South by South East (13 page)

“£600,000 to the gentleman at the back.”

“Go with you where?” I asked.

“Down to the station.”

“£700,000 to Mr Kusenov.”

“This is hopeless!” I wanted to tear my hair out. There were maybe only seconds left. And I’d had to come up against PC Plod and his best friend, Big Ears. There was only one thing left to do. It was the oldest trick in the book – but I just hoped they hadn’t read the book. I pointed up. “Look!” I shouted.

The two policemen looked up. So did Tim.

I pushed my way through and on to the first stair. One of the policemen grabbed me. I broke free, then pushed him hard. He lost his balance and fell on to the second policeman. Tim was
still
looking up, wondering what I’d pointed out. But then both policemen collided with him and all three of them fell down in a tangle. The staircase was free. I bounded up.

“£750,000 to the young lady…”

The top of the stairs was blocked by two attendants who were coming down with an antique sofa. I skidded down onto my back and slithered underneath it. One of the attendants called out to me but I ignored him. I just hoped they would block the staircase enough to delay the two policemen below.

“£850,000 to Mr Kusenov. £900,000. Back to you, Mr Kusenov…”

I could hear the bidding but I couldn’t see the auction room. There was a large, square room hung with faded watercolours and prints but it was empty. Then I noticed an archway on the other side. I ran through, my feet pounding on the frayed carpets. At last I had arrived.

“£950,000 to Mr Kusenov. Do I have any advance on £950,000?”

I burst into the auction room and took everything in with one glance.

“Going once…”

There was the canvas itself, “The Tsar’s Feast”, that had started all the trouble by bringing Kusenov to England in the first place. It was bigger than I had imagined it, standing in a gold frame on an easel right at the front of a raised platform. An assistant stood next to it.

Then there was the auctioneer, a tall thin man in a three-piece suit. He was standing behind an ornate wooden desk. He was holding the white antique hammer in his hands.

There were about two hundred people in the gallery, all crammed together in narrow rows running across its width. Kusenov was sitting in the middle of them. He was everything I’d imagined he would be: grey hair, granite face, small, serious eyes, suit. That’s the thing about the Russians. They always look so … Russian.

Kusenov had been given a police guard – and if I hadn’t recognized him I’d have known him from the company he kept. Chief Inspector Snape was sitting on one side of him. A bored-looking Boyle was on the other. Why, I wondered, had they been chosen? The long arm of the law? Or the longer arm of coincidence? Either way it was bad news for me. Somehow I had to cross the full length of the auction hall – fifty or more metres – to get the hammer. I had two policemen who’d be arriving behind me any time now. And I had Snape and Boyle ahead.

“Going twice…”

The auctioneer lifted his hammer. I’d been standing there for only one second but already I’d run out of time. The hammer was about to come down on “The Tsar’s Feast”. There weren’t any more bids. As far as this auction went there would never be any more bids.

Unless…

There was only one thing I could do. I lifted a hand. “One million pounds!” I called out.

The auctioneer had been about to strike down with the hammer. But now he stopped. There was an astonished murmur from the audience and everyone turned to look at me. I took a few steps into the gallery. The auctioneer stared at me. Then he turned to his assistant and whispered a few words.

“Who are you?” he demanded at last.

I could see he wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m a bidder,” I said. “And I bid a million pounds.”

All the time I was talking I was moving further into the gallery, getting closer to the hammer. I was aware of everybody watching me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Snape and Boyle stand up and start moving round to cut me off. But I had to keep going.

“You’re just a boy!” the auctioneer exclaimed. The hammer turned in his hand.

“I know,” I said. “But I get a lot of pocket money.”

There was another murmur from the audience. Kusenov was staring at me. Then Snape broke out of the end of his row and moved to the front of the room.

“Wait a minute,” he called out. “I know that boy!”

“So do I,” Boyle snarled, catching up with him.

The auctioneer gazed at the two men unhappily. “Who are you?” he quavered.

“We’re the police,” Snape snapped. “And the boy has got no money at all!”

The auctioneer looked as if he was about to burst into tears. Clearly he had never dealt with a situation like this. “Well … please…” he stammered. “The last bid stands at £950,000.”

