by D. J. Taylor
“Dies,” Mr. Pardew told him, beginning to melt the stick of wax over the flame of the oil lamp and allowing the liquid to drip down onto the first of the metal discs. “No one will know these ain’t the merchants’ stamps, not on Folkestone quay at dead of night, but sealed up they must be or what we’ve been about will be plain to everyone.”
Almost at the moment that he restored the first of the bullion chests to the safe, Mr. Pardew was aware that the engine was beginning to lose speed. Extinguishing the lamp, he stood up, stretched his arms to their fullest extent and pushed the heavily laden travelling case into the centre of the floor.
“We shall be in Redhill in a moment. You had better crouch down in that corner—there, where the safe comes closest to the wall.”
Grace did as he was bidden. Joining him, Mr. Pardew found that the corner of the compartment contained several pieces of ancient sacking. These they draped over themselves and lay half concealed in the darkness. Presently, as the engine slowed almost to a halt, they heard a key turn in the lock and became aware of Dewar stepping into the compartment. He did not exactly acknowledge their presence but could be heard moving cautiously to the door and throwing it open. There was a pause, a great hiss of steam from further down the platform and the noise of footsteps. “Where is it then?” Pearce’s voice enquired softly out of the darkness. There was a thud and an exclamation, as of some heavy object being propelled into the arms of one who is startled by its weight. No more than a few seconds later, it seemed to the persons concealed beyond the safe, the door had been pulled shut once more and the engine was moving off into the night.
Throwing off his coat of sacking, Mr. Pardew reignited the lamp with a sulphur match and turned again towards the safe. With the first case of contraband removed from the luggage van, his spirits had risen. The springing of the second bullion chest was accomplished in half the time taken by the opening of the first. When he prised it open, Mr. Pardew found to his satisfaction that it contained packets of American gold eagles and French Napoleons. Once more he and Grace set to work to replace them with the exact equivalent of lead shot. The third chest, split open in a trice it seemed, so dextrous had Mr. Pardew grown in his trade, revealed more rows of yellow bullion bars. Pausing occasionally in the weighing of his bags of shot to pass a hand across his sweating forehead, Mr. Pardew sensed that Grace was growing restive. Presently Grace remarked, “Notice anything?”
“Only that we shall be stopping in Tonbridge in twenty minutes, by which time we had best have finished our business.”
“There’s more gold than we’ve got the lead for. What shall we do?”
“What shall we do? Why, we shall leave it in the safe.”
“Leave it? What, prime gold just a-waiting to be took? Who’s to know that it was us?”
“Who’s to know?” Mr. Pardew’s face, as he peered up from behind the glow of the oil lamp, looked devilish. “Don’t be a fool. Did I not tell you the procedures? The safe will be weighed at Folkestone Harbour, while we sit here in the train waiting to go on to Dover, and these bags lie in the luggage van waiting for us to collect them. You might as well walk along the platform with a gold bar wedged in your hatband.”
“I only thought…”
“You had better think nothing at all. Each of these bags is nearly full. We shall have trouble enough carrying them as it is. You had better take that broom in the corner there and sweep the floor. A child could tell that we had been at work here.”
Looking at his boots, Grace saw that the boards of the compartment were covered with flakes of red wax and splinters from the bullion boxes. Whistling quietly to himself, he hastened to remove these traces of their activities while Mr. Pardew locked up the chests, hammered down the iron bands and secured their rivets.
“You’ve found your courage again, I see,” Mr. Pardew remarked during the course of these labours.
“There was no courage wanting,” Grace replied stiffly.
“Well, have some in store, for there is a great deal still to do.”
It seemed to Mr. Pardew as he issued this warning that long hours had passed since they had boarded the train, trackless days spent labouring by the dim light of the lamp, that he was like some benighted troglodyte of legend, condemned to live out his days far underground. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was barely a quarter past ten. The safe now shut up and the two travelling bags placed inconspicuously in the corner of the compartment, he became, by degrees, more aware of his surroundings. Grace was squatting with his back to the safes, his face waxy-pale in the half-light. Cold night air had begun to steal up from beneath the floorboards. It was no longer so hot. Again, the train was beginning to slow.
