Secret of the Skull (11 page)

I had no doubt. Beeks had stolen those diamonds. He’d stolen the diamonds
and
he’d never left that office. In a simple, but roudabout sort of way.

What finally made me so sure was spotting the answer to an important question: Where had he hidden the gems? The solution to that little problem convinced me that I was right and that the theft
had indeed taken place.

It was all down to one small detail. I’d encountered Mr Beeks twice since arriving at the hotel and there had been one difference, one physical change, between our first meeting and our
second. Something to do with that phoney leg injury of his.

Can you spot it too?

The first time I met him, in the admin office, I’d noticed how light that walking stick of his had been. When I bumped into him upstairs, and handed the same walking stick
back to him, it had been heavier.

Why the difference in weight? It must have been hollow. There must now be something hidden inside it.

The diamonds.

I looked at my watch – the time was exactly seven forty-eight p.m. I ran back to the restaurant’s entrance. Black Suit Man was now nibbling at a salad. Moss the smuggler was wading
through a giant plateful of steak and chips. Susan, Izzy and the other girls were tucking into their main courses and nattering away to each other.

I caught Izzy’s eye and beckoned to her urgently. She pulled a face at me. I beckoned even more urgently and eventually she came over.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Have you been watching Beeks in that office?’

‘Yeeeees,’ she sighed. ‘And no, he hasn’t budged.’

‘I bet he closed the blinds a couple of minutes ago,’ I said.

Izzy gaped at me. ‘Yes! How did you know?’

‘It happened earlier. It confirms what I’ve already suspected. You and the others have to come to the admin office with me. Now. Beeks has nicked those diamonds and we have to stop
him.’

‘He can’t have. He’s been in that office all the time,’ said Izzy.

‘Get the others and come with me. Now!’

‘We’re in the middle of dinner!’

‘Well, get them to do you doggy bags! This is urgent! And be subtle! Don’t draw attention to yourselves! The smuggler, over there, and that guy in the black suit, over there, must
not
suspect we know the truth!’

Izzy hurried back to Susan’s table. She spoke to them for a minute or two. They all gasped loudly and stared at me. With a hurried shifting of chairs and a burst of excited chatter, they
jumped up and raced across the room. Everyone in the restaurant watched them go, including Moss and Black Suit Man.

‘I said
don’t
draw attention!’ I hissed.

‘This is really great!’ giggled Susan. ‘Diamond smugglers! And on my birthday!’

‘Shhhhhh!’ I said. ‘I’ve told you before, this is not a game! If I didn’t need witnesses, I’d . . . Oh, never mind, come on.’

I led them back to reception.

Susan’s mum wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of us all going into the office and confronting Bryan Beeks. She was even less keen on the idea of her coming in there with us.

‘But this is important!’ I protested. ‘If I’m right, we’ll be preventing a major crime! No, two major crimes, because we’ll have got a shipment of stolen
diamonds back from those smugglers as well!’

‘And if you’re wrong?’ said Susan’s mum.

‘I’m not wrong,’ I said, hoping to goodness that I wasn’t wrong.

I opened the door of the admin office. There was Mr Beeks, sitting at the nearest desk exactly as expected.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Bryan,’ said Susan’s mum, ‘but Saxby here thinks you’ve nicked a load of diamonds.’

Mr Beeks laughed heartily. ‘Really? That’s interesting! I’ve never been a desperate criminal on the run before. When did I make off with the loot, then?’

‘About twenty minutes ago,’ I said.

He laughed again. ‘Wow! And how did I do that, then, when I haven’t left this office for over an hour?’

‘That’s true,’ said Susan. ‘We could all see him from the restaurant. He was in here all that time.’

‘Ah,’ said Beeks, ‘looks like you’ve spotted the fatal flaw in your friend’s argument, Susan. I have a perfect alibi.’