“A million and a half!” I called out.

“What?” the auctioneer groaned.

“Boyle!” Snape shouted. “Arrest him!”

Boyle grimaced. “Right.”

The auctioneer tried to ignore us all.

“£950,000,” he announced.
“Going…”

I took another step forward. “I’ll buy the hammer!” I exclaimed.

“Going…”
The auctioneer was determined to go through with it. I couldn’t stop him.

Boyle was moving faster now, heading towards me. And then, at the last moment, Tim appeared in the archway at the back of the gallery. Somehow he had shaken off the two policemen.

“Where’s the bomb?” he asked.

“Bomb?” Snape cried.

Everybody froze.

I lunged forward and grabbed the hammer from the auctioneer’s hands. “Tim!” I shouted.

I turned round and threw it. The hammer flew high above the audience, twisting in the air. Tim reached up and caught it.

Boyle lurched towards me.

I stepped to one side.

Boyle missed and toppled forward. His outstretched hands went over my head and through the canvas of “The Tsar’s Feast”. There was a loud ripping sound as the rest of Boyle followed them, his head and shoulders disappearing through the frame.

In the audience, Kusenov fainted.

The auctioneer gazed sadly at the ruined painting. He shook his head.

“
Gone
,” he muttered. What else could he say?

“Do you know,” I said, “there was enough dynamite under Kusenov’s seat to blow up half of London.

“Which half?” Tim asked.

It was three days later and I was reading the newspaper reports of the attempted killing at Sotheby’s. I’d been right about the hammer. The auctioneer’s dais had been rigged up with a wire connected to a detonator and nineteen sticks of dynamite under the floor. If the hammer had come down, Kusenov would have been blown to pieces. It made me sweat just to think that I’d been there.

Of course, not everything had got into the press. My name, for example. According to the newspapers, it was Chief Inspector Snape of Scotland Yard who had raised the alarm and saved the life of the visitor from Moscow. I was merely an “unknown teenager” in the last paragraph who had disrupted the auction shortly before the bomb was discovered.

We’d heard nothing from Mr Waverly. I suppose he’d wanted to keep himself and MI6 well out of it. Since we’d saved his neck for him you’d have thought he might have dropped us a line or something, but that’s the secret service for you. Happy enough to be secret. But not so keen on doing you a service.

And so at the end of it all we were more or less back to square one. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and a carton of milk sat on the table between us. I’m not sure if it was tea or supper. It would probably have to do for both.

“There were nineteen sticks of dynamite, Tim,” I said, reading from the paper. “Charon really wanted Kusenov dead.”

“Right,” Tim said.

“It’s a shame we never found out who he was.”

Tim poured the milk. “He was a Russian diplomat, Nick.”

“Not Kusenov. Charon. The police never found him.”

“He was probably the last person you’d have expected, Nick.” Tim raised his glass. “Mind you, I’d have worked it out in the end. I’ve got a sixth sense.”

“Well,” I muttered, “you missed out on the other five…”

There was a knock at the door. The last time we’d had a knock on the door, it had cost us a week of our lives. We’d been chased, kidnapped, gassed, blown up, pushed off a train, shot at and generally manhandled and we hadn’t actually earned a penny out of it. This time neither of us moved.

But a moment later the door opened and a motorbike messenger came in. He was dressed in black leather from head to foot, his face hidden by his visor. Almost subconsciously I found myself counting his fingers. They were all there. Five of them were holding a long, narrow cardboard box.

“Tim Diamond?” he asked.

“That’s me,” Tim said.

“Special delivery…”

The messenger put down the package. I signed for it and showed him out. By the time I had shut the door, Tim had opened the box and pulled out a single, red rose.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “It’s from Mr Waverly.”

“No.” Tim blushed. “It’s from Charlotte.”

“Charlotte?” The last time we had seen her had been at the station in Amsterdam. I had almost forgotten her. “What does she want?”

“She wants to see me.” There was a white card enclosed with the box. “This evening.”

“Where?”

Tim crumpled the card in his hand. “She wants to see me alone.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s written it. And she’s underlined it. In red ink.”

