The Falcon's Malteser (2 page)

I suppose it was pretty strange, the two of us living together the way we did. It had all happened about two years back when my parents suddenly decided to emigrate to Australia. Herbert was twenty-three then. I’d just turned eleven.

We were living in a comfortable house in a nice part of London. I still remember the address: 1 Wiernotta Mews. My dad worked as a door-to-door salesman. Doors was what he sold; fancy French sliding doors and traditional English doors, pure mahogany, made in Korea. He really loved doors. Ours was the only house in the street with seventeen ways in. As for my mum, she had a part-time job in a pet shop. It was after she got bitten by a rabid parrot that they decided to emigrate. I wasn’t exactly wild about the idea, but of course nobody asked me. You know how some parents think they own their kids? Well, I couldn’t even sneeze without written permission signed in duplicate.

Neither Herbert nor I really got on with our parents. That was one thing we had in common. Oh yeah . . . and we didn’t get on with each other. That was the second thing. He’d just joined the police force (this was one week before the Hendon Police Training Center burned down) and could more or less look after himself, but of course I had as much independence as the coffee table.

“You’ll love Australia,” my dad said. “It’s got kangaroos.”

“And boomerangs,” my mum added.

“And wonderful, maple-wood doors . . .”

“And koalas.”

“I’m not going!” I said.

“You are!” they screamed.

So much for reasoned argument.

I got as far as Heathrow Airport. But just as the plane to Sydney was about to take off, I slipped out the back door and managed to find my way out of the airport. Then I hightailed it back to Fulham. I’m told my mum had hysterics about thirty-five thousand feet above Bangkok. But by then it was too late.

Now, by this time, Herbert had finished with the police force, or to put it more accurately, the police force had finished with Herbert. He’d finally gotten fired for giving someone directions to a bank. I suppose it wasn’t his fault that the someone had robbed it, but he really shouldn’t have held the door for the guy as he came out. But in the meantime, he’d managed to save up some money and had rented this run-down apartment in the Fulham Road, above a supermarket, planning to set himself up as a private detective. That’s what it said on the door:

Inside, you went up a staircase to a glass-fronted door, which in turn led into his office, a long, narrow room with four windows looking out into the street. A second door led off from here into the kitchen. The staircase continued up to a second floor, where we both had a bedroom and shared a bathroom. The apartment had been made available to Herbert at a bargain-basement price, probably because the whole place was so rickety it was threatening to collapse into the basement at any time. The stairs wobbled when you went up and the bath wobbled when you turned on the taps. We never saw the landlord. I think he was afraid to come near the place.

Dark-haired and blue-eyed, Herbert was quite handsome—at least from the opposite side of the street on a foggy day. But what God had given him in looks, He had taken away in brains. There might have been worse private detectives than Tim Diamond. But somehow I doubt it.

I’ll give you an example. His first job was to find some rich lady’s pedigree Siamese cat. He managed to run it over on the way to see her. The second job was a divorce case—which you may think is run-of-the-mill until I tell you that the clients were perfectly happily married until he came along.

There hadn’t been a third case.

Anyway, Herbert was not overjoyed to see me that day when I turned up from Heathrow carrying a suitcase that held exactly nothing, but where else could I go? We argued. I told him it was a fait accompli. We argued some more. I told him what a fait accompli was. In the end he let me stay.

Mind you, I often wondered if I’d made the right decision. For a start, when I say I like a square meal a day I don’t mean a sawed-off shredded wheat, and it’s no fun starting the winter term in clothes you grew out of the summer before, with more holes in your socks than a Swiss cheese. We could never afford anything. Her Majesty’s government helped Herbert out a little, which is a fancy way of saying that he got welfare, and my parents sent the occasional check for my upkeep, but even so, Herbert never managed to make ends meet. I tried to persuade him to get himself a sensible job—anything other than private detection—but it was hopeless. As hopeless as Herbert himself.

Anyway, after the movie, we got back to the flat around eleven and were making our way up the stairs past the office when Herbert stopped. “Wait a minute, Nick,” he said. “Did you leave the door open?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s strange . . .”

He was right. The door of the office was open, the moonlight pouring out of the crack like someone had spilled a can of silver paint. We made our way back downstairs and went in. I turned on the light.

“Oh dear,” my brother said. “I think we’ve had visitors.”

That was the understatement of the year. A stampede of wild bulls would have left the place in better order. The desk had been torn open, the carpets torn up, the bookshelves torn apart, and the curtains torn down. The old filing cabinet would have fit into so many matchboxes. Even the telephone had been demolished, its various parts scattered around the room. Whoever had been there, they’d done a thorough job. If we’d been invited to a wedding, we could have taken the office along for confetti.

“Oh dear,” Herbert repeated. He stepped into the rubble and picked up what was now a very dead cactus. A moment later, he dropped it, his lower jaw falling at about the same speed. “My God!” he shrieked. “The envelope!”

He stumbled over to the remains of his desk and searched in the rubble of the top drawer. “I put it here,” he said. He fumbled about on the floor. “It’s gone!” he moaned at last. He got back to his feet, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The first job I’ve had in six months and now I’ve gone and lost it. You know what this means, don’t you? It means we won’t get the other five hundred dollars. I’ll probably have to pay back the five hundred we’ve already spent. What a disaster! What a catastrophe! I don’t know why I bother, really I don’t. It’s just not fair!” He gave the desk a great thump with his boot. It groaned and collapsed in a small heap.

Then he looked at me. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he snapped.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Well . . . say something.”

“All right,” I said. “I didn’t think it was a very good idea to leave the package in your desk . . .”

