SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (23 page)

Through the steamy windows of the Green Man, he saw
Cazamian sitting alone at a settl
e. Cazamian looked up as Roper pushed open the door and a cracked bell ratded on its spring.

"Thought you ain't coming, Mr Roper," said Cazamian reprovingly.

Roper gathered the skirts of his greatcoat around him and sat down.

"But you got the key, old fellow?" he said anxiously. "You have got it, haven't you?" "What key might that be?"

"Why,
" said Roper cheerily, "our gentleman 'as his jewel back!
Pleased ain't the word for it. Last night, straight away, he gets me to send a key to your lodgings by penny post. And tonight he sends me 'ere with the money-box what the key fits."

He produced the small metal box, which had carried Dacre's three hundred pounds in sovereigns from London to Folkestone a few weeks before.

"You were to have the box, he said," Roper added, "so soon as you should have finished your day's duty. The key he sent first as a token of good faith."

"I been at work since morning," said Cazamian sulkily, "much chance I've 'ad to get keys in the penny post."

"Then you may break it open, if the key ain't waiting," said Roper, handing the solid weight of the box to Cazamian.

"It was to be four hundred," said Cazamian ungraciously. It seemed to Roper that the man had been drinking for much of the evening and had now convinced himself that he was no mere pawn in cracking a crib, but rather one whose secret knowledge must be recognised.

Roper smiled at him.

"You'll find five hundred in there," he said with studied
coyness. "Very pleased the gentl
eman was to have his diamond back."

Cazamian shook the box and heard the bunched rattle of coins. He stood up, lurched against the settle, and clutched the box under his coat.

"I shall go 'ome," he said thickly, "and there I shall expect to find a key and five hundred quid in the box."

"If you don't," said Roper good-humouredly, "you may call o
ut every jack in the division!
"

He watched Cazamian moving slowly through the crowd, towards the door. The door opened and swung to again.

With that. Roper was off, outside and across the street, up the steps to the station forecourt, and into the first hansom cab. He watched with satisfaction as a railway constable took the number and destination of the cab. Then he was whirled away towards the gaslit brilliance of Regent Circus.

Cazamian, still clutching the metal box under his coat, hovered uncertainly on the corner of Tooley Street and Mill Lane, where the ill-lit side streets ran between tall, dark warehouses to the river. In his fuddled mind he hardly knew whether to run to his lodgings in search of the promised key or beat open the box on the flagstones around him. His fingers played with the metal lid as he half-walked, half-ran past Counter Street towards the river and his pathway home.

He had reached the spot where a single gas-jet hissed and flared over the rotten planking of an old wharf, when he heard other footsteps which had been part muffled by his own. As he spun round, the two men were upon him, seizing his arms and alternately dragging and walking him to the wharf steps.

"What do you want with me?" he wailed, uncomprehending still, alone in the remote darkness of the river bank.

At the foot of the steps, which entered the races and eddies of the dark water, two more men sat in a little boat. One held the rudder lines, while his companion had shipped the sculls and was steadying the litde craft against the rotten timbers. Both were river men, with ragged hair and weather-beaten faces.

Cazamian's captors pushed him into the boat and jumped in after him. Their companions drove stern foremost into the broad sweep of water until they were in the middle of the great river, the stone pillars of London Bridge and the iron span of Southwark Bridge rising in hard silhouette against the pale glimmer of the city sky. Only then did they take the box from Cazamian. One of his captors broke it open with a deft wrench of a chisel blade and shone a bull's-eye lantern upon the contents. Cazam
ian watched him pour out a palm
ful of coins and return them to the box once more. Next he saw, in total bewilderment, that the man had taken several sheets of paper and something resembling a cameo brooch from the box. The man held these out to his companion, who looked at them and nodded abruptly. The lights of L
ondon Bridge flared more distantl
y as the litde craft drifted further downstream with the ebbing tide. Away on the far bank, the paddles of a river steamer beat the foul water to a phosphorescent foam.

Neither of the two men spoke to Cazamian, from first to last, as if they wished to conceal all but the inevitable deed from the lightermen who sculled the little boat. The man with the box put it down, and seized Cazamian's arms, locking them behind his back in a grip that obliged him to bow his shoulders rather than dislocate them. In an instant, his head and shoulders faced over the side of the boat, inches above the black, foul-smelling water. The second man took Caza
mian's head in the firm but gentl
e grip of a bone-setter, forcing his face forward and under the surface of the flood. The terrible struggle lasted a few moments, Cazamian, suddenly and appallingly sober, tasting the evil, astringent water at his lips, fighting with bursting lungs against the inevitable intake of breath. The man- who held Cazamian's arms also pressed his knees rhythmically into the back between the shoulders, and then freeing one of his hands momentarily, struck hard at the back of the neck. Air burst from the tortured lungs under the impact and, as a cold flood replaced it, a final brilliant spasm spread before Cazamian's eyes, fading at the last explosive beat of the heart.

Using a rusty boat-hook, Sealskin Kite's men edged the limp body out into the stream. The man with the metal box tossed it into the water, and poured a stream of coins after it.

"Farthings! " he said contemptuously.

From the shadows of the wharf, Verney Dacre watched as much of the scene as he could make out with the aid of a military spy-glass. When it was over, he walked quickly to the
house off South
wark Bridge Road, to which he had followed Cazami
an secretly for his own informati
on. Whatever had happened to Cazamian's wife and child, they were certainly not living with Cazamian. He occupied a single room, which looked down from the first floor of the house on to a cobbled passageway.

