The Falcon's Malteser

by Anthony Horowitz

  Who else was there? I recognized a journalist who worked on the local newspaper and who had done a piece on Herbert and me when we’d set up the business. But apart from Snape, Boyle and the widow, the rest of the crowd were strangers to me. The vicar was hurrying through the service now, tripping over the words to get to the end and out of the rain. His surplice was splashed with mud and pages of his Bible were straggling out of the spine. When he scooped holy dirt into the grave, the wind caught it and threw it back in his eyes. He blinked, spat out an amen and ran. Beatrice von Falkenberg turned and went after him. Snape and Boyle hung back. Owl-face jammed his hands into his pockets and sauntered off in the other direction, towards the Brompton Road.

  “Very moving. Very touching.”

  It was a familiar voice and it came from beneath a multicoloured golfing umbrella held by a man who had crept up to stand beside me. I looked round. It was the Fat Man. I should have known that he would be there. “How nice to see you again,” he said in a voice that said exactly the opposite.

  “Come on,” I said to Herbert. I wanted to get back to the flat, out of the rain.

  But the Fat Man blocked my way. “Do you like funerals?” he asked. “I’m thinking of arranging one. Yours.”

  “I’m too young to die,” I said. “What brings you here, Fat Man?”

  “Von Falkenberg and I were old friends … very dear friends,” he explained. “There was something about him that I very much admired …”

  “Yeah – his money,” I said. “Well, we still haven’t found your key. Perhaps you ought to ask Gott or Himmell.”

  He obviously knew the names. His eyes narrowed and his mouth twitched as if he had just swallowed one of his poisoned corn pellets.

  “We are looking for it, Mr Fat Man,” Herbert said.

  “And we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve found it.”

  “I gave you two days.” The Fat Man plucked the carnation out of his button-hole and threw it into the grave. “You’ve run out of time.” Then he turned his back on us and walked away.

  I’d had enough. Coming to the funeral had been a mistake – a dead end in every sense of the word. We hadn’t picked up anything apart, perhaps, from double pneumonia. And if it had been a chance to meet a few old friends, they were all old friends I’d have preferred to avoid. Herbert sneezed. “I need a shot of Scotch,” he said for the benefit of the undertaker or anyone else who might be listening. I knew that once we got back to the flat, he’d actually fix himself with a shot of cod-liver oil.

  But I was wrong there. Things didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.

  We made a couple of stops on the way back. Herbert had cashed the cheque and we had enough money to lash out on a packet of Alka Seltzer and another box of Maltesers.

  “What do you want them for?” Herbert asked.

  “I’ve got a headache,” I said.

  “No … the Maltesers.”

  So I explained. Whoever had snatched Lauren Bacardi might know by now that Johnny Naples had spent the last month of his life traipsing around London with a box of Maltesers. And they might come looking for them. The dwarf’s box was still safely hidden underneath the floor. I’d bought the second box as a sort of insurance. I’d leave it somewhere nice and easy to find, just in case anyone else broke in.

  We got back to the flat and let ourselves in, dripping on the doormat. Maybe I noticed that the street door was unlocked when it wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember. What with the rain, I was just glad to be in. We went upstairs. Herbert sneezed again. The office door was open and this time I did notice.

  “Herbert,” I said.

  We went into the office. Herbert’s eyes must have gone straight to the desk because he went and picked something up. “What’s this doing here?” I heard him say.

  But I didn’t look at him. My eyes were on the corpse stretched out beside the window. It took me a minute before I remembered where I’d seen him before, but I should have known from the moment I saw the chauffeur’s uniform. It was Lawrence, the Fat Man’s driver. He was still wearing his one-way glasses, but one of the lenses had become a spider’s web of cracks, shattered by the bullet that had gone one-way through it.

  “Nick …” Herbert whimpered in a voice of pure jelly.

  I looked up. And I saw it all.

