Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (23 page)

We’d left Dilling and Spry behind in Ibiza, with what looked like the entire Spanish police force. I gathered they were all going to Mummy’s villa to take official custody of Jorge and Gregorio: Clem and the Saint Hubert rubies were already safely locked up. It hadn’t dawned on me until then that Dilling, as well as Spry, was Johnson’s man. Even then, I couldn’t really absorb it, but just sat with my teeth chattering somewhat until the Casa Veñets came into view. We were all, I suppose, really getting over the shock.

Johnson sat, staring into his soup, and said, “Mr. Lloyd, you are the only person here, I believe, who doesn’t know that Mrs. van Costa is Sarah’s mother. The deception was a perfectly innocent one and had a great deal to do with what has happened today. If the children hadn’t stumbled on the fact rather by accident, they wouldn’t have known either. I tell you this so that you will see there are only two families here tonight, apart from myself; and I want a promise from you both that what I am now going to tell you won’t go beyond these four walls.”

Mr. Lloyd’s eyes, swiveling, met my mother’s. She stubbed out her cheroot and absently patted his hand. “You have my word,” said Mr. Lloyd to Johnson. “And you may take it I speak for my family.”

“Now listen to that, She-she,” said Mummy.

“
Their
family’s normal,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone, Mr. Johnson.”

“And I certainly won’t,” Derek said. “What are you, sir? MI 5?”

“They never gave me a number,” said Johnson with regret. “I just knock around with a boat and some paints, and they call me in if anything happens to the genuine men in the field. If they go off the rails or get themselves into trouble or get murdered, for instance.”

There was a short silence, as all the spoons stopped. Mummy was smiling into her plate like Mia Farrow by Leonardo da Vinci. I stared at Derek, and he stared back, going slowly red in queer patches. I said, “Daddy?”

“Yes. Schuytstraat got it wrong, Derek,” said Johnson. “Your father was, as it happened, an agent. But for us, not for the wrong side.”

“You
knew
?” I said to Mummy. It was absolute rubbish, of course. Daddy had been a charming old, liquored-up peer, and of such, secret agents are simply not made. I remembered the offer he’d made Derek of five thousand a year to leave Schuytstraat’s and opened my mouth to continue, but Mummy forestalled me.

“Yeah. I knew,” she said. “I guessed last time I saw him. He dropped by, you know, when he was staying with those friends in Bermuda. He looked much the same and he talked much the same, but there was a kind of difference. You wouldn’t notice unless you’d gotten kind of used to him over a period. It seemed to me half of it was acting.”

“Only half,” said Johnson gently. “We couldn’t entrust him with anything major. But he helped me once, quite unwittingly in a… small contretemps. He was sober at the time, and he acted with such speed and such imagination that it struck me that here was something to be salvaged. Forgive me, Lady Forsey, for putting it like that.”

“Mr. Johnson, you may put it any way that you like,” said my mother. “However he died, Eric owed the whole of the last part of his life to you people. We had nothing in common, Lord Forsey and I, when we parted. When we met again, I found things were quite different. Nothing was said; not at first, but we formed the habit of writing, and we arranged to meet the next year, briefly, on a friend’s yacht. It was after we had become quite close again that I got out of him the cause of the change. I am telling all the rest of you this, as I have already told Mr. Johnson, so that you will understand that Lord Forsey did not regard me as an outsider when finally he told me of his new work. All the time, of course, he continued to travel and visit with friends, and present the same impecunious face to the world. It hurt him, She-she and Derek, to have to deny you some of the luxuries he felt you should have, and it hurt him even more that neither of you would ever realize he was not the man you both thought he was. I don’t think it harmed either of you not to have money, although it may have been hard on you, Derek, not to have a parent whom you could respect. You placed him in a really awkward position when you accused him of betraying Schuytstraat’s secrets. He didn’t want either you or the firm to investigate any further, and the only way he could think of to stop you was to buy you off with a pension. He was rather proud, I may say, that you refused.”

“He could have told me,” said Derek. His nose had gone red.

“He was a great and good man,” said Mr. Lloyd. He looked terribly struck. “And this was why he was killed? Because he was an agent?”

“He was killed,” said Johnson, “because he found out the secret of Austin Mandleberg’s gallery. Lady Forsey had seen some of these pieces of art in America. She is interested in artists: she knew how these exhibits should look. It struck her, seeing the exhibits a second and a third time, that they were being tampered with. Excisions had been newly made, and joins where there had been none before. She mentioned it in a note to her husband, and Lord Forsey, in Amsterdam for a trade fair, went to see for himself. Then, while he was in Holland, these highly secret items of machinery went missing from Schuytstraat’s factory.

“Not only that, but they disappeared utterly, and no trace of them was ever found. No doubt he asked an unusual number of questions. At any rate, for quite the wrong reasons, he roused the company’s suspicions. Meanwhile, without realizing this, he had discovered that the exhibition was going next to Ibiza. He found no difficulty in inducing Mr. Lloyd, who was a close and generous friend, to invite him to Ibiza for the duration of this exhibition. When he wrote and told Lady Forsey, she, too, on the whim of the moment, found means to rent a house in Ibiza, and taking Coco Fairley with her as cover, descended on the island as Mrs. van Costa. Her husband was perhaps a little disconcerted at finding her here, but no one knew her: even as an actress she had long been off the stage, and she had spent the last years of her life entirely in America. When she made her presence known to him, he rather enjoyed stealing off to meet her, clandestinely, at the villa. Unfortunately, Coco saw them.”

