A Remarkable Case of Burglary Read online

  “An’ you’re such a likely lad, eh? Is that the way the wind lies?”

  “It is, sir. It is. It come to me only this mornin’. A piece o’ luck it was. A rare piece o’ luck. I happened by chance to be a-walking along a road called Northbourne Park Villas. It’s just over by—””

  “I knows, lad. Noll Sproggs makes it ‘is business to know pretty well all the best streets o’ London.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sproggs. Then you’ll have seen the ‘ouses there?”

  “Not me, lad. Never.”

  The quick flush of rage came up again on the pale toad features and as quickly died away.

  “Not me, lad. It’s more’n my life’s worth to be seen within a mile o’ any place where there’s going to be a bust I ain’t never been quodded yet, not fer so much as a day. An’ believe you me, boy, I don’t intend ter be.”

  “No, Mr. Sproggs. No.”

  Val licked at his lips.

  “Well then,” he said, “let me tell yer that this house in North-bourne Park Villas, No. 53 it is, is a big ‘un. An’ well kep’ up. You can see there’s plenty o’ push spent there every day, if only by the shine on the brass an’ the shine on the winders. But this is the best on it, Mr. Sproggs, this is the best on it. There’s a servant girl there what’s taken a real fancy to me. She’s mine fer the beckoning, Mr. Sproggs. Maybe I ain’t a-spoken so many words with ‘er, but she’s mine just as soon as I moves me little finger to call’er.”

  He leant forward across the round table and knew that, for all his exaggerating, his eyes were shining with the fervency of pure truth.

  “Is it to yer liking, Mr. Sproggs?” he burst out hungrily. “Is it? Say it is. Say it is, Mr. Sproggs.”

  Noll Sproggs’s heavy toad face remained totally unexpressive.

  “This ‘ere servant girl,” he said at last “What class o’ servant might she be?”

  Val had to think. His brain scrambled. And the unmoving putter-up on the far side of the table implacably recorded the delay in answering.

  “Yer don’t know,” he stolidly challenged at last. “You’re not half so bleedin’ friendly with the lass as yer makes out.”

  Val’s hands, leaning in fists on the edge of the gleaming teak table, tightened till the knuckles were white.

  “Listen, Γ11 be open with yer,” he said, forcing from within himself every lest feather scrap of conviction he could raise, seeing slipping away instant by instant the chance that had come to him, the one chance in a million. “Listen, Mr. Sproggs, I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know the girl so well. I ain’t even hardly spoke to ‘er.”

  The sweat prickled his upper lip as he told the extra lie.

  “I ain’t hardly spoke to ‘er, but I seen the smile she ‘ad on ‘er face fer me. I seen that, an’ I tells yer. It’s on between ‘er an’ me. It’s on, if ever anything was.”

  And, to his thumping joy, the squat putter-up, instead of angrily dismissing him, asked another question.

  “Whereabouts yer see ‘er then?”

  “It was on the front steps there, Mr. Sproggs. She was a-scrub-bing of ‘em as I ‘appened to pass by.”

  “Kitchenmaid then, or scullery wench,” the putter-up said. “The likes o’ her won’t see much on the toff part o’ the ‘ouse, if she sees any.”

  “But she could ask questions o’ the other servants like,” Val pleaded. “She could find out anything. She’d do it fer me.”

  Noll Sproggs jerked sharply forward in his wooden-armed chair.

  “Now you watch what you’re a-doing of, lad,” he whispered hoarsely. “Questions to a servant. She begins to wonder. Confides in one o’ the others. Maybe the cook, if so be as she’s the motherly sort. And then it’s upstairs to the Master. It’s call in the detective officers. It’s shadder yer, lad. Shadder yer every step o’ yer way. And then one fine day it’s those damned crushers in Noll Sproggs’s parlour.”

  “Mr. Sproggs,” Val came back, summoning up entire candour on to every muscle of his face. “Mr. Sproggs, I got more sense nor that. I ain’t a half Irish fer nothing, Mr. Sproggs. I can spin a tale wi’ the best on ‘em. That girl won’t know one bit about it. She’ll talk ter me an’ tell me, an’ not know a thing she’s a-doing of. That I promise.”

