Mr Smith saw him at once. He was standing in the forecourt of the garage, staring at the road, and he hadn’t changed at all. He still wore the blue overalls he had worn when he was driving, and the flat cap, and for a moment Mr Smith was worried because, of course, he himself had changed tremendously.
And at first Hal looked very surprised to see a skeleton coming towards him, but as soon as Mr Smith greeted him, his face lit up. ‘Well, well, Doug, old man, it’s good to see you.’ He looked his friend up and down. ‘What have you been up to? Lost a lot of weight,’ said Hal, and burst out laughing. ‘Never thought you’d end up a skeleton. Remember how we all teased you because you were too fat to get into the cab?’
They talked about the old days for a while but then Mr Smith came to the point. ‘I need your help, Hal,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a big truck – perhaps two – carrying a load of cattle. Would have gone through sometime in the last week.’
‘Are you, then?’ said Hal thoughtfully. He lifted his cap and scratched his head. ‘Now let me see...’
In Cousin Howard’s library the children waited. They had been there most of the day, since they woke to find the nursery empty.
There had been no time to panic – Cousin Howard had given them the message which the ghosts had left as soon they woke – but the waiting was hard. They had never known time go so slowly.
Then, in the early afternoon, Sunita came in through the window, carrying The Feet. Both of them looked utterly exhausted and even before Sunita shook her head they realized that there was no news.
Brenda came in soon after that. Her veil was tangled and her bullet holes had dried out on the long journey.
‘Nothing,’ she said wearily. ‘No one’s seen anything.’
Ranulf came next. His shirt had blown open and they could see the weary rat lying like a limp dishcloth against his chest.
Ranulf did not speak; he only shook his head and collapsed on to the couch.
It was hopeless, then. Dead or alive, the cattle were gone.
Mr Smith came last. He too was exhausted. As he touched the floor his leg bones seemed to give way under him and for a few moments he could not get his breath. But when he roused himself they saw that his single eye was shining, and his skull looked as though it was lit up from within.
‘I have news,’ he said. ‘There has been a sighting. All is not lost!’
And he told them what he had discovered.
‘I’ve got this friend, Hal Striver,’ Mr Smith began, ‘and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about motor transport. Well, last week – on Thursday night it was – he saw two big cattle trucks pull up by the garage, and one of the drivers got out and went into the cafe but he didn’t stay more than a minute, and no one else got out. So Hal went to have a look and he saw it was chock-full of cattle, but the animals were very quiet – he thought they must have been drugged. They often drug animals now when they move them. Anyway, Hal had a look inside the cab of the driver who’d got out, and he saw a map on the dashboard and a ring round one particular place.’
Mr Smith paused and the children waited, trying desperately not to show their impatience.
‘Hal reckons he knows where the cattle were going. To a place called Blackscar Island. It’s over the border, in Scotland, off the north-east coast, and it’s a funny place, Hal said. There’s a causeway you can drive over at low tide, but at high tide the island’s completely cut off. No one knows much about it because it’s so isolated and the people who own it don’t like visitors, but Hal reckons he’s seen other loads bound for there.’
‘And it was last Thursday night that he saw them?’ asked Ned.
Mr Smith nodded. ‘The night after the cattle were taken from here.’
‘Did he see what colour they were?’ asked Madlyn.
‘No. It was dark and there were only small gaps in between the slats. But he did say he thought they were horned.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Sunita. ‘Why pretend to bury the cattle and then take them somewhere else?’
No one could understand it.
‘It doesn’t matter whether we understand it or not,’ said Rollo. ‘We shall find out when we get there.’
‘Get where?’ said Madlyn – though she knew, of course.
‘To this island place. To Blackscar.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It would have been all right, thought Madlyn; she would have been able to hold Rollo back, but everything was against her. First of all Sir George came down to breakfast in his suit, which was only twenty years old, instead of in his thirty-year-old ginger tweeds, and said he was going to London.
He didn’t tell the children why he was going but he looked worried and preoccupied. The truth was that he had decided to go to the Ministry of Animal Health and find out more about the disease which had felled his cattle.
Then Aunt Emily, after staggering about bravely with her eyes half closed against the light, went to bed with one of her sick headaches.
‘You will be all right, won’t you?’ she said anxiously to Madlyn. ‘Mrs Grove will come up if you want her to.’
‘We’ll be perfectly all right,’ said Madlyn firmly.
The last bit of bad luck for Madlyn was that Mrs Grove, not knowing that Emily was laid up, took a local train to Berwick to visit her brother, who had left hospital and was staying with a friend.
Nothing could stop Rollo now.
‘We have to go to Blackscar. We have to see what’s happened.’ It was no good trying to get him to see sense; no good telling him that the animals that Hal had seen could have been any load of cattle going to any slaughterhouse in the country. He was like a zombie. ‘We have to go,’ he kept repeating. ‘We have to.’
‘How?’ said Madlyn angrily. ‘How do you think you can get to this Blackscar place. It’s over a hundred miles away, over the border.’
‘We can drive,’ said Rollo.
‘Oh we can, can we? And who’s going to drive us ?’
