The Gold Masters

by Norman Russell

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Box. I never employed no one. It’s God’s truth, I never had anything to do with Croydon. If Snobby was there, then he was working for someone else. And I’ve never employed Mahoney. You must know that yourself. I’m a thief, not a murderer. And this bullion – I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, call this killer off me, will you?’

  ‘That’ll do, Sergeant Knollys,’ said Box. ‘You could have told me all this when I came in, Mr Fisher, then there wouldn’t have been all this unpleasantness. I believe what you say. You’re too much of a sneaking coward to risk murder. Next time I call, try to be a little more co-operative. Come on, Sergeant.’

  Jack Knollys withdrew his arm from Fisher’s throat, and the man gasped and sagged with relief The sergeant picked up the stout billiard cue from the floor, and snapped it in two across his knee.

  ‘Yours, I think, Mr Fisher?’ he said. He threw the pieces down on the table, and followed Inspector Box out of the stale room.

  Lady Marion Peto, sitting on a sofa in a small private apartment in the Coburg Hotel, Carlos Place, near Grosvenor Square, put up her lorgnette, and looked with scarcely concealed distaste at the man standing with his back to the window. Mr Paul Lombardo was certainly a man of distinguished appearance; and in the Coburg he had chosen a first-class hotel for their meeting. But the waxed beard and moustaches, and the rose-tinted spectacles, appeared to be rather outré.

  ‘Now, madam,’ said Mr Lombardo in a quiet, confiding tone, ‘it would be better if I were to give you a plain, unvarnished account of my investigation, rather than wrap up the business in a stream of soothing platitudes.’

  ‘That would be by far the better way,’ Lady Marion agreed.

  Lombardo had noted the look of grim determination in his client’s face, and realized that, for all her lack of dress sense and social nicety, Lady Marion Peto was an aristocrat of the old school. It would be pointless and impertinent to trifle with her.

  ‘Your husband, Lord Jocelyn Peto, pays frequent visits to a woman living in Melbourne Avenue, Belsize Park. He calls there usually between eleven and twelve in the morning, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and frequently, but irregularly, in the early evening. He has on two occasions remained in the house for a complete day, by which I mean from early morning to late afternoon. My agents and informants can prove that Lord Jocelyn is engaged in immoral physical commerce with this woman.’

  ‘You mean they are lovers?’

  ‘Madam, with due respect, that is a novelist’s word in this context. We are not talking about a young man’s romantic attachment. Lord Jocelyn and this woman are engaged in immoral commerce.’

  He paused delicately, and heard his client’s rapid hiss of indrawn breath. His insistence on the sordid nature of the affair had gone home. Lombardo saw Lady Marion’s face grow pale, but he knew that a woman of her breeding would show no sign of emotion.

  ‘What is this woman’s name?’

  ‘She calls herself Madam Almena Sylvestris, though she was born Ada Mullins, daughter of a Birmingham corn chandler. When she was eighteen she married a Mr John Silvers, tobacconist, of Eltham. Silvers died of liver complications in 1887.’

  ‘How old is she now, this Madam Sylvestris? And why did she adopt such a ridiculous, tawdry name?’

  Lady Marion, he saw, was trying very hard to keep her venomous contempt from revealing itself in her words, but the struggle was unavailing.

  ‘Madam Sylvestris is thirty-three. By any standards she’s a beautiful woman, and very charming with it. She adopted that name when she became a spiritualist medium.’

  Lady Marion Peto started violently, and the reticule that she had been clutching slid to the floor.

  ‘A medium? How appalling … Lord Jocelyn must have lost his senses to consort with such degenerate people. Has he lost all sense of caste? Very well, Mr Lombardo. I’m most grateful to you for this information. How you found it all out is beyond me.’

  Mr Paul Lombardo smiled deprecatingly.

  ‘Well, madam, it’s my business to find out things. There is more, if you’d care to hear it.’

  ‘Tell me. Tell me all!’

  ‘The house in which Madam Sylvestris lives – 8 Melbourne Avenue, Belsize Park – is wholly owned by Lord Jocelyn. Its deeds are lodged with Ephraim & Sons, the land agents in Poultry. Lord Jocelyn recently ordered a new carriage for Madam Sylvestris, at a cost of three hundred and fifty pounds. That’s all I have to report, Lady Marion. I beg the favour of awaiting your further orders.’

