The Falcon's Malteser db-1 Read online

  “He came over,” she went on. “He just turned up one day on my doormat. No. He was standing on a chair on the doormat—to reach the bell. He had these plans. We were going to be rich. We’d buy this little house in the South of France with low ceilings. Johnny didn’t like high ceilings. He told me that he knew where he could lay his hands on five million dollars—enough money to take me away from all this . . .”

  She raised her hands, taking in the whole of the Casablanca Club with ten chipped and nicotine-stained fingernails.

  “Did he have anything with him?” I asked. “A box, for example?”

  “You mean the Maltesers?” Lauren Bacardi smiled. “Sure. He never went anywhere without them. He seemed to think they were important, but he didn’t know why. It nearly drove him mad . . . if he wasn’t mad already. I mean, how could a box of candy be worth all that dough?”

  She paused. “But maybe he was on the level,” Lauren went on. “Why else would anyone want to wipe him out? I mean, Johnny never hurt anyone in his life. He was too small.

  “And he was afraid—all the time he was in England. He wouldn’t stay at my place. He hid himself away in some filthy pit of a hotel, and whenever we went out together, he always made like he was being followed. I thought he was imagining things.” A single tear trickled down her cheek, turning a muddy brown as it picked up her makeup. “Just my luck,” she whispered. “Johnny getting himself killed just one day after he’d found the answer.”

  “He found the diamonds?” Herbert cried.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Just the answer. We were out together one day and he saw something; something that made everything make sense.”

  “What was it?” Herbert and I asked more or less together.

  “Miss Bacardi?” the waiter interrupted. “There’s someone at the door with some flowers for you.”

  “For me?” She got to her feet, swaying slightly in front of us. “Just give me one minute.”

  She moved away in the direction of the front entrance, followed by the waiter. Herbert looked at the half-empty bottle of champagne. “Did I pay for that?” he asked.

  “It was on the house,” I told him.

  “What was it doing up there?” he asked.

  Neither Herbert nor I said anything for a while, and in that silence I became aware of a little voice whispering in my ear. It wasn’t Herbert. It was actually making sense. It was my common sense trying to tell me something was wrong. I played back what had just happened and suddenly I knew what it was. The flowers. Why had the waiter made Lauren Bacardi walk all the way to the entrance instead of bringing them to her? And there was something else. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. But now I remembered. The waiter had spoken with a German accent. I was on my feet making for the door before I knew what I was doing. Herbert ran after me, calling my name. But I wasn’t going to stop and explain what was going on. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the shouts of protest and the crash of breaking glass. That was one time I was glad I wasn’t fully grown. Before anyone could see me to grab hold of me, I was gone.

  I reached the door and the cold night hit me like an angry woman, slapping my face and tearing at my hair. The first thing I saw were the remains of what had been a bouquet of flowers. But now the cellophane was torn and the flowers were scattered over the steps, the stalks broken. At the same time, I heard someone calling out. It was Lauren Bacardi. I took the steps three at a time, and as I reached the street, I just had time to catch sight of her being bundled into the back of a dark blue van. A shadowy figure slammed the door and ran around to the front. The engine was already running. A moment later, so was I.

  I ran across to the van, intending . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d be able to pull the door open and get Lauren out, but of course it was locked. So instead I jumped onto it, slamming into the metal like a hamburger hitting a griddle, and hung on for dear life as the van roared away. I’d managed to get a foothold of sorts on the license plate and I had one hand on the door handle, one hand curled round the rim at the edge. I was half spread-eagled and traveling at about thirty miles an hour when the van turned a corner. Whoever was driving put their foot down then. Perhaps they’d heard they had an unwelcome passenger. I guess the van was doing sixty when I was thrown off. It was hard to tell. After all, I was sort of somersaulting through the air, and if I’m going to be honest, I might as well add my eyes were tightly closed like I was praying—which, in fact, I was.

