The Aylesford Skull (8 page)

“By God, I’m happy to see you, Bill,” St. Ives said. “We thought you were lost to the Morecambe sands all those years ago. Jack and I found your wagon and your pony on the bottom of the bay just a year back.”

“Old Stumpy!” Kraken said, clearly still lamenting the death of the pony. He shook his head sadly. “How did he look?”

“Tolerably skeletal, to tell you the truth. I was happy enough not to find your own skeleton still driving the wagon, in the employ of Davey Jones.”

“It was a near-run thing, sir. I leapt clear of the wagon, do you see, onto a little rocky shingle that lay above the sands, but was nought but an island. I couldn’t do a blessed thing but sit where I was while poor Stumpy went under, along with the device. It would have been death, pure and simple, to do ought else. I failed poor Stumpy, and I failed you, sir, and I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.”

“There’s no call for it, Bill. You’re quite right about the sands. It would have been death for you to venture off your bit of solid ground. And as for the device, as you call it, we’ve fetched it home again, safe as it ever was, so there’s no failing there, either.”

The two men walked out of the deepening shadows of the barn, into the twilit evening. The air still carried the warmth of the afternoon, and there was the smell of blossom on the breeze. An owl flew past overhead, circled around, and landed on a branch of a nearby oak, regarding the two men openly. Kraken bowed to it – a little nod of the head, and the owl seemed to nod back, as if they were old friends.

“How did you win free in Morecambe, Bill, when the tide came up? And where have you been, for all that? We’ve often thought about you, Alice and I.”

“I’ve been here and there, sir, more than anywhere else. I’d most given up, there on Morecambe Bay. I was safe enough from the Doctor, but I was surrounded by the quicksands and daren’t move. When old Stumpy was gone I was alone and sad-like, thinking about him, and I made up my mind to shift, for better or worse. I’d either walk clear of the sands or follow old Stumpy down. But right then the tide come up raging – the Red Sea come again, sir, with no Moses at hand. The flood picked me up like a blessed leaf and bore me away. I nearly drowned four times a-sailing up the bay, and then I was caught up in some kind of river and was swept down again along the shoreline, going like billy-o, and it was all I could do to raise my head up into the blessed air and take a gulp before I was topsy-turvy again. I found myself in deep water by and by, out in Morecambe Bay proper, where I latched on to a drift log and floated half the night before I was picked up by a cutter out in the Irish Sea.

“It turned out she was a smuggler with a full hold, running for the Irish coast with a sloop hot behind, its guns loaded with grape, or so I was told. The captain was a God-fearing man, or he wouldn’t have hove to and picked me up. They come around fast, fished me out with a hook, and were away again, with me wet and shivering and the seas coming in through the scuppers. It was the delay that cost them their liberty, for the sloop came upon us off what they call the Mountains of Mourne, when we were nearly ashore. They put a four-pound ball through the mainsail and we swung up into the wind, not being fond of death.”

“The smugglers vouched for you, certainly?”

“Aye, they did, but damn-all good it did me. I was transported, and thank God I wasn’t hanged.”

“
Transported?
” St. Ives said. “That was given up years back.”

“Tell that to the judge, sir. That’s what them that spoke for me did. They told the Beak that I was flotsam that they’d fished out o’ the drink, but the judge was a right devil, sir, set up in robes and a wig, and transported me is just what he did. No, sir – what’s been given up and what ain’t been given up is sometimes tolerably similar, if you follow me, depending on who’s doing the giving and the taking. I was four years shearing sheep outside Port Jackson before I won free and set out for home again.”

“And now you’re living hereabouts? We’re neighbors? It scarcely seems plausible.”

“Yes, sir. I’m out on Hereafter Farm.”

St. Ives found himself nearly speechless for a moment. “That would be Mother Laswell’s community of spiritualists?”

“Right as rain, sir. When I run off from Port Jackson I took ship and worked my way back, but I was right worried about being taken up again, and so I slipped ashore by night at Allhallows and lived in the marshes for a time, looking after the flocks for a man named Spode. We didn’t see eye to eye, though, and I made my way south afoot, down along the Medway, where I come upon Mother Laswell, whose horse had lost a shoe. She was sitting by her cart, all to seek, along with the boy Simonides, who was helpless. I lent a hand, seen her home to Hereafter, and stayed on.”

