Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

Fake by Iain Rowan

“Chambers, Fraud Squad,” I said, and I flapped my ID wallet open in front of him, not caring whether he looked or not. He didn’t. Mark Rogers stood there, in the middle of his office, hand still raised from when he had marched from behind his desk to ask me what the hell I was doing bursting into his office. He looked at me, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish.

“You must be Mr. Rogers. Time we had a word, I think, Mr. Rogers. A private chat. Or if you like, we could do it out there amongst all of your staff? Or back at the station with me, we do reasonable coffee these days, you know, not like it used to be. Of course, you’d not know, would you, Mr. Rogers? Or would you? Been down the station before? Anyway, your choice. We can do it here, but you have to get the coffee.”

I didn’t give him time to get a word in edgeways, bombarding him with questions while he was still panicking. Standard procedure.

“Whuh — uh, what about — I mean—”

I turned and walked for the door, waving my hand to indicate that he should follow me.

“No! No, I mean, here is fine. Here — I’ll get coffee — Marian makes good coffee — here, please take a seat. I don’t know what this is about, Officer, but I am sure that we can sort it out quickly.”

I turned and walked back to the chair in front of his desk, pulled it out so that it was against one wall, walked behind his desk, and grabbed his deluxe executive swivel chair and wheeled it around the room at speed, nearly running him down with it, making him skip out of the way. I put it next to the other chair. Take him out from behind his desk, take him away from his position of power, his little fortress where he sat safe and smug, hurling arrows down at his staff. Leave him in an unusual place, vulnerable, exposed. I took the swivel chair, left the hard low one for him. Let him have some of his own medicine. He came over, all nerves like a startled deer. Some people are like that with the police, whether they have anything to hide or not. Most of them do have something to hide though, most of them do.

I waved him away from the chair. He stood there, looked confused.

“I think you said something about coffee, Mr. Rogers? Sorry, but I have been doing a lot of talking this morning, making a lot of phone calls about — certain inquiries, checking certain facts.”

“Sorry — coffee — yes.” He walked behind his desk, looking flustered, and picked up his phone. “Marian? Yes, two coffees please. Yes.” He went to put the phone down, but then snatched it back up to his ear. “Marian, you still there? Marian? Yes, yes, it’s still me. Hold all calls, will you — important meeting. No calls until I say. Understand?”

Rogers hung up, reached for his chair, and remembered that it wasn’t there. He stood where he was, rubbing his hands together as if he was washing them. “Coffee won’t be a minute, er, Detective.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll wait until it’s here before we start. No sense in being interrupted, and besides, you may not want any of your staff to be overhearing this particular conversation.” Might as well crank the tension a little higher. I swiveled round in the chair, stared out of his big glass windows that overlooked the rest of the staff at their desks, gazing over Mr. Rogers’s little empire. I hummed Puccini to myself as well, making it quite clear to him that we would not proceed until I chose to. I could hear him fidgeting behind me.

The door to the office opened, and I swiveled back to look into the room. A middle-aged woman in a bright floral print dress had brought two cups of coffee in on a tray, with a little milk jug and a bowl of sugar. And if I saw right, a small plate of biscuits. Very nice. She smiled nervously at me, but her attention was really on the chairs. Something unusual was obviously taking place in Mr. Rogers’s room. He had noticed that the rearrangement of the furniture had caught her attention.

“On the desk, Marian, on the desk,” Rogers snapped, and she hurried across, looking like a pet that was used to being kicked. Must be fun working for this man, I thought.

“Thank you — Marian, isn’t it?” I said. “Thank you. And are those biscuits that I see?”

“Yes, there’s bourbons, and there’s custard creams.”

“Marian, you’re a treasure. How long have you worked here?”

I could see that Rogers was itching to get her out of there, but I shot him a warning look and he stood there, impotent.

“Eighteen years now.” She knew straightaway without having to count. “Eighteen years for the company, although not in this building; we only moved in here twelve years ago.”

“A loyal servant.” Time to ratchet the tension again. “And how long have you worked for Mr. Rogers?”

Rogers opened his mouth as if he were about to interrupt, then closed it again. He was jiggling one leg as if a wasp had just flown up his trousers.

“Eight years now.” She knew that straightaway as well. Probably chalked every one of them off on the wall, like a prisoner in a gulag.

“You must know all the secrets here then, nothing’ll get past you.”

