I ran across to the van, intending . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d be able to pull the door open and get Lauren out, but of course it was locked. So instead I jumped onto it, slamming into the metal like a hamburger hitting a griddle, and hung on for dear life as the van roared away. I’d managed to get a foothold of sorts on the license plate and I had one hand on the door handle, one hand curled round the rim at the edge. I was half spread-eagled and traveling at about thirty miles an hour when the van turned a corner. Whoever was driving put their foot down then. Perhaps they’d heard they had an unwelcome passenger. I guess the van was doing sixty when I was thrown off. It was hard to tell. After all, I was sort of somersaulting through the air, and if I’m going to be honest, I might as well add my eyes were tightly closed like I was praying—which, in fact, I was.
All I knew was that me and the van had parted company. It roared off to the left, its tires screaming. I flew off to the right. I could have been killed. I should have been killed. But if you go down that part of London at night, you’ll find that the offices put a lot of junk out on the pavements, to be cleared up by the garbage trucks the next day. My fall was broken by a mountain of cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Better still, the bags were full of paper that had been put through the shredder; computer printouts and that sort of thing. It was like hitting a pile of cushions. I was bruised. But nothing broke.
A minute later Herbert reached me. He must have been convinced that I was finished because when I got to my feet and walked toward him, brushing strips of paper off my sleeves, he almost fainted with surprise.
“Did you get the van’s number?” I asked.
He opened and closed his mouth again without speaking. It was a brilliant impersonation of a goldfish. But I wasn’t in the mood to be entertained.
“The license plate . . .” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You were standing on it . . .” He still couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.
I looked back down the empty road. Lauren Bacardi had been about to tell us something important and now she was gone. Our only chance of finding the secret of the Maltesers might have gone with her.
“NICE DAY FOR A FUNERAL”
I wasn’t feeling too good the next day. I woke up wishing I hadn’t, tried to close my eyes, and groaned into the pillow. There was something unpleasant in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t. It was my tongue. Outside, it was raining. I could hear the water pitter-pattering against the windows and dripping through the leak in the bathroom ceiling. I looked out. It was another gray London day with little yellow spots dancing in the air. I figured a couple of Alka-Seltzer would see to the spots, but it looked like we were going to be stuck with the weather.
It took me about twenty minutes to get out of bed. The tumble I had taken the night before must have been harder than I had thought. My right shoulder had gone an interesting shade of black and blue and it hurt when I moved my fingers. Actually it hurt when I moved anything. Somehow I managed to wiggle out of my quilt, and bit by bit, I forced the life back into my battered frame. But it was an hour before I’d made my way downstairs and into the kitchen. It was still raining.
Herbert was sitting there reading a newspaper. When he saw me, he flicked on the kettle and smiled brightly.
“Nice day for a funeral,” he said.
“Very funny,” I groaned, reaching for the medicine chest.
“I’m being serious.” Herbert slid the newspaper in front of me.
I opened the medicine chest—a red plastic box with a white cross on it. It contained two Band-Aids and a tin of cough drops. Clearly Herbert wasn’t expecting an outbreak of bubonic plague. I groaned for a second time and pulled the newspaper before me. With an effort, I managed to get the print to unblur itself.
Herbert was right. There was going to be a funeral later in the day—just a few minutes down the road as luck would have it. Or was it luck? I wasn’t thinking straight, that was my trouble. The guy being buried was one Henry von Falkenberg. It appeared that the Falcon had flown home.
There was nothing about the Falcon’s five million dollars in the paper. They didn’t even mention he’d been a crook. In fact it was just one of those fill-in stories, the sort of thing they print between the crossword and the gardening report when they haven’t got enough news. This was a story about a wealthy businessman living in Bolivia who had once lived in England and had decided that he wanted to be buried there. The only trouble was, the week he’d died, there’d been a baggage handlers’ strike in La Paz and—now that he was dead—“baggage” included him. He’d spent the last four weeks sharing an airport deep freeze with a load of corned beef from Argentina.
But now the strike was over and von Falkenberg could be buried in his family plot just down the road from our apartment. It was too good an opportunity to miss, hungover or not. How many of the names on Snape’s blackboard would turn up to pay their last respects to the Falcon?
We had to be there.
Herbert reached for the telephone book. “3521201,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Brompton Cemetery.”
I’d written the number down for him and he called them. He spoke briefly before he put down the phone.
“The funeral’s at twelve,” Herbert said. “Recommended dress: black tie and rain boots.”
Perhaps you know Brompton Cemetery—a stretch of ground between Fulham Road and the Brompton Road—a stone’s throw away from the soccer field. I sometimes walked there on Sundays, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. After all, there’s not much grass in Fulham, and with the sun shining it isn’t such a bad place to be. Anyway, the best thing about walking in a cemetery is walking out again. Don’t forget, not everyone can.
From the Fulham Road you pass between a pair of tall black iron gates and follow the path. You don’t even know you’re in a cemetery until you’re a short way up and pass the first graves. It’s pretty at first. This is the old part of the cemetery, the romantic bit with the grass waist-high and the stones poking out at odd angles like they’ve grown there, too. Then you turn a corner and there’s a cluster of buildings curving around an open space like some sort of weird Victorian summerhouse. Now everything is flat and you can see all the way up to the Brompton Road, a green stretch with the crosses sticking up like the masts of a frozen armada.
We got there at five to twelve, squelching through the rain and the mud, our raincoats pulled up tightly around our necks. About a dozen people had braved the weather to make their farewells to the Falcon . . . and the Argentinian Corned Beef Company had sent a wreath, which was a nice gesture. The first person we met was a less pleasant surprise: Chief Inspector Snape looking about as cheerful as the cemetery’s residents. Boyle was behind him, dressed in a crumpled black suit with a mourning band on his arm.
“Simple and Simple,” Snape cried, seeing us. “I was planning to visit you as soon as this little shindig was over.”
“Why?” Herbert asked.
“We’ve been receiving reports of an incident in Charing Cross. I thought you might be able to help us with our inquiries into the disappearance of a certain singer. One Lauren Bacardi. It looks like a kidnapping. And guess which kid is our prime suspect?”
“Search me,” I said.
“I probably will one of these days,” Snape assured me. He smiled at his little joke and I have to admit that jokes don’t come much more little than that. “I’ve got you for murder, for kidnapping, for entering an adult club under false pretenses, and for failing to pay for one bottle of champagne,” he went on. “I could lock you up right now.”