In addition, by the 6 o’clock at night the day after, the train that would be travelling through London to Paris that would be ferrying the gold would likely be hit by the heist Mr. Pimms had been planning for many months. Based on what he had observed of the man, Edward knew in his gut that Mr. Pimms would be grimly determined to carry his plans out.

A few days earlier, the attempted heist of the payroll was stopped by Scotland Yard, and three men were arrested, but Mr. Pimms was not amongst them. Instead, the man was able to prove he was with his mistress in Birmingham that day, thus could not have been in the gang that attempted the robbery of the payroll coach.

Mr. Richard Mayne had been proud of the Yard’s success, and all the papers carried congratulatory stories of the daring exploits of the team that had stopped the attempted heist.

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News of the heist of the gold thought to have been secured in renowned Chubb safes, transiting through London, bound for Paris, exploded onto the scene, potentially jeopardizing the tenuous French-British partnership in the Crimean War.

John, Jack, and Lady Beatrice had been successful in stealing the gold from Mr. Pimms.

Months later, newspapers reported that a group of men including a man long suspected of running a ring of thieves, Mr. Pimms, had been arrested but only ten pounds of the gold could be recovered from them. The thieves had protested that the rest of the stolen gold had been stolen, in turn, from them. No one believed them, nor could people understand the seething rage of Mr. Pimms over what, if one were to believe rumors in the underground, was an even more audacious heist of a legendary gold cache.

But the spectacular arrests had cost Scotland Yard dearly. Edward Harranby, his men reported, had been killed by Mr. Pimms himself as they closed in on the lair in Surrey where Mr. Pimms and his men escaped to.

“Mr. Harranby had spent the morning and afternoon of that hot day in late July knocking on doors, looking under rocks, determined to catch the gang,” the policemen told Mr Richard Mayne when they finally made it back to Scotland Yard. “He was going through one farmhouse to the next, with only two others, real quiet-like, to avoid creating a ruckus, and alerting the men we were hunting that we were close. Finally, late in the afternoon we chanced upon the shed those men were holed up in, but, since we were outnumbered, Mr Pimms managed to escape and headed for the rocky hills while the others we couldn’t collar ran in other directions. So the three of us got separated.”