The Hangman's Child (12 page)

'Barrister' Saward's practice had never been more than an occasional brief for the defence in assault or receiving stolen goods. Even that dwindled among rumours of suspect dealings in probate and bank-bills. But Saward had known the law for thirty years and there was no conviction against him. At sixty, he lived in his Inner Temple chambers, among a coterie of clerks, coachmen and whores.

Pandy Quinn had known more than any policeman about The Barrister. It cost only a few sovereigns to coax the 'vixen' of an introducing house, a procuress of young girls for the old man's bed. From this, Pandy knew that document-forms for bank bills, which only a licensed attorney might buy from a law stationer without questions asked, were Saward's weapons. If a pile of these were now missed from his desk or deed-box, Jem the Penman must suffer quietly rather than draw the attention of the police to his loss.

The beauty of such bills, as Pandy had said, was that they might

be written as easily as cheques and traded as safely as bank-notes.

As Rann entered Middle Temple Lane from Fleet Street, Miss Jolly on his arm, St Brides struck midnight. The golden-skinned figure of the Chinese Shades was covered by a high-waisted walking-gown in green silk with a matching bonnet.

‘I
got to do what I must and get clear,' he had said firmly.
‘I
ain't got weeks, let alone months.'

They passed the barred windows of the bailiffs' office, where debtors were first confined after arrest. Between a patent office and a wine cellar, frequented by runners and managing clerks, stood a gateway to Masters' Green.

There were lights at a few chambers' windows, but the paved alleys and courtyards were deserted. The quarters from the Temple Church rang clear and cold. At the far end of the path, Rann passed under a dilapidated arch into the cul-de-sac of Masters' Yard. There was no grass at the centre of this small paved quadrangle. Its buildings shut out sun and moon alike. The column of a broken pump stood on one side, a solitary iron post with a bubble gas-lamp on the other.

The outer door to each staircase and its chambers was approached by steps between area railings, open day and night, the names of tenants painted in a column on the stone facing of the entrance. They passed a little barber's shop, a display of dirty-white legal wigs in a paned window. The topmost name on the next doorpost announced 'J
ames
Townshend Saward, Esquire, M.A., Barrister-at-Law'. Rann glanced up and saw that the outer room was in darkness.

'Nothing to fear,' he said gently, tightening his hold on her arm. 'I'll do what's needful. He's got far more cause to be frightened of us.'

'So you say!' But she made no attempt to pull back.

'Wait in the shadows of the pump. I'll signal from that middle window, if I have to. It's where his office is. So long as I see you, I'll know I'm safe. No police, no one coming in. If there's police or a sign of trouble, start a row, so's I shall hear. I'll be out 'cross the roof faster than they could run up the stairs.'

'How long?'

Rann shrugged.

'Half an hour, near as a toucher. If you ain't here then, I'll follow home.'

Faltering gaslight glinted in Miss Jolly's dark vigilant eyes as she turned to him.

'And that's the worst of it, Jack? The worst of Pandy's plan?' He lied easily.

'Much the worst. With a clever girl like you, the rest is good as done.'

He studied the gold of her complexion, the seductive slant of her eyes, the dark hair combed back from the slope of her forehead. Not many in his profession would have brought her, for fear of making her a hostage or from a belief in bad luck. But Rann knew that his last and best robbery was impossible without her. He kissed the odalisque profile, her cheek cooler than the warm night air, and turned away.

Crossing the courtyard like a shadow, he thought of Soapy Samuel and Bully Bragg, who dismissed Miss Jolly as a shop-mouse, a funeral-mute in childhood, sleeping among half-finished coffins, then a slop-shop needle-girl, later an attendant with downcast eyes waiting meekly on customers at the Conduit Street
Artiste-en-Modes.
It was as well that they should continue to think so.

Beyond the doorway with its painted names, wooden stairs led up four sides of a dingy whitewashed vestibule, a single gas-lamp like a distant star high above the drop. At the top he stopped by a brown unpainted door. The keyhole showed that the outer office was still unlit. A rim of reflected light placed Saward in the inner room. There was an uneven murmur of conversation. Rann tried the door and found it fastened.

A three-slider domestic lock. The panelled oak of the door was shabby but almost impregnable, resplendent with dull brass furnishings. The lock was a few minutes' work. He took a small tin from his pocket and a slender metal rod, thinner than a pencil. The tin held yellowish wax which smelt of cobblers' shops.

Rann smeared the little rod and stood with the gaslight on the keyhole. He used the rod like the barrel of a key, revolved it and withdrew it. Looking at the marks on the wax, he saw the crude three-slider he had predicted.

From a roll of soft leather he took three steel probes, the length of sewing-needles. Frowning at the lock's shoddiness, he tried one in the keyway. A lever of the mechanism yielded and lifted. Holding the first probe in place by the heel of his left palm, he tested the lock with a second. When two were in place, it was easy to lift the third slider and turn the handle.

Rann knew better than to open a creaking door. He took a small tin oil-can, a flat round container with a long spout, moistened the hinges, then wiped them so that no trace should be found. Then he pushed gently. The heavy door opened silently. He entered the darkened room and closed the door behind him.

Voices came more clearly from the inner room, light showing round the door, but he paid them no attention yet. When they took their leave, Saward would show them out by candle or oil-lamp rather than bothering to put up the gas in the office. Rann struck a 'silent' light, a match whose scraping made no sound. The brief flare of it showed two armchairs set before a plain desk, where The Barrister received clients. A small mirror hung on a wall-nail. Several black iron deed-boxes with names painted in white were stacked by the uncurtained and cobwebbed windows. The turkey carpet was worn almost to its canvas backing.

