The Great Train Robbery (28 page)

“What man is that?” McPherson demanded, in a burst of outrage.

“Oh, please, sir, that guard upon the line. He will not let me set my dear brother here upon the train, for he says I must await another guard. Oh, I am most wretched,” she finished, and dissolved into tears once more.

“Why, the unfeeling rogue, he would not let your brother be put aboard?”

Through sobs and sniffles, the girl said something about rules.

“Rules?” he said. “A pox on rules, I say.” He noticed her heaving bosom, and her pretty, narrow waist.

“Please, sir, he is most firm about the other guard—”

“Missy,” he said, “I am the other guard, standing here before you, and I’ll see your dear brother on the train with no delay, and never you mind that blackguard.”

“Oh, sir, I am in your debt,” she said, managing a smile through her tears.

McPherson was overwhelmed: he was a young man, and it was springtime, and the girl was pretty, and soon to be in his debt. At the same instant, he felt the greatest compassion and tenderness for her distress. Altogether, he was set spinning with the emotions of the moment.

“Just you wait,” he promised, and turned to chastise Burgess for his heartless and overzealous adherence to the rules. But before he could make known his opinion, he saw the first of the gray-uniformed, armed guards of Huddleston & Bradford, bringing the bullion consignment down the platform toward them.

The loading was carried out with sharp precision. First, two guards came down the platform, entered the van, and made a quick search of the interior. Then eight more guards arrived, in neat formation around two flatcarts, each pushed by a gang of grunting, sweating porters—and each piled high with rectangular, sealed strongboxes.

At the van, a ramp was swung down, and the porters joined together to push first one, and then the other, of the laden flatcarts up into the van, to the waiting safes.

Next an official of the bank, a well-rigged gent with an air of authority, appeared with two keys in his hand. Soon after, McPherson’s uncle, the dispatcher, arrived with a second pair of keys. His uncle and the
bank’s man inserted their keys in the safes and opened them.

The bullion strongboxes were loaded into the safes, and the doors were shut with a massive metal clang that echoed in the interior of the luggage van. The keys were twisted in the locks; the safes were secured.

The man from the bank took his keys and departed. McPherson’s uncle pocketed his keys and came over to his nephew.

“Mind your work this morning,” he said. “Open every parcel large enough to hold a knave, and no exception.” He sniffed the air. “What’s that ungodly stink?”

McPherson nodded over his shoulder to the girl and the coffin, a short distance away. It was a pitiful sight but his uncle frowned with no trace of compassion. “Scheduled for the morning train, is it?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“See that you open it,” the dispatcher said, and turned away.

“But, Uncle—” McPherson began, thinking he would lose his newly gained favor with the girl by insisting on such a thing.

The dispatcher stopped. “No stomach for it? Dear God, you’re a delicate one.” He scanned the youth’s agonized face, misinterpreting his discomfiture. “All right, then. I’m near enough to death that it holds no terrors for me. I’ll see to it myself.” And the dispatcher strode off toward the weeping girl and her coffin. McPherson trailed reluctantly behind.

It was at that moment that they heard an electrifying, ghastly sound: the ringing of Mr. Bateson’s patented bell.

In later courtroom testimony, Pierce explained the psychology behind the plan. “Any guard watches for certain happenings, which he suspects at any moment, and lies in wait for. I knew the railway guard suspected
some fakement to smuggle a living body onto the van. Now, a vigilant guard will know a coffin can easily hold a body; he will suspect it less, because it seems such a poor trick for smuggling. It is too obvious.

“Yet, he will likely wonder if the body is truly dead, and if he is vigilant he will call to have the box opened, and spend some moments making a thorough examination of the body to insure that it is dead. He may feel the pulse, or the warmth of the flesh, or he may stick a pin here or there. Now, no living soul can pass such an examination without detection.

“But how different it is if all believed that the body is not dead, but alive, and wrongly incarcerated. Now all emotions are reversed: instead of suspicion, there is hope the body is vital. Instead of a solemn and respectful opening of the casket, there is a frantic rush to break it free, and in this the relatives join in willingly, sure proof there is nothing to hide.

“And then, when the lid is raised and the decomposed remains come to light, how different is the response of the spectators. Their desperate hopes are dashed in an instant; the cruel and ghastly truth is immediately apparent at a moment’s glance, and warrants no prolonged investigation. The relatives are bitterly disappointed and wildly distraught. The lid is quickly closed—and all because of reversed expectations. This is simple human nature, as evidenced in every ordinary man.”

At the sound of the bell, which rang only once, and briefly, the sobbing girl let out a shriek. At the same instant, the dispatcher and his nephew broke into a run, quickly covering the short distance to the coffin.

By then the girl was in a state of profound hysteria, clawing at the coffin lid with her fingers, mindless that her efforts were ineffectual. “Oh, my dear brother—oh, Richard, dear Richard—oh, God, he lives …” Her fingers
scrabbled at the wooden surface, and her tugging rocked the coffin so that the bell rang continuously.

The dispatcher and his nephew instantly caught the girl’s frantic anxiety, but they were able to proceed with more sense. The lid was closed with a series of metal latches, and they opened them one after another. Apparently it never occurred to either man, in the heat of the moment, that this coffin had more latches than any three others. And certainly the process of opening was more prolonged as the poor girl, in her agony, somehow impeded their efforts with her own.

In a few moments, the men were at a fever pitch of intensity. And all the while, the girl cried, “Oh, Richard—dear God, make haste, he’s alive—please, dear God, he lives, praise God …” And all the while, the bell rang from the rocking of the coffin.

The commotion drew a crowd of some size, which stood a few paces back on the platform, taking in the bizarre spectacle.