Marian laughed nervously, darting glances from Mr. Rogers back to me. Who is this man, I could see her thinking, what can I say that will not get me into trouble. I stood up, nodded to her, and got my coffee, wedging a custard cream into the saucer. “Thanks, Marian.”

“Um yes, that will be all, Marian,” Rogers said, attempting to reassert his authority. “Remember, hold all my calls. I’ve got no appointments this morning, have I?”

“There’s Steven’s appraisal, the work evaluation session you wanted—”

“Cancel them. Both of them.”

“Yes, Mr. Rogers.” She left the room, risking one last curious glance back at me. I sipped at my coffee and dipped my biscuit, not looking at Rogers.

“Right, shall we get on?” I said.

He came over, sat on the chair, muttered something and got up again, walking back over to his desk to get his coffee. When he sat back down again I would have bet that he wished he had not bothered, because when he rested his cup and saucer on his knee the crockery tinkled with the shaking of his leg. He took another sip to disguise his next action, and then with a too-studied casual gesture put the cup down on the floor, as if that was where he had always wanted to keep it.

“How can I help you, Detective?” His voice was full of bonhomie, the concern of a good citizen to help the forces of the law, full of earnest interest. The shake betrayed him though, an unconscious informant. I wondered what his secret really was. It wasn’t sex, he didn’t look the type and I think that Marian would rather have forced her head through the office shredder. Money. He was fiddling something, I could tell from the way that he started when I announced that I was Fraud, an involuntary backwards jerk of the head, a licking of the lips, the way his eyes looked like those of a sheep at the slaughterhouse. Expenses maybe. Or overordering, some scam involving bogus invoices that ended up with payments for goods that were never received to a company that never existed. I had done my research, knew that this company had a reputation for slack accounting, had sat patiently in a pub while an obnoxious man drank the drinks that I bought him and sweated and broke wind and told me about all the dodges he had got up while he had worked there. And mentioned Mr. Rogers, a man who was most certainly up to something, even if no one really knew what.

“It’s about counterfeit money, Mr. Rogers. Or to be more specific, the laundering of counterfeit money into the banking system. A very serious crime.”

I sat back and watched the expressions chase each other over his face. Bewilderment. Confusion. Then hope, the prisoner finding out that the bars are loose, that the door has been left unlocked. I don’t know what this is about, he was thinking, but maybe, just maybe it’s nothing to do with me and I’m going to get away with whatever it is I am up to.

“I... I don’t know anything about any counterfeit money.”

“Mmm.” I paused for a moment and just stared at him. “Do you not? Isn’t it the case that you disperse a fair amount of money via these premises?”

“Well, it’s not a huge amount, but some — but I—”

“Put a figure on it.”

“Sorry?”

“In a week, how much?”

“Er, I don’t know, I mean, without looking it up, six or seven thousand, it’s not a lot these days, really—”

“Six or seven thousand pounds a week. Fifty weeks a year, say? That’s three hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. Three years, and there’s over a million in cash passing through here. No, it’s not a lot, Mr. Rogers, but that’s how many counterfeiting operations work, drip-feeds so the banks won’t notice it, using seemingly legitimate businesses to get the bent cash out there.”

“No, but that’s impossible, I mean — the money doesn’t come from me, how could it, it comes in from head office.”

“Does it indeed?” I sat forward in my seat, not hiding my excitement. “And does anyone in particular handle that side of things? In head office I mean.”

“Er, yes, it’s a Mr. Hassan,” Rogers said, “that’s who I deal with. Anwar Hassan.”

“Anwar Hassan.” I said the name slowly, in the way that you do when it is a name that you have said many times before.

“You already know about him?”

I said nothing, but let the silence speak for itself. I could see the spark in Rogers’s eyes, the quick assumption, the prospect of an escape into daylight when only minutes before he had thought himself condemned to darkness.

“Of course you do,” he said. His voice dropped to a level that was part conspiratorial, part overly friendly, wholly nauseating. “Always had my doubts about him. Of course, you know what it’s like these days, can’t say anything, especially with him being, you know.”

“In head office?” I kept my voice completely neutral.

“No, no, I mean with him being, you know, foreign. I mean, he sounds English enough, heard him on the phone you’d never know he wasn’t one of us, but still, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it, trust, just not the same over there, is it?”

Revolting man, I thought. Time to put you back on the back foot, don’t want you getting too confident.