  Lady Marion Peto recognized the request for payment. She retrieved her reticule from the floor, opened it, and removed a purse.

  ‘What do I owe you, Mr Lombardo?’ she asked. She had recovered her sang-froid, and looked at the private enquiry agent with what she imagined was haughty indifference. Lombardo suppressed a smile.

  ‘Twelve guineas, madam.’

  Lady Marion opened her purse and counted out twelve sovereigns, a half-sovereign and a silver florin, which she handed to Lombardo, who bowed his thanks.

  ‘In matters of this nature, Lady Marion,’ he said, ‘it is better not to ask for a receipt, though I will write you one readily if you so desire.’

  ‘A receipt is not necessary. I may wish to employ you further, and I know where you are to be found.’

  Lady Marion stood up, and moved towards the door.

  ‘Should you be contemplating divorce—’

  He was stopped by an exclamation of disgust from his titled client.

  ‘You forget yourself, Mr Lombardo! People of our sort do not resort to the divorce courts. There are other, more acceptable, ways of righting these grave wrongs.’

  In a moment she had gone, leaving Paul Lombardo with a profound sense of unease. There had been something in Lady Marion Peto’s demeanour during their interview that had frightened him, leaving a sense of danger in the air. He wondered, with an ill-defined feeling of foreboding, what Lady Marion would do next.

  Sergeant Kenwright had reassembled the fragments of ten of the smashed bullion chests, and had laid them carefully on ten trestle tables in the drill hall. It was a large, forlorn place, used mainly for meetings and storage. There was a row of windows high up on one wall, and closed double doors at the end. At night, and on dark winter days, the room was lit by candles, placed in a series of tin candle sconces fastened along the walls.

  Kenwright had donned spectacles for his work, and was sitting on a folding chair in front of one of the ten chests. He had made the four sections of it hold together by tying them with rough parcel string. From time to time he uttered a little grunt of satisfaction as he peered at a splinter or indentation through a hand lens. Eventually he rose from the chair, and crossed the room to a lectern, where he had placed a few sheets of paper, an inkwell, and a pen. It was time, he thought, to write up a few notes for the guvnor.

  After some minutes, he looked up, as Inspector Box and Sergeant Knollys came into the room through the tunnel from the front office. He took off his spectacles, folded them, and slipped them into a little tin case.

  ‘Well, Sergeant,’ said Box, ‘have you found anything of interest? You’ve practically rebuilt some of those chests, I see. Well done! You’re a careful man, with delicate hands and a sharp eye for the irregular, So what have you found?’

  ‘Sir,’ said the big bearded sergeant, ‘if you look at these boxes, or chests, you’ll see a regular pattern of marks and dents on the interiors which are very interesting. I’ll say a few words about those in a minute. The hasps and staples were forced with jemmies, leaving the heavy padlocks intact, which is what you’d expect. I’ve placed four of those locks on that table over there. Perhaps you’d care to look at them, sir?’

  Box picked up each of the four padlocks in turn, and examined them. They were still fastened to the hasps and staples, which had been contorted when the jemmies had forced them from the wood.

  ‘They just look like regulation padlocks to me, Sergeant Ke
nwright.’

  ‘They are, sir. But three of them were actually open. They’d never been locked at all.’

  Box’s eyes gleamed with a sudden speculation. He tried the locks, and found that the sergeant’s assertion was true. Whoever had secured those three chests, with their priceless contents, hadn’t bothered to turn the key in their padlocks. He glanced at Sergeant Knollys, and met an answering look of understanding. Very soon both men would put into words what they thought, but dared not articulate.

  ‘Well done, Sergeant Kenwright! And what’s so peculiar about those marks and dents on the inside of the chests?’

  ‘Well, sir, some of them are like heavy pencil lines, all horizontal, and occurring in the same place inside all ten chests. The dents, too, are all of the same depth, and all blackened, as though rubbed inside with a soft lead pencil.’

  Box peered into one or two of the reassembled chests, noting the marks, all of which Kenwright had ringed in white chalk.

