Return of the Emerald Skull Read online

  ‘Beautiful, are they not?’ Archimedes Barnett beamed.

  ‘Beautiful, are they not?’ Archimedes Barnett beamed.

  I nodded.

  ‘But delicate, Mr Grimes, as I'm sure you now appreciate,’ he said, gathering his thoughts. ‘Bird collecting, as you can see, consumes me, body and soul. I am constantly adding to my collection, with birds being sent to me from my contacts all over the world. If you – as a tick-tock lad – could see your way to picking up these birds from the docks and bringing them safely back here to the school, I would be eternally grateful. And, of course, I should pay you most handsomely for your services.’

  It seemed that these stuffed birds of his were even more important to him than the pupils in his charge. Still, it took all sorts. And anyway, who was I to judge?

  ‘Thank you, Headmaster,’ I said. ‘You can rest assured, not a feather on their delicate heads shall be ruffled.’

  It was obviously what the headmaster wanted to hear, for he beamed back. ‘It is agreed then,’ he said. ‘This is most fortuitous, Mr Grimes, for I have a shipment arriving next week – a most unusual-sounding specimen, I'm sure you'll agree …’

  ‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.

  ‘The catincatapetl,’ said the headmaster, ‘which, translated from the ancient Toltec, means’ – he paused, a dreamy smile playing across his mouth – ‘the emerald messenger of darkness.’

  week later, I carried out the instructions the headmaster had given me. It was a Tuesday and I'd spent the morning doing my usual rounds – collecting receipts, delivering dockets, transferring forms safely from one address to another; highstacking over the sooty rooftops with hardly time to draw breath.

  I set off after a spot of lunch: bread, cheese and an apple, which I ate while sitting on top of the dome of the Law Courts, leaning back against the golden statue of Justice, with her sword in one hand and scales in the other – scales which contained an apple core by the time I'd finished. It was once more a bright sunny day, though with a crisp wind coming in from the east. The blanket of smoke which hovered constantly over the poorer areas of the city was, for once, being blown across the more wealthy quarters to the west.

  I headed against the wind, to an area called Riverhythe, a strip of wharves and warehouses between the East Batavia Trading Company's timberyards and the squat Spruton Bill lighthouse, built to keep the incoming and outgoing vessels from running aground on the mudflats.

  In the space of twelve short years Riverhythe had been transformed from a small fisherman's rest, where fishing boats would land their catches, into a great bustling port, its jetties packed with merchant ships, cargo boats, tea clippers and dhows from the four corners of the earth. The fishmarkets and riverside shops had given way to vast warehouses and stockyards, while the water in the river itself, once sparkling, clear and teeming with fish, was now filthy, brown and utterly dead.

  Yet I loved the place. I always had.

  As a youngster I'd come here often to watch the ships docking to unload their cargoes and take on new ones. With its broad quays, huge jetties and great warehouses, the place was endlessly fascinating. I would sit for hours at the end of a creaking wooden jetty, just watching the endless comings and goings.

  The arrival of the coal barges, for instance, was greeted by gangs of men in dirty smocks and women with baskets, who would ferry them to shore. Vast vessels, teeming with mariners and merchant seamen, would come and go, mooring side by side, the insistent cries of the dock-chiefs accompanying their movements. Clippers and cargo ships swarmed with stevedores, who shifted wares onto the barges and rowing boats moored alongside and transported them to quays and wharves further upstream. Tall, spindly cranes would load and unload the ships, great packages of merchandise swinging precariously through the air on knotted ropes to the accompaniment of yet more bellowed shouts and commands.

  Every so often, with a crack and a sigh, one of the ropes would break and the crate tumble to the dock below. There it would split open and spill its wares across the ground. Then, appearing out of nowhere like a colony of ants, women and children would scamper round, grabbing whatever they could find – be it mangoes or mantillas; buttons, books, boots or bolts of cotton cloth – secrete them inside the voluminous tattered rags they wore for the purpose, and scurry away.

  As I arrived that day, I saw the great stone eagle which stood atop the East Batavia Trading Company's main warehouse. That, at least, had remained. As for the rest, well, few things survived from the days of my childhood. The untidy jumble of fishermen's cottages had given way to huge fortress-like structures with iron gates and tall brick walls, while the river itself had been tamed and transformed, the mudflats largely drained and vast artificial lagoons created.

