Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley) Page 15

  “Not to me, and, realising that they are not always on the best of terms, I have not approached him on the subject. He may not even be aware of his father’s absence, if he has not visited the lighthouse recently.”

  “What did Fiona Spalding think about Howard’s going off like that?”

  “She said she was accustomed to it, and indicated that her husband is fanatical, impulsive, and irrational where his bird-watching is concerned.”

  “Fair enough, from what I know of him. Had she any idea of when she might expect to have him back?”

  “I did not ask her. It was nothing to do with me. I showed her your telegram and she said that there was nothing to worry about—this in spite of the fact that she is in a state of anxiety. You did not mention Manoel, so, of course, I did not mention him, either, although, knowing of your quest, I guessed that you thought you had found some connection between him and Howard Spalding.”

  “Oh, well, I suppose Howard will turn up again in his own good time. I wish Ferrars would, too. There’s only one thing I can’t make out. I can’t understand why Howard deserted the kid like that. It doesn’t seem to fit in with his character as I read it.”

  “Really? That is very interesting. You have a flair for distinguishing the sheep from the goats in a way which I cannot sufficiently admire.”

  Laura gazed suspiciously into the bright black eyes of her employer.

  “Hm!” she said. “That sounds a double-edged compliment, coming from you. Are you staying on here now that Manoel has turned up? I wish you would. It only wants five more days to the end of term, and, as I don’t like the way things are going, I’d be much happier if you were here. I mean, why did Howard need the kid as a smoke-screen? It stinks a bit, that.”

  “I will invoke Mr. Eastleigh’s hospitality and travel home with you in your car. That will enable me to send George before us in mine, so that he may alert the domestic staff. I must say Zena seems to have settled in well, and has already acquired a fair proficiency in the French tongue.”

  “Stay until the end of term? Why, of course you must stay,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “I’ve had Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars to see me. They are naturally most concerned about the continued and inexplicable absence of their son. I feel extremely sorry for them. It is a very odd business altogether. I cannot account for the finding of Ferrars’ clothes in possession of that convict. Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars knew about that, of course, and fear the worst. They think the convict may have killed their son in order to obtain the change of clothes, and that the body may be in the sea. I confess I share their anxiety, particularly as, by this time, there seems very little chance of finding the young man, alive or dead. The search has been a most exhaustive one, and I understand that it will be abandoned very soon, so far as the quarries are concerned, and the coast watched for a washed-up body.”

  “Oh, well, in a few days’ time, our part in all this will be over. I shan’t be sorry to get back to normal, although I’ve rather enjoyed the school,” said Laura, later, to her employer. “What are you going to do with yourself during the time that’s left? I won’t see much of you, I’m afraid. You know what the end of term is like.”

  “I shall find ways and means of occupying my time,” said Dame Beatrice.

  She spoke more truly than, at the time of utterance, she knew. The first report came from Colin, the second from the police. As it happened, Dame Beatrice had been prevailed upon by Skelton, Robson, and Heathers to recount some of her cases to them. Skelton, by virtue of being in charge of the physical education and games, had no examination papers to mark; Heathers, whose youthful charges were not required to sit for end-of-term examinations, was in the same happy state; Robson, who taught mathematics to the older boys, had made very short work of the few dozen papers sent in, and so all three were free at a time when their less fortunate colleagues, including Laura and Colin, were kept extremely busy.

  Laura had seen very little of Colin since her return from the Channel Islands. She had sought him out to give him such news of his father as she had gathered, but he seemed neither interested nor excited. His sole comment had been, “Went off with the beastly kid and then abandoned him? I don’t believe it.” As this was Laura’s own reaction, except that, on the evidence, there was nothing more creditable to believe, she had merely retorted, “All right. I’ve no proof. I don’t even know that the man was your father. I just thought you might like to know what I’d been told.” After that, he had appeared to avoid her, and was seen heading for the Point whenever it was his free afternoon. Laura thought she knew why, and despised him for taking so obvious an advantage of his father’s absence.

