The Hangman's Child (22 page)

'See?' he said quickly. 'Nothing to it. And this is your way out, whenever the time comes.'

She took his hand, pressing it to her face for reassurance.

'And you, Jack?'

'I'd be up the chimney before they could get through the street door.'

He struck a match, lit the dark lantern from the carpet-bag, saw the flame settle, and opened the shutter. Before them stretched the length of the cutting-room, half-a-dozen heavy tables set at intervals, several high-backed chairs at each. Above the centre of each table was a double-branched gas-lamp, low on a long brass pipe from the ceiling. The green conical shades had been painted white on the underside, increasing the glare and heat of the mantel. Cheap coats in various stages of completion lay chalked and pinned, Brighton coats, Oxonians, and Chesterfields. Three men and women would work on a coat, each man as a rule cutting out and sewing the right or left of the main body, the woman stitching the arms and sleeves. Rolls of cloth and boxes of thread lay on the carpeted floor beside each chair. At each place were cotton reels, scissors and baskets of pins.

With shutters closed, the wor
kroom was still hot and unventi
lated after the day's tailoring, an acid smell of new cloth from bales stacked by the far wall. Rann put down the lantern, went to the first table and set a match to the two mantels in their coolie-hat shades. By the wall-clock with its Roman numerals, it was twenty minutes past midnight. He checked a shabby silver-plated watch in his pocket, its pearl face set with six cheap stones.

'They must a-known we'd need light to copy by!' he said cheerfully.

She looked at him and he remembered her childhood in such rooms, the heat and glare which brought blindness to many of their inmates, the rule of a reformatory master or mistress, starving or whipping for work not neatly done.

There was an unlocked door at the far end, leading to the lower room where the cheap coats and cloaks were sold, a show-shop which dispensed garments directly to the public. A circular iron staircase led down to the darkened shop at street level. Here, too, the windows were shuttered against thieves.

Rann said a prayer for Pandy Quinn, who had come this far and reconnoitred the shop. At the rear was a row of fitting-rooms. Rann doubted if anyone had taken up the dusty hessian or seen the boards beneath for ten years past. He worked at the corner of a fitting-room by the back wall. Hessian came up easily, bringing the tacks with it.

'When you leave,' he said, as she stood over him, 'lay the carpet on the boards and knock the tacks in their holes. No one won't look close then whatever happens.'

He drew the hessian back. Beneath it were six-inch boards, eight of them forming the width of the fitting-room floor, running forward under its wall into the shop.

'They'll have to be cut,' he said, 'two of 'em. Cut a couple of feet from the wall, where the first joist must be.'

'What if they see it's done?'

He screwed a hacksaw blade into its frame.

'They ain't looked under this carpet for years. They won't look for years more. Even if they do, they won't know what the boards are supposed to look like nor why they might have been cut. I can dirty them in ten seconds.'

When the hacksaw had started the cut, he chose a heavier blade. The board was loose on the joist. He levered out the nails that held it by the wall. A brief struggle freed it, opening a dark drop beneath the fitting-room floor. The second board was easier. There was room to lower himself. He handed Miss Jolly a small leather writing-box from the carpet-bag with the pens, inks, and enlarging-glass.

'All you do is wait,' he said, hugging her with one arm. 'I'll come back as soon as I get the first bills. Anything wrong, you go straight up to Sammy, or out through the street door. And there'll be a necessary closet back of the workroom.'

He kissed her cheek, feeling moisture. Perspiration in the closed room, or a tear of fright? Then he lowered himself and his feet touched uneven rubble.

Five feet down, too shallow for a cellar. Lowering the carpetbag, he shone his lantern at the wall dividing the tailor's shop from the Cornhill Vaults. As he started towards it, there was a shriek and a scuttling. A rat the size of a young rabbit sprang past, making for safety in the far corner of the rubble-strewn space.

Jack Rann put down the carpet-bag by the roughened wall. It was not load-bearing but a stone partition several courses high, no thicker than a single block. The damage must be done on this side. There was not a chance that Mr Trent would investigate his foundations. If he did, his enthusiasm for the perversities shown to Pretty Jo or Maggie Fashion might counsel silence.

With a wide-bladed cold-chisel and a muffled hammer, he began on the mortar between two stones at mid-height. It flaked and cracked. He choked twice with the dust. The blows of the hammer on a chisel, deadened by lint, would be inaudible in the street.

Even so, he listened for the bell, working round the perimeter of each block. With a smaller head-bar, he prised the stone towards him. It was more than he could lower or lift. But with the next stone free, the pair turned through forty-five degrees, he might open a gap a foot high and eighteen inches long.

In dust and dark, he was as far from the world as a drowned sailor in the depths of the sea. He thought it had taken twenty minutes to free and turn the blocks of stone. Perhaps more. He shone the dark lantern through the gap and saw another rubble-strewn expanse. Lifting the carpet-bag, he slid after it like a diver. It was the small hours of Sunday morning but at last he stood directly under the strong-room floor of Mr Walker's Cornhill Vaults.

22

Lantern light cut a path along boards and joints above him. Rann knocked with the head-bar at intervals. The dull resonance lightened abruptly, confirming where the plate-iron of the strong-room floor ended and the office began. Having sealed the strong-room with iron, Mr Walker saw no need to protect the rear office. Rann aimed for the far corner. Boards under a carpet and no furniture above. He prayed it might still be so.

Crouching in the cobwebbed corner, he found a short renewal board on only two joists with a longer one next to it. He tried them. The short board was nailed on the joists but free at the wall. With the tapered head-bar and hammer, he prised the steel between board and joist, then drove it home. He hung with all his weight. Nails groaned and squealed in wood. He felt them give as the short board sprang an inch from the joist. There was only carpet above.

