Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  Titles by Gladys Mitchell

  Speedy Death (1929)

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929)

  The Longer Bodies (1930)

  The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)

  Death at the Opera (1934)

  The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)

  Dead Men’s Morris (1936)

  Come Away, Death (1937)

  St. Peter’s Finger (1938)

  Printer’s Error (1939)

  Brazen Tongue (1940)

  Hangman’s Curfew (1941)

  When Last I Died (1941)

  Laurels Are Poison (1942)

  Sunset Over Soho (1943)

  The Worsted Viper (1943)

  My Father Sleeps (1944)

  The Rising of the Moon (1945)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1946)

  Death and the Maiden (1947)

  The Dancing Druids (1948)

  Tom Brown’s Body (1949)

  Groaning Spinney (1950)

  The Devil’s Elbow (1951)

  The Echoing Strangers (1952)

  Merlin’s Furlong (1953)

  Faintley Speaking (1954)

  On Your Marks (1954)

  Watson’s Choice (1955)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)

  The Twenty-Third Man (1957)

  Spotted Hemlock (1958)

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)

  Say It with Flowers (1960)

  The Nodding Canaries (1961)

  My Bones Will Keep (1962)

  Adders on the Heath (1963)

  Death of a Delft Blue (1964)

  Pageant of Murder (1965)

  The Croaking Raven (1966)

  Skeleton Island (1967)

  Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)

  Dance to Your Daddy (1969)

  Gory Dew (1970)

  Lament for Leto (1971)

  A Hearse on May-Day (1972)

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)

  A Javelin for Jonah (1974)

  Winking at the Brim (1974)

  Convent on Styx (1975)

  Late, Late in the Evening (1976)

  Noonday and Night (1977)

  Fault in the Structure (1977)

  Wraiths and Changelings (1978)

  Mingled with Venom (1978)

  Nest of Vipers (1979)

  The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

  Uncoffin’d Clay (1980)

  The Whispering Knights (1980)

  The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)

  Lovers, Make Moan (1981)

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)

  Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)

  The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

  Cold, Lone and Still (1983)

  No Winding Sheet (1984)

  The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)

  Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie

  Heavy as Lead (1966)

  Late and Cold (1967)

  Your Secret Friend (1968)

  Shades of Darkness (1970)

  Bismarck Herrings (1971)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1967

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle 2014

  www.apub.com

  First published Great Britain in 1967 by Michael Joseph

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  E-ISBN: 9781477869109

  A Note about this E-Book

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  This story is dedicated,

  with very much love,

  to my brother Reginald and his wife Elizabeth

  Contents

  Start Reading

  CHAPTER ONE Wrong-Angled Triangle

  CHAPTER TWO Change of Air

  CHAPTER THREE Fish Out of Water

  CHAPTER FOUR The New Swim

  CHAPTER FIVE The Rented Lighthouse

  CHAPTER SIX News from Nowhere

  CHAPTER SEVEN Second Childhood

  CHAPTER EIGHT Manoel is Missing

  CHAPTER NINE Dea Ex Machina

  CHAPTER TEN The Bird-Watcher’s Wife

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Convict’s Story

  CHAPTER TWELVE In a Beautiful Pea-Green Boat

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Les Ecrehous

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN A Reappearance

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Mother—Naked Man

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Findings

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Wheat from the Chaff

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Chaff from the Wheat

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The Beginnings of a Synthesis

  CHAPTER TWENTY The Master of Pronax

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Island Lives up to its Name

  About the Author

  The title and quotations are taken from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wrong-Angled Triangle

  “Keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island.”

  So-called, since in all but the wettest and wildest weather it was connected with the mainland by a causeway built high on a wide bank of shingle, the island presented itself to two of the travellers as outlandish. It was an enormous outcrop of limestone rock which, in past ages, had been in truth an island until the flung-up pebbles had piled themselves into an isthmus which joined it to the rest of the coast. It rose steeply from the causeway to a height of five hundred feet and then fell gradually away to a waste land of naked crags at its southernmost point. Past these the sea swirled madly, even in the calmest weather, and the boiling waters were marked on old maps as The Race.

  The car climbed slowly round the hairpin bends until it reached the highest point of the island. Then its owner said to its driver, a boy of nineteen:

  “Pull up a minute, Colin. One gets a good view from here.” The speaker was a middle-aged, ineffectual man named Howard Spalding. The boy was his son by his first marriage. The other person in the car was Howard’s second wife. The vantage point he had selected offered the wide, unlovely prospect of a stony, almost treeless land. Northward, the direction from which the car had come, lay the mighty bank of shingle against whose intractable menace unwary ships could beat themselves to death in winter storms. To the east was the splendid curve of the principal bay. Away to the west the cliffs fell sheer to the sea, their face as cleanly perpendicular as the drop of a plummet line.

