The Hangman's Child (25 page)

No sane man would waste room in a safe deposit to keep a hawker's pamphlet. It lay in the steel box because he was meant to find it. The secret that he shared with Pandy Quinn, the meticulous plan, had been no secret at all. He stood in the tawny oil-light and knew that he had been caught.

Not caught by the police. So how and by whom? He took the last bills to the vault door, listened for Miss Jolly's knock and brought them to her. He said nothing. If he and she had been found out, the snare was too well rigged for them to escape it now. He sat and watched her copy the bills. But he sat with fists clenched on his knees and the ghost of Pandy Quinn warning him to get clear while he could. Two bills for
£100
were left. The chance was no longer worth it.

'That's enough,' he said abruptly. 'Leave them.' 'Leave them?' The eyelids blinked as she looked at him. 'Why leave them, Jack? Why?'

'We got to move,' he said firmly. 'Now.'

He took the finished copies and the bills she had not begun. For
£200,
for
£2,000,
for
£20,000,
he would not stay. When he had replaced the originals with her copies, he went to the last deposit-box to look again at the black-lettered pamphlet. He dared not take it. That was what his hunters intended. Unlocking the box, drawing it from its envelope, he stared at the obscene black print that celebrated his death. And then he saw that on this second occasion he had unlocked the same steel box with a different key. It would open with any key, then. But why?

Closing the box and locking it, he slipped from the vault into the strong-room for the last time. He turned the wheel on the front of the heavy door and felt the six bolts whisper into place. With the key that he had built to open the twin locks, he turned the cogs and felt the steel arms close with a ton of pressure behind them. But he worked like a man in a dream. Then he was gone from the view of the spy-holes, closing the Yale on the office door.

'What's the matter, then?' She looked at him, her voice rising in apprehension at the sight of his face. Rann put a finger to his lips. He took the pens and inks from the table, clearing everything that might betray their presence. He helped her down between the floorboards of the rear office and through the foundations of the vaults to those of the tailor.

They came to the corner where he had taken up carpet and boards in the tailor's fitting-room. Rann pulled his head and shoulders above the level of the floor. He stopped and listened. There was not a sound in the building. He drew himself clear and pulled Miss Jolly after him.

'Right,' he said softly, 'you know what to do. Take the bills, the bag of pens and inks, the lantern too. When I go back down, I'll pull the two boards in place. Lay the hessian back over 'em and knock the tacks into their holes. Heel of a shoe'll do it. Then go back to Sammy upstairs. Lock the cutting-room. Put that key and the key to Trent's rooms in his safe, as if they were never took. He'll think it was them photographs of Pretty Jo that Bragg or someone was after. You and Sammy wait in the room for me. But if there's a screw loose, take the carpet-bag and clear out. I'll look for you at the Marquis of Granby.'

'But you, Jack!' Her slim fingers covered his hand on the edge of the board as he stood again in the space below. Jack Rann drew his hand out and covered hers.

‘I
got to go back this way, my love. The other floor and carpet in the vaults got to look right. It can't look right if I come up with you. If they think someone's had that carpet up, they'll look at the boards underneath. If they think they've been took up, they'll have that Yale lock apart. Once they see it's been drilled, they'll have Milner's in like a flash and perhaps find scratches, in the vault lock or in the deposit-box locks. Me and Pandy worked it out. There ain't no way but this.'

As quietly as he could, he pulled the two boards into place above his head, packing dirt where his hacksaw blade had gone through the longer board. He heard Miss Jolly draw the hessian into place at the corner of the fitting-room. A dozen light taps assured him that the tacks were in their holes.

It was almost black in the foundations as he made his way over the rubble. Gaslight in the rear office of the vaults shone through the open floorboards and dimly showed the gap where he had levered back two stones in the partition wall. Going to the open boards in the office floor, he reached up for the short steel head-bar, the length of his forearm.

This time he had fitted it with a forked cleaver to grip the corner of each block of stone and turn it back through forty-five degrees. With his head down and his hands gripping the steel bar, like a man turning a mill again, he brought the blocks into line. It was not perfect but it was good enough. Almost all the marks of damage were on the far side in the tailor's foundations.

Lodging the head-bar on the floor above him, he pulled himself up, slid the boards into place, drove the nails into their holes and tacked down the carpet in the rear corner of the office. He knew there was no sign, except his own presence, that the Cornhill Vaults had been entered.

As he turned out the gaslight and went through the workshop, he saw that it was twilight outside. Two men were crossing Sun Court in conversation, too low for him to catch the words. That they should be visiting commercial premises on a Sunday evening was odd. Yet once he was out of the building, there was nothing to make Mr Walker or the police suspect a robbery had taken place.

The chimney from the workshop furnace was the one he had recognized and measured with his eye from outside. It was square, the inner dimensions of the flue starting at about fourteen inches where it sloped back from the furnace, narrowing to ten or twelve inches at the top.

A novice would have looked in despair at so narrow a space. But Rann was no novice. He knew from practice what others deduced by mathematics. Fourteen inches became twenty inches 'on the slant'. Even ten became fourteen. Mathematics proved that he could do it. But Mathematics knew nothing of fear. Its calculations left out the utter darkness, coffin-like confinement growing ever narrower, soot thickening the air to a point where each breath was an agony. For Jack Rann, at that moment, it was the sight of the sixpenny pamphlet printed for his death which infected the air about him.

Pandy Quinn had planned the escape for a Sunday, when the furnace flue would be cool after a day's rest. Standing by the brick opening, Rann dismantled the head-bar into three sections. He took a length of string from his trouser pocket. Then he stripped the vest off over his head and drew off the moleskin trousers. Wearing only canvas shoes, he turned the clothes inside out, rolled them tight round the metal lengths of the bar and tied them with the string.

