The Twenty-Third Man

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Well, can I baby-sit as long as you’re there as well?’ Clement demanded.

  ‘Oh, all right. Go ahead. You can begin right now.’

  ‘Do baby-sitters talk to their charges?’

  ‘Not when they’re asleep.’

  At this moment Gavin junior opened his eyes, screwed up his nose, sneezed once for luck, and then brought up wind, making a slight grimace.

  ‘He smiled at me! Did you see that?’ cried Clement. ‘He likes me to be his baby-sitter. Now he’s awake, and I can talk to him. How do you begin speaking to a baby? And how do you know he’s listening?’

  ‘There’s only one rule about talking to him,’ said Laura, who held strong views on this matter. ‘There’s to be no baby-talk.’

  ‘Oh, but I do so much agree, Mrs Gavin, I think baby-talk is absolutely stinking! I got it until I was nearly six! Imagine that!’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Laura, shuddering. ‘Well, that’s all right, then. As to listening, well, your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘I know he’ll listen. It’ll be so interesting he’s absolutely plumb bound to listen. Aren’t you, baby? Do I call him by his proper name? What is it?’

  ‘Hamish Alistair Gordon Grant Iain Sinclair. Add Gavin, for good measure, of course.’

  ‘But his baptismal names make Haggis!’ Clement was overcome by this discovery. Laura, who had invented all but two of her son’s first names, grinned cheerfully. ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ said Clement, still giggling joyously. ‘All the same, I shall jolly well call him Haggis, and it’s your fault if I do.’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘And that’s a pun!’ yelled Clement, throwing himself about. ‘See? Grant – granted! I suppose you can make jokes and puns all day!’

  ‘More or less,’ said Laura, squinting modestly down her nose. ‘Anyway, haggis is a grand name for a grand food. Did you never try it?’

  ‘No. I shouldn’t think English people would like it. How is it made?’

  Laura repeated the recipe for haggis as it was made in her own home. Clement produced his pocket-diary and took down the recipe from dictation. Replacing the book, he said:

  ‘It sounds better than Mr Peterhouse’s chocolate would have tasted. Still, it was decent of him to offer it to me. Laura – I can call you Laura, can’t I? – you know, Petrarch and all that – it’s really quite respectful, if you don’t mind – what did you think about Mr Clun swimming out like that to get us rescued yesterday?’

  ‘A jolly good effort.’

  ‘He was lucky to spot that fishing boat and make the men come and take us off. Golly, was I hungry by the time we got to the hotel! I could have eaten a jelly-fish if there’d been one on Tiene.’

  ‘Yes, so could I. It’s dreadful to miss your tea. I don’t know why I eat so much on Hombres Muertos.’

  ‘Well, it’s a boring sort of place, now the murder’s all washed up and finished.’

  ‘What makes you think it is?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it? You see, until I turn squealer, nobody can get any farther.’

  ‘You underestimate our intelligence.’

  ‘Quit kidding!’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been talking to that girl from Boston, Massachusetts! Where she picked up that dreadful jargon of hers I can’t imagine.’

  ‘From the films, I expect. I’d like to see a film again, Laura. Do you think I’ll ever be sent to school in England?’

  ‘I’ll do my best for you. You’re not a bad kid in your way.’

  ‘Come off it! Do you really think Mr Peterhouse is mad? You know that chocolate he offered me must have been poisoned, don’t you? Laura, is he mad?’

  ‘A bit eccentric, perhaps. What is the object of your researches into the life-history of the indigenous lizard of this island, as Dame Beatrice would say?’

  ‘Oh, Laura, don’t change the subject! Do you know what I think?’

  ‘No, and I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Oh, but you must listen to this! Do you know why Mr Peterhouse wanted to keep us on Tiene?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘He’d been bribed to do it.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I bet that’s what it amounted to. Laura, will you get Dame Beatrice to tell them they must let me go to school in England?’

  ‘Possibly. Tell me more about bribes.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know any more, but hasn’t it struck you that Peterhouse knew Mrs Lockerby and Mr Telham? – before they came here, I mean?’

