The Hangman's Child Read online

  'Exactly, Sammy. When this job is done, the bills I send to the bank for cashing will be genuine as the roast beef of old England. What's lying in vaults and deed-boxes will be the copies I leave there. They're the ones that'll have to explain to the banks.'

  Samuel chuckled at the neatness of it. Rann lowered his voice.

  There's some can copy a hand, like Miss Jolly, or fake a bill. When they've done it, yellow spot or the smell of chlorine trips them. But there's not a bank or crib in London I can't open, with the hangman behind me. And if genuine bills are taken and copies left, it gives a new look to the whole business. Don't it? I got more than fifty blank bills, that was Saward's. Those I'll leave behind, with Jolly's hand on 'em, and come out with others taken in their place. Every one would pass the Scrutiny Committee of the Bank of England, just because they're genuine.'

  Samuel looked at him, wanting to believe. Rann pressed on.

  True as sterling silver or twenty-four carat gold. As many as possible payable to bearer and can't be refused cash when presented. That's what me and Pandy meant to have. Enough to keep a man for life. And that's what I must have now.'

  Samuel glanced at the waxwork Robin Hood and then away again.

  Trouble is, Jack, the minute you've stole those bills, someone might take one of your fakes to change it. But you won't know. Every time you try to change a bill, you might be second in the race. You come in second, there's an end of you.'

  Rann smiled.

  'I'm not going near a bank, Sammy' 'And you think I am?'

  'Sam, neither of us goes near a bank once this is over. And only you before the job's done. And you won't ask the bank for money, so there's no crime. At the first bank, you're old Canon Wilberforce that's taking a share in a joint-stock company. At the second, you're a silver-haired bishop from New Zealand that's dad of Miss Mag Fashion and must raise the wind for a marriage settlement. Third, you're attorney and guardian to rich Orphan Jolly and must consolidate funds in a wardship suit. That's all. In each case you arrange to send bills to be cashed into Bank of England bonds, that can be taken elsewhere and changed for coin. And you're never seen again. Messengers take them to the bank for you. Easy as buying a pound of cheese.'

  "What when it's the same bill a second time and there's a stink?'

  Pandy and me thought of that. If there's a stink, you won't be there to smell it, nor shall I. Any case, bills run three months and we'll have those with longest to go. The duds'll be traded on between holders for weeks or months, not cashed.'

  Samuel's eyes were on the waxwork figures, as if something else was worrying him.

  'How'll you live till this comes off, Jack?'

  'The girl's room. Off Haymarket. Bragg thinks she's lodging in Shoreditch with Mag Fashion in a two-pair back. On'y he don't know quite where!'

  Samuel smiled. Then he asked, 'Exactly where's the vault, Jack?'

  Rann shook his head.

  'The fewer that know, Sammy, the fewer can tell.' 'If I don't know what I'm in for, Jack, I'm out of this.' Rann sighed and looked round carefully at the other benches. 'In Cornhill, Sam.'

  It took a moment for Samuel to respond. 'Cornhill? Walker's Vaults, opposite Trent's Mourning?' 'That's it,' said Rann quietly.

  'You seen the steel vault-door you'll have to bust before you set eyes on the safe deposits? You seen the building you'll have to get into before you even see that steel door?'

  'I seen all that, Sam. A dozen times. And if I ain't the man to get in, how am I sitting here, not lying in a shroud six feet down in quicklime by Newgate wall?'

  But Samuel shifted with dismay on the wooden bench.

  'Anyone walking down Cornhill can see that vault door day and night, Jack. Two spy-holes through the steel shutters and gas always burning. Policeman looks in every twenty minutes. It's why Walkers say they're safer than the Bank of England.'

  'They do, Sammy. They do say that.'

  'You'd be on show every second, Jack. Vault door with mirrors all round to show anyone near it. You'd need hours at a lock like that. Even you can't make yourself invisible.'

  'Not all the time, Sammy. But I think I could be invisible if I had to be. For a little while. Same as no one saw me leave them death-wards. Mag Fashion got word from a jack that's stiff for her. They still don't know how I got out. Think Lupus or Jessup forgot to lock the cell door. Reckon I got out through the chapel gallery, disguised as a woman with clothes that Hawkins or Sue Berry left hid there on a Sunday.'

