Dacre had not anticipated the ceremonial of the tea table with Mrs Kite present. However, Kite himself seemed indifferent as to whether the matter of the sale was discussed at first, and appeared almost to have forgotten that this was the reason for his guest's presence. Yet Dacre had laid the second part of his plan with even more care than he had prepared the robbery. If he were now to succeed in it, he must work with such speed that his victims had no time to recover from one blow before another was struck.
"That young 'ooman," said Mrs Kite at length, "mayn't come amiss for having her ears boxed about the compass! Nasty charity school creetur! "
As soon as the two men were alone together, Dacre was about to speak, but Kite moved a hand slowly as though asking forbearance.
"I was so glad, my dear young sir, that you were able to honour me by this visit. So glad. Sealskin Kite keeps open house. Always did and ever shall."
He spoke with the deference of a proud man, in the tone of a gamekeeper addressing his young master.
"It ain't nothin' but the need to trade gold for specie that obliges me to call on you in this fashion," said Dacre pointedly.
Kite patted his forehead with, a folded handkerchief and pouted his lips in perplexity.
"Gold ain't the spec it used to be, my dear sir, not by 'alf. And there being such a quantity in your hands makes it hard to dispose of in the way of business. Hundredweights! Why, I never knew a man that had hundredweights of gold, and I can't think 'ow he should come by them, for the matter of that."
"Five hundredweight, less a few pounds, all at twenty-four carat," said Dacre with flawless arrogance, "but if it's too big a chance, old fellow, you need only say the word."
The faintest flush coloured Kite's forehead and cheekbones at the familiarity and the carefully balanced insult.
"You'd do well, young sir," he said softly, "to recall that nothing you have is too big for Sealskin Kite. You may bring your bullion and whatever else you have, and Sealskin Kite will spend pound for pound with you from here to Jericho. As to five hundredweight of gold, however, you'd do better to sell it to the Bank of England at three guineas an ounce."
"I don't choose to sell it to the Bank," said Dacre flatly.
Kite stroked his chin.
"No," he said, "banks is apt to be fussy about a quarter of a ton of bullion."
"You ain't sayin'," Dacre inquired, "that this may be dishonest gold?"
"No," said Kite.
"You ain't heard of five hundredweight that's been missed anywhere?"
"No," said Kite, "but that's not to say that I mightn't." And with that, the pale dropsical face creased in a smile which indicated that the preliminaries of negotiation were over.
Verney Dacre took a package from his inner pocket, unwrapped the wash-leather and slid the miniature ingot across the table for Kite's inspection. Kite examined the assay mark of the Royal Mint, using an eye-glass for the purpose, weighed the bar in his hand, and then passed it back.
"You'd do best to take it to the Bank," he said finally. "You won't find anyone else to give you three guineas an ounce. It ain't that many that has got thirty-six thousand pounds to give."
"Have the goodness," said Dacre wearily, "to name a price."
Kite pushed his chair back a little from the table.
"Not three guineas," he said firmly. "We must sell abroad. Spain, Egypt, where there's a paper loan to be raised and they want gold to back it. Even they won't pay you three guineas, a-cos there's nothing in it for them if they do. Two pounds ten is their going price. Now, if I must undertake the whole of the transaction, at my own cost and risk, and not knowing or asking where the gold came from, I mayn't go above two pounds an ounce, my dear sir. Really, I mayn't."
It was as much as Dacre had expected and he knew that argument would be useless.
"It ain't far removed from extortion," he said casually, "since you may dispose of it to the Bank in due course and take thirty-six thousand quid for the twenty thousand you give me."
"But I give you twenty thousand, sir," said Kite, "for what may never have cost you near that. And I take the risk and I lose the use and interest of all that money until I can sell the bullion. I can serve you, sir, but a servant must be paid his hire."
Dacre nodded.
