Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal (6 page)

'My dear, sir!' the jeweller inclined his head in mild reproof. 'We are all too familiar with such artifices. Mr Myrtle!'

As the old man raised his voice, a square of wooden panelling at the rear of the room slid hack and a young man's face peered through it.

'Glass,' said the jeweller for Verity's benefit, 'painted glass. It gives a view, sir, of any customer in the shop without the disagreeable knowledge for them that they are under our surveillance. I guess, sir, our ways are not so different from yours.'

'But she gone into another jeweller's just up the street,' said Verity insistently.

'When a young lady cannot be suited at one emporium, sir, it is frequently the case that she visits another.' The little man turned to his assistant, 'Mr Myrtle, did you observe the lady in the pink silk just now?'

'Every second, Mr Liddell, and the gentleman who came in after. Most respectably they both behaved.'

The jeweller turned to Verity with a little shrug.

'You see ?' he said gently. 'And you may be sure that we check the items exhibited to customers with great care. There was nothing missing from the tray which the young lady examined. Have you found your wax by the way?'

'No,' said Verity shortly, ‘I ain't. P'raps they twigged your apprentice there behind the panelling. I'd best be getting up the street to the next premises. All things considered, Mr Liddell, you came off very fortunate in this affair.'

The little jeweller bowed and held the door for his visitor.

Above Broadway, the sun now seemed bright as a furnace and hot enough to blister the smartly painted sides of the passing carriages. Jolly was sauntering with her pink parasol open and her accomplice was just emerging from the second shop. The girl began to thread her way across the road, her eyes on a third establishment whose narrow front stood between a saddler's and a hat-shop.

'She got the cheek of Old Nick!' said Verity furiously, dodging through the crowd to the shop which the girl and her companion had just visited.

The interior was less like a shop than an elegantly furnished drawing-room with curved chairs and sofas, padded by cerise velvet and ornamented by ivory inlaid on rosewood. It was presided over by a pudgy young man with large ears and features, bearing the deformities of the prize-ring and bare-knuckle contests. His black hair was parted in the centre of his forehead, as if in careful imitation of a Norman arch. He looked at Verity as at one who had no legitimate business on his premises, fingering his thick gold watch-chain with its seals and key as though it might have been a weapon.

'Metropolitan Police, London,' said Verity breathlessly, waving his warrant-card. "I got reason to think you might a-been robbed a few minutes ago by a young person in pink silks and her accomplice who was here just after. . .'

'You are mistaken, signore,' said the pudgy man, his eyes as blankly threatening as wet stone. 'No goods are missing. None have left their cases.'

'You Eye-talian, arc you?' inquired Verity suspiciously.

'I am a citizen of the United States,' said the dark man, resting a heavily-ringed hand on his flowered waistcoat and glaring. "I am honoured by the visit of Signorina Jollee who ask for what I have not, and the young gentleman who come to ask if she have been and gone.'

Verity began running his hands under ledges of tables and chairs.

'You got wax under here somewhere,' he said desperately. 'You must have. I daresay they mightn't have robbed you now, but they must a-left the wax ready for when they come back.'

'The lady and the gentleman stand only 'ere,' said the jeweller. 'You see? The little table. Turn it over. No wax! All right, eh?'

Verity's plump face quivered, as though he might be about to weep with frustration.

'She give you her real name!' he muttered uncomprehendingly. 'And you swear her fancy man never left you a watch to mend?'

'To you,' said the jeweller, 'I do not 'ave to swear. The gentleman inquired only if his lady had been and gone. There was no watch!' He moved heavily towards Verity, almost jostling him towards the door, his boots creaking as ominously as the cracking of one set of knuckles in the palm of his other large hand. Verity looked at the sharply-filed stones set in the heavy rings of the jeweller's fingers.

‘I hope, for your sake, you're right and you ain't been robbed,' he said at the door, mustering his portly dignity to have the last word.

The olive-skinned jeweller leant forward, the perfume of
Eau de Mille Fleurs
enveloping Verity like a cloud. The soft Italian intonation was almost a caress in his ear.

