Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I don’t know what to think. You see, the odd thing is that the criminal was not only wearing Ferrars’ suit and waterproof, but his underclothing as well, apart from his socks.”

  “What does he say he did with his prison clothes?”

  “He told the police where to find them.”

  “And they did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing missing?”

  “Nothing, except his own socks, which, of course, he had on. All was carefully checked at the prison.”

  “Well, Ferrars can hardly be going around with nothing on,” said Laura. “It must mean that Ferrars is a complete bad hat and had a disguise stashed away somewhere. But I wonder how he got Manoel to go with him? It indicates that he must have sneaked back here and somehow or other enticed the kid away.”

  “Surely somebody would have seen him, if that were so. I have already spoken to all the boys who played that game of hide-and-seek with Spalding, but I shall interview them again and question them even more closely. It does not seem as though anybody saw the boy after the game ended, but somebody must know something about his disappearance. Little boys of nine, even the sons of South American presidents, don’t disappear into thin air.”

  “Leaving not a wrack behind? No, you’re right enough there,” said Laura. “There must be a clue somewhere.”

  The clue, if there was one, did not appear to be in the possession of the Nines. There were fourteen of them, counting the missing boy, and they were interviewed by the headmaster after he had seen Colin. Two captains had been chosen for the game of Smugglers and Excisemen, and the rules explained. These were that the smugglers were to have ten minutes in which to go into hiding, that nobody was to leave the building, that the kitchen regions were out of bounds. The game would be won by those individual smugglers who managed to get back to the formroom, where the game began, without being touched by an exciseman—spotting without touching not to be counted. At half-time the parties were to change sides.

  Manoel had been a smuggler first. The game had been played in the half-light of the fading March day, and he, being an adroit and eel-like little boy, had been one of the first to get back to the formroom, where Colin was waiting to check the winners. After about a quarter of an hour, by Colin’s calculations, everybody on the smugglers’ side had either got back or been captured, and the sides changed over. The bell had been rung for prep. before the game ended, and so Colin, who was not down to take prep. that evening, had no idea that Manoel was not present at that imposition and curtailment of liberty.

  Armed with this information, which Colin had given him twice, and whose two accounts of the game had not varied in any particular, the headmaster spoke to the group of nine-year-olds as a whole, and then, to their mingled terror and excitement, to each one individually. By the very nature of the game they had played, however, it was very difficult to discover which child had been the last to see Manoel. Both the “smugglers” and the “excisemen” had dispersed as soon as they got the word from Colin, and, after that, it was each for himself. The only point which seemed to be fixed was that Manoel had certainly been present up to the beginning of the second half of the game. After that, there was no certainty about it, except that he had not answered the bell for prep. and had not gone along for his milk and biscuits later.

  “I suppose,” said the headmaster to Colin, after he had dismissed the Nines, “the boy cannot still be on the building?”

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “Well, this is a very large and rather complicated house. I am beginning to wonder whether he may have shut himself away in one of the attics, for example, or in one of the large cupboards, and been unable to get out again.”

  “Well, there are two reasons against that, Headmaster. One is that he was on the seekers’ side at the time, and so, far from wanting to hide, he would have been tailing the boys in the opposing team. The other is that, surely, if he had managed to get himself shut away somewhere, he’d have made enough noise to be heard long before this. Besides, we’ve searched the whole place.”

  “All the same, I shall have the house thoroughly searched again,” said the headmaster to Laura, who was dining with him and his wife. “Then, if we meet with no success, I suppose I must cable the boy’s father and give the police carte blanche. So far, I have simply reported the boy and Ferrars as missing, but it now seems to me that there is nothing for it but a full-scale operation, beginning in the house itself. The police, of course, have not been in the school so far, except for my interviews with the inspector, but, unless we find the boy at once, a full-scale enquiry, beginning with a police search of the premises, and police questioning of the boys, will have to come. Once it does, there is nothing to stop the boys writing all sorts of wild things in their Sunday letters home.” He sounded an extremely worried man.

