Island of the Aunts

Chapter 23

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.

Then the witnesses were called. Minette’s mother came first, tripping towards the witness box and patting her hair. She was sorry the trial wasn’t shown on the telly because her hat was exactly right — serious and dark but very flattering — and because she had been an actress she swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a very dramatic way.

“Is this the woman who met you at King’s Cross Station?” asked the prosecuting counsel who looked like a ferret, pointing at Etta.

“Yes it is.”

“And did you think she was a fit person to have charge of your daughter?”

“Yes, I did, because she came from an agency. But I thought she had a sinister face.”

“Could you tell us what you mean by sinister…?”

Minette’s father was called next and described the false message he had had to say that Minette would not be travelling to Edinburgh.

Then it was Minette’s turn.

There had been a lot of argument about whether Fabio and Minette were old enough to give evidence, but in the end it was decided that they could. So Minette too swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then a footstool was fetched so that her head came over the edge of the witness box and the ferrety man began.

“Now, Minette, will you tell us what happened when you travelled with this person to Edinburgh,” he said. “Just take your time,” he said, speaking very carefully, as though Minette was three years old.

“We talked about things,” said Minette.

“What sort of things?”

“Seals…and whether there were ghosts or not…and then I asked her if there was a third place.”

“Could you tell us what you mean by that?”

Minette bent her head, thinking. “All my life I’ve kept going backwards and forwards between my parents…and when I got there they were always horrible about each other so I got…tired. And sad. And I asked Aunt Etta if there was a third place. A place that wasn’t either or or—and she said there was, there was one for everybody. Only they had to be brave and want it.”

“And what happened then?”

“I fell asleep. And when I woke up I was there. In the third place.”

“I see. You woke up in a completely strange place. And were you frightened?”

Minette smiled — a slow, very sweet smile which lit up the dark courtroom like a beacon. “No. Not for long. I had a nightlight you see. I was frightened in London and in Edinburgh because of the dark and the cracks in the ceiling. I used to think I saw tigers…and my parents both thought I was silly. But there when I woke, the first thing I saw was this light.”

The ferrety man in the wig didn’t like her answer. His job was to prove how wicked the aunts were and she wasn’t helping. “Are you telling me that you woke up in a completely strange place having been kidnapped and you weren’t frightened?”

Minette lifted her chin.

“I wasn’t kidnapped,” she said clearly. “I was chosen.”

That evening the newspapers quoted her words. “I wasn’t kidnapped, I was chosen,” says child snatch victim, and they all carried pictures of Minette.

The next morning it was Aunt Coral’s turn and it was Fabio who went into the witness box and climbed on to the footstool. Again it was the ferrety prosecutor who asked the first questions.

“Now, my boy, will you tell us what happened on the way to Greystoke Towers.”

“I was sick,” said Fabio.

“Is that because you were frightened?”

“Yes.”

“You were frightened of that lady there?” he asked, pointing to Aunt Coral.

“No. I was frightened of going back to school. It was a horrible place. They put my head down the toilet and kicked me and hung me out of the top-floor windows by my ankles because I came from Brazil and wasn’t like them.”

There was a sympathetic murmur from the public gallery and the lady with orange hair stopped fanning herself and made a clucking noise.

“I don’t think we need to hear about your school,” said the ferret, but the judge leant down and said Fabio should tell his story in his own way.

“So Aunt Coral went to talk to the matron and then she came back and said I couldn’t go to school because they were in quarantine and I was terribly pleased. But then I realized it meant going back to my grandparents and that was almost as bad. They made me kneel on dried peas and they kept saying how vulgar my mother was. And then I realized that Aunt Coral knew how I felt because she was rather a magic person and I knew I could trust her.”

“So you were drugged and kidnapped,” the prosecutor went on.

Minette at this point had smiled but Fabio didn’t. He glared, but the words he said were the same.

“I wasn’t kidnapped,” he said. “I was chosen.”

By the next day the newspapers were writing rather differently about the trial and some strange things were happening. Those children who were old enough to hear about the trial began to ask their parents for different bedtime stories: stories about magical aunts who came and took children away to islands where they didn’t have to go to school.

Of course the aunts were guilty, everyone knew that. They would go to prison, probably for the rest of their lives, but there wasn’t so much glee about, and the people who stood outside the courtroom holding up banners saying Hanging is too good for them stopped yelling and went home.

The third day of the trial was the last and the ferret started his questions again.

“What exactly did you do on the Island?” he wanted to know.

“We worked,” said the children. “We helped to clean out the animals and milk the goats and feed the baby seals.”

“Exactly. You worked all the time? From dawn to dusk.”

“Yes.”

“And didn’t you get tired?”

“Of course we got tired.” Fabio scowled at him. “What’s wrong with being tired? Working like that was good. Everybody ought to do it instead of messing about at school trying to solve maths problems that don’t have anything to do with real life and writing silly essays about people who are dead.”

When he found he couldn’t drive the children into a corner, the ferret started on the aunts and it seemed as though there really couldn’t be any hope. They had taken the children without their parents’ knowledge; they didn’t try to deny that. Neither Coral nor Etta were any good at telling lies.

And now it came to the end, to the summing-up, when the judge had to make the jury understand exactly what the case was about. Everyone in the court was silent, everyone knew the verdict would be guilty, but even those people who had wanted it at the beginning weren’t so certain now.

Then Etta beckoned to the Christmas pudding man who was supposed to be defending them and whispered something, and he went over to the judge and whispered to him, and the judge nodded. No one knew what had been said but after a few minutes a clerk came in carrying two big dictionaries.

“Your honour,” said the pudding. “I ask for leave to read out the two most up-to-date definitions of kidnapping. The first comes from the London Dictionary and it says: Kidnap: To hold a person against their will.” He turned to Minette. “May I ask you to step into the box again.”

She did so.

“Would you say you had been held against your will?”

“No,” said Minette.

The question was repeated to Fabio.

“No,” shouted the boy.

The pudding picked up the second book. “The definition of kidnapping given here is: To hold a person for ransom. To demand money to secure the victim’s release.”

He looked at the benches where Minette’s parents and Fabio’s grandparents were sitting. Then he called them out one by one, and to each of them he said: “Have you ever been asked for a single penny by either of these ladies?”

And crossly, peevishly, they admitted that they had not.

“In that case, your honour, it is my opinion that no kidnap took place.”

The jury were out for six hours and during the whole of this time Fabio and Minette absolutely refused to leave the building.

“We’re staying till they bring in the verdict,” said Fabio — and nothing the police or the social workers or anyone else could say would move them.

So they sat on hard chairs in an office behind the courtroom and waited. They were so tired they could hardly stop themselves from slipping to the ground but they did it. It was like keeping watch when someone was ill or dying; it had to be done.

It was after midnight before the jury returned and everybody filed back into the courtroom.

“Have you reached a verdict?” asked the judge, leaning down from his box.

“We have, my lord,” replied the foreman in a solemn voice.

“And do you find the defendants guilty or not guilty?”

There had never been such silence. Not a breath was heard in the court; not a rustle…

The foreman raised his head.

“Not guilty.”

Oddly it was not Minette but Fabio who burst into tears.