Monster Mission

But he’d ruined his health and he couldn’t get work and soon after Fabio was born he went back to England. Since then Fabio had lived first with his mother in Rio and then, when she moved in with another man, upriver in the forest with his grandparents and his uncle and his cousins. There were a lot of people in the three huts and very little money but Fabio had been perfectly happy. His grandfather was an Amorian Indian and knew everything, and his grandmother had worked as a cook for a Portuguese planter and had told the most marvellous stories.

Then just over a year ago his mother had come with an Englishman in a silly suit who kept mopping his face all the time and wrinkled up his nose when he passed the pig. It turned out that Fabio’s father had died and on his deathbed had begged his parents, the old Mountjoys, to bring Fabio to England and bring him up as an English gentleman.

That was the beginning of the nightmare. His mother had insisted that he went. Henry Mountjoy had talked so much about his grand house in England that she wanted her son to have his share. But the grand house had been sold to pay Henry’s debts, and Henry’s parents took one look at the wild little boy and shuddered.

Since the grandparents were too old to turn Fabio into an English gentleman, this odd thing was to be done in a boarding school. But boarding schools, according to the old Mountjoys, had gone soft. They had tried two from which Fabio had returned much as before, only speaking better English.

Greymarsh Towers, though, was different. The headmaster believed not just in cold baths and stiff upper lips but in all sorts of things that one would have thought didn’t happen any more, and the boys were vile.

‘They call me “monkey” or “chopsticks” and try to tie me up. But I’m going to kill them this time. I’m going to kill them and I’m going to kill the headmaster and they can take me to prison and I don’t care!’

But before he could get round to killing the headmaster, Fabio started being sick.

He was sick outside Slough, and on the far side of Maidenhead and in the entrance of a house called The Laurels in Reading, and the closer they got to Greymarsh Towers, the sicker Fabio became.

And when she saw Greymarsh Towers, Coral thought that she too would be sick if she had to return there. It was a huge bleak house with iron bars across the windows, and the stone walls looked slimy and cold.

It was now time to act. The chauffeur was supposed to drop them at the school and she was to make her own way back by train.

‘Will you please wait here, Fabio,’ she said to the boy. ‘Keep an eye on him, Mr Fowler. Don’t let him run away.’

The boy, who had begun to trust her, cowered back in his seat and Coral marched up to the front door. The smell of Greymarsh would have been enough to put her off for life. Hospital disinfectant, tortured cabbage, lavatories …

As for Matron, as she came out of her office she would have made a very good camel: the nose was right, the sneering upper lip, and the distrustful muddy eyes. Except that camels can’t help their expressions and people can.

‘I am afraid I have bad news about Hubert-Henry Mountjoy,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘He has been laid low with a bad attack of Burry-Burry fever and can’t come back to school at present.’

Matron pursed her mouth.

‘Well, of course, that is what you expect from foreign children—he probably picked it up in his hut in the jungle.’

Since Aunt Coral had just invented Burry-Burry fever she only nodded and said she would let Matron know as soon as the boy was better. She then returned to the car and said, ‘I am sorry to tell you that there has been an outbreak of meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.’

The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.

‘Well, I can’t take him back,’ said the surly driver. ‘I’m going on to another job down in the West Country and I haven’t a minute to waste.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Coral. ‘Just take us to the station. We’ll make our own way back to London.’

Sitting on the station platform, Coral noticed the exact moment when Fabio’s happiness at the thought of escaping school changed to misery at the thought of going back to his grandparents’ dungeon of a house.

She hadn’t had any real doubts but now she was certain. Should she use chloroform? Or the sleeping powder that Etta used?

Either way, thought Coral, Fabio was the one.

Etta and Coral had been right. Aunt Myrtle should never have been allowed to come on the kidnapping job. Almost as soon as she arrived in London she was so homesick that she thought she would die. She missed the sound of the waves on the rocks and the scent of the clover and the way the clouds raced across the high clean sky. But most of all she missed Herbert. She was used to sitting on the point every day and playing the cello to him, and now she began to worry in case he was missing her too.