by Lawton, John
“I seen a lot older, but this is about 1880 summink. It ought to be a doddle.”
In a workman’s grip Abner carried drills, hammers, lockpicks and jemmies, and, wrapped in hessian with their stoppers tied down, two small jars, one of H2SO4—clear, concentrated sulfuric acid, commonly known as vitriol—one of HNO3—a seventy per cent solution of reddish-yellow anhydrous nitric acid, commonly known as aqua fortis—and an eyedropper.
“Who needs gelignite eh, son?”
Wilderness had been looking forward to gelignite, but had little expectation of it.
“I used it a few times during the Blitz, when I was trying to crack some big bugger that just wouldn’t budge. But without the Jerries providing cover half London’d hear me.”
Thus began Wilderness’s education in cracksmanship.
He learnt rapidly how to open most makes of safe, both British and imported. The most common safe in the world was the Herring—made by the millions in the USA, but hardly much exported. The British competed with Withers and with Gores, with Milners and with Cartwrights—all of which could be found dotted around the far reaches of the Empire—while Europe’s safes—Richter and Heinz or Julius Schuler, both of Hamburg, whilst much favoured by the jewellers and diamond merchants of Hatton Garden, were not often to be found in private homes.
His favourite was the Green Crocodile made by the Tiger Company. The words alone delighted him.
They came across it six weeks later. An apartment on the top floor of a building next door to Baker Street Station. They had gone in wearing overalls looking like workmen about their work. Abner’s trick, his alibi, was to have a grubby piece of paper in the breast pocket of his overalls with the apartment number, a fake name and the address of the building next door written on it. If challenged, he would simply say, “Silly me. Wrong block of flats,” pick up his cracksman’s kit and saunter out much as he had sauntered in. They were not challenged. Most London blocks had had porters before the war, far fewer now when wages in factories paid better and most able-bodied men were in the forces.
It was beautiful.
Wilderness said so.
Out loud.
“Do I give a monkey’s?” Abner replied. “What’s it matter what it looks like? It’s what’s inside.”
It was a small safe, probably custom-made for jewellery, but with luck there might be a pile of white five-pound notes inside—still referred to by Abner as “Bradburys” even though Sir John Bradbury had not put his signature to a Bank of England note these twenty years or more. Abner when flush, when cash-happy, would often refer to himself as being “out of the shit and into the Bradbury.”
It was finished in deep green crocodile skin, so deep as to be almost black, fastened to the steel body with brass studs. The door had a decorative (it could hardly be functional) border in a yellow hardwood, which Wilderness, a boy for whom taxonomy was a private paradise, took to be yew or myrtle. Less than twenty inches high, it stood atop a long-legged table, ending in a burr-walnut pedestal and two carved tigers’ feet in lacquered gold.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Shaddup and gimme the drill.”
“We can’t. Grandad, we can’t.”
They did.
Thieves there were who might have carted a safe so small back home with them and cracked it at their leisure. Abner was not one of those.
“We’d look a right pair of twats pushing this back to Whitechapel in a wheelbarrow, wouldn’t we?”
A chisel ripped the lock covers from their housing, and a razor blade edged with insulating tape sliced through the green leather down to the steel.
Part of the deterrent power of a safe is the illusion of thickness and strength. The Crocodile bore the inscription “Fire and Thief Proof,” which of itself might be considered an oxymoron—a word Wilderness knew and Abner didn’t. A safe that appeared to be three inches of solid steel might only be half an inch thick—the lining being made up of a mix of gypsum and alum or a layer of acid-washed chalk, which, so compressed, was just about the most fire-resistant material man had invented. The purchaser of a safe had, knowingly or not, a choice—was it to be fireproof or thiefproof? For as Abner said:
“Can’t be fuckin’ both now can it?”
And so saying he began to drill into the steel just above the first lock. A slow process, but patience is a criminal virtue. A quarter of an hour later, when he had drilled the second, they flipped the safe onto its back.
