The Hangman's Child (23 page)

He put away his tools and pushed the door gently. Through its gap there was a white fire of gas shining steadily on squares of iron, studded and painted battleship-grey. The corrugated steel of the window-shutters with their two spy-holes were like blind eye-sockets or dark wounds. On the rear wall, which he could not yet see, was the mirror that reflected the strong-room to the street.

A policeman was the only probable passer-by in the small hours of Sunday morning. That gave him twenty minutes before he heard Samuel's bell again.

The flat steel vault-door, with its twelve-inch lock-plate, twin keyholes, and bolt-wheel, was set in the wall to his right. Its metal plate was embossed as Milner's Double Treasury with the maker's address in Finsbury Pavement. Rann took another breath and let it out slowly. Before entering the strong-room, he chose a small boxwood wedge and jammed it into the strike-plate of the Yale to keep the bolt open. Then, with heart pumping, he stepped into the white brilliance of unshaded gas. The silent spy-holes faced him from the street like gun muzzles whose triggers might be pulled at any moment.

He was safe enough, unless Samuel fell into a doze ... unless the bell sounded too faintly for him to hear ... unless Samuel was trapped
....
Working on the Yale he had been absorbed and calm. Now he felt his hand shaking. But Jack Rann spoke softly to the soul of Pandy Quinn and swore to be true.

A year ago, with Pandy at his side, two country-dressed trippers had studied the vault-door through the spy-holes on quiet Sundays or Saturday evenings when the commercial length of Cornhill was deserted. Several times, he and Pandy had gone to an abandoned cotton warehouse in Shadwell. The safe once used by its owner was still there. It was not Milner's Double Treasury but worked on the same principle. The watchman had taken two sovereigns to leave them alone for an afternoon.

With force and unlimited time, a large steel 'alderman' head-bar would jemmy the best single-bolted safe or vault. But Milner's set of six steel bolts, holding the door top to bottom, was proof against jemmying of any kind. Mr Walker was safe in the knowledge that only the lock would open his vault.

In Rann's narrow skull lay a map of the Double Treasury Lock, as plain as the design of the Yale. The central bolt to which the five others were linked was round steel, thick as a broomhandle, held shut with a ton of pressure from a steel bit. The bit was secured by two steel arms on pivots. Each pivot was activated by a set of three cogwheels, each set controlled by a separate lock. The first cog of a set was moved by turning the key, until the others followed.

No one man would be trusted to open the Cornhill Vaults alone. The first key would move the cogs to lift the first lever. But only when the second key was turned and the second lever had been raised was the pressure of the steel bit on the central bolt removed. Still the door would not open until the wheel to one side of the keyholes was turned, drawing back simultaneously the six linked bolts.

Treasury locks were designed for keys whose steps could be varied constantly. A resetting of the first cogwheel's position in each lock would make a key which opened the door on one day useless on the next. Pandy Quinn's answer had been the micrometer, often spoken of but seldom seen.

When a lock was opened without a key, it was most often by a locksmith, called when the owner lost a key or the mechanism was faulty. Quinn had been the first to hear of James Sargent's new micrometer, designed to chart the interior of a closed lock. The American locksmith claimed that he had measured the position of pins and levers to a ten-thousandth of an inch, using a watch-face as his dial.

Quinn never saw Sargent's invention, whose prototype was kept on the premises of Sargent and Greenleaf, locksmiths of Rochester, New York, but its principle was clear to him. Rann unwrapped the lint from Quinn's copy. For this device, Orator Hawkins had offered him the run of Newgate and two more weeks of life; for this, Pandy Quinn had died.

Quinn's micrometer was simple by comparison with the American original, a single hand on a watch dial, instead of hands for hours, minutes and seconds which Sargent had devised. Yet to measure a sixtieth of an inch on Quinn's dial was straightforward and to measure a hundredth might be possible.

