The Great Train Robbery (27 page)

“Is your name Coolidge, then?” Burgess asked. “You said Simms.…”

“It’s Simms,” Pierce said. “Our friend here is only making a joke. I want you to go home now, and sleep, and get up tomorrow and go to work as usual. Just carry on as usual, no matter what happens. Just do your regular day of work, and don’t worry about anything.”

Burgess glanced at Agar, then back to Pierce. “Will you pull tomorrow, then?”

“Yes,” Pierce said. “Now go home and sleep.”

When the two men were alone, Agar exploded in anxious fury. “Damn me if I’ll voker flams at this dead hour. This is no simple kynchin lay tomorrow. Is that not plain?” Agar threw up his hands. “Make an end to it, I say. Next month, I say.”

Pierce remained quiet for a moment. “I’ve waited a year,” he said finally, “and it will be tomorrow.”

“You’re puckering,” Agar said, “just talk, with no sense.”

“It can be done,” Pierce insisted.

“Done?” Agar exploded again. “Done
how
? Look here, I know you for a clever one, but I’m no flat, and there’s no gammoning me. That lay is coopered. It’s too damn sad the wine was snaffled, but so it was, and we must know it.” Agar was red-faced and frantic; he swung his arms through the air in agitation.

In contrast, Pierce was almost unnaturally still. His eyes surveyed Agar steadily. “There is a bone lay,” Pierce said.

“As God is my witness, how?” Agar watched as Pierce calmly went to a sideboard and poured two glasses of brandy. “You’ll not put enough of that in me to cloud my eyes,” he said. “Now, look plain.”

Agar held up his hand, and ticked the points off on his fingers. “I am to ride in the van, you say. But I cannot get in—an eager jack of a Scotsman stands sharp at the door. You heard as much yourself. But fair enough: I trust you to get me in. Now.”

He ticked off another finger. “Now, there I be in the van. The Scotsman locks up from the outside. I’ve no way to touch that lock, so even if I make the switch, I can’t open the door and toss out the pogue. I’m locked in proper, all the way to Folkestone.”

“Unless I open the door for you,” Pierce said. He gave Agar a snifter of brandy.

Agar swallowed it in a single gulp. “Aye, and there’s a likely turn. You come back over all those coaches, tripping light over the rooftops, and swing down like Mr. Coolidge over the side of the van to pick the lock and break the drum. I’ll see God in heaven first, no mistake.”

Pierce said, “I know Mr. Coolidge.”

Agar blinked. “No gull?”

“I met him on the Continent last year. I climbed with him in Switzerland—three peaks in all—and I learned what he knows.”

Agar was speechless. He stared at Pierce for any sign of deception, scanning the cracksman’s face. Mountaineering was a new sport, only three or four years old, but it had captured the popular attention, and the most notable of the English practitioners, such as A. E. Coolidge, had become famous.

“No gull?” Agar said again.

“I have the ropes and tackle up in the closet,” Pierce said. “No gull.”

“I’ll have another daffy,” Agar said, holding out his empty glass. Pierce immediately filled it, and Agar immediately gulped it down.

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s say you
can
betty the lock, hanging on a rope, and break the drum, and then lock up again, with nobody the wiser. How do I get on in the first place, past the Scots jack, with his sharp cool?”

“There is a way,” Pierce said. “It’s not pleasant, but there is a way.”

Agar appeared unconvinced. “Say you put me on in some trunk. He’s bound he’ll open it and have a see, and there I am. What then?”

“I intend for him to open it and see you,” Pierce said.

“You
intend
?”

“I think so, and it will go smoothly enough, if you can take a bit of odor.”

“What manner of odor?”

“The smell of a dead dog, or cat,” Pierce said. “Dead some days. Do you think you can manage that?”

Agar said, “I swear, I don’t get the lay. Let’s settle the down with another daffy or two,” and he extended his glass.

“That’s enough,” Pierce said. “There are things for you to do. Go to your lodgings, and come back with your best dunnage, the finest you have, and quickly.”

Agar sighed.

“Go now,” Pierce said. “And trust me.”

When Agar had departed, he sent for Barlow, his cabby.

“Do we have any rope?” Pierce said.

“Rope, sir? You mean hempen rope?”

“Precisely. Do we have any in the house?”

“No, sir. Could you make do with bridle leather?”

“No,” Pierce said. He considered a moment. “Hitch up the horse to the flat carriage and get ready for a night’s work. We have a few items to obtain.”

Barlow nodded and left. Pierce returned to the dining room, where Miriam was still sitting, patient and calm.

“There’s trouble?” she said.

“Nothing beyond repair,” Pierce said. “Do you have a black dress? I am thinking of a frock of cheap quality, such as a maid might wear?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Good,” he said. “Set it out, you will wear it tomorrow morning.”

“Whatever for?” she asked.

Pierce smiled. “To show your respect for the dead,” he said.

On the morning of May 22nd, when the Scottish guard McPherson arrived at the platform of the London Bridge Station to begin the day’s work, he was greeted by a most unexpected sight. There alongside the luggage van of the Folkestone train stood a woman in black—a servant, by the look of her, but handsome enough, and sobbing most piteously.

The object of her grief was not hard to discover, for near the poor girl, set onto a flat baggage car, was a plain wooden casket. Although cheap and unadorned, the casket had several ventholes drilled in the sides. And mounted on the lid of the casket was a kind of miniature belfry, containing a small bell, with a cord running from the clapper down through a hole to the innards of the coffin.

Although the sight was unexpected, it was not in the least mysterious to McPherson—or, indeed, to any Victorian of the day. Nor was he surprised, as he approached the coffin, to detect the reeking odor of advanced corporeal decay emanating from the vent-holes, and suggesting that the present occupant had been dead for some time. This, too, was wholly understandable.