  All I knew was that me and the van had parted company. It roared off to the left, its tires screaming. I flew off to the right. I could have been killed. I should have been killed. But if you go down that part of London at night, you’ll find that the offices put a lot of junk out on the pavements, to be cleared up by the garbage trucks the next day. My fall was broken by a mountain of cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Better still, the bags were full of paper that had been put through the shredder; computer printouts and that sort of thing. It was like hitting a pile of cushions. I was bruised. But nothing broke.

  A minute later Herbert reached me. He must have been convinced that I was finished because when I got to my feet and walked toward him, brushing strips of paper off my sleeves, he almost fainted with surprise.

  “Did you get the van’s number?” I asked.

  He opened and closed his mouth again without speaking. It was a brilliant impersonation of a goldfish. But I wasn’t in the mood to be entertained.

  “The license plate . . .” I said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You were standing on it . . .” He still couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

  I looked back down the empty road. Lauren Bacardi had been about to tell us something important and now she was gone. Our only chance of finding the secret of the Maltesers might have gone with her.

  “NICE DAY FOR A FUNERAL”

  I wasn’t feeling too good the next day. I woke up wishing I hadn’t, tried to close my eyes, and groaned into the pillow. There was something unpleasant in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t. It was my tongue. Outside, it was raining. I could hear the water pitter-pattering against the windows and dripping through the leak in the bathroom ceiling. I looked out. It was another gray London day with little yellow spots dancing in the air. I figured a couple of Alka-Seltzer would see to the spots, but it looked like we were going to be stuck with the weather.

  It took me about twenty minutes to get out of bed. The tumble I had taken the night before must have been harder than I had thought. My right shoulder had gone an interesting shade of black and blue and it hurt when I moved my fingers. Actually it hurt when I moved anything. Somehow I managed to wiggle out of my quilt, and bit by bit, I forced the life back into my battered frame. But it was an hour before I’d made my way downstairs and into the kitchen. It was still raining.

  Herbert was sitting there reading a newspaper. When he saw me, he flicked on the kettle and smiled brightly.

  “Nice day for a funeral,” he said.

  “Very funny,” I groaned, reaching for the medicine chest.

  “I’m being serious.” Herbert slid the newspaper in front of me.

  I opened the medicine chest—a red plastic box with a white cross on it. It contained two Band-Aids and a tin of cough drops. Clearly Herbert wasn’t expecting an outbreak of bubonic plague. I groaned for a second time and pulled the newspaper before me. With an effort, I managed to get the print to unblur itself.

  Herbert was right. There was going to be a funeral later in the day—just a few minutes down the road as luck would have it. Or was it luck? I wasn’t thinking straight, that was my trouble. The guy being buried was one Henry von Falkenberg. It appeared that the Falcon had flown home.

  There was nothing about the Falcon’s five million dollars in the paper. They didn’t even mention he’d been a crook. In fact it was just one of those fill-in stories, the sort of thing they print between the crossword
and the gardening report when they haven’t got enough news. This was a story about a wealthy businessman living in Bolivia who had once lived in England and had decided that he wanted to be buried there. The only trouble was, the week he’d died, there’d been a baggage handlers’ strike in La Paz and—now that he was dead—“baggage” included him. He’d spent the last four weeks sharing an airport deep freeze with a load of corned beef from Argentina.

  But now the strike was over and von Falkenberg could be buried in his family plot just down the road from our apartment. It was too good an opportunity to miss, hungover or not. How many of the names on Snape’s blackboard would turn up to pay their last respects to the Falcon?

  We had to be there.

  Herbert reached for the telephone book. “3521201,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Brompton Cemetery.”

  I’d written the number down for him and he called them. He spoke briefly before he put down the phone.

  “The funeral’s at twelve,” Herbert said. “Recommended dress: black tie and rain boots.”

  Perhaps you know Brompton Cemetery—a stretch of ground between Fulham Road and the Brompton Road—a stone’s throw away from the soccer field. I sometimes walked there on Sundays, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. After all, there’s not much grass in Fulham, and with the sun shining it isn’t such a bad place to be. Anyway, the best thing about walking in a cemetery is walking out again. Don’t forget, not everyone can.

