Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked. Laura glanced at him, but could see little of his face, even as the match spurted.

  “It will assist my aim when clouds cover the moon again,” said Dame Beatrice amiably. Laura also took out a cigarette. The time passed very slowly. The room became very cold. Because of the racing clouds, much lighter now, the moon appeared to be swimming in the sky and was seldom obscured.

  “I’m going to light the gas fire. It will never be noticed,” said Laura, “and it’s getting dashed chilly in here.”

  “A good idea,” said Dame Beatrice. “Mr. Thorvald, you may move away from that draughty doorway, but mind you continue to behave yourself.”

  “I’ll behave myself until Louse turns up,” said Thorvald, through his teeth. “After that, I shan’t behave myself at all.”

  “‘And you may lay to that!’” quoted Laura. The door was opened very quietly and the sergeant put his head in.

  “All right, ladies?” he murmured. A cloud was passing over the moon. He missed Thorvald, who was in the shadows, away from the glow of the fire. “I’d turn the key of this door, if I was you. I’ve just had the tip from one of my men. We’re off!”

  Dame Beatrice went over to the gas fire and turned it out, and they sat on, in the alternating moonlight and blackness, straining their ears. At first there was nothing to interpret. The silence, except for the slight sounds occasioned by their own breathing, seemed absolute. Then they heard the smugglers. There were hushed voices and then a creaking noise. Thorvald left his chair and crept to the door. Dame Beatrice fingered her revolver. Laura watched the moonlight on the wall above Thorvald’s head. The sounds became louder, but were indeterminate. They ceased, and the voices took up again in the form of a low murmuring.

  Thorvald crept up to Laura.

  “Any moment now,” he whispered. “As soon as the police take over, I shall nip out and do my stuff. I wonder how many journeys they’ll have to make?”

  “This one will be enough for the police,” Laura whispered back. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re in the clear, so far, and I’m not going to shop you.”

  All sounds of activity from the smugglers ceased. It was clear that they had entered the base of the tower. Thorvald opened the door, peered out, and listened. Then he stepped into the moonlight. Laura followed him and Dame Beatrice followed Laura. The next moment the dark figures of the sergeant and his men came in by the door in the wall which surrounded the yard.

  “The big moment,” said Laura, writing the rest of the story to her friend Alice Boorman, “came when the gendarmes had rounded up Louis and the two men with him just as they were in the act of opening up the cellar. There was no end of a kerfuffle and a lot of bad language, and then the police, two of them to each of the gang, came marching into the yard. That was when Thorvald stepped forward and did his stuff. Melodrama was no word for it.

  “‘Stop!’ he shouts. ‘I want a word with that man!’

  “Well, you can imagine the effect. There was the moon, sailing along like the ghostly galleon Alfred Noyes compared it to, and there were the blaspheming captives, and there was Thorvald, standing up like one of his Viking ancestors, or a priestess of Isis, or someone, denouncing the whole lot of them and calling on heaven to witness that Louis the Louse had murdered three of his friends.

  “‘Where’s Bunting?’ he demands. ‘Where’s Tony? Where’s Eric? Why aren’t Tony and Eric with you? I’ll tell you why, you murdering runt of a half-breed!’ (That’s my polite interpretation of what he actually said.) ‘They’re dead and cold, with the salt in their hair and their faces all nibbled by the fishes! They’re lying out there on the shingle, with their eyes, that can’t see any more, turned up to the sky and the moon. They’re…’ At this dramatic juncture the sergeant interrupts him. ‘I don’t know who you are, sir,’ he says, ‘or what you’re doing here, but it seems you might be in a position to help the inspector identify a couple of corpses he’s found on the beach.’

  “Well, that was the end of it, except for the explanation. It seems that this Louis had decided that to run brandy and tobacco was chicken-feed to the rake-off he could get by running dope and diamonds. Tony and Eric (identified without trouble by Thorvald—the fishes hadn’t had time to nibble them, thank goodness) didn’t object to the diamonds, but had jibbed at the dope, I fancy, so clumping them over the head and ditching them over the side had been cheaper than buying them out.

  “As for Ferrars, he’d had a message to meet Louis on that cliff by the lighthouse. Apparently they’d found he visited there, and it came out (for the two deckhands turned Queen’s Evidence on Louis) that suspicions had been aroused by the sight of Howard up on the lighthouse gallery with his field-glasses. They weren’t to know that he was only looking for birds.

  “PS ‘Mrs. Croc. says her son will get poor old Howard off with a ten-pound fine for “failing to report a death.’ Knowing, as I do, the Machiavellian mind of Sir Ferdinand Lestrange, Q.C., I bet she’s right. I hope so, anyway.”

  About the Author

  Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and history, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.