“Would you like us to arrest them, Mr Holmes? Any people who turn up at your rooms in Pall Mall tomorrow?”
“Arrest them, Lestrade? Why ever should we arrest them? On what charges, pray?”
“Being in receipt of forged currency, of course,” said the Inspector.
“But the notes will just have been delivered from the Bank of England itself!”
“They won’t know that, will they? Even the most dim-witted criminal from the East End will be able to work out that if you’re selling a five pound note for five shillings, it must be a fake. Once we’ve got them all locked up we can see who will sing for their supper, or my name’s not Lestrade!”
“My dear Lestrade,” said Mycroft, taking a long pull at his cigarette, “your plan is admirable in its way, but there is one disadvantage. The criminal world will know at once that the scheme has the law behind it. They may suspend their operations which is the last thing we want. Follow them, follow them all, Lestrade. One or two may be known to your colleagues already and may be willing to talk, who knows. But we need to know who they are and where they come from. Unless I am very much mistaken, the Count and his people will want to have a look. They will want to see if they have competition on their hands. Do you see?”
“I do, Mr Holmes. You are playing a longer game than me. But what should I do if twenty people turn up? Or thirty? Or fifty?”
“My dear Lestrade, in that case you must have fifty officers lurking in the alleys round Pall Mall to follow all fifty if need be. This is a national emergency, not some break in down Bermondsey way.”
“God bless my soul,” said Inspector Lestrade, and helped himself to one of Mycroft’s cigarettes.
*
Early the next morning it was the same routine as the day before. This was the shape of Mycroft’s life. His apartment in Pall Mall. The Government Offices. The Diogenes Club. Another sheaf of papers, another bunch of telegraph messages, another Turkish Delight, another problem for the man who audited the accounts of all Government Departments. This morning he read three items of his correspondence twice and began writing furiously in a large red ledger in front of him. Normally, Mycroft did all his calculations up to the third decimal point in his head. Only arithmetic on a heroic scale needed to be written down. After three minutes hard work with his left hand there was a low sound, a sort of muted growl, as if an animal was in pain.
“This is bad, Tobias, very bad,” he whispered.
“Sir?” said Tobias, looking up from his own paperwork.
“It’s the prices. They’re going up faster than we thought. The forgers are winning.”
“How do you know that, sir?”
“Well, people often think prices are going up all the time. That’s not quite true. Some prices go up, others come down. I have two means of my own for keeping track of price changes. I see the cost of all the raw materials for the Navy building their ships, timber, steel, guns, fittings of every sort.”
Mycroft waved a bundle of papers in the air, as if they were to blame.
“Those costs are now going up at the rate of fifteen per cent a year. And I have a private arrangement with six leading shops and hotels in the capital here who send me figures every month for cost of raw materials, numbers of people employed, prices charged and profit earned. Those figures for the cost of raw materials are also going through the roof. This inflation will soon be uncontrollable. We are losing the battle. We are in danger of going down to a heavy defeat.”
“What can we do about it, sir?” asked Tobias, polishing his glasses with a fresh white handkerchief, washed and ironed by his mother. “More than we are doing already, I mean.”
There was a long pause. Mycroft flicked some more flakes off his shoulder with one hand and twirled his pen around with the other.
“I want you to set up a meeting for twelve o’clock this morning. The people invited will just have to drop whatever they are doing, Tobias. That milksop Governor of the Bank of England, I should never have sanctioned his appointment, he’d better come. Tell him to bring his expert on High Street banking with him, not one of their specialists in currency or international finance. And we want the Managing Director of Watermans and his expert on printing notes.”
“Are you going to warn them about how serious the situation is, sir?”
“More than that, Tobias, we need to have a set of arrangements in place to deal with the crisis.”
“A sort of alternative plan, sir?”
“Exactly so, Tobias, exactly so.”
Shortly after twelve o’clock the men were seated round the conference table at the far end of Mycroft’s office. The Governor was looking worried, rubbing his hands together. The director of Watermans looked quite cheerful as if this meeting was preferable to whatever he had been doing before. The two experts were ready for action, pens and notebooks at the ready.
“Gentlemen,” Mycroft began, “we are here to discuss a specific problem. For reasons of national security I cannot reveal the reasons behind this extraordinary gathering, but I trust you will believe me when I tell you that they are extremely serious. I want the answer to a simple question. How long would it take to change all of the nation’s currency, not to get rid of the pound, but to replace all currency notes now in circulation with new ones to approximately the same value.”
“God bless my soul,” said the Governor. “That’s a very difficult question. I would have to set up a special sub-committee at the Bank to consider the matter and get back to you.”
Mycroft snorted and blew a mouthful of smoke in the general direction of the Governor.
I presume, from what you say,” said the printing expert from Watermans, a man in his early thirties with curly brown hair and the most expensive suit in the room called William Hooper, “that you would be wanting the design on the new notes to be noticeably different from the designs now in circulation?”
“You would be correct in that assumption, Mr Hooper,” Mycroft replied, staring hard at the young man. Tobias, taking notes at the back of the room, had not expected that anybody would work out why the new currency was needed as fast as this.