He moved to the broad desk, one foot where the other had been to cut the risk of a creaking board. The desk was scattered with papers tied in red ribbon. Bills, cross-bills, injunctions, pleadings, indictments, petitions. He lit a second match and saw that none bore a recent date. They were the theatrical props of Saward's imposture. Two large office candles stood in tin holders. The air tasted of hot tallow from their snuffing. Tall bookcases were lined by volumes in yellow calf or plum morocco, titles incomprehensible to him,
Impey's Practice, Fearn on Remainders, Coke's Reports
and
Foster's Crown Cases.
Beyond the desk was a tray with a plate of stale biscuits, a decanter long empty, and a dead hawk-moth.

Through the door, a boule clock chimed with the expensive sound of a hand stirring dainty teaspoons in a drawer. A man said, 'Well, old chums, shall we say a bank of a hundred sovs for My Lord tomorrow night to make the wheel go round easy? And Joanne-on-the Sly taking his mind off his losings by showing him something too pretty for sitting on?'

Rann knew the voice as Saward's, whose own gaming debts had led him to forgery. There was a mutter of laughter from other men, two of them, Rann thought. The game was over and their dupe had left.

'Ain't I right?' Saward continued. 'He's a gentleman, not half! And even when a gentleman thinks he sees huggery-muggery, he looks away rather than have a beastly row. Gentlemen don't care to quarrel at cards, God bless 'em. Not when there's a young lady present.'

There was laughter, a clink of heavy glass against light glass. They were pouring. No one would come out for the next ten minutes.

'The beauty is, Jem,' said a man's voice at a higher pitch,
‘I
lost my piece of plum to you, and you was so obligin' as to lose it all to Nipper. It takes suspicion off you, and if you nor me don't complain at losin', why should His Lordship? Eh?'

'If he comes back or not, he's left gold and paper tonight,' a third man said.
‘I
don't risk a sport busting up and not paying his ticks. But Pretty Jo shall get him back, I think.'

A hand fell appreciatively on bare rounded flesh. Rann thought with shock and then amusement that she might be partly or wholly naked in the room with them.

'Smooth as ivory velveteen, if there was such, ain't it, Pretty Sly?' Saward asked wistfully and the sound came again.

Rann struck another light. Desk or deed-boxes? There was nowhere else in the fly-spotted office to keep such documents. He stepped behind the desk. It was a mere table with two drawers under the ledge. Neither was locked. Bank bills would not be left in unlocked drawers. He opened them softly and felt that they were empty. The deed-boxes, then. There were four of them under the window.

To provide for a quick response, he tested the sash-window, eased the catch back and opened it an inch at the bottom. From Masters' Yard, he had mapped the way with his eyes. The ground was thirty feet below with area railings that would spear the body of a falling man. A little to one side of the stone window-ledge, however, was a drainpipe with a gutter ten feet above it. Behind the Georgian balustrade of the roof, outside the attic windows, there would be leads about two feet wide. He would be over the roof and down a pipe on the far side of the building while his pursuers were still thundering down the wooden stairs.

Folk who bought tin deed-boxes imagined them impregnable, each with a lock opened by a unique key. Rann knew that most manufacturers were content with half a dozen different locks for all their boxes. A man with a dozen keys might open half the boxes in England. Safes were for valuables, deed-boxes for privacy.

From the folded leather, he took a little key with adjustable teeth. In his apprenticeship to Pandy Quinn, they had bought second-hand tin boxes for practice - and once or twice an old safe. With a skeleton key, he had worked until he could open a deed-box almost by touch and instinct.

The profile of a deed-box key was a series of steps, the longest being the furthest in. It was a simple matter of screwing on steps of varying lengths on the steel shank until they met all four levers in the lock and moved the bolts aside. He could tell from the lock's resistance on his fingers what the lengths were likely to be. It had seldom taken longer than a minute to open such a box.

He tried the first lock and frowned. The whole box shifted as he twisted the key. It was empty, or nearly so. Slowly he tilted it, listening for the movement of papers or packages. He tilted further and turned it upside down. Nothing. It was empty. So were the other three. The Barrister's tin boxes were merely for show, like the legal documents cluttering the desk.

There was nowhere else in the outer room for the bill-forms. Yet they were somewhere to be found. To believe Jem Saward honest with other men's bank bills was easier than trusting the old Penman at cards.

Some men and women consigned valuables to unpredictable hiding-places, the frame of a picture, the cavity under the treble strings at the back of a piano, within the bottom of a bird-cage. He had known all these. Now he must see the interior of the inner room. Sooner or later, the card-players would leave. Jem and the girl would retire to an attic bedroom. But he must see the inner room first. He lifted the sash-window a little more and listened to their talk.

‘I
shan't half be in a wax if My Lord don't play tomorrow,' said the man with a boyish voice,
‘I
signed a debtor's note for fifty sovs two months ago, from a money-changer by Temple Bar. They never give fifty nor nothing like, but it was fifty at three months and must be paid. Seeing I put another fellow's name to it!'

There was a round of good-natured laughter. Rann sat on the inner sill and eased his shoulders into the night, testing the ledge with his weight. Holding the coarse smoke-roughened ashlar either side, he straightened up and with one hand slowly pushed the window down. Tiny fragments of stone broke from the edge of the sill under his feet and, after a long pause, rattled on the area paving far below him.

He paused, then with the drop and the spear-like railings at his back, reached for the drainpipe. Beyond it, was the sill of the inner room.

The pipe was strong and firmly attached. He crooked a leg round it, then one arm, and let it take his weight. A metal collar, where two sections of the pipe were joined, gave a tenuous foothold. Holding tight with his arms, he slid his other foot on to the further sill. Again the stone fragments rattled down, but at last he stood outside the curtained window of the inner room.

The gap between the drawn curtains was wider than he had expected. Blue-grey cigar smoke funnelled into the lamplight. Curtains and window were open a little in the humid night.