“Before I could investigate what had happened, without letting people know he was my informant, Mr. Mayne was told that the owner of the firm laying the cable was nervous about a gang of thieves that someone had told him was planning to hit the carriages that would be bringing the payroll to the workers on the next payday. And around the same time, suddenly this man from Mayfair began to lay out clues about a planned heist, which I was obliged to share with Mr. Mayne. So my orders were to focus on this possible heist of the payroll he may be pulling. ”

Edward looked around again, and then addressed John with an even more serious mien, “So there are two things I will be asking you to do. One would be to retrieve the gold from the two sites in Surrey, once I confirm their locations through my own investigations.”

John coughed, and asked with mock seriousness, “And that’s just one?”

“Yes. The other is to find out what he is really planning. And whether he intends to rob the gold bound for Paris.”

“Hmm… I see,” John said. “I take it since everyone else thinks it’s the payroll he’s after, you can’t put anyone else on the other possible, um, pulls, he may, in fact, be planning?”

“John, this information about what he has been doing, bringing gold into England, and then using the London Necropolis Railway to move the gold, is too important. I haven’t shared it with anyone else. Not even in the Yard. This is a lot of gold, and whoever gets this information could use it to take the gold for themselves. I dare not trust anyone there with this enterprise,” Edward said as he looked around again. Then he turned to look John in the eye, “But I trust you.”

John gave him a grim smile, “As always, Edward. You can count on me.”

Edward blew a breath out, and then asked, “Do you remember that code we came up with, back in university, when we wanted to tell each other something we didn’t want others to know?”

John nodded and laughed lightly, “I still have the list of names of our classmates and the numbers and symbols we assigned to the letters of their names in one of my notebooks from that time, along with the nouns and verbs they corresponded to, that we used to create our own version of English.”