  'Cornhill Vaults could hang you yet,' said Samuel glumly. 'First off, you'll have to crack them twice. Until you do it first, you won't have genuine bank-bills for your little shop-mouse to copy the details on your blanks. You'd have to wait for her to do the penning. Then you must take the copies back and leave them. It's not on, Jack. You might crack a crib, but even you can't do Walker's Vaults twice before it's noticed. No one could. This ain't a china pig, it's iron and steel. They'd tumble to it first time. If you have to snoop for a second chance, you'll be seen, took back to Newgate and stretched before you know it.'

  Rann whispered to him, 'I'm going in once, Sam. They'll be copied in there. In the vault. No other way.'

  Samuel shook his head.

  'Not you, Jack Rann. You're not a faker! Hardly sign your own name.'

  'No, Sam, but Jolly is. Me and Pandy decided it was the only way. When I crack that vault, she's coming with me.'

  Samuel stared at the mechanical waxworks, as if trying to calculate whether this made the scheme better or worse.

  'And as for a shop-mouse,' Rann continued bitterly, 'when she was a child in the slop-trade, she must get every stitch and seam neat and exact. Starved and whipped when not so. But them that treated her so cruel gave her the best training for nimble fingers to fake a bill or a name. See it on those papers. Neat and true as fancy lace.'

  Soapy Samuel fingered his clergyman's tie again and gestured at the stage with his other hand. He said in a whisper, 'Suffering God, Jack! They're bloody real, not waxworks. Seen the eyes blink. Seen 'em breathe! They're watching us!'

  'What if they are?' said Rann irritably. 'They come from America. They got no cause to be interested in us.'

  Samuel got to his feet.

  ‘I don't care. I ain't going to be watched. I'm off.' 'They'll remember you all the better running off with a face like a poisoned cat!'

  As Samuel came to the end of the bench, his way was blocked by a well-dressed woman, two curly-headed girls clutching at her skirts. She had just come in and was putting her purse away. Samuel inclined his head and raised his hat, his face a smiling moon. The woman smiled back. Samuel ruffled the curly heads. Rann heard the unctuous clerical tone. 'Little angels of the Lord .... So pretty ... so blessed .... Would that all little children, all little heavenly lambs might be ....' He had found a card in his notecase and was pressing it into her hand.

  Rann looked away, exasperated, until Samuel and the woman parted. Then he got up and walked outside. The clerical impostor was staring thirstily into his palm.

  'Two sovs and a chinker,' he said, more cheerfully than he had said anything that afternoon. 'But the best of it is, Jack, she feels happier this minute than we shall ever know. Warm inside and good as gold. She don't miss a quid or two. Folks like her never give what they'd really miss. So where's the harm in all that, Handsome Rann? Eh?'

  THREE PLAIN DUTIES

  14

  'God knows,' Verity said glumly, ‘I couldn't a-made a worse mess. I may choke to say it, Mr Stringfellow, but Mr Croaker give me what I deserved. And that brute Fowler, I can't help seeing he's right. About the smuggling at least. That's what riles me most. I must've wiped out months of work. How could I be so stoopid?'

  Julius Stringfellow, cabman of Sovereign Street, Paddington Green, shook his head, picking at a gap in his teeth with his forefinger. The suction applied to a scrap of ham and egg seemed a comment on his son-in-law's imprudence.

  'Your trouble, me old sojer, is taking no account of superi
or numbers. Superior numbers has all the time in the world to lay a snare. And that's what they did. Good and proper.'

  Stringfellow was dressed in an old green coat, brown breeches, and billicock hat. As usual after supper, he sat among the remains of broiled bones, ham, and eggs at the kitchen table, his glass of porter half-finished. He was poking at the crevices of a harness brass with a well-used handkerchief. An odour of hot straw and horse-hide ebbed and flowed about the latch of the kitchen door.

  Verity looked up from the toecap of a new boot, whose pimples he was smoothing with a hot iron, so that it might be polished to the brilliance of black glass.

  'Bragg and his lot watched me all that night. Fowler too. Watched until they saw a chance with that young person. If old

  Tollis, the lighterman, hadn't been on his barge and sung in tune, I'd be in Horsemonger Lane Gaol now for attempted ravishing of Lambeth Sue, let alone grievous bodily on two of Bragg's prizemen.'