  ‘Lead? Are you suggesting—? You know, Sergeant, the gold coins stored in chests of this type are laid between layers of lead foil.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but foil is only a thirty-second of an inch thick at its edges. Foil would leave no marks at all. Look, sir.’

  Kenwright stooped down to the floor, and picked up a weighty lump of metal, which had once formed part of a lead gutter. He had battered it roughly into the shape of a brick. Without saying a word, he thrust the lump of metal firmly into one corner of the first chest, and then removed it. Box and Knollys saw the dark indentations made in the wood, and realized that they were more or less identical with the marks that Kenwright had ringed in chalk.

  ‘And what do you deduce from that, Sergeant Kenwright?’ asked Box.

  ‘I deduce, sir, that these boxes were filled with lead ingots, and that they’d been crammed rather roughly into the chests to make them fit. Lead, sir, not gold: that’s what we’re looking at here.’

  12

  The Good Neighbour

  Batt’s Lane, a terrace of workmen’s brick cottages facing a builder’s yard, lay dozing in the strong sun of the last day in July, 1893. Box tapped on the door of PC Lane’s little house, noting the black crape tacked around the door knocker. There was no reply, and he was just about to knock again when a ponderous, genial old man appeared from the house next door.

  ‘They’re not there,’ he cried. ‘Are you from the benefit club?’ The old man’s voice rang loud but uncertain, as though he were slightly deaf. ‘You’d better come in here, and talk to the wife and me.’

  The cottage at the end of the terrace nearer to Bevis Marks had been expanded at the rear with a long yard, at the end of which was a milking-shed. A sign along its front read, ‘Simon Lovett, Dairyman’. Box and Knollys followed the old man into a shady stone-flagged kitchen. A plump, contented-looking woman was sitting behind a short counter. She looked at the two detectives with absorbed interest.

  ‘Mr Lovett?’ said Box. ‘I’m Inspector Box of Scotland Yard, and this officer is Sergeant Knollys—’

  ‘There, Martha, didn’t I tell you? The gentleman from Whitehall Place who came to see poor Mary on Saturday told me that you’d probably be coming, sir. He wasn’t an inspector, he was a big man, covered in buttons and flaps and frogs, with silver braid on his hat.’

  ‘He was a superintendent. Superintendent Fitzgerald of “A” Division.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Very nice, he was. As I said, he’d come to see poor Mary next door. Poor girl, she’d already lost the baby, and now her husband’s dead. They came first thing Saturday morning to tell her the news. It was dreadful. The wife and I went in, of course, and poor Mary was crying, and the children were all howling….’

  This big, genial man exuded goodness from every pore. He was obviously a kindly and concerned neighbour, a man whom PC Lane would have trusted as a confidant. He was also, if his opening salvo was anything to go by, an inveterate talker.

  ‘Now, Inspector,’ Mr Lovett continued, ‘is there anything special you want to hear about?’

  ‘I’d just like to hear about the baby, Mr Lovett, and what happened to her. You see, I was working with PC Lane on a very distressing case, and he told me that he and his wife had just lost a baby—’

  ‘Dreadful! It broke her heart, and he was never the same afterwards. Catherine Mary was a lovely little thing She’d toddle in here from next door, through the back yard, clutching her doll – Polly, she called it – and then she’d say, “Cathy come”. She called herself Cathy … she didn’t have many words. “Dada”, she’d say, and “Mammy”. Didn’t she, Martha?’

  This man, thought Box, is a good neighbour, kind-hearted and generous. But he has a tongue that runs away with him, which makes him one of the most dangerous kind of neighbours in the world….

  ‘And where’s Mrs Lane now?’ asked Box.

  ‘Her brother came on Saturday night – came on the railway to Paddington – and took Mary and the children away with him,’ said Mr Lovett. ‘She was calmer by then, and agreed to go down with him to the country for a while – until the funeral, you know. Her brother’s a farmer, from a place called Marsh Gibbon, in Oxfordshire.’

  ‘And what’s his name, Mr Lovett? This brother?’

  ‘Miller. Joe Miller. I think he’s her only living relative.’

  Simon Lovett launched out on to a sea of reminiscence. He spoke at length about Mary Lane’s late grandmother, Theodora, and about Mary’s scapegrace uncle, Roger Wilcox, who had died in the Malay Straits in 1865.

