South by South East

CHAIN REACTION

One hour after the bank blast, Tim was a wanted man. Suddenly his picture was in the papers and on TV. Identikit pictures had appeared so fast you’d think the police had had them printed in advance just in case they needed them. Once again we were Public Enemies — but all we’d managed to take from the bank was two hundred dollars and some travellers’ cheques. I changed the dollars and used some of the money to buy Tim a new shirt. That hardly left enough to get us a room for the night.

We couldn’t go back to the office. That was the first place they’d come looking for us. We needed a cheap hotel somewhere quiet, where they didn’t look at their guests too closely. Somewhere that needed guests so badly they wouldn’t look at all.

We found the hotel on the wrong side of Paddington. In fact it wasn’t a hotel but a guest house; a narrow, grimy building with no name on the door, but a “Vacancies” sign in the window. It was halfway down a cul-de-sac so there would be no passing traffic. And you couldn’t reach it from the back either. The Paddington railway tracks cut right through the garden. Try mowing the lawn and you’d be run over by a train.

“What do you think?” Tim asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. I rang the bell.

The door was opened by a thin, elderly woman in a grey cardigan that she had knitted herself. About halfway through she must have lost the pattern. Underneath it there was a shabby dress hanging over a hideous pair of slippers with pink pom-poms.

“Yes?” she said.

“You got a room?” Tim asked.

“Oh yes! Come in! I’ve got lots of rooms.”

The lady led us through a dark, depressing hallway and into a reception room that wasn’t much better.

This room had six lumpy chairs and a coffee-table stained with coffee. Two elderly men were sitting at a table playing chess. A third man was in an armchair with his back to us.

“My name is Mrs Jackson,” the lady told us. She spoke like a duchess, rolling each word between her lips. “Let me introduce you to my guests.” She gestured at the plump, fair-haired man in the armchair. “Mr Blondini is in the theatre!” she announced. The man in the armchair grinned and tried to stand up. But he couldn’t, as he was wearing a straitjacket and there were about a dozen chains snaking round his arms, legs and chest. “Mr Blondini is an escapologist,” Mrs Jackson explained.

“Just practising!” Mr Blondini added, heaving frantically with his shoulders.

Mrs Jackson went over to the two men playing chess. The first of them was short with close-cropped hair and a monocle. “This is Mr Webber,” she said. “Mr Webber is from Germany. But otherwise he’s perfectly nice.”

“Check!” Mr Webber snapped, moving his bishop with such force that it snapped too.

“And this is Mr Ferguson.” The other player was tall and thin, a timid-looking man with curly hair. Mrs Jackson drew Tim aside. “Do try not to mention mountains or tall buildings to him,” she whispered. “Mr Ferguson suffers terribly from vertigo.”

Tim waved at Mr Ferguson. “Hi!” he said.

Mr Ferguson rolled his eyes and fainted.

Mrs Jackson frowned. “I have a room on the first floor,” she said. “How many nights will it be?”

“We’ll be here until the end of the week,” I lied.

“It’s thirty pounds a night. Cash in advance.”

I nodded and Tim counted out three ten pound notes.

Mrs Jackson snatched them hungrily. “Room twelve on the first floor at the end of the corridor,” she said. She stopped and looked more closely at Tim. “Do I know you?” she said. “Your face is very familiar. What did you say your name was?”

“It’s… it’s…” Tim stared blankly at me.

I glanced at the ten pound notes in Mrs Jackson’s hands. “It’s Queen,” I said. “We’re the Queen brothers.”

“Oh yes?”

“Good night, Mrs Jackson.”

I grabbed Tim and we made our way upstairs. At the top, I turned and looked back. The landlady was still there, watching us, her eyes glinting in the half-light. I nodded at her and she spun on her heel, disappearing the way she had come.

“She knows who we are!”

“No, Tim. Maybe she saw you on the news. But I don’t think she recognized you…”

We were sitting in room twelve a few minutes later. The room was about as inspiring as the rest of the hotel. It had one ancient bed, a couch and a swirly carpet that had lost most of its swirls. Tim was lying on the bed. I was sitting next to him, thinking. We couldn’t stay long at this guest house. Not at thirty pounds a night. We had to go somewhere. But where?

It seemed to me we had only one choice. Tim was now a wanted bank robber. Snape would never believe our story about the bomb, not after the telephone box and the pet shop. No, Mr Waverly — the real Mr Waverly — had us right where he wanted us. We had to help him find Charon. It was our only chance.

But where could we start? Sitting on the bed, I thought about what he had told us. One of his agents, Jake McGuffin, had been following Charon’s trail but he hadn’t been working alone. Waverly had mentioned a Dutch secret agent. A man with no name — but a number. Seventy-six or eighty-six…

Eighty-six! It meant something to me. I was sure of it. I had seen or heard the number somewhere before. And sitting there on the lumpy mattress, I suddenly remembered where.

“Tim!” I exclaimed. I stood up and pulled the ticket out of my pocket. This was the ticket to the ice-rink that I had found in McGuffin’s hotel room. And I was right! There was a number printed in the left-hand corner.

