He put a silver bucket and two glasses on the table. I leant forward. There was a bottle of champagne in the bucket, surrounded by ice-cubes, already uncorked. “With the compliments of the house,” the waiter said. I scratched my head. The dwarf must have been quite a regular here. Came regular, drank regular … I wondered what else he did regular at the Casablanca Club.
I looked around me. There were perhaps a hundred people there, sitting at tables or crowding round the bar where three black-tied waiters shook cocktails behind a curving marble counter. The air was filled with the hubbub of conversation, as thick and as indistinct as the cigarette smoke. There was a dance floor at one end but tonight there was no band, just a black pianist stroking the ivories with fingers that looked too stubby to sound so good. Right in front of my table there was a stage about the size you’d expect a stage to be in a run-down drinking club. The place had no windows and no ventilation. The smoke had smothered the light, strangled the plants and it wasn’t doing a lot for me either.
I drank some champagne. I’d never drunk the stuff before and I can’t say I really liked it. But I was thirsty and it was free. Herbert joined me, muttering about the ten pounds and a moment later a spotlight cut through the clouds and the crowd fell silent. A figure moved on to the stage, a woman in her fifties, who dressed like she was in her thirties, with jewellery flashing here and there to keep your eyes off the wrinkles. She was attractive if you didn’t look too closely. At one time she might even have been beautiful. But the years hadn’t been good to her. They’d taken the colour out of her hair, put a husk in her voice, hollowed out her throat and slapped her around a bit for good measure.
I drank some more champagne. The bubbles were going right up my nose and dancing behind my eyes. The pianist had come to the end of a tune but as the woman moved forward he began another and she sang almost as if she didn’t care what she was doing. She sang two or three songs. When she finished, she got a scattering of applause and as the talk started up again, she moved down to our table and sat opposite me. Only when she was close enough to see the pinks of my eyes (the whites had gone that colour in all the smoke) did she see who I was.
“You’re not Johnny,” she said.
“We’re friends of his …” I said. I let the sentence hang in the air. I needed her name to complete it.
“Lauren Bacardi,” she said. “Where’s Johnny?”
I looked at Herbert. From the way she was talking, the little guy had obviously meant something to her and I didn’t know how she would take the news. I hoped he’d think of a gentle way to tell her. You know, with a bit of tact.
“He’s dead,” Herbert said.
“Dead?”
“Yup.” He nodded. “Dead.”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. I guessed she needed something to do with her hands. After all, to smoke in the unique atmosphere of the Casablanca Club, you didn’t actually need to light another cigarette. “Was he … killed?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. I drank some more champagne. The more I drank, the better I liked it. “You knew him?”
She smiled sadly. “We were friends.” Her eyes were far away. They seemed further away than her nose. Maybe it was the champagne. I thought she was going to get up and walk out of our lives. The way things turned out, it would have been better if she had. But the pianist had slid into a bluesy number and she needed to talk. “Johnny and I knew each other for ten years,” she said. “But we never met. Not until a month ago.
“We were pen-pals. He was in South America. I was over here. Maybe you’ll laugh at me, but we kind of fell in love by post.” She flicked ash on to the carpet. “We wrote letters to each other for ten years and he never even mentioned that he was a dwarf. I only found out a month ago when he came over and by then I’d more or less agreed to marry him. The little rat …”
She puffed at her cigarette. I knocked back the champagne. Herbert was watching both of us anxiously.
“He came over,” she went on. “He just turned up one day on my doormat. No. He was standing on a chair on the doormat – to reach the bell. He had these plans. We were going to be rich. We’d buy this little house in the South of France with low ceilings. Johnny didn’t like high ceilings. He told me that he knew where he could lay his hands on three and a half million pounds – enough money to take me away from all this …”
She raised her hands, taking in the whole of the Casablanca Club with ten chipped and nicotine-stained fingernails.
“Did he have anything with him?” I asked. “A box, for example?”
