William Monk 05 - The Sins of the Wolf

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 withsatisfaction, 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 hadknown, 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.