“Thank you,” she said sleepily. She pointed to the photo. “Is that your wife?”
Salem smiled. “Anne was my wife, yes. She was from Paris, like you. She was a wonderful woman, so kind, and so talented – all these sketches are hers,” he said, gesturing to the birds on the walls. “But Anne died twenty years ago.”
“Oh,” said Max, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I was and am a lucky man.” Salem drew the curtains against the afternoon light, dimming the room. “Sleep well, Max.”
A minute later, Sister Marguerite poked in her head, and whispered, “Rest well, mon lapin.” But Max was already asleep.
When she woke, dusk was drawing in. It took her a few moments to understand why her bed felt so different today, before she remembered that she was in a new flat. A new city. A new continent. Max went to the window, held back the curtain, and looked out at Asia. People hurried home through the darkening streets – not so different, after all those miles crossed, from Parisians hurrying home on a December evening. For a few minutes she just stood, feeling very far from home and at the same time not so far at all.
Then she tidied up her plaits, and found her shoes, and went downstairs. The café had been filled with candles, and it looked lovely, but it was still mostly empty. Max felt sad for Salem, who clearly cared for the place beautifully. A few small groups clustered at tables, drinking tea, and sharing something that Max had not seen before: colourful glass bottles sat between them, with pipes winding out like octopus legs, and people puffed on the pipes as they sat and talked.
Salem Sadik appeared behind her with a tray. “Shisha,” he said, smiling. “Tobacco is heated at the bottom of those glass things, the hookah; and they’re all smoking it. Terrible for you, just like cigarettes. Perhaps you’d prefer some tea?” He nodded at the two copper teapots on his tray, stacked one on top of the other. “We’re over here, in the corner. Follow me. I hope you slept well?”
So Max followed Salem, past the muttering groups, through candlelight and shisha smoke, to where a group she knew sat waiting: Sister Marguerite, Ester Rosenkrantz, Klaus Grob, and Rupert Nobes.
Rupert Nobes?
Max blinked, wondering if she was seeing things. She gawped. She gawped some more. She briefly goggled, then went back to gawping. But the more she gawped, the more Rupert carried on very much being there, and not in a hospital bed in Romania at all.
“Hello, Max,” he said, smiling at her shocked face. The smile was interrupted by an enormous fit of sneezing and shuddering, but when that was over, he went back to smiling. He looked as scruffy as ever, but not as vague – sharper round the edges somehow, like a grainy film come into focus.
“Sit!” ordered Marguerite. “Tea! We need to look after you, mon lapin. You’re not the only one who’s had adventures on the wrong side of trains, Rupert. Max crawled on the roof. While it was moving.”
Rupert raised his eyebrows. “I say, not bad, Max!”
“But,” added Klaus, “please never do it again.”
“Um,” said Max, “what’s…?” Which was about all she could manage. She sipped the tea that Salem had poured into a glass for her. It was strong and dark, with a sweet streak of sugar.
Luckily, Marguerite understood the question. “My friend Salem here,” she said, “is a café owner by profession, but also a rather gifted amateur detective. We knew each other years ago, when he lived in Paris for a stretch. If I needed a good brain to pick, I picked his. So after he moved back here, over the years, if I’ve needed someone to keep an eye out in Istanbul…”
Salem chuckled. “Marguerite has had me keeping my eyes out so often, it’s a wonder I haven’t lost them. I’m a fool to play along. But I’ve got the time – as you can see, business is not exactly booming. And her cases are always so curious.”
“I had a feeling,” continued Sister Marguerite, “that we hadn’t heard the last of Rupert. There was no way that he was on our train by coincidence. So when he disappeared, I asked Salem to keep an ear to the ground, to see if he turned up here.”
“Outrageous behaviour,” said Rupert – but he was smiling, and pouring Sister Marguerite more tea, so Max didn’t think he meant it.
“So,” said Salem, taking up the story, “I checked at the hotels and hostels and so on – easy enough, if you’ve got friends in the right places. And sure enough, the man himself pitches up, only a couple of streets from this café.”
