Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 (6 page)

I woke in bed later that evening in Mrs Sheridan’s house, with Natalie Sheridan herself leaning over me. I was aching all over.

I knew it was Villa Sheridan, because the bed was in a smart single room, equipped from a powerful income. Also, my things had been unpacked and stood about everywhere. Including my special cat with the smile, my video tapes and my recorder. Bloody Dodo.

I knew it was evening, because Mrs Sheridan wore crimson silk, jet earrings and Arpège, for a change, and had a small drink in her hand, which she put down as my eyes came to rest.

She said, ‘What a welcome to Madeira. Poor Rita. What on earth did they do to you?’

Her natural voice, I guessed, was clear and metallic. Ten years of hard work had brought it down to clear, warm and husky. Now it was sympathetic but bracing: buck up, Rita.

I lay still while I sorted her manner out. She had her hair done in a softer style than before, buckled at the nape of her neck and falling in a yellow silk tail. Her make-up was light as well, and kind of rosy. Motherly.

Her eyes were the eyes of a horse-trainer who has just bought a horse.

I said, ‘Nothing permanent. I got bumped about by someone who thought Kim-Jim and I were after your money. I had to promise to leave Madeira tomorrow. And that Kim-Jim would never come back. Can I have a drink, please?’

She patted my hand, her rings flashing. ‘When you’ve seen my doctor. He’s waiting to look at you. Then you can drink all you want.’

The hand on mine became still. ‘But I can hardly believe this. Tell me more. Who attacked you? Who could possibly make such a mistake? Kim-Jim and you!’

She drew back her hand, picked up her glass and smiled at me. ‘If it didn’t sound melodramatic, I’d say that I’d trust Kim-Jim with my life. And of course, anyone Kim-Jim trusts, I trust absolutely. So who were they, these idiots?’

I told her the story and she listened, sipping and sometimes looking into her glass. By the end, the glass was empty and she put it down and got up, walking slowly up and down the plush carpet.

She said, ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am that this happened. It does, sometimes, you know. Public figures attract cranks. People form crazy attachments… people I’ve never even met.’

She came and sat down, very gently, beside me. ‘Rita. You’ve been scared and you’ve been hurt, and you deserve some sort of restitution. You think that if I call in the police and the consul, they’ll track this lunatic down, and then we’ll all be safe.’

I could see where she was leading, and it wasn’t where I was going. ‘I want the police and the consul on the trail of this guy,’ I said. ‘Or thank you, but goodbye.’

‘And Kim-Jim?’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘I thought he was a friend of yours? But for the sake of an unknown man whom no one can possibly find, Kim-Jim is going to have a reputation he never had before. A plotter. A gold-digger. Things that no more apply to him than they apply to you, but you’ll both be branded. And so will I.’

She looked down, and I noticed that the black of her eye-liner was shaky. She said, ‘Kim-Jim and I aren’t married, but we don’t live together like brother and sister. You must know that perfectly well.’

Garbage. I didn’t say it. I just said, ‘But if you don’t go to the police, Kim-Jim will come back and be killed. Like I don’t leave tomorrow and ditto.’

Mrs Sheridan smiled. She had very large eyes, and despite the duff job, they were compelling.

She said, ‘The police don’t handle everything. If you have money, you can see justice done, and without any publicity. Do you want to stay with me, Rita? If I show you how sorry I am that this has happened? If I promise that nothing like it will be allowed to happen again?’

I closed my eyes. My head ached, and I thought.

I wanted to stay. I didn’t believe in Mrs Sheridan’s “anonymous crank”. Anyone who felt that strongly about her was already, surely, on her Christmas card list.

I had a feeling that I could trust Natalie Sheridan to root out my attacker.

And in case she didn’t, I was prepared to do a bit of footwork myself. I wanted my own back, very badly.

I opened my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see what you mean. I want to stay, if it won’t happen again.’

I hoped there wasn’t chrome all over the pillows to spoil the finale. But she gave me a warm smile, and told me she thought I’d been perfectly dauntless, and that once the doctor had seen me, I was to order anything I wanted to eat or to drink, and not to think about anything else till tomorrow.

The doctor was bland, English and told me nothing except what I knew already about my own cuts and bruises. I had no concussion. A good night’s sleep would cure all the rest. I waited until he was leaving to ask the question I’d forgotten to ask of my employer.

‘How was I found?’

He finished packing his bag, closed it, and picked it up, smiling. ‘What a shock for poor Miss Dodo. Mrs Sheridan’s maid. She had just left for a walk when she saw the car. She thought you had driven straight for the gates somehow and killed yourself.’

I was slow. ‘What gates?’ I said.

