They set the bags on the floor. Fry crouched over them with the lamp, rattling it every now and then to keep its beam alive. ‘We really should have brought some more light, she said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Let’s have a quick look, then we’ll take them up to the house,’ said Cooper.
‘It won’t take you long to sec what it is,’ said Malkin. He was standing above them, and his voice sounded unnaturally distant and echoey, as if he were back in the hole that his brother had sent him into as a child.
Cooper’s fingers were clumsy in his gloves, and the straps of the first bag had stiffened and cracked, so that he had difficulty
359
pulling them through the buckles. Finally, the Hap Fell open, and he saw it was a sort of saddlebag like those carried by Wells Fargo riders in Westerns. Inside, it was packed with something solid and white. Cooper couldn’t believe what he was looking at. ‘Bring the light closer.’ he said.
c*c* ‘
Fry crouched alongside him. He could hear her breathing in his car, and he could sec a cloud of her breath drifting through the beam of light from the lamp. He tugged at the contents of the bag, and a lump of the white mass broke away into his hand. It wasn’t solid at all, but consisted of tightly packed bundles which had stuck together in the damp that had seeped into the leather bag.
Cooper tilted the bag more, and the heaps of paper slid out. They were like wedges of frozen snow slipping on to the ground and separating into dirty crystalline rectangles. They were unfamiliar, yet he knew what they were.
‘Bank notes,’ he said.
‘They can’t be,’ said Fry.
‘I think you’ll rind they are.’
‘But they’re white. Has the colour faded? Is it foreign currency?’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re British sterling.’
Cooper looked up. He could barely see George Malkin’s face. His expression was impassive. For a big man, it was surprising how easily he had almost faded into the rock among the shadows outside the light of the lamp. ‘Mr Malkin?’
‘Aye, you’re right,’ he said. ‘But I’m not surprised you’ve never seen them before. You’re much too young, the pair of you.’
‘I’ve heard of them, though,’ said Cooper. ‘These are 15 notes, aren’t they? White fivers. They haven’t been in circulation for nearly fifty years.’
‘That’s right. White fivers. They’re part of the wages for RAF Bcnson.’
Together, they carried the bags back to the house. On the
C*^ ^ o
sitting room table, the bank notes looked almost at home, as if they were back in their own time again. It was as if a part
360
of George Malkin’s life had been frozen in 1945 and had never changed since.
‘We thought at first it was a German plane that had keen shot down,’ said Malkin. ‘There had keen stories just before that of a Junkers that had been downed near Manchester. So we didn’t think it was wrong to take the bags.’
‘But you must have heard later that the aircraft was British/
^
‘It was too late then. We knew we couldn’t tell anybody about the money. Ted threatened me not to say a word. Not that I needed telling. I always thought Ted would know what to do with the monev. I thought he had a plan. He never told
-O 1
me what it was, but then I was only his annoying little brother, and I didn’t need to know. When he went oH (or his National Service, I thought we’d do something with the money alter he came back. I thought he would tell me what the plan was then, because I’d be seventeen and grown up enough. But, of course, Ted never came back.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Ted was called up when he was eighteen vcars old, and
:& v ‘
they sent him to Malaya. He was dead before he was nineteen shot by a Chinese communist rebel when his troop train was ambushed.’
‘Did your mother and father never know about these bags?’ asked Cooper. He watched Malkin shake his head. ‘How on earth did you keep them secret all that time?’
‘I left them in the old mine workings, where we’d put them. Sometimes, as a lad, I would go up there with a torch, and I’d get the bags out and look at the money. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I knew I’d do .wmetAin^ with it one day. It made me feel different from the rest of the kids. I really believed I was a secret millionaire. That helped a lot when I had bad times. I hey were like friends waiting to help me out when I needed them. Even after Mum and Dad died, I didn’t bring the bags into the house. They never knew about the money while they were alive, and it seemed wrong to produce it when they were dead. As long as their memories still hung around the house, 1 felt as though I’d be giving away my secret to them. It’s surprising how long it takes people to leave a place after they’re dead.’
361
Cooper nodded. ‘So you never moved them?’
‘Once. One day I saw some potholers coming into the mine. They had ropes and helmets and lamps, all the proper tackle. There was nothing I could do while they were in there, hut I was terrified they would find the hags my hags; I pictured one of them shining his lamp into the crack, and that w ould he that, all those years of w aiting wasted. 1 thought of starting a rock fall to hlock the mine entrance, so that they would all die in there. It seemed like the only option. Then at least no6oJy would have got the money.’
Malkin paused, momentarily shaken hy a desperate memory. ‘But eventually they came out with their ropes, and they went away. And the bags were still there, where I had put them. I dragged them out and brought them up to the house. But then I started worrying about Florence finding them, so I took them back.’
Cooper stared at the bundles of notes. Those in the middle looked as though they might be as clean and pristine as when they were first issued.