“Where’s this? I wonder,” Grace mused, almost as if speaking to himself.
Half an hour before, Mr. Pardew would have rebuked his clerk for his ignorance. His mind was racing on, though, reckoning up the several dangers that might await them in the next hour, and he allowed the spasm of irritation to pass.
“We are at Folkestone. Now, have a care that you do exactly as I say.”
A moment or so before he judged the engine would halt, Mr. Pardew slid open the door of the luggage van six inches or so and peered anxiously out. The stretch of platform was deserted. Fifty yards away a lamp blazed above the stationmaster’s office, but there were no other signs of life. Reaching to the compartment door, he found, as he had anticipated, that it was now unlocked, and that the train carriage into which it led was empty. Rapidly, he and Grace strode back along the train towards the first-class carriages. Gazing out into the darkness, Mr. Pardew saw a brace of porters and a gentleman whom he presumed to be a railway policeman moving sharply in the direction of the luggage van. In the distance Dewar’s voice could be dimly heard. Mr. Pardew realised that his heart was beating very fast. Well, a few minutes more would see them in Dover, after which the fate of their enterprise lay in the hands of the gods. He folded his hands across his chest, looked disparagingly for a moment at Grace and then stared out into the Kentish darkness.
MR. ROBT. GRACE: HIS RECOLLECTION OF THE NIGHT’S EVENTS
He was a cool ‘un, d——n him, that much must be allowed. No sooner are we stopped at Dover than it’s back to the luggage van to collect our bags. Precious heavy they was, too, but we made it look as if there was just ordinary togs inside. There’s the Dover Castle Hotel over the way—a tip-top place as I could see—and he says to me “What do you say to a little supper?” Naturally I’m game, so we sit ourselves down in the coffee room. While they’re a-cooking of the food—broiled fish it was, and devilish good—he takes a wander outside. Never said a word to me, but I’d lay even money those keys are at the bottom of the Channel. And the hammer and the pincers and them dies, I’ll be bound.
Very late it is now, and no one much about. Just a single waiter left at the bar of the Castle to take our money (Mr. Pardew tipped him a half sovereign, which I thought was rash) and shut up shop. London train leaves at one, we’d been told. There’s a particular dodge we’re going to play now. The dodge is that we’ve to come to the station along the quay from where the foreign boats dock, them that comes from Ostend and Calais. Coming up to the station entrance—pitch-dark it was, with only a light or two showing—he stops and says to me, “You’ll need this, you know.” And blow me if he hasn’t somehow got the return halves of two tickets from Ostend to London Bridge. Just say that anyone’s crying out over a robbery of the mail train—why then, here’s proof that we’e been on the high seas all the time.
Inspector on duty at the station entrance. Stiff, tall cove of a kind I never did like. Looks at the tickets. Looks at the bags, tickets still in his hand. Looks at the two of us. I can feel myself wanting to drop the bag I’m holding and run, but Mr. P., as cool as a lettuce leaf, asks, is there anything the matter? Why yes, says the cove, where’s the chalk-mark on these here bags saying they’ve been examined by the Customs back in yonder shed? Oh C——t, I thinks, how are we to get out
of this one? They’ll take us back to the blessed Customshouse and then there’ll be the devil to pay. But Mr. P. just smiles as if it’s the merest trifle in the world and says he don’t think the water guard would thank him for putting them twice to the same trouble, for we came over from Ostend the previous night and have been staying in the town. Anyway, the cove calls his mate, says: better put these gents through the Customs again surely, than risk a stripe for letting them through unchecked. Mr. P.’s nodding, saying something about that night’s steamer delayed, no question of us having just come over, and suddenly the tickets are back in our hands and we’re through.
Getting onto the London train I nearly faint, I’m so far gone, but Mr. P. has some brandy and water in a sody bottle and that revives me. What happens then I don’t much recollect, only that coming into the Bridge, with the dawn about to break, blow me if there ain’t a peeler opening the door of the carriage. Again, I’m rare to throw him down and run, but bless me if the chap doesn’t ask if he can help with the luggage! Never did luck hold out so, only that it fell in the end, as it always does.