  From the Fulham Road you pass between a pair of tall black iron gates and follow the path. You don’t even know you’re in a cemetery until you’re a short way up and pass the first graves. It’s pretty at first. This is the old part of the cemetery, the romantic bit with the grass waist-high and the stones poking out at odd angles like they’ve grown there, too. Then you turn a corner and there’s a cluster of buildings curving around an open space like some sort of weird Victorian summerhouse. Now everything is flat and you can see all the way up to the Brompton Road, a green stretch with the crosses sticking up like the masts of a frozen armada.

  We got there at five to twelve, squelching through the rain and the mud, our raincoats pulled up tightly around our necks. About a dozen people had braved the weather to make their farewells to the Falcon . . . and the Argentinian Corned Beef Company had sent a wreath, which was a nice gesture. The first person we met was a less pleasant surprise: Chief Inspector Snape looking about as cheerful as the cemetery’s residents. Boyle was behind him, dressed in a crumpled black suit with a mourning band on his arm.

  “Simple and Simple,” Snape cried, seeing us. “I was planning to visit you as soon as this little shindig was over.”

  “Why?” Herbert asked.

  “We’ve been receiving reports of an incident in Charing Cross. I thought you might be able to help us with our inquiries into the disappearance of a certain singer. One Lauren Bacardi. It looks like a kidnapping. And guess which kid is our prime suspect?”

  “Search me,” I said.

  “I probably will one of these days,” Snape assured me. He smiled at his little joke and I have to admit that jokes don’t come much more little than that. “I’ve got you for murder, for kidnapping, for entering an adult club under false pretenses, and for failing to pay for one bottle of champagne,” he went on. “I could lock you up right now.”

  “You’re dead,” Boyle whispered.

  Snape sighed. “Thank you, Boyle.”

  “Why don’t you arrest us?” I asked.

  “Because you’re more useful to me outside. I mean, you’d be nice and safe in a cozy police cell, wouldn’t you?” He gestured at the other mourners now grouping themselves around the grave. “I’m still waiting to see what happens to you. Come on, Boyle!”

  Snape and Boyle went over to the grave. We followed them. It turned out that the Falcon was to be buried in the old part of the cemetery, where the grass was at its highest, the gravestones half buried themselves. There was a vicar standing in the rain beside what looked like some sort of antique telephone booth. It was a stone memorial, about six feet high, mounted by a stone falcon, its beak slightly open, its wings raised. There was a stone tablet set in the memorial below, with a quotation from the Bible cut into it.

  THE PATH OF THE JUST IS AS SHINING LIGHT,

  THAT SHINETH MORE AND MORE

  UNTO THE PERFECT DAY.

  Proverbs 4:18

  The names of the dead von Falkenbergs were written beneath it: a mother, a father, two grandparents, a cousin . . . there were seven of them in all. A rectangular hole had been cut into the earth to make room for an eighth. As we approached, the coffin was being lowered. Henry von Falkenberg had come to join his ancestors.

  It was raining harder than ever. The vicar had begun the funeral service, but you could hardly hear him for all the splashing. I took the opportunity to examine the other mourners. It was a pity about the weather. What with the umbrellas, the turned-up collars, and the hunched shoulders, it was impossible to see half of them. If the sun had been shining I’d have gotten a better look.

  But I did recognize Beatrice von Falkenberg. It had to be her—a tall, elegant woman in black mink with a servant holding an umbrella over her from behind. Her eyes and nose were hidden by a widow’s veil, but I could see a pair of thin lips set in an expression of profound boredom. She was dabbing at her eyes with a tiny white handkerchief, but she didn’t look too grieved to me. Snape had said that she had been Holland’s greatest actress. She wouldn’t have won any Oscar for this particular performance.

