The Symbol Seekers Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  ALSO BY A. A. GLYNN

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  FIRST AFTERWORD

  SECOND AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2015 by A. Glynn.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  ALSO BY A. A. GLYNN

  The Case of the Dixie Ghosts

  A Gunman Close Behind

  Mystery in Moon Lane

  DEDICATION

  For my niece, Julie and great niece Quinn with love; and to the memory of Michael Burgess (Robert Reginald) in deep appreciation of his encouragement.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BOX AND MR. O

  The beam of the shaded bull’s eye lantern swung around the darkened room. Where it smote the walls it showed richly patterned wallpaper and, here and there, it fell upon ornaments that spoke of a collector of good taste. It came at length to a wall bearing several framed portraits, all of a distinctly American character. There were George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America which, nearly two years before this February of 1867, were defeated after four years of bloody civil war with Abraham Lincoln’s United States.

  Curiously there was a portrait of Maximillian, the puppet emperor of Mexico, set up by the French after a reckless and ill-fated invasion. The light moved down and found a table, laid out as a kind of naval shrine. It bore a couple of models of men in naval uniform, a pair of antique pistols and a spyglass. Lastly, it picked out a long wooden box, fastened by solid looking brass locks.

  One of the two burglars working in the dark whispered excitedly in an unmistakable Liverpool accent:

  ‘That’s it! Grab it, lad and let’s get out of here, quick.’

  The pair were professionals and they were doing a professional job of burglary in this comfortable villa in Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. The owner of the residence, a distinguished American whose name was honoured around the world, and his family were sleeping soundly upstairs, totally unaware of the larceny in progress below them.

  Charlie Sephton and Bill Twist were physically and morally stunted products of the tangle of cramped streets and alleyways surrounding the docks of the great seaport in Northwest England. They had been recruited by a mysterious man known as “Mr. O” to break into the villa and steal the box they had just located. The pair showed him the most grovelling deference when in his presence but, privately, Charlie Sephton called him ‘the fella from London’, while Bill Twist called him ‘the Dago’ by reason of his slightly olive skin and his vaguely foreign manner. He had offered the two thieves the high sum of five pounds each when the box was delivered to him.

  Sephton and Twist had broken in by expertly forcing the window of this room As usual, they had planned their thieving expedition well, using all their criminal cunning. Behind a bush in the garden, they left certain “props” that would aid their return across the river to Liverpool with the box they were about to steal.

  Sephton took the box from the table, found it to be heavier than he thought and tucked it under his arm. Then, moving swiftly and silently, the pair made for the window and climbed out into the fairly spacious garden. The very first signs of dawn were beginning to signal a new day as the pair slipped behind the evergreen bush that offered a screening barrier of thick leaves where other shrubbery was in a state of winter nudity. It was there that they had left the articles of disguise to aid their getaway. There were a couple of battered buckets some cans of paint and brushes; a pair of smocks as worn by workmen, liberally splattered with old paint; a pair of caps, also paint-splattered and a large sheet of the kind used by painters to protect furniture. Bold as brass, the pair left the scene of their crime by the garden gate in the guise of painters with Sephton carrying the box, wrapped in the sheet, under his arm.

  They had pre-planned this departure carefully, so that, after walking for some distance through this more genteel district, they were soon close to Birkenhead’s docks where streams of workers were gathering in the vicinity of the Liverpool ferry boats.

  Many residents of Liverpool worked in Birkenhead and vice-versa, so this gathering and mingling of both sets of passengers on the landing stages was a regular event of the working day. In an era when working people commonly wore the garb of their calling day in and day out and policemen and soldiers were compelled by law to do so, two men garbed as painters among a crowd of genuine daily toilers were likely to be taken without question for what their clothing declared them to be.

  The Liverpool bound vessel was waiting to take passengers on board when Sephton and Twist arrived at the landing stage. A chilly wind, polluted by the smoke and odours of dozens of riverside industries was blowing off the river and a dock policeman in tall hat and blue tunic was standing at the bottom of the gangplank, swinging his arms to stimulate his circulation.

  As Sephton and Twist joined the stream of passengers shuffling up the gangplank, they passed him and he cast his eye over the gear they carried, including the sheet concealing the long box under Sephton’s arm.

  ‘Off to do a bit of painting, lads?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeh, some offices in Dale Street,’ responded Bill Twist without batting an eye.

  ‘Good thing you’ll be working indoors,’ said the good natured policeman. ‘I reckon we’ll have rain later, if not snow.’

  Shuffling on up the gangplank, the two burglars exchanged sly smiles at having smuggled the stolen box past the limb of the law so easily. On the open upper deck, crowded with workers because its accommodation was cheapest, they sat with a group of genuine toilers. Each took out his British working man’s comforter, the clay pipe, lit up and smoked contentedly throughout the short passage in spite of the river wind.