  ‘How could it strike me? I wasn’t here when they came.’

  ‘Too right. You weren’t.’ He was silent after this. Laura brooded. The non-appearance of the launch which, according to Peterhouse, should have taken them off Tiene; the amount of time Peterhouse had wasted before he had taken Dame Beatrice to see his Alpine plants; his distress when Clun had swum out to sea; his fury (Laura remembered it with rueful amusement) when the fishing vessel – the triumphant Clun on board – had put in to Tiene to return the explorers to Reales; these were matters worthy of thought, and so was Dame Beatrice’s action in causing Peterhouse to throw the chocolate into the sea.

  ‘I shall tell the baby a story. He’s not easily shocked, I hope?’ said Clement, interrupting her thoughts.

  ‘No, he’s pretty broad-minded,’ said Laura, bringing herself back to the present with an effort. ‘I’m going to lie down on the sand. Do you want any more lemonade?’

  Clement declined the offer of more lemonade, and squatted on his haunches beside the baby.

  ‘There was once a very wicked man,’ he began. The baby gurgled delightedly. ‘You ought not to be pleased to hear it. You are even more broad-minded than I thought. This wicked man came to an island called Hombres Muertos and there he jolly well got himself bumped off. Yes, he got a knife in his back, and serve him jolly well right. What do you think, Haggis? Oh, yes, you’re no end of a chap!

  ‘You may not know it, Haggis, but only wicked men get themselves knifed in the back. It’s done chiefly by girls. The men promise to marry the girls, and then they don’t, and the girls get haughty about it, and it annoys them.’

  ‘Too right,’ agreed Laura. ‘It annoys them to think that their charms, and their looks, and the scent they use, and the way they do their hair, and the things they talk about, don’t appeal any more to the man, so then, if they’re English, they bring a case against him and the man has to pay a lot of money.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Clement, ‘but if they’re Spanish they knife him. Believe it or not, Haggis – and I wouldn’t have believed it myself if Pilar hadn’t shown me hers and told me she kept it very sharp for the first man who let her down – but they do knife him. And I dare say that English girls, if the man hasn’t got any money, would either knife him or shoot him, and serve him jolly well right.’

  ‘It could be, at that,’ muttered Laura.

  ‘All clear to you, so far? Right. Then let’s get down to the details. I came to this island from the other, lousier one where my rather feeble people have a house, and I met this murdered man just before he went to live with the cave-dwellers. (By these cave-dwellers, I mean the living ones, Haggis. They live in terribly smelly houses made from the caves where there used to be a small fort. You ought to go up there sometime, when you can walk.)

  ‘When I heard he had gone to the caves, I went there, too, but they didn’t seem to know much about him – either that, or they were holding out on me. I told my Spanish friend – you must meet him, Haggis – and he said he didn’t think this man – his name was Emden, if it interests you, Haggis – he didn’t think this man had ever gone to the caves, not actually to live, I mean.’

  ‘Dame B. didn’t think so, either,’ said Laura, under her breath. The story-teller was too much absorbed in his narrative to take any notice of this.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ he continued, watching the baby put its foot into its mouth, ‘this man disappeared from mortal ken. What do you think of that, H
aggis? Only, not quite from mortal ken, because I found out where he was. He was in the Cave of Dead Men. Well, he was a dead man, too, you see, so it was eminently suitable. What wasn’t so eminently suitable was that one of the other dead men had had to make room for him, Haggis. Somebody had robbed the dead king of his robe and face-mask and put them on this new dead man. Whoever did it thought he was perfectly safe because the people from the hotel had already been to the cave and nobody was likely to go there again for at least another month. That’s when the next ship comes in. I say, I shouldn’t eat that foot if I were you, Haggis; you’ll need it when you learn to walk, you know. I spoilt his little game. Only I think it was a her. Anybody can stick a knife in somebody else’s back as long as they know where to stick it. Then the person dies; and that’s what happened to Emden.’

