Ikey worked quickly, using a bull's eye lamp he'd trimmed in the scullery, to move the stolen goods from the attic down to the small back room leading into the alley. He left a large square parcel carefully wrapped in oilcloth until last. Ikey was forced to rest several times as he struggled with it down to the scullery and, despite the cold, he was perspiring profusely by the time he heard the low pre-arranged whistle of one of the lads. The cart, the noise of its wheels padded by the six inch fall of snow, had arrived silently at the rear of the house. The two boys stood rubbing their hands and blowing into their mittens as Ikey opened the scullery door.
With the help of the boys the goods were quickly loaded, placing the square oilcloth parcel into the cart last before covering the whole load with a blood-stained canvas, the cart having been obtained from a mutton butcher at the Garden. Ikey gave each lad a shilling, with the promise of another to come, and asked them to await him at the Pig 'n Spit.
Ikey then let himself into the basement quarters down a short flight of stairs and through a door within the house to which only he had a key. Upon entering he became aware of a deep and resonant snoring coming from behind a curtained partition at the far end of the large room which his partner kept as his own quarters. He had no need to concern himself with careful movement since Van Esselyn, the deaf and dumb master forger, would not awaken unless shaken.
Ikey knew the room off by heart, having often enough visited it before dawn. The remainder of the room contained the engraver's bench with etching tools, a large lock-up cupboard for storing the special paper and precious inks procured from a source in Birmingham, a general work bench, hand press, guillotine, and finally the splendid Austrian-manufactured printing press.
Ikey quickly crossed over to the beautiful press and, kneeling beside it, he pushed down hard on what appeared to be a knot-hole in the floorboard. The board immediately snapped open an inch. Ikey repeated this with similar knot-holes in adjacent and parallel boards until the ends of four short boards stood raised an inch above those surrounding them. Ikey then removed the loose nails and lifted the boards to reveal a steel safe set into the floor, its door facing uppermost.
Ikey quickly worked the combination and removed five copper plates etched with the markings of Bank of England notes of various denominations. The etching for the Bank of England five pound note he immediately placed back in the safe. Then he removed all the counterfeit notes from the safe, save for a small bundle of five pound notes. He locked the safe again and carefully replaced the floor boards, clicking the knots back into place and pushing all but one of the nails back into their slots, so that it was once again firm underfoot. The nail he placed not quite beside the empty hole into which it belonged so that even the most careless searchers might eventually become suspicious.
Ikey spent several minutes more looking about the room and then quietly left, carrying the etching plates and counterfeit notes under his arm. He collected a hemp bag, into which he placed the copper plates and the larger denomination forged notes taken from the safe. Dipping into the interior of his coat he added Mary's ledger, the pewter tankard and the doily, and killing the wick of the bull's eye lamp, he returned it to the scullery, whereupon he let himself out into Bell Alley and back onto Winfield Street. He had less than an hour left before dawn, when the raid was due to take place.
The snow storm seemed to have abated, the wind had dropped and now everything lay quiet, covered in a blanket of fresh snow. But Ikey, his yellow boots crunching on the carpet of white, saw none of the new innocence of his surroundings. Nor did he appreciate the crispness of the clean air which the wind had punched through the rookeries, replacing the foulness which lingered all year, trapped within vile-smelling yellow smog, until the first big snowfall froze the stench, covered the filth and banished the smog. Ikey's mind was otherwise occupied with the problems which lay ahead. In his entire life he had never faced a more difficult situation. If he were to be arrested and convicted on a conspiracy to defraud the Bank of England through forgery, he would be fortunate to escape the hangman's noose. But should this misfortune be avoided it would most certainly be replaced with 'The Boat'. He was sure to get life and be transported to Botany Bay or the new prison island of Van Diemen's Land.
It had been Hannah who had persuaded Ikey to deal in counterfeit money. Ikey recalled how he had at first been most reluctant, but eventually became pleased with the suggestion for all the wrong reasons, the major one used by a nagging Hannah being that the notorious Van Esselyn was deaf and dumb. This, to someone of Ikey's cautious nature, had been what had finally persuaded him.
At first Ikey had insisted on the most basic equipment for the forger, such as could be quickly disposed of in an emergency, but the Liverpool contact grew too greedy and demanded too great a share of the resultant notes. The decision to add the latest in printing machinery finally came about when Ikey discovered a method of obtaining the very paper used by the Bank of England. Furthermore, he had also located a source of inks from Birmingham which closely matched those needed for all the denominations of Bank of England banknotes. The temptation to print on his own had simply been too great and Ikey set about obtaining, mostly from Austria, the machine parts needed for a highly sophisticated press. The only drawback was that such specialised and large equipment could not be easily dismantled, or moved, nor could it be passed off as a press used for printing works of the usual everyday kind.
Ikey cursed his carelessness and his vanity. The location of his forgery business was another of his exquisite ironies. Often a rich banker would be in the process of dalliance, his fat bum pumping up and down, while directly under his squeaking mattress, separated only by a wooden floor, was a sophisticated printing press in the hands of one of Europe's most skilful engravers and designed to rob the very institution to which this pompous and randified gentleman belonged.
Ikey once confided in Mary that he had invented the three 'f' system of profit: 'A modern economic marvel, my dear, fencin', fuckin' and forgery. We take profits from the bottom, the middle and the top, an excellent arrangement, do you not agree? In the basement we make money, in the house proper we employ your plump little pigeons to make riches from downed breeches and at the very top, we store plate, silver and gold taken from the rich by the bold!'
Ikey, although in shit deeper than that which flowed from the two hundred sewerage outlets which spilled into the River Thames, was far from witless in this matter facing him. For example, he had all the documents of rent and receipts for the printing machinery made out in Van Esselyn's assumed name, this being Thomas Thompson. These were all signed by Van Esselyn. Nor did Ikey's name appear, other than as landlord, on any other documents of a formal nature. In the event of a raid, Abraham Van Esselyn, alias Thomas Thompson, would take the blame and Ikey would assume the unlikely role of a rather stupid absentee landlord, hugely astonished to find his premises, hired innocently to a simple printer, so ill-used by this rapacious and untrustworthy foreigner. The fact that the printing press was of such a specialised nature that it immediately condemned its owner as a high-class printer of banknotes he would claim was beyond his limited knowledge of mechanicals and machinery.