The Twenty-Third Man
Read The Twenty-Third Man Online
Authors: Gladys Mitchell
The Hotel Sombrero de Miguel Cervantes
The Lotus Eater of Puerto del Sol
The Case Against a Brother-in-Law
Concerning an Uninhabited Island
More from Vintage Classic Crime
Renowned criminologist, psychoanalyst and sardonic widow Mrs Bradley is enjoying a relaxing holiday on the beautiful island of Hombres Muertos. Then a cave high up in the mountains, containing the mummified bodies of twenty three dead kings, acquires an extra corpse overnight and Mrs Bradley is delighted to be called into action.
As her investigations begin it quickly becomes clear that almost everyone on the island has a motive for murder, and a dark secret they are desperate to conceal. But who is the real killer?
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin described her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.
Her first novel,
Speedy Death
, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.
Speedy Death
The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop
The Longer Bodies
The Saltmarsh Murders
Death at the Opera
The Devil at Saxon Wall
Dead Men’s Morris
Come Away, Death
St Peter’s Finger
Printer’s Error
Brazen Tongue
Hangman’s Curfew
When Last I Died
Laurels Are Poison
The Worsted Viper
Sunset Over Soho
My Father Sleeps
The Rising of the Moon
Here Comes a Chopper
Death and the Maiden
The Dancing Druids
Tom Brown’s Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil’s Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Merlin’s Furlong
Watson’s Choice
Faintley Speaking
Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose
Spotted Hemlock
The Man Who Grew Tomatoes
Say It With Flowers
The Nodding Canaries
My Bones Will Keep
Adders on the Heath
Death of the Delft Blue
Pageant of Murder
The Croaking Raven
Skeleton Island
Three Quick and Five Dead
Dance to Your Daddy
Gory Dew
Lament for Leto
A Hearse on May-Day
The Murder of Busy Lizzie
Winking at the Brim
A Javelin for Jonah
Convent on Styx
Late, Late in the Evening
Noonday and Night
Fault in the Structure
Wraiths and Changelings
Mingled with Venom
The Mudflats of the Dead
Nest of Vipers
Uncoffin’d Clay
The Whispering Knights
Lovers, Make Moan
The Death-Cap Dancers
The Death of a Burrowing Mole
Here Lies Gloria Mundy
Cold, Lone and Still
The Greenstone Griffins
The Crozier Pharaohs
No Winding-Sheet
To
JUNE MACHOWICZ
for her great interest in detective
stories and for her ingenious plans
for making murder an even
finer art than it is already
The
Twenty-Third
Man
CHAPTER 1The Hotel Sombrero de Miguel Cervantes
THE ISLAND OF
Hombres Muertos was aptly named. They sat, these dead men, twenty-three of them, around a stone table in a cave on Monte Negro, the highest mountain on the island and so called because of the dark, sculptured waves of lava which had flowed from the crater and congealed above the cavern.
No one knew the names of the dead men or why their bodies had been placed where they were. There was a legend that they had been kings of the island before the Spaniards conquered and named it. The Jesuits followed the Conquistadores and built a college and a church in the village they named Reales. Reales grew into a city with a cathedral and a bishop. There were installed in the Cathedral a solid silver altar and silver lamps from Spanish America. Later came the harbour and a long, concrete Mole; later still, tourists and the sale of souvenirs.
The cave, with its grisly occupants, was one of the show-places of the island. It ranked with the three-thousand-year-old dragon tree, the banana plantation, the botanical gardens, and the cigar factory, and there were men in Reales who made a fair living by acting as guides to the cave, where sat the robed, masked, and mummified kings.
From the sea, the island had the appearance of a stark, serrated mountain range, black against the eye-dazzling blue of the sky, and that was almost as Caroline saw it from the deck of the liner
Alaric
, six days out from Liverpool and due to make Reales the first port of call. It was half past five in the morning, and she stood by the rail in her dressing-gown and looked towards Hombres Muertos. She could make out the Mole and a huddle of houses dominated by the Cathedral. Behind these houses were
white-walled
villas on the long, green slopes of a hill, and beyond these slopes rose the mountains, menacing, dark, and sharp against a green and primrose heaven.
