The Riddle of Sphinx Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

pass. One of their intimidation tactics was to drop oyster shells on his head, another to vomit on him, or worse, and, if he let them, they would certainly succeed in bespattering him since they had the precision of stealth-bombers. Only he didn’t let them. As soon as they started descending, he took aim and pulled the trigger – boum-boum!
    He never missed. He was a crack shot.
    Most of his male ancestors had been big game hunters. De Coverleys had travelled the world over, looking for beasts to kill, to places like India, the Amazon, the Zambezi, even the Siberian steppes. Papa’s hunting lodge in the Upper Hebrides, he remembered, had been full of ‘trophies of the chase’. Antlers and tusks gracing every wall, elephant’s feet serving as umbrella stands, and, best of all, there had been the mounted maws of snarling tigris and ursa .
    The difference between me and my ancestors, John thought, is that I don’t shoot pour le sport .No – this was war! He regarded himself as a soldier. He had moved his bed to the middle of the room and it now occupied a diagonal position, like a battleship of the paper game Jutland, which, forty years ago, he had been extremely fond of playing.
    There wasn’t anything wrong with him, was there? He took off his monocle and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. He thought back to that fatal day in June when he had been nearly scalped by the two herring gulls, which had swooped down on him and attacked him simultaneously, in a synchronized manner …
    Perhaps he had suffered some kind of brain damage after all. Or wasthere something in the de Coverley genes that caused male members of the family to cling tenaciously to some idée fixe ? Or, for that matter, to remain partially stuck in their childhood? John smiled at the idea.
    The doctor who examined him had described his wounds as ‘superficial’, but sometimes these chaps didn’t know what they were talking about. The funny thing was that he had never so much as considered the possibility of subjecting himself to a proper, more comprehensive examination. Sybil had made the suggestion, several times in fact, but then he knew she was eager to have him despatched to a loony bin, blast her.
    Had he been born with a rogue gene or was he catapulted into non-conformity by the seagulls’ attack? He found the question endlessly fascinating. As a matter of fact it was his sister who was the bedlamite. Sybil frequently did things that defied logic, like filling the house with crowds of people and then going off to London.
    Extreme gregariousness was a form of madness, of that he had no doubt. And she had dismissed the servants. She was up to something, he could tell. Not that he minded a servant-less state. The fewer people there were about the better. He needed neither a daily woman nor a night nurse.
    He would have preferred the island ‘not honour’d with a human shape’. He’d told Sybil time and again – no more house-parties, please – but he might have been speaking Eskimo. It stuck in his craw that his sister never seemed to understand what he told her. Or pretended not to.
    If gulls pose a particular threat to health and safety, a cull should be conducted, either by shooting or poisoning . He had seen that written somewhere. He was doing society a favour, not that he expected society to show any appreciation, let alone return the favour.
    Gulls could live up to forty years, which was an awfully long time. They bred excessively. Their wingspan was three to five feet and they had fearsome hooked beaks. They were evilly-inclined and full of malice. They knew he went to bed at about two every morning and they woke him up at five with their shrieks. They tried to punish him for the destruction of their brethren.
    John glanced at his watch. Tea-time. Marching up to a side table, he turned on the electric kettle. There were the Spode teacup and pot with the hunting scenes which he rather liked. Sybil, he had to admit, was