  “Oh, well, it isn’t Sunday yet, so let’s put a cheerful face on it. There’s no knowing what Mrs. Croc will unearth, once she gets down to it, you know, and, if the worst comes to the worst, you will have to warn the boys that all their letters from now on will be censored,” said Laura.

  “I do not run a police-state, Mrs. Gavin.”

  “Of course not. Sorry I spoke.”

  “No, no. The suggestion is a most sensible one. I am not anxious to act on it, that is all. For one thing, I do not want the boys to think the situation graver than it is.”

  “They could hardly think that, unless they suspect the poor little chap has been murdered.”

  The headmaster shook his head, but did not look surprised or horrified.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s the money these people are after. His father is a millionaire, no less. He bought himself into power, or so it is said.”

  “The whole thing might be political, then, as well as a kidnapping for money.”

  “It might. There is no telling that, at present. I shall be glad when Dame Beatrice arrives. I have tremendous faith in her.”

  Dame Beatrice turned up on the following day, having driven from her home in Hampshire—or, rather, having been driven, for her chauffeur was at the wheel of a car which the boys regarded with awe. She was given tea by the gratified headmaster, and was invited to address the assembled school. This she declined to do.

  “I will speak to Mr. Heathers and Mr. Spalding,” she said, “if they can be spared from their duties.”

  Heathers and Colin had just finished tea and were shepherding boys out of the dining-room when they received the headmaster’s message. Dame Beatrice had gathered very little from Laura’s letters about their personal appearance, and found herself confronted by two young men of dissimilar aspect in that one was fair-haired, portly, and wore glasses, the other was tallish and slim, with a pale face and dark hair.

  “As you two are the youngest men on the Staff, apart from Mr. Ferrars himself, I am assuming that you know more about him than the older masters are likely to do,” she said briskly. “I have some slight evidence that he was responsible for the fire which has closed, temporarily, the school in Kent. You, Mr. Spalding, would know nothing, at first hand, about that. Mr. Heathers?”

  “Burnt down the school?” The plump Heathers took off his glasses, polished them nervously on a spotless handkerchief, and almost dropped them before he put them on again. “I never heard that!”

  “What was your own part in the Guy Fawkes festivities?”

  “I took no part. I was born during a particularly noisy air-raid in 1942. Fireworks disturb me very much. I retired to my room and put in my ear-plugs and drew the curtains across the window. I was very nearly burnt to death.”

  “Oh, come now!” protested Mr. Eastleigh, who, by Dame Beatrice’s request, was present at the interview.

  “I did not hear the fire-bell—my ear-plugs, you see, Headmaster, muffled every sound.”

  “But your wing of the school was nowhere near the part which caught fire. The flames were got under control before they even reached the central hall.”
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  “Very well,” said the aggrieved Heathers. “All the same, they might not have been, you know. I still think that I was in danger. I knew nothing about the fire until Mr. Noble came and found me, and advised me to leave the building.”

  “Did either of you know Mr. Ferrars before he joined the Staff?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes, I did,” said Colin. “I didn’t know he was here until after Mr. Eastleigh appointed me, but then I found I’d been at school with him.”

  “But you were not the same age, of course.”

  “Oh, no. He was in the second year Sixth when I was a member of the Ticks’ Union—er—when I was in my first term, I mean.”

  “Apart from being in the second year Sixth Form, which, in itself, implies some degree of eminence, was he, so far as you remember, an outstanding boy?”

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t in the First Fifteen, or anything like that. I don’t think he was terribly interested in games. Boats were more in his line.”

  “Was yours a rowing school?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean those sort of boats. I mean yachts and motorboats, and even bigger stuff.”

  “How do you know that? There were no facilities at your school for yachting, were there?”

