The Blurred Man

by Anthony Horowitz

  And yet it wasn’t going to be easy to prove. There were no witnesses. And until Smile was found, it was hard to see exactly what he could do. Suddenly I realized how clever Smile had been. The blurred man? He had been more than that. He had run Dream Time, he had stolen all the money, and he had remained virtually invisible.

  “Nobody knew him.” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Smile. Mrs Lovely never spoke to him. Joe Carter only wrote to him. We went to his flat and it was like he’d never actually lived there. Even Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee couldn’t tell us much about him.”

  Tim nodded. I yawned. It was two o’clock, way past my bedtime. And in just five and a half hours I’d be getting ready for school. Monday was going to be a long day.

  “You’ll have to go to the Ritz tomorrow,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “To tell Joe Carter about his so-called best friend.”

  Tim sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “He had this big idea about Lenny Smile when all the time he was someone else!”

  I finished my hot chocolate and stood up. Then, suddenly, it hit me. “What did you just say?” I asked.

  “I’ve forgotten.” Tim was so tired he was forgetting what he was saying even as he said it.

  “Someone else! That’s exactly the point! Of course!”

  There had been so many clues. The note in the cemetery. Mrs Lovely and the card Lenny had sent her. The gravestone. The photograph of Smile outside the Café Debussy. And Snape…

  “We know when he was born…”

  But it was only now, when I was almost too tired to move, that it came together. The truth. All of it.

  The following morning, I didn’t go to school. Instead I made two telephone calls, and then later on, just after ten o’clock, Tim and I set out for the final showdown.

  It was time to meet Lenny Smile.

  * See Public Enemy Number Two

  THE BIG WHEEL

  The tube from Camden Town to Waterloo is direct on the Northern line – which was probably just as well. I’d only had about five hours’ sleep, and I was so tired that the whole world seemed to be shimmering and moving in slow motion. Tim was just as bad. He had a terrible nightmare in which he was lowered, still standing up, into Lenny’s grave – and woke up screaming. I suppose it wasn’t too surprising. He’d fallen asleep on the escalator.

  But the two of us had livened up a little by the time we’d reached the other end. The weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain was sheeting down, sucking any colour or warmth out of the city. We had left Waterloo station behind us, making for the South Bank, a stretch of London that has trouble looking beautiful even on the sunniest day. This is where you’ll find the National Theatre and the National Film Theatre, both designed by architects with huge buckets of prefabricated cement. There weren’t many people around. Just a few commuters struggling with umbrellas that the wind had turned inside out. Tim and I hurried forward without speaking. The rain lashed down, hit the concrete and bounced up again, wetting us twice.

  I had made the telephone call just after breakfast.

  “Mrs Lee?”

  “Yes. Who is this?” Fiona Lee’s clipped vowels had been instantly recognizable down the line.

  “This is Nick Diamond. Remember me?”

  A pause.

  “I want to meet with Lenny Smile.”

  A longer pause. Then, “That’s not possible. Lenny Smile is dead.”

  “You’re lying. You know where he is. I want to see the three of you. Hoover, Lenny and you. Eleven o’clock at the London Eye. And if you don’t want me to go to the police, you’d better not be late.”

  You’ve probably seen the London Eye, the huge Ferris wheel they put up outside County Hall. It’s one of the big surprises of modern London. Unlike the Millennium Dome, it has actually been a success. It opened on time. It worked. It didn’t fall over. At the end of the millennium year they decided to keep it, and suddenly it was part of London – a brilliant silver circle at once huge and yet somehow fragile. Tim had taken me on it for my fourteenth birthday and we’d enjoyed the view so much we’d gone a second time. Well as they say, one good turn deserves another.

  Not that we were going to see much today. The clouds were so low that the pods at the top almost seemed to disappear into them. You could see the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river and, hazy in the distance, St Paul’s. But that was about it. If there was a single day in the year when it wasn’t worth paying ten pounds for the ride, this was it, which would explain why there were no crowds around when we approached: just Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee, both of them wearing raincoats, waiting for us to arrive.

