Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I think it’s unlikely there will be a prosecution after all this time,’ said Fry. ‘Not for something you did when you were eight years old.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Malkin. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘There was a lot of money,’ said Cooper. ‘We’d like to know what you did with it. What did you spend it on?’

  Malkin smiled then, a sheepish, embarrassed smile. ‘You won’t believe me.’

  ‘Try us. We’ve heard all sorts of things that people waste their money on. Foreign holidays? Women? Did you gamble it away?’

  ‘None of those things.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I didn’t spend it at all. I’ve still got it.’

  Cooper stared at him. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘You found yourself suddenly in possession of a fortune, and you’re telling me that you just put it in the bank and saved it up for a rainy day? You didn’t spend any of it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But I didn’t put it in the bank either.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘I’m going to have to show you,’ said Malkin.

  George Malkin led Cooper and Fry up to the top of his garden, through a gate and across a snow-covered paddock. They had to lean into the wind and lift their feet high out of the snow to make progress. But Malkin seemed almost unaware of it. He ploughed across the field like a carthorse, with his head down and his shoulders hunched forward inside his overcoat.

  At the far side of the field was a stile built into the drystone wall. They crossed it carefully, and found themselves floundering waist-deep in a drift that had been blown up against the other side. When they struggled out of it, they were panting with the effort. In front of them was another field, but this one sloped gently up to the rocky base of the hill, and the snow became less deep as they crossed the last few yards.

  It was only when they were standing at the foot of the hill that they saw they’d reached the entrance to an old mine. It was no more than a cleft in the rock face, about as wide as a man’s shoulders – not wide enough, in fact, for George Malkin, who had to slide through it sideways. A fine layer of snow had blown a foot or two into the entrance, but beyond that the rock floor was only damp, so that it gleamed in the light of an old bicycle lamp that Malkin took from his pocket.

  ‘We should have brought a Dragon light from the car,’ said Fry. ‘I can hardly see a thing.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Malkin. ‘We’ll not be doing much reading or anything.’

  Like all caves or mines, even the smallest and most insignificant, there were unidentifiable noises and echoes in its darkest corners, and angles of rock that made sudden black fists in the edges of the shadows. The smell was of wet sand, and the dampness was as heavy as a blanket, as if they’d stepped below the level of the water table.

  George Malkin used the wavery beam of the bicycle lamp to locate a deep crack in the wall. He lifted a foot-wide boulder clear and fumbled inside with one hand until he drew out a length of baling twine. The twine was bright blue, and it seemed to be the only flicker of colour in the gloom. At first, there seemed to be no weight on the end of it, but then a small rope appeared, knotted to the twine.

  ‘Maybe you could help me pull,’ said Malkin.

  Cooper took hold of the rope and they pulled on it together, while Fry held the lamp over them. The light failed momentarily and left them completely in the dark until she shook it, rattling the battery inside the casing to restore the corroded connection. Cooper could hear a dragging sound deep inside the rock. He could feel the resistance on the rope of something heavy that snagged on every bump. They seemed to be pulling at about a forty-five degree angle.

  ‘It’s a leather bag of some kind,’ said Fry, peering over the shoulders of the two men into the hole. ‘No, two bags – there’s another one tied behind it.’

  ‘Aye, there were two,’ said Malkin as the bags appeared over the lip of rock. ‘We managed one each, just about. Of course, in those days, I was only a little lad. I was small enough to slide right down into that hole. It levels out at the bottom, like a shelf. Ted sent me down there and passed the bags to me. I remember they blocked the way at first, and they were so heavy I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to get out again. But Ted was there. I knew he would rescue me if I got stuck.’

  Malkin grabbed a leather strap as Cooper took the weight on the rope. ‘It was totally dark down there,’ he said. ‘I hated the dark, always have. I’ve been scared of it since I was tiny. Darkness and deep water – those are the things that frighten me. I always had nightmares of being trapped somewhere with water coming in. You’d think you would grow out of that when you’re not a nipper any more. But it just got worse after Ted was killed. I reckon it was because I knew he wouldn’t be there any more to rescue me.’

  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 see 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 pulling them through the buckles. Finally, the flap fell open, and he saw it was a sort of saddlebag like those carried by Wells Fargo riders in western films. Inside, it was packed with something solid and white. Cooper couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

  ‘Bring the light closer,’ he said.

  Fry crouched alongside him. He could hear her breathing in his ear, and he could see 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 find 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’d 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 £5 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 Branton.’

  Together, they carried the bags back to the house. On the 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 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 been shot down,’ said Malkin. ‘There had been 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 tellin
g. I always thought Ted would know what to do with the money. I thought he had a plan. He never told me what it was, but then I was only his annoying little brother, and I didn’t need to know. When he went off for his National Service, I thought we’d do something with the money after 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 years old, and 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 something 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. They 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, I 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.’

  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, but I was terrified they would find the bags – my bags. I pictured one of them shining his lamp into the crack, and that would be that, all those years of waiting wasted. I thought of starting a rock fall to block the mine entrance, so that they would all die in there. It seemed like the only option. Then at least nobody would have got the money.’

  Malkin paused, momentarily shaken by a desperate memory. ‘But eventually they came out with their ropes, and they went away. And the bags were still there, where I’d 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 …’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Malkin ‘They took those notes out of circulation in 1957. I should have spent them when I was thirty 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 didn’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 was 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 it to a bank they’d know straight away it was stolen and I’d be 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 be no risks that way.’

  ‘Does your wife not know about the money?’ said Cooper, recalling Florence’s constant questions about her private medical treatment.

  ‘I’d met Florence about three years before, and we’d started saving to get married. It was daft, but I let her think I had some 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 bags 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 be round here. I couldn’t risk that, when I was planning to get wed. So there was no money, as I’d always let Florence think.’

  Cooper picked up the bag. ‘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 Daley. If you want to have a look at some stuff, you have to ask to see his upstairs room.’

  Fry exchanged a glance with Cooper. ‘We’ll do that,’ she said.

  Malkin looked at the bag in Cooper’s hands. ‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘It’s too late now, but it’s something I won’t stop thinking about until the day I pop my clogs.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I wonder if I could have spent some of 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?’

  ‘But Mr Malkin,’ said Cooper, ‘your wife is in the Old School Nursing Home.’

  ‘Not any more, poor old lass. They phoned me just before you arrived. She died about two hours ago.’

  32

  Cooper spent a few minutes ringing around his contacts before they set off 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’d finished, tapping her fingers on the dashboard.

  ‘So? Did he say why they would have sent all the money in £5 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 £5, so that it wasn’t worthwhile making counterfeits. Of course, there were £1 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’d 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 £60 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.’

  ‘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 are worth whatever somebody will pay for them.’

  ‘It’s crazy.’

  ‘It’s called a free market economy, Ben. That’s why a footballer is paid millions of quid for kicking a ball about once a week. And it’s why you can’t afford to buy somewhere decent to live. Let’s face 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’d 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 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 Daley was alone in the bookshop as usual. He looked over his glasses in outrage at Cooper and Fry when he finally 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 books,’ said Fry. ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘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.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You sell books 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 books. 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 off 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 off his glasses and fiddled inside his 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.