Island of the Aunts (11 page)

So it wasn’t Josette Sprott who should have been there and wasn’t, and it wasn’t the housekeeper who always had two hours off in the afternoon.

Which meant that it was his son, Lambert.

“Lambert!” bellowed Mr Sprott, standing in the middle of the hallway.

No answer.

“Get him on the intercom,” Mr Sprott told Des.

But though all the rooms were connected electronically, Lambert did not appear.

Mr Sprott was not alarmed, but he was surprised. He had told Lambert when he was coming back and the boy, though an awful sniveller, was fond of his father.

Mr Sprott went to his study, sent out for a secretary, and was soon deep in his business affairs.

But when the housekeeper came back in the early evening, Mr Sprott was reminded of his son once more.

“Didn’t you bring Lambert, sir?” she asked him. Her voice was hopeful. She really hated the boy.

“How could I bring Lambert? I haven’t got him. I never had him—he’s staying here with you.”

“No, he isn’t. There was a message saying he was joining you in America. It was left by the aunt—she said there’d been a call.”

“The aunt? What aunt?”

“The aunt from the agency. She took Lambert to the zoo and when I got back the boy was gone.”

The flapping posters, the notice of the reward, ran through Mr Sprott’s mind. They didn’t seem so funny now.

“I’m sorry, sir, but—”

“Be quiet.” Mr Sprott was scowling. “I’m going to the police. Tell Merton to bring the car round.”

But at that moment, very faintly, a telephone rang upstairs.

It was his personal phone, or rather one of them. Mr Sprott bought mobiles like other people bought matches and now he couldn’t remember which one it was or where he might have left it. Under his bed? On the lavatory cistern? In the cocktail cabinet?

“Find it,” he ordered, and the bodyguard and the secretary and the housekeeper ran all over the house trying to follow the sound.

It was Mr Sprott who reached it just as it was about to stop ringing. It was under a pile of monogrammed underpants in his chest of drawers.

“Hello!” he shouted. He was a man who always shouted into telephones. There were some strange noises; a sort of gulping sound followed by a gabble. “Speak up, damn you. I can’t hear you!”

“It’s me, Daddy. It’s Lambert. I’ve been kidnapped! You’ve got to come and get me!” More gulping, more tears. What a cry-baby the boy was!

“All right, Lambert. I’ll come and get you, but where are you? Speak clearly.”

“I’m on an island. It’s an awful place—”

“What island? Where is it?”

“It’s in the sea.”

Stanley Sprott rolled his eyes. “Yes, Lambert, islands are usually in the sea. But where? Which sea?”

“I dunno—they won’t tell me—but it’s cold. There aren’t any coconuts. I’ve been phoning and phoning you every day.” He broke off, gulping again. “My battery is running out.”

“Lambert, please think. Are there any other islands near by?”

“There’s a couple on one side.”

“What side. East? West? North? South?”

“I dunno. The sun comes up behind them, I think. It’s awful here—it’s weird. There’s these aunts; they’re mad and they give me drugged food. You’ve got to come, you’ve got to! There’s one after me now!”

The line went dead. Mr Sprott stood for a while thinking. An isolated island with two islands to the east of it. And—unbelievably—a posse of aunts.

He gave his orders. “I want the
Hurricane
made ready. I’ll pick her up at London docks. Get a couple of armed men aboard and see there’s plenty of ammunition. Pick them carefully; this mission is secret!”

The
Hurricane
was his yacht—a converted patrol boat and his pride and joy.

It was only then that he went to the police. He would not trust them to find Lambert—that job he would do by himself without telling anybody—but he might as well find out if there were any other clues.

That evening a third picture appeared on the walls of the police station, and in bus shelters and public libraries. This was of Aunt Myrtle, as remembered by the housekeeper and the man who fed the seals in London Zoo. It was even more peculiar than the other two pictures. Aunt Myrtle seemed to be standing in a high wind with her mouth open, and once again no one came forward to say they had seen her.

But Stanley Sprott’s team of researchers were already marking down all the islands in the North Sea and the Atlantic with two islands to the east of them. And the
Hurricane,
with a full complement of arms on board, lay ready at the docks.

