The Billionaire’s Curse (8 page)

Gerald glanced in the van’s side mirror and saw that the red-vested photographer was now running toward them, camera gear flapping wildly.

“The British Museum,” Gerald said, one eye still on the reflection of the advancing cameraman.

“Do I look like a tour guide?” The driver laughed. “Yeah, no problem.”

The van lurched forward and accelerated down the alley, spraying gravel into the face of the puffing photographer and drowning out his shouts for them to stop.

They rounded the bend at speed. As they reached the corner, Gerald grinned at the scene he had created at the front of the house. The combination of extreme boredom and the prospect of a free feed had worked a treat; the assembled media had gone berserk at the endless supply of pizza and coffee. Cardboard boxes and paper cups were strewn across the road. Entire pizzas lay upside down trodden into the footpath. Spilled coffee flowed into the gutters. Some of the greedier photographers were still hoeing through the pizza boxes that had been dumped outside Gerald’s door.

In the middle of the melee stood Mr. Fry, railing at one reporter about the tomato paste that was smeared across the doormat. The van sat idling at the end of the street with Gerald beaming at the window. The reporter with Mr. Fry spotted him. He sprayed pizza crumbs all over the butler with a yell of: “The kid’s gettin’ away!”

Gerald nodded at the driver and the van lurched off. Reporters and cameramen dumped their food and drink where they stood and scrambled to their cars, pulling out into the street in pursuit. Several slammed sideways into other vehicles as they surged down the road and ended up mounting the curb or ploughing into railings. Others weaved around the wrecks only to find that each end of the narrow road was blocked; the remaining two pizza delivery vans were parked across both lanes, sealing off any hope of a quick exit from the street.

Gerald smiled as the van trundled away from his prison, satisfied that his plan had worked. He was about to ask the driver how far to the museum when a flash of red caught the corner of his eye. He looked into the side mirror and gasped. Sweeping out of the lane after them was the red-vested photographer astride a motor scooter.

Gerald turned to the driver. “There’s an extra fifty pounds if you lose the guy on the scooter.”

The driver glanced into the mirror, and grinned.

“Not a problem.”

Gerald was only six months old when he’d last been in London, so it’s fair to say that he didn’t remember anything about the place. It’s equally fair to say that the next twenty minutes of tearing down back lanes, taking tire-bursting turns across the flow of traffic, dashing through red lights, and speeding the wrong way up narrow one-way streets gave him a view of the city he hoped never to have again. The pizza van driver rose to the challenge of losing the red-vested photographer. But while the driver fancied himself as a rally champion, the van was not rally material. Gerald was tossed in his seat like a tennis ball in a clothes dryer. He clung onto his seat belt with white-knuckle intensity as the van hurtled over potholes and speed bumps, tailed by the fat photographer on his scooter.

At last the van tore out of a side street near Hyde Park Corner and, in a purple cloud of screeching brakes and disintegrating tire rubber, joined the flow of traffic toward Bloomsbury and the museum.

“I think we’ve lost him,” the driver panted.

Gerald straightened himself up and looked out the back window. There were cars and vans of all shapes but no sign of a red vest on a scooter.

“Fantastic. Is it far from here?” Gerald asked.

“Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.”

Gerald caught a glimpse of Buckingham Palace and the long green stretch of St. James’s Park. For the first time since arriving in England, he felt like he was in a foreign country.

The young driver glanced at Gerald.

“You’re not from ’round here, are you?” he asked, buzzing from the morning’s excitement. “What brings you to town?”

Gerald hesitated.

“Well, I’m on my own in London because my parents are sailing around the Caribbean on my new super-yacht. I’m going to the British Museum to ask a professor I’ve only seen in a newspaper photograph about the murder of my great-aunt. I never actually met her but I inherited twenty billion pounds from her yesterday.”

The driver blinked.

“All right, if you don’t want to say you don’t have to,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Just tryin’ to be polite.”

They continued in silence until the van pulled into Great Russell Street and came to a halt outside the main gates to the British Museum. Gerald counted out some cash and the driver pocketed the notes and drove off.

Gerald gazed across the front lawns to the building’s imposing Greek façade, took a breath, and joined the flow of tourists heading toward the main entrance for the ten o’clock opening.

