The Twenty-Third Man

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘It wouldn’t be you, by any chance?’ asked Telham, in a tone which was intended to be light, but which succeeded in sounding insulting. Clun looked at him and did not reply. Caroline said quickly:

  ‘It’s probably somebody he owes money to. I always thought he looked the borrowing type.’

  ‘The welshing type, too, then,’ said Clun, ‘and, now that I have counted twenty and swallowed my nasty temper (which, no doubt, you will remember, Telham, got me into serious trouble once before), I will inform you categorically that I was not, am not, and shall not (so far as I know) ever be, prepared to kill that silly womanizer. What is more, if you suggest such a thing again, I shall take considerable pains to twist your head off. There seems to be no law here against manslaughter, and, even if there were, the police, to coin a phrase, are a spent Force. Do I make myself clear?’

  Telham walked over to where the speaker was sprawled and stood glaring down on him. Clun took out a cigarette case, scanned the contents, shook his head at them, chose a cigarette, and studied it with his head on one side.

  ‘Tcha!’ said Telham, with explosive suddenness. He snatched the cigarette from Clun’s fingers and flung it in his face. Clun got up, swinging himself to his feet like an athlete.

  ‘This can’t kill!’ he said, and smacked his open hand across Telham’s eyes and the bridge of his nose. The former watered; the latter dripped blood. ‘And now stop being a blasted fool,’ Clun added, reseating himself and selecting another cigarette from the case, which had fallen on to the carpet.

  ‘Please, please!’ said Ruiz urgently. ‘Mr Telham, go and wash your face. You are making your white trousers very nasty. Mr Clun, either you apologize to these ladies, or I kick you out of my hotel.’

  ‘You’ve got to kick him out,’ said Caroline furiously, leading her brother away. ‘Either he goes, or we do. I’m not standing for this kind of thing.’

  ‘Nobody will be kicked out,’ said Luisa Ruiz, who had been studying the hotel ledger but had witnessed the physical exchanges. ‘The señores will fight a duel. That is the proper procedure when insults have been offered and reciprocated.’

  ‘Swords or pistols, Telham?’ said Clun, with outrageous cheerfulness. ‘As for the ladies, I apologize wholeheartedly for not putting up a more entertaining and instructive show.’ He got up, followed the brother and sister to the door, took Telham’s free arm, and said sincerely, ‘Sorry, old man. Beastly sorry. But you did begin it, you know.’

  To the general surprise, Telham unhooked his arm from that of his sister, muttered something which nobody but she could catch, and went out arm-in-arm with Clun.

  ‘Well!’ said Mrs Angel. ‘And what are we supposed to make of that?’

  ‘The lion lying down with the lamb,’ suggested Mrs Drashleigh, with a nervous titter.

  ‘Or with a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  The next piece of information came from Tio Caballo. In the very early hours of the following morning he sneaked down from his mountain eyrie, took refuge in his mother’s house in the slum quarter of Reales, and sent his sister to the hotel.

  ‘My brother, Rodrigo Cunez, says you have promised to cure him. I must not give another name here. He said you would understand.’

  Dame Beatrice went with her at once. The evil-smelling little house was one of a huddle of dwellings just behind the Cathedral. Dame Beatrice supposed that it formed a before-and-after-service refuge when Uncle Horse attended Mass.

  The bandit was seated in the inner and more malodorous of the two rooms which composed the ground floor of his home, and rose politely when Dame Beatrice came in. His mother, whose wrinkles were caked with the dirt of several weeks, and who was completely toothless, came in with the visitor, escorting her as though the noisome den was a palace. Her hair was as black as Dame Beatrice’s own, but, unlike Dame Beatrice’s, was as coarse as a pony’s mane and thick with rancid grease.

  ‘This’, said Señora Cunez, ‘is my son. I am not proud of him. He cheats me, his mother, and expects me to protect him. He is an ape.’

  ‘With a slight dislocation,’ said Dame Beatrice in English. ‘He must take off his shirt,’ she added in Spanish.

  ‘You have great power,’ said Señora Cunez. ‘I will send in the priest. Not good is it for a man to take off his garments, even before an old woman, except there be a witness.’

