by D. J. Taylor
Down in the poulterer’s shop it was nearly pitch dark, with only a thin shaft of light penetrating the shuttered windows. Mr Pardew felt his boots brush against the stone floor, almost blundered over, but regained his balance and stood taking stock of his surroundings. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he made out the shop’s long wooden counter and the assortment of hooks and wires that ran across its further wall. Something blew against his hand and he reached down and saw that it was a feather.
‘Are you there? What’s amiss?’ Above him he could see Lythgoe’s pale, lamp-lit face peering through the hole in the ceiling.
‘Nothing is amiss. But you must turn down that lamp. There is a crack in the shutter. Now, you had better send down that bag.’
Lythgoe made as if to do this, hauling up the rope and attempting to secure it, but lost his grip and sent the bag crashing down onto the stone floor, very nearly taking off Mr Pardew’s head in the process. Mr Pardew swore softly under his breath. As he waited for Lythgoe to descend, which was done with painful slowness, he moved over to the wall of the shop which adjoined Mr Gallentin’s premises and struck it hard with his fist.
‘What are you doing?’ Lythgoe wondered, very dishevelled and with his hair white with plaster.
‘It is as I thought,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘They have reinforced the dividing wall. A metal plate, if I’m not mistaken. I wonder if it goes the whole way?’ He made three or four more assaults with his fists at various points along the wall and shook his head. ‘Well, we had best explore a little.’
The poulterer’s shop was found to consist of the central chamber in which they stood, a smaller room behind it, containing a safe, which Mr Pardew, on examining it, found to his regret to be unlocked and empty, and a flight of steps leading down to a cellar. Turning up the lantern, Mr Pardew went down the stairs. Since he had dug out the hole in the poulterer’s ceiling – a long age ago now, it seemed – his mind had not ceased to calculate. It was now, he thought, about half past six in the evening, but time meant nothing to him. No key would be turned in Mr Gallentin’s front door until Monday morning. He could spend the whole of Sunday there if he chose. The cellar was dark and airless, but not untenanted. In fact, thirty or forty pheasants in various stages of ripening hung from its walls, together with a brace or two of Norfolk turkeys and several geese. Mr Pardew set down his lantern at a point where he judged it would provide maximal illumination and began to inspect the further wall. This, he was pleased to discover, was made of soft red brick, crumbling in several places and not more than five or six inches thick.
‘What is it we’ve to do?’ Lythgoe wondered uneasily. He was breathing heavily. Stepping too close to one of the birds and feeling the touch of its claws upon his shoulder, he recoiled in horror.
‘What are we to do? Why, we are to break through that wall,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘That is, unless you want to use a powder charge which would very likely bring the roof down on us.’ He saw a flash of the little office in the continental town and the people walking past the window, and a lake set amid green hills with a far-off view of mountains, and he wondered at the distance between the boy he had been and the man he now was. He remembered, too, a house in Kensington and a woman who, unlike Jemima, certainly had been his wife, and the carriages in the street beyond, and the recollection hardened in his mind and made him angry, and he picked up one of the metal spikes that had come from Lythgoe’s bag, pushed it into a soft part of the wall where the mortar had crumbled away, took the twenty-pound hammer and struck it with all his force. Still the memory of the house at Kensington played on his mind – the little study where he sat and read his books, and the little kitchen where he ate his breakfast – and he struck at the wall again, while Lythgoe watched and put his fingers in his ears and the lamp danced and all but fell over and the pheasants looked indifferently on.
Presently he came to his senses – how many blows had he struck? He could not quite tell. He laid down the hammer and inspected the damage he had caused. The brickwork was even weaker than he had first imagined. He wondered why no one had attended to it, and told himself that if he had possessed a cellar it should have been regularly looked into. Three or four bricks now lay on the cellar floor beside him. Lythgoe coughed at the brick-dust and passed his hand over his face. ‘This will never do,’ Mr Pardew said. Reaching into the pocket of his coat, he drew out a bandanna handkerchief and tied it around his mouth. A scrap of paper came fluttering out of the pocket along with the handkerchief, but in his haste he did not see it. The vision of the house at Kensington had almost faded from his mind, but there was no mistaking the fury with which he once more began to attack the wall.
