The Great Train Robery by Crichton, Michael

He reached through the jagged hole in the glass, turned the transom lock, and raised the window. It was a widow of rectangular shape, perhaps nine by sixteen inches. He wriggled through it easily, stepped down onto a desk top, and paused.

He had not been told the walls of the office were glass.

Through the glass, he could see down to the deserted tracks and platforms of the station below. He could also see the jack on the stairs, near the door, a paper bag containing his dinner at his side.

Carefully, Clean Willy climbed down off the desk. His foot crunched on a shard of broken glass; he froze. But if the guard heard it, he gave no sign. After a moment, Willy crossed the office, lifted a chair, and set it next to the high cabinet. He stepped onto the chair, plucked the twirl Agar had given him from his pocket, and picked the cabinet lock. Then he sat down to wait, hearing distant church bells toll the hour of nine o’clock.

Agar, lurking in the deep shadows of the station, also heard the church bells. He sighed. Another two and a half hours, and he had been wedged into a cramped corner for two hours already. He knew how stiff and painful his legs would be when he finally made his sprint for the stairs.

From his hiding place, he could see Clean Willy make an entrance into the office behind the guard; and he could see Willy’s head— when he stood on the chair and worked the cabinet lock. Then Willy disappeared.

Agar sighed again. He wondered, for the thousandth time, what Pierce intended to do with these keys. All he knew was that it must be a devilish flash pull. A few years earlier, Agar had been in on a Brighton warehouse pull. There had been nine keys involved: one for an outer gate, two for an inner gate, three for the main door, two for an office door, and one for a storeroom. The pogue had been ten thousand quid in B. of E. notes, and the putter-up had spent four months arranging the lay.

Yet here was Pierce, flush if ever a cracksman was, spending eight months now to get four keys, two from bankers, and two from a railway office. It had all cost a pretty penny, Agar was certain of that, and it meant the pogue was well worth having.

But what was it? Why were they breaking this drum now? The question preoccupied him more than the mechanics of timing a sixty-four-second smash and grab. He was a professional; he was cool; he had prepared well and was fully confident. His heart beat evenly as he stared across the station at the jack on the stairs, as the crusher made his rounds.

The crusher said to the jack, “Yon know there’s a P.R. on?” A P.R. was a prize-ring event.

“No,” said the jack. “Who’s it to be?”

“Stunning Bill Hampton and Edgar Moxley.”

“Where’s it to be, then?” the jack said.

“I hear Leicester,” the crusher said.

“Where’s your money?”

“Stunning Bill, for my gambit.”

“He’s a good one,” the jack said. “He’s tough, is Bill.”

“Aye,” the crusher said, “I’ve got a half-crown or two on him says he’s tough.”

And the crusher went on, making his rounds.

Agar smirked in the darkness. A copper talking big of a five-shilling bet. Agar bet ten quid on the last P.R., between the Lancaster Dervish, John Boynton, and the gummy Kid Ballew. Agar had come off well on that one: odds were two to one; he’d done a bit of winning there.

He tensed the muscles in his cramped legs, trying to get the circulation going, and then he relaxed. He had a long wait ahead of him. He thought of his dolly-mop. Whenever he was working, he thought of his dolly’s quim; it was a natural thing— tension turned a man randy. Then his thoughts drifted back to Pierce, and the question that Agar had puzzled over for nearly a year now: what was the damn pull?

__________

The drunken Irishman with the red beard and slouch hat stumbled through the deserted station singing “Molly Malone.” With his shuffling, flatfooted gait, he was a true soak, and as he walked along, it appeared he was so lost in his song that he might not notice the guard on the stairs.