During the nineteenth century, both in England and in the United States, there arose a peculiar preoccupation with the idea of premature burial. All that remains of this bizarre concern is the macabre literature of Edgar
Allan Poe and others, in which premature burial in some form or another appears as a frequent motif. To modern thinking, it is all exaggerated and fanciful; it is difficult now to recognize that for the Victorians, premature burial was a genuine, palpable fear shared by nearly all members of society, from the most superstitious worker to the best-educated professional man.

Nor was this widespread fear simply a neurotic obsession. Quite the contrary: there was plenty of evidence to lead a sensible man to believe that premature burials did occur, and that such ghastly happenings were only prevented by some fortuitous event. A case in 1853 in Wales, involving an apparently drowned ten-year-old boy, received wide publicity: “While the coffin lay in the open grave, and the first earth was shovelled upon it, a most frightful noise and kicking ensued from within. The sextons ceased their labors, and caused the coffin to be opened, whereupon the lad stepped out, and called for his parents. Yet the same lad had been pronounced dead many hours past, and the doctor said that he had no respirations nor any detectable pulse, and the skin was cold and gray. Upon sighting the lad, his mother fell into a swoon, and did not revive for some length of time.”

Most cases of premature burial involved victims ostensibly drowned, or electrocuted, but there were other instances where a person might lapse into a state of “apparent death, or suspended animation.”

In fact, the whole question of when a person was dead was very much in doubt—as it would be again, a century later, when doctors struggled with the ethics of organ transplantation. But it is worth remembering that physicians did not understand that cardiac arrest was wholly reversible until 1950; and in 1850 there was plenty of reason to be skeptical about the reliability of any indicator of death.

Victorians dealt with their uncertainty in two ways.
The first was to delay interment for several days—a week was not uncommon—and await the unmistakable olfactory evidence of the beloved one’s departure from this world. Indeed, the Victorian willingness to postpone burial sometimes reached extremes. When the Duke of Wellington died, in 1852, there was public debate about the way his state funeral should be conducted; the Iron Duke simply had to wait until these disagreements were settled, and he was not actually buried until more than two months after his death.

The second method for avoiding premature burial was technological; the Victorians contrived an elaborate series of warning and signaling devices to enable a dead person to make known his resuscitation. A wealthy individual might be buried with a length of iron pipe connecting his casket to the ground above, and a trusted family servant would be required to remain at the cemetery, day and night, for a month or more, on the chance that the deceased would suddenly awake and begin to call for help. Persons buried aboveground, in family vaults, were often placed in patented, spring-loaded caskets, with a complex maze of wires attached to arms and legs, so that the slightest movement of the body would throw open the coffin lid. Many considered this method preferable to any other, for it was believed that individuals often returned from a state of suspended animation in a mute or partially paralyzed condition.

The fact that these spring-loaded coffins popped open months or even years later (undoubtedly the result of some external vibration or deterioration in the spring mechanism) only heightened the widespread uncertainty about how long a person might lie dead before coming back to life, even for a moment.

Most signaling devices were costly, and available only to the wealthy classes. Poor people adopted the simpler tactic of burying relatives with some implement—a crowbar, or a shovel—on the vague assumption
that if they revived, they could dig themselves out of their predicament.

There was clearly a market for an inexpensive alarm system, and in 1852 George Bateson applied for, and received, a patent for the Bateson Life Revival Device, described as “a most economical, ingenious, and trustworthy mechanism, superior to any other method, and promoting peace of mind amongst the bereaved at all stations of life. Constructed of the finest materials throughout.” And there is an additional comment: “A device of proven efficacy, in countless instances in this country and abroad.”

“Bateson’s belfry,” as it was ordinarily known, was a plain iron bell mounted on the lid of the casket, over the deceased’s head, and connected by a cord or wire through the coffin to the dead person’s hand, “such that the least tremor shall directly sound the alarum.” Bateson’s belfries attained instant popularity, and within a few years a substantial proportion of coffins were fitted with these bells. During this period, three thousand people died daily in London alone, and Bateson’s business was brisk; he was soon a wealthy man and respected as well: in 1859, Victoria awarded him an O.B.E. for his efforts.

As a kind of odd footnote to the story, Bateson himself lived in mortal terror of being buried alive, and caused his workshop to fabricate increasingly complex alarm systems for installation on his own coffin after he died. By 1867, his preoccupation left him quite insane, and he rewrote his will, directing his family to cremate him at his death. However, suspecting that his instructions would not be followed, in the spring of 1868 he doused himself with linseed oil in his workshop, set himself aflame, and died by self-immolation.

On the morning of May 22nd, McPherson had more important things to worry about than the weeping servant
girl and the coffin with its belfry, for he knew that today the gold shipment from Huddleston & Bradford would be loaded upon the railway van at any moment.

Through the open door of the van, he saw the guard, Burgess. McPherson waved, and Burgess responded with a nervous, rather reserved greeting. McPherson knew that his uncle, the dispatcher, had yesterday given Burgess a good deal of sharp talk; Burgess was no doubt worried to keep his job, especially as the other guard had been dismissed. McPherson assumed that this accounted for Burgess’s tension.

Or perhaps it was the sobbing woman. It would not be the first time a stout man had been put off his mark by a female’s piteous cries. McPherson turned to the young girl and proffered his handkerchief.

“There, now, Missy,” he said. “There, now …” He sniffed the air. Standing close to the coffin, he noticed that the odor seeping out of the ventholes was certainly rank. But he was not so overcome by the smell that he failed to observe the girl was attractive, even in her grief. “There, now,” he said again.

“Oh, please, sir,” the girl cried, taking his handkerchief and sniffling into it. “Oh, please, can you help me? The man is a heartless beast, he is.”