The Great Train Robbery (5 page)

“What about the front door?” Pierce said, shifting his gaze. Not only was the cupboard inside locked, but the door to the suite of offices—a frosted door, with
SER
stenciled on it, and underneath,
TRAFFIC SUPERVISOR DIVISION
—had a large brass lock above the knob.

“Appearances,” Agar snorted. “She’ll crack open with any cheap twirl to tickle her innards. I could open her with a ragged fingernail. We’ve no problems there. The problem is the bloody crowds.”

Pierce nodded, but said nothing. This was essentially Agar’s operation, and he would have to figure it out. “The pogue is two keys, you say?”

“Yes,” Pierce said. “Two keys.”

“Two keys is four waxes. Four waxes is nigh on a minute, to do it proper. But that doesn’t count cracking the outside, or the inside cabinet. That’s more time again.” Agar looked around at the crowded platform, and the clerks in the office. “Bloody flummut to try and crack her by day,” he said. “Too many people about.”

“Night?”

“Aye, at night, when she’s empty, and a proper deadlurk. I think the night is best.”

“At night, the crushers make rounds,” Pierce reminded him. They had already learned that during the evening, when the station was deserted, the policemen patrolled it at four- or five-minute intervals throughout the night. “Will you have time?”

Agar frowned, and squinted up at the office. “No,” he said finally. “Unless …”

“Yes?”

“Unless the offices were already open. Then I can make my entrance neat as you please, and I do the waxes quick-like, and I’m gone in less than two minutes flat.”

“But the offices will be locked,” Pierce said.

“I’m thinking of a snakesman,” Agar said, and he nodded to the supervisor’s office.

Pierce looked up. The supervisor’s office had a broad glass window; through it, he could see Mr. McPherson, in his shirtsleeves, with white hair and a green shade over his forehead. And behind McPherson was a window for ventilation, a window approximately a foot square. “I see it,” Pierce said. And he added, “Damn small.”

“A proper snakesman can make it through,” Agar said. A snakesman was a child adept at wriggling
through small spaces. Usually he was a former chimney sweep’s apprentice. “And once he’s in the office, he unlocks the cupboard, and he unlocks the door from the inside, and he sets it all up proper for me. That will make this job a bone lay, and no mistake,” he said, nodding in satisfaction.

“If there’s a snakesman.”

“Aye.”

“And he must be the devil’s own,” Pierce said, looking again at the window, “if we are to break that drum. Who’s the best?”

“The best?” Agar said, looking surprised. “The best is Clean Willy, but he’s in.”

“Where’s he in?”

“Newgate Prison, and there’s no escaping that. He’ll do his days on the cockchafer, and be a good lad, and wait for his ticket-of-leave if it comes. But there’s no escape. Not from Newgate.”

“Perhaps Clean Willy can find a way.”

“Nobody can find a way,” Agar said heavily. “It’s been tried before.”

“I’ll get a word to Willy,” Pierce said, “and we shall see.”

Agar nodded. “I’ll hope,” he said, “but not too excessive.”

The two men resumed watching the offices. Pierce stared at the storage room of the offices, at the little cupboard mounted on the wall. It occurred to him that he had never seen it opened. He had a thought: what if there were more keys—perhaps dozens of keys—in that little closet? How would Agar know which ones to copy?

“Here comes the escop,” Agar said.

Pierce looked, and saw that the police constable was making his rounds. He flicked his chronometer: seven minutes and forty-seven seconds since the last circuit.
But the constable’s routine would be more rapid at night.

“You see a lurk?” Pierce said.

Agar nodded to a baggage stand in a corner, not more than a dozen paces from the staircase. “There’d do.”

“Well enough,” Pierce said.

The two men remained seated until seven o’clock, when the clerks left the office to return home. At seven-twenty, the supervisor departed, locking the outside door after him. Agar had a look at the key, from a distance.

“What kind of a key?” Pierce asked.

“Cheap twirl will manage,” Agar said.

The two men remained another hour, until it became inconvenient for them to stay in the station. The last train had departed, and they were now too conspicuous. They remained just long enough to clock the constable on night duty as he made his rounds of the station. The constable passed the traffic manager’s office once every five minutes and three seconds.

Pierce snapped the button on his chronometer and glanced at the second hand. “Five and three,” he said.

“Dub lay,” Agar said.

“Can you do it?”

“Of course I can do it,” Agar said. “I can get a judy preggers in less—a dub lay is all I said. Five and three?”

“I can light a cigar faster,” Pierce reminded him.

“I can do it,” Agar said firmly, “if I have a snakesman such like Clean Willy.”

The two men left the railway station. As they stepped into the fading twilight, Pierce signaled his cab. The cabby with a scar across his forehead whipped up his horse and clattered toward the station entrance.

“When do we knock it over?” Agar said.

Pierce gave him a gold guinea. “When I inform you,”
he said. And then he got into the cab and rode off into the deepening night darkness.

By the middle of July, 1854, Edward Pierce knew the location of three of the four keys he needed to rob the safes. Two keys were in the green cupboard of the traffic supervisor’s office of the South Eastern Railway. A third hung around the neck of Henry Fowler. To Pierce, these three keys presented no major problem.

