The House with Nine Locks, page 10
Adelais explained about the Red Cross Charity Dance and the double-ticket policy. ‘I can pay you back for your half, only it might take me a while.’
She knew she wasn’t going to get away with leaving it there. She told Saskia about Sebastian’s classes, that she wanted to surprise him at the charity dance. He had assumed that dancing was beyond her, but she was going to prove him wrong. ‘I’ve been taking lessons at the bar. Hendryck says I’m getting the hang of it and he’s very tough.’
‘Well, I suppose it might be fun. Pa’ll give me the cash.’
‘Thank you, Saskia. I hate to ask, but I really want to go.’
Saskia smiled at Adelais and took her arm as they shuffled forward in the queue. Once she had tickets to the dance, the only issue remaining would be what to wear. Somehow, from somewhere, she was going to need a dress.
They had gone forward a few paces when Saskia said: ‘You told me Sebastian was like a brother to you.’
‘I know.’
‘So you can’t really dance with him, can you?’
‘Why not?’
Saskia pulled a face. ‘You don’t dance with your brother. I’ve a brother, so I should know. It’s, well …’ She lowered her voice. ‘Incestuous.’
‘Incestuous? It’s only dancing, Saskia.’
She looked over her shoulder. A woman with an ugly brown hat was staring at them.
‘It’s the thin end of the wedge. Everyone knows what dancing’s really for. My pa’s got a book about it. It’s actually a fertility display. You dance, and after you’ve danced, you mate.’
Adelais was glad Saskia couldn’t see her blush. ‘That’s not how they see it at the opera house. The woman in the box office was very clear about that.’
‘I’m just sounding a word of warning. You don’t want him getting the wrong idea.’
At that moment, Adelais was not sure what the wrong idea was.
They were almost inside the building. It looked like there were still some tickets for the Van Gogh film, so they wouldn’t have to see Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments instead, which they both agreed was a relief.
‘Of course,’ Saskia said, ‘if Sebastian thinks of you as a sister, he probably won’t want to dance with you either. The problem might not arise.’
‘There isn’t a problem, Saskia. You’re being—’
‘Isn’t he coming with a partner anyway? Who’s he coming with?’
‘His whole class is going, together.’
‘I see.’ Saskia nodded to herself, and reached into her bag for her purse. ‘An opportunity to play the field. He’ll have his eye on someone though, by now. He’s a boy, isn’t he?’
Saskia did not know what she was talking about, and Adelais got through almost the whole of Lust for Life without thinking about Sebastian dancing with other girls, or picturing one that he might like especially – a girl sweeter and prettier than she was. The idea did not make her jealous, in any case. What could be more ridiculous than being jealous of someone who might not even exist? Besides, Sebastian would spare her a waltz or two, and maybe a foxtrot – and maybe a polka as well, if she got that far with Hendryck – and she would have made her point. She would have proved that she was not a social liability. Sebastian wasn’t supposed to fall in love with her, or realise that he had been in love with her from the moment they met, because that was the kind of thing that only happened in films – films that cheered everyone up, perhaps, but had nothing to do with real life.
She told herself all this during Lust for Life, and again on her way home, and a few more times before she went to sleep. It was deliberate. Someone had once told her that if you thought about your feelings long enough, they would start to disappear.
The House with Nine Locks
SIXTEEN
Brussels, March 1957
There was something different about the call from Waregem. Major de Smet took down the information calmly, asking the same questions he always asked, but the way he sat in silence afterwards, it was obvious he had heard something significant.
‘Another find, sir?’ Lieutenant Toussaint said. ‘How many this time?’
De Smet took a long time to reply. ‘Waregem: get me the file.’ He tossed a key onto the desk. Toussaint picked it up and headed for the door. ‘And see if you can find me yesterday’s copy of De Standaard, the racing page specifically.’
‘The racing page?’ Toussaint risked a grin. ‘Are you going to place a bet, sir?’
