The Secret of the Lonely Isles

by Joanne Van Os

  They stood on the beach staring around but there was no sign of the blue inflatable.

  ‘It musta come undone somehow. Maybe the tide came in and moved it around and loosened it or something?’ suggested Jem.

  ‘We can swim out to the yacht!’ said Zac. ‘It’s not that far, we can get there easy.’

  Ella sighed and shook her head. ‘I can’t swim that far, I’m afraid. It’s much too far for me. Oh dear, what are we going to do?’

  They were silent for a few moments. ‘Well,’ said Maddy shrugging her backpack to the ground. ‘We can worry about it in the morning. We have to camp here for the night. The boys can swim out tomorrow and get anything else we need, or we can make some kind of a raft to get Ella back there, but right now we need to organise some food. Tyler, you and Zac light a fire.’

  She and Jem went down to the spring with the empty water bottles, and Ella laid out the mattresses.

  While Tyler and Zac prepared the fire and put the billy on to boil some water, Ella sat on her mattress and took the statue out of her backpack. She unwrapped it from the oilskins just as Maddy and Jem arrived back from the spring.

  ‘It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, turning it around in the last of the sunlight. It glowed and shone while she told them what she knew about gryphons.

  ‘They’re very ancient mythical beasts with, as you can see here, the head and forelegs of an eagle, and the hindquarters of a lion. They were supposed to have the strength and bravery of both, and were said to guard great treasure. Perhaps that was why Montgomery Fox wanted this statue. He was a very wealthy man. Or maybe it was because he had a ship called Gryphon, and this was just an old man’s whim. We’ll probably never know.’

  She handed it to Jem. ‘Here, you can all have a good look at it. Once it gets to the museum it’s unlikely that anyone will be allowed to touch it.’

  As it was passed around the group, Jem felt uncomfortable. The back of his neck was prickling, and he looked around at the water and the cliffs. The sun was going down behind the sandhill, and the light in the cove was dimming. Just as he looked away from the cliffs he stopped and jerked his head back. There had been some kind of a flash, just momentary, but he was sure he’d seen it. He scanned the rocks again closely but there was nothing else. Must have been some of that basalt glinting in the sun, he decided. Last ray of sunlight or something. Maybe it was that white bird again …

  Maddy passed the statue back to Ella, who rewrapped it in the oilskins and put it inside her pack.

  ‘Let’s eat!’ said Tyler and pulled out some more packets of noodles.

  The first thing they saw when they woke next morning was the dinghy, floating just out of reach, its mooring rope dragging in the water. With a yell, Tyler and Zac rushed into the water and swam out to it, pulling it back into shore.

  ‘Well, it must’ve got lonely and come back during the night,’ said Maddy. ‘How weird!’

  Ella shook her head. ‘It’s very odd. But then we don’t know anything about how the tides work inside the cove. Maybe it has some odd currents, and maybe Tyler’s knot wasn’t as good as I thought!’

  They loaded everything into the dinghy, motored back out to Freya and made their plans to leave.

  ‘It’s not a neap tide,’ said Ella, looking at the tide chart. ‘The current will be running fast through the strait, but we’ll be on the other side of the whirlpool when we leave the cove, so we’ll be safe now that we know about keeping to the south side and maintaining that angle once we’re out of the passage. We’ll wait till after ten o’clock to leave, because then we’ll have the best visibility when we go out the other side. Just to be sure, I’ll have you all up the front looking out for reefs.’

  It was a little tricky negotiating the entrance. Jem was struck again by how difficult it was to pick the spot where the cliffs overlapped. Ella kept the boat steady and they motored out through the gap between the cliffs, and into the dim passage. The tide was running strongly, and Ella had to work hard to steer the yacht across the surging current in the centre of the strait and along beside the south wall. As they shot out of the eastern entrance into the bright light, they were amazed to see a large white motor yacht up ahead, leaning drunkenly on top of the submerged reef. Two men could be seen dancing around on the deck, waving madly and shouting at them. As they drew near, keeping well away from the reef, they could hear one of them:

  ‘Hey there! Hello, hello!! We need some help!’

