SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

by Francis Selwyn

  Once the box was firmly placed, with its back against the safe, he set the first wedge in the crevice between the lid and the front. Then, with half a dozen powerful hammer blows, he drove it firmly into place, driving a second one into position on the other side of the lock. He struck the wedges alternately with heavy, rapid blows. The crevice widened, the bolt of the lock jumped and then gave way, wrenched from its socket on the lid. Dacre removed the wedges, inserted them under the iron hoops which still bound the bullion-box, and then drove them in to raise the hoops sufficiently for them to slide clear of the box. Finally, he raised the lid, splintering the unique seal of Messrs Spielmann and Bult beyond any hope of repair.

  For all the crudity and force, Dacre thought, it would prove to be a cracksman's masterpiece yet. It was the race to Reigate which had first to be won. The lamplight shone on rich, tawny metal. There must have been a score of small ingots, each weighing two or three pounds, and bearing the stamp of assay.

  ROYAL MINT

  21 VICTORIA R.

  24 CARAT

  He touched the cool, smooth metal, fondling it with a pleasure so entirely physical that he wanted to cry out or laugh aloud in the intensity of his triumph. At twenty-four carat, this bullion was gold in its purest form.

  A shriek from the engine and the sudden roaring of a tunnel ended his trance of delight. Opening one of "Miss Martineau's" leather portmanteaus, he poured a stream of lead shot from it into one of the brass scale-pans. In the other he set the ingots from the broken bullion-box. When he had brought the two pans into balance, the ingots went into the portmanteau, and the grey mass of shot into the oak box. With his hammer, he beat the iron hoops of the box into place, forcing the lid into position. There was no time to adjust the lock, nor to diink about the broken seal. One gamble had to be taken, that the safe and its boxes would not be checked at Reigate. It seemed a reasonable chance to take. Reigate was too soon, at Folkestone it would be a different matter.

  As he opened a second box, the train screamed out of Merstham tunnel, crashing and rattling towards Reigate station in the thickening twilight. He judged there was time for a third box, but only at the risk of not being able to replace the iron hoops before the train stopped. With a frenzy that almost paralleled sexual obsession, he raised the stake of his gamble, breaking open the box and exchanging the hastily weighed gold for equivalent shot from the "governess" box. He had just closed "Miss Martineau's" luggage when the train lost speed rapidly and began gliding into Reigate platform. In the final seconds before the door of the luggage van was unlocked by a constable, Dacre swung the broken box into the safe, closed the iron lid, though without time to lock it, and crouched on the floor of the van, under the guard's table, which was enveloped by the folds of black velvet from the pall of the coffin lying upon it. He trusted to an obsequious reverence for the middle class dead, or even plain fear of a six-month-old corpse, to prevent a traffic clerk or porter from disturbing the pall.

  Ned Roper swung his oatmeal-suited legs on to the seat and lay, like a grotesque and whiskery male odalisque, observing the passing scene. Evening sunlight picked out the distant cupolas of Greenwich Hospital, or the rusty sails of tall East India merchantmen, and threw long shadows over the broad engine-sheds of the Greenwich Railway Company. Gathering speed, the ferry train flew past little streets of new yellow brick and red tile, past dust-heaps, market-gardens and waste-grounds. With a crash and a rattle. New Cross Station, and the London and Brighton's railway sheds flashed across Roper's carriage window. Then came the Atmospheric Engine House at Croydon, then the tunnel, and then Reigate, with a grinding and screwing of metal brakes, and the smell of water on hot ash.

  Taking a silver flask from his inner pocket, Roper unscrewed the top, put his head back, and jerked the remaining dregs into his mouth. Now, he told himself, he was ready for whatever might come his way, from sherry to rum-shrub, as the saying was. He sniffed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  "Thirty-five," he said aloud, "still half a lifetime to come, and the sweetest half at that! Carriage company! Heavy swells on the lark! White ties and pink bonnets! "

  As for the girls who came to Langham Place, he'd top and tail 'em once, just for practice as he always had done, but he'd never ditch Nell Jacoby and the "little fellow." Ever since London Bridge, he had wished for her there, to see her stretched out on the carriage seat bucking to the rhythm of the train. Legs like a dancer, thought Roper, bubbies like the statue in the Hyde Park Exhibition, lovely blue eyes and long hair, and an arse like a real young lady of fashion. Once or twice he'd leathered her, but she loved him just the same afterwards.

