by D. J. Taylor
The safe key is, of course, kept locked up in a repository on the premises. The key to this is in the sole possession of Mr. Chapman.
I should add that in addition to the precautions here outlined, the pier is patrolled by the police on a regular basis during the hours of daylight.
I shall be delighted to supply you with any further information that you or other members of the board may require.
Having the honour to remain your obedient servant,
I am, sir, yours most faithfully,
J. HARKER
Secretary to the Board
A disinterested observer, travelling down to Dover by way of Folkestone on the train from London Bridge that afternoon, would perhaps have observed the following. Mr. Pardew and his clerk stepped into their carriage together—indeed the latter held the carriage door open for the former—but it could not be deduced from these civilities that they knew each other, nor that they were connected by any object other than their journey. During this transit Mr. Pardew read a newspaper, made calculations with a bit of old pencil in a notebook and grasped his stick with a remorselessness that suggested the slightest loosening of his grip would see it dance off down the corridor. Grace, alternatively, looked out of the window, admired a young lady in a muslin frock being escorted to the seaside by an old gentleman in a billycock hat and finally went to sleep with his mouth open, much to his employer’s secret disgust.
At Folkestone, where the sea breeze blew in across the platform and the young lady in the muslin frock, looking delightfully fresh-cheeked, clutched her straw hat anxiously to her head, it could have been assumed that there was some slight relationship between them, for they set off together in the direction of the town—or rather Mr. Pardew stalked a yard or two in front while Grace strolled meekly in his wake, Mr. Pardew throwing back certain remarks over his shoulder which his clerk either did or did not catch depending on the severity of the breeze. In truth, as the train had left London Bridge the confidence that Mr. Pardew habitually felt in his abilities had altogether deserted him. He was aware that the mission on which he was now embarked involved a considerable risk, and the thought frightened him. He was also aware that he could not allow himself to impart any of these misgivings to Grace. In this way, Mr. Pardew brooding with his eyes seeming to bore into the very surface of the road, Grace moving jauntily through the crowds of people pressing back and forth from the esplanade, they came eventually to the Pavilion Hotel, where Mr. Pardew, having checked his watch and assured himself that the steamer would not be docking for a further two hours, proposed that they might eat an early dinner. For myself, I like nothing better than to dine early on a day in summer in sight of the sea, but I do not think that Mr. Pardew enjoyed his meal. Certainly, he was surly with the waiter and, having eaten his broiled fowl, lapsed altogether into silence. Grace, on the other hand, gave every impression of relishing the food that was set before him, ordered an extra chop and sent word to the orchestra—the Pavilion is a select establishment—asking, would they play “Garryowen”?
Presently a ship’s horn sounded in the distance. Mr. Pardew broke out of his reverie, looked suspiciously across the table as if he could not imagine how the plates, serving dishes and glasses had got there, called for the bill and paid it. As he and his companion strolled through the hotel foyer into the busy high street and thence in the direction of the pier, it could be observed that Grace’s demeanour had altogether changed, that he kept close to his employer and that certain words were spoken of which he took precise note. The pier, when they came to it, was thronged with people: passengers for the steamer, with porters bringing their baggage behind them, townsfolk come to patronise the refreshment rooms. At the further end they could see the grey bulk of the steamer moving slowly towards its mooring place. Mr. Pardew’s spirits rose, for he knew that a crowd was as advantageous to his schemes as solitude.
