Diamond Brothers 1 - The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780142402191
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE PROFESSOR

I was woken by the smell of lavender. Lavender? Yes—perfume. You’ve smelled it before, Nick. Where? I can’t remember, but maybe it was mixed with the raw meat and . . . I swallowed, stretched, opened my eyes.

“Blimey, you’re a sight!” Betty Charlady exclaimed.

I was half stretched out on Herbert’s desk in his office. I’d had to walk home the night before, and by the time I’d gotten in I’d been too tired to go upstairs. I’d looked at the second flight of steps. They led to a bed with a crumpled sheet and a tangled-up quilt. I’ll never make it, I’d thought, and so I’d gone into the office and collapsed there. And now Betty Charlady was standing in front of me, looking at me like I’d dropped in from another planet.

“What happened to you?” she demanded, shaking her head and sending the artificial daisies on her hat into convulsions.

“I had a bad night,” I said. “How did you get in?”

“Through the door.”

“It was open?”

She nodded. “You ought to lock it at night, Master Nicholas. You never know who might visit . . .”

I needed a hot bath, a hot meal, two aspirin, and a warm bed—not necessarily in that order. Instead I went up and washed my face in the sink while Betty made breakfast: boiled eggs, toast, and coffee. I looked at myself in the mirror. Somebody else looked back. His hair was a mess, there were bags under his eyes, and he had a nasty cut on his forehead. I felt sorry for the guy.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting down in the kitchen, eating. Betty had insisted on cutting my toast into triangles, which was pretty embarrassing. I’d been threatened, blown up, attacked—and here I was being treated like a kid again. But I suppose she meant well.

“Where’s Mr. Timothy?” she asked.

“Herbert?” I said. “He’s in jail. Accused of murder.”

“Murder!” she shrieked. “That’s a crime!”

“Well . . . yes.”

“No. I mean accusing Mr. Herbert of doing anything like that.” She sniffed. “Anybody could see he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

She was right there. Herbert ran away from flies. He was probably the only private detective in the country who was even scared of goldfish.

“So you’re doing all the detective work for him,” she said. I nodded. “Have you found anything out yet?”

Had I found anything out? Well, I’d found out that Beatrice von Falkenberg had strange taste in pets. I’d found out that if you stood too close to an exploding grenade, it made your ears hurt. I’d found out that the Fat Man still wanted to lose weight and that I was the weight he wanted to lose. But when you added up everything I’d found out, it would just about fit on the back of a postage stamp and you wouldn’t even need to write in small letters.

“No, Betty,” I said. “I haven’t found anything out. Not unless you know what a digital detector or a photo lighter is.”

“A wot?” she asked.

The scraps of paper that I had found in the dwarf’s room were still safely in my shirt pocket.

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