  And ships! There were hundreds of them, packed into every spare inch. Barques and barges, wherries, ferries and tugs; while the biggest of them – the great clippers and traders – were so much larger than they had been in my childhood. These behemoths sported exotic names: the Queen Mahavashti; the Golden Macaranda; the Transatalanta. And my favourite, the Pasacuda Princess – a vast coal- and sail-driven vessel, sweet with the scent of the crates of exotic spices she transported from the distant islands of the Maccabees, far away in the eastern oceans.

  I walked along the wharf, taking in the sights, sounds and smells, looking for the vessel the headmaster had told me would be berthed and unloading its cargo. The Ipanema was its name, a twin-masted schooner out of Valdario, carrying a cargo of teak and coconut oil. Not that that was of any interest to the headmaster.

  No, my instructions were to find the captain, who had a carefully crated specimen with Archimedes Barnett's name on it. Judging by the banknote I had in the third pocket of my poacher's waistcoat, this Captain Luis Fernandez was going to be paid handsomely for his trouble.

  ‘Catincatapetl,’ I mused as I passed a couple of large steam tugs called Gargantua and Pantagruel.

  The word had barely passed my lips when the air seemed to turn icy and the sky cloud over. I peered across the harbour to see a great bank of fog rolling up the river, like an unfurling grey carpet.

  In moments, the warehouses and wharves of Riverhythe were swathed in a dense yellow mist. These sudden sea fogs – or ‘fish stews’, as they were called – were nothing new. Combining with the smoke from factory chimneys and thousands of domestic chimney stacks, they could be particularly thick and acrid on the dockside.

  As a tick-tock lad, I hated ‘fish stews’. Even the most familiar trips became fraught with uncertainty when the fog was bad. One missed turning, one forgotten landmark, and the unwary traveller was lost in an instant and, once off the beaten track, could easily fall prey to thugs, thieves and pickpockets. What was worse, their cries for help – like the calls of the market sellers, the shouts of the carriage drivers, and the howls and yowls of the dogs and cats – were so muffled that no one ever heard them.

  No, when the fog descended, the city became harsh and forbidding; a place of dark secrets, darker whispers and the sound of footsteps forever fading away. Even up on the rooftops, the dense pall of stinking fog did not release its grip. And with each step a challenge and every journey a gamble, high-stacking was all but impossible, even for an expert tick-tock lad like yours truly.

  Sometimes, though, far up at the top of the highest towers and steeples, the air would abruptly clear. And then, from those lofty vantage points, the yellow fog could be seen below, shifting and rolling like a filthy ocean, while sticking out of it all around – like the masts of grounded sail boats – were the tops of other buildings, each one acting as a landmark.

  But down on the dockside I stood no chance. Pulling up my collar and pulling down my coalstack hat, I made my way carefully along the wooden boardwalk, tapping with my swordstick as I went.

  A little way on I stopped next to a huge tea clipper, the Oceania. There were lights on the deck, fuzzy with the fog but bright enough for me to see half a dozen or so crew members in silhouette,
going about their business.

  ‘The Ipanema! I'm looking for the Ipanema!’ I shouted up to an old seaman in a waxed sou'wester.

  ‘Three vessels along, mate. You can't miss her!’ he replied with a cheery wave.

  ‘Thanks!’ I shouted back, and tapped my way past.

  The fog was now so thick I found it difficult to see my own hand in front of my face, let alone read the names of the dark shapes I took to be ships ahead of me.

  One, two … three, I counted, approaching a looming black bow.

  ‘Ipanema …’ A strange, disembodied voice – half cry, half whisper – sounded close to my ear.

  I paused, a shiver of apprehension running down my spine. ‘Who's there?’ I called into the swirling fog.

  There was no reply. Gripping my sword-stick, I approached the shadowy vessel and, by tapping the boards, found the edge of the boardwalk and the beginning of a gangplank. Carefully I climbed the swaying board and stepped onto an eerie, deserted deck.

  ‘Hello?’ I called into the muffling blanket of fog. ‘Is there anybody there?’

