The Twenty-Third Man Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  Dedication

  Title Page

  The Hotel Sombrero de Miguel Cervantes

  The Dead Troglodytes

  Twenty-four Men

  Uncle Horse and José the Wolf

  The Living Troglodytes

  The Twenty-Fourth Man

  Owls and Pussy-Cats

  Mark Antony’s Oration

  The Lotus Eater of Puerto del Sol

  Botanical Information

  Down to Earth

  The Case Against a Brother-in-Law

  The Case Against a Killer

  Concerning an Uninhabited Island

  Revelations of a Baby-Sitter

  Permutations and Combinations

  Brother Cain

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Renowned criminologist, psychoanalyst and sardonic widow Mrs Bradley is enjoying a relaxing holiday on the beautiful island of Hombres Muertos. Then a cave high up in the mountains, containing the mummified bodies of twenty three dead kings, acquires an extra corpse overnight and Mrs Bradley is delighted to be called into action.

  As her investigations begin it quickly becomes clear that almost everyone on the island has a motive for murder, and a dark secret they are desperate to conceal. But who is the real killer?

  About the Author

  Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin described her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

  Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

  ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  The Saltmarsh Murders

  Death at the Opera

  The Devil at Saxon Wall

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Printer’s Error

  Brazen Tongue

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  The Worsted Viper

  Sunset Over Soho

  My Father Sleeps

  The Rising of the Moon

  Here Comes a Chopper

  Death and the Maiden

  The Dancing Druids

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Merlin’s Furlong

  Watson’s Choice

  Faintley Speaking

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose

  Spotted Hemlock

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

  Say It With Flowers

  The Nodding Canaries

  My Bones Will Keep

  Adders on the Heath

  Death of the Delft Blue

  Pageant of Murder

  The Croaking Raven

  Skeleton Island

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  Gory Dew

  Lament for Leto

  A Hearse on May-Day

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie

  Winking at the Brim

  A Javelin for Jonah

  Convent on Styx

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Noonday and Night

  Fault in the Structure

  Wraiths and Changelings

  Mingled with Venom

  The Mudflats of the Dead

  Nest of Vipers

  Uncoffin’d Clay

  The Whispering Knights

  Lovers, Make Moan

  The Death-Cap Dancers

  The Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy

  Cold, Lone and Still

  The Greenstone Griffins

  The Crozier Pharaohs

  No Winding-Sheet

  To

  JUNE MACHOWICZ

  for her great interest in detective

  stories and for her ingenious plans

  for making murder an even

  finer art than it is already

  GLADYS MITCHELL

  The

  Twenty-Third

  Man

  CHAPTER 1

  The Hotel Sombrero de Miguel Cervantes

  THE ISLAND OF Hombres Muertos was aptly named. They sat, these dead men, twenty-three of them, around a stone table in a cave on Monte Negro, the highest mountain on the island and so called because of the dark, sculptured waves of lava which had flowed from the crater and congealed above the cavern.

  No one knew the names of the dead men or why their bodies had been placed where they were. There was a legend that they had been kings of the island before the Spaniards conquered and named it. The Jesuits followed the Conquistadores and built a college and a church in the village they named Reales. Reales grew into a city with a cathedral and a bishop. There were installed in the Cathedral a solid silver altar and silver lamps from Spanish America. Later came the harbour and a long, concrete Mole; later still, tourists and the sale of souvenirs.

  The cave, with its grisly occupants, was one of the show-places of the island. It ranked with the three-thousand-year-old dragon tree, the banana plantation, the botanical gardens, and the cigar factory, and there were men in Reales who made a fair living by acting as guides to the cave, where sat the robed, masked, and mummified kings.

  From the sea, the island had the appearance of a stark, serrated mountain range, black against the eye-dazzling blue of the sky, and that was almost as Caroline saw it from the deck of the liner Alaric, six days out from Liverpool and due to make Reales the first port of call. It was half past five in the morning, and she stood by the rail in her dressing-gown and looked towards Hombres Muertos. She could make out the Mole and a huddle of houses dominated by the Cathedral. Behind these houses were white-walled villas on the long, green slopes of a hill, and beyond these slopes rose the mountains, menacing, dark, and sharp against a green and primrose heaven.

  There was no breeze, and the delicious, temperate air of the early morning gave no indication of the heat of the day to come. The sea was calm and very clear. It rushed in silent, translucent glass from the cut-water of the liner and flared out towards the ship’s wake. It had a mesmeric, evocative effect on the watcher from the deck above. Caroline, her mind never far removed from the deed which had altered her life, found herself brooding again on the reasons for her own and her brother’s escape from England to Hombres Muertos.

  This black mood was dispelled almost at once by the discovery that she was not alone. At her elbow a beautiful, resonant voice was quoting from John Masefield.