Climbing-girls as well as climbing-boys in his childhood preferred to 'buff it'. From decency, they first locked the door of the room where the chimney began, then stripped off their clothes on the hearth. Masters and mistresses of houses preferred not to know of these 'promiscuous practices', as the missioners called them. Yet climbing children, trapped and suffocating in narrow domestic chimneys, had often been caught tight on the rough brick as clothes snagged and rucked where a hand could not reach. In a nine-inch flue, the arms were wedged in the position in which they entered. One hand, stretched high to climb and brush, could not be lowered. The other, palm out at hip-level to push from below, could not be brought up. Jack Rann had sworn to Pandy Quinn that he could still climb a flue of nine or ten inches but he dared not risk it in vest and trousers.

The furnace was lined and faced with brick, standing a foot off the floor. In the fading twilight, it was black, empty, and dead. He knelt at its opening and stretched forward. His left arm would go above him, holding the tight bundle of clothes wrapped round the sections of the metal bar. He lay forward, in line with the angle of the flue, as the brickwork sloped back from the furnace-hearth.

At first it would be easy. The opening behind the furnace was two feet across, narrowing to fourteen inches a body-length beyond. Then the shaft curved from sight as it straightened vertically in the darkness. He had known such chimneys all his life. In the dark flue, whose air began to scorch his throat, he felt the familiar sandy texture of firebricks, with which it would be lined for the first twenty feet.

As the way narrowed, he eased the soreness of soot in his throat by spitting out the dust from time to time. The corrosive breath of it in his lungs was worse than the grazing from it on his hands. At intervals, the movements of his left hand above him brought down little showers of acrid powder on his head and shoulders.

In a fourteen-inch flue, he told himself, he could climb on the slant easy as eating pie. But his arms must be in place for the sudden narrowing. He would have no warning in the darkness. Only here and there a faint splash of light fell on the encrusted brickwork of the shaft from a small ventilation grille or the 'foul-air' pipes that ran off the main chimney.

He crawled at an angle, as the flue curved up from the furnace, his shoulders in diagonally opposite corners. Before it began to narrow, he touched an iron ventilation grille designed to protect banks and vaults from attempts to enter them by their chimneys.

The tips of his fingers found a square of corroded metal perforated by small holes. There was a catch on the inside that would open the two halves against the wall, allowing sweeps' brushes upwards. When closed, there was no means of opening it from above. Rann touched the catch. It was stiff but he felt it move. The two halves folded back awkwardly against the brick shaft.

Blind in darkness and soot, he struggled through. Then his heart jumped as he heard a man's voice. Who or where he could not tell. Perhaps it was Samuel. Or Trent. Perhaps someone had entered the cutting-room or the vaults. Perhaps it came from outside, the two men in Sun Court, or passers-by in the street. The metal grille was level with his hips now, about twelve feet above the hearth.

He was naked in the narrow flue, one arm above that could not be lowered, the other trapped by his side, his shoulders drawn in, his breath shallower. He listened. Like a shriek of terror, a bell rang. It was not Samuel's iron clapper but a bell that rang on and on, operated by mechanism of some kind. The sound came from a door, a street door that led to the tailor's shop or the vaults themselves.

There was no light below him and he guessed that the man who had spoken could not be in the workshop. All the same, if the building was searched, they would test the metal grille in the flue. They must not find it open while he was still climbing. He pushed himself clear, guiding it with his feet, letting it fall back and lock with as little sound as possible.

Soon he was gasping at the smart as the narrowing flue scraped flesh from the bony joints of his bare shoulders and hips. He could do nothing to protect his hips but he tried to draw his shoulders in more narrowly. Even the brine-hardened skin on his lower elbow was bleeding. He looked up to measure his progress. The bundle in his raised hand blocked any glimpse of twilight or night sky at the top of the flue. The narrowing shaft began to crush him in a last embrace, until he could scarcely work his lower hand. That arm was trapped, twisted by pressure until he gasped at the pain of wrenched muscles. His shoulders were concave to a point where he drew only quick and shallow breaths.

For the first time, he cried out and heard in his voice the sound that had begun so many childhood deaths. Twice, Rann had heard a trapped climbing-boy die. The first cry of alarm. The screams. The final helpless sounds. Others lost consciousness or were heard only after the lighting of fires which killed them. In six or seven hours, Walker's men would light the workshop furnace. The way back was locked against him by the grille. He must go on or die.

Rann was well above the point where the flue had turned from a slant to a straight ascent. He guessed that the width here was twelve inches. A bulge of chimney-mortar, a lump of hardened fire-clay the size of an egg, might trap him. Had he worn the clothes that were in his left hand above him, the rough surface would have held him now as securely as a pair of claws.

The great danger was panic. Climbing-boys and climbing-girls who were trapped would struggle against the walls that held them, and were held faster still. In their exertions they breathed the foul air more deeply. Jack Rann paused. He felt no draught from the opening of the chimney above him, nothing but stagnant air below. He coughed black phlegm from the soot in his lungs and knew that, unless he could get free, he would suffocate before the furnace could be lit.

Even his ribs were scoured now by the crusted soot. The points of his hips were raw to the bone. Then, for the first time, he felt air, perhaps from a grille but more likely from the open sky above. There was a spurt of fright as he touched the smooth surface of engineering brick with which the last part of the stack had been re-lined. It was unyielding as iron. No amount of twisting or slanting would get past it if the way was too narrow. But he moved his raised hand, in which his clothes were held, and found room above him.

Like so many buildings adapted to industrial use, this one had a stack which stood about eight feet above a stretch of flat roof on a rear extension. He was in that upper part now. If he could climb where he was, surely he could reach the top.