At the same time, the scheme was dependent on a precise set of circumstances whose existence he could not at all guarantee. Thinking to reconnoitre, and indicating to Grace that he should remain a short distance behind him, he moved forward along the pier, walking quickly but affecting to take an interest in the lemonade stalls and the souvenir shops. Five minutes spent in this way brought him to the railway office. Here the press of people was less great, enabling him without difficulty to observe that the outer door was ajar and that a clerk in a railway company uniform was stationed at a counter within. Having noted this fact, and then turned his head to examine the hovering gulls and the grey sweep of the sea, Mr. Pardew proceeded a little further along the pier, almost to the point where the docking apparatus began and men in oilskins and woollen jerseys stood ready to set about their business. Here the line of shops and stalls gave way to bare deck, and he was able to stand with his arms on the pier rail (Grace, meanwhile, occupying a similar position a dozen yards away) apparently entranced by the heaving deeps before and beyond him, but in fact keeping one eye on the pier walk that he had just traversed. He had been there but a moment or so when two railway officials came walking up very rapidly towards the steamer. Mr. Pardew waited another moment until they had passed, still staring out over the grey horizon, and then, lifting his face skywards with the expression of one who delights in the briny air, walked purposefully back in the direction he had come. As he had anticipated, he found the railway office shut up and the outer door firmly closed and locked. Observing that there were several people in the near vicinity, Mr. Pardew made a great show of trying the door and feigning exasperation when it did not yield.
“Why it’s too bad,” he exclaimed to Grace, who had taken up a position at the pier rail. “The place is closed.”
“We shall have to wait, I suppose,” Grace answered him. “That’s all there is to it.”
Having, as he saw it, established his bona fides—those of a traveller frustrated by the absence of officialdom—Mr. Pardew lingered a foot or so in front of the heavy oak door. To anyone passing it would have seemed that he was studying a notice advertising sailing times and tariffs. In fact, Mr. Pardew was examining the lock. This, as he had suspected, was a substantial affair but primitive, consisting of a narrow opening and a spindle, over which the hollow of the railway officials’ key would fit like a glove over a finger. Round this spindle were eight iron sliders pressed forward to the mouth of the lock by a spring. Each slider, Mr. Pardew knew from certain other investigations he had undertaken in this line, had a tiny knob whose position corresponded with a notch in the central spindle. The key, consequently, would push each slider back to the point where the knobs and notches were in line. Mr. Pardew had no key, but, he assured himself, he had a means of establishing how such a key would operate. Still training his eye on the notice, but reaching the while into his inner pocket, he drew out the tobacco pouch and delved inside. Moving the metal cylinders into his hand, he slid first one then the other into the lock, then turned them slowly against the enclosing metal barrel until he felt them rub against the eight notches of the sliders.
“There is no sign of anybody,” Grace now called out to him. “We had best away, I daresay.”
Mr. Pardew nodded. With the pouch now stowed back in his coat pocket, he stood back and took a last look at the notice. Then he sauntered across to join Grace at the rail, and the two men walked back along the pier. Here they conducted a conversation which, had it been overheard by any passerby, would doubtless have puzzled this eavesdropper by its obliquity.
“Smoked?” Grace enquired.
“A tolerable job, I think,” Mr. Pardew allowed. “I did not care to see whether the marks corresponded. We had better go somewhere out of the way and assure ourselves.”
“Mr. File knows what he’s about,” Grace remarked. “And then if it don’t fit exact, we can always sand it down.”
Mr. Pardew laughed grimly at his clerk’s presumption of expertise. “As you say,” he observed, “we can always sand it down.”
A BRIEF MEDITATION ON KEYS BY MR. ROBT. GRACE
/>
We had come a fair way, I will allow, but not far enough. We had a key that would open the door of the railway office, but that was all we had, and a day spent in there might not have been enough to get what we wanted. But then Mr. P. as is a clever man, whatever else may be said of him, hit upon a plan. It was this: that he should send himself a box of a hundred golden sovereigns by the South-Eastern Railway to Folkestone, to be collected from the railway office on the harbour pier. This to be sent down at the weekend, when there was no shipment to Paris and the safe, as we reckoned, would travel straight back to town. This was done—I took the receipt myself for an old cash box with the money in it—and Mr. P. goes down to Folkestone, in a frock coat and a silk hat, for it’s as well to play the gentleman in a game like this, to collect it back. A quiet Sunday forenoon, you understand, with the folks at church and no one about and just the one clerk—as Mr. P. had wagered—in the office. What has the clerk to do? Why, he has to get the cash box from the safe, while Mr. P. stands and waits in the office. Nothing there for him to steal, is there? In any case Mr. P.’s a fine gentleman in a silk hat, and he ain’t a-going to be taking halfpence out of the charity box, is he? So the clerk fishes a key out of his pocket, unlocks a cupboard on the wall, takes out another key—this one opens the second lock of the safe—and goes off to do his duty. When he comes back, there’s Mr. P. still a-standing at the counter looking as cool as you please. Opens up the box, looks over the gold, sees it’s all there, signs another receipt and goes back to his ‘otel. What the clerk don’t know is that Mr. P. has the tin of green wax in his coat pocket with the line of the wall cupboard key pressed into it neat as neat.