‘Yes, rather too perfect,’ I said. ‘You’re in here, with orders not to be disturbed, guarded by Susan’s mum on the desk out there and clearly seen by every last
person in the restaurant across the courtyard. An absolutely, totally, one hundred per cent watertight alibi.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ chuckled Mr Beeks. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve still got work to do. You kids run along and play your games somewhere else, eh?’

‘One hundred per cent watertight,’ I said, ‘thanks to
that
.’ I pointed up to the projector attached to the ceiling, the one I’d noticed when I’d first
visited the office, the one that was just like the equipment at school.

‘I think the sequence of events went like this,’ I said. ‘A while ago, you planned to rob the diamond smuggler you knew would be in the hotel this evening. You knew you’d
need an iron-clad alibi to escape suspicion when the smugglers started looking for who’d stolen from them. So last time you were in this office, you recorded a video of yourself working at
that desk, including the sounds you made typing at your laptop.

‘Tonight, you put a
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door. You sat working at the desk for a short while. Then you got up and closed the blinds. I saw you do that from where I was sitting
in the restaurant. In the thirty seconds this room was hidden from view, you turned the projector so that it was facing the window. You set up a screen of some sort, linked your laptop to the
projector and started showing the video you’d taken of yourself. You even thought to reverse the image so that it would appear normal from the other side.

‘You opened the blinds. From across the courtyard, nothing appeared to have changed. Except that we were watching the video, not the real Bryan Beeks. You were now free to leave the office
with your alibi in place. However, you still needed to get past Susan’s mum and anyone else who happened to be in the reception area. If someone saw you leaving the office, your alibi would
be useless. And this is where you needed an accomplice, a helper.’

Beeks laughed softly to himself. ‘You’ve got imagination, kid, I’ll give you that.’

Everyone else was looking back and forth between me and Beeks. Except for Susan’s mum, who was looking straight at me with an expression which said, ‘Yes, you really are as strange
as I first thought.’

‘Your accomplice,’ I continued, ‘is currently in the restaurant. He’s the man wearing the smart black suit. I still can’t for the life of me work out where I know
him from. Anyway, he arrived at the hotel at a pre-arranged time, shortly after you’d shut yourself away in here. He waited until the reception area was empty, except for Susan’s mum.
Then he “accidentally” knocked over the display stand out there. While Susan’s mum was busy putting things back, you had a chance to sneak out of the office, unseen by anyone
except Black Suit Man.

‘You went upstairs, to room 217. I don’t yet know how you got into the safe. I can only assume you have some device or other which will read the combination. But in any case, you
stole the diamonds.

‘You then unexpectedly ran slap bang into me. Your alibi would stick if you’d simply passed someone in a corridor on your way back – they would be unlikely to remember you if
asked. But as it was me – someone who knows who you are – things might get awkward. However, you didn’t worry too much. It would have been your word against mine and with all
those witnesses in the restaurant, the alibi was still pretty safe.

‘Of course, you needed to get back into the office. So you called Black Suit Man. I saw him answer his phone when I returned to the restaurant. You told him you were ready to return. So
out he went to reception again and, making sure only Susan’s mum was around . . . oh what a clumsy clot, he sent that display stand flying again. Susan’s mum, really cross this time,
was looking the other way when you slipped back to your desk.

‘I’d suspected that you’d left this room, because the
Do Not Disturb
sign had been, er, disturbed. That probably wouldn’t have happened unless the door had been
opened and closed.

‘Once you were back in the office, you closed the blinds. You switched off the projector, turned it to face the other way again, put the screen away, and reopened the blinds. And there you
were once more, in this office, working away, as if nothing had happened, in full view of everyone in the restaurant. Perfect alibi.’

Beeks laughed and clapped his hands. ‘That’s ingenious,’ he chortled. ‘I wish I’d really thought of that.’

‘Some very simple things, done in a very roundabout way, to produce an apparently impossible result,’ I said.

While I’d been talking, Izzy had been examining the room. At that moment, she reached behind one of the piles of cardboard boxes that littered the room and pulled out a large sheet of thin
paper. It was pinned to a narrow wooden frame with small hooks attached at one side.