  There was no sign of Lenny Smile, but I wasn’t surprised. I had known he would never show up.

  “Why are you calling us?” Hoover demanded. “First we have the police accusing us of terrible things. Then you, wanting to see Lenny. We don’t know where Lenny is! As far as we know, he’s dead…”

  “Why don’t we get out of the rain?” I suggested. “How about the wheel?” It seemed like a good idea. The rain was still bucketing down and there was nowhere else to go.

  “After you, Mr Hoover…”

  We bought tickets and climbed into the first compartment that came round. I wasn’t surprised to find that there would only be the four of us in it for this turn of the wheel. The doors slid shut, and slowly – so slowly that we barely knew we were moving – we were carried up into the sky, into the driving rain.

  There was a pause as if nobody knew quite what to say. Then Fiona broke the silence. “We already told that ghastly little policeman … Detective Chief Inspector Snape. Lenny was with us that day. He was killed by the steamroller. And it is Lenny buried in the cemetery.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. “Lenny Smile is right here now. He’s on the big wheel. Inside this compartment.”

  “Is he?” Tim looked under the seat. “I don’t see him!”

  “That’s because you’re not looking in the right place, Tim,” I said. “But that was the whole idea. You said it yourself last night. We all thought Lenny Smile was one thing, but in fact he was something else.”

  “You are not making the lot of sense,” Hoover said. His face, already dark to begin with, had gone darker. He was watching me with nervous eyes.

  “I should have known from the start that there was something strange about Lenny Smile,” I said. “Nothing about him added up. Nobody – except you – had ever seen him. And everything about him was a lie.”

  “You mean … his name wasn’t Lenny Smile?” Tim asked.

  “Lenny Smile never existed, Tim!” I explained. “He was a fantasy. I should have known when I saw the details on the gravestone. It said that he was born on 31st April 1955. But that was the first lie. There are only thirty days in April. 31st April doesn’t exist!”

  “It was a mistake…” Fiona muttered.

  “Maybe. But then there was that photograph Carter showed us of ‘Lenny’ standing outside the Café Debussy. You told us that he was allergic to a lot of things, and one of those things was animals. But in the photograph there’s a cat sitting between his feet – and he doesn’t seem to care. The allergy business was a lie. But it was a clever one. It meant that he had a reason not to be seen. He had to stay indoors because he was ill…”

  Centimetre by centimetre, the big wheel carried us further away from the ground. The rain was hammering against the glass. Looking out, I could barely see the buildings on the north bank of the river. There was Big Ben, but then the rain swept across it, turning it into a series of brown and white streaks.

  Tim gaped. “So there was no Lenny Smile!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s right. Except when Hoover pretended to be Lenny Smile. Don’t you see? He rented the flat even though he never actually lived there. Occasionally he went in and out to make it look as if there was someone there. And of course it was Hoover who wrote that letter to Mrs Lovely.”
/>
  “How do you know?”

  “Because it was written in green ink. The message we saw in the card on Lenny’s grave was also written in green ink – and it was the same handwriting. I should have seen from the start. It was Hoover we saw at the circus. And he was also there at Brompton Cemetery the day we visited the grave. I should have known it was him as soon as we met him at the Dream Time office.”

  “Why?” Tim asked.

  “Because Hoover had never met us – but somehow he knew we’d been to Brompton Cemetery. Don’t you remember what he said to us? ‘You know very well that he’s lying there in Brompton Cemetery.’ Those were his exact words. But he only knew we knew because he knew who we were, and he knew who we were because he’d seen us!”

  Tim scratched his head. “Could you say that last bit again?”

  Fiona looked at me scornfully. “You’re talking tommy-rot!” she said.

  “Was Tommy part of this too?” Tim asked.

