The Hangman's Child (13 page)

A chair scraped and he saw a rubicund man standing up, carrying a fur-cuffed coachman's cape and a fur cap with side-straps that buckled under the chin. The high-pitched voice had come from a man the size of a boy, in dark clothes and white cravat. An ink-stained cuff marked him as a copying-clerk. A young woman leant back on a Regency sofa that had been covered in banded silk. There were handsome upright chairs of Hepplewhite design, a mahogany gloss of sideboard, sofa-table, and an inlaid walnut bureau. The green velvet of the walls was hung with formal silhouettes, miniatures, and oil portraits in gilt surrounds.

The young woman was holding an ivory hand-screen, as if it were a fan, to keep the heat of the fire from her face. Her dark hair was unpinned. It lay aslant features that showed a certain provocative crudeness, perfectly matched to the clients of an introducing house. Her easy appeal had first lured 'His Lordship' and then distracted him from the game. If Joanne-on-the-Sly still wore her waist-length corset, it was only because a lady's maid would have been needed to dress her again. Corset and stockings were all that covered a pale and rather meagre figure. Rann knew he had seen her before, a bunter from the French House off Drury Lane, where Bragg was part-owner. It did not surprise him that Bragg should hire her to an amenable lawyer like Jem Saward.

She yawned and spoke to someone who now moved into Rann's view, his voice warmed by food and drink. Saward was tall and sunken-cheeked, with a stoop, his dark hair long and lank. In black coat and white tie, he looked like a consumptive butler drinking himself to death on his master's port. Two gold watch-seals shone on his shirt-front and a large seal-ring gleamed on his little finger. Rann doubted that the ornaments to Saward's evening dress had been paid for. Nor was he surprised that the companions for an evening with His Lordship should have been the old barrister's coachman, copying-clerk, and whore.

Sensing that their master w
as now encumbered by their pres
ence, the coachman and the clerk left. Saward removed his eyeglasses rimmed with gold and folded them in a red leather case. He looked at the disorder of the room. Then the old penman turned the gas down to a glimmer and took the girl by the hand. Without speaking, he twirled her up like a dancer while the sleek dark hair spilt about her head. He followed her appreciatively up the attic stairs, leaving the gas-lamp low, his eyes watching her movements with calm appraisal.

Rann heard the boards and springs as they entered the attic room and stretched upon the bed. He raised the window of the room and slid inside. He guessed the hiding-place. Deed-boxes and desks were the first place a search-party might think of, but even Scotland Yard would hesitate to drive an axe through the delicate furniture of Inner Temple chambers.

The gas bubbled softly as he turned it higher. Despite the gap in the curtains, the air was thick and hot. Two packs of cards lay scattered on the baize of a gaming-table, its walnut surround polished to a gloss of liquid honey. There was a litter of empty glasses and piled cigar bowls, scraps of paper on which reckonings had been made, a handful of IOUs. On a table to one side were the remains of cold goose-liver pie and plum pudding, one empty bottle of hock, another almost finished in an ice-bucket, and a flask of seltzer beside it.

He crossed to the bureau, an elegant Chippendale design. Drawers and upper flap were unlocked. That was to be expected. The invitation of an unlocked bureau suggested that no one need use violence to search such an inconsequential piece. Rann tapped and felt, sliding a hand under the ledges of the drawer-openings, trailing his fingers along graceful beading, in search of secrets.

A bureau was for love-letters and indiscretions, not to defeat a professional cracksman. A thief with an eye soon measured the places in the structure which no other drawer or cubby-hole occupied. Then it was only a matter of tapping the wood to find a telltale hollow sound. A common housebreaker would carve his way with a chisel. Rann preferred the skill of searching for a hidden spring.

His fingertips struck a hollowness beneath the polished surface. He had the flap of the bureau down on its supports and was facing the drawers and pigeon-holes inside. Between two sets of drawers there was an inlaid panel, four inches across and about eight inches tall. He tapped it and heard the hollowness once more.

