The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  'Wait in the shadows of the pump. I'll signal from that middle window, if I have to. It's where his office is. So long as I see you, I'll know I'm safe. No police, no one coming in. If there's police or a sign of trouble, start a row, so's I shall hear. I'll be out 'cross the roof faster than they could run up the stairs.'

  'How long?'

  Rann shrugged.

  'Half an hour, near as a toucher. If you ain't here then, I'll follow home.'

  Faltering gaslight glinted in Miss Jolly's dark vigilant eyes as she turned to him.

  'And that's the worst of it, Jack? The worst of Pandy's plan?' He lied easily.

  'Much the worst. With a clever girl like you, the rest is good as done.'

  He studied the gold of her complexion, the seductive slant of her eyes, the dark hair combed back from the slope of her forehead. Not many in his profession would have brought her, for fear of making her a hostage or from a belief in bad luck. But Rann knew that his last and best robbery was impossible without her. He kissed the odalisque profile, her cheek cooler than the warm night air, and turned away.

  Crossing the courtyard like a shadow, he thought of Soapy Samuel and Bully Bragg, who dismissed Miss Jolly as a shop-mouse, a funeral-mute in childhood, sleeping among half-finished coffins, then a slop-shop needle-girl, later an attendant with downcast eyes waiting meekly on customers at the Conduit Street Artiste-en-Modes. It was as well that they should continue to think so.

  Beyond the doorway with its painted names, wooden stairs led up four sides of a dingy whitewashed vestibule, a single gas-lamp like a distant star high above the drop. At the top he stopped by a brown unpainted door. The keyhole showed that the outer office was still unlit. A rim of reflected light placed Saward in the inner room. There was an uneven murmur of conversation. Rann tried the door and found it fastened.

  A three-slider domestic lock. The panelled oak of the door was shabby but almost impregnable, resplendent with dull brass furnishings. The lock was a few minutes' work. He took a small tin from his pocket and a slender metal rod, thinner than a pencil. The tin held yellowish wax which smelt of cobblers' shops.

  Rann smeared the little rod and stood with the gaslight on the keyhole. He used the rod like the barrel of a key, revolved it and withdrew it. Looking at the marks on the wax, he saw the crude three-slider he had predicted.

  From a roll of soft leather he took three steel probes, the length of sewing-needles. Frowning at the lock's shoddiness, he tried one in the keyway. A lever of the mechanism yielded and lifted. Holding the first probe in place by the heel of his left palm, he tested the lock with a second. When two were in place, it was easy to lift the third slider and turn the handle.

  Rann knew better than to open a creaking door. He took a small tin oil-can, a flat round container with a long spout, moistened the hinges, then wiped them so that no trace should be found. Then he pushed gently. The heavy door opened silently. He entered the darkened room and closed the door behind him.

  Voices came more clearly from the inner room, light showing round the door, but he paid them no attention yet. When they took their leave, Saward would show them out by candle or oil-lamp rather than bothering to put up the gas in the office. Rann struck a 'silent' light, a match whose scraping made no sound. The brief flare of it showed two armchairs set before a plain desk, where The Barrister received clients. A small mirror hung on a wall-nail. Several black iron deed-boxes with names painted in white were stacked by the uncurtained and cobwebbed windows. The turkey carpet was worn almost to its canvas backing.

  He moved to the broad desk, one foot where the other had been to cut the risk of a creaking board. The desk was scattered with papers tied in red ribbon. Bills, cross-bills, injunctions, pleadings, indictments, petitions. He lit a second match and saw that none bore a recent date. They were the theatrical props of Saward's imposture. Two large office candles stood in tin holders. The air tasted of hot tallow from their snuffing. Tall bookcases were lined by volumes in yellow calf or plum morocco, titles incomprehensible to him, Impey's Practice, Fearn on Remainders, Coke's Reports and Foster's Crown Cases. Beyond the desk was a tray with a plate of stale biscuits, a decanter long empty, and a dead hawk-moth.

  Through the door, a boule clock chimed with the expensive sound of a hand stirring dainty teaspoons in a drawer. A man said, 'Well, old chums, shall we say a bank of a hundred sovs for My Lord tomorrow night to make the wheel go round easy? And Joanne-on-the Sly taking his mind off his losings by showing him something too pretty for sitting on?'

