Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob. Page 7

  'Listen to me, Meiklejohn! I had dealings with this young person! It's me that can make her see reason!'

  'You tell Mr Croaker, then.'

  'You gone stoopid, 'ave you?' said Verity, reddening with exasperation. 'Old man Croaker'd have me off this detail so fast I'd never know I'd been on it. No, Mr Meiklejohn. What I got is a stratagem!'

  Meiklejohn looked up, the apprehension clear in his face, and Verity snuffled humorously.

  'Ain't the first time I've brought such young persons to see reason, Mr Meiklejohn. First chance I get I’ll have Cosima in a corner and put it to her good and straight. Let her hand over that heathen ornament and every good word shall be spoke for her. Else she'll be took for handling stolen goods. Ten years under lock and key in a place where beauty fades remarkable sudden.'

  Meiklejohn appeared thoroughly alarmed.

  'You listen, Verity. . .'

  ''s all right, Mr Meiklejohn! Trust me and we'll all be shaking Mr Gowry's hand tomorrow.'

  'Verity? Meiklejohn's shout interrupted his plump companion's enthusiasm. 'What's going to happen to us all when Croaker finds you scared the bird off the nest and she can't be found this side of Christmas? Have some sense!'

  Verity thrust his large head forward, glaring pugnaciously.

  'Won't be like that, Mr Meiklejohn. I know her!' Meiklejohn became reasonable.

  'Look, old friend,' he said gently, I’d rather have Whitehall or Haymarket. Who wouldn't? But Brighton ain't a bad billet for now. 'If you want to end up down Mr Croaker's privy, that's your affair. But me and four other poor bleeders on the detail don't fancy it. Act sensible and we’ll all have a bit of a jolly here with the races and the chits on the promenades. So you just leave her be and proceed as instructed. All right?'

  'You forgot something, Mr Meiklejohn,' said Verity solemnly.

  ‘Have I? What's that, then?'

  ‘I ain't one to say it without some cause,' said Verity, ‘but since that unfortunate affair in Langham Place over Miss Helen Jacoby, you been reduced to the ranks. I'm your superior officer. In fact, ‘I’m superior to anyone else that'll be watching the front of the house. What I say goes.'

  Meiklejohn let out a breath of forceful exasperation.

  'See here, Verity,' he said gently. 'You take a single step towards Miss Cosima whoever-she-is. Say one word to her. That's all. I’ll be in Mr Croaker's office there and then. And I’ll tell him that you know the young person and she knows you. An officer that can be recognised has no use in surveillance. Why, you won't be on this detail then. You won't even be private-clothes any more. They'll have you wearing your legs out, up and down the Waterloo Road in a tall hat and uniform. Can't say I should like to have your feet when that happens.'

  Verity's face fell. Under the flattened black hair and the waxed moustaches his round red cheeks went slack as if in a token of surrender. He seemed bereft of any answer. Then he pulled himself together.

  'You ain't a man of confidence, Mr Meiklejohn,' he said reproachfully. 'Not a man of confidence at all.'

  Meiklejohn's triumph was not marred by this.

  'P'raps not,' he said thoughtfully, ‘But I know a soft billet when I see one. And I seen one here. Mind you, though, I wouldn't say no to a pull or two of shrub before we all got Mr Croaker's harness on our backs.'

  It was the following morning when Verity and Meiklejohn took their first watch in Brunswick Square. Verity himself had not previously walked as far west as this during his time in Brighton. After the narrower streets of the town, the market area still reminiscent of an old fishing village, the grandeur of Brunswick Town, as the neighbourhood was called, seemed undeniably impressive. The square was built on a slight incline, the lower side open to the promenade and the sea. At the top end there was a gap between the buildings where Brunswick Place entered. The fine white houses of the square thus formed two L-shaped blocks. Baron Lansing's love-nest was in the corner of the western block.

  Verity stood at ease in the morning sunshine which danced on the bottle-green waves where the buildings opened out to the sea. He had begun to take a proprietorial interest in the majestic sweep of Georgian facades. Against the tall cream houses, the black paint of area railings and drawing-room balconies shone with an immaculate gloss. Behind the long sash windows of the first floor, veiled by silk curtains, he could almost imagine the swish of evening gowns and the strains of a waltz or a quadrille.