  When they arrived on the Liverpool side of the river, they had more good fortune in not being challenged by those known in their social circles as “scuppers”—policemen—of whom there were many on duty and, once they were out of the dock gates, they hastened through streets of old houses whose character became increasingly sinister the deeper they penetrated the district.

  They came to a narrow street of frowning old houses where they climbed the broken steps and entered the ever open front door of one known as Ma Sugden’s Boarding House—in reality, a sailors’ doss house. They entered a sparsely furnished front room which had been exclusively reserved for them. There, they dumped their painting gear, took off their smocks and Sephton placed the box, still wrapped in the sheet on the scarred table in the middle of the room.

  They sat in two rickety chairs and waited.

  ‘D’you reckon he’ll come?,’ asked Bill Twist.

  ‘Course he’ll come,’ said Sephton. ‘Why would he put up the job then welsh on us?’

  ‘Dunno, except he’s a Dago and you never can tell what a Dago will do,’ replied Twist.

  ‘You’re being illogical, lad,’ scorned Sephton. ‘The fella from London wants that box—or whatever’s in it—badly. Besides, he’s paid Ma Sugden for the use of this room. He’ll show up all right.’

&
nbsp; ‘I’d like to know more about him,’ commented Twist. ‘He takes good care we never learn his proper name or where he really comes from.’

  This was true. Mr. O burst into their lives having tracked them down to the Mermaid and Flagon, a dockland tavern that was their regular drinking den. He was all aristocratic style, making it plain that he considered himself to be far above a pair of Liverpool “scallies” such as themselves. He proposed the theft of the box from the home of the distinguished American exile and offered a price. The three met again only twice to iron out the plan, the rendezvous being pubs in different parts of Liverpool where they were unknown.

  The canny Mr. O admitted he was from London but from which part he never said. Nor did he ever disclose how he’d heard of the two provincial thieves but they were highly flattered by news of their fame reaching the capital. From the street outside Ma Sugden’s Boarding House, there came the jingle of harness trappings, the clip-clop of a horse and the grind of iron-rimmed wheels on hard cobbles.

  ‘It’s him—coming in a cab!’ declared Bill Twist.

  From beyond the window came a hoarse command to stop from the cabby to his horse and, a couple of minutes later, Mr. O entered the room. He was tall and well turned out in a black winter topcoat and a top hat and gloves and he carried a black, silver headed stick. As soon as he entered, Sephton and Twist, drilled in the slavish subservience the English lower classes were expected to show to those who considered themselves to be their betters, immediately stood up. Each whipped off his workman’s moleskin cap.

  Mr. O had a thin wisp of a light coloured moustache which, with his olive skin strengthened the suggestion of foreign origins. Another alien touch was the scent of Turkish cigarettes that came into the room with him. Although cigarettes were brought to the notice of the British smoking public more than a decade before when British troops fighting in the Crimean War adopted them from their Turkish allies, they never fully caught on. The stolid British smoker might concede that, remembering the privations and shortages the troops had to endure in the Crimea, it was understandable that they would accept anything that could be smoked when the Turks made the comradely gesture of offering their cigarettes. But the only proper smoke for an Englishman was his traditional pipe or cigar.

  Mr. O, however, seemed to be addicted to cigarettes. He smoked them with a quick, nervous sucking action as if hungry for nicotine. Even before offering any greeting on entering the room, he produced a case from which he took a cigarette. He lit it with a flint and wheel lighter. Then his only greeting was a curt nod to his small, undernourished partners in crime.

  ‘Did you get it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. There it is, on the table,’ said Charlie Sephton.

  ‘Any trouble with the police?’ asked O, walking to the table. He picked up the box and unwrapped it from the sheet.

  ‘No, sir. Everything went as clean as a whistle,’ said Sephton.

  ‘As clean as a whistle, sir,’ echoed Twist, thinking that emphasising the criminal skill of his partner and himself might induce O to increase their reward.

  Surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke, Mr. O examined the brass locks on the box. ‘No sign of a key, I suppose’ he commented.

  ‘No sign, sir,’ said Sephton.

  ‘No matter. It can be put right easily enough. The price we settled on was five pounds each, I think?’ said O.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sephton and Twist in unison and with enthusiasm.

  From his pocket, O produced a soft leather bag fastened with a drawstring. From it, he took a number of gold coins and placed them in two small piles on the table. Remembering the instructions of their youth, emphasising that they should show some decorum in the presence of their betters, the pair tried to avoid looking like birds of prey swooping on carrion when they grasped the coins and pocketed them.

  Mr. O stepped back towards the door with the box in his possession.

  ‘You’ll be going back to London, I suppose, sir,’ ventured Sephton.

  O looked at him imperiously. ‘I shall and that’s as far as I intend to discuss this little adventure of ours,’ he responded curtly.

  He opened the door and left with a trail of perfumed smoke lingering behind him.

  There was such a note of finality about his departure that Sephton and Twist felt they would never see “the fella from London, the Dago”, again.

  But it hardly mattered. He had left their pockets heavy with gold!

