Brother Can You Spare a Crime?

  Table of Contents

  Brother, Can You Spare a Crime? (John Pickett Mysteries, #10)

  BROTHER, CAN YOU | SPARE A CRIME? | Another John Pickett Mystery | Sheri Cobb South

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  Read all the John Pickett Mysteries:

  Pickpocket’s Apprentice: A John Pickett Novella

  In Milady’s Chamber

  A Dead Bore

  Family Plot

  Dinner Most Deadly

  Waiting Game: Another John Pickett Novella

  Too Hot to Handel

  For Deader or Worse

  Mystery Loves Company

  Peril by Post

  Into Thin Eire

  Other Regency Novels by

  Sheri Cobb South:

  The Weaver Takes a Wife

  Brighton Honeymoon

  (Weaver #2)

  French Leave

  (Weaver #3)

  The Desperate Duke

  (Weaver #4)

  Of Paupers and Peers

  Baroness in Buckskin

  Miss Darby’s Duenna

  Visit Sheri Cobb South’s website HERE!

  Subscribe to Sheri Cobb South’s newsletter HERE!

  BROTHER, CAN YOU

  SPARE A CRIME?

  Another John Pickett Mystery

  Sheri Cobb South

  BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A CRIME?

  © 2020 by Sheri Cobb South. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  To my dad, Bill Cobb,

  who taught me how to draw blueprints when I was a teenager—

  a skill that proved invaluable during the robbing of this bank, er,

  the writing of this book.

  And to the helpful folks at the Bank of England,

  who, when I emailed them and asked for advice on how best to rob it,

  gave me an answer.

  1

  In Which a Crime Is Committed

  Robert Maxwell sat in a public house in the Strand, nursing a pint (his third that evening, if memory served) and trying without success to hold the ghosts at bay. He had fared better than many of the men at Corunna, he knew; the fact that he was sitting here, and not buried under six feet of rocky Spanish soil, was proof of that. He had a good position, for his military service (along with a letter of recommendation from his commanding officer) had secured for him immediate entry to a place amongst the elite half-dozen Bow Street men known colloquially as Runners without his being obliged to languish for years on the Foot Patrol. Granted, to call himself a “Runner” might be overly optimistic, as the French ball that had shattered his leg had left him with a tendency to limp unless he made a concentrated effort to even his gait. Still, the magistrate had been willing to take a chance on him, and Maxwell was determined that Patrick Colquhoun’s confidence in him would not be misplaced.

  It was only that certain things, experienced unexpectedly and without warning—the acrid smell of gunpowder, or the loud report of a firearm close at hand—recalled the chaotic retreat to his mind so vividly that it might have taken place yesterday, instead of almost nine months ago. In the present instance, he had left the Bow Street Public Office a few hours earlier and had headed west along the Strand, only to come upon the near-collision of a peddler’s wagon with a cumbersome landau. While the drivers of the two vehicles had exchanged pleasantries (most of which were unfit to be spoken in mixed company, let alone on a public thoroughfare), the spooked horses had added their own terrified contributions to the conversation. It had all come rushing back: the shouts and the curses, the shrieking, sweating horses, the stench of gunpowder and blood, the screams of men falling around him, never to rise again . . .

  He could not face an empty house, with only the ghosts for company. For here was the great irony: While he had survived on that cold day in January, his wife had not. Instead, poor Sally had succumbed to an attack of influenza at roughly the same time that he’d been dragging himself aboard a British transport ship for evacuation back to England. To England, and London, and an empty house . . .

  No, he could not face that house, not tonight. He’d made straight for the nearest tavern, and there he remained. He raised the glass to his lips and discovered that it was empty. Perhaps he should order a fourth; the brew was clearly not doing its job, for it seemed he could still hear the confusion of the disordered retreat.

  Gradually he realized that the noise was not some trick of memory, but of a loud commotion in the street. Even as the recognition registered, he heard a shout, followed by the hollow clack-clack-clack of the watchman’s wooden rattle. The ghosts vanished as he, along with every other man in the place, jumped up and hurried from the premises to join in the hue and cry.

  Three men—no, he amended mentally, two men and a youth—had just emerged into the street through the gaping door of Number 59, and now ran eastward along the Strand. One of the men paused in his flight and turned back just long enough to throw something at the pursuing watchman, who fell with a scream that ended, sickeningly, in a gurgle. Maxwell had seen enough men bayoneted to recognize the sound, and to know there was nothing that could be done for the poor fellow. Instead, he turned his attention to the escaping felons, leaving his fellow public-house patrons to administer whatever comfort they could to the dying, or dead, watchman.

  But he missed his footing in the uncertain light of the gas lamps. As he stepped off the curb, pain shot up his injured leg and he fell sprawling into the street. Clutching his throbbing knee, he looked up at the fleeing robbers just as something fell from the youth’s hand. The boy would have turned back to retrieve it, but one of the men, the one who had thrown the knife, grabbed him by the arm with a curse and dragged him away.

  As they fled, however, the boy looked back at whatever it was that he’d dropped, and the yellow light from the nearby streetlamp fell full onto his face.

