The Falcon's Malteser (9 page)

“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, laddie,” 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 rasped.

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

Boyle lumbered a few steps toward 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 midmorning I had it more or less figured out. It went like this: The Fat Man gives us two days to come up with the goods and we run out of time, so he decides to have a rummage around our apartment 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 the plan.

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 the 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 line. What did she want me for? “Suppose I’m busy . . .” I said.

“I’ll make it worth your while.”

“You’ll pay for the train 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 figured 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 subway 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 garbage cans had burglar alarms. I got directions from a traffic cop and walked around 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 overlooking 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 figured forty winks would probably cost you ten bucks 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 doorbell. It went
bing-bong,
which was a bit of an anticlimax. After all that had gone before, I’d been expecting a massed choir. The door opened and there was another anticlimax. 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 chimney sweep. 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 housedress 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 spelled 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 rods had lost their curtains. Even the potted plants were dead. The house was a shell. All it contained was a widow in a housedress 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 housedress with the champagne and the tin of raw meat, it seemed that the house also contained an alligator. The last time I had seen an alligator it was hanging on some rich woman’s arm with lipsticks and credit cards 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 toward 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 permit for that thing?” I asked.

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

“Have you ever thought about pussycats?”

“Fido ate the pussycats.”

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 few feet 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 by an alligator before.

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

“And where is he?”

“In jail . . . 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 around and dived after it.

“I like you,” she said. “You’re not afraid.” She walked over to me and put an arm around 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 spend time 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 dollars if you’ll get them back for me. That’s how much I’ll pay you.”

“I thought you had no money.”

“I’ll find it. Maybe Fido will end up as suitcases after all.”

She walked me back to the door and opened it.

“Talk to Herbert,” she said. “When the police release him, bring the Maltesers here. I will have the money, I swear it. And to you they are useless. You must see that.”

“What about my taxi fare home?” I asked.

“When you come with the Maltesers . . .” She shut the door.

“See you later, alligator,” I muttered.

So that was Beatrice von Falkenberg! A strange, lonely woman, sharing her memories with a strange, lonely pet. I walked back down the road toward Hampstead, and as I went I turned over two questions in my mind. If the Falcon had been so secretive, how come she had found out about the Maltesers? It seemed unlikely that he had told her. So who had?

The second thing was even stranger. She had telephoned me and asked to speak to Tim Diamond. I hadn’t said anything on the subject of my brother. So how had she known that his real name was Herbert?

I didn’t go back to the flat that afternoon. It wouldn’t have been the same without Herbert. Quieter, tidier, less dangerous, and generally nicer . . . but not the same. Also I was worried about him. I wouldn’t want to spend half an hour with Snape and Boyle, let alone a whole day. Boyle could have killed him by now. On the other hand, if Herbert told them about the Maltesers, I’d kill him myself. Either way he was in big trouble, and the sooner I found out just what was going on, the better it would be for him.

Things might have been different if Lauren Bacardi had been able to tell me where the dwarf had been when he worked out what the Maltesers meant. If I could see what he had seen, maybe I’d be able to work it out, too. But I had a nasty feeling that the only way I’d be able to talk to Lauren again would be with a Ouija board. The people who had snatched her were playing for keeps. By now she probably had more lead in her than a church roof.