In this way perhaps an hour or two passed, Mr Pardew alternately striking at the brick and resting with his hands on the shaft of the hammer and inspecting the damage done. Lythgoe stood, or occasionally sat with his hands on his haunches, regarding him with an ever more piteous expression. All this Mr Pardew saw, to a certain extent sympathised with, but was also very much amused by. Putting down the hammer once and brushing the red brick-dust off his shirtfront, he asked:
‘Are you a religious man, Lythgoe?’
‘Certainly I am.’
‘And might I enquire’ – the red dust was very troublesome and had got in his watch chain – ‘how you square what we’re engaged upon here with your conscience?’
‘It’s no fault of mine. I was pressed into it, and shall not be judged for it.’ Lythgoe’s voice, as he said this, was unusually firm.
‘No fault of yours! I suppose you made that fellow Raff a present of your paper, just to give him an income?’
‘It is not Captain Raff who has the paper, but that Mr Happerton who directs him.’
‘Oh yes, Mr Happerton,’ Mr Pardew said, with an attempt at vagueness that very nearly succeeded. ‘I have heard of Mr Happerton. And how will he be judged, eh?’
‘Why, the Lord will find him out,’ Lythgoe said. ‘There are men – discounters, people in the bill-broking line – that buy up paper in the way of their business dealings, and that’s fair enough, for the money’s not certain and no one can be blamed for taking a risk. But this Mr Happerton’ – Lythgoe’s face as he said this was very white in the glare of the lamp and its dark surround – ‘does mischief with his bills. He does. Why, there’s half a dozen fellows like me, very near ruined, that he likes to play with as a cat does with a mouse, never quite striking it dead and never quite letting it go neither. It’s my belief that he don’t want the bills paid up, for then he could do no more mischief.’
‘I have known worse than Mr Happerton,’ said Mr Pardew, whose late partner, Mr Fardell, had been found dead in Pump Court with his brains knocked out and no one any the wiser as to the identity of his assailant.
‘The Lord will judge him, you shall see,’ Lythgoe said, very earnestly, and Mr Pardew wondered at his fervour, and the incongruity of the conversation, here amid the flaring lamplight and the swirling brick-dust, and perhaps thought for a moment of Mr Fardell lying dead upon the Pump Court cobbles. If there was anything on Mr Pardew’s own conscience, it did not seem to trouble him, for he soon after leapt up and attacked the wall again with redoubled fury. A great piece had been torn out of it now, and by means of some dextrous probing of the mortar he was able to widen it out to the point where a man, if he did not care very much about damage to his clothing, could climb through it into the adjacent room.
‘We ain’t going through there, surely?’ Lythgoe asked.
‘You may blame it on Mr Happerton,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘Let him be judged for it.’ Once more, his mind was lost in calculation. He knew that if he broke through the cellar wall of the poulterer’s shop he would emerge into the space beneath Mr Gallentin’s showroom. What he did not know was how far this space extended, whether, in fact, he would be forced to undertake some other strenuous assault upon a second wall, or a locked door, before he could effect an entry into Mr Gallentin’s strongroom. But, as he now
saw, taking the lamp from Lythgoe and forcing first it and then his head and shoulders through the ragged gap in the brickwork, he was in luck. The cellar beneath Mr Gallentin’s showroom seemed to extend for a considerable distance. Pulling himself through and getting to his feet, he gazed enquiringly round the vault in which he now found himself. There was not, in truth, a great deal to see, merely the squat outlines of one or two pieces of furniture which Mr Gallentin, or someone else, had thought to store there, and, at the cellar’s further end, a flight of wooden steps leading up to a metal door-frame. Mr Pardew put his head back through the brickwork, instructed Lythgoe to hand him the carpet-bag, heard a complaint from that gentleman that his mouth was full of brick-dust, and assisted his passage into the cellar by main force, so that he tumbled all in a heap on the damp stone floor.
