A Remarkable Case of Burglary Read online

  A Remarkable Case of Burglary

  by

  H. R. F. KEATING

  “A remarkable case of burglary was committed in a dwelling house in——about twelve months ago, and was effected in this manner. One day…”

  —Those That Will Not Work, Vol. IV of London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1812-87)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  1

  It began by purest chance. Early on the first day of April 1871, Val Leary, tramping in search of work across West London from the hovel he called home to the new buildings of Notting Dale, was just lifted out of his slogging head-down walk by a sharp sound in the still air. A block of hearthstone was being vigourously scraped on the steps of the corner house of a street called Northbourne Park Villas.

  Val’s glance rested momentarily on the kneeling maidservant on the steps, forerunner of the whole tribe who would be busy before long outside every house in this solidly respectable area. It rested momentarily, and then a second later it returned to her. Perhaps what brought it back was the fleeting ray of pale sun that caught an auburn curl escaping from the jammed-on white cap. Perhaps it was the merest hint in the thin back swinging awkwardly this way and that of a newly emerging pride in the swell of the hips. But, whatever it was, Val’s glance stayed resting on the girl he guessed to be a good three or four years younger than himself, probably barely seventeen.

  Then after he had stood there on the far side of the road for perhaps a quarter of a minute, taking in the girl’s blue print dress, more than a little pulled out of shape with constant wear, her sacking apron and her patched boots projecting into the air from where she knelt, the slaty-blue eyes in his thin pale face narrowed suddenly. His glance moved up to the house beyond her. With purpose.

  The steps being turned an unblemished milky-white by the action of that block of powdered stone and pipe clay led to a substantial black-painted front door, its brasswork already shining with a ferocious glitter. This stood in a porch supported by two fat white pillars, its roof forming part of the balcony that ran the full width of the house protected by stout bellying-out iron railings. Behind these glinted and gleamed three broad sash windows, their well-polished panes reflecting the bright first sunshine. Then above rose two more floors, each with its glinting complement of broad windows growing step by step less in height. And finally, just visible behind an overhang, came a last set of windows, for the attic bedrooms, altogether smaller, hardly measuring two foot square. The whole front of the house was freshly white-painted and up it ran, in gleaming black, four thick waterspouts.

  For several separate seconds Val looked at these last, his eyes slowly travelling up and down them savouring their each solid foot almost as if they were a repast spread out to be eaten. And then a look of decision flicked on to his pale features.

  He set off walking again. But now, crossing the road, he headed down Northbourne Park Villas itself on the pavement running directly outside No. 53. His footsteps sounded louder and louder in the morning quiet.

  Janey, kitchenmaid at No. 53, her head down at her hearth-stoning, the harsh rasp of the block loud in her ears, hardly took in the approaching footsteps. But when, directly behind her, they ceased with all the suddenness of a column of soldiers brought to a slammed halt, then the abrupt cessation of sound penetrated her mind at once. Her scrubbing stopped. From under her bent arm she looked backwards to the street.

  She saw, standing on the pavement exactly outside the narrow house gate, a young man marked by the greyness of his face as one of the poorest of the poor. His jacket and trousers were wretched cotton fustian, worn and grease-stained, with patches on both knees and a triangular unmended rip on one sleeve. But the pallid face with the colourless lips was singularly striking under its crown of dark hair, only half hidden by the greasy cap. And the slaty-blue eyes danced with beckoning confidence.

  Janey, to her tumbling-over astonishment, found she longed for nothing other than to take needle and thread, run down to the pavement, and set to work on that ripped sleeve. But she said nothing and moved not an inch.

  Nor did the young man say a word. And, after a few long seconds, Janey turned her head again and started once more to scrub at the step beneath her.

  But gone was the steady rhythm of a minute or so earlier and of day upon day before, seemingly almost without number. Instead she found she could do no more than attack the step in little aimless jerks. And beneath the gaze that she knew was steadily on her she shifted her knees uneasily.

  At last, when not much more than half a minute had passed, though to Janey it had seemed like a whole long morning, the still watcher broke his silence.

  He broke it, but hardly broke it. In the stillness, above the hesitant rasping of the hearthstone, there came one single sound. A little click of the tongue, quiet but carrying. A sound such as a horse coper might make at the sight of a fancied animal.

  Janey’s scrubbing ceased again. She took her hands from the step, straightened her back, turned and looked at the young man fully and frankly. A smile, a little subdued by caution but ready to ride out into the unexplored world, began to part her lips.

  And at that instant, with a clatter that sounded in the cone of intentness that spread from the steps down to the pavement like a rippling explosion, the kitchenmaid from No. 51 heaved open the door in the sunken area in front of the house and barged her way out laden with wooden pail slopping with water, long sweeping broom, and awkward box full of brushes and rags and polishes.

  At once Janey swung back round, seized her hearthstone, and began furiously scrubbing once more, regardless of the fact that she was whitening a section of the steps already entirely free of every last yesterday’s blemish. Only from the corner of her eye did she see the handsome young man in the wretched ragged clothes turn on his heel and lounge off along the wide respectable street, an alien figure.

