The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz Page A

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. The trouble was, my shirt pocket was still in the hotel. It had been blown off the shirt by the blast and for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly what the words had been.
    “I’m going to have a bath,” I said.
    “I’ll run it for you,” Betty volunteered.
    I shook my head. Any more encouragement and she’d be offering to scrub my back. “No, thanks . . . you go home. I can manage.”
    “But what about the cleaning?”
    I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of Herbert’s ten-dollar bills. It hurt me to see it go, but there was no denying that Betty had done a good job. When she’d come, the flat had looked like a junkyard. Now it was more like an industrial slum. “Here you are,” I said. “Come back next week, after Christmas.”
    “Ooh! Ta!” She took it. “Merry Christmas, Master Nicholas,” she burbled.
    “Merry Christmas, Betty,” I said. ———
    Sometime later, the doorbell dragged me out of a beautiful sleep. I looked at my watch. It said five to ten. It had said five to ten when I’d gone to bed. Either it had been a short sleep or I needed a new watch. I held it up to my ear and shook it. There was a dull ping and the second hand fell off. Well, that’s what comes of buying a secondhand watch.
    I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and made my way downstairs. The bell was still ringing. Whoever was down there was leaning on the button. I pressed the intercom to let him in, hoping he wouldn’t do the same to me. I don’t like being leaned on, and in the last few days I’d had more than enough of it. I went into the office and had just sat down when my client walked in.
    Correction—he didn’t walk, he staggered. And I smelled him before I saw him. It must have been around lunchtime, but he’d been drinking since breakfast and he’d brought the stale reek of whiskey as his calling card.
    I recognized him from somewhere. He was around sixty, small, fat, unshaven, owlish, with round glasses, dressed in a crumpled gray raincoat with bottle-size pockets.
    He fumbled his way toward one of the chairs that Betty Charlady had repaired for us and sat down heavily, stretching out his