  ‘Her?’ muttered Laura. ‘The trouble is, which her? Don Juan gets his! Yes, but – Don Juan? That’s the whole trouble. That’s what makes the whole thing such a problem. There simply isn’t any evidence, because Don Juan was Don Juan. There are too many women mixed up in this sordid business.’

  ‘No, there isn’t any evidence,’ said Clement, looking up at her. ‘But I bet I’ve managed to put wind up whoever did it.’

  ‘Have you? How?’

  ‘Well’, said the boy, in a virtuous tone, ‘I don’t think girls ought to stick knives in men just because the men manage to get out of marrying them and buying them a ring and taking them out, and so forth. I think it’s a rotten thing to do. So I thought I’d let people know what this rotten person had done. That’s why I went to the cave again and threw the poor old mummified king down the mountain. I knew someone at the bottom would find him, and that might make people wonder what had happened, and go up to the cave, and find there were still twenty-three men. I thought it might occur to the person – whoever it might happen to be – that one of them didn’t – ought not to be there. That being so, I thought that, sooner or later, they’d discover it was Emden, because he’d not been seen or heard of, you see, so that somebody would be for it.’

  ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ said Laura. ‘I like the kind of bedtime story you tell my son, I must say!’

  ‘He enjoys it! Look at him!’ retorted Clement, waggling his finger at the baby. The baby crowed, gurgled, and kicked.

  ‘Of course, it gets us no further,’ said Laura, recounting the story, later in the day, to Dame Beatrice, ‘but it’s rather interesting that Clement should think a woman might have done it. Brings us back to Luisa and Pilar, I should rather think. I can’t see Caroline Lockerby sticking knives in people. Can you?’

  ‘I can imagine anything,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and it is more than time that we questioned Mrs Lockerby. We must take the bull by the horns, Time by the forelock and the tide which leads on to fortune, not to mention that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

  ‘Sang fairy-ang,’ said Laura. ‘No, but honestly, what do you make of Clement’s disclosures?’

  ‘I cannot tell until I have spoken to Señor Ruiz.’

  Señor Ruiz was as helpful as his lack of knowledge allowed him to be.

  ‘The little boy? Intelligent, yes. Mrs Lockerby? A very sad lady, one would say. I think she has had a difficult time with her brother. Of goings and comings from my hotel I cannot speak. The beach, the garden, the expeditions – who can say where any of my guests may be at a given time or even on a given day? This I say: you will know by now that neither I nor my Luisa had the urge to kill Mr Emden. That he was a louse is clear. That he dishonoured my Luisa is a misconception. Pilar may have killed him, but Pilar has not the mind which would have tried to disguise him as one of the dead kings. Pepe, too. He has no imagination, that lad. So we come back to where we begin. It is one of the English guests who has killed Mr Emden.’

  ‘“I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart – never ask me whose!’” said Laura, under her breath. Dame Beatrice patted her kindly on the shoulder.

  ‘You have nicked the matter,’ she said solemnly. ‘But who was the sweetheart? That is the hub of the wheel.’

  ‘The wheel must come full cycle,’ said Laura idiotically. Her employer accepted this reading of the realities of the case.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘So now we will talk again with Clement.’

  Clement, summoned to a solemn conclave, was lyrical.

  ‘I said there was dirty work afoot! I said it was too bad of my mother to go to see the dead kings without me! I said I’d have my revenge! I said ill deeds would follow the rising of the moon! I said I’d tell the world – and so I have.’

  ‘Yes, but what?’ asked Laura. ‘Speak up, king-pin, and let us have all the dope – if there is any, of course.’

  ‘“You wrong me every way; you wrong me, Brutus,”’ declared Clement, to the astonishment of his hearers. ‘I am not a king-pin, “but I am here to speak what I do know.’”

  ‘For heaven’s sake, say on, abnormal child.’ Laura stuck a sweet in his mouth to add weight to her words. Clement nodded his thanks and chewed dreamily for some moments. Then he said:

  ‘I suppose I’ve listened to everything everybody’s said in this hotel since I’ve been here, unless the people have been in bed. What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘Only that which is on your mind,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  Clement chewed on, sucked, and nodded.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it all began the day you got here. Do you remember me pushing Mrs Lockerby into that pool?’