He looked surprised. ‘These gates. The gates of the villa. The car had stopped with its wheels at the wall, and you were lying in the front seat. No one could tell if you had been driving or not. The thieves must have had some good in them at least. They brought you where you could get attention. Pity about your camera, though. Tell Mrs Sheridan to get you another.’

I don’t have a camera. He smiled, opening the door, and I smiled back, thanking him. The official story of the assault, put about before I’d even agreed not to report it.

How Natalie Sheridan got to be where she is.

I fell asleep. I was wakened by the click of the door and the appearance, looming over me, of Mrs Sheridan’s all-American maid, a tray in her hands.

On the tray was a small cup of cocoa and an envelope, both of which she put on my bedside table. Then she stood holding the tray and just looking at me.

Her lips held apart a set of teeth like a weir. Whoever called her Dodo had a sense of humour.

At the same time, in the pecking order below stairs she was the tops. And below stairs was where I might hear some gossip.

The envelope was thick and expensive-looking, and I left it alone. The cocoa seemed worth talking about. I said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with something stronger. Wasn’t it a shock, when you found me?’

She lifted her eyebrows, which seemed to weigh a lot. ‘Shock?’ she said. ‘I was a nurse for ten years, on Emergency. Drunks and layabouts, junkies and beaten-up deadbeats… I’ve handled more meat than the Army has. If you want any liquor, Aurelio will have to go to Mrs Sheridan, and she’s busy.’

In a house like this, there would be a butler. I didn’t say that Mrs Sheridan had offered me anything. I just said, ‘There’s a bottle of Haig over there, and I’m fed up lying in bed. What about splitting it in the kitchen?’

Since she’d unpacked it, she knew it was there. And when she said, ‘Well, there’s no law against it,’ and stood back, I smelt the whisky again on her breath as I stood up and aimed for my dressing-gown. The room went up and down quite a bit before I got it on, and I was quite glad when Dodo offered to carry the bottle.

Then I thought of the guy who had hit me, and ploughed on after her into the service wing, which proved to have a sitting-room in it for the resident staff, which consisted of cook, butler/chauffeur and Dodo. I got an armchair, a glass, a large whisky and a lot of horrified interest, but of information only a snippet.

I thought Natalie would have told them the camera story, but she had told them the truth, which meant she knew she could count on their loyalty. Later, I realised why she had had to tell them the truth, when I asked what had become of the car, and Aurelio said he had driven it back to where they had hired it from, and given the original driver a present to keep quiet about how it was pinched from him.

Aurelio was the Portuguese butler, recently acquired, and trained by brutal experience on the Algarve. He had dark brown skin and a black moustache and black hair that looked as if it wanted to run down in front of his ears, only Natalie wouldn’t allow it.

I asked how the car had been pinched, and Aurelio said that the driver had been struck from behind and shoved in a Gents, and when he staggered out, the Mercedes was driving away.

It seemed to me that Mrs Sheridan must have paid quite a lot to keep that particular bruise from being reported, and I let myself wonder, for a minute, about the unopened envelope back in my bedroom. Then I asked if the driver had got a look at the guy who had bopped him, and nobody knew.

I got them to pour themselves another stiff double and steered them on to Mrs Sheridan’s habits, if any.

Mrs Sheridan didn’t have any habits. I’d put down Aurelio as true-blue loyal but I had hopes of Dolores the cook, born in Brazil and trained by all the consuls in Rio, to listen to her.

Dolores was hopper-active. That is, she moved like T.V. ping-pong at the fast rate, and had a squeak to go with it. I got all the scandal of Funchal and beyond, but nothing on Mrs Sheridan’s love-life, even when the bottle was empty.

Dodo didn’t open her mouth: just sat with her arms folded, watching us. I left after an hour, weaving my way stone-cold sober back to my bedroom.

Between my aching skull and my swollen jaw-bone, praise of Natalie Sheridan rang in my ears.
A fine lady, a kind and generous employer, Senhora
.

Please the Senhora
, they said,
and always, she will show she is grateful
.

It was true. Back in my bedroom, I opened her envelope, and found she had been grateful to the tune of one thousand pounds. Which was about the right rate for the market, considering.

Dodo hadn’t found the brandy I keep in my cat.

I got into bed, and drank it, and went out like a light.

The first thing that happened next morning was a phone call from Natalie, ringing I suppose through three walls, to ask how I felt. The thousand pounds, for which I thanked her, prevented me from being too truthful.

She said I was to have a pampered breakfast in bed, and she wouldn’t need me till evening. I thanked her again, with the mirror this time in my hand. I had a black eye.

She rang off, and I wished I had asked her the time, and where my executive watch could have got.