“And would you want to replace them all at once, Mr Auditor? Or are there some that do not need replacing?”
“We need to replace them all. If we can do it in one go, that would be preferable.”
William Hooper was scribbling furiously. “It’s a pity we have lost so many of our key players in the last couple of years,” he said. “Roach, Fettiplace-Jones, Browne, they have all been replaced, but the new men are not that experienced. If we just change the typefaces, that should take the least time. If we work twenty-four hours a day for the duration we could replace the designs in five weeks, a week for each note. Then it would take five days to print them with all the usual security measures. We would propose, in these unusual conditions, to produce the notes in six weeks. Please do not assume that we will be able to meet that target, but we will do our damnedest.”
Tobias was wondering if Hooper had made the connection between forged notes in circulation and the disappearance of three of Watermans staff. He rather hoped not.
“I am much obliged to you, Mr Hooper,” said Mycroft. “How long would it take to deliver the new notes, to put them in circulation, Mr Governor?”
The Governor mumbled into his beard. Mycroft shot another blast of smoke at him.
“If I might speak to that question, Mr Auditor,” the Bank of England’s High Street banking expert, Hugo Thomas, a tall thin man with greying hair, a small moustache and an MCC tie, “the key to the timescale is the distribution of the money all around the country. The plan would work like this. It would start on a fixed day, outside the holiday season, the first of October, the first of January, that sort of thing. On that day all the new notes would be introduced through the banks and finance houses and the big shops and would be legal tender. The old notes would continue to be valid for two months. At the end of that period the old notes would cease to be l
egal tender. So the whole process, taking into account the Waterman timetable, and allowing us two weeks to deliver the money round the country, the whole process could be completed in four months.”
“Could we save a week or so if we used the Army to deliver the new currency?”
“We could, Mr Auditor, that is a helpful suggestion.”
“Gentlemen,” said Mycroft, “let me sum up for the Government. I want Mr Hooper and Mr Thomas to leave this meeting and draw up detailed plans for carrying out these proposals. I do not want them implemented yet, but I want them ready to move into action when I give the word. Thank you all very much for your time.”
When the four visitors had left Mycroft kicked the leg of his desk in disgust.
“Four months!” he said. “Four bloody months! I didn’t think it would take that long. In four months time prices could have gone through the roof and the British economy could be drifting towards the rocks.”
Tobias had only seen Mycroft this angry once before when he had a life and death struggle with an incompetent Chancellor of the Exchequer who wanted to announce the abolition of income tax just before a general election.
“Perhaps we’ll find out something to our advantage this evening when out visitors come to 68b, sir.”
Mycroft cheered up. “The visitors, yes, the visitors. I had almost forgotten about our late afternoon guests.”
*
Mrs Hudson made a special effort to clean up Mycroft’s rooms while he was at his office that morning. Something in his manner when he told her he was expecting visitors at six o’clock led her to believe that one or two of them might be rather unorthodox citizens. She was well used to these kinds of gentlemen, having received all sorts and conditions of men from the King of Bohemia to Professor Moriarty himself in 221b Baker Street.
By a quarter to six that afternoon Mycroft’s forces were in position. Seated at the little coffee table was Tobias, a fresh ledger in front of him. Lodged on the table was an open suitcase filled to the brim with Treasury notes of all denominations. Tobias’s job was to receive and hand over the money. His boss felt that such exchanges were beneath the dignity of the Government Auditor. Mycroft was in his usual chair near the window. Seated on his left hand was a tall, burly man with a very large jacket with very large pockets and a pistol concealed in each one. This was Detective Sergeant Patrick Baldwin, one-time boxing champion of the Metropolitan Police, and in Inspector Lestrade’s words, ‘a good man in a rough house.’
Lestrade himself and another heavyweight policeman, this one a veteran of the second row of the Police Rugby Fifteen, were waiting in reserve in the spare bedroom. Lestrade had declared that they must be ready for all eventualities. Fifty more plain-clothes officers were deployed along Pall Mall. When a visitor left he would be followed.
The officers who began furthest away from 68B would gradually come closer as their colleagues set off on their missions of pursuit.
At one minute past six, there was a ring of the doorbell. Two lots of footsteps could be heard coming up the stairs. Detective Sergeant Baldwin put a hand in his pocket. Tobias fiddled with his tie. Lestrade was peering through the keyhole. Mycroft was smoking one of his foul cigarettes.
“A gentleman to see you, sir. Mr Smith.”
Mycroft showed his visitor to a chair. The man was about forty years old and there was nothing remarkable about him at all. You would not have looked at him twice if you passed him in the street or sat next to him on the bus. He was an average man, average height, average amount of hair, a bland countenance. He looked round the room, the portly figure of Mycroft, the tall plain-clothes policeman, Tobias and the money. His gaze locked onto the suitcase full of notes.
“I have come about the money,” he began.
“Indeed so, Mr Smith,” said Mycroft.
“Would you permit me to examine one of the five-pound notes? I shall do no business here without an examination.”
“Is it only the five-pound notes you are interested in, Mr Smith?”
“That is correct.”