She turned it over for a few seconds, frowning at it. Then she raised it up and neatly hooked it to the top edge of the office window. The view of the dark courtyard and the brightly lit
restaurant beyond was precisely covered up.

Everyone turned to look at Bryan Beeks. Any hint of laughter had drained from his face.

‘Just because something is possible,’ he said, ‘doesn’t mean it’s true.’ He turned to Susan’s mum. ‘Mel, are you going to let this kid accuse me
of robbery?’

For the first time, I couldn’t work out what Susan’s mum was thinking. ‘I’m going to let him have his say,’ she muttered.

‘You have no proof!’ cried Mr Beeks. ‘Where are these diamonds, then, eh?’

‘You needed a really good hiding place,’ I said, ‘in case something went wrong. If the smugglers found out about the robbery too early, anything might happen. You needed to be
sure that your alibi would hold up and that the diamonds wouldn’t be found on you. If we hadn’t come in here now, you would have passed the diamonds to Black Suit Man when – oh,
what a coincidence! – you left the office just as he left the restaurant. Black Suit Man would then have walked out of here taking them with him. After that, it wouldn’t matter what the
smugglers did. They’d have no reason to suspect you and the diamonds would be long gone.’

Beeks snorted and shook his head. ‘So where is this hiding place, then?’

I picked up the walking stick that was propped against the desk. The moment I touched it, the expression on Beeks’s face changed.

The handle was screwed on tightly. I struggled with it at first, but then it snapped loose, like the top coming off a jar of chutney.

A horrible thought suddenly occurred to me. What if I was too late? What if he’d already moved the diamonds? What if he’d transferred them to some other hiding place? I’d have
no proof. None at all – or at least nothing beyond a few coincidences and possibilities.

Beeks would get away with it. I’d look like a total idiot.

With trembling hands, I placed the handle of the walking stick on the desk. I tipped up the long, tubular section.

I tipped it some more. Nothing was coming out. I got a cold, creeping feeling down my spine.

With a sudden rush, a glittering flow of light dropped out on to the desk in front of me. There must have been several dozen diamonds, all of them sparkling brightly in the glow from the
overhead lighting.

Susan and the others wow-ed and hey-ed and holy-cow-ed. Izzy’s face was a mask of astonishment.

‘Bryan,’ said Susan’s mum quietly, ‘I think you’d better stay right where you are. Girls, don’t let him leave this room.’ Susan and her friends blocked
the doorway, arms crossed.

‘We need to stop Black Suit Man,’ I said, ‘before he leaves the hotel. We may never trace him if he gets away.’

‘I’ll go and have a word with Vernon and Susan’s dad,’ she said. ‘We’ll find a way to keep him here until the police arrive.’

‘Don’t alert him,’ I said. ‘And don’t alert Mr Moss, the smuggler, either. There’s an entire organisation behind that guy. We must leave him to the cops
– it could get dangerous.’

Susan’s mum gave me a nod and disappeared. I turned to Mr Beeks as I rummaged in my pocket for my phone.

‘How did you open the safe?’ I said.

Beeks reached over and picked up the handle of his walking stick. He clicked a tiny catch at its end and opened it up into two halves. Inside was a device which looked a bit like a small
pen.

He took it out and placed it on the desk. Then, with a violent crunch, he smashed down on it with his fist. Izzy and the others flinched. He swept the broken bits in to the waste paper
basket.

‘Temper temper,’ I mumbled.

Now that the case was concluded, I turned my attention to the mysterious texter. I switched on my phone and sent him/her a brief message:

Robbery foiled. Diamonds in my possession. Police being called.

I pressed
Send
. Ha! Whoever the texter was, he/she would be hugely impressed with me. They’d also be shaking in their boots, because they’d realise that if I could wrap up
this case so efficiently, then I’d be hot on their heels and discover their identity before you could -—