Then I remembered.

Dolores hopped in with a breakfast-tray, and paused on the second bounce out to listen to what I was saying. She said that Aurelio’s next trip to Funchal would be later that morning, and she was sure he wouldn’t mind company. The time, it appeared, was nine o’clock. The weather, from the window, was warm but cloudy. Across the tops of a lot of palm trees and flowering bushes, as in the Glasgow Patanics, I could see the roofs of one or two other large villas.

Beyond was the sea. Grey-blue, as off Rothesay on a Glasgow Fair day.

I felt not too bad. I got into bed and dragged the breakfast-tray over my knees. My door suddenly behaved like a drum stand in the first set at Tiffany’s, and I said, ‘Come in,’ cautiously, without moving my jaws.

The door opened, and in came King Ferdy, the photographer with the most subjects everywhere, including Madeira.

I don’t know why I was so amazed to see him, except that when I spoke to him last, he was in London. I wondered if he had an interest in Mrs Sheridan’s film. And of course, Madeira was the place for Sexual Strategy in Flowers, so long as creepers came into it.

This time, he was togged up in Brideshead Revved-Up; all cream flannel and open-necked silk; and his arms were full of orange flowers, which he dropped into my water jug.

I didn’t see he had a camera under his beard until it was already in action, photographing me in bed with the flowers beside me. They were funny flowers as well. Each had a great poking beak and a crown of bright orange spikes with a wee blue one sprouting in front of it.

By the time I saw what he was after, it was too late. I flung the teapot at him, but he was already shutting the lens cap and grinning.

‘
Strelitzia parvifolia
. Birds of paradise, darling,’ he said. ‘Vulgar, vigorous, and their spelling is utterly ghastly. You’ve got tea all over Natalie’s lovely carpet.’

‘What a pity,’ I said. ‘I hope she doesn’t send you a bill that’s too big for you.’

My Scotch Bird of Paradise
. I always thought he meant fancy birds with big tail-feathers.

‘She won’t mind. She thinks I’m the only photographer in the world who can make her look good on her wrong side, you unfairly gifted genetic mutation.

‘Now,’ said Ferdy, sitting on the side of my bed and sliding his hand as far as he could get under the covers, to show there was no ill feeling, ‘now what about this nonsense yesterday? Someone tried to scare you off Natalie?’

I was glad Mrs Sheridan had told him the truth, and not the camera story. As well as being a goat, Ferdy is a guy who knows his world and can give sensible advice when he feels like it. He heard exactly what happened to me, and he listened to Natalie’s reasons for not calling in the authorities.

And he agreed with Natalie.

He was quite firm, and perfectly reasonable. ‘I know, darling. The call for revenge is burning in that stout little heart. But it’s not going to do your career and Kim-Jim’s a power of good to be labelled publicly as a pair of sex-fiends after Natalie’s money, and that’s what the media boys will make of it.

‘I know,’ repeated Ferdy earnestly, ‘that you think I don’t want Natalie’s love-life dragged into the open because Natalie is going to lay rne a lot of lovely golden eggs in the near future and, of course, you’re right. But Rita… She’s going to lay you some also. And Rita, you do like eggs? Whites of, handy for hair?’

I told you. He’s an idiot. I had hoped very much, as the gossip king of the western semiphore, that he would tell me what the kitchen wouldn’t. Even supply a few names and addresses.

But he didn’t know any. No one but Natalie, he said, knew exactly whom Natalie was laying. Apart, of course, from Kim-Jim.

I said, ‘I don’t want to be bumped off. I don’t want Kim-Jim bumped off either.’

‘My darling Rita,’ said Ferdy, ‘the fellow will have come to his senses and got on the first plane for Australia, I shouldn’t wonder. Portuguese police don’t like girls being beaten up and taxi-drivers coshed and eminent ladies’ mid-life crises threatening to appear live on Cable.’

‘And if he happens to know Natalie as well as we do, and is sure that she won’t go to the police?’ I said. It was my jaw that was hurting. ‘Otherwise, why drive me all the way to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, once he’d clouted me?’

‘Maybe he thought you were going to flake out,’ Ferdy said. ‘Dodo said you looked just like –’

‘- a slab of junked meat in Emergency.’ I finished it for him, narkily.

Under every muscle in Ferdy’s face and behind every whisker there was a laugh busting its guts to get out and shriek as he looked at me.

I took one of his Birds out of my water jug, and twisted its neck for it, but he just tut-tutted, picked it up, and put it in his top pocket like an umbrella handle.

He left, turning at the door to repeat his expectoration.