  The car pulled up on a verge of grass bounded by a freestone wall. The man got out, unslung the binoculars he carried, and rested his elbows on the wall to rake the landscape through the lenses. The boy remained at the wheel and turned his head to address the woman who was on the back seat of the car.

  “Want to get out and look at the view?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “By the time we’ve been here a year I’ll have seen enough of it,” she said.

  “God, yes!” He turned his head again and stared moodily out through the windscreen.
“By the time we’ve been here a year! Why couldn’t he let me go up this autumn? I’m perfectly fit again now. And where are we going to live? I’m not having you pig it in some beastly insanitary cottage. And what on earth shall we do here?” He continued to glower upon the uninviting prospect ahead.

  The time of year was early March. Except for a few sad crocuses there had been nothing of colour in the front gardens of the stone-built houses of the only town on the island. Once clear of it, disused quarries, and quarries still in production, had formed the features of a bleak, grey, windswept landscape. The sky itself was grey, and a tumbling, sullen sea had broken, snarling and foam-flecked, on the western side of the causeway over which they had passed to reach the island.

  “I don’t know what’s in his mind. I never do,” the woman said. “We must be prepared to make the best of whatever it is.”

  “It’s all very well for him! He’s got his bird-watching and his book to write. But what on earth is there in it for me?”

  The woman made no reply. She wound down her window and looked at the unfriendly countryside and then at her husband’s narrow shoulders and the grizzled back of his head. He put the binoculars into their leather case and came back to the car.

  “Better be moving,” he said. “There’s plenty to do. When we’ve unshipped the gear, Colin and I have to take the car to the garage and then walk back. Not much fun if we have to do it after dark.”

  “Well, you were the one who wanted to stop off and look at the view,” his son said sharply. He let in the clutch and the car moved forward down the slope. “Why are we going this way? I looked at the map and there’s nothing south of all this except a few cottages and a couple of lighthouses. Why two, anyway?”

  “Ah,” said his father, “that’s where my big surprise comes in! Just wait until you know what it is!” His childishness never failed to irritate his son.

  “Oh, for heavens’ sake!” he exclaimed. “We’re not children going to bed on Christmas Eve!”

  “I only hope you’re not going to land me with an impossible job,” said the woman.

  “An impossible job? How do you mean, my dear?”

  “Well, you paid off Minna and the char—not that they’d have come to a place like this!—so what do we do for servants? Can you get in some local people? Have you made any arrangements?”

  “Arrangements?” He was genuinely surprised. “I don’t think we’ll need any help. You’ll see what I mean when we get there, and, after all, there are three of us. It will do Colin all the good in the world to hew wood and draw water for a bit. Build him up. Strengthen those muscles of his. He’s no end flabby after all those weeks in hospital.”

  “Thank you,” said Colin bitterly. The road which, although well-surfaced, all along had been narrow, now became narrower still and, for the first time, in need of repair. Colin slowed down. His stepmother leaned forward.

  “You surely haven’t rented one of those tiny cottages?” she demanded. “You know we must have three bedrooms.” (She had not shared a room with her husband since the second year of their marriage.)

  “A fisherman’s cottage? Why, of course not, my dear. The fact is, I’ve rented a lighthouse.” He was too single-minded and self-centred to be able to interpret correctly the silence of incredulity which followed on this announcement. “You see, the first lighthouse, the one you see nearer to us, was put up in 1789, or so I’m told—and it was discarded years ago as being out of date, so they built a modern one further out on the Point. Somebody bought the old one and now lets it, furnished, to visitors. I know you’re going to fall in love with it, Fiona. Think of the sheer romance of seeing nothing but sea and sky!”

  “But—all those stairs!” said his wife, her dire dismay adequately indicated by her tone. Her husband, genuinely astonished by her lack of rapture, exclaimed:

  “All those stairs? Bless my soul, little woman, the stairs are no problem! The lighthouse isn’t built on a sea-girt rock. It’s on land, and there are modern living-quarters at ground level. You can’t see much of them from here because of the high stone wall, but it’s just an ordinary bungalow, that’s all, and, as I tell you, it’s fully furnished.”

  “I suppose it’s been empty all the winter and the beds will need airing before we can sleep on them tonight,” said Fiona, by no means mollified by hearing of the amenities of the place. Colin said nothing at all, but his actions spoke for him as he pulled up the car with a vicious jerk and a squeal from the brakes, at a door in a white-washed wall. He got out and the others followed.

  “So this is it,” he said, gazing up at the lighthouse tower. “Well, it’s a good thing some of it is on the ground floor. You won’t catch me climbing that thing.”

