The Ghost of Waterloo (15 page)

Miss Hathaway was the first to recover composure. ‘Then who possessed a second, spare key?’

‘Ah, yes, there may be such a one,’ said Owens. ‘But it plays no part in my riddle. For the door was also securely barred on the inside.’

‘The window —’ began Dunne, then stopped abruptly as he looked around at the blank walls. ‘Oh, damn. Of course not.’ He looked for signs of openings in the floor and ceiling, as Rossi rapped the walls with his cane. The Pieman followed him, running his hands over the lath and plaster, but there were no hidden entries.

‘Very well,’ said the Police Chief. ‘So he killed himself.’

The doctor shook his mop of unruly hair. ‘Sorry, Captain, but there is no weapon in, on or near him. Or anywhere else in the room.’

The Patterer broke his silence. ‘Then who ordered the door knocked down? And why?’

Owens gave a small nod of satisfaction. ‘Good thinking. It was none other than our theatrical friend, Mr Barnett Levey. He was worried about his distraught charge and came here to counsel him. Learning that he was in his chamber, it appears Mr Levey headed up the stairs. Failing to raise Signor Bello by knocking and shouting, he peered through the keyhole. It has a large aperture, suitable for an old-fashioned key, which, by the way, is safely resting in the corpse’s pocket. Mr Levey could see the body on the floor. Was he ill? Taken by apoplexy, perhaps? In the absence of Mr and Mrs Terry, Mr Levey took the responsibility for action upon himself.

‘Naturally, he cried “Fire!”.’ The men listening nodded, although Miss Hathaway required an explanation, which was that, in a society predominantly peopled by criminals, past and present, a call of ‘Thief’, ‘Rape’, or even ‘Murder’, might well fall on callous or deliberately deaf ears. Even the Police Chief acknowledged the logic.

‘He met a soldier in the corridor,’ said Owens, ‘but the man disgraced his uniform and hurried off. He then enlisted a constable in the street, who obtained the hammer you see and dealt with the door.

‘Mr Levey is now back at the theatre. There’s been a break-in, nothing serious, just clothing from the property room.’

The Patterer nodded and went to examine the shattered door more closely. Yes, the keyhole was indeed large, with an aperture almost an inch deep and half an inch wide.

As they retired from the room, Captain Rossi paused to accost a servant girl. ‘Where is your master?’ he asked.

‘Probably making himself scarce, again,’ she sniffed.

The Captain caught the reproof. ‘Why do you say “again”?’

‘Well, he were no use when they shouted, “Fire!”, not even when they was bashing down his door, were he?’

‘He was here, though, in the building?’

‘Yes, skulking, he was, in the attic.’

‘What’s there that’s so important?’

She shrugged. ‘Dunno. It’s always locked.’

Rossi dismissed her. For a moment he had been taken aback by the girl’s casual insolence. She obviously did not fear her master, as she might have done in England. There, to be discharged for such attitude or any other insubordination without a ‘character’, as a reference was termed, could put her on the streets and into an early grave.

But here, of course, where women were outnumbered by men by as much as three to one, she could have another job, a husband, or at least a protector, within the hour. Her behaviour was also doubtless a product of one of Sam Terry’s more gentle traits: the normally unbending businessman refused to have his servants whipped. Not that the system had flogged a woman for ten years. Sent them to the Female Factory, yes, but Sam did not like that as a threat either.

The Patterer thought deeply as they all – it now seemed that the American singer was an accepted partner – headed for the carriage. How very interesting. The poor castrato had, impossibly, been murdered. But why? Surely no disaffected member of the audience the other night had felt
that
strongly about his short-lived performance…

The theatre, of course! Bello had seen something – or someone – there he should not have seen. And why would Sam Terry have reacted to the threat of fire by going
up
, surely the most dangerous direction? Back in Bello’s room, there had been some by-play with Terry that floated out of reach of Dunne’s reason. And why had Levey promptly left after finding the body? Odd. None of this altered the Patterer’s earlier worries that others – Rossi and Thomas Owens – seemed to have lied, or at least bent the truth.

Something else surfaced in his brain: just before they were interrupted by the arrival of the Police Chief’s carriage, Susannah Hathaway had mentioned a name he believed he should recognise. But in all the new excitement he no longer remembered. Something Porter, had she not said?

One thing, however, was becoming crystal-clear – all the characters wandering around in his suspicious mind had been at the theatre that night and could have upset – or scared – Cesare Bello, who could no longer point a finger to explain or accuse.

Miss Hathaway broke his concentration by brushing vigorously at his coat sleeves and hands. ‘Goodness,’ she rebuked him, ‘you have red all over you. Not blood, I hope.’

He saw she was right. ‘No, it’s just red dust. Ochre. Something I touched must have been coated with the mess from a “Brickfielder” gale.’

That
, he thought idly, made Terry’s wife a lazy landlady. Although, come to think of it, there hadn’t been a wind howling for days.

The Flying Pieman grinned at Dunne’s discomfiture. ‘She has made your face red too.’

It was time to make as dignified a withdrawal as possible. Such dignity was endangered by their having to step carefully again around a pile, once perhaps a full human cartload, of new bricks that had been delivered in the alley.

Chapter Twenty-one

The ‘holey’ dollar and its punched-out ‘dump’ proved a lifesaver.

Emerging from the Angel tavern into Mort’s Passage then Pitt Street, the team (as Nicodemus Dunne now thought of these friends, old and new) had to part.