  “Why would Rodney and I want to invent a man called Lenny Smile?” she continued, ignoring him.

  “Because the two of you were stealing millions of pounds from Dream Time. You knew that eventually the police would catch up with you. And there was always the danger that someone like Joe Carter would come over from America to find out what was happening to his money. You were the brains behind the charity. You were the ‘big wheels’, if you like. But you needed someone to take the blame and then disappear. That was Lenny Smile. Henderson – the policeman – must have found out what was going on, so he had to die too. And that was your brilliant idea. You’d turn Henderson into Lenny Smile. He went under the steamroller and, as far as you were concerned, that was the end of the matter. Smile was dead. There was nothing left to investigate.”

  The pod was still moving up. There were a few pedestrians out on the South Bank. By now they were no more than dots.

  “But now the police think Lenny Smile is alive,” I went on. “That’s why the two of you aren’t in jail. They’re looking for him. They don’t have any proof against you. So the two of you are in the clear!”

  Hoover had listened to all this in silence but now he smiled, his thin lips peeling back from his teeth. “You have it exactly right,” he said. “Fiona and I are nobodies. We were just working for Lenny Smile. He is the real crook. And, as you say, they have no proof. Nobody has any proof.”

  “Hoover dressed up as Lenny Smile…” Tim was still trying to work it all out.

  “Only once. For the photograph that Joe Carter requested. But he was wearing the same coat and the same gloves when we saw him – which is why we thought he was Lenny Smile. Both times, he was too far away for us to see his face. And, of course, in the photograph the face was purposely blurred.” I turned to Rodney. “I’d be interested to know, though. What were you doing in the cemetery?”

  Hoover shrugged. “I realized that the bloody fool of an undertaker had made a mistake with the date on the gravestone. I went there to put it right. When I saw you and your brother at the grave, I knew something was wrong. I have to admit, I panicked. And ran.”

  “And the circus…?”

  “Mrs Lovely told us there had been a witness. I had to track him down and make sure he didn’t talk.”

  “But it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d talked,” Tim said. “He was Russian! Nobody would have understood.”

  “I don’t believe in taking chances,” Rodney said. His hand had slid into his coat pocket. Why wasn’t I surprised, when it came out, to see that it was holding a gun?

  “He’s got a gun!” Tim squealed.

  “That’s right, Tim,” I said.

  “You’ve been very clever,” Hoover snarled. “But you haven’t quite thought it through.” He glanced out of the window. We had reached the top of the circle, as high up as the Ferris wheel went. Suddenly Hoover fired. The glass door smashed. Tim leapt. The rain came rushing in. “An unfortunate accident!” Hoover shouted above the howl of the wind. “The door malfunctioned. Somehow it broke. You and your brother fell out.”

  “No we didn’t!” Tim whimpered.

  “Anyway, by the time they’ve finished wiping you off the South Bank, Fiona and I will have disappeared. The money is in a nice little bank in Brazil. We’ll move there. A beach house in Rio de Janeiro! We’ll live a life of luxury.”

  “That money was meant for sick children!” I shouted. “Don’t you have any shame at all?”

  “I cannot afford shame!” He gestured with the gun, pointing at the shattered glass and the swirling rain. “Now which one of you is going to step out first?”

  “He is!” Tim pointed at me.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. I turned back to Hoover. “It won’t work, Hoover. Why don’t you take a look in the next pod?”

  Hoover’s eyes narrowed. Fiona Lee went over to the window. There were about twenty people in the pod above us on the London Eye. All of them were dressed in blue. “It’s full of policemen!” she exclaimed. She went over to the other side. “And the one below us! That’s full of police too!”

  “It must be their day out!” Tim said.

  “Forget it, Tim.” It was my turn to smile. “You’ve been set up, Hoover. Every word you’ve said has been recorded. The pod’s bugged. Your confession is on tape right now, and as soon as the ride is over you and Fiona will have another ride. To jail!”