“Lots o’ brass on the outside. Bound to be a lot on the inside.”
Brass locks were harder. Compared to steel an alloy like brass was hard to corrode; an ancient formula of copper and zinc, improved in recent times by the addition of tin or antimony or arsenic—all of which strengthened its resistance.
Abner opened the jar of nitric acid, filled the eyedropper, emptied it into both the drilled holes and the keyholes and said, softly “Leg it!” as noxious yellow fumes and a foaming green slime oozed from the locks.
When the air had cleared, Wilderness deployed a tool Abner had made himself—a strong L-shaped hexagonal spanner, steel with a wooden handle, not unlike a docker’s hook. He inserted it into the keyholes and twisted it hard three or four times, feeling metal give as he did so. Abner flipped the safe upright, clouted the handle with a club hammer and the door flew open. Thiefproof no more.
The inside was no less beautiful than the outside.
It was like looking into a doll’s house. Rows of tiny drawers with pearl handles and inlays of fine marquetry.
Abner ripped them all out in seconds—wood splintering, hinges snapping and the contents spewing out across the floor. A pearl necklace, a couple of diamond rings and—holy of holies—a roll of Bradburys tied up with red string.
Abner said, “Must be a monkey here at least,” but did not stop to count. He had little interest in the jewellery. One glance at the necklace and he tossed it back on the carpet, crushed one end with the heel of his boot.
“Cultured. Rubbish.”
Wilderness had picked up the rings.
“Paste?”
“Dunno. Take ’em anyway.”
As they left—the diamonds in Wilderness’s pocket, the money in Abner’s—Wilderness looked back, a violation of one of Abner’s unspoken rules.
The scarred and mammocked safe. Scalped and raped. The pearls crushed to dust. The dribble of acid eating into the kelim rug.
He had ruined something beautiful. He had by this act reached childhood’s end—a moment which can come at any age, and at which a truth becomes inescapable . . . that what has been done cannot be undone.
He felt he had tasted sin for the first time. He felt as though he should be punished—for the last time. And he was.
§14
Harry made a point of thrashing Wilderness every time he came home on leave, just, as he had put it, to show him who was who. Wilderness could read his mood by the sound of his footsteps in the street, by the rhythm of his knocking at the door. Rage or calm registered in every pace and every tap. He learnt that “there are strange Hells within the minds War made.” Wilderness grew quickly, but never resisted. No gain in height or weight would ever have been enough to let him stand up to his father. There was the possibility Harry might kill him if he did. Wilderness would shield his face with his forearms, take what was coming to him. Abner left the house, and, as a rule, Merle would barricade herself in the bedroom or the scullery until it was all over and Wilderness tapped on the door. She would crack it open enough to see out, look at the boy, assess the bruising with a quick scan of his features and then say simply “Well?”
“He’s sleeping it off,” Wilderness would say.
“We could slit the bastard’s throat.”
“No, we couldn’t, Merle. We could neither of us do that.”
Then she would burst into floods of tears and be inconsolable until Abner reappeared, awash in the recognition of her own powerlessness.
“I’d understand him more if he was dr
unk,” Abner said.
“What’s to understand?” Wilderness replied. “Drunk he’s as happy or as horrible as any other man. Sober . . . he’ll do what he’s going to do.”
“He weren’t always like this. Only since Dunkirk.”
“And which of us is going to ask him about that?”
Abner thought about this and came to the right conclusion.
“You’re growin’ up a sight too quick for me, son. I can’t keep up with you.”
The beatings stopped when Harry’s leave stopped, in the January of 1942. Wilderness had no idea where his father spent his embarkation leave, and only knew he had embarked when a postcard arrived that read, “Gone to get me knees brown, Dad,” which was about as close as any serving soldier would ever get to saying he was sailing for North Africa.
Wilderness had no feelings about this news. His father had gone. He might be killed in battle. He might never be seen again. Or he could return home with whatever vicious flame burned in his brain fanned into a conflagration.
