The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz Page A

front door. Mind you, the way things were around here, that could have just been the bath.
    I reached out and pressed the front doorbell. It went bing-bong, which was a bit of an anticlimax. After all that had gone before, I’d been expecting a massed choir. The door opened and there was another anticlimax. Beatrice von Falkenberg opened it herself. So what had happened to the butler? She looked at me with disinterest and mild distaste. I could see we were going to get along fine.
    “Yes?” she asked.
    “I’m Nick,” I said. “Nick Diamond. You asked me to come here.”
    “Did I?” She shrugged. “I was expecting someone older.”
    “Well . . . I can come back in twenty years, if you like.”
    “No, no . . . come in.”
    I followed her in, suddenly feeling like a scruffy chimney sweep. She was young for a widow; maybe about forty, with black hair clinging to her head like a bathing cap. Her skin was pale, her lips a kiss of dark red. She was wearing some sort of housedress with a slit all the way up to her waist and she moved like she had never left the stage—not walking but flowing. Everything about her spelled class. The slim, crystal champagne glass in one hand. Even the tin plate with the lumps of raw meat in the other.
    “I was about to feed my pet,” she explained.
    “Dog?” I asked.
    She glanced at the plate. “No. I think it’s beef.”
    We’d gone into the room with the swimming pool. It had been designed so that you could sit around it in bamboo chairs sipping cocktails from the bar at the far end, watching the guests swim. Only there were no bamboo chairs, the bar was empty, and I was the only guest. I looked around and suddenly realized that although I was in a millionaire’s house, the millions had long gone. There was no furniture. Faded patches on the walls showed where the pictures had once been. The curtain rods had lost their curtains. Even the potted plants were dead. The house was a shell. All it contained was a widow in a housedress with a glass of champagne and a tin of raw meat.
    “Fido!” she called out. “Come on, darling!”
    Something splashed in the water. I swallowed. Apart from the widow in the housedress with the champagne and the tin of raw meat, it seemed that the house also contained an alligator. The last time I had seen an alligator it was hanging on some rich woman’s arm with lipsticks and credit cards inside. But this one was no handbag. It was very alive, waddling out of the pool, its ugly black eyes fixed on the plate of meat.
    “Don’t worry,” the widow said. “He’s very fond of strangers.”
    “Yeah—cooked or raw?” I asked.
    She smiled and tossed Fido a piece of meat. Its great jaws snapped shut and it made a horrid gulping sound as its throat bulged, sucking the meat down. She held up a second piece. “I want the Maltesers,” she said.
    “Maltesers?”
    She threw the piece of meat, but this time she made sure that it fell short so the creature had to stalk forward to get it. It stalked forward toward me. “They belonged to my husband,” she went on. “The dwarf stole them; I want them back.”
    I pointed at the alligator. It was getting too close for comfort. As far as I was concerned, a hundred miles would have been too close for comfort. “Do you have a permit for that thing?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “It was a present from my late husband.”
    “Have you ever thought about pussycats?”
    “Fido ate the pussycats.”
    I thought of turning and running, but I couldn’t be sure I’d make it to the door. The alligator had short, wrinkled legs, but at the moment I can’t say mine felt much better. It was only a few feet or so away. Its black eyes were fixed on me, almost daring me to make a move. The whole thing was crazy. I’d never been threatened by an alligator before.
    “I don’t have the Maltesers,” I said. “Tim has them.”
    “And where is he?”
    “In jail . . . Ladbroke Grove Police Station.”
    She