  Maxwell, staring after him, breathed, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  “BRADLEY NEVER STOOD a chance, poor devil,” concluded Maxwell, having reported the incident to the magistrate the following morning. “The knife caught him in the throat. He apparently surprised a group of men in the act of robbing Number 59. That would be the bank, sir—Thomas Coutts and Company.”

  Scowling fiercely beneath bushy white eyebrows, Patrick Colquhoun examined the knife that Maxwell had retrieved from the scene of the crime. It was cheap as such weapons went, and had been repaired at least once, when the blade had apparently separated from the haft. Still, it had been honed to razor sharpness, as Mr. Colquhoun discovered when he tapped its point and a bead of bright red blood appeared on the tip of his finger. He wiped it away with his thumb and addressed his newest Runner. “And the man who threw it?”

  Maxwell sighed. “Escaped, I’m afraid. I stumbled and fell, and between half of the witnesses stopping to see to Bradley and the other half stopping to see to me, the robbers got clean away, headed north on Bedford Street.”

  Mr. Colquhoun nodded in resignation. “Toward the rookeries of St. Giles and Seven Dials, no doubt.”

  Maxwell didn’t hav
e to ask for an explanation. The twisting, narrow streets north of Covent Garden were a regular rabbit warren, offering bolt-holes sufficient for sheltering the practitioners of every sort of vice. And the watchmen were utterly ineffective as a deterrent. They were elderly men—former soldiers, most of them—who had been given the position as a supplement to pensions that amounted to little more than a pittance. God knew they needed something; unlike the officers who commanded them, the enlisted men had no commissions to sell in order to fund their retirement. Unfortunately, what had sounded good in theory was less so in practice: Most of them, perhaps feeling they had already done their bit in the wars of the last century, were content to doze peacefully in their watchmen’s boxes with a bottle of gin for company. And perhaps they had the right of it; Bradley had apparently been more conscientious than most, and look what that had got him.

  “Did you see anything else?” the magistrate was asking. “I realize it was dark, but anything at all might be useful.”

  With an effort, Maxwell dragged his attention back to the present. “I can tell you there were three of them, and they were all male, but other than that—” he broke off with a shrug.

  “The inquest will no doubt bring in a verdict of willful murder by person or persons unknown. In the meantime, you might begin with this,” Mr. Colquhoun said, handing the knife over the railing that separated his bench from the rest of the room. “If you can find the shop where it was repaired, they might be able to tell you who brought it in. God knows it’s little enough to go on, but it appears to be all we have.”

  “There is one other thing, sir,” Maxwell began hesitantly.

  “Yes?” prompted the magistrate. “What is it?”

  “One of the gang of robbers—well, sir, I thought he was a youth—twelve or thirteen years old—but then he turned back, and I realized he was only a child. He’d dropped this.”

  He handed something across the railing, and Mr. Colquhoun took and examined it. It was no weapon, this, but a toy soldier made of metal. It was something between two and three inches tall, and its uniform depicted that worn a quarter-century earlier, as well as he could tell, given that the paint was so chipped as to be almost nonexistent, and at some point the bayonet had snapped off the end of its tiny musket. Mr. Colquhoun could recall his own son having once owned an entire set of similar soldiers—a set which, his wife might have told him, still resided in the attic of his Mayfair residence, where his grandchildren might play with them whenever they came to visit. Mr. Colquhoun had seen too much of the world to cherish many illusions, but he found something rather poignant about a child young enough to play with toys being put to work robbing banks instead.

  “It’s unfortunate, Mr. Maxwell, but not uncommon,” he acknowledged with a sigh. “A child can get into places a grown man can’t—through windows, gaps in the walls, even down chimneys, if he’s small enough.”

  “Yes, sir, but this child—” He broke off frowning.

  “Well?” prompted the magistrate, when his principal officer seemed disinclined to continue. “What of him?”

  “This child—the light from the gas lamp was shining on him, you understand, and I got a good look at his face.”

  “Yes, Mr. Maxwell?” Mr. Colquhoun’s voice held an edge of impatience. “What of it?”

  Maxwell took a deep breath. “He looked just like Mr. Pickett.”

  2

  In Which John Pickett’s Character

  Is More than Once Called into Question

  Mr. Colquhoun scowled at him over bushy white brows. “Just what are you implying, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “I’m not implying anything, sir. It just seemed to me that if some by-blow of Mr. Pickett’s is going about robbing banks, then he might ought to know about it.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Maxwell, whoever that child may have been, he is no by-blow of Mr. Pickett’s.”

  The magistrate’s tone left no room for argument, but Maxwell could not be entirely satisfied. “I tell you, sir, the resemblance was remarkable—staggering, even.”

  Mr. Colquhoun drummed his fingers on the bench for a long moment before asking, “And how old would you say this child was?”

  Maxwell frowned thoughtfully. “I expect he must have been around ten years old. He was tall for his age, though, so I mistook him at first for older.” After a discreet pause, he added, “Then, too, Mr. Pickett is quite tall, is he not?”

  “Ten years,” echoed Mr. Colquhoun thoughtfully. “You realize that for it to be as you say, Mr. Pickett must have fathered a child at the age of fourteen?”

