The Great Train Robbery Read Online Free PDF Page B

five minutes and three seconds.
    Pierce snapped the button on his chronometer and glanced at the second hand. “Five and three,” he said.
    “Dub lay,” Agar said.
    “Can you do it?”
    “Of course I can do it,” Agar said. “I can get a judy preggers in less—a dub lay is all I said. Five and three?”
    “I can light a cigar faster,” Pierce reminded him.
    “I can do it,” Agar said firmly, “if I have a snakesman such like Clean Willy.”
    The two men left the railway station. As they stepped into the fading twilight, Pierce signaled his cab. The cabby with a scar across his forehead whipped up his horse and clattered toward the station entrance.
    “When do we knock it over?” Agar said.
    Pierce gave him a gold guinea. “When I inform you,”he said. And then he got into the cab and rode off into the deepening night darkness.

CHAPTER 6

The Problem and the Solution
    By the middle of July, 1854, Edward Pierce knew the location of three of the four keys he needed to rob the safes. Two keys were in the green cupboard of the traffic supervisor’s office of the South Eastern Railway. A third hung around the neck of Henry Fowler. To Pierce, these three keys presented no major problem.
    There was, of course, the question of opportune timing in making a clandestine break to obtain a wax impression. There was also the problem of finding a good snakesman to aid in the break at the railway offices. But these were all easily surmountable obstacles.
    The real difficulty centered around the fourth key. Pierce knew that the fourth key was in the possession of the bank’s senior partner, Mr. Trent, but he did not know
where
—and this lack of knowledge represented a formidable challenge indeed, and one that occupied his attention for the next four months.
    A few words of explanation may be useful here. In 1854, Alfred Nobel was just beginning his career; the Swedish chemist would not discover dynamite for another decade, and the availability of nitroglycerin “soup” lay still further in the future. Thus, in the mid-nineteenth century, any decently constructed metal safe represented a genuine barrier to theft.
    This truth was so widely acknowledged that safemanufacturers devoted most of their energies to the problem of making safes fireproof, since loss of money and documents through incineration was a much more serious hazard than loss through theft. During this period, a variety of patents were issued for ferromanganese, clay, marble dust, and plaster of Paris as fireproof linings for safes.
    A thief confronted with a safe had three options. The first was to steal the whole safe outright, carrying it off to break open at his leisure. This was impossible if the safe was of any size or weight, and manufacturers were careful to employ the heaviest and most unwieldy construction materials to discourage this maneuver.
    Alternatively, a thief could employ a “petter-cutter,” a drill that clamped to the keyhole of the safe and permitted a hole to be bored over the lock. Through this hole, the lock mechanism could be manipulated and the lock opened. But the petter-cutter was a specialist’s tool; it was noisy, slow, and uncertain; and it was expensive to purchase and bulky to carry on a job.
    The third choice was to look at the safe and give up. This was the most common outcome of events. In another twenty years, the safe would be transformed from an impregnable obstacle to a mere irritant in the minds of burglars, but for the moment it was virtually unbeatable.
    Unless, that is, one had a key to the safe. Combination locks had not yet been invented; all locks were operated by key, and the most reliable way to break a safe was to come prepared with a previously obtained key. This truth lies behind the nineteenth-century criminal’s preoccupation with keys. Victorian crime literature, official and popular, often seems obsessed with keys, as if nothing else mattered. But in those days, as the master safe-cracker Neddy