Secret of the Skull Read online

  1. Great Aunt Mirna has very little money.

  2. Great Aunt Mirna has credit cards in her purse.

  3. The credit cards are not in Great Aunt Mirna’s name. Conclusion: Great Aunt Mirna has nicked the credit cards. This looks like an open-and-shut case!

  BUT IS IT? Could there be an innocent explanation? What other explanations might there be . . .?

  1. Mirna is looking after the cards for a friend. This seems unlikely. Why would she? And for half a dozen friends?

  2. Mirna has applied for credit cards using fake names. That’s a huge no-no in itself! That’s called fraud!

  3. Mirna just happened to find these cards lying in the street. Also unlikely. Why hasn’t she said anything? Why is she keeping them?

  4. Mirna has a new hobby – making imitation credit cards out of salt dough and cardboard. Kind of a handicraft. Yeah, right.

  So! COULD there be an innocent explanation? Doesn’t look like it . . .

  WAIT! HUGE moral dilemma!

  ON THE ONE HAND: If Mirna is guilty, then I have a duty to say so. If I turn a blind eye, I wouldn’t simply be bending the rules, I’d be tying them in a knot. What about the people whose credit cards have been stolen? If one of them came to me for help, I wouldn’t hesitate to expose whoever was guilty. Justice must apply to EVERYONE, EQUALLY. What right do I have to make an exception? ON THE OTHER HAND: Mirna has had a tough life and she’s poor and she’s finally made contact with her family again. If she’s guilty, couldn’t things be put right quietly and Mirna’s crime be looked on as a one-off, a bad mistake? Should I take her circumstances into account? SHOULD I show more compassion?

  Can ANY crime be excused? Or justified? If so, to what extent? If not, why? If Mirna IS guilty and I tell the world, then whose side would I be on? Whose side SHOULD I be on?

  Perhaps . . . I should turn the job down? No, that would be chickening out. And I don’t do that.

  Perhaps . . . I should do what I’ve always told myself a good detective should do – remain OBJECTIVE and IMPARTIAL and DETACHED.

  I really, really, REALLY hope she’s innocent . . .

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, MONDAY, Skull and I walked back to his house after school. Although his street was only a short walk from my own, the houses were very different. They were sort of boxish and arranged in pairs, two separate homes forming one chunky building. They had tall roofs and regularly-spaced windows, which made them look rather toy-like, as if some giant kid had clicked them all together to make a play road.

  Skull’s house was towards the far end of the street. Unlike most of the neighbouring houses, his had a small porch built on to the front. There was also a garage attached to the side, which I guessed was a fairly recent addition. Its shallow-sloped roof made it look like that giant kid had been in a hurry and left it leaning against the main bulk of the house.

  Skull’s dad was cooking the tea, his mum was still at her desk in the dining room. (Both Skull’s parents worked from home, after having been made redundant from other jobs the previous year.) Great Aunt Mirna was sitting in the living room, flicking through a hefty catalogue from a DIY store.

  ‘Sledgehammers . . . sledgehammers . . .’ she muttered to herself as she whipped pages aside. ‘Chain saws, no . . . Cement mixers, no . . .’

  ‘What do you want a sledgehammer for?’ said Skull.

  Mirna grinned up at him. She had a round, wrinkly face with owlish glasses. Her dark hair, silver at the roots where she hadn’t dyed it for a while, was pinned up in a bun. ‘Your father’s going to get rid of this hideous fireplace,’ she said brightly. Her East European accent was very broad, but her English was excellent. ‘This room always did look better without it. Nobody around here has one of these hideous things in their lounge any more!’

  She was right, the fireplace was indeed hideous. It was one of those thick, lumpy stone things you see in places which haven’t been redecorated since about 1985. It was a total fake as well – the house had no chimney, the wall where the fireplace stood backed on to the garage!

