Secret of the Skull (12 page)

BEEP.
A-ha, an answer. Congratulations, no doubt!

I leaned over to Susan. ‘Er, I don’t suppose the restaurant could warm up that curry for me? I’m starving.’

Then I held up my phone,

No!!! Told you to prevent robbery only! Told you not to interfere! Smugglers’ meeting MUST take place at 9 p.m. Codename Heather is NOT a smuggler, is an UNDERCOVER MI5 AGENT. Heather
will arrest Moss when sees Moss has diamonds. Moss MUST not suspect. Entire MI5 operation at stake, months of investigation.

Oh dear.

Remember that cold, creeping feeling I got down my spine when I opened the walking stick? I got it again.

The time was eight twelve p.m.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

‘OH N
OOOOO
!’ I
WAILED
.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Izzy.

‘Arrghh! Why didn’t Mr Bloomin’ Mystery bloomin’ well
tell me
?’ I cried.

‘Tell you what?’ said Izzy.

For a second or two, I was so frozen with terror and indecision that I think I could hear my brain ticking. Then I hurriedly gathered up the diamonds.

‘We’ve got to move quickly! It’s . . . eight thirteen p.m. We have forty-seven minutes, maximum.’

‘To do what?’ said Izzy.

I ushered her out into the reception area, leaving Susan and the other girls to keep watch on Beeks.

‘To get these diamonds back into the safe in room 217, without Moss the smuggler knowing about it and before his contact turns up.’

‘Why?’ said Izzy.

I told her. She nearly went ‘Arrghh!’ too.

‘We need Muddy,’ I said, finding his number on my phone. My conversation with Muddy went like this:

Me:
Muddy! Can you open a locked safe?

Muddy:
Hmmm. What sort of safe?

Me:
Number combination, the kind you reset, like you find in hotel rooms.

Muddy:
Hmmm. Not sure. Let me go and see what I’ve got in my Development Laboratory. Hang on.

Me:
No, wait! We can’t wait while you root around in your garage! Yes or no? Quick!

Muddy:
Then yes. Well . . . probably.

Me:
Great! Get over here now! I’m at the Regal Hotel!

Muddy:
Forget it, matey, you’re on your own.

Me:
WHAT?

Muddy:
I’m not turning up to Susan Lillington’s girlie sleepover! If one of those girls has locked her make-up or something in a safe, you can deal with it on your own.

Me:
Forget the sleepover! This is urgent! I’m on a case!

Muddy:
Nope. You got yourself into it, you can get yourself out.

I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. I was going to have to tell him the truth. He would go bananas.

Me:
Please?

Muddy:
Nope. You won’t get me within a mile of that girlie sleepover, and that’s my final word.

Me (deep breath):
MI5 is involved. Truly. I’m not joking.

Silence.

Muddy:
I’ll be there in ten minutes.

Nine minutes and forty-two seconds later, he came hurtling into the hotel, gasping for breath, with a large grubby bag of assorted gadgets slung over his shoulder.

‘Where are they?’ he said. If his eyes had been any gogglier they’d have dropped out of his head. He scampered about like a puppy that’s been promised a new squeaky
toy.

‘On their way,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, we have work to do. Well,
you
have work to do.’

The time was eight twenty-four p.m. Susan’s mum reappeared from the direction of the restaurant.

‘Sorted,’ she said. ‘Vernon’s accidentally on purpose spilled gravy down Black Suit Man’s trousers. They’ve got him in the kitchens, apologising and soaking
out the stain.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Izzy, keep an eye out for Moss the smuggler. We have to be finished before he returns to his room. He’ll go back upstairs as soon as he’s
polished off that gigantic free dinner. Call us the moment he passes through here.’

Muddy and I raced for the stairs. Then we raced back again. Susan’s mum handed us a duplicate keycard for room 217.
Then
we raced for the stairs.

Two minutes later, we were in the smuggler’s lair! The curtains had been drawn and a briefcase had been dropped on to the bed.

I opened the wardrobe. The squat metal hatch of the room safe was firmly shut.

‘Why couldn’t Beeks have left it open?’ I muttered to myself.

‘Good thing he didn’t,’ said Muddy cheerily, ‘otherwise you wouldn’t have needed me.’ He pulled a couple of electronic gizmos out of his bag. He clipped one
end of the first gizmo to the safe and listened carefully to the other as he made delicate adjustments.

