The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  Jack Rann put down the carpet-bag by the roughened wall. It was not load-bearing but a stone partition several courses high, no thicker than a single block. The damage must be done on this side. There was not a chance that Mr Trent would investigate his foundations. If he did, his enthusiasm for the perversities shown to Pretty Jo or Maggie Fashion might counsel silence.

  With a wide-bladed cold-chisel and a muffled hammer, he began on the mortar between two stones at mid-height. It flaked and cracked. He choked twice with the dust. The blows of the hammer on a chisel, deadened by lint, would be inaudible in the street.

  Even so, he listened for the bell, working round the perimeter of each block. With a smaller head-bar, he prised the stone towards him. It was more than he could lower or lift. But with the next stone free, the pair turned through forty-five degrees, he might open a gap a foot high and eighteen inches long.

  In dust and dark, he was as far from the world as a drowned sailor in the depths of the sea. He thought it had taken twenty minutes to free and turn the blocks of stone. Perhaps more. He shone the dark lantern through the gap and saw another rubble-strewn expanse. Lifting the carpet-bag, he slid after it like a diver. It was the small hours of Sunday morning but at last he stood directly under the strong-room floor of Mr Walker's Cornhill Vaults.

  22

  Lantern light cut a path along boards and joints above him. Rann knocked with the head-bar at intervals. The dull resonance lightened abruptly, confirming where the plate-iron of the strong-room floor ended and the office began. Having sealed the strong-room with iron, Mr Walker saw no need to protect the rear office. Rann aimed for the far corner. Boards under a carpet and no furniture above. He prayed it might still be so.

  Crouching in the cobwebbed corner, he found a short renewal board on only two joists with a longer one next to it. He tried them. The short board was nailed on the joists but free at the wall. With the tapered head-bar and hammer, he prised the steel between board and joist, then drove it home. He hung with all his weight. Nails groaned and squealed in wood. He felt them give as the short board sprang an inch from the joist. There was only carpet above.

  He worked the board, moving it clear, sliding the head-bar under the carpet, and wrenched again. The carpet-edge came up, taking the tacks with it. Now he could fold it from the black-varnished border of the floor. His narrow lantern-beam shone into a darkened room above him.

  The long board lay over several joists. With the head-bar, he freed it from two joists nearer the wall. It was held by a weight above. The corner of a desk perhaps. If need be he would cut it at

  the next joist with his hacksaw. But he made one more effort to lift it and slide through. It sprang an inch or so with a thump and a crash. But he could raise its nearer length. There was space enough.

  Rann lifted the carpet-bag, pulled himself up, shone the lantern and saw office windows covered by cream shutters of stoutly panelled wood. The thump had been the overturning of a small table. The crash was the breakage of a Meissen candlestick with a pink rose design on a white ground.

  He put the table upright and gathered the fragments of china. At the worst they would suspect that a clerk or a customer had broken it and hidden the damage.

  He unbolted a rear door from the office to the brick extension. Galvanic batteries, used in electro-plating, gave its workshop a corrosive metallic air. A three-foot square furnace was set in the hearth and a fourteen-inch flue sloped back from it. To increase the draught, the flue would narrow near the top. Twelve inches, if he was lucky. It was tight - but to a climbing-boy of Rann's build and experience, it was enough.

  He went back to the office and the opposite door to the strongroom. Beyond it were the constant gaslight and spy-holes from the street. He knocked firmly on a panel of the door. The resonance was deadened again by sheet-iron lining on its far side. To open it by any means except the lock would be impossible.

  Bringing his cheap bracelet for repair, Rann had noted that the door was held by one of the new cylinder-locks with the stamp of Linus Yale upon it. It would have more than three thousand combinations for the keys that might raise its five pin-tumblers. Mr Walker thought it enough. Even a man who could open that door, would be on view to every passer-by and policeman through the spy-holes in the steel shutters.

