“Those women who are holding you prisoner — are they nudists?”
“Eh?” said Lambert, who did not know what nudists were.
“Are they wearing clothes?” Mr Sprott wanted to know.
Lambert thought about this. “Yes,” he said. “They’re wearing clothes.”
“And sheep? Are there a lot of sheep?”
Lambert said he didn’t think so. “Just a few on the hill.” Then his battery began to play up again and he said frantically: “But you’re coming, aren’t you? You’re coming to fetch me?”
“Yes, Lambert, I’m coming,” said Mr Sprott.
It was after he talked to his father that Lambert changed. Soon now the Hurricane would come and his father would blow everyone to helclass="underline" the creepy aunts, the horrible children and the foul monsters who weren’t really there. When Lambert smiled now it was because that was what he was thinking about: all the people he hated lying dead in their own blood.
“I feel sick,” said Boo-Boo, leaning over the rail of the steamer.
“I feel sick too,” said the Little One. “I feel sicker than you.”
Aunt Dorothy looked at them with loathing. What she really wanted to do was throw them into the sea and make her own way to the Island. Doing good is all right when you are beating up restaurant owners or thumping people who are trapping rare animals for their skins, but doing good by taking on your sister’s horrible children is just stupid.
The steamer was hardly going up and down but now first Boo-Boo and then the Little One were sick and as soon as they’d finished they started worrying about whether they had messed up their clothes.
“Etta is going to kill me when she sees them,” thought Dorothy.
But though she would very much have liked to throw them both overboard she realized it could not be done so she took them down into the cabin and dabbed at the Little One’s velvet coat collar and Boo-Boo’s silly blazer, and told them to lie down till they landed.
But landing was only the beginning. After that they had to take a ferry to a smaller island and then they had to wait till the one fisherman who could be trusted not to gape or gawp or give away the secrets of the Island could take them across at night. There was no one else the aunts ever used — and just how sick these idiotic children would be in an open boat at night was anybody’s guess.
The Hurricane came in quietly at noon. She anchored to the south of the Island, hidden from the house by a copse of windblown trees, and Mr Sprott took Des and one of the gunmen with him in the dinghy for a reconnaissance.
But even if she had come into the bay by the house no one would have seen her. Fabio and Minette had taken the kraken to the north shore with a picnic and the aunts were visiting the Sybil, which they did once a week to see that she was eating properly. Even the Captain was not looking through his telescope but dozing quietly in his bed.
Mr Sprott had at first meant to come in with his cannon firing but then he had thought better of it. After all, Lambert had to be got out safely first.
As the dinghy rounded the spur of rocks, with its row of slumbering seals, he saw a boy standing alone on the edge of the sea.
“It’s Lambert!” said Des.
And it was!
Whatever plans Mr Sprott might have made were set aside as his son waded towards him and threw himself weeping into his arms.
“Take me away, quick. Take me to the Hurricane. Oh hurry, please, Dad.”
Mr Sprott pulled himself out of Lambert’s clinging arms and looked at his son. He looked well. In fact he looked better than he had ever seen him look; but that was neither here nor there. The boy was obviously terrified.
“It’s an awful place. They feed you poisoned food and then you see things,” sobbed Lambert.
“What sort of things, Lambert?”
“Creepy crawly things…things that slither, and freaks with tails — only they’re not really there.”
There was a sudden yell from Des. The bodyguard knew that it was as much as his life was worth to yell when they were trying to get into a place unseen but now he stood up in the dinghy and pointed with staring eyes at a rock sticking out of the water.
“My God,” he shouted. “Look, guv’nor! It’s a bloomin’ mermaid!”
“No, it isn’t,” cried Lambert. “She isn’t really there. It’s because of what you’ve eaten. None of them are there, the other one isn’t there and the old one isn’t there and the long white worm isn’t there. They’re all because of what Art put in the—”
“Be quiet, Lambert,” said his father. Then to Des, “Catch her,”
Des didn’t need to be told twice. He slipped off his holster and dived into the sea.
The girl was Queenie, and she thought the whole thing very funny. She waited till the clumsy man was almost up to her — then she gave her silvery laugh and vanished underneath the waves.
“She isn’t there, she isn’t there,” Lambert went on yelling. “It’s what you’ve eaten — it’s Art’s seaweed flour.”
“Don’t be silly, Lambert,” said his father. “I haven’t eaten any seaweed flour and I saw her quite clearly. Unless it was a trick. It must have been a trick, but if so it was a good one.”
Des was still thrashing about in the icy water. Now suddenly he dived down, grabbed at something — and missed. But when he swam back to the boat he had two things clutched in his hand. A silver fish scale and a golden hair.
Mr Sprott examined them. Then he turned to his son.
“Now then, Lambert,” he said. “Just tell us what else you’ve seen on the Island.”
“I haven’t seen it — it isn’t—”
“All right, boy. Tell us what you haven’t seen, then. Tell us carefully.”
By the time Lambert had finished babbling about old mermaids with no teeth and long white worms that sucked peppermints and outsize birds the size of elephants — all of which weren’t there—Mr Sprott’s face wore a look of eager cunning. Of course it was probably all rubbish, but if it wasn’t, the money one could make! And those trees with the branches stripped off — the ones that Lambert called stoor-worm trees — they were there all right.
“Go on, what else?” he prompted, digging his son roughly in the ribs.
But Lambert had said all he could. The sight of that island in the bay that hadn’t been there at night and then really hadn’t been there in the morning had frightened him so much that he couldn’t say another word, nor about the small island that had broken off from the big one and was around somewhere.
“Please, Daddy, take me home,” he whined. “Look, there they are; they’re coming for me!”
Stanley Sprott looked up. The three dreaded women whose pictures were on the wall of every police station in London were coming towards them.
Aunt Myrtle was in the lead, which was unusual for her. She was carrying a brown paper parcel and she was very nervous — but in a way Lambert was hers, just as Fabio was Aunt Coral’s, and Minette belonged to Etta, and she felt she had to hand him back herself.
“Good morning,” she said, bracing herself. “I see you have come to fetch Lambert — he will be pleased to go home. I’m afraid he never quite fitted in.”
Mr Sprott stared at her. The cheek of the woman was unbelievable!
“I’ve washed and ironed his underclothes and his pyjamas. I wasn’t able to take many of his clothes in the cello case but you’ll find everything is there.”
Myrtle now felt she had done all she could and stepped back, leaving her sisters to take charge, which they did by asking Mr Sprott if he would care to stay to lunch.