The Twenty-Third Man (3 page)

‘I hardly think so. There is a young man named Clun who seems to have been released from prison very recently.’

‘Prison? What had he done?’

‘He had slaughtered a man.’

‘Murdered him? My God!’

‘No. He “hit him a bit too hard”, to employ his own euphemism. Then there are a brother and sister.
He
is in a highly nervous state, it seems, and
she
is recently widowed. A very beautiful young woman, passionate, if I judge aright, but apparently self-controlled. It is a self-control which could easily snap, I feel. Her name is Lockerby.’

‘And nobody else stopped off?’

‘I think there is nobody else.’

‘My God!’ said the young man again. ‘What a collection! And you’re all staying at least a month, until the next ship calls, of course?’

‘There is an airfield, is there not, on the island?’

‘Yes, a tiny one. There’s not much flat land here, as you can imagine. So you think you might fly home, do you? And what about the other three, I wonder?’

‘I have no idea. My plan was to stay a month at least. I do not much care for flying. I greatly prefer the sea.’

‘I’ve no money. That’s my trouble,’ said the young man. ‘If I had, I’d leave here tomorrow. You’re not thinking of coming back to the hotel yet, I suppose?’

‘I am thinking of logger-headed turtles, skinks, geckos, and eels,’ responded Dame Beatrice, transferring her attention to an attractive, bright-green lizard some seven inches long which was flicking its tongue in and out and appeared to be smiling. ‘I think I’ll go down to the beach.’

The path was a broad walk broken every twenty yards or so by flights of steps. After the tropical luxuriance of the hotel gardens, where grew date palms and oranges, flowering shrubs, and ferns as tall as trees, the path, which was bordered by castor-oil plants, aloes, and the prickly pear, was arid and very dusty. At one of the hairpin bends a primitive sort of man came into view. He was watering the path from a goatskin, but when she reached the beach she might have been on the Riviera. She found a chair which was not shaded by a striped umbrella, and sat in the sun for an hour watching the bathers and the sun-bathers, until Caroline Lockerby, in a short, elegant wrap of orange and white towelling, open down the front to show the briefest of bathing costumes, came and sat on the sand beside her.

‘I can’t get Telham to come out of the water,’ she said, ‘and I’m dying for a cup of tea. Do come back to the hotel and let’s have it on the terrace. I’m sorry about lunch,’ she went on, as they climbed towards the shady gardens, ‘but, if I tell you the circumstances, you’ll probably understand. What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘I met one of the hotel inhabitants who appears to have gone native,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘He was asking all about the new arrivals at the hotel. I don’t think he found my descriptions interesting.’

They climbed to the terrace and sat down. Below them the mountainous coast, bent like a friendly arm around the bay, stretched to the shadowy distance. To the right the Mole, the shape of a dog’s hind leg, separated Puerto de Reales from the tree-lined Avenida Maritima, a newly constructed road which had become a favourite promenade for the townspeople when the heat of the day was over. Far away, but easily distinguishable because of its height
and
the everlasting snow on its mountain summit, towered Santa Maria de Nieves. It had always been regarded as sacred by the natives of Hombres Muertos and had been dedicated by the Spaniards to Our Lady of Snows. From where they sat, Monte Negro, with its cave of dead men, was not visible.

‘It is a beautiful place,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I’m very sorry Laura couldn’t come.’

‘Laura? Your daughter?’

‘My secretary. I am the personification of Macbeth’s wish for Lady Macbeth – I bring forth men children only. Laura is no luckier. She has just had a boy. I remained in England long enough to stand godmother and then I came here to muse upon the mutability of secretaries and the tendency of young women to substitute husband and baby for the services of morbid psychology.’

‘Morbid psychology?’ Caroline suddenly stiffened. ‘Could you cure Telham?’ she asked.

‘Cure him?’

