The Walking Stick

  Ted Sandymount said: ‘D’you want two points or one?’

  ‘One’ll do for the time being. There’s a lift in the place somewhere, isn’t there?’

  ‘Just a furniture lift,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. I may want extra power, Ted. But I’ll let you know.’

  He took out a hammer and began to tap at the strongroom wall. After a minute he stopped and put a fruit gum in his mouth. He’d brought all his gear in a canvas cricket bag. It was odd; I’d thought he’d go to great pains to disguise what he carried, but this was the sort of bag any policeman would suspect, since no one played cricket in February, least of all a gaunt, pallid-faced, black-browed man in his fifties.

  ‘Chisel,’ he said to Leigh.

  As if the feel of the wall gave him some guidance he began to chip at the brick about shoulder high, two feet from the corner. In five minutes he had made a sizeable hole about a finger-width across and a few inches deep.

  Ted had made his connections and plugged in the drill. It whirred noisily until it was switched off.

  Irons looked at Leigh. ‘Carpets.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Any sort.’ He glanced at me. ‘She’ll know where they are.’

  We went off together. There were big carpets upstairs but these would take too much lifting. We got one from Smith-Williams’s office, one from Grant Stokes’s, one from the passage. When we dragged them back, Irons was unwrapping a bag that contained slim sticks of things like grease paint. He took out one and gently peeled off the paper. Inside was a yellowish putty-like substance, and he began to ease and press some of this into the hole he had made. Ted Sandymount had pulled off his nylon and was tinkering with some thin wire and a little dry-cell battery not much bigger than a torch battery.

  Leigh pulled off his own stocking; relief to see his features again after the distortion of the mask.

  Irons had filled up the hole and was smoothing it over. Two wires were projecting, and he plugged the end with plasticine. He muttered to Leigh, ‘How about taking her ladyship upstairs?’

  ‘I can go myself,’ I said, ‘if you want to get rid of me.’

  ‘What time’s your next call to the HQ, Ted?’

  ‘Ten minutes yet.’

  ‘Oh, well then we can get this over first.’

  I went up the stairs with Leigh. He was terribly tense – far more so than I was now. But even with me the first moments of release were already past.

  The explosion was more a heavy vibration in the building than a noise.

  When we went down Irons was pulling away the remains of the carpets. ‘It got to be taken gently. We can’t afford too much row. Another couple of charges’ll do the trick.’

  ‘How long is that going to take?’

  ‘Ten minutes each maybe. But we’ll need more carpets. How would it be, dear, if you made us a cup of tea? We’ll be glad of a cup of tea.’

  So I made them tea. It should have been slugs of whisky; this was too prosaic, too homely, the sort of chore you did for a carpenter or a plumber on a job. But it lowered the temperature; maybe Irons, the only pro, asked for this deliberately; if so his idea worked. To him only of the four, this was a night like others – he’d done this regularly all his life; he’d been in the nick three times, he said; twice caught on the job and once framed by the police; he was a workman, a skilled workman whose only distinctiveness was that his work happened to be anti-social.

  I knew the tiny kitchen well, could do everything by the light of a pencil torch – there was a frosted window to the place, though it only looked out on the next building – and when we’d all finished I washed up and emptied the teapot and put the cups away. Ted Sandymount had taken a cup up to Len when he went along to telephone Safeguard headquarters. The word tonight was Harrogate, and this was his second call.

  Last night he had been on the roof locating the wire. Tonight again he had been up there in the dark and had listened to earlier calls, so he knew roughly the sort of brief conversation that passed; but every time he had to ring increased the risk. And he could pass for McCarthy who, surprisingly with that name, was a cockney like himself; but he couldn’t imitate Gaskell’s west country voice; headquarters might expect Gaskell to take his turn sooner or later.

  While I was drying and putting away the cups there was a second vibration, louder down here than the last. This was an old building, ramshackle and abutting on others in which people might be sleeping or a night watchman patrolling; I wondered how far tremors would travel.