"Now, sir," Kite resumed, "you may bring whatever bullion you wish to the Cape and India warehouse in Bermondsey tomorrow afternoon at three. My assayer shall be there. After the assay and weighing, he shall have my authority to pay you two pounds an ounce for whatever you may bring. The sum shall be paid in specie, in notes of a hundred pound denomination. The transaction shall include only gold assayed at twenty-four carat. As to the warehouse, it is a business premises of my own to which you may safely bring your bullion."
Dacre nodded.
"You have my word," said Kite. "Sealskin Kite's word, for good or ill, is never broken."
And then he smiled once more, and, dismissing the subject, resumed the manner of a suburban host at his well-provided table.
Dacre glanced round the room, so that Kite might see him admiring the Regency sofa in banded silk; the elegant chairs; the mahogany or walnut gloss of sideboard and sofa-table; the framed silhouettes, miniatures, and oil portraits in gilt surrounds with which the green velvet of the walls was hung. His heart beat faster but his voice was carefully controlled as he came to the second and more dangerous negotiation.
"Y' have a fine collection of heads," he remarked, nodding at the wall, "uncommon fine."
Kite was on his feet at once, shepherding Dacre towards them.
"Devilish fine, though," said Dacre admiringly, "now ain't these some of the originals of the miniatures you see sold all over town?"
Kite regarded him with a forced smile.
"There you are mistaken, my dear sir, these are my family and my little ones. They were all painted for me by Mr Frost, more than ten years ago. They have never left this house."
Dacre gave a shrug of genial bewilderment.
"Then I have seen some very like," he conceded. "That head of the little girl with blue ribbons in her hair—deuced fine!—I swear I saw the very spit of that not a month ago. The kitten in her arms, too. I wish now I had bought it, so that you might have seen for yourself."
"Was it for sale then?" There was the first note of a tremor in Kite's voice.
"In a manner of speakin'," said Dacre. "A common rough lookin' fellah had it. A pickpocket, an amateur magsman who sells what he can. Seem' he had it, I thought it must be stolen, or else a cheap copy. They tell me he brags of the cribs he's cracked and the trinkets he's found, but I take it for gammon."
"Now, my dear sir," said Kite softly, "this touches me very close. You may know or you mayn't—it's of no consequence —but I must see that miniature and your magsman." Dacre laughed.
"I should not care for you to meet him I He's an uncommon rough sort of cove! He ain't the sort to play at tip and run. He'd be even with you and even with me, if you were to press hard on him! "
"If he's got that miniature, as you describe," murmured Kite, "he won't trouble you after."
"But someone else may," said Dacre evasively.
Kite had sat down again, his face paler than before. He seemed short of breath, as though even the exertion of talking had been beyond his strength.
"Your meaning?" he said.
Dacre sat down on the far side of the table.
"It don't take the judgment of Solomon to see that you've been wronged by someone, and that may be our magsman. It ain't a secret that you suffered a cruel robbery. If I put you in his way, you may be revenged, and you may thank me for it."
"I should," said Kite earnestly, "and neither you nor any friend of mine should be troubled by the man after that." "Favour for favour," said Dacre smoothly. "Meaning?"
"You might oblige me by squarin' an account of mine with a troublesome cove. I know they call you a killin' man, Mr Kite, and I don't want that. I know you can break a man so that he never walks st
raight again. And I shan't want that. All I want is an affidavit or two, so that a certain party shall be far enough away from me that I may never hear of him again."
Kite shrugged.
"Affidavits can be bought," he said amiably. "Only tell me of your magsman and you shall have a hundred affidavits."
Their conversation, earnest and abrupt, was ended some minutes later by the return of Mrs Kite. When tea was over, and Kite rang for his servant to show his guest out, Verney Dacre took a last look at Sealskin and his wife, nestling side by side on the sofa, like two old mice in a glove.