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Rogers.” My voice was full of contempt. “My wife is Egyptian.”

“Uh—”

“Of course, you probably assumed that being with the police I’d be as free with casual offhand racism as you are, Mr. Rogers.” He spluttered noises that never quite made it into words. “But it’s not like that anymore in the force. And for some of us it never has been. So let’s just move on, and I’ll forget what you just said to me. Understood?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t. Don’t try and apologize or explain it away because you will only make things worse, and frankly I don’t have the patience. Now, back to Mr. Hassan. He mustn’t get a whiff of the fact that we have him under investigation. If I hear that he has heard anything...”

Rogers virtually fell off his chair in his eagerness to agree with me, to reassure me that Hassan would hear nothing from him, not a word.

“Good. I think I can trust you in this.” Rogers simpered a nervous smile back at me in response. “If the money dispersed through your office is counterfeit, then it would be a vital link in our chain of evidence.”

Rogers looked thoughtful. At least, that’s what I think it was; if I didn’t have the experience of the last few minutes in his company, then I’d have just thought that he was staring vacantly into space. I sat and waited, finishing my coffee.

“I don’t see how it helps him,” he said eventually. “I mean, I can see that it gets the counterfeit money out and into circulation, but where does Hassan—” He caught my look. “Where do the criminals get their money back?”

“Hallmark of a sophisticated counterfeiting laundry job,” I said. “You keep the dispersal separate from the recouping operation. Diversify the dispersal routes and delink the income side of the operation as far as possible, get the proceeds back laundered through the accounting system, wrap it all up in transfers so complex that even the auditors miss them.”

“Of course, of course, yes, I see.”

“Or more likely, and much more simply, someone at head office just brings in a load of counterfeit cash in a sports bag and just swaps it for the legitimate money before it’s couriered out to you all in the branches. Beautifully simple, if the opportunity is there, and no accounting audit will ever show it up. One minute’s work, and clean money turns into dirty money as if by magic, and the clean money goes back to those in charge of the operation.”

Rogers nodded. “Bloody clever.”

“Bloody illegal. Have you any idea what effect counterfeiting has on the national economy? Serious destabilization of fiscal planning, Mr. Rogers. Serious. And that’s why they pay me a decent amount of money to catch up with people—” I looked Rogers straight in the eye. “—who cheat their employers—” He blinked. “—and steal money—” He swallowed. “—fraud, all of it. But most of all, currency counterfeiting. That’s my main interest these days.”

“Yes, I can see why that’s the worst,” he said, desperate to drag the conversation away from the question of those who defraud their employers. “Sensible to concentrate efforts.”

“If I can determine that the money you are dispersing — unknowingly — is counterfeit, then that puts us a huge step forward.”

“Of course, anything we can do to help, anything.”

“You have the money for this week? Here on the premises?”

“What? Yes. It was delivered yesterday. It’ll only start going out tomorrow.”

I smiled, and pulled the pen from my pocket. “Get me one note please, Mr. Rogers. Any one. Pick it at random.” I waved the pen at him. “Let’s find out if you’re going to be able to help us make this vital link in the chain, and get me out of your hair. Any one, Mr. Rogers. Any one.”

He scuttled out of the office. I leaned back and thought about having another biscuit, decided not to. With luck I would be finished here soon, and could start thinking about lunch. Within a minute Rogers came back in, a twenty pound note in his hand. He waved it like a little girl waving her flag at the queen. I stood up, uncapped my pen. “On the desk please.”

He swept some papers aside to make room, laid the note down on the desk. I walked up to it, squatted down and peered at it, stood up and looked down on it, tilted my head from side to side to look at it from every angle. “Good,” I said. “Very good.” I picked it up, holding the tiniest portion of one corner, held it up to the light. “Very, very good.” I put it back down on the table again, readied my pen. Rogers crowded in close to me, and I could smell his sweat under his too-strong aftershave.

“What are we looking for?” he asked. I could feel the heat off him and wished that he would take a step back. I could make him jump if I wanted to, but now was not the time.

“Orange,” I said. “If we see orange...”

“It’s fake?”

“It’s fake.”

I held the note steady with one hand, and drew the pen right down the middle of it.

“It’s fake,” I said. There was a thick orange streak, cutting right across the picture of the queen.

“My God,” Rogers said. “Is that — is it certain? It looks so real.”

