The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

Samuel tried to speak but his throat was too tight. He cleared it. 'Right, Jacko.'

  'Me and missy go through the tailor's cutting-room below Trent's door. Runs the length of the building above the vaults. At the far end, it comes down to street-level next to the vaults. Just a room for shop trade that's shuttered after dark. Pandy went there, pretending to be measured for an Aldershot coat. That's where Jolly stays and I bring the bills out to her to be copied on our blanks. She'll have the blank bill-forms, the inks and dips from the carpet-bag. I'll have the tools. Shutters are closed now so she can work there till Monday, if she has to.'

  'And you?' Samuel's smile was of doubt rather than triumph.

  'Floorboards under the tailor's fitting-room carpet should come up easy. Pandy saw them. There's a partition wall in the foundations between the tailor and the vaults. Under the floor is too shallow for a cellar, that's why they keeps the coal out the back. Any case, Walker don't want coal under the floor, seeing he'd need a coal chute and someone might get in that way.'

  'Yes,' said Samuel scornfully, 'but when you break through that foundation wall, you can't never make it good. Even if you put it back, they'll see the stones were moved.'

  'They don't go down there, Sammy. It's not used. They don't go down more than they go down the drains or up the chimney. They couldn't tell you if the stones in that wall has been loose or tight, damaged or not, for ten years past.'

  Samuel was not reassured.

  'Once you're under the floorboards, you still ain't in their vault. Jack Rann. And seeing the floor above you'll be lined with sheet-iron, you may never be.'

  Miss Jolly's eyes caught the tawny light of the dark-panelled bar as she looked from one to the other. Rann closed his hand over hers and stared at Samuel.

  'The office behind the strong-room ain't an iron floor,' he said

  quietly, 'just boards. I'll have them off the joists easy as winking.' 'And the carpet?' Samuel asked.

  'It'll come up with the force of the boards in the corner.' 'How d'you know?'

  'Six months ago, Sammy, I was there with a broken gold chain to mend. Only eight-carat but if a man's fool enough to pay for mending trumpery, what's it to them? I stood in that office, while they looked the chain over in the workshop. Dropped a sovereign in the corner and had to pick it up. It's nailed boards under that carpet. And they can't nail boards through sheet-iron. I know where the carpet ends, where the desk and chairs is. And though I was never in the strong-room, I stood long enough in sight of the door of that room to get a good view of the lock. It's nothing, Sammy. A five-pin Yale. They'd rather trust the vault-door beyond it and the deposit boxes. And the mirror and the spy-holes from the street.'

  Samuel looked round at the other booths, to make sure no one was listening. He turned back.

  'What I'm saying, Jack, is you might get in as you say but how can you get out without a trace to show you been there? Ain't it plain?'

  'No, Sammy, it ain't.'

  'There's no way you can leave the place as it was! Not the carpet! Not the floor! Not the partition wall! And if you don't, the game's up, soon as they open the door on Monday morning! You can't get back under the floor and then nail the boards and the carpet back after you. They'll see it first thing. And then they'll be down the foundations and they'll see the damage to the wall.'

  'I ain't going back that way, Sammy,' Rann said simply.

  'You'll stay there?'

  Rann shook his head.

  'There's no other way in, Sam, but there's another way out.' 'Where?'

  'Chimney in the back workshop. The furnace for gold and silverwork. Not as big as a foundry, but I spent half my life in chimneys like this. It's big enough. Old brick, about fourteen inches across at the base. Say twelve at the top.' 'Twelve inches!'

  ‘I was a climbing-boy, Sam, younger than you first went to school. Do it on the slant. I could do ten inches on the slant, let alone twelve. And I knew chimneys in banks and vaults before I was eight years old. There's a grille to let smoke up but stops a man getting down. Set deep in the brick with iron bolts. Has to unbolt from below to let sweeps and brushes through. Then falls back and locks under its own weight. You'd never get in that way - if you did you'd be covered in soot. But that's how I mean to get out and it's why they'll never know I was there.'

  'You'll still be caught in the flue, Jack.'

  Tt's a main flue up the building, Sam. Stand in Sun Court and you see it. Starts at the furnace. Goes up past the tailor's. No grille at the top. I been there with Pandy and let a line down. I can get up and out on the roof.'