  On the third evening after Laura’s return, the headmaster came to the Staff common-room. Laura, Pocock, and Grange were marking papers, making out lists, and jotting down notes for the boys’ end-of-term reports. It was unusual for Mr. Eastleigh to go to the Staffroom. It was on the house telephone, as were most of the rooms in the hotel, and it was his custom to use this convenient method of getting in touch with the masters if he needed to contact them when they were not actually teaching, so that his appearance, to the occupants of the common-room, was a dramatic one.

  “Oh, Mr. Spalding, can you spare me a minute?” he asked. As this amounted to a royal command, Colin put down his marking pencil and followed his headmaster out of the room. “My sitting-room will be best, my dear fellow,” Mr. Eastleigh went on. “That’s it. Sit down. My dear, a glass of sherry for Mr. Spalding.”

  “I’m so sorry about the news, Mr. Spalding,” said Mrs. Eastleigh, bringing the glass to Colin, “but while there’s life, there’s hope.”

  “Not…what’s happened to her? She isn’t…she hasn’t…” babbled Colin.

  “‘She’? We are talking about your father, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “He appears to have been a little too venture-some, and to have exposed himself to danger. In short, we have had a message from the police to say that he was picked up at sea by fishermen and is in a rather serious condition and in hospital on Jersey. It is thought that he must have fallen from cliffs and injured himself, and that the tide, which, as you probably know, can be extremely strong in those parts, must have swept him out to sea. It is a miracle he was not drowned.”

  “Does my stepmother know?” asked Colin.

  “No. The police here, having received this information from the Jersey police, passed it straight on to me.”

  “Seems a funny thing to have done.”

  “What does? Drink up your sherry, my boy.”

  “Yes…thanks.” He sipped. “I mean, I should have thought they would have sent to my stepmother direct. My father would have carried plenty of papers and things by which they could identify him, I should have thought.”

  “Oh, well, it is a minor point,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “No doubt, if he had papers on him, they were so saturated with sea-water as to supply very little information. Possibly the only means the authorities had of identifying him was to trace him to an hotel, or wherever it was that he stayed, and obtain what information they could from the hotel register. This would give little more than his name and the fact that he had been in residence on this island.”

  “That means he’s unconscious, then. Otherwise, he’d have given them the address of the school or the lighthouse. And that’s another thing…how did the police…I mean, what made them think of coming here to the school?”

  “The disappearance of Manoel de Roseda y Lambre, I imagine, gave them the necessary data. The police took down the name of every adult in this house, and your father’s name being the same as your own, it would be the obvious thing to bring me the information. That is how it happened, I should think.”

  “Well, I suppose I’d better let my stepmother know what’s happened. Thanks for telling me, sir. Do you mind if I go to her at once?”

  “That is what I would suggest, and, if you think it best, perhaps you had better stay the night there, unless she has friends she can contact. I am afraid th
e news will be a shock to her.”

  “Isn’t my father likely to recover, then?” asked Colin, bluntly.

  “Oh, my dear boy, we must never lose hope,” said the headmaster. Colin, outwardly unperturbed, got up.

  “I’d better take my examination papers with me, sir. I expect I can get them marked some time tonight,” he said.

  “He doesn’t seem unduly upset,” Mr. Eastleigh remarked to his wife, when Colin had left them.

  “He has to break the news to his stepmother, so I suppose he feels he must try to keep calm for her sake,” said Mrs. Eastleigh. “I expect she will want to go out to the hospital immediately.”

  Colin’s first action, upon leaving the headmaster, was to interrupt Dame Beatrice’s talk to his colleagues. Skelton answered the door to him.

  “Sorry to barge in,” he said, “but something’s happened. Could you possibly come home with me, Dame Beatrice? I hate to bother you with my affairs, but, well, you see, I’ve—there’s some news to give my stepmother, and I’d rather have another woman there, if you wouldn’t mind. Laura—Mrs. Gavin—is tied up with marking, or I would have asked her to come.”

  “Not your old man?” asked Heathers, coming forward. “You don’t mean there’s something wrong?”

