Kept Page 23

  Here he found Bob Grace, feet up on a chair, hat pulled low over his eyes, eating his lunch out of a pastrycook’s carton. Seeing his employer, he removed his boots from the chair and cocked up his hat, but did not otherwise salute him. Mr. Pardew smote his desk hard with the ferrule of the stick.

  “Upon my word, Grace, I never knew such a one as you for eating. Well, has anything happened?”

  “Davidson undertook to pay ten now and renew for another month. Here’s the stamped paper. And that Pearce is outside. Brought a letter here, which he says you’ll want to see. I told him as you’d want to see the letter first and him second, most probably.”

  “Most probably is right. Where is it?”

  Grace flicked across the desk a piece of rough white paper, which Mr. Pardew immediately picked up and smoothed beneath his fingers. He knew, as soon as the paper passed into his hands, that it was not in fact a letter but a copy of one, or rather the first attempt of a clerk working to dictation, for there were several crossings-out and emendations by a second hand. Nonetheless, the paper was entirely sufficient for Mr. Pardew’s purpose, and he examined it with great interest. The letter was signed by the secretary to the South-Eastern Railway Company and addressed to its directors. Such was the care taken with the alterations that Mr. Pardew declared himself certain that the information contained in it was accurate and that a final document would soon after have been prepared.

  Much of what it had to say was known to Mr. Pardew, but a certain proportion was not. These parts of the letter he read over two or three times, committing them to memory as he did so, before placing the piece of paper on the table before him. As he did so he became aware, once again, of his surroundings, the shabby room in which he sat and the saturnine figure of his clerk, and resolved to himself that whatever steps might be necessary to remove himself from Carter Lane, its bleary window, the piles of stamped paper and Bob Grace would be worth the taking. Again he picked up the paper and read through it once more, lest there were some detail that had escaped his eye. But there was nothing, and having assured himself that he had the words by heart, and thinking such a course of action prudent in the circumstances, he crumpled the paper quickly between his fingers and flung it into the wastepaper basket. As he did so his gaze fell upon his clerk, who had ceased all pretence of eating his lunch and was sitting with his hands drawn up over his chest regarding him keenly.

  “Now,” said Mr. Pardew, looking up again at the bare, distempered ceiling of his office and thinking that he hated it. “Now, Grace, what hour would you say it was?”

  Grace licked some gravy from the ends of his fingers, staring all the while at these appendages as if he fancied that they might serve as his dessert. “It’s a few minutes after midday, I daresay.”

  “Where is Latch?”

  “Out collecting. Gone after the swell in Monmouth Street as was supposed to have renewed this day fortnight.”

  “You had better go and find him. You needn’t trouble to come back this afternoon.”

  “Not come back! Why, who’s to lock up the shop? I should like to know?”

  “I think you’ll find,” Mr. Pardew observed tartly, staring at the bleary window and hating it, “that I can turn a key in a lock if I have to. Now, be off with you. And ask Pearce to step in on your way out, if you please.”

  With the expression of one greatly wronged, Grace rose to his feet, scattering a fine spray of crumbs negligently on the desk as he did so, jammed his hat as low over his brow as it would go and took his leave, taking care to slam the door smartly behind him as he went. In truth he was not unduly displeased by the turn that events had taken, having grasped the opportunity to read the letter before it passed into his master’s hands, and also to have spoken several words to Pearce when that gentleman first presented himself in Carter Lane. Armed with this information, and with certain other hints that Mr. Pardew had let fall, deliberately or otherwise, over the past month, he had a fair idea of what his master was about, and the advantages that might accrue to himself from this knowledge. “He is a sly one and no mistake,” he said admiringly to himself as he lumbered out into the street, “and yet I’ll be even with him too.”

  Left on his own in the office, Mr. Pardew got up immediately from his desk and performed several rapid actions. First he took a small notebook from out of a drawer and laid it open before him. Then he inspected the contents of a metal cash box that sat upon his clerk’s desk, replaced the lid but did not lock it. Finally, he took Grace’s chair and, lifting it easily in one hand, placed it in the centre of the room. This done, he returned to his own chair just as Pearce, following the instructions given to him by Grace, came through the street door.

  Mr. Pardew laid his hands out squarely on the desk before him, stuck his chin up at an angle and gave his visitor a glance. On close inspection, he seemed even more haphazardly attired than he had appeared in the street. The cotton handkerchief looped round his neck was stiff with grease, and his hands, half protruding from his trowser pockets, were extremely dirty. Seeing Mr. Pardew, he raised his eyebrows slightly in a gesture that spoke of an intelligence greater than that suggested by his outward demeanour and accepted the proffered chair. He smelled very strongly, Mr. Pardew now noticed, of beer and tobacco smoke.

  “It’s a Friday afternoon,” Mr. Pardew said, without preamble. “Why ain’t you at work?”