  I made my way cautiously up onto the quarterdeck, and was about to push open the door to an unlit cabin when a figure loomed up at me out of the fog. I found myself staring into a pair of dead-looking eyes. In the gloom, I could just make out the tattered brocade on a brass-buttoned seaman's frock coat, and a battered cap with an ornate embroidered ‘I’ on its band.

  ‘Captain?’ I asked.

  As if in answer, the figure thrust a small wooden crate, the size of a hatbox, into my hands. As I took it, I felt, with a flinch, the captain's ice-cold fingers brush mine.

  I found myself staring into a pair of dead-looking eyes.

  My fingers trembling, I fumbled with the pocket of my waistcoat for the banknote that the headmaster had given me, when the figure lurched back into the swirling mist and seemingly vanished.

  By now I was thoroughly spooked – not to mention chilled to the bone and shivering like a plucked goose. I took out the note and, crouching down, found a cargo hook lying at my feet. Grasping the hook, I pinned the note to the cabin door and made a rapid exit.

  Without looking back, my heart still hammering in my chest, I set off back along the boardwalk, the crate clamped firmly beneath one arm. As I did so, the fog seemed to clear as abruptly as it had rolled in, and by the time I reached the Oceania, daylight was breaking through the thinning mist. Glancing back over my shoulder to get a better look at the ghostly vessel I had just left, I ran slap-bang into the old seaman in the sou'wester.

  ‘Whoa! Steady there, son!’ he exclaimed, regaining his balance and catching the box that had tumbled from my hands.

  He handed it back to me as I apologized for my clumsiness and hurried on my way

  It was only when I had left the docks far behind, the crate stowed securely in the haversack which hung from my shoulder, that I paused on top of a roof-ridge and caught my breath.

  In the distance, the sun shone out of a blue sky down onto the masts crowded into the wharves of Riverhythe. Just beyond them, floating down the river, was the dark shape of a twin-masted schooner. I felt an icy shiver at the sight and, glancing down, saw that the palm of my right hand was sticky with blood.

  aybe it was the cold fog that had chilled me to the marrow. Maybe it was the sinister ship with its haunted-looking captain that had thoroughly spooked me. Or maybe it was the sight of my hand, stained with someone else's blood, that had shocked me to the core. Whatever it was, highstacking it from the Riverhythe docks to Grassington Hall late that afternoon proved far from easy.

  I slipped on an easy drainpipe ascent, grazing my knuckles and making a hole in the knee of my breeches. I stumbled on a roof-ridge and came within a bald man's eyelash of tumbling through an open skylight. And then – most embarrassing of all for a tick-tock lad of my experience – I messed up a perfectly simple Peabody Roll manoeuvre, overshooting the end gable and ending up sprawling on a flat roof beyond.

  Luckily I'd instinctively protected the haversack containing the headmaster's package with one arm as I fell. But although there was no damage done, as I climbed to my feet and dusted myself down, I was angry that I had been so inept. Archimedes Barnett had entrusted the safe delivery of this specimen to me and I didn't intend to betray that trust.

  Resolving to take far more care as I continued on my journey, I set off at a gentler pace and arrived at Grassington Hall School a little under an hour later with no further mishaps. It was late afternoon by the time I reached the gatehouse. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows across the grounds of the school and turning the pale-grey stone walls the colour of spiced honey. The ‘fish-stew’ fog, so dense and acrid down at the docks, was now no more than a distant memory – and with it, I believed, the horrors that had so unnerved me on the wharfside.

  I called a cheery greeting to the gatekeeper. He doffed his cap and waved me through, into the school grounds. A game of Farrow Fives was once again in full swing on the main field, to the accompaniment of loud shouting and whooping from what looked like almost the entire school. As I strode past the swaying willows and spreading oaks, the sounds of cheering voices filling the air – chanting, laughing, singing – I was struck once more by just how fortunate the pupils of Grassington Hall seemed to be.

  ‘Enter!’ Archimedes Barnett called out in response to my knock on his study door.

  I turned the handle and went in, to see the headmaster sitting at his desk with a large leather-bound book open in front of him and a magnifying glass clasped in one hand. He looked up.

