Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927
- Автор: Valentine, Corley H. W.
- Год: 1927
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927». Краткое содержание книги:
The Dice Are Loaded
So he stored up the idea of turning them over to justice and going scot free himself.
Then something very disagreeable happened. A stranger appeared at the inn one night, and he and the four started shaking dice. The stranger was no fool; suddenly he seized the dice and declared them “loaded.”
He hauled his four playmates to the police station, but there he cooled off. Inquiries as to his own antecedents worried him. He went away suddenly and the four were released, but not until Brown had been rather sharply interrogated.
He remembered this. He put it away in his kit of recollection, determining that he would be influenced by what had happened — some day.
March, 1788, the gang determined to do something which was more daring. Brodie knew very well the buildings of the excise office in Cannongate, for he had often been there to make repairs.
Also, he had a relative who had an office there on whom he called occasionally, for he never missed the opportunity to be friends with people in power, and he had long had his eye on how he might use this person.
The Fourth of March
The watchman was away a good part of the time; Brodie tried to find out what those times were. He called on his relative at the office, in his character of lock-window-door and floor repairer, and took with him an assistant who was none other than Smith. Smith took an impression of the key of the important room, while wandering about, seeming to wait for Brodie.
Brodie, finding it difficult to get a precise account of the movements of the watchman, Ainslee was set to work to lounge and smoke and talk when the man was taking the air, at the door of the building.
The result was an exact report. The watchman was away from eight to ten every night, at his supper. This left the building without a soul in it.
The fourth of March was set for the day. Brodie, to give himself an alibi, had a party on that day. The guests sat down to a bountiful dinner at three in the afternoon, then the fashionable hour.
He was dressed all in white, which was a well-known eccentricity of his; his special “party” style. At seven, he had thought, the guests would all be gone, but he had reckoned without the easy going ways of his townsfolk. They were gone only at eight.
He tore off the white clothes, after bowing his guests away from the brightly lighted front door, for the benefit of passers-by, and ran through well-known alleys to Smith’s store, where the three lesser rascals had already begun to shiver in their boots because of his failure to appear at seven, as agreed on.
Brodie was in high spirits, singing “Let Us Take the Road,” from “The Beggar’s Opera,” which was a great favorite of his. They set out, on streets which were none too well lighted. At the building they saw no one in the dark square which it fronted, and slipped inside.
It was the work of Smith and Brown to open the locked boxes, desks and “safes” — the iron boxes in which the large sums were kept. They went at their task, using the great ring of keys which they had, which would open almost anything.
Ainslee was to stand just outside and to softly whistle if he saw any one coming, and Brodie stood in a dark place in the lower hall.
Smith and Brown had found about seventeen pounds, which was a mere trifle compared to what they could have had if they had finished their work, when they heard a door downstairs slam. Footsteps came up the stairs.
They stood, petrified, expecting every moment to have some one come on them, in the midst of the boxes and safes, all of which they had pulled into one room for convenience in working, when they heard some one go down again and slam the door.
Brodie Tries to Explain
A moment afterward a door opened, as they could tell by the draft — and then softly closed. They listened for a whistle, and heard nothing. They slipped down the stair, failed to find either Brodie or Ainslee, got into a panic and headed for Smith’s home.
What had happened was very simple. A Mr. Bonar, who worked in the building, had remembered that he needed a paper which he was to take with him on a business journey the following morning.
He went back for it after work was over, and had not the slightest idea that any one was in the building at the time. If Brodie had kept his nerve, he need never have stirred from the dark place where he was entirely concealed, in the hall.
But he had been getting nervous. Some of his early effrontery had deserted him. He ran to his house, stripped off the black suit into which he had changed from the white one and went, as he often did, to spend the night at his Jean Watt home.
For several days he kept out of sight of Smith, who did his jobs about town, directed thereto by notes which his employer left for him.
Then Brodie reappeared and to remonstrances said that he would see them all that night. At Smith’s house, then, he appeared that evening, full of assurance.
He declared that he had slipped out of the building because it would be absolutely fatal to the operations of the gang for him to be seen, and that he had thought Bonar — whom, at that time, he did not know of by name — was the watchman.
French Leave
He succeeded in partially cooling off the anger of the three and, to appease them farther, dug up a lot of loot which he had been keeping and sent Mrs. Smith, who had been the go-between of the gang for a year, across the border to the fence, promising them all of what was procured for it.
Suspicion was stronger than Brodie thought, and his association with Smith, Brown and Ainslee had not been as successfully hidden as he had imagined. There was no proof, however.
Brown, though, finally furnished it. He had not liked the way that Brodie had treated him, from time to time, and he was a timorous soul, too, always fearing that he would be made the “goat.”
The other three had made the great mistake of discounting Brown, of making fun of him, of giving him less than his share of the proceeds of their robberies. They cheated him at cards, thought anything good enough for him, and, last and crowning insult, cut him out with a girl that he liked.
So, he went to see the procurator — that is to say, the district attorney, and the next day Smith and Ainslee were arrested for the job on the Excise Building.
The two were lodged in the famous “Tolbooth,” where so many famous and infamous prisoners had been confined. Just why Brown did not implicate Brodie at first is not clear. He might have thought that it was safer to charge the lesser rascals and see what came of it.
If Brodie escaped the net, it would be better not to have mentioned him, he thought, but he trusted to later events to bring Brodie into the matter, in which he showed himself an astute observer.
Brodie was in a great sweat when he heard of the arrests, but so far there was no direct suspicion attracted to him. He made sure of that and then went to the Tolbooth to see the two men, making the excuse that he thought he knew them, but the authorities had forbidden the public to have access to them.
In those days, unless there was such a special order, the public streamed through the Tolbooth — which was the principal jail of Edinburgh — as if it were the zoo.
Efforts to have notes taken to them failed and Brodie turned tail! Knowing the men as he did, he entertained no false ideas of their loyalty to himself, or to any one. He gathered some money together and went to London, where detectives shortly followed and lost him.