“On the first flight I could catch, when those fussing doctors would let me go,” said Rupert. “I kept telling them I was fine.” He rolled his eyes, then slightly ruined the effect by sneezing ten times in a row. Klaus helpfully yelled “Gesundheit!” after every sneeze. Max guessed that this was the German equivalent of “bless you”, which was nice of Klaus, but maybe he didn’t need to say it for every sneeze.
When the sneezing and gesundheit-ing was over, Max said, “But – what are you doing here? In Istanbul, I mean – but also, here, right now?”
Rupert nodded approvingly. “Our young sleuth asks all the right questions, as ever. Well, Max, I am in Istanbul because I have been planning for weeks to get my hands on that blasted diamond, and I continue to pray that I will, although I’m losing hope a bit, I must say. And I am here tonight because Mr Sadik seems to think that we should be working together.”
“I followed him a bit,” explained Salem. “It became pretty clear that he was snooping around Elodie Morel. When I heard Marguerite’s story, I figured that you were all looking for the same thing. So, I paid him a visit.”
Max stirred her tea thoughtfully. She remembered something Marguerite had told her, back in Budapest – that there were sure to be other criminals chasing after the Phantoms. She had forgotten all about it. “So Rupert – on the train – you were trying to steal the diamond from the Phantoms? You thought Suzanne had it?”
“I’ve known Suzanne was with the Phantoms for a while,” said Rupert, nodding. “I had a tip from an old friend in the business. So I’ve been keeping an eye on her, and when I found she was booking a train out of the country, I knew she’d be smuggling something worth my while. So I followed. When I saw the headlines that morning, I realized I’d hit the jackpot.” He smiled, a not even slightly vague smile. “I only ever thieve from thieves, Max. There’s a satisfying justice to it.”
Marguerite snorted. “That’s stretching it a bit, mon poulet. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But I have to admit, Max, this man has brought his own peculiar form of justice to more criminals than anyone I know in the force. And never taken a penny from an honest man. It’s just a crying shame,” she said sternly, “that he won’t use his talents lawfully, through the police force.”
“Like you do, Sister?” said Rupert, with a sly grin.
“That is not at all the same thing—”
“So, Rupert,” said Max, before they could start arguing, “you aren’t really in love with Suzanne?”
“Goodness, no,” said Rupert, grimacing. “Not my type. I prefer men, and even if I didn’t, she’s a bit—”
“Terrifying?” suggested Max.
Rupert nodded. “That’s the ticket. I was trying to work out where she was keeping it, hoping I could charm or annoy her into letting something slip. I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I took a quick look through her suitcase, and she caught me looking at her letters. I’d got a rose as a cover story: I pretended I was leaving it in her case for her to find and just got a bit nosy along the way, and I think she still believes that’s true. But I’d still obviously seen too much for her liking, even if it was ‘by mistake’.” He sighed. “She invited me for a drink in her car, and I thought I was finally getting somewhere, but my head felt awfully heavy when I went to bed, and I woke up in a snowdrift. The blasted drink must have been drugged with something to knock me out, so she could throw me off.” Rupert sneezed a sad little sneeze, then added croakily, “It’s not over – achoo – yet, though.”
Salem poured another round of tea. “A brave se
ntiment,” he said. “However, I have suggested to Rupert that he is very unlikely to succeed alone, now that the diamond is safely in Elodie Morel’s house. And I have suggested to Marguerite that Rupert’s information may be crucial to our success. No one understands a thief like a thief. So here we are.”
Max’s eyes widened. “Success for what? Are we stealing it back?”
Ester cried “Ja!” and pounded the table, Klaus grinned, and Rupert gave a tired nod. “Absolutely, mon lapin,” said Marguerite. “Although, as ever, how is the interesting question. And –” she gave Rupert a steely stare “– we will not be keeping it.”
This had obviously been an earlier debate. Rupert stirred his tea mulishly.
“Don’t look so down,” said Salem, punching him lightly on the arm. “The reward for its return will be more than enough.”
“Enough for what?” asked Max.