The telephone on de Smet’s desk rang, and he snatched up the receiver. For an icy moment, Toussaint wondered if he had gone too far. ‘You could say that, yes.’
Toussaint took the stairs to the top floor. It was there that de Smet had set up an operations room. It was narrow and bare, big enough for a row of filing cabinets, a desk placed sideways and a solitary chair. The sound of traffic drifted up from the Rue du Marché au Charbon through a small window with one frosted pane. When he wasn’t in there de Smet kept the room locked.
A big map of Belgium covered most of one wall. There were now black pushpins at 153 different locations. At each of these, at one time or another over the past four years, counterfeit 500-franc notes of the kind that had first turned up in Tournai had been spotted. Attached to each pushpin was a small paper label, bearing a reference number in de Smet’s meticulous hand.
On the wall opposite were more maps of Belgium, on a smaller scale. The pushpins here were fewer in number and connected with lengths of red string. They represented attempts to establish a pattern, to reveal a methodology in the distribution of the notes: times, places, amounts – anything that could be traced to a source, anything that might indicate where their adversary might go next. So far, these attempts had been unsuccessful. With every new report de Smet dropped what he was working on – often in Toussaint’s lap – and went to investigate. The result was always the same: the addition of information that told them next to nothing.
The forger had been patient and careful. His target locations, whether towns or city districts, appeared to be chosen at random. From what they could gather he arrived often, but not always, on a market day, when retail trade was brisk. He would visit somewhere between twenty and thirty shops and stalls, making purchases at each. On an average day, de Smet estimated, around thirteen thousand francs would be exchanged. Operation complete, the forger would not return to that location for at least six months.
Larger shops, oblivious to the deception, would use some of the counterfeit notes to pay wages. Smaller operations would exchange them for stock. Eventually, in the days, weeks and months that followed, the counterfeit currency would find its way into banks, where it might or might not be detected. By then it was too late to work out who had first received them, let alone get a description of the individual who had handed them over.
De Smet called it a ‘retail operation’: slow, labour-intensive, but highly profitable. The alternative was to sell the counterfeits wholesale to criminal gangs who knew what they were buying. In such cases, the best fake notes sold at a quarter of face value. Thousands of notes could be unloaded in a single transaction, but dealing with other criminals carried risks of its own, and the Tournai Forger seemed unwilling to take them. De Smet said it was only a matter of time: their man would go wholesale, sooner or later. He would get greedy. But four years had gone by, and so far they had done nothing but follow in his wake, recording his path to riches, like fans following their idol.
Toussaint unlocked the door and switched on the light. It was cold inside. The air smelled of stale tobacco. On the big map he found Waregem: it lay thirty kilometres south-west of Ghent. Unusually for a town of its size, there were already seven black pushpins in place.
The files in the cabinets were organised alphabetically. Waregem had a file to itself. Toussaint looked over the reports. They were nothing unusual: clusters of counterfeit notes being banked from multiple sources over periods lasting a few weeks. If anything stood out, it was that the totals were high. The information had been provided over the telephone. At no time had the bank employees concerned been interviewed.
Toussaint checked the dates on each report and it was then that he saw what de Smet must already have seen: the last report had come in just two months earlier. According to his own rules, the Tournai Forger had returned several months too soon.
‘So he’s jumped the gun a bit. How does that help us?’
Toussaint handed over the file, along with the newspaper. One of the gendarmes who guarded the building took De Standaard every morning and kept a stack of them behind the front desk.
De Smet took out the reports. ‘It’s helped us already. A clerk at De Spaarbank was on the lookout for the bad notes. She spotted them at once. A few more months and she’d have forgotten all about it.’ He looked at Toussaint over the top of the papers. He wasn’t smiling, but the lieutenant could see a predatory eagerness in his eyes.
‘You think he’s getting careless? It’s hardly a blunder.’
‘It’s a lapse. There may be more.’