  Below the handsome bowed windows of the principal apartments, flights of steps led up from the pavement to the brass-furnished doors of each house. A gate was set in the pavement railings, giving access to the basement steps which led down to the kitchen and servants' quarters.

  While Inspector Croaker and his colleagues of the Brighton Constabulary watched the rear of the house from their hired room, Verity and Meiklejohn surveyed the front. It was easily done. At first, Verity had been apprehensive that they would have to stand immediately outside the building, or at least directly across the square from it. Even a helpless young woman like Cosima Bremer would soon have recognised them for what they were, even if she failed to identify Verity himself. But the design of the square enabled them to watch without being seen.

  They stood a few yards up Brunswick Place, which divided the two blocks of houses as it entered the square from the hill above. This gave them an oblique view across the front of the corner house. Anyone entering or leaving must cross their gaze, while they themselves could not be seen from the windows of the Lansing mansion. If the girl who lived there wished to scrutinise them, she would have to come down the steps as far as the pavement to do so.

  In any case, Verity and Meiklejohn had a pretext for their guard. The house outside which they appeared to be standing watch was one of the grandest of all, tall Corinthian pilasters rising between its long windows. During the summer recess, the mansion was the home of the Right Honourable Henry Layard, lately appointed Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs upon Lord Palmerston's insistence. The Right Honourable gentleman had been greatly flattered when offered a private-clothes guard upon his front door. To the entire neighbourhood, as well as to the Queen's Messengers arriving with despatch cases, his newly acquired grandeur was advertised unchallengeably.

  Verity and Meiklejohn stood either side of the front door with its polished brass, their boots planted firmly astride, hands behind their backs, the rear of one hand resting in the palm of the other. It was the approved posture for a private-clothes detective on surveillance duty. Only one feature betrayed their purpose. The eyes, which should have stared unswervingly ahead, slanted sidelong at the opening of Brunswick Square and the view across its north-western corner.

  Verity shifted apprehensively as a young woman came into sight, walking from the dazzling sunlight of promenade and sea. She was making for the top of the square, accompanied by a child in red velvet carrying a hoop. It was the oldest dodge in the business, a pickpocket or a flash-tail who used a child to give a semblance of innocence to such movements. But before she reached the shaded corner of the square, she crossed to the green space of its private central garden. On the long sweep of grass, stretching down to the promenade, a dozen lime trees, warped by the prevailing sea-wind, rose among the paths and flower-beds. The child gave a cry of delight, produced a stick and began to bowl the hoop vigorously. Verity sighed.

  The morning passed in heat and stillness, broken only by the distant surge of breakers and the shouts of children on the beach itself. A milkman, pulling his little cart with several churns upon it, passed the two policemen and turned into the square. He stopped outside the corner house and leant over the area railings.

  "Milk down below!'

  Presently he returned to his float, carrying a jug, ladled out milk from a churn, and went back to give it to someone on the basement steps.

  'Bloody useless!' said Meiklejohn, breaking the silence between the two men. 'He could be going off now with that Shah Jehan clasp in his milk churn! There's a hundred ways!'

>   'No he couldn't, Mr Meiklejohn.' 'Course he bloody well could.' ‘No he couldn't, Mr Meiklejohn.' ‘Why couldn't he?'

  Verity turned his plump face smugly upon his companion.

  ' 'Cos he's one of Mr Bunker's men from the London Indemnity, Mr Meiklejohn. That's why. And so's the baker, and the cat's meat man. They got this square sewn up tighter 'n a curate's pocket. What a curse that jool brought on Miss Cosima! A legacy o' doom, Mr Meiklejohn! She can't admit having the clasp without a charge of stolen property or fraud. And she can't trust a living soul with the story. And she ain't a wicked girl, as such. Not reely bad.'

  Meiklejohn was silent for a moment, as though something had begun to weigh upon his mind.

  'P’raps you was right, Verity. P'raps the best thing would be to have it out with her, face to face.'

  Verity chortled indulgendy.

  ‘No, Mr Meiklejohn. You was right. I thought about it after.'

  'About what?'