Chapter 10

He seemed to be swimming quite slowly and peacefully, though the swell he left as he moved through the water could be felt on shores a thousand miles away.

Above him, the air was filled with flocks of birds which circled him, and the sea creatures ringed him down below. The sky was a hazy gold and the sunsets were glorious and lingering, as though the sun could not bear to go down on such a sight, and the sea glittered and glistened.

As he swam, the kraken hummed, but not all the time. Sometimes he stopped and turned his head to speak to someone who was swimming close beside him and when he did that, the birds in the air fell silent and the underwater creatures moved their fins and flippers carefully, so as not to make a splash. Because the person who was swimming beside the kraken was important, and they wanted to make sure that he understood what the kraken was telling him.

Strange things happened as the kraken moved south from his Arctic hideout. He came level with an oil rig where men were working the night shift. The lights of the rig were only distant specks to the kraken but he paused and changed his Hum to a deeper one, and on the rig a man called Dave O’Hara said:

“I’m going to shut off the waste pipe.”

His mates put down their beer mugs and stared at him.

“Why? What’s got into you? It’s always on at night.” This was true. The outlet pipe spilled its filthy sludge into the water night and day.

“I dunno,” said Dave, “but I’m shutting it off.” And he did so…and the kraken swam on.

On the Island, Herbert was the first to know.

His mother had come out of the sea a few days before and had tried to nag him again.

“You must make up your mind, Herbert,” she had said in the selkie language they spoke when they were alone. “You’re not young any more; and I won’t be around for ever. If you’re going to stop being a seal and start being a man you must do it now.”

For a while, Herbert only looked at her. Then: “Listen!” he said in his quiet and serious voice.

She had listened, and she had heard it because selkies are famous for the sharpness of their ears. Not the Great Hum with which the kraken sent out long-distance messages, but the quiet, thrumming noise he made when he was patrolling the ocean.

“This is not the time to be human, Mother. I shall greet him in the water, and proudly, as a seal.”

It was because of Herbert that Myrtle understood more quickly than the other aunts how near the kraken was. She had tried to play Herbert one of his favourite pieces—a minuet by Mozart. Usually he listened to this with his eyes closed, absolutely enchanted; Mozart was his favourite composer. But now he was restless, eagerly looking out to sea, and then he shook his head once as if to excuse himself and dived into the waves.

Soon it wasn’t only Myrtle who guessed. Aunt Etta saw three snow geese—birds she had never seen on the Island before—and Coral came back from a shell hunt, dancing with excitement.

“The sea is changing colour,” she said. “Only slightly, but it’s changing.”

Then suddenly it seemed as though everyone knew that the time was coming and the last-minute preparations began.

In his bed, the old Captain sat with the telescope glued to his eyes and tried to be gloomy.

“Of course he won’t be like the kraken was in the olden days. He’ll be smaller, like the seals are smaller and the sheep, and the bosoms of the ladies. Maybe he won’t be any bigger than a whale,” said Captain Harper. But if anyone tried to take the telescope away from him he became absolutely furious and, as the kraken came closer, he scarcely slept.

As for the aunts and the children, during those days they seemed to be welded together into one band of workers who thought of nothing except to make the best possible welcome for the kraken when he came. It was impossible to imagine that Fabio and Minette had been drugged and kidnapped against their will not three weeks before. There was no need to give them orders; they knew what needed doing almost as soon as the aunts and they, like the aunts, never spared themselves.

Then one day they too heard the Hum once more. It was the kraken’s Daily Hum, his Working Hum, the Hum with which he cleaned and healed the sea, and it was getting closer, and closer…

There was only one thing which puzzled the aunts. Every so often the Hum stopped and they heard a low rumbling which might have been the kraken speaking. They couldn’t understand the words from that great distance—and in any case none of the aunts spoke Polar—but they could understand the tone, and the feeling they had was that whoever the kraken was talking to was driving him a little mad.

But who could it be? The kraken had always been a loner.

They were soon to find out.