  For a time I didn’t go back; Irons had said to keep away because of the fumes, and anyway I felt they did not want me around. I thought of the argument in Sarah’s flat. The ethics of crime was no longer an academic problem. Tonight everything was changed for me.

  I sat on a high stool, tried to see through a flaw in the frosted glass whether there were any lights in the opposite building. There was a brightish one somewhere but I couldn’t locate it without opening the window. It might of course be the headlights of the first police car to arrive, having been alerted by some extra alarm that we knew nothing of. They might now be completing the surrounding of the building so that no one could get away . . .

  Leigh came sharply into the room: ‘I wondered where the hell you were! You didn’t come back . . .’

  ‘Irons told me not to.’

  ‘Oh . . . sorry. I didn’t know that. I’m pretty geared up tonight. Sorry, love.’ He put his arm on my shoulder.

  ‘Will it be long now?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘There’s only about four hours left.’

  ‘It’ll do.’

  There was the third vibration through the building. Cups rattled in the cupboard.

  I said: ‘Why didn’t Jack Foil take part in this himself?’

  ‘It isn’t his line. He makes the arrangements, organizes things, disposes of the stuff afterward.’

  ‘And takes none of the risks.’

  Leigh shrugged. ‘That’s the way it works . . . Let’s go.’

  Irons was getting in. The strongroom wall consisted of fourteen inches of brickwork – three four-inch bricks, with thick cement between. The first explosion had breached the first layer, the second had split the second. The third, working on already loosened and damaged bricks, had blown a sizable hole through into the room itself; and now, while Irons stood back, Ted Sandymount worked with a pick to break a sufficient opening to climb through. When it was done Irons led the way in and we followed.

  He switched on the light. The room was in a mess; part of a steel filing cabinet blown away, papers scattered with ledgers on the floor, the room horribly acrid with the smell of the last explosion.

  Irons and Ted went over to the safe. Irons had taken off his gloves and didn’t put them on as he fingered the safe, trying, you’d think, with the ends of his blunt fingers to probe and test the quality of it. The safe itself stood about four feet high and three broad. It was finished in grey enamel with the maker’s name, Pemberton, and the door handle and the keyhole guard in chromium plate. The door handle was long and rather slim and pointed downward.

  Irons put in another fruit gum and chewed quietly.

  ‘Well?’ said Ted.

  ‘Newer than I reckoned on,’ said Irons. ‘Later than I reckoned on. They’ve messed their numbers about, just to be awkward.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Ah . . . that’s yet to be known, isn’t it? But there was big changes between, say, ’53 and ’56. First we’ll have this little key guard off.’

  ‘What d’you mean, changes?’ Leigh demanded as he began to work.

  ‘Well, up to ’53 they was mostly still making safes of mild steel. Mixing the layers, maybe, but not so bad. But by ’56 or so, safes was being made with an outer lining of steel and an inner lining of steel, and between them was this new alloy that’s more or less drillproof. Of course you can get through it all right in the end, but it’s a long job. I’m not sure abou
t Pemberton’s. They was always a bit out of line with the rest. It’s years since I’ve had a go at a Pemberton.’

  He inserted a thin tube slimmer than a pencil into the keyhole. At its end was a battery and a switch. After he had slid about six inches in he switched on and bent to peer along the barrel into the keyhole.

  Ted Sandymount looked at his watch. ‘Time d’you make it?’

  ‘Twenty minutes to three.’

  ‘I’ll be going up to ring them. You’d best come with me, Leigh.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve got to force an entry somewhere. It’s not got to be left to look as if we were let in from the inside.’

  Irons withdrew his probe. They waited but he shook his head. ‘It looks round about a ’56. I’ll drill for a bit and see.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to try gelly first?’ Ted asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Leigh passed him the drill which Ted had connected. Irons seemed in no hurry to begin, but put his hand on the top of the safe and tapped it in a familiar way. Words came quietly out of the corner of his mouth as if he was afraid a warder was listening.

