“My informant claimed that this man had, in fact, been stealing gold from all these places, and quite artfully, always managing to hide what he had stolen in his luggage. Since he travelled with a lot of equipment, including for hunting and mountain climbing, no one questioned the weight of his luggage. He also used his connections in the shipping trade to insert his crates amongst various shipments, mixing in the gold with other items, including lead shot.”

John opened his mouth to ask a question, but Edward shushed him. “Let me tell you everything first before you ask me any questions.”

Edward looked at John for any sign of protest, but John merely nodded.

He continued, “The informant said further that over the last six months, the man had been using the London Necropolis Railway, which terminates in Waterloo station, to transport his cache of gold out of his safehouses in London, by hiding the gold in coffins that are transported to Brookwood Cemetery, through trains run by the London Necropolis Railway. He has done this six times, and in coffins that take the last trains out of Waterloo each time, hiring mourners to pretend to be crying their eyes out over the dead in the coffin he is transporting the gold in, while it is being loaded onto the train at the Waterloo Station . He has managed to select the foggiest days to smuggle the gold in the coffins, and this has left no one the wiser as to what he is really doing.”

“I was told that when the coffin gets to Brookwood Cemetery, his men empty the coffin of the gold, and replace the weight of the coffin with stones, which is then buried in the same manner as all the other coffins. The men would load the bags of gold in a waiting Clarence, which would then take the gold to one of two farms in Surrey.”

When Edward paused, John cut in and asked, “You said you had an informant…”

“Yes,” Edward answered, and then looked at John solemnly, “To my knowledge, I’m the only one he has given this information to. When I last spoke to him, he told me where in Surrey the gold had been moved to. But I learnt last week that he was found with his throat slit in one of the alleyways down by Rotten Row. His death is not being looked into because people in the Yard think that he was just double-crossed by one of the prostitutes that he was known to frequent.”