Ned Roper had slept soundly the length of the hot July afternoon, while Verney Dacre took tea with Sealskin Kite. He had woken only when the jangle of music, two floors below him in the Introducing Room, proclaimed the opening of the evening's business in Langham Place. He got up, dressed, and remembered that since early morning he had been a very rich man. Richer, he thought, than manufacturers and country squires; quite rich enough to have a house in St James's Square, a spanking new carriage and pair, and such an income that would make him a gentleman for life. But that should come later. For the moment he willingly obeyed Lieutenant Dacre's instructions to the very letter. Until half past ten and after, he was to be seen at his post in Langham Place, giving orders to Tyler and Coggin or supervising Ellen's accounts in the little parlour. Just before eleven o'clock, he slipped out and called a cab for Tooley Street.
The hansom set him down a few yards from the dingy, dockside facade of the Green Man. The light from the murky windows fell thickly through the insanitary river mist of the warm night, the outpourings of sewers and gas factories drawn into the very air of the great city. To one side of him, the huge brick arches and buttresses rose like a cliff to London Bridge station. It hardly seemed possible, Roper thought, that it was only the evening before that he and Verney Dacre had set out from there on the bullion caper. Why, it would be hours yet before the shocking news from Paris even reached Folkestone.
Through the steamy windows of the Green Man, he saw Cazamian sitting alone at a settle. Cazamian looked up as Roper pushed open the door and a cracked bell ratded on its spring.
"Thought you ain't coming, Mr Roper," said Cazamian reprovingly.
Roper gathered the skirts of his greatcoat around him and sat down.
"But you got the key, old fellow?" he said anxiously. "You have got it, haven't you?" "What key might that be?"
"Why," said Roper cheerily, "our gentleman 'as his jewel back! Pleased ain't the word for it. Last night, straight away, he gets me to send a key to your lodgings by penny post. And tonight he sends me 'ere with the money-box what the key fits."
He produced the small metal box, which had carried Dacre's three hundred pounds in sovereigns from London to Folkestone a few weeks before.
"You were to have the box, he said," Roper added, "so soon as you should have finished your day's duty. The key he sent first as a token of good faith."
"I been at work since morning," said Cazamian sulkily, "much chance I've 'ad to get keys in the penny post."
"Then you may break it open, if the key ain't waiting," said Roper, handing the solid weight of the box to Cazamian.
"It was to be four hundred," said Cazamian ungraciously. It seemed to Roper that the man had been drinking for much of the evening and had now convinced himself that he was no mere pawn in cracking a crib, but rather one whose secret knowledge must be recognised.
Roper smiled at him.
"You'll find five hundred in there," he said with studied coyness. "Very pleased the gentleman was to have his diamond back."
Cazamian shook the box and heard the bunched rattle of coins. He stood up, lurched against the settle, and clutched the box under his coat.
"I shall go 'ome," he said thickly, "and there I shall expect to find a key and five hundred quid in the box."
"If you don't," said Roper good-humouredly, "you may call out every jack in the division!"
He watched Cazamian moving slowly through the crowd, towards the door. The door opened and swung to again.
With that. Roper was off, outside and across the street, up the steps to the station forecourt, and into the first hansom cab. He watched with satisfaction as a railway constable took the number and destination of the cab. Then he was whirled away towards the gaslit brilliance of Regent Circus.
Cazamian, still clutching the metal box under his coat, hovered uncertainly on the corner of Tooley Street and Mill Lane, where the ill-lit side streets ran between tall, dark warehouses to the river. In his fuddled mind he hardly knew whether to run to his lodgings in search of the promised key or beat open the box on the flagstones around him. His fingers played with the metal lid as he half-walked, half-ran past Counter Street towards the river and his pathway home.
He had reached the spot where a single gas-jet hissed and flared over the rotten planking of an old wharf, when he heard other footsteps which had been part muffled by his own. As he spun round, the two men were upon him, seizing his arms and alternately dragging and walking him to the wharf steps.
"What do you want with me?" he wailed, uncomprehending still, alone in the remote darkness of the river bank.
At the foot of the steps, which entered the races and eddies of the dark water, two more men sat in a little boat. One held the rudder lines, while his companion had shipped the sculls and was steadying the litde craft against the rotten timbers. Both were river men, with ragged hair and weather-beaten faces.
