Bent Pitman is a criminal, and therefore his position's weak. He must
have some of that eight hundred left; if he has I'll force him to go
shares; and even if he hasn't, I'll tell him the tontine affair, and
with a desperate man like Pitman at my back, it'll be strange if I don't
succeed.'
Well and good. But how to lay hands upon Bent Pitman, except by
advertisement, was not so clear. And even so, in what terms to ask a
meeting? on what grounds? and where? Not at John Street, for it would
never do to let a man like Bent Pitman know your real address; nor yet
at Pitman's house, some dreadful place in Holloway, with a trapdoor
in the back kitchen; a house which you might enter in a light summer
overcoat and varnished boots, to come forth again piecemeal in a
market-basket. That was the drawback of a really efficient accomplice,
Morris felt, not without a shudder. 'I never dreamed I should come to
actually covet such society,' he thought. And then a brilliant idea
struck him. Waterloo Station, a public place, yet at certain hours of
the day a solitary; a place, besides, the very name of which must knock
upon the heart of Pitman, and at once suggest a knowledge of the latest
of his guilty secrets.
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