‘Now,’ Mr Pardew said briskly, ‘there is only a short way to go. You had better follow me, and bring the bags.’
‘Gracious heaven,’ Lythgoe said, ‘I think my back’s broken.’
‘It is nothing of the kind. But there may be something else broken in a moment or two. Now, stir yourself.’
The security of his cellar was clearly not one of Mr Gallentin’s prime considerations. The lock on its door was known to Mr Pardew, and he greeted it like an old friend and made short work of it. Thrusting open the door, they found themselves in a tiny corridor, its right-hand exit, Mr Pardew judged, belonging to the showroom, but with a second door, immediately before them, which, he thought, could only lead to the strongroom. Here the fastening was altogether more secure, but Mr Pardew had his cylinder, and an ingenious instrument made of flattened steel but with a ridge along its side, which he inserted into the space between the door and its frame: in another five minutes the lock snapped open and they tumbled into the room.
‘Great heavens!’ said Mr Pardew, almost to himself. ‘Great heavens indeed.’
Lythgoe caught the note of wonder in his voice. They were standing, as they now saw, in a single, windowless room, lit by the blazing lights of half a dozen gas jets turned up to their fullest extent. This, allied to the three or four carefully angled mirrors that hung upon the far wall, gave the place a fantastic air, as if it would not be wonderful to see piles of precious stones heaped on the floor and a dragon coiled beside them. The safe – a squat metal box, four feet square – stood on a plinth in the very centre. Mr Pardew did not at first approach it. He was taking a survey of the room, noting the angle of the mirrors, searching for the observation slit which he knew let out into the street and could be looked into by anyone passing down Cornhill who had a mind to stare. Having located it, six feet up on the further wall, Mr Pardew’s first act was to turn down the gas jets to the point where they made the overall complexion of the room soft red rather than bright orange. This done, he took another look at the mirrors and then at Lythgoe, who was brushing the brick-dust from his shirtfront with stiff little jerks of his white hand.
‘Now,’ Mr Pardew said equably – he might have been assisting Lythgoe to negus at a buffet – ‘there is nothing you can do here. You had better go back the way we have come and wait in the street.’
‘And what am I to do if a policeman comes?’
‘You may stop looking like a rabbit when it sees a fox. The police come by each half-hour. I have made a study of it. Up from Leadenhall Street. When you see one, give a whistle and then find an alley to hide in until he has passed.’
‘What if you don’t hear?’
‘Why then, we shall find ourselves in Pentonville,’ Mr Pardew said, more equably than ever. ‘Now be off. In five minutes I intend to begin.’
Lythgoe disappeared. Mr Pardew heard the noise of his retreat: the door slamming in the passage; a faint pattering of feet below; a distant scuffling which seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, but which he knew marked his descent into the poulterer’s cellar. Mr Pardew waited until the sounds had faded away almost to nothing and then, with a sigh that had something in it of pleasure mixed with profound anxiety, turned his attention to the safe. Like the lock he had disposed of a few moments before, it was not unknown to him. Unlike the lock, he did not quite know at first what he should do with it. He had a suspicion that his cylinder, and his metal contrivance, would be useless with this behemoth of Mr Milner’s devising, and so it proved. The first cylinder he pushed into the lock snapped when he tried to extract it. As for the metal plate, he could not even insert it between the door of the safe and the cast-iron frame. Listening all the while for noises from the street, Mr Pardew reached into his carpet-bag and drew out a small hammer and a couple of thin iron wedges, so thin that they were no more than the size of wafers. These, by dint of a prodigious blow or two, he succeeded in driving into the gap between the door and the wall of the safe. The lock naturally held firm, but Mr Pardew thought that he saw an inconsiderable space where the gap might be thought to have widened.