The number was eighty-six.

I showed it to Tim. “Don’t you see?” I said. “I think this is a ticket to an ice-rink in Amsterdam. McGuffin and the Dutch agent must use it as a meeting place.” I pointed at the two words at the top of the ticket. “Amstel Ijsbaan. Do you think that sounds Dutch?”

“It’s all Greek to me,” Tim said.

“Amstel…” Just for once I wished I’d concentrated more in geography lessons. “Isn’t that a river,” I said. “In Amsterdam?” It was all beginning to make sense. “We have to go there.”

“To Amsterdam?”

“We’ll find the ice-rink. We’ll find 86. And he’ll help us find Charon.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know, Tim. I’m completely in the dark…”

That was when the lights went out.

Suddenly it was pitch black in the room. At the same time there was a click and a rush of cool air as the door was opened and even as I stood up to take my bearings, I felt myself grabbed and thrown back on the bed. I heard Tim cry out. Then someone grabbed my hand and I felt a circle of cold metal closing around my wrist. There was a second click, closer this time and more distinct. I tried to move my hand and found that I couldn’t.

And then the lights went back on and I found myself staring at Mrs Jackson and two of her lodgers — Mr Webber and Mr Ferguson. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Tim was lying next to me and now I saw that they had managed to handcuff us together. And, most bizarre of all, Mrs Jackson was holding a gun.

A moment later, Mr Blondini came into the room. He had obviously been the one controlling the main fuse. “Did you get them?” he asked.

“Oh yes!” Mrs Jackson pursed her lips. “Who’d have thought it?” she went on. “A dangerous criminal sleeping in my house!”

“It’s not true!” I said.

“That’s right!” Tim agreed. “I hadn’t gone to bed yet.”

“He’s not a dangerous criminal!” I explained. “He hasn’t done anything!”

“Then why is his face here?” Mr Ferguson asked. He produced a copy of that day’s Evening Standard with Tim’s face on the front page. So that was how they had recognized us.

“We’d better call the police.” Mrs Jackson was still aiming the gun at us. She turned to Mr Webber. “Do you know the number?”

“Nine, nine, nine,” the German said.

“All right,” she muttered. “I’ll look it up in the phone book.”

“I’ve already called them,” Mr Blondini said. “They’re on the way.”

“Good!”

I looked around me, trying to find some way out of this situation, but there was nothing I could do, not while Mrs Jackson had the gun. The gun… I’d been held up at gunpoint quite a few times in my life. The Fat Man, Johnny Powers, Big Ed — they’d all tried it at one time or another. But now I looked at her, I saw there was something wrong about Mrs Jackson. It wasn’t just her. It was the way she was holding the gun. Or perhaps it was the gun itself…

And suddenly I knew. “Have you got a cigarette, Mrs Jackson?” I asked.

“You’re too young to smoke,” she scowled.

“Then why are you offering me a light?” I pointed at the gun. My hand was chained to Tim’s and he pointed at it too.

“What…?” Tim began.

The front doorbell rang. The police had arrived.

“Move!” I shouted.

We leapt off the bed and pushed past Mrs Jackson and her friends, making for the door. They were too surprised to do anything and a moment later we were out of the room. I could feel the chain straining at my wrist as Tim hesitated. I suppose he was afraid that we were about to get shot. But I knew better. It hadn’t been a real gun at all but a fancy cigarettelighter. And how had I guessed? Maybe it was just intuition. But the single word “Dunhill” printed on the barrel had probably helped.

Down below, the police were hammering at the door. That meant we could only go up. We found a second staircase and clambered up it, arriving on the second floor. This was also the top floor. We had nowhere else to go. Behind me I heard Mrs Jackson hurrying down to let the police in. We had maybe ten seconds before we were taken.

There was a window at the end of the corridor. Pulling Tim with me, I went over to it. The window was at the back of the house. There was a narrow alley — about two metres across — and then a lower building. The roof of the other building was a few metres below us. It was flat, covered in black asphalt.

“We can jump,” I said.

“We can’t,” Tim quavered.

“We’ve got to.” I opened the window and Tim and I crawled out onto the sill. The handcuffs didn’t make it easy. We hovered there for a few seconds. Behind us, I could hear the police racing up the stairs.

“Jump!”

I launched myself into space. Tim did the same. Like some sort of clumsy, prehistoric bird we soared out of the house. For a horrible moment I thought I wasn’t going to make it. And if I didn’t make it, nor would Tim. The chain would drag him back and we’d both end up as so many broken bones on the pavement below. But then the asphalt roof rushed up and hit me in the chest. My legs still hung in space but enough of me had reached the building to save me. I twisted to the right. Tim was lying beside me.

“Close…” he rasped and wiped his brow. He used the chained hand and I had to wipe his brow too.

The building was some sort of office block. We found a skylight in, a flight of stairs down and a glass door out. Nobody saw us go. There were about a dozen police cars parked in the street at the front but everybody was concentrating on Mrs Jackson’s guest house so we simply walked away. We held hands until we were round the corner. But then, of course, we were still very much attached.