Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  Mr. Pardew hesitated, tapping one hand against the pocket of his frock coat and getting a hint of something metallic concealed there in return and half extending the other before him. He was not sure of his man, was conscious, too, of the public nature of the place in which he stood and knew that he must proceed with very great caution. Nonetheless, he fancied that if he could first succeed in putting the visitor at his ease, the business might be done. Consequently, he extended the hand yet further, to within a foot or so of the young man’s stomach, so that he could not very well avoid shaking it.

  “I believe I have the honour of addressing Mr. Tester?”

  “I…that is…I am Tester.”

  Tester’s eyes, as he spoke these words, darted around the room—at the sword in its case, at the windows, at the retreating figure of the landlord—as if it were alive with a movement that none but he could see. He was, Mr. Pardew saw, a good-looking young man, light hair sleekly parted on his head, the set of his features only impaired by the suspicion of a twitch on his upper lip.

  “Perhaps you would like to sit down,” Mr. Pardew suggested, with the same pleasantness of tone as when he had drawn the landlord’s attention to the sword, “and take a glass? As you see, we are very quiet.”

  Tester looked around him again, rather wildly, as if quietness were the last thing he desired and that only a German band with its instruments pitched to crescendo would have been sufficient to restore his spirits. However, he consented to sit down, passing a hand through his hair—his fingernails, Mr. Pardew could see, were bitten down to the quick—and measuring the distance to the door with his eye.

  “Will you take some brandy?” Mr. Pardew wondered.

  “No…nothing.”

  They sat in this way for two or three minutes, Mr. Pardew still smiling blandly and peering every so often at his newspaper. In the short time since the two men had greeted each other, he had changed his opinion of the best means of handling the enterprise on which he was now embarked. Tester’s nervousness and his apparent deference could, he believed, be usefully exploited by sheer firmness of manner. Thus he folded up his newspaper, glanced at the door (Tester’s gaze following him as he did so) and said in a tone lower than that which he had previously used, “You have the items with you?”

  Tester nodded.

  “I have a room hired upstairs. We had better go there.”

  “Could we not…could it not be done here?”

  “What, and have a policeman come in and find us?” said Mr. Pardew, meaning to frighten Tester. “I hardly think so.”

  After this Tester agreed to go upstairs. Ascending the wooden steps, which clattered beneath their feet in an alarming manner, they came eventually to a bedroom containing nothing but a bed, a wardrobe and an open window with an excellent view of the river and the towers and pinnaces of the distant city. This view Mr. Pardew went and inspected with evident delight. Tester, meanwhile, seated himself on the bed with an expression of blank terror.

  “I should not be here,” he said at length. “I had better go.”

  “By all means,” Mr. Pardew rejoined. “Then you will have wasted my time as well as your own. You have read my letter?”

  “Certainly I have read it.”

  “Then it is necessary for you to know only that I stand by it. Where are the keys?”

  Tester turned his head towards the doorway, as if there were some other person there whose help he might enlist in denying Mr. Pardew his wish.

  “I have them here in my pocket.”

  “Give them to me.”

  “On my honour, I never did a bad thing in my life before.”

  “Who is to say that you are doing a bad thing now? They shall be out of your hands for half a minute. Half a minute, I promise. Then you shall have them back. Give them to me.”

  With an audible sigh and an attitude of resignation—as if he could not help what he did and wished to emphasise this fact to any unseen eye that might be watching—Tester dipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and passed the keys across. Mr. Pardew, placing them in the palm of his hand, gave them a quick, exultant stare and then dropped them singly onto the coverlet of the bed. The first key lay where it had fallen, but the second sprang up and clattered onto the floorboards. Mr. Pardew gave a little exclamation and bent to retrieve it. Reaching into the pocket of his coat, he brought out a small, square tin, not unlike a cigar box, whose lid, prised off, revealed a layer of greenish wax. This Mr. Pardew considered for a moment, pressing down the surface with his thumb once or twice to see whether he thought the depth sufficient for his purpose. Then, picking up first one key, then the other, he plunged each of them into the wax, drew them forth, established that the impressions were to his satisfaction and then placed them once again on the bed. All this Tester watched with the air of a man who observes a conjuror producing coloured scarves from a tall hat and cannot for the life of him see how the trick is done.