We don’t need no Mr. File for that key, bless you. Any die sinker as knows his trade could make you a twin brother of that in half an hour. So now we has the key to the door and the key to the cupboard where they keeps the thing we truly wants. Two weeks later Mr. P. and me are on our way to Folkestone again. It’s remarkable how regular a gentleman like Mr. P. needs a touch of sea air to keep his spirits up, ain’t it? To be sure, Pearce has been with us—that’s a conniving scoundrel as I’m sure you’ll know—and I’ve a railwayman’s uniform over my arm. It don’t fit me, but who’s to know it’s not mine, eh? When we get to Folkestone Mr. P. asks for the use of a bedroom at an inn, and I go up and put it on. As we come down we hear the boom of the steamer horn. Sure enough, hurrying along the pier in the dark it’s to find the clerks gone and the office locked up. Well, Mr. P. gives me the key to the outer door, and before you can say jingo I’m opening up the wall cupboard with the key that lies in its lock. There inside is the key to the safe lying on a little saucer as a man might lay a teacup on. Half a moment later and I’m outside again, looking very serious and official-like. Heavens, I even stop to tell an old lady the time of the next steamer sailing, though my heart’s jumping into my mouth all the time. Mr. P. has his tin to hand, to be sure, and before you can say jingo again I’m locking up the cupboard with it safe back inside. Then I fastens up the outer door, and we’re away off down the pier again like a couple of sports with nothing on their mind but the path to the beer ‘ouse. And yet it was a narrow-run thing, sir—those clerks coming back from the steamer can’t have missed us by more than a few minutes—and I wouldn’t do it again for all the guineas in Christendom.
XXI
A MORNING IN THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN McTURK
About halfway along Northumberland Avenue, not very far from Charing Cross Station, reached by means of a tight little archway whose ancient flagstones have veered this way and that like pieces of crazy paving, hard by a stable yard whose ostlers must be the least occupied in all London, in that they are never seen to move from the hay-strewn approach to their place of work, waiting for horses that never come, lies a tiny square composed of small buildings in lugubrious grey brick. In one of these, shined by way of two flights of gloomy stairs, a long polished oak corridor and an anteroom tenanted by a neat, side-whiskered secretary, sits Captain McTurk. The public these days has romantic notions of the senior officers of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police Force. If they are not lithe-limbed young men with cold grey eyes capable of wresting a vital clue from a dung heap at a second’s glance, then they are picturesque, snuff-taking ancients, hearty and comfortable yet thinking nothing of pursuing the doughtiest villain across, let us say, a couple of rooftops to grapple with him finally upon the pinnacle of St. Paul’s. Captain McTurk belonged to neither of these categories. He was a tall, somewhat spare man in middle age, clean-shaven, with hair cropped very close to his scalp and with a prominent chin that no amount of razoring would ever quite keep clear of stubble.
How Captain McTurk had conducted himself in his previous life nobody quite knew, but he had occupied his present position for nearly ten years and it was said that his criminal adversaries, those gentlemen whose portraits appear with such startling regularity in the Police Gazette, were very anxious that he should cease to occupy it. The public these days has romantic notions of how the senior officers of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police Force spend their time. If they are not routing out continental revolutionaries from their nests among the Soho attics, then they are attending upon the Home Secretary and establishing the security of the Royal person against the attentions of sundry garroters and pistol-wielding assailants. Again, Captain McTurk was engaged in neither of these duties. Just at this moment he was sitting in his room with a cup of tea on the deal table before him examining the pile of post which, neatly opened, assembled and docketed, had lately been brought in to him on a tray by his secretary.