  ‘You’re a mine of information, Mr Lovett, if I may say so,’ said Box. ‘A positive cornucopia of knowledge. Could you tell me exactly what happened to the baby? I don’t want to ask her mother.’

  ‘She took ill in Wellclose Lane, just near the railway bridge, while she was playing with some older children who knew her. Diphtheria, it was. Doctor Morland was summoned, but there wasn’t much he could do. They took her to the hospital, of course, but it was hopeless. I remember that the ward sister wept when poor little Catherine Mary died. She was buried out at Putney Vale, in her favourite little pink dress.’

  Mr Simon Lovett suddenly ran out of words, and a large tear rolled down his cheek. For the first time since Box had entered the house, Mrs Lovett found her voice.

  ‘Mary had started to go to these seances – wicked, I call them. Poor Mr Lane told me that he was going to attend some of them, in case he could discover anything like fraud going on. He forbade Mary to go. And then, on the day before Mr Lane was due to go to one of these sittings out at Belsize Park, a little girl called Nora Maitland was knocked down and killed by a runaway cart. Dreadful, it was.’

  Box glanced at Knollys, who had been quietly listening to the conversation. It was a signal for the sergeant to ask a question that Box and he had prepared before ever they had set foot in Batt’s Lane.

  ‘I expect you’ve told this story of poor little Catherine Mary to other folk, Mr Lovett? People who called on you to ask how the Lanes and their children were coping with their loss?’

  ‘Well, Sergeant, that’s true enough. We’re friendly people, Martha and I, and it was only natural for the neighbours to ask us how poor Mr Lane and his wife were coping.’

  ‘There was that well-spoken gentleman who called, Simon,’ said Mrs Lovett. ‘Don’t you remember? It was only a day or two after the baby died. He asked us a lot of questions, sitting in that chair where you are now, Sergeant. He said he was from a police charity, but that it would be wise not to say anything to Mary in case nothing came of the matter. I remember him particularly, because as he left the dairy, I saw him stop and peer through the Lanes’ front window. Then he pushed an envelope through their letterbox. And what do you think was inside it? Five sovereigns, wrapped up in tissue paper. So whoever he was, he was genuine enough.’

  ‘What was he like, this gentleman?’ asked Box. ‘To look at, I mean.’

  ‘Well, he was a narrow-faced kind of a man, aged about forty, with black whiskers
meeting beneath his chin. He was wearing a well-tailored morning coat, and his silk hat was shiny-new. But for all his smart appearance, Inspector Box, I think there was more of the clerk than the gentleman to him. He told us his name, but I can’t remember it now.’

  Box rose to his feet, and Knollys followed suit.

  ‘Thanks very much, both of you,’ said Box. ‘You’ve been of great help to the police, and when I write up the record of this case, your names shall stand as evidence of your part in its solution.’

  Uttering little cries of pleasure, husband and wife accompanied Box and Knollys into the street. The last thing they saw, as they turned the corner, was Mr and Mrs Lovett waving cheerily to them from the front door of their cottage.

  *

  The morning’s work, not all of it connected with the bullion robbery and Lane’s murder, took Box and Knollys from Bevis Marks to the City, and then to Oxford Street, where they interviewed a man suspected of concealing a dead body. As a neighbouring clock struck twelve, they settled themselves in an empty bar in the rear of the Horse and Groom public house, and refreshed themselves with a pint of Bass’s ale, and a generously-conceived bacon sandwich.

  ‘It was Portman,’ said Box. ‘Mr Arthur Portman, chairman and secretary of the Temple of Light, and chief counter clerk of Peto’s Bank in the Strand. He was careful not to call directly on the Lanes, because they were to be his dupes, though he did look through the Lanes’ front window, and no doubt saw the portrait of that scapegrace uncle on the mantelpiece. So he visited our friends Mr and Mrs Lovett, and found in Mr Lovett the answer to his prayers.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, sir?’

  ‘I mean that Lovett is one of nature’s gossips,’ said Box, ‘and everything he told us, he told Portman. When the time’s ripe, we’ll pay friend Portman a surprise visit at his place of work in the Strand.’