‘Spies!’ he giggled happily. ‘Real spies! Just like I’ve always wanted!’

‘Yeah, OK, calm down,’ I muttered. ‘You and Susan seem to be finding this case highly entertaining.’

‘I always told you to be more spyish,’ said Muddy, turning dials on a homemade oddity he’d constructed out of an old pocket calculator. ‘Haven’t I always told you
to be more spyish?’

‘Detective work is nothing like being a spy,’ I insisted. ‘I am not a spy. You are not a spy.’

‘Sooooo, we’re doing something a spy would do and there’s a spy coming here soon, doing undercover stuff like spies do . . . but we’re not spies.’

‘No. It’s just this one time, OK?’

‘If you say so.’ Muddy grinned. ‘You see this lock-picking gear I’m using?’

‘Yes?’

‘I bet spies use stuff like that.’

‘Oh, get on with it. I wish I’d never told you.’

The time was eight thirty-six p.m. Moss the smuggler could arrive at any moment.

Muddy listened as the machine beside the safe click-bleep-blipped. He switched it off and slung it back into his bag.

‘No good, I’ll try something else.’

The seconds ticked away. I glanced around. The room felt gloomy and cold. I closed my fists to stop my hands shaking. My heart was pattering like a drum roll.

Why did I get myself into this? Exactly how much trouble would we be in if this all went wrong?

CLUNK!

‘Done it!’ cried Muddy. The safe’s door swung open.

My phone warbled. It was Izzy.

‘Get out of there!’ she said. ‘Moss has just passed us. He’ll be at his room in seconds!’

Sitting inside the safe was a little black drawstring bag. Fumbling awkwardly, my pulse beating against the sides of my head, I took the bag and filled it with the diamonds from my pocket.

‘Shall we keep one?’ whispered Muddy.

‘
No!
’

‘Just one?’

‘No!’

I kept glancing at the thin bar of light that showed under the door of the room. We wouldn’t hear Moss approaching, not with those thick carpets everywhere. I slipped the bag back into the
safe and closed it up again.

‘C’mon, move!’

We scurried out of the room, taking care to make sure the door was shut behind us. We walked as calmly as our screaming nerves would allow.

We passed Moss on the stairs. He didn’t give us so much as a second glance. We tried not to stare at him with raw fear in our eyes. He patted his chest and burped quietly to himself.

‘That was close,’ whispered Muddy, as we arrived at reception.

‘The police are on their way,’ said Susan’s mum. Several of Susan’s friends were still in the admin office, keeping guard on Mr Beeks. The rest of us zipped across the
reception area and sat on the wide leather sofas that were next to the leaflet display stand.

We tried to look casual, as if we were simply lounging about without a care in the world. I don’t think we succeeded very well. Most of us were looking around like a bunch of meercats on
red alert. Izzy tried playing a game on her phone and kept dropping it. Muddy had picked up a magazine from the coffee table beside the sofas and was reading it upside down. The magazine was upside
down, I mean, not Muddy.

Minutes passed. Every second felt like a hundred million years. A couple of hotel guests checked in and a couple of hotel guests went out and diners came and went from the restaurant.

Eight fifty p.m. I felt a shock of cold air as the glass entrance door swung open. I turned to see a tall, angular woman crossing the lobby. She had a beautifully sculptured face and long, brown
hair. Her sharply tailored outfit had narrow lapels at the neck and her broad trousers flapped around her high-heeled shoes. She went over to the reception desk.

‘Hello,’ she said to Susan’s mum. ‘I believe I’m expected by a Mr Moss you have staying here? My name is Heather.’

I suddenly noticed that Muddy was staring at her. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen someone gape so open-mouthed at anything.

He nudged me in the ribs as ‘Heather’ headed for the stairs and out of sight. ‘Now that’s what I call a spy,’ he breathed. ‘I think I’m in
love.’

A lot happened in the next five minutes. The police arrived. Some of them piled into the admin office to collar Beeks, some of them hurried towards the restaurant to collar Black Suit Man.
‘Heather’ reappeared, frogmarching a handcuffed Moss in front of her.

All three villains (Black Suit Man with gravy stains all down his legs) were escorted out of the hotel, past where I, Muddy, Izzy, Susan and the other girls were still perched on the sofas. The
villains were bundled out into the freezing night air, towards a flashing shimmer of police car lights which glinted off the snow.

