Secret of the Skull Read online

  The

  Saxby Smart

  Private Detective

  series:

  The Curse of the Ancient Mask

  The Fangs of the Dragon

  The Pirate’s Blood

  The Hangman’s Lair

  The Eye of the Serpent

  Five Seconds to Doomsday

  The Poisoned Arrow

  Secret of the Skull

  Saxby Smart’s Detective Handbook

  Find fun features, exclusive mysteries and much more at:

  www.saxbysmart.co.uk

  Find out more at:

  www.simoncheshire.co.uk

  To Constable Cheshire (1937-2010) who told many a detective story.

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Piccadilly Press Ltd, 5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR

  www.piccadillypress.co.uk

  Text copyright © Simon Cheshire, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  The right of Simon Cheshire to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 84812 055 6 (paperback)

  eISBN: 978 1 84812 178 2

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD

  Cover design and illustration by Patrick Knowles

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION:

  IMPORTANT FACTS

  CASE FILE TWENTY-TWO:

  SECRET OF THE SKULL

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CASE FILE TWENTY-THREE:

  DIAMONDS ARE FOR HEATHER

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CASE FILE TWENTY-FOUR

  THE GUY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  INTRODUCTION:

  IMPORTANT FACTS

  My name is Saxby Smart and I’m a private detective. I go to St Egbert’s School, my office is in the garden shed, and this is the eighth book of my case files. Unlike some detectives, I don’t have a sidekick, so that part I’m leaving up to you – pay attention, I’ll ask questions.

  CASE FILE TWENTY-TWO:

  SECRET

  OF THE

  SKULL

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  SCOTLAND YARD, LONDON. FBI HEADQUARTERS, Washington DC. Saxby Smart’s Crime HQ, my garden shed. Three major centres of crime-busting operations. But which is the odd one out?

  The answer is: my garden shed. Reason: because the other two have got heating systems, and my bloomin’ shed hasn’t. During the coldest months of the year, instead of concentrating on being a brilliant schoolboy detective, I have to concentrate on having enough blankets and woolly hats in the shed to stop me from shivering while I’m working on case notes.

  It’s not fair. I bet Inspector Whatever-Name of the Yard never has this trouble! The only thing I like about the winter is that at least I’m free of hayfever for a few months.

  I was shivering in my shed the day I was asked for help by a kid in my year group at St Egbert’s School who we always call The Skull. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was wrapped up in a thick blanket, nestled in my Thinking Chair (the battered old leather armchair where I do all my detective-type thinking).

  I was busy going through my notebook and writing up some observations on The Case of the Shrinking Monkey. It had been a long but fairly routine investigation, so I won’t bore you with the details of it here. I was rapidly sliding into a bad mood, partly because of the cold and partly because the thick woollen gloves I was wearing meant the pen kept slipping out of my fingers. I glanced up at the tall, teetering piles of gardening and DIY stuff I’m forced to share the shed with. You’d think whopping great piles of junk would at least act as insulation, wouldn’t you? But no, apparently not.

  There was a knock on the shed door and a voice called out, ‘Hello? Anyone at home?’

  ‘Come in!’ I called back. ‘Welcome to the South Pole – mind out for the penguins!’

  An icy blast of air sliced through the shed as the door opened and The Skull came in. Calling him The Skull makes him sound like he had a black cloak and an evil cackle, but Peter Skulyevic (pronounced skull-ee-ay-vitch) was just a regular kid. I’d walk to school with him sometimes, as he lived only one street away from me. He tramped into the shed wearing a chunky hooded anorak to which a number of damp leaves were sticking, and fleece-lined boots which had clearly been soaking up icy puddles for an hour or two.

  Everyone called him The Skull – or simply Skull, or occasionally Jack Skull-ington – for two reasons. Firstly, because Skulyevic is so unusual and long it was just crying out to be nicknamed. Secondly, because of his equally unusual head. It was rather domed, and his hair was perfectly flat, and the impression you got when you looked at him was . . . well, very skull-like.

  It was a terribly unfortunate coincidence of name and looks. What made the effect worse was the way he appeared to have a permanent smirk on his face. He was one of those people who seem to be about to laugh out loud, or start giggling about something, for no reason.

  He could drive teachers barmy. ‘Perhaps you’d like to share the joke with the rest of the class?’ they’d demand, or ‘Have I said something funny?’ To which he would innocently reply, ‘No. Honestly.’ And then he’d look like he was smirking all over again.

  Nice guy. Very good at model trains.

  ‘Here, you can sit in my Thinking Chair,’ I said, shifting my stuff over on my desk so I could sit on it. ‘Do you want a blanket?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ he smirked. ‘I think it’s rather cosy in here.’ He settled back in the chair.

  ‘Now then,’ I said, ‘how can I help you? I have the feeling that you’ve only come here as a last resort. You’ve been making your own investigations? Perhaps secretly tailing a suspect this afternoon?’

  He stared at me. ‘But . . . Yes! How could you possibly know that?’

