South by South East

THE WRONG MAN

The whole scene was frozen in the glare of the spotlights: Scarface, the knife, the waiting audience. Then everything happened at once.

The knife flashed down. There was a gunshot. Scarface screamed and reeled back, clutching his hand. The knife hit the stage and stuck there, quivering, in the wood. Ugly twisted round, trying to see what was happening. Scarface bent over his cradled hand and groaned. Blood seeped out between his fingers and dripped onto his legs.

“Good shot, Ted.”

“Thanks, Ed.”

“Lower the curtain, Red.”

The men from M16 had sprung out of nowhere. Now they swarmed over the stage while the audience — evidently in a good mood — gave them a cheerful round of applause. Ugly had put up a token resistance. One of the agents had given him a token punch on the nose and now he was out cold. Two more of them dragged Mr Marvano off while Ed and Ted grabbed hold of Scarface himself. His hand was bleeding very badly now. Ted’s bullet had smashed right through it, and I can’t say I was sorry.

Red lowered the curtain. Ted came over to me. He was wearing the same dark suit he’d had on at the London International the first time we’d met, and the same sunglasses. But now he took off the shades and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Are you OK, kid?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I was fine — except that I still couldn’t move.

Ted opened the box. “That was some trick,” he said.

“They probably do it with mirrors,” I agreed.

Then Tim came in between two more agents. Ned and Zed, perhaps.

“We found him outside,” one of them said. “He was hiding in a dustbin.”

“Rubbish!” Tim exclaimed.

“Yes. He was hiding in the rubbish.”

Tim shook himself free and came over to me. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. But it wasn’t true. I’d been chased enough. I felt as if I hadn’t stopped running for weeks. I turned to Ted. Or maybe it was Ed. “Please. I want to go home,” I said.

“I’m very glad to see you,” Mr Waverly said. “As soon as I got a report that you were in Amsterdam, I realized that you’d gone after Charon. So I sent my agents over to look after you. They spotted you just in time. Luckily for you…”

Tim and I had been flown over to London and now we were back more or less where we’d begun; at Number Seventeen, Kelly Street. Only this time there was no Bodega Birds. The headquarters of MI6 was just how it had been the first time, with Mr Waverly examining us with his hooded grey eyes over the polished leather surface of his desk. Ted and Ed stood guard by the door.

“You may have rescued us,” I said. “But it was you who got us into this mess to start with.”

Mr Waverly shrugged. “That was really your own fault,” he said. “How were we to know that Charon would try to kill you?”

He sounded innocent but I knew better. Mr Waverly had somehow let Charon know that we were working for MI6. He had drugged us and dumped us. We were his sitting targets. And when he had sent his men across to Amsterdam, it hadn’t been to rescue us. It had been to find Charon.

“I expect you have a lot of questions,” Mr Waverly said.

“I’ve got one,” Tim cut in. “What happened to the birds?”

“The birds?” It took the head of MI6 a moment to work out what he was talking about. “Oh — you mean Bodega Birds. That was just a front. We had to do that. You see, we couldn’t allow you to get the police involved.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “They might have found out that it was you who paid Charon to kill Boris Kusenov.”

That got him. For one second his eyes were unguarded and I saw the panic that was hiding behind those small, faded pupils. Behind him, Ted and Ed shifted uneasily. All three of them were like guilty schoolboys who had just been caught smoking behind the gym. “How did you find out?” Waverly asked.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cheque that I had found in Charon’s drawer. “I found this,” I said.

Mr Waverly hardly needed to look at it. He knew what it was. He coughed and ran a hand through his hair. “I have to congratulate you,” he said. “You’ve been very resourceful.”

“So why did you do it?” I demanded. “If you wanted to stop Charon, why did you pay him in the first place?”

Waverly sighed. I think he was actually relieved to get the confession off his chest. “It was an operation that went horribly wrong,” he began.

“I’m sorry,” Tim chimed in. “I didn’t know you’d been ill.”

“I haven’t been ill, Mr Diamond!” Waverly paused. This was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. “We had to find Charon,” he went on at last. “Too many people had died. Not just in England. America. France. Even Russia. It was always Charon. So we decided to mount an operation to bring him in. To unmask him. And we came up with an idea. The simplest way to find him was to become his client.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“It was easy. He had a number of agents working for him. The man who knocked out the magician, for example. We got a message to them. They passed it to Charon.”

“So you hired him to kill Kusenov.”

“Yes. We chose Kusenov because we knew he had no intention of coming to England. He doesn’t like England. In fact he never leaves Moscow. In other words, in order to kill him, Charon would have to go to Russia. And so of course, there was something he would need…”

“An aeroplane?” Tim suggested.

“A visa. You can’t enter Russia without a visa. Don’t you see? It was brilliant. All we had to do was monitor all the people applying for a visa to Russia and one of them would have to be Charon. And of course if anyone who applied for a visa had only nine fingers…”

“So you never really wanted Kusenov dead.”

“Oh no. That was just the point. We were certain that Charon would be unable to kill him. He was meant to be an impossible target.”

Suddenly I understood. Waverly was right. It had been a brilliant plan until it had gone terribly wrong. “But Kusenov decided to come to England after all!” I said.