“It’s a fat lot of good telling me now,” Herbert whined. It looked as though he was going to cry.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea,” I continued, “so I took it with me.” I pulled the envelope out of my jacket pocket, where it had been resting all evening.

My brother seized it and gave it a big wet kiss. He didn’t even thank me.

We didn’t get much sleep that night. First we had to make our beds—and I’m not just talking sheets and blankets. Whoever had wrecked our office had done the same for the rest of the apartment. It took about forty nails and two tubes of Super Glue before the beds were even recognizable, and then I found that Herbert had managed to stick himself to the door handle and had to spend another hour prying him free with a kitchen knife. By then it was morning and I was too tired to sleep. Herbert sent me out for a loaf of bread while he put on the teakettle. At least they hadn’t dismantled the kettle.

There were three letters on the doormat and I brought them up with the bread. One was a bill. One was postmarked Sydney, Australia. And the third had been delivered by hand. Herbert filed the bill under
W
for “wastepaper basket” while I opened the Australian letter.

 

 

It was written on the back of a postcard showing a picture of the Sydney Opera House. There was a check attached with a paper clip: seventy-five dollars. It wasn’t a fortune, but at least it would pay for a few more tubes of Super Glue. Herbert pocketed the check. I kept the card.

The third letter was the most interesting. It was typed on a single sheet of paper with no address at the top. It was a big sheet of paper, but it was a short letter.

 

DIAMOND—

TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 1:00 P.M .BE THERE.

The Fat Man.

 

“Who the hell is the Fat Man?” I asked.

“The Fat Man . . .” Herbert muttered. His face had gone a sort of cheesy white and his mouth was hanging open. The last time I had seen him look like that had been when he found a spider in the bath.

“Who is he?”

Herbert was tugging at the letter. It tore in half. “The Fat Man is about the biggest criminal in England,” he croaked.

“You mean . . . the fattest?”

“No. The biggest. He’s involved in everything. Burglary, armed robbery, fraud, arson, armed burglary . . . You name it, he’s behind it.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“From when I was a policeman,” Herbert explained. “Every crook has a file at New Scotland Yard. But the Fat Man has a whole library. He’s clever. Nobody’s ever been able to arrest him. Not once. A traffic cop once gave him a parking ticket. They found her a week later, embedded in concrete, part of the M6 highway. Nobody tangles with the Fat Man. He’s death.”

Herbert pressed the two halves of the letter together as if he could magically restore them. Personally, I was more puzzled than afraid. Okay—so there was this master criminal called the Fat Man. But what could he want with a loser like Herbert? Obviously it had to be something to do with the dwarf’s mysterious package. Had the Fat Man been responsible for the destruction of the apartment? It seemed likely, and yet at the same time I doubted it. You don’t tear someone’s place apart and then casually invite them to meet you in Trafalgar Square. One or the other—but not both. On the other hand, if he hadn’t done it, who had?

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“Do?” Herbert looked at me as though I were mad. “We’re going! When the Fat Man invites you to jump in front of a subway train, you don’t argue. You just do it. And you’re grateful he wasn’t in a bad mood!”

So later that morning we took the number 14 bus into the West End. This time I left the package—carefully hidden—back at the flat. It had been ransacked once and I figured that nobody would think of looking for it there a second time.

“How will we recognize the Fat Man?” I asked.

“I’ve seen mug shots,” Herbert said.

“You mean—you even had pictures of him on your mugs?”

Herbert didn’t laugh. You could have tickled the soles of his feet with an ostrich feather and he wouldn’t have laughed. He was so scared, he could barely talk.
And
he ate the bus tickets.

The bus dropped us in Piccadilly Circus and we walked across to Trafalgar Square. It was another cold day with a bite in the air that bit all the way through. The tourist season had ended weeks before, but there were still a few of them around, taking photographs of one another against the gray December sky. The Christmas decorations had gone up in Regent Street—it seemed that they’d been up since July—and the stores were wrapped in tinsel and holly. Somewhere, a Salvation Army band was playing “Away in a Manger.” I felt a funeral march would have been more appropriate.

Trafalgar Square is a big place and the Fat Man hadn’t been too specific about the meeting point, so we positioned ourselves right in the middle, under Nelson’s Column. There were a few tourists feeding the pigeons. I felt sorry for them. Who’d be a pigeon in London . . . or for that matter a tourist? I had a candy bar, so I pulled out a couple of peanuts and fed them myself. I ate the rest of it. It was already ten minutes to one and in all the excitement I’d missed out on breakfast. Taxis, buses, cars, and trucks rumbled all around us, streaming down to the Houses of Parliament and across to Buck ingham Palace. I leaned against a lion, looking out for anyone with a fifty-inch waist. A pigeon landed on my shoulder and I gave it another peanut.

Big Ben struck one. According to my watch, it was five minutes fast.

“There he is,” Herbert said.

I didn’t see him at first. At least, I saw him but I didn’t see him. A pink Rolls-Royce had pulled up at the curb, ignoring the blasts of the cars trapped behind it. A chauffeur got out, strolled round to the back, and opened the door for one of the thinnest men I had ever seen. He was so thin that, as he moved toward us, he was like a living skeleton. His clothes—an expensive Italian suit and fur-lined coat—hung off him like they were trying to get away. Even his rings were too big for his pencil fingers. As he walked, he kept adjusting them to stop them from sliding off.

I looked from him to Herbert and back again. “That’s the Fat Man?” I asked.

Herbert nodded. “He’s lost weight.”

He reached us and stopped, swaying slightly as if the wind was going to blow him away. Close up, he was even more peculiar than far away. Hollow cheeks, hollow eyes, hollow gut. The man was a drum with skin stretched so tight over bones you could probably see right through him when the light was behind him.