  A gummy corner of Samuel's mouth twitched. But there was no smile.

  'Sammy,' said Rann, in a kindly whisper, 'if I thought I wasn't coming out, I wouldn't be going in, would I?'

  21

  Jack Rann hung by his fingers in the thin starlight, a gaunt spider. Sun Court was a black pit below, a shaft of Tudor brick which the glare of London sky and the stars failed to penetrate. But Mag Fashion had dropped her gloves at London Bridge. On Monday, if Mr Trent guessed his rooms had been entered, it was not likely that he would care to discuss his weekend absence with the police. A clock chimed the half-hour from St Michael's, across Cornhill and Lombard Street.

  Rann's bony fingers were hooked over the parapet by the attic windows. Against his back lay the short steel head-bar and hammer. He extended a leg for a firmer lodgement. Light and lean-boned, he pressed against soot-crusted London brick. To cut a deeper toe-hold in the flaking mortar with a steel file might betray him.

  He had climbed the wall as if on the face of a mountain. A fool would try the drainpipes and might find a lethal smearing of tree-grease at attic height. On the parapet, his fingers were alert for a barricade of sharpened glass. But there was none. Mr Trent's attics, two floors above the Cornhill Vaults, were a private world of pleasure.

  In black moleskin trousers, dark vest, and canvas shoes, he scaled the remaining height, unobtrusive as a ghost. Slithering over the ledge, to hide his silhouette in the starlight, he used the edge of a file to test each attic window. The second window opened, as if on oiled hinges. Hunched on the sill, he slid his legs into the room and looked about him.

  His heart gave a thump of alarm at the thought that these might be the wrong rooms. But there were no others. Reason returned. All the same, he first took the attic for a child's nursery, starlight on a wooden piebald rocking-horse fitted with toy harness. Pandy had hinted at the ordeals of Maggie Fashion in trapping Mr Trent. The proprietor of the mourning showroom would scarcely want a servant, let alone the police, to enter a room where such curious devices lay on the table by the toy horse.

  Three times, Rann and Quinn had lain concealed on the opposite roof to be sure that only Mr Trent and a young woman came or went from the building between Saturday evening and Monday morning. Now he went down the stairs and surveyed the rooms below, then closed the dark green velvet of the curtains. A blade of light, when the tenant was thought to be away, would cause less suspicion than shaded lights moving behind plain glass.

  He turned on the gas of a wall-bracket and set a match to the mantel. The light flared, settled, and showed him a bachelor's rooms. Sporting prints, leather or velvet chairs, plain tables. Beyond the dining-room was a narrow larder, at its end a tall square surface covered with cheese-cloth. Trent hoped that a burglar would take it for a game cabinet or a cold cupboard. Rann raised the cloth needing only to confirm the manufacturer's name on the safe hidden beneath.

  It was a Tappin Steel that looked solid as a cannon. Trent must think it so. But its makers rarely used hardened steel frames when cheaper metal would do. Few purchasers examined the thin upright corner-bars holding the impressive-looking flanks. A man with a mallet might open it. Rann had something more decisive.

  He began with a steel wedge in the crevice between door and upright, two inches above the lock. Wrapping his hammer in lint, he drove the tapered steel in. Then he knocked the wedge askew until it fell out. Next the head-bar, a b
olt of steel two feet long with a tip that was both tapered and slightly curved.

  The wedge had jarred the door narrowly from the upright, opening the crevice and giving the head-bar purchase. He struck the head-bar several blows with the hammer and then, like a man pushing a grinding-wheel, used all his strength on the head-bar to force the door and the bolt clear of the frame.

  Not enough. He tapped in a larger steel wedge, then drove it with powerful blows of the hammer. At last the bolt jarred away from the weakened upright. By testing with a pick in the keyhole, he felt the bolt itself was loose. With a grimace of scorn for such shoddy workmanship, he unwrapped the lint from a 'Jack-in-the Box', a steel lever on a brass stock that would wind into a damaged lock with a pressure of half a ton. Useless against a bank vault, the Jack-in-the Box was a killer of such domestic safes as this.

  He felt the last of the levers give way and moved it with a long steel blade. Inside the safe was a money-box, a jewel case, and several packets of papers. The money-box was not even locked. On its green leather lay a pair of keys.