“You’ve been there since?”

“Nigh onto three years now. The farm harbored some bad sorts – I seen that straightaway – hangers on, you might say, taking and not giving, treating her shabby. ‘Mother Laswell,’ I told her, ‘you need new fittings on the garden pump, but you need a tugboat and a pilot a sight worse than that.’ Things had gone adrift on the Hereafter, you see, on account of her having a heart the size of a tub. Once she took someone in, she couldn’t bear to put them out, and they knew it. I could bear it, though, and I set out to tidy things up with a broom and spittle, as they say. I found my sixth sense on account of Mother Laswell, who one fine day I mean to marry, if she’ll have me.”

“Your sixth sense?”

“I know that’s not your way, sir, the mysteries of the spirits and suchlike, but I’ll tell you plainly that you’ve had spirits hereabout, right there in the barn just now, or I’m a hedge pig. It was the boy, wasn’t it, a-searching for his Mary?”

St. Ives gaped at Kraken now, every iota of his scientific soul screaming in protest. “How on
Earth
do you know that?” he asked. “You
saw
the figure of the boy, didn’t you? Sitting on the keg? Surely you were standing in the doorway?”

“No, sir, I weren’t. When I come up along the side of the barn I could
feel
him thereabouts, and quick enough I could see it in your face that you did, too. But I wasn’t standing in no doorway until you saw me a-standing in it. How do I know it was the boy? Because his spirit’s fluttering hereabouts, unsettled like. They’re nought but moths, you see, spirits is, with no blessed place to go unless someone bottles them up and takes them away.”

At that moment Alice appeared from around the side of the barn and stood looking at Kraken’s back. Her face had turned ashen, and for a moment St. Ives thought she would faint, although fainting wasn’t really in her nature. Kraken, seeing something in St. Ives’s demeanor, turned slowly around, looked for a moment at Alice, and then took his hat off and bent his head.

“Bill Kraken, ma’am, in case you’ve forgot me.”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten you, Bill. Never in life.” She stepped forward resolutely, took his hand, and looked hard at him. “It was
you
today, wasn’t it, along by the river?”

“Yes, ma’am. It were.”

St. Ives was aswim yet again. “By the river?” he asked Alice.

“The figure I saw in among the trees this afternoon, wearing that same green shirt.”

“Of course!” St. Ives said, everything coming clear in a rush. “You were the one who came into the wood from Hereafter Farm. The man who wielded the club. My brain must be full of wool.”

“That were me as well. I was coming along through the trees when I caught sight of the missus fishing the old weir. I scarce could credit it. I thought my senses had give out. I knew that Miss Agatha Walton was gone on to glory, and that someone had moved into the farmhouse, but I didn’t know it was you. You was dug so far in at Chingford that I couldn’t feature it, even when I saw Alice with my two eyes. I stood there a-watching her, and it made my heart glad as an oyster. Then I heard someone coming along the other way, and I stepped into the trees not wanting to be seen, and I weren’t seen, although I myself seen well enough, and you can believe me when I say that had I been a carp, the sight would have took the scales off my forearm when I realized who he was. Your old enemy, sir.

“I picked up a stout piece of oak that lay there on the ground, stepped out onto the path, caught up with him in three strides, and laid him out. I thought I’d done for him, but he was up again and staggering. I could see that he was wondering whether he knew me. He’d seen me before, here and there. The last time it was the back of me he seen, driving that wagon over the sands at Morecambe Bay all them years back, but I didn’t remind him of it. I raised the stick again, meaning to take his head off, but he bolted into the trees, bleeding like a pig in a butcher’s yard. I would have made a job of it, too, I can tell you. My blood was up.

“I went back on up to Hereafter and my blood come down a fraction. I took to thinking that he might turn me in to the constabulary, which I couldn’t afford, and I’d find myself in Newgate Prison this time, a-swinging from a gibbet and dreaming of Port Jackson after all. But then I got to thinking about Alice and about you, sir, and I was main happy that you was here in Aylesford, and I knew that I must seek you out and tell you about meeting the Doctor in the wood. I had some hope that you could mayhaps speak to Mother Laswell, too, and shed some light on the murder of Mary Eastman and this grave robbery, which give rise to poor Edward’s ghost, God rest the boy’s soul. And that’s my tale, sir, first to last.”