  'That jool ain't just a jool, Mr Meiklejohn. Can't be. If it was Banker Lansing's inheritance there was more to it. And the trouble someone's taken to try and sweeten me! What for? That jool'd be the biggest give-away a thief could have. Ain't a magsman that would touch it, unless he was to throw it in the sea. I don't suppose Miss Cosima got the least idea what it's worth, nor why.'

  'Ten thousand, old Bunker reckoned.'

  'Double it, Mr Meiklejohn. Treble it. Put a nought on the end and double it again. Banker Lansing's fortune, that's what it was. This whole thing got a real rich aroma about it. A real ripe smell.'

  He broke off suddenly as a figure scuttled out from the little gate above the basement steps of the Baron Lansing's mansion. It was a servant, a girl in a green cotton dress. The girl had a cloth in her hand. She flapped it vigorously in the air, as though to shake dust or crumbs from it, and then scuttled back again. As she turned, Meiklejohn let out a gasp of surprise.

  'Blimey!' he said. 'Jolly!'

  'Tighter 'n a curate's purse, Mr Meiklejohn,' said Verity firmly.

  The sun was at its zenith, turning the sea to molten silver.

  'Ten thousand,' said Meiklejohn presently. 'Ten thousand on the open market, Bunker said. That's your Shah Jehan clasp.'

  Verity shook his head.

  'No, Mr Meiklejohn. I don't see it. Three villains has gone to their reward. And there's a lot that never came to light. There's a 'ell of a sight more to this than ten thousand. More than a heathen clasp that the stoopidest magsman in Seven Dials would look at and run.'

  'My eyes is hurting,' said Meiklejohn plaintively. 'Looking sideways into that square all the time! I'll have a bloody squint like two gobstoppers by the time this lot's over.'

  'It ain't just for ten thousand,' said Verity, ignoring the complaint.

  Meiklejohn lowered his voice to a growl of exasperation.

  'How can a jool be worth more than a jool is worth?'

  Verity settled his burly shoulders. Under the tall stovepipe hat his eyes were set, his red face round and belligerent. He puffed his black moustaches up, as if to dislodge an insect which might have landed upon them.

  'I dunno, Mr Meiklejohn,' he said fiercely. 'I dunno why I been seen off, nor how a jool can be worth more than it is. But I bleeding well mean to find out!'

  TICKET OF LEAVE

  7

  Pale daylight began to penetrate the barred portholes of the Indomitable's lower deck, where Stunning Joe lay motionless and watchful in his coarse brown hammock. He knew by the gurgling of water round the wooden hull that the tide had turned and was now on the ebb. Two more days, he thought, and the contractor's vessel would take on board its human cargo for Port Jackson. Then, even the familiar sounds of Portland Harbour would be lost for ever.

  The convict decks of the Indomitable were each divided into two long prison dormitories running fore and aft. They were railed off by iron bars from floor to ceiling, like animal-cages, with a narrow gangway between in which the warders kept their vigil. A hundred men slept in each cage, the line of hammocks packed so closely that there was no space between them. In the misty light some of the sleepers had already begun to stir, groaning, coughing and yawning.

  Stunning Joe could just make out the figure of the warder in his narrow corridor, lit by a glimmer of little lanterns fastened in a row to the bars of the two cages. The oil-light caught the polished buttons of the dark uniform, the crowns stitched upon the lapels, the glazed peak of the officer's cap. The warder had put down his bull's-eye lantern and was splashing the deck around him with chloride of lime from a tin bucket. Joe O'Meara caught the harsh acrid smell in his nostrils. If statistics were to be believed, the third-class felons on the lower deck would die at the rate of forty a year from what was called 'general infirmity'. It was rare for a warder to catch the prisoners' contagion but the officers of the night-watch took no chances.

  Somewhere overhead a deep-toned bell was struck three times. On each of the fetid decks the warders took the bright bunches of keys which hung at their belts and drew them jangling along the iron bars.

  'All up! Turn out! Move yourselves!'

  Following his neighbours' example, Stunning Joe slid down from his hammock and began to dress in the convict's uniform, rusty brown with red stripes in a hoop-pattern. There was nothing to be gained by defying authority. Soapy Samuel had preached obedience and dying to be born again. Joe dismissed the promises of Samuel, but they were the only hope offered to him since he had come face to face with the officers of the law at Wannock Hundred.