  “No, but I met him two years after he’d left school and was at Cambridge. My father had taken me on a Mediterranean cruise, and Ferrars was on it, too. I knew him, but, of course, he didn’t know me from Adam. I wasn’t even in his house at school. On the cruise he spotted my blazer and then he was rather decent to me—we used to swim and play deck tennis, and that sort of thing—until one day he told me he’d got permission to climb the mast and go out on to the crow’s nest. You know what it’s like on those big boats, I expect. The mast is of metal, and it’s canted a bit, and you climb an iron ladder inside it. He asked me to come with him, and he thought I was just a common or garden pansy when I said I couldn’t. I tried to explain I’ve got no head for heights, and that climbing anything gives me vertigo, but, of course, he thought I funked it. I suppose it is that, in a way. Still, he was pretty decent about it, and I was glad of that, as he sat at our table for meals.”

  “You mentioned yachts and motor-boats.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, even after this mast thing queered the pitch, he used to talk to me quite a bit at odd times. He didn’t dance, and he didn’t drink or play cards, so I expect he thought my society was preferable to none. Well, he told me his ambition was to take a five-ton boat round the world single-handed. He said he spent nearly all his holidays in boats, and he certainly did seem to know a lot about them. He said that, at school, he used to keep a small ketch in Chichester harbour—we were a Sussex school—and sneak away whenever he could and sail her. It was out of bounds, of course, but he said he was never caught, although he had some near squeaks once or twice. The only snag, he said, was that he had to be pretty careful about weather, in case he couldn’t get back, but he was always lucky.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Heathers. “Almost the first thing he said to me, when he knew we were coming here, was that he wondered whether there would be anywhere he could keep a boat.”

  “And was there?” Dame Beatrice asked. Heathers shook his head.

  “No,” he replied, “not at this time of year. There’s the bay, but it’s not all that much sheltered, and the tides round here are tricky. Then there’s the Race. You have to creep in almost under the cliffs, I believe, unless you stand right out to sea. But I don’t know much about it, actually.”

  “But you do know that Mr. Ferrars did not keep a boat anywhere near here?”

  “I can’t say I know. We shared duties, you see—or split them, I should say—so we didn’t go out together on our free afternoons.”

  “Does either of you know of any special connection between Mr. Ferrars and the missing boy?”

  “He wasn’t his form master. Ferrars didn’t have a form,” said Heathers. “That’s why he and I split the duties. He helped with my Sevens and Eights.”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t any special connection,” said Colin. “The boy was in the Nines, and Ferrars took them for maths. and science, that’s all.”

  “Science has had to become botany and zoology,” put in the headmaster. “There are no facilities for chemistry here.”

  “Botany and zoology would suggest fieldwork,” said Dame Beatrice. “Did the missing child have intimates?”

  “Nobody in particular,” said Colin, “so far as I know. He wasn’t a popular boy, but I think he rubbed along all right with the others, although he seemed a bit friendless and solitary.”

  “What about pocket money? Was he well supplied?”

  “Pocket money is supervised. I attend to it myself,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “The amount is laid down and strictly controlled.”

  “Postal orders, and so forth, in letters from home?”

  “The post is opened in public. In any case, all post offices are automatically placed out of bounds. The boys write a weekly letter home and stamps are provided.”

  “I should like to speak to the boys who shared Manoel’s dormitory, and I think it would be better if you were not present, if you have no objection to my seeing them in private,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Please do just as you wish. I realise that they may talk more freely to you that way.”

  “Then, if I might see them together?”

  Two nervous little boys, inclined to assume a bland, poached-egg expression as a disguise of their real feelings, were shown in and told to sit down. Then the three men went out, closing the door behind them, and the children were left to be confronted by a small, black-haired, yellow-skinned old lady with claw-like hands and herpetological leer.

  “Well,” she said, seating herself behind the headmaster’s desk, “so here we have…?”

  “Please, Gateson, please, Dame Beatrice.”

  “Please, Comrie, please, Dame Beatrice.”