For the space of a long moment the evening was dead silent. Then the owl flew out of the oak tree, beating the air. Kraken waved his hand in a parting salute to the bird without taking his eyes from St. Ives’s face.

“Narbondo, do you say?” St. Ives asked as the two men moved toward the house.

“It was him, sure enough – the creature who calls himself Narbondo.”

“You’re quite certain?”

“Aye, that I am, and it was him who murdered poor Mary Eastman and robbed his dead brother’s grave of what they call the Aylesford Skull.”

St. Ives could make nothing of this last part, but he knew that grave robbery and murder were nothing to an old hand like Narbondo, and it would have given the man vast pleasure to drench the pike in hemlock, knowing that Alice, whom he would recognize easily enough, would take it along home. St. Ives hadn’t wanted to believe it, despite his suspicions. He had wanted their corner of the world to be at peace. Even now it came into his mind to hope that Narbondo had fled, that he would be anxious to put some distance between himself and the scenes of his various crimes.

He heard Cleo’s laughter now, and the homely sound of Mrs. Langley working in the kitchen. Eddie stood atop the stepladder on the veranda, experimenting with his parachute, which caught the breeze now and very nearly worked. There was the smell of blossom on the breeze, which lent the summer evening a quality that might conceivably be matched in Heaven, but surely nowhere else. He wondered abruptly what Alice was thinking, but he could read nothing in her face.

“Is there evidence, Bill, that it was Narbondo who committed the crime?” he asked. “Certain enough to hang the man?”

“No, sir. Not so as to say ‘evidence.’ The law is a mortal idiot when the fit’s upon it. That’s why I knocked him on the head with the stick when I saw my opportunity. Mother Laswell told me it was him, you see, come back home after all these years to finish what he fomentated as a boy. She saw the murder in the churchyard through the boy Edward’s dead eyes. She woke up in the middle of the night with it. You’ll tell me that it don’t stand to reason, but that’s the way with Mother Laswell. She don’t care a groat for reason. When I caught sight of the Doctor a-sneaking along the path, I knew what she said was true as a piece of scripture.”

“When was Mary Eastman murdered, Bill?” Alice asked.

“Last night, ma’am. After midnight it must have been, for Mary was seen walking in the village late, on her way to the rendezvous, no doubt. He cut her throat in the churchyard, pushed her into an open grave, and left her to bleed out. Murdered the sexton into the bargain.”

“There you have it,” St. Ives said to Alice, who couldn’t keep the effect of Kraken’s words out of her face. “We know who dosed the pike. Clearly he learned that we had settled here in Aylesford, and he saw it as his great good luck to be able to compound his crime. A happy coincidence from his point of view.”

“He would do that?” Alice asked. “Poison children?”

“It would give him great pleasure,” St. Ives told her. “And he has no love for you, not after the hard way you treated him at Eastbourne.”

“My only regret is that we didn’t shoot the man and cast his body from the cliff,” Alice said in a dead-even voice.

Kraken gaped at Alice, as if not quite sure what to make of this pronouncement.

“Sorry to be so bloody minded, Bill,” Alice told him, “but I’ve had my fill of this Dr. Narbondo. Hasbro has put up some lemonade, if you’d like a glass. And you can meet Eddie and Cleo, our children. You’ll be Uncle William from this night on.”

“I’d like that above all things, but would you come out to Hereafter, sir?” Kraken asked St. Ives. “Would you hear her out? Quick-like?”

“
Now
, Bill? There’s perhaps no great hurry. The Doctor will have gone on his way, surely. No murderer tarries in the neighborhood of the crime, not a murderer as conspicuous as Narbondo at any rate.”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, but what you seen in the barn tells otherwise.”

“Does it Bill?”

“Aye, it does. You know the Doctor better than any man alive, sir, better than Mother Laswell, despite that she raised him from a baby, and ...”

“
Raised him from a baby?
” St. Ives was dumbfounded once again.

“Yes, sir. She was his own natural mother. She give him his Christian name, which he threw onto the rubbish heap along with his soul. He’s been gone these thirty years, but now he’s come back, and he’s stolen the Aylesford Skull, the one object that he must not have, and Mother Laswell fears that it’s the end of all things holy if he puts it to use. Come along and speak with her, sir. I’ve got no living right to ask anything of you, and I wouldn’t ask it, neither. But for the sake of us all, I must.”