  Something else caught his eye: an envelope of yellow-edged photographs, processed in collodion that had been worked to exhaustion. They were sold in back rooms of the dusty little shops along Holywell Street. The pretext for these was Andromeda chained naked at the mercy of an erect male Gorgon.

  Rann stared at the lean figure of the naked girl, the slant of dark hair across bold features, the heavy mouth, scorn and self-satisfaction improbably shown in the captive's eyes. Turning to embrace the rock as a refuge, the dark hair swept her back as her monster took a whip from his belt. With her back to the rock she endured his thrusts. Rann knew her. Sly Joanne had been with Jem Saward and his friends in the 'Barrister's' rooms. In the Gorgon, he recognized through wig and whiskers Bully Bragg's man, Hardwicke, happy with his scourge, and the subject before him.

  'Well, there's a thing,' he said softly, using his picks to work the damaged lock until the bolt closed as best it would.

  It was a bonus he had half-expected. The girl had broken some rule of her employment by Bragg. Faced by loss of her work in the introducing-house, or a mark that would ensure she never worked again, Pretty Jo preferred to act the heroine of a brothel melodrama for paying admirers.

  When Arthur Trent returned, let him find his safe broken open, his keys and valuables in place, but his photographs of Andromeda's violation and flogging gone. If he suspected any man, it would surely be Bragg or those who ran the girl.

  The two keys in the safe were servant keys, rather than a master. Each would open the street door. Only one would open the cutting-room and the other Trent's rooms. He tested the lock of Trent's rooms, went down the darkened stairs and opened the street door.

  Samuel slipped out of the shadowed archway, the courtyard dark around him. A clergyman carrying a carpet-bag was a common sight between one terminus and another. A policeman on his beat would more likely salute such a figure than suspect him.

  A second figure scurried from the archway on Cornhill, Miss Jolly in her pink fleshings and shako, like a ballet-girl by starlight. She had shed her blue tunic in the warm night. A coster's white shirt was tucked into her waist. Rann followed her upstairs, so unexpectedly caught by a twinge of desire for her, the movements of her trim thighs and tautly rounded hips in the suggestive tightness of cherry hussar-pants, that he felt more amusement than passion.

  In the room, Rann indicated the photographs on the table.

  'We'll take these. He'll see his safe's been open and nothing else missing. He'll hardly go to the police to complain these been taken. If not, he can't go at all.'

  'Bragg's girl - Pretty Jo!' Samuel said.

  'But it mightn't come amiss, Sam, if Mr Trent should be too anxious for his honour to go looking for Mag or enquire as to what don't concern him. If a jack should ask what happened in the vaults tonight, he might be last to say.'

  He buckled the carpet-bag and slung it on his back. Now that the job had begun, it was a cold equation of skill. He might be caught, but unless he pulled a stroke of this sort soon, they would catch him anyway. There was less danger to him in robbing the Cornhill Vaults than in stealing an apple where the world might see.

  He handed Samuel a bell from the carpet-bag, an iron shell with a clapper and handle to ring children to school.

  'Ring it in the fireplace, Sammy. Ring long if you see someone. Ring short when they've gone.'

  Samuel nodded apprehensively and Rann continued, 'Any trouble, get straight into Sun Court. But, as you go by, ring the street bell of the vaults good and hard. We'll know there's a screw loose then.'

  'Right,' Samuel said huskily and then cleared his throat. 'Right.' 'We're going down now,' Rann said. 'We'll bring the bills up from time to time.' 'How long?'

  'Hard to say, Sam. There's the vault door. I know a way to open it but you could be having breakfast before I'm in.'

  There was a quiver in Samuel's face, quickly checked.

  As he led the way down the stairs, a chill cramp gripped Jack Rann's entrails. There was fear, after all; the fear of being alone. It was his first time without Pandy Quinn. Pandy, who worked without expression at a lock, in triumph or adversity, had been like an elder brother. When a lever would not budge or a bolt held fast, Pandy would tease it in some new way. Rann knew that it was not he who could crack any safe in London but Pandy Quinn. And Pandy had bled to death on a tap-room floor in Clerkenwell, so many months ago.