‘Take him out of himself. You saw what he was like at lunch. He was there when Ian was killed. He doesn’t get over it. That’s why I want to talk to you. What happened was fairly beastly. Ian was my husband. Well, they were out together one night, coming home from a rather vulgar pub-crawl. They got mixed up with some louts in a street fight. I don’t know how it began. Telham ran away, but Ian, who was always hot-tempered, stood his ground. Telham felt ashamed after a bit, and went back. Ian was dead. Somebody had – what they call “attended to” him. I wasn’t allowed to see the body. His father identified him at the inquest. The police couldn’t find any evidence. There were no witnesses – at least, no one came forward, and Telham wasn’t able to describe any of the youths well enough to be much help. I ought to tell you that I was almost through with Ian, but, all the same, it was a rotten way for him to finish up. Telham can’t forgive himself. That’s why he reacted as he did when that awful young man talked about hitting too hard and not knowing his
own
strength. Telham’s quite raw inside. It’s driving him mad to think he ran away and left Ian to face it all.’

‘Remorse acts like that,’ said Dame Beatrice. There was a pause. ‘I couldn’t treat him without his consent and cooperation, you know,’ she added in a tone of finality.

‘It’s not as though he could have
done
anything if he
had
stuck by Ian,’ said Caroline angrily. ‘He’d have been killed, too – or maimed for life – and where’s the sense in that?’

There was another short pause. Caroline looked defiant, as though she sensed disapproval in the air. But Dame Beatrice expressed nothing of that kind. She said:

‘But isn’t he maimed for life now? I don’t think any treatment could restore his peace of mind. A woman may be able to forgive herself for cowardice, but I do not believe it of a man.’

‘But think of all the people who have shown fear, and then gone back and won the V.C. and things like that!’

Dame Beatrice looked at her with sharp interest.

‘Um – yes,’ she said, very doubtfully.

‘But Telham went back!’ said Caroline wildly. ‘I tell you he
did
go back to help Ian!’

‘I can do nothing to help
him
.’

‘But why not?’

‘I should find out all the wrong things.’

‘I don’t know what you mean!’

‘Neither do I, my dear. You are very fond of your brother, are you not?’

‘We’re very fond of one another. I almost brought him up, although there are only four years between us. I was fourteen when my mother died. Telham was too young to lose his mother at ten years old.’

‘I agree. I also see a waiter who is coming to provide us with tea.’

The waiter, a thin young man with melancholy eyes, came up and solicited their order.

‘China tea. Nothing more,’ said Dame Beatrice. Caroline involved herself in a lengthy speech in Castilian
Spanish.
The waiter looked perplexed and returned with the usual set tea.

‘I don’t want it,’ said Caroline, when the waiter had left them. ‘Oh, dear! What on earth am I going to do?’

‘Don’t eat it,’ said Dame Beatrice; she spoke lightly, knowing perfectly well that Caroline was not referring to the over-sweet cakes and poisonous-looking sandwiches, but to the morbid preoccupations of Telham. ‘Please believe me’, she went on in a different tone, ‘when I insist that there is nothing I can do for your brother.’

‘You mean his case is hopeless?’ Caroline poured out tea for them both and avoided Dame Beatrice’s eye.

‘I do not regard him as a case, otherwise I would do as you wish.’

‘He’s in hell,’ said Caroline, ‘and you refuse to do anything to help him!’

‘It does not seem to me a task for laymen. Tell him to go to a priest.’

‘We have no religion, I’m thankful to say!’

With this, Caroline got up abruptly and went into the hotel. Dame Beatrice poured herself out a second cup of tea, and added a thin slice of lemon. She had just taken a refreshing sip – it was very good tea, for Ruiz understood his English guests – when she was joined by a young American girl who was visiting the island with her father.

‘I have never’, said the new arrival, ‘gotten around to the English theory that tea is a social vehicle. No,
sir
. I guess the Boston Tea Party settled for me in this respect.’

‘Speak English, sit down, and help me dispose of these revolting sandwiches,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Sure. I guess you are
the
Dame Beatrice Bradley. I’ve read your books. I’m just mad about psychiatry. Could I trouble you to sign my book? I’d appreciate it very much if you would.’

‘With pleasure. Tell me, what do you make of a man staying in the hotel who wears peasant costume and is extremely handsome?’

‘He’s a wolf.’

‘By that I am to understand –?’

‘Nobody’s safe when that guy Karl Emden is around. He’s as fresh as they come. Ask me; ask Luisa Ruiz; ask Pilar, the room-maid. One thing: he’s quitting the hotel pretty soon, or so I hear.’

‘Quitting the hotel?’