Cazamian's captors pushed him into the boat and jumped in after him. Their companions drove stern foremost into the broad sweep of water until they were in the middle of the great river, the stone pillars of London Bridge and the iron span of Southwark Bridge rising in hard silhouette against the pale glimmer of the city sky. Only then did they take the box from Cazamian. One of his captors broke it open with a deft wrench of a chisel blade and shone a bull's-eye lantern upon the contents. Cazamian watched him pour out a palmful of coins and return them to the box once more. Next he saw, in total bewilderment, that the man had taken several sheets of paper and something resembling a cameo brooch from the box. The man held these out to his companion, who looked at them and nodded abruptly. The lights of London Bridge flared more distantly as the litde craft drifted further downstream with the ebbing tide. Away on the far bank, the paddles of a river steamer beat the foul water to a phosphorescent foam.
Neither of the two men spoke to Cazamian, from first to last, as if they wished to conceal all but the inevitable deed from the lightermen who sculled the little boat. The man with the box put it down, and seized Cazamian's arms, locking them behind his back in a grip that obliged him to bow his shoulders rather than dislocate them. In an instant, his head and shoulders faced over the side of the boat, inches above the black, foul-smelling water. The second man took Cazamian's head in the firm but gentle grip of a bone-setter, forcing his face forward and under the surface of the flood. The terrible struggle lasted a few moments, Cazamian, suddenly and appallingly sober, tasting the evil, astringent water at his lips, fighting with bursting lungs against the inevitable intake of breath. The man- who held Cazamian's arms also pressed his knees rhythmically into the back between the shoulders, and then freeing one of his hands momentarily, struck hard at the back of the neck. Air burst from the tortured lungs under the impact and, as a cold flood replaced it, a final brilliant spasm spread before Cazamian's eyes, fading at the last explosive beat of the heart.
Using a rusty boat-hook, Sealskin Kite's men edged the limp body out into the stream. The man with the metal box tossed it into the water, and poured a stream of coins after it.
"Farthings! " he said contemptuously.
From the shadows of the wharf, Verney Dacre watched as much of the scene as he could make out with the aid of a military spy-glass. When it was over, he walked quickly to the house off Southwark Bridge Road, to which he had followed Cazamian secretly for his own information. Whatever had happened to Cazamian's wife and child, they
were certainly not living with Cazamian. He occupied a single room, which looked down from the first floor of the house on to a cobbled passageway.
A child could have climbed to the room without difficulty. It was one step from the cobbles to a low wall, another from the wall to a wash-house roof, and a brisk pull-up from there to the ledge of the window. The catch opened at the first pressure of a knife-blade. Dacre stepped inside, crossed to a bare wooden table with a drawer at one end. He opened the drawer, inserted two sheets of paper, one of them in an envelope, and closed the drawer again. Then he retraced his steps by fastening the window, and going down the darkened stairs to the street. Whatever else might not happen, as soon as the bullion robbery was known at London Bridge and Cazamian failed to report for duty, the private clothes detail would visit the little lodging-house.
16
Ned Roper looked up from the leather-topped table, where he sat before a sheet of accounts, as Coggin appeared in the doorway of the little front parlour at Langham Place. The mid-afternoon sun fell through the Nottingham lace of the curtains, casting a wavering brilliance across red velvet and green morocco, as though illuminating an underwater world.
"Pair o' swells," remarked Coggin disdainfully, "and they'd be obliged to Mr Roper if he'd take a draft on Coutts Bank."
Roper closed the ledger and beckoned Coggin into the room. Houses in Langham Place or Regent Street, as well as those in Chelsea or St James's, prided themselves on the cheques they took and the celebrity of the names which appeared on them. But there were precautions to be observed.
"What sort of swells?" Roper inquired.
"Regimental, by their look," said Coggin gruffly. "Not a single Victoria in their pockets, I dare say, but ready enough to write their own flimsies for any amount you might name. They've got their own chaise and pair waiting outside, with their own groom to 'old the 'orses."
SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman Page 18
