The London Deception (10 page)

Joe moved toward the edge of the roof. “Jennifer?” Joe called quietly, not wanting to frighten her.

Jennifer turned to Joe, then shouted, “Watch out! He's right behind you!”

A violent shove from behind sent Joe Hardy stumbling forward and over the three-foot retaining wall that bordered the roof.

Joe grabbed hold of the storm gutter, which tore away from the outer wall of the building under his weight.

Joe was left dangling six stories above the street, hanging on to the aluminum gutter, one end of which remained uncertainly fastened to the outer wall by an iron brace.

He tried to get a foothold on the wall, but the gutter had left him hanging too far away to reach.

“Here!” Jennifer shouted, hanging over the retaining wall while rapidly feeding the metal tape from a tape measure down to Joe.

Joe grabbed the tape with one hand and wrapped it around his wrist. The edge of the metal tape cut into Joe's palm as Jennifer began hoisting him up.

“Joe?” Jennifer cried out.

She had wrapped the other end of the tape around her own hand to keep it from detaching from the casing, and it was cutting into her skin.

Joe knew she couldn't hang on for more than a few seconds, but he could not climb up without letting go of the gutter. His full weight would either break the tape or pull Jennifer off the roof.

Joe looked down, but there was no ledge below to which he could jump. A set of hands suddenly grasped him by the shoulders of his leather jacket.

Frank hung far over the retaining wall, supported by Chris. Together, all three of them were able to hoist Joe up and over the wall and back on to the roof.

As the four of them sat, breathless, Jennifer explained that she hadn't seen the face of Joe's attacker because his head was lowered and then her attention was focused on helping Joe. She did say the man was tall with dark hair. Frank asked her to go back to the beginning and tell what had happened.

“I heard something up on the catwalk,” she began. “I thought perhaps it was only mice or a rat, so I didn't want to disturb your sleep.”

“Only mice or a rat, so you didn't want to disturb us?” Chris repeated, panting. “Jennifer, you would never fall into the category of shrinking violet.”

“Thank you,” she replied.

“I heard something, too,” Joe told her, as he and the others got to their feet.

“You probably heard me,” Jennifer said. “I found the old service door to the roof open.”

“It's usually locked?” Frank asked.

“With a padlock, which I've never seen off it until tonight,” Jennifer replied. “Footprints led to the edge of the roof, then disappeared. Whoever it was, I thought he had escaped.”

Joe had been surveying the roof. “He must have been hiding on the water tower,” Joe said, pointing to the elevated tank behind them.

“Still, how did he get off the roof?” Chris wondered.

“Which footprints were the ones you initially saw, Jennifer?” Frank asked.

Jennifer pointed them out.

“You can see your tracks and Joe's are pointing toward the edge of the roof,” Frank said. “The other tracks are pointing toward the door to the catwalk.”

“You're right, Frank!” Jennifer exclaimed. “I hadn't looked closely until now.”

“And this person's tracks already have quite a bit of new fallen snow in them,” Frank added.

“Meaning?” Chris asked.

“Meaning that our mystery man or woman got into the theater from the roof,” Joe told him, following Frank's train of thought.

“But the lock to the roof door had been removed from the inside,” Jennifer pointed out.

“Perhaps an accomplice who's involved with
Innocent
Victim
left the door unlocked for the saboteur,” Chris suggested.

“But how did this person get onto the roof in the first place?” Jennifer wondered.

“Here's a fresh set of the same footprints leading from the place where I was pushed to the edge of the roof,” Joe said, following them and then kneeling beside a long depression in the snow. “Looks like he picked something up that was lying here.”

Frank noticed the shape: an oblong rectangle about ten feet long and one foot wide. He then looked across the alley to the roof of the abandoned building, which was nearly parallel in height to the theater roof.

“A plank!” Frank exclaimed as the thought struck him.

