by D. J. Taylor
Let us say, to amuse ourselves, that Mr. Frith has set up his easel on the concourse of London Bridge Station on this quiet summer’s evening, here among the rows of kiosks and the bookstall women selling copies of the Cornhill and Bell’s Life and ninepenny novels and waxing ever more discontented, it being past eight and the workday crowds mostly departed. What does he see? A couple of small boys, indescribably dirty and depraved, playing at peg top at the summit of a flight of stone steps, several old women bent on mysterious errands at the sausage and pie shops, certain of those vague-looking persons, very dilapidated in the hat and footwear department, who will always infiltrate themselves into scenes of this kind. One passingly dramatic event Mr. Frith will have missed, seeing that he has only just begun to set out his materials, is the arrival, hot from the City half an hour since, pulled by a pair of sweating horses, of a covered wagon at whose appearance two railway policemen instantly emerged and began to help its custodians unload a pair of crates into the stationmaster’s office. That gentleman stands at his door now, under the eye of the station clock and a severe-looking lady in a black coat with turban to match, and no doubt Mr. Frith would cast an appreciative glance over the brass buttons of his waistcoat and the jet profusion of his whiskers. Others are there on whom Mr. Frith’s hand would perhaps pause: an old clergyman in gaiters and a suit of black with a copy of Fraser’s under his arm looking very studiously at the printed timetable that hangs under glass on the wall beside the stationmaster’s door; three or four young ladies in dove-grey travelling dresses and sober bonnets being whisked out of the waiting room by a hard-faced old woman who could be anything from the headmistress of their school to the embittered old housekeeper of their aunt. A train stands waiting—the Dover train (via Folkestone), the mail train heading down to the steamer packet—at the nearby platform, all wreathed in vapour with its furnace banked up and a couple of workmen busily shovelling coal onto its fuel stack, but the old duenna pays it no heed and whips her charges away at the point of a little umbrella to a distant bench beyond the reach of engine fumes and artist’s palette alike.
In their wake, though, step a pair of gentlemen with whom Mr. Frith might if he cared do marvels: the one clad in black with curious side-whiskers and a prognathous jaw bearing a stick—fiercely—and a travelling bag in his hand; the other, burly and red-faced, burdened by the weight of a couple more such containers. What is in those bags? Whatever it is, the burly man is uneasy about them, gives them anxious little glances and fiddles nervously with their straps. To be sure, there is something faintly mysterious about these persons. The same cab brought them to the station—can be seen, in fact, on the further side of the concourse rattling off towards the Borough—but it could not be said that either knew or acknowledged the other. Are they here to catch a train? Certainly, he of the side-whiskers and the jutting jaw has gone off to inspect the framed timetable and shake his stick in the direction of the ticket office, but the burly man merely drops his burden at his feet (and no end of a thump can be heard on the stones) and stands guard over it, mopping his brow with a handkerchief and generally looking for all the world as if the bags contained a couple of alligators taken from the reptile house at the zoo.
The hands of the station clock have now moved to within a few moments of half past eight, which is the hour of the Dover train’s departure. A few passengers are already moving briskly along the platform, but there seems some doubt as to whether the brandisher of the stick and the custodian of the travelling bags shall join them. The former is now standing before the station bookstall, poring over that month’s Cornhill as if it contained fresh instalments of the Scriptures and a man would jeopardise his soul by not reading them, while the latter looks almost wildly about him, first at the waiting train, then at the station clock, then at the platform edge, but never, it must be noted, at the figure by the bookstall. A guard arrives out of nowhere—a fat, ill-favoured man with the most melancholy face you ever saw—looks around him once or twice and in a curious gesture—curious in that the doing of it seems to perplex him rather—taps the peak of his broad cap a couple of times with his forefinger. By now it is wanting a minute and a half to half past eight.