  The toad-squat putter-up took a long lemony pull from the little gin glass he had all along clasped in his podgy white hands.

  “Well then, lad,” he said eventually, with dragged-out willingness. “I’ll do this fer yer. You can talk to that girl o’ yourn. You can talk to ‘er all yer wants. An’ you can come in ‘ere for a drink one night. No ‘arm in coming in ‘ere fer a drink.”

  The gooseberry-green blinking eyes looked up at Val, deep past plumbing with wariness.

  “An’ maybe then I’ll ’ave a word with yer,” the putter-up said. “An’ maybe as I won’t.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sproggs,” said Val. “I truly thank you. An’ you can be sure, come termorrer morning, I’ll be talking to that girl o’ mine. Talking to ’er fine.”

  Scouts make reports. A chief of staff assesses them. He weighs factors, allows for chances, seizes on a small lucky event, ponders the forces at his disposal for the attack, adds up their weaknesses and their strengths, bides his time.

  2

  The general officer commanding a fortress town takes his precautions, even in piping times of peace. And if on occasion these precautions are strengthened purely by chance, they yet keep the enemy at bay. So the fact that on the morning of April the second, 1871, Mortimer Johnson, Esq., city merchant and householder at No. 53 Northbourne Park Villas, London West, happened while in the act of shaving himself to nick the very edge of the lobe of his left ear was to prove a matter of unexpected importance.

  The trivial accident seemed at first to be going to have no more effect than to provide Mr. Johnson with a providence-given chance to vent an ill temper seldom far below the surface. Temper indeed was, it almost always seemed, the final outcome of the man. He was a powerfully built aggressive specimen, an inch over six foot in height, notably upstanding and particularly florid complexioned, the result of fifty years of good eating and more than thirty of measured liberal drinking. He believed to the core that the circumstances of his birth, as a gentleman and as the inheritor of a worthy fortune, entitled him to this good living, as they equally entitled him to exercise to the full the power that had come into his hands. He did not like to be crossed. And when he was so, by the perversity of the people around him either in his household or among the scratching clerks on their high stools at his office in the city, and even by the less accountable perversity of mere fate, he would inevitably break out into a rage which he never considered other than as perfectly just.

  So on the morning of April the second, partly because he had always preferred to wield the flashing ivory-handled razor himself rather than entrust his night’s growth of beard to the ministrations of Robert, that tiny cut appeared on the lobe of his left ear. And then he felt himself completely permitted to give free rein to temper.

  The moment that Robert entered the dressing room to turn the underlinen warming on the clothes horse in front of the newly lit spluttering fire, Mr. Johnson hastily but thunderingly accused him of bringing up his pot of shaving water “cold as dead mutton.” Robert, as usual, merely murmured apologies, then quickly spread the linen out again and retreated.

  But the incident, and the bluster and haranguing that went with it, had served to delay Mr. Johnson not a little in the ritual of his rising. And, in the way of things, this short initial delay built up in little matters like the contrariness of collar studs until he was a full ten minutes past his time coming down to take Family Prayers.

  And even here he felt himself thwarted at every turn. It was his custom while the domestic staff assembled in the dining room each morning to glance at the passage of Scripture he was to read—the Gospels were doled out in regular rotation, as had been his father’s way before him—and to decide where he could convenient
ly bring the reading to an end. But this morning he was the last to enter the room, and, eager to make up for lost time, he simply opened the large Bible at the place its broad red silk bookmark indicated and began to read. And there was nowhere for him to stop.

  On and on he went till at last in sheer fury he left off bang in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, trenchantly pronouncing the by chance somewhat inappropriate words “pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” And then he closed the pages of the Good Book with a single thunderous slam.