“Rupert has taken some stupid risks,” explained Marguerite, “and now owes some very dangerous people a lot of money. Correct, mon poulet?”
Rupert rolled his eyes, but didn’t object. “They’re getting rather angry, Max. Caught up with me at the station in London as I was leaving, dumped everything out of my bag – which was everything I had left in the world by that point, apart from the contents of my pockets – and punched me on the nose, snapping the old glasses. All more to scare me rather than anything serious, but they’ve promised much worse if I don’t pay up soon. I promised them I was about to hit the jackpot, but they’re not exactly being patient.” He rubbed a hand through his hair. “Being frank, Max, it’s rather a pickle.”
So that’s why your case was empty, thought Max. And now the phone call she had heard from the Ister made sense too. Poor Rupert. He was having a lot of not-flies for one week.
Ester banged her stick impatiently, annoyed that none of this conversation was about her. “Come on!” she blared. “Enough, enough. I have drunk my own body weight in tea, and we still don’t have a plan.”
“Well said, mon chou,” said Marguerite. “Time for business. Rupert. What do you know about Morel’s house?”
Rupert rubbed his hair some more, helplessly. “Nothing good. She lives in a huge pile on the west bank of the Bosphorus Strait, with a butler and a whole pack of maids and cooks and so on.” (So much, thought Max, for Great-Aunt Elodie’s claim that she would be needing help around the house.) “Suzanne is there too for now. The whole house is alarmed. If you enter any way other than the front door, you trip the alarms, the whole place locks down, and the police are automatically summoned. Vicious guard dogs at the front door ready to savage anyone trying to sneak in that way unnoticed. There are cameras everywhere. All her safes are fingerprint-operated; no way to pick those locks. And the place is enormous, so even if you could get in unnoticed, you’d need to know exactly where to look.”
There was a silence. Not a very encouraging one. It sounded impossible. But then, it had already been impossibly stolen twice. That still puzzled Max. “What I don’t understand,” she said, breaking the silence, “is how it was stolen in the first place. From Fort Vaults, and again from Sirkeci station.”
Rupert cheered up a bit at that, and pushed his glasses up his nose importantly. “That’s where a professional con man can help you, Max. Piece of cake. The Fort case is a very simple matter of diversion. There’s no way in without setting the alarms off. So, you set them off. You make a big show of it. You let them arrest someone. Meanwhile, while they think they’re catching the thieves, the real thief is somewhere else entirely, and no one notices. You saw in the papers, perhaps, that there was another break-in at Fort the week before they noticed the diamond had been switched for a fake? Yes? I’d bet any money that the Phantoms set that up. Then all Suzanne has to do is turn up dressed as a policewoman or security guard, and while all the confusion is going on, replace the real diamond with the fake one.”
Max thought about the alarms at Great-Aunt Elodie’s house. Her mind, as sharp as her own great-aunt’s, set to work.
“I’d love to know what they used to make the fake,” Rupert added. “It must have been good. Maybe glass, or quartz – maybe cubic zirconia, that’s very fashionable … but the police are holding it very close to their chests. Probably don’t want to admit that they were so easily fooled!” He cough-chuckled to himself, wheezing merrily, then caught his breath and continued. “Anyway. As for the theft at the station: obviously, tripping up Marguerite was a deliberate distraction. But there’s a few ways to pick a pocket, and I don’t know which she used. Did she touch the diamond, Max?”
“Yes. And –” Max suddenly remembered “– she took something from my case, I think.”
“What did you have?”
Max recited everything she had packed. Rupert looked puzzled.
“Frankly, Max, that doesn’t really help…”
“Oh!” said Max. “And there were the things Sister Marguerite left behind. Tickets, and a newspaper, and glue, and a jar, and a bag of thread…”
Rupert’s eyes lit up. “Aha! The spider trick, then.”
Across the table, Ester moaned and shut her eyes.
“You put a dab of glue on the end of some fine thread,” explained Rupert. “Really fine, so that you wouldn’t spot it if you weren’t looking for it. You just need to get the gluey end of the thread on the object, and let it stick. Elodie could have done that when she touched the diamond. She leaves the room, and then she yanks the thread, while Le Goff is busy with Marguerite. By that time, it’s stuck to the diamond, like a spider’s web. Voila – the spider trick.”
