M Is for Magic Read Free Page B

clutched in his hamlike fist.
    â€œI’m sorry I suspected you, Horner,” he said drily. “You’re lucky I did, though, sure and begorrah. I had you tailed here and I overheard the whole thing.”
    â€œHi, Sarge, thanks for stopping by. But I hadn’t finished my explanation. If you’ll take a seat I’ll wrap it up.”
    He nodded brusquely, and sat down near the door. His gun hardly moved.
    I got up from the bed and walked over to the Queen. “You see, toots, what I didn’t tell you was who did have the snaps of your nose job. Humpty did, when you killed him.”
    A charming frown crinkled her perfect brow. “I don’t understand…. I had the body searched.”
    â€œSure, afterward. But the first people to get to the Fat Man were the King’s Men. The cops. And one of them pocketed the envelope. When any fuss had died down the blackmail would have started again. Only this time you wouldn’t have known who to kill. And I owe you an apology.” I bent down to tie my shoelaces.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI accused you of trying to frame me this afternoon. You didn’t. That arrow was the property of a boy who was the best archer in my school—I should have recognized that distinctive fletching anywhere. Isn’t that right,” I said, turning back to the door, “‘Sparrow’ O’Grady?”
    Under the guise of tying my shoelaces I had already palmed a couple of the Queen’s jam tarts,and, flinging one of them upward, I neatly smashed the room’s only lightbulb.
    It only delayed the shooting a few seconds, but a few seconds was all I needed, and as the Queen of Hearts and Sergeant “Sparrow” O’Grady cheerfully shot each other to bits, I split.
    In my business, you have to look after number one.
    Munching on a jam tart I walked out of the palace grounds and into the street. I paused by a trash can, to try to burn the manila envelope of photographs I had pulled from O’Grady’s pocket as I walked past him, but it was raining so hard they wouldn’t catch.
    When I got back to my office I phoned the tourist board to complain. They said the rain was good for the farmers, and I told them what they could do with it.
    They said that things are tough all over.
    And I said, “Yeah.”

Troll Bridge
    T HEY PULLED UP MOST of the railway tracks in the early sixties, when I was three or four. They slashed the train services to ribbons. This meant that there was nowhere to go but London, and the little town where I lived became the end of the line.
    My earliest reliable memory: eighteen months old, my mother away in hospital having my sister, and my grandmother walking with me down to a bridge, and lifting me up to watch the train below, panting and steaming like a black iron dragon.
    Over the next few years they lost the last of the steam trains, and with them went the network of railways that joined village to village, town to town.
    I didn’t know that the trains were going. By the time I was seven they were a thing of the past.
    We lived in an old house on the outskirts of the town. The fields opposite were empty and fallow. Iused to climb the fence and lie in the shade of a small bulrush patch, and read; or if I were feeling more adventurous I’d explore the grounds of the empty manor beyond the fields. It had a weed-clogged ornamental pond, with a low wooden bridge over it. I never saw any groundsmen or caretakers in my forays through the gardens and woods, and I never attempted to enter the manor. That would have been courting disaster, and, besides, it was a matter of faith for me that all empty old houses were haunted.
    It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.
    The converse held reassuringly true: daylight was safe.