The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (13 page)

‘Martial Bourdin,’ Algernon said, this time looking at all of us in turn. He had seen that we had failed to respond to his previous utterance. ‘Must be French.’

‘Could be Belgian,’ said Coleridge negligently.

‘Or Swiss,’ chipped in Anatole pointedly. He has suggested that people usually believed that neutrality was synonymous with insignificance.

‘And what ’as that French, Swiss or Belgian fello done again?’ asked Armande, ‘ ’as ee robbed a banque or somsing?’ Algie folded his Reynolds’ News in four, moved it away a bit as he was slightly hypermetropic and read us an account of how a certain Martial Bourdin had
blown himself outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park the day before yesterday and died half an hour later at the Seamen’s Hospital.

‘That man gives anarchy a bad name,’ said Ivan Vissarionovich indignantly, in his baritone bass voice. ‘He should be blowing up rotten institutions and not himself.’ That started us off on a discussion on bomb-making, anarchy, Belgians, and a variety of unrelated topics. When someone mentioned bank-robbery, Clarihoe, holding the paper demanded our attention and spoke again. ‘Listen to this,’ and he read an article about how the recent spate of attacks on banks had damaged the reputation of the financial institutions of the country.

If the day came when one’s money was no longer as safe as in a bank
, the author of the article wrote, quoting William Stanley Jevons,
then capitalism itself, on which the well-being of the Empire itself rests, would collapse like a house of cards
. Mr Sherlock Holmes, Algie paraphrased, after having gained plaudits for apprehending the arch-villain Vincent Spaulding, the creator of the fictitious Red-Headed League, who had planned to break into and rob the City & Suburban Bank in Saxe-Coburg Square, had been recruited to evaluate the impregnability of the Royal Mersey Bank of Lombard Street. After an extensive study of the locking systems, the iron bars in the windows, and after studying a report of a geological survey of the rock and soil in an appropriately large area around the building, which the proprietors had commissioned at the detective’s behest, he had pronounced it unassailable, even if the presence of the Lombard Street Police Station fifty yards away was not taken into account. That, in his estimate, increased security by a factor of two. I cannot recall how, but the conversation somehow led to the owners of the aforesaid bank. Although slavery had been abolished more than half a century earlier, the Bishop never ceased talking about it as the greatest blot on the human landscape, suggesting that it would take centuries before the nation’s soul would be cleansed of the ignominy. None of us could forget the stories that Coleridge had told us about what his own forbears had gone through. Vissarionovich had vociferously advocated the confiscation of the wealth gained by the practitioners of that obscene trade, but of course nothing of the sort had been envisaged. The shameless heirs of
those spoliators of human dignity continued to flaunt their extravagant mansions, their manicured gardens and their six-horse carriages.

The Royal Mersey, Anatole informed us, was a consortium created by Sir Thomas Golightly, once Lord Mayor of Liverpool, a man whose fortunes had sprouted from and flourished on indignity and human misery, with his fellow slave-traders John Williamson and William Davenport. These three men had done everything in their power to sully the good name of god-fearing men like Wilberforce and Roscoe who were the spirit behind the Abolition Act, and who had tirelessly campaigned to rid the world of this inhuman practice. The Royal Mersey was now under the management of Mr William Golightly, the son of the founder, a shrewd and sprightly nonagenarian, who had also worn the Liverpool mayoral chain.

‘Martial Bourdin,’ I shouted, to the consternation of all my friends.

‘That’s ’ow we started, ma chère,’ said Armande in a pretend hectoring manner. ‘We’ve moved on now, Ee-reine, or ’adn’t you noticed?’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but—’

‘Irene,’ admonished Algernon Clarihoe, ‘you’re not thinking of blowing up the bank?’

‘And why not?’ exclaimed Bartola merrily.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I am thinking of breaking into it just the same. After all we’re getting short of funds, aren’t we, Anatole?’ Frunk, the renegade financial wizard who was our treasurer pursed his lips and nodded gravely. Everybody agreed. I was much heartened when nobody expressed any reservations as a result of the bank having been pronounced impregnable by the man from Baker Street.

In those days, the reader might remember, unbeknownst to Holmes, I had infiltrated his Baker Street home and was masquerading as his housekeeper under the name of Mrs Hudson. As such, I had a good chance of reading the whole of the confidential report that he had produced for William Golightly and his associates, that the newspaper had unwisely printed a summary of.

‘Do we really need to make a bomb?’ asked Probert, rubbing his hands in glee, a mischievous glint emanating from his eyes.

I was biding my time and as I was serving him his cocoa one evening less than a week later, Mr Holmes informed me that he was catching the thirteen past seven express from Paddington in the morning, bound for Exeter. The moment he closed the door behind him I rushed to his desk and had no difficulty in opening the drawer. I had honed many useful if questionable skills since we formed the Club. I found the report and settled down in his swivelling armchair to study it. It confirmed much of the press story and provided useful details of rock analysis and such things. Besides, there were informations of a confidential nature which I found very useful. For instance that there was only one entrance to the premises. This unicity, according to Holmes, was the single most important factor in ensuring the one hundred percent security of the building, rating it higher than the presence of the Police Station less than fifty yards away. The front door is of massive seasoned oak six inches thick, with two separate rim locks. This was further shielded by an iron grill, itself fitted with an American steel lock supplied and made by Mr Allan Pinkerton himself. The entrance is therefore impossible to breach unless one had all three keys, or a large quantity of dynamite, the use of which we would consider inelegant. Holmes expresses his admiration for the practice of using three keys, but suggests the introduction of decoys as a refinement. His idea was to involve six senior clerks instead of three. They would all crowd the exit while carrying out the locking, after which, the keys would be surreptitiously attributed among them, according to a rota chosen by Mr Golightly in the afternoon. The six senior employees then going in different directions would make it extremely difficult for a putative gang to organise an ambush with a view to gaining possession of all three means of entry. My boss also indicated approval of the Strongroom being protected by another iron grill, and of the safes being fitted with Pinkerton-commended and Pittsburgh manufactured locks. He thought that the keys being entrusted unto the care of the Police Station at closing time. was very sensible. Spread the keys around in the same manner as you would keep your eggs in several baskets, he had added in his report. He agreed that the Chubb safes in the Strongroom were the best available in the world, and were well-nigh crack-proof. He had summarised it thus: To break into the bank, a potential gang would
have first to ambush the six trusted employees as well as attack and overpower the police at the station.