‘I don’t know much about currency,’ he said. ‘But I’ve a feeling …’
o
‘Oh, I know,’ said Malkin. ‘They took those notes out of circulation in 19S7. 1 should have spent them when I was twenty years old, when I could have made proper use of them and set myself up for life.’ He began to toss the bundles back into the bags. “I remember the day I read the news that white fivers wouldn’t be legal tender any more. It was like all my dreams had been smashed. That money was my future, as I thought. It felt as though I’d just lost a fortune. It was like thinking you’d won the jackpot on the National Lottery, then finding you’d lost the ticket. They’re not even a secret any more, are they?’
‘But why Jjjn’t you spend it when you were thirty?’ said Fry, staring at him in bafflement.
Malkin shrugged. ‘It might sound daft,’ he said. ‘Maybe it waj daft. But I’d never been abroad or anything back then. I was too young to have gone away in the war, too old to take foreign holidays for granted like the young folks do today. I honestly didn’t know what to do with the money. I thought if I took
362
it to a hank they’d know straight away it was stolen and I’d he arrested. I was frightened to do anything with it. It seemed better to keep it as my secret. It was safer to sit here at home and dream of what I might spend it on. There seemed to he no risks that way.’
‘Does your wife not know ahout the money?’ said Cooper, recalling Florence’s constant questions ahout her private medical treatment.
‘I’d met Florence ahout three years before, and we’d started saving to pet married. It was daft, hut I let her think I had some
o &‘
money saved up. Well, I had, in a way. Then I found out they were scrapping the white fivers. Without Ted, I didn’t know what to do. It was a couple of days later that I got the chance to go out to the old mine and check the hags one last time. I had to make sure the money was what I thought. Yes, white fivers, all of it. I knew I couldn’t take it all to the bank to change it it would look too suspicious, and the police would he round here. I couldn’t risk that, wh
en I was planning to get wed. So there was no monev, as I’d always let Florence think.’
Cooper picked up the hag. ‘What happened to all the souvenirs that you had, Mr Malkin? Who did you sell them to?’
‘The only man who deals in that sort of thing around here the bookseller in Edendale, Lawrence Dalcy. If you want to have a look at some stuff, you have to ask to sec his upstairs room.’
Fry exchanged a glance with Cooper. ‘We’ll do that,’ she said.
Malkin looked at the hag in Cooper’s hands. ‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘It’s too late now, hut it’s something I won’t stop thinking ahout until the day I pop my clogs.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I wonder if I could have spent some o( that money on getting treatment for Florence. Do you think it would have helped? Do you think I could have used the money to save her life?’
VV
‘But, Mr Malkin,’ said Cooper, ‘your wife is in the Old School Nursing Home.’
‘Not any more, poor old lass. They phoned me just hefore you arrived. She died ahout two hours ago.’
363
32
IJen Cooper spent a few minutes ringing around his contacts before they set of? back from Harrop. Eventually, he managed to track down a member of the antiques dealers association who specialized in coins and bank notes.
Fry waited impatiently until he had finished, tapping her fingers on the dashboard.
‘So? Did he say why they would have sent all the money in 15 notes?’
‘Counterfeiting,’ said Cooper.
‘Oh?’
‘Apparently, the Germans were into it in a big way. They thought they could destabilize the British economy and bring the country to its knees. They were producing half a million counterfeit notes a month at one stage of the war. The Bank of England .stopped issuing denominations of over 15, so that it wasn’t worthwhile making counterfeits. Of course, there were ll and ten-shilling notes as well then. The white fivers were the first to go, though.’
‘So George Malkin’s haul is worthless.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Cooper. ‘Not now. If he had put them on the market judiciously, he could have been coining it in handsomely for a few years now.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m told they’re collector’s items, those notes. According to the expert, white fivers from 1944 in good condition would sell for about 160 each.’ ‘Jesus/ said Fry. ‘George Malkin had two thousand of them stashed away.’
‘Nice, eh?’
‘And we’ve got to return them to the RAF. Not so nice.’
o
‘Blasted collectors,’ said Cooper. ‘Why don’t they live in the real world? They distort the value of everything.’
‘It’s like anything else,’ said Fry. ‘Things arc worth whatever somebody will pay for them.’
364
‘It’s cra/y.’
‘It’s called a free market economy, Ben. That’s why a footballer is paid millions of quid for kicking a hall ahout once a week; and it’s why you can’t afford to huy somewhere decent to live. Let’s lace it, mate, what you have to offer just isn’t marketable.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t thank me. Thank the ungrateful public.’
But Cooper wasn’t thinking of his own position. He had learned never to expect thanks. He was thinking of Walter Rowland sitting at his dining-room table, unable to lift a mug of tea, unable to help himself, and too stubborn to ask for help from anyone else. He was thinking of Rowland starving in a house full of tinned food because he was too proud to tell anyone he couldn’t use a tin opener, of an old man frightened to turn up the heating because he didn’t know whether he could afford the electricity bill. That was how much society had valued what Walter had done for it. And George Malkin had sat and watched his wife die because it had never occurred to him that people would be willing to pay much, much more for a bagful of outdated and useless bank notes than for the treatment to save a woman’s life.
