by D. J. Taylor
Even here, though, there was a difficulty, for tea parties can only take place if there are people who can be asked to them. Mrs Happerton, looking down the list of her friends’ names which she kept in the neatest little calf-bound book that Mr Happerton had given her, together with sundry other tokens of his regard, on the day of his marriage, was conscious that it was neither particularly extensive nor particularly enticing. A husband, when he marries, generally introduces his wife to the society of his male friends, but Mr Happerton had played her false in this regard. No doubt some of his friends had wives, but they were not the kind of people who were invited to Belgrave Square. The majority of the names in Mrs Rebecca’s book, consequently, belonged to middle-aged ladies who had known her mother in their salad days, and these she did not think she could bear. Accordingly she returned to the milieu in which, for however short a time, she had moved with her cousin Harriet. She invited Mrs Venables, and took great delight in snubbing one or two little suggestions that this lady made about the drawing room and its decor. But there was a limit to the fun that could be got out of snubbing Mrs Venables. And then she remembered Mrs D’Aubigny, whom she had met at one of Mrs Venables’ luncheons in Redcliffe Square, and was a younger, milder version of their hostess, and asked her to tea.
Mrs D’Aubigny came on a cold, wet afternoon in early April, in a carriage which her husband, a lawyer who worked in Mr Screwby’s office on Cheapside, was not supposed to be able to afford. But she was a nice, humble, modest girl who, in addition to her niceness and her modesty, was a fund of interesting information. She knew what the Prince was supposed to have said to his mother when they met at Balmoral. She knew what Mr Dickens might be supposed to be reading to his audiences at Edinburgh. She had an opinion of Mr Frith’s new picture. But best of all she knew a great deal about Mrs Venables and the life of Redcliffe Square.
‘Of course it is such a pity about Mr Venables,’ she began at one point when, the initial pleasantries having been concluded, the two young ladies were rather wondering what to say to each other.
‘Why is it a pity about Mr Venables?’ Mrs Rebecca wondered, who had perhaps heard a little of Mr Venables’ recent difficulties but was under no compulsion to say so.
‘Well, John’ – John was Mr D’Aubigny – ‘says that his association with Lord Pitching was very unwise. And now they think that he is going to have resign his seat.’
‘Papa always said that Lord Pitching would destroy himself and anyone who made the mistake of lending him anything,’ Mrs Rebecca said sententiously. She was bored by Mrs D’Aubigny, but for private reasons of her own rather interested in the fate of Mr Venables.
‘John says that the real difficulty is that Mr Venables has not been very discreet.’
For Mr Venables, in whom one or two Conservative newspapers had begun to take an interest, had recently made a little speculation. This in itself was not enough to condemn him – how many parliamentary gentlemen are there who do not speculate in some way? But it was thought that Mr Venables had rather overstepped the mark. He had allied himself with a mining company whose affairs had been shown to be fraudulent, and he had done so under the auspices of Lord Pitching, a gentleman whose reputation in polite society was not much more than that of a ravening wolf. Even then he might have got out of the business unscathed, but Mr Venables represented the Chelsea Districts, and it was thought that the fine independent sensibilities of his electors wouldn’t stand for it.
‘Mr Venables is a radical, is he not?’ Mrs Rebecca enquired, rather artlessly.
‘Well – it is not quite certain.’ Mrs D’Aubigny’s familiarity with politics was almost equal to her knowledge of I Promessi Sposi. ‘Of course he is for extending the suffrage, but John says it is all a sham and he would just as soon sit down to dinner with Mr Disraeli, if Mr Disraeli would have him.’
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and the carriages were circling the square.
‘And will some other radical gentleman obtain the seat?’ Mrs Rebecca wondered.
‘John says there is bound to be a row. They are still having an enquiry into Mr Venables’ conduct at the last election. John says he spent three thousand pounds bribing the publicans. So there is a good chance that a Conservative may get in. At least that is what Mr Dennison told him.’
Here Mrs Rebecca was entirely mystified. ‘Who is Mr Dennison?’
‘Oh, he is the gentleman … well’ – Mrs D’Aubigny smiled – ‘perhaps he is not quite a gentleman – who manages the seats all along the river. He is only an attorney, but they say the party can do nothing without him. But perhaps’, Mrs D’Aubigny said, fearing that she had let her enthusiasm run away with her, ‘you do not care for politics?’
‘Well, maybe not. Papa is an old Tory.’ And here Mrs Rebecca smiled a smile of such paralysing sweetness that her father would have marvelled at it, had he been there to see. ‘He would have the Corn Laws back, I think, if it were left to him.’
‘I daresay old gentlemen are rather set in their ways,’ Mrs D’Aubigny proposed. She was a nice, modest, humble girl.
It was remarkable how after this Mrs Rebecca’s interest in the conversation stalled. Mrs D’Aubigny tried her with the Irish Church Bill and the portraits in Vanity Fair, but it was no good. When she got up to go – it was still raining in the square – she said, all in a little breathless rush:
‘I am so glad we have met. You will not mind my saying so, but it is so rarely that one meets anyone that one – likes. We – that is, some ladies of my acquaintance – are engaged in arranging a sale of work. It would be so nice if you could join us.’