“Exactly. That wretched painting, ‘The Tsar’s Feast’, came up for auction at Sotheby’s. Kusenov was a collector, and he had this fixation about the artist, Salvador Dali. He believed the painting had to hang in Russia — so he came over to bid for it. It was the last thing we’d expected.”

“I get it…” I said.

“I don’t,” Tim muttered.

I turned to him. “If Charon had killed Kusenov on British soil and the Russians had then found out he’d been paid by MI6-”

“It’s too horrible to contemplate.” Waverly finished the sentence. He had sunk into his chair as if he were deflating.

“You still haven’t found Charon,” I said. “Kusenov still isn’t safe.”

“My dear boy.” Mr Waverly recovered quickly. “The man with the scar! He was Charon.”

“Scarface…?”

“Yes. He’s in a prison cell now. It has to be him. He has only four fingers on his right hand.”

I thought back to the theatre in Amsterdam. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Of course he’s only got four fingers on his right hand!” I exclaimed. “Ted shot the other one off!”

That sent a ripple of alarm through the three agents. Quickly they conferred. Then Ted spoke. “It’s true I shot him in the hand,” he admitted. “But I didn’t see him lose a finger.”

“He must have lost it!” I insisted. “He certainly had all his fingers when we first met.”

Ted shook his head smugly. “Relax, kid. Your Mr Scarface is Charon, all right.”

“Has he admitted it?” I asked.

“No. But we’ll crack him.”

Personally, I doubted Ted could even crack a walnut without help from a friend but I didn’t say that. I turned back to Mr Waverly. He was my only hope. “Mr Waverly,” I said. “I know that Scarface is not Charon. Please believe me. You’ve got the wrong man.”

But Mr Waverly wasn’t having any of it. Suddenly he was all suit and old school tie. “I think I can be the best judge of this,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m the head of MI6 and you’re just a fourteen-year-old boy!”

Tim shrugged. “He has a point.”

I started to speak, then bit my tongue. There was no point arguing with them. I’d be better off working it out on my own. “What about us?” I asked.

Mr Waverly smiled. “You can go,” he said. “I’ve had a word with the police. That business with the bank. Everything’s been explained. You’re no longer wanted.”

We weren’t wanted. Not in any sense of the word.

Tim stood up. “So that’s it,” he said.

“That’s it.”

“Right.” Tim thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose you could lend us the bus fare home?”

We walked home. Every step of the way the same thought went through my mind. They’ve got the wrong man. They’ve got the wrong man. I knew Charon wasn’t Scarface. He had been in the room at the Winter House with Ugly and a third man. It was the third man who was Charon.

I thought back to the desk, the drawer with the cigarettes, the mirror and… something else. I couldn’t remember any more. I was tired. I needed to rest. But I couldn’t — not yet. They’d got the wrong man.

Tim picked up a newspaper on the way back. Someone had left it on a bench and now that the adventure was over he was keen to cut out any photographs of himself. But there wasn’t even a mention of him. He was yesterday’s news, already forgotten.

We climbed the stairs into the office and while Tim went through the paper again I put on the kettle and made us some tea. By the time I’d carried it into the office and sat down opposite Tim, my mind had begun to click into action. Carefully, I set out the pieces of the puzzle and tried to make sense of them.

Charon.

A white hammer.

A mirror in a drawer.

South by south east.

We still didn’t know what McGuffin had been trying to tell us. Had he really wanted us to travel south on the South East rail network? Was that all it boiled down to? I still couldn’t believe it could have been as unimportant as that. I thought back to the moment he had died, struggling to speak in Tim’s arms, with the train thundering past overhead.

“They’re auctioning that painting today,” Tim said. He folded the paper in half and tapped one of the articles.

South by south east.

“There’s a story about it here.”

“A story about what?”

“The painting.” He read out the headline.

“Sotheby’s. ‘Tsar’s Feast’.”

South by…

I sat up. “What?”

Tim sighed. “I was just telling you-”

“I know. What did you say? The headline…”

Tim waved the paper in my direction. “‘The Tsar’s Feast’! It’s the first lot to come under the hammer this afternoon.”

I snatched the paper. “Of course!” I shouted. “You’ve done it, Tim! You’re brilliant!”

Tim smiled. “Yeah. Sure I am.” The smile faded. “Why? What have I done?”

“You’ve just said it. The hammer…!”

“Where?”

“At Sotheby’s!” I turned the paper round and showed him the headline. “That’s what McGuffin was trying to tell you. But what with the train and everything you didn’t hear him properly.”

“What?”

“He didn’t say south by south east. He said Sotheby’s… ‘Tsar’s Feast’.”

I grabbed Tim’s wrist and twisted it round so that I could look at his watch. It was half past one. “When does the auction start?” I yelled.

“Two o’clock.”

“Half an hour. Maybe we can still get there in time…”

I was already moving for the stairs but Tim stayed where he was, his eyes darting from the newspaper to me then back to the paper. “The auction?” he muttered. “Why do you want to go there?”

I stopped with my hand on the door. “Don’t you see?” I said. “We’ve got to stop it.”

“Stop the auction?”

“Stop Charon. He’s planning to blow up Kusenov.”