SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (9 page)

Dacre laughed.

"You ain't married her, old fellow?" "No," said Roper uncertainly.

"Dammit man! Then you've fathered a child on her! Why not say so?"

"Eight months since," said Roper quietly, "a boy."

"Say no more, old fellow. I'll put the other one out of harm's way. Your woman will be safer with you. What's the other little minx like?"

"Jolie?" said Roper. "Bit of temperament. Ain't been properly broken to the saddle yet!"

The two men laughed.

"All right," said Dacre, "let's see what the cavalry can do! "

"She's hot enough," said Roper. "Handle her right, and she'll be at you like a monkey up a stick."

Then Roper went and spoke to the two girls. Dacre watched from the doorway, while Jolie received her orders without any reaction beyond an enigmatic glance, and this time she submitted while Dacre's eyes ran over her, as they might have done over a filly at Tattersall's. It was little more than an hour later, when the girl and her box were accompanied by Verney Dacre to the opulent seclusion of his apartments in Albemarle Street.

7

"It isn't right, Mr Verity, and you know it," said Sergeant Samson.

He walked the next three hundred yards in great thought and then added,

"It's more than not right. It isn't natural."

"Yes," said Verity absent-mindedly, "it isn't."

They strode in perfect step towards the vaulted glass roof of the Great Western terminus at Paddington, there to await the unlikely arrival of Albert Groat, the mad rapist of Gloucester, reported to be making for the anonymity of the great metropolitan wen.

"Look," said Samson, "
Sealskin Kite was burgled. Crab
stick of "T" division swears he got it from one of his men who's been pleasuring the cook. Went through the house like the charge of the Light Cavalry at Balaclava. Broke the ornaments. Smashed up the desk. Stole some little things."

"What for?" asked Verity.

"Exactly." Samson adjusted his tall hat a little and strode onwards, Verity breathing heavily beside him. "An amateur. It ain't anyone who knows Kite, or knows the things he'll do to a man who's caught at that game."

"That's a fact," said Verity, gasping a little at the pace.

"And Kite, of course, ain't come to the police office, as he means to take his man himself." "So he does," said Verity abruptly.

"Obliging of him, no doubt," said Samson. "And then there's Ned Roper, who everyone would like to see working the treadmill and eating oats. And what does he do? Comes to Inspector Croaker, to tell him of the state he found you in, along the Haymarket that night, and begs Mr Croaker to call upon his services as a witness at any time that your assailant may be apprehended."

"I told Mr Croaker," said Verity coldly, "I fell up the stairs."

"Down the stairs," said Samson reproachfully. "It was down the stairs last time."

They reached the great glass and iron canopy, under which the steam and smoke gathered in a cloudy atmosphere of its own, and there they stood, conspicuous as if they had been wearing uniform, among the clatter of wagons and the snort of engines.

"But you can't deny there is something very peculiar about the behaviour of the criminal element just at present," said Samson gravely. "Unnatural. Like fearful prodigies foretelling some dire event." It was a phrase he had gathered from a Hoxton melodrama at the Britannia and had now made his own.

"I'll tell you what, though, Mr Samson," said Verity softly, "there are men in this city who believe themselves secure in their wickedness. But I will have them yet in a sure and inescapable snare."

Samson looked at him with respect, thinking that the fiery preaching of Verity's Wesleyan boyhood in Cornwall might have taught the Hoxton melodramas a trick or two. And then Samson and Verity waited dutifully until relieved from their watch. By which time, Albert Groat, who had never contemplated leaving his native haunts, had "coopered" a girl on a field-path near the Badminton estate.

8

Union Bank,

4,
Pall Mall East,

London.

5th June 1857

Sir,

In accordance with your instructions to us
of
the
2
n
d.
instant, we have today despatched
300I.
in specie per South Eastern Railway Company to await your collection from the Railway Office at Folkestone Harbour Pier. An early acknowledgement
of
receipt will oblige.

I have the honour to remain, sir, Your obedient servant,

Charles London Estcourt, Secretary, Union Bank.

To

Lieutenant Verney Dacre, 19
th Dragoon Guards, The Grand Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone.

Verney Dacre folded the sheet of paper into his notecase and smiled almost imperceptibly. It was, of course, entirely safe to use his rank and former regiment for several years to come. The previous September, the
19th
Dragoons had been marched on board two superannuated East India sailing vessels at Gravesend for the slow route round the Cape to Calcutta. The latest news of the native rebellion in India suggested that one troop had been cut to bits when the mutineers sacked Lucknow, while most of another squadron was annihilated as the Sepoys overran Cawnpore. If Dacre laid claim to a continuing and honourable connection with the regiment, he was unlikely to find anyone still in England to contradict him.

He turned his eyes upon the girl beside him, watching the glimmer of cheap stones in her ear-rings and the energy of her brown, fine-boned hands as she clenched the reins in her little fists. Her cheeks were flushed with exertion and exhilaration as she chopped with her slender switch at the quarters of the off-horse of the carriage pair.

"There ain't no call to destroy them," said Dacre peevishly. "They may be only dumb brutes, but the livery stables charge the devil for them in season. Let the reins go a bit, and they'll pull easier."

