The Blurred Man (6 page)

The digger stabbed down. The earth shifted. Gradually the hole got deeper. There was a clunk – metal hitting wood – and two of the workmen climbed in to clear away the rest of the soil with spades. Snape moved forward.

I didn’t watch as the coffin was opened. You have to remember that I was only fourteen years old, and if someone had made a film out of what was going on here I wouldn’t even have been allowed to see it.

“Boyle!” Snape muttered the single word and the other man lowered himself into the hole. There was a pause. Then…

“Sir!”

Boyle was holding something. He passed it up to Snape. It was dark blue, shaped a bit like a bell, only paper thin. There was a silver disc squashed in the middle. It took me a few seconds to work out what it was. Then I realized. It was a police-constable’s helmet. But one that had been flattened.

“Henderson!” Snape muttered.

There had been a police-constable watching Smile’s flat. He had disappeared a week before the accident. His name had been Henderson.

And now we knew what had happened to him.

“Don’t you see, Tim? It was Henderson who was killed. Not Lenny Smile!”

The two of us were back at our Camden flat. After our hours spent in the cemetery, we were too cold to go to bed. I’d made us both hot chocolate and Tim was wearing two pairs of pyjamas and two dressing-gowns, with a hot-water bottle clasped to his chest.

“But who killed him?”

“Lenny Smile.”

“But what about Hoover? And the woman? They were there when it happened.”

For once, Tim was right. Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee must have been part of it. Snape had already gone to arrest them. The man they had helped down the stairs must have been Henderson. I had been right about that. He had been drugged. They had taken him out of the flat and thrown him into the road, just as Barry Krishner turned the corner on his way home…

And yet it wasn’t going to be easy to prove. There were no witnesses. And until Smile was found, it was hard to see exactly what he could do. Suddenly I realized how clever Smile had been. The blurred man? He had been more than that. He had run Dream Time, he had stolen all the money, and he had remained virtually invisible.

“Nobody knew him.” I said.

“Who?”

“Smile. Mrs Lovely never spoke to him. Joe Carter only wrote to him. We went to his flat and it was like he’d never actually lived there. Even Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee couldn’t tell us much about him.”

Tim nodded. I yawned. It was two o’clock, way past my bedtime. And in just five and a half hours I’d be getting ready for school. Monday was going to be a long day.

“You’ll have to go to the Ritz tomorrow,” I said.

“Why?”

“To tell Joe Carter about his so-called best friend.”

Tim sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “He had this big idea about Lenny Smile when all the time he was someone else!”

I finished my hot chocolate and stood up. Then, suddenly, it hit me. “What did you just say?” I asked.

“I’ve forgotten.” Tim was so tired he was forgetting what he was saying even as he said it.

“Someone else! That’s exactly the point! Of course!”

There had been so many clues. The note in the cemetery. Mrs Lovely and the card Lenny had sent her. The gravestone. The photograph of Smile outside the Café Debussy. And Snape…

“We know when he was born…”

But it was only now, when I was almost too tired to move, that it came together. The truth. All of it.

The following morning, I didn’t go to school. Instead I made two telephone calls, and then later on, just after ten o’clock, Tim and I set out for the final showdown.

It was time to meet Lenny Smile.

The tube from Camden Town to Waterloo is direct on the Northern line – which was probably just as well. I’d only had about five hours’ sleep, and I was so tired that the whole world seemed to be shimmering and moving in slow motion. Tim was just as bad. He had a terrible nightmare in which he was lowered, still standing up, into Lenny’s grave – and woke up screaming. I suppose it wasn’t too surprising. He’d fallen asleep on the escalator.

But the two of us had livened up a little by the time we’d reached the other end. The weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain was sheeting down, sucking any colour or warmth out of the city. We had left Waterloo station behind us, making for the South Bank, a stretch of London that has trouble looking beautiful even on the sunniest day. This is where you’ll find the National Theatre and the National Film Theatre, both designed by architects with huge buckets of prefabricated cement. There weren’t many people around. Just a few commuters struggling with umbrellas that the wind had turned inside out. Tim and I hurried forward without speaking. The rain lashed down, hit the concrete and bounced up again, wetting us twice.

