14

10 P.M.

Alex knelt and gazed at the door handle through his thick glasses. To the average passer-by, one might reasonably conclude that this was the first time the boy had ever set eyes on such a thing. A door with a handle? A handle, you say? Are you completely mad?!

But, deep inside Alex’s brain, images of locks whistled past as he ran through his own private database. Then he smiled slightly, and nodded to himself, and – with several deliberate flicks of both wrists – produced a long, thin metal spike with a hook at the end, in one hand, and a thin metal shaft in the other.

The bits of metal were a pick and a rake – classic housebreaking tools which could possibly have got Alex arrested, or at least questioned with serious intent, if a police officer had decided to search him – which would never happen because, to the outside world, Alex looked like a harmless, studious urchin, and sometimes – just sometimes – it was very useful to preserve this image. The items were both stored inside the sleeves of his blazer, in little compartments that he had sewn in especially. His mum would have had a fit had she known …

‘That blazer is meant to get you places, darling! It’s not for tinkering with,’ she would have said.

‘And it does get me into places, Mum,’ Alex murmured to himself as he slid the two pieces of metal into the lock. Tinkering away.

The thin shaft was lined with metal ridges that engaged with the pins inside the lock – the bits that actually kept the lock locked. Alex moved the metal gently back and forth until something went click inside, more felt than heard.

Alex twisted the pick, the bit with the hook, and the lock went clunk.

Something or someone moved down the passage and Alex glanced quickly round. Zack was coming out of another room. Their eyes met and Zack just shook his head, his lips pursed.

If there were any clues to be found at all, the friends had decided their best chances of finding them were in the network of function rooms and offices on the ground floor, between reception at the front and the Montpellier Room at the back. After all, this possibly wasn’t just the work of one person. This could be a far-reaching plot, and a plot required people to meet and plan … ideally in secret, and maybe even to stash their secret stash.

Alex had been making his way from room to room, unlocking each door so that the others could follow in his stead and conduct a search. This was the last room before the large lobby area that led to the bar and the dining room.

Behind the increasingly dejected-looking Zack, Alex saw Sophie and Jonny coming down the passage, which meant they were all done too.

‘Nothing,’ Zack muttered.

‘Zip,’ from Sophie.

‘Nada,’ from Jonny.

Alex shrugged, and tugged on the handle of the last room. The door swung open and he stepped in, quickly followed by the other three.

‘Yep. And I think this one’s going to be just the same, sadly,’ Jonny said as his eyes searched desperately for clues, but only fell on dingy, scuffed carpet and piles of old chairs – the kind of battered plastic ones that you get in primary schools, which smell slightly of sick (correction: smell one hundred per cent of sick). Nope, no clues here. Not today. Not ever.

‘Only one thing for it,’ Zack sighed. ‘We’re going to have to search the bedrooms.’

‘All one hundred and eighty of them!’ Jonny groaned.

‘Well, one hundred and seventy-eight,’ Alex pointed out. ‘We know there’s nothing in our two rooms. Unless Deanna is behind all this!’

Jonny held up his hand for silence, his head cocked like a lovely tall doggy.

The sound of approaching footsteps. And the turn of a door handle …

By the time the door opened, the Young Magicians had all vanished behind stacks of chairs, each conveniently choosing a height similar to their own, save for Jonny who was now bending his knees while keeping a straight back, and hoping his core strength would last the next few minutes. None of them had the foggiest idea who had entered the room. From his cramped position, all Alex knew was that a man’s legs had come in (woven leather loafers, trendily shabby jeans), followed by a woman’s (high heels, colourful, floor-length skirt). The man was laughing, fit to bust.

Alex’s eyes went suddenly wide. Oh no, they weren’t all about to witness – he blushed – any of, you know, that going on, were they? Not with the four Young Magicians as hidden observers. That would really be hashtag AWKWARD!

Sophie’s eyes also flew wide open as the woman spoke, filling the room with the sultriness of the Deep South and fried green tomatoes.

‘Are you all right? (ahl-rayuht?) I thought you were having a fit!’

‘Oh my, I never thought we’d get away!’ Eric Diva wheezed. ‘One more anecdote about Pickle’s early days and I was going to spontaneously teleport, if no one else could do it for me. The number of times he said, “When I was young”! When Pickle was young, he was entertaining the other cavemen by pulling baby mammoths out of a hat!’

Jonny grinned at Alex. So Eric Diva’s nice-guy image was … let’s just say not entirely accurate – but then this was a magicians’ convention, and everyone knew you shouldn’t take anything at face value.

‘Oh, Eric, you are unkind!’ (ahn-kayuhnd!)

That’s Belinda in a nutshell! Sophie thought. Defending a man who isn’t here.

‘But yes,’ Belinda continued, ‘maybe the Magic Circle is long overdue a new president. We’re doing the society a favour.’

Sophie frowned. Okkkkkkkay, Belinda wasn’t exactly defending President Pickle … But maybe she was just being realistic.

‘Long overdue?’ Eric Diva snorted. ‘Belinda, you know there are telescopes that are so powerful they can look back in time to the furthest reaches of the universe? But let me tell you, we are so long overdue a new president that not even one of those telescopes could spot due from where we’re now standing.’