‘I can drive,’ said Ned unexpectedly. ‘My uncle lets me drive his estate car in the park.’
Madlyn glared at him. Ned was usually on her side; she had learned to rely on him.
‘Oh yes? And you’ve got a licence, I suppose, at your age.’
Ned shrugged. ‘I didn’t say I had a licence. I said I could drive.’
‘And get arrested as soon as the first police car sees us. You’re mad.’
Rollo turned to Mr Smith.
‘You can drive,’ he said. ‘You must be able to. You were a taxi driver.’
‘I may have been a taxi driver once, but I’m a skeleton now,’ said Mr Smith.
‘But you could, if you had to, couldn’t you?’ Rollo went on.
The skeleton sighed, ‘You’ve no idea how much ectoplasmic force it takes to move things when you’ve passed on,’ he said. ‘Look at Brenda – she always has to rest after she’s strangled someone. It isn’t as though we’re poltergeists.’
‘No indeed, we are definitely not poltergeists,’ agreed Ranulf, sounding quite shocked. ‘Poltergeists are just vulgar bundles of force.’
‘And nasty bundles at that,’ said Brenda. ‘Bang, crash, thump! No skill. No care for other people.’
‘Well, then it’ll have to be Ned,’ said Rollo.
‘No!’ said Madlyn. ‘I won’t have Ned sent to prison or wherever they send children to. If I have to choose between being driven by a skeleton or an eleven-year-old boy, I’d rather it was a skeleton. But anyway, we haven’t got anything to drive in so there’s no point in arguing. Uncle George has taken his Bentley.’
‘There’s my uncle’s estate,’ said Ned. ‘He hasn’t used it since he came out of hospital. It’s old but it goes.’
In the end the skeleton and the boy took turns to drive the ancient, rattling car up to the Scottish border, towards the flat, low-lying eastern shore. Ned had filled the tank from the petrol pump in the farmyard and when Madlyn saw that she couldn’t stop them going, she k
new she had to come too – and she packed a hamper of food and some warm clothes and their toothbrushes. If Rollo was killed by a cattle rustler at least he’d die with clean teeth.
They had waited till it was dark. Mr Smith wore his overcoat with the hood up and no one stopped him, but it was a nightmare journey. He’d been the safest of drivers when he was alive, but now his finger bones slipped on the steering wheel and his single eye gave him distorted vision. Nor was it any better when Ned drove: his legs were really too short to reach the pedals, and his gear changes made Mr Smith wince.
In the back, the ghosts sent out waves of ectoplasmic force to help but it wasn’t easy. Ranulf’s rat was gagging badly: rodents are good on ships but motor transport doesn’t agree with them. And being in a car always reminded Brenda of the drive to church for her wedding and made her weepy.
But somehow they did it. The journey, which should have taken two hours, took nearly four, but well before dawn they saw the outlines of the Lammermuir hills to the west. Their headlights caught fields of sheep, copses, an occasional farmhouse, but it was a bleak and empty landscape that they were coming to.
Then, still before sunrise, they reached the sea and saw before them a low dark shape in the water.
They had arrived.
The tide was high. They could hear the water lapping on the rocks. It would be several hours before they could hope to get across to the island. What they needed now was somewhere to sleep.
‘I’ve never seen such a lonely place,’ said Madlyn. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone living here at all.’
There was no sign of a village or even a farmhouse – but standing quite by itself on a spit of land was a church.
It was a very small church, and very simple, but solid and well built to withstand the winds from the sea. It was too dark to make out more than the outline: the squat tower, the arched windows. Surrounding it was a small graveyard. The building looked almost like the turf from which it sprang.
The children walked slowly up to the big wooden door.
‘It’ll be locked,’ said Ned. ‘They always are these days.
’ But it was not locked. The door drew back, creaking, and they were in the dim interior. A few brass plates reflected what little light there was, but the inside of the church was as simple as the outside. There was a row of pews with flat cushions; the windows were filled with plain glass.
‘Could we sleep here?’ wondered Madlyn. ‘Or would it be disrespectful to God?’
‘People have always sheltered in churches,’ said Ned. ‘It’s called seeking sanctuary.’
‘Yes, I know, people... but ghosts?’
‘It should be all right if they haven’t been wicked.’
But they weren’t sure. Sinners are always welcome in a church or any House of God as long as they have repented – but what if they haven’t? It would be so embarrassing if there were thunderclaps or bolts from heaven when their friends tried to come in.
‘We’ll stay outside,’ said Ranulf. ‘Ghosts can rest anywhere.’
But the children felt it would be rude to go inside and leave their companions out in the cold.
So Ranulf glided across the porch and into the church and there were absolutely no thunderbolts of any kind. Obviously Ranulf had not been wicked and nor had the rat. (Gnawing is not wicked if you are a rat because gnawing is what rats do.) Mr Smith too passed peacefully into the church, and so did Sunita.
They were a bit worried about Brenda, because she had broken her promise to Roderick when she married the boot manufacturer, but breaking promises, though bad, is so common that it isn’t really a sin and she got in too and flopped down on a pew.
Then Sunita turned to The Feet, which were standing outside on the porch.
