The Ghost of Waterloo (7 page)

His fingers moved in blank space. The box was gone. When he returned with a lamp he found the chamber almost bare. Valuables, papers, everything appeared to have vanished. And he discovered the ragged hole.

He called the banker, Mr McVitie, who sent for the town’s senior constable, George Jilks. He, in turn, called for the Chief Magistrate and Police Chief, Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi.

Captain Rossi, an excitable, thick-accented Corsican, raised eyebrows when his first action was to insist on summoning two most unusual assistants. One of these, they knew, was a convict and itinerant worker. The other? Well, everyone knew he was mad.

Chapter Nine

The characters in question had been idling near the town waterfront when Captain Rossi sought them out.

One, a sternly handsome, hawk-featured man, perhaps nearing thirty years, was popular ticket-of-leave felon on parole Nicodemus Dunne, the Running Patterer. At that intriguing stage of life, when the optimism of youth had not yet been extinguished but the advantages of maturity were there to be tapped, Dunne had already put aside such dramas as the soldier’s execution and the fiasco at the theatre.

The other, William King, the Flying Pieman, was a free settler in his early twenties, a failed schoolteacher who now sold pies on the streets. However, it was his eccentricity and outlandish dress that marked him out. With garish coat and a hat billowing streamers, he once wheeled a barrow one mile, took fifty flying leaps, picked up fifty stones a yard apart, then carried a live goat weighing eighty pounds for two miles.

The two young men recognised Captain Rossi’s sturdy carriage and its two horses even before they saw the lawman’s excited face. The Patterer hoped it was good news at last – for he knew that something, apart from the usual waves of crime in the colony, had been worrying the Police Chief of late.

Dunne and King had been in the odd situation of both congratulating and comforting each other, after their recent adventure with the Captain
*
had resulted in success – but at what a price! Someone close to the Patterer had been killed. And, during his work on that case, Dunne had learnt a terrible secret about his tarnished birthright. The Pieman, too, had seen old wounds reopened.

But now, as the carriage careered off to the ravished Squatters’ Bank, they hoped to push all that into the past.

The press of the crowd jostling in George Street at the impressive entrance to the Bank of Australia was intense but mostly good-humoured, even celebratory. Few ordinary souls were upset at the spreading news of the robbery. They had just gathered in the hope of enjoying the discomfort of any well-heeled depositors who might appear to bemoan their lost wealth. Any old road, it was a moment in history: the colony’s first bank job.

As Nicodemus Dunne pushed his way through to the porticoed doorway, accompanied by Captain Rossi and William King, he overheard one grey-haired spectator excitedly compare the crush to the chaotic street scenes that had occurred when the New South Wales Corps – the rapacious ‘Rum Corps’ – had revolted against official attacks on their racketeering and boldly arrested the then Governor, William Bligh, with a vigour to match that of his mutinous crew on the ill-fated ship
Bounty
years before. Those soldiers claimed that Bligh had cowered under a bed, but who could believe that of the captain who had taken his loyal sailors 3615 miles to safety in an open boat?

The Patterer could not judge whether the comparison drawn by today’s animated spectator was apt or not. The Governor’s seizure had been in 1808, a good thirteen years before Dunne’s own clash in London with the military. Then, he had strenuously defended a child caught up in a riot who was being punished by an overzealous army officer. This gallantry had ruined his career as a thief-taker with the famous Bow Street Runners and had seen him sent to the colony – as a convict, instead of on the side of the angels.

But he
could
concur with another bystander, who compared, rather sniffily, this morning’s melee with the Hogarthian, Gin Lane-like scene that had occurred only recently outside the tavern next door to the bank. Then, a 120-gallon puncheon of rum had ruptured in the street and hundreds had fought to salvage the flowing free drink. Yes, he had seen that – in fact, it was the very distraction that had allowed him to escape the redcoat who was taking him down to the gaol. He shuddered and shook off the unhappy memory.

The oddly assorted trio now passed into the main banking chamber, where they met the managing director, Mr Thomas McVitie, his nephew, John Wallace, and the teller who had discovered the crime, Peter Gardner.

McVitie was ashen and shaking. ‘They stole 14000 pounds!’ he whispered. ‘What are we to do?’

What could be done immediately was for the senior constable of the town, George Jilks, to lead the newcomers down steep stairs into the strongroom, which now was brightly lit by batteries of candles and unshuttered lanterns.

Jilks was a rather reluctant guide. He resented Rossi’s frequent interference in police cases but could not ignore him. The emotional foreigner, who, nevertheless, had served the Crown for most of his adult life, was a figure of power – variously (and sometimes overlapping) as Chief of Police, Chief Magistrate and Collector of Customs. And at 2000 pounds or more a year, a hundred times most men’s wages. Some even said he had once been a secret agent.

Certainly, Jilks did not understand why Rossi had involved the damned news-hawker or that stupid pie-seller. Nonetheless, the three seemed to enjoy the patronage of the Governor himself. Jilks shrugged and pointed. ‘See for yourself,’ he said. There was little left to claim the new visitors’ attention: haphazardly strewn papers and several boxes, some with their lids smashed open.

A gang of prisoners from the Hyde Park Barracks had been conscripted to enlarge the eye-catching new focal point of the vault – the hole into the drain. Rossi and his aides climbed through, taking a lantern.