There was no breeze, and the delicious, temperate air of the early morning gave no indication of the heat of the day to come. The sea was calm and very clear. It rushed in silent, translucent glass from the cut-water of the liner and flared out towards the ship’s wake. It had a mesmeric, evocative effect on the watcher from the deck above. Caroline, her mind never far removed from the deed which had altered her life, found herself brooding again on the reasons for her own and her brother’s escape from England to Hombres Muertos.
This black mood was dispelled almost at once by the discovery that she was not alone. At her elbow a beautiful, resonant voice was quoting from John Masefield.
‘
In the harbour, in the island in the Spanish seas, are the tiny white houses and the orange trees, and, day-long, night-long, the cool and pleasant breeze of a steady tradewind blowing
. All seem to be ours except for the cool and pleasant breeze. Hot weather is promised for today.’
Caroline turned and smiled. She knew the voice although it was the first time that she herself had been directly addressed by the speaker.
‘Good morning, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘Are you thinking of going ashore?’
‘Not only of going ashore, but of staying ashore,’ the small, spare, black-haired Witch of Endor replied. ‘I am taking a holiday, and Hombres Muertos appears to be the one place whither none of my acquaintances is bound.’
‘We’re staying ashore, too. My brother and I, you know. Telham had had a bad breakdown and we thought it might be a good place in which to recuperate.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Yes. We haven’t the same surname. I’m married – that is, I’m a widow. My name is Lockerby. Where are you staying on the island?’
‘At the Hotel Sombrero.’
‘Oh, good! So are we. Oh, I forgot, though. You want to get away from people, don’t you?’
‘Only from old acquaintances. I am no misanthrope. It will be very pleasant to have someone to talk to at the hotel.’
She nodded and walked briskly away. Caroline picked up the towel which she had flung on to the rail, and sauntered off to the open-air swimming pool.
By the time that the passengers were beginning to go in to breakfast, the ship was fast to the Mole. On the quayside the local itinerants were setting up a Babel of sales-talk. There were ferocious outbursts of argument and high-pitched, foreign laughter. They had brought their wares alongside before the ship had docked, and were offering embroidered shawls, pyjamas of generous cut and gaudy hue, basket-work, carvings, beads, and fruit, and were hoping to reap a harvest before the tourists had a chance to visit the shops in the town.
By half past nine those passengers who had decided to remain on board were nearly in deck-chairs with their feet up, and those others, the majority, who had heard the call of the island, were already stepping ashore.
Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley found herself following Caroline and her brother to a line of taxi-cabs beside which laden camels lurched, grunted, and spat, and panniered donkeys, stoically disregarding thumps and curses, were pulled, and sometimes thrust, towards the edge of the Mole, so that their burdens might be unloaded on to the small black steamers which were to take bananas, wine, and basket-work to Europe.
Behind Dame Beatrice walked a tall young man with a pale face, short, dark-brown hair, and an expression of reckless dissatisfaction. She had noticed him during the voyage and had put him down as an ex-convict. As psychiatric consultant to the Home Office, she knew a good deal about the reactions and bearing of released prisoners, and the young man, whose name on the passenger list was given as Clun, bore, she decided, the unmistakable signs.
She
wondered whether he intended to stay on Hombres Muertos, or whether he had come ashore for the few hours that the ship would remain in port.
He caught her up just before they reached the taxi-rank.
‘I trust you are bound for the Hotel Sombrero,’ he said. His voice was pleasant. ‘If so, I wish you would share my taxi.’
‘Very kind of you,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but I am not going immediately to the hotel. I propose to do some shopping.’
‘Ah,’ said the young man, unabashed by this transparent excuse, ‘then I think I’ll catch up those two people in front.’ Before he could overtake Caroline and her brother, however, they had given directions to the driver of the first taxi in the rank and were off. The young man took the next cab and Dame Beatrice took the third and drove to the shopping centre of Reales where she purchased some picture postcards and a small basket before going back to the waiting taxi.
The hotel porters had made themselves responsible for the collection and transportation of luggage, and she gave them mental praise when she discovered that her trunk and suitcases were already in her room. The Customs formalities had been of the briefest. Short-term visitors had been allowed to go ashore after signing, on board the
Alaric
, a declaration that they had nothing on which duty should be paid. From what she had observed, as she watched the luggage being taken ashore, of a perfunctory scrawling on a trunk here and on a suitcase there, the Customs officials found little reason to suspect that anything illicit was being smuggled ashore, and did not care much, anyway.