Secret of the Skull (5 page)

‘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.

‘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.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

B-B-B
UT
. . .I W
HAT
? . . . H
OW
? . . . W
HEN
? . . .
W
HY
? . . .

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.

Have you spotted it too?

Surely, nobody who was writing someone’s life story would fail to talk to that person’s son? Any brief glance at the available info on Emerik Skulyevic would reveal
that Emerik had a son, Antonin – Skull’s dad.

As soon as Izzy had mentioned this Janet Smith, I wondered why Skull’s family – being so proud of Emerik – hadn’t mentioned this biography to me. The reason was
they’d never heard of it, or of Janet Smith. Conclusion: ‘Janet Smith’ wasn’t really doing this research at all!

(Of course, it
could
have been that she was real and
was
researching a biography, but was simply a complete twit for not knowing about and/or not contacting Antonin. However, since
I’d already established that something dodgy was going on, this didn’t exactly seem likely.)

For a minute or two, I felt extremely pleased with myself, because I’d so quickly realised that this mysterious ‘researcher’ was nothing of the kind. But then . . .

Several increasingly uncomfortable thoughts occurred to me . . .

Thought 1:
Someone
had been out in Vojvladimia.
Someone
had been asking all about Emerik Skulyevic.
Someone
had got hold of Mirna’s wooden box.

Thought 2: Because of Thought 1, and because it now turned out that our ‘Mirna’ was an imposter after all (still couldn’t quite get my head around that!), then it seemed
reasonable to suppose that Mirna and this Janet Smith character were one and the same. She’d rooted around for stuff in Vojvladimia, then travelled to the UK and become Mirna. The timings
seemed to fit, anyway.

Thought 3: Because of Thoughts 1 and 2, I couldn’t escape the creeping suspicion that maybe I’d been too quick to dismiss the Elsa Moreaux connection. What was Mirna’s real
identity? What was Janet Smith’s real identity? Could they both be the infamous leader of the Minkstreet and Batt armed robbers?

My stomach did a quick backflip and went to hide somewhere in my lower intestines. The possibility that I’d have to confront one of the nastiest villains I’d ever come across was
deeply disturbing.

The only fly in the ointment, as they say, was that same problem which had puzzled me earlier – how could Mirna be Elsa Moreaux, since Elsa Moreaux – constantly watched out for at
airports, on ferries, etc, etc – definitely left the country, definitely hadn’t come back again, and was probably still running a sushi bar in Spain?

With a jolt of alarm, I suddenly realised that there
was
a way for them to be the same person. Thinking back to the contents of that wooden box Skull had shown me, and thinking back to
what Muddy had told me, I could see a way for Elsa Moreaux to have become both Janet Smith and Mirna Skulyevic. She
could
have returned to the UK, she
could
now be living in
Skull’s house – the house she herself had once lived in – and the idea filled me with horror.

Have you worked out how she might have done it?

I knew she’d been in contact with the skilled forger from Doyle Avenue. Since the real Mirna was dead, that newly issued passport that was in the wooden box must have been
faked by the forger (a real passport can hardly be issued to a dead person!). Everything else in the box was real, but that passport must have been a fake.

And if the forger could create a fake passport in the name of Mirna Skulyevic, he could easily have created one in the name of Janet Smith. Both must have been good enough to fool the
authorities, since the Mirna passport had all those border stamps in it (or, at least, it had leaving-Vojvladimia and entering-the-UK border stamps in it. The others could have been faked, but
since ‘Janet’/’Mirna’ must have genuinely travelled from Vojvladimia to the UK at some point, those stamps were probably real).

The timetable would have gone like this: Elsa Moreaux gets two faked passports from the forger. She travels from Spain to Vojvladimia as ‘Janet Smith’. The cops aren’t looking
for any Janet Smith, so she gets through without being noticed (although, I’d guess she has to adopt some sort of disguise to avoid face recognition computers).

As Janet Smith, she starts asking around about Emerik Skulyevic. She claims to be researching a biography. She manages to get hold of Mirna Skulyevic’s wooden box.

She then travels to the UK, this time as Mirna. She now has with her enough proof to convince the Skulyevic family that she is the long-lost Mirna. After all, the only person in that house
who’s ever met Mirna before is Antonin, and he was only a young boy at the time, many years ago. ‘Mirna’ settles down in the Skulyevic’s spare room. So far, so —

Wait! Wait! Wait!

Why would Elsa Moreaux do all that?
Why?

Whichever way I looked at it, there was only one possible answer. There was only one reason Elsa Moreaux could have had for returning to her old home: that stolen gold was still in the
house!

But the police had searched the place from top to bottom. They’d taken up all the floors. They’d dug up the garden. They couldn’t possibly have missed several million
pounds’ worth of gold bullion! The idea was ridiculous. For a start, all that gold would take up quite a bit of space. It would be heavy, too.