South by Southeast Read online

  SOUTH BY

  SOUTH EAST

  Maybe I should have emigrated to Australia.

  My parents had left the country three years before when I was eleven, and of course they’d meant to take me with them. I’d got as far as Heathrow. But while my parents had got jammed up in one door of the aircraft, I’d slipped out another. Then I’d legged it across the main runway, leaving the screams of the engines – and of my mother – behind me. I remember stopping at the perimeter fence and turning round. And there they were, my mum and dad, flying off to Australia without me. As the plane soared away into the setting sun there was a big lump in my throat and I realized I’d laughed so much I’d swallowed my chewing-gum.

  Ever since then I’d been living with Tim. Twice I’d almost been killed with him. I should have remembered that as we set off together in search of McGuffin. Perhaps this was going to be third time unlucky.

  “Are you sure about this?” Tim asked as we walked together.

  I jiggled the key in my hand. “We’re just going to give it back,” I said.

  As we approached Skin Lane, a street cleaner limped round the corner, stabbing at the pavement with a broken, worn-out brush. The cleaner wasn’t looking much better himself. Maybe it was the heat. There was a dustcart parked in the alley and that puzzled me. Why hadn’t the cleaner taken the cart with him? Meanwhile Tim had walked on and, looking past him, I saw Jake McGuffin standing in the telephone box with the receiver propped under his chin.

  “He’s still there,” I said.

  “Yes.” Tim sniffed. “But look at that. He’s only had my coat five minutes and he’s already spilled something all down the front.”

  “What?” Suddenly I wasn’t feeling so good. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, which was strange, because I didn’t know I had any hairs on the back of my neck. Leaving the cart, I moved quickly past Tim. McGuffin watched me approach but his eyes didn’t focus. I reached out to open the door.

  “Wait a minute, Nick,” Tim said. “He hasn’t finished talking.”

  I opened the door.

  McGuffin had finished talking. The telephone was dead and any minute now he’d be joining it. The stuff he had spilled down the coat was blood, his own blood, and it was Charon who had done the spilling. Even as I opened the door I saw the shattered pane of glass where the bullet had passed through on its way to McGuffin’s heart. And at the same time, I knew that the man with the broom – Charon – had just made a clean getaway.

  I was holding the door. For a moment I was trapped behind it. Tim was standing in front of me, his mouth open, his eyes wide. Then McGuffin pitched forward, landing in Tim’s arms. He was still alive. He began to talk. I would have heard what he said but it was exactly then that a train decided to pass overhead, and for the next few seconds the air was filled with the noise of grinding, creaking metal. The brick walls of the alley caught the sound and batted it back and forth like a ping-pong ball. I saw McGuffin’s lips move. I saw Tim nod. But I didn’t hear a word. I tried to move round but the glass door was still between me and them. By the time I managed to close it and get over to them, the train was gone.

  So was McGuffin.

  Tim let him go and he sprawled out on the tarmac. I tried to talk but my lips were too dry. I took a deep breath and tried again. “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Suth,” Tim said.

  “Suth? You mean – south?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that all?”

  “No. He said ‘bee’.”

  “A bumblebee?”

  “No.” Tim shook his head. “Just ‘bee’.”

  “South. Bee…”

  “Suff-iss.”

  “Suff-iss?”

  Tim looked at me sadly. “I couldn’t hear,” he wailed. “The train was too loud…”

  “I know!” I forced myself not to shout at him. “But you were closest to him, Tim. You must have heard what he said.”

  “I’ve told you. Suff. Bee. Suff-iss.”

  “Suff. Bee. Suff-iss?” I played it over in my head a few times. “You mean south by south east? Was that what he said?”

  Tim brightened. “Yes! That was it, Nick! I mean, that’s what it must have been. South by south east! That’s exactly what he said.”

  “South by south east.” I made a quick calculation, then turned round so that I faced the corner of Skin Lane, away from the High Street.