  ‘In the harbour, in the island in the Spanish seas, are the tiny white houses and the orange trees, and, day-long, night-long, the cool and pleasant breeze of a steady tradewind blowing. All seem to be ours except for the cool and pleasant breeze. Hot weather is promised for today.’

  Caroline tur
ned and smiled. She knew the voice although it was the first time that she herself had been directly addressed by the speaker.

  ‘Good morning, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘Are you thinking of going ashore?’

  ‘Not only of going ashore, but of staying ashore,’ the small, spare, black-haired Witch of Endor replied. ‘I am taking a holiday, and Hombres Muertos appears to be the one place whither none of my acquaintances is bound.’

  ‘We’re staying ashore, too. My brother and I, you know. Telham had had a bad breakdown and we thought it might be a good place in which to recuperate.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yes. We haven’t the same surname. I’m married – that is, I’m a widow. My name is Lockerby. Where are you staying on the island?’

  ‘At the Hotel Sombrero.’

  ‘Oh, good! So are we. Oh, I forgot, though. You want to get away from people, don’t you?’

  ‘Only from old acquaintances. I am no misanthrope. It will be very pleasant to have someone to talk to at the hotel.’

  She nodded and walked briskly away. Caroline picked up the towel which she had flung on to the rail, and sauntered off to the open-air swimming pool.

  By the time that the passengers were beginning to go in to breakfast, the ship was fast to the Mole. On the quayside the local itinerants were setting up a Babel of sales-talk. There were ferocious outbursts of argument and high-pitched, foreign laughter. They had brought their wares alongside before the ship had docked, and were offering embroidered shawls, pyjamas of generous cut and gaudy hue, basket-work, carvings, beads, and fruit, and were hoping to reap a harvest before the tourists had a chance to visit the shops in the town.

  By half past nine those passengers who had decided to remain on board were nearly in deck-chairs with their feet up, and those others, the majority, who had heard the call of the island, were already stepping ashore.

  Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley found herself following Caroline and her brother to a line of taxi-cabs beside which laden camels lurched, grunted, and spat, and panniered donkeys, stoically disregarding thumps and curses, were pulled, and sometimes thrust, towards the edge of the Mole, so that their burdens might be unloaded on to the small black steamers which were to take bananas, wine, and basket-work to Europe.

  Behind Dame Beatrice walked a tall young man with a pale face, short, dark-brown hair, and an expression of reckless dissatisfaction. She had noticed him during the voyage and had put him down as an ex-convict. As psychiatric consultant to the Home Office, she knew a good deal about the reactions and bearing of released prisoners, and the young man, whose name on the passenger list was given as Clun, bore, she decided, the unmistakable signs. She wondered whether he intended to stay on Hombres Muertos, or whether he had come ashore for the few hours that the ship would remain in port.

  He caught her up just before they reached the taxi-rank.

  ‘I trust you are bound for the Hotel Sombrero,’ he said. His voice was pleasant. ‘If so, I wish you would share my taxi.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but I am not going immediately to the hotel. I propose to do some shopping.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the young man, unabashed by this transparent excuse, ‘then I think I’ll catch up those two people in front.’ Before he could overtake Caroline and her brother, however, they had given directions to the driver of the first taxi in the rank and were off. The young man took the next cab and Dame Beatrice took the third and drove to the shopping centre of Reales where she purchased some picture postcards and a small basket before going back to the waiting taxi.

  The hotel porters had made themselves responsible for the collection and transportation of luggage, and she gave them mental praise when she discovered that her trunk and suitcases were already in her room. The Customs formalities had been of the briefest. Short-term visitors had been allowed to go ashore after signing, on board the Alaric, a declaration that they had nothing on which duty should be paid. From what she had observed, as she watched the luggage being taken ashore, of a perfunctory scrawling on a trunk here and on a suitcase there, the Customs officials found little reason to suspect that anything illicit was being smuggled ashore, and did not care much, anyway.

  She unpacked and went down the wide, cool, stone staircase to lunch. At a table for four were Caroline Lockerby and her brother. The tall, pale young man who had invited Dame Beatrice to share his taxi was standing at the entrance to the shuttered dining-room and was scanning the tables. He saw Dame Beatrice at once.

  ‘Why, look,’ he said, ‘those two people from the boat seem to have spare chairs. Who are they?’

  ‘They are Mrs Lockerby and her brother,’ Dame Beatrice replied.

  ‘Do you think they’d like us to join them? Family party, wouldn’t you say? I can’t abide eating alone.’ There was something peculiar in his tone. He walked towards the table at which Caroline and her brother were seated, and pulled out a chair for Dame Beatrice. Telham gave him an appraising glance, reminding Dame Beatrice of the attitude of an older brother towards a younger one, and nodded as the introductions were made.