“You mean the Maltesers?” Lauren Bacardi smiled. “Sure. He never went anywhere without them. He seemed to think they were important, but he didn’t know why. It nearly drove him mad … if he wasn’t mad already. I mean, how could a box of sweets be worth all that dough?”
I poured myself some more champagne. Herbert whisked it away before I could drink it. I wanted to argue but suddenly there were two of him and I wasn’t feeling so good.
“But maybe he was on the level,” Lauren went on. “Why else would anyone want to wipe him out? I mean, Johnny never hurt anyone in his life. He was too small.
“And he was afraid – all the time he was in England. He wouldn’t stay at my place. He hid himself away in some flea-pit hotel and whenever we went out together he always made like he was being followed. I thought he was imagining things.” A single tear trickled down her cheek, turning a muddy brown as it picked up her make-up. “Just my luck,” she whispered. “Johnny getting himself killed just one day after he’d found the answer.”
“He found the diamonds?” Herbert cried.
“No.” She shook her head. “Just the answer. We were out together one day and he saw something; something that made everything make sense.”
“What was it?” Herbert and I asked more or less together.
“Miss Bacardi?” the waiter interrupted. “There’s someone at the door with some flowers for you.”
“For me?” She got to her feet, swaying slightly in front of us. “Just give me one minute.”
She moved away in the direction of the front entrance, followed by the waiter. I reached for the bottle but Herbert stopped me. “Do you know how much that stuff costs?” he hissed.
“It was free,” I told him.
“Well … you’re only thirteen. What would Mum say?”
“Mum …” I muttered and for a fraction of a second actually missed her. That was when I knew that I’d had more than enough to drink.
Neither of us said anything for a while, and in that silence I became aware of a little voice whispering in my ear. It was my common sense. It was trying to tell me something that I’d have known at once if I hadn’t had so much to drink. Something was wrong. I played back what had just happened and suddenly I knew what it was. The flowers. Why had the waiter made Lauren Bacardi walk all the way to the entrance instead of bringing them to her? And there was something else. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. But now I remembered. The waiter had spoken with a German accent. I was on my feet making for the door before I knew what I was doing. Herbert ran after me, calling my name. But I wasn’t going to stop and explain what was going on. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the shouts of protest and the crash of breaking glass. That was one time I was glad I wasn’t fully grown. Before anyone could see me to grab hold of me I was gone.
I reached the door and the cold night hit me like an angry woman, slapping my face and tearing at my hair. The first thing I saw was the remains of what had been a bouquet of flowers. But now the cellophane was torn and the flowers were scattered over the steps, the stalks broken. At the same time, I heard someone calling out. It was Lauren Bacardi. I took the steps three at a time and as I reached the street, I just had time to catch sight of her being bundled into the back of a dark blue van. A shadowy figure slammed the door and ran round to the front. The engine was already running. A moment later, so was I.
I r
an across to the van, meaning … I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d be able to pull the door open and get Lauren out, but of course it was locked. So instead I jumped on to it, slamming into the metal like a hamburger hitting a griddle and hung on for dear life as the van roared away. I’d managed to get a foothold of sorts on the licence plate and I had one hand on the door handle, one hand curled round the rim at the edge. I was half spread-eagled and travelling at about thirty miles an hour when the van turned a corner. Whoever was driving put their foot down then. Perhaps they’d heard they had an unwelcome passenger. I reckon the van was doing sixty when I was thrown off. It was hard to tell. After all, I was sort of somersaulting through the air and if I’m going to be honest I might as well add my eyes were tightly closed like I was praying – which, in fact, I was.
All I knew was that me and the van had parted company. It roared off to the left, its tyres screaming. I flew off to the right. I should have been killed. I could have been killed. But if you go down that part of London at night, you’ll find that the offices put a lot of junk out on the pavements, to be cleared up by the refuse trucks the next day. My fall was broken by a mountain of cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Better still, the bags were full of paper that had been put through the shredder; computer print-outs and that sort of thing. It was like hitting a pile of cushions. I was bruised. But nothing broke.