“Oh, hurry, hurry, lest we are too late,” the girl cried, and the men worked frantically at the latches. Indeed, only when they were at the final two latches did the dispatcher hear the girl cry, “Oh, I knew it was not cholera, he was a quack to say it. Oh, I knew …”

The dispatcher froze, his hand on the latch. “Cholera?” he said.

“Oh, hurry, hurry,” the girl cried. “It is five days now I have waited to hear the bell.…”

“You say cholera?” the dispatcher repeated. “Five days?”

But the nephew, who had not stopped throwing off the latches, now flung the coffin lid wide.

“Thank God!” cried the girl, and threw herself down upon the body inside, as if to hug her brother. But she halted in mid-gesture, which was perfectly understandable. With the raising of the lid, a most hideous, fetid,
foul stench rolled forth in a near palpable wave, and its source was not hard to determine; the body lying within, dressed in his best Sunday clothes, hands folded across the chest, was already in a state of obvious decomposition.

The exposed flesh at the face and hands was bloated and puffed, a repellent gray-green color. The lips were black, and so was the partially protruding tongue. The dispatcher and his nephew hardly saw more of that horrific spectacle before the feverish girl, with a final scream of heart-wrenching agony, swooned on the spot. The nephew instantly leapt to attend her, and the dispatcher, with no less alacrity, closed the lid and began shutting the latches with considerably more haste than he had displayed in opening them.

The watching crowd, when it heard that the man had died of cholera, dissipated with the same swiftness. In a moment, the station platform was nearly deserted.

Soon the servant girl recovered from her swoon, but she remained in a state of profound distress. She kept asking softly, “How can it be? I heard the bell. Did you not hear the bell? I heard it plain, did you not? The bell rang.”

McPherson did his best to comfort her, saying that it must have been some earth tremor or sudden gust of wind that had caused the bell to ring.

The station dispatcher, seeing that his nephew was occupied with the poor child, took it upon himself to supervise the loading of luggage into the van of the Folkestone train. He did this with as much diligence as he could muster after such a distressing experience. Two well-dressed ladies had large trunks and, despite their haughty protests, he insisted that both be unlocked and opened for his inspection. There was only one further incident, when a portly gentleman placed a parrot—or some such multicolored bird—on the van, and then demanded that his manservant be permitted to
ride with the bird and look after its needs. The dispatcher refused, explaining the new rules of the railway. The gentleman became abusive, and then offered the dispatcher “a sensible gratuity,” but the dispatcher—who viewed the proffered ten shillings with somewhat more interest than he cared to admit, even to himself—was aware that he was being watched by Burgess, the same guard whom he had admonished the day before. Thus the dispatcher was forced to turn down the bribe, to his own displeasure and also that of the gentleman, who stomped off muttering a litany of stinging profanity.

These incidents did nothing to improve the dispatcher’s mood, and when at last the malodorous coffin was loaded into the van, the dispatcher took a certain delight in warning Burgess, in tones of great solicitousness, to look after his health, since his fellow passenger had fallen victim to King Cholera.

To this, Burgess made no response at all, except to look nervous and out of sorts—which had been his appearance prior to the admonition. Feeling vaguely dissatisfied, the dispatcher barked a final order to his nephew to get on with the job and lock up the van. Then he returned to his office.

With embarrassment, the dispatcher later testified that he had no recollection of any red-bearded gentleman in the station that day at all.

In fact, Pierce had been among the crowd that witnessed the dreadful episode of the opened coffin. He saw that the episode proceeded precisely as he had intended, and that Agar, in his hideous make-up, had escaped detection.

When the crowd dissipated, Pierce moved forward to the van, with Barlow at his side. Barlow was carrying some rather odd luggage on a porter’s trolley, and Pierce had a moment of disquiet when he saw the dispatcher himself take up the job of supervising the loading of the van. For if anyone considered it, Pierce’s behavior was distinctly odd.

To all appearances, he was a prosperous gentleman. But his luggage was unusual, to say the least: five identical satchels of leather. These satchels were hardly the sort of items considered agreeable by gentlemen. The leather was coarse and the stitching at the seams was crude and obvious. If the satchels were unquestionably sturdy, they were also unmistakably ugly.

Yet none was very large, and Pierce could easily have stowed them in the overhead luggage racks of his carriage compartment, instead of the luggage van. The van was ordinarily considered a nuisance, since it meant delays at both the start and the conclusion of the journey.

Finally, Pierce’s manservant—he did not employ a railway porter—loaded the bags onto the luggage van
separately. Although the servant was a burly character of evident strength, he was clearly straining under the weight of each satchel.

In short, a thoughtful man might wonder why a gentleman of quality traveled with five small, ugly, extremely heavy, and identical bags. Pierce watched the dispatcher’s face while the bags were loaded, one after another. The dispatcher, somewhat pale, never noticed the bags at all, and indeed did not emerge from his distracted state until another gentleman arrived with a parrot, and an argument ensued.

Pierce drifted away, but did not board the train. Instead, he remained near the far end of the platform, apparently curious about the recovery of the woman who had fainted. In fact, he was lingering in the hope of seeing the padlock that he would soon be attempting to pick. When the dispatcher left, with a final sharp rebuke to his nephew, the young woman made her way toward the coaches. Pierce fell into step beside her.

“Are you fully recovered, Miss?” he asked.

“I trust so,” she said.

They merged with the boarding crowd at the coaches. Pierce said, “Perhaps you will join me in my compartment for the duration of the journey?”

“You are kind,” the girl said, with a slight nod.

“Get rid of him,”
Pierce whispered to her. “I don’t care how, just do it.”

Miriam had a puzzled look for only a moment, and then a hearty voice boomed out, “Edward! Edward, my dear fellow!” A man was pushing toward them through the crowd.