Secret of the Skull (4 page)

‘Exactly. She must have got fed up of all the surveillance though, because she left the country nine months ago and hasn’t come back.’

‘Are the police sure about that?’ I asked.

‘All airports, rail terminals and coastal authorities have had her on their Top Priority lists ever since,’ said Izzy. ‘Not a sign of her. The cops currently think she’s
in Spain, running a sushi bar.’

I scratched my chin in a very detectivey way. ‘This is all very well,’ I said, ‘but what’s it got to do with the Skulyevic situation?’

‘Ah, that’s where we come to fact number two,’ said Izzy. ‘I’ll give you one guess what Elsa Moreaux’s home address was in the years before she got caught for
the Minkstreet and Batt job.’

It’s not often I can honestly say that a cold shiver went down my spine. But a cold shiver did exactly that, right there and then.

‘Skull’s house?’

I gasped. Izzy nodded slowly.

‘But that means . . .!’ I gasped.

Izzy nodded slowly.

This information suddenly opened up a couple of obvious possibilities about Mirna.

I’m sure you’ve already spotted them both.

Possibility 1: If Mirna
was
a phoney, could she actually be Elsa Moreaux?

Possibility 2: If so, could it be that she had returned to her old house to reclaim the gold bullion she’d stolen forty years ago?

‘No,’ said Izzy. ‘I can see what you’re thinking, Saxby, and I’m afraid the answer is no. Her old house – Skull’s current address – is the one
place the police are sure she
didn’t
hide the gold. After she was arrested, they searched every last millimetre of the house. They took out the kitchen cupboards, they lifted all the
floorboards, they ripped all the furniture apart, they stripped the whole place bare. They dug up the entire garden, too, down to a depth of five metres. Here, take a look at this.’

She passed me another print-out. It was a clipping from a newspaper dated shortly after Elsa Moreaux’s arrest. A photo showed Skull’s house as it had been forty years before, without
its porch or garage and with climbing roses growing up a tall trellis beside the front door.

‘Hmm,’ I muttered to myself, ‘at least I was right about that garage being built recently.’

The photo also showed various uniformed police officers milling about outside the house. Beside them was a huge pile of wrecked furniture. Beside the pile was an enormous mechanical digger, and
behind the digger was a series of earth mounds where the garden had once been.

‘They almost literally took the place apart,’ said Izzy. ‘No gold. Wherever Elsa Moreaux is, the secret of where it’s hidden is lost along with her. And, don’t
forget, she’s out of the UK. The authorities are still watching out for her.’

I sighed. Then I sighed again. I had to agree with Izzy – it looked like I’d been jumping to conclusions.

If the stolen gold wasn’t hidden in Elsa Moreaux’s old house, what possible reason could she have for returning there?

What reason could I have to think that Elsa Moreaux had come back to the UK anyway? I had no reason to doubt that she really was in . . . Where was it, Spain?

‘Spain, yes,’ said Izzy. ‘I have a feeling that maybe the Elsa Moreaux connection is just a coincidence. There’s a mystery to be solved here – the mystery
surrounding those credit cards – and perhaps the fact that Skull’s house has an interesting story attached to it has sidetracked us?’

‘Yes, could be,’ I mumbled. However, I was still troubled by the idea that Mirna was a fake. If she wasn’t the notorious Elsa Moreaux, she was still
somebody
.

‘Talking of credit cards,’ I said, ‘did you find anything out on that score?’

‘Sorry, nothing at all,’ said Izzy. ‘There’s no way I can access records on that sort of thing. I’ve got no way of checking up on a stolen card. In any case, credit
card theft is quite common. Even if I could track down records of stolen cards, working out which ones Mirna might have nicked would be like finding a needle in a load of haystacks.
Sorry.’

‘No problem,’ I sighed. ‘Thanks anyway.’

Izzy finished off her wrap and neatly pierced her carton of apple juice with its little plastic straw. ‘On the other hand, there’s an absolute lorry-load of info about Emerik
Skulyevic available. Articles, reviews, all sorts. There were a lot of interviews with him published after the dictatorship in Vojvladimia was overthrown, stuff about his work, his family, his
life. Have you read any of Emerik Skulyevic’s poetry?’

I shuddered slightly. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes,’ said Izzy. ‘He’s reckoned to have had a very lyrical turn of phrase and to have written poems powerfully rich in symbols and meaning.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. But I thought it was a load of old rubbish, personally.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘It’s a pity we don’t know anyone who actually lives in Vojvladimia right now. This whole problem is made even harder to sort out by the fact
that Mirna’s turned up out of the blue.’

‘I could ask around on my FaceSpace page,’ said Izzy, clipping the lid back on her lunchbox. ‘Someone might know someone who might know someone.’

‘Good idea, keep digging,’ I said.

Izzy gave me a nod and headed off back to class. I took a last jab at the vegetable pie. Tasted OK, after all.

The one thought that went through my head at that moment was: Thank goodness I told Skull to take no further action. If Mirna really
does
turn out to be a dangerous criminal on the scale
of Elsa Moreaux, there could be a
terrible
risk in doing anything which might alert her to my investigation. It was even more vital that Skull kept silent about our suspicions.

A school bag clunked down on to the table next to me. I looked up to find Skull beaming away.