G
erald made his way up the steps and between the towering columns at the museum entrance. He paused beneath the front portico and gazed at a row of statues high above: a lineup of ancient Greeks that stared, marble cold, at the people below. He let the flow of tourists take him inside.

The museum had just opened and already there was a crowd in the foyer. It was a mixed bunch: parents with children (who would rather be almost anywhere else on their school holidays), a clutch of older folk (filling in time before lunch), and tour groups from all corners of the globe (not really sure why they were there but it was on the itinerary for that morning). Gerald jostled his way through the throng, finally stumbling into an enormous open space—the Great Court. The contrast with the confines of the dark foyer could not have been greater. The huge area was defined by sandstone buildings on all four sides and was filled with natural light that beamed through a vast glass roof high above. Gerald looked up in wonder. A pattern of triangular glass tiles spread out from the center as if a colossal crystal jelly bowl had been upended over the surrounding buildings. For a moment Gerald forgot why he was at the museum, entranced by the spectacle above him.

He spotted an information desk and wandered across. The man behind the counter was dealing with a dozen flustered tourists who were apparently searching for the
Mona Lisa
. It looked like he could be some time. Gerald was about to ask a security guard for directions when he spied the police tape.

The blue-and-white checkered tape was strung across a doorway at the base of a large circular building in the center of the Great Court. A police constable stood at the entrance and a number of people were hanging around, trying to peek inside. Gerald saw two words carved into the stone wall next to the doorway: R
EADING
R
OOM
. The policeman on duty was talking in an exasperated tone to an elderly man.

“I’m sorry, sir, this area’s off limits to the public at the moment. You can’t go in.”

The old man screwed up his face.

“Is this something to do with that diamond robbery?” the man asked, craning his neck across the tape to get a better look. The policeman shuffled sideways to block his view.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss anything about—”

The man squinted into the policeman’s face: a pale, podgy face with fine sandy hair that poked out from under his bobby’s helmet.

“You look familiar,” the old man said. He turned to the even older-looking woman at his side. “Doesn’t he look familiar, then?” he yelled into her ear.

The policeman recoiled as the woman shoved her prune-like face close to his.

She declared at the top of her voice, “He’s the copper wot was in the paper.”

“In the paper?” the old man shouted back.

“You remember,” the old lady said. “The one with the flowers up his bum!” Clearly quite deaf, the woman could have been heard across the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The policeman was mortified. His eyes darted about as heads across the Great Court turned. A boy and girl about Gerald’s age wandered up. The boy whispered something in the girl’s ear and they both started giggling.

The policeman had had enough.

“Okay. That’s it,” he said, ushering the growing crowd away from the taped-off entrance. “Move along. Nothing to see here. Go on, clear off!”

The old woman shrugged and, casting a sideways glance in the direction of the policeman’s bottom, placed her hand on the old man’s arm. They tottered off toward the coffee shop.

“I guess I’d be upset too if I’d had some flowers, you know, up there,” the woman shouted.

The girl who had been giggling caught Gerald’s eye and smiled. Gerald grinned back. She was a touch shorter than he with short blond bangs and a ponytail.

A tall man appeared and put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Come along, you pair. There’s a lot to see.”

“Okay, Dad,” the boy and girl answered, resigned boredom in their voices. They headed toward the Egyptian sculptures at the other end of the Great Court.

Gerald was left standing with the policeman, who was still flustered after his run-in with the elderly couple. He noticed Gerald staring at him.

“What are you lookin’ at?” the officer demanded.

“Um, nothing,” Gerald said as innocently as he could. From the corner of his eye he could make out a good deal of activity inside. In the middle of the room at least five people in white overalls were crawling on their hands and knees around the base of a black pedestal. Occasionally, one would stop and pick up something in rubber-gloved fingers and drop it into a clear plastic bag. To one side a group of uniformed police and some men in blue suits chatted and sipped from paper cups. At the very far end of the room, beneath a huge gold clock on the wall, more men in overalls hefted chunks of what appeared to be broken plaster into a Dumpster.

The police officer at the door shunted in front of Gerald.

“I said clear off, all right?”

At that moment, two policemen emerged from the Reading Room and ducked under the blue-and-white tape.