Part Five
EASTON HALL, NEAR WATTON
A Jacobean E plan house with three bays in each recess of the E and a bay beyond the E at each end. An hexagonal tower to the rear. The Jacobean house faces west and includes the library and the dining room. Fenestration later Georgian, and a bow window was added at the south end, with a new Georgian fourth bay at right angles, incorporating the drawing room. Todhunter’s print, in Fastes Norfolkenses, predates this addition. A fine early C18 staircase has three twisted balusters to the tread and carved tread ends. It was here that James Woodforde upset himself on a winter’s evening, having indulged too freely in his host’s milk punch (“a vexatious incident, fair to embarrass me in the eyes of my host, yet Mr. Benny, an exceedingly courteous gentleman, received my apology very civilly”; James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 17 November 1784). Thomas Percival Benny was the seventh descendant of the hall’s original owner. Eventually, Easton passed into the Dixey family, connections of T. P. Benny on his mother’s side. An aquatint by Gandish, RA (1818?) shows the property in relation to an artificial lake, subsequently drained, commenced in Waterloo year. It was for some years the home of the celebrated naturalist James Chatterton Dixey, until his death, in mysterious circumstances, in 1866. Subsequently, the house was inherited through the Beresfords by the Kenyons. A Dornier bomber crash-landed in the outer park in 1942. At this point the property was in use as a boys’ school. Now empty.
BURKE’S AND SAVILL’S Guide to Country Houses,
VOLUME 3: EAST ANGLIA
XXIV
CAPTAIN McTURK MAKES PROGRESS
The sensation caused in polite society by news of the train robbery did not die down in nine or even ninety-nine days. It was talked of at every dinner table in England and not a few outside it. The daily newspapers, naturally, could not be kept from it and devoted countless leading articles to the audacity of the villains, the boldness of the crime and the negligence of the authorities in allowing it to be committed. An august royal personage read of it in her great rooms at Windsor and summoned her ladies-in-waiting to discuss it. The Prime Minister heard of it as he sat at breakfast in the bosom of his family, shook his head and looked very grave. Punch satirised it most awfully in a burlesque in which the Home Secretary was kidnapped from a meeting of the Cabinet without anyone’s noticing and a ransom then demanded for the sum of eleven pence three farthings, which his colleagues declined to pay. And subsequently that gentleman, made even more wrathful by a caricature of himself being abstracted in a sack by three footpads, summoned Captain McTurk to a meeting at the Home Office from which the police commissioner emerged two hours later with a look in his grey eye from which the very coachman recoiled. There had been nothing like it in the annals of metropolitan life for a decade, Captain McTurk was assured, and there would continue to be nothing like it until such time as the villains were caught, arraigned, rebuked and put behind bars.
As to the catching, however—let alone the arraigning, the rebuking and the putting behind bars—Captain McTurk was altogether at a loss. Assembling such fragments of evidence as could be found in the days following the robbery, he was aware that he knew almost nothing of its circumstances. Three chests of bullion, when taken from a safe in Paris and opened by the representatives of a French banking house, had been found to contain a quantity of lead shot. And yet when had the lead shot been placed in them? The chests had been weighed at London Bridge, at Folkestone and again at Boulogne and nothing amiss found. The seals of the chests had certainly been tampered with and the boxes forced open, but nobody could say for certain when the tampering and the forcing had taken place. The driver of the train and the guard professed to have seen nothing. In addition, Captain McTurk had interviewed such passengers on the train as could readily be assembled, the ticket collector who had taken their tickets and various other officials who had been in the vicinity, and discovered…nothing.