‘I hope so, signore,
for your sake- '

Then the man stood in his doorway, glaring through the glass until the plump, insulted sergeant had disappeared from sight.

For the rest of the afternoon, Verity shadowed the girl and her accomplice as unobtrusively as a wraith. Twice more he entered jeweller's shops with growing furtiveness, only to find that nothing was missing and that no incriminating blobs of wax were to be found under the ledges of tables or display-cases. Each time, Jolly had given her real name.

'It don't make sense,' he said irritably to himself. 'It don't make any sort of sense at all. First time I ever heard of villains trying to look as if they was going to commit robbery - and leaving a real name - but never doing anything! P'raps she wants to get herself apprehended.'

He looked longingly at the great blocks of clean ice being carried into shops and bar-rooms, the stacks of pineapples and water-melons displayed for sale. They passed shops which sold French calf-boots or gold birdcages, art galleries which looked like the drawing-rooms of gentlemen's houses in Piccadilly, offering for sale paintings by Titian, Rubens and Raphael. Jolly paused at H. S. Beal's Daguerrian Rooms, as though thinking of having a dollar portrait done of herself.

'She gone silly!' Verity gasped. 'I never heard of a pretty thief advertising herself like that before!'

But the girl entered and came out again a few minutes later. By the next day, her face would be staring from Beal's display of the photographer's art, for all the world to see.

Verity lost count of the jeweller's shops. There were at least a dozen which the couple visited, perhaps as many as twenty. In the autumn dusk he followed them back, past the trees and fountains of Washington Square. The panes of shop-fronts glowed with the light of gas lamps, the bells of street-cars jangled in the cooler air, and the newsboys hawked the evening papers with sharp, discordant cries. Verity glimpsed hotel interiors through plate-glass windows, the marble-paved lobbies with lamps and columns, travellers from the West stretching their legs on the divans of lounges and reading-rooms. The vestibules of theatres were already illuminated, their swinging doors of red leather studded with brass nails swung open to reveal coloured bills and photographs of actresses.

In an hour or so more he would have to break off the pursuit and report to Captain Smiles. To have reported what he had so far seen would merely have earned him a reprimand and an instruction to mind his own business for the future. But now they were turning cast. Hurrying after them, Verity saw them arm-in-arm again, approaching a shabbier neighbourhood. He saw a street sign which identified it as Second Avenue. Soon they were among large, decaying houses of red brick with faded green shutters and matching first-floor balconies with roofs of painted tin. Jolly and her escort paused at the corner, where the canopy of a grocer's shop extended over the pavement to posts fixed in the kerbstone. A fly-blown card offering 'Table Board' was lodged at an angle in the adjoining window. A strong odour of smoked fish and the thick fragrance of molasses wafted from behind the piled baskets of vegetables under the grocer's wooden canopy.

Jolly and the tall young man were engaged in some final and earnest conversation. Then the girl moved quickly, flitting across the rutted street, between the leaning lampposts and the ash-barrels to the large shabby house on the far side. She pulled the bell beside the heavy door, which opened in a moment. As she scuttled inside, the man who had escorted her turned and strode away. Verity, unable to watch both of them, chose the girl. He was unlikely to force the truth from the young man, but he had frightened a confession from Jolly twice in the past and had no doubt that he could do it again. He crossed the street with a determined stride and approached the door of the decayed red-brick house with its green verandah. On the wall to one side of it was an engraved metal plate, 'Asylum of the New York Magdalen Female Benevolent Society'.

'It never is!' said Verity confidently. 'Not after what I've seen this afternoon. Bloody thieves' kitchen, more like.'

It was not the easiest of buildings to enter unobserved. Standing back, he looked up at the verandah. There was a light in one of the windows looking on to it, but the other was in darkness. A glance at the darkened ground-floor window revealed that it was barred on the outside but to a man intent on climbing, the vertical iron rails were as good as a ladder. He looked up at the overhang of the verandah, and he knew that it could be done. Whistling softly to himself he walked slowly away for a few yards, waiting until the street should be empty. There were two men in the grocer's store, but they were intent on weighing and packing goods. His chance came in a few minutes and for a space of thirty seconds or so he was sure that he would be unnoticed.