  “Sick,” Pearce rejoined, hoisting one leg over the other so that Mr. Pardew could take better notice of a pair of exceedingly patched and battered boots. “Left word at the orfice. Expected back Monday.”

  “You’d better take care, else you’ll be out of a situation,” Mr. Pardew told him with a familiarity that suggested he had perhaps met Mr. Pearce once before and perhaps even enjoyed with him a previous conversation of this nature. “Now, you’ll oblige me by telling me where this letter came from.”

  Pearce opened one of his eyes, having for some reason closed both of them during Mr. Pardew’s earlier remarks. “Fellow named Tester as is assistant to the superintendent.”

  “A young man?”

  “Four- or five-and-twenty. I daresay you’d call that young.”

  “I daresay indeed.” It may be seen from these remarks that Mr. Pardew was not altogether certain of the man who sat before him. The problem was that he disdained to attempt any intimacy with him and yet he fancied that scant progress could be made until at least some kind of intimacy had been established. Accordingly, he went off on a different track.

  “As to the letter, I can’t say that it contains anything altogether startling.”

  Pearce opened both his eyes to their absolute limit in a way suggesting that had he not been employed by the South-Eastern Railway Company, he could have made a fair living at the dramatic entertainments that are staged at penny gaffs. “That may be your opinion. It ain’t mine.”

  “No? Well no doubt it will be of some use, let us say. Oblige me, Pearce, by walking over to that cash box there”—he indicated the metal tin on his clerk’s desk—“and telling me what you find in it.”

  Pearce did as he was bidden.

  “A ten-pun’ note.”

  “Very well. I never saw it there. The box was empty when you came into the room. You take my meaning? There is another box here in this drawer. You take my meaning in that respect? Excellent. Now, about the letter, which to be sure contains nothing altogether startling. The days on which bullion is to be shipped are not generally known to the company’s staff?”

  “Stationmaster himself don’t know until the van drives up.”

  “In how many safes are they generally contained?”

  “There’s three safes. Only one of them is ever used, though.”

  “And how many keys to lock it?”

  “Two. Superintendent and the stationmaster has one each at the bridge. There’s two more the same down at Folkestone.”

  “And who has charge of them?”

  “Folkestone superintendent has one. Other one’s
kept in the office on the pier.”

  “Very well. Is the safe only in use when there is bullion to be shipped?”

  “No. It travels down in the luggage van anyhow, whether there’s things in it or not.”

  “Is there ever a time when the two keys are kept together? Either in London or Folkestone?”

  For the first time since their conversation had begun, Pearce looked if not uneasy then reluctant to vouchsafe the information that had been demanded of him. He took a little turn around the portion of the room in which he stood, peered through Mr. Pardew’s window at the great dome of St. Paul’s, shuffled his feet uncomfortably and looked at the door behind him. Mr. Pardew saw all this and was encouraged by it.

  “I assure you we are quite alone. Now, is there ever a time when the two keys are kept together? For an hour even?”

  “Last week,” Pearce began, speaking in a low voice and addressing his remarks not to Mr. Pardew but to the inkwell on his desk, “one of the Folkestone keys went missing.” He lapsed into reverie once more and was silent for such a long time that Mr. Pardew felt it necessary to sharpen the tone of his voice: “And what did the directors have to say about that? Come now!”

  Pearce, looking up, thought that he did not like the expression on Mr. Pardew’s face, that it seemed to have grown larger and more oppressive in proportion to the rest of his figure, and that he would have given much not to have had it trained upon him.

  “Orfice turned upside down to find it. And when they didn’t find it, the talk is that it’s ‘mislaid.’ All the safes to go back to Chubb. New locks, new keys, everything.”

  “So at some point two keys—that is, two sets of two keys—will be returned to London Bridge? And to whom will they be sent?”

  “Tester, I suppose. He had the writing of the letter.”

  Having vouchsafed this intelligence, Pearce looked so enquiringly at the cash box that Mr. Pardew decided to halt his interrogation. He was in any case confident that the man had told him all he needed to know. Ascertaining from him that Tester lived with his mother at an address in the Borough, he dismissed the man from his office and sat down again at his desk. There was a copy of a financial newspaper before him, which he picked up and affected to study, but I do not think that its contents interested him very much, for his mind was far away brooding savagely. Outside in Carter Lane the promise of the morning had given way to an overcast sky. Rain fell against the window, and Mr. Pardew watched it fall, hating it and the things that lay beyond it. He had reached, he acknowledged, a crisis in his affairs. Either he could proceed with the plan that had been occupying him for the past three months, ever since he had walked into Mr. Crabbe’s chambers and asked him to write a letter, or he could put it aside and make to believe as if it had never been. For the moment, he knew, he had taken no decisive step. He was like a man who, resolving to burn down his enemy’s house, lights a lucifer, holds it to the thatch and then withdraws it. Thinking of his conversation with Pearce, of the opportunity that the mislaid key seemed to offer him, of half a dozen other courses that he must follow if he wished to be successful in his plan, Mr. Pardew found even now that his mind drew back from the task. There was a sudden noise at the door and he started up guiltily, taking his stick in his hand, but it was merely a circular falling airily through the letterbox and he stood looking at it stupidly as the rain fell against the window and somewhere near at hand a clock chimed the half hour. The room in which he sat, he now discovered, had become intolerable to him. Its mass of papers, its unswept floor, the discarded carton from which Grace had eaten his lunch: all these, though glimpsed a dozen times before, oppressed him in a way that he now found almost painful.