The copy consisted of a metal probe, slimmer than the shank of a key, with a single metal step at its end, large enough to encounter the levers but thin enough to pass the steel wards which sometimes guarded the keyway. The probe was connected to a two-inch corrugated strip of metal. On this hung a miniature weight that could be adjusted as if on the arm of a weighing machine. While the probe moved, its progress turned the wheel-mechanism of the watch, measuring the distance travelled, the watch-hand moving in time with it.

As the probe approached the first lever of the lock, the little weight was moved to maintain the tension and balance between the probe and the dial. At the first lever, the probe was turned on its side to clear the lever and the wards of the lock, then upright again until it encountered the second lever. At each of the five levers, the position could be read from the dial.

His ears alert for the rattle of Samuel's bell, Rann carried the micrometer out of the rear office, pulled shut the Yale door, and knelt at the double-lock of the vault. Five levers. He could be certain of that. With the dial supported on his palm, he eased the probe into the first keyway. The hand moved slowly through the minutes of the hour. One by one they made their map. Eight, nineteen, twenty-nine, thirty-five, forty-seven.

He tried again, to test for error. But months of practice had made him near-perfect. The second time, each reading was one minute earlier on the dial, but this confirmed that he had got the relative distances between them accurately. Then it was a matter of measuring the second lock. This time he did it only once. The figures were identical to the first lock, though those employees who held the keys would never be allowed to know it. Owners did not advertise that they often used identical keys and settings for the twin locks. Some did it for fear of losing one of the keys. Mr Walker, perhaps, was not prepared to pay good money to have the cogs of the locks constantly reset to different keys.

Rann looked round to make sure he had left nothing on view. With the micrometer wrapped again, he opened the door of the rear office and closed it after him. By the light of the lantern he began to fit the first shank of a skeleton key with five metal steps of the smallest size, spaced at the micrometer readings. The irony, it seemed to him, was that he was doing exactly what Milner's or Mr Walker would do in varying their settings.

The key to a variable Treasury Lock was itself a skeleton. The shank ended in two downward prongs, an inch apart with a steel screw connecting them. The steel steps were threaded on the screw and tightened in whatever order and contour the locksmith or his client chose and changed as often as required. Combined with the six steel bolts, it was the despair of the housebreaker and shop-burglar. But a technician like Pandy was entitled to believe that it must have been made for him.

Of the smallest key-steps, none was likely to make contact with the levers of the lock, even when set at the right distance. One size at a time, Jack Rann would work his way up until the first step touched a lever. He must then increase the height of the others until every step seemed ready to raise its lever and turn the first set of cog-wheels.

He finished the key and heard the clatter of Samuel's bell. A minute or two later the single bell-notes signalled that all was clear.

Back in the strong-room, his face ran with sweat under the flaring gas of the summer night. But he felt the calm that came from doing the thing he did best in the world. No mechanic, no locksmith, could match what Pandy had taught him. His hand was steady as he screwed the first metal teeth tighter on the key-shank and tried it in the lock. As he expected, none of the smallest steps touched the levers. It might be hours before he could defeat the vault door.

Beside him were the steel key-steps in a watchmaker's pouch. He worked, kneeling by the vault until, at the fifth attempt, a lever grazed the outer step. He drew the shank out and saw a slight scratch on the polished metal. Then, in a long interval between the sounding of the alarm bell, he increased the other steps, little by little, until each of them met a lever, as squarely as the key created by Milner's themselves.

He held his breath and tried the key he had built. It passed the keyway and he felt the tip engage the talon or notch at the rear of the lock. The shank was held firm enough now for its steel steps to lift the levers. In the hermetic silence of the strong-room, he heard and felt the levers move, almost through ninety degrees. And then they jammed.

Jack Rann let out a gasp of frustration. He tried to ease the key back and draw it clear. But the far tip of the shank seemed trapped in the talon. Worse still, the talon and levers held his key-shank askew, so that it would turn neither way. He could not move it but dared not leave it in the lock for the first policeman at the spy-holes to see.

To
pull the key out by force was more than his strength could match. Calmly, despite the cold sweat on his face, he tried to edge it deeper a fraction. Faintly, he felt that one of the metal steps had now cleared a minute obstruction. Turning the shank again, he heard a set of quiet cogwheels move. A steel arm rose in a slight eccentric movement from the powerful bit holding the central bolt.

