The Twenty-Third Man (4 page)

‘I really have no idea. A homeward-bound ship calls every month, of course.’

‘If he’s only here for a month I shall persuade Telham to put up with him, but if he’s here longer than that, I really think we must move to another hotel. My brother is in no state to have a murderer around.’

‘A harsh description, surely? There may have been extenuating circumstances. In fact, Mr Clun himself implied that this was so, although he denied it later.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ exclaimed Caroline suddenly. ‘Here come those frightful people from Santa Catalina Island! They all speak dreadful Spanish!’

Dame Beatrice followed her gaze. Into sight at the top of the steps which led to the beach had come a man, a woman, and a boy of about eleven. Each parent held a hand of the boy, who was protesting vigorously.

‘Poor child!’ said Dame Beatrice, in a dispassionate tone which hardly conveyed sympathy.

‘The idiots!’ said Caroline violently. ‘People ask for what they get! They’ve brought up that brat so badly that now they’ve got a white elephant instead of a son!’

‘They seem elderly to be the parents of that child.’

‘Oh, he’s adopted. Their name’s Drashleigh. He isn’t their own. At least, so I was told. He’s an experiment. They want to bring him up without any inhibitions, the beastly brat. He almost drowned me, yesterday evening, in that horrible pool by the rock-gardens.’

‘He seems sufficiently frustrated at the moment.’ Dame Beatrice eyed with detached and critical interest the attempts of the boy to free himself. His voice came shrilly across the peaceful garden.

‘It’s not fair! You’re all against me! Let go! I want to walk by myself. I’m not an idiot!’

‘If we do let go, you must promise not to go back to the beach,’ said his father.

‘Promise, now, Clement,’ said his mother.

‘All right, all right, all right!’ shouted the child. The parents exchanged glances across the top of his head, then the father nodded and they released their grip on his wrists. Like a deer, the boy leapt away and tore to the top of the steps up which he had been dragged. The father patted the mother on the arm. She sank on to a garden seat. The father plunged after the boy.

‘Be careful! Be careful!’ called the woman. Then she
got
up and walked towards the terrace. ‘Oh, dear! How hot it is!’ she said. ‘Is this anyone’s chair?’

As the woman seated herself, Caroline got up.

‘I promised to play rummy,’ she said, and sauntered indoors. As a gesture, it could hardly have been more pointed. The newcomer turned her head and gazed for a moment at the swing doors through which Caroline had disappeared.

‘And all because Clement pushed her into the ornamental lake yesterday,’ she observed in a bitter tone. ‘I offered to pay for her frock. I could hardly do more. It was just his boyish sense of fun.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is fun for your husband, too, to run after him in all this heat. It does seem kind of so young a boy to keep his elders amused.’

Mrs Drashleigh gave her a very sharp glance, but Dame Beatrice’s yellow countenance was non-committally bland.

‘Of course, Clement is not like other children,’ said his foster-mother. ‘We believe in absolute freedom. Any psychiatrist will tell you…’

‘Pardon me, but there is at least one who will not.’

‘I meant to say –’

‘You see, I am a psychiatrist myself.’

‘Oh?
Oh!
Then you’ll be just the person!’

‘I am afraid I must contradict you.’

‘But Clement –’

‘I am here on holiday, and, in any case, my methods would prove too drastic for Clement, I fear.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean shock treatment or anything of
that
kind! I thought an analysis under light hypnosis would be best.’

Dame Beatrice cackled. ‘Hypnosis would certainly be necessary,’ she agreed. She got up. ‘I am glad your son did not push
me
into the ornamental pond,’ she added.

‘Well, for
your
sake…’ Mrs Drashleigh began.

‘For his,’ said Dame Beatrice. She smiled kindly and strolled towards the steps down which father and son had
disappeared
. It would be interesting to see the end of the chase, she thought.

Half-way down she met Mr Drashleigh toiling terrace-wards. He was alone. He mopped his brow and seemed relieved to have an excuse to pause for breath.

‘The hotel should install a lift, I think,’ he said. ‘You will find it a long pull up if you are thinking of descending to the beach.’

‘Yes, I think I will turn back with you,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Are you and your wife proposing to join the party tomorrow?’