  In his mind Jack Rann saw the interior of Linus Yale's lock, plainly as a schoolroom map. Unlike a Chubb or a Bramah, where only the levers were moved, the entire cylinder of a Yale turned with the key. The keys were sheet metal, cut flat in an attempt to prevent a thief working a pick in the narrow keyway. Five steel pin-tumblers, each thick as a match and held by springs, dropped as the key was withdrawn. To turn the cylinder and draw back the bolt, the key was inserted upside down. Its contours lifted each steel pin level with the circumference of the cylinder. Only when each was lifted by a unique distance would the cylinder turn and the bolt draw back.

  Pandy Quinn had bought several specimens of Yale's invention to work upon. And even Pandy had taken a month to perfect the opening of it. Rann, who watched his progress, had since dissected a dozen locks of this type with the care that a practised surgeon might have given to a choice cadaver.

  Where damage did not matter, he would drill through the pins. A fine diamond-head in an American off-centre brace would enter the keyway and cut through the ends. Shorn of their length, the pins no longer held a cylinder in its locked position. But the damage would be discovered when there was no resistance to the key. Mr Walker's lock must remain in working order.

  He unstrapped the bag and laid out a small brace with a wooden mushroom-grip and an off-centre steel shaft to add force to the drive. In its mouth, he fitted a diminutive diamond-head that a watchmaker might have coveted.

  Pandy Quinn had calculated that to cut the pins one by one divided the possible combinations by five each time. By leaving the two innermost pins to exert pressure on the key and work the lock, he might reduce the combinations from more than three thousand to about thirty.

  Thanks to Maggie's courtship of Arthur Trent and her tracing of the contours of the Yale for the rooms rented from Mr Walker, Pandy had gone further. As a locksmith's boy, he knew that a suite of Yales for such a building would differ in the outer pins but that the deepest pins would probably be the same in all of them.

  His legacy included two dozen keys, which he had filed to operate the two innermost pins of a Yale based on the pattern of Mr

  Trent's. Better still, with such a key in place and two rear pins resting in its contours, there was just room to use a fine probe that might raise the next pin to a point where the cylinder of the lock would turn and free the bolt. With three or four pins left intact, it would feel to Mr Walker or his supervisor that the lock was working as usual.

  Jack Rann knelt, hands and eyes level with the keyhole. The fine diamond-head entered the keyway, catching at first on the side. He frowned and adjusted it so that it cleared the mouth in the lock-plate by an invisible fraction of an inch. Then the veins in his narrow wrists swelled with exertion as he wound the shaft of the brace slowly but with all his weight and strength. Each pin was a pygmy in bulk but a full minute of metallic grinding passed before he felt the first one give.

  He put down the brace and took a fine needle of steel to coax out the broken fragment. Now there was more space and the next pin would be easier.

  He listened, touched the bit to the second pin and turned the brace. Then his heat beat in his throat as he heard the explosion of a bell-clapper that seemed close as the next room. Samuel's warning, carried by flues and hearths. Jack Rann waited until the man on his beat moved off and Samuel rang a single note several times.

  The second pin sheered off under the drill. It seemed as far as he need to go. He studied the lock and saw the bit had cut straight and true. There was not a scratch on the edges of the metal lock-plate.

  Patiently, he took the flat steel keys from their pouch and tried each in turn. After a dozen, the cylinder turned a fraction of
an inch before jamming. Rann drew the arm of his shirt across his forehead. Despite the heat, he shivered and took the slender probe of hardened steel. It moved easily in the keyway, above the flat outer length of his steel shank. Then it was a matter of sense and touch, pressing the nearest pin upwards against the spring that held it in place, turning the key at the same time to raise the inner tumblers.

  Nothing moved. He eased the steel needle a little, breathed deeply, and shivered again with relief as he felt the cylinder turn, taking the bolt with it.

  He put away his tools and pushed the door gently. Through its gap there was a white fire of gas shining steadily on squares of iron, studded and painted battleship-grey. The corrugated steel of the window-shutters with their two spy-holes were like blind eye-sockets or dark wounds. On the rear wall, which he could not yet see, was the mirror that reflected the strong-room to the street.