“It should look real, Mr. Rogers, this is the product of about as sophisticated a counterfeiting operation as you can get. But even they can’t get the chemical composition of the surface of the note quite right, the Bank of England keeps that one as secret as anything gets in this country, and so these little pens are our greatest friends.” I put the pen down on the table. “Would you mind if I tried...?”

“No, no, not at all, I’ll go straightaway.”

He brought another five notes, and laid out each one on the desk for me to swipe with the pen, and with each one it was the same result.

“Cunning bastards,” he said. “All this time, this money passing through my office. God, people might have thought I was behind it.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Rogers,” I said. “I don’t know what else you might be up to—” I laughed as if I was joking. Maybe. He swallowed again and kept his face very still. “But I’m sure that you’re just an innocent bystander in all of this, just being used. Still, with this batch as evidence, this whole thing is going to stop. A few people at your head office will be getting a surprise visit in the next twenty-four hours. I’ll need to take the whole batch off, of course, there’s forensics to give it a going over first, pick up the characteristics of the printing plates, any fingerprints — someone will be out later on to take yours, just so we can eliminate them from the set, you and anyone else in this office who’ve handled the money, probably be some pretty WPC if you’re lucky — then it’s going to be part of the chain of evidence when we go to the Crown Prosecution Service to demonstrate a case — our accountancy team will be in touch with your head office, you won’t lose out. Not a word though for twenty-four hours, not a word. If there are any leaks, the whole thing will be blown. Even if you think you can trust someone at head office, not a word. If you did — well, colleagues of mine would take some convincing that you weren’t involved. They’d be in here going over all of your affairs with a fine-toothed comb. Of course, you’d have nothing to hide, but...”

Rogers was just about out the door. I let him go and waited. In about a minute, he came back in with the money, in marked courier bags from his company. I opened my briefcase and let him put it all inside. Then I closed the case, but did not spin the combinations.

“Are you completely mad, Mr. Rogers?”

The question caught him by surprise; he thought that it was all done, that it was over, that I was leaving.

“Sorry, I... I don’t know—”

I held up the case. “You’re letting me walk out of here with all this, and I haven’t even given you a receipt. I’m not one of the policemen one year off retirement that they give crime prevention to, going round giving pensioners talks about window locks, but really Mr. Rogers, have some more sense.” I pulled the form from my pocket, set it on top of the case, began to fill it in. “BS47/1. Always ask for one of these in a case like this. Always, always. And make sure the officer signs it and puts their number on. See — like this. If you can’t read the name — it should be printed, not a signature — or the number, then tell them you won’t accept it and ask them for another one. There, you sign, here, and here, where I’ve put the crosses. No, you can just sign it, no need to print, you know who you are. There, done. Now this is your copy, and I suggest that you put it straight back into that safe. And this is my copy, which goes on the case file — if we go as far as proceeding with the case, and with what you’re telling me hopefully we won’t get that far. And this one—” I opened the briefcase and dropped it in, snapped the locks shut, spun the combinations this time. “—this one stays with the exhibit at all times. Chain of evidence, Mr. Rogers, sure you’ve heard of it.”

He nodded, although I expect if I asked him to repeat any of what I had just said he would just have given me a blank and confused look. I confused him again, by sticking my hand out at him. He stared at it for a moment, and then realized what I was doing. His hand felt so sweaty that it was all that I could do to resist wiping it on my trousers the moment that he let go.

“Well, thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Rogers. If what you say is true, then all this will be over in a day or so and we’ll owe you an apology. Hope you understand why we have to be vigilant — daresay you wouldn’t be too happy if one of your customers paid you in counterfeit currency.”

“No,” he said, “no, I... I understand.”

Oh no you don’t, I thought. I nodded at him, picked up my orange marker pen, and left, walking briskly out of his office, leaving him standing alone and confused, a man whose world had been turned upside down in the space of a morning. I smiled at Marian as I walked out through the main office toward the lifts. It had been good coffee, and she had given us biscuits, too. Rogers would feel confused for a few minutes, then relieved that whatever it was that he was up to, whatever it was that he was hiding, had nothing to do with the reason why I was there. That relief might last a few hours before he started thinking straight, depending on how guilty he really was. Then he might start getting suspicious, dismiss it as paranoia, then really think about it, maybe make a few phone calls, and then he would be ringing the real police. But I would be long gone by then, me and this briefcase.