  He glanced at Miss Jolly. She said nothing and showed little, as they came to the door of the cutting-room. But the tight-lidded almond eyes moved quickly and unpredictably, as if she could not help it. She was frightened, how should she not be? Perhaps he had better have gone without her. Suppose her nerve broke in tears, hysterics, unable to copy the endorsements on the bills ....

  'This is easy,' he said quietly. 'Just the tailor's door.'

  He tried the servant-key and let out a long breath. Then he kissed the cool gold of her cheek.

  'See?' he said quickly. 'Nothing to it. And this is your way out, whenever the time comes.'

  She took his hand, pressing it to her face for reassurance.

  'And you, Jack?'

  'I'd be up the chimney before they could get through the street door.'

  He struck a match, lit the dark lantern from the carpet-bag, saw the flame settle, and opened the shutter. Before them stretched the length of the cutting-room, half-a-dozen heavy tables set at intervals, several high-backed chairs at each. Above the centre of each table was a double-branched gas-lamp, low on a long brass pipe from the ceiling. The green conical shades had been painted white on the underside, increasing the glare and heat of the mantel. Cheap coats in various stages of completion lay chalked and pinned, Brighton coats, Oxonians, and Chesterfields. Three men and women would work on a coat, each man as a rule cutting out and sewing the right or left of the main body, the woman stitching the arms and sleeves. Rolls of cloth and boxes of thread lay on the carpeted floor beside each chair. At each place were cotton reels, scissors and baskets of pins.

  With shutters closed, the workroom was still hot and unventilated after the day's tailoring, an acid smell of new cloth from bales stacked by the far wall. Rann put down the lantern, went to the first table and set a match to the two mantels in their coolie-hat shades. By the wall-clock with its Roman numerals, it was twenty minutes past midnight. He checked a shabby silver-plated watch in his pocket, its pearl face set with six cheap stones.

  'They must a-known we'd need light to copy by!' he said cheerfully.

  She looked at him and he remembered her childhood in such rooms, the heat and glare which brought blindness to many of their inmates, the rule of a reformatory master or mistress, starving or whipping for work not neatly done.

  There was an unlocked door at the far end, leading to the lower room where the cheap coats and cloaks were sold, a show-shop which dispensed garments directly to the public. A circular iron staircase led down to the darkened shop at stre
et level. Here, too, the windows were shuttered against thieves.

  Rann said a prayer for Pandy Quinn, who had come this far and reconnoitred the shop. At the rear was a row of fitting-rooms. Rann doubted if anyone had taken up the dusty hessian or seen the boards beneath for ten years past. He worked at the corner of a fitting-room by the back wall. Hessian came up easily, bringing the tacks with it.

  'When you leave,' he said, as she stood over him, 'lay the carpet on the boards and knock the tacks in their holes. No one won't look close then whatever happens.'

  He drew the hessian back. Beneath it were six-inch boards, eight of them forming the width of the fitting-room floor, running forward under its wall into the shop.

  'They'll have to be cut,' he said, 'two of 'em. Cut a couple of feet from the wall, where the first joist must be.'

  'What if they see it's done?'

  He screwed a hacksaw blade into its frame.

  'They ain't looked under this carpet for years. They won't look for years more. Even if they do, they won't know what the boards are supposed to look like nor why they might have been cut. I can dirty them in ten seconds.'

  When the hacksaw had started the cut, he chose a heavier blade. The board was loose on the joist. He levered out the nails that held it by the wall. A brief struggle freed it, opening a dark drop beneath the fitting-room floor. The second board was easier. There was room to lower himself. He handed Miss Jolly a small leather writing-box from the carpet-bag with the pens, inks, and enlarging-glass.

  'All you do is wait,' he said, hugging her with one arm. 'I'll come back as soon as I get the first bills. Anything wrong, you go straight up to Sammy, or out through the street door. And there'll be a necessary closet back of the workroom.'

  He kissed her cheek, feeling moisture. Perspiration in the closed room, or a tear of fright? Then he lowered himself and his feet touched uneven rubble.

  Five feet down, too shallow for a cellar. Lowering the carpetbag, he shone his lantern at the wall dividing the tailor's shop from the Cornhill Vaults. As he started towards it, there was a shriek and a scuttling. A rat the size of a young rabbit sprang past, making for safety in the far corner of the rubble-strewn space.