SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

by Francis Selwyn

  Corporal Alfred French was puzzled by that final cry. "Take her!" Take who? And where? The girl Jolie, presumably.

  That evening, French spoke to Charlie Dalby, a gentleman-ranker of ten years' service. More ranker than gentleman, French thought. However, he asked Dalby what had become of the girl in the McCaffery case.

  "Too late, Frenchy!" chortled Dalby. "Too late m' boy! Gone to England. Goin' to be looked after by a charitable old couple. Make a pretty little horse-breaker, I dare say. Dammit, Frenchy! Don't mean you fancied the little whore yourself? Eh?"

  Alfred French walked slowly away and considered the facts again. Then he considered the charitable old couple. Charitable old couples might send money to India for the relief of distress. But they did not, as a rule, bring raped half-caste girls all the way to England to live in their own homes. French found Sergeant O'Sullivan.

  "Yes, Fred French, I recall exactly how we found 'im and the girl. No, Fred French, I ain't going to tell no one the prime bits of the story unless someone is going to moisten my bleeding throat with a quart of that Hodgson's India Pale. Why, 'ow 'andsome of you, Fred French! As I was saying, this bunch of natives tells us about the shindy, like, and off we go. Takes five, ten minutes. Just as we gets there, the poor little doxy starts squealing like she's got a bayonet in her bum . . ."

  "It didn't start till you got there? The shindy didn't start..." "Not that we heard."

  "Then how did the natives who fetched you know it was going to happen?"

  " 'ow should I know?"

  "They bloody planned it, that's how," said French angrily. "They faked the whole lay to put McCaffery in the salt box."

  "Don't you go saying that, Fred French! Not unless you want to end up head over your heels in regimental excrement! Faked! I saw that bugger McCaffery! Bloody near killed the lot of us I Yes, and you should have seen this lovely little tit he'd got with him! Listen! She'd got her bubbies all tilted up, real ladylike, and she'd got an arse like a marchioness. She had her drawers half off and you could see . . . 'Ere, Fred French! Where yer going, Fred French?"

  Alfred French was a slow writer. It took him most of the night by the light of penny candle dips to produce a laboured but faithful statement of McCaffery's case. He read it through for the last time and thought about it. Several years earlier, in the mud and drizzle of the ravaged hillside at Inkerman, a sergeant of the Rifle Brigade had stumbled doggedly through the brushwood and the mist to drag back two wounded men from the Russian bayoneting. One man, a cornet of dragoons, had been so savagely and repeatedly stabbed that he bled to death as his rescuer carried him on his back. The other, Private Alfred French, was less severely wounded and had lived to earn his corporal's stripes after the fall of Sebastopol.

  Alfred French decided that a man who would risk his life to save two comrades in that manner was a man to be trusted with McCaffery's case. In slow, deliberate script, he addressed his statement to Sergeant William Clarence Verity, late of the Rifle Brigade and now of the Private Clothes Detail, Metropolitan Police "A" Division, Whitehall Place, London.

  2

  Sergeant William Clarence Verity of the private clothes detail, Whitehall Office, presents his compliments to Inspector Croaker. Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker will read the attached paragraph from the Morning Chronicle of the 11th inst., "Military Execution in the Punjab' and the enclosed letter from Alfred French, Corporal of Her Majesty's 77th Regiment, now under orders for Allahabad.

  Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker or his superior officers may authorise a further investigation into certain circumstances attending the death of Private Thomas McCaffery. The man McCaffery had, to Sergeant Verity's knowledge, served two terms in Horsemonger Lane gaol for picking pockets. Both sentences were attended by hard labour upon the treadmill. Last autumn, previous to going for a soldier and sailing with his regiment to Bombay, McCaffery had been a companion of Edward Roper, a person of a criminal reputation.

  Ned Roper is known to Sergeant Verity as a man once prosecuted, but acquitted, on charges of receiving. Until last year he was the proprietor of a betting office in Fitzroy Square and known on racecourses as one of the Swell Mob. He has been engaged in the management of houses of ill-repute in the neighbourhoods of Regent Circus and the Waterloo Road. He is spoken of among low women and gamesters as "one of the flyest flats in the village." He acts for the putters up of robberies who can thus remain outwardly respectable.