  CHAPTER 2

  A PAIR OF CONVERSATIONS AND NO SALE FOR MR. O

  Septimus Dacers chuckled. ‘My dear Miss Van Trask, you do have a lively imagination—lady detectives, indeed!’

  Miss Roberta Van Trask, frowning only slightly, looked at him coolly.

  ‘It does not surprise me that you are scornful,’ she said levelly. ‘I fear you are a typical man and always ready to laugh at a new idea if it is put forward by a lady. Well, I believe ladies could bring some special talents to police work. Has it never occurred to you that because of her sex, a lady can go into places a man cannot go? Disguised as a female servant, perhaps; or maybe as woman shop assistant. If there were need to deal with small children, it seems logical that a lady would be preferable to a frightening male with a face full of whiskers and a shouting voice. I fear we ladies will never reform you men. You will always consider us to be your inferiors.’

  ‘You do me an injustice,’ Dacers objected. ‘I do not consider you or any lady to be inferior to men. I have the greatest admiration for feminine intelligence and ability…it’s just that there is so much rough and tumble in tackling crime that it is—well it’s—er—just not a ladylike business.’

  ‘Tosh, Mr. Dacers,’ Miss Van Trask said, almost in pity. ‘You are just like the bulk of men—totally hidebound in your view of women.’

  The sunshine, remarkably strong for early February, streamed through the tall window of the breakfast room of Carrington’s Hotel, close to the United States’ Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, where Miss Van Trask’s father, Theodore Van Trask, was a senior officer under US Ambassador, Charles Francis Adams. It touched highlights to the silver teapot, and the china on the table at which the couple sat. It gave an enhancing emphasis to the delicate beauty of Miss Van Trask’s face, framed in the halo of her bonnet and the inner rim of neatly dressed dark hair. Together with her sparkling blue eyes, it brought out one of the many attributes of this young American woman that fascinated Septimus Dacers: the hint that a lively, tomboyish spirit of adventure danced just beneath her calm and dignified demeanour. Doubtless it was this that prompted her to mention that she would quite like to be a detective, which caused Dacers to laugh.

  He was a private enquiry agent, so called because the official police did not like such functionaries calling themselves detectives. His laughter set off one of their spirited discussions, a feature of their weekly breakfasts.

  ‘Mr. Dacers, you claim detective work is not ladylike and you talk of rough and tumble. Well, I think you’ll agree that there was a great deal of extremely nasty rough and tumble in our Civil War, so recently ended,’ she said. Her long residence in Washington, DC, cheek by jowl with the State of Virginia, had given her speech the soft and warm cadences of the American South. ‘Well, Clara Barton was inspired to leave comfortable government employment in Washington and, without any training, to take up caring for the wounded, learning as she went along. Why, when attending to a wounded man on the battlefield, an enemy bullet ripped her dress and killed her patient. She didn’t run away screaming; she simply moved on to the next man who needed attention. Now, she’s revered in America just as your own Florence Nightingale is revered here. She inspired many Northern women to follow in her footsteps and there were plenty of Southern women who did the same thing. The battlefield hospitals were dreadful places, soaked in blood and filled with men suffering from the most grievous wounds. I suppose you’ll tell me i
t was unladylike for those women to take up such work.’

  Dacers, felt his defences falling under her attack and was beginning to regret his typical mannish reaction to her contention that there was a place for women in police work. He liked her fighting spirit and the way she stood her ground in an argument, He liked the emphatic way in which she stated her case, with her blue eyes flashing earnestly but otherwise without any emotion. He didn’t even mind that she usually beat him with her logic.

  There were many things about Roberta Van Trask that attracted Septimus Dacers. Indeed, he felt more than attraction. The plain fact was that he loved her. It was, however, an unspoken love. He was older by a few years and he mentally magnified the point, believing that if he proposed marriage, she would reject him, seeing him as almost an old man.

  Now, on the point of conceding defeat in a verbal clash once again, he said: ‘Miss Van Trask, I have told you I have nothing but admiration for women and their courage and devotion. In so many ways they shame us men. It is not the women of the world who take to the musket and the cannon to settle big differences. They understand too well the sorrow war brings. Why, I even think women should have the vote. Mr. John Stuart Mill is soon to bring a Bill before Parliament, calling for female suffrage. I feel he is right, though many are laughing at him. With some female influence in government, I’m sure there would be more humane laws in the land.’

  ‘Yes, and perhaps more scope for womankind to enter the professions and trades’, she said.

  ‘I agree. If we do reach the remarkable point of having ladies in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, who’s to say we will not have ladies keeping the Queen’s—or perhaps King’s—peace as detectives and policemen?’

  ‘Policewomen if you please, Mr. Dacers,’ she corrected, smiling. ‘Policewomen!’

  ‘Well, if it comes to pass let us hope it does so when the present crinoline craze is over,’ Dacers said. ‘Our lady constables would have a hard time of it chasing fleet footed felons if attired in anything so highly attractive but so utterly illogical as the creation you are sporting this morning,’