Dr Thomas Owens was to accompany the castrato’s body to the death-house at the Rum Hospital. His associates would not have the results of his deliberations until later the next day, for all needed early nights to best face the different duties that would call them on the morrow.

Captain Rossi had to tell Chief Constable Jilks that he was now largely on his own with the bank robbery; after all, Rossi’s rival would be busy looking for the loot and preparing the police case against the thieves he had so cleverly and promptly put into custody. They would go to trial without much ado, and their punishment would be swift and draconian.

The Captain noted with grim satisfaction that here the mills of justice, unlike God’s, did not grind exceedingly slow. One gentleman convict who had continued his horrible habit of homicide was caught, tried and hanged within thirteen days.

Jilks need not bother himself over John Creighton’s death, and he, Rossi, would attend to the killer of the castrato and the matter of Bonaparte. If he still existed.

William King departed to prepare himself for an extraordinary athletics challenge, to be played out for huge wagers. This involved a race against the clock over half a mile – the test was that he had to walk backwards.

Miss Susannah Hathaway, of course, had to rehearse for a new theatrical divertissement and the Patterer realised with a guilty start that he, too, should be at work. He owed a reading visit to Mr Joseph Hyde Potts at the rival of the aloof Bank of Australia, the ‘People’s’ Bank of New South Wales.

The banker Potts would be eager to know all about the robbery, and Dunne had an exhaustive report to read him from
The Gazette
. He also had additional detail, furnished by Captain Rossi, to flesh it out.

One particularly interesting new piece of intelligence was that James Dingle had claimed (and this claim had been confirmed by Sudden Solomon Blackstone) that each of the six thieves – five in the tunnel, one out – had received an immediate share of banknotes amounting to 1133 pounds each. They seemed happy to have, for less than a week’s actual work, the money a labourer (at twenty pounds per annum) would make in nigh on fifty-seven years.

But the prize outside the Angel today was clearly won by Captain Rossi. It was he who drove off with Miss Hathaway.

The Pieman and the Patterer started walking.

Nicodemus Dunne sat comfortably on a chaise longue in the office of the Bank of New South Wales, which was on George Street, just south of the military barracks. He was facing Mr Joseph Hyde Potts, the manager of the bank, who had been the first and only employee when the institution had opened its doors and its coffers eleven years earlier. The seat was comfortable because Mr Potts was so attached to his job that he lived on the premises, always on guard. He even slept on this wicker couch.

Potts was a regular recipient of the Patterer’s news recitations, a particularly well-paying one because the Colonial Treasury subsidised the fee, a fact that had intrigued Dunne until he learnt that he was being paid to stay away from Britain and a royal scandal that was too painful to consider.

‘Dear me, Mr Dunne,’ Mr Potts tut-tutted as they shared a pot of tea. The Patterer did not know whether the manager was put out by the details of his competitor’s calamity, or by an ugly scene in his own front chamber only moments before. A drunken gentleman had staggered into the room and demanded a glass of porter with a rum chaser (in any order) and a penny pipe of best Brazil twist.

Dunne suspected such misunderstandings occurred quite frequently – as the bank shared the building with the Thistle Inn, drinkers often mistakenly gave their orders to a teller, and barmaid Alice Finn (only a door away) had to deal with some misdirected deposits and requests for withdrawals.

For whatever reason, Mr Potts shook his head as the younger man read to him details of the grand theft, adding any additional facts he had gleaned.

‘So, 14000 pounds missing, they say?’ the banker mused. ‘Why, that would be more than a pound for every man, woman and child in the town.

‘But, pray, run through the lost treasure again: the list that results from your admirable research.’ As his visitor obliged, Mr Potts made careful notes in pencil on a large sheet of paper. He made no immediate comments but only grunted occasionally, as the Patterer rattled off what he now knew.

Missing, it seemed, were 800 half-crowns, worth 100 pounds; 8000 shillings: 400 pounds; 1000 dollar coins: 312 pounds and ten shillings; and 1200 sixpences: thirty pounds. This was the only coinage: a total of 842 pounds and ten shillings.

To that list, Dunne added 100 fifty-pound notes, that is 5000 pounds; 200 twenties, at 4000 pounds; 400 tenners: 4000 pounds; 400 fivers: 2000 pounds; 500 two-pound notes: 1000 pounds; and 1000 single-pound notes. Silver plate and 2000 sovereigns were untouched.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Potts reflectively after a moment. He stared hard at Nicodemus Dunne.

‘What?’ was all the Patterer could think of to say.

‘What, indeed,’ replied Mr Potts. ‘Simply, that figures never lie – except perhaps this time.

‘Consider the publicly announced total of 14000 pounds. Now, the notes listed in your report alone add up to 17000 pounds. And in coin there would appear to be 842 pounds and ten shillings missing; more of that latter amount in a moment.

‘But, immediately, we appear to have a total of 17 842 pounds and ten shillings to be divided at first glance among six miscreants.

‘Yet you tell me again that each thief’s share, of notes only, is claimed to be 1133 pounds – a grand total of 6798 pounds. Where then is the extra, let’s see, 10 202 pounds?’

Mr Potts was in full flight. ‘And now refresh my memory once more: read me again the sentence in the
Gazette
report about gold coins and silver plate.’

Dunne obliged. ‘ “Sovereigns to the amount of 2000 pounds, together with a large silver-plate chest, stood contiguous to the place whence the other property was abstracted, but were left untouched by the robbers, who, doubtless, were cunning enough to anticipate the difficulty which would arise in disposing of this description of property.” Is that the part you wanted?’