A minute later Herbert reached me. He must have been convinced that I was finished because when I got to my feet and walked towards him, brushing paper cuttings off my sleeves, he almost fainted with surprise.
“Did you get the van’s number?” I asked.
He opened and closed his mouth again without speaking. It was a brilliant impersonation of a goldfish. But I wasn’t in the mood to be entertained.
“The licence plate …” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You were standing on it …” He still couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.
I looked back down the empty road. Lauren Bacardi had been about to tell us something important and now she was gone. Our only chance of finding the secret of the Malterers might have gone with her.
“Let’s get a taxi home,” I said.
“NICE DAY FOR A FUNERAL”
I wasn’t feeling too good the next day. I woke up wishing I hadn’t, tried to close my eyes and groaned into the pillow. There was something unpleasant in my mouth. I tried to spit it out but I couldn’t. It was my tongue. Outside, it was raining. I could hear the water pitter-pattering against the windows and dripping through the leak in the bathroom ceiling. I looked out. It was another grey London day with little yellow spots dancing in the air. I figured a couple of Alka-Seltzer would see to the spots but it looked like we were going to be stuck with the weather.
It took me about twenty minutes to get out of bed. The tumble I had taken the night before must have been harder than I had thought. My right shoulder had gone an interesting shade of black and blue and it hurt when I moved my fingers. Actually it hurt when I moved anything. Somehow I managed to wiggle out of my quilt and, bit by bit, I forced the life back into my battered frame. But it was an hour before I’d made my way downstairs and into the kitchen. It was still raining.
Herbert was sitting there reading a newspaper. When he saw me, he flicked on the kettle and smiled brightly.
“Nice day for a funeral,” he said.
“Very funny,” I groaned, reaching for the medicine chest.
“I’m being serious.” Herbert slid the newspaper in front of me.
I opened the medicine chest – a red plastic box with a white cross on it. It contained two plasters and a tin of cough sweets. Clearly Herbert wasn’t expecting an outbreak of bubonic plague. I groaned for a second time and pulled the newspaper before me. With an effort, I managed to get the print to unblur itself.
Herbert was right. There was going to be a funeral later in the day – just a few minutes down the road as luck would have it. Or was it luck? I wasn’t thinking straight, that was my trouble. The guy being buried was one Henry von Falkenberg. It appeared that the Falcon had flown home.
There was nothing about the Falcon’s three and a half million pounds in the paper. They didn’t even mention he’d been a crook. In fact it was just one of those fill-in stories, the sort of thing they print between the crossword and the gardening report when they haven’t got enough news. This was a story about a wealthy businessman living in Bolivia who had once lived in England and had decided that he wanted to be buried there. The only trouble was, the week he’d died, there’d been a baggage handler’s strike in La Paz and – now that he was dead – “baggage”, included him. He’d spent the last four weeks sharing an airport deep-freeze with a load of corned beef from Argentina.
But now the strike was over and von Falkenberg could be buried in his family plot just down the road from our flat. It was too good an opportunity to miss, hungover or not. How many of the names on Snape’s blackboard would turn up to pay their last respects to the Falcon?
We had to be there.
Herbert reached for the telephone book. “3521201,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Brompton Cemetery.”
I’d written the number down for him and he rang them. He spoke briefly before he put the phone down.
“The funeral’s at twelve,” he said. “Recommended dress: black tie and Wellington boots.”
Perhaps you know Brompton Cemetery – a stretch of ground between Fulham Road and the Brompton Road – a stone’s throw away from the football ground. I sometimes walked there on Sundays which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. After all, there’s not much grass in Fulham and with the sun shining it isn’t such a bad place to be. Anyway, the best thing about walking in a cemetery is walking out again. Don’t forget, not everyone can.