  Seeing the keys once more within his grasp, Tester made as if to retrieve them. Mr. Pardew frowned. Reaching into his breast pocket, he brought out a white handkerchief, took up the keys for a second time in the palm of his hand and began carefully to polish them. In this way he was able to remove several traces of wax that still clung to the metal.

  “Now,” he remarked finally, “I think our business is concluded. You will not have been missed at your work?”

  “Mr. Smiles and the secretary are elsewhere.”

  “And these are the keys that came from Chubb? You are sure of it?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  “Excellent. The terms stated in the letter will, of course, be fulfilled. One thing more,” said Mr. Pardew amiably. “I never knew you. You never knew me. This place”—he cast his hand around the room, Tester’s gaze following wide-eyed in its wake—“never was. That is all.”

  When Tester had departed—flying down the stairs so rapidly that the boards resounded beneath his feet—Mr. Pardew did not immediately follow. An onlooker, observing him, would have deduced that he had nothing in the world to summon him away. Picking up the tin from where he had left it on the bed, he replaced it in his pocket, moving as he did so to the window, where he stared for some while at the horizon of buildings and wharfs and tall ships’ masts as if to reassure himself that no essential part of their arrangement had changed, the presumption being that if it had, Mr. Pardew would have had something to say about it. This done, he sauntered downstairs in the airiest manner, greeted the landlord, who had by this time repositioned himself at the bar, complimented Mrs. Landlord (met in the passageway) on her fresh complexion, drank off a small glass of brandy with which this lady gladly furnished him, made a further inspection of the sword in its glass case, rather as if he would have liked to take it out and whirl it above his head, and finally wandered out onto the pavement.

  It was now shortly before midday and the frenzy of Tooley Street—its wagonettes and its carts and its stern-faced gentlemen in rapid transit to the waterfront—had not abated, but Mr. Pardew paid it no heed. With the little square tin in his pocket and a hand clasped protectively over that pocket, as if it guarded the greatest secret in the world, he crossed over Tooley Street, narrowly avoiding being run over by a great pantechnicon, and proceeded, by degrees, to the bridge, thereafter to the City, the vicinity of Clerkenwell and the workshop of a professional acquaintance in the business of metal casting and die sinking, where, it is to be hoped, he spent a profitable afternoon.

  Five days had elapsed since the encounter in Tooley Street, and Mr. Pardew sat at his desk. The month of May was now well advanced and the weather warm, so that Bob Grace, who sat opposite him on his high stool, had taken off his jacket and in addition rolled his shirt cuffs up to the level of his elbows, but Mr. Pardew cared nothing for such relaxations. He was examining a package which had lately arrived from Clerkenwell and which contained a pair of keys, very sleekly burnished, and with the one attached to the other by way of a metal band. Thus far in his inspe
ction Mr. Pardew had not taken the keys out of their packaging but had merely looked at them as they lay nestled within it. In truth Mr. Pardew, knowing that gentleman’s perspicacity, hesitated to display them before his clerk. Grace, if he saw the keys and the manner in which Mr. Pardew examined them, would certainly pass some comment. This Mr. Pardew felt that he could not endure. At the same time, Mr. Pardew had a suspicion, born of long dealing with the man, that Grace knew a great deal more about his affairs than he had ever divulged and that any attempt to conceal even a small part of his business would be worse than useless. Consequently, having pondered the desirability of sending Grace out on an errand and then decided against it, and having reflected on his own anxieties with regard to the matter before him, he threw caution to the winds, delved inside the package and drew the keys out onto his desktop.