Toussaint had been working a smuggling case and wanted to get back to it. De Smet would have another pin in his map, a little anomaly in the timing to spice things up. If that made his day, then fine. Toussaint just hoped he wasn’t going to be sent out to Waregem to write the report. He had a double date set up with a couple of typists and a comrade in the Judicial Division and didn’t want to miss it. Besides, the Tournai Forger might be clever – exceptional even – but catching him wasn’t personal. It wasn’t going to validate his existence, or justify his position as an officer of the law.
De Smet had opened the newspaper. Toussaint had never known him to take an interest in horse racing, or any sport for that matter. As for gambling, it was the kind of thing that could tank a gendarme’s career. De Smet had said it himself: an officer who gambled was an officer who could be corrupted.
Toussaint turned to go. Out of nowhere, he remembered something: there was a racetrack at Waregem. ‘Did they …? Were there races this week?’
De Smet did not look up. ‘There were ten, on Tuesday.’
‘And you think …?’
De Smet got to his feet. ‘Yesterday morning a customer called Eric van Aken deposited twenty thousand francs into his account at De Spaarbank.’ He took his overcoat from the hook. ‘Four of his notes were forgeries.’
‘Four? Is he in custody?’
De Smet gave Toussaint one of the pitying looks that he had grown used to over the years, but resented nonetheless. ‘Mr van Aken is a bookie, one of at least twenty bookies at the track.’ He pulled on his coat. Toussaint could already see that his plans for the evening were shot. ‘That’s what brought our man back to Waregem when he should have stayed away: he has a soft spot for the horses.’
Most of the other bookies had already banked their takings at different branches around the region. One of them, a man called Jaspers, still had the cash in a safe at his home in Kortrijk. Another used a safe deposit box in Brussels. In each case, where the cash could be traced, counterfeit notes were found. The forger’s trip to the races in Waregem had been a matter of business. He had bet five hundred francs on every horse in every race – that was de Smet’s conclusion – placing each bet with a different bookie. It was a great way to lose money, if you were betting with money. But the forger was betting with paper. He ended up with a winning ticket every time. One horse came in at 20/1, another at 18/1. The bets were paid for with counterfeit money, but the payouts were real. None of the bookies had seen anything unusual. None of them could give Toussaint a description. The forger had placed around sixty bets in the course of the day, but nobody could remember his face.
Two weeks later, Toussaint travelled out to the Wellington Hippodrome in Ostend, a flat racecourse two hundred metres from the sea. If de Smet was right, the occasion would prove too big a draw for the forger to resist: a full card of races, twenty-seven bookies and a big crowd to cover an escape if something went wrong. It was their best shot yet at an arrest.
Toussaint and de Smet were in plain clothes. Six gendarmes from the local station patrolled the exits. The perimeter was far from impermeable, especially on the south side, where the track gave onto a nine-hole golf course and a cemetery, but de Smet was convinced it would sink the operation if the police presence was too heavy. The forger was likely to be a regular, and if anything was different, he would notice. It meant de Smet and Toussaint were the only ones watching the bookies.
It was a sunny day with a stiff onshore breeze. Along the front, people had turned out in numbers. Some brave souls were going for a swim. Others were picnicking on the beach or around the course. There was a festive atmosphere, regular announcements from the tannoy adding to the sense of anticipation. Toussaint moved through the crowd, a Beretta heavy in his jacket pocket. Almost everyone he passed was part of a group – couples, families, what looked like a veterans’ social club. Walking around on his own, he felt conspicuous.
De Smet was up in the grandstand with a pair of binoculars. It was at his insistence that the bookies had been kept in the dark. If they were told counterfeit bills might be in circulation they would start inspecting every 500-franc note that came their way, which meant holding them up to the light to reveal the watermark. ‘Our man only has to see that a couple of times and he’ll be gone.’
At twenty minutes past noon, the horses in the first race were led into the paddock. People were still streaming in through the gates, swelling the crowd. At the bookies, queues were forming. De Smet had abandoned the grandstand, and was heading down to the course. He didn’t look like much of a racegoer to Toussaint’s way of thinking, in his city overcoat and his teardrop fedora. He looked like fun was the last thing on his mind.
