The Riddle of Sphinx Island (4 page)

‘That surprise we’ve got for them –’ Maisie broke off. ‘Do you think they will like it?’

‘I very much hope they will. In my opinion it’s the kind of present that’s so much more suitable than anything one could buy at Fortnum’s or Selfridges … I still have coffee at Fortnum’s sometimes, though these days I find myself spending more time in Harley Street than in Piccadilly … I don’t suppose you like England much, do you, my dear?’

‘Oh but I do! I love England!’

‘You love England? Really? I am told that some people – foreigners, mainly – are fascinated by the
idea
of England but they get bitterly disappointed when they come face-to-face with the real thing … A
soggy little island, huffing and puffing, trying to catch up with
– with something or other. One of your fellow Americans said that, I do believe, though don’t ask me which one. It was some famous American writer.’

‘I don’t read as much as I should. I need to improve my mind,’ Maisie said. ‘Oswald keeps recommending books to me.’

‘Keeping up with one’s reading can be quite a task.’ Lady Grylls pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘I am now compelled to use a magnifying glass which is rather a bore.’

‘Would you like me to read to you sometime?’

‘Kind of you to offer, my dear. Yes, why not? Your voice is as clear as a bell. Perhaps you could try to get something racy? Or maybe a murder mystery, of the kind my niece-by-marriage writes?’

‘I don’t really like murder mysteries. They scare me.’

She seemed a genuinely nice gel, Lady Grylls decided. She couldn’t have been anything but an American. There was the earnestness, the simplicity, the complete lack of self-consciousness, the kindness and friendliness, all of which one associated with Americans. Might have been deemed gushing, garrulous and gauche, but, oddly enough, Lady Grylls didn’t for a moment think of her in those terms. And she was so awfully pretty. Didn’t she really see how pretty she was? Hadn’t it occurred to her that her quite exceptional looks might have had something to do with her rapid promotion from nurse to secretary and the great trust her employer had to chosen to put in her?

At some point Lady Grylls seemed to doze off and she woke up with a start.

‘That’s right, my dear, how perfectly extraordinary. What was it you said about the house?’

‘It’s very old, isn’t it?’

‘No, not all old. It was built in the early
1930
s. There’s nothing special about it, really, though it seems to have generated its own mythology. I believe it was used for something terribly hush-hush during the war, then there was the alien thing.’

The girl’s eyes had opened wide. ‘The
1930
s is
very
old
. Oswald said he is enthralled by the lullaby the sea waves sing to him at night. Oswald is very romantic, but I think he is worried about something. I am not sure Ella likes it much here. She hasn’t complained or anything, mind. Ella never complains.’

‘No, she is not the complaining type.’

Lady Grylls found herself contemplating the Ramskritt ménage – tragic queen Ella and ingénue Maisie – not a
ménage-à-trois
, surely? It was curious that Oswald should have brought his very own German medico along. A Doctor Klein. Though of course anyone less
kleine
one could hardly imagine. His name should have been Grosse, something like that. Each time their orbits intersected, she had the disconcerting feeling she was seeing
two
people. Doctor
Klein’s eyes didn’t seem to belong to Doctor Klein’s body
. She didn’t quite know what she meant by that … 
Not
a well man … Metabolism as sluggish as a frozen Thames. Breathing like a suction pump … One always expected doctors to enjoy perfect health but this one clearly didn’t …

The girl was telling her something about her parents, elder sister and younger brother who lived in a place called Vermont …

The drawing room door opened.

‘I’d like to see everybody in the library in a couple of jiffies, if poss,’ a voice said. ‘Oh sorry, Lady Grylls. Were you having a nap? I do apologise, but we’ve got
very
little time
and I am not sure we’ve got everything right yet. So let’s put our best foot forward, shall we?’

Lady Grylls blinked. It was the woman with the pudding-bowl hairdo of course, the dreadful draperies, the smudged make-up and the costume jewellery. A Mrs Garrison-Gore. At the moment she was wearing something else, not the draperies and the jewellery – something in
aubergine à la crème d’oursin
– Goodness! – clung to her like a uniform – were those epaulettes?