  ‘Vividly.’

  ‘I never realized a lady could be so tough.’

  ‘Tough?’ Laura pricked up her ears and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Tough is the only word,’ Clement insisted. ‘I had to hop it pretty-dam’-quick, I can tell you. “There was blood in the mate’s eye.”’

  ‘Oh, tosh!’ said Laura. ‘You’d expect any normal person to be a bit annoyed if a wretched little half-bake like you pushed her into a pond.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ agreed Clement, ‘and I can see now that it was a fairly stinking thing to do, but, honestly, Laura, I thought she was going to brain me, and if she had brained me I think – well, never mind that.’

  ‘You’re not certain what your father’s reactions would have been?’

  Clement did not reply. He swallowed what remained of the sweet and then said: ‘Come for a swim. I want you to look at my arms when I do my back-crawl.’

  ‘They’re not sufficiently relaxed after each pull,’ said Laura. ‘You look like a demented porpoise. Come on, then, but you’ll have to go up to the hotel to get my things. I’m not going to sweat more than I have to in this heat. Pilar knows where everything is.’

  When the instructional session was over, and coach and pupil were spread-eagled on the sand, Clement said:

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘Say on, boy-friend.’

  ‘You know when I went to the cave of the dead kings?’

  ‘First or second time?’

  ‘First. I didn’t see twenty-four of them, you know.’

  ‘We had tended to suppose that, but don’t let it deter you that we came to the conclusion you’re a pestiferous, pernicious, and unskilful little liar.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s a help. I just wanted to make old Peterhouse sit up.’

  ‘Peterhouse?’

  ‘Well, it must have been Peterhouse who hid Mr Emden, mustn’t it? When nobody could get any news of him, you know.’

  ‘Golly!’ Laura sat up and stared down at the sprawling child. Clement closed his eyes. A smile of self-satisfaction wreathed his young, tender mouth. ‘Take that smirk off your face, or I’ll bounce my fist on your tum! Now tell me what you mean,’ said Laura firmly.

  ‘Well,’ said Clement, ‘I do a lot of thinking, and what I wondered was where on earth Emden was between the time he left the hotel and the time he was killed.’

  ‘It wasn’t a long time,’ Laura pointed out.

  ‘No, I know.
But there must have been a day or two, Laura. Well, Dame Beatrice found out he’d never been to the troglodytes, didn’t she?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Pilar told me. Pilar knows everything.’

  ‘And what she doesn’t know she invents. Don’t lose sight of that significant fact.’

  ‘Did she invent what I said just now?’

  ‘Partly. He had been to the troglodytes. He went to fix himself up as a lodger in one of the caves, but he never took up his option.’

  ‘Well, but that’s near enough, isn’t it, Laura? I mean, he wasn’t killed immediately, was he?’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ It was not that she disagreed; she was interested in his powers of inductive reasoning.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t dead when Peterhouse took that first party to the cave, otherwise he’d have been in the cave, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Not necessarily. The body could have been hidden somewhere at hand.’

  ‘Oh, no, Laura! The bandits would have known. We know they always keep a watch on the cave of dead men to kidnap anybody who goes without a proper guide. Look at what they did when I went!’

  ‘And when I went, only I pleaded the blessed state of motherhood and got away with it! Yes, you’ve got something there. The bandits would have known. So what?’ But she guessed what was coming.

  ‘He was alive and hidden, Laura. And shall I tell you where?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘All right. you tell me, then, and we’ll see whether great minds think alike.’

  ‘Flattering both of us, aren’t you? Here goes, then! He was hiding on Peterhouse’s island of Tiene.’

  ‘Got it in one! My cock-eyed parents wouldn’t have worked that one out in a month of Sundays!’

  ‘Fifth Commandment!’ said Laura sternly.

  ‘Yes, but they’re not; they’re foster-parents, and all they foster in me is a sort of dreary loathing. It’s no joke being adopted by people you don’t like or respect.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you. What’s their opinion of you, Clement?’