Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

Mr. Jacob nodded. “I understand. This reverend selected a ring priced at forty pounds and offered to pay with a hundred-pound banknote.”

Fraud. Such was Faro’s immediate reaction considering the few hundred-pound banknotes printed and in circulation. Only a foreigner would be taken in by such audacity.

“I see that you too are doubtful, sir, as I was. And so was this reverend. He said, ‘As I am a complete stranger you must be wondering if this note is real. I noticed a bank just across the road there. Would you care to ask the cashier to verify that this is a genuine banknote?’”

“Ah,” said Faro. “How very convenient. You go across the road and leave him in the shop. And when you return-” He shrugged, said sadly: “My dear fellow, this is a very old trick.”

“I am not stupid, Inspector. When I suggested that my daughter go to the bank instead, the reverend was not in the least dismayed. I was watching him intently and he was most complimentary about her. He talked-much as you have done, sir, curious about my reasons for coming to Scotland.

“Nadia came back and told us that both the bank cashier and the manager himself had assured her that the banknote was indeed genuine. I put the diamond ring into a box and from the safe, in the wall over there-” he pointed-”I gave the reverend his sixty pounds change.”

Mr. Jacob sighed and shook his head. “He seemed such a kindly man, but just as he was leaving the shop, you-I mean, the policeman-entered, seized him, and said to me: ‘I am a police inspector and I have to tell you that this man is a thief, well known to us. He has already been in prison three times.’”

Faro was puzzled. A trickster like the minister, who had been jailed three times, yet he had never heard of him.

Mr. Jacob continued: “I am an honest man, sir, and I had to protest that this time no fraud was involved, for the bank had examined the hundred-pound note and declared it genuine. You-er, this inspector-then asked me to show it to him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘as I suspected; like many other shopkeepers and bank cashiers, you have been tricked by a brilliant forgery. This is a master craftsman and I am arresting him. I shall have to take the fake bank-note, which will be required as evidence later.’

“When he brought out the handcuffs, the reverend said to him: ‘They will not be necessary, Inspector. You have my word as a gentleman that I will come with you quietly.’

“But the inspector just laughed at him and I felt sorry for the reverend. He did seem like a real gentleman who had fallen on hard times. Who knows what sorrows and misfortunes had driven him to a life of crime.”

Faro was curious about the man’s identity. “Can you describe him for me?”

“Garbed all in black, he was. Tall, pale-skinned, light-eyed…”

Mr. Jacob ended with an embarrassed shrug, for the description also fitted the man who was now questioning him.

Faro suppressed a smile. Did all gentiles look alike to the jeweller?

“The reverend then began to plead. ‘There are hiring carriages outside. I will pay for one, Inspector. Please allow me this last indulgence.’ It was a wild day,” Mr. Jacob continued, “a blizzard blowing, so the inspector gave in.”

“And you were sent for a carriage and you watched the inspector hand his prisoner in and drive away,” said Faro. “Is that so?”

Mr. Jacob looked puzzled and then he sighed. “You smile, sir? I expect you know what happened next,” he added glumly.

“When you came back into the shop you realised that your sixty pounds change had not been returned to you and that your fake minister had also carried off the diamond ring.”

The jeweller nodded sadly. “I realised there had been a mistake. When I closed the shop I went at once to the police station. But do you know, Inspector, no one would believe a word of my story. They pretended that no inspector of theirs had brought in a holy man. When I protested that I was telling the truth, they became very suspicious and asked a lot of questions while another policeman wrote it all down. Where are your papers? they kept shouting. What about this shop of yours? How did you pay for it?”

He spread his hands wide. “I was so ashamed and upset, Inspector, and very afraid. This was the kind of life I had escaped from when I fled to Scotland. Was I to go through it all over again? Fortunately, for me, that is, there was a disturbance. A bad woman-from the streets-was brought in drunk and fighting. So I took my chance and ran away as quickly as I could.”

Faro shook his head, aware that would make the Central Office even more suspicious. He knew his men. Edinburgh was full of people who came in with wild stories and tried to obtain compensation for imagined frauds. They would jump to the obvious conclusion that they were dealing with another criminal-or a madman. And they got plenty of both kinds in a day’s work.

“After that I was afraid to go back again,” Mr. Jacob continued. “I know I should not have rushed out like that, but you see, no one, not even a policeman, wishes to believe that a foreigner is telling the truth. I could see it in their eyes as they listened to me. An expression I have reason to know very well. Suspicion and something worse-hatred.”

Again the jeweller spread his hands in that despairing gesture. “Like eager hungry dogs waiting for the chance to leap on their quarry,” he added in a horrified whisper.

Faro protested with some soothing platitudes regarding the law and justice, which he knew were untrue. His words rang hollow, for Mr. Jacob was correct in his assumptions and Faro was well aware that many of his men had strong anti-Semitic feelings.

Even those with skins the same colour and speaking the same language, Irish and English, and their own countrymen from the Highlands were abused. To the struggling teeming mass of Edinburgh poor, signs of affluence in any “foreigner,” however hard won, were a subject of the most bitter hostility.

And now Faro was faced with the hardest part of all, to tell the jeweller what was patently obvious.

“The police inspector who made the arrest, Mr. Jacob-well, I am afraid he was not a real policeman.”

“Not real? But how could one doubt it? He was wearing a uniform.”

“Alas, that is no criterion of honesty. He had probably stolen it.”

Mr. Jacob looked at him wide-eyed. “What are you trying to tell me, sir?”

“That your police inspector and the minister were both criminals, in league together, planning to steal a diamond ring and sixty pounds from you.”

“But the hundred-pound note-”

“Oh yes, that banknote was genuine enough. And a very necessary part of their trick to defraud shopkeepers who would be-as you were-immediately suspicious of such a large denomination, rarely exhibited in public and even more rarely handed across shop counters.”

As he spoke, Faro realised that the jeweller must have seemed the perfect foil for the crooks. The success of this trick depended on the ignorance of new shopkeepers. Particularly foreigners who might have their own reasons, nothing to do with fraud, but a lot to do with past unhappy experiences of political persecution, which made them wary about any involvement with the law.

Mr. Jacob continued to look astonished and Faro repeated, “Please believe me, there was no inspector, no minister. You must understand that both men were thieves who had set out to rob you.”

“Ah, Inspector, in that you are mistaken,” said Mr. Jacob stubbornly. “There was no crime, since the very day after I went to the police station the inspector came back-to return the diamond ring with many apologies. It had been found on the reverend’s person when he was searched. He also returned my sixty pounds,” he added triumphantly. “Now that is not the action of a thief.”