“What if it’s in the roof?” she said desperately. “Or the cellar?”
“Then there’ll be stairs to it—and there aren’t.”
“Then it must be here. We just haven’t found it.”
“Your logic is typical,” he said tartly. “We haven’t found it, so it must be here.”
“That’s not what I said. You have it backwards.”
He raised his eyebrows. “It must be here because we haven’t found it? That is a deductive improvement?”
She took the lantern and left him standing in the dark. There was nothing to lose by searching a little longer. This was the last chance. Tomorrow they would leave, and either Baird McIvor would face trial, and maybe be hanged, or else live with another “not proven” verdict over his head. Either way, she would never be sure who had killed Mary. She needed to know, not just for herself but because Mary’s wry, intelligent face was still as sharp in her mind as when she had gone to sleep that night on the train to London, thinking how very much she liked her.
She did not find it by accident, but by methodical, furious banging and thumping. A heavy panel of the wall slid away and opened up a narrow door. The room itself must originally have been part of the next-door warehouse and not the Farraline building at all. Its very existence was concealed because a floor plan would have shown no discrepancy. One would have had to have the plans of both buildings and compare them.
“I’ve got it!” she cried out exultantly.
“Don’t shout,” he whispered from just behind her, making her start and nearly drop the lamp.
“Don’t do that!” she said as she led the way into the hole ahead.
With the lantern high and as far in front as she could hold it, the entire room was visible as soon as they were inside. It was windowless, about twelve feet by ten feet large, low-ceilinged, and there was a single air vent in the far corner leading to the outside. It was at least half filled with printing presses, ink, stacks of paper, and guillotine cutters. More space was taken by a table like an easel and a rack of fine etching and engraving tools and acid. Over the table was a bracket for a large, unshaded gas lamp. When lit it must have shed a brilliant light.
“What is it?” Hester said in bewilderment. “There aren’t any books here.”
“I think we have just found the source of the Farraline wealth,” he said in awe, almost under his breath.
“But there aren’t any books. Unless they shipped them all out?”
“Not books, my love—money! This is where they print money!”
Hester felt a shiver run through her, not only for the meaning of what he had said but also for the way in which he had addressed her.
“You mean f-forged money?” she stammered.
“Oh yes, forged … very forged. But they must do it damnably well, to have got away with it for so long.” He
moved forward and bent over the presses to examine them more closely, taking the light from her. “Lots of it,” he went on. “Here are several pound notes, five pounds, ten pounds, twenty. Look, all the different banks in Scotland—the Royal, the Clydesdale, the Linen Bank. And here’s the Bank of England. And these look like German, and here’s French. Very eclectic tastes, but by heaven they’re good!”
She peered over his shoulder, staring at the metal plates.
“How do you know they’ve been doing it for a long time? It could have been just recently, couldn’t it?”
“The family wealth goes back a long way,” he answered. “Well into Hamish’s time—I’ll wager he was the original engraver. Remember what that woman said in church? And Deirdra said something about his being a good copyist.” He picked up a note and examined it carefully. “This one is current. Look at the signature on it.”
“But if they’ve got new notes as well, who’s the artist now? It’s not the sort of thing you can go out and hire.”
“Of course it isn’t. I’ll lay any odds you like that it’s Quinlan. No wonder he’s so damned arrogant. He knows they can’t do without him, and they know it too. He has them over a barrel. Poor little Eilish. I expect she was his price.”
“That’s unspeakable!” she said in horror. “Nobody would …” Then she stopped. What she had been going to say was absurd, and she knew it. Women had been given in marriage to suit the ambitions or the convenience of their families since time immemorial, and for worse reasons than this. At least she was still at home, and participated in the wealth. And Quinlan was roughly her own age, and not uncomely, or drunken, diseased or otherwise repellent. And it was even possible he had cared for her originally, before she betrayed him by falling in love, however unwillingly, with Baird. Or was that Oonagh’s attempt at self-protection, to marry her exquisite younger sister to a man who would possess her and brook no disloyalty?