  I’d made an educated guess based on three things: the freezing weather, his appearance and where he lived. Have you worked out what I’d been thinking?

  ‘It’s a very cold day today,’ I said. ‘Not many people are going to be out and about longer than they need to be. You live only one street away from here, so you could reach this shed in a matter of minutes. But your boots have clearly been soaking up puddles for quite a while. You’ve been out for ages.

  ‘The fact that all those wet leaves are sticking to your coat implies you’ve been around a lot of foliage too. Been gardening? Hardly, in this weather. I know something’s going on, that you’ve got some kind of problem, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So perhaps you’ve picked up all those leaves while trying to stay out of sight? Behind hedges or trees? Why would you want to stay hidden? So that someone doesn’t spot you.’

  He scratched his round head. ‘Yes, well, when you put it like that, it’s very simple, really.’

  ‘Who is it you’ve been following?’ I asked.

  ‘My aunt,’ he said sadly. ‘Or rather, my great-aunt – she’s my grandfather’s
sister.’

  ‘And why were you following her?’

  He sighed, reluctant to speak for a moment. ‘I think she’s turned to a life of crime. I think she’s been stealing credit cards.’

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  ‘AND WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?’ I asked.

  ‘A few days ago,’ said Skull, ‘I was clearing my homework off the dining room table, and I accidentally knocked Great Aunt Mirna’s handbag off the chair she’d left it on. All her stuff spilled out across the floor. I was embarrassed, but there was nobody else around so I quickly gathered everything up and put it back in the handbag.’

  ‘But not before you’d noticed something odd?’ I suggested.

  ‘Right,’ replied Skull. ‘There were several credit cards in among everything else. I’m pretty sure Aunt Mirna doesn’t even have a bank account, not in this country, let alone any credit cards. Besides, each card had a different name on it.’

  ‘What names? Anyone you know?’ I asked.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Umm, I think one of them might have been . . . er, Robinson? I don’t know, I can’t remember.’

  Great. No help at all. Thanks. ‘No problem,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘I was just worried about getting everything back in the bag, so nobody would notice,’ explained Skull.

  ‘But you’re sure that’s what you saw?’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have been mistaken?’

  ‘Yes and no. I mean, yes I’m sure, no I wasn’t mistaken.’

  I huddled up in my blanket. It felt like the temperature in the shed was falling faster than a giant rock chucked off a cliff. I decided to gather the facts as quickly as possible.

  ‘Why would Aunt Mirna turn to crime?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, she has no money,’ said Skull, shrugging. ‘She’s got quite a bit coming, but it hasn’t turned up yet.’

  ‘Why is that? You said she didn’t have a bank account in this country? She’s been living abroad?’

  ‘Oh no, she’d never even been to the UK until nearly three months ago,’ said Skull. ‘She’s lived in Vojvladimia all her life.’

  ‘Veggie-where?’ I muttered.

  ‘Voj-vlad-eee-me-a,’ repeated Skull slowly.

  I think I must have stared blankly at him. Either that or the cold had frozen my face.

  ‘In the Balkans?’ Skull went on. ‘Where my family comes from? Remember?’

  I suddenly remembered. ‘Oh yeah! Sorry!’ I cried, going a bit red.

  What I’d remembered was that Skull had stood up in class a couple of terms ago and told us about his family tree. We were doing a history project on ancestors. For most of the class, research had turned up nothing terribly interesting, but not in Peter Skulyevic’s case.

  For generations, the Skulyevic family had lived in the tiny Balkan province of Vojvladimia. (I had no idea where that was. I hadn’t wanted to say I had no idea where that was, so I had quietly looked it up when I got home – according to my atlas, it’s a little crinkly rectangle on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, just opposite Italy. I really ought to pay more attention during geography.)

  About thirty-something years ago, there was a civil war in Vojvladimia and the government was taken over by the army. The guy in charge was a brutal dictator who started locking up anyone he didn’t like. And if he really didn’t like them, he had them shot. Among the many, many people he disliked was Emerik Skulyevic, Peter’s granddad. Emerik was quite a well-known poet, and had been very critical of the army.

  Emerik managed to escape along with his seven-year-old son Antonin, Peter’s dad, by hiding in the back of a truck that was leaving the country. On the way, the truck drove through a military camp filled with soldiers who would have killed the pair of them on sight if they’d been caught.

  Emerik and young Antonin arrived as refugees in the UK a few months later. From that point on, Emerik campaigned against the dictator and also continued to be quite a well-known poet. Five years ago, the military government in Vojvladimia was finally overthrown. Freedom returned and everyone who’d been locked up was released.

  Peter’s granddad intended to return to his homeland at once, but he needed a hip operation and couldn’t travel until he was fully recovered. Sadly, he died before he could make the trip and see Vojvladimia again.

  As Peter had finished his story, standing at the front of the classroom, there was absolute silence. Mrs Penzler, our form tutor, had dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

  ‘Did he not make it through the operation, Peter?’ she’d asked softly.