The harness brass and the glossy backs of the yearlings flashed in the bright marine sunlight to the accompanying rumble of wheels and clinking of bridles. On its india
-
rubber bearings the fairy shape of the swan's-neck Pilentum seemed to roll in air above the glittering spokes of its wheels. Top-hatted or crinolined, the strollers on the parade turned to admire the elegant little carriage with its ultramarine lines and hood, its panels an airy imitation of canework in white and amber paint. A few noticed the languid hussar-like figure of Verney Dacre, with his faded fairness, and his long, narrow blue eyes expressing total indifference to all around him. He wore his right arm in a black silk sling, as though it had been broken. It was not, but a small part of his scheme required that it should seem so. He judged it best, therefore, to be seen being driven on the parade by Jolie, the golden tan of her skin shaded by the blue hood of the carriage and by the pink straw bonnet, which matched the skirts she had gathered tightly round her legs.

"This is a great bore," he said at length. "There is nothing else to be seen here."

"I should like to go on, though," said the girl.

"I daresay you should. Nevertheless, have the goodness to turn back to the hotel."

The water had ebbed from the tidal harbour where the railway ran out along the pier. Several men in high boots scooped and shovelled their way along an empty channel between shining grey flanks of mud, a runnel dug out twice a day so that the keel of the Boulogne steamer might clear the sea bed before full tide. A group of stranded fishing-smacks and several colliers, their tall stacks and red paddle-wheels idle, lay like dead sea-monsters among the green slime and weed of the harbour stones. The halyard of the harbour flagstaff hung limp and the little wooden lighthouse seemed to dwindle to a toy in the morning heat. Away from the sea, the laughter of a wedding party at an open window of the Royal George overlaid the prolonged dirge of a minstrel band. An infinite perspective of posters announcing Cooke's Imperial Circus, with ventriloquist, Indian jugglers, and infant phenomenon, faded in a bright shimmering distance.

Jolie still brooded on Dacre's order to turn the carriage back. Her eyes flicked to one side, as though she was half looking at him.

"I'm not your bloody slave girl," she said, blinking fiercely, "though you may think so."

"Ain't you, though?" said Dacre, half-amused.

"Not yours, nor Ned Roper's. I know McCaffery was up to some dodge of Roper's. Half of what I know could put Ned Roper in quod."

Dacre laughed, and dropped hjs half-smoked cigar carefully on to the road.

"If you suppose I care a damn for that," he said softly, "you are most stupendously mistaken."

"Am I?" There was a rising slyness in her voice, but this only reassured him. He shifted against the cushions a little, in order to watch her as he spoke.

"Swearing a fellow's life away, even a simpleton like McCaffery, is an uncommonly serious business, my love. It's quite the best thing that one of us should protect you."

She blew a derisive, farting sound with her tongue.

"That for your protection! " she said bravely.

Dacre appeared to look sad.

"I don't care to see a girl hang," he said, "that's all. I daresay they'd put Ned Roper to tread the cock-chafer for a year or two, but they'd fly a black, flag for you at Newgate. Over the water to Charley you'd dance, my girl, at eight sharp. It's a long polka, too. None of the poor doxies ever has the tin left to bribe Jack Ketch to pull on their legs and end it smartly."

He watched her body grow tense and felt, for the first time in their four days' acquaintance, a desire for her, a bizarre lust to enjoy her while she was still trembling with the fear of what he had described.

"I only did what Ned Roper made me," she said, half indignant and half pleading.

Dacre yawned with monumental indifference.

"Did y' now? Oblige me by not grippin' those reins like a madwoman. These two nags may be only park hacks in summer and cover hacks in winter, but they don't need their heads pulled clean off."

In their first hours together, he had concluded that fright was beneficial to her. Indeed, she herself had almost seemed to invite it by several half-hearted little threats of rebellion. Dacre had, of course, known girls who appeared to find a strange reassurance in the threats or the blows which their protectors used upon them. Why that should be so, he could not tell, and cared even less. This doxy, according to Roper, had been an undertaker's mute as a child, sleeping on coffin lids in the carpenter's shed, and eating such scraps as might have been given to the shop cat. Even if fear failed to subdue her, her greed for possessions after a childhood of such poverty made her an absurdly easy mark for a man as rich as Dacre.

Before they left Albemarle Street for Folkestone, he had taken her to Howell and Jones's, and to Sawyer's in Bond Street, to buy such costumes for her as his plan might require. In one of the warm, mirrored
salons,
heavy with the scent of camelias, she had watched, lynx-eyed, as the
demoiselles
paraded in
toilettes de jours
and
toilettes de soire
e
for her choice. At first she had chosen quickly and indiscriminately, as if frightened that she might otherwise lose the beautiful clothes for ever. Then, confronted by courteous shop-walkers and lady assistants, she had grown confused and in her confusion had actually begun to weep. Dacre was intrigued, but not for long. Women, like men, had their uses for him. When they were not being useful they might, for all Dacre cared, laugh or cry as the mood took them. It was nothing to him.

Back at the hotel, Jolie went ahead of him, moving with bustling little steps up the broad staircase. From the pillared entrance hall, several sets of imposing double doors led to the public dining-room, reading-room, billiard-room, smoking-room, and all the other amenities necessary to a grand hotel. At every door was an elaborate wrought-iron gas pillar with a frosted glass globe that shone like a brilliant moon by dinner time. The centrepiece of the hall was a round ottoman in maroon velvet and gilt wood, which might have sat a circle of a dozen guests. Its tall central back formed a pedestal on which stood the gilded figure of a Grecian girl with a harp, her simple robe having slipped almost to her navel and parted conveniently about her thighs.