Gavin Lyall - Spy’s Honour

Ranklin didn’t argue with the gesturing gun. The cellar was windowless but had a rusty punched-metal grille in the door, impossible to see through, to let some air in to circulate around the racked bottles. Ranklin stayed close to it, listening to the key creak in the lock and then O’Gilroy’s footsteps fade back along the corridor.

The footman was sitting so far from the kitchen maid that he’d obviously been much closer before Ranklin came in; now both looked at him with the hope on their faces as thin as the light. Ranklin tried a reassuring smile. “So now we go back to waiting. Did the brandy help at all?”

They over-enthused their thanks, the kitchen maid adding: “But I don’t like to think what the butler will say.” She was a local girl, the footman was English.

“He’s got other things to worry about. And that being the case, I might take a drop myself. And for you?” From the level in the bottle, they’d had no more than a spoonful each.

The footman didn’t mind if he did, but the girl shook her head. “Thank ye kindly, sir, but it’s terrible strong stuff.”

It was also terribly nice stuff, and Ranklin looked for the first time at the label: a forty-year-old Hines worth about twenty-five shillings a bottle, so they’d each drunk a day’s wages already. Well, it was a rare luxury for himself these days, and if the Admiral really wanted to bring the matter up … though his years in uniform had convinced him that a few shillings’ worth of misappropriated brandy was exactly the sort of thing senior officers did like to concentrate on in a crisis.

“What are your names?” He should have asked that before, if he was in charge. The footman was Wilks, the kitchen maid Bridget.

“And I’m Captain Ranklin, Royal Garrison Artillery. But I’m afraid I forgot to bring any of our big guns with me tonight.” No, he wasn’t good at this sort of thing. But they ha-ha’d dutifully.

“Wilks – upstairs there was talk of gold, twenty thousand pounds worth. Do you know anything about it?”

Wilks shrank back from the thought. “It’s not for me to listen to what the officers are saying, sir.”

Bridget looked at him with contempt. “No, but ye do, me little man, and blether it to the likes of me to show yer importance. Now be telling himself that really needs to know.”

It was possible, Ranklin reflected, that Bridget’s virtue didn’t need as much protection as everyone seemed to assume.

“Well, sir, it’s for the squadron. The cruiser squadron in the harbour. There’s talk of them being sent to the Mediterranean.” Ranklin was snobbishly surprised that Wilks pronounced the word perfectly – but of course this was a Naval household where such names were as common as … as gold, apparently. And with a new outbreak of fighting in the Balkans the Admiralty might well be sending flag-showing reinforcements. But …

“But twenty thousand pounds: how on earth are they going, in taxis?”

“Ha, ha, sir. No, it’s for the captains, sir. They always take golden guineas to foreign parts.”

Of course. A warship commander was far more on his own than his Army equivalent. He might need repairs in some out-of-the-way port, or supplies, or just the latest rumours – all easiest bought with gold sovereigns that were recognised worldwide. “But … is it being brought here? Hasn’t the Paymaster got a safe somewhere?”

“He must do, sir, but it seems it isn’t as safe a safe as the Admiral’s here.”

So it was all a cunning plan to defeat the very robbery that was now going on. And he could guess at how cunningly it had itself been defeated: the embezzling clerk in the Paymaster’s office had found the money to repay his theft from the sale of that information. Finding such men and exploiting their weaknesses sounded like Peter’s doing. It was just such work that spies and their ilk were expected to be good at.

But that still left the robbers with a problem: “I wonder how much it all weighs?”

Wilks shrank back again. “I’m sure I don’t know, sir.”

“No, no, sorry. I was just thinking aloud.” He took three sovereigns from his pocket and clinked them in his palm: small but heavy, weighing – as much as an ounce? Then he remembered how recently he had been concerned with the price of gold on the market. Depending on its “fineness” it ranged from just under to just over four pounds an ounce. Perhaps that was troy weight, but he only wanted a rough figure. So four pounds times sixteen divided into twenty thousand is just over three hundred pounds in weight. Even split into three loads, no one man was going to stroll out of here with over a hundred pounds of gold in his pockets. They must have a cart or carriage nearby. Or a car.

Then they heard a car – just a distant growl filtered through an airbrick high on the outside wall. The door creaked open behind them and O’Gilroy was standing there. Holding the shotgun one-handed, he pointed it silently at each of them in turn and held a finger to his lips. It was a macabre little performance.

Then, above them, the front door slammed and footsteps – many of them – creaked the ceiling. The gold had arrived.

Ranklin walked to the door and listened. But O’Gilroy would be well away, probably at the top of the cellar steps and ready to intervene up there. Any noise they made down here could be dealt with later, after the slaughter in the hallway that was all they could cause.

He turned away and made a brief exploration of the cellar, finding nothing but a drain hole in one corner and a small table with a candle-holder used for decanting wines. But behind one of the tall racks, he was out of sight of anybody else for the first time in hours. He pulled up his left trouser leg and ripped loose the surgical tape that held a tiny pistol just below the hollow behind his knee. It was a two-barrelled derringer, an American gambler’s sleeve gun barely three inches long and accurate no further than the width of a card table, issued to him “just in case”. Just in case, he had reckoned, he needed a false sense of security. But now, maybe … Well, maybe.

He slid it into a pocket, hoping O’Gilroy and co. would be content with just one search, and went back wearing as cheerful a smile as he could manage.

“Begging yer pardon, sir,” Bridget whispered, “but would ye be, sort of, knowing the …” She pointed to the door.

“Yes, but for God’s sake don’t mention it. He doesn’t seem to want his … colleagues to know, so let’s leave it that way.” He was pretty sure by now that Bridget wasn’t one of Peter’s or O’Gilroy’s informants, and sharing confidences was a good way to raise morale (though raise it for what, he had no idea).

“He was a soldier in an Irish regiment at the South African War. Before your time,” he added. He might think of himself as still young, but these two had barely been of school age when that war began. “His battalion got chopped up before Nicholson’s Nek, where I had a troop of field artillery, I was a subaltern, then. He was probably lucky that he got wounded and dropped out early: we picked him up in the retreat and …” They might be listening, but he could be describing the battle of Agincourt for all they understood or could imagine. “Anyway, we ended up besieged in Ladysmith with him attached unofficially to my troop, sharing roasted rat and horsemeat soup until General Buller condescended to relieve us four months later.”

They might imagine that – the diet, anyway. Not the heat and flies and bombardment from guns better than their own, nor the daily death list from sickness … No: born in an Irish city, Bridget could probably understand that list.

“It must have been frightful, sir,” Wilks said, as convention demanded.