Was I overwhelmed by this seemingly impossible task? At the risk of being thought insufferably vain, I will own to a feeling of exhilaration. To me here was a real conundrum, and I have never in my born life been able to resist a challenge. When the problem ahead is an easy one, finding an answer is trivial, but as it becomes more difficult, the resolution becomes more interesting, therefore, irresistible. I never doubted for one minute that I would rise to the occasion.

We began by organising surveillance. A time-table was drawn, whereby each one of us had a role to play in determining the routines of the bank. Armande and Coleridge, disguised as an actress and an African prince began by walking into the
Parasol Tea Rooms
at the corner of Lombard and King William Streets, sat in a corner which afforded a full view of the entrance to the bank through its vast glass window, and over an enjoyable breakfast, they observed the
va et vient
—as Armande put it— of the employees and clients of the bank. Artémise’s task was to walk into the bank to transact some business, in this case, changing one hundred pounds into Swiss Francs. Next day Anatole, our financial wizard went to change back the Swiss francs into Sterling, resulting in a small loss which we considered an unavoidable expenditure.

Vissarionovich’s mission was probably the most delicate, but surprisingly the excitable Russian is well able to turn himself into an urbane and cool-headed operator when the occasion demands. It involved him going in the Royal Mersey to enquire about the availability of gold ingots. He was discreetly invited into the manager’s office to see the governor.

The shifty man sitting behind the desk with an improbably luxurious mane displayed a face of pasty complexion and of rare melancholy ugliness. He was so endowed in matters follicular that a pair of thick bushy eyebrows not being enough to dispose of his available stock of hair, a non-negligible amount of it had found an outlet through the nostrils of his spud-nose. On the wall behind the banker’s large desk, a portrait of an extraordinary man, looking like Moses’ older brother, in a flowing white beard, exuding serenity and respectability caught the visitor’s attention.

‘My illustrious father, Sir Thomas Golightly,’ said the banker gravely when he caught our man looking at it. ‘The country owes much to him.’

Golightly seemed greatly impressed when Ivan mentioned that he was a Romanov, and hinted that he was in London to buy gold for his cousin the tsar. An association with that family, the near centenarian had been thinking, cannot but bring untold advantages to him.

‘Trading in gold ingots is a complicated affair,’ he informed his visitor after hearing what his business was, ‘but we wouldn’t be in banking my dear Count, if we did not know how to bend the rules and cut corners for our clients.’

‘Do I understand that the deal can be transacted unofficially?’

‘Sir,’ whispered the man who in his youth had helped his father displace over five thousand black men women and children from the safety and comfort of their huts in the bush to the cruel and harsh realities of sugar plantations in the West Indies, in leaky hulks in which over fifteen percent of them perished, his eyes twinkling mischievously. ‘You are after gold and I am after money, why should we spoil it by sharing our profits with officialdom?’

‘Indeed,’ exclaimed Vissarionovich. ‘Sir, you are a man after my own heart and I daresay you and I can do business together.’ They discussed terms and the Russian said to expect him on Friday at eleven o’clock. Was that convenient?

In the late afternoon, Algie and I, not wishing to miss out on the delights that the
Parasol
had to offer, went in, sat ourselves where our two friends had enjoyed their bacon and eggs earlier that morning and partook of mocha and patisserie, while observing and making notes of people coming in and out of the bank.

We had gathered most of the relevant information we needed on the very first day, but as often, the quest being more delightful than the destination, the operations of the first day were repeated the following week, with different pairs partaking of breakfast or afternoon
amuse-gueules
, providing us with more detailed information.

The dextrous Artémise and the knowing Vissarionovich constructed the device. The Bishop, who had personally supervised the renovation of the pews in his Epping church, working with Coleridge, now branching
off more and more into carpentry, produced a perfect rectangular block made of balsa wood, twenty six centimetres long, eight centimetres wide and four centimetres high. Anatole who knew that the kilo-bar ingots originating from Crédit Suisse, as stocked by the Royal Mersey, were six and a half centimetres long, by four, by two, and helped with the tricky conversion into inches. We planned on deviating just sixteen of them, as anything over forty pounds might prove troublesome to carry.

We now knew the exact time at which the clerks and tellers arrived on the premises and when they locked up. Following Holmes’ instructions they did it so efficiently that we found it impossible to identify who of the six had the good keys and who the decoys. We noted that the tellers ate lunch inside, as indeed did the bosses, although sometimes they went to lunch at restaurants in Fenchurch with business associates.

In the meantime, we had made our device. It looked harmless enough, the size and shape of a shoebox, except that footwear does not as a rule make ticking noises. I was padded to appear heavily pregnant, but among other things I was concealing a leather bag and our block of balsa wood. On Friday, as each one of us had an active role to play, we wended our merry way to Lombard Street by tram. Probert, fitted with a florid beard, had the device in a doctor’s bag. I carried some victuals and a flask of water in my handbag. The others, with lesser involvement in the operation, assembled in the
Parasol
or other watering holes in the vicinity, enjoying a drink and a patisserie while waiting for their cues.