Public Enemy Number Two

Caught red-handed!

I walked toward the door. At the same moment there was a crash of breaking glass. A bell went off. I turned and looked back.

It was impossible. A minute ago I’d been looking at a glass-topped cabinet with twelve red carbuncles inside. Now I was looking at a shattered cabinet with only eleven carbuncles lying in the wreckage. But apart from the security guards, there was nobody in the room. Someone had just stolen part of the Woburn windfall. The alarm bell was still ringing. But I knew it wasn’t me and it couldn’t have been them, so . . .

“All right, sonny. Stay where you are . . . Give it back, son,” the security guard muttered, holding out one hand. He was moving very slowly, like I was dangerous or something. “You can’t get away with it.”

“Get away with what?” I squeaked. My voice seemed to have climbed up my nose and hidden behind my eyes.

I pushed my hands into my pockets. I wanted to show them that they were empty, that it was all a terrible mistake. But before I could say another word, my palm came into contact with something cold and round. I took it out. It glittered in the sunlight.

BOOKS BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ

THE ALEX RIDER ADVENTURES:

Stormbreaker

Point Blank

Skeleton Key

Eagle Strike

THE DIAMOND BROTHERS MYSTERIES:

Public Enemy Number Two

The Falcon’s Malteser

Copyright © Anthony Horowitz, 1987, 1997

All rights reserved

eISBN : 978-1-101-17664-1

http://us.penguingroup.com

FRENCH DICTATION

I didn’t like Peregrine Palis from the start. It’s a strange thing about French teachers. From my experience they all have either dandruff, bad breath, or silly names. Well, Mr. Palis had all three, and when you add to that the fact that he was on the short side, with a potbelly, a hearing aid, and hair on his neck, you’ll agree that he’d never win a Mr. Universe contest . . . or a Combat Monsieur Univers as he might say.

He’d only been teaching at the school for three months—if you can call his brand of bullying and sarcasm teaching. Personally I’ve learned more from a stick of French bread. I remember the first day he strutted into the classroom. He never walked. He moved his legs like he’d forgotten they were attached to his waist. His feet came first, with the rest of his body trying to catch up. Anyway, he wrote his name on the blackboard—just the last bit.

“My name is Palis,” he said. “Pronounced ‘pallee.’ P-A-L-I-S.”

We all knew at once that we’d gotten a bad one. He hadn’t been in the place thirty seconds and already he’d written his name, pronounced it, and spelled it out. The next thing he’d be having it embroidered on our uniforms. From that moment on, things got steadily worse. He’d treat the smallest mistake like a personal insult. If you spelled something wrong, he’d make you write it out fifty times. If you mispronounced a word, he’d say you were torturing the language. Then he’d torture you. Twisted ears were his specialty. What can I say? French genders were a nightmare. French tenses have never been more tense. After a few months of Mr. Palis, I couldn’t even look at French doors without breaking into tears.

Things came to a head as far as I was concerned one Tuesday afternoon in the summer term. We were being given dictation and I leaned over and whispered something to a friend. It wasn’t anything very witty. I just wanted to know if to give a French dictation you really had to be a French dictator. The trouble was, the friend laughed. Worse still, Mr. Palis heard him. His head snapped around so fast that his hearing aid nearly fell out. And somehow his eyes fell on me.

“Yes, Simple?” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir?” I asked with an innocent smile.

“Is there something I should know about? Something to give us all a good laugh?” By now he had strutted forward and my left ear was firmly wedged between his thumb and finger. “And what is the French for ‘to laugh’?”

“I don’t know, sir.” I winced.

“It is rire. An irregular verb. Je ris, tu ris, il rit . . . I think you had better stay behind after school, Simple. And since you seem to like to laugh so much, you can write out for me the infinitive, participles, present indicative, past historic, future, and present subjunctive tenses of rire. Is that understood?”

“But, sir . . .”

“Are you arguing?”

“No, sir.”

Nobody argued with Mr. Palis. Not unless you wanted to spend the rest of the day writing out the infinitive, participles, and all the restiples of the French verb argumenter.

So that was how I found myself on a sunny afternoon sitting in an empty classroom in an empty school struggling with the complexities of the last verb I felt like using. There was a clock ticking above the door. By four- fifteen I’d only gotten as far as the future. It looked as if my own future wasn’t going to be that great. Then the door opened and Boyle and Snape walked in.

They were the last two people I’d expected to see. They were the last two people I wanted to see: Chief Inspector Snape of Scotland Yard and his very unlovely assistant Boyle. Snape was a great lump of a man who always looked as if he was going to burst out of his clothes, like the Incredible Hulk. He had pink skin and narrow eyes. Put a pig in a suit and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until one of them went oink. Boyle was just like I remembered him: black hair—permed on his head, growing wild