The Great Train Robery by Crichton, Michael

“I keep my lills to the ground, but I heard nothing of a pull in Greenwich, I swear.”

Harranby paused. “There’s another guinea. in it for you if you can say.”

A fleeting look of agony passed across Chokee Bill’s face. “I wish I could be helping you, sir, but I heard nothing. It’s God’s own truth, sir.”

“I’m sure it is,” Harranby said. He waited awhile longer, and finally dismissed the pawnbroker, who snatched up the guinea and departed.

When Harranby was alone with Sharp, he said again, “What’s in Greenwich?”

“Damn me if I know,” Sharp said.

“You want a gold guinea, too?”

Sharp said nothing. He was accustomed to Harranby’s sour moods; there was nothing to do except ride them out. He sat in the corner and watched his superior light a cigarette and puff on it reflectively. Sharp regarded cigarettes as silly, insubstantial little things. They had been introduced the year before by a London shopkeeper, and were mostly favored by troops returning from the Crimea. Sharp himself liked a good cigar, and nothing less.

“Now, then,” Harranby said. “Let us begin from the beginning. We know this fellow Simms has been working for months on something, and we can assume he’s clever.”

Sharp nodded.

“The snakesman was killed yesterday. Does that mean they know we’re on the stalk?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Harranby said irritably. “Perhaps is not enough. We must decide, and we must do so according to principles of deductive logic. Guesswork has no place in our thinking. Let us stick to the facts of the matter, and follow them wherever they lead. Now, then, what else do we know?”

The question was rhetorical, and Sharp said nothing.

“We know,” Harranby said, “that, this fellow Simms, after months of preparation, suddenly finds himself, on the eve of his big pull, in desperate need of five barkers. He has had months to obtain them quietly, one at a time, creating no stir. But he postpones it to the last minute. Why?”

“You think he’s playing us for a pigeon?”

“We must entertain the thought, however distasteful,” Harranby said. “Is it well known that Bill’s a nose?”

“Perhaps.”

“Damn your perhapses. Is it known or not?”

“Surely there are suspicions about!’

“Indeed,” Harranby said. “And yet our clever Mr. Simms chooses this very person to arrange for his five barkers. I say it smells of a fakement ” He stared moodily at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “This Mr. Simms is deliberately leading us astray, and we must not follow.”

“I am sure you are right,” Sharp said, hoping his boss’s disposition would improve.

“Without question,” Harranby said. “We are being led a merry chase.”

There was a long pause. Harranby drummed his fingers on the desk. “I don’t like it. We are being too clever. We’re giving this Simms fellow too much credit. We must assume he is really planning on Greenwich. But what in the name of God is there in Greenwich to steal?”

Sharp shook his head. Greenwich was a seaport town, but it had not grown as rapidly as the larger ports of England. It was chiefly known for its naval observatory, which ‘maintained the standard of time— Greenwich Mean Time— for the nautical world.

Harranby began opening drawers in his desk, rummaging. “Where is the damned thing?”

“What, sir?”

“The schedule, the schedule,” Harranby said. “Ah, here it is.” He brought out a small printed folder. “London & Greenwich Railway… Thursdays… Ah. Thursdays there is a train leaving London Bridge Terminus for Greenwich at eleven-fifteen in the morning. Now, what does that suggest?”

Sharp looked suddenly bright-eyed. “Our man wants his guns by ten, so that he will have time to get to the station and make the train.”

“Precisely,” Harranby said. “All logic points to the fact that he is, indeed, going to Greenwich on Thursday. And we also know he cannot go later than Thursday.”

Sharp said, “What about the guns? Buying five at once.”

“Well, now,” Harranby said, warming to his subject, “you see, by a process of deduction we can conclude that his need for the guns is genuine, and his postponing the purchase to the last minute— on the surface, a most suspicious business— springs from some logical situation. One can surmise several. His plans for obtaining the guns by other means may have been thwarted. Or perhaps he regards the purchase of guns as dangerous— which is certainly the case; everyone knows we pay well for information about who is buying barkers— so he postpones it to the last moment. There may be other reasons we cannot guess at. The exact reason does not matter. What matters is that he needs those guns for some criminal activity in Greenwich.”

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