‘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
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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, when 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?’
V V
‘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.’
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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.’
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‘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