‘Going to get him an apartment in a cave. There’s a big troglodyte community in the foothills of Santa Maria de Nieves. He’s going there to get local colour, and I sure hope it’s a black eye.’

‘Dear me! You sound very vindictive!’

‘Sure am. Not that I can’t take care of myself, but it does make me real sore when these heels take it for granted every girl they meet is going to fall for them. As I say, he’s even dunked a doughnut with Luisa Ruiz, and she’s no film star. I guess old Papa Ruiz has chucked him out of the hotel, and that’s why he says he’s leaving.’

‘I doubt whether that is the reason,’ said Dame Beatrice. She spoke absently. She was thinking of the reaction of the handsome young man with the German name when she had described to him the newest guests at the hotel, ‘I think someone has turned up whom he doesn’t want to meet.’

‘Then I guess it’s that Mrs Lockerby,’ said the girl. ‘If he’s played Don Juan with her, he’ll need to watch his step, and, when I say that, I’m not kidding. I’d just hate to meet
her
down a dark alley on a dirty night if I were a guy who’d stood her up.’

‘I don’t know why your dear papa paid to send you to an expensive school,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘And don’t you come from Boston?’

The unabashed American laughed.

‘Sure, but I aim to be democratic,’ she said. ‘Pop likes me to talk good, like I was English or something, so I only get to practise my native wood-notes on strangers.’

‘Then the sooner I cease to be a stranger the better,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘
I AM ORGANIZING
’, said the ubiquitous Mr Peterhouse, looming over the small table at which Dame Beatrice was at breakfast some mornings later, ‘an excursion into the mountains. I wonder whether you would care to join my party? We shall go by mule, donkey, or litter; the last to be borne by lousy but sure-footed porters. We propose to visit the cave of Los Hombres Muertos. It is an outing which no one should miss. The cost I can let you know later.’

‘So there really
are
dead men on the island,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I thought there must be. And they inhabit a cave, do they? Yes, I should like to join your party. You speak with muted enthusiasm of the litter, I notice. Do I understand that you yourself at some time have patronized its porters?’

‘It would scarcely be a possible means of progress for one of the tougher sex, dear lady.’

‘No, you are right. I shall not patronize it. But for you it would be a different matter. You have before you the historic example of King Edward, Hammer of the Scots. Was he not borne northwards in a litter? As for me, I shall compound for a donkey. I have never owned one, but they have a reputation for sure-footedness, and, although undoubtedly obstinate, they are said to be faithful. Then, too, they appear, with credit to themselves, in literature. One thinks of the noble ass of Lucius Apuleius; of Stevenson’s little Modestine; one remembers that the immortal Sancho Panza rode upon an ass, not to speak of the prophet Baalam.’

‘We start at eight tomorrow morning,’ said Mr Peterhouse, ignoring with dignity these irrelevancies. ‘It is not a long journey, but it needs to be taken slowly, for the
track
is rough and steep. Then, too, one does not willingly travel during the hottest part of the day, and one does wish to leave time for a thorough exploration of the cave. Besides, we
must
get back in time for dinner.’

‘Yes, I do see that
that
is essential! Very well, then, I look forward to eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’

As Dame Beatrice was about to leave the dining-room, Caroline Lockerby came across to her from a table in an alcove. ‘Have you finished breakfast? If so, come and sit in the garden,’ she said.

‘On the terrace, then.’

Caroline waited until her elderly companion had settled herself against the wicker back of her armchair and then she said: ‘This expedition. What’s it all about?’

‘A pleasure trip, I gather.’

‘To visit a cave full of dead bodies? I don’t want to go, and I know Telham doesn’t, but it’s not very easy to refuse. Mr Peterhouse is a harmless old thing, and when we tried to stall he looked so upset that I gave in at once. The trouble is that that awful man Clun is going as well, and – well, mountain heights affect Telham and, really, I don’t want another row.’

‘Possibly we need not travel in very close propinquity. Could not your brother ride in the rear of the party?’

‘Yes, if he can be persuaded to, but I’m afraid he’s a bit of a thruster. We ride on mules, I understand?’

‘I have compounded for the harmless, necessary ass. I might possibly get Mr Clun to ride beside me to be my prop and stay upon the journey. Is he chivalrous towards the aged and infirm, do you suppose?’

‘I should very much doubt it. Do you think he’s staying here long?’