‘Come along, dears,’ she said to them.
But The Feet didn’t come along, even for Sunita. The Feet absolutely wouldn’t enter the church; they wouldn’t even try. They turned away firmly and the children could just make out the heels disappearing in the direction of a tombstone before the darkness swallowed them completely.
‘Oh well,’ said Madlyn. ‘Perhaps they just want to be alone.’
They were all too tired to argue, and one by one they stretched out on the pews and went to sleep.
And while they slept, the water receded and Blackscar began to lift itself out of the morning mist.
It was called Blackscar Island but it was only an island part of the time. The causeway built across the sands could carry cars and people from the mainland, but it was only passable at low tide and for a few hours on either side of it. At high tide Blackscar was as complete an island as any in the North Sea.
Because of this there had been talk among seafarers in the olden days of people, or flocks of sheep, walking on the water ... and miracles – but they were walking on the submerged causeway. And anyone who set off later than the time shown on the noticeboards on either side of the causeway risked drowning. There was a list of those who had perished in this way in the church, and to prevent further accidents a kind of wooden hut on stilts had been built halfway across, with a ladder leading up to it, where foolish travellers could take refuge till the tide turned again. It was called the Blackscar Box and was not at all a comfortable place in which to spend the night.
The coast near Blackscar is bleak: flat and muddy with reeds and sandbanks – the island stretches a drear arm out into the grey water. All the same, years earlier a property developer had decided to build a luxury hotel on it. He thought people might be excited by the difficulty of getting across to the island, and by the loneliness.
The hotel he built was very grand: it had towers and turrets, and glassed verandas attached to each of the bedrooms. It had a palm court, where visiting orchestras could play, and three lounges, and the bathrooms had shell-shaped baths with gold-plated taps.
And at first people did come and the hotel did good business.
But the weather was terrible: fogs and wind and endlessly grey skies. The birds whose sad cries kept the visitors awake were not the kind that rich people liked to shoot, and the fish were just . . . fish – not the sort you could be photographed with when you had caught them. Who wants to be photographed with a herring?
And then a very important visitor ignored the noticeboard telling him the times of the high tide, and was drowned in his expensive motor car, and fewer and fewer visitors came, and the hotel went bankrupt.
The hotel stayed empty for nearly ten years. Then a very important doctor from London came and bought it – and with the hotel went the whole island: the fields and the marshes and the foreshore.
The name of the doctor was Maurice Manners and he was a man with a dream.
Dr Manners moved into the main part of the hotel – in fact he made it even grander – but the part where the servants used to sleep he turned into workshops and offices. He built wooden huts on the far side of the hotel and large sheds, and he fenced off paddocks, and he brought in like-minded people to help him with his business.
But exactly what his business was, no one knew, because visitors were not welcome at Blackscar. Dr Manners needed peace and solitude for his work, and for a long time now only those who had been specially invited made the crossing to the island.
Rollo woke first, and came out of the chapel to see the silver ribbon of the sea-washed road disappearing into the morning mist.
He would have set off then and there but Madlyn made them all eat some bread and butter and wash as best they could under the tap they found in the vestry. They had parked the car behind the church; with luck no one had seen it from the island, and they could make their way across on foot without being noticed.
‘We’ve got to hurry,’ Rollo kept saying, ‘before everybody wakes up.’
The ghosts meant to come with them but they were having trouble with The Feet. The Feet had spent the night on a moss-covered tombstone at the edge of the churchyard. It didn’t seem to be so different from any of the other tombstones – s
lightly crooked, with crumbling stonework and a name carved into it which was difficult to read. The name on this particular tombstone was ISH, which was unusual, but this was the place where The Feet wanted to be, and when it was time to set off for the island they refused to move.
Even Sunita couldn’t make them come away. When she called them, The Feet would take a few steps towards her and then they would sort of fall in on themselves, the toes curled under, and, even in the cold of early morning, a sweat broke out on their skin.
‘We’ll catch you up,’ said Ranulf, and the children scrambled down on to the sands and set off along the causeway.
It was easy to believe that only an hour earlier the road that they walked on had been under water; there were still puddles between the uneven stones. On either side of them, on the sands, waders and oystercatchers were looking for shellfish left in the shallow pools. The receding water sucked and eddied round the wooden piles.
Halfway across, they passed the ladder leading to the Blackscar Box; but they kept steadily on. They could only hope that the mist was hiding them from the windows of the hotel. Fortunately the hotel had been built so as to face away from the mainland, with most of the windows looking out on the open sea.
When they reached the island itself they left the causeway and dropped down on to the foreshore, seeking the shelter of the dunes, crawling through the marram-grass and between hummocks of sand.
So far they had met nobody.
Every so often they made their way to the top of a dune and looked out on the interior of the island. They could make out the ornate building of the hotel, a row of wooden huts and a big windowless building almost the size of an aircraft hangar.
They had come to a small bay with a wooden jetty. The water here was deep and would provide good anchorage for seagoing boats, but there were no boats to be seen. Running across the gravelly sand, they found that the foreshore on the far side of the bay had levelled out; the dunes were less steep. An upturned rowing boat gave them a hiding place from which to watch.