Suddenly Jack was at his side. “Cemeteries give me the creeps.”
“Yes. And quite a few creeps have turned up,” Alex muttered.
They slipped away quietly and went home. The car that had taken them to the funeral was still waiting, but they preferred the open air. The walk took them fifteen minutes and as they turned the corner onto their street, Alex noticed a moving van parked in front of the house, the words STRYKER & SON painted on its side.
“What’s that doing …?” he began.
At the same moment, the van shot off, the wheels skidding over the surface of the road.
Alex said nothing as Jack unlocked the door and let them in, but while she went into the kitchen to make some tea, he quickly looked around the house. A letter that had been on the hall table now lay on the carpet. A door that had been half open was now closed. Tiny details, but Alex’s eyes missed nothing.
Somebody had been in the house. He was almost sure of it.
But he wasn’t certain until he got to the top floor. The door to the office, which had always, always been locked, was now unlocked. Alex opened it and went in. The room was empty. Ian Rider had gone and so had everything else. The desk drawers, the closets, the shelves … anything connected to the dead man’s work had been taken. Whatever the truth was about his uncle’s past, someone had just wiped it out.
HEAVEN FOR CARS
WITH HAMMERSMITH BRIDGE just ahead of him, Alex left the river and swung his bike through the lights and down the hill toward Brookland School. The bike was a Condor Junior Roadracer, custom built for him on his twelfth birthday. It was a teenager’s bike, with a cut down Reynolds 531 frame, but the wheels were fullsize so he could ride at speed with hardly any rolling resistance. He spun past a delivery van and passed through the school gates. He would be sorry when he grew out of the bike. For two years now it had almost been part of him.
He double locked it in the shed and went into the yard. Brookland was a modern school, all redbrick and, to Alex’s eye, rather ugly. He could have gone to any of the exclusive private schools around Chelsea, but Ian Rider had decided to send him here. He had said it would be more of a challenge.
The first period of the day was algebra. When Alex came into the classroom, the teacher, Mr. Donovan, was already chalking up a complicated equation on the board. It was hot in the room, the sun streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, put in by architects who should have known better. As Alex took his place near the back, he wondered how he was going to get through the lesson. How could he possibly think about algebra when there were so many other questions churning through his mind?
The gun at the funeral. The way Blunt had looked at him. The van with STRYKER & SON written on the side. The empty office. And the biggest mystery of all, the one detail that refused to go away. The seat belt.
Ian Rider hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.
But of course he had. Ian Rider had never been one to give lectures. He had always said Alex should make up his own mind about things. But he’d had this thing about seat belts. The more Alex thought about it, the less he believed it. A collision in the middle of the city. Suddenly he wished he could see the car. At least the wreckage would tell him that the accident had really happened, that Ian Rider had really died that way.
“Alex?”
Alex looked up and realized that everyone was staring at him. Mr. Donovan had just asked him something.
He quickly scanned the blackboard, taking in the figures. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “X equals seven and Y is fifteen.”
The math teacher sighed. “Yes, Alex. You’re absolutely right. But actually I was just asking you to open the window…”
Somehow he managed to get through the rest of the day, but by the time the final bell rang, his mind was made up. While everyone else streamed out, he made his way to the secretary’s office and
A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)