Free The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz Page A

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.
    “Nick . . .” Herbert whimpered in a voice of pure jelly.
    I looked up. And I saw it all.
    “What’s this doing here?” Herbert had asked. I replayed the words in my head. “This” was a gun. It had been lying on the carpet beside the desk. Now he was holding it. At that moment, the door opened. Snape and Boyle had followed us in. And there was me kneeling beside another dead man. There was Herbert, again, holding the gun that had