Surely it couldn’t be that these two were somehow behind the plot?

Could it really be that easy?

‘Well, patience, Eric dear, patience. We have to wait for the AGM before –’

‘Before what, Belinda?’ said a voice. A third voice. An impossible voice.

The jaws of the Young Magicians simultaneously hit the floor. How did he get in with no one noticing?

‘Oh wow, Mr President!’ Eric Diva exclaimed. ‘Didn’t see you there! How are you?’

If the discovery that Belinda and Eric Diva might possibly be behind this plot had been mind-blowing, then this was the mic drop to end all mic drops. Where had President Pickle even come from?

‘Belinda.’ President Pickle’s voice sounded calm and friendly. ‘Eric. What are you two doing skulking in here? Rehearsing some clever trick, like that quite astonishing telepathy act you did earlier?’

The four friends looked at each other as best they could – Alex to Jonny to Sophie to Zack – as their minds collectively whirled, desperately trying to make sense of everything … How had President Pickle managed to appear on a whim at precisely the right moment? Or the wrong moment, depending on whose side you were on.

They were absolutely certain no one else had come into the room – in particular Alex, who could see the door, and who had actually watched two people, and two people only, enter.

The only other explanation was that President Pickle had been hiding here all along. So why hadn’t they spotted him? In fact, why would he have been hiding in here at all? And why hadn’t he emerged to tell them off for sneaking around? No, none of this added up whatsoever.

But, even if you put that to one side, the other question was, how much had President Pickle heard of this potentially mutinous plot from Belinda and Eric? From his affable tone, it sounded like nothing at all.

‘Mr President.’ Belinda oozed concern. She sounded just like the woman Sophie had thought she was. ‘Are you sure you should be walking about on your own? We know about the letters – we’d hate anything to happen to you.’

‘Happen to me?’ President Pickle started to bellow with laughter. It was a mad, deafening sound – the audio definition of unhinged.

‘Oh dear! Oh, dearie me. I’m obviously much better at magic than I thought, if I was able to get it past the likes of you two!’

Silence. None more so than from four watching, waiting, worried young magicians.

‘What you don’t understand is … there is no plot!’

The friends gaped at each other.

It sounded like Belinda and Eric Diva were just as gobsmacked.

‘No … no plot?’ Belinda whispered melodramatically, like this was the rehearsal for some dodgy stage play.

Another bark of laughter from President Pickle. ‘Not the faintest sausage of one! I made the whole thing up from scratch! I wrote those letters to myself and even spiked my own food with a bit of saltpetre to get those authentic-looking cramps.’

‘But why –?’

‘The Young Magicians!’ President Pickle screamed. ‘Those intolerable, overhyped, untalented brats!’

Who you asked to solve this mystery? Each one of the Young Magicians thought the same baffling thing.

He calmed down, took a couple of breaths and continued in a voice that was almost normal. ‘I … I have given my life to the Magic Circle, I am president of one of the most respectable and honourable societies in the country, maybe even the world, and yet when I say Magic Circle what do people say back? They say, oh yes, those clever children! They say, that elongated marionette …’

Jonny bit back an indignant ‘Hey!’ when he realized President Pickle was talking about him.

‘Plus, the girl-thing.’

Sophie’s eyes narrowed.

‘And the cocky little twerp with the haircut.’

Zack felt a sudden red-hot fury grip his heart. This from the man they had been trying to save! Talk about ingratitude!

‘And the one who looks like an owl.’

Alex shrugged to himself. Fair enough. Some people had said that about him and he couldn’t wholly dismiss it as a pretty reasonable approximation of his look.

‘They say, you must be so proud of them! And I – I have to grin like a constipated skeleton, nodding like a screw has come loose and say, yes, of course, SO proud, because what else can I do? But I’m going to show the world what they really are! A bunch of kids who got lucky with the Crown Jewels plot, but who don’t really know a thing. They’ll never solve this new mystery because quite simply … there is no mystery to solve!’

A stunned pause.

‘Well,’ said Eric Diva after a moment, ‘that was – um …’

‘Most unexpected,’ Belinda filled in for him. ‘Will you be stating all that at the AGM, Mr President?’

‘I certainly shall! I think it’ll make quite a stir, don’t you?’

‘Okaaay …’ Eric Diva still didn’t sound like he knew how to process what he’d heard. Had the president finally well and truly lost it? Talk about going down in a blaze of glory. ‘Well, um, Belinda and I are going back to the bar … Would you like to come along too?’

‘No, you two run along now. I’ll stay here with my thoughts for a while.’

There was a pause, and then the sound of footsteps. Alex counted the legs walking past him again, in the other direction. One, two, three, four – two male, two female, the same as before. The door opened and closed.

Zack could contain his fury no longer.

‘Overhyped!’ he raged. ‘Untalented!’ He leaped up from behind his stack of chairs. ‘We were trying to save y–’

His words dried up as the others all jumped to their feet, ready to confront this meanest of men.

But they found Zack standing stock-still, rooted to the spot, staring round the room in total amazement.

Amazement that they all felt … because the room was now as empty as they had found it. Apart from four totally baffled Young Magicians!