  “Spoken like men of principle and of decisive action. You shared a three-room with Manoel de Roseda y Lambre. What did you think of him?”

  It was obviously an unexpected question. The children looked at one another. Then Gateson nodded to Comrie.

  “You say.”

  “Well,” said the North Briton, “he wasn’t everybody’s money.”

  “I see. Talking of that, did he seem to have more than the usual amount to spend?”

  The boys exchanged glances again.

  “The Man—Mr. Eastleigh—is rather strict about that,” said Gateson, “but—well—de Roseda told us once that he had an arrangement.”

  “Indeed? With whom?”

  “He wouldn’t say. Anyway, we didn’t really believe him.”

  “Oh? Why was that?”

  “He never seemed to spend more than anybody else.”

  “Was he a generous boy?”

  “Not to us, but we thought he gave a lot of his money to his church,” said Comrie.

  “He was a Catholic, you see,” explained Gateson.

  “He and two or three others used to be taken to their church every Sunday when we were at our proper school in Kent,” said Comrie.

  “And here?”

  “Manoel—de Roseda—told us there isn’t a Catholic church on the island, and the nearest one on the mainland is in the town, and the town is out-of-bounds.”

  “Even for Sunday services?”

  “Well, I suppose one of the masters could have taken him, like they used to in Kent, but the other Catholics happen to be in the Common Entrance form, and didn’t come here with us, so there was only de Roseda, and I suppose none of the masters wanted to give up Sunday morning just to take one boy to church. It meant about twenty miles there and back, I suppose.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “Oh, we’re all right, because the room here, where we have Assembly, is called Chapel on Sundays, and Mr. Eastleigh takes it one week and a curate comes over the next week and takes it at half-past three, and has tea with M
r. and Mrs. Eastleigh afterwards. Mr. Pocock fetches him in his car, and takes him back, and has dinner at an hotel on the mainland.”

  “Well, we think he does. He has a drink, anyway,” put in Comrie.

  “And how did de Roseda react to the changed conditions?”

  “About coming here and not going to church?” asked Comrie. Dame Beatrice nodded.

  “He used to cry every Sunday night,” said Gateson. “I think he thought he’d go to hell if he couldn’t go to church, you see.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Bird-Watcher’s Wife

  “…the hill bare and dark, the head bound with cliffs forty or fifty feet high, and fringed with great masses of fallen rock…Among the fallen rocks the breakers spouted and bellowed…”

  “So there, for what it’s worth, is an indication of how the boy could have been spirited away,” said Dame Beatrice to the headmaster. “There need not have been any violent action. An arrangement that, at the first favourable opportunity, he would be taken to a Catholic church might cause him to commit himself to going off secretly with his abductor without noise and with perfect confidence. I only offer it as a suggestion, of course, but that is the way a kidnapping could have been carried out with the full consent and connivance of the child himself.”

  “Dear me! He had been to me, of course, to ask whether he would be taken to Mass, and I was concerned for him and had committed myself to taking him every fourth Sunday to the Catholic church on the mainland, but I could not promise more, and, as it turned out, I could not manage even that, as, four weeks later, I had a visit from the chairman of the governors of the public school I keep in with. He came on the Saturday and stayed until after breakfast on the Monday morning, so I had to break my promise to Manoel, and, I am afraid, forgot all about it. I suppose I might have delegated the job to one of the younger men, but I always hesitate to impose on them, so I said nothing, and the boy has not been near me since to remind me of my promise.”

  “He would hardly like to do so, perhaps.”

  “I suppose not. Mind you, Dame Beatrice, I could easily understand a little chap of four or five years old being enticed away in this manner, but Manoel was turned nine. The police, in any case, are treating it as a case of a runaway boy, a truant from school, although, as Ferrars is also missing, they are not prepared to rule out both kidnapping and also murder—the murder of Ferrars by the recaptured convict, I mean. It is significant that the man was wearing Ferrars’ clothes, except, I understand, his pullover, shirt, socks and tie.”