  Sergeant Verity hears that Ned Roper has several times boasted to street girls of making £500 in a year by criminal conspiracies. He is thought to have benefited by £200 or £300 as an accomplice in frauds upon insurance companies perpetrated up to 1850 by Walter Watts of the Olympic Theatre.

  During the last summer, Roper associated with McCaffery and was liberally supplied with money from an unknown source. After a drunken argument in the Grapes public house, Southwark Bridge Road, McCaffery swore that he and Roper had been paid to commit the greatest robbery of modern times. Two weeks later, after a similar affray, McCaffery boasted in the presence of a constable that he and his friends had a plan to rob the Bank of England and every bullion merchant in the City of London, which plan must infallibly succeed.

  McCaffery, when sober, denied this boast. He was taken into custody and committed to Clerkenwell prison for a short period for disorderly conduct. While in the House of Detention, he exhibited great fear for his life. It appeared that he had betrayed the confidences of his associates and that they had promised to revenge themselves upon him. After his release, he was not noticed by the police again and it was later learnt that he had enlisted at Gravesend in a regiment which was already under orders for India.

  Sergeant Verity also begs to state that a young woman of a bad reputation, answering both the name and description of the girl Jolie, was taken up in Langham Place in March 1856, upon a gentleman complaining of her to a constable.

  In conclusion, Sergeant Verity is of opinion that a crime of considerable significance may be in contemplation by conspirators of resource and experience. If such men contrived the death of Thomas McCaffery in India, Sergeant Verity believes the proposed felony must relate to property of the greatest value. Sergeant Verity therefore respectfully begs that orders be given for the pursuit of fuller investigations.

  Sergeant Verity has the honour to remain Inspector Croaker's obedient humble servant.

  W. Verity, Sgt. 25th of May, 1857.

  Inspector Croaker presents his compliments to Sergeant Verity, and is in receipt of Sergeant Verity's request of 25th of May instant.

  Mr Croaker cannot help expressing surprise that Sergeant Verity should think fit to address his superior officers in a manner as if he knew the business of the Division better than they. It appears to Mr Croaker that Sergeant Verity would best serve his own interest by satisfactory completion of those duties already allotted to him. Upon consulting the defaulters' sheet, Mr Croaker observes that Sergeant Verity has been paraded twice in the past twelve months, once for insubordination and once for an assault upon a member of the public. Mr Croaker hopes that Sergeant Verity will reflect upon this.

  However, Mr Croaker has carefully perused the letter from Corporal Alfred French and the paragraph from the Morning Chronicle. This is not a paper which Mr Croaker normally has the pleasure of reading. Mr Croaker is bound to say that, even were it his privilege to do so, he could find no fault whatever with the verdict and sentence in the case of Private Thomas McCaffery.

  McCaffery was not convicted in respect of any offence against the young woman, Jolie, nor was the girl a material witness. However, Sergeant Verity must be aware that her evidence, such as it was, appeared abundantly supported by Surgeon-Major Fitzgerald. No positive proof exists to identify this unfortunate young woman with the street-walker to whom Sergeant Verity refers. Even if there were such proof, a common prostitute in a case of violence is no less entitled to the protection of the law. Mr Croaker trusts that Sergeant Ve
rity will remember this in future.

  Mr Croaker is disturbed at the apparently easy terms upon which Sergeant Verity associates with low women and others of the criminal class, and the reliance he seems to place upon their evidence. The man Edward Roper is a person whose earnings may possibly accrue from gaming or prostitution. He stands convicted of no crime, however. Mr Croaker is dismayed that Sergeant Verity should regard a threat by Roper or McCaffery to rob the Bank of England as anything but a drunken boast.

  Mr Croaker must solemnly remind Sergeant Verity that the use of a plain-clothes detail is confined to detecting crime and is not to extend to espionage upon men who may be in contemplation of a crime. This limit is imposed by the good sense of the Home Office. If Sergeant Verity feels unable to perform his duties within this limit, Mr Croaker will expect to be informed at once.

  If Sergeant Verity should possess knowledge of a crime to be committed and should alloio such crime to be committed for the purpose of apprehending the criminals, he will be in danger of being charged as accessory before the fact. Mr Croaker hopes that Sergeant Verity will think of this.