There was no sign of a catch, no place where a catch might be concealed. He opened the drawers on either side of the panel, drew them from their recesses and searched in the wooden frame. He found a thin strip of springy metal and thumbed it back. Abruptly, the entire section of the drawers and the panel came free so that he drew it out like an open box, four inches by eight and a foot deep.

Under it, in the wood that formed the flat surface of the bureau, was a box-like cavity that might have held a jewel-case or a couple of quarto volumes. But he touched paper whose first sheet was thin and crisp and blue. He drew out the topmost bundle of oblong forms for bills of exchange, printed in the usual copperplate, blanks for the names of parties and the sum of money, the date and stamp of endorsement. But they were of no more use than unsigned IOUs.

He searched under the blank exchange forms and found a printed bank-bill the size of a large currency note. It was issued by the Bank of Baltimore, on cream paper with a sepia design of a mythological figure by a castle wall. The sum and payee had been filled in. But the date for payment had passed. Why had it not been cashed? Rann examined the script in which it had been completed and guessed that this was the work of an apprentice forger with a blank bill. He put it back and knew that he had yet to find Pandy's treasure.

There was pink bank-paper, which a French attorney might buy from a law stationer. The luckless apprentice-forger had written on it a name that all the world recognized too well. 'N.N. Rothschild and Sons, Paris'. None of this was Pandy's scheme. Rann might as well have offered the bank his death warrant.

Underneath these papers was a third package, larger than the other two. His heart quickening with hope, he examined the brown paper in which it had been wrapped. The package had been through the post, the stamps black with cancelling ink. It bore the address of Waterlows Printers. The blood beat in his temples with triumph as he stared at its contents.

Oblivious to the movements of passion above him, he held the printed bills in his hands. There were fifty or sixty forms, none filled in, headed by printed names: The London and Westminster Bank; Baring Brothers; Union Bank; Drummonds, Pall Mall; Brune & Co, Marseille; Suse and Sibbeth; Schroeder & Co; Mitchell, Yeames 8c Co; Brown, Shipley & Co; The International Bank of Hamburg and London; The Russian Bank of Foreign Trade; The Bank of Montreal
....

Pandy Quinn had heard how the ghostly Jem the Penman had intercepted 'samples' returned from the banks to the printers after approval for final casting off. Somewhere there had been bribery of a clerk to conceal an exchange. In the printer's furnace, the bills were spared and a package of political pamphlets or religious tracts went to the fire. Some knew the story but had no idea that Saward might be Jem the Penman. Others guessed the Penman's identity but knew nothing of the story. Pandy Quinn had heard and believed both.

Every bill was good for three months. Rann's eyes followed the printed wording:
Pay value received without further advice to the account
Without further notice might give a thief three months
to get clear. He looked back at the Bank of Baltimore:
Pay value
received and charge to the account of
The holder of the
account need know nothing until the bill had been traded like a banknote for three months more and came to be redeemed. When a printed bill; stamped and completed, was presented to a bank, the bank could no more refuse the money to the holder than it could refuse twenty shillings silver for a golden sovereign.

Of course, the banks would smell a forgery as soon as it was passed over the counter. Even Saward had been unable yet to make use of these blanks because the old penman had no genuine bill with names, dates and endorsements to copy. The least fault of penmanship, the slightest error in placing the bank's acceptance stamp, the smallest mistake in a serial number, any failure to match serial number, names, previous endorsements, sums paid, would lead to disaster.

But as he talked about the impossibility of passing off such a forgery, Pandy had chuckled like a happy child.

'They know it can't be done, Jacko. And that's the very reason that it will be.'

Impossibility was the centrepiece of his plan. With an eye for a lock and the bundle of blank bills that Saward had stolen from the printer, Pandy swore that a man might pull off a robbery whose proceeds would buy the crown and sceptre.

Rann looked about him, picked up a discarded newspaper, wrapped it in the brown paper and returned it to the bottom of the secret drawer. On top of it, he laid the other two packages. It was enough to deceive casual inspection.