“Interviewing a prime suspect, are we, Constable Lethbridge?” one asked, smirking.

Lethbridge swung around but before he could open his mouth the other officer said, “Haven’t you got better things to do than harass innocent children, Crystal?”

Lethbridge flinched.

“What’s this?” the first officer asked in mock confusion, winking at Gerald. “Why’d you call him Crystal?”

“You know…crystal vase.”

The pair erupted in laughter and sauntered off, leaving Lethbridge seething.

Gerald decided it was time to find Professor McElderry.

He went back to the information desk, but it looked like the tourists were still arguing over the whereabouts of the
Mona Lisa
. He spotted a museum attendant.

“Excuse me,” Gerald said. “Could you tell me where—” He stopped midbreath. Over the attendant’s shoulder he saw the photographer with the red vest step into the Great Court.

The snapper had a camera slung over his shoulder and another clutched in his hand. He stood inside the entrance, his eyes sweeping the space like searchlights. His face shone bright with sweat and the thrill of the hunt. Gerald was too stunned to move. He had clean forgotten about his pursuer. And now he was standing barely thirty yards from him.

The crisscrossing tourist traffic provided Gerald with some cover but he felt painfully exposed.

“Can I help you?” the museum attendant asked.

“Um. No, it’s all right,” Gerald mumbled. He looked about, darted across to a large plinth, and slid down behind it. It held a statue of a Roman youth on a horse. Gerald sat with his back against the cold white marble, half wishing he had a horse to escape on. He took a deep breath and poked his head around the corner. The photographer hadn’t moved—he stood feet apart like a big-game hunter waiting for his prey to break cover. Gerald knew there was no way he could get through the museum entrance without being seen. And to go either left or right from his hiding spot would put him out in the open. He thought about staying where he was, sitting behind the statue. If the photographer moved off to one of the galleries on the western side, he could make a dash for the exit. All he needed was a few minutes.

“Can I help you, young man?”

Gerald winced. He looked up to find the museum attendant glaring down at him.

“Um…no,” Gerald said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m quite all right. Thanks.”

“Well, you can be quite all right somewhere else,” the attendant said. “No sitting on the floor and no leaning against the exhibits!”

Gerald looked back around the plinth and saw in alarm that the photographer was staring in his direction, watching a museum attendant talking to someone hiding behind a statue. The snapper took a step closer. Then another.

It was time to act. Gerald leaped to his feet and grabbed the attendant by the arm.

“Watch out for that guy with the camera,” Gerald said to the bewildered guard, pointing a finger toward the photographer. “He doesn’t look like a tourist to me.”

Gerald bolted. He glanced over his shoulder just as the photographer spotted him, just as the photographer shouted a loud “Oi!” and broke into a run. And just as the museum attendant stepped forward, extending his hand with a firm, “Not so fast, sir,” they collided in an awkward embrace of arms, legs, and tangled camera straps.

Gerald slid sideways through a doorway and almost tripped as his feet met a floor of uneven wooden boards.

At the end of a long narrow room he saw an exit sign and made for it. Galleries flashed past as Gerald bounced and weaved his way between exhibits and people. He rounded a corner and ran down a flight of stairs. He flung himself against a wall inside a small alcove on a landing, pressing his back into the bricks and gulping in air. He waited. A few tourists wandered by, as well as a cleaner pushing a trolley loaded with mops and brooms. But there was no sign of the photographer.

Gerald’s breathing eased and he bent down to rest his hands on his knees. He wasn’t even sure why he was bothering to run away. It was only some guy wanting to take a few photos for a newspaper. It wasn’t like any real harm was being done. But it bugged him. No one cared who he was last week. He hadn’t done anything special. So why should anyone care who he was this week? He couldn’t put his finger on it. It just bugged him.

The cleaner rolled his trolley past again and Gerald caught a whiff of cleaning fluid. That smell, he thought. Where have I…?

Four bony fingers and a thumb dug deep into the flesh of Gerald’s left shoulder. A strong hand wrenched him upright, almost yanking him off his feet. A searing pain shot down Gerald’s side. The acrid stench of bleach burned into his throat. Through the pain jolting into his shoulder, Gerald felt something brush against his cheek.

“Mr. Wilkins,” a voice hissed into his ear. “We need to talk.”