  The priest was run to earth by one of a swarm of half-naked children who thronged the open doorway. Dame Beatrice greeted him courteously. He scowled at her after the manner of the island village priests and muttered something under his breath.

  ‘It is necessary’, said she, ‘that this poor man should receive remedial treatment. Advise him to take off his shirt.’

  After an impassioned dialogue between the two men, off came Uncle Horse’s shirt to disclose a remarkably clean body, albeit a somewhat hairy one.

  ‘And now,’ said Tio Caballo, when he had been allowed to resume his garments, ‘I will do for you what you will, for, although you have given me so excruciating an agony, I am grateful to you.’

  ‘You shall tell me the story of the twenty-fourth man,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  Uncle Horse broke into voluble speech. How did she know (he inquired) that there had been a twenty-fourth man? Of what type was he? Was it possible that the Señora could not count? It did not seem likely… What was Uncle Horse to make of it? What was this twenty-fourth man? Surely, if there was such an individual, he was an impostor.

  ‘You must show me’, said Dame Beatrice, ‘the redundant bones.’

  ‘But whose bones? I know nothing of bones. The Señora has misunderstood me. I have said nothing of bones.’

  From these statements he declined to deviate. Dame Beatrice left the house with her firm conviction unaltered that the twenty-fourth man was Karl Emden.

  Armed, thus, with faith rather than with sight, she began her investigations. Having made contact, in two senses, (since she had manipulated his bones), with Tio Caballo, she felt that there was nothing to fear from the bandits. Her comings and goings on the mountains would be remarked, no doubt, but would provoke no other reaction.

  Early on the following morning she hired a mule, declined the services of a guide, and set out alone for the cave on Monte Negro. The early morning air was fresh and clear, there was cloud on the summit of the mountain and she had an exhilarating feeling that she was penetrating, in her dotage, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

  Not far from the cave she met an uncouth man of (as nearly as she could judge) some forty years of age, who saluted her by stretching his arm across the path. Dame Beatrice halted.

  ‘You have found them?’ she asked. ‘Señor Cunez has revealed to you their hiding-place?’

  ‘We speak of bones,’ said the stranger. ‘Come with me.’ He led her, jerking her mule by the bridle and exhorting it, in the island Spanish, to bestir itself, to a shelf of rock from which a precipice dropped three hundred feet to a dry river-bed. This, in the rainy season, was a torrent, boulder-strewn and with deep and dangerous holes, but in summer it looked like a particularly badly-surfaced track.

  ‘Down there,’ said Dame Beatrice’s guide.

  ‘Is there a way down?’

  ‘Yes, but one needs courage.’

  ‘I have a good head for heights. Lead on.’

  After giving her thin and wiry body an appraising glance, he obeyed. Who, or what, had made the path they followed, Dame Beatrice did not know, and there seemed no point in asking for enlightenment. She found the going difficult but not dangerous. Hand-holds and foot-holds seemed man-made, for they were found at fairly regular intervals. In less time than she had been prepared for by her first sight of the gorge, she and her guide were at the bottom and he was picking his way across the potholes in the bed of the stream.

  In the side of the gorge on the opposite side was a cave – or, rather, a ramification of caves. From the pocket of his disreputable trousers her guide produced a powerful electric torch which
he shone on the glistening walls, and the oddly-assorted couple followed passage after passage until even Dame Beatrice’s bump of locality failed her and she ceased to be able to memorize the turns and angles of the way. She guessed, however, that she was penetrating the principal stronghold of Tio Caballo and José the Wolf.

  It was the Wolf, in fact, who was there, at the end, to greet her. The passage they were following ended in a gigantic natural hall with a roof so high that the light of the torch gave only an eerie impression of Cyclopean walls which ended in velvet blackness. The Wolf was seated on a heap of blankets in front of a wood fire. He was a tall young man whose only claim to his nickname, so far as Dame Beatrice then, and subsequently, could discover, was the possession of a pair of extraordinarily long eye-teeth which gave to his smile the effect of an animal snarl.