  ‘Aunt Mirna,’ protested Skull, ‘Dad built that fireplace himself. I’m sure he’s never even mentioned it to you, let alone said he wanted it gone.’

  Mirna frowned to herself, letting the catalogue on her knees close with a slap. ‘Well, he definitely said he wanted something gone,’ she said.

  Skull shot me a let’s-change-the-subject look. ‘This is my friend Saxby,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ said Aunt Mirna, giving me a firm handshake. ‘Nice to meet you, Saxby. That’s a very unusual name.’

  ‘It’s medieval, apparently,’ I said with a smile. ‘I’ve been hearing all about the Skulyevic family history. I expect it’s wonderful to have found Skull, er, I mean, Peter here and his mum and dad after all this time.’

  Mirna sat back in her armchair with a soppy expression on her face. Her spindly hands grasped one of Skull’s, and she patted it gently as she spoke.

  ‘Thoughts of my family are what kept me going,’ she said, ‘through the dark years of military rule in my country. In a strange way, I suffered much less than a lot of people in Vojvladimia. I wasn’t mistreated in that prison and at least I was fed. Plenty can’t even say that. My only regret is that I’m here too late to see my brother Emerik again. I did miss him, all those years. But at least we still have his work, we have his poetry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Skull. He turned to me. ‘Have you read any of my granddad’s poems?’

  ‘Actually, no. But I’d like to,’ I said. To be perfectly honest, I was only being polite. I’ve never been much of a poetry fan. There are a couple of limericks I like, but that’s my limit, really.

  Skull and Great Aunt Mirna bustled over to the bookshelves and started taking down armfuls of slightly faded little hardbacks. As I watched them, reluctantly I had to marvel at Mirna. She had obviously settled into the Skulyevic household as comfortably as if she really was one of the family.

  She might have been Mirna Skulyevic. But I was having doubts. She might have been telling the truth about her past. But I had reason to believe that there was something sinister going on here. Something that went way beyond any stolen credit cards.

  Have you spotted why I was suspicious? There was a mismatch between what ‘Mirna’ had said, and what Skull had told me back in the shed. She might have made a simple slip of the tongue, but her English was otherwise perfect. I was on my guard.

  Can you work out what was troubling me?

  The day before, Skull had told me that Mirna had never left Vojvladimia until a few weeks ago. OK. So, why did she say, referring to the hideous fireplace, ‘This room always did look better without it’?

  When exactly could she possibly have seen this room before? She’d been out of touch with the family for years, she can’t even have seen photos or been told about it.

  As I said just now, it might have been a slip of the tongue, but it seemed unlikely when her command of English was so good. Besides, she also said that ‘Nobody around here has one of these hideous things in their lounge any more’. An odd thing to know, if you’ve never even visited the country before. Besides, she also said ‘That’s a very unusual name’. I suppose if she’d studied English, she’d have an idea of what sort of names were common or not in the UK, but on top of everything else, I couldn’t help feeling it was a suspiciously precise thing to say.

  Skull handed me one of the books they’d gathered up. It was a slim, slightly dusty volume, a bit dog-eared at the corners. While Skull and Mirna eyed me eagerly, I opened the book at random and read aloud the first poem that caught my eye. It began:

  BEAUTY

  0 swiftly, swiftly, swiftly,

  Falls the jam, plopping like a sandwich

  There

  Upon the carpet, upon the dancing mice

  That spin eternal webs of sorrow

  O’er frog, and tree, and bicycle . . .

  I Ahad to stop there. I’m
no judge of good poetry but I was pretty sure I’d never heard such a load of old rubbish in all my life. Maybe it lost something in translation into English. Or maybe not.

  ‘Beautiful,’ muttered Mirna. ‘Emerik had such a lyrical turn of phrase.’

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Skull. ‘My granddad’s still Vojvladimia’s greatest-ever poet.’

  Good grief.

  ‘Emerik’s poems are so powerfully rich in symbols and meaning,’ said Mirna, her eyes shining with pride.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they’re very, er . . . moving.’