‘Where are we going next?’ said Fry. ‘Shall I guess?’
Lawrence Dalcy was alone in the bookshop as usual. He looked over his glasses in outrage at Cooper and Fry when he Anally answered their banging.
‘Had any customers today, Lawrence?’ said Cooper.
‘I’m doing my best. A customer here, a customer there, you know. I expect to reach double figures by the end of the year. What do you want?’
‘There are lots of other things in life apart from hooks,’ said Frv. ‘Can we come in?’
v
‘You can find everything you want to know in books. Life, death, love, the specifications for a 1968 Ford Capri ignition system.’
‘And aircraft wrecks?’ said Cooper.
‘Sorrv?’
365
‘You sell hooks on aircraft wrecks.’
‘You know I do you bought a couple yourself.’
‘I’ve heard there’s quite a demand for that sort of thing. And not only hooks. Other items. Souvenirs. Collectibles.’
Lawrence nodded. ‘I believe you’re right.’
‘Fetch a good price, do they? There’s more profit in aircraft souvenirs than in books that never move oft the shelf, I guess. A bit of diversification?’
Lawrence fidgeted with a set of keys, watching Cooper’s eyes.
‘Will you show us the upstairs room, Lawrence?’ said Cooper.
The bookseller took of! his glasses and fiddled inside his
c*
waistcoat for his tiny screwdriver. His eyes looked weary without the glasses. There were blue patches underneath them, and the tired creases that come with age.
‘It’s not illegal, you know.’
‘Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?’ said Fry. ‘Lead the way.’
Lawrence Dalcy led the way to the foot of the bare wooden stairs, past the sign that said ‘Sfo^On/y’. The stairs were narrow and unlit, and the boards creaked alarmingly underfoot. Their footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and once they had turned a corner halfway up, they lost the benefit of the light from the shop. They could see their way only by a naked bulb somewhere high above them, and its reflection in a series of tiny stone-mullioned windows set into the back wall. The light picked out thick strands of blackened cobwebs clinging to the ceilings and the highest corners. The banister rail felt slightly sticky under Cooper’s fingers, but he was afraid to let go of it, in case the stairs disappeared in front of him and he lost his footing.
He could see that the building had once been a town house for some wealthy family, a tall, rambling place that the bookshop occupied only half of. The stairs they were climbing were so narrow that they must once have been designed only for the use of servants, who were expected to be thin and undernourished. Probably they were expected to be
366
able to sec in the dark, too, and survive the winter without any heating.
Along the skirting boards and on the window ledges, Cooper saw more black mouse droppings. He wondered if Lawrence would be interested in having a cat.
Lawrence stopped in front of them and jingled his keys. Cooper could make out a dusty corridor ahead. Unsurprisingly, it was piled high with books stacked against the walls. There were two or three doors further down, but they were inaccessible because of the number of books in front of them. To the right, though, there was one clear doorway near the head of the stairs, tucked under a sloping section of roof. They must be close to the eaves of the building.
Fry stood behind him, just below one of the mullioned windows. Cooper turned to exchange a look. He saw her lace was lit by a strange mottled pattern from the light reflected off the dust on the window.
‘No wonder people like Rddie Kemp are never out of work,’ she said.
All the doors were narrow and low, as if they had been made (or the use of midgets. The paint on them was old and peeling, but must once have been dark green, and they had brown bakelite handles that had got chipped over t
he years. There was no carpet on the floor of the passage, and probably never had been. The floorboards had been painted black, and that was the limit of decoration. Cooper shivered. The passage was cold, as cold as George Malkin’s farmhouse, but with a different feel to the coldness. Malkin’s house had dripped with the chill of emptiness, but this place felt full of phantoms. He could imagine a crowd of pale, thin ghosts in ragged clothes who walked continuously backwards and forwards, day and night, bearing bowls of hot water and candles for their masters.
‘Useful-looking attic,’ said Fry. ‘Have you ever thought of converting it into student bedsits?’
A gleam came into Lawrence’s eye for a moment at the prospect of income from student rents. Hut he looked at the stacks of books, and his face fell.
‘I don’t think it’s practical.’
367
‘Let’s have a look at this room/ said Cooper. ‘It’s what we came for, after all.’
The upstairs room at Eden Valley Books was full of aviation memorabilia, much of it of Second World War vintage. One of the most eye-catching items was an RAF pilot’s Irving jacket, which fitted Ben Cooper fine when he tried it on. There had been a few repairs to the leather, but the y.ips and the belt still worked, and the lining was very warm. He could have kept it on and worn it all day.
‘Two hundred pounds/ said Lawrence. ‘It’s still got the MoD label and everything.’
‘I’ll not bother.’
A cockpit clock was dated 1940. The label said it was in working condition, though it currently showed the time as four twenty-eight. It was priced at 17S. A leather Hying helmet with attached oxygen mask seemed to be one of the prime exhibits at ^450. Cooper could sec that Lawrence put more thought into the prices for his collectibles than he did into pricing his books.
Blood on the tongue bcadf-3 Page 41