  He introduced himself and continued:

  ‘Good day, Doña Beatrice. I hope you have not inconvenienced yourself to make this difficult journey. You are interested, I believe, in the king who has been dethroned. We rescued him from an ignominious situation, and have arranged to return him to his own place, which now is occupied by a usurper.’

  ‘I am indeed interested in the kingly bones; even more so in those of the usurper. It would please me very much if I might be permitted to examine this dethroned monarch.’

  ‘Willingly. Carlos, kindly trouble yourself to display the twenty-third man to Doña Beatrice.’

  Carlos, who had been seated in the shadow beyond the range of the firelight, came forward. He bowed, disappeared, and returned with another of the band. They vanished into the shadows and came back, after a short time, carrying something which they dumped, with little ceremony, in front of José el Lupe.

  The object thus rudely presented was the mummified body of a man of slightly less than medium height (Dame Beatrice deduced) which had been reduced to shrivelled and monkey-like nonentity.

  ‘This’, she said, when she had made her examination, ‘is not the body I seek. Conduct me to the cave of the dead men.’

  There was some delay about this. Rapid conversations went on in the local patois and there seemed to be acrimonious argument. Dame Beatrice bided her time with the patience born of vast experience. In the end the group of gesticulating bandits came to her with their difficulties.

  ‘We have nothing to do with this.’

  ‘We are peaceable men. Our assassinations are our own business.’

  ‘We know nothing of these island kings. They were not of our blood.’

  ‘What have we to do with the English lord?’

  Dame Beatrice took up the last speaker.

  ‘The English lord? Name him.’

  ‘Who is he but the Señor who is lost?’

  ‘Name him.’

  ‘Do we not speak of the Señor who lives like the islanders? He of the blanket? He who dresses like a shepherd?’

  ‘You have not named him.’

  Their armour of circumlocution was not proof against her persistence. They were, after all, very childlike.

  ‘We speak of the Señor Carlos Emden,’ said the bandit Carlos sullenly.

  ‘Then let us go and see his dead body.’

  This practical suggestion met with strong disapproval. Men advanced into the firelight from the depths of the cave, materializing – no longer disembodied voices – like a horde of grimacing ghouls. José the Wolf was equal to the situation.

  ‘Are you men or lice? Are you cowards, afraid of the dead men’s dinner-party? Carlos, the torch and a quick walk, if you please! It is insufferable discourtesy in you all to keep a lady waiting. Enrique, Gonzalo, Pablo, you will go with Carlos to escort Doña Beatrice to the cave. Take lanterns. It will be better to go by the river-bed, so that people who see you will not know the object of your search.’

  Sullenly the escort fell in. Dame Beatrice was led through the labyrinthine cavern once more, and, sooner than she had anticipated, she and her bandits were picking their way among the pebbles and boulders of the dried-up watercourse. This wound round the foot of the mountain and they followed it for several miles. At last Carlos, who was in the lead, called a halt.

  ‘We are now’, said he, ‘in line with the cave. It is where we found the twenty-third king. Here.’ He pointed to the ground. ‘We must clamber up this cliff. It is a steep climb, not dangerous. We will eat before we attempt it.’

  He produced gofio, the unleavened bread of the island, cheese, and fruit, and the five of them perched themselves on boulders for a picnic. The bandits offered no conversation, but champed and swallowed, or spat out bits of fruit-skins and pips, in what Dame Beatrice recognized as a comradely and sociable manner. At the end of a quarter of an hour of stolid mastication, and a swig all round from a flask of raw, red wine, the escort rose as one man, and Carlos led the way to the bank and began to climb. The woods were thick here on the mountain-side, and formed an effective screen up to a thousand feet. After this there was nothing but heather until they had climbed to the next wooded slope. Above this was the cave, which they reached by a narrow gulley between two lava streams.

