he would only speak to the desk sergeant in the station when he had counted his ten fingers.
The desk sergeant listened to our story with a cold smile, then showed us into a back room while he went to find a senior officer. I was beginning to wonder if we hadn’t made a mistake going there.
Then the door opened and I knew we’d made a mistake.
The senior police officer was Chief Inspector Snape.
Snape was a tough, round-shouldered bull of a man. Wave a red flag at him and he’d probably flatten you. He had the sort of flesh you’d expect to see hanging upside down in a butcher’s shop. Snape hardly ever smiled. It was as if nobody had taught him how. When his lips did twitch upwards, his eyes stayed small and cold.
But without any doubt, the worst thing about Snape was his sidekick, Boyle. And with Boyle, kick was exactly the word. Boyle loved violence. I once saw a photograph of him in full riot gear — shield, truncheon, tear gas, grenade, helmet — and that had been taken on his day off. He was shorter than Snape, with dark, curly hair that probably went all the way down to his feet.
“Well, well, well,” Snape muttered. “If it isn’t Tim Diamond!”
“But it is!” Tim replied, brilliantly.
“I know it is!”
Snape’s eyes glazed over. Perhaps he was remembering the time when Tim had put together an Identikit picture and the entire police force of Great Britain had spent two months looking for a man with three eyes and an upside-down mouth. “There never was another police constable like you,” he rasped.
“Thank you, Chief.” Tim grinned.
“I’m not flattering you! I fired you!” Snape had gone bright red. He pulled out a chair and threw himself into it, breathing heavily.
Boyle edged forward. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes. I’m all right, Boyle.”
“You want me to…” Boyle winked and nodded his head in Tim’s direction.
“No. I’m all right.” Snape seemed to have collected himself. He glanced at a typed sheet of paper. “So what is all this nonsense?” he demanded. “Spies and killers and bodies in telephone boxes.”
“It’s the truth,” I said.
That brought a dark look from Boyle. “I’ll get the truth,” he growled.
“No, Boyle.” Snape shook his head tiredly.
“I can use the lie detector, sir.”
“No, Boyle. You short-circuited it — remember?”
“Look, Chief Inspector,” I said. “If you don’t believe us, why don’t you come back with us? We can show you the body.”
Snape considered. “All right,” he said. “We’ll come with you and take a look. But I warn you, laddie. If you’re wasting our time…”
I’ve been in a police car quite a few times and normally it’s fun. But Snape was a slow driver. He didn’t put on the siren and the only flashing light was his petrol gauge. By the time we got back to Skin Lane, events had overtaken us. So had half the traffic in London.
He parked the car. We got out. Tim and I had shared the back seat and we were a few paces behind Snape as he turned the corner into the alley. Boyle went between us. We all stopped at the same moment.
“Well?” Snape demanded.
Tim’s mouth dropped open. “It’s gone,” he said.
I looked past him. He was right. McGuffin’s body had vanished. But that wasn’t the strange part.
So had the telephone box.
ROOM SERVICE
“I don’t think Snape believed my story,” Tim said.
“Whatever makes you think that, Tim?” I asked.
We’d just been thrown into prison for wasting police time. We were sitting on two bunk beds in a small square cell lit by a single bulb.
Snape hadn’t believed a word we’d said — but for once I couldn’t blame him. I mean, how often do secret agents drop in on you, swap coats, get shot and then vanish in a puff of smoke, taking the nearest telephone box with them? Even Tim was having trouble working it out.
“Maybe somebody stole the telephone box,” he muttered.
“What about the body?” I asked.
“No. It couldn’t have been the body, Nick. The body was dead.”
Something hard was jabbing into my pocket. At first I thought it was the mattress but as I shifted my weight I realized it was the hotel key. In the excitement I’d forgotten all about it. I suppose I could have shown it to Snape, but I don’t think it would have helped. By the time he got to the London International Hotel the whole place would probably have vanished too.
I took the key out and held it up. It took Tim a moment or two to remember what it was. Then he groaned.
“We’ve got to go there,” I said. “Room 605-”
“Why?” Tim cut in.
“You heard what McGuffin said. If this Russian of his gets killed, he was talking about nuclear war… the end of the world!”
“Maybe he was exaggerating.”
“Well, somebody believed him, Tim.”
“How do you know?”
“They shot him.”
Snape let us out the next morning with another warning about wasting police time. I noticed that he hadn’t wasted a police breakfast on us, and the first thing we did was get a McBreakfast at the nearest McDonald’s. We left the place feeling slightly McSick and hopped on a bus that took us across town to the London International Hotel.
The hotel was one of those great piles on twenty-seven storeys with hot and cold running tourists in every room. This was the middle of the summer season, and the building was packed with Japanese and Germans and Scandinavians all milling round searching for someone who could speak their language and knew where Harrods was.
Nobody stopped us as we made our way across to the lift and took it up to the sixth floor, and there was nobody around in the corridor either. We walked on and arrived at room 605. It was a door just like all the others. So why did it seem so solid, so threatening? I handed Tim the key.
“You want me to open it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“But we don’t know what’s on the other side.”
“That’s why we’ve got to open it.”
I knocked on the door first, just to be sure.
Then I stood back while Tim opened it with the key. We slipped in quickly and shut the door behind us. And there we were, inside Jake McGuffin’s room. I wondered how long it would be before the hotel realized he’d checked out. Permanently.
There was nobody there. I don’t know what I’d been expecting but it was just an ordinary hotel room: twin beds, bathroom and colour TV. It had a nice view of Hyde Park and windows that didn’t open so you couldn’t throw yourself out when the bill arrived. The beds hadn’t been slept in, of course, but there was still some of McGuffin’s stuff spread about — a couple of ties on the back of a chair, a pen on the table, a suitcase on the stand by the door.
“There’s no one here,” Tim said.
“OK. Let’s move.”