  “What’s this doing here?” Herbert had asked. I replayed the words in my head. “This” was a gun. It had been lying on the carpet beside the desk. Now he was holding it. At that moment, the door opened. Snape and Boyle had followed us in. And there was me kneeling beside another dead man. There was Herbert, again, holding the gun that had just killed him. And there were the two policemen looking at us in open-mouthed astonishment.

  “You’re …” Snape began.

  “No …” Herbert moaned.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  CROCODILE TEARS

  Herbert and I spent the night back at the Ladbroke Grove police station. I’d never slept behind bars before – not that I got a lot of sleep that night either. There was a double bunk in our cell and I took the top level, with Herbert underneath. He’d caught a nasty cold in the cemetery and every time I was about to drift away he’d let loose with a deafening sneeze and I’d be awake again. The bunk wasn’t too comfortable either: just a narrow board with an inch-thick mattress, a sheet and two blankets you could have struck a match on. I dropped off around midnight. Then I climbed back on and tried to get some sleep.

  “Nick …” It could have been any time when Herbert’s disembodied voice floated up out of the darkness.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Are you awake?”

  “No. I’m sleeptalking.”

  “Nick, I’ve been thinking.” Herbert paused, sneezed, continued. “Maybe I’m not cut out to be a private detective after all.”

  “Whatever makes you think that, Herbert?” I asked.

  “Well … I’m wanted for two murders, kidnap and disturbing the peace. The Fat Man wants to kill me. My flat has been torn apart. And I haven’t actually been able to detect anything.”

  “You may have a point,” I agreed.

  He sighed. “In the morning I’ll tell Snape everything. He can have the Maltesers. I wish I’d given them to him in the first place.”

  That woke me up like a bucket of iced water. Three and a half million pounds in diamonds and he wanted to give them away! I leant over the side of the bunk. It was so dark that I couldn’t see a thing but I hoped that I was addressing Herbert’s ear rather than his feet. “Herbert,” I said. “If you whisper one word about those Maltesers, I will personally kill you.”

  “But Nick …”

  “No, Herbert. Those Maltesers are the only hope you’ve got.”

  “But … uh … uh …” He sneezed again. “But I might get sent to prison!” he protested.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll visit you every Friday.”

  They woke us up at seven in the morning. We were allowed to wash and then a guard brought us each a mug of tea. I asked for a bacon sandwich but all I got was a nasty look. Then it was back into the interrogation room – for Herbert but not for me. Snape stopped me at the door. Boyle was with him, growling softly. That was one guy I wanted to steer clear of. I wouldn’t even have trusted Boyle to take my fingerprints. Not if I wanted to keep my fingers.

  “You can go, laddy,” Snape said. “It’s only big brother we want.”

  “How long are you going to keep him for?” I asked. “It’s only five days to Christmas.”

  “So?”

  “He hasn’t had time to buy my present yet.”

  Snape was unimpressed. “We’ll keep him as long as it takes,” he said. “I’ll tell a social worker to visit you – to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I’ll visit him!” Boyle grunted.

  “No you won’t, Boyle!” Snape hissed.

  I jerked a thumb at the police assistant. “He needs a social worker mor
e than me,” I said.

  Boyle lumbered a few steps towards me but then Snape grabbed hold of him. For a minute it was as if I wasn’t there.

  “You’re being ridiculous, Boyle.” Snape muttered. “I’ve told you about those violent videos …”

  “I just want to …” Boyle began.

  “No! No! No! How many times do I have to tell you. This isn’t the right sort of image for a modern metropolitan police force.”

  “It used to be,” Boyle growled.

  “In Transylvania,” Snape replied. He turned back to me. “Go on, son. Out of here.” he said. I glanced at Herbert who sneezed miserably. The door slammed. And suddenly I was alone.