‘I am afraid I am very busy,’ Mrs Rebecca said, with an infinitesimal shake of her head, ‘what with Papa and the house. But it is very kind of you.’
Mrs D’Aubigny left the house with a faint suspicion – one that she could not for the life of her have put into words – that the afternoon had been a failure in some way or other. Mrs Rebecca, on the other hand, rang for the footman, ordered that a fresh pot of tea should be brought in, and settled down amid the sofa cushions in what for her was high good humour.
XV
Captain McTurk Takes Charge
It is remarkable how the police have grown respectable. In Sir Robert Peel’s day the representatives of Her Majesty’s force would sometimes be hard pressed to distinguish themselves from the malefactors they pursued and harassed around the streets of London. Now, mysteriously, they are men of education, tenacity and resolve. They are invited into polite drawing-rooms; their portraits are in newspapers; romances are written about their exploits …
Some Thoughts on our Contemporary Malaise (1865)
THE BURGLARY AT Mr Gallentin’s shop was a nine days’ wonder. Mr Gallentin himself discovered it when he came to unlock his strongroom at eight o’clock on the Monday morning. Thereafter the news of it spread like wildfire, was taken up to the West End by all the City Croesuses who lunched there, and by late afternoon had made its way into most of the evening newspapers. Mr Gallentin, picturesquely interviewed by his shattered safe, was loud in his expostulations. He had done everything in his power to protect his property – locked it into a safe and put the safe on general view – but he proposed that the police had not done enough. The value of the stolen goods was put at £6,000 – an extraordinary sum. There had been no robbery like it in living memory, people said, not since the Duke of ——’s plate had been snibbed from his strongbox in Grosvenor Square while the family lay asleep, and Mr Fogle, the celebrated cracksman, been taken on Hay Hill with a coronet absolutely in his knapsack. The next day’s newspapers were full of it, and the political gentlemen talked about it in Westminster Great Court. And before long, the City police being baffled by its complexities, it was taken back to the West End again and presented to the commander of the metropolitan force, Captain McTurk, for his particular delight and edification.
Quite what Captain McTurk made of this forensic gift was anyone’s guess. He was a tall
, spare, middle-aged man with a blue chin that no razor could ever subdue, who had filled his present post for upwards of a dozen years. There was a Mrs Captain McTurk and half a dozen little McTurks living at a villa in Fulham, but most of Captain McTurk’s days were spent in an office in a greystone building overlooking one of those melancholy courtyards on the western side of Northumberland Avenue. He was sitting in this office now, in a high-backed chair, with a cigar smoking between his fingers, a pile of correspondence on the japanned desk before him and a secretary in a closet nearby awaiting his summons, but in truth the cigar had ceased to interest him, the pile of letters was so much camouflage and the secretary had not been called in for half an hour. At the same time, he could not be said to be ignoring the world around him, for every time a door slammed in the corridor or there came a clattering of footsteps in the middle distance he raised his head and stared intently at the doorway. Finally, there was a noise of footsteps more purposeful than any he had previously heard, and a demure-looking man with a tall hat pushed to the back of his head came striding along the passageway. This was Mr Masterson, Captain McTurk’s confidential assistant.
‘So you have been to Cornhill?’ Captain McTurk demanded.
‘Certainly I have been there,’ Mr Masterson said, as suavely as if Captain McTurk had asked him if he had been to Margate for his holiday.
‘It is a confounded imposition. How are we likely to see anything that Major McGarry’s people have not seen? I suppose they have been down there and trampled everything. I never knew such a man for interfering with things as Major McGarry.’
‘There has been no trampling, I think,’ said Mr Masterson. ‘At any rate, there is not a great deal to trample. Everything has been left just as you would wish it, I believe.’
Captain McTurk’s stare relented a little. ‘What does Gallentin say?’
‘Oh, he is in a fury. Says that McGarry must have stopped his patrols that night, and McGarry cannot deny it. There is talk of an action for negligence.’
‘You have seen the room?’
‘Certainly I have,’ Mr Masterson said. ‘A thoroughly professional job, I should say. Indeed, they came down into the poulterer’s shop next door and then up through the cellar. I should think it will take the best part of a week to make good the damage. As for the safe, I gather Mr Milner is in despair.’
‘That’s what comes of calling your things “invincible”, or whatever was said. They came at it with a torch, I take it?’
‘By no means. In fact, the lock held. It was done by main force, I should judge.’
Captain McTurk thought about this, and stared out of the window where an ostler in the stable yard below was turning over a pile of straw with a fork.
‘Gallentin can say precisely what was taken?’
‘Oh precisely. I took the liberty of obtaining a list.’
‘And is that the extent of the damage?’
‘Well – Mr Henley – that is, the poulterer who has the shop next door – earnestly desired me to tell you that there are two brace of pheasants gone missing from his storeroom.’
If Captain McTurk was amused by this, he did not say so. ‘Is that all?’
‘There is this.’ And here Mr Masterson produced what looked like a sheet of notepaper, faintly tinged with blue, and placed it face down upon the pile of letters. ‘It was found on the floor of Mr Henley’s cellar, and Mr Henley knows nothing about it.’