There was, of course, the question of opportune timing in making a clandestine break to obtain a wax impression. There was also the problem of finding a good snakesman to aid in the break at the railway offices. But these were all easily surmountable obstacles.

The real difficulty centered around the fourth key. Pierce knew that the fourth key was in the possession of the bank’s senior partner, Mr. Trent, but he did not know
where
—and this lack of knowledge represented a formidable challenge indeed, and one that occupied his attention for the next four months.

A few words of explanation may be useful here. In 1854, Alfred Nobel was just beginning his career; the Swedish chemist would not discover dynamite for another decade, and the availability of nitroglycerin “soup” lay still further in the future. Thus, in the mid-nineteenth century, any decently constructed metal safe represented a genuine barrier to theft.

This truth was so widely acknowledged that safe
manufacturers devoted most of their energies to the problem of making safes fireproof, since loss of money and documents through incineration was a much more serious hazard than loss through theft. During this period, a variety of patents were issued for ferromanganese, clay, marble dust, and plaster of Paris as fireproof linings for safes.

A thief confronted with a safe had three options. The first was to steal the whole safe outright, carrying it off to break open at his leisure. This was impossible if the safe was of any size or weight, and manufacturers were careful to employ the heaviest and most unwieldy construction materials to discourage this maneuver.

Alternatively, a thief could employ a “petter-cutter,” a drill that clamped to the keyhole of the safe and permitted a hole to be bored over the lock. Through this hole, the lock mechanism could be manipulated and the lock opened. But the petter-cutter was a specialist’s tool; it was noisy, slow, and uncertain; and it was expensive to purchase and bulky to carry on a job.

The third choice was to look at the safe and give up. This was the most common outcome of events. In another twenty years, the safe would be transformed from an impregnable obstacle to a mere irritant in the minds of burglars, but for the moment it was virtually unbeatable.

Unless, that is, one had a key to the safe. Combination locks had not yet been invented; all locks were operated by key, and the most reliable way to break a safe was to come prepared with a previously obtained key. This truth lies behind the nineteenth-century criminal’s preoccupation with keys. Victorian crime literature, official and popular, often seems obsessed with keys, as if nothing else mattered. But in those days, as the master safe-cracker Neddy Sykes said in his trial in 1848, “The key is everything in the lay, the problem and the solution.”

Thus it was Edward Pierce’s unquestioned assumption in planning the train robbery that he must first obtain copies of all the necessary keys. And he must do this by gaining access to the keys themselves, for although there was a new method of using wax “blanks” and inserting them into the locks of the actual safes, this technique was undependable. Safes of the period were usually left unguarded for this reason.

The true criminal focus was upon the keys to the safe, wherever they might be. The copying process presented no difficulty: wax impressions of the key could be made in a few moments. And any premises containing a key could be cracked with relative ease.

But, if one stops to think of it, a key is really rather small. It can be concealed in the most unlikely places; it can be hidden almost anywhere on a person’s body, or in a room. Particularly a Victorian room, where even so ordinary an item of furniture as a wastebasket was likely to be covered in cloth, layers of fringes, and decorative rings of tassels.

We forget how extraordinarily cluttered Victorian rooms were. Innumerable hiding places were provided by the prevailing décor of the period. Furthermore, the Victorians themselves adored secret compartments and concealed spaces; a mid-century writing desk was advertised as “containing 110 compartments, including many most artfully concealed from detection.” Even the ornate hearths, found in every room of a house, offered dozens of places to hide an object as small as a key.

Thus, in the mid-Victorian period, information about the location of a key was almost as useful as an actual copy of the key itself. A thief seeking a wax impression might break into a house if he knew exactly where the key was hidden, or even if he knew in which room it was hidden. But if he did not know where in the house it was, the difficulty of making a thorough search—silently, in a house full of residents and servants, using
a single shaded lantern that threw only a “bull’s-eye” spot of light—was so great as to be not worth the attempt in the first instance.

Therefore, Pierce directed his attention to discovering where Mr. Edgar Trent, senior partner of the firm of Huddleston & Bradford, kept his key.

The first question was whether Mr. Trent kept his key in the bank. Junior clerks of Huddleston & Bradford took their dinner at one o’clock at a pub called the Horse and Rider, across the street from the firm. This was a smallish establishment, crowded and warm at the noon dinner hour. Pierce struck up an acquaintance with one of the clerks, a young man named Rivers.

Normally, the servants and junior clerks of the bank were wary of casual acquaintances, for one never knew when one was talking to a criminal out of twig; but Rivers was relaxed, in the knowledge that the bank was impregnable to burglary—and recognizing, perhaps, that he had a deal of resentment toward the source of his employment.

In this regard, one may profitably record the revised “Rules for Office Staff” posted by Mr. Trent in early 1854. These were as follows:

However Utopian, the working conditions of Huddleston & Bradford led the clerk Rivers to speak freely about Mr. Trent. And with less enthusiasm than one might expect for a Utopian employer.

“Bit of a stiff, he is,” Rivers said. “Snapping his watch at eight-thirty sharp, and checking all to see they are at their places, no excuses. God help the man whose omnibus is late in the traffic of the rush.”