Encouraged, Mr Pardew took out three more wedges, put the first two in his mouth and hammered in the third, a little further down the door-frame but still not within a foot of the lock. As he did this, a low whistle sounded from beyond the wall, and Mr Pardew instantly dropped to his knees and shuffled away to what he judged to be the safest part of the room – the area immediately below the observation slit. Presently there came a sound of footsteps, a silence, and then the noise of the same footsteps moving away. Mr Pardew counted to thirty, wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the flat of his hand and then went back to inspect the safe. In the soft light it looked unblemished, but Mr Pardew’s eye, turning repeatedly on that tiny gap between door and frame, saw that it had widened. For the next half-hour, until another whistle sounded from the street, he went on hammering in wedges. Then, when he went back to examine his handiwork, he saw that the space between door and frame was perhaps a quarter of an inch.
Mr Pardew glanced at his watch and found it was nearly ten o’clock. A part of him told himself that he ought to rest, that he had a whole day and another night before him if he wanted it, but another part of him counselled urgency. He fancied that Lythgoe, if left to his own devices for too long, might very well lose his head, or at any rate draw attention to himself in a way that might imperil the whole enterprise. There was a mirror near at hand, and Mr Pardew stared at his face in it, saw his red eyes and jutting jaw and wished himself at home at Shepherd’s Inn. Then he took another handful of wedges and began to hammer them home. In this way a great stretch of time seemed to pass, but still Mr Pardew hammered, aware as he did so that that there had been no whistle from the street. Then, almost at once, three things happened: a clock began to chime the midnight; the gap between the uppermost part of the door and its frame was found to have widened to half an inch; and, advertising his arrival by way of a series of scuffling noises down in the building’s heart, Lythgoe appeared in the doorway.
‘What is it?’ Mr Pardew demanded, his mouth full of wedges.
‘There hasn’t been no policeman for an hour and a half,’ Lythgoe said. ‘So I thought I should come back.’ He seemed utterly woebegone, saw the safe with the gap opening up in its frame, and shrank back from it with a look of absolute terror.
‘There are some nights when the police stop their patrols,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘Very shocking to a law-abiding man, I know, but there you are. If no one has gone by for an hour and a half, I should think we are pretty safe. Great heavens, man, what is the matter?’
Lythgoe was still staring at the safe. ‘I am innocent of this,’ he said. ‘It was you that made me do it – you and that Captain Raff. And that’s what I shall tell anyone that asks me.’
‘You had better hand me that bag,’ Mr Pardew said, ‘and stop talking about your innocence.’
And so the night went on. No doubt the police had stopped their patrols. By two o’clock the gap between the door of the safe and the wall had widened to the point where Mr Pardew could begin to insert a series of much larger wedges into it. By three, the wall of the safe had been forced su
bstantially apart from the lock, and Mr Pardew brought out his ‘alderman’, the sectioned iron bar against which it was thought that no safe in Christendom could hold out. Lythgoe lay sprawled asleep on the floor, insensible to the noise of the hammer blows, with the red brick-dust still sprinkling his face. Outside there was pale early summer light gently diffusing through the City streets. At ten minutes to five, when the contents of the safe could be plainly seen through the all but shattered door, Mr Pardew gave a final blow and then laughed. Mr Chubb’s finest, that no cracksman had ever been able to get the better of, sprang open.
Another man would have instantly plunged his hands into the safe, but Mr Pardew’s composure held and he sank down into a sitting position. He was immensely tired. He knew, too, that there was no reason for him to hurry – that hurry, in fact, might be fatal to his chances of avoiding detection. Accordingly he was very prudent and careful. He tidied up the floor a little and removed one or two odd pieces of debris. He counted the wedges back into his carpet-bag and turned up the gas jets. Finally he turned his head towards the safe, inspected what he saw there, gave a little snort of exaltation and began to fill his pockets from the trays of jewellery that lay within. Occasionally he held a particular item up to the light, the better to appraise it. This done, he pushed the door of the safe – very battered it was now, and altogether knocked out of shape – back into position. Mr Pardew wondered whether the extent of its damage would be visible to anyone looking in from the street and decided that the answer was very probably not. With luck, no one would be any the wiser until the strongroom was opened the following morning. As he stepped back from the safe, patting the pocket of his coat, Lythgoe came awake.