  ‘All safes since the war, more or less, have got this double-locking caper, what they call an anti-blowing device. If you blow the lock with gelly you release a spring that lets a new bolt fall into place that jams the door for keeps. So you’re worse off than when you began. So then you have to drill holes in the door and find where the jamming bar is and lever it up with a couple of screwdrivers.’

  Ted looked at his watch again and grimaced and began to pull his stocking over his face. ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, if you’ve got an older job – ’53 or before – you’re all right. But when you get this new alloy it’s hours of work to make the holes, so then you try other tricks to see if you can save all that time and trouble.’

  Ted said: ‘Come on, Leigh. We’ll be back in about twenty minutes, John.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  I bent to pick up some of the fallen ledgers and put them in a pile beside the filing cabinets. The shrill whine of the drill began.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  You began to feel tired and cold; suddenly you began to feel tired and cold, and your eyes were heavy and your limbs ached. More tea? The last was only half an hour gone. Dead of night. The small hours. Four hours to daylight. Four hours to the arrival of Bob Sloane and two cleaners, to get ready for another day. The noise of the drill got on my nerves, and I slid out through the gap in the bricks and made for our office. Even here you could still hear the drill, like the distant noise of a bluebottle caught against a windowpane. It stopped. I turned back. It started again.

  Somewhere upstairs, Ted and Leigh were faking a forced window. But it must look like an inside job. They’d first suspect one of the guards. Then . . .

  The drill stopped. Irons cocked a black eyebrow at me as I squeezed back in, but he said nothing. He was changing the bit of the drill for a finer one. I began to move some of the broken bricks, piling them to where they would be less in the way. Footsteps. Ted.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s the reinforced type,’ Irons said.

  ‘Hell’s fire. What now?’

  ‘We’ll think a bit.’ Irons didn’t restart the drill but took out another fruit gum. ‘Done your break in?’

  ‘Yes. First floor. You can get up to it by crossing the parapet from next door.’

  ‘And the alarms?’ So that hadn’t been forgotten.

  ‘I’ve still got to fix that. It means fiddling with some matchsticks and a few bits of rubber . . . What you going to do here, though?’

  Leigh came down as he was saying this. His face was flushed and tense.

  Irons said: ‘Doing it straightforward will take me best part of three hours—’

  ‘Three—’

  ‘But I’ve told you. There’s ways of cheating. I’ll try gelly now. Just a baby charge to begin – say half an ounce in the keyhole – see if we can blow the lock without jamming the handle.’

  Ted pulled off his mask, made a face as if he was going to sneeze. ‘It’s those phone calls that give me the willies. Bloke at the other end wanted to chat this last time, said it looked as if the fog was coming back, and it’d be hell getting home if all the trains were late. Next time we’ll be talking about wives or something!’

  With firm fingers Irons was squeezing the yellow gelignite into the keyhole. Then he got out a pencil and gently pressed it in, added more, pressed it in, added more.

  ‘Look,’ said Ted. ‘There’s ten minutes before the next call. I’ll go and fix those alarms while you’re doing that. We can’t help, can we?’

  ‘No,’ said Irons composedly. ‘No one can help.’

  ‘Right. Then come on again, Leigh. Maybe we can plug, maybe we’ll have to cut the wires.’

  They went off again.

  Irons looked at me sidelong as if he didn’t want to be seen looking.

  ‘It’s no good getting in a flap. That’s half the trouble, getting in a flap. Opening a safe’s one of those jobs where you’ve got to use your loaf. Make a mistake and you add hours to the work. Now this safe – it’s strong and not too old as safes go. D’you know there’s still safes in use in London built in Victoria’s day? D’you know one of the biggest insurance companies in London has its main safe thirty years old? Strong, mind you, strong as a bank vault, but not modern, no modern ideas.’ He covered the keyhole with plasticine and trailed the thin wires across the floor.

  ‘You want more carpets?’

  ‘No, these’ll do. But it depends whether I use ’em.’ He went to his cricket bag and rummaged in it. ‘I’d advise you to keep out of here – else you’ll have a headache.’

