Secret of the Skull Read online

  ‘But that means . . .!’ I gasped.

  Izzy nodded slowly.

  This information suddenly opened up a couple of obvious possibilities about Mirna.

  I’m sure you’ve already spotted them both.

  Possibility 1: If Mirna was a phoney, could she actually be Elsa Moreaux?

  Possibility 2: If so, could it be that she had returned to her old house to reclaim the gold bullion she’d stolen forty years ago?

  ‘No,’ said Izzy. ‘I can see what you’re thinking, Saxby, and I’m afraid the answer is no. Her old house – Skull’s current address – is the one place the police are sure she didn’t hide the gold. After she was arrested, they searched every last millimetre of the house. They took out the kitchen cupboards, they lifted all the floorboards, they ripped all the furniture apart, they stripped the whole place bare. They dug up the entire garden, too, down to a depth of five metres. Here, take a look at this.’

  She passed me another print-out. It was a clipping from a newspaper dated shortly after Elsa Moreaux’s arrest. A photo showed Skull’s house as it had been forty years before, without its porch or garage and with climbing roses growing up a tall trellis beside the front door.

  ‘Hmm,’ I muttered to myself, ‘at least I was right about that garage being built recently.’

  The photo also showed various uniformed police officers milling about outside the house. Beside them was a huge pile of wrecked furniture. Beside the pile was an enormous mechanical digger, and behind the digger was a series of earth mounds where the garden had once been.

  ‘They almost literally took the place apart,’ said Izzy. ‘No gold. Wherever Elsa Moreaux is, the secret of where it’s hidden is lost along with her. And, don’t forget, she’s out of the UK. The authorities are still watching out for her.’

  I sighed. Then I sighed again. I had to agree with Izzy – it looked like I’d been jumping to conclusions.

  If the stolen gold wasn’t hidden in Elsa Moreaux’s old house, what possible reason could she have for returning there?

  What reason could I have to think that Elsa Moreaux had come back to the UK anyway? I had no reason to doubt that she really was in . . . Where was it, Spain?

  ‘Spain, yes,’ said Izzy. ‘I have a feeling that maybe the Elsa Moreaux connection is just a coincidence. There’s a mystery to be solved here – the mystery surrounding those credit cards – and perhaps the fact that Skull’s house has an interesting story attached to it has sidetracked us?’

  ‘Yes, could be,’ I mumbled. However, I was still troubled by the idea that Mirna was a fake. If she wasn’t the notorious Elsa Moreaux, she was still somebody.

  ‘Talking of credit cards,’ I said, ‘did you find anything out on that score?’

  ‘Sorry, nothing at all,’ said Izzy. ‘There’s no way I can access records on that sort of thing. I’ve got no way of checking up on a stolen card. In any case, credit card theft is quite common. Even if I could track down records of stolen cards, working out which ones Mirna might have nicked would be like finding a needle in a load of haystacks. Sorry.’

  ‘No problem,’ I sighed. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  Izzy finished off her wrap and neatly pierced her carton of apple juice with its little plastic straw. ‘On the other hand, there’s an absolute lorry-load of info about Emerik Skulyevic available. Articles, reviews, all sorts. There were a lot of interviews with him published after the dictatorship in Vojvladimia was overthrown, stuff about his work, his family, his life. Have you read any of Emerik Skulyevic’s poetry?’

  I shuddered slightly. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Izzy. ‘He’s reckoned to have had a very lyrical turn of phrase and to have written poems powerfully rich in symbols and meaning.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. But I thought it was a load of old rubbish, personally.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘It’s a pity we don’t know anyone who actually lives in Vojvladimia right now. This whole problem is made even harder to sort out by the fact that Mirna’s turned up out of the blue.’

  ‘I could ask around on my FaceSpace page,’ said Izzy, clipping the lid back on her lunchbox. ‘Someone might know someone who might know someone.’

  ‘Good idea, keep digging,’ I said.

