I Spy (9 page)

He was so relieved that he let out a deep breath and allowed himself to relax for the first time since he’d heard the men outside his suite. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making
him lose his grip in the chute and he’d plummeted a good ten, twelve feet before he managed to stop himself. Now he was twelve feet from the way he’d gotten in (and had hoped to get
out), and more than likely the same distance from the chute entrance on the next floor. This situation was bad enough in itself, but then he heard footsteps coming back
up
the stairs,
stopping on the floor below.

Trey looked down between his legs...what was going on? Four floors below he could see the pale, grey square that had to be the end of the chute; it was a long, long way away. Then light spilled
into the shaft as someone opened the cover one floor down and poked their head in, checking up and down the chute. Trey froze. This was it, the chase was over and he was about to get caught!

But maybe not...at least not yet.

Below him the man swore and slammed the cover shut, his footsteps disappearing back down the service staircase. Once again Trey let out a sigh of relief, but this time he didn’t relax; he
realized he hadn’t been caught because, suspended
above
the man in the pitch black of the laundry chute, he’d been invisible!

All he had to do now was shimmy down to the next floor, maybe the one below, get out of the chute and go find the Manager’s Office. He would
surely
be safe there, and the Manager
could call the police or the Embassy and do all that official stuff – in fact, it now occurred to him, whatever had happened to his dad might have
nothing
to do with those men turning
up...his dad might’ve had a minor accident or something and gone to hospital. It was possible. And if
that
was the case (you had to look on the bright side) the Manager would know all
about it. But then, as he cautiously edged his way down the shaft, Trey had a worrying thought: if his father had been kidnapped from their suite –
in broad daylight, no less!
–
maybe the Manager might
not
, in fact, be the best person to go to. He could be in on the whole thing, or being bribed or blackmailed or...or not. Trey wouldn’t know until it was too
late.

As Trey slid past the third-floor chute entrance, it crossed his mind that if this
was
all an inside job, it would likely be someone below the Manager – like in the detective
stories set in English country houses where it was the butler who’d always done it. Or like the yarn he’d read called
The Inside Out Job
, where the bank’s security guard
had been in on the heist. Deep in thought, and assuming that the two men chasing him had gone elsewhere to look, Trey wasn’t trying to be particularly quiet so he was quite unprepared when
the chute door he’d just gone past opened and a hand reached in to grab him by the arm.

“Got you, boy!” exclaimed a gruff voice, of the kind that Trey knew for sure belonged to a gun-carrying type.

Everything then seemed to happen all at once.

Trey lost his grip and fell, except the hand holding his arm kept a tight grip and he found himself dangling in mid-air; but, as he felt himself being inexorably pulled back up, a bundle of
sheets and pillowcases came tumbling down the chute and enveloped him, and however much of his captor was poking into the shaft. As the two of them struggled to untangle themselves, Trey felt the
man lose his grip.

It was a couple of seconds before he fully took in that this sensation of freedom was
also
what it felt like to plunge, uncontrollably, towards the basement. However far down
that
was...

As he dropped like a stone, Trey was acutely aware that he could well be just moments away from becoming strawberry Jell-O. Fading into the distance above him he could hear shouting, but the
only thing that concerned him now was what was going to happen below. It was as he thought that he probably wouldn’t
ever
get to see his parents again (and that he’d yet to send
his mother a postcard from Constantinople, like he’d promised he’d do at regular intervals and from everywhere they visited) that he landed with a muffled thud which knocked the breath
out of him.

Gasping for air, and batting various pieces of dirty washing out of the way, Trey attempted to stand up. This was not as easy as it might have been. The loose mound of laundry, piled in the huge
wicker container that had caught him, acted much like quicksand, so that the more he tried to get out, the further down he seemed to go. When he finally surfaced he found himself, the arm of a pair
of striped pyjama tops draped over his head, staring at a very confused and startled maid, unused to seeing guests come down the laundry chute.