  Mr Croaker lakes this opportunity of returning Sergeant Verity's enclosures and begs to remain his obedient servant.

  H. Croaker, Inspector of Constabulary, 26th of May, 185J.

  3

  Below the level of the pavement, William Clarence Verity sat on a tall counting-house stool and finished posting up his books. The air of the warm Saturday evening filtered a pervasive smell of horse dung and soot through the open window above his head, while the crash of cartwheels on cobbles was drowned only by the occasional hearty cursing of a drayman.

  Sergeant Verity was a portly, youngish man with a pink moon of a face, well-flattened black hair, and moustaches lightly waxed at the tips. The little room seemed all the smaller for his bulk and the tall stool on which he perched at his desk appeared in danger of collapsing like dolls' furniture under his tightly-trousered buttocks. With a little groan of satisfaction he dipped his quill judiciously in the inkwell and laid it on a scrap of paper. Then clenching his plump fist round a cylindrical ruler and holding it like a truncheon, he ruled the final line under a faithful record of his week's work.

  Beyond the little window above his head lay Sergeant Verity's Westminster. A curious mixture of the verminous courtyards and alleys of the Devil's Acre, and the airy Gothic palace, newly rebuilt for Britain's Imperial Parliament. It took every effort of the Whitehall Police Office to protect the silk hats and gold hunter watches of parliamentary gentlemen from brutal attacks by starving ruffians, or from the nimble fingers of street girls, educated only in selling their thinly-clad bodies for two or three shillings a time.

  Sergeant Verity shut the ledger, closed the little window, adjusted a tall stovepipe hat on his head with the aid of a cracked mirror, and drew on his gloves.

  "And now, sir," he said cheerfully. "Damn your eyes, sirl"

  The eyes to be damned were narrow, glittering ones belonging to Inspector Croaker, with his frock coat buttoned up to his leather stock, and his face the colour of a fallen leaf. The Inspector sat in a more spacious office, above Sergeant Verity, while Superintendent Gowry sat higher still, in celestial opulence, high above the horse dung and the soot. Whitehall Police Office had once been a gentleman's house and even in the 1850s it still retained a proper distinction between those who lived above and below stairs. Inspector Croaker lived above stairs. What could he be expected to know about men like Ned Roper? Croaker was an ex-artillery lieutenant who had never so much as been in the same room as a gonoph or a magsman. Who was Croaker to send disparaging memoranda to Verity?

  "No one," said Verity aloud. "No one whatsoever, sir."

  He patted his smooth red cheeks with an even redder handkerchief and climbed the stairs from his dungeon.

  In the front office, Swift, the night inspector, sat preoccupied with his own ledger, apparently deaf to the screaming weekly delirium of old Carrotty Jane in the cells. Verity reported for permission to go off duty. The night inspector consulted a roll of names.

  "A warm evening, sergeant," he said, looking through the list again.

  "It is warm, sir, yes," said Verity sincerely. "Warm for May, that is."

  "Yes," said the night inspector, nodding and putting away the list. "The river stinks tonight. You can smell it the length of Parliament Street away."

  "So I believe, Mr Swift, sir," said Verity respectfully.

  "And the streets! " sighed the night inspector. "Forty-two pounds of horse dung every day from each cab horse 1 Did you know that, Sergeant Verity?"

  "No, sir, I cannot say I did. Not know it as a fact, that is."

  "Ah!" said Inspector Swift. "You should read a little more, sergeant. There's no knowing what a man may do, if he'll only read."

  "I believe that is very true, sir," said Verity, fingering the brim of his hat, which he had removed on seeing the inspector, and lowering his head a little in a gesture of humility. Then he wished the inspector a good night, put his hat on his head, and set off in his usual manner, shoulders bowed and hands behind his back, one resting in the palm of the other. Swift watched him go. Verity's rotundity gave him an air of prosperity which his threadbare frock-coat and shiny black trousers denied. He looked to Swift like a dubious man of property who had disguised himself as a clerk in order to accost young women in the Waterloo Road or along the Ratcliffe Highway.