  Fortunately, tea was ready at that exact moment, so we all went to eat. Unfortunately, Mirna and Skull kept reading out sections of Emerik Skulyevic’s poetry all through the meal. Soon, Skull’s mum and dad were joining in and reciting stuff from memory. There was a weird little verse about zebras and an even weirder little verse about telephones made out of cheese, or something like that. I was trying not to listen – it nearly put me off my food.

  A little while later, as I was zipping up my coat and pulling on my woolly hat before heading home in the freezing cold, I managed to have a quiet word with Skull in the narrow hallway which led to the front door.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ I whispered, ‘don’t take any further action. You don’t need to keep tabs on what Mirna is up to or anything like that.’

  I was careful to make sure I said nothing about my suspicions. I needed to establish the truth before making any accusations. If I was right, it was vitally important that Skull did nothing to alert Mirna to the possibility that her cover was blown.

  ‘You think she’s innocent, then?’ hissed Skull hopefully.

  ‘I think it’s absolutely essential that you do nothing,’ I whispered. ‘Leave it to me. Understood?’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ whispered Skull, doing a miniature salute.

  The doorbell rang. It turned out to be a delivery man from SuperSave, with a week’s worth of groceries.

  ‘My parents get everything online,’ tutted Skull, as the delivery man hefted boxes into the kitchen. ‘They don’t go anywhere from one week to the next. Too busy working. I swear they’d never leave the house if they had the choice. Oh, by the way, before you go, I thought you might like to borrow this.’

  He handed me the volume of Emerik Skulyevic’s poetry we’d been looking at before tea. ‘You seemed so keen on my granddad’s work, I thought you might like to read more of it.’

  ‘That’s . . . very kind of you,’ I said weakly, as I took it from him. ‘I’ll, um, look forward to it.’

  When I got home, I phoned my great friend Isobel ‘Izzy’ Moustique, St Egbert’s School’s top brainiac and all-round Information Guru. I told her all about the Skulyevic situation and asked her to dig up whatever research might be relevant.

  After that, I went and huddled up in my Thinking Chair, wrapped in the chunkiest blanket I could find. It seemed that there was much more to this case than there’d first appeared. Whatever was going on, it went way beyond a few stolen credit cards.

  A Page From My Notebook

  Whichever way I approach this problem, it gets more tangled-up and mind-baffling the more I think about it!

  Could I have got things the wrong way around? COULD Mirna actually BE Mirna? If not, WHO IS SHE? If so, where am I going wrong?

  Could it be that I’ve allowed myself to get

  sidetracked? Could SOMEONE ELSE be the guilty party? Could someone else have PLANTED those credit cards on Mirna, knowing that she’s a little absent-minded?

  No, wait a minute. That creates even MORE questions:

  1. WHY would someone else be doing it?

  2. WHO might this someone else be?

  • Surely not Skull himself – he alerted me to the problem!

  Or might that be a double bluff?

  • Could it be Skull’s MUM? Could it be Skull’s dad, ANTONIN? Mirna appears to have outstayed her welcome, with Skull’s mum at least. BUT . . .to deliberately implicate Mirna in a crime? That’s a bit drastic, surely?

  All in all, I think the most likely scenario is still that Mirna is a phoney. BUT . . . if so, how do we explain the passport, other documents and personal odds and ends Skull says she’s got?

  Is Mirna innocent? Is she as guilty as a toddler with chocolate all round its mouth? If she’s the phoney I suspect, I’m left with a problem: Have I got the heart to reveal to the Skulyevic family that she’s a total fake?

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  SS-PLOPP! A QUIVERING DOLLOP OF what looked like scrambled egg landed on my plate.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to the rock-faced dinner lady, giving her my nicest smile. ‘Um, I asked for the vegetable pie?’

  The rock-faced dinner lady glared at me. ‘That is the vegetable pie,’ she grumbled.

