SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman by Francis Selwyn Page A

the clerk. The clerk looked at the twin keys on their separate rings, as though he had never seen them before. With great deliberation, he scratched two entries in the ledger with his quill and offered each to the boy for his signature.
    "I could take them keys for the postal packets too," said the boy thoughtfully, nodding at the drawer.
    The clerk looked at Dacre, as though for sympathy.
    "You get the gemmen's box first, my son," he said to the boy, "unless you want a leathering."
    Dacre, having affected extreme annoyance at this elaborate pantomime, waited while a constable was fetched as escort and then followed the policeman and the boy through the maze of apparently aban doned luggage which stretched th e length of the Harbour Pier. Beyond the wooden trough, down which trunks and boxes were shot on to the steamer's deck, heavy wagons were loading to capacity from the miniature mountain of coal deposited by the colliers at high tide. Overhead, several horses in canvas slings, and two travelling carriages with gold crests on their doors were being swung aboard the Lord Warden. Then, near the harbour steps, down which the mail was carried to the paddle-box opening, Dacre saw a white rectangular shape.
    A professional in all things, Dacre took his pleasures coldly, yet the very sight of the iron safe made his heart beat rapidly and violently in his throat, so that for a moment it almost stopped his breath. As the finest rider of the Cottesmore or the Quorn might feel on facing a murderous double jump of thirty or forty feet, so Verney Dacre felt at the sight of the bullion safe. It might destroy him, but if any man alive could beat it, he was the one. It had been heralded by John Chubb himself as the locksmith's masterpiece and the cracksman's despair.
    It seemed the most beautiful and the most sinister artefact in the whole world. Within its iron walls, on certain nights, there lay more gold than in any other safe outside the Bank of England. It stood about two feet square and three feet high, painted white with a black rim at the top and bottom. On the side, in a prosaic inscription, was the black-lettered identification.
     
    S.E. RLY. LONDON TO
    FOLKESTONE
     
    The two locks were set immediately under the upper rim, so that when they were released the entire lid of the safe opened backwards on a safety chain. Three uniformed constables in their long coats and tall hats stood guard over it, accompanied by the inspector of railway police in plain clothes and the top-hatted superintendent of traffic at the Harbour Pier.
    Dacre stood well back in the shadows. He did not need to inspect the double lock in order to discover the dangers that lay in wait. He knew that the old game of holding a light to the keyhole and angling a reflector to survey the position of the tumblers would never work here. If they bothered to fit a lock to this, it was one with a metal barrel and curtain, so that the tumblers were proof against all inspection. Dacre knew a way of dealing with metal barrels and curtains but it would hardly do on this occasion. What was worse, the steel curtain inside the lock made it impossible to use more than one pick effectively at a time in the confined space. With such a lock as this, a man might just as soon not bother unless he could use one pick to move the bolt while another loosened the tumblers. Even then, this was a lock that had been fitted with the latest detectors, as sensitive as a hair-trigger on a duelling pistol. A fraction too much pressure on any tumbler and the spring of the lock leapt across, jamming the mechanism and setting off a clockwork alarm. The delicacy of touch required to move these tumblers, even if a man could get at them, was such as to make the touch of Paganini or the Abbe Liszt as crude as a blacksmith's fist by comparison. Yes, thought Dacre, they must really believe it to be the cracksman's despair. It would have been enough, under the circumstances, simply to make the gold