The Aylesford Skull

“Of course I haven’t forgotten you, Bill. Never in life.” She stepped forward resolutely, took his hand, and looked hard at him. “It was you today, wasn’t it, along by the river?”

“Yes, ma’am. It were.”

St. Ives was aswim yet again. “By the river?” he asked Alice.

“The figure I saw in among the trees this afternoon, wearing that same green shirt.”

“Of course!” St. Ives said, everything coming clear in a rush. “You were the one who came into the wood from Hereafter Farm. The man who wielded the club. My brain must be full of wool.”

“That were me as well. I was coming along through the trees when I caught sight of the missus fishing the old weir. I scarce could credit it. I thought my senses had give out. I knew that Miss Agatha Walton was gone on to glory, and that someone had moved into the farmhouse, but I didn’t know it was you. You was dug so far in at Chingford that I couldn’t feature it, even when I saw Alice with my two eyes. I stood there a-watching her, and it made my heart glad as an oyster. Then I heard someone coming along the other way, and I stepped into the trees not wanting to be seen, and I weren’t seen, although I myself seen well enough, and you can believe me when I say that had I been a carp, the sight would have took the scales off my forearm when I realized who he was. Your old enemy, sir.

“I picked up a stout piece of oak that lay there on the ground, stepped out onto the path, caught up with him in three strides, and laid him out. I thought I’d done for him, but he was up again and staggering. I could see that he was wondering whether he knew me. He’d seen me before, here and there. The last time it was the back of me he seen, driving that wagon over the sands at Morecambe Bay all them years back, but I didn’t remind him of it. I raised the stick again, meaning to take his head off, but he bolted into the trees, bleeding like a pig in a butcher’s yard. I would have made a job of it, too, I can tell you. My blood was up.

“I went back on up to Hereafter and my blood come down a fraction. I took to thinking that he might turn me in to the constabulary, which I couldn’t afford, and I’d find myself in Newgate Prison this time, a-swinging from a gibbet and dreaming of Port Jackson after all. But then I got to thinking about Alice and about you, sir, and I was main happy that you was here in Aylesford, and I knew that I must seek you out and tell you about meeting the Doctor in the wood. I had some hope that you could mayhaps speak to Mother Laswell, too, and shed some light on the murder of Mary Eastman and this grave robbery, which give rise to poor Edward’s ghost, God rest the boy’s soul. And that’s my tale, sir, first to last.”

For the space of a long moment the evening was dead silent. Then the owl flew out of the oak tree, beating the air. Kraken waved his hand in a parting salute to the bird without taking his eyes from St. Ives’s face.

“Narbondo, do you say?” St. Ives asked as the two men moved toward the house.

“It was him, sure enough – the creature who calls himself Narbondo.”

“You’re quite certain?”

“Aye, that I am, and it was him who murdered poor Mary Eastman and robbed his dead brother’s grave of what they call the Aylesford Skull.”

St. Ives could make nothing of this last part, but he knew that grave robbery and murder were nothing to an old hand like Narbondo, and it would have given the man vast pleasure to drench the pike in hemlock, knowing that Alice, whom he would recognize easily enough, would take it along home. St. Ives hadn’t wanted to believe it, despite his suspicions. He had wanted their corner of the world to be at peace. Even now it came into his mind to hope that Narbondo had fled, that he would be anxious to put some distance between himself and the scenes of his various crimes.

He heard Cleo’s laughter now, and the homely sound of Mrs. Langley working in the kitchen. Eddie stood atop the stepladder on the veranda, experimenting with his parachute, which caught the breeze now and very nearly worked. There was the smell of blossom on the breeze, which lent the summer evening a quality that might conceivably be matched in Heaven, but surely nowhere else. He wondered abruptly what Alice was thinking, but he could read nothing in her face.

“Is there evidence, Bill, that it was Narbondo who committed the crime?” he asked. “Certain enough to hang the man?”

“No, sir. Not so as to say ‘evidence.’ The law is a mortal idiot when the fit’s upon it. That’s why I knocked him on the head with the stick when I saw my opportunity. Mother Laswell told me it was him, you see, come back home after all these years to finish what he fomentated as a boy. She saw the murder in the churchyard through the boy Edward’s dead eyes. She woke up in the middle of the night with it. You’ll tell me that it don’t stand to reason, but that’s the way with Mother Laswell. She don’t care a groat for reason. When I caught sight of the Doctor a-sneaking along the path, I knew what she said was true as a piece of scripture.”

“When was Mary Eastman murdered, Bill?” Alice asked.

“Last night, ma’am. After midnight it must have been, for Mary was seen walking in the village late, on her way to the rendezvous, no doubt. He cut her throat in the churchyard, pushed her into an open grave, and left her to bleed out. Murdered the sexton into the bargain.”

“There you have it,” St. Ives said to Alice, who couldn’t keep the effect of Kraken’s words out of her face. “We know who dosed the pike. Clearly he learned that we had settled here in Aylesford, and he saw it as his great good luck to be able to compound his crime. A happy coincidence from his point of view.”

“He would do that?” Alice asked. “Poison children?”

“It would give him great pleasure,” St. Ives told her. “And he has no love for you, not after the hard way you treated him at Eastbourne.”

“My only regret is that we didn’t shoot the man and cast his body from the cliff,” Alice said in a dead-even voice.

Kraken gaped at Alice, as if not quite sure what to make of this pronouncement.

“Sorry to be so bloody minded, Bill,” Alice told him, “but I’ve had my fill of this Dr. Narbondo. Hasbro has put up some lemonade, if you’d like a glass. And you can meet Eddie and Cleo, our children. You’ll be Uncle William from this night on.”

“I’d like that above all things, but would you come out to Hereafter, sir?” Kraken asked St. Ives. “Would you hear her out? Quick-like?”

“Now, Bill? There’s perhaps no great hurry. The Doctor will have gone on his way, surely. No murderer tarries in the neighborhood of the crime, not a murderer as conspicuous as Narbondo at any rate.”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, but what you seen in the barn tells otherwise.”

“Does it Bill?”

“Aye, it does. You know the Doctor better than any man alive, sir, better than Mother Laswell, despite that she raised him from a baby, and …”

“Raised him from a baby?” St. Ives was dumbfounded once again.

“Yes, sir. She was his own natural mother. She give him his Christian name, which he threw onto the rubbish heap along with his soul. He’s been gone these thirty years, but now he’s come back, and he’s stolen the Aylesford Skull, the one object that he must not have, and Mother Laswell fears that it’s the end of all things holy if he puts it to use. Come along and speak with her, sir. I’ve got no living right to ask anything of you, and I wouldn’t ask it, neither. But for the sake of us all, I must.”

SEVEN

HEREAFTER FARM

A mule greeted them as they walked up the lamp-lit path to the rambling stone farmhouse occupied by Mother Laswell and her people.

“This is old Ned Ludd,” Kraken said to St. Ives, who scratched the mule’s forehead. The creature showed its enormous teeth in a wide grin.

“Named after the leader of the infamous Luddites, I take it,” St. Ives said, thinking of Mother Laswell’s grudge against industry.

“That he is. He’s the guardian of the estate these last twenty years. Mother Laswell has taught him to count,