  A policeman was the only probable passer-by in the small hours of Sunday morning. That gave him twenty minutes before he heard Samuel's bell again.

  The flat steel vault-door, with its twelve-inch lock-plate, twin keyholes, and bolt-wheel, was set in the wall to his right. Its metal plate was embossed as Milner's Double Treasury with the maker's address in Finsbury Pavement. Rann took another breath and let it out slowly. Before entering the strong-room, he chose a small boxwood wedge and jammed it into the strike-plate of the Yale to keep the bolt open. Then, with heart pumping, he stepped into the white brilliance of unshaded gas. The silent spy-holes faced him from the street like gun muzzles whose triggers might be pulled at any moment.

  He was safe enough, unless Samuel fell into a doze ... unless the bell sounded too faintly for him to hear ... unless Samuel was trapped .... Working on the Yale he had been absorbed and calm. Now he felt his hand shaking. But Jack Rann spoke softly to the soul of Pandy Quinn and swore to be true.

  A year ago, with Pandy at his side, two country-dressed trippers had studied the vault-door through the spy-holes on quiet Sundays or Saturday evenings when the commercial length of Cornhill was deserted. Several times, he and Pandy had gone to an abandoned cotton warehouse in Shadwell. The safe once used by its owner was still there. It was not Milner's Double Treasury but worked on the same principle. The watchman had taken two sovereigns to leave them alone for an afternoon.

  With force and unlimited time, a large steel 'alderman' head-bar would jemmy the best single-bolted safe or vault. But Milner's set of six steel bolts, holding the door top to bottom, was proof against jemmying of any kind. Mr Walker was safe in the knowledge that only the lock would open his vault.

  In Rann's narrow skull lay a map of the Double Treasury Lock, as plain as the design of the Yale. The central bolt to which the five others were linked was round steel, thick as a broomhandle, held shut with a ton of pressure from a steel bit. The bit was secured by two steel arms on pivots. Each pivot was activated by a set of three cogwheels, each set controlled by a separate lock. The first cog of a set was moved by turning the key, until the others followed.

  No one man would be trusted to open the Cornhill Vaults alone. The first key would move the cogs to lift the first lever. But only when the second key was turned and the second lever had been raised was the pressure of the steel bit on the central bolt removed. Still the door would not open until the wheel to one side of the keyholes was turned, drawing back simultaneously the six linked bolts.

  Treasury locks were designed for keys whose steps could be varied constantly. A resetting of the first cogwheel's position in each lock would make a key which opened the door on one day useless on the next. Pandy Quinn's answer had been the micrometer, often spoken of but seldom seen.

  When a lock was opened without a key, it was most often by a locksmith, called when the owner lost a key or the mechanism was faulty. Quinn had been the first to hear of James Sargent's new micrometer, designed to chart the interior of a closed lock. The American locksmith claimed that he had measured the position of pins and levers to a ten-thousandth of an inch, using a watch-face as his dial.

  Quinn never saw Sargent's invention, whose prototype was kept on the premises of Sargent and Greenleaf, locksmiths of Rochester, New York, but its principle was clear to him. Rann unwrapped the lint from Quinn's copy. For this device, Orator Hawkins had offered him the run of Newgate and two more weeks of life; for this, Pandy Quinn had died.

  Quinn's micrometer was simple by comparison with the American original, a single hand on a watch dial, instead of hands for hours, minutes and seconds which Sargent had devised. Yet to measure a sixtieth of an inch on Quinn's dial was straightforward and to measure a hundredth might be possible.

  The copy consisted of a metal probe, slimmer than the shank of a key, with a single metal step at its end, large enough to encounter the levers but thin enough to pass the steel wards which sometimes guarded the keyway. The probe was connected to a two-inch corrugated strip of metal. On this hung a miniature weight that could be adjusted as if on the arm of a weighing machine. While the probe moved, its progress turned the wheel-mechanism of the watch, measuring the distance travelled, the watch-hand moving in time with it.

