Stilton looked guilty.
‘Aye. I’m not dumping you, honest-but there’s things best said copper to copper.’
‘That’s OK, Walter. I understand. There’s something I could be getting on with anyway. Why don’t you pick me up around lunchtime?’
Cal went back to the sixth floor and found his something wrapped in his dressing gown, drying her hair.
‘You see him off then?’
‘Kitty,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’
‘Like wot?’ she said.
§ 53
Inspector Drew held the ration book up to the light. Then he took a large magnifying glass from the top drawer of his desk, and scrutinised it. It was a full minute before he spoke. ‘It’s as though he’d signed it. The silly sod.’
Stilton said nothing. He liked Drew. He was his opposite as a copper-young, technically-trained, a desk and paper man, a meticulous man with a field of expertise at his fingertips, not the shoe-leather, brown mac and make-it-up-as-you-go-along copper he knew himself to be. More than he liked him, he admired Drew. It was hard not to. In his way he was the English, the civilised version of that lunatic Pole Kolankiewicz out at the Hendon lab. You admired Kolankiewicz, you respected his talent, but you’d never say you liked him.
‘It’s perfection. What the Ministry of Food aspires to and will never attain. So silly. It would be a piece of cake for him to make a messy one, but no-he has to turn in a work of art.’
‘He?’ Stilton said. ‘Who’s he?’
‘Forsyte. Lawrence Forsyte. It’s his work. I’ve no doubt about it. Best in the business. Least he was till I nicked him in ‘37. Five to seven years for forging five-pound notes.’
Stilton found this confusing.
‘We didn’t have ration books in 1937. And this is bang up to date.’
Drew put the paraphernalia of his trade down and chewed a moment on the end of his pencil.
‘Walter-what I have to tell you must go no further. You do understand that, don’t you?’
‘O’ course.’
‘Forsyte served less than three years. He was paroled in January last year.’
‘Then it’s time we yanked on his leash. He could go down for another stretch for this, as well as the one he hasn’t finished.’
‘No, Walter. That’s just it. He can’t and he won’t. Forsyte works for us now. Or to be more accurate, for your lot.’
‘The Branch?’
‘Not quite-but you do have the same masters. Penny dropped now, has it? Good. Larry forges all the German stuff we need to send our chaps into occupied territory. Travel permits, identity cards. They’ve even got him at work on Reichsmark notes. Whatever he’s done, he’s pretty well untouchable.’
‘What he’s done is forge ration books. If that’s for the war effort I’m a monkey’s uncle!’
‘Well-I’m sure he’d say the temptation was too great. I keep an eye on him, of course. Helps to let him know he’s not entirely ignored by the Forgery Squad. But most of the time they use your colleagues in the Branch as nothing more than go-betweens, and the truth is they let him do what he wants-orders, naturally-and with that kind of freedom he’ll dabble in this sort of thing just to see if he can do it. I shouldn’t think it bothers the spooks-if they have to turn a blind eye to it, then of course they will.’
‘I took this off a dead German agent two nights back. How do you explain that? Is that dabbling?’
‘I don’t explain it. And I’m inclined to take it as seriously as you do.’
‘Then you’ll tell me where I can find him?’
‘If I do-two things. First, you never got his address from me, and second, you can threaten him all you like, but you can’t pull him. Shout at him, let him taste the back of your hand, tickle his ribs with a truncheon, if you like, but if you go after Forsyte all you’ve got is one big bluff.’
‘Story of my career,’ said Stilton.
Even now Drew was still thinking about it, teeth clamped onto his pencil, little flakes of yellow paint sticking to his lip.
‘OK. He has a printing shop in Silver Place. Nothing more than an alley at the end of Beak Street. You’ll find him in the cellar.’
‘I’ll find him? You mean you’re not coming?’
‘Sorry, Walter. You’re on your own. Whatever you do when you get there, I don’t want to know. And if he picks up the phone to Military Intelligence, I shall want to know even less.’
§ 54
They arranged to meet mid-afternoon. It seemed simple enough to let Cormack find his own way there. What could go wrong? It was, as Stilton pointed out, ‘ironically close to Marshall Street’ and Cormack had said, ‘That’s not irony, Walter, that’s just coincidence.’ All the same the American had got there ahead of him. Stilton rounded the corner from Lexington Street to find him sprawled on the pavement, feet in the gutter, head down on the slabs. He stirred his boots and, as much as a portly policeman could, he ran, reached the body, seized a shoulder and turned it over.
‘Walter, this guy is unbelievable. He’s down there forging twenty dollar bills!’
Then Stilton spotted the fanlight at pavement height, opening into the cellar. He hoped he wasn’t red in the face-he knew he was breathless-hoped Cormack couldn’t see what a fool he’d just made of himself. He tugged at the knees of his trousers, stuck his backside in the air and bent to peer through a century of grime into the cellar. At some point the fanlight had been painted over from the inside, but it was flaking now, and there were half a dozen peepholes into the world below the street.
‘Look along the wire in the middle of the room. Those green strips of paper are twenty dollar bills-and those big white ones… aren’t they-‘
‘Fivers,’ Stilton said. ‘Five-pound notes. The bugger’s gone back to printing fivers! This bloke’s a one-man crime wave. I’d love to nick ‘im. It’s going to be a temptation not to. How you get a wrong’un to talk without the threat of arrest, God knows. I’ve all the power of a friendly fireside chat.’
‘I think the FBI might have a few things to say to him themselves.’
‘Let’s get in there. I feel like a penniless kid at the sweetshop window.’
Stilton hammered on the door. The bolts shot back and an over-refined voice said from the dark interior, ‘You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you till tomorrow. But as you’re here…’
The door swung wide, they found themselves following a man’s back down the cellar steps, still not having seen his face, a smell of oil and ink and the clatter of printing presses.
Forsyte stood behind his desk, still not looking at them, filling a small attache case. A five-pound note brushed Stilton’s hat as he passed under it. The blasé-ness of the man made his blood boil. Five-pound notes-the ink not even dry-pinned up with clothes pegs like the Monday wash-and he didn’t seem to give a damn who saw.
‘There’s six Ausweisses in the names you asked for. Half a million in Reichsmarks and there’ll be another two hundred thousand tomorrow. I don’t know what’s so urgent, but perhaps next time a telephone call?’
He looked up at them, clearly feeling none of the confusion they felt themselves. He was thirtyish, a thin moustache, prematurely grey above the ears-and Stilton was right about the voice. It was, he thought, posh with a long ‘o’, the fake culture of an upper-crust accent by lower-class pretensions. Hence the fondness for a loud waistcoat and a bow tie. They went with the over-articulation and the prolonged vowels. Was nothing real about this man? Was he as phony as his currency? Perhaps he wore false teeth and a cardboard collar?
‘You were expecting me?’ Stilton said.
‘I was expecting a policeman. You’re a policeman. You look like every Special Branch copper they’ve ever sent as a bagman. If not, you’ve missed your vocation and I’m about to send for a real one.’
He reached for the telephone. Stilton and Cormack stepped forward with the synchronicity of Busby Berkeley dancers, but it was Cormack who spoke first.