  Fiona had begun to tremble. Hoover’s eyes twitched. His grip tightened on the gun. “Maybe I’ll kill you anyway,” he said. “Just for the fun of it…”

  And that was when the helicopter appeared – a dark-blue police helicopter, its blades beating at the rain outside the broken window. It had come swooping out of the clouds and now hovered just a few metres away. I could see Snape in the passenger seat. Boyle was in the back, dressed in a flak jacket, cradling an automatic rifle. I just hoped he was pointing it at Hoover, not at Tim.

  “Why do you think the police released you?” I shouted above the noise of the helicopter. “I rang Snape this morning and told him what I’d worked out and he asked me to meet you. You walked into a trap. He knew you’d feel safe up in the air, just the four of us. He wanted you to confess.”

  A second later there was a crackle and Snape’s voice came, amplified, from the helicopter. “Put the gun down, Hoover! The pod is surrounded!”

  Hoover swore in Ukrainian, and before I could stop him he had twisted round and fired at the helicopter.

  I threw myself at Hoover.

  He fired a second time. But his aim had gone wild. The bullet hit Fiona in the shoulder. She screamed and fell to her knees.

  Hoover, with my hands at his throat, crashed into the window. This one didn’t break. I heard the toughened glass clunk against his un-toughened skull. His eyes glazed and he slid to the ground.

  I turned to Tim. “Are you all right, Tim?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” He pointed past the helicopter. “Look! You can see Trafalgar Square!”

  It took another fifteen minutes for the pod to reach the ground. At once we were surrounded by uniformed police officers. Hoover and Lee were dragged out. They’d spend a few days in hospital on their way to jail. The helicopter with Snape and Boyle in was nowhere to be seen. With a bit of luck a strong gust of wind would have blown it out of London and maybe into Essex. The trouble with those two was that no matter how many times we helped them, they’d never thank us. And I’d probably end up with a detention for missing a day of school.

  “We’d better go to the Ritz,” I said.

  “For tea?” Tim asked.

  “No, Tim. Joe Carter…”

  The American was still waiting to hear about his best friend, Lenny Smile. I wasn’t looking forward to breaking the bad news to him. Maybe I’d leave that to Tim. After all, discreet was his middle name.

  It had stopped raining. Tim and I walked along the South Bank, leaving the London Eye behind us. There were workmen ahead of us, shovelling a rich, black ooze onto the surface of the road. On the pavement
, a tramp stood with an upturned hat, playing some sort of plinky-plonk music on a strange instrument – a zither, I think. I found a pound coin and dropped it into the hat. Charity. That was how this had all begun.

  “Ta!” the tramp said.

  “Tar? Don’t worry,” Tim said. “I’ve seen it…”

  We crossed the river, the sound of the zither fading into the distance behind.

  THE ALEX RIDER SERIES

  Alex Rider – you’re never too young to die…

  High in the Alps, death waits for Alex Rider…

  Sharks. Assassins. Nuclear bombs. Alex Rider’s in deep water.

  Alex Rider has 90 minutes to save the world.

  Once stung, twice as deadly. Alex Rider wants revenge.

  He’s back – and this time there are no limits.

  Alex Rider bites back…

  Alex Rider – in the jaws of death…

  One bullet.

  One life.

  The end starts here.

  Become an Alex Rider Insider…

  Watch videos at www.youtube.com/alexriderinsider

  Chat with other fans at www.facebook.com/alexrideruk

  Visit the website at www.alexrider.com

  He always knew he was different. First there were the dreams. Then the deaths began.

  It began with Raven’s Gate.

  But it’s not over yet.

  Once again the enemy is stirring.

  Darkness covers the earth.

  The Old Ones have returned.

  The battle must begin.

  An ancient evil is unleashed.

  Five have the power to defeat it.

  But one of them has been taken.

  HOROWITZ HUMOUR