“Rupert,” growled Ester, “will you stop saying that word.”
“What word? Spider?”
“What’s wrong with spiders?” said Marguerite.
“Spiders are useful,” Salem remarked.
“Really,” said Klaus earnestly, “if you could all stop staying ‘spiders’, Ester’s very—”
“ENOUGH!” bellowed Ester. “You should be planning. Not upsetting a poor old woman.”
“I think I have a plan,” said Max.
Everyone looked at her. Max was suddenly reminded of her family all turning to stare at her, when she had asked to go to Istanbul. But this time, no one was looking at a little girl known only for armchairs and daydreams. They were looking at Max Morel, who had climbed on trains and spied on jewel dealers and found stores of secret diamonds. Even if she had been homesick and afraid for most of that time – she had done it anyway. They leaned in. The candle flames flickered and dimmed, as if they too were huddling close.
“We need the police to see that it’s my great-aunt who has the diamond, right?” said Max, lowering her voice. “And the alarms bring the police? Maybe we need to copy the Phantom break-in at Fort. We do a big loud break-and-enter, a distraction. It brings the police – and then we show them where the heartbreak diamond is.”
“But mon lapin,” said Sister Marguerite, “we don’t know where it is. How will we find a two-inch diamond in that enormous house?”
“We’ll have to get my great-aunt to show us.”
Salem shook his head sadly. “But Max, why would she show that to any of you – a con man, a jewel dealer, a gang member, a detective, and a detective’s apprentice?” The others all murmured their agreement, and Rupert sneezed despairingly.
Max smiled. She liked “detective’s apprentice”. “That isn’t how Suzanne and Great-Aunt Elodie see us,” she said. “Rupert’s just Suzanne’s spurned admirer, as far as they know. Ester’s their bitter rival; Klaus is her suspicious friend. Sister Marguerite’s the ‘real menace’ – those were her words. Between those four people, I think I know how we can crack this.”
“And you, Max?” said Salem softly. “Who does this great-aunt of yours think you are?”
Max smiled. The candles flickered and straightened, tall and bright.
“Who, me? Oh, I’m just a child.”
Great-Aunt Elodie’s house was a towering white block of stone, laced in archways
and columns. It backed on to the Bosphorus Strait. To its left was a beautiful garden, sleeping for the winter. At the front were wide stone steps, leading up to a black front door.
On either side of the door were chained two dogs that seemed to be made all of triangles – hackles raised into triangles that trembled behind triangular faces that hung open to reveal triangular teeth. They sat alert, waiting for intruders.
Today, there would be four.
The spurned admirer
At 10.03, a young man in tweed rang the doorbell. He put down a large basket on the step, polished his glasses on his jacket, put them back on his nose, ran a hand through his hair and waited.
It was answered by a butler with permanently raised eyebrows, who listened politely to the man’s vague rambling, bowed stiffly, and disappeared inside to deliver his message. A minute later, a young woman with mismatched eyes and a dragon smile appeared. She did not smile the smile, and both the mismatched eyes matched each other in their anger. She stayed a foot inside the doorway.
“Rupert!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
The man sneezed twice, then heaved up the basket from the steps and put it inside the hallway, at her feet. The dogs stretched their chains to sniff the basket, heads cocked, puzzled.
“I had to find you,” said Rupert. “I sleep-walked off that train before I could tell you that I love you.”
The woman raised her eyebrows at that, but she didn’t say anything.
“I brought you a hundred roses,” said the man, indicating the basket. “One for every year that I will love you.”
“Right. You’re planning to live to be one hundred and, what, thirty-five?”
“Twenty-eight!” The man seemed, for a moment, less vague somehow; sharper round the edges. Then he cleared his throat, and melted again. More softly, he said, “Twenty-eight – my love.”
“Fine. You’re planning to live to be one hundred and twenty-eight?”
The Secret of the Night Train Page 11