  I didn’t do much that morning. There wasn’t much I could do. As I sat in Herbert’s office with my feet up on his desk I tried to work out who might have pulled the plug on the Fat Man’s chauffeur and why. By mid-morning I had it more or less figured. It went like this: The Fat Man has given us two days to come up with the goods and we’ve run out of time so he decides to have a rummage round our flat for himself. He sees us arriving at the Falcon’s funeral and that gives him the chance he wants. While he holds us up in the cemetery – there was no other reason for the little chat we had – his faithful chauffeur and housebreaker, Lawrence, is turning the place over. At least, that’s what he thinks.

  But whoever kidnapped Lauren Bacardi (and my money’s still on Gott and Himmell) has been asking her questions. She tells them about the box of Maltesers. So they nip back to pick them up and that’s when they find Lawrence. Maybe there’s a fight. Maybe they just didn’t like him. Either way, they shoot him just before Herbert and I get back from the funeral. They make a hasty exit through the bathroom window and over the roof. We get left with the body.

  Simple as that.

  I opened the drawer of Herbert’s desk. The box of Maltesers was still there – the fake box that I’d bought myself. The real box was still under the floorboard, covered in dust. I was just about to pull it out and have another look at it when the telephone rang.

  “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Soft, hesitant, perhaps foreign. I figured she must have a wrong number. I didn’t know any soft, hesitant, perhaps foreign women. But then she asked, “Tim Diamond?”

  “He’s not here,” I told her. “I’m his partner.”

  “His partner?”

  “Yeah – but right now I’m working solo. How can I help you?”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then the lady made up her mind. “Can you come out … to Hampstead? I need to see you.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Beatrice von Falkenberg.”

  That made me think. So the black widow had finally come crawling out of the woodwork – or to be more accurate, the telephone exchange. What did she want me for? “Suppose I’m busy …” I said.

  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “You’ll pay for the tube fare?”

  “Take a taxi.”

  I agreed so she gave me an address on the West Heath Road and told me to be there by twelve. I wondered if this was another decoy – if the moment I was gone somebody else would be elbowing their way into the flat. But so long as the fake Maltesers were in the desk, I reckoned I was covered. I changed my shirt and ran a comb through my hair. When I left, I was still a wreck, but at least I was a slightly tidier wreck. Once the widow discovered I was only thirteen-years-old, I didn’t think she’d really care how I dressed.

  I’d charge her for a taxi but I took the tube to Hampstead and then walked. Hampstead, in case you don’t know it, is in the north of London in the green belt. For “green”, read “money.” You don’t have to be rich to live in Hampstead. You have to be loaded. It seemed to me that every other car I passed was a Rolls Royce and even the dustbins had burglar alarms. I got directions from a traffic warden and walked round the back of the village. A quarter of an hour later I arrived at the Falcon’s lair.

  It was a huge place, standing on a hill over-looking the Heath. Whoever said crime doesn’t pay should have dropped by for an eyeful. It was the sort of house I’d have dreamed about – only I’d have had to take a mortgage out just to pay for the dream. Ten bedrooms? Eleven? It could have slept fifteen or more under those gabled roofs and with the price of property in that part of town I reckoned forty winks would probably cost you ten quid a wink. And that was just the top floor. Through the windows on the ground floor I could glimpse a kitchen as big as a dining-room and a dining-room as big as a swimming-pool. There was a swimming-pool too, running along four windows to the right of the front door. Mind you, the way things were around here, that could have just been the bath.

  I reached out and pressed the front door bell. It went bing-bong, which was a bit of an anti-climax. After all that had gone before, I’d been expecting a massed choir. The door opened and there was another anti-climax. Beatrice von Falkenberg opened it herself. So what had happened to the butler? She looked at me with disinterest and mild distaste. I could see we were going to get along fine.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I’m Nick,” I said. “Nick Diamond. You asked me to come here.”

  “Did I?” She shrugged. “I was expecting someone older.”

  “Well … I can come back in twenty years, if you like.”

  “No, no … come in.”