Chapter 11

The Great London Aunt Hunt was still going badly. The pictures of Etta and Coral and Myrtle went on flapping on the walls of police stations everywhere but the people who came to say they had seen one or other of them were obviously barmy. A man came and said a lollipop lady who was helping schoolchildren across the road in Kensington had a moustache and was certainly Aunt Etta, but she wasn’t. Another man said he had seen Aunt Myrtle busking outside a cinema, but he hadn’t. And anyone weighing over a hundred kilos and wearing jewellery was apt to be hauled off by the police in case she was Coral.

“Don’t call me ‘aunt’,” terrified women were begging their nephews and nieces all over London’s streets and, by the time the children had been gone three weeks, the word had almost disappeared.

Minette’s mother, as the days passed with no news, smoked three packets of cigarettes a day, couldn’t sleep without slurping a full tumbler of whisky and allowed her flat to get into even more of a mess than before. Of course in some ways it was easier without Minette who kept trying to tidy up and open windows. All the same, Mrs Danby couldn’t help wishing she had let her have a nightlight.

“And I should have taken her to the seaside—she always wanted to go,” she said to her latest boyfriend.

“You can take her when she comes back,” he said, dropping his empty lager can over the side of the sofa. “Though I’ve never seen much point to the seaside myself. The water comes in, the water goes out—what’s the sense in that?”

Professor Danby too wished he had done some things and hadn’t done others. He had promised every time she came to take Minette to the ice rink and there’d never been time, and he’d known really that she didn’t want an encyclopaedia without pictures for her birthday.

But when they telephoned each other for news of Minette, the Danbys quarrelled as much as ever. They had decided that she had run away, and of course they blamed each other.

“I’m surprised she lasted so long in that pigsty you live in,” the professor said.

“Well, really,” Mrs Danby would reply. “Considering that your place would make an underground tomb on a rainy Sunday look like Disneyland, you’ve got a nerve!”

The Mountjoys were not sorry about anything they had done. They were sure that Fabio had had everything he needed in their house and that in sending him to Greymarsh Towers—and
paying
for it—they had treated him better than any poor child from the back of beyond had a right to expect. But they did wonder whether they should tell Fabio’s mother that he had disappeared, and his other grandparents in South America.

“I really can’t face the thought of having a lot of foreigners coming here and waving their arms,” said Mrs Mountjoy. “They probably paint their faces and don’t wear shoes.”

Old Mr Mountjoy agreed. “Still, she is the boy’s mother. We’ll give it a few more days and then if there’s no news we’ll have to let them know.”

Both the Mountjoys and the Danbys were angry with the police. “You’ve gone cold on the case,” Mrs Danby accused the superintendent.

But she was very wrong. Discovering the third kidnap and the third aunt had given the police a new and important lead. Two days after Stanley Sprott came to report that his son was missing, an “Aunt Myrtle” was seen in Putney swimming baths. She had long greyish hair and an open mouth, which is a silly thing to have in a swimming bath, so it had to be her.

The police wearily pulled her in and sent an officer to Mr Sprott’s house to ask the housekeeper to come and identify her—and learnt that Mr Sprott wasn’t there.

So where was he, they wanted to know. He was supposed to be standing by in case there was news of Lambert.

At first no one would tell him, but when the policeman threatened to get a search warrant, the secretary admitted that he had gone away in his yacht.

“That’ll be the
Hurricane,”
said the superintendent thoughtfully when the officer got back to the station.

They knew a bit about Mr Sprott’s activities and his yacht.

“
I
think we’ll see what he’s up to. He may have got a lead on the boy.”

“What about the other parents—it’s likely the children are all together. Should we tell them?”

“Not yet. If we find them we’ll bring the parents out by helicopter. But we won’t say anything yet.”

The team that Stanley Sprott had sent to the chart room at the British Museum, to look for lonely islands with two islands to the east of them, had found an ancient map with three that seemed likely.

Now the
Hurricane
was steaming to the first of these—a place called Dooneray off the west coast of Scotland. It was a small island and there were no houses marked on it, but it seemed quite likely that the mad aunts who held his son were keeping him imprisoned in a cave.