Eva Ibbotson - Monster Mission

Sprott looked at his son. He had always despised Lambert but he was sorry now. Lambert was right. He had said all along that the … things … weren’t really there and they weren’t. How could they have been?

‘Quite right, Lambert,’ said Stanley Sprott, and leant back and closed his eyes.

If they were rescued he’d say nothing — and see that the others said nothing too. He wasn’t going to be locked up as a loony, that was for sure …

The last days on the Island were strangely happy. The children knew they would soon be fetched away but they were able to enjoy each moment as it came and being in an adventure seemed to have done everybody good.

The stoorworm no longer complained about being too long for his thoughts.

‘If I’d been any shorter I couldn’t have held up Aunt Coral in the sea,’ he said and stopped talking about plastic surgery once and for all.

As for Loreen, when Aunt Myrtle fetched Walter out of the washbasin and put him in his mother’s arms she let out a shriek of joy.

‘He’s grown hair!’ she cried.

‘He’s grown a hair,’ said Queenie who was giving herself airs because she had saved Aunt Etta.

But the most exciting thing happened to the boobrie. After she waddled up to her nest with her three bedraggled chicks she found somebody sitting in it.

The boobrie paused, hissed … stretched out her neck. Who was it who dared to sit on her nest? Hooting, honking and complaining, she flapped her wings and prepared to attack.

Then suddenly she stopped. She lay down in front of the stranger, she clapped her beak against his … her eyes rolled with welcome and with love.

‘My goodness,’ said Fabio. ‘It’s her husband. He’s come back!’

And he had. He didn’t seem to be a very intelligent bird but knowing that there were two boobries now to look after the chicks was a great relief to everybody.

Herbert was of course a hero, but not at all conceited. He began straight away to tidy up the aunts’ house and to label Art’s storage jars and to show him how to cut the heads off fish.

But it was Myrtle who had been his special friend and he did everything he could to help her. He told her when her skirt was on back to front and he corrected her when she played a tune too fast on the cello, and he insisted that she had swimming lessons twice a day.

‘Oh, Herbert, the water is so cold!’ Myrtle would cry.

But Herbert said it was dangerous to live so close to the sea and not be able to swim, and every morning and every evening Myrtle had to get her rubber ring and put on her chill-proof vest and Aunt Etta’s navy-blue bloomers and go into the sea.

But the important thing — the thing that was on everybody’s mind — was what was going to happen to the kraken.

After he had brought them safely to the shore the great kraken had moved a little way away to the mouth of the bay. He stayed submerged most of the time and out of sight and his son stayed with him.

‘He’s thinking,’ said Aunt Etta and she was right.

He was thinking about what to do next. Should he give up his healing journey around the world and go back to the Arctic? Or should he find somewhere else to leave his son? For he knew without being told that things were going to be different on the Island.

Then one morning Ethelgonda appeared, shimmering above her tombstone, so they knew that it would be an important day.

And sure enough by noon the great kraken swam slowly into the bay with his son on his back. It was a most anxious moment. No one could blame the kraken if he turned his back on human beings once again and left the sea to spoil, and it was as though all those who waited by the shore were holding their breath.

Then he began to talk. He talked in Polar and it was his son who translated.

‘Although people deserve that I should leave them to their mess and their wickedness, I have decided to go on with my journey around the oceans of the world. But I shall not take one year and one day to make the journey. I shall take two years and two days … or even three years and three days, so that my son, who has been restored to me, can come also and be with me at my side.’

When he said that a great cheer went up and Fabio and Minette hugged each other because it was the closest to a happy ending they could hope for.

That evening when it was quiet, the little kraken came and said goodbye all by himself to the children who had cared for him. There was just one bun left in the boobrie tin but when Fabio gave it to the kraken he did not at once open his mouth. He said: ‘Share!’

So the children broke the bun into three parts and everybody had a piece. It was a most squashed and sorry-looking bun, with cracked icing and a wilting Smartie clinging to the top … but afterwards the children remembered it as tasting like a bun in Paradise.

The next morning the kraken and his son had gone.

And only a few hours later the noise they had been expecting was heard over the Island: the sound of a helicopter. But not one … three … and coming from them a whole posse of policemen with guns and handcuffs and body-armour — come to fetch back the children and arrest the aunts.

Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral had been in prison for several weeks before their trial for kidnapping came to the courts. The children were not allowed to visit them and so the first time they saw them was in the dock at the Old Bailey, handcuffed to the policewomen who brought them up from the cells.

For Minette and Fabio, seeing them like that was like being kicked very hard in the stomach and Minette gave a gasp of distress which the people in the courtroom heard.

‘Poor little thing — look how frightened she is,’ they whispered — and it was true. Minette was very frightened and so was Fabio — frightened for the aunts and what might happen to them; very frightened indeed.

Etta had always been thin but now she was all bone, and Coral’s bulk had gone so that her skin hung in folds. It wasn’t the prison food or the other prisoners that had worn them down, it was waking up day after day to the grey walls which closed them in. It was their loss of freedom.

The courtroom was very dark and very old. The judge sat high above everyone else like God, and below him were men in gowns and wigs: a ferrety-looking man who was the prosecuting counsel and had to prove that the aunts were guilty, and a man with a round face like a Christmas pudding who was the defence counsel and had to try and show that the aunts were innocent. The jury — three women and nine men, sat on the judge’s right. One of them, a lady with a large bosom and red hair, kept fanning herself with a piece of paper. Minette’s parents sat on benches facing the judge, as far away from each other as possible, and the old Mountjoys were in the back row.

It was only Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral who were being tried. Myrtle had been allowed to return to the Island because Mr Sprott was in a clinic in America and too muddled to accuse anyone of kidnapping his son. Etta and Coral were glad of that. They thought that Myrtle would probably have died in prison.

The case had attracted a lot of attention. Killer Aunts Brought to Justice screamed the newspaper headlines and the strange pictures of Etta and Coral that had been on the walls of the police station were printed again, making everyone certain that these were the most evil women in the world.

‘Will the prisoner stand,’ said the clerk of the court — and the children drew in their breath for the prisoner was Etta.

The charge was read out.

‘Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’ she was asked.

‘Not guilty,’ said Etta, holding her head high.