  “Yes. Oh, he’s not dead—not yet.” He looked at Dame Beatrice, and then at the concerned expressions on his colleagues’ faces. “I can’t understand it,” he went on. “He’s got a good head for heights, and he never does anything dangerous. I can’t believe he went rock-climbing, or whatever it was, and fell into the sea and got swept away by the tide. It doesn’t make sense. He’s the most cautious man on earth. There’s something very odd about all this.”

  Fiona Spalding’s first question was a little surprising.

  “Is he delirious?” she asked. “Is he talking any nonsense, do you know?”

  “There is no reason to think so,” Dame Beatrice replied. “He has injuries, it seems, and was picked up half-drowned. Unfortunately, that is all we know at present.”

  “I can stay the night,” said Colin, “if you want me to. Then I suppose I’d better see about getting you out there to visit him. I can’t come with you, of course. Too much to do at school.”

  “I don’t want to go,” said Fiona. She began to cry. “I can’t bear people to be ill. He’ll be all right if he’s in hospital. If you’ll get the address, I’ll write to him.”

  “Oh, no, hang it all!” protested the young man, obviously shocked by this approach. “Look here, I’ll get leave from Mr. Eastleigh and go with you. He won’t refuse me, the circumstances being what they are. He’ll know you can’t be expected to go alone. How about that?” But she continued to weep. He took Dame Beatrice into the hall, and added, “She’s had a shock. Of course she’ll go and see him. I’ll talk to her when she’s calmer. Well, I’d better drive you back to school. Thanks a lot for coming with me.”

  “I don’t think you had better leave your stepmother. I am perfectly capable of walking back to the school.”

  “Oh, no, dash it! It’s all of five miles.”

  As it happened, Mr. Eastleigh had foreseen the difficulty almost as soon as they had left. He went back to the common-room, detached Laura from her marking and sent her in her own small car to bring Dame Beatrice home. They met no more than a couple of hundred yards from the lighthouse.

  “How did she take the news?” asked Laura, when she had picked up her employer.

  “It is difficult to say. She wept, but more in rebellion against going to see her husband in hospital than from shock, I fancy. She asked, point-blank, whether he was delirious.”

  “Extremely odd, that. What was she after? Afraid he’d babble the secrets of the marriage bed?”

  “Or other, guiltier secrets, I should imagine.”

  “You curdle my blood! What, exactly, do you mean?”

  “Nothing definite, at present, but it was, as you say, an odd question. Mr. Colin Spalding will ask the headmaster for leave of absence for the remainder of the term, I think, and travel with his stepmother to Jersey. Well, at any rate, we can now account for two of our three absentees. I wish we could locate Mr. Ferrars. What is the last we know of him for certain? Something which can be checked?”

  “Oh, simply that he was supposed to meet this girl and didn’t show up. It’s all extremely unsatisfactory. It’s known that he left the school immediately after lunch, and, according to what she told Heathers on the telephone, he wasn’t to meet the girl until six.”

  “Do we know that for a fact?”

  “Well, I suppose not, really, but they were meeting at the pub for a drink, and you can’t do that before six. I mean, they’d have been too late to get one before afternoon closing time. Anyway, I expect the girl would be at work in the afternoon. No, I’m positive he went out to the lighthouse and then something stopped him keeping his real appointment.”

  “Is there any way of getting in touch with the girl, I wonder?”

  “The police are sure to have winkled her out. You could ask the inspector for her address. With your Home Office job, he’d be bound to respect your wishes. Flourish your bona fides at him, and he can’t refuse you.”

  “With your usual acumen, you have nicked the matter. I will take your advice.”

  The inspector was not only pleased but flattered to be visited by so distinguished a personage as the consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office. It was not that he admired psychiatrists—like most policemen, he distrusted them, and called them, in private, the mumbo-jumbo merchants—but Dame Beatrice, he was aware, had solved some pretty problems in murder in her time, and had never expected to be given credit for this to the disadvantage of the Force.