‘The good news is that Feversham will be with us very soon. Oswald phoned to say he’d fetched Feversham and they were on their way. I pray to God that Feversham is the right person. We’d be lost if he turned out not to be, lost! I’ll have to reshape the whole thing. Doesn’t bear thinking about! Maisie, would you help Lady Grylls?’

‘The right person for what?’ Lady Grylls was now fully awake.

‘The right person for the job.’

‘What job? Hate it when people talk in riddles.’

‘
The takeover
. That’s how I think of it.’ Mrs Garrison-Gore spoke with an air of aimless defiance. ‘I keep my fingers crossed he is the right man. If he is not, it’s back to the drawing board and square one!’

What a tedious woman. Mrs Garrulous-
Bore.
Brought to mind a scout mistress. Lady Grylls couldn’t abide scouts mistresses. Self-preoccupied, interfering, bumptiously self-important and
such
a loud voice
. Lady Grylls then remembered Mrs Garrison-Gore served a very definite purpose – but surely Sybil could have hired someone less annoying?

‘Maisie, I really do think you should –’

‘Leave the gel alone. I can manage. My good woman, you fuss too much. You make it sound as though my time to depart to the shades has come.’

‘Not to the shades, Lady Grylls, only to the library,’ Mrs Garrison-Gore said.

Lady Grylls suppressed a groan. Who was it who said that the meaning of our lives was the impact we have on other people, whether we make them feel good or not? If that were true, she reasoned, then Mrs Garrison-Gore led a singularly meaningless life.

‘I have not yet reached the stage gerontologists call “twilight senility”. Whenever I am asked what it feels like to be eighty-six. I invariably say that it’s
so
much better than the alternative. My doctor warned me I have the typical physical constitution of a likely centenarian. Apparently my mind is most likely to go some time before my body, but then one can’t have everything, can one?’

Clasping her stick, Lady Grylls rose to her feet. She gave Maisie a little wink.

Mrs Garrison-Gore stood in the corridor outside the library, frowning down at the open folder in her hands. Although she had managed to work out all the details now, she was assailed by the ghastly feeling the whole thing was all going to be a complete fiasco … Chin up, she murmured as she pushed open the door.

The Game Book, bound in black morocco leather, lay on his desk and the sight of it cheered him up considerably. He knew of no other morale-booster that could ever rival the Game Book!

It had belonged to his great-grandfather; it had then passed to his grandfather, then to his father. His grandfather had shot with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Screwing up his face, John de Coverley adjusted his silver-rimmed monocle in his left eye.
Pheasants 456, Hares 90, Rabbits 99, Woodstock 57, Boar 15, Grouse 47.
He turned a page, then another.

He picked up his pen and started writing.
Herring-gulls 18
.
Lesser black-backed gulls 4. Bonaparte gulls. 3 Black-legged Kittiwake 4. Sybil gulls 4 –

No, not Sybil –
Sabine
– Sabine gulls! Funny mistake to make – a ‘Freudian slip’. Well, sometimes he did see Sybil – his impossible older sister – as a seagull. It wasn’t only his imagination. She
did
resemble a seagull. The way she walked, the way she put her head to one side, the quizzical look she gave him. Most irritating of all, there was her cawing laugh. He had nearly taken a pot-shot at her the other day. There were times when he felt like wringing Sybil’s neck.

John knew the exact number of seagulls he had killed the night before. Also the precise
genus
they belonged to. He had examined each corpse carefully by the light of his lantern. Every time he shot a gull, he made an entry in his little notebook; he later transferred all the entries to the pages of the Game Book.

The gulls were familiar with him by now and they tried to fight back in various ways. Sometimes they were too lazy for a full-on attack, then they tried to scare him off with their ominous ‘gagagaga’ and when they failed, they subjected him to a low pass. One of their intimidation tactics was to drop oyster shells on his head, another to vomit on him, or worse, and, if he let them, they would certainly succeed in bespattering him since they had the precision of stealth-bombers. Only he didn’t let them. As soon as they started descending, he took aim and pulled the trigger –
boum-boum!