  Stringfellow got to his feet, supported on one side by the wooden leg which had served him since the loss of his own at the siege of Bhurtpore almost thirty years earlier. Verity frowned, the tip of the iron close to the stitching. To touch the cobbler's thread would burn it through and cause the entire toecap to fall off.

  'Well, you ain't in Horsemonger Lane Lock-Up,' said Stringfellow bracingly. 'Reduced to plain duties you may be, but you got no cause to blub until you're hurt worse than this. A man's been with the Rifle Brigade at Inkerman and the Redan knows better - or should do. Never call retreat - ain't that what they say?'

  'Yes,' said Verity sadly, 'I 'spect they do.'

  The old cabman lifted the door latch.

  'On warm nights like this,' said Verity quietly, 'it wouldn't come amiss if you was to stand the old horse a bit further off.'

  The atmosphere in the mews cottage in Sovereign Street was depressed. Stringfellow ambled off to attend to Lightning, the elderly cab-horse with its bony flanks and patient manner. He could be heard whistling softly to it as he plied the sponge and bucket.

  Verity picked up the second boot and studied it. He put it down as the latch at the bottom of the staircase clinked and the cottage door opened. Bella Verity, daughter of Cabman Stringfellow, slipped past her husband, sat down in the low nursing-chair and picked up her small blue work-basket. Despite her plumpness and fair curls, she seemed a diminutive partner, her prettiness illuminated by her habit of smiling to herself while she worked, as if at some secret happiness.

  'Care killed a cat, Mr Verity,' she said presently.

  'So it might, Mrs Verity,' - he studied the next toe-cap again -'but Mr Inspector Croaker is more likely to be the death o' me!'

  She looked up at him, her face drawn in a parody of anxiety.

  'But it don't matter, Mr Verity! Even if you got to spend the rest o' your life on sentry-go outside the houses of quality, keeping nuisance away. Think what we got! We got little Billy and Vicky; we got food on the table; clothes to our backs. There's poor soul-s'd think us rich! You got Paddington Chapel on Sundays. They think the world of you down there.'

  'Wait till this gets out,' he said bleakly. 'No one's going to think the world of me then.'

  'But I will,' she said quietly, 'and I know Pa will. I will, Mr Verity, always and always.'

  She came behind his chair and put her arms round him.

  'Never say die,' she said gently. 'If Mr Fowler done wrong and Mr Bragg's a brute, they'll answer for it soon enough.'

  ‘I hope so, Mrs Verity - Bella.'

  'You was brought up to know it's true!' she said reprovingly. 'You was taught it every Sunday.'

  Verity sighed and patted the hand that lay on his lapel. He nodded.

  'And I mean to go on. I'll find them houses where Soapy Samuel went. I'll see what happened there. Mr Croaker can't stop me doing that. I'll see about that knife Flash Fowler says he found down Saffron Hill. But I'll be doing it alone.'

  'No you won't!' she said with another little flare of anger. "Course you won't! Don't you think you will! There's people out there'd be proud of you, if they knew. Thousands of 'em. And they'd help you, if they could. And they will. Not nasty Mr Inspector Croaker but people that's brave and true. You'll see.'

  Verity stared at the door to the stable, where Stringfellow was whistling his unmelodious tune to the horse. He wondered if Bella might be right. Later they lay in the ancient bed to which Julius Stringfellow had brought his bride, the late Mrs Stringfellow of a cholera epidemic, quarter of a century before. The London sky was starlit beyond the window with its curtains drawn back in the summer warmth. At the foot of the bed, two cradles were occupied by Billy and Vicky, each showing the round red face and black hair of Verity himself.

  Above them, in the attic, he heard Stringfellow's fruity chuckle and a few muttered words. He sat up in bed.

  'Your old father got someone up there with him!'

  'No,' said Bella innocently, ‘I asked about that. Pa says he seems to have took to talk in his sleep of a night. That's all.'

  The chuckle was repeated and the attic bedsprings shifted. Before Verity could ask the next question, Bella's foot touched his and she turned towards him.

  'Oh, William Clarence Verity,' she said happily, 'even if we hadn't food on the table, nor clothes to our backs, I'd still be no end proud of you . .. .'

  15

  Verity stood at ease by the red oval of an iron pillar-box, the morning sunlight still cool. In tall hat, frock coat and dark trousers, he was dressed for duty. The first point on his beat was outside a cream-painted portico and steps leading to the double-door of Lord Tregarva's town-house in Portman Square.