  As the probe approached the first lever of the lock, the little weight was moved to maintain the tension and balance between the probe and the dial. At the first lever, the probe was turned on its side to clear the lever and the wards of the lock, then upright again until it encountered the second lever. At each of the five levers, the position could be read from the dial.

  His ears alert for the rattle of Samuel's bell, Rann carried the micrometer out of the rear office, pulled shut the Yale door, and knelt at the double-lock of the vault. Five levers. He could be certain of that. With the dial supported on his palm, he eased the probe into the first keyway. The hand moved slowly through the minutes of the hour. One by one they made their map. Eight, nineteen, twenty-nine, thirty-five, forty-seven.

  He tried again, to test for error. But months of practice had made him near-perfect. The second time, each reading was one minute earlier on the dial, but this confirmed that he had got the relative distances between them accurately. Then it was a matter of measuring the second lock. This time he did it only once. The figures were identical to the first lock, though those employees who held the keys would never be allowed to know it. Owners did not advertise that they often used identical keys and settings for the twin locks. Some did it for fear of losing one of the keys. Mr Walker, perhaps, was not prepared to pay good money to have the cogs of the locks constantly reset to different keys.

  Rann looked round to make sure he had left nothing on view. With the micrometer wrapped again, he opened the door of the rear office and closed it after him. By the light of the lantern he began to fit the first shank of a skeleton key with five metal steps of the smallest size, spaced at the micrometer readings. The irony, it seemed to him, was that he was doing exactly what Milner's or Mr Walker would do in varying their settings.

  The key to a variable Treasury Lock was itself a skeleton. The shank ended in two downward prongs, an inch apart with a steel screw connecting them. The steel steps were threaded on the screw and tightened in whatever order and contour the locksmith or his client chose and changed as often as required. Combined with the six steel bolts, it was the despair of the housebreaker and shop-burglar. But a technician like Pandy was entitled to believe that it must have been made for him.

  Of the smallest key-steps, none was likely to make contact with the levers of the lock, even when set at the right distance. One size at a time, Jack Rann would work his way up until the first step touched a lever. He must then increase the height of the others until every step seemed ready to raise its lever and turn the first set of cog-wheels.

  He finished the key and heard the clatter of Samuel's bell. A minute or two later the single bell-notes signalled that all was clear.

  Back in the strong-room, his face ran with sweat under the flaring gas of the summer night. But he felt the calm that came from doing the thing he did best in
the world. No mechanic, no locksmith, could match what Pandy had taught him. His hand was steady as he screwed the first metal teeth tighter on the key-shank and tried it in the lock. As he expected, none of the smallest steps touched the levers. It might be hours before he could defeat the vault door.

  Beside him were the steel key-steps in a watchmaker's pouch. He worked, kneeling by the vault until, at the fifth attempt, a lever grazed the outer step. He drew the shank out and saw a slight scratch on the polished metal. Then, in a long interval between the sounding of the alarm bell, he increased the other steps, little by little, until each of them met a lever, as squarely as the key created by Milner's themselves.

  He held his breath and tried the key he had built. It passed the keyway and he felt the tip engage the talon or notch at the rear of the lock. The shank was held firm enough now for its steel steps to lift the levers. In the hermetic silence of the strong-room, he heard and felt the levers move, almost through ninety degrees. And then they jammed.

  Jack Rann let out a gasp of frustration. He tried to ease the key back and draw it clear. But the far tip of the shank seemed trapped in the talon. Worse still, the talon and levers held his key-shank askew, so that it would turn neither way. He could not move it but dared not leave it in the lock for the first policeman at the spy-holes to see.

  To pull the key out by force was more than his strength could match. Calmly, despite the cold sweat on his face, he tried to edge it deeper a fraction. Faintly, he felt that one of the metal steps had now cleared a minute obstruction. Turning the shank again, he heard a set of quiet cogwheels move. A steel arm rose in a slight eccentric movement from the powerful bit holding the central bolt.