He never missed. He was a crack shot.

Most of his male ancestors had been big game hunters. De Coverleys had travelled the world over, looking for beasts to kill, to places like India, the Amazon, the Zambezi, even the Siberian steppes. Papa’s hunting lodge in the Upper Hebrides, he remembered, had been full of ‘trophies of the chase’. Antlers and tusks gracing every wall, elephant’s feet serving as umbrella stands, and, best of all, there had been the mounted maws of snarling
tigris
and
ursa
.

The difference between me and my ancestors, John thought, is that I don’t shoot
pour le sport
.
No – this was war! He regarded himself as a soldier. He had moved his bed to the middle of the room and it now occupied a diagonal position, like a battleship of the paper game Jutland, which, forty years ago, he had been extremely fond of playing.

There wasn’t anything
wrong
with him, was there? He took off his monocle and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. He thought back to that fatal day in June when he had been nearly scalped by the two herring gulls, which had swooped down on him and attacked him simultaneously, in a synchronized manner …

Perhaps he had suffered some kind of brain damage after all. Or was
there something in the de Coverley genes that caused male members of the family to cling tenaciously to some
idée fixe
? Or, for that matter, to remain partially stuck in their childhood? John smiled at the idea.

The doctor who examined him had described his wounds as ‘superficial’, but sometimes these chaps didn’t know what they were talking about. The funny thing was that he had never so much as considered the possibility of subjecting himself to a proper, more comprehensive examination. Sybil had made the suggestion, several times in fact, but then he
knew
she was eager to have him despatched to a loony bin, blast her.

Had he been born with a rogue gene or was he catapulted into non-conformity by the seagulls’ attack? He found the question endlessly fascinating. As a matter of fact it was his sister who was the bedlamite. Sybil frequently did things that defied logic, like filling the house with crowds of people and then going off to London.

Extreme gregariousness was a form of madness, of that he had no doubt. And she had dismissed the servants. She was up to something, he could tell. Not that he minded a servant-less state. The fewer people there were about the better. He needed neither a daily woman nor a night nurse.

He would have preferred the island ‘not honour’d with a human shape’. He’d told Sybil time and again –
no more house-parties, please
– but he might have been speaking Eskimo. It stuck in his craw that his sister never seemed to understand what he told her. Or pretended not to.

If gulls pose a particular threat to health and safety, a cull should be conducted, either by shooting or poisoning
. He had seen that written somewhere. He was doing society a favour, not that he expected society to show any appreciation, let alone return the favour.

Gulls could live up to forty years, which was an awfully long time. They bred excessively. Their wingspan was three to five feet and they had fearsome hooked beaks. They were evilly-inclined and full of malice. They knew he went to bed at about two every morning and they woke him up at five with their shrieks. They tried to punish him for the destruction of their brethren.

John glanced at his watch. Tea-time. Marching up to a side table, he turned on the electric kettle. There were the Spode teacup and pot with the hunting scenes which he rather liked. Sybil, he had to admit, was awfully adept at providing him with regular supplies of eatables. And if she wasn’t around, it would be that obliging American girl who answered his call. The other day he had asked for a dish of
fritto misto
– and he’d got it – hey presto! – piping hot – done to perfection!

The American girl had also brought him a whole cherry Bakewell tart. He had tried to lure and entice the Enemy with pieces of cake, which he had left lying on his windowsill. His intention was to capture a seagull alive, put it in a cage and subject it to some refined nastiness worthy of Dante, but the blasted things were too clever to fall for such a ruse, it seemed.

There was still some cake left. Goody! He swung his monocle on its black silk ribbon.

The American girl was actually the kind of girl he’d enjoy making friends with. But she seemed to be at the beck and call of the chap in the yachting cap, another American, whom John suspected of coveting the island. It was the kind of aberration that urgently needed correcting.

As John poured boiling water over the Gunpowder tealeaves, he felt the beginnings of a headache. The fellow in the yachting cap looked ruddy and hearty and he had discussed the island with Sybil. They had been standing on the terrace below. The fellow said the island was
exactly
what he needed …