The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz

Herbert’s office with my feet up on his desk, I tried to work out who might have pulled the plug on the Fat Man’s chauffeur and why. By midmorning I had it more or less figured out. It went like this: The Fat Man gives us two days to come up with the goods and we run out of time, so he decides to have a rummage around our apartment for himself. He sees us arriving at the Falcon’s funeral and that gives him the chance he wants. While he holds us up in the cemetery—there was no other reason for the little chat we had—his faithful chauffeur and housebreaker, Lawrence, is turning the place over. At least, that’s the plan.
    But whoever kidnapped Lauren Bacardi (and my money’s still on Gott and Himmell) has been asking her questions. She tells them about the box of Maltesers. So they nip back to pick them up and that’s when they find Lawrence. Maybe there’s a fight. Maybe they just didn’t like him. Either way, they shoot him just before Herbert and I get back from the funeral. They make a hasty exit through the bathroom window and over the roof. We get left with the body.
    Simple as that.
    I opened the drawer of Herbert’s desk. The box of Maltesers was still there—the fake box that I’d bought myself. The real box was still under the floorboard, covered in dust. I was just about to pull it out and have another look at it when the telephone rang.
    “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Soft, hesitant, perhaps foreign. I figured she must have the wrong number. I didn’t know any soft, hesitant, perhaps foreign women. But then she asked, “Tim Diamond?”
    “He’s not here,” I told her. “I’m his partner.”
    “His partner?”
    “Yeah—but right now I’m working solo. How can I help you?”
    There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then the lady made up her mind. “Can you come out . . . to Hampstead? I need to see you.”
    “Who is this?”
    “Beatrice von Falkenberg.”
    That made me think. So the black widow had finally come crawling out of the woodwork—or to be more accurate, the telephone line. What did she want me for? “Suppose I’m busy . . .” I said.
    “I’ll make it worth your while.”
    “You’ll pay for the train fare?”
    “Take a taxi.”
    I agreed, so she gave me an address on the West Heath Road and told me to be there by twelve. I wondered if this was another decoy—if the moment I was gone somebody else would be elbowing their way into the flat. But so long as the fake Maltesers were in the desk, I figured I was covered. I changed my shirt and ran a comb through my hair. When I left, I was still a wreck, but at least I was a slightly tidier wreck. Once the widow discovered I was only thirteen years old, I didn’t think she’d really care how I dressed.
    I’d charge her for a taxi, but I took the subway to Hampstead and then walked. Hampstead, in case you don’t know it, is in the north of London in the green belt. For “green,” read “money.” You don’t have to be rich to live in Hampstead. You have to be loaded. It seemed to me that every other car I passed was a Rolls-Royce and even the garbage cans had burglar alarms. I got directions from a traffic cop and walked around the back of the village. A quarter of an hour later I arrived at the Falcon’s lair.
    It was a huge place, standing on a hill overlooking the Heath. Whoever said crime doesn’t pay should have dropped by for an eyeful. It was the sort of house I’d have dreamed about—only I’d have had to take a mortgage out just to pay for the dream. Ten bedrooms? Eleven? It could have slept fifteen or more under those gabled roofs, and with the price of property in that part of town I figured forty winks would probably cost you ten bucks a wink. And that was just the top floor. Through the windows on the ground floor I could glimpse a kitchen as big as a dining room and a dining room as big as a swimming pool. There was a swimming pool, too, running along four windows to the right of the