  The four made an ill-assorted quartet – Caroline in her late twenties, beautiful after the fashion of the pre-Raphaelite painters, but with eyes whose passion Burne-Jones never painted, the two young men, the one dark, pallid, and restless, the other fair-haired with strained, weak eyes and a mouth which mocked at himself, and, a truly incongruous figure, the spare and upright, black-haired, quick-eyed psychiatrist, humorous, shrewd, and mellowed. On her yellow, claw-like hands the precious stones with their witchcraft fire of rubies, opals, and emeralds, glowed in magnificent rings.

  Young Clun put his fingers on her yellow wrist. Her hand was palm-downwards on the table.

  ‘You seem to be worth robbing,’ he said. Dame Beatrice looked down at his hand and he took it away. She flexed her fingers and grinned.

  ‘Yes,’ she said pleasantly, ‘quite worth robbing – up to a point, dear child. Beyond that point, of course, not.’ She glanced at his face. Clun shrugged, but his eyes fell away.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it wasn’t robbery,’ he said. ‘It was brought in as manslaughter. I hit a bloke a little bit too hard. Three years. Quite a packet for the all-too-human mistake of not realizing what the poor corpse would look like, you know.’

  There was a crash. Telham had leapt up and pushed his chair from the table with so much violence that it had fallen over. His face was scarlet. He made Dame Beatrice an awkward, stiff little bow.

  ‘You won’t expect me to sit down with a murderer,’ he said. His sister rose, but in a composed manner.

  ‘Please forgive us,’ she said. She put her hand on her brother’s arm, and the pair walked over to an empty table in a different part of the room. It was another table for four, and the brother and sister seated themselves with their backs to the places they had left.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Clun mildly. ‘What bug, do you suppose, has bitten them?’

  ‘Manslaughter,’ replied Dame Beatrice. ‘And Mrs Lockerby, I gather, recently lost her husband.’

  ‘Well, hang it, how the hell was I to know?’

  ‘You couldn’t know – unless, of course, you knew. Would you care to order for both of us? I can eat anything except the island pork. Veal, I am glad to notice, does not appear on the menu.’

  ‘You know,’ said Clun, when they were served, ‘you’re the sort of person who gets told things. You seem what they call a born confidante.’

  ‘Naturally. It is my profession.’

  ‘A barrister? Yes, you could be. Don’t care much about barristers. Mine failed to get me off, yet I should have thought there were extenuating circumstances. Provocation, for instance. Doesn’t provocation count for anything in the eyes of the law?’ A twisted smile came into play. She wondered what the provocation had been, but he wanted her to ask him and for this she was disinclined.

  ‘I am not a barrister,’ she said.

  ‘A doct
or, then? The medico let down the prisoner at my trial. Would the blow have killed the man before he fell down the stairs? Yes, it would. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Sit on the fence and don’t commit yourself. It was really pretty to hear him. Anyway, the ayes had it. You ever been in prison?’

  ‘I have not had that experience, but I am a doctor. I am also a psychiatrist and a specialist in nervous diseases.’

  ‘One of those “lie on the couch and spout any rot that comes into your head” merchants? Somehow, I shouldn’t have thought it. You seem, if you don’t mind my saying so, more like a rather cynical but sporting aunt. Are you an aunt, by any chance?’

  ‘Certainly I am, and a great-aunt, too.’

  ‘I knew it well, you’d better adopt me as an extra nephew. I have a feeling that we are going to get on rather well.’

  ‘What, precisely, did you do to be sentenced?’

  ‘I got tight and punched a chap and he tumbled downstairs.’

  ‘Extenuating circumstances, I think you said.’

  ‘None, great-aunt. He did not fall: he was definitely pushed.’

  ‘I do not need another great-nephew.’

  ‘Oh, well, there was no harm in trying. See you later, alligator.’

  Dame Beatrice grinned, looking much like the creature in question. Clun smiled in response, made her a jerky, ironic bow, and, waving aside the waiter who was bringing ice-cream and a profusion of the fruits of the island, sauntered out. Dame Beatrice finished her lunch and was about to get up from the table when the brother and sister came up to her.

  ‘I say,’ said Telham, the flush still visible on his cheekbones, ‘I ought to apologize, but, well…’ He glanced at his sister.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now. One day I’ll tell Dame Beatrice all about it. What are we going to do this afternoon?’

  ‘I’, said Dame Beatrice, ‘am going to sit in the sun and watch lizards.’

  ‘Lovely. Telham and I thought of going down to the beach. They say the bathing here is delightful, and this hotel has its own private path down the cliff – a wonderful zigzag affair with the most marvellous views from every angle.’ But her panegyrics rang false, thought Dame Beatrice. She herself did not get into the sunshine as soon as she had hoped. She was taking coffee in the shaded lounge of the hotel when a small, spare woman who might once have been very good-looking, came up to her and demanded: ‘Are you a bird-watcher?’