfully, his voice subsiding again into its broken drawl. "You look like a half-stripped parlourmaid whose soldier's given her the chuck. If you choose to make yourself a freak for every hotel servant to gape at, have the goodness not to do it in my company."

  She turned from the glass and straightened up.

  "I don't dress to your bloody orders," she said, adding with careful emphasis, "nor undress neither."

  Of his own choice, Dacre had made her sleep in a separate room, calculating that by such an arrangement he might still enjoy her when he chose without having to endure more than was necessary of her company at other times. However, this present defiance had to be put down.

  "All this coquetting is a damned bore," he said softly, lifting his hand level with his shoulder and apparently searching out the area where he would strike her across the face. "The next time I beckon you, you shall oblige me. If Ned Roper didn't teach you to come when he called, then, by George, I will. Don't play your va-tue with me, miss. It won't answer."

  He was gratified to see that she had fleetingly hunched her head down between her shoulders, as though expecting the back-hand blow across the mouth which had been familiar enough in her childhood. Then, snatching up her other clothes from the sofa table, she gave him a dark glance from her narrow odalisque eyes, hurried into the bedroom, and closed the door on him. She did not lock the door, since there was only one key, which Verney Dacre had taken possession of as soon as they arrived.

  The elegant brass carriage-lamps of the Pilentum threw tawny pools of oil-light, faintly high-lighting the almost catlike mask of Jolie's profile. Dacre slid out his gold hunter and tilted its dial towards the steady flame. He touched the girl's arm, helping her to dismount, and speaking briefly to the boy who, for a few pence a day, held the horses of the "quality" at the gates of the Harbour Pier. Before them, along the curve of the Marine Parade, the gas jets flickered and flared in the breeze which had risen with the night tide.

  He gave the girl his left arm, and felt her fingers resting there with the lightness of practised poise. It amused him to think that when it came to self-improvement, no vicarage bluestocking could match a Haymarket doxy with an empty belly. From time to time, she was obliged to ease the gloved fingers a little in movements which had all the furtive intimacy of a caress between strangers.

  Alongside the Harbour Pier, a constant funnelling of smoke from the thin stacks of the Lord Warden rose in a black cloud against the paler night sky. Gusts of steam from the paddle-boxes accompanied the rumbling of the finned wheels as they thrashed the harbour waves to a calm, whispering froth. Dacre led the girl close to the railway office, and waited. Somewhere close by, a bell rang to telegraph the down tidal train from London Bridge. Soon, with the screech of a whistle and a gong-like sound, the two red eyes of the brass-domed engine grew steadily larger in a slow and even glide. Then it slid past them, steam snorting from the pistons and sparks breaking in clusters from the tall copper funnel, until it had drawn the first carriages level with the steamer. Bright patches of light broke out as the doors of the post office vans opened and the guards, stooping under the weight of their sacks, moved like a procession of monks, down the harbour steps to the pier's lower level. There the mail was carried directly over the steamer's paddle-box sponsons to the strong room below the main deck. As the first huddle of passengers, and porters bearing hatboxes and portmanteaus, shuffled down
the gangway to the shifting deck, Dacre turned to the girl and spoke peremptorily.

  "I shall want a few minutes to collect what belongs to me. I don't choose that you should be seen standing around on your own. It's best you should go back to the carriage."

  Without waiting to see his instuctions obeyed, he opened the door of the railway office and stepped inside. At the far end of the heavy wooden counter with its chipped black varnish, the clerk sat on his high stool, gazing absent-mindedly at a ledger open on the desk before him. A boy in waistcoat and baize apron watched at his elbow. Dacre rapped the wooden counter with his stick.

  "I have a box addressed to me from the Union Bank in Pall Mall. Oblige me by havin' it fetched at once."

  "If it's just come down, sir," said the boy in the green apron, "it'll be with the bank boxes at the steamer. They'll fetch it here presently."

  Dacre fingered a receipt and his card from his waistcoat pocket. Ignoring the boy, he tossed them on the counter by the clerk.

  "It's of no consequence to me where anything may or may not be," he said languidly; "oblige me by havin' my property brought to me at once. I don't care to be kept standin' here like a fool."

  The clerk summed up Dacre's silk hat, lined cloak, and silver topped stick. Without even bothering to read the card, he slid from his stool, ducking his head in obsequious acknowledgement, and handed a key to the boy.