Galvanised by some mysterious agency, both our gentlemen can be seen hastening to the ticket office. Are those first-class tickets they have bought? Certainly, the burly gentleman goes and arranges himself in a first-class carriage, staring nervously at a porter—a gloomy porter who thinks it surprising that three travelling bags can weigh so much—who carries those items off to the luggage van. But as for the other gentleman, what can he be doing? First he strolls along the platform, glancing to right and left as if waiting for someone to join him. Then he doubles back, as if the object of his quest lies behind one of the monstrous pillars supporting the station roof. The sad-eyed guard, by this time, is traversing the platform ringing his bell to signal the train’s departure. A few seconds now until half past eight. The great wheels have begun to grind and a hellish mechanical noise to drive out all human interventions. The guard has clambered up into his compartment that abuts the luggage van, where he stands peering melancholically out into the murk, and still the sharp-jawed man lingers a yard or so away. He will turn back and retreat to his pillar—no, he sees an acquaintance at the platform’s further end and is hailing him through the smoke. But no, there is no one there.
The train has begun to roll slowly yet inexorably forward. The guard, half-hidden in the billowing, ever-ascending vapour, gives another confidential tap on the peaked brim of his cap with the tip of his forefinger, and the sharp-jawed man, belying the impression of age implied by his silvery whiskers, makes a bound and a leap and is swallowed up by the guard’s compartment as it rocks by, so that Mr. Frith, if he sat still at his easel (but that there is no one there and the platform empty), might wonder where he had gone and how a man can vanish into thin air on a railway platform in the middle of the evening of a summer’s day.
STATEMENT BY SAMUEL SPRAGG, RAILWAY POLICEMAN
A message came through to our post from Messrs. Abell in the City about seven that a shipment would be travelling down to Folkestone on the mail train. This was quite in the usual way of things. Constable Harlow and I attended. Again, this was customary on such occasions. The bullion boxes were taken from the wagon all sealed up in red wax and then taken into the stationmaster’s office, and Mr. Sellings will tell you the same.
STATEMENT BY JAMES SELLINGS, STATIONMASTER, LONDON BRIDGE
The first I knew of it was when the van pulled up before my door. That is quite usual. There is never notice given, as Mr. Smiles will tell you. Three chests according to my signed document, the one weighing 98 lb., the other 92¾ lb., the third the same to within an ounce or so—look, it is written down here. They are bound in iron and take two men to carry them. After weighing, the chests were taken to the luggage van, Sergeant Spragg and Constable Harlow attending, and fastened up by Mr. Dauntsey and myself, using our separate keys, in the third of the three safes. I have done my duty in the matter and can say no more.
STATEMENT BY PETER DAUNTSEY, ASSISTANT STATIONMASTER, LONDON BRIDGE
The seals were unbroken, as I remarked, it being a particular duty of mine at this time.
Mr. Pardew sat alone in the luggage van, feeling the train roll under him. Behind the half-open door a few feet away to his right he could glimpse chimney tops, slatted roofs, the silvery grey of the river. The sight reassured him, for he knew that they must be travelling across the arches above Tooley Street. Drawing himself up to his feet and resting one hand on the metal stanchion that rose from the floor of the compartment to its ceiling, he began to say something to Dewar, speaking loudly above the roar of the wheels and ceasing only when he found that the man had gone. Gingerly, for he was conscious that a false move would send him plunging to his death beneath the arches, he reached out and fastened the door. This action both diminished the volume of noise and brought home to him the reality of his position. There was an o
il lamp to hand, which Dewar had left, this he secured and lit before looking about him. At the far end of the compartment, a little apart from the handful of cases and travelling portmanteaux, he could see the three squat safes side by side against the wall. There was something about them—some quality in the dull gleam of the metal—that made him wish to reach out and touch them, but something else, too, that stayed his hand. Standing irresolute on the moving boards, he realised that he was struck with terror, and that, curiously, it was a terror of an abstract sort, and that its effect, though it remained with him always, was to displace the chief anxiety that occupied his mind and substitute it with other, lesser horrors that now came crowding in on him.