Before he could try the other lock, the distant clamour of Samuel's bell sounded. Rann cursed, gathering the watchmaker's pouch of key-steps, scrambling past the Yale door. As he closed it, the bell rang single notes. A false alarm? A passer-by with no interest in the spy-holes? A policeman too late on his beat to pause?

In the strong-room again, he tried his key in the second lock. For some reason it engaged the talon but missed the levers. Yet he knew it must be right. He had worked it too far in or not far enough. By drawing back a little, still lodged in the talon, it turned its circle. As the second set of cogwheels moved, he felt the last pressure released from the main bolt of the steel door.

Now it was a matter of collecting the carpet-bag and slowly turning the bolt-wheel at one side of the lock-plate. He heard the hushing sound of six steel bolts drawn back in unison. The heavy wheel served as a handle by which the weight of the door could be pulled slowly open.

Jack Rann slid clear the shutter of the dark lantern, took his carpet-bag, and stepped into the darkness. Pulling the heavy door until it would appear closed behind him, he stared at the interior of the Cornhill Vaults.

23

Like caskets of the dead in a necropolis of the ancient world, rows of steel deposit boxes presented their blank silvered faces to the tawny flicker of the oil-lamp. There were more than he had imagined. They stood three tiers high on metal shelves, the lowest a couple of feet from the floor. Numbered in order, the ranks ranged down the longer walls to either side and across the shorter walls, as well as in two ranks back-to-back down the centre of the vault. The front of each was fifteen inches square and its depth about two feet. They were not designed for bulk but for confidential documents and small items of great value.

Jack Rann walked down the aisles and saw that the numbering ran to 364. With the five keys cut by Pandy Quinn from the wax impressions of the autumn burglaries, he might open as few as five boxes or as many as fifty. Pandy's chance discovery that two of the stolen keys were identical had made the larger number possible.

He walked slowly back along the ranks of steel, then stopped and listened. He was hidden from the spy-holes but might no longer hear Samuel's bell. At whatever moment he left the vault, there could be eyes at the spy holes. He and Pandy had seen no watchman at night. But if a watchman visited the premises, the unlocked doors would be found. The wheel would be turned, shooting six steel bolts across and trapping the thief in the vault. Samuel and even Miss Jolly might
find a way out. It was a condi
tion of his gamble that Rann would be beyond rescue.

As in most safe deposits, the steel boxes were fitted with key exchangeable locks. Both the client's and the banker's keys would close a lock but only the client's would open it. Rann tried the locks with the first of his five keys. It opened nothing at all. Either his own wax impression or Pandy Quinn's copy had not been true. But here and there, as he tried the second key, he felt the first levers of the little locks move, the shank turning through a quarter circle. This time, the cut was true.

A single key would fit several locks. This suggested almost a hundred varying patterns. At the first deposit box which his second key opened, he stared into a bare steel cavity. Neither he nor Pandy Quinn had considered that some of the safe deposits might be unused. The second proved as empty as the first.

The third box yielded a will, two mortgages, and two leather boxes set with wine-tinted stones. Going through the papers, he found one inland bill of exchange, drawn on Drummonds Bank, Pall Mall East, six weeks earlier for £250 at three months notice. The paper had been endorsed twice and had seven weeks to run. It was Rann's first trophy.

Some bills would be no use. He needed those drawn on banks for which Saward had stolen the blank forms. A number of these required the return of the bill to its bank for an acceptance stamp at each endorsement. For these, Miss Jolly's needle had carved a counterfeit stamp in slate. If a bill was genuine and unpaid, the previous endorsements registered, no bank need look closely at a stamp.

Rann knew that in the next hour he must have enough bills for his penny-dancer to start work. By the lantern-light, he moved down the ranks of steel, trying each of the five stubby keys in each lock. One after another they jammed at a quarter turn. Only at the end of the first row did another move through a half circle. With time at his heels, he drew the steel drawer open, turned the key back to free it, and hurried on.