“When you say you’re going to kill yer Dad, I can’t help but be shocked. Yet when anyone else says it, even as a joke, you just disagree and change the subject,” Abner said.
“It’s my prerogative,” Wilderness replied.
“Yer what?
“My . . . privilege. It’s mine and mine alone. I’m the one he’s beating . . . and . . . besides, do any of us mean it? It says what we feel not what we might do. And . . . Harry’s in combat. There’s a half a million Jerries out in the desert who really do want to kill him.”
“Like I say, son, I can’t keep up with you. You and yer great big brain. Maybe you should o’ done all them exams arter all.”
Wilderness said nothing to this. It was too late, and “too late” was not a phrase he wanted to utter.
§15
Abner had no time for oxyacetylene cutters. Apart from the inevitable smack of modernity—anathema to a man clinging to the last elusive vestiges of the Edwardian era—it would have altered his entire cracksman’s modus operandi. It was a bulky kit and would have required him to have a van and that would have sacrificed one of his principal tenets—to be able to “have it away on yer toes.”
The biggest component of Abner’s kit was his Phillips Motor Hammer Impact electric-powered drill—a beast heavy enough that it was only brought out when he had cased a job and decided it was worth the effort. It could bore through steel over three-quarters of an inch thick, hammer into sheet iron, and required both of them to hold it steady.
They were back in Hampstead, on a rooftop high above Downshire Hill, only yards from Hampstead Heath. It was, against Abner’s habitual practice, a job to be done in darkness—in the February of 1944 when the Luftwaffe had resumed bombing London, and provided him with cover, a blanket of night and noise to smother any sound he made.
At the south end of the heath was a station of the North London Railway Company, built to feed commuters into the City, into Broad Street, once, in the days when Victorian London was home to a million Mr. Pooters, the busiest railway station in the world. It was their getaway, a twelve-minute swaggard ride almost to their own doorstep—off the train, out the back way to vanish “on their toes” into the narrow streets of Shoreditch and to emerge home and free in Whitechapel.
London was blacked out every night. The days when people had been more at risk of being run over than bombed had long passed, as an instinctive night-awareness took over. When the sirens whined Wilderness shinned up the soil stack at the back of the house, perched himself on the parapet and lowered a rope to Abner. Abner tied on the bag of tools and Wilderness hauled them to the roof. Abner followed, complaining that he was “too old for this lark.” But, “this lark” had been his choice. They would not be on a rooftop with the searchlights raking the sky above them if the old man were not a hundred per cent sure of what they were after.
“Over the other side,” he said, pointing with his free hand.
The top floor of the house appeared to have been turned into some sort of studio. A low-ridged glass atrium spanned the house front to back. The only way across to the far side was to walk along the parapet—a perilous nine inches, single-brick wide.
“Do we need to be over there?” Wilderness asked.
“We do. Or else it’s cut a way in here and risk bringing the whole damn thing down with us.”
Wilderness understood the risk. The atrium looked shaky, flaking white paint and green moss—in all probability rotten in places.
“Still we’s’ll manage, eh son?”
Abner crossed first. Wilderness followed slowly, inclining his head and shoulders inward to offset the weight of the drill, which otherwise threatened to unbalance him in the direction of a four-storey drop.
Once across Wilderness slung the rope around a chimney, and his grandfather climbed down one floor and slid the catch on a sash window.
The safe was a Milner List 5. Tall and tough.
Abner surmised that it dated from circa 1900—knuckle hinges, three triple-stump fantail locks, and a sandwich door with a drill-resistant plate at its core.
The plate fell to Abner’s touch, to his touch and his Phillips Motor Hammer Impact drill.