‘Doesn’t he?’ Captain McTurk picked up the sheet of notepaper, looked at the three or four lines that were written on it, appeared to make nothing of them, and put it down again. He asked no further questions, seemed to pass into a state of dazed abstraction, and Mr Masterson, who was used to his superior’s moods and fancies, crept silently from the room.
A minute or two passed after he had gone before Captain McTurk woke up. He first stared out of the window – the same ostler was still forking up the same pile of straw – and then set about making an inventory of the items on his desk. The letters to which he had been attending, or not attending, when Mr Masterson arrived he folded up and placed in a tray. The list setting out the contents of Mr Gallentin’s plundered safe he now arranged in front of him. The fragment of the letter that Mr Masterson had found on the cellar floor he took up again and closely inspected. It was, as he now saw, a rather curious document, written in a distinctive but almost unintelligible hand, had no salutation and no signature, and seemed to consist of a pair of questions: would the recipient be interested in performing a certain task? And on what date did he (or she) think that it might conveniently be performed? After this there were a number of crossings-out and the start of a sentence that presumably continued onto a second sheet of paper which Captain McTurk did not possess. Captain McTurk stared at it, held it up to the light to examine the watermark, and then put it down again, thinking that if he could find the author of it, much less the person to whom it had been sent, then he would have the answer to his mystery. Then, seeing by his watch that it was about half past twelve o’clock, and that the secretary in the adjoining cubby-hole had so despaired of being called that he had gone off to his lunch, he locked up his desk, with the sheet of notepaper in it, took his hat, descended into the courtyard, nodded at the ostler and passed out under the archway into Northumberland Avenue, where he hailed a cab and had himself taken off to Cornhill.
There was a crowd of people scurrying around the door, and a constable on duty, who touched his hat, and Captain McTurk felt his spirits sink. ‘That confounded Gallentin will do nothing but wail at me,’ he said to himself. But having discovered from the constable that Mr Gallentin was away in Lothbury consulting his insurers, he made his way into the shop and, having declared himself to one of Mr Gallentin’s young men, was immediately ushered into the strong-room. What he saw there, though it corresponded exactly with Mr Masterson’s description, interested him very much. The safe had been taken down from its plinth and now lay in the middle of the floor with the twisted door pulled back to its furthest extent. Bending down to examine it, Captain McTurl inspected the lock and saw, as Mr Masterson had told him, that it had been pulled out by main force. Then he took a small optical glass out of the pocket of his coat and held it against the door-frame, noted the countless tiny abrasions that ran along its length and then put the glass away. This done, he inspected the observation slit in the wall, and the angle of the mirrors that flanked it, and then walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, paying the closest attention to the floor and the wainscoting. There was not a great deal to see, but Captain McTurk thought he had the measure of what little there was. Coming back out of the strongroom into Mr Gallentin’s shop, which was full of people making not the least pretence of buying jewellery, he did trouble himself to walk out into the street, up the flight of stairs adjoining the strongroom and into the warren of offices that ran above it. There were men at work patching up the gaping hole in the poulterer’s ceiling, and Captain McTurk smiled at them, asked a question or two, looked thoughtfully at the unfurled carpet, and then went down to his waiting cab.
There was a street conjuror at work on the pavement before the Mansion House, and Captain McTurk watched the half-dozen coloured balls that he spun making their variegated descent and thought of the other conjuror and the £6,000 he had spirited away. What struck him about the robbery was not merely the technical skill brought to bear on Mr Gallentin’s safe but the audacity of the person, or people, who had committed it. Captain McTurk was not perhaps a very advanced student of criminal psychology – his interest in wrongdoers extended only to catching them and locking them up – but he believed that most of them were, above all, fearful of exposing themselves. This led him to reason that only a very bold man would have robbed Mr Gallentin’s shop in this manner, and he spent the remainder of his journey back to Northumberland Avenue wondering who that bold man might be.
Arriving back at his office, where the view from the window disclosed the same ostler still apparently forking up the
same pile of straw, he instantly routed out the secretary and had Mr Masterson summoned to him from the nook he occupied at the corridor’s further end.
‘I declare’, he said, as Mr Masterson came into the room, ‘the fellow there has been turning over the straw for the last half-hour at least. What can he mean by it?’
‘I believe there is very little for them to do,’ Mr Masterson said apologetically. ‘Do I take it you have been to Cornhill?’
‘Certainly I have been there. So has half the City. It is quite as you say. I wished merely to see the premises. The safe was wedged open, I suppose, or an iron bar driven in. There is no more information?’
‘We have had a report of two men possibly seen in Eastcheap at about half past five in the morning on the Sunday.’
‘And no one arrested them?’
‘The constable who saw them declares that they were some distance off and that he had no reason to suspect their behaviour.’
‘I should suspect anyone’s behaviour that I met in Eastcheap at half past five in the morning. I don’t doubt those were the two men. But there is no use crying after spilt milk. You have asked our people?’
‘It would be difficult, I think, for anyone to offer one of Mr Gallentin’s pieces without our coming to hear of it. Certainly not in London.’