Getting a hunch, Joe ran to the side of the roof facing the back alley and looked down. He saw a figure running out the rear door of the abandoned building. As the figure passed beneath a streetlight, Joe recognized the wild black hair of the man who had tried to rob him in the underground.

“Let's go!” Joe shouted, leading the group back through the roof door, across the catwalk, and down the ladder.

“Jennifer, you phone the police,” Frank shouted as he, Joe, and Chris ran through the lobby.

The boys crashed out the door of the theater and ran to the back of the abandoned building. There they followed the tracks in the snow that led away from the rear door.

“We're lucky,” Joe said as they ran. “This early in the morning, there won't be many other tracks to confuse us.”

Joe was right. The group followed the mystery man's tracks for several blocks with ease. Then they reached a major intersection where early morning foot traffic had left prints all over the sidewalk.

“There he is!” Joe exclaimed in a hushed voice, spotting the man with black hair crossing the street two blocks down.

Frank and the others took off running, staying on their side of the street, hoping that the man wouldn't spot them. They were nearly adjacent to him when the man glanced over his shoulder.

Seeing the Hardys, he took off running. Frank, Joe, and Chris pursued the man at a sprint for nearly a quarter mile through the streets of London. Chris was not as athletic as the Hardys and lagged behind, so Joe slowed to keep pace with him while Frank moved ahead.

Looming in front of them was the great dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.

When the man reached the gigantic structure, he bounded up the great stone steps and into the cathedral with Frank only fifty yards behind.

When Chris and Joe reached the main entrance, a security guard stopped them.

“St. Paul's isn't open to visitors for another two hours,” he told them.

“We're chasing a man who tried to push me off a roof,” Joe said, huffing and puffing.

“His brother followed the man in here not fifteen seconds ago!” Chris added, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

Joe scanned the main chamber of the cathedral, which stretched for blocks in front of him. A cleaning crew was polishing the floor, but he didn't see Frank or the man with long black hair.

“If they got past me, they must have veered off into one of the galleries,” the guard said, pointing to both sides, beyond the giant support pillars that lined the main seating area of the cathedral.

Joe and Chris split up and moved to separate sides of the cathedral.

Joe rounded one of the pillars just in time to see Frank disappearing into an alcove across from the central dome.

• • •

As Frank bounded up the stairs in the alcove, he passed a sign pointing up to the Whispering Gallery. Two hundred and fifty steps later, he reached it. The Whispering Gallery circled around the base of the great dome.

Frank wondered why it was called the Whispering Gallery. As he paused, catching his breath, he found out. He heard footsteps nearby, but then saw the man with the black hair across the dome on the other side of the gallery, a hundred feet away. The footsteps he heard were his!

The man held something to his ear and spoke in a hushed voice. Frank held his breath and listened.

“I'm at St. Paul's, the Americans followed me,” the man said with a foreign accent. Frank realized he was speaking into a cellular phone. “If I'm caught, you can forget about the corner kick.”

Frank listened, stunned that he could understand the man speaking a hundred feet away as if he were right beside him. His throat felt raw from his long run in the bitter cold, and he tried to suppress a cough, but couldn't.

The man heard him, and ran up another set of stairs on the other side of the Whispering Gallery. Frank followed, winding up a steep, spiral staircase that led to the Stone Gallery.

As Frank reached the top of the staircase, he found himself looking out at a grand vista of London. The Stone Gallery ran around the outside of the great dome. Frank rounded the entire gallery and found yet another staircase that led up to the Golden Gallery at the pinnacle of the dome.

Frank had his foot on the first step before he stopped, realizing that the man would be trapping himself by going to the top of the dome.

Rushing to the high railing that surrounded the Stone Gallery, he looked down and spotted the man climbing down one of the huge stone pillars, using some kind of suction devices to cling to the smooth surface.

“Frank!” Joe called as he ran to his brother's side. “Where is he?”

Frank frowned and pointed down.

“This guy's not human!” Joe exclaimed.

“Hurry!” Frank shouted, pointing back to the stairs leading down.