Once or twice they stopped to listen to the dull thump of bombs falling. Wilderness wondered how close they were. It sounded as far off as Hackney, but the volume was rising and the bombs crossing London manors . . . Islington, Highbury, Holloway, closer. Abner pressed on. His shoulder against the back of the drill,
“Once the all clear sounds Gawd knows who’ll hear the fuckin’ racket we’re makin’.”
But they had the door open long before the raid was over.
Wilderness packed up the drill. Abner stuffed his bag with white fivers and chuckled to himself.
“Easy money, son. Easy money.”
Back on the roof, Abner handed the bag of money to Wilderness and took the drill off him.
“Let me. I’m younger than you, Grandad.”
“Younger don’t mean stronger. The day you can beat me in an arm wrestle . . .”
Wilderness walked the narrow parapet between the glass atrium and the drop like a man on the high wire. All but dancing. He wore the two handles of Abner’s old canvas bag like shoulder straps. The money and the hand tools centred in his back for balance. He reached the other side and turned to Abner.
It was the moment before the moment when a voice in Wilderness’s head would have said “home and dry.”
A voice that came from the roof of the neighbouring house said, “There they are.”
And the voice in Wilderness’s head said “Who? Me?”
Abner was crouched down, just hoisting the drill bag onto his shoulder. He turned. A London bobby, pointy hat and all, had appeared on the rooftop and behind him was a bloke in evening dress clutching a 12-bore shotgun.
“I told you I heard something. Thieves I say, thieves!”
Wilderness froze as the barrel of the gun levelled on him.
Abner stood up, the bag now dangling from his right shoulder.
“Leg it son, he won’t shoot.”
Wilderness did not move. The copper was saying something about staying where they were and being under arrest. None of it seemed to translate into meaning. It might have been Chinese for all Wilderness knew. All he could see was the gun, and all he could hear was the pulse pounding in his chest.
Abner set off along the parapet at the same dancing pace Wilderness had used. Younger was not stronger. It was nimbler. It was more agile. Abner’s natural gait, limping slightly, coming down hard on the right foot was nowhere near as light or balanced as Wilderness’s—and the weight of the drill on his shoulder threw him off kilter.
He was halfway across when the bag slipped to the crook of his elbow. Instinct overtook logic. Instead of letting the drill fall to earth he attempted to right it with a sudden jerk of his shoulder and the shift of weight swung the bag too far to the left, across his chest, his whole body following in
a corkscrew twist with the slow inevitability of a pendulum—and tipped him through the glass roof.
His last word as he fell, roaring up through the sound of breaking glass, was “Scaaaaarper!”
Then the bang as his body hit the floor below, and the cascade of shattered glass and splintered timber as the atrium collapsed on top of him.
§16
Wilderness found a pair of wire cutters under the wad of money. At Gospel Oak Station he snipped the lock off a bike and cycled back in the direction of Stepney. He got off and walked for a while close to Highbury Corner. Most of one side of the street was in ruins. Air raid wardens, firemen, and Heavy Rescue swarmed across the rubble. No one paid the slightest bit of notice to him. Nor did they when he abandoned the bike by the London Hospital, where ambulances swept in and out every few seconds like bees at the hive.
§17
He lay awake, watching the night pale into day through the skylight. Around dawn it started to rain.
Abner was dead. He was certain Abner was dead. The old man would not have his identification card on him, but it would not take the police long to work out who he was.
It took till breakfast.
He sat at the kitchen table—a steel Morrison shelter to which Abner had bolted a wooden top—with a cup of tea.
Merle was asleep. He’d told her nothing. She had come in long after he had got home, another night on the game, and he’d told her nothing.
The copper at the door was not a local. He knew all of them by sight. This one was in civvies. A rain-spotted, belted macintosh and a trilby. The copper who stood behind him, buttoned to the chin, helmet clutched to his chest, was a manor face. One he knew from the streets without ever knowing his name.
“This is the home of Abner Riley?”
They knew damn well it was. As surely as they knew he was dead.
Wilderness strived for the appearance of innocence, to sound and look closer to thirteen than seventeen.