Читать книгу This England - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6
ОглавлениеReproduced from The Evening Post (New Zealand), February 12, 1927
NOTHING gives Bill a bigger laugh than newspaper articles on prison reform. The State started to reform Bill when, as a ragged little pickpocket of 12, they sent him to an institution for youthful delinquents. I don't know how long he was there, but he went in a clumsy, inept little thief, and came out as dexterous an expert as ever picked a pocket or dipped a bag.
Then he became a burglar and a jewel thief (he got his introduction to the right kind of mentors when he was in Pentonville); and later he learnt from a friend in Dartmoor of the good pickings that could be had by a man of smart appearance who hangs around railway stations and picks up momentarily neglected suitcases. Bill has a poor opinion of humanity, and his one grim jest which never fails to tickle me is that when he meets a funeral he takes off his hat and says piously: "Thank Gawd he's going straight!"
Alec is another burglar: a slim, refined man with an amazing vocabulary (he speaks with a very pleasant Scottish accent, and is invariably voluble and earnest). He is an office-breaker.
Joe is known to the police as a ladder larcenist. Of late he has been dignified with a new title—they "call him a cat-burglar. But he is still a ladder larcenist, whose job of work it is to enter bedrooms whilst the family are at dinner, usually by means of a ladder, lock the door, and, clearing off all the available jewellery, make his escape, all within a period of ten minutes. The ladder larcenist who takes more than ten minutes at his job is regarded as a bungler.
I don't know whether Bill has ever engaged in ladder larceny, but he confesses that at the moment he is too fat. We were talking the other day about the possibility of burgling my flat, the difficulty of climbing up into my study, which overlooks a busy street, and the almost impossibility of opening a safe of a well-known make, in which I keep, if, the truth be told, nothing more valuable than the duplicate copies of manuscripts that have gone to America, and have not yet been printed. Bill was amused.
"No man of intelligence would dream of climbing up the front of your house," he said. "All he wants is a key blank"—(I have a patent lock on the front door)—"and I'll show you how he does it."
He produced a key blank from his pocket, which he swore he kept only as a souvenir and not for business, blackened it with a match, inserted it in the lock of my door, turned it gently, and then, withdrawing it, showed me the marks that had been made on the blackened surface.
"I could file that key to fit your door in a quarter of an hour," he said. "All I've got to do is to step into a telephone box, call you up, and if there is no reply—-which shows that the family are out—walk round, try the key, file it, and be inside your flat under half an hour. As to the safe—!"
He said insulting things about the safe, and left me with the impression that a child of three could overcome that obstacle with a corkscrew.
I don't know how many times Bill has been in prison. He has been flogged for bashing a "screw"; he has been birched for various offences; he has been in Dartmoor, in Portland, and Parkhurst, and dislikes them all, but finds nothing in the experience calculated to act as a certain deterrent to the criminally minded. I call him a burglar, but he isn't really a burglar, for he loathes night work and the danger attendant upon breaking into occupied premises. Of late years, he tells me, "fencing" has become a well-organised business. Mr. Fence is sitting in the saloon bar of a handsome establishment at Islington, when there enters, a respectable-looking man known to him. Possibly they drink together. After a while Mr. Fence and Mr., Burglar adjourn outside. Says the burglar: "I'm going to 'do' a fur store in Wardour street. I wish you'd come along, Mr. X, and price it for me."
"Is it dead or alive?" asks the interested "fence," meaning thereby: "Is it a lock-up shop or is it one over which people are living?"
"It is dead," explains the thief; and the next morning the fence drives down to Wardour street strolls into the shop, examines a few of the furs offered for sale, and makes a rapid and fairly accurate estimate of the value of the shop's contents. That afternoon he meets the burglar, or a friend of the burglar's, by appointment; there is a little bargaining, a little haggling, and eventually a sum is agreed upon. The contents of that unfortunate store have been sold before the burglary is committed. The place to which the furs are to be taken is decided upon, and nothing more is left than for the crime to be committed, the furs taken away and stored, for the thief to receive his price.
Similarly, whilst your Rolls-Royce is outside your door, there may be a car thief and his receiver haggling over its price hours before it is "knocked off" and disappears from all human ken, later to find its way to the colonies or to India, the latter being a favourite market for stolen motor-cars. It may be some satisfaction to you to know that the Morris-Cowley, the pride of your house, which vanished mysteriously a year ago, is now the favourite vehicle, of a Babu clerk and his bright-eyed family somewhere around Lahore.
Our burglars arc-considerably more attractive than, say, the American variety.
"Have you ever carried a gun, Bill? I asked, and he was genuinely shocked.
"Good God, no!" he said. "What do you want a gun for? If you want to commit murder, go out and commit it. If you want to be a burglar, be a burglar. No policeman is going to be afraid of a gun. You've either got to kill him or he'll get you. Besides, these men are doing their duty. When a lag says, 'I'd sooner be hung than go back to prison,' there's nothing to stop him hanging himself is there?" His own theory is that shootings are prevalent in America because the police carry pistols.
"When you hear of mail vans being held up, or post offices, by people with revolvers, you can bet that the chaps who do the job are amachers."
Individual burglary is not a thriving trade in these days. There are two or three little confederations responsible for most of the more startling robberies, and these, according to Bill, owe their immunity to their perfect organisation. They'll take, a year to plan a real big job, and very likely get one of their own people inside the premises six months before they bust the place. They have tools worth hundreds of pounds, and work to a time-table. Generally they're foreigners, who go around the Continent between busts."
The day of the old burglar, with his dark lantern, his bit of candle, and his simple jemmy, has passed. This is the age of the specialist; and although there may be a sprinkle of old-timers, who are prepared to take the risk of a "bust" with little or no preliminary investigation, they are seldom successful.
"It's just as hard to burgle a country house as it is to get into a bank nowadays," said Bill. "And, anyway, silver doesn't pay for stealing. Most of the big jobs you read about are done at country houses by somebody inside. An old lag gets a job as butler or chauffeur, and waits till he finds something worth taking before he skips. In fact, there are more of this kind of crime nowadays than actual burglaries."
He tells me there is a class of "workman" who specialises in dressmakers' shops, and, curiously enough, not the great establishments, but the smaller, struggling fry.
"It doesn't pay," he said, "but they're satisfied with a few pounds for a night's work, and the job's a pretty easy one if you know anything about the beats, when the police are likely to be around.
"Generally speaking," summarised Bill a little despairingly, "the game's never been so bad as it is to-day. When I was a boy, almost every house had a box hidden somewhere, and you were pretty sure of finding money in it. Tradesmen especially. Nowadays people have banks and cheque books."
A cheque book, by the way, is regarded by most burglars as a valuable acquisition. A man who specialises in the stealing of cheque books told me once that a packet of Bank of England "kites" (cheques) would always fetch £20 from a fence. He sells them to the members of the well-dressed mobs that haunt the West End, and these in turn, make big profits by inducing simple-minded tradesmen to cash big cheques after banking hours. But that is another graft. Bill is emphatic on only one point— that burglary is not what it used to be.