He worked the board, moving it clear, sliding the head-bar under the carpet, and wrenched again. The carpet-edge came up, taking the tacks with it. Now he could fold it from the black-varnished border of the floor. His narrow lantern-beam shone into a darkened room above him.

The long board lay over several joists. With the head-bar, he freed it from two joists nearer the wall. It was held by a weight above. The corner of a desk perhaps. If need be he would cut it at

the next joist with his hacksaw. But he made one more effort to lift it and slide through. It sprang an inch or so with a thump and a crash. But he could raise its nearer length. There was space enough.

Rann lifted the carpet-bag, pulled himself up, shone the lantern and saw office windows covered by cream shutters of stoutly panelled wood. The thump had been the overturning of a small table. The crash was the breakage of a Meissen candlestick with a pink rose design on a white ground.

He put the table upright and gathered the fragments of china. At the worst they would suspect that a clerk or a customer had broken it and hidden the damage.

He unbolted a rear door from the office to the brick extension. Galvanic batteries, used in electro-plating, gave its workshop a corrosive metallic air. A three-foot square furnace was set in the hearth and a fourteen-inch flue sloped back from it.
To
increase the draught, the flue would narrow near the top. Twelve inches, if he was lucky. It was tight - but to a climbing-boy of Rann's build and experience, it was enough.

He went back to the office and the opposite door to the strongroom. Beyond it were the constant gaslight and spy-holes from the street. He knocked firmly on a panel of the door. The resonance was deadened again by sheet-iron lining on its far side.
To
open it by any means except the lock would be impossible.

Bringing his cheap bracelet for repair, Rann had noted that the door was held by one of the new cylinder-locks with the stamp of Linus Yale upon it. It would have more than three thousand combinations for the keys that might raise its five pin-tumblers. Mr Walker thought it enough. Even a man who could open that door, would be on view to every passer-by and policeman through the spy-holes in the steel shutters.

In his mind Jack Rann saw the interior of Linus Yale's lock, plainly as a schoolroom map. Unlike a Chubb or a Bramah, where only the levers were moved, the entire cylinder of a Yale turned with the key. The keys were sheet metal, cut flat in an attempt to prevent a thief working a pick in the narrow keyway. Five steel pin-tumblers, each thick as a match and held by springs, dropped as the key was withdrawn.
To
turn the cylinder and draw back the bolt, the key was inserted upside down. Its contours lifted each steel pin level with the circumference of the cylinder. Only when each was lifted by a unique distance would the cylinder turn and the bolt draw back.

Pandy Quinn had bought several specimens of Yale's invention to work upon. And even Pandy had taken a month to perfect the opening of it. Rann, who watched his progress, had since dissected a dozen locks of this type with the care that a practised surgeon might have given to a choice cadaver.

Where damage did not matter, he would drill through the pins. A fine diamond-head in an American off-centre brace would enter the keyway and cut through the ends. Shorn of their length, the pins no longer held a cylinder in its locked position. But the damage would be discovered when there was no resistance to the key. Mr Walker's lock must remain in working order.

He unstrapped the bag and laid out a small brace with a wooden mushroom-grip and an off-centre steel shaft to add force to the drive. In its mouth, he fitted a diminutive diamond-head that a watchmaker might have coveted.

Pandy Quinn had calculated that to cut the pins one by one divided the possible combinations by five each time. By leaving the two innermost pins to exert pressure on the key and work the lock, he might reduce the combinations from more than three thousand to about thirty.

Thanks to Maggie's courtship of Arthur Trent and her tracing of the contours of the Yale for the rooms rented from Mr Walker, Pandy had gone further. As a locksmith's boy, he knew that a suite of Yales for such a building would differ in the outer pins but that the deepest pins would probably be the same in all of them.

His legacy included two dozen keys, which he had filed to operate the two innermost pins of a Yale based on the pattern of Mr

Trent's. Better still, with such a key in place and two rear pins resting in its contours, there was just room to use a fine probe that might raise the next pin to a point where the cylinder of the lock would turn and free the bolt. With three or four pins left intact, it would feel to Mr Walker or his supervisor that the lock was working as usual.

Jack Rann knelt, hands and eyes level with the keyhole. The fine diamond-head entered the keyway, catching at first on the side. He frowned and adjusted it so that it cleared the mouth in the lock-plate by an invisible fraction of an inch. Then the veins in his narrow wrists swelled with exertion as he wound the shaft of the brace slowly but with all his weight and strength. Each pin was a pygmy in bulk but a full minute of metallic grinding passed before he felt the first one give.

He put down the brace and took a fine needle of steel to coax out the broken fragment. Now there was more space and the next pin would be easier.

He listened, touched the bit to the second pin and turned the brace. Then his heat beat in his throat as he heard the explosion of a bell-clapper that seemed close as the next room. Samuel's warning, carried by flues and hearths. Jack Rann waited until the man on his beat moved off and Samuel rang a single note several times.

The second pin sheered off under the drill. It seemed as far as he need to go. He studied the lock and saw the bit had cut straight and true. There was not a scratch on the edges of the metal lock-plate.

Patiently, he took the flat steel keys from their pouch and tried each in turn. After a dozen, the cylinder turned a fraction of an inch before jamming. Rann drew the arm of his shirt across his forehead. Despite the heat, he shivered and took the slender probe of hardened steel. It moved easily in the keyway, above the flat outer length of his steel shank. Then it was a matter of sense and touch, pressing the nearest pin upwards against the spring that held it in place, turning the key at the same time to raise the inner tumblers.

Nothing moved. He eased the steel needle a little, breathed deeply, and shivered again with relief as he felt the cylinder turn, taking the bolt with it.