A scatter of banknotes attracted the Flying Pieman’s eye. He examined one; it was unmarked, not endorsed for circulation. He nodded approvingly. The thieves, wisely, seemed to have decided to discard such notes. One robber, however, had found that a handful of this valueless currency had a use. The Patterer picked up several of these, but dropped them hurriedly. ‘Jesus!’ he said with disgust. ‘They’ve used them as arse-wipes!’ Rossi stifled a laugh.

The light filtering through the drain’s street grille indicated where the intruders had entered and left. Apart from the mess and the stench, the tunnel floor supported only a tinderbox, open chests, four empty rum bottles, a pannikin and a broken oil lamp.

‘What the devil did they dig with?’ asked Captain Rossi when they had clambered back into the vault.

George Jilks answered the question by taking a heavy hessian sack from a constable and tipping the contents onto the flagged floor. ‘They left these in the drain,’ he said. There were weighty large-toothed files, a stone saw and two crowbars, one heavy-duty and the other with a needle point for digging through mortar to weaken stone and brick walls.

The tools were both functional and beautiful, clearly the work of a craftsman.

‘I’ve never seen such working tools so delicate,’ said William King.

Chief Constable Jilks was smug. ‘Oh, but
I
have!’

Chapter Ten

Captain Rossi banged his fist on the table in the taproom of the Hope and Anchor, where the Flying Pieman worked as a barman between bursts of food-peddling and extraordinary sporting activity. ‘That rogue thinks he has outsmarted us!’ the Captain fumed, rapidly rescuing his nobbler of rum from the reverberations caused by his rage. ‘That rogue’ referred not to one of the bank criminals, but rather to the Chief Constable. Misplaced or not, the unease was mutual.

In truth, Rossi had to admit that Jilks seemed to be well on the way to solving the crime, or at least part of it, barely hours after its discovery. The fiery, frustrated thief-taker conceded it was first-class policing. Jilks had been rewarded for spending so much of his life among old lags. He had immediately suspected two men – Sudden Solomon, whose coining and smithing skills marked him as the toolmaker, and Thomas Turner, the man with a record who knew the bank’s construction plans intimately.

And then the two charleys – Quinn and Melville – had quickly come forward to recall their now suspicious early morning meeting with James Dingle. He, Blackstone and Turner were in irons, but there was as yet no firm evidence to link them with the crime. Not yet. Nor, and just as importantly, was there a clue to the recovery of any loot. Still, the suspects were on remand in the prison hulk,
Phoenix
, moored on the harbour.

Captain Rossi, however, did have one card up his sleeve. He had the influence with the Governor to press for a quick authorisation of a reward for the criminals’ capture. Surely 100 pounds would flush out a traitor? Rossi advised Darling to add a sweetener to the bait and Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling responded by throwing in two aces – a full pardon and a passage to Britain for the man who turned King’s Evidence.

All the hounds could do was strain at the leash and wait for a fox to break cover. As it transpired, it was a ‘dog’, in a manner of speaking, that made the next move.

While George Jilks trawled the underworld and the three friends were drinking and thinking, James Wood, an English convict ‘trusty’ – earning a year off his sentence for a two-year stint overseeing his brethren – was writing himself into the story of the robbery.

Wood, the educated son of a clergyman, had seen his death sentence for theft commuted to ‘life across the seas’, in the euphemism of the court. Now money and freedom beckoned for the man who could warm the cold trail of the robbers. And Wood thought he was just that man.

For he was the very convicts’ muster clerk to whom James Dingle had offered a bribe in exchange for excusing two friends from the Sunday services on the day of the theft. Wood hurriedly wrote his message and delivered the incriminating letter to the Post Office, addressed to the police. He turned tail and ran, unobserved. He would reveal his identity and claim his reward when it was all over. Until then he still had to work with convicts, who hated and punished ‘dogs’ who ‘gave up’ mates.

He confirmed Blackstone and Dingle as suspects and added the new name of George Farrell.

If a floorboard in Sudden Solomon’s room in Cumberland Street, near Church Hill and St Phillip’s, had not squeaked louder than his vaunted ‘mouse-like’ tools, all the thieves may have been able to bluff their way out of the affair.

But after Blackstone was arrested on suspicion, a constable searching the blacksmith’s humble home was alerted by the floor protesting against his weight. Prising up the noisy board he found metal stamping dies, moulds, a small crucible, a tiny ladle, silver and tin shavings, and a spirit pressure lamp.

‘Well, Sudden,’ said George Jilks jovially to William Blackstone when they met on the hulk. ‘What a pity those dies didn’t have a Frenchie king’s head on them, or a Bavarian emperor’s, or something like that. We don’t give a toss about faking
their
money.

‘But you had King George, God bless him, and that’s treason – and the hangman.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Of course, if you had something to tell us…’

Sudden Solomon suddenly did have something to tell. He shopped James Dingle, George Farrell, Valentine Rourke and John Creighton as the thieves in the tunnel. The charleys picked up Farrell at his house in Kent Street, between The Rocks rookeries and Cockle Bay.

Valentine Rourke could not be found anywhere and John Creighton, who lived with Farrell, was not at home or at any of his usual haunts.

He had been picked up, literally, on the shingle at Cockle Bay. Dead from the dragon gun.