Tobias handed him a crisp new five-pound note. The man held it up to the light. He ran his right hand very slowly over the surface. When he put his other hand in his pocket Detective Sergeant Baldwin tightened his grip on his pistol.
Smith brought out a magnifying glass of considerable power. He examined the note for another couple of minutes.
“It’s a very fine piece of work,” he said. “One of the best I’ve seen.”
“Do you see many forgeries, Mr Smith?” said Mycroft.
“I’ve seen a lot in my time, sir.”
“Recently?” asked Mycroft.
“That’s as maybe. I haven’t come here to discuss recent forgeries. I’ll take fifty pounds worth of these five pound notes if I may.”
“Do you mean you will give me fifty pounds of your pounds, or do you want fifty pounds of my pounds?”
Tobias had worked out that if Smith handed over fifty pounds, he, Tobias, would have to hand over one thousand. A fifth of his capital would be gone inside five minutes.
“I will give you fifty of these pounds, Mr Holmes. In return, as per your advertisement, I expect one thousand of your notes on that table.” Smith had put his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and laid down fifty pounds in five rather battered ten pound notes on the coffee table. Tobias handed over a thousand pounds worth of five pound notes in bundles of a hundred at a time. Smith checked that there were genuine notes and not blank pieces of paper in each pile. He stowed the money in various pockets and stood up.
“Thank you gentlemen,” he said, “and a very good afternoon to you all.” The transaction had taken less than ten minutes.
Five minutes passed, then ten. Tobias was beginning to wonder if they would only have one customer. At twenty past six there was another ring at the front door bell.
“A gentleman to see you, sir. Mr Hammond.”
Mycroft knew Hammond by sight. He kept the greengrocer’s shop not far from his offices.
“Mr Holmes, it is you,” said the greengrocer who was still wearing his work uniform of brown apron with a tattered cap that had once been blue on his head. “It must be alright then.”
“Good to see you, Hammond. Have you come to buy some money?”
“That’s what I meant just now when I said it must be alright, sir. It’s my little boy, Mr Holmes,” the greengrocer went on, “he’s very sick and they say he needs all kinds of treatment I can’t afford. Not the way things are at the moment, if you understand me.”
Hammond was twisting his hands together as he spoke. “I’ve only got five pounds,” he went on, “that’s all I have managed to save these last five years, four children being so expensive to bring up.”
“My dear Hammond,” Holmes handed a rather grubby five pound note over to Tobias who placed it carefully in an envelope and wrote Second Man on it in large letters, “you did well to come here to us today. For reasons I cannot explain this offer ends in another an hour and ten minutes time. How would you like the money?” Tobias had noted before how Mycroft seemed to have a clock in his brain which told him the precise time of day whenever he wanted to know it, without needing to glance at a watch or a clock.
“Five pound notes would be best,” said Hammond. Tobias handed over twenty brand new notes. “Do you know, Mr Holmes,” said the greengrocer, staring in wonder at his new wealth, “I’ve never had this much money in my hand, not once. I’m so grateful.”
With that the greengrocer hurried towards the door. “Just one last thing, Mr Holmes,” he said, “there’s nothing funny about these notes, is there? They’re not fake, are they?”
“They’re fine,” said Mycroft with a smile. “You could take them down to the Bank of England right now, and they’d tell you they’re absolutely genuine.”
“I didn’t think there’d be anything funny going on with you involved, Mr Holmes. I’m so grateful. Good evening to you both.”
As the door closed beh
ind him Mycroft rose to his feet and took up a position by the window. As the greengrocer passed up the street, a slim figure in a battered raincoat detached itself from a doorway and followed him towards Whitehall. But it was another figure that held Mycroft’s attention, a small man lurking behind a pillar by the entrance to The Hypocrites Club across the road. He slipped onto the pavement while a bus was passing. Two minutes later he was shown into the room by Mrs Hudson.
“Mr Jones, sir,” she announced. Mycroft doubted very much if he was inspecting a genuine Jones as the man sat down. Names in this case, he reflected, were as fickle as forgeries. The man was in his middle thirties, of average height, clean-shaven with large eyes that seemed to flicker between grey and a light blue. He was wearing heavy boots not often seen in London’s West End. He had a long scar running down his right cheek.
“These notes of yours,” Jones began, “I would like to inspect some if I might be allowed.”
He spoke with a very slight accent, as if English might not be his mother tongue, or he had lived abroad for a long time. Like the first caller, Mr Smith, he took a note out of his own pocket and compared it with the five pound note handed over by Tobias. Then he held them up to the light. Out came the microscope. Jones turned the two notes over and over until his eyes must have grown tired of looking at them. He ran a finger very gently down his cheek with the scar.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said, returning the note to Tobias. “I have a proposition to put to you. I am here as the representative of a group, a consortium, of investors. They are very interested in your notes. That is why they sent me here to investigate them. I have made a preliminary inspection. I would like to take two representatives of each denomination away with me to make further tests. I shall, of course, pay for them. If I and my colleagues are satisfied with the notes, we would like to purchase whatever number you have currently available, and commission more if you have the ability to produce them. Would this plan be agreeable?”
The Mycroft Holmes Omnibus Page 3