  If Grace noticed this manoeuvre of Mr. Pardew’s he did not acknowledge it but continued to brood over a copy of Bell’s Life. Mr. Pardew looked at the keys. They had certainly been excellently turned, he thought to himself as he slid first one then the other into his hand, and would certainly serve for the purpose he had in mind. Something about their respective size and the set of their teeth struck him, and, still with his eye on Grace, he placed the first key on the wooden surface of the desk with the second balanced on top of it. The suspicion that had lurked in his mind being confirmed by this experiment, he fetched a sheet of cartridge paper and a pencil out of his drawer and, laying the keys side by side, traced rapidly around their edges with the pencil point. Having accomplished this task, he stared for a long while at the resultant outlines, biting his lip and occasionally referring to the keys themselves. “The fool,” Mr. Pardew said finally to himself. “He has brought me duplicates of the same key!” For a moment he tried to convince himself that this was not so, that there was some tiny variation in the metal which would differentiate them, but it was no good: the two keys, he now saw, were identical. For a moment Mr. Pardew’s spirits sank to the point where the enterprise he had determined upon scarcely seemed worth continuing. Then, after a short interval, during which time Mr. Pardew looked out of the window and cast his eye over certain melancholy documents that lay on his desk, they revived. “Well, I suppose I shall have to bring it off at Folkestone,” he said again to himself.

  Looking up from his desk, and at the keys, from which even now he had some difficulty in removing his gaze, Mr. Pardew saw that his clerk’s eye was fixed firmly on him, and that the copy of Bell’s Life had been scrunched up and hidden out of sight. There was something about Grace’s expression that Mr. Pardew did not at all like, for it spoke of shared confidences and painful secrets; nevertheless, he determined to meet it head-on. Still Grace continued to stare.

  “What is it? Why do you gawp at me in that way?”

  Grace drummed his finger ends on the desk, took a fresh nib from a little box he had beneath the desktop and inspected it as if it might be something good to eat.

  “Keys is a blessed noosance,” he suggested.

  “Eh? What is that? What business is it of yours if I have a pair of keys on my desk?”

  Grace appeared not to hear. He was still evincing the greatest interest in the nib, which he now held between finger and thumb, preparatory to fixing it onto his pen.

  “Mr. File is a man who knows all about keys,” he continued meditatively. “An excellent man to talk to, I believe, if there’s anything wanting in the key line.”

  “Eh?” Mr. Pardew said again. “Mr. File? I will not have Mr. File’s name mentioned in this office, do you hear?”

  “Certainly,” Grace replied. “Mr. File not to be mentioned. And his address in Amwell Street to be took out of the book, and no letter to be sent there, nor anything else, I suppose.”

  All this was horrible to Mr. Pardew for he understood, or he thought he understood, exactly what Grace meant by it. For a moment he thought—and the imagining was very pleasant to him—that he might usefully dismiss the man on the spot. Prudence, however, as Mr. Pardew soon acknowledged to himself, counselled caution. A Grace who sat in Mr. Pardew’s office, under Mr. Pardew’s eye, however great his impertinence or dirty his shirtfront, was preferable to one who roamed the world outside it and, embittered by harsh treatment, breathed all kinds of things to all manner of people. It occurred to Mr. Pardew that the present moment would be a good one in which to take Grace into his confidence, and yet even here he hesitated. If he began to explain to Grace things of which the clerk was already aware, he would appear exceedingly foolish. If, on the other hand, he imparted information to Grace which Grace did not know, he might compromise himself still further. Mr. Pardew cursed under his breath and wished Grace at the bottom of the Thames.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “we had better have a little conversation. There are certain affairs in which I am currently engaged of which I don’t doubt you are aware. I take it you have a fair idea of what I am about?”

  “A pretty fair idea, sir, I believe,” Grace acknowledged meekly. “Though of course Mr. File’s name is not to be mentioned.”

  This, too, was horrible to Mr. Pardew, but still he persevered.