  ‘Yes, but he got run over by an ambulance on the way out of the hospital,’ Peter had told us. ‘Sad, really. His new hip was so good he was walking faster than he’d done in years.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Penzler had said. She’d turned to the class. ‘Any questions?’

  Almost everyone had put up their hand. The girls had wanted to hear some of Emerik’s poetry. The boys had wanted to know how many people the army had shot.

  Meanwhile, back in my freezing cold shed, Skull continued.

  ‘After Vojvladimia was freed, my dad often wondered what had become of Granddad’s sister, Mirna. Dad really didn’t remember her, it was too long ago, but she would have been the only other member of the Skulyevic family still alive. She’d been arrested by the army before Emerik could escape. Throughout the dictatorship there was very little information allowed in or out of the country, and Emerik never heard from her again. So you can imagine how overjoyed Dad was when she called us, out of the blue, a few months ago.’

  ‘I have to ask this,’ I said. ‘You’re sure it was really her?’

  Skull nodded. ‘We all asked exactly the same thing. But there’s no doubt. She’s got her passport, and various odds and ends from years ago, and she definitely recognised Dad from when he was a boy. Mirna is definitely Mirna. She’s, er, what’s the phrase . . . quite a character.’

  ‘Which is what adults say when they mean “a right pain in the backside”,’ I translated.

  Skull pulled a kind of yeah-hmm-oh-well face. ‘She’s loads of fun, always making us laugh. But she’s a bit . . . dippy. She found some varnish in the cupboard under the stairs and painted the kitchen walls with it. And she keeps phoning all the neighbours and having street parties at eleven o’clock at night. Dad says we’ve all got to remember that she spent years locked up by the military. She’s bound to be a bit eccentric.’

  ‘And she lives with you now?’ I said.

  Yeah-hmm-oh-well-face. ‘When she turned up in person, nine weeks ago, she said she was staying for a few days and would be off on her travels again. She’s decided to see the world, you see, enjoy her freedom after being imprisoned for so long.’

  ‘Good for her. But . . . ?’

  ‘But she’s still sleeping in the spare room. She got to the UK by doing odd jobs and spending her earnings on train tickets. But she’s got no money at all at the moment. She’s waiting for some bank in Vojvladimia to forward her a load of cash it’s been holding. I don’t quite understand the details of it. There’s some sort of mix-up.’

  ‘Could she borrow some money?’

  ‘Mum and Dad have offered to lend her some, but she won’t take it. Which is kind of a relief, because we haven’t got any spare anyway. She keeps saying she wants to send us on holiday as soon as her money comes through. A few weeks ago, Dad happened to mention that we hadn’t been able to afford our usual week at the seaside for a couple of years, so Mirna’s insisting she pay. She says we’re her only family, and she wants to repay us for welcoming her and letting her stay and all that.’

  ‘What do your mum and dad think about that?’ I asked.

  ‘To be perfectly honest,’ sighed Skull, ‘Mum’s counting the minutes till the money arrives and Mirna can be off on her travels again. Dad thinks much the same, but he won’t say so. As far as he’s concerned, she’s his last relative, his last link back to Vojvladimia, so although she’s a bit of a handful, he likes having her around. I mean,
we’re all very fond of her, it’s just that . . .’

  ‘She’s a bit of a handful,’ I said. ‘And now there’s this business with the credit cards.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Skull. He shifted forward in the chair. In the shed’s icy chill, our breath puffed like balls of steam. ‘I’m really worried she’s getting into trouble. I think she’s stealing because she’s got no money. I think all those years locked up have taken their toll on her.’

  ‘Do you have any other leads to follow?’ I asked. ‘When you followed her earlier today, where did she go?’

  ‘I’ve kept a close eye on her for days,’ said Skull. ‘But she’s done nothing suspicious. This morning, she said she was going to visit this lady she’s got friendly with from the Post Office who lives in Doyle Avenue. And that’s what she did! Straight to number eighteen, stayed for forty-five minutes and straight home again. Then I came here to see you.’

  ‘You can stop worrying,’ I declared, ‘Saxby Smart is on the case! I think the first thing for me to do is to meet Great Aunt Mirna myself. I’ll come over to your house after school tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Skull with a smile. Well, a broader smile than the one he always had.

  I put my case notes away in my filing cabinet and we made our way out of the shed. Skull paused at the garden gate which leads on to the alleyway behind the houses.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘if Mirna has turned to a life of crime, if she has been stealing credit cards . . . you won’t tell the police, will you? I mean, I just want her to stop. You know, see the error of her ways. We’d all be horrified if she ended up being arrested in this country, too! Especially Dad.’

  At first, I wasn’t sure what to say. In the end, what I did say was: ‘You mean, you want me to turn a blind eye if she’s guilty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  What? What?

  ‘Er, I see,’ I muttered. ‘Let’s, um, let’s hope she’s innocent . . .’

  A Page From My Notebook

  OK, let’s review the basic facts.