Secret of the Skull (6 page)

And yet . . .

I retreated to my garden shed and my Thinking Chair. It was absolutely freezing in there, so I grabbed my notebook and a pen and retreated to underneath my bedsheets instead. By my flickering
flashlight, I scribbled down a few ideas.

Little did I know, but everything would become clear the following day at school. The final piece of the weirdly shaped puzzle which surrounded the Skulyevic family fell into
place at last. All it took was a brief conversation with Skull himself.

‘How’s it going?’ said Skull. The class was slowly traipsing in for the start of the school day and teachers were slowly traipsing along the corridors towards the staff
room.

‘Oh, er, not too bad,’ I said, not quite knowing how to bring him up to date on all the worrying recent developments. ‘Um, y’know, making progress . . .’

‘So, you haven’t actually found out any more about those credit cards?’ asked Skull.

‘Umm, not as such . . .’ I said vaguely.

‘Good!’ said Skull. ‘Because I think we can forget the whole thing now.’

‘Huh? Why?’

‘Her money’s come through from her bank back in Vojvladimia,’ said Skull cheerily. ‘It occurred to me that she only got herself mixed up in stolen credit cards because
she’s been as short of cash as the rest of us at home. But now the problem’s solved. I’m sure we’ll see no more of that sort of thing from her. Let’s just put it
behind us, move on, forget the past and so on. Yes?’

‘Ah,’ I mumbled, going slightly red with embarrassment. ‘To be perfectly honest, um —

‘And she’s done just what she said she’d do,’ Skull went on. ‘Remember, I told you, about how she was going to thank us for letting her stay? She’s booked us
a night at a hotel on the south coast. Plus train tickets for getting there, plus dinner, plus passes for Ocean Depths Aquarium. Isn’t that nice of her?’

‘Yes, now I think about it, you did mention it when you came to my shed,’ I said. ‘Can’t have been cheap, all that for four people.’

‘Three people,’ said Skull. ‘Mirna’s staying at home. She says her gammy leg’s playing up.’

As soon as Skull said that, the truth suddenly dawned on me. That final piece of the jigsaw clicked neatly into place and the picture was complete!

‘She’s not going!’ I cried. ‘Of course! What an idiot! I should have seen this from the very beginning! Skull, when are you and your parents off on this trip?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Skull.

I almost squeaked with fright. ‘Good grief! We have to act fast! Sorry, you can’t go.’

‘What? Why?’

I waggled my arms about in a bit of a panic. ‘No. Scratch that. You
are
going —

‘Phew.’

‘— but then you’re coming straight back again!’

‘What? Why?’

‘Trust me! Say
nothing
to Mirna.
Nothing!
I mean it this time! Tomorrow morning, the three of you leave for the train station as arranged. I’ll meet you halfway there
and we’ll all sneak back to your house.’

‘No way – we’ll miss the train!’

I wanted to jump up and down and make ‘Ggnnnghh’ noises. ‘I promise you, you’d rather do things my way! We have to stop a serious crime being committed. Or rather,
completed. And anyway, the three of you need to be there to . . . well, to find out what’s been going on.’

‘But Saxby . . .’

‘Don’t argue! I haven’t a moment to lose! For a start, I need to go and see Muddy!’

Already, I was feeling nervous. I could have gone straight to the police with what I knew, but I felt it was important that Skull’s family should see proof of what I’d discovered
before the cops showed up. The truth was going to hurt them, but at least if they learned it for themselves it might not be quite so much of a shock. They deserved to find out about Mirna first,
before any arrests were made!

The trouble was, doing the right thing for Skull’s family also meant doing what I was dreading most: confronting the notorious Elsa Moreaux, face to face. The more I thought about it, the
more my legs started to wobble.

I’d found the final piece of the puzzle thanks to three specific factors. There were three things which, considered alongside the weekend trip Skull had just told me about, added up to
answer the questions that remained. Those factors were:

1) The negative results of the police’s search of Skull’s house, all those years ago.

2) The fact that Skull’s house never used to have a garage. Or that hideous fireplace in the living room.

3) The way Skull’s parents both worked and shopped from home.

How much of the puzzle have you pieced together?

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, S
KULL’S PARENTS
were not happy bunnies. They weren’t happy when
Skull told them about my don’t-catch-the-train plan. They weren’t happy when Skull insisted they keep everything secret from Mirna. And they
really
weren’t happy when I
stood in the middle of the road, hands outstretched, blocking their car’s way to the railway station. Happy bunnies, they were not.

‘Listen, Saxby,’ said Skull’s dad with a sigh, ‘I really don’t want to hear any more of these wild stories.’

‘We’ll miss our train!’ protested Skull’s mum.

‘Please, please, please do as I ask,’ I pleaded. ‘I know this seems mad, but it’s also very, very important. If I’m right, you’ll be glad you never went to
the station. If I’m wrong, you’ll only be delayed by an hour or so, you can catch the next train and you’ll have my deepest apologies from now until the end of time.
Deal?’

Reluctantly, they agreed. We all piled back into their car, and parked just out of sight of their house.