  “I find that I am obliged to pay a visit to the coast. To Folkestone, in fact. Perhaps you had better accompany me.”

  “It shall be as you say, sir.”

  “We may very well set off this afternoon.”

  “To Folkestone, sir?”

  “Yes, to Folkestone.”

  “Where the mail steamers go across to Boulogne?”

  “Yes. Where the mail steamers go across to Boulogne.” The look on Mr. Pardew’s face as he said this was positively devilish, and once again he wished Grace at the bottom of the Thames. “Now, is there anything outstanding?”

  “Samuelson’s bill is due for renewal. Forty pounds at six weeks, I recollect.”

  “Do you think he will pay it?”

  “Last time he was a-talking of his cousin as is a clergyman that might put his signature to it.”

  “I don’t like clergymen’s paper. No good ever came of it. You had better go round there. No, send Latch to call on him. By the by,” Mr. Pardew enquired, “how do you find Latch?”

  “He is an obliging young man, sir, as does his duty.”

  Mr. Pardew said that he was very glad to hear it and again wished Grace at the bottom of the Thames.

  Before departing for Folkestone on the early afternoon train, Mr. Pardew undertook certain preparations of a highly confidential nature. To accomplish these, it was absolutely necessary that he should be undisturbed. Thus, having despatched Grace with a copy of Mr. Samuelson’s promissory note, and having instructed that gentleman that he would meet him at London Bridge at two o’clock, he shut the office door, turned the key in the lock, pulled down the blinds upon the bleary window and seated himself once more at his desk. Here he took a final look at the keys, holding first one and then the other up to his face, before replacing them in the packet and locking it in the office safe. This done, he wandered over into a little back room that adjoined the main part of the office where was a coat stand, a chair with a broken leg which nobody had ever troubled to have repaired and a box of miscellaneous items such as dusters, India rubbers and the like. Mr. Pardew turned the contents of the box over in his fingers for some time before finding precisely what he wanted.

  When he returned to his desk some moments later, he carried in one hand a short length of candle stuck into a saucer and in the other two slender half cylinders of metal resembling the halves of a very slim pencil split lengthwise. Placing the candle on the desktop and lighting it with a sulphur match from a box that lay nearby, Mr. Pardew took the first of the metal cylinders between finger and thumb and held it to the flame. When it was quite black from the heat, he withdrew it, laid it carefully on a sheet of blotting paper and performed the same manoeuvre with the second. A lick of air coursing in from beneath the locked door caused the candle to flare up and scorch his thumb, but such was Mr. Pardew’s absorption in his
task that he paid it no heed. A short while later both of the metal cylinders, each stained black with carbon, lay side by side on the blotting paper before him. Seeing them there, Mr. Pardew frowned. Then, reaching into the drawer of his desk, he drew forth an ancient tobacco pouch, poked his fingers into it to ensure that no strands of tobacco remained within, and very gingerly, taking care to handle the cylinders only by their extremities, pushed them inside. Stowing the pouch in his coat pocket, extinguishing the candle, drawing up the blind and unlocking the office door, Mr. Pardew, having fastened the door once more behind him, set off at a rapid pace in the direction of Blackfriars.

  WM BARCLAY, ESQ.

  Director

  South-Eastern Railway Company

  Dear Sir,

  I refer to your communication of the 14th inst., in which the directors, while declaring themselves perfectly satisfied with the arrangements for the conveyance of bullion to the Continent, requested further particulars with regard to the procedures at Folkestone.

  The railway office is situated on the pier, under the supervision of Mr. Chapman. This gentleman has been in the company’s service for five years, and we repose the greatest confidence in his abilities and general trustworthiness. There is in addition an assistant, Allman, and a clerk. Our regulations state that the office is to be manned at all times. However, on such occasions when the officials are obliged to meet the steamer the room is left unattended but with the door securely locked. I am informed by Mr. Chapman that this period is rarely longer than a few moments’ duration.