  “I realize, of course, that he must have been very young,” said Maxwell, readily conceding the point, “but I don’t see that youth alone eliminates him. He’s a good-looking lad, and, well, God knows young men of the poorest classes have little enough else to look forward to.”

  Mr. Colquhoun emitted a low growl, and for a moment Maxwell feared he had overstepped in referring to John Pickett’s criminal past—a past widely known at Bow Street, but rarely mentioned outright, at least not by those with an eye to their careers. A man more familiar with the magistrate’s moods—a man, in fact, such as the one currently under discussion—might have assured him that the sound was indicative of nothing more ominous than deep concentration.

  Ten years, Mr. Colquhoun thought. Which meant he would have been born in 1799. . . And Pickett Senior had been transported in 1798 . . . Yes, it was just within the realm of possibility . . .

  “The coroner’s inquest is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” he said briskly, giving Mr. Maxwell to understand that no further speculations were to be made regarding his fellow principal officer. “Until then, see what you can discover about that knife. Oh, and when Mr. Pickett comes in, tell him I want a word with him.”

  MEANWHILE, THE SUBJECT of this discussion sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair while the governor of no less venerable an institution than the Bank of England addressed him in placating tones and studiously avoided looking him in the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Pickett, but I’m afraid we haven’t a place for you,” said Mr. John Whitmore. He picked up the quill pen lying on his desk, then looked at it as if surprised to find it in his hand, and put it down again.

  “Oh?” John Pickett fumbled in the inside pocket of his tailcoat (the plum-colored one, fashionable enough to suggest prosperity and yet sufficiently sober in hue to escape the censure of even the staidest banker) and fished out the rectangle of paper he’d cut from the Times just that morning. “It says here—”

  “Yes, I know what it says,” Mr. Whitmore said hastily. “I wrote out the advertisement myself.”

  Pickett read it aloud nonetheless. “ ‘Clerk wanted. Young man of good character with strong ciphering skills and neat penmanship.’ ” He glanced down at the desk, and the sheet of paper where he had demonstrated these abilities. “Were my calculations not correct?”

  “They were,” Mr. Whitmore conceded the point, albeit reluctantly. In fact, they had been accurate down to the last farthing, including the one designed to trip up all but the most careful applicants.

  “Has the position already been filled?”

  “It has not,” the bank’s governor confessed somewhat sheepishly.

  “I can only assume, then, that the sticking point is the matter of my character,” Pickett said with great dignity. “In fact, you don’t trust me to keep my hand out of the till.”

  “It isn’t that.” Somehow Mr. Whitmore’s objection had the effect of confirming Pickett’s suspicions rather than allaying them. “But, well, one never knows what latent tendencies one might possess until actually faced with temptation. And you, with your, er, background, might be, let us say, more susceptible than most.”

  “Let me remind you, sir, that I have been employed by Bow Street since I was nineteen years old. During that time, I have handled not only large sums of money, but jewelry and other valuables as well—and I returned every last farthing to its rightful owner, whether that r
ightful owner was the victim of a theft or the magistrate himself. If I had any ‘latent tendencies’ toward theft, don’t you think they would have shown themselves by now?”

  “And yet, you have a criminal record, Mr. Pickett.”

  “Yes—as a fourteen-year-old boy, trying to survive any way I could! But I made a vow to the man who rescued me, a vow I’ve kept for more than ten years. Even if I were tempted—which I beg leave to doubt—I would resist it out of loyalty to him.”

  “And this would be”—he looked at the letter of recommendation Pickett had supplied—“Major James Pennington of Norwood Green in Somersetshire?”

  “No. Patrick Colquhoun, the magistrate who oversees my work at Bow Street.”

  “And yet you bring me no endorsement from him, Mr. Pickett. Why is that?”

  For the first time in the interview, Pickett’s air of confidence faltered. “He—he doesn’t know I’m looking for a new position.” Neither did Major James Pennington, for that matter, and the major was his brother-in-law. But Pickett would cross that bridge when he came to it—an event that would not take place today, given the governor’s unenthusiastic response to his application.

  “Oh?” Mr. Whitmore frowned. “And just why are you looking for a new position, given your apparently successful career at Bow Street?”

  “It—it has recently been brought home to me that I could be putting my wife in danger,” Pickett said, choosing his words with care. “For her sake, I thought it was time I sought out a safer line of work.”

  “I see.” Mr. Whitmore was silent for a long moment, during which he studied Pickett thoughtfully. “Mr. Pickett, if it were entirely up to me, I would be sorely tempted to engage you, at least on a trial basis. But I have the shareholders to answer to, you know. If I were to take such a chance, and be mistaken in you—”

  “You wouldn’t be, sir, I assure you,” Pickett insisted.

  “So you say. And you may be telling the truth, or at least believe you are. And as I say, if it were only my own funds at risk—” He broke off with a dismissive shake of his head. “But I don’t have the right to take such a chance with other people’s money, Mr. Pickett. I wish you all the best, truly I do, but I can do nothing for you. I hope you understand.”