The first of these, he now acknowledged, was that he found Grace—Grace’s presence, Grace’s familiarities—intolerable. Whatever else might occur as a result of the night’s work, he would have done with Bob Grace, and whether or not there remained an office in Carter Lane, Grace would certainly no longer sit in it with him. The thought cheered him, even though the greater terror still lurked behind it, and he consoled himself with it for a while, reaching as he did so for the travelling bags and, with a good deal of exertion, manoeuvring them to a place on the compartment floor about a yard from the three safes. There should be no more Grace to fret and trouble him—no, he should see to that. And then some queer remembrance, brought into his head perhaps by the glimpse of the rooftops of Tooley Street, stirred in his mind, and he recalled out of some distant corner of his bygone life a schoolyard, with grey stone walls abutting a landscape of low, forlorn hills, and himself in it, and an old gentleman whom Mr. Pardew had not thought of for thirty years saying something to him, and Mr. Pardew shuddered at the recollection, silent for a moment, with his hand over the clasp of the nearest travelling bag, until the sound of footfalls woke him from his reverie.
At the sight of Grace, whose arms and legs seemed not quite sure of themselves in this confined space and whose face appeared to have squeezed itself into all manner of unnatural corrugations, the old gentleman and the schoolyard with its grey stone walls vanished instantly.
“Gracious heavens, man, you are drunk! You were at an alehouse before we came here. Is it not so?”
“Sir, I swear it’s not. I’m as sober as Father Mathew. Indeed I am.”
“I’ll have no blacklegging, do you hear? You knew what this was about when we began it, and you shall stick to me.”
Grace said something in an undertone, doubtless to the effect that there would be no blacklegging and he would stick by him.
“Now then,” Mr. Pardew remarked, more mildly. “We shall get on very well if you do exactly as I say. What is the time?”
“Twenty-five minutes wanting to the hour.”
“And Pearce and Latch?”
“Off in the cab half an hour since.”
“You have seen Dewar?”
“Passed him in the corridor as I came by from first class, and gave him a nod.”
Mr. Pardew nodded his head in acknowledgement of this. He knew that a bare thirty minutes was allowed to him for the accomplishment of the first part of his scheme, but he knew also that the chance of its succeeding was now immeasurably enhanced. In half an hour the train would stop at Redhill, its first port of call. In that time, if he applied himself to his task, he could achieve a great deal. Reaching into the first of the travelling bags, he drew out, one by one, an assortment of items carefully assembled by him in Carter Lane three hours before. A pair of pincers, a two-pound hammer, several boxwood wedges, a pair of scales (the last abstracted on the previous evening from the kitchen in St. John’s Wood)—each followed the other onto a square of green baize cloth which Mr. Pardew had first laid out on the compartment floor. In so doing, he also laid bare the mystery of the cases’ great weight. Each was crammed to the rims with quantities of lead shot bound up in paper packets. It was beautiful to see Mr. Pardew do this. He had the look of a craftsman, a blacksmith arranging his tools before the forge, an artist, even, bringing out his brushes and mixing a preliminary mess or two on his palette, and the consciousness that there was an artistry in what he did gave a flourish to his movements. And yet mingling with this was the sensation of absolute terror and foreboding: not that he might be discovered but that some crucial element in his scheme might be found wanting.
Two or three times in the deployment of his little armoury Mr. Pardew felt his hand straying towards the pocket of his coat. But he had a superstitious delight in completing tasks in what he conceived to be their proper order, and each time he managed to concentrate his mind on this preordained sequence. Finally, when the pincers, the hammer, the boxwood wedges and the scales (on which the flour of yesterday’s baking still lingered) lay upon the green baize square, he fished inside the pocket, scrabbling his fingers into the cloth in his anxiety, and drew out a pair of keys. Apprehending that only one of the safes was fastened, he quickly inserted first one then the other key into their locks. There was a second’s pause, during which Mr. Pardew tugged determinedly on the second key. Then the door of the safe swung open.
Grace, who had monitored the operations on the green baize square in a state of glassy-eyed bewilderment, like a man who watches a conjuror produce rabbits out of a tall hat previously exhibited as empty, contorted his face into an expression so extraordinary that Mr. Pardew, busy as he was about his work in the flicker of the lamplight, could hardly fail to notice it.