‘What party?’

‘The party which is to visit the cave of dead men.’

‘Oh,
that
party! I could wish it elsewhere! That is why Clement is being so tiresome today.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Mr Peterhouse invited my wife and me to go, and was thoughtless enough to do so in front of the boy. Well, of course, we could not take a child of his age to see anything unpleasant like that. It might colour his whole outlook for years to come. I could not think of exposing him to such horrors!’

‘No doubt you are quite right. I remember, however, that my own son, at about the same age, insisted upon visiting a kind of grotto in the south of France where were exhibited the embalmed remains of the abbots of the local monastery.’

‘
Insisted?
You did not allow him to go!’

‘Indeed I did. I thought it the lesser of two evils.’

‘In what way?’

‘It satisfied his curiosity, which might otherwise have turned morbid, and it convinced him that, as a chamber of horrors, the spectacle had been overrated.’

‘That is one way of looking at it, of course.’

It was clear to Dame Beatrice that he did not think so, and she changed the subject by asking him what he thought of the hotel. He was still telling her when they reached the terrace.

‘But where is Clement?’ asked his wife.

‘Sitting on the moored raft out in the bay, dear. I could see him before I got right down to the beach, so it was obviously useless to go further.’

‘Oh, dear! He
is
being difficult, and all because we refused to take him to that disgusting cave! Well, I suppose we must just sit here until he chooses to come back.’

‘No, dear. He must be taught a little lesson. Let
him
come and find
us
. Come along to the suite.’

Caroline rejoined Dame Beatrice as soon as the fatuous couple had gone.

‘Well?’ she said, seating herself in the chair which Mrs Drashleigh had vacated. ‘Did you enjoy a cosy chat?’

‘Yes. Mrs Drashleigh has asked for my professional services for Clement.’

‘The only professional services that would do any good to that frightful little monster would be those of an undertaker, I should think.’

‘Come, come! Live and let live, you know.’

‘That little fiend has the same mentality, exactly, as those brutes who killed my husband! I can’t
stand
him! And I think his stupid parents ought to be hanged!’

She burst into tears and rushed into the hotel. Dame Beatrice remained where she was. She was not easily shocked, but there was something infinitely shocking about the hatred which Caroline felt for the boy. As she was thinking thus, he appeared at the top of the steps. He was a sturdy, freckled child with almost white hair, a very white skin except where the sun had scorched it, and a sullen droop to his mouth. He was wearing bathing trunks and rope-soled shoes and carried a brightly-striped towel. He was not at all an unattractive figure. He climbed to the terrace, flung the towel on the ground, and seated himself upon it. ‘Hullo,’ he said.

‘Good day, Clement,’ Dame Beatrice responded. ‘Where did you get the towel?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ The question was not insolently put. He really meant what he said.

‘You did not have it when you broke your promise and skipped for the beach.’

‘Oh, it belongs to somebody, I suppose. I needed one, so I took it.’

‘I sincerely hope that you will not contract any of the more scabrous forms of dermatitis, then.’

‘What’s that?’ A fleeting look of alarm changed his normal expression of boredom to one of interest.

‘There are several rather loathsome forms of skin disease which can be caught from using somebody else’s towel. Didn’t you know?’

‘Oh, slosh! I don’t believe that sort of rot! Who told you?’ But his voice was more high-pitched than usual.

‘I am a doctor. It is my business to warn people about such things. Of course, if they choose not to listen, there is nothing more I can do.’

‘Oh, slosh!’ said Clement uneasily. He got up, kicked at the towel, and then asked, ‘If you’re a doctor, can’t you disinfect me? I used the beastly thing coming up. If it belongs to one of the islanders I might get leprosy!’

‘Pick up the towel with this, then, and put it back where it came from’ – Dame Beatrice produced a piece of paper – ‘and hurry up. Time is of the essence in these skin diseases. The open pores, you know.’

He came back later to discover that she had a small bottle in her hand.

‘This should obviate any possible ill-effects,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It smells good, too. Tip it into the bath when you have about six inches of water, preferably tepid. Use no soap. Conclude the ablutions with a cold shower.’