Having drawn, as it were, a blank in this preliminary investigation, Captain McTurk set out, as was his professional wont, to assemble the course of the operation in his mind. Having questioned the officers of the steamer and the officials who received the safe at Boulogne, he was certain that the crime had been committed in England. But how? Clearly, those who had taken the bullion must have smuggled it from the train in the guise of ordinary passengers. How had they done so? Captain McTurk had been assured by the bullion merchants that the weight of contraband was more than a single man—two men—could carry without difficulty. Had any passenger or passengers quitting the train at Folkestone been seen to possess cases or valises of an abnormally large size? Captain McTurk had demanded of those he interviewed. Here again he could get no satisfactory answer. The people had noticed nothing out of the ordinary course of events. The ticket collector deposed, mournfully yet righteously, that it was the custom of gentlemen who arrived at Folkestone late at night either bent on travelling to France or staying in the town to carry large cases. All this, Captain McTurk acknowledged to be true.
There were certain other questions, too, which he urgently wished to answer. How many felons had there been? Given the weight of the gold, Captain McTurk was inclined to think two or even three. And having abstracted it (and how had they abstracted it?), where had they gone? The newspapers confidently asserted that they had fled on the steamer to France, but Captain McTurk rather thought not. By his reasoning the men had either remained in Folkestone that night or departed it immediately for some other place in England. And here the trail, which had threatened to turn cold, grew suddenly warm. A policeman indeed, stationed at London Bridge very late on the night in question, remembered assisting two gentlemen lately debouched from a railway carriage with what had seemed to him an inordinately heavy piece of baggage, but the hour was late and the gentlemen so caparisoned in travelling cloaks that he could recollect nothing of them. A cabdriver, too, recalled picking up two men—again with pieces of heavy luggage—and depositing them on the edge of the City. Again, he could remember nothing other than both were tall, one stout and one with a prognathous jaw. Finally, there came a money changer near Blackfriars to reveal that very early on the following morning he had changed into sterling a quantity of Napoleons offered to him by a burly man in a travelling cape speaking in a low voice and showing every indication of wishing to conclude the transaction as swiftly as possible. Though he gave no outward indication of disquiet, these three pieces of information excited Captain McTurk very much. He ensured that representations were made to others of the capital’s money changers. Banks were asked to examine their records for that day and the day following it in search of unusually large cash deposits. Nothing further came to light, however, and again the trail ran cold.
All these enquiries proceeded during the course of the summer. Though the sensation did not die down in nine or even ninety-nine days, it could not, by its very nature, be maintained at the same high
pitch. Polite society was by this time in any case decamped to Baden-Baden or taking its ease on the grouse moors. The public likes variation in the criminal accomplishments offered up for its delectation, and it was thought that the murder of a nobleman by certain burglars engaged in the plundering of his ancestral seat rather had the edge on the robbing of the Folkestone mail. All this was observed by Captain McTurk, who did not apparently take holidays, sitting in his office in the square beyond Northumberland Avenue, sending Mr. Masterson out on his little errands and continuing to ponder the suggestions offered up by the day’s post.
It must not be supposed that the other enterprises on which Captain McTurk had been engaged before the scandal of the bullion robbery had now been placed in abeyance. On the contrary, he continued to revolve them in his mind even as he sat attending to the Home Secretary’s wrath or questioning the Folkestone ticket collector. It could be said, in fact, that Captain McTurk’s mind, or that part of it which did not contain his wife, family and acquaintance, was a single stage populated by an ever-shifting cast of criminal actors, this one now moving audaciously into the light to say his lines, that one now subsiding gently into a throng of scene swellers. To this end, he had continued to take an interest in the death of Mr. Henry Ireland, had summoned a craftsman who might know something of the manufacture of life preservers and sent Mr. Masterson once more to Suffolk with instructions to submit all the evidence in the case to the closest reinspection. At the same time, he had recalled to mind the circumstances of certain other murders in which gentlemen had been bludgeoned to death. None of this, however, was of the slightest avail. The craftsman, bidden from his workshop in Mile End, shook his head over the bludgeon, agreed that it was a remarkable piece, speculated that it might have come from Prague or the region of the Danube, but could say no more. Mr. Masterson, though he spent a further week in Woodbridge and retraced his steps along the Wenhaston Road, was unable to add to the stack of lore he had brought back from his previous visit.