  When the party were all assembled at the mouth of the cave, the bandits lit their lanterns, crossed themselves, and advanced towards the stone table around which the dead men were stiffly and majestically seated. Dame Beatrice made a rapid count, and then, accompanied by Carlos, who seemed not to relish the task, she inspected each cadaver closely.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Ask your comrades to gather round. I must have witnesses.’ She stripped the mask from the swathed head of the tallest dead man. The bandits, who had gathered round, recoiled and crossed themselves. ‘Here, you see,’ she said, ‘is the face of Mr Emden. Help me to lay him flat and take off his robes.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Owls and Pussy-Cats

  ‘STABBED IN THE back, and with an islander’s knife? So we know where we are,’ said Peterhouse, ‘and that is something. Now the authorities will have to deal with it. Not that they’re the slightest bit of good. They will probably think that the fact that a modern man has joined the kings in the cave will add to the attractions for tourists.’

  Pentland Drashleigh took it upon himself to report to Ruiz, and to order him to call in the police. Ruiz became excited, and retorted that his hotel had always borne a good name.

  ‘What are the police?’ he demanded with impassioned rhetoric. ‘Dogs, cowards, assassins, creeping cut-purses, usurers, spies! I tell you, you can trust them with nothing! This Emden was an Englishman. Why should my hotel be turned into a sty for these pigs of policemen? If an Englishman is killed on Hombres Muertos, is it my fault? Can I help it if other Englishmen wish to send him to hell? It is you others who must see to it. I will not countenance the police. They would eat my food, drink my wine, and ravish my daughter. No, I tell you! A thousand times, no! If the police come here, I tell them at once that the English do it. You!’ He pointed dramatically at Mr Drashleigh. ‘You, perhaps, are the man!’

  ‘Very well,’ said Dame Beatrice, coming to the rescue. ‘There is much in what you say, Señor Ruiz. I have had experience of investigating the causes of unnatural death, and am prepared to undertake the duty of finding Mr Emden’s murderer. I shall rely upon the willing cooperation of you all.’

  ‘Clement,’ said Mr Drashleigh, ‘must be taken back to our home on Santa Catalina. He cannot be mixed up in this horrible business.’

  ‘He has contrived to mix himself up in it,’ Dame Beatrice pointed out, ‘but I agree with you in principle. He cannot, however, be taken. He must be sent. As a public-spirited and enlightened man, you will appreciate that you and your wife must remain here, pending some result of our inquiries.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But the boy must go. For one thing, his life may not be safe. It seems to me that, but for his naughtiness in going to the cave in the first place, the subsequent substitution of Emden’s body for that of one of the kings would never have been discovered.’

  ‘The bandits know of the s
ubstitution, of course, because it was they who discovered the mummified body after it had been tumbled down the mountain-side. All the same, I think it very unlikely that they would have reported the matter, as Clement did. I understand your feelings perfectly well. By all means get the boy away from here, although, if he has told all he knows, I do not think he can be in any physical danger.’

  ‘I am greatly concerned for his safety, none the less.’

  Theodora Drashleigh did not share these fears. She even went so far as to reproach her husband for wishing to make Clement (as she expressed it) into a nincompoop.

  ‘But, my dear,’ said Mr Drashleigh, ‘if the boy’s life is in danger –’

  ‘It can’t be, Pentland! Clement is a high-spirited, naughty boy, but he knows no more than he has told us. I am sure of it. And he is not to be allowed to run away from danger, real or fancied. It would stunt his spiritual growth. You know our compact. You must abide by it. You promised.’

  ‘Very well, Theodora. All I say is that you are taking an unwise risk and must accept the responsibility it entails.

  He sought Dame Beatrice and begged her to add her arguments to his own. She set out his point of view clearly to Mrs Drashleigh, but Clement’s foster-mother was not to be persuaded.

  ‘Clement is in no danger. It’s to be inferred that everything that he knows about this distressing business he has confided to us,’ she insisted. ‘Are you really thinking of interesting yourself more deeply in the affair? I refer to what you told Señor Ruiz.’

  ‘More deeply?’

  ‘Well,’ put in Pentland Drashleigh apologetically, ‘one cannot help but know of your alter ego, you know.’

  ‘I have no alter ego. I am, first and last, a psychologist. I could even tell you why you wish to take Clement away from this island and why your wife wishes him to stay.’

  ‘I have no concern but the boy’s safety. My wife has no concern but the proper development of his character.’

  ‘Pull devil, pull baker,’ murmured Dame Beatrice in her beautiful voice. Drashleigh looked startled.