  ‘What if this had been a new safe?’ I said. ‘Bought this year or last.’

  ‘Well, there’s ways round everything, if you’ve the will and the tools, but it gets harder every year. There’s safes made now you can’t get through with a drill, no, nor with oxyacetylene neither. Can’t touch ’em. But there’s a thing called a thermic lance – French brought it out after the war for cutting into Jerry’s strong points – well, that’ll go through anything – concrete, steel, rock. I’ve seen it used. Phew!’ He pulled out a long circular piece of black rubber.

  ‘But you don’t use it?’

  ‘Me? No. That’s out of my street. Anyway, you don’t want it here. Anyway, the heat kills you. The fumes’d gas you out in a cellar like this and the heat’d burn up any bank notes in a safe before you got to ’em. All right for jewels or gold maybe – but the oxygen you use . . .’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said pointing.

  ‘A bicycle tyre. We’ll just see if it works—’

  The lights went out.

  I heard Irons curse in the darkness, and groped my hand back against the wall. After a minute he put on a pencil torch. Neither of us spoke then. The light travelled slowly round the strongroom. For the first time he was rattled; I could hear him breathing.

  At first dead silence. In it a car accelerated away. Then closer sounds came in – muffled voices, soft footsteps. We waited: Irons reached in his pocket for something that looked like a cosh. In flagrante delicto came into my mind. One of Douglas’s favourite expressions. In flagrante delicto.

  Footsteps down the stairs, another pencil torch. Above us something was knocked over; Irons moved quickly behind one of the cabinets. Torch out. Darkness.

  The other torch flickered through the hole. ‘Are you there?’ Leigh’s voice. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here!’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t you got a light at all? The bloody lights have fused. John—’

  Irons put on his torch again; Leigh’s nylon-flattened face peered in like something out of a Hammer film.

  ‘We were fixing the alarms: Ted said if we didn’t cut them no one would believe it was an outside job. He must have crossed the wires. Lucky he wasn’t killed!’

  ‘Damn you,’ said Iro
ns, and the simple word sounded worse than an obscenity. ‘You give me a right shock. What’s he doing now?’

  ‘He’s gone to check with Len, tell him and see the guards are safe. Where are the fuse boxes, Deborah? Any idea?’

  ‘No, I don’t—’

  ‘Damn the fuse boxes,’ Irons said, suddenly urgent. ‘We got to get a move on with this now. You’ – to me – ‘can you take both torches, hold them so’s we can see. I want you t’help me with this safe, Leigh. But for Pete’s sake mind the wires. I want the safe turned side on to those shelves. Watch the wires!’

  ‘If you need the drill again you’ll need the power.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe I won’t need it—’

  Ted came clattering down the stairs and pushed his way in, scattering mortar and bits of broken brick. ‘Deb, d’you know where the fuses are? Leigh’s told you – I goofed high and big. John—’

  ‘Mind those wires!’ Irons snapped. ‘Maybe we can manage with this light – ’

  ‘We’ve got to find it. Any passing copper might notice there’s no lights anywhere.’

  ‘I think they’re in the kitchen,’ I said. ‘There are electric boxes in the corner cupboard—’

  ‘Show me—’

  ‘What’s the time, Ted?’ Irons said. ‘It must be—’

  ‘For Chrissake, yes . . . Wait. I’ll do that first. You go with Deb, Leigh, see if they’re what we—’

  ‘I want Leigh here!’ said Irons. ‘I got to move this ’ere safe a few inches if we’re to try to—’

  ‘You go, then,’ Ted said, grasping my arm so that I winced. ‘See if you’re right, but don’t touch anything.’

  He went with jerking flat-footed strides up the stairs as I made for the kitchen. I was right: there were eleven fuse boxes, three meters. As soon as I knew I went back to the strongroom, found the two men, by the light of a single pencil torch propped on a filing cabinet, heaving with crowbars at a corner of the safe, trying to shift it away from the wall. They had moved it perhaps an inch.