Toussaint’s superiors said he was lucky to have ended up where he had. Major de Smet had cracked a lot of tough cases over the years. There was a lot he could learn. And Toussaint had learned a lot: the importance of thoroughness, of amassing detail even when it seemed insignificant. He had learned the value of patience and vigilance, of leaving nothing to chance. And yet, for all that, when Toussaint thought of Major de Smet, what he pictured was a spider, pale and bloodless, sitting motionless in a corner of his web, waiting for a tremor that would tell him when to strike.
Two years earlier they had gone after a company accountant called Jens van Marcke. Van Marcke had been swindling his employers, a large import-export firm in Antwerp. He had not covered his tracks very well, but de Smet had found out all there was to know about the man before he was even questioned. In particular, he had found out that van Marcke’s mistress was a Yugoslav immigrant, and that she was applying for Belgian nationality. Some of the missing money had not been accounted for. De Smet had got it into his head that there had been an accomplice, someone who had turned a blind eye at the right moment, someone van Marcke had paid off. If he didn’t get a name, van Marcke’s mistress would be deported to Belgrade for consorting with a known criminal. Van Marcke insisted he had been acting alone. De Smet had carried out his threat. A few weeks later, by which time the missing money had been found and the accomplice theory discredited, court officials at the Palais de Justice had gone to collect van Marcke from a holding cell at the start of his trial. They had found him dead. He had opened his wrists with a shard of mirror glass. Toussaint had been present when de Smet received the news. The major hadn’t registered so much as a flicker of regret, hadn’t even paused from his work. ‘Is there something wrong?’ he had asked, when he caught the lieutenant staring.
The fact was, when it came to de Smet, there were some lessons Toussaint didn’t want to learn.
The horses in the first race were still being walked around the paddock. Toussaint watched them for a minute before sauntering off towards the bookies. A dozen of them were strung out opposite the finish line, standing on boxes, their odds chalked up on boards behind them. A French horse, Claire de Lune, was the clear favourite. Most of the bookies had her at 3/2. Toussaint play-acted at shopping around, before joining a short queue for a bookie called Appelman’s. De Smet had told him to be patient, to get a good look at who was betting, who was winning, who kept coming back. They had all afternoon to find their man.
Toussaint scanned the faces all around him, trying to fix as many as possible in his mind. It was then he recognised one of the bookies from the Waregem races – the one who lived in Kortrijk and kept his cash in a safe. His name was Jaspers. He was writing a slip for a young man in a blazer. The young man took the slip and handed over a 500-franc note. Before Toussaint had time to think about the danger, Jaspers had taken the note and was holding it up to the sun, squinting at the watermark. He had been caught for three thousand francs at Waregem. He was not going to be caught again.
Toussaint hurried over. Jaspers had to be told, before he ruined everything. The young man in the blazer moved away, clutching his betting slip. An older man in a grey raincoat ambled forward, his nose buried in his race card.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Toussaint said. ‘Just one second.’
The man in the raincoat looked up at him, smiling absently. He had a lined face and thick dark hair, streaked with silver.
Jaspers was frowning. ‘Lieutenant Toussaint? I thought it was you. What’s up this time?’
Toussaint grabbed him by the sleeve and whispered in his ear: told him to forget about the watermarks, told him why in as few words as he could.
‘All right, understood,’ Jaspers said. ‘But you’re not the one losing out.’
Toussaint turned. He had drawn attention to himself. He would have to make himself scarce for a while.
The man in the grey raincoat was no longer in the queue behind him. He had been there a moment ago, all ready to bet. Now, in his place, there was an old boy with a white moustache and a shooting stick. Toussaint stood on tiptoe and checked the queues at the other bookies. People were flooding into the grandstand, taking their places for the start of the race. He glimpsed the grey raincoat. The dark-haired man was nudging people aside, a man in a little too much of a hurry. Then he was gone.
