Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

Minette and Fabio exchanged troubled glances.

“What was the top of her like?”

“I don’t know…she had sort of green hair — and when I screamed she flopped her tail — I heard it flop…” He shuddered. “And then she dived into the water.”

“It sounds like Oona,” said Minette in a low voice. “Of course it would be her — she’s been frightened enough already by that ridiculous Lord Brasenott. I’ll go and comfort her. If only it had been Queenie, she’d have seen Lambert off.”

She slipped out and Fabio was left alone with the blubbering Lambert.

He had had an idea.

“Lambert,” he said. “Listen to this, because it’s important. When Minette and I first came, we saw all sorts of strange creatures — mermaids like you’ve seen and a long slithery worm and a giant bird — oh, all sorts of things — but then we realized they weren’t real. They couldn’t be real because creatures like that don’t exist. I mean, there aren’t any such things as mermaids, are there?”

Lambert had stopped crying. He was actually listening.

“No,” he said. “There aren’t.”

“So what has happened, Lambert, is that you’re imagining them. It’s like having a vision or a dream. And it’s because of something that Art puts in the food. He uses a flour made of seaweed and it has a drug in it that makes you see things. He doesn’t mean to harm us but it’s the only kind of flour you can get here.”

“They aren’t really there?” asked Lambert, sniffing the snot back into his nose. “She wasn’t there — that horrible girl and the awful tail that she flopped with — that wasn’t there either?”

“No it wasn’t. And anything else you see like that will just be a dream. You’ve heard of drugs that give you visions, haven’t you? They’re called halluci—” But here Fabio gave up, not sure of how to pronounce hallucinogenic or even if that was the word he meant. “And it’s best not to say anything to anyone — even if you think you see other things. Just don’t take any notice, and if you get back to your father don’t tell him, he’d only laugh at you.”

It worked. Lambert gave a few more gulps; he was still blotched, he was still hiccuping unpleasantly, but he was calm.

And from then on, if Lambert saw anything unusual he was sure it was because of something in the food.

The aunts weren’t happy about Fabio telling lies, but it seemed safer than letting Lambert go screaming all over the Island and hurting the feelings of the creatures that he came upon.

And so the days passed. Minette and Fabio still talked about getting away but they always fell asleep before they could work out how to do it, and slowly the beauty of the place — the great wide skies, the flaming sunsets and the never-ending sound of the sea — seemed to be becoming a part of them.

But meanwhile in London all hell was breaking loose.

Eight days after Minette ate her drugged cheese and tomato sandwich, Minette’s mother, Mrs Danby, rang Edinburgh to ask if Minette could stay with her father for an extra week. Minette’s term had started but that was not the kind of thing that bothered Mrs Danby.

“I have the chance of a job filming in Paris,” she said.

This wasn’t strictly true. What she did have was yet another boyfriend who said he’d take her to France for a bit of a “jolly”.

Professor Danby, whom she’d interrupted as he was preparing an important lecture on “The Use of the Semi-Colon”, did not at first understand what she was saying.

“I can hardly keep Minette longer, when I haven’t got her,” he said in his dry, irritable voice.

There was a pause at the other end while Mrs Danby fought down the slight fluttering in her stomach.

“Don’t be silly, Philip. I sent Minette to you more than a week ago. She’s been with you since the fifteenth.”

“No, you didn’t. I had a telephone message to say you were keeping her with you and taking her to the seaside. I remember it quite clearly.”

The professor had in fact been rather pleased because the lecture he was giving was part of an important series—“The Use of the Semi-Colon”, “The Use of the Comma”, “The Use of the Paragraph” and so on — and he needed to get on with his work without being bothered by a child.

Now, though, he too began to feel as though his stomach was not quite where it should have been. But of course being the sort of people they were, the Danbys immediately began to blame each other.

“You must be mad, not letting me know she hadn’t arrived.”

“I must be mad?” hissed the professor. “You must be mad. Any normal mother would ring up to see that her daughter had arrived safely.”

“And any normal father would ring and find out why she wasn’t being sent.”

“Are you accusing me of not being normal?” said the professor in a dangerously quiet voice. “A woman who stubbed out her cigarette on a poached egg.”

“It wasn’t a poached egg, it was a fried egg. And if you hadn’t kept turning the lamps off because you were too mean to pay the electricity bill I’d have seen it wasn’t an ashtray. And anyway, how a man who leaves a bath full of scum every time he—”

“Scum!” yelled the professor down the phone. “Are you accusing me of leaving scum? Why I couldn’t even get into the bath without wading through a heap of your unspeakable toenail clippings.”

They went on like this for some time but then they remembered that their only daughter was missing and pulled themselves together.

“Can she have run away?” wondered Mrs Danby.

“Why should she run away? She has two perfectly good homes.”

“Yes. But she’s been looking a bit peaky. And she sees tigers on the ceiling. Perhaps I should have let her have a nightlight.”

“If every child who sees tigers on the ceiling ran away, there’d be very few children left in their homes,” said the professor.

But obviously the next thing to be done was to go to the police. So Professor Danby went to the police station in Edinburgh and Mrs Danby went to the police station in London. Then she rang her ex-husband and said that the police wanted them to come together and compare their stories exactly.

“You have to come down,” said Mrs Danby. “And quick. They say there’s no time to waste.”

So the professor took the train to London and the next day both of Minette’s parents sat side by side in a taxi on the way to the Metropolitan Police Station.

The officer they saw this time was a high-ranking one, a detective chief superintendent who had a secretary sitting beside him to take everything down.

“Now, I understand that you have heard nothing since your daughter disappeared ten days ago?” he asked. “No messages? No ransom demand?”

Both the Danbys shook their heads.

“I have very little money,” said the professor. “I’m on the staff of the University and they pay abominably. It’s a disgrace how little—”

“And I’m on the dole,” said Mrs Danby, unusually honest. “So even if they asked us for money, it wouldn’t help.”

The detective wrote this down. “Now tell us, please, Mrs Danby, exactly where and when you last saw your daughter.”

“It was at two o’clock on the fifteenth of April. At King’s Cross Station, Platform One. I handed her over to an aunt—”

“Wait a minute!” The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. “You mean your aunt…or her aunt…?”

“No. An aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.”

The detective seemed to find this very interesting. “Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,” he said to the secretary. “Sergeant Harris has it.” He turned back to the Danbys. “Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.”