I had made the telephone call just after breakfast.

“
Mrs Lee?
”

“
Yes. Who is this?
” Fiona Lee’s clipped vowels had been instantly recognizable down the line.

“
This is Nick Diamond. Remember me?
”

A pause.

“
I want to meet with Lenny Smile
.”

A longer pause. Then, “
That’s not possible. Lenny Smile is dead
.”

“
You’re lying. You know where he is. I want to see the three of you. Hoover, Lenny and you. Eleven o’clock at the London Eye. And if you don’t want me to go to the police, you’d better not be late
.”

You’ve probably seen the London Eye, the huge Ferris wheel they put up outside County Hall. It’s one of the big surprises of modern London. Unlike the Millennium Dome, it has actually been a success. It opened on time. It worked. It didn’t fall over. At the end of the millennium year they decided to keep it, and suddenly it was part of London – a brilliant silver circle at once huge and yet somehow fragile. Tim had taken me on it for my fourteenth birthday and we’d enjoyed the view so much we’d gone a second time. Well as they say, one good turn deserves another.

Not that we were going to see much today. The clouds were so low that the pods at the top almost seemed to disappear into them. You could see the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river and, hazy in the distance, St Paul’s. But that was about it. If there was a single day in the year when it wasn’t worth paying ten pounds for the ride, this was it, which would explain why there were no crowds around when we approached: just Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee, both of them wearing raincoats, waiting for us to arrive.

There was no sign of Lenny Smile, but I wasn’t surprised. I had known he would never show up.

“Why are you calling us?” Hoover demanded. “First we have the police accusing us of terrible things. Then you, wanting to see Lenny. We don’t know where Lenny is! As far as we know, he’s dead…”

“Why don’t we get out of the rain?” I suggested. “How about the wheel?” It seemed like a good idea. The rain was still bucketing down and there was nowhere else to go.

“After you, Mr Hoover…”

We bought tickets and climbed into the first compartment that came round. I wasn’t surprised to find that there would only be the four of us in it for this turn of the wheel. The doors slid shut, and slowly – so slowly that we barely knew we were moving – we were carried up into the sky, into the driving rain.

There was a pause as if nobody knew quite what to say. Then Fiona broke the silence. “We already told that ghastly little policeman … Detective Chief Inspector Snape. Lenny was with us that day. He was killed by the steamroller. And it
is
Lenny buried in the cemetery.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “Lenny Smile is right here now. He’s on the big wheel. Inside this compartment.”

“Is he?” Tim looked under the seat. “I don’t see him!”

“That’s because you’re not looking in the right place, Tim,” I said. “But that was the whole idea. You said it yourself last night. We all thought Lenny Smile was one thing, but in fact he was something else.”

“You are not making the lot of sense,” Hoover said. His face, already dark to begin with, had gone darker. He was watching me with nervous eyes.

“I should have known from the start that there was something strange about Lenny Smile,” I said. “Nothing about him added up. Nobody – except you – had ever seen him. And everything about him was a lie.”

“You mean … his name wasn’t Lenny Smile?” Tim asked.

“Lenny Smile never existed, Tim!” I explained. “He was a fantasy. I should have known when I saw the details on the gravestone. It said that he was born on 31st April 1955. But that was the first lie. There are only thirty days in April. 31st April doesn’t exist!”

“It was a mistake…” Fiona muttered.

“Maybe. But then there was that photograph Carter showed us of ‘Lenny’ standing outside the Café Debussy. You told us that he was allergic to a lot of things, and one of those things was animals. But in the photograph there’s a cat sitting between his feet – and he doesn’t seem to care. The allergy business was a lie. But it was a clever one. It meant that he had a reason not to be seen. He had to stay indoors because he was ill…”

Centimetre by centimetre, the big wheel carried us further away from the ground. The rain was hammering against the glass. Looking out, I could barely see the buildings on the north bank of the river. There was Big Ben, but then the rain swept across it, turning it into a series of brown and white streaks.

Tim gaped. “So there was no Lenny Smile!” he exclaimed.