  Tyler grabbed the binoculars and trained them on the boat.

  ‘You know what? That’s that bloke we met at Black Point! The guy who was asking all those questions!’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ said Jem, and peered through the binoculars himself. It was the same man, mirror sunglasses and all. ‘Hah! The map might have got him inside the strait, but it didn’t tell him about the rest of it. Serves him right!’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to risk Freya anywhere near those rocks,’ said Ella. ‘If they start to sink we’ll get them off with the dinghy, but I think they’re pretty safe there for a while. I’d better go and talk to them, anyway. Jem, you come with me.’ They found a place to anchor nearby, and lowered the dinghy into the water. They motored slowly across, stopping short of the reef.

  ‘Hello there! Are we glad to see you!’ called one of the men. ‘We had a bit of a wild ride coming through the passage. Lost our radio mast, and our sat phone got smashed, and we ended up on this reef.’ Jem could see a bad scrape along the side of the hull where the boat must have hit the wall.

  ‘Is anyone hurt?’ asked Ella.

  ‘No no, we’re fine. We just need a lift!’

  ‘What are you doing way out here?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, um … fishing! We’re fishing!’ answered the man in the sunglasses.

  Ella assured the men that she would get them off the boat if they looked like sinking any time soon, but that Freya would wait nearby till help arrived.

  Back at the boat, Ella had a look at the radio, fixed a loose wire and made a distress call. It was picked up by a sea rangers’ base at Maningrida, the same little town where Zac’s uncle worked. The rangers would be out there as soon as they could, hopefully by the afternoon.

  Ella went downstairs to put some gear away, and came back up on deck almost immediately. ‘Did any of you take the statue out of my pack?’ she asked.

  They all looked at each other, and shook their heads.

  ‘That’s odd. I know it was here last night. I stowed it right at the bottom so that it wouldn’t fall out into the water when I climbed aboard.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t just put it away somewhere, you know, so it would be safe?’ asked Maddy.

  ‘No, I put my pack in my cabin, and then we got ready to leave. I don’t understand it. I couldn’t have dropped it.’

  Jem immediately checked his backpack. Ella had put the tin box with the precious diary into Jem’s pack to make room in hers for the statue. He’d used his pack for a pillow last night, while Ella’s was lying with the other packs a few metres from where they slept. He listened to the conversation with the prickling on the back of his neck growing stronger and stronger. The flash on the cliffs, the dinghy disappearing and reappearing …

  ‘Those guys!’ he said suddenly, pointing at the stricken motor boat. ‘They saw us last night! I saw a flash on the cliffs while we were looking at the statue, and I thought it was just a bird or something. Maybe they followed us from Port Essington, and were watching us through binoculars, saw the statue, and stole it while we were sleeping.’

  ‘No way!’ Tyler and Zac couldn’t believe anyone could have followed them so easily.

  ‘Yeah, and what about the dinghy? Why would that disappear and then come back like that?’ said Maddy.

  Jem thought for a moment. ‘Well, they knew we were looking for the settlement and a gold statue. If they wanted to steal it, their best chance was after we’d found it and brought it back here. It’d be harder to get it once
we were back on board Freya. So they hid the dinghy to make us stay the night on the beach, then stole the statue and put the dinghy back while we were asleep. I reckon that flash was them looking at us with binoculars last night,’ he finished.

  ‘Bro – wa-a-ay too much TV,’ said Tyler, shaking his head.

  ‘Well it’s entirely possible I suppose,’ said Ella. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Well let’s go an’ ask ’em!’ said Zac, standing up and looking out at the boat on the reef.

  ‘No way, Zac,’ said Maddy. ‘If they did, they’re just gunna deny it. What’ll we do then, search their boat or something? Don’t be nuts!’

  ‘We’ll report it to the police as soon as we can make a call,’ said Ella, her face grim. ‘Let’s wait for the sea rangers to get here. They’ll have a sat phone or something.’

  ‘Hey! Uncle! Uncle!’ Zac shouted and waved excitedly as the launch pulled up alongside Freya. Four Aboriginal men in green rangers’ shirts and badged caps grinned back at them. One of them stood up and called back:

  ‘Hey young fella! What you doin’ out here?’