  If chance brings about many events in the world, many more are produced by its opposite, regularity. And the household at No. 53 Northbourne Park Villas was a model of regularity. So Janey, from the moment she had finished her work on the steps, had no time at all to think about the encounter that had so unexpectedly broken the grey pattern of her life. She had to give the back stairs their daily wash so that every last random heel mark was obliterated from them. She had to lay the breakfast table in the servants’ hall—a salt cellar at each corner—and then to cook the bacon and eggs and make the tea and be certain it all was ready sharp by half-past eight, the later wintertime breakfast hour that would go on till the first of May. And then, no sooner had she eaten her share of the meal, listening all the while to a harangue from Mrs. Vickers, the cook, than it was time to clear the table and wash the dishes so as to have the scullery clear and herself tidy before Family Prayers.

  But when the whole household was at last assembled in the dining room for that daily ceremony Janey did have time to think. Usually while the Master sonorously declaimed a passage from the Bible she stood, head bent in a mere daze, recovering from the rush of the morning, hardly thinking coherent thoughts at all. But today, as soon as that loud voice began uttering the long words her mind turned at once to the event that had so startlingly broken in on the unvarying pattern. And from the m
oment that she conjured up in her recollection the picture of the young man with the dancing slaty-blue eyes—she could see him in every detail clearly as if he were standing beside the Master, looking over his shoulder at the big white pages of the fine-leaved Bible—from that moment on her brain seemed to leap and race along a course that had all along been laid out for her, a smooth wide downward-running course sweet and easy to the feet.

  That wordless encounter in the morning stillness from being a small nugget of time with neither past behind it nor future in front of it became the starting point of a whole beaded rope of rich possibilities. What would happen next exactly, she could not decide. But that things would happen, one after the other, getting better and better, more wildly heart-thumping at each advance, she knew with every dumb certainty that was in her. He would come again, her dark handsome admirer. Because admire her he did. That was certain. She knew it from his eyes, from the set of his head, from, above all, that tiny little, almost too quiet to be heard but wonderfully carrying click of sound that had come from his nearly smiling lips. He admired her. And he would come again. There were the starting fixed points. And after them all was uncertainty, wonderful uncertainty in an unfathomable, never before visited, hardly before thought of realm.

  So, when Prayers were done and her duties by Mrs. Vickers’ side, sending up family breakfast, at last completed and Robert, the footman, and Maggie, the housemaid, had come down to the scullery with their loads of dirty plates and cups and dishes and Robert had dumped his into the steaming sudsy sink and had hurried off, this first opportunity of pouring everything out to a sympathetic ear was beyond possibility of resisting. And out it all came, every detail as it seemed engraved on her mind from the instant the ringing steps behind her on the pavement outside had stopped so suddenly till the moment when the crash and clatter of that stupid Betsy from next door had brought to a sudden end the enchanted encounter.

  “But he’ll come again, Maggie; I know ’e will,” she concluded.

  Maggie, raw, red nosed, lank haired, gawky of body, some seven years older than Janey and her only friend in the world, gave a prolonged sniff of overdramatic disbelief.

  “No,” Janey protested, picking a plate out of the hot water in the sink and propping it to dry hardly realising what she was doing. “No, he’ll come all right. I knows it, Mag. I knows it in every bone in me body. If ‘e don‘t come termorrer, it’ll be because ‘e can’t. But then he’ll come the next day, or the next. That I know.”

  Maggie, slowly beginning to unload the greasy dishes from her tray, could keep up her hard-won pretence of superiority no longer.

  “What you say ‘e looked like again?” she inquired, her eyes beginning to shine in lumbering sympathy. “What you say?”

  Janey sighed deeply and in pure joy. She consulted once more that ever-vivid picture in her mind’s eye.

  “Blue eyes,” she said. “A sort o‘ dark blue, getting on fer grey. An’ black ‘air. Very black. The ’andsomest ’air I ever seen.”

  Maggie took the last items from her tray and shook herself out of her uncritical admiration like a dog emerging all wet from a warm pool.

  “Blue eyes,” she said in suddenly heavy tones. “Blue eyes an’ black ‘air.”

  “Maggie!”

  It was Rosa, the Mistress’s lady’s maid. Her sharp voice in an instant split wide the intimate cosiness of the warm suds-smelling scullery. Rosa, a proud creature becoming every day more fragile and friable as the years mounted up and there was never a sign of that ultimate seal of womanly success, the husband. The fine complexion beginning to turn papery, the piled golden hair becoming thin and dry, the once-bright voice turning shrill.

  “Maggie, there’s their bed still to be made, and you standing here gossiping. Come along, can’t you? I shan’t get a stitch of my mending done this morning if you go on at this rate. Not a stitch.”

  “Coming, Rosa, coming,” Maggie said, with a pleading grin. “I was only just a-going to—””

  “Never mind what you ‘was only just.’ Come along now. Come along, do.”

  “Yes, Rosa.”

  Red-faced lumpy Maggie heaved a great sigh and turned to go. But what she had been just on the point of saying was evidently of such importance that even the flashing imperious presence of Rosa could not quite stop her giving it voice.