  There was a man standing a short way from her and he caught my attention because he alone carried neither raincoat nor umbrella. He was short and pudgy with silver hair, round glasses in a steel frame, and a face like an owl. As the vicar droned on, he shuffled about on his feet, occasionally steadying himself against a gravestone. Like the widow, he didn’t look exactly heartbroken. His eyes were fixed on the von Falkenberg memorial, but it was easy to see that his mind was miles away.

  Who else was there? I recognized a journalist who worked on the local newspaper and who had done a piece on Herbert and me when we’d set up the business. But apart from Snape, Boyle, and the widow, the rest of the crowd were strangers to me. The vicar was hurrying through the service now, tripping over the words to get to the end and out of the rain. His surplice was splashed with mud and pages of his Bible were straggling out of the spine. When he scooped holy dirt into the grave, the wind caught it and threw it back in his eyes. He blinked, spat out an “amen,” and ran. Beatrice von Falkenberg turned and went after him. Snape and Boyle hung back. Owl-face jammed his hands into his pockets and sauntered off in the other direction, toward the Brompton Road.

  “Very moving. Very touching.”

  It was a familiar voice and it came from beneath a multicolored golfing umbrella held by a man who had crept up to stand beside me. I looked round. It was the Fat Man. I should have known that he would be there. “How nice to see you again,” he said in a voice that said exactly the opposite.

  “Come on,” I said to Herbert. I wanted to get back to the apartment, out of the rain.

  But the Fat Man blocked my way. “Do you like funerals?” he asked. “I’m thinking of arranging one. Yours.”

  “I’m too young to die,” I said. “What brings you here, Fat Man?”

  “Von Falkenberg and I were old friends . . . very dear friends,” he explained. “There was something about him that I very much admired—”

  “Yeah—his money,” I said. “Well, we still haven’t found your key. Perhaps you ought to ask Gott or Himmell.”

  He obviously knew the names. His eyes narrowed and his mouth twitched as if he had just swallowed one of his poisoned corn pellets.

  “We are looking for it, Mr. Fat Man,” Herbert said. “And we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve found it.”

  “I gave you two days.” The Fat Man plucked the carnation out of his buttonhole and threw it into the grave. �
�You’ve run out of time.” Then he turned his back on us and walked away.

  I’d had enough. Coming to the funeral had been a mistake—a dead end in every sense of the word. We hadn’t picked up anything apart, perhaps, from double pneumonia. And if it had been a chance to meet a few old friends, they were all old friends I’d have preferred to avoid. Herbert sneezed. “I need a shot of Scotch,” he said for the benefit of the undertaker or anyone else who might be listening. I knew that once we got back to the apartment, he’d actually fix himself with a shot of cod-liver oil.

  But I was wrong there. Things didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.

  We made a couple of stops on the way back. Herbert had cashed the check and we had enough money to go wild and buy some Alka-Seltzer and another box of Maltesers.

  “What do you want them for?” Herbert asked.

  “I’ve got a headache,” I said.

  “No . . . the Maltesers.”

  So I explained. Whoever had snatched Lauren Bacardi might know by now that Johnny Naples had spent the last month of his life traipsing around London with a box of Maltesers. And they might come looking for them. The dwarf’s box was still safely hidden underneath the floor. I’d bought the second box as a sort of insurance. I’d leave it somewhere nice and easy to find, just in case anyone else broke in.

  We got back to the apartment and let ourselves in, dripping on the doormat. Maybe I noticed that the street door was unlocked when it wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember. What with the rain, I was just glad to be in. We went upstairs. Herbert sneezed again. The office door was open and this time I did notice.

  “Herbert,” I said.

  We went into the office. Herbert’s eyes must have gone straight to the desk because he went and picked something up. “What’s this doing here?” I heard him say.

  But I didn’t look at him. My eyes were on the corpse stretched out beneath the window. It took me a minute before I remembered where I’d seen him before, but I should have known from the moment I saw the chauffeur’s uniform. It was Lawrence, the Fat Man’s driver. He was still wearing his one-way glasses, but one of the lenses had become a spiderweb of cracks, shattered by the bullet that had gone one way through it.