The Blurred Man by Anthony Horowitz Page B

me.
    The picture showed a man standing in front of a café in what could have been London or Paris. It was hard to be sure. I could see the words C AFé D EBUSSY written on the windows. But the man himself was harder to make out. Whoever had taken the photograph should have asked Dream Time for a new camera. It was completely out of focus. I could just make out a man in a black suit with a full-length coat. He was wearing gloves and a hat. But his face was a blur. He might have had dark hair. I think he was smiling. There was a cat sitting on the pavement between his legs, and the cat was easier to make out than he was.
    “It’s not a very good picture,” I said.
    “I know.” Carter took it back. “Lenny was a very shy person. He didn’t even sign his letters. That’s how shy he was. He told me that he didn’t like going out very much. You see, there’s something else you need to know about him. He was sick. He had this illness … some kind of allergy.”
    “Was Algy his doctor?” Tim asked.
    “No, no. An allergy. It meant he reacted to things. Peanuts, for example. They made him swell up. And he hated publicity. There have been a couple of stories about him in the newspapers, but he wouldn’t give interviews and there were never any photographs. The Queen wanted to knight him, apparently, but sadly he was also allergic to queens. All that mattered to him was his work … Dream Time … helping kids. Anyway, meeting him was going to be the biggest moment of my life… I was as excited as a schoolboy.”
    As excited as a schoolboy? Obviously Carter had never visited my school.
    “Only when I got to Heathrow, Lenny wasn’t there. He wasn’t in London either. I never got to meet him. And you know why?”
    I knew why. But I waited for Lenny to tell me.
    “Lenny was buried the day before I arrived,” Carter said.
    “Buried?” Tim exclaimed. “Why?”
    “Because it was his funeral, Mr Diamond!” Carter lit another cigarette. “He was dead. And that’s why I’m here. I want you to find out what happened.”
    “What did happen?” I asked.
    “Well, like I told you, I arrived here at Heathrow last Tuesday. All I could think about was meeting Lenny Smile, shaking that man’s hand and telling him just how much he meant to me. When he didn’t show up, I didn’t even check into my hotel. I went straight to the offices of Dream Time. And that was when they told me…”
    “Who told you?” I asked.
    “A man called Hoover. Rodney Hoover…”
    “That name sucks,” Tim said.
    Carter ignored him. “He worked for Lenny, helping him run Dream Time. There’s another assistant there too, called Fiona Lee. She’s very posh. Upper-class, you know? They have an office just the other side of Battersea Bridge. It’s right over the café you saw in that photo. Anyway, it seems that just a few days after I e-mailed Lenny to tell him I was coming, he got killed in a horrible accident, crossing the road.”
    “He fell down a manhole?” Tim asked.
    “No, Mr Diamond. He got run over. Hoover and Lee actually saw it happen. If they hadn’t been there, the police wouldn’t even have known it was Lenny.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Because he was run over by a steamroller.” Carter shuddered. Tim shivered. Even the desk light flickered. I had to admit, it was a pretty horrible way to go. “He was flattened,” the American went on. “They told me that the ambulance people had to fold him before they could get him onto a stretcher. He was buried last week. At Brompton Cemetery, near Fulham.”
    Brompton. That was where the master criminal known as the Falcon had been buried too. Tim and I had gone to the cemetery at the end of our first ever case * . We were lucky we weren’t still there.
    “This guy Rodney Hoover tells me he’s winding down Dream Time,” Carter went on. “He says it wouldn’t be the same without Lenny, and he doesn’t have the heart to go on without him. I had a long talk with him in his