  ‘Thanks very much, looks delicious,’ I said quickly. I hurried away from the lunch queue and found somewhere to sit.

  It was the day following my visit to Skull’s house, and as Skull and I were in different groups for most subjects, I hadn’t yet seen him to make sure he was doing as he was told – leaving the whole Mirna situation well alone.

  As I was beginning to prod the vegetable pie with a fork and worrying that it might start prodding me back, I was joined by Izzy. We swapped notes for a couple of minutes about how aaaawwwful the history supply teacher was. Izzy flipped open her sandwich box and started nibbling at an exotic-looking wholemeal wrap filled with interesting sauces.

  ‘That looks nice,’ I said, hungrily.

  ‘It is,’ she said.

  ‘Got a spare one?’

  ‘No.’

  I went back to prodding the pie. ‘Did you find out anything after I called last night?’

  ‘Yes, I certainly did!’ declared Izzy. She dusted crumbs from her fingers and pulled a folder from her school bag. ‘Although I have a feeling you may already know most of it.’

  ‘Never mind, let’s hear what you’ve got,’ I said, chancing a sniff at the pie. Smelled OK, actually.

  Izzy flipped a few sheets out of the folder. ‘You’ve heard of the Minkstreet and Batt bullion robbery?’

  If I’d dared to start eating any of that pie, I’d now have spluttered it back out again. ‘You bet I have!’ I cried. ‘Third biggest robbery of gold bars in English criminal history! A bunch of crooks got away with about thirty million pounds’ worth, if I remember right?’

  Izzy consulted her print-outs. ‘Thirty-two and a half million,’ she said, nodding. ‘The Minkstreet and Batt Investment Bank was reckoned to have the most secure underground vault in London. The thieves burned their way through the door.’

  ‘That’s going back a while, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it about forty years ago?’

  Izzy consulted her print-outs again. ‘Forty-one,’ she said.

  I screwed up my face trying to recall the details of the case. (Note to self: one day, put together a proper encyclopedia-type book on all these old real-life investigations! Sherlock Holmes kept saying he’d do it, and he never did! Don’t make the same mistake!)

  ‘They were all caught,’ I said. ‘It took several weeks, and the gang had split up the gold and gone their separate ways, but they were all tracked down in the end. What was the name of the leader? She was a really nasty piece of work.’

  Izzy read from her notes. ‘Elsa Moreaux. Half French, half German. You’re right, she had a long list of convictions for various violent armed robberies, starting from when she was just nineteen. Once she was locked up, she quickly got a reputation as the prison’s toughest and most intimidating inmate.’

  Izzy slipped a sheet of paper over to me. Among all the data was a photo of Elsa Moreaux, taken in a police station. It showed a young woman with fair hair, holding up a prisoner number and scowling at the camera in a way which would make even a rock-faced dinner lady dive for cover.

  ‘That’s the only known picture of her,’ said Izzy, ‘taken thirty-eight years ago. According to several sources, she was unchained
for two minutes while they took that shot, and in that time she managed to knock out four guards and badly injure another three. And break the camera. Very dangerous lady.’

  ‘She looks it,’ I whistled. ‘Am I right in thinking they never recovered her share of the gold? Worth about seven or eight million pounds?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Izzy. ‘All the rest was traced, but hers has never been found.’

  ‘Must be worth several million more in today’s money,’ I muttered to myself.

  ‘Now then,’ said Izzy, leaning over the table. ‘I’ve dug up a couple of facts about her you may not know.’ For a moment, I thought she was about to do her slightly smug eyebrow-raising thing (which always happens when she thinks she’s proving she’s cleverer than I am! Huh!) But she didn’t. This was obviously serious stuff she’d discovered.

  ‘Fact number one,’ she continued, ‘Elsa Moreaux was finally released from prison just over a year ago. The police kept a twenty-four hour watch on her from that moment on.’

  ‘Why? Because of the missing gold?’

  ‘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.