“How do I get out of here – I mean the hotel, not...” Trey flipped the pyjama arm off his head and pointed down at where he was standing, “...
this
place?”

The maid frowned, in a way that made it perfectly clear she didn’t speak a word of English.

“Okay...” Trey clambered over the side of what he now saw was basically a massive laundry basket on wheels, jumped to the floor and brushed himself down. He thought for a moment,
then mimed going up to a door, opening it, checking no one was there and then tiptoeing through. “Out,” he said, “so no one sees me, right?”

The maid looked none the wiser.

“Okay, how’s about this...” Trey mimed a grand arrival. “
Front
entrance.” He pointed to himself and shook his head; then he did a “tiny door” and
the tiptoe thing and pointed to himself again, nodding and grinning. “
Back
entrance! Get that?”

The maid, who really didn’t look
that
much older than him, shrugged, said something in Turkish and pointed behind Trey.

“Thanks a million!” Trey turned to go, then turned back. “Anybody asks? This never happened, right?”

The maid frowned again.

“Oh, okay...sure,” Trey dug into his pocket and handed her a couple of the coins his father had given him so he had some cash when he was out with Miss Renyard and the
Stanhope-Leighs. “Me,” he pointed to himself and shook his head, “never here, okeedokey?”

The maid took the money and Trey left her, a puzzled expression on her face, standing by the laundry basket that had without a shadow of a doubt saved his life. Going in the direction
she’d pointed he found himself in an ill-lit corridor that went past a number of rooms full of people ironing, sewing, pressing and folding clothes and sheets like robots. No one looked up,
no one noticed him passing by and a couple of minutes later he found himself at the requested small door.

He opened it, expecting to find himself looking at some dingy corridor, only to find that instead the door gave onto a wide boulevard, which a swift glance told him must be at the rear of the
hotel. He’d been expecting to find himself somewhere
inside
the hotel and without thinking, turned to go back the way he’d come but then stopped himself. What was he thinking?
This was far better than getting lost trying to find his way through the warren below stairs, on top of which, back there was where the men chasing him were, no doubt right at that moment rushing
down to the basement to get him. At least he’d escaped, even if he didn’t have a clue, now he had, what to do next.

As he made his way to the side of the hotel, Trey was suddenly hit by the reality of everything that had just happened. One moment he was coming back from not such a bad day
spent with Arthur Stanhope-Leigh (he’d tried calling him Artie, but the boy had looked at him like he was something the dog had done), and the next his whole world had been turned upside
down.

He leaned against the wall for a moment and considered what he knew for an actual fact (supposition, hunches and guesses were for the birds, as Deke Preston, PI, had put it in a recent issue of
Dime Detective
) and he had to admit that it didn’t add up to much at all.

But he did know a few items of 24 carat information. To start with, somebody had been on their tail ever since they’d arrived in Constantinople, and this was
nothing
to do with his
“overactive imagination” as Ahmet had also seen them; then, there was the fact that there had been a set-to in their suite, the end result of which was blood had been spilled and his
father was no longer there. And finally, the bald Russian man with the gun he’d seen arguing with his father the day before had come back and ended up chasing
him
!

Trey chewed his lip nervously; whichever way you looked at it, things couldn’t be much worse. But holding up a wall, moping, was not going to get anyone anywhere, least of all him. Trey
squared his shoulders. It went completely against every rule in the book for a private dick to go to the police for assistance, but this wasn’t a detective story, he wasn’t a gumshoe
and no matter how steely-eyed and iron-fisted he’d imagined he’d be, when it came to
actually
being hunted by
real
gunmen, truth was, he needed all the help he could
get.

As he climbed up the steps leading to the road at the front of the hotel, a line from a recent novelette,
Time Waits For This Man,
came back to him: “A cautious guy gets to live
another day”, was what one of the characters had said. Trey stopped and, sticking to the wall like a gecko, he slunk the last few yards up to the corner; he wished he had a small mirror so he
could use it to see what was happening without being seen, but he didn’t and so very,
very
carefully he poked his head out for a swift glance.