Ten minutes later Mrs Drashleigh appeared.

‘I can’t understand it.’ she said. ‘
Did
you tell Clement to have a bath?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s having one! Without any fuss! I can’t understand it! He’s never obeyed anyone before.’

‘He thought it a case of necessity,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Obedience should depend upon that, don’t you think?’
The
party which set out next morning consisted only of Peterhouse, Dame Beatrice, Caroline, Telham, a local guide, and Mrs Drashleigh. They went in two cars to the hill village from which the mules were to be hired. A donkey for Dame Beatrice was not available, the reason, she suspected, being that for donkeys it was customary to charge a lower hiring-fee than for their unfertile offspring.

The village was dirty and charming. The wooden houses, stinking and insanitary, had balconies, courtyards, and galleries. The hillside beyond the village was terraced for crops. The cavalcade passed by the flank of a vineyard so widespread that the owners, as the guide, a short, swart, cut-throat man, explained, were obliged to move house frequently in order to keep it under complete cultivation.

The road the company were following degenerated into a narrow, precipitous path which zigzagged, black and dangerous, up the mountain-side until, at a thousand feet, it entered some beautiful woods of chestnut and laurel. In the clearings there was heather and where the belt of trees ended there was no other form of vegetation until the pinewoods began. At just on two thousand feet the party reached their goal and could see, beyond the cave, the dark-grey lava streams, immobile now, which had flowed in the sixteenth century from the huge volcanic crater up above.

The cave itself was rather disappointing. It was big enough – there was no doubt about that – but it penetrated only a comparatively short distance into the mountain-side. There was a sudden relief from the brilliance of the sun, an interlude of slightly alarming gloom, and then, as the eyes became accustomed to this, there were the embalmed dead men, all twenty-three of them, seated around their stone table in a dignified silence which seemed to rebuke the onlooker. Each was wearing a mask and his robes of state.

‘There!’ said Mr Peterhouse. ‘Twenty-three dead men, and all of them kings! A sight worth seeing, I trust? Of course, all the bodies are mummified. They would not look so perfect otherwise. And what do you think of their
robes
and death-masks? Slightly Aztec in feeling, would you say?’

All that Dame Beatrice noted was that one of the dead kings was taller than the others, but she made no comment upon this.

‘I would have thought African,’ said Mrs Drashleigh. ‘Zanzibar, you know.’

Nobody else contributed an opinion, and Caroline created an unpleasant diversion by clutching Peterhouse and suddenly screaming:

‘He moved! The twenty-third one! I saw him move! Take me out! Take me out of here!’

Her brother swore nervously and gave her a slight shake. Mrs Drashleigh laughed, a sound rather like the neighing of a horse. Peterhouse clicked his tongue. The guide went up to the twenty-third robed skeleton and stared into its mask, then he spat for luck and announced abruptly that all would leave the cave.

A picnic meal had been provided by, and brought from, the hotel. As, by this time, it was past midday and the majority of the company were hungry, the food was hailed with considerable enthusiasm, especially as the preparation of the picnic dissipated the atmosphere induced by Caroline’s inexplicable outburst. Mrs Drashleigh insisted upon presiding, in a somewhat officious manner, over the arrangements, but, freed from the onus of managing, or attempting to manage, Clement, she proved efficient enough, and, as she did most of the running about, nobody offered any objection to her as self-appointed organizer.

When the food had been disposed of and the last bottle of beer had been given to the guide, some of the party suggested that a further ascent of the mountain would be enjoyable. The opinion of Dame Beatrice, the oldest of the company, was solicited by Peterhouse. She replied:

‘I should like to climb far enough to see El Pino de la Virgen, which, I understand, is at two thousand five hundred feet.’

The guide was pleased with this suggestion and fell in
with
it volubly, explaining that the Pine of the Virgin was the biggest tree in the world, yes, and in the Garden of Eden also. Impressed, albeit not convinced, by these assertions, the party mounted their mules and resumed their mountain pilgrimage. The path was steeper than before, and appeared, to one, at least, of the company, very dangerous.

‘I’m not going any further!’ cried Caroline, suddenly. ‘Look at where the rocks have fallen! We shall all be killed!’