The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton Read Free Book Online

elaborate scheme. Teddy Burke was nobody’s fool. “Five quid’s no great matter.”
    “Ten,” the man said, in a weary voice.
    “I have to think of me boys.”
    “No,” the man said, “this is you, alone.”
    “What’s the lay, then?” Teddy Burke said.
    “Lots of bustle, a ruck touch, just enough to set the quarry to worry, make him pat his pockets.”
    “And you want me to come up dry?”
    “Dry as dust,” the man said.
    “Who’s the quarry, then?” Teddy Burke said.
    “A gent named Trent. You’ll touch him with a bungler’s dip in front of his offices, just a roughing-up, like.”
    “Where’s the office, then?”
    “Huddlestone & Bradford Bank.”
    Teddy Burke whistled. “Westminster. Sticky, that is. There’s enough crushers about to make a bloody army.”
    “But you’ll be dry. All you’ve to do is worry him.”
    Teddy Burke walked a few moments, looking this way and that, taking the air and thinking things over. “When will it be, then?”
    “Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock sharp.”
    “All right.”
    The red-bearded gentleman gave him a five-pound note, and informed him he would get the rest when the job was done.
    “What’s it all about, then?” Teddy Burke asked.
    “Personal matter,” the man replied, and slipped away into the crowd.

CHAPTER 8

The Holy Land
    Between 1801 and 1851, London tripled in size. With a population of two and a half million, it was by far the largest city in the world, and every foreign observer was astonished at its dimensions. Nathaniel Hawthorne was speechless; Henry James was fascinated and appalled at its “horrible numerosity”; Dostoevsky found it “as vast as an ocean … a Biblical sight, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes.”
    And yet London continued to grow. At the mid-century, four thousand new dwellings were under construction at any one time, and the city was literally exploding outward. Already, the now familiar pattern of expansion was termed “the flight to the suburbs.” Outlying areas that at the turn of the century had been villages and hamlets—Marylebone, Islington, Camden Town, St. John’s Wood, and Bethnal Green—were thoroughly built up, and the newly affluent middle classes were deserting the central city for these areas, where the air was better, the noise less bothersome, and the atmosphere in general more pleasant and “countrified.”
    Of course, some older sections of London retained a character of great elegance and wealth, but these were often cheek by jowl with the most dismal and shocking slums. The proximity of great riches and profound squalor also impressed foreign observers, particularly since the slums, or rookeries, were refuges and breeding places for “the criminal class.” There were sections ofLondon where a thief might rob a mansion and literally cross a street to disappear into a tangled maze of alleyways and dilapidated buildings crammed with humanity and so dangerous that even an armed policeman did not dare pursue the culprit.
    The genesis of slums was poorly understood at the time; indeed, the very term “slums” did not become widely accepted until 1890. But in a vague way the now familiar pattern was recognized: a region of the city would be cut off from circulation by newly constructed thoroughfares that by-passed it; businesses would depart; disagreeable industries would move in, creating local noise and air pollution and further reducing the attractiveness of the area; ultimately, no one with the means to live elsewhere would choose to reside in such a place, and the region would become decrepit, badly maintained, and overpopulated by the lowest classes.
    Then, as now, these slums existed in part because they were profitable for landlords. A lodging house of eight rooms might take on a hundred boarders, each paying a shilling or two a week to live in “hugger-mugger promiscuity,” sleeping with as many as twenty members of the same or