“You can still tell me where she wants to meet you.”

Tim blushed and I realized he was still as much in love with Charlotte as he had ever been. It was incredible. I’d never once imagined Tim going out with a girl, mainly because it was impossible to imagine a girl who would want to go out with Tim. I mean, he wasn’t bad-looking or anything like that. But if you were an attractive, sophisticated woman, would you want to spend your time with someone who still cried when he saw
The Railway Children
? Tim had no sex-appeal. He wore Dennis the Menace boxer shorts in bed.

And yet Charlotte Van Dam was after him. She had said so herself. And she’d underlined it. In red ink…

“It doesn’t matter where we’re meeting,” Tim said. He had gone as red as the rose by now. What had she written on the card? “It’s just me and her…” He went into the kitchen for a shower. I heard the rattle of the water hitting the curtain. Then there was the slapping of wet feet on floorboards as he went into his bedroom. He sneezed. The water must have been cold. There was the slam of a door. Then silence.

Twenty minutes later he reappeared in a crumpled linen suit with a pale blue handkerchief in his top pocket. He had washed and combed his hair. He had shaving foam in one ear and a little talcum powder in the other.

“I’ll be back later” he said.

“Have fun,” I muttered.

“Don’t wait up.”

I finished the milk and threw the carton in the direction of the bin. It hit the edge and bounced onto the floor. What would I do if Tim moved in with a girlfriend? What if she was crazy enough to marry him? Maybe the two of them would go and live together in Holland – and where would that leave me?

I had nothing to do, so I started to clean up. I plumped up the cushions and rearranged the dust on the mantelpiece. There was a shirt lying on the carpet so I put it in the filing cabinet – under “S”. That was when I found the gloves. They were on the floor, under the shirt. They belonged to Charlotte. She had left them behind when she’d run from Amsterdam station.

I picked them up, meaning to put them in the top drawer of the desk. But as I held them, they dangled down and I found myself staring at them. There was something wrong about them, something that didn’t quite add up. I spread them out on the palm of my hand. It was obvious, but I couldn’t see it. And thirty seconds must have passed before I finally did.

The left-hand glove had only four fingers.

It was as if someone had grabbed hold of my throat with a hand made of ice. I felt all my breath being sucked up into my chest. A little sound came out of my nose. Automatically, I scrunched the glove up in my hand as if I was trying to wring water out of it.

Charlotte’s glove. Charon’s glove.

And of course it had been obvious from the start. Only Charlotte had known that we were going to meet 86. We had given her the name of the ice-rink on the train. The moment she had arrived in Amsterdam, she had sent her two agents, Scarface and Ugly, to take care of the secret agent, to stop him from leading us to her. They must have arrived just after we did.

Her very names should have told me. Both of them began with the same four letters – Charon and Charlotte. So why hadn’t I seen it? Maybe I was more of a sexist than I thought, but I’d never imagined an international killer being a woman. Everyone – McGuffin, Mr Waverly, Rushmore – had spoken of Charon as a man. Maybe that had been her most effective weapon. She had played on other people’s preconceptions, hidden behind them. She had known. Nobody would ever suspect a woman.

But I should have guessed that, too. When I had searched Charon’s desk at the Winter House, I’d discovered a small mirror covered in some sort of powder. If I’d thought about it, I’d have known what it was: the mirror from a powder compact. With a sprinkling of face powder. It should have told me. It was a woman’s desk, not a man’s. And if I’d only seen that, everything else would have fallen into place.

I made a mental note to read more feminist literature – but not right now. Tim had gone to an appointment with a killer. If Charlotte blamed him for saving Kusenov … I had to find him before he reached her.

I ran into his bedroom. There were clothes everywhere – except in the wardrobe. He must have tried on everything before he’d chosen the linen suit. I started heaping up the trousers and shirts. I had to find the little white card that had come with the rose.

There was no sign of it. When I’d thrown out all the clothes, I started on his
Beano
collection, his bills, and six years’ subscription to
True Detective
. There must have been nine layers between me and the carpet. If you wanted to hoover this room it would probably take you a week to find the Hoover. And I was looking for one small card. What if he had taken it with him?