  “No, of course not. I intend to do my bird-watching from the gallery and shall be glad to be undisturbed. Besides, with your poor head for heights, you certainly mustn’t venture. We don’t want a repetition of the scene we had with you on the fortifications at Dubrovnik. I really thought we should never get you down that outdoor staircase,” said his father, chuckling. Colin looked murderous, and Fiona said quickly:

  “Never mind about that staircase, Howard. There’s no need to be so superior. It terrified me—let alone people with no head for heights. You should never have started Colin off by daring him to climb it. People can’t possibly help having no head for heights. It’s like claustrophobia or having a horror of cats. It’s …”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” interjected Colin, restrained from using a stronger protest only by the fact that it would have been directed at the woman with whom he was violently in love. “Let’s get inside and know the worst, can’t we?”

  The inside was clean, well-cared-for, and adequately furnished. The living-quarters consisted of two double and two single bedrooms, a living-room, and a large square kitchen. Gas was laid on, since the lighthouse lantern had been lighted, when gas was first introduced, by a gas mantle behind a highly magnifying glass screen. There was no bathroom, but there was a zinc bath hanging from a hook on the scullery wall, and a gas water-heater of fair dimensions had been fixed above the sink.

  “Well, we had better be off, if we’re to get back here before it gets dark,” said Howard, when he and his son had unloaded the car. “There is a gas fire in every room and the gas cooker in the kitchen, so I think you’ll be all right while we’re gone, my dear. Rustle up a meal from our stores. We shall be the best part of a couple of hours, I expect.”

  “Why, how far is it?” asked Colin.

  “Oh, a matter of four or five miles,” said his father, in an off-hand tone.

  “Four or five miles? Do you mean we’ve got to walk all that way every time we want to use the car?”

  “We shan’t be using the car. When we choose to go out we shall go on foot. I am putting the car away in one of the lock-ups at that hotel we passed a mile or so this side of the town. All arrangements are made. I have only to get the car there and ask for the key to the garage.” He sounded, as usual, self-satisfied.

  “Do you mean to say that we’re going to be marooned on this beastly island?” Colin demanded.

  “We should use the car in a case of emergency, of course,” said his father weakly. Colin detected the change of tone.

  “Well, I’m not coming with you. I don’t fancy walking five miles after driving the car all day,” he said sharply.

  “Please yourself, my boy. I thought you might like to stretch your legs and get the lie of the land, but I shall quite enjoy the walk back by myself. Tonight I shall climb to the gallery, if the sky is clear, and study the stars. There is always something worth while if one takes the trouble to find it.”

  “Rebuke noted and digested,” said Colin to his stepmother when his father had gone out to the car. “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s very patient with you,” she replied. “Go and put on the gas fires, and then you can help me air the bedding. We shall have to chance the mattresses, except yours. Whatever happens, yo
u mustn’t catch another cold, darling.”

  “Oh, do stop making an invalid of me! Come here! I’ll soon show you whether I’m flabby or not!” He stepped up to her masterfully and took her in a clumsy, powerful, inexperienced embrace.

  “Oh, Colin, stop being silly!” she said, not attempting to struggle. “You really are quite fatiguing. Do grow up. Go and light those gas fires, and use your muscles by spreading out the blankets and things. I don’t want to start our new life by getting a cold in the head, any more than I want you to. And Howard with a cold in the head is completely disgusting, as you know.”

  “If he’s going to spend his time on the lighthouse gallery, he’ll have a perpetual cold in the head,” said Colin, dropping his arms and kicking the rug. “Oh, Fiona, we could have such fun by ourselves! You don’t realise how deadly it’s going to be here. Why won’t you let me love you? I’m younger and stronger than he is, even if I am afraid to climb up a flight of stairs.”

  “He has got your goat,” said Fiona, offering neither resistance nor submission to another clumsy and smothering embrace. “You’re still such a baby, you know, Colin. You think you’ve only got to scream loud and long enough, and you’ll get what you want.” Colin dropped his arms to his sides again, then caught her as she lost her balance.

  “Damn you, Fiona!” he said. “I shall have you in the end, whatever you think! You’re going to be mine, I tell you!” He turned on his heel, a gesture rendered void dramatically as he caught his foot in the rug and had to stagger in order to keep on his feet. She watched him go, a tall, thin boy who needed a haircut and who had not shaved since early morning. She rubbed her cheek, half amused and half touched by the calf-like nature of his love-making.

  “The gas fires and the bedding!” she called after him. “And don’t put things near enough to scorch!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Change of Air

  “Then there followed a great to-do.”

  Some sixty miles from the island the scene was vastly different. There were snowdrops and crocuses out in the Stone House garden in Hampshire. In the woods nearby the catkins already hung golden with pollen from the hazels. Blackthorn was out, and so were the almond trees at the gate. The first bright green was on the hawthorns. The ash was still in resolute black bud, but the elms were heavy with flowers.