One day, about three o’clock in the afternoon, I took some papers in to him. I found him sitting in the chair beside the fireplace, The Times (which he read every day from cover to cover) in one hand, and in the other a glass.
He said, “You find me indulging in my secret vice. I’m one of the old school, who thinks that claret should be drunk after lunch and burgundy after dinner.”
I am fond of French wines myself and he must have seen the quick glance I gave at the bottle.
“It’s a Pontet Canet,” he said. “Of 1943. Certainly the best of the war years, and almost the best Château of that year. You’ll find a glass in the filing cabinet.”
You can’t drink wine standing up. Before I knew what I was doing, we were seated on either side of the fireplace with the bottle between us. After a second glass Mr. Portway fell into a mood of reminiscence. I kept my ears open, of course, for any useful information, but only half of me, at that moment, was playing the spy. The other half was enjoying an excellent claret, and the company of a philosopher.
It appeared that Mr. Portway had come late to the law. He had studied art under Bertalozzi, the great Florentine engraver, and had spent a couple of years in the workshops of Herr Gröener, who specialised in intaglios and metal relief work. He took down from the mantel shelf a beautiful little reproduction in copper of the Papal Colophon which he had made himself. Then the First World War, most of which he had spent in Egypt and Palestine, had disoriented him.
“I felt the need,” he said, “of something a little more tangible in my life than the art of metal relievo.” He had tried, and failed, to become an architect. And had then chosen law, to oblige an uncle who had no son.
“There have been Portways,” he said, “in Lombards Inn for two centuries. I fear I shall be the last.”
Then the telephone broke up our talk, and I went back to my room.
As I thought about things that night, I came to the conclusion that Mr. Portway had presented me with the answer to one problem, in the act of setting me another. I was being driven, step by step, to the only logical conclusion. That he had found some method, some perfectly safe and private method, of manufacturing money.
But not forgery, as the word is usually understood. Despite his bland admissions of an engraver’s training, the difficulties were too great. Where would he get his paper? And such notes as I had seen did not look in the least like forgeries.
I had come to one other conclusion. The heart of the secret lay in the strong-room. This was the one room that no one but Mr. Portway ever visited; the room of which he alone had the key. Try as I would, I had never even seen inside the door. If he wanted a deed out of it, Mr. Portway would wait until I was at lunch before he went in to fetch it. And he was always last away from the office when we closed.
The door of the strong-room was a heavy, old-fashioned affair, and if you have time to study it, and are patient enough, you can get the measure of any lock in the end. I had twice glimpsed the actual key, too, and that is a great help. It wasn’t long before I had equipped myself with keys which I was pretty sure would open the door. The next thing was to find an opportunity to use them.
In the end I hit on quite a simple plan.
At about three o’clock one afternoon, I announced that I had an appointment with the local Inspector of Taxes. I thought it would take an hour or ninety minutes. Would it be all right if I went straight home? Mr. Portway agreed. He was in the middle of drafting a complicated conveyance, and looked safely anchored in his chair.
I went back to my room, picked up my hat, raincoat and briefcase, and tiptoed down to the basement. The secretarial staff were massacring a typewriter in the outer office.
Quietly I opened the door of one of the basement storage rooms; I had used my last few lunch breaks, when I was alone in the office, to construct myself a hideaway, by moving a rampart of deed boxes a couple of feet out from the wall, and building up the top with bundles of old papers. Now I shut the door behind me, and squeezed carefully into my lair. Apart from the fact that the fresh dust I had disturbed made me want to sneeze, it wasn’t too bad. Soon the dust particles resettled themselves, and I fell into a state of somnolence.
It was five o’clock before I heard Mr. Portway moving. His footsteps came down the passage outside, and stopped. I heard him open the door of the other strong-room, opposite. A pause. The door shut again. The next moment my door opened and the lights sprung on.
I held my breath. The lights went out and the door shut. I heard the click of the key in the lock. Then the footsteps moved away.
He was certainly thorough. I even heard him look into the lavatory. (My first plan had been to lock myself in it. I was glad now that I had not.) At last the steps moved away upstairs; more pottering about, the big outer door slammed shut, and silence came down like a blanket.
I let it wait for an hour or two. The trouble was the cleaner, an erratic lady called Gertie. She had a key of her own, and sometimes she came in the evening, and sometimes early in the morning. I had studied her movements for several weeks. The latest she had ever left the premises was a quarter to eight at night.
By half past eight I felt it was safe for me to start moving.
The room door presented no difficulties. The lock was on my side, and I simply unscrewed it. The strong-room door was a different matter. I had got what is known in the trade as a set of ‘approximates’; which are blank keys of the type and, roughly, the shape to open a given lock. My job was to find the one that worked best, and then file it down and fiddle it until it would open the lock. (You can’t do this with a modern lock, which is tooled to a hundredth of an inch, but old locks, which rely on complicated convolutions and strong springs, though they look formidable, are actually much easier.)
By half past ten I heard the sweet click which means success, and I swung the steel door open, turned on the light switch and stepped in.
It was a small vault with walls of whitewashed brick, with a run of wooden shelves round two of the sides, carrying a line of black deed boxes. I didn’t waste much time on them. I guessed the sort of things they would contain.
