3 Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers Read Online Free PDF Page A

well.’
    ‘Thank you. I was going to stay there for a couple of days, but I had a little accident …’
    Hobbes chuckled.
    ‘… and after seeing the news, I wanted to get back here.’
    ‘Why? What’s happened?’ He looked puzzled.
    ‘The gold robbery, of course.’
    ‘Oh, that. It was nothing.’
    ‘That’s not what the press think, and they’ve been showing a film of you in action.’
    He frowned. ‘I was filmed?’
    ‘By someone staying at the Golden Fleece,’ I said, ‘and it’s been all over the news and it seems to have made everyone excited.’
    ‘So, that’s why all those people were loitering outside. I did wonder.’
    ‘If you knew nothing about it, why did you come in through the window?’
    ‘It was open,’ said Hobbes, ‘so I thought I’d take a shortcut.’
    ‘Umm … wouldn’t it have been quicker to park outside and come through the door?’
    ‘It would, had I anything to park.’
    ‘Why? What’s happened to the car?’
    ‘I broke it.’ He grinned. ‘It turns out it wasn’t up to jumping walls, or, rather, it couldn’t cope with landing afterwards. All the wheels came off – even the steering wheel. They don’t make them like they used to. I’ll have to buy another.’
    ‘Won’t the police buy you one?’
    ‘No, we have an arrangement. I get what I want and they don’t tell me how to drive it. It saves Superintendent Cooper a lot of stress.’
    ‘That doesn’t seem fair when you were on police business.’
    He shrugged. ‘Well, I was, it’s true, but I was enjoying myself, too. I could have left the pursuit to the other lads, but why should they have all the fun?’
    ‘Fun? Yeah, OK. But the robbers still got away.’
    ‘For the time being.’
    ‘You might have been hurt. I saw that police car crash.’
    ‘I wasn’t and nor was anyone else. As for the lads who crashed, it’ll teach them to drive better next time.’
    ‘Fair enough, but someone was hurt last night. There was the poor driver of the security van who got deafened.’
    Hobbes scratched his head, sounding like someone brushing their feet on a coconut doormat. ‘The driver wasn’t deafened. I spoke to him.’
    ‘Yes, he was, I saw it on the news. Some guy called Percival.’
    ‘Are you referring to Percival Longfellow? He is most certainly hard of hearing, but he’s been like it ever since getting too close to an explosion years ago in London.’
    ‘But,’ I said, ‘didn’t that happen last night? And wasn’t he driving the van?’
    ‘I think you are getting confused. The gang did indeed blow the doors off the security van last night, but Percival wasn’t the driver. He hasn’t worked in security for twenty years or more; not since a gang of jewel robbers blew open a bank vault he was guarding. He received a substantial amount of compensation for his deafness, which he invested in a nice flat in town. Nowadays, he manages a boy band.’
    ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘A reporter spoke to him about the robbery.’
    ‘Reporters have been known to get things wrong. You should know.’
    I nodded, wondering if he’d made a dig at me. For far too many years, I’d been a cub reporter for the Sorenchester and District Bugle, and my failure to move up the pecking order in that time might have been down to the sackful of mistakes I’d made.
    ‘What concerns me now,’ said Hobbes, ‘is how long those reporters are going to stay outside.’
    ‘Probably until you give them a story.’
    ‘In which case, they’ll be there a long time.’
    ‘Actually,’ I said, thinking rapidly, ‘it might be better to give them what they want now, because if you don’t, they’ll just stick around and make something up. That’s what I used to do.’ I didn’t mention that most of my fictions had been discovered, sooner or later, resulting in embarrassing exposures to the Editorsaurus’s sarcasm.
    ‘No,’ said Hobbes. ‘It sounds like I’ve already got more than enough publicity and I don’t