  “A dead end,” Tim said. He looked down at the body, his face going the colour of mouldy cheese. If we stayed here much longer he was going to pass out on me.

  “You’re not going to faint, are you?” I asked.

  “No!” Tim was indignant.

  “You usually faint when there’s a dead body.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “You even fainted when your goldfish died.”

  “That was grief!”

  “We’d better call the police,” I said.

  Tim glanced at the phone box but I shook my head. “We can’t use that one. Fingerprints…”

  We half walked, half ran. The police station was a half-mile away. It seemed we were doing everything by halves. It even took us half an hour to get there. The trouble was that Tim was seeing Charon all over the place now. A woman with a pram, a traffic warden, a man waiting for a bus … they all had him paralysed with terror and he would only speak to the desk sergeant in the station when he had counted his ten fingers.

  The desk sergeant listened to our story with a cold smile, then showed us into a back room while he went to find a senior officer. I was beginning to wonder if we hadn’t made a mistake going there.

  Then the door opened and I knew we’d made a mistake.

  The senior police officer was Chief Inspector Snape.

  Snape was a tough, round-shouldered bull of a man. Wave a red flag at him and he’d probably flatten you. He had the sort of flesh you’d expect to see hanging upside down in a butcher’s shop. Snape hardly ever smiled. It was as if nobody had taught him how. When his lips did twitch upwards, his eyes stayed small and cold.

  But without any doubt, the worst thing about Snape was his sidekick, Boyle. And with Boyle, kick was exactly the word. Boyle loved violence. I once saw a photograph of him in full riot gear – shield, truncheon, tear gas, grenade, helmet – and that had been taken on his day off. He was shorter than Snape, with dark, curly hair that probably went all the way down to his feet.

  “Well, well, well,” Snape muttered. “If it isn’t Tim Diamond!”

  “But it is!” Tim replied, brilliantly.

  “I know it is!”

  Snape’s eyes glazed over. Perhaps he was remembering the time when Tim had put together an Identikit picture and the entire police force of Great Britain had spent two months looking for a man with three eyes and an upside-down mouth. “There never was another police constable like you,” he rasped.

  “Thank you, Chief.” Tim grinned.

  “I’m not flattering you! I fired you!” Snape had gone bright red. He pulled out a chair and threw himself into it, breathing heavily.

  Boyle edged forward. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Yes. I’m all right, Boyle.”

  “You want me to…” Boyle winked and nodded his head in Tim’s direction.

  “No. I’m all right.” Snape seemed to have collected himself. He glanced at a typed sheet of paper. “So what is all this nonsense?” he demanded. “Spies and killers and bodies in telephone boxes.”

  “It’s the truth,” I said.

  That brought a dark look from Boyle. “I’ll get the truth,” he growled.

  “No, Boyle.” Snape shook his head tiredly.

  “I can use the lie detector, sir.”

  “No, Boyle. You short-circuited it – remember?”

  “Look, Chief Inspector,” I said. “If you don’t believe us, why don’t you come back with us? We can show you the body.”

  Snape considered. “All right,” he said. “We’ll come with you
and take a look. But I warn you, laddie. If you’re wasting our time…”

  I’ve been in a police car quite a few times and normally it’s fun. But Snape was a slow driver. He didn’t put on the siren and the only flashing light was his petrol gauge. By the time we got back to Skin Lane, events had overtaken us. So had half the traffic in London.

  He parked the car. We got out. Tim and I had shared the back seat and we were a few paces behind Snape as he turned the corner into the alley. Boyle went between us. We all stopped at the same moment.

  “Well?” Snape demanded.

  Tim’s mouth dropped open. “It’s gone,” he said.

  I looked past him. He was right. McGuffin’s body had vanished. But that wasn’t the strange part.

  So had the telephone box.

  ROOM SERVICE

  “I don’t think Snape believed my story,” Tim said.

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

  We’d just been thrown into prison for wasting police time. We were sitting on two bunk beds in a small square cell lit by a single bulb.