  Rann knew the voice as Saward's, whose own gaming debts had led him to forgery. There was a mutter of laughter from other men, two of them, Rann thought. The game was over and their dupe had left.

  'Ain't I right?' Saward continued. 'He's a gentleman, not half! And even when a gentleman thinks he sees huggery-muggery, he looks away rather than have a beastly row. Gentlemen don't care to quarrel at cards, God bless 'em. Not when there's a young lady present.'

  There was laughter, a clink of heavy glass against light glass. They were pouring. No one would come out for the next ten minutes.

  'The beauty is, Jem,' said a man's voice at a higher pitch, ‘I lost my piece of plum to you, and you was so obligin' as to lose it all to Nipper. It takes suspicion off you, and if you nor me don't complain at losin', why should His Lordship? Eh?'

  'If he comes back or not, he's left gold and paper tonight,' a third man said. ‘I don't risk a sport busting up and not paying his ticks. But Pretty Jo shall get him back, I think.'

  A hand fell appreciatively on bare rounded flesh. Rann thought with shock and then amusement that she might be partly or wholly naked in the room with them.

  'Smooth as ivory velveteen, if there was such, ain't it, Pretty Sly?' Saward asked wistfully and the sound came again.

  Rann struck another light. Desk or deed-boxes? There was nowhere else in the fly-spotted office to keep such documents. He stepped behind the desk. It was a mere table with two drawers under the ledge. Neither was locked. Bank bills would not be left in unlocked drawers. He opened them softly and felt that they were empty. The deed-boxes, then. There were four of them under the window.

  To provide for a quick response, he tested the sash-window, eased the catch back and opened it an inch at the bottom. From Masters' Yard, he had mapped the way with his eyes. The ground was thirty feet below with area railings that would spear the body of a falling man. A little to one side of the stone window-ledge, however, was a drainpipe with a gutter ten feet above it. Behind the Georgian balustrade of the roof, outside the attic windows, there would be leads about two feet wide. He would be over the roof and down a pipe on the far side of the building while his pursuers were still thundering down the wooden stairs.

  Folk who bought tin deed-boxes imagined them impregnable, each with a lock opened by a unique key. Rann knew that most manufacturers were content with half a dozen different locks for all their boxes. A man with a dozen keys might open half the boxes in England. Safes were for valuables, deed-boxes for privacy.

  From the folded leather, he took a little key with adjustable teeth. In his apprenticeship to Pandy Quinn, they had bought second-hand tin boxes for practice - and once or twice an old safe. With a skeleton key, he had worked until he could open a deed-box almost by touch and instinct.

  The profile of a deed-box key was a series of steps, the longest being the furthest in. It was a simple matter of screwing on steps of varying lengths on the steel shank until they met all four levers in the lock and moved the bolts aside. He could tell from the lock's resistance on his fingers what the lengths were likely to be. It had seldom taken longer than a minute to open such a box.

  He tried the first lock and frowned. The whole box shifted as he twisted the key. It was empty, or nearly so. Slowly he tilted it, listening for the movement of papers or packages. He tilted further and turned it upside down. Nothing. It was empty. So were the other three. The Barrister's tin boxes were merely for show, like the legal
documents cluttering the desk.

  There was nowhere else in the outer room for the bill-forms. Yet they were somewhere to be found. To believe Jem Saward honest with other men's bank bills was easier than trusting the old Penman at cards.

  Some men and women consigned valuables to unpredictable hiding-places, the frame of a picture, the cavity under the treble strings at the back of a piano, within the bottom of a bird-cage. He had known all these. Now he must see the interior of the inner room. Sooner or later, the card-players would leave. Jem and the girl would retire to an attic bedroom. But he must see the inner room first. He lifted the sash-window a little more and listened to their talk.

  ‘I shan't half be in a wax if My Lord don't play tomorrow,' said the man with a boyish voice, ‘I signed a debtor's note for fifty sovs two months ago, from a money-changer by Temple Bar. They never give fifty nor nothing like, but it was fifty at three months and must be paid. Seeing I put another fellow's name to it!'