  Between two lines of warders the third-class convicts shuffled up the companionway to the top deck. Each man carried his hammock, now rolled and trussed like a large sausage. The upper deck of the old wooden ship had been built over with square huts, the so-called 'hammock-houses' where the prisoner's bedding was stored during the day. The masts of the Indomitable were cut down to a height of a dozen feet. The stumps had been left as clothes-props between which the lines of washed linen and bedding were hung to dry. The garments suspended there looked as if they had been sprinkled with pepper but this was merely the infestation of lice and fleas which prison laundering never removed.

  Standing in the single file of men, waiting to hand in the bundled hammock upon which his number and the ship's name had been stitched, Joe looked about him. The dark ferret-eyes measured the distance to the ship's rail and the expanse of water, beyond which the Dorset coast grew yellow in the early sun. Warders with carbines and short bayonet-blades attached to the barrels stood between the felons and the ship's side. He would be dead before he could cross the deck.

  With his hammock stacked in its place, he followed the shuffling prisoners down the steps again, to the lowest and dampest level of the old wooden ship. The first men were already scrubbing the floor of the cage and arranging canvas cloths on the white deal tables which now stood where the hammocks had been slung. Each table accommodated a dozen men, sitting on benches at either side. An inverted bowl of brick tin, polished like silver, was set at every place, a matching basin at the table's end. 'Stand! Stand at your places!'

  The warder's hoarse shout was followed by the obligatory grace, uttered in the same military shriek.

  'Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service! A-men!'

  The benches scraped as the men moved them to sit down and eat, under strict rule of silence. Prisoners deputed as messmen doled out a single hunk of bread from the laundry baskets and a ladle of rust-coloured cocoa from the tin pails. This portion twice a day, plus a ladle of boiled meat at noon made up the diet of the hulks. In the first few weeks Joe had endured a hunger that was like torture to him. Now he felt only the numbness in his belly which followed the keen torment of his initiation.

  Five minutes later the duty warder's voice came again, in a shrill yap.

  'All up! Stand at your places! Will you stand when I order you!'

  Then came the muster, each felon saluting like a soldier and shouting 'Yes sir!' as his name was called. Stunning Joe wondered ho
w Sealskin Kite and Old Mole could ever have believed that they would spring him from such a crib as this.

  After the muster each cage was unlocked in turn. Under an escort of warders the men were marched up to the top deck once more. This time they wore glazed, broad-brimmed hats over their cropped hair as they waited docilely in line to go down the gangway steps to the cutters below. A queue of these little boats waited to ferry the labour gangs to the Portland quarries. Rocks broken under their hammers were used in building the new quay and prison. The oarsmen were first-class convicts, indicated by the two red bands round their right arms, their black leather patches on the left sleeve. Stunning Joe looked for no assistance from them. A first-class man had too much to lose by being implicated in escape or mutiny. Many of them were more vicious than the most brutal warder.

  Beyond the convict hulks, the hospital ship Iphigenia and the little washing-sloop Lydney rode at their mooring chains. Even from these auxiliary vessels, Joe thought, there was no prospect of escape. He sat with the other men in the cutter, cowed and despondent, while the sun shone on the polished bayonets of the warders in the stern. Many of the new officers wore the Alma and Inkerman clasps upon their breasts. A man who had fought hand-to-hand in the bloody skirmishes of the Crimea would not hesitate to use bullet or steel on a condemned felon.

  Stunning Joe's detail was marched up the hill from the quayside, through the streets of the little town, to the stone-yards on the far side of the peninsula. The men were halted while the contractors detonated another section of the whitish rock-face, providing the boulders upon which the prisoners worked with their hammers. Joe O'Meara glimpsed again the long crescent of Chesil Bank below, its banked pebbles curving away towards the mainland and freedom.

  A man who could once get clear of the work detail might make a run for it when darkness fell. During daylight, of course, it would be impossible. A figure on the long stretch of pebbles connecting Portland with the coast would be as conspicuous as a bluebottle on a whitewashed wall. The sharp brain in the neat little head thought of darkness. Darkness, or perhaps a sea mist.