  ‘He’s my Uncle Victor!’ said Zac happily. ‘He’s da bomb. He’ll save us!’

  He introduced the others to his uncle, a tall black man with a beard and a big smile.

  ‘This is Ella, Uncle, she’s Tyler’s old aunty, and this is Tyler, an’ Jem an’ their sister Maddy.’

  Ella shook Victor’s hand. ‘I am very pleased to meet you! We actually don’t need saving, but those fellows over there,’ she said, waving at the motor boat on the reef, ‘they might need a hand. I’m not really sure what they’re doing there.’

  Victor looked at them. ‘Got ’emselves in a bit of a mess, ay?’

  ‘Yeah, they stole somethin’ real important off us,’ Zac said with a rush, as Ella tried unsuccessfully to stop him. ‘We reckon they followed us from Port Essington, after they stole Ella’s map and papers while we were lookin’ at them old people’s houses. Then we found that gold statue Ella’s been lookin’ for, an’ her old uncle’s grave and everything. Her uncle bin die on that island a long long time ago. Then last night someone took that statue outta Ella’s bag while we were sleepin’. We reckon them blokes took ’em, ay.’

  Victor looked at Ella and raised an eyebrow. She sighed and nodded.

  ‘That’s it in a nutshell, pretty much.’

  ‘And your uncle, he buried on this island?’

  ‘That’s right. We found a book that helped us find his grave.’

  Victor frowned, and looked very serious. He stroked his beard and gazed at the motorboat. He tilted his head and looked at his men. ‘Might go ’n’ have a chat to them fellas, what d’ya reckon, boys?’

  Twenty minutes later the sea ranger launch came back.

  ‘This what you lost?’ Victor asked, handing over the manila folder and an object wrapped in dirty old oilskin.

  Ella took the folder and looked inside the oilskin, while Zac and Tyler yelled, ‘That’s it! That’s it!’

  ‘It certainly is. It’s all here by the look of it, including the map,’ she said, showing it to the others. ‘Thank you so much! How ever did you manage to get it from them?’

  Victor gave a huge grin. ‘I just reminded them three fellas how long it was gunna take ’em to swim back to Darwin, that’s all.’

  ‘Three men? We only saw two men,’ said Jem.

  ‘Yeah, three fellas on that boat. One fella, he banged his head when they hit that wall inside the strait, so he was lyin’ down on a bunk below.’

  Ella put the statue and the folder away, and said, ‘Mr Martin, do you have a satellite phone by any chance?’

  The sail back to Darwin took three days, and Jem was seasick the whole way. When they finally dropped anchor in the bay, and motored ashore in the dinghy, Jem could have kissed the sand with relief. It was quite early in the morning, and he could hear the sounds of traffic as people began to make their way into the city for work. He felt a little disoriented, and strangely disappointed. Somehow it didn’t seem right that life should have been going on as usual, as if nothing special had happened to them.

  Inside the Isherwoods’ kitchen, over a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes and pancakes, they told Carol and Neenie about the voyage and what they had discovered at the Lonely Isles. Ella hadn’t stopped to have breakfast. She’d headed straight into town for a meeting with the museum and with the police. A couple of hours later, she returned, looking exhausted but satisfied. Professor Penhall was with her.

  ‘Well, it took a while to convince the police about what happened, but thankfully the Professor has a good reputation around here and his word carried a lot more weight than mine!’

  Professor Penhall harrumphed and stroked the end of his moustache. ‘Nonsense, nothing you couldn’t have handled by yourself, m’dear. I was just along to keep that old Cromarty’s hands off everything. Can’t trust the beggar.’

  ‘Well, the Professor was able to prove that I was conducting research, and that the stolen map and papers were indeed what he had given to me, and that the whole story of the Gryphon was actually true.’ She stopped to drink some coffee.

  ‘What confused me was how anyone else knew what we were doing, that is, anyone who was likely to try and steal the statue. The police have questioned the three men, and I’m afraid, Maddy, that one of them says he knows you quite well, that you had told him all about the Gryphon. His name’s Drake.’