  There was a round of good-natured laughter. Rann sat on the inner sill and eased his shoulders into the night, testing the ledge with his weight. Holding the coarse smoke-roughened ashlar either side, he straightened up and with one hand slowly pushed the window down. Tiny fragments of stone broke from the edge of the sill under his feet and, after a long pause, rattled on the area paving far below him.

  He paused, then with the drop and the spear-like railings at his back, reached for the drainpipe. Beyond it, was the sill of the inner room.

  The pipe was strong and firmly attached. He crooked a leg round it, then one arm, and let it take his weight. A metal collar, where two sections of the pipe were joined, gave a tenuous foothold. Holding tight with his arms, he slid his other foot on to the further sill. Again the stone fragments rattled down, but at last he stood outside the curtained window of the inner room.

  The gap between the drawn curtains was wider than he had expected. Blue-grey cigar smoke funnelled into the lamplight. Curtains and window were open a little in the humid night.

  A chair scraped and he saw a rubicund man standing up, carrying a fur-cuffed coachman's cape and a fur cap with side-straps that buckled under the chin. The high-pitched voice had come from a man the size of a boy, in dark clothes and white cravat. An ink-stained cuff marked him as a copying-clerk. A young woman leant back on a Regency sofa that had been covered in banded silk. There were handsome upright chairs of Hepplewhite design, a mahogany gloss of sideboard, sofa-table, and an inlaid walnut bureau. The green velvet of the walls was hung with formal silhouettes, miniatures, and oil portraits in gilt surrounds.

  The young woman was holding an ivory hand-screen, as if it were a fan, to keep the heat of the fire from her face. Her dark hair was unpinned. It lay aslant features that showed a certain provocative crudeness, perfectly matched to the clients of an introducing house. Her easy appeal had first lured 'His Lordship' and then distracted him from the game. If Joanne-on-the-Sly still wore her waist-length corset, it was only because a lady's maid would have been needed to dress her again. Corset and stockings were all that covered a pale and rather meagre figure. Rann knew he had seen her before, a bunter from the French House off Drury Lane, where Bragg was part-owner. It did not surprise him that Bragg should hire her to an amenable lawyer like Jem Saward.

  She yawned and spoke to someone who now moved into Rann's view, his voice warmed by food and drink. Saward was tall and sunken-cheeked, with a stoop, his dark hair long and lank. In black coat and white tie, he looked like a consumptive butler drinking himself to death on his master's port. Two gold watch-seals shone on his shirt-front and a large seal-ring gleamed on his little finger. Rann doubted that the ornaments to Saward's evening dress had been paid for. Nor was he surprised that the companions for an evening with His Lordship should have been the old barrister's coachman, copying-clerk, and whore.

  Sensing that their master was now encumbered by their presence, the coachman and the clerk left. Saward removed his eyeglasses rimmed with gold and folded them in a red leather case. He looked at the disorder of the room. Then the old penman turned the gas down to a glimmer and took the girl by the hand. Without speaking, he twirled her up like a dancer while the sleek dark hair spilt about her head. He followed her appreciatively up the attic stairs, leaving the gas-lamp low, his eyes watching her movements with calm appraisal.

  Rann heard the boards and springs as they entered the attic room and stretched upon the bed. He raised the window of the room and slid inside. He guessed the hiding-place. Deed-boxes and desks were the first place a search-party might think of, but even Scotland Yard would hesitate to drive an axe through the delicate furniture of Inner Temple chambers.

  The gas bubbled softly as he turned it higher. Despite the gap in the curtains, the air was thick and hot. Two packs of cards lay scattered on the baize of a gaming-table, its walnut surround polished to a gloss of liquid honey. There was a litter of empty glasses and piled cigar bowls, scraps of paper on which reckonings had been made, a handful of IOUs. On a table to one side were the remains of cold goose-liver pie and plum pudding, one empty bottle of hock, another almost finished in an ice-bucket, and a flask of seltzer beside it.

  He crossed to the bureau, an elegant Chippendale design. Drawers and upper flap were unlocked. That was to be expected. The invitation of an unlocked bureau suggested that no one need use violence to search such an inconsequential piece. Rann tapped and felt, sliding a hand under the ledges of the drawer-openings, trailing his fingers along graceful beading, in search of secrets.