  A morning stillness in the pale sky cast its silence over the cypress and beech trees of the central lawn. Against dark London brick, Lord Tregarva's area railings and his iron-canopied veranda lined by urns of gilly-flowers shone with a gloss of fresh black paint. Oblong bas-reliefs on blank upper walls, cream swags on a ground of pale Wedgwood blue, marked Portman Square. Its elegant terraces seemed as secure from criminal conspiracies as anywhere in England. Verity's fault was to think otherwise. If Baptist Babb read Orator Hawkins' lips correctly, Lord Tregarva's house and three of the five others visited by Soapy Samuel last summer were near neighbours.

  A clock towards Marylebone began to strike ten, entitling the officer on duty to stretch his legs. He drew the regulation tin watch from his fob-pocket, checked it, and paced slowly along the balconied houses. Crossing old Tyburn Road, he studied the facades of Park Street. Lady Lisle's villa stood apart from the others. He frowned and wondered how that entry had been

  planned. The chestnut trees of Park Lane ahead of him, he passed the fine gilt-tipped railings of Sir Isaac Thorne's mansion in Upper Brook Street. Once again, it stood detached from its neighbours. Portman Square was Rann's preferred territory with its stretches of connected roofs.

  He turned and walked back. At the first corner of Portman Square, several passers-by were looking in horror at a pathetic human sight. A blubberish young man of twenty-five or thirty, hatless and dishevelled, sat against a house wall. A tin bowl with a few coppers lay before him. His sleeves were pulled up, trousers hoisted above his knees. The exposed limbs were ulcerated, festering to a point where amputation of all four seemed the kindest remedy. Pus ran down his forearms and shins. The little group of benefactors stared with revulsion and pity. His voice was a thin, yet penetrating wail.

  'Good and kind Christians! Help a poor sailor scalded in the engine-room of HMS Ulysses on the bursting of a boiler. Help a poor unfortunate what served his country ten years but has no pillow at night save the 'ard stones of the pavey! A poor Jack Tar of the China War what hasn't a crumb in his mouth the last four days. Help a fellow being, reduced to eat the very scraps of bread thrown in the street to feed the sparrows

  From time to time he flexed a pus-laden limb, causing the women to draw back their skirts, the men to avert their gaze. Verity stepped softly to the front of the little group. He went up to the injure
d man and aimed a sharp kick, intended as a sideways blow to the seat of the ragged trousers.

  'Get up, Infant!' he said sternly. 'Get up, you miserable, idle, thieving little tyke!'

  There was a gasp from the group of witnesses. An elderly woman said reprovingly, 'My good man!'

  Verity turned to them, "s all right,' he said confidently, 'there's nothing wrong with him. He's Infant. Otherwise known as The Scaldrum Dodge.' He kicked the cripple with a little more energy.

  'Get up, you worthless young cadger!'

  'Infant' put his hands on the wall behind him and appeared to pull himself up with great difficulty. His eyes turned in mute appeal to the onlookers as his protectors. He hung a moment against the stonework. Then, for fear that the crowd might scatter, he began to utter wordless howls of despair.

  'That's right,' said Verity with patient scorn, looking confidentially at the bystanders, 'you cry away, my lad. You'll find as how it exercises the lungs, cleanses the features, rinses the eyes, and softens the temper.'

  Infant looked up dry-eyed.

  'Fucking jack!' he said bitterly. His sympathizers caught their breaths and went abruptly on their way.

  Verity took the offender by the lobe of an ear, leading him back towards Lord Tregarva's residence. At the approach of another pedestrian, Infant would howl like a broken spirit, the rest of the time he came quietly. At the area railings by the little gate that led down to the kitchens, a middle-aged woman in a white apron and cap watched their approach.

  'You never come down for your tea, Mr Verity,' she said anxiously. 'Oh, my lord, look at him!'

  'Don't pay any notice to him, Mrs Baker. He's Infant. Lives off the scaldrum dodge. Likewise cadging and scavenging.'

  'But his poor legs! And his arms!' She covered her mouth with her hands in a pantomime of dismay.

  'With them same legs, Mrs Baker, he done a runner a dozen times from Mr Samson and me. And we almost never caught him. We find he understands reason best when his ear's hurting.'