  Snape hadn’t believed a word we’d said – but for once I couldn’t blame him. I mean, how often do secret agents drop in on you, swap coats, get shot and then vanish in a puff of smoke, taking the nearest telephone box with them? Even Tim was having trouble working it out.

  “Maybe somebody stole the telephone box,” he muttered.

  “What about the body?” I asked.

  “No. It couldn’t have been the body, Nick. The body was dead.”

  Something hard was jabbing into my pocket. At first I thought it was the mattress but as I shifted my weight I realized it was the hotel key. In the excitement I’d forgotten all about it. I suppose I could have shown it to Snape, but I don’t think it would have helped. By the time he got to the London International Hotel the whole place would probably have vanished too.

  I took the key out and held it up. It took Tim a moment or two to remember what it was. Then he groaned.

  “We’ve got to go there,” I said. “Room 605—”

  “Why?” Tim cut in.

  “You heard what McGuffin said. If this Russian of his gets killed, he was talking about nuclear war … the end of the world!”

  “Maybe he was exaggerating.”

  “Well, somebody believed him, Tim.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They shot him.”

  Snape let us out the next morning with another warning about wasting police time. I noticed that he hadn’t wasted a police breakfast on us, and the first thing we did was get a McBreakfast at the nearest McDonald’s. We left the place feeling slightly McSick and hopped on a bus that took us across town to the London International Hotel.

  The hotel was one of those great piles on twenty-seven storeys with hot and cold running tourists in every room. This was the middle of the summer season, and the building was packed with Japanese and Germans and Scandinavians all milling round searching for someone who could speak their language and knew where Harrods was.

  Nobody stopped us as we made our way across to the lift and took it up to the sixth floor, and there was nobody around in the corridor either. We walked on and arrived at room 605. It was a door just like all the others. So why did it seem so solid, so threatening? I handed Tim the key.

  “You want me to open it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But we don’t know what’s on the other side.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to open it.”

  I knocked on the door first, just to be sure.

  Then I stood back while Tim opened it with the key. We slipped in quickly and shut the door behind us. And there we were, inside Jake McGuffin’s room. I wondered how long it would be before the hotel realized he’d checked out. Permanently.

  There was nobody there. I don’t know what I’d been expecting but it was just an ordinary hotel room: twin beds, bathroom and colour TV. It had a nice view of Hyde Park and windows that didn’t open so you couldn’t throw yourself out when the bill arrived. The beds hadn’t been slept in, of course, but there was still some of McGuffin’s stuff spread about – a couple of ties on the back of a chair, a pen on the table, a suitcase on the stand by the door.

  “There’s no one here,” Tim said.

  “OK. Let’s move.”

  I started with the suitcase but there was nothing interesting inside it, just some shirts and socks and a couple of handkerchiefs. Meanwhile Tim had thrown open the bedside cupboard and was rummaging about inside.

  “Nick?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Yes?”

  “What are we searching for?”

  It was a good question, only maybe he should have asked it five minutes before. I shut the suitcase. “We’ve got to find out who McGuffin was working for and where he’d been,” I said. “Anything that can lead us to Charon. Names, addresses, telephone numbers…”

  “Sure.” Tim snatched up a book of matches lying in an ashtray beside the bed.

  “London International,” he muttered. “I’ve heard that name somewhere before.”

  “Yes, Tim,” I said. “It’s the name of this hotel.”

  “Right.” He put the matches down and looked underneath the pillows. I didn’t know what he hoped to find there. I thought it better not to ask.

  In the meantime, I’d crossed over to the low table that ran underneath a mirror along the far wall – and that was where I found it. It was a ticket: seat number 86 to something called the Amstel Ijsbaan. Whatever the something was, it had to be foreign. The only word in the English language that I know with a double “a” in it is “Aagh”. The ticket had a little illustration in one corner: a pair of skating boots.

  “Come and look at this!” I called Tim over and handed him the ticket.

  He examined it. “Do you think he was an ice-skater?” he asked.

  “McGuffin?” I shook my head. “He didn’t look like one.”