For all his bulk, Verity's agility was as remarkable as his strength. With hardly a sound, he stepped on to the sill of the ground-floor window, pulling himself up so that he could clutch the highest bar. There was an awkward manoeuvre as he stood on the higher bar with nothing to hold him against the wall but his own weight, until he could reach up and seize the first metal strut of the verandah rail, where it joined the wall. Hanging for an instant by one arm, and then by two, Verity kicked his feet up until he could cross them round a further strut. Praying that the mctalwork had not rusted from its fixtures, he put his strength into the gripping of his feet on the bar, and snatched himself up, hand over hand, until he was diagonally against the verandah rail and could pull himself over its ledge. It had not been an elegant display of acrobatics, but it had been quick and almost silent. With a final heave, Verity's capacious trouser seat and plump legs disappeared over the rail and on to the floor of the verandah itself.

Cautiously and silently he got to his feet. Somewhere in the rooms facing him, the meek and contrite women of the New York streets shed tears of repentance on the shoulders of a sisterhood of mercy. So, at least, the brass plate by the street door proclaimed to the world. He was still standing there, judging the best and quietest means of entry when, from behind the lighted curtain of the left-hand window, a slurred male voice said, 'Ah, shit! Don't you whore-pokers never deal nothing but twos and threes?
^’

There was gruff, pleased laughter from two other men, one of whom said, 'Make a call, soldier, and stop talking from ya ass.'

Verity's spirits rose with delight. The asylum for fallen women was about to prove richly rewarding. Combined with the story about Jolly being adopted by a charitable married couple, there was every chance that it would have Inspector Croaker out of Whitehall Police Office and back in the artillery.

As a preliminary, he crept to the lighted curtain and peered through a chink where it had not quite closed. His view was restricted but he could see the back of a man sitting in his shirt-sleeves and the dark hair of a second man on the other side of the table. The shirt-sleeved man belched and fluttered a card down on the table.

'Deuce!' he said.

There was a groan of disgust from someone who remained out of Verity's view. Blue-green cigar smoke rose, funnelling upward, above the man whose back was towards him. Glass clinked against glass and there was a splash of liquid.

The dark head turned and a yellow squirt of tobacco juice shot into the china resonance of a spitoon. The shirt-sleeved man threw down his hand of cards with a light patter. 'Ah, shit!' he said monotonously.

Silent as a shadow, Verity drew back and moved gently to the next, darkened window. It was closed, but fastened by nothing more than a rather loose casement-latch. He took out his carefully-oiled clasp-knife and slid the blade between the jamb and the window-frame. It was child's play. The loose catch lifted easily and the window swung open. He slid soundlessly into the darkened room. The glimmer of light from the street lamps showed it to be a poorly-furnished sitting-room with heavy mahogany upholstered in horsehair. Verity sniffed the air. Whatever the truth about the New York Magdalen Asylum, it certainly had the familiar smell of such institutional buildings, a steamy carbolic vapour concealing the grosser scents.

Cautiously he opened the door and stepped out on to a tiled landing with narrow flights of stairs, their bare wood stained the colour of treacle. Below him, the building seemed to be in darkness, but a brass oil lamp was suspended over the well of the stairs and there was a glow of light from the next floor up. A single step creaked loudly under his weight as he moved quickly in that direction, but the noise of the card players in the other room more than covered the squeal of wood.

The next landing was identical, except that there was a slit of light under one of the doors. From beyond it, Miss Jolly's voice came softly and melodiously in high-pitched song.

'Oh, the man that has me must have silver and gold,

A chariot to ride in and be 'andsome and bold

Verity tried the door. It was unyielding. He inspected the vertical chink of light and saw that it was held on the inside by a tiny bolt.

'His hair must be curly as any watch-spring,