  Izzy gave me a nod and headed off back to class. I took a last jab at the vegetable pie. Tasted OK, after all.

  The one thought that went through my head at that moment was: Thank goodness I told Skull to take no further action. If Mirna really does turn out to be a dangerous criminal on the scale of Elsa Moreaux, there could be a terrible risk in doing anything which might alert her to my investigation. It was even more vital that Skull kept silent about our suspicions.

  A school bag clunked down on to the table next to me. I looked up to find Skull beaming away.

  ‘Hey, guess what?’ he said, pointing to the bag. ‘I’ve swiped Great Aunt Mirna’s box of treasures, complete with her passport and everything. We could search it all for clues. She probably won’t know it’s gone. Not until about five o’clock, anyway.’

  I slapped a hand to my face.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  I WAS TOO FURIOUS WITH SKULL to do or say anything straight away. I managed to growl a few words, such as ‘twit’, ‘idiot’ and ‘never listen to a bloomin’ word I say’, before the bell went for the start of afternoon lessons.

  By the time the bell went at the end of afternoon lessons, I’d calmed down a bit. As a steady flow of pupils bubbled up and down the school corridors, I grabbed Skull and we walked through the cloakroom and out of the main building.

  ‘Right, we’d better make the best of a bad job,’ I said, zipping up my coat. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Skull, ‘I just wanted to clear Mirna’s name as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I grumbled. ‘What’s in the bag?’

  Inside Skull’s school bag was a rectangular wooden box, about the size of a large cake tin. It was covered in delicately carved patterns.

  ‘My dad remembers this box from when he was very little,’ said Skull, ‘from before Granddad Emerik fled Vojvladimia. It’s been in the family for two centuries.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

  Skull opened it up. The inside of the box was crammed with all kinds of papers, old photographs and odds and ends. There was a small puppet-like toy, also wooden, held together at the joints with tiny twists of wire.

  ‘Granddad Emerik made that for my dad on the day he was born. When Dad saw that again he almost cried!’

  There were a selection of official documents written in Vojvlic (the version of the Croatian language used in Vojvladimia), including what looked like a couple of birth certificates. There was a picture, faded and crumpled, showing a tall man standing in a doorway, wearing a baggy suit.

  ‘That’s Granddad Emerik,’ said Skull. ‘That was taken on the day his first book of poetry was published. Look, he’s put a date and his signature on the back.’

  He had indeed. Out of the box I also took a glossy, freshly issued passport. In it were Mirna Skulyevic’s photo and details, plus a series of border stamps showing that she’d left Vojvladimia, travelled across Europe and arrived in the UK in exactly the way she’d described to Skull’s family.

  ‘Well?’ said Skull. ‘What do you think?’

  There was only one thing I could think. It was impossible, quite impossible, that all these things could have been faked or happened upon by chance. Clearly, much of it was verifiable as genuine by Skull’s dad, Antonin.

  There was only one conclusion I could come to, a conclusion which finally cleared up the question of Mirna’s true identity. I could now be sure of one absolutely definite fact.

  Can you see what that fact was?

  Mirna was Mirna. The Mirna Skulyevic living at Skull’s house was the genuine article. She really was his great-aunt. Nobody else could be in possession of all t
his stuff.

  All that information about the infamous Elsa Moreaux was just a distraction. Izzy had been correct. The link between Skull’s house and that bank robbery from forty-odd years ago was nothing more than a coincidence.

  (Which was good news. I didn’t like the thought of coming face to face with someone as violently dangerous as Elsa Moreaux!)

  ‘Skull, I’ve changed my mind,’ I declared. ‘You bringing me all this stuff has been very helpful.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It’s allowed me to focus my investigation.’ We were nearing the school gates. Kids were dispersing across the playground and the road beyond. ‘Now, hurry up and get that box back, before it’s missed!’

  ‘Right away!’ said Skull.