From the Fulham Road you pass between a pair of tall, black iron gates and follow the path. You don’t even know you’re in a cemetery until you’re a short way up and pass the first graves. It’s pretty at first. This is the old part of the cemetery, the romantic bit with the grass waist high and the stones poking out at odd angles like they’ve grown there too. Then you turn a corner and there’s a cluster of buildings curving round an open space like some sort of weird Victorian summer house. Now everything is flat and you can see all the way up to the Brompton Road, a green stretch with the crosses sticking up like the masts of a frozen armada.
We got there at five to twelve, squelching through the rain and the mud, our raincoats pulled up tight around the neck. About a dozen people had braved the weather to make their farewells to the Falcon … and the Argentinian Corned Beef Company had sent a wreath, which was a nice gesture. The first person we met was a less pleasant surprise: Chief Inspector Snape looking about as cheerful as the cemetery’s residents. Boyle was behind him, dressed in a crumpled black suit with a mourning band on his arm.
“Simple and Simple,” Snape cried, seeing us. “I was planning to visit you as soon as this little shindig was over.”
“Why?” Herbert asked.
“We’ve been receiving reports of an incident in Charing Cross. I thought you might be able to help us with our enquiries into the disappearance of a certain singer. One Lauren Bacardi. It looks like a kidnap. And guess which kid is our prime suspect?”
“Search me,” I said.
“I probably will one of these days,” Snape assured me. He smiled at his little joke and I have to admit that jokes don’t come much more little than that. “I’ve got you for murder, for kidnap, for under-age drinking, failing to pay for one bottle of champagne and causing a disturbance,” he went on. “I could lock you up right now.”
“You’re dead,” Boyle whispered.
Snape sighed. “Thank you, Boyle.”
“Why don’t you arrest us?” I asked.
“Because you’re more useful to me outside. I mean, you’d be nice and safe in a cosy police cell, wouldn’t you?” He gesture
d at the other mourners now grouping themselves around the grave. “I’m still waiting to see what happens to you. Come on, Boyle!”
Snape and Boyle went over to the grave. We followed them. It turned out that the Falcon was to be buried in the old part of the cemetery where the grass was at its highest, the gravestones half buried themselves. There was a vicar standing in the rain beside what looked like some sort of antique telephone box. It was a stone memorial, about two metres high, mounted by a stone falcon, its beak slightly open, its wings raised. There was a stone tablet set in the memorial below, with a quotation from the Bible cut into it.
THE PATH OF THE JUST IS AS SHINING LIGHT,
THAT SHINETH MORE AND MORE
UNTO THE PERFECT DAY.
Proverbs iv 18
The names of the dead von Falkenbergs were written beneath it: a mother, a father, two grandparents, a cousin … there were seven of them in all. A rectangular hole had been cut into the earth to make room for an eighth. As we approached, the coffin was being lowered. Henry von Falkenberg had come to join his ancestors.
It was raining harder than ever. The vicar had begun the funeral service, but you could hardly hear him for all the splashing. I took the opportunity to examine the other mourners. It was a pity about the weather. What with the umbrellas, the turned up collars and the hunched shoulders it was impossible to see half of them. If the sun had been shining I’d have got a better look.
But I did recognize Beatrice von Falkenberg. It had to be her – a tall, elegant woman in black mink with a servant holding an umbrella over her from behind. Her eyes and nose were hidden by a widow’s veil but I could see a pair of thin lips set in an expression of profound boredom. She was dabbing at her eyes with a tiny white handkerchief but she didn’t look too grieved to me. Snape had said that she had been Holland’s greatest actress. She wouldn’t have won any Oscar for this particular performance.
There was a man standing a short way from her and he caught my attention because he alone carried neither raincoat nor umbrella. He was short and pudgy with silver hair, round glasses in a steel frame and a face like an owl. As the vicar droned on, he shuffled about on his feet, occasionally steadying himself against a gravestone. Like the widow, he didn’t look exactly heartbroken. His eyes were fixed on the von Falkenberg memorial but it was easy to see that his mind was miles away.
The Falcon's Malteser Page 6