Keeping to one side of the street and stepping as softly as possible, the four of us made our way back towards Skull’s house. A couple of net curtains twitched as neighbours wondered what
we were up to, but apart from that everywhere was quiet.

I tapped at the small camera lens that was pinned to the front of my jacket. ‘Muddy?’ I whispered. ‘All set?’

‘Yup,’ said a tinny voice in my ear. I adjusted the Whitehouse Listen-O-Scope Mark III that was curled around my right ear. ‘Are you sure about this? It sounds potentially
dangerous.’

‘It
is
potentially dangerous,’ I replied.

‘So why couldn’t I come too?’ moaned Muddy. ‘Spoilsport.’

‘I need you to phone the police!’ I hissed. ‘Is this video feed live on Izzy’s FaceSpace page or not?’

‘Yes,’ grumbled Muddy. ‘I’ll phone as soon as we get to the good bit. Hang on . . . Izzy’s here. She says why not phone the police right now?’

‘Because I don’t want them finding out about this and turning up too early,’ I said. ‘Now shush. We’re nearly at Skull’s house.’

‘
We’re
not the ones who need to shush,’ mumbled Muddy grumpily. ‘
You’re
the one who’s
there
.’

I ignored him.

Slowly, Skull’s parents, Skull and I sneaked across the front lawn of the house. There was no sign of movement inside.

‘What if she sees us?’ whispered Skull.

‘She won’t,’ I whispered back. ‘She’ll be in the garage. But she might hear us, so shhhh.’

The four of us crept up to the garage. It had a swing-up-and-over metal door, which was very slightly open.

Suddenly, a sharp crack, like a hammer striking a nail, came from behind the garage door. Then another.

We looked at each other. Skull’s parents couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing.

The cracking came again, louder and heavier this time – more like a mallet being whacked down on to a hard surface. It sounded again and again, regularly, over and over. It stopped and
started for the next few minutes until at last the garage fell quiet again.

Then we could hear scraping sounds, a grating noise and something crumbling on to the concrete floor inside. Finally, something clanked against metal.

I turned and nodded to Skull. He tiptoed to the far side of the garage door. We each took hold of one edge.

On my signal, we heaved the door up high. It clattered against the roof with a squeal of rusty springs.

Standing halfway down the garage was Mirna. She was wearing workman’s overalls. In front of her, above a pile of loosened bricks and an assortment of tools, was a gaping hole in the wall
which joined on to the house.

Behind her was a SuperSave trolley. In the trolley was a large, gleaming gold bar, about the size of a loaf of bread. In her hand was another one. Similar bars were stacked behind the hole.

She gaped at us. Her face showed a mixture of anger and surprise. For a split second, nobody moved.

‘What on
Earth
. . .?!’ cried Skull’s dad.

Mirna dropped the gold brick she was holding into the trolley. She turned to face us again and this time the expression on her face was nothing less than pure fury.

‘Hi there, Elsa Moreaux,’ I said as casually as I could. Not casually at all, really – my voice was shaking like a nodding car mascot on a mountain trail.

She snorted. ‘If you know who I am, you’re sharper than the cops, I’ll give you that.’

‘Brilliant hiding place,’ I said. ‘Inside the wall cavity itself. The police would only have found it if they’d demolished the entire building.’

‘Would someone please tell us
what
is going on?’ cried Skull’s dad.

I broke the news to them that Great Aunt Mirna wasn’t Great Aunt Mirna after all. Briefly, I told them about the chain of clues in my investigation. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I
added, ‘but you’ve been conned from the outset.’

Elsa Moreaux picked up one of the bricks she’d removed from the wall and dropped it with a loud clack to the ground. I jumped with fright. She growled, ‘Why didn’t you send for
the cops straight away?’

‘That gold was still hidden,’ I said. ‘I was pretty sure it was in that wall, but I needed to wait. Until, that is, you went to fetch it yourself and showed me exactly where
you’d put it.’

‘And how could you possibly know it was inside this wall?’ she spat. ‘I made it perfect. It looked totally untouched!’

‘Logical deduction,’ I said. ‘Your original plan, I think, was simply to turn up here as Mirna and stay just a day or two, until you had a chance to retrieve the gold. You
couldn’t simply burst in and grab it. Because of the way it was hidden, you needed a couple of hours in which to get the gold out. Which is why you decided to adopt a disguise.

‘When you got out of prison, you worked out your plan: you went to Spain, then to Vojvladimia, then came back to the UK as Mirna Skulyevic. But when you finally got into the house you saw
that Skull’s dad had built a large, stone fireplace in the living room, on the other side of this wall – right over the top of your hiding place.

‘That fireplace was far too thick and heavy to get through without major effort. You’d have to get to the hiding place from
this
side of the wall instead, from what had been
the outside wall when
you
lived here. However, you had a piece of luck. There’d been another addition to the house – the garage. It would conceal you while you broke into the
wall from
this
side instead.

‘Unfortunately, your plan was upset by something else as well as the fireplace. Skull’s parents were always at home. There was always somebody in the house. You’d assumed that
it would only take a few days before you could grab an hour or two alone. It turned out that you might need weeks and weeks. So you had to outstay your welcome and you had to devise a way to get
these three out of the house for a while.