  He trotted off ahead of me. I was left feeling extremely pleased that some of the dense mist surrounding this case had finally started to clear.

  However . . .

  There was still the important matter of the credit cards to sort out. And the matter of the strange things Mirna had said when I’d visited Skull’s house – the strange things she’d said which had led me to doubt her identity in the first place.

  I drifted into thought. I also drifted slap bang into my other great friend George ‘Muddy’ Whitehouse, the school’s leading expert in all things gadget-related. I nearly knocked him off his feet.

  ‘Sorry, Muddy! I was busy thinking!’

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a couple of days, Saxby,’ he said cheerily. As usual, he was looking like a walking rubbish tip, littered with assorted mud, oil and food stains. He scratched at a yellow one on his pullover. I think it was the vegetable pie from lunchtime. ‘You on an investigation?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m in the middle of a very puzzling problem,’ I said.

  ‘The Case of the Doyle Avenue Forger, is it?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’ I blinked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It was on the news this morning. Didn’t you see it? The police raided a flat opposite where whassisname in Mr Prunely’s class lives.’

  ‘No,’ I shrugged. ‘What was going on?’

  ‘The bloke who lived there got dragged out kicking and screaming in the early hours, apparently. He had a flat full of fake documents – forged banknotes, certificates, passports, money-off coupons, plastic parking permits, lottery tickets – everything you could think of. They’ve been after him for years. He had a whole forgery factory in there. Whassisname was telling me all about it.’

  Suddenly, I stopped dead.

  Those dense mists I mentioned, surrounding this case? They were clearing faster than ever!

  I’d solved the mystery of the credit cards. They weren’t stolen at all, they were forgeries, made by this guy who’d just been caught.

  How did I know? Think way back, to something Skull told me when he visited my garden shed.

  Can you spot the connection between Mirna and the forger?

  ‘This flat in Doyle Avenue,’ I said urgently, ‘was it number eighteen?’

  ‘Er, yes, I think whassisname did say eighteen, yes,’ replied Muddy. ‘I thought you said you hadn’t seen the news?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘The day he came to see me, Skull followed Mirna to number eighteen Doyle Avenue. She wasn’t visiting a “friend from the Post Office” though, she was getting hold of forged credit cards.’

  ‘Now I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Muddy.

  ‘Can you forge credit cards?’ I asked. ‘I thought that sort of thing was very difficult these days, what with all the chips and other security in them?’

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s difficult,’ said Muddy, ‘but not impossible. This guy they just caught must have been using some cutting-edge tech. My guess – from an electronics point of view – is that each card would only have been of use once or twice before it was detected.’

  ‘Which explains why Mirna had half a dozen in her bag,’ I said. ‘She’s probably been getting through heaps of them. And now her supply has been turned off!’

  I thanked Muddy and zoomed out of the school gates. All the way home, fresh questions and ideas kept popping into my brain like lightbulbs being switched on.

  I definitely was going to have to reveal Mirna’s activities to the rest of the Skulyevic family. However, I would still need to handle the matter delicately. What I had to establish now was what Mirna had been using those forged credit cards for. That was now the key to the whole thing. Once I could work out how Mirna had been using the cards, I would have the complete picture.

  As to her motive, the reason she’d done it, well . . . Skull had said she had very little cash. Perhaps she’d got fed up of waiting for her money to be transferred from Vojvladimia? Perhaps those years of being locked up by the military government had affected her more than anyone thought? Perhaps her new-found freedom had gone to her head and she’d taken things too far?

  Another coincidental link between Mirna and Elsa Moreaux – a sad one this time – suddenly occurred to me. They’d both spent decades in prison, but it was the one who’d been innocent for all those years who was now guilty of a crime and who’d probably end up going back behind bars.

  This was one case I really wasn’t looking forward to wrapping up. It felt as if everyone involved, me included, would be losing out in one way or another.

  An hour or two later, I got a call from Izzy.