  On the instant an idea came to him. Lying in a drawer of his desk was a letter addressed to the Earl of——outlining that nobleman’s melancholy dealings with the firm of Pardew & Co., and it occurred to him that it would be a relaxation to deliver it to the Earl at his club. Accordingly, he placed his hat on his head, drew on his coat, seized his stick, placed the letter in an inner pocket and stepped out into the street. Here Mr. Pardew did what for him was an unusual thing. He walked to the cab rank on Ludgate Hill and had himself carried away by hansom along Fleet Street and the Strand towards Trafalgar Square and the West End. Almost immediately, though, having seated himself in the cab’s interior, with his stick drawn up under his chin, he found that this mode of conveyance was no relaxation at all. He tried fixing his gaze on the people milling by in the rain—on an immensely tall man who rose a foot or more above the crowds, on a very miserable street clown dancing a hornpipe near the crossing opposite St. Bride’s Church—only to find that his eye continued to bore inward and that he scarcely saw the sights that lay before him. Constantly, his mind turned on the information that Pearce had given him, devising half a dozen little schemes by which he might press his plan forward. Then, almost immediately, he would acknowledge to himself that it would not do, that half a dozen different stratagems were likely to prove more successful. Then again, shifting his attention to these new possibilities, he would decide, again on the instant, that they too were flawed in conception or beyond his power to execute. In this way Mr. Pardew spent a thoroughly miserable quarter of an hour, gnawing on his stick, staring out of the cab window with such ferocity that the passers-by might have thought him a madman being carried off to the Bedlam on the instructions of his heir, and altogether wishing that he stayed at his office where there were letters to write and work in which he might have immersed himself thoroughly. Reaching Trafalgar Square, he could stand his situation no more and so, paying off the cab, walked hastily along Pall Mall before turning into St. James’s Street, where he knew the Earl of——’s club was to be found.

  It was by now perhaps half past one, the sky turned slate-grey and the rain continuing to fall. Having walked a brisk half mile in which he had concentrated on the transit rather than the problems that oppressed him, Mr. Pardew felt somewhat more at ease with himself. Yet a second, more immediate, difficulty now presented itself. It was Mr. Pardew’s intention to mount the steps of the Earl’s club, where experience told him that his lordship would most probably be found, and absolutely confront that nobleman in the card room or the library or wherever he might have taken refuge. And yet Mr. Pardew was not a member of this establishment (his own club was a modest affair in Covent Garden, where he went to play whist with six or seven retired barristers and discreet tradesmen), and he rather fancied he would have difficulty in gaining entry. Nonetheless, having ventured all this way, he would have despised himself had he not made the attempt, and so, with the letter in his pocket, he fairly skipped up the steps and plunged into the club’s hallway. It was Mr. Pardew’s hope that he might pass through this entrance undetected. Almost immediately, though, a majordomo in livery and with a tremendous floured wig came stalking across the tiles to enquire how he might assist him.

  “I was hoping very much to have a word with the Earl of——,” Mr. Pardew said blandly. “That is, of course, if His Lordship is available.”

  The majordomo, regarding Mr. Pardew as he stood there on the marbled floor with the letter in his hand, did not quite like the look of him. He rightly suspected that Mr. Pardew was up to no good in the matter of the Earl of——, that he had come, additionally, from the City, and that the envelope in his hand contained a bill. Therefore he placed himself squarely in the path that Mr. Pardew imagined that he might have taken towards the staircase and remarked that he didn’t believe His Lordship was in the club.

  “Not in the club!” Mr. Pardew exclaimed. “Why, he told me himself that he would be here this afternoon.”

  The Earl of——was, as it happened, at this moment smoking a cigar with certain pleasure-loving acquaintances in the billiard room. However, something in Mr. Pardew’s manner of expostulation suggested to the majordomo that the Earl would not wish to be troubled by such a one as Mr. Pardew. Therefore he repeated his denial, at the same time nodding his head to a footman, who n
ow came and stood ominously a yard or so from Mr. Pardew’s side.

  Mr. Pardew saw that he was defeated. He saw also that nothing was to be gained from an outburst of temper in the hall of a grand gentlemen’s club in full view of several of its members. “Perhaps, then, you would be good enough to see that this is placed in His Lordship’s hand,” he remarked, extending the letter as he did so.

  The majordomo flicked his forefinger in the direction of the footman.