‘Hey, guess what?’ he said, pointing to the bag. ‘I’ve swiped Great Aunt Mirna’s box of treasures, complete with her passport and everything. We could search it all
for clues. She probably won’t know it’s gone. Not until about five o’clock, anyway.’

I slapped a hand to my face.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

I
WAS TOO FURIOUS WITH
S
KULL
to do or say anything straight away. I managed to growl a few words, such
as ‘twit’, ‘idiot’ and ‘never listen to a bloomin’ word I say’, before the bell went for the start of afternoon lessons.

By the time the bell went at the end of afternoon lessons, I’d calmed down a bit. As a steady flow of pupils bubbled up and down the school corridors, I grabbed Skull and we walked through
the cloakroom and out of the main building.

‘Right, we’d better make the best of a bad job,’ I said, zipping up my coat. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Skull, ‘I just wanted to clear Mirna’s name as quickly as possible.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I grumbled. ‘What’s in the bag?’

Inside Skull’s school bag was a rectangular wooden box, about the size of a large cake tin. It was covered in delicately carved patterns.

‘My dad remembers this box from when he was very little,’ said Skull, ‘from before Granddad Emerik fled Vojvladimia. It’s been in the family for two centuries.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

Skull opened it up. The inside of the box was crammed with all kinds of papers, old photographs and odds and ends. There was a small puppet-like toy, also wooden, held together at the joints
with tiny twists of wire.

‘Granddad Emerik made that for my dad on the day he was born. When Dad saw that again he almost cried!’

There were a selection of official documents written in Vojvlic (the version of the Croatian language used in Vojvladimia), including what looked like a couple of birth certificates. There was a
picture, faded and crumpled, showing a tall man standing in a doorway, wearing a baggy suit.

‘That’s Granddad Emerik,’ said Skull. ‘That was taken on the day his first book of poetry was published. Look, he’s put a date and his signature on the
back.’

He had indeed. Out of the box I also took a glossy, freshly issued passport. In it were Mirna Skulyevic’s photo and details, plus a series of border stamps showing that she’d left
Vojvladimia, travelled across Europe and arrived in the UK in exactly the way she’d described to Skull’s family.

‘Well?’ said Skull. ‘What do you think?’

There was only one thing I
could
think. It was impossible, quite impossible, that all these things could have been faked or happened upon by chance. Clearly, much of it was verifiable as
genuine by Skull’s dad, Antonin.

There was only one conclusion I could come to, a conclusion which finally cleared up the question of Mirna’s true identity. I could now be sure of one absolutely definite fact.

Can you see what that fact was?

Mirna
was
Mirna. The Mirna Skulyevic living at Skull’s house was the genuine article. She really was his great-aunt. Nobody else could be in possession of all this
stuff.

All that information about the infamous Elsa Moreaux
was
just a distraction. Izzy had been correct. The link between Skull’s house and that bank robbery from forty-odd years ago was
nothing more than a coincidence.

(Which was good news. I didn’t like the thought of coming face to face with someone as violently dangerous as Elsa Moreaux!)

‘Skull, I’ve changed my mind,’ I declared. ‘You bringing me all this stuff has been very helpful.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. It’s allowed me to focus my investigation.’ We were nearing the school gates. Kids were dispersing across the playground and the road beyond. ‘Now, hurry up and
get that box back, before it’s missed!’

‘Right away!’ said Skull.

He trotted off ahead of me. I was left feeling extremely pleased that some of the dense mist surrounding this case had finally started to clear.

However . . .

There was still the important matter of the credit cards to sort out. And the matter of the strange things Mirna had said when I’d visited Skull’s house – the strange things
she’d said which had led me to doubt her identity in the first place.

I drifted into thought. I also drifted slap bang into my other great friend George ‘Muddy’ Whitehouse, the school’s leading expert in all things gadget-related. I nearly
knocked him off his feet.

‘Sorry, Muddy! I was busy thinking!’

‘Haven’t seen you for a couple of days, Saxby,’ he said cheerily. As usual, he was looking like a walking rubbish tip, littered with assorted mud, oil and food stains. He
scratched at a yellow one on his pullover. I think it was the vegetable pie from lunchtime. ‘You on an investigation?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m in the middle of a very puzzling problem,’ I said.

‘
The Case of the Doyle Avenue Forger
, is it?’ he said.

‘Huh?’ I blinked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It was on the news this morning. Didn’t you see it? The police raided a flat opposite where whassisname in Mr Prunely’s class lives.’

‘No,’ I shrugged. ‘What was going on?’

‘The bloke who lived there got dragged out kicking and screaming in the early hours, apparently. He had a flat full of fake documents – forged banknotes, certificates, passports,
money-off coupons, plastic parking permits, lottery tickets – everything you could think of. They’ve been after him for years. He had a whole forgery factory in there. Whassisname was
telling me all about it.’

Suddenly, I stopped dead.

Those dense mists I mentioned, surrounding this case? They were clearing faster than ever!

I’d solved the mystery of the credit cards. They weren’t stolen at all, they were forgeries, made by this guy who’d just been caught.

How did I know? Think way back, to something Skull told me when he visited my garden shed.

Can you spot the connection between Mirna and the forger?