Listening again, he heard the bed shifting, Saward gasping and the girl mumbling, as though he might be turning Pretty Jo. Rann pressed the little drawers and panels into place, closed the flap, and turned from the bureau. In the outer room, he slid the window-catch across, leaving it as Saward had last seen it. Taking the key to the heavy door from its hook, he let himself out on to the landing and went down the wooden stairs. But first he drew the little steel picks from the roll of soft leather and eased the three-slider lock until it snapped shut behind him. When Saward discovered his loss, he would first suspect Bragg's cronies.

His penny-dancer stood in shadow by the broken pump. Rann gazed at the piled dark hair, the profile and the eyes that would have graced a Nefertiti, the delicate ears and neck. His memory held the images of a slim straight back, and trim thighs, hips coppery pale by contrast with her warm brown waist. With a pang of longing for her, he swore to himself that, in comparison, even the treasure of fifty crisp sheets of bank paper was dust and ashes.

12

Above the plumes of horse-chestnuts and lime trees, the sky over Battersea was smoke-grey with a threat of summer thunder. A metallic smell of rain hung in the air of Cremorne's riverside pleasure garden. Its Oriental Circus had given way to an encampment of fairground booths, the promise of an afternoon's entertainment. Children too young to assist, slept on straw under the shade of the carts. Donkeys and thin horses grazed hungrily upon the turf.

Samuel, walking beside Jack Rann, wore the only professional costume that he had taken in his flight from Bragg, a well-tailored suit of clerical black, white tie and silk hat. In this he had worked the front-doors of Chelsea and Kensington as The Reverend Amos Prout, Secretary to the Archbishop of York's Overseas Mission. The mention of an Archbishop silenced all questions, and York was far enough from London to make enquiries difficult. Samuel's pathetic sincerity and copies of printed testimonials from converted heathen had proved, as he said, 'a choker' for his middle-class victims. He glanced at Jack Rann.

'Why here? I was safe where I was.'

'Safer here,' Rann said coolly. 'They'll come down that sewer one day. Where you won't find Bragg nor police is a kiddies show. We got to talk about Pandy.'

They walked slowly past brightly streamered tents and booths. On the grassy spaces, men in silken vests and plumed hats appeared as jugglers or acrobats. A shrill uncertain note flared from the trumpet of the Punch and Judy Show.

P
andy was in a house last summer,' Rann said quietly, 'Lord Mancart in Lowndes Square. A roof job as usual. In through the attic window and doing the top floors while them and their servants was at dinner below. That's when it all began.'

Samuel turned a smooth elegant profile for the luxury of feeling the sun upon it.

'Take much, did he?'

'An impression.'

'Took what?'

Nursemaids in green and blue silks with feathered bonnets were hanging on the arms of impoverished swells. It was the furthest place in London from the men who wanted to take him back to Newgate and hang him.

'Pandy did a safe in a wall, Sam. A little toy. Behind a picture where anyone'd look. He was going to take an item or two. Then he saw a key lying there.'

'What use is a key, when the safe's open?'

'Walk up!' bawled a showman, sharp enough to make Samuel jump. 'See The Dominion of Fancy, or Punch's Opera. Now, gents, look up your 'aypence! Who's for a farden or a 'aypenny?'

Rann turned away.

'This key had a label, Sam. Property of safe deposit vaults. Lord Mancart's key to his private deposit. In those vaults, they have a whole wall of safe deposits a man can hire.'

Samuel gave a short laugh.

'Behind a door thicker than the hull of a battleship. Supposing, Jack, you could get that far in the first place.'

'Just listen, Sammy,' said Rann patiently. 'Pandy might have took a trinket or two, but he left them. He made an impression of the key in a tin of wax he always had in his pocket, when he went on business. No one knew he'd ever been there. Think what a man might do, if he had keys to all the deposits in a set of vaults!' 'Get any more keys, did he?'

'He took it slow, Sammy. Opposite the vaults is premises where Mag Fashion found a corner, her also giving a ride to the owner from time to time. From there, Pandy could see who came and went at the vaults. Me and him followed forty or fifty of them last summer. We got it down to about fifteen or sixteen. Who they were and where they lived.'