“That’s right. Except when Hoover
pretended
to be Lenny Smile. Don’t you see? He rented the flat even though he never actually lived there. Occasionally he went in and out to make it look as if there was someone there. And of course it was Hoover who wrote that letter to Mrs Lovely.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it was written in green ink. The message we saw in the card on Lenny’s grave was also written in green ink – and it was the same handwriting. I should have seen from the start. It was Hoover we saw at the circus. And he was also there at Brompton Cemetery the day we visited the grave. I should have known it was him as soon as we met him at the Dream Time office.”

“Why?” Tim asked.

“Because Hoover had never met us – but somehow he knew we’d been to Brompton Cemetery. Don’t you remember what he said to us? ‘You know very well that he’s lying there in Brompton Cemetery.’ Those were his exact words. But he only knew we knew because he knew who we were, and he knew who we were because he’d seen us!”

Tim scratched his head. “Could you say that last bit again?”

Fiona looked at me scornfully. “You’re talking tommy-rot!” she said.

“Was Tommy part of this too?” Tim asked.

“Why would Rodney and I want to invent a man called Lenny Smile?” she continued, ignoring him.

“Because the two of you were stealing millions of pounds from Dream Time. You knew that eventually the police would catch up with you. And there was always the danger that someone like Joe Carter would come over from America to find out what was happening to his money. You were the brains behind the charity. You were the ‘big wheels’, if you like. But you needed someone to take the blame and then disappear. That was Lenny Smile. Henderson – the policeman – must have found out what was going on, so he had to die too. And that was your brilliant idea. You’d turn Henderson into Lenny Smile. He went under the steamroller and, as far as you were concerned, that was the end of the matter. Smile was dead. There was nothing left to investigate.”

The pod was still moving up. There were a few pedestrians out on the South Bank. By now they were no more than dots.

“But now the police think Lenny Smile is alive,” I went on. “That’s why the two of you aren’t in jail. They’re looking for him. They don’t have any proof against you. So the two of you are in the clear!”

Hoover had listened to all this in silence but now he smiled, his thin lips peeling back from his teeth. “You have it exactly right,” he said. “Fiona and I are nobodies. We were just working for Lenny Smile. He is the real crook. And, as you say, they have no proof. Nobody has any proof.”

“Hoover dressed up as Lenny Smile…” Tim was still trying to work it all out.

“Only once. For the photograph that Joe Carter requested. But he was wearing the same coat and the same gloves when we saw him – which is why we thought he was Lenny Smile. Both times, he was too far away for us to see his face. And, of course, in the photograph the face was purposely blurred.” I turned to Rodney. “I’d be interested to know, though. What were you doing in the cemetery?”

Hoover shrugged. “I realized that the bloody fool of an undertaker had made a mistake with the date on the gravestone. I went there to put it right. When I saw you and your brother at the grave, I knew something was wrong. I have to admit, I panicked. And ran.”

“And the circus…?”

“Mrs Lovely told us there had been a witness. I had to track him down and make sure he didn’t talk.”

“But it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d talked,” Tim said. “He was Russian! Nobody would have understood.”

“I don’t believe in taking chances,” Rodney said. His hand had slid into his coat pocket. Why wasn’t I surprised, when it came out, to see that it was holding a gun?

“He’s got a gun!” Tim squealed.

“That’s right, Tim,” I said.

“You’ve been very clever,” Hoover snarled. “But you haven’t quite thought it through.” He glanced out of the window. We had reached the top of the circle, as high up as the Ferris wheel went. Suddenly Hoover fired. The glass door smashed. Tim leapt. The rain came rushing in. “An unfortunate accident!” Hoover shouted above the howl of the wind. “The door malfunctioned. Somehow it broke. You and your brother fell out.”

“No we didn’t!” Tim whimpered.

“Anyway, by the time they’ve finished wiping you off the South Bank, Fiona and I will have disappeared. The money is in a nice little bank in Brazil. We’ll move there. A beach house in Rio de Janeiro! We’ll live a life of luxury.”

“That money was meant for sick children!” I shouted. “Don’t you have any shame at all?”