  ‘Anything turned up?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Izzy. ‘But you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘I’m feeling that way already,’ I told her.

  ‘I had a search around through FaceSpace and one of my cousins has some FaceSpace friends in various parts of Eastern Europe —

  (Not surprising. Izzy had nineteen cousins at the last count, and they were all just like her. I’d have been surprised if one of them hadn’t known anyone in Eastern Europe! For more info on Izzy’s vast family connections, see volume four of my case files, The Hangman’s Lair.)

  ‘— and I’ve found out something very important about Mirna Skulyevic.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re really not going to like it,’ said Izzy.

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘OK. Mirna Skulyevic . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The real Mirna Skulyevic, the sister of Emerik Skulyevic . . .’

  ‘Yeeeees! What?’

  ‘ . . . died in Vojvladimia nearly seventeen years ago.’

  I froze in horror. The phone dropped from my fingers and clattered to the floor.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  B-B-BUT . . .I WHAT? . . . HOW? . . . WHEN? . . . WHY? . . .

  Huh?

  The mind-boggling consequences of what Izzy had just told me were boggling my mind more than it had ever been boggled before. And, what with one thing and another, my mind’s been boggled a lot!

  After a couple of minutes, I regained the power of speech. I scooped up the phone and said, in a feeble voice, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Totally,’ said Izzy. ‘Why is that such a shock? You told me the woman at Skull’s house wasn’t Mirna anyway.’

  ‘Yes . . . but . . . er . . . but . . . this afternoon, I saw conclusive proof that she is Mirna Skulyevic.’

  ‘That’s not possible. She’s dead. I mean, unless Skull’s got a zombie or something living with him, that woman is an imposter.’

  I held a hand to my forehead, as if I was trying to stop my mind from overflowing. ‘Wait a minute. How can Mirna have died years ago and Skull’s family be unaware of that?’

  ‘The country was under a ruthless military dictatorship until very recently, remember,’ Izzy reminded me. ‘Mirna was locked away by the government. Very few people over there knew she’d died, let alone anyone over here!’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said, trying to get my head around it all. ‘How do you know this? What exactly have you discovered?’

 
; ‘Well,’ said Izzy, ‘basically, one of my cousin’s FaceSpace friends knows people in the area of Vojvladimia where the Skulyevic family comes from. Many people there knew Emerik at least, because he was such a well-known poet. Several people who knew Mirna personally swear she died years ago. One of them, a close friend of hers, was given all her belongings because there were no more members of the family in the country at the time.’

  ‘Belongings?’ I said. That wooden box Skull had shown me!

  ‘There were various bits and pieces,’ said Izzy. ‘I don’t know the exact details. They were all packed into one carved wooden box. Some sort of family heirloom, apparently.’

  My heart nearly skipped a beat. ‘What happened to the box?’

  ‘It was given to an English researcher who was in Vojvladimia a few months ago,’ said Izzy.

  ‘Researcher? Researching what?’

  ‘Emerik Skulyevic. An English woman visited the area, gathering any information she could about him and his life. She’s writing his biography, his life story. She’s going to establish an Emerik Skulyevic permanent exhibition in one of the London museums.’

  By now, my heart was skipping along to whatever beat it happened to fancy. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Janet Smith. Which isn’t helpful. There must be hundreds of Janet Smiths around!’

  ‘Yes, quite.’ I smiled to myself.

  ‘I’ve tried to find out if this biography she’s working on is due out soon,’ said Izzy, ‘but no luck. None of the online bookshops have it listed.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘I think the whole biography thing is a lie.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Not quite. I will be in a few minutes. See you at school tomorrow.’

  I sent a text to Skull: Quick question – has your dad heard of anyone called Janet Smith? Has he been contacted by anyone writing a biography of Emerik Skulyevic?

  The reply was: No, and no. Why?

  I was right. Whoever Janet Smith was, she certainly wasn’t writing Emerik’s biography. For one very simple reason.