I gazed sadly at the milk. “You need a job, Tim,” I said.
“I’ve applied for jobs, Nick,” Tim protested. He slid open a drawer in his desk. It was bulging with letters. “Look! I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs.”
“How many rejections have you had?” I asked.
He scowled. “These are the rejections.” He fumbled in the pile for a minute and pulled one out, his face brightening. “Here’s one I haven’t heard from yet,” he said.
“Maybe your application got lost in the post.”
Tim opened the letter and spread it out in front of him. “Head of Security at the Canadian Bank in Pall Mall,” he read out. “Forty thousand quid a year plus luncheon vouchers and car. In other words, meals and wheels.”
“When will you hear?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. The phone’ll ring…”
“We don’t have a phone,” I reminded him. “We got cut off.”
Tim’s face fell. He folded the letter and put it back in the drawer.
“Things aren’t so bad,” he muttered. “I’ll get a case sooner or later. I bet you any day now somebody’s going to knock on the door.”
Somebody knocked on the door.
Tim gulped like he’d just swallowed a chicken bone. He looked around him. What with the lunch tray on the desk, the paper boats and everything else, the office hardly looked like the headquarters of a successful private eye. And here was a potential client knocking at the door! For a moment he froze. Then we both went into action.
The paper boats went into the bin. Tim opened another drawer and threw the knives, forks and napkins inside. At the same time, I grabbed the milk carton and slipped it into a vase on a shelf. That just left the tray. Tim handed it to me. I looked for somewhere to put it. I couldn’t see anywhere so I put it on a chair and sat on it.
“Come in!” Tim called out. He was bent over the desk, scribbling away at a blank sheet of paper. It would have looked more impressive if he’d been using the right end of the pen.
The door opened.
Our visitor was carrying a gun — and it was the gun that I looked at first. It was small, snubnosed, a dull, metallic grey. So was the visitor. He was only a little taller than me and he was so pale he could have just stepped out of one of those old black and white films they show on TV. He had a square chin, close-cropped hair and small eyes that seemed to be hiding behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. Either he was extremely short-sighted or his optician was. Or maybe it was just that he felt safer behind bulletproof glasses.
He shut the door behind him. It must have been raining outside because there were big drops clinging to his forehead and dripping off the hem of his coat. Or maybe he was sweating. “You Tim Diamond?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m Tim Diamond,” Tim agreed.
The man moved further into the room and saw me. For a moment the gun pointed my way and my hands flickered automatically towards a position somewhere above my head. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“I’m Nick Diamond,” I said. “His brother.”
His eyes travelled down. “Why are you sitting on a tray?” he demanded.
“Because I feel like a cup of tea.” It was the first thing to come into my head but the answer must have satisfied him because a moment later, walking over to the window he’d forgotten me.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Tim said.
“Jake McGuffin.” The man peered out of the window, his eyes as narrow as the venetian blind we’d sold the week before. He glanced back over his shoulder at the door. “Is that the only way in?”
Tim nodded. “Are you in some sort of trouble?” he asked.
“Somebody’s trying to kill me,” McGuffin said.
He turned away from the window just as a high-velocity bullet fired from the street drilled a neat hole through the pane, flashed across the room a bare millimetre from his face, smashed the vase on the shelf opposite and exposed the carton of milk I had hidden there earlier. Milk fountained out.
“What makes you think that, Mr McStuffing?” Tim enquired.
I was staggered. Even McGuffin had gone pale. But evidently Tim just hadn’t noticed there was anything wrong. The truth was he was so wrapped up in his own performance that he probably wouldn’t have noticed if his visitor had been hit then and there. I edged closer to the filing cabinet, ready to hurl myself behind it if any more bullets blasted into the room.
McGuffin slipped the gun into a shoulder holster and moved across the carpet, keeping clear of the window. “I need to use a phone,” he said. The words came out fast, urgent.
“Why?” Tim asked.
McGuffin hesitated. I think he still hadn’t worked Tim out. But then he had other things on his mind.
“You can tell me, Mr McMuffin,” Tim went on. He tapped his nose. “I’m a private nose with an eye for trouble. Trouble is my middle name.”
McGuffin looked around the room. If he could have seen a telephone I reckon he would have used the flex to strangle Tim and then made his call uninterrupted. But whoever was waiting for him outside had him cornered. Time was running out. He had no choice. “OK,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
He sat down opposite Tim and took out a cigarette. “You got a light?” he asked.
Tim switched on his desk light. McGuffin scrunched his cigarette on the desktop. He seemed to have got a lot older in the last few minutes. “Listen,” he said. “I’m an agent. It doesn’t matter who I work for.”
“Who do you work for?” Tim asked.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m on the track of a man called Charon. He’s a killer, an assassin, the head of a murder organization that’s bigger than Esso.”
Tim was puzzled. “Charon?” he asked. “What sort of name is that?”
“It’s a code name,” McGuffin explained. “It comes out of the Greek myths. You ever hear of Hades, the Greek underworld? In the old legends, it’s where people went when they died. Charon was the person who took them there. He was the ferryman of the dead.”
The sun must have gone behind a cloud. For the first time that summer I felt cold. Maybe it was the breeze coming in through the bullet hole.
“Nobody knows who Charon really is,” McGuffin went on. “He can disguise himself at the drop of a hat. They say he’s got so many faces his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.”
“Do you know his mother?” Tim asked.
“No.” McGuffin took a deep breath. “There’s only one way to recognize Charon,” he said. “He’s lost a finger.”
“Whose finger?” Tim asked.
“His own. He only has nine fingers.”
Tim smiled. “So that’ll help you finger him!”
McGuffin closed his eyes for a few seconds. He must have hoped he was dreaming and that when he opened them he’d be somewhere else. “Right,” he said at last. “But I’ve got no time. Charon is about to kill a Russian diplomat called Boris Kusenov.”
“I’ve heard of him,” I muttered. And it was true. I’d seen the name in the last newspaper I’d read. It had been underneath my chips.
“If Kusenov dies, that’s it,” McGuffin went on. “The Iron Curtain goes back up. There’ll be another arms race. Maybe even war…”
“As bad as that?” Tim asked.
“I’m the only man who can stop him. I know when Charon plans to kill him. And I know how. I’ve got to make that call.”
Tim shrugged. “That’s too bad, McNothing. We don’t have a phone.”
“No phone…” For a moment I thought he was going to murder Tim. He’d told us everything. And he’d got nothing for it. His hands writhed briefly. Maybe he was imagining them round Tim’s throat.
“There’s a phone box round the corner, in Skin Lane,” I suggested.
McGuffin had forgotten I was even in the room. He looked at me, then at the bullet hole. The bullet hole was like a single eye and that seemed to be looking at me too. “It’s an alley,” I added.
“Outside.” McGuffin licked his lips. I could see his problem. If he waited here much longer, Charon would come in and get him. And next time it might not be a single bullet. One grenade and we’d all be permanently