  I followed her in, suddenly feeling like a scruffy kid in bob-a-job week. She was young for a widow; maybe about forty with black hair clinging to her head like a bathing cap. Her skin was pale, her lips a kiss of dark red. She was wearing some sort of houserobe with a slit all the way up to her waist and she moved like she had never left the stage – not walking but flowing. Everything about her spelt class. The slim, crystal champagne glass in one hand. Even the tin plate with the lumps of raw meat in the other.

  “I was about to feed my pet,” she explained.

  “Dog?” I asked.

  She glanced at the plate. “No. I think it’s beef.”

  We’d gone into the room with the swimming-pool. It had been designed so that you could sit around it in bamboo chairs sipping cocktails from the bar at the far end, watching the guests swim. Only there were no bamboo chairs, the bar was empty and I was the only guest. I looked around and suddenly realized that although I was in a millionaire’s house, the millions had long gone. There was no furniture. Faded patches on the walls showed where the pictures had once been. The curtain-rails had lost their curtains. Even the potted plants were dead. The house was a shell. All it contained was a widow in a houserobe with a glass of champagne and a tin of raw meat.

  “Fido!” she called out. “Come on, darling!”

  Something splashed in the water. I swallowed. Apart from the widow in the houserobe with the champagne and the tin of raw meat it seemed that the house also contained an alligator. The last time I saw an alligator it was hanging on some rich woman’s arm with lipsticks and purses inside. But this one was no handbag. It was very alive, waddling out of the pool, its ugly black eyes fixed on the plate of meat.

  “Don’t worry,” the widow said. “He’s very fond of strangers.”

  “Yeah – cooked or raw?” I asked.

  She smiled and tossed Fido a piece of meat. Its great jaws snapped shut and it made a horrid gulping sound as its throat bulged, sucking the meat down. She held up a second piece. “I want the Maltesers,” she said.

  “Maltesers?”

  She threw the piece of meat but this time she made sure that it fell short so the creature had to stalk forward to get it. It stalked forward towards me. “They belonged to my husband,” she went on. “The dwarf stole them, I want them back.”

  I pointed at the alligator. It was getting too close for comfort. As far as I was concerned, a hundred miles would have been too close for comfort. “Do you have a licence for that thing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It was a present from my late husband.”

  “Have you ever thought about pussy cats
?”

  “Fido ate the pussy cats.”

  I thought of turning and running but I couldn’t be sure I’d make it to the door. The alligator had short, wrinkled legs but at the moment I can’t say mine felt much better. It was only a metre or so away. Its black eyes were fixed on me, almost daring me to make a move. The whole thing was crazy. I’d never been threatened with an alligator before.

  “I don’t have the Maltesers,” I said. “Tim has them.”

  “And where is he?”

  “In prison … Ladbroke Grove police station.”

  She paused for a long minute and looked at me with cold eyes. The eyes burrowed into me, trying to work out if I was telling the truth. In the end they must have believed me because she laughed and threw the rest of the meat into the swimming-pool. The alligator corkscrewed round and dived after it.

  “I like you,” she said. “You’re not afraid.” She walked over to me and put an arm round my shoulders. She hadn’t managed to frighten me so now she was trying to charm me. She wouldn’t manage that either. Given a choice, I’d have preferred to go out with the alligator.

  “When Henry von Falkenberg died,” she said, “all his money went with him. This house isn’t mine, Nick. I’ve had to sell the contents just to pay the rent. Even Fido is going to the zoo. It breaks my heart but I can’t afford to keep him. And now I don’t have a friend in the world.” There were tears in her eyes. Crocodile tears, I thought. Or alligator. “There is only one hope for me, Nicholas. The Maltesers. Henry wanted me to have them. They belong to me.”

  “What’s so special about them?” I asked.

  “To you – nothing,” she replied. “But to me … They’re worth five hundred pounds if you’ll get them back for me. That’s how much I’ll pay you.”