  A bureau was for love-letters and indiscretions, not to defeat a professional cracksman. A thief with an eye soon measured the places in the structure which no other drawer or cubby-hole occupied. Then it was only a matter of tapping the wood to find a telltale hollow sound. A common housebreaker would carve his way with a chisel. Rann preferred the skill of searching for a hidden spring.

  His fingertips struck a hollowness beneath the polished surface. He had the flap of the bureau down on its supports and was facing the drawers and pigeon-holes inside. Between two sets of drawers there was an inlaid panel, four inches across and about eight inches tall. He tapped it and heard the hollowness once more.

  There was no sign of a catch, no place where a catch might be concealed. He opened the drawers on either side of the panel, drew them from their recesses and searched in the wooden frame. He found a thin strip of springy metal and thumbed it back. Abruptly, the entire section of the drawers and the panel came free so that he drew it out like an open box, four inches by eight and a foot deep.

  Under it, in the wood that formed the flat surface of the bureau, was a box-like cavity that might have held a jewel-case or a couple of quarto volumes. But he touched paper whose first sheet was thin and crisp and blue. He drew out the topmost bundle of oblong forms for bills of exchange, printed in the usual copperplate, blanks for the names of parties and the sum of money, the date and stamp of endorsement. But they were of no more use than unsigned IOUs.

  He searched under the blank exchange forms and found a printed bank-bill the size of a large currency note. It was issued by the Bank of Baltimore, on cream paper with a sepia design of a mythological figure by a castle wall. The sum and payee had been filled in. But the date for payment had passed. Why had it not been cashed? Rann examined the script in which it had been completed and guessed that this was the work of an apprentice forger with a blank bill. He put it back and knew that he had yet to find Pandy's treasure.

  There was pink bank-paper, which a French attorney might buy from a law stationer. The luckless apprentice-forger had written on it a name that all the world recognized too well. 'N.N. Rothschild and Sons, Paris'. None of this was Pandy's scheme. Rann might as well have offered the bank his death warrant.

  Underneath these papers was a third package, larger than the other two. His heart quickening with hope, he examined the brown paper in which it had been wrapped. The package had been through the post, the stamps black with cancelling ink. It bo
re the address of Waterlows Printers. The blood beat in his temples with triumph as he stared at its contents.

  Oblivious to the movements of passion above him, he held the printed bills in his hands. There were fifty or sixty forms, none filled in, headed by printed names: The London and Westminster Bank; Baring Brothers; Union Bank; Drummonds, Pall Mall; Brune & Co, Marseille; Suse and Sibbeth; Schroeder & Co; Mitchell, Yeames 8c Co; Brown, Shipley & Co; The International Bank of Hamburg and London; The Russian Bank of Foreign Trade; The Bank of Montreal....

  Pandy Quinn had heard how the ghostly Jem the Penman had intercepted 'samples' returned from the banks to the printers after approval for final casting off. Somewhere there had been bribery of a clerk to conceal an exchange. In the printer's furnace, the bills were spared and a package of political pamphlets or religious tracts went to the fire. Some knew the story but had no idea that Saward might be Jem the Penman. Others guessed the Penman's identity but knew nothing of the story. Pandy Quinn had heard and believed both.

  Every bill was good for three months. Rann's eyes followed the printed wording: Pay value received without further advice to the account Without further notice might give a thief three months to get clear. He looked back at the Bank of Baltimore: Pay value received and charge to the account of The holder of the account need know nothing until the bill had been traded like a banknote for three months more and came to be redeemed. When a printed bill; stamped and completed, was presented to a bank, the bank could no more refuse the money to the holder than it could refuse twenty shillings silver for a golden sovereign.

  Of course, the banks would smell a forgery as soon as it was passed over the counter. Even Saward had been unable yet to make use of these blanks because the old penman had no genuine bill with names, dates and endorsements to copy. The least fault of penmanship, the slightest error in placing the bank's acceptance stamp, the smallest mistake in a serial number, any failure to match serial number, names, previous endorsements, sums paid, would lead to disaster.