As if a switch had been thrown, the girls all started chattering at once. They agreed that this was definitely the best birthday sleepover any of them had ever been to, ever. With a flurry of
‘Bye’s and ‘See ya, guys’s they went up to their room. Susan’s mum stood behind the reception desk with a look on her face which said, ‘Yes, this is definitely
the weirdest evening I’ve ever had, ever’.

Muddy slung his bag of gizmos over his shoulder. ‘Bye, Saxby,’ he said, still a bit awestruck by the memory of Heather, or whatever her real name might have been. ‘An actual
spy. I don’t think I can ever thank you enough.’

By now, I was feeling as crumpled and worn out as a pre-owned tissue. I was about to head home myself, when I caught sight of a short figure wrapped in an overcoat, lurking beside the leaflet
stand.

It was Inspector Godalming, he of the whistling false teeth and the birdish walk. I walked across the lobby to him, shaking my head slowly, hand slapped to my forehead.

Remember that one and only vague clue I had to the identity of the mysterious texter? It hadn’t been
what
he’d said, so much as the fact that he’d said it at all. The
texter had to be someone in the know, someone who had
access
to the kind of information he’d given me. (And as soon as he’d told me that ‘Heather’ was from MI5,
I’d realised that my initial fears were unfounded and that the texter was one of the good guys after all – the smugglers would have wanted to make sure MI5’s plan went wrong.)

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You sent me those texts.’

‘Yesh, I’m afraid sho, shonny,’ said Inspector Godalming. (We’ll take the badly-fitting dentures as read from now on, otherwise it’s a bit of a spelling nightmare!)
‘I thought you might have known it was me once you saw Sergeant Willis.’

‘Who?’ I said.

‘The man in the black suit?’

‘He was a police officer? Of course!
That’s
where I’d seen him before! With you. He was there when you arrested Elsa Moreaux. Argh, I should have realised!’ I
thought for a moment. ‘And that’s why you called on me. You knew a police officer was mixed up with Beeks’s scheme to steal the diamonds. So I take it you didn’t know
which
police officer?’

‘Correct,’ said the Inspector. ‘And that’s
one
reason I called on you. Beeks has been in trouble before, but there was no way he could have known about the
diamonds unless someone under my command had told him about them. As I had no idea who that was, any enquiries at the police station ran a high risk of alerting the guilty officer to the fact that
they were being investigated and that someone at the hotel had learned of Beeks’s plan.’

‘So who
was
your source of information inside the hotel?’ I said.

‘The restaurant’s head waiter,’ said the Inspector.

‘Vernon. You know, I barely even considered it was him!’ (Did
you?
) ‘But why was it
me
you contacted? You’ve always gone on about how much you disapprove of
me “interfering in police work”!’

‘Yes, well,’ muttered Inspector Godalming, bristling with embarrassment like a parrot flapping on its perch.

‘I would have used a grown-up private eye, but if a member of my own squad was a bad apple, I couldn’t be sure that any investigator wasn’t one too. And in any case, I knew
young Susan’s father from his days in the police force. I know she goes to the same school as you, so I knew you’d have no difficulty being here without raising Beeks’s
suspicions.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Which only leaves the MI5 connection . . .’

‘The security services had been tracking those smugglers for months,’ said the Inspector. ‘This meeting tonight was their one and only chance to catch Moss red-handed. They
contacted us, told us what was going on and warned us that nothing, absolutely nothing, must get in the way of them arresting him. There couldn’t be the faintest whiff of a cop within five
miles of this place tonight, not until Moss was captured. We even had to delay responding to Susan’s mother’s call until we got the nod.’

‘But your bad apple, Sergeant Willis, threw a spanner in the works,’ I said. ‘He told Beeks about the diamonds, Beeks devised the robbery and the pair of them were set to walk
off with the gems.’

‘Correct,’ said the Inspector. ‘When I found out, through Vernon, I was in a right panic. I couldn’t be seen to interfere with tonight’s events, or MI5 would come
down on us like a ton of bricks. But I also couldn’t risk

Beeks succeeding, or MI5 would
still
have come down on us like a ton of bricks.’

‘So you texted me,’ I said, ‘and kept your identity secret from me until it was all over.’