‘Leave it to Natalie,’ Ferdy said. ‘She has what are known as Ways and Means. She loves your make-up, darling. Rely on it. She’ll see no one knocks your socks off from here on.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say that, driven to it, I could produce some ways that were quite mean myself.

I let him go. Then I got up, painted out my black eye, and went exploring.

Rich houses don’t impress me. You get used to working out what’s hired, hocked or might be negotiable.

Natalie Sheridan’s was a medium-sized villa. There was a high white wall round it, with creeper almost covering the closed-circuit cameras, and solid electronic-locked gates, with a slight Mercedes-sized chip to one side of them.

Inside, it was all done in pink and grey suede and white marble, with flowering trees in white vats standing everywhere, and pink ruffled blinds to soften the sunlight. Kim-Jim’s room was next door to mine, on the first-floor.

I had a look inside, for sort of good luck, and it was just as I’d imagined it: neat and workmanlike with special places for all the things he was keen on: his record player and his world radio and his tapes.

On a chest of drawers, in the middle, was the yellow cat I’d sent him. I came out smiling.

His workroom was next to Natalie’s dressing-room, and there again, the arrangements were efficient and American and streamlined.

The cupboards which lined the walls were full of packets and tubes and bottles arranged in date order and separated into their various uses: for cinema and T.V. work; for Mrs Sheridan and her friends. The make-up mirror was huge, with a special chair with a foot-rest in front of it.

There was a sink with a mixer-tap and another fitted for shampooing, and a standard hair-dryer and an infra-red stand for fuzzed hair. There was an incinerator chute. There was everything.

I had seen something like it once or twice before in a private house, but I’d never before been in charge of one. I understood, a bit, how he’d come to leave the struggle outside to serve Mrs Sheridan.

I left the room, and went downstairs to the other room, the morning-room and study where he sat, and where he did his secretarial bit.

Unlike the rest of the house, the study was not pink and grey but done up in pine panelling, with rows of books and a couple of filing cabinets. One of the two desks, heavy on onyx and leather, looked like Mrs Sheridan’s.

The other stood to one side and had a tape-recorder on it, as well as a couple of telephones. Kim-Jim’s desk. And now mine.

But this was also a sitting-room. In front of a real fireplace were two nice leather chairs and a good rug. And a T.V. with a video machine under it. And a cabinet full of cassettes.

Here Natalie Sheridan would sit with Kim-Jim sometimes, I guessed, if they were alone. Or here Kim-Jim would relax, watching films while Natalie entertained her private business friends, or her boyfriends.

Kim-Jim loved telly films. It was one of the things we had in common. I had brought a lot of tapes with me, most of them pirated or got for me on the side by my Byres Road pals.

Dodo hadn’t found them, although she might have noticed that my pack of Modesse was a bit weighty. Dodo, whom I’d seen already when I carried the tea tray into the kitchen, was stony-faced according to custom, eyeing my drawstring pants of Old English Patchwork with the same look that she cast on my New Madeira black eye.

Dolores and Aurelio, bustling, were friendly. Aurelio would be glad, he said, to take me into town. What Mrs Sheridan’s plans were they didn’t exactly know, except that two men and an Honourable were coming to dinner.

After a bit they remembered the Honourable’s name, which was Margaret Oliver.

A female Honourable. A female Honourable I had reason to know, because she was one of Ferdy’s real bits of crumpet. A bitch called Maggie.

I was cross. I thought he was here to write a book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, goddammit. What he’d already told me about pansies ought to have been enough to keep him going till Christmas.

After that, I came out of the service door and fell over him.

I fell across him because he was lying immediately outside the door on the furry wall-to-wall rug of Mrs Sheridan’s sitting-room, requesting me to be his Sexy Flower Assistant and load his camera for him.

He had also freed Mrs Sheridan’s parrot, or perhaps it was Kim-Jim’s parrot, who was sitting on one of his shoulders, brooding over half a pound of unravelled cashmere and a bagel of bird-shit.

‘She doesn’t need you till later,’ Ferdy said.

‘
Screw the bitch
,’ said the parrot.

I stepped over Ferdy’s beautiful flannels.

‘I’ll pay you,’ Ferdy said. ‘Twenty a flower.’

‘
Bugger the bastard
,’ the parrot said.

I walked to the door. ‘Not me,’ I said.

‘Who else is there?’ bawled Ferdy. He got up on one elbow, and the parrot fell off.

‘
Bugger the bitch
,’ roared the parrot, fluttering off him.

‘The Honourable Maggie. Your parrot knows her,’ I said; and walked out.

The Bird of Paradise, I had noticed, still stuck out of his shirt pocket, with its neck broken.

I hoped it bit him.