There was no letter from the Home Secretary. In fact the topmost communication on the first pile that Captain McTurk turned his attention to consisted of a complaint concerning an old woman who kept a toll bridge at Chiswick, which missive I am afraid to say that he crumpled up with his hand and flung into a wastepaper basket. The second packet, however, interested him greatly, so much so that he pushed the tray to one side as a way of making sufficient space to inspect its contents. The packet—in truth a substantial parcel—had been addressed to Captain McTurk by the police superintendent of Suffolk. It contained a life preserver, something over twelve inches in length, fashioned out of a wood that Captain McTurk could not identify, so thick was the layer of varnish, weighted with lead at one end so cunningly that it was almost impossible to determine where the wood ended and the lead began. All in all it was a fearsome-looking weapon. Seeking to test its efficacy, Captain McTurk picked it up in his right hand and tapped smartly on the surface of his desk. To his surprise, for he had put no force into the blow, the glass veneer of the desk broke instantly into a dozen fragments. After this Captain McTurk put the life preserver back into its covering and applied himself to the letter which had accompanied it.
The weapon, he now learned, had been picked up by a farm labourer from beneath a bush on the road between Woodbridge and Wenhaston. Having seen nothing like it before, knowing that such things were not likely to be the property of respectable citizens yet unable to connect it to any misdemeanour of which he was himself aware, the Suffolk superintendent now offered it to Captain McTurk with his compliments. Putting down the letter and at the same time sweeping aside certain fragments of glass, Captain McTurk retrieved the life preserver from its wrappings and turned it over once more in his hands. He too, though familiar with every kind of nefarious weaponry, had seen nothing like it before, but he was aware that a blow delivered with it to a human limb would result in fracture and a blow to a human skull most likely result in death. Still holding the life preserver in his right hand, Captain McTurk picked up the letter once more and read again the names of Woodbridge and Wenhaston. He was conscious as he did so, without being in any way able to verify the sensation, of some memory stirring within him, of something that he had read or mused over that had some bearing—he did not quite know what—on this discovery. Having pondered this for a few moments more, he pressed a bell on the side of his desk and summoned his assistant to
attend him.
The assistant, whose name was Masterson, surveying the broken glass, but knowing that Captain McTurk was not generally prone to offer explanations of his behaviour, remarked merely, “There seems to have been some kind of accident, sir.”
“Accident? I suppose there has been. You had better send someone up here with a broom.”
Masterson having promised that someone should be sent, Captain McTurk placed the life preserver on the desk before him.
“Did you ever see anything like this before?”
The assistant, on whose professional skills Captain McTurk was accustomed to rely, weighed the instrument in his hand.
“Well, no. I never did. It is foreign, I should say.”
“Would you now?”
“Well, I should doubt it was made in Shoreditch. Or anywhere else around London. Look at those hieroglyphics or whatever they are around the base. Where did it come from?”
Captain McTurk explained about the farm labourer and his discovery on the high road between Woodbridge and Wenhaston.
“Do you know where the London Library is in St. James’s Square?”
Masterson acknowledged that he did.
“Well, perhaps you’d oblige me by stepping round there and seeing if they keep a file of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Say from the December of three years past to the December of two. But it may be that my memory is at fault.”
Masterson remarked politely that he doubted it and went off on his errand. When he had gone, Captain McTurk locked the life preserver inside a little safe which reposed in a cupboard on the far side of the room and contained a great deal of material evidence gathered over the years, while placing it metaphorically in a compartment in his mind where it could lie undisturbed but be hastily retrieved when the occasion demanded it, and went back to his letters. Outside the clock chimed eleven, the ostlers in the stable yard continued to linger in the most hopeful manner, a janitor climbed up from the depths of the establishment to clear away the smashed glass and shake his head at the destruction, but Captain McTurk paid none of them any heed. One leg twisted awkwardly over the other, a cigar smoking between his fingers, the bristle on his chin waxing bluer by the moment in the soft spring light that now began to infiltrate the room, he continued to tear through his correspondence and the packets that various of his subordinates had thought worthy of his attention.