  He gave the girl’s name as Miss Juniper Keggs and her address in the mainland seaside resort as “Bunkies,” Tideway. He offered to send Dame Beatrice there in a police car, but this she refused. Laura had finished her marking and was free until the school reports had to be made out, so, on the following afternoon, she drove Dame Beatrice down the steep incline and over the causeway and so to Miss Keggs’ home in an unpretentious, respectable little street which ran alongside part of the harbour.

  Miss Keggs was not at home, and her mother regarded the visitors with suspicion.

  “I don’t know you, do I?” she asked, when, at the front door, with its polished brass and white-washed step, she came face to face with them. Dame Beatrice produced a visiting card.

  “I am attempting, with the goodwill of the police, to trace a certain Mr. Ronald Ferrars,” she said, “and I think your daughter may be able to help me.”

  “She isn’t in. She’s at work. The police have been here, and she’s told them all she knows.”

  “I am not convinced that she has told them all she knows. Maybe they did not ask her as many questions as they might have done, but we know a little more now than they did then,” said Dame Beatrice. The woman flushed and said:

  “My Junie’s a good girl, and this Ronnie was—well, seemed—a most respectable young man. Oh, well, you’d better come in.” She gave them armchairs in a room which contained, among other things, a television set and a radiogram. “Now,” she went on, “what did you want to know?”

  “How long has your daughter known Mr. Ferrars?”

  “Only since the school moved on to the island.”

  “How did they become acquainted?”

  “My daughter was at school with Nina Beverley, who used to teach at the school. Nina knew our address, of course, and brought young Ronald to see us. Then Nina and Ronald fell out because of Junie, and Nina kept trying to get him back, and, when she couldn’t, she just threw up her job and went and stayed with somebody who lets rooms to summer visitors. Quite near the school—you know—the hotel—it was, but she didn’t stay all that long. She wrote to Junie, rather a nasty letter, saying Ronnie was cutting a dash with a married woman.”

  “Mr. Ferrars was to have met your daughter, I understand, on the evening when he disappear
ed.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Junie was very put out about it. But the police have had all this out of her already.”

  “Did she have any idea, at the time, of his reason for not keeping the engagement?”

  “Well, I didn’t mention it to the police, of course, it being none of their business, but Junie did say to me—being very annoyed, you understand, when Ronald, as she thought at the time, had broken their date—she did say to me, ‘I bet he’s with Nina, unless he’s gone after the trolloping married woman again.’ Of course, I checked her for language, but I did agree with her really. After all, I mean, a married woman and old enough to be, well, anyway, his aunt! It wasn’t decent.”

  “Mrs. Spalding,” said Laura. Mrs. Keggs gazed at her. “They met on a cruise,” Laura went on. “Mrs. Spalding’s stepson and Ferrars were at school together. If Ferrars was friendly with a married woman down here, ten to one it was with Fiona Spalding.”

  “I wouldn’t know the name,” said Mrs. Keggs.

  “And the police knew nothing of this friendship?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “It wasn’t for Junie and me to sling mud,” said Mrs. Keggs, virtuously. “When Ronnie didn’t turn up that last time, Junie acted dignified, and put him out of her life.”

  “Your daughter did not suggest that the police should question Mrs. Spalding when it was known that Mr. Ferrars had disappeared?”

  “How could she?—apart from not wishing to cast nasturtiums, I mean. I don’t suppose for a minute she knows the woman’s name, any more than I did ’til you mentioned it. If she does, she hasn’t mentioned it to me. And, anyway, until the police came poking their noses, we didn’t know he had disappeared.”

  “How did Miss Beverley find out that Mr. Ferrars was in the habit of meeting a married woman?”

  “Followed him about, I wouldn’t wonder. Just to be nasty, you know. She said (so Junie told me), ‘You needn’t think you’ve taken him away from me. Neither you nor this married Martha he’s taken a fancy to.’ Of course, Junie asked her straight out what she meant, and then it all came out, everything except the woman’s name. I wonder,” she concluded, looking thoughtful, “whether Junie does know who the woman was, and didn’t like to say? After all, Junie was very fond of him. She wouldn’t like to give him away, even if he done something wrong and had to clear out in a hurry.”