  Breakfast, with its steaming sideboard array of silver-dished kidneys, eggs and bacon and sea-evoking finnan haddock, with its hot toast, its smoothly ironed and well-folded Morning Post, and its substantial pile of reassuring correspondence waiting to be opened, gradually mellowed him. But it was a calm that, when broken, was to bring all the more violent a tempest. And before long broken it was. Although when the meal began the teapot was in its place at the lower end of the long table, the tall silver coffeepot that ought to have stood beside it was not. And, while Mr. Johnson sometimes took tea and sometimes coffee according to whim, when he observed along the length of the table that the coffeepot was not where it ought to be at once he opted irrevocably that day not to drink tea.

  And then he sat there, neither eating, nor looking at the paper, nor opening his letters, but drumming his fingers in silent foreboding impatience on the damask cloth and glowering into space while the minutes passed.

  The fact of the matter was that the fire in the kitchen range was sulking dismally and the second kettle would not come to the boil. And for the sulking fire, Janey was to blame.

  She too, like the Master of the house, had had a contrary start to her day. She had got up promptly enough when the battered alarm clock had shrilled out at the wintertime hour of half-past five in the low-ceilinged chill attic room she shared with Maggie, and she had encountered no difficulties with her first task of clearing out the dead fire from the range and cleaning the flues. But when she had come to light the new fire her troubles had begun. The eight sticks of her allowance for this task turned out to be damp and the two sheets of the Morning Post of a fortnight earlier had failed to ignite them. Nor had the sticks caught when she had taken another two sheets, and one extra.

  At last she had helped herself to a little lamp paraffin, a thing strictly forbidden by Mr. Burch, the butler. Nevertheless she had at least got the fire to go, if smokily. And though Robert had contrived to bring the small amount of water needed for the Master’s shaving pot to the boil, she herself had not thought to put on the breakfast kettles a little earlier than usual. The kettle for the tea, which was the smaller of the two, had boiled in time. But the kettle for the coffee had not quite been ready when they had come down from Prayers.

  And Janey’s day had continued to go badly after this partial defeat. It may well have been that her mind was not wholly on her work. The prospect of hearthstoning the front steps, and what she expected to happen then, had already made her forget the evening before to put her sticks down by the range to dry. And so when she came to see to the fire in the servants’ hall she had fared no better, and even though she resorted at once to the lamp paraffin after the first failure, already she was beginning to get well behind time.

  Then she found that not only had she forgotten to dry the sticks the night before but she had also forgotten to put her black-leading rag to soak. So when she came to clean and black the front of the range, a task she was meant to perform while coaxing into sturdy life the fire there and keeping an eye on the one in the servants’ hall, she found the rag so stiffly boardlike that she was totally unable to push it into the whorls and twirls of the decoration on the range and could not even get much of a shine on the flat parts. What Mrs. Vickers would say when she came to look at it closely she did not dare think. And, of course, wrestling with the stiff rag had caused her to neglect the already sulky fire even more.

  So, eventually, up above in the breakfast room the Master was left glaring into space and drumming his fingers on the tablecloth while waiting for his coffee. And earlier in the kitchen, immediately after dealing with the range, Janey had found, when at last she seized broom and box and filled her pail, that she was nearly a quarter of an hour later than her usual early time in going out to the front steps. And, as she had feared and dreaded, already Betsy from next door and one or two of the other maids were out at work on their steps. She looked up and down the street. But all she saw was the whisk of a dark shadow disappearing at the far end, too quickly for her to be truly sure that it was really her dark Irish dream chap.

  It was a full twenty minutes after Mr. Johnson’s usual hour of ten that day Burch bowed him out of his front door, draped in immaculate black surtout, superlatively brushed, tall silk hat on head. By then his customary thorough perusal of the Morning Post, which he had declined to abate by a single half minute, had restored something of his calm. But again it was a precarious calm, all the readier to change instantly into roaring storm for the outbursts that had preceded it. And, because he was twenty minutes after his time, just as he stepped out into the chilly damp air—the brisk weather of the day before had yielded once more to the last dull malice of winter—his ears were at that moment affronted by the sound from just below him in the area of Maggie, his housemaid, in raucous conversation with the visiting iceman.