“What is it?”
“What if somebody comes?”
“Nobody will come. Dewar has the key. Did you not hear it turn a moment or so ago? We are sealed in until such time as he releases us. Well then?” For he saw that Grace’s gaze was still bent in fascination on the interior of the safe.
“A man,” Grace said slowly, not looking at Mr. Pardew as he spoke but at the floor, the ceiling and several other places besides, “a man could be hanged for this, surely?”
“Transported rather. This is not a capital offence, I believe.”
“I wonder you can take it so easy!”
“If we do not look to ourselves, there shall be no offence committed, and then we shall go back to London cursing ourselves for fools. You had better hand down one of those boxes, indeed you had.”
With an effort, the muscles of his arms straining beneath his black coat, Grace tumbled the first of the three bullion chests out of the safe. The chests, he saw, were stoutly made, each circled by an iron band secured to the wood by rivets, and locked fast. The puzzle of how his employer might be able to break his way into the first of these sanctums rose suddenly in his mind, and for a moment he watched with interest as Mr. Pardew, holding the pincers in his left hand while his right felt for the iron band, sized up his quarry. The pincers, Grace again saw, had been filed fine, so fine as to render them useless for most ordinary work. And yet, as Mr. Pardew twisted with them here and there, Grace divined that they were remarkably efficacious in raising the rivets an inch or so from the wood in which they were embedded, and that such a raising had the additional advantage of causing the lock to lose its reinforcement. Within a short time, and working with what seemed to Grace particular dexterity, Mr. Pardew had conjured into existence a crack—not large but of sufficient magnitude for a man to be able to insert a sovereign into it—between the lid of the lower part of the chest at its front. Then, taking four of the boxwood wedges in one hand and the two-pound hammer in the other, he belaboured them into place in such a way that, when the fourth had been secured, he could jar the lock free from the lid.
Mr. Pardew, as he worked, was conscious of two things. The first was Grace’s admiring stare, which, even though he despised the man, was not uncongenial to him. The second was a desperate anxiety lest in the heat of his task he should damage the chest. Knowing that the lock would be inspected, however casually, when the train reached Folkestone, he was careful to make it seem to appear intact. Neither did he allow any of the boxwood wedges to produce a crack that could not be hidden when the chest was
resealed. It seemed to him, what with his admonition of Grace and the cautiousness of his preparations, that he had been at work for an hour at least, yet a glance at his watch assured him that a bare five minutes had passed. He gave a final tap with his hammer at the fourth boxwood wedge, shook the lock with a little craftsman’s twist of his fingers, and prised open the lid.
“D——n my eyes,” Grace said.
“D——n them indeed,” Mr. Pardew observed. Once in the course of some earlier professional undertaking—not, as it happened, a criminal one—he had been invited to inspect a stack of bullion bars in a bank vault. There had been a dozen of them, of no great size, smeared over with some kind of wax used in their manufacture, and Mr. Pardew, respectful though he was of the sum of money they represented, had not been overly impressed. Here, on the other hand, were perhaps fifty, each the size of a tobacco pouch, lying in four neat rows. Mr. Pardew took one in his hand and placed it on the set of scales. The result confirmed to him something that his eye had already judged: that in the first of Messrs. Abell, Spielmann & Bult’s chests lay something like a hundredweight of gold. If Mr. Pardew’s inner self exulted in this fact, he was careful not to let the external self show it. He merely set hastily yet methodically to work, removing the gold bars in handfuls, placing them into the first and smallest of the travelling bags, while calculating in his mind the weight of lead shot needed to replace them. When the bag was full and the exact equivalent of shot had been substituted for the purloined gold, Mr. Pardew consulted his watch. Assuring himself that perhaps ten minutes remained until the train arrived at Redhill, he carefully closed the robbed chest, hammered down the iron bands and tapped each of the rivets back into place. Then, from the pocket of his coat, he produced a taper, a stick of red wax and some circular discs of metal.
“What’s them then?” Grace wondered.