Poor Oonagh—she had failed. Their acts might be without blemish, but no one could govern their dreams.
Monk laid the notes back gently, exactly as he had found them.
“Do you suppose Mary knew?” Hester asked in a whisper. “I … I hope not. I hate to think of her being party to this. I know it is not as evil as really hurting people … it’s only greedy, but …”
He looked at her, his face bleak, the lean planes of his cheeks and brow harsh in the lamp’s glow, his nose exaggerated.
“It’s a filthy crime,” he said between his teeth. “You sound as if there is no victim, because you aren’t thinking. What would you do if half your money was worth nothing and you didn’t know which half? How would you live? Who could you trust?”
“But …” There were no words, and she stopped.
“People would be afraid to sell,” he went on savagely. “You might trade, but who with? Who wants what you have to offer and can give you what you need? Ever since man acquired goods and leisure, specialized his skills and learned to cooperate one with another for everyone’s benefit, we have used a common means of exchange—money. In fact, ever since we began anything one could call civilization and learned that we are more than a collection of individuals, each for himself, and formed the concept of community, money has been pivotal. Pollute that, and you strike at the root of all society.”
She stared at him, comprehension of the magnitude of it dawning inside her, of the totality of the damage.
“And words,” he went on, his face burning with the fierceness of his emotion. “Words are our means of communication, that which raises man above the beasts. We can think, we have concepts, we can write and pass our beliefs from one land to another, one generation to the next. Pollute our relationships with flattery and manipulation, our language with lies, propaganda, self-serving use of images,
the prostitution of words and meaning, and we can no longer reach each other. We become isolated. Nothing is real. We drown in a morass of the sham, the expedient. Deceit, corruption and betrayal … they are the sins of the wolf.” He stopped abruptly, staring at her as if he had only just that moment really seen her.
“The wolf?” she urged. “What do you mean? What wolf?”
“The lowest circle of hell,” he answered slowly, rolling the words as though one by one. “The last pit of all. Dante. The three great circles of hell. The leopard, the lion and! the wolf.”
“Do you remember where you read that, who taught it you?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
He waited so long she thought he had not heard her.
“No …” He winced. “No, I don’t. I’m trying … but it’s just out of reach. I didn’t even know I knew it at all until I started to think about forgery. I …” He shrugged very slightly and turned away. “We’ve learned all we need to here. This could be the reason Mary was killed. If she learned about it somehow, they’d have to keep her silent.”
“Who? Which one?”
“God knows. Perhaps Quinlan. Maybe she knew about it anyway. That’s for the police to discover. Come on. We can’t find out anything more here.” He picked up the lantern and went back towards the way they had come in. It took him a moment or two to find the door because it had swung closed again. “Damn,” he said irritably. “I could have sworn I left it open.”
“You did,” Hester said from close behind him. “If it swung shut on its own, it must be weighted. That means we can open it from here somehow.”
“Of course we can open it from here,” he said. “But how? Hold the lantern up.” He ran his fingers over the wall experimentally, covering every inch. It took him something less than three minutes to find the catch. It was not (concealed, simply in an awkward place. “Ah …” he said with
satisfaction, pulling it hard. But it did not move. He pulled again.
“Is it stuck?” she asked with a frown.
He tried it three times before he accepted the truth. “No. I think it is locked.”
“It can’t be! If it locks just by closing, how did Quinlan get out? He can’t have worked in here without being able to get out if he wished to!”
He turned around slowly, looking at her with the kind of candor they had so often shared. “I don’t think it did lock itself. I think we have been locked in deliberately. Someone realized we took Hector at his word, and waited here to see if we would come. This is too precious and secret to allow us to blunder into and repeat.”
“But the workers don’t come back until Tuesday. Quinlan said it was closed because of the gas lines,” she said with mounting realization of what it meant. The room was small, windowless, effectively sealed but for the air vent. Tuesday was at least thirty hours away. She went over to the vent and stretched up her hand to it. There was no breath of air, no chill. It had been blocked—of course. There was no need to add the rest.
