SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman Read Free Page A

McCaffery in the salt box."
    "Don't you go saying that, Fred French! Not unless you want to end up head over your heels in regimental excrement! Faked! I saw that bugger McCaffery! Bloody near killed the lot of us I Yes, and you should have seen this lovely little tit he'd got with him! Listen! She'd got her bubbies all tilted up, real ladylike, and she'd got an arse like a marchioness. She had her drawers half off and you could see . . . 'Ere, Fred French! Where yer going, Fred French?"
    Alfred French was a slow writer. It took him most of the night by the light of penny candle dips to produce a laboured but faithful statement of McCaffery's case. He read it through for the last time and thought about it. Several years earlier, in the mud and drizzle of the ravaged hillside at Inkerman, a sergeant of the Rifle Brigade had stumbled doggedly through the brushwood and the mist to drag back two wounded men from the Russian bayoneting. One man, a cornet of dragoons, had been so savagely and repeatedly stabbed that he bled to death as his rescuer carried him on his back. The other, Private Alfred French, was less severely wounded and had lived to earn his corporal's stripes after the fall of Sebastopol.
    Alfred French decided that a man who would risk his life to save two comrades in that manner was a man to be trusted with McCaffery's case. In slow, deliberate script, he addressed his statement to Sergeant William Clarence Verity, late of the Rifle Brigade and now of the Private Clothes Detail, Metropolitan Police "A" Division, Whitehall Place, London.
     
     
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    Sergeant William Clarence Verity of the private clothes detail, Whitehall Office, presents his compliments to Inspector Croaker. Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker will read the attached paragraph from the Morning Chronicle of the 11 th inst., "M ilitary Execution in the Punjab ' and the enclosed letter from Alfred French, Corporal of Her Majesty's 77 th Regiment, now under orders for Allahabad.
     
    Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker or his superior officers may authorise a further investigation into certain circumstances attending the death of Private Thomas McCaffery. The man McCaffery had, to Sergeant Verity's knowledge, served two terms in Horsemonger Lane gaol for picking pockets. Both sentences were attended by hard labour upon the treadmill. Last autumn, previous to going for a soldier and sailing with his regiment to Bombay, McCaffery had been a companion of Edward Roper, a person of a criminal reputation.
    Ned Roper is known to Sergeant Verity as a man once prosecuted, but acquitted, on charges of receiving. Until last year he was the proprietor of a betting office in Fitzroy Square and known on racecourses as one of the Swell Mob. He has been engaged in the management of houses of ill-repute in the neighbourhoods of Regent Circus and the Waterloo Road. He is spoken of among low women and gamesters as "one of the flyest flats in the village." He acts for the putters up of robberies who can thus remain outwardly respectable.
    Sergeant Verity hears that Ned Roper has several times boasted to street girls of making £500 in a year by criminal conspiracies. He is thought to have benefited by £200 or £300 as an accomplice in frauds upon insurance companies perpetrated up to 1850 by Walter Watts of the Olympic Theatre.
    During the last summer, Roper associated with McCaffery and was liberally supplied with money from an unknown source. After a drunken argument in the Grapes public house, Southwark Bridge Road, McCaffery swore that he and Roper had been paid to commit the greatest robbery of modern times. Two weeks later, after a similar affray, McCaffery boasted in the presence of a constable that he and his friends had a plan to rob the Bank of England and every bullion merchant in the City of London, which plan must infallibly succeed.
    McCaffery, when sober, denied this boast. He was taken into custody and