  "No, Miss Ellen," said Roper softly, "there ain't any other would do as well."

  At Reigate, he put his head out of the window and caught the dark movement of another head hastily drawn in, several carriages further along the train. There was no escape to the platform without Verity seeing him. It was all as Vcrney Dacre had predicted. Roper watched a porter cooling a hot wheel with the contents of a watering can, while passengers scurried to and from the crowded refreshment-room. In the twilight, the lamplighter and his boy were going their rounds "putting up" the gas along the station platforms. Roper withdrew his head, so that Verity might resume his vigil on the platform. The five-minute bell rang.

  Ned Roper waited two minutes more. Then he gently opened the door which faced away from the platform, taking care not to hold it wider than was necessary. He slipped through the gap and lowered himself almost soundlessly into the shadowy gloom, crouching level with the thick iron wheels of the carriage. He pushed the door to, not slamming it but allowing it to half engage the lock so that at least it would not fly open. He had hardly done this when the whistle shrieked and the engine, with a rapid thunder of preliminary gasps, edged forward, the iron wheels rumbling past him as he crouched there.

  By the time that the luggage van at the end of the train came towards him, the wheels seemed to have picked up a terrifying speed. The door of the van was still closed and there was nothing to jump for but the narrow footboard. Roper began to run alongside the moving train. He spurted as the luggage van began to pass him, the flashing iron of the wheels no more than twelve inches from his feet. Then he leapt at the speeding footboard and in mid-leap saw that he had been no judge of distance and seemed now almost to will himself to miss his mark. The iron rims flailed like knives below him, the earth flying away into darkness, as his right foot hit the board and his body fell against the boarding of the van. For what seemed ten or twenty seconds, but could not have been a tenth so long, his nails scrabbled at the wooden side, seeking some hold, and yet knowing that if he found one, death between the wheels and rails would only be postponed a few minutes unless Verney Dacre could open the sliding door.

  He felt his body turn, swaying towards the outer darkness and the horror beneath him. In utter terror he gave one helpless shriek. "Nell!"

  It seemed that he had passed the point of equilibrium and was already falling when a pair of hands gripped him at shoulder and collar, hauling him to safety from the clutch of the winds of death that pulled him outwards. He fell forward at last on the floor of the van, sobbing with mingled exhaustion and terror.

  "You killed me!" he said bewilderedly, and then corrected himself. "You almost had me under the wheels, Mr Dacre."

  "Oblige me," said Verney Dacre grimly, "by tellin' me in future if you're going to get so drunk that you can't jump two feet on to the running-board of a train."

  Nevertheless, he drew out his own cavalry flask, unscrewed it and handed it to his trembling companion. Ned Roper drank long and gratefully.

  "It went all right?" he said at length, sniffing and pulling himself together.

  "It ain't likely, is it," said Dacre coldly, "that I should be standin' here like this if it had gone all wrong? The box and two bags went off at Reigate, Tyler and the girl had them. They left three more bags for Dover."

  " 'ow much?" asked Roper, getting to his feet. />
  Dacre closed the sliding door of the van on the darkness outside.

  "One and a half hundredweight and twelve pounds weight. Say, £10,000, give or take a few flimsies."

  He was already raising the lid of the safe again, when Roper, recovering some of his habitual jauntiness, inquired,

  "You pitched the major in the river, I take it?"

  "No," said Dacre, attending to the safe, "that's what a fool would do, and then bury our own coffin weighted with pure gold! Coggin is drivin' the major smartly to a night's lyin' in state at Appleford church. They expect him about ten o'clock, only they ain't to know he hasn't come from the railway station. Then Coggin drives to Folkestone, announces he's come for the coffin here, and drives it back to town for tomorrow morning. And once the poor major's back in the earth tomorrow, no one will question that it was his coffin the railway company carried in their luggage van. Oh, they may dig him up again, if they please, and see if he got out of his salt-box and robbed their gold. So much the better." Ned Roper chuckled.

  "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. "Yankee 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, apparently 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.

  "Oblige me," said Verney Dacre softly, "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 thieving, he had killed men at the battle of Chillianwallah. 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 still 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 the lock itself. It was not essential 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 admiration. "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 Superintendent of Traffic ain't born a gentleman and won't ever be his own master. He'll see the seals ar
e 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 then? 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 before tomorrow morning, by which time 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 officials of the Messageries Imperiales 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.