  Maddy gasped. ‘Drake? Drake wouldn’t do anything like that, he’s a nice person, he’s …’ Her voice trailed off and she looked horrified.

  ‘This Drake claims that you told him there might be a valuable statue at the island. He works for a local dive shop, which is also a salvage company, and according to the police, a front for some shady operations they’ve long suspected but never been able to prove. Drake told his boss about it and they decided to follow us and see if we found anything. Then they’d know the location of the settlement and be able to take anything of historical value and sell it on the international market.’ She paused for a moment. ‘He was the third person on the boat, Maddy, the one who was below because he banged his head.’

  Maddy looked ashamed and tears started to run down her cheeks.

  ‘It’s all right, Maddy darling, I know you had no idea he had other motives. You thought you were just chatting to a good friend,’ said Ella, patting her on the hand. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  She went on. ‘They were very clever, really. Must be all that TV, like Tyler said. Remember when you thought you saw something at the window, in the Professor’s house, Jem? Apparently that young fellow so intently reading at our table in the library was there to eavesdrop on us. Drake knew we were going to the library that morning, and his boss sent this other person along to see if he could hear anything useful. He followed us to the Professor’s house the next day, and looked in through the window. That’s how they knew we had a map.’

  Maddy gave a loud groan and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘But we never saw anyone following us. How could they have known where we were without us seeing them, when we were on the yacht?’ said Jem trying to deflect the attention away from his sister.

  ‘Well there’s the other part of the puzzle. Zac!’

  Everyone stared at Zac, who blinked back at them, looking equally bewildered.

  ‘The dive shop just happens to be the same one that Ricky works at part-time. Remember the GPS that we switched on and left on the nav table? It was left switched on the entire time, just as Ricky told Zac to do. Unbeknown to us, it wasn’t an ordinary GPS, but one that sends a tracking signal to a base station. Ricky’s boss gave it to him to give to Zac as a safety measure, so that Zac couldn’t be lost. Very thoughtful of him. But what Ricky didn’t know was that his boss was making sure they could find Freya, without having to actually follow us. They knew when we would be at Port Essington, and it was easy for them to find us after that.’ She drank some mo
re coffee.

  ‘But, fortunately, they didn’t have old Robert Perceval helping them, like we did, telling us how to get safely out of the strait. They stole the statue and rushed out in the dark, and hit the reef fair and square. It’s a miracle they didn’t sink.’

  They all sat there digesting this information for a while.

  ‘How did they get into the cove at all?’ asked Jem. ‘We would’ve seen their dinghy, and they can’t anchor close to the island anyway.’

  ‘That was the beauty of it being a dive business, you see,’ said Professor Penhall. He was clearly enjoying the unravelling of the mystery. ‘The White Pointer is a fully equipped dive charter boat, and it was very easy for it to drop two divers at the entrance to the cove, which they discovered when there was no – what was it Ella? – no whirlpool in front of it, and the tide was weaker. The divers just swam in and waited for you to leave the yacht and disappear over the hill. You almost caught them when you came back the first day you all went ashore, and they only just hid themselves in time, apparently. They swam up to the boat and heard you say you’d be away overnight, so they planned to keep you onshore when you came back, to give them a chance to see if you’d found anything. Quite ingenious, for a mob of crooks.’

  ‘So now the police are charging them with theft and with damaging a reef,’ continued Ella. ‘The Lonely Isles are a protected marine park these days. Victor Martin took exception to finding a huge great game fishing boat, as he describes it, crunching up an important reef habitat. They had fishing gear on the boat, and some reef fish in the freezer, so they’re in trouble with the sea rangers already. And, Victor said to tell you that if an old uncle of ours is buried on that island, then it’s his business too, because the Isherwood and the Martin families are as good as related in his eyes.’

  A few days later, Steve and Karen came home. Jem was amazed at the difference in his father – the old Steve was back.

  ‘Those fools had me on the wrong medication! I was goin’ outta my head, worryin’ about everything, and feelin’ depressed. It’s okay now,’ he said, squeezing Jem’s shoulder gently. ‘I’m sorry mate – I was pretty horrible to live with, I know. But you didn’t give up on me, did you?’