  At the scullery door she turned and brought it out.

  “Blue eyes,” she said. “Black ‘air. That’s Irish. Irish, my girl. Irish, so you watch out.”

  That evening of April the first Val Leary, who after his early morning encounter had no longer thought it necessary to look for work on the new building in Notting Dale, set out once again from the tumbledown cottage near Lisson Grove, one room of which was all the domestic security he had ever known. He walked down past the Paddington Station and on along to the Marble Arch. But his pace now was not the resigned slog it had been in the morning when all that had been in prospect was a hard day’s labour for perhaps as little as eighteen pence in wages. He walked now with his head up and his eyes darting sharply here and there. In Oxford Street, where the shopmen were beginning to put up the shutters and the lamplighter was slowly making his way from post to post, he looked in at those windows, that were not yet covered over, with quick appraising glances, as if at last he could begin to think about the fine goods they held.

  More than halfway down the broad thoroughfare he turned into Wardour Street and some way along that he branched off yet again into a narrow ill-lit lane, not much more than an alley, called Newel Street. Almost the only illumination here now came from the half-curtained windows of a low-built gin shop, and into this Val went.

  Inside, he stood warily just past the threshold, taking in everything there was to see, the dull metal-topped bar, the row of tapped barrels behind it, the pewter pots and measures and the nets of bright lemons hanging underneath, the sawdusted floor, the three or four rough tables, and the half-barrel seats and three-legged stools, none of them at present occupied. Last of all he looked carefully at the two yellow-jacketed carpenters, the only customers, leaning against the bar, glasses of Old Tom gin in their hands.

  Satisfied that there was nothing untoward, at last he crossed over to the bar and spoke to the potboy behind it in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

  “Mr. Sproggs at home by chance?”

  The thin white-faced lad gave him a quick hard look.

  “What’d you be a-wanting with ‘im?”

  “Business,” Val answered, returning look for look.

  “Ain’t never seen you in ’ere afore.”

  “No,” Val said. “You ain’t.”

  He hesitated a moment.

  “Jem Walker told me,” he added.

  A flash of understanding, quickly suppressed, passed over the potboy’s drawn features.

  “I’ll go an’ see.”

  He turned and slid through a narrow curtained doorway behind him. Val stood quite still looking down at the dented and whorled surface of the bar, the record of countless haphazard crashings and bangings of pewter pots.

  It was three long minutes before the potboy came back. When he did so, without a word he opened the half door underneath the bar.

  Val paused for the merest instant and then ducked through and slipped in his turn through the narrow doorway behind.

  He found himself in a little snug room all lined with dark cupboards and with its sole window firmly shuttered. The air was redolent with the odour of hot gin and of lemon. A neatly cheerful little fire burned in the grate with a black kettle singing on the hob, and the only other light came from a small oil lamp on a round table in the centre of the room.

  At this table, in the sole chair drawn up to it, a comfortable wooden-armed piece of furniture, there was seated a round well-fleshed man of about fifty, who at first and immediate sight put Val in mind of nothing so much as a heavy white-skinned toad. He sat squarely and dumpily in his chair with his elbows resting on the table in fron
t of him, his pale podgy hands clasping a little steaming glass of hot gin. Beside him on the gleaming dark teak of the table stood a black bottle, squat as himself, and half a lemon and a small sharp wooden-handled knife on a large white plate. His face was white and round as the plate beside him, crowned by a scatter of short brushlike grey-white hair and hardly marked at all by a podgy nose, a small tight-lipped mouth, and eyes that under the scanty grey eyebrows blinked a gooseberry-green.

  Val was conscious of receiving an unwavering inspection as he came into the room and stood at the near side of the round table. And it was a long while before he was addressed, in a voice so breathily hoarse it was hard to hear even in the quiet all round.

  “Jem Walker sent yer. So yer say.”

  Val swallowed.

  “Not so much sent, Mr. Sproggs, as told,” he said. “Told me where you was to be found, and what the game were you was in.”

  The toad face in front of him flushed up in quick anger.

  “What game? What game, eh? Very free with his talk, Jem Walker.”

  “I’m a good friend of his, Mr. Sproggs,” Val said quickly. “Honest I am. Not one word o’ what he said’ll go a yard further by me. That I promise.”

  “Hmph.”

  Again Val felt himself subjected to a bitterly suspicious scrutiny from the gooseberry-green, softly blinking eyes. And again the silence was broken with solid reluctance.

  “An’ what did ‘e tell yer, Jem Walker?”

  Val hesitated an instant, and then brought it out.

  “He said as ‘ow you was a putter-up, Mr. Sproggs. He said as ‘ow if a likely lad knew of a toffken easy to bust an’ worth the bustin’, you was the one as’d stake ‘im out and provide the companions as was necessary.”

  “He said all that, did he?”

  Again Val had to withstand a glare that seemed intent on tearing to pieces the holder of such dangerous information. But when the hoarsely whispering voice spoke again it seemed one degree less heavy with suspicion.