The Great Train Robbery (Page 53)

"But surely," Sharp said, "there is no purpose in stealing a cable—"

"Not the cable," Harranby said. "The payroll for the firm. What is it? Glass, Elliot & Company, or some such. An enormous project, and the payroll must be equal to the undertaking. That’s our man’s objective. And if he is in a hurry to leave on Thursday, he wishes to be there on Friday—"

"Payday!" Sharp cried.

"Exactly," Harranby said. "It is entirely logical. Yon see the process of deduction carried to its most accurate conclusion."

"Congratulations," Sharp said cautiously.

"A trifle," Harranby said. He was still very excited, and clapped his hands together. "Oh, he is a bold one, our friend Simms. To steal the cable payroll— what an audacious crime! And we shall have him red-handed. Come along, Mr. Sharp. We must journey to Greenwich, and apprise ourselves of the situation at first hand."

Chapter 37 Further Congratulations

"And then?" Pierce said.

Miriam shrugged. "They boarded the train."

"How many of them were there?"

"Four altogether."

"And they took the Greenwich train?"

Miriam nodded. "In great haste. The leader was a squarish man with whiskers, and his lackey was clean-shaven. There were two others, jacks in blue."

Pierce smiled. "Harranby," he said. "He must be very proud of himself. He’s such a clever man." He turned to Agar. "And you?"

"Fat Eye Lewis, the magsman, is in the Regency Arms asking about a cracker’s lay in Greenwich— wants to join in, he says."

"So the word is out?" Pierce said.

Agar nodded.

"Feed it," he said.

"Who shall I say is in?"

"Spring Heel Jack, for one."

"What if the miltonians find him?" Agar said.

"I doubt that they will," Pierce said..

"Jack’s under, is he?"

"So I have heard."

"Then I’ll mention him."

"Make Fat Eye pay," Pierce said. "This is valuable information."

Agar grinned. "It’ll come to him dear, I promise you."

Agar departed, and Pierce was alone with Miriam.

"Congratulations," she said, smiling at him. "Nothing can go wrong now."

Pierce sat back in a chair. "Something can always go wrong," he said, but he was smiling.

"In four days?" she asked.

"Even in the space of an hour."

Later, in his courtroom testimony, Pierce admitted he was astounded at how prophetic his own words were, for enormous difficulties lay ahead— and they would come from the most unlikely source.

Chapter 38 A Sharp Business Practice

Henry Mayhew, the great observer, reformer, and classifier of Victorian society, once listed the various types of criminals in England. The list had five major categories, twenty subheadings, and more than a hundred separate entries. To the modern eye, the list is remarkable for the absence of any consideration of what is now called "white-collar crime."

Of course, such crime existed at that time, and there were some flagrant examples of embezzlement, forgery, false accounting, bond manipulation, and other illegal practices that came to light during the mid-century. In 1850, an insurance clerk named Walter Watts was caught after he embezzled more than ￡70,000, and there were several crimes much larger: Leopold Redpath’s ￡150,000 in forgeries on the Great Northern Railway Company, and Beaumont Smith’s ￡350,000 in counterfeit exchequer bonds, to name two examples.

Then, as now, white-collar crime involved the largest sums of money, was the least likely to be detected, and was punished most leniently if the participants were ever apprehended. Yet Mayhew’s list of criminals ignores this sector of crime entirely. For Mayhew, along with the majority of his contemporaries, was firmly committed to the belief that crime the product of "the dangerous classes," and that criminal behavior sprang from poverty, injustice, oppression, and lack of education. It was almost a matter of definition: a person who was not from the criminal class could not be committing a crime. Persons of a better station were merely "breaking the law." Several factors unique to the Victorian attitude toward upper-class crime contributed to this belief.

First, in a newly capitalistic society, with. thousands of emerging businesses, the principles of honest accounting were not firmly established, and accounting methods were understood to be even more variable they are today. A man might, with a fairly clear conscience, blur the distinction between fraud and "sharp business practices."

Second, the modern watchdog of all Western capitalist countries, the government, was nowhere near so vigilant then. Personal incomes below ￡150 annually were not taxed, and the great majority of citizens fell beneath this limit. Those who were taxed got off lightly by modern standards, and although people grumbled about the cost of government, there was no hint yet of the modern citizen’s frantic scramble to arrange his finances in such a way as to avoid as much tax as possible. (In 1870, taxes amounted to 9 percent of the gross national product of England; in 1961, they were 38 percent.)

Furthermore, the Victorians of all classes accepted a kind of ruthlessness in their dealings with one another that seems outrageous today. To take an example, when Sir John Hall, the physician in charge of the Crimean troops, decided to get rid of Florence Nightingale, he elected to starve her out by ordering that her food rations be halted. Such vicious maneuvers, were considered ordinary by everyone; Miss Nightingale anticipated it, and carried her own supplies of food, and even Lytton Strachey, who was hardly disposed to view the Victorians kindly, dismissed this incident as "a trick."