“I know,” he said quietly. “It looks as if the Farralines win in the end. I’m sorry.”
She looked around with sudden fury. “Well, can’t we at least destroy this machine that prints the money? Can’t we smash the plates or something?”
He smiled, then he started to laugh, quietly and with genuine amusement.
“Bravo! Yes, by all means, let’s ruin them. That’ll be something accomplished.”
“It’ll make them very angry,” she said thoughtfully. “They might be enraged and kill us.”
“My dear girl, if we are not already suffocated to death, they’ll kill us anyway. We know enough to hang them … we just don’t know which ones.”
She took a deep breath to steady herself. Although she had already realized it, it was different to hear him say so.
“Yes—yes, of course they will. Well, let us at least min their plates. They could still be evidence, in the event the police find them. Anyway, as you say, forgery is very evil; it is a pollution, a corruption of our means of exchange with one another. We ought to end this much of it.”
And
without waiting for him to follow, she went over and lifted up one of the plates, then froze.
“What is it?” he said immediately.
“Don’t let’s break them,” she said with a tingle of quite genuine pleasure. “Let’s just mar them, so little they don’t realize it, but enough that when they have printed all the money, unless they look at it very carefully, they will still pass it. But the first person who does look at it will know it is wrong. That would be more effective, wouldn’t it?
And
a better revenge …”
“Excellent! Let’s find the engraving tools and the acid. Be careful you don’t get any of it on your skin. And not on your dress, in case they notice it.”
They set about it with determination, working side by side, erasing here and there, making little blotching marks, but always discreetly, until they had in some way marred every single plate. It took them until after two in the morning, and the lamp was burning low. And now that there was nothing more to do, they were also growing increasingly aware of the cold. Without thinking, they automatically sat close together on some boxes of paper, huddled in the corner, and above the colder floor level. There were no drafts; the room was effectively sealed. And after their concentration on the plates had gone, they were also aware that the air was getting stale. A great deal of the space was already taken up with boxes and machinery.
“I can’t believe Mary knew about this,” Hester said again, her mind still hurt by the thought, teased by memories of the woman she had known, or thought she had
known, on the London train. “I really don’t think she would have lived off forgery all those years.”
“Perhaps she viewed it as you did,” Monk replied, staring into the little pool of light the lantern made. “A victimless crime, just a little greed.”
She did not reply for several minutes. He had not met Mary, and she did not know how to convey the sense of honesty she had felt in her.
“Do you suppose they all did?” she said at length.
“No,” he said immediately, then apparently realized the logical position in which he had placed himself. “All right, perhaps she didn’t. If she did, then all this”—he inclined his head towards the presses—“was no reason to kill her. If she didn’t, how do you suppose she found out? She wouldn’t have come down here looking for this room. If she knew, why did she not call the police? Why go off to London? It was urgent, but hardly an emergency. There was certainly time to attend to this first.” He shook his head. “But would Mary have exposed her own family to scandal, ruin and imprisonment? Wouldn’t she just have demanded they stop? That would be reason to kill her?”
“If I were a forger,” she replied, “I’d have said, ‘Yes, Mother,’ and moved it somewhere else. It would be infinitely safer than killing her.”
He did not reply, but lapsed into thought.
It was getting even colder. They moved closer yet, the warmth of each other comforting, even the steady rhythm of breathing a kind of safety in the threat of enclosing darkness and the knowledge that time was short and every second that passed meant one fewer left.
“What did she say—on the train?” Monk asked presently.
“She talked about the past, for the most part.” She thought back yet again to that evening. “She traveled then. She danced at the ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo, you know?” She stared into the darkness, speaking softly. It seemed appropriate to the mood and it saved energy. They were sitting so close together whispering would serve. “She
described it to me, the colors and the music, the soldiers in their uniforms, all the scarlets and the blues and golds, the cavalrymen, the artillery, the hussars and dragoons, the Scots Greys.” She smiled as she pictured Mary’s face and the light in it as she relived that night. “She spoke of Hamish, how elegant he was, how dashing, how all the ladies loved him.”