A child could have climbed to the room without difficulty. It was one step from the cobbles to a low wall, another from the wall to a wash-house roof, and a brisk pull-up from there to the ledge of the window. The catch opened at the first pressure of a knife-blade. Dacre stepped inside, crossed to a bare wooden table with a drawer at one end. He opened the drawer, inserted two sheets of paper, one of them in an envelope, and closed the drawer again. Then he retraced his steps by fastening the window, and going down the darkened stairs to the street. Whatever else might not happen, as soon as the bullion robbery was known at London Bridge and Cazamian failed to report for duty, the private clothes detail would visit the little lodging-house.

16

Ned Roper looked up from the leather-topped table, where he sat before a sheet of accounts, as Coggin appeared in the doorway of the little front parlour at Langham Place. The mid-afternoon sun fell through the Nottingham lace of the curtains, casting a wavering brilliance across red velvet and green morocco, as though illuminating an underwater world.

"Pair o' swells," remarked Coggin disdainfully, "and they'd be obliged to Mr Roper if he'd take a draft on Coutts Bank."

Roper closed the ledger and beckoned Coggin into the room. Houses in Langham Place or Regent Street, as well as those in Chelsea or St James's, prided themselves on the cheques they took and the celebrity of the names which appeared on them. But there were precautions to be observed.

"What sort of swells?" Roper inquired.

"Regimental, by their look," said Coggin gruffly. "Not a single Victoria in their pockets, I dare say, but ready enough to write their own flimsies for any amount you might name. They've got their own chaise and pair waiting outside, with their own groom to 'old the 'orses."

Roper brushed his reddish moustaches and gave an undecided sniff.

"What are they paying for?"

"The new blowen, Elaine. She's a-going to take them both on. Seems they want it that way," said Coggin with a broken grin.

Roper thought a moment longer, and then made up his mind.

"Ten sovs a-piece in the best room," he said quickly, "and they may write me the cheque and send their own chaise to Coutts in Piccadilly to bring the money back. That's the usual form, fair and square, ain't it?"

Coggin withdrew, only to return a moment or two later with one of the clients at his heels, a swaggering figure of a guardsman with black hair and moustachios.

"I say, sir, you ain't goin' to keep two warriors standin' to arms while a damned slip of paper goes to Piccadilly and back? Let the man go to Glyn's in Regent Circus."

"Glyn's ain't Coutts," said Roper shortly.

"No, but dammit," said another voice from the hallway, "write the cheque out payable to the fellow. Let it go to Coutts and let the sovs be brought straight back. I don't mind waitin' in turn for a servin' of greens, but I ain't so dashed partial to them when t
hey're off the boil altogether !
"

Roper hesitated. He was rich enough now to tell these two bucks and every other that they might go to the devil. But even after two days of wealth, it was hard to break long habit and to turn away a draft for twenty sovereigns. At the worst, he thought, his fifteen-year-old doxy would be topped and tailed for nothing. That would hardly break him. He watched the first client write out a cheque on Coutts Bank, payable to E. Roper, Esquire, in the sum of twenty pounds and against the credit of Charles Scott-Hervey. While the other man went down the steps to call the groom, Ro
per took the draft into the littl
e parlour and looked it over care-fully. Then he slipped it into an envelope and handed it to the groom.

"Take the chaise," shouted the first client, as the man made his way out again, "and cut along to Piccadilly as sharply as you may."

Coggin hovered in the background with the girl beside him, her light brown hair worn loose down her back, framing her snub-nosed sauciness and the slyness of her narrow blue eyes. Then Roper nodded to his bully. The girl ran off up the stairs at once and Coggin, suddenly deferential, approached the two clients.

"This way, if you please, sirs."

As soon as Coggin had come downstairs again, Ned Roper made his way softly up, and gently opened a door adjoining the main bedroom. In the partition wall was a glass, no larger than the lens of a telescope, giving a view of activities in the centre of the bedroom. Being no
voyeur,
Ned Roper made little use of it as a rule, but he felt a professional interest in observing the behaviour of his newly acquired girl. The fifteen-year old had stripped the clothes from her tomboy figure and the degree of excitement shown by the two men, who stood before her in their shirts, reminded Roper of a pair of Smithfield porters rather than two holders of the Queen's commission.

It took only a little while to satisfy him that he had a promising young apprentice in Elaine. While she lay on the bed with the first man straddling her, she flipped and wiggled like a fish in a net with the pleasure of it, striving to impale herself more vigorously. Her eyes closed, her tongue passed rapidly over her lips, and then she turned her face aside to where the other man stood at the side of the bed. When his turn came, he stooped and whispered something to her. The youngster shook back her hair and gave a look of comic fright at the object which menaced her. But she turned over on her belly, her forehead resting on her arms, the muscles of her legs and buttocks showing a visible tension. She kept her face hidden until the tension began to slacken. Then she moved her hips, bucking in time with her lover, and turning her head towards him, pouting for kisses.

Roper walked softly away and down the stairs. The girl had the makings of a professional courtesan. For his successor in the business, she might be another Nell Jacoby. He was sitting in his parlour, elaborating these thoughts, when the girl came hurrying down to take her place in the Introducing Room again. She stood in the parlour doorway in her short, pleated skirts, which revealed a length of bare leg. Seeing that Roper was watching her, she stepped into the room, lifted the skirts to her waist, and spun round and round in front of him.

"Got nice legs, 'aven't I?" she said tauntingly, turning so close to his chair that her bare calves brushed the knees of his trousers. Then she dropped the skirts into place, gave him a careful look, and ran off. It was the same with all of them, Roper thought, they all believed that the keeper of the house could be their own personal protector by a little coaxing and wheedling.

At that moment he heard the front door open and the voices of Coggin and the groom, who had evidently returned from Coutts. But something in the tone of their voices caused Roper to go out into the vestibule and deal peremptorily with the groom.