They reached the Whispering Gallery and hurried out to the pillar, but there was no sign of the man who had climbed down it.

“Do you think he fell?” Joe wondered, looking down.

A commotion erupted below them. Running back into the Whispering Gallery, they looked down to the main floor of the cathedral, where the man with black hair pushed aside the security guard and headed for the entrance.

“He suckered us into following him up here,” Frank realized. “Where's Chris?”

“He couldn't keep up, I left him downstairs!” Joe recalled.

Frank spotted their friend near the entrance. “Chris!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the cathedral.

Chris looked up, and Frank and Joe pointed frantically to the fleeing suspect.

“Go after him!” Frank shouted.

Chris took off, reaching the entrance to the cathedral only a second after the suspect had run out.

By the time the Hardys reached the street outside St. Paul's, Chris and the man were nowhere to be seen.

“They went west and turned on Maria Lane,” the security guard called to them from the steps of the cathedral.

Following the security guard's directions, the Hardys ran into Chris a few blocks up Maria Lane.

“Another disappearing act,” Chris said, and motioned for them to follow.

The Hardys followed Chris to a small courtyard behind three apartment buildings.

“An apparent dead end,” Chris explained, “but when I turned the corner not fifteen seconds behind this geezer, he was gone.”

The fire escape ladder on one building hung about ten feet off the ground. Joe walked up beneath it. “Our guy could climb the wall to this fire escape, no problem,” Joe commented.

“Looks like you're right, Joe,” Frank said, picking up a long black wig that had been tossed behind a nearby trash bin.

“Do you think he climbed to the roof?” Joe asked.

Frank shook his head. “Five stories up? Chris would have spotted him before he reached the top. I think he went through the window of one of these apartments.”

“Let's go talk to the super,” Joe suggested.

“The super?” Chris asked, puzzled, then realized. “Oh, the property manager!”

The boys walked around the block to the front of the building. Frank was about to buzz the doorbell of the apartment labeled Manager when Joe suddenly grabbed his arm and pointed up. “Look, Frank!”

Over the front entrance etched in the stone was the building's address: 117 Hayworth.

“One-seventeen Hayworth,” Frank said aloud, thinking. Then he exclaimed, “That's Neville Shah's address!”

Joe scanned the names of the tenants next to the door buzzers. “Shah, apartment number three-B. We don't need to talk to the building super, Frank, we need to call Detective Inspector Ryan.”

Thirty minutes later Detective Inspector Ryan had the property manager let them into Neville Shah's second floor apartment.

Frank moved to an open window and looked out onto the back courtyard, but Neville Shah had disappeared again.

Joe noticed three identical framed posters depicting ornamented and costumed elephants. The posters were written in three different languages.

“Circus posters,” Joe said, looking closely at the lettering. “From America, France, and India, I think.” He
spotted the picture of a spider in the top corner of each poster and read aloud the legend below the one printed in English: “ ‘Witness the astounding feats of Anacro, the Human Spider.' ”

“Do you think Neville Shah is Anacro?” Frank asked.

“Either that or he really loved this circus,” Joe remarked.

“Mr. Shah had yet another profession,” Detective Inspector Ryan said, pulling a computer printout from his jacket pocket. “He served a five-year sentence for burglarizing luxury high rises in Chicago. I ran a check on the name before I left Scotland Yard.”

“But how could he do all that climbing with a broken wrist?” Chris wondered.

“Like this,” Joe said, pulling the wrist cast Shah had been wearing from beneath his bed.

“Do you mean that whole fall from the ladder last week was staged?” Chris asked.

“That's my guess,” Joe said.

“Fine work, boys,” Detective Inspector Ryan said. “Looks like we have our man.”

“Our man,” Frank agreed, “but not our motive. Why would Shah break into the Quill Garden Theatre just to sabotage
Innocent Victim?”

“I'll take the investigation from here,” Detective Inspector Ryan said. “I might have more questions for you later.”