The guy who’d written the novelette (Seymour G. Something-or-other) certainly knew his stuff when it came to survival tips. Standing right out in front of the hotel, with his back to him,
was the balding man.

Trey’s heart sank. He was trapped! And then a thought occurred to him...maybe it was
a
bald man, not
the
bald man. He took another quick look, this time catching the
man’s profile. No doubt about it, it was
the
bald man. For a moment he considered the idea of going back the way he’d come, but the last thing he felt like doing was retracing
his steps. A better idea was to get away from the hotel, find somewhere reasonably out of sight where he could maybe wait for a bit to see if his dad came back, before trying his luck with the
police; it was a plan, sort of. All he knew was that every instinct he owned was telling him to
get away from the Pera Palas
!

Which was all well and good, if only he could work out how to do it without being seen.

When his opportunity came he very nearly missed it because he was lost in thought trying to work out what to do. A large gaggle of people – locals, not hotel guests, from the way they were
dressed – had appeared from somewhere, talking loudly and with much hand-waving. His brain finally clicking into gear, before they’d all moved past where he was hiding Trey dashed out
and just managed to bury himself within the group, who were far too busy yakking to notice him. Keeping in the middle of the crowd, he waited until he thought it was safe and then made a break for
it.

There were no shouts, no pistol shots, no pounding feet chasing after him as he ran. He’d made it!

T
rey had an
extremely
rough mental map of bits of the area around the Pera Palas Hotel (basically just what he’d picked up driving
with Ahmet) and, once he was totally and ab-so-
lutely
sure he wasn’t being chased, he began to do what he hoped was circle back so that he could find somewhere to watch from.

Getting to where he wanted to be took a lot more time than it ought to have done because he’d ended up losing his way, which hadn’t been a barrel of laughs; it was only when he
recognized a Post Office his father had had Ahmet stop at the previous day that he realized he was going the wrong way. When he
eventually
managed to sort himself out with a safe spot to
observe the front of the hotel, the bald man was, wouldn’t you know, nowhere to be seen. And to top it all, he’d taken so long to get back that the idea of waiting to see if his father
turned up didn’t have a leg to stand on; hanging around any longer would just be a waste of time.

Chewing fingernails was not something Trey ever did, but he thought that now might well be the time he took the habit up...because what, apart from fret, was he going to do? His father could
have been and gone for all he knew, and then there was a fact that he’d so far ignored, which was that he had
no
idea what the other guy chasing him looked like. It could be anyone.
Trey’s shoulders slumped, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed. He was stymied. It looked like the only thing he could do now was find a policeman and hope he spoke some English...

“Numbskull! Ignoramus! Dolt and
chump
!”

Trey shook his head and almost gave himself a personal biff. What
had
he been thinking? He should get himself straight over to the Stanhope-Leigh household! And it didn’t matter
that he wasn’t sure
exactly
where it was, he had his father’s money clip and he could get a taxi...he’d find the place somehow. Trey’s right hand felt in his jacket
pocket for the clip, which wasn’t there, no matter how many times he felt for it, or turned the pocket out. It was gone.

With a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach Trey patted his jacket, his trousers and his jacket one last time, then stopped himself, took a deep breath and had to admit that the money clip
was absolutely, one hundred and ten per cent
definitely
not there. Anywhere. At all.

“How...?” he muttered to himself. “I mean
how
?”

In his mind’s eye, Trey reran where he’d been and what he’d done since he’d first stuffed the clip in his jacket, back in the suite. Could it have fallen out as he ran
down the corridor? Maybe, because, as there was a man with a gun right behind him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. Had it come out as he’d plummeted down the laundry chute? More than
possible, and the thought that it might have, and could at this very moment be getting laundered made him kick the wall he was standing next to. So, what was he going to do now? No money meant no
taxi, and no way of getting over to the Stanhope-Leighs, wherever they were.