  "Ain't no cause to keep the gemmen waiting, Chaffey. Look slippy and find the gemmen's box and fetch it here."

  The boy took the key and opened a drawer on the far side of the counter. From it, he produced two heavy iron keys on separate rings, then locked the drawer with the original key and returned it to the clerk. The clerk looked at the twin keys on their separate rings, as though he had never seen them before. With great deliberation, he scratched two entries in the ledger with his quill and offered each to the boy for his signature.

  "I could take them keys for the postal packets too," said the boy thoughtfully, nodding at the drawer.

  The clerk looked at Dacre, as though for sympathy.

  "You get the gemmen's box first, my son," he said to the boy, "unless you want a leathering."

  Dacre, having affected extreme annoyance at this elaborate pantomime, waited while a constable was fetched as escort and then followed the policeman and the boy through the maze of apparently abandoned luggage which stretched the length of the Harbour Pier. Beyond the wooden trough, down which trunks and boxes were shot on to the steamer's deck, heavy wagons were loading to capacity from the miniature mountain of coal deposited by the colliers at high tide. Overhead, several horses in canvas slings, and two travelling carriages with gold crests on their doors were being swung aboard the Lord Warden. Then, near the harbour steps, down which the mail was carried to the paddle-box opening, Dacre saw a white rectangular shape.

  A professional in all things, Dacre took his pleasures coldly, yet the very sight of the iron safe made his heart beat rapidly and violently in his throat, so that for a moment it almost stopped his breath. As the finest rider of the Cottesmore or the Quorn might feel on facing a murderous double jump of thirty or forty feet, so Verney Dacre felt at the sight of the bullion safe. It might destroy him, but if any man alive could beat it, he was the one. It had been heralded by John Chubb himself as the locksmith's masterpiece and the cracksman's despair.

  It seemed the most beautiful and the most sinister artefact in the whole world. Within its iron walls, on certain nights, there lay more gold than in any other safe outside the Bank of England. It stood about two feet square and three feet high, painted white with a black rim at the top and bottom. On the side, in a prosaic inscription, was the black-lettered identification.

  S.E. RLY. LONDON TO

  FOLKESTONE

  The two locks were set immediately under the upper rim, so that when they were released the entire lid of the safe opened backwards on a safety chain. Three uniformed constables in their long coats and tall hats stood guard over it, accompanied by the inspector of railway police in plain clothes and the top-hatted superintendent of traffic at the Harbour Pier.

  Dacre stood well back in the shadows. He did not need to inspect the double lock in order to discover the dangers that lay in wait. He knew that the old game of holding a light to the keyhole and angling a reflector to survey the position of the tumblers would never work here. If they bothered to fit a lock to this, it was one with a metal barrel and curtain, so that the tumblers were proof against all inspection. Dacre knew a way of dealing with metal barrels and curtains but it would hardly do on this occasion. What was worse, the steel curtain inside the lock made it impossible to use more than one pick effectively at a time in the confined space. With such a lock as this, a man might just as soon not bother unless he could use one pick to move the bolt while another loosened the tumblers. Even then, this was a lock that had been fitted with the latest detectors, as sensitive as a hair-trigger on a duelling pistol. A fraction too much pressure on any tumbler and the spring of the lock leapt across, jamming the mechanism and setting off a clockwork alarm. The delicacy of touch required to move these tumblers, even if a man could get at them, was such as to make the touch of Paganini or the Abbe Liszt as crude as a blacksmith's fist by comparison. Yes, thought Dacre, they must really believe it to be the cracksman's despair. It would have been enough, under the circumstances, simply to make the gold vanish, as if at the touch of a magician's wand. To leave the police bewildered and the press goggling. But Verney Dacre had sworn to do something more than that. In a hundred years' time his theft should be thought a greater work of art than Chubb's masterpiece, a public performance of such virtuosity that even Paganini, the devil's fiddler, had never matched its skill.

  He watched the keys turned, by the superintendent of traffic and the inspector of police. Then, when the handle was turned and the lid opened, he saw that there was a second thickness of iron on the underside of the lid, shaped to block any attempt to drive wooden or iron wedges between the door and the frame of the safe. The same mind that had protected it against subtlety had made it proof against force as well.

  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 o
f 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