On the left, behind the door, was a table. On the table stood a heavy, brass-bound, teak box; the sort of thing that might have been built to contain a microscope, only larger. It was locked, and this was a small, Bramah-type lock, which none of my implements were really designed to cope with.
I worked for some time at it, but without a lot of hope. The only solution seemed to be to lug the box away with me – it was very heavy, but just portable – and get someone to work on it. I reflected that I should look pretty silly if it did turn out to be a valuable microscope that one of old Portway’s clients had left with him for safe keeping.
Then I had an idea. On the shelf inside the door was a small black tin box with ‘E. Portway. Personal’ painted on the front. It was the sort of thing a careful man might keep his War Savings Certificates and passport in. It too, was locked, but with an ordinary deed box lock, which one of the keys on my ring fitted. I opened it, and, sure enough, lying on top of the stacked papers in it, the first thing that caught my eye was a worn leather keyholder containing a single, brass Bramah key.
I suddenly felt a little breathless. Perhaps the ventilation in that underground room was not all that it should have been. Moving with deliberation I fitted the brass key into the tiny keyhole, pressed home, and twisted. Then I lifted the top of the box. And came face to face with Mr. Portway’s secret.
At first sight it was disappointing. It looked like nothing more than a handpress. The sort of thing you use for impressing a company seal, only larger. I lifted it out, picked up a piece of clean white paper off the shelf, slid it in, and pressed down the handle. Then I released it, and extracted the paper.
Imprinted on it was a neat, orange, Revenue Stamp for twenty pounds. I went back to the box. Inside was a tray, and arranged in it stamps of various denominations, starting at ten shillings, one pound, two pounds and f
ive pounds and so on upwards. The largest was for a hundred pounds.
I picked one out and held it up to the light. It was beautifully made. Mr. Portway had not wasted his time at Bertalozzi’s Florentine atelier. There was even an arrangement of cogs behind each stamp by which the three figures of the date could be set; tiny, delicate wheels, each a masterpiece of the watchmaker’s art.
I heard the footsteps crossing the courtyard, and Mr. Portway was through the door before I even had time to put down the seal I was holding.
“What are you doing here?” I said stupidly.
“When anyone turns on the strong-room light,” he said, “it turns on the light in my office, too. I’ve got a private arrangement with the caretaker of the big block at the end who keeps an eye open for me. If she sees my light on, she telephones me.”
“I see,” I said. Once I had got over the actual shock of seeing him there, I wasn’t alarmed. I was half his age, and twice his size. “I’ve just been admiring your homework. Every man should have his own stamp office. A lovely piece of work.”
“Is it not?” agreed Mr. Portway, blinking up at me under the strong light. I could read in his Chelonian face neither fear nor anger. Rather a sardonic amusement at the turn of affairs. “Are you a private detective, by any chance?”
I told him who I was.
“You have been admiring my little machine?”
“My only real surprise is that no one has thought of it before.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s very useful. To a practising solicitor, of course. I used to find it a permanent source of irritation that my clients should pay more to the Government – who, after all, hadn’t raised a finger to earn it – than they did to me. Do you realise that if I act for the purchase of a London house for £8,000 I get about fifty-five, whilst the Government’s share is eighty?”
“Scandalous,” I agreed. “And so you devised this little machine to adjust the balance. Such a simple and foolproof form of forgery, when you come to think of it.” The more I thought of it the more I liked it. “Just think of the effort you would have to expend – to say nothing of stocks of special paper – if you set out to forge a hundred one pound notes. Whereas with this machine – a small die – a simple pressure.”
“Oh, there’s more to it than that,” said Mr. Portway. “A man would be a fool to forge treasury notes. They have to be passed into circulation, and each one is a potential danger to its maker. Here, when I have stamped a document, it goes into a deed box. It may not be looked at again for twenty years. Possibly never.”
“As a professional accountant,” I said, “I am not sure that that angle is not the one that appeals to me most. Let me see. Take that purchase you were talking about. Your client would give you two cheques, one for your costs, which goes through the books in the ordinary way, and a separate one for the stamp duty.”
“Made out to cash.”
“Made out to cash, of course. Which you would yourself cash at the bank. Then come back here—”
“I always took the trouble to walk through the stamp office in case anyone should be watching me.”
“Very sound,” I said. “Then you came back here, stamped the document yourself that evening, and put the money in your pocket. It never appeared in your books at all.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Portway. He seemed gratified at the speed with which I had perceived the finer points of his arrangements.
“There’s only one thing I can’t quite see,” I said. “You’re a bachelor, a man with simple tastes. Could you not – I don’t want to sound pompous – by working a little harder, have made sufficient money legitimately for your reasonable needs?”
Mr. Portway looked at me for a moment, his smile broadening.
“I see,” he said, “that you have not had time to examine the rest of my strong-room. My tastes are far from simple, and owing to the scandalous and confiscatory nature of modern taxation—oh, I beg your pardon. I was forgetting for the moment—”
“Don’t apologise,” I said. “I have often thought the same thing myself. You were speaking of expensive tastes.”