  Your garrison must have provisions. So it cannot but have links with the people of the countryside around. An Englishman’s castle home had to admit the tradesmen.

  One of the tradesmen into whose regular round fell No. 53 Northbourne Park Villas was the iceman, a creaking rheumy individual with hands perpetually chapped and raw from loading the big blocks from the ice pits on to his little donkey cart. He had too a face as roughhewn as one of those blocks itself, singled out, perhaps because of the cold he dealt in, by a nose that was an altogether notable large lump of squashy blue.

  Yet, despite his awkwardly unprepossessing appearance, Maggie had long cherished for him feelings that were yearningly romantic-cum-practical. Possibly his very ugliness had first sown the seed in her mind. Certainly she used often to make such remarks as “I dunno, who’d ‘ave a girl like me what’s more a church doorpost nor a lass beyond compare.” Carefully month after month she had found new remarks to make to him, extracting from him pieces of personal history, chief among them the golden fact that he was, as she had hoped and guessed, unmarried and so leading him bit by bit into her widemouthed net.

  So she had been ready and waiting this Tuesday morning for his knock, only a little put out by the fact that Mrs. Vickers had told her that with no orders for dinner party ice creams no ice was needed. But she had contrived not to answer directly her bachelor friend’s invariable greeting of “Any old ice?” Instead she had blurted out a quick “Hullo, it’s nice to see a bit o’ sun again,” despite the returned grey winter chill. And from that hasty, and long meditated introduction she had gone straight into the tale of a murderer who had been apprehended on a particularly sunny summer’s day, a version of Thomas Hood’s ever-popular Eugene Aram culled from the Servants’ Magazine, one of the few joys of her hard and humdrum life.

  The iceman had listened entranced, openmouthed. Until, like the thunder voice of a god from the heavens above, the angry tones of Mr. Mortimer Johnson, standing on the front steps over their heads, had abruptly cut the saga short.

  “What in heaven’s name is going on down there?”

  Mr. Johnson, peering redder-faced than ever down into the area, found that his burst of simple indignation at the undignified occurrence taking place outside his own house had moved at once by leaps and bounds into altogether more serious considerations.

  As he had awaited chastened apologies from below, the remembrance of a conversation he had happened to have at his club some three or four evenings earlier came back to him. Sir Hervey Chalmers of the Home Office had been discoursing to a small circle of chance
listeners about the newly gathered statistics for criminal offences in the metropolis. And he had had some startling facts to impart. The most impressive of them, to Mr. Johnson’s mind, had been that a majority of the house burglaries that had occurred in the period under review had been due in the first place to careless talk by the servants of the house.

  So now he turned abruptly from his godlike contemplation of the area, swung round, and hammered furiously upon his own front door.

  Almost immediately it was opened by Burch, who had been restoring to its appointed hook on the hall stand the fur-soft brush that he had used on his Master’s hat

  An impressive piece of humanity, Burch. He might seem to be designed by Nature to fill the office he held. He was the right height, an exact five foot ten inches, not so tall that he would tower over his employers, not so short as to lack a jot of presence. His fifty-odd years had endowed his frame with a becoming rotundness. His face, if it had not been long and dignified at birth—and his father had been a butler before him—had with the years attained the very essence of length and of dignity, set gravely between two grave lengths of grey side hair.

  His features now were unerringly arranged into the proper mixture of aplomb and concern as he opened the heavy front door again to his Master’s hammering.

  “Burch, step out here if you please.”

  Burch took a galleon stately step into the chill air.

  “Look down there.”

  Burch directed his gaze into the area. Maggie was looking up, her mouth wide as a fish’s. Beside her the shambling figure of the iceman was regarding the house wall in a manner so furtive that it truly looked as if he were contemplating hacking his way through it

  “They were conducting a conversation,” Mr. Johnson announced. “A servant and a tradesman in close and lengthy colloquy.”

  “Yes sir,” said Burch. ‘I shall speak to them, sir. I shall speak to each one of them, and it will not happen again.”