  “You’re right,” Tim agreed. “He wasn’t wearing shiny tights.”

  I took the ticket back. “Maybe he was going to meet somebody there,” I said.

  “Amstel Ix-barn.” Tim turned the words over in his mouth. “Do you think it’s a play?”

  “Not a very catchy title,” I muttered.

  There was a sudden rattle at the door. Both of us froze. Somebody was trying a key in the lock and somehow I got the feeling it wasn’t room service. “Quick!” I whispered. I gestured at the bathroom. As the main door opened we disappeared inside. I took the ticket with me.

  Two men came into the bedroom. I had swung the bathroom door shut behind me but left a crack so I could see them. The first man was thin and pale, about thirty-five years old, dressed in a dark suit with hair cut so close that when he spoke you could see the skin move on his skull. The second man was exactly the same. Maybe they hadn’t been born twins but whatever work they did had turned them into mirror reflections of each other. They even wore the same sunglasses. You couldn’t see their eyes.

  “OK, Ed,” the first one said. “This is the room.”

  “Right, Ted.”

  The second one – Ed – moved forward and grabbed McGuffin’s suitcase. Then he started throwing things into it … the ties, the pen, everything McGuffin had left behind. Meanwhile Ted had pulled a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket and was talking quietly to someone somewhere outside.

  “Red? This is Ted. I’m here with Ed. You wait with Ned. We’ll be five minutes.” He switched it off. “Come on! Let’s move it,” he muttered. His accent was faintly American but I got the feeling he was English.

  “I’ll clear the bathroom,” Ed announced.

  Ed was already moving towards the door. I just had time to grab hold of Tim and jerk him backwards into the bath. As Ed opened the bathroom door, I swept the shower curtain across but it was still a close thing. As he busied himself at the sink, scooping up McGuffin’s toothbrush and razor, he was only separated from us by a thin sheet of plasti
c. Next to me, Tim seemed to be crying. I wondered what had upset him. Then I looked up and realized that the shower was dripping on his nose.

  Ed moved out. We got out of the bath and went to the door. Tim had snatched up a lavatory brush in self-defence.

  The two men had cleared the room. All McGuffin’s things were in his suitcase and the suitcase was in Ted’s hand. And that might have been it. They might have walked out of there and been none the wiser. But it had been Tim who had opened the door to McGuffin’s room. He had had the key in his hand. And he had left it on the bed. I saw it about half a second before Ted. Then Ted saw it.

  “Ed!” he said.

  “Ted?”

  “The bed!”

  Ed looked at the bed and saw the key lying on top of the duvet. As one, the two men’s heads turned towards the bathroom. Ted reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun. Then he started moving towards the bathroom. Things looked bad. I was trapped in the bathroom with a quivering brother and a lavatory brush. There was no other way out.

  And then, suddenly, the bedroom door opened. Ted spun round. The gun vanished so fast that if he’d missed the holster he’d have stabbed himself with it. A housemaid had chosen that moment to walk into the room. She stood there now with a pile of fresh towels in her hands. She seemed a little surprised to see the two men.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I have new towels.”

  I realized it was time to move. Grabbing a towel off the handrail I walked straight out of the bathroom with Tim close behind. I didn’t even look at Ed and Ted. I knew I had to move quickly. The way Ted had concealed the gun told me that he didn’t want to start any shooting with witnesses about. Before he had time to change his mind I had walked up to Ed and Ted as if I worked for the hotel too.

  “Hi,” I said. “These are the old towels.”

  “Yes,” Tim added. “They’re very old.”

  I threw the towels at the two men and ran.

  We sprinted out of the room and back down the corridor. I knew that Ed and Ted were close behind us. I’d heard them curse and now their feet were thudding down on the soft-pile carpet. The corridor seemed to stretch on for ever and I couldn’t remember the way to the lift. I thought of turning and somehow fighting it out but I knew it was a bad idea. Find people. Instinct told me. You’ll be safe in a crowd.