  ‘Barnaby!’ he exclaimed. ‘You've made excellent time. I congratulate you, my boy.’ He tapped a finger on a magnificent engraving in the book. ‘Audley-Bishop's Birds of the Rainforests, plate number seventy-three: the catincatapetl,’ he murmured reverently, ‘or emerald messenger of darkness – named after the Toltec demon god Catincatapetl, Master of the Underworld and Lord of Chaos.’ He fixed me with a stare. ‘Do you know how rare this bird is?’

  I shook my head as I opened my haversack and carefully took out the small crate.

  ‘No, of course you don't. How could you?’ chuckled the headmaster, greedily seizing the box and examining its wooden sides minutely. ‘If you'll excuse me, Barnaby, I must go to the bird hall at once and unpack our illustrious guest with the greatest care imaginable … Here.’

  He fumbled in his waistcoat and drew out three large banknotes, thrusting them into my hand.

  ‘But, Headmaster,’ I protested, ‘that's far too much …’

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ Archimedes Barnett called over his shoulder to me, brushing my objections to one side as he strode out of his study and along the corridor. ‘You've made an old ornithologist very happy.’

  I shook my head as I made my way outside, the banknotes neatly folded in the top left-hand pocket of my poacher's waistcoat. I'd wanted to tell the headmaster about the strange ship and the bloody stain on my hand, but he hadn't given me a chance. He was just delighted to get his hands on his precious bird, no questions asked.

  And if he was satisfied, then so was I. I'd been rewarded handsomely for my trouble, the Ipanema had left the docks and the headmaster had his parcel.

  Job done. Or so I thought …

  I couldn't have been more wrong if I'd baited an elephant trap with a mouse. Not that I knew it that beautiful sunny evening as I strode across the playing fields of Grassington Hall towards the gates.

  I was just passing the main field when a groan went up from the crowd. I glanced across to see a boy in grass-stained flannels rolling around by one of the targets, clutching his head. There was a heavy leather ball lying by his right foot. A loud whistle sounded and a tall, heavily built man with bushy hair, ruddy cheeks and watery blue eyes came striding over.

  ‘A fine save, Thompson,’ he shouted sarcastically. ‘But next time you might try stopping the ball with your hands, not your head!’

  There were sniggers from the watching pupils as th
e tall games master stood over the youth. It was the fair-haired boy who'd been my guide on my first visit to the school.

  ‘Come on, Thompson!’ The master prodded the prone boy with a muddy boot. ‘Stop rolling around like a Highfield lady with a touch of the vapours …’

  I pushed through the crowd and knelt by my stricken friend. Gently I pulled his hand from his face and examined the nasty-looking swelling above his left eye.

  ‘Better get yourself off to the infirmary and have Matron look at it,’ I advised Thompson, who was blinking up at me, a dazed expression on his face.

  ‘On your feet!’ bellowed the master. ‘Now!’

  ‘Y-y-yes, sir, Mr Cripps,’ Thompson mumbled, trying to get up.

  I helped him climb unsteadily to his feet. ‘This boy is in no condition to continue,’ I protested.

  Mr Cripps turned on me, his face red with suppressed rage. ‘I'm the games master!’ he shouted. ‘And I decide who's fit or not fit to continue. Thompson is up next, as fifth hitter – or Ibis House loses the game!’

  ‘Not if I take his place,’ I said smoothly, slipping off my topcoat and rolling up my sleeves.

  A cheer went up from the crowd as the games master blustered about substitutions and second-half rules and how he had never seen me on the fives field before.

  ‘The name's Grimes,’ I told him, winking at Thompson, who was being helped to the sideline, ‘and I'm a new boy, you could say.’

  Again the crowd roared their approval. Mr Cripps blew his whistle and shouted, ‘Well, get on with it, then, Grimes!’

  I strode over to the plate, picked up the fives bat and glanced around the field. From what I'd picked up during my brief observation of the game, my task was to hit one of the targets in the outfield, where a catcher with a long-netted stick stood waiting. The shot would determine how much of a free run I'd have to get round the bases, before the opposing team were allowed to tackle me or trip me up with the fives mallets – or ‘toe-crushers’ – they brandished. If the ball was caught, then I was out, and it was game over.