Mr. Portway stepped over to a large, drop-fronted deed box, labelled ‘Lord Lampeter’s Settled Estate’, and unlocked it with a key from a chain. Inside was a rack, and in the rack I counted the dusty ends of two dozen bottles.
“Château Margaux. The 1934 Vintage. I shouldn’t say that even now it has reached its peak. Now here” —he unlocked ‘The Dean of Melchester. Family Affairs’— “I have a real treasure. A Mouton Rothschild of 1924.”
“1924!”
“In Magnums. I know that you appreciate a good wine. Since this may perhaps be our last opportunity—”
“Well—”
Mr. Portway took a corkscrew, a decanter, and two glasses from a small cupboard labelled ‘Estate Duty Forms. Miscellaneous’, drew the cork of the Mouton Rothschild with care and skill, and decanted it with a steady hand. Then he poured two glasses. We both held it up to the single unshaded light to note the dark, rich, almost black colour, and took our first, ecstatic, mouthful. It went down like oiled silk.
“What did you say you had in the other boxes,” I enquired reverently.
“My preference has been for the clarets,” said Mr. Portway. “Of course, as I only really started buying in 1945 I have nothing that you could call a museum piece. But I picked up a small lot of 1927 Château Talbot which has to be tasted to be believed. And if a good burgundy was offered, I didn’t say no to it.” He gestured towards the Marchioness of Gravesend in the corner. “There’s a 1937 Romancé Conti—but your glass is empty . . .”
As we finished the Mouton Rothschild in companionable silence I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock in the morning.
“You will scarcely find any transport to get you home now,” said Mr. Portway. “Might I suggest that the only thing to follow a fine claret is a noble burgundy.”
“Well—” I said.
I was fully aware that I was compromising my official position, but it hardly seemed to matter. Actually I think my mind had long since been made up. As dawn was breaking, and the Romancé Conti was sinking in the bottle, we agreed provisional articles of partnership.
The name of the firm is Portway and Gilbert of 7 Lombards Inn.
If you are thinking, by any chance, of buying a house . . .
Stay of Execution
Number One Court at the Old Bailey was full. And yet at that solemn moment there seemed to be only two people there.
The presiding Judge wore long-sleeved, full skirted, red robes, and a grizzled wig. A deep cleft started from the corner of each nostril, ran out at an angle, and then dropped, so that his mouth lay between goal posts. Over against him, separated by the well of the court, Henry Neville Gordon stood in the dock. He looked baffled. Not fearful, but dumb, and worried, as a man may look when the forces of the world conspire to bludgeon him.
At seventy, Mr. Justice Enright was too old to welcome change. So he signalled to the hovering chaplain to place the black square of silk on his wig. This was optional, but he thought it added an extra solemnity to the moment. He would have preferred the old words, too, now denied to him.
“. . . that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and that you suffer death by hanging . . .”
They were horrible words. But not inappropriate, he thought, for a man found guilty of a horrible crime. A man who had attempted, repeatedly, to seduce a girl, and failing, had shot her, later trying to dispose of body and weapon.
“The sentence of this court,” he said, “is that you shall suffer death, in a manner authorised by law.”
On the word, the reporters, who had worked their way close to the swing doors, jumped through them and clattered off down the passage to the row of telephone booths. Receivers were off the hook, and their voices were breathing into the mouthpieces, before Harry Gordon had left the dock.
Sentence on Highgate Killer said the po
sters in blood red, which matched Mr. Justice Enright’s robes. Death they said. And again, and again, Death. The old beast of capital punishment had opened its mouth once more. It had breathed fire from its throat. A man was to be put to death. People could no longer watch it, but they could think about it, they could imagine it, as they made their way home, that evening, to their snug villas and their semi-detached existences.
A few cranks would protest, but not them. No, no. To them the sentence was right and fitting. Harry Gordon was a cold-blooded killer. In a few weeks he, too, would die.
To Harry Gordon himself, the realisation had come slowly; not in one piece, but in several pieces. He was living two lives at once. One in the present, in a brick walled, steel-barred room in Pentonville Prison; the other in the past.
Sometimes it was the distant past. Childhood, with dimly-remembered, conventional, middle-class parents; left-wing friends at London University; his short and undistinguished career as a National Serviceman. The resolve, taken on the top of a bus going west down Kings Road, Chelsea, to become an architect. The fight to qualify, the anti-climax when he had qualified and could get no work. The day he had met Janine.
Like a camera tracking suddenly into a close-up, his mind focused on Janine.
He could remember every detail of the meeting.
In his wanderings round North London he had spotted a tumbledown box of bricks called Sandpit Cottage. His architect’s eye had seen possibilities in it, as living quarters, office and studio. He had got hold of the details from the agent, and had hurried down to talk to his solicitor, Mr. Beeding, at his office in New Square.
While he was in the waiting room, Mr. Henry, the old litigation clerk, had poked his head round the door and said, in his rich, comedian’s voice, “Come along, come along. You can make yourself useful, Mr. Gordon. There’s a signature to be witnessed.”
Janine was sitting in a chair beside Mr. Beeding’s desk, pen poised.
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