  The evening air was oppressive, even for the end of May. Every stretch of pavement from Westminster to Trafalgar Square, and on to St Giles's Circus, was hot and gritty under the worn soles of Sergeant Verity's boots. The smoke of the day's fires had left a deposit of soot in the air, giving the entire city the taste and smell of a railway terminus. Coal wagons drawn by teams of heavy, ungroomed horses, rattled down Whitehall and Parliament Street towards the Whitehall Wharf. Verity soon felt the hard black dust between his teeth.

  What he longed for more than anything else just then was a veal cutlet wrapped in a cabbage leaf, such as they sold from the stalls in Paddington Green. And an onion. Saturday was the day for an onion. But this was no ordinary Saturday. He strode past the wine vaults with their faded gilt lettering, and past the bootmaker's with its display of "The Wellington Boots" in a bow window. He walked in a lumbering manner, like a badly trained performing bear. It was just as he was passing the little jeweller's near the turning of Whitehall place, with its discreet notice that "ladies' ears may be pierced within," that he finally decided that Inspector Croaker could go to the devil, if the devil would have him.

  Along Whitehall the gas lamps were burning against a pale blue twilight. Whores in their cloaks and feathered bonnets were sidling like a plague of rats, bearing disease and poverty from Union Court and the Westminster slums. None of them approached him. A few even shuffled further away. They knew a private-clothes peeler as sure as he knew them. In any case, Verity's habit of beginning to talk aloud to himself was, to say the least, discouraging.

  "You do not follow a man all the way from London to Meerut, and then contrive his death, just because you dislike his face. No, Mr Croaker, sir, you do not! You do not employ an expensive young harlot and carry her to the Punjab to assist you in the scheme, unless it is a desperate important secret that McCaffery can give away!"

  A ragged boy of nine or ten, with a broom taller than himself, swept a path for Verity across the Strand, whisking aside the refuse of costers' barrows and the horse dung. Verity dropped a copper in the boy's hand. The copper was not for the sweeping but for information regularly received. Down the Strand, towards Exeter Hall and Southwark Bridge was a confusion of carts, cabs, twopenny buses, barrows, and coffee stalls. A pair of horses pulled a huge portable placard on wheels, advertising a new waxwork show, a firework display at Vauxhall, a Derby night supper at the Cremorne Gardens, and a masked ball at the Holborn Assembly Rooms.

  Verity threaded his way through the top-hatted crowds outside Morley's Hotel and St Martin-in-the-Fields.

>   "The Bank of England," he said firmly. "They meant to rob the Bank of England. And now that McCaffery is in his six-by-two, by God they will do it. But how?"

  Several heads turned and looked disapprovingly at the man who was talking to himself. Verity shook his head, puzzling over the problem, and turned north towards the great criminal "rookery" of Seven Dials. He was a walking self-advertisement, whose behaviour was so odd that he had twice been arrested by the uniformed constables of other divisions before he could prove to them who he was. Small wonder if Ned Roper and his friends were certain that they could "cook Verity's goose for him," as Roper called it, whenever they chose. But wiser brains than Roper's had decided that the chosen time had not yet come. "The quality of vengeance is not strained," one of the abler brains had said. Ned Roper did not know precisely what this meant, but every time his able friend applied it to Verity, Ned Roper laughed even louder than fat old Mother Martileau, who kept the "French Introducing House" off Soho Square.

  Saturday night street-markets stretched north along the Tottenham Court Road and south towards Charing Cross. Stalls were packed into every adjoining alley and courtyard from St Giles's Circus onwards. At pay-time the area was thronged like a fairground. The white glare of self-generating gas lamps on the cake stalls faced the red flare of grease lamps on the fish barrows. Hot coals shone through the gaps of the roast-chestnut stoves. Verity sniffed at the misty air, as the soot of the great city was overlaid by the aromatic scent of roasted nuts and hot nougat. Candles stuck in a haddock or turnip on the vegetable stalls competed with the butchers' open gas-lights, streaming and fluttering like flags of fire.

  Picking his way fastidiously though the crowd, Verity pushed aside the starved urchins who held up bunches of onions and begged him, in whining tones, to buy. On every side rose the babble of the Saturday night markets. "Eight a penny, stunning pears! Now's yer chance!" "'aypenny a skin, blacking!" The woman at the fishmonger's stall plucked his sleeve, brandishing a Yarmouth bloater on a toasting fork. "Come and look at 'em! Here's toasters!"