“Coco,” said Mummy, “was actually there uninvited. I had no wish for his company. He merely bought a plane ticket for himself, as well as for me, and threatened to kill himself if I refused to let him come with me. A silly boy,” said my mother severely, “but he was right in the middle of a most valuable poem. I think it stands, still, as the best thing he has done. The letters are all formed from ten-cent New Zealand stamps with a human rights message. The impact of these words, multiplied hundreds of times was
cathartic
. He finished it, poor child, just a week or two before he died.”

“Where is it?” said Gilmore. He had a doting look in his eyes.

“Oh. We posted it,” Mummy said, faintly surprised. “She-she, I believe we’ve all finished soup.”

I tore myself, with reluctance, from my seat. “Where to, for goodness’ sake?”

“Let me guess,” Johnson said. He contemplated the whiskey glass in his hand, the bifocals steady. “Vietnam?”

“Check,” said Mummy, surprised. I shot out and came back with the bacon. Gilmore got up to help me. In the kitchen, he said, “Was she always like this?”

“Who? Mummy?” I said. “She was always bloody impossible, if that’s what you mean. Well, imagine having her coming down for the Eton-Harrow match, smoking cheroots.”

“I think she’s marvelous,” Gilmore said.

“She doesn’t water-ski,” I said bitingly. “How are Louie and Petra?”

“Blooming,” said Gilmore. “What got into you two over your parents? They must have been quite remarkable.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I said, picking up a tray with the eggs. “But then, look at your taste.”

When we got back, Johnson was explaining how on Daddy’s death he had put into harbor with
Dolly
. It had been rigged as suicide, but he saw at once there wasn’t enough blood. The body had been brought there, and death had actually taken place somewhere else. Since it was the Art in the Round Daddy had been suspicious of, there was at least a sporting chance that something had gone wrong there. He pulled strings and got the Spanish police to sit on the evidence that it was anything other than suicide. Then he went to Austin Mandleberg’s gallery and started making gentle inquiries. Austin was still in Paris, and Jorge and Gregorio were most helpful. They remembered everyone who had been at the gallery during that afternoon and evening, and he was able to trace and discount every one. The only person whose visit they didn’t mention was Clem Sainsbury, whom a neighbor had seen going in.

It was only a hunch, and there was no real reason then to think that Gregorio had been concealing anything. Since questioning, in any case, was quite useless and would have scared Clem off any scheme he might have, Johnson simply hired him to come and live as mate with Spry and himself on board
Dolly
.

It was then that he heard that Daddy had spoken of writing to me the day he died and that Janey had actually posted a letter. He wired London and got them to watch for it. He also got them to watch me and the flat.

I said, “Hey!”

“Your father had got himself into a dangerous business,” said Johnson. “He might well have wanted to warn you, or to tell you something about it, or even to justify himself to you, after all those years, in case something went wrong. We had to know what he had written. It might even have told us his murderer.”

“Well, it didn’t, did it?” I said. “I should think it was the dullest letter he ever wrote in his life, probably because he was too stoned to think straight. The bit in the middle was gibberish. In any case, I’ve been thinking. Clem doesn’t call me She-she; but Mummy does. Daddy could have picked that up from her. It
was
his letter, I expect, all the time.”

“It wasn’t, you know. I wrote it,” said Johnson.

I gazed at him, the knife and fork limp in my hand. “You didn’t,” said Janey. “He gave me that letter to post himself, Mr. Johnson. And I posted it.”

“But it didn’t arrive,” Johnson said. “And we wanted it to arrive, because it was obvious that the people who killed Lord Forsey were going to be very interested in what he might have said to his daughter. So we concocted another. I’m sorry about the slip, Sarah, over your name. It was no part of the plan that you should come haring over to Ibiza, even though you were quite right, if for the wrong reasons, in thinking your father had not killed himself. I wrote it, and I put that cockeyed section in the middle for a purpose: so that anyone hearing you speak of it would assume that it might well contain a message in code, even if you yourself did not understand it. In fact, you spoke of the incoherence in the letter in the phone call you made to Derek in Holland, reassuring him about what your father had said.”

“I didn’t tell you about the call,” I said.

“Neither did Derek,” said Johnson. “Your line was tapped. You were very well protected, you know, Sarah. We watched the flat day and night.”

I thought of the one-armed bandit and the two and six for the pizza. “Oh. Big deal,” I said crossly. “Pity you couldn’t prevent someone from breaking in and pinching Flo’s jewelry. You mean to say,” I said, my voice getting high as I realized the iniquity of it, “that someone actually stood by and
watched
while a bloody spy walked in and raked through our drawers…?”

“That was the point. No one broke in,” Johnson said.

“They did,” I said icily. “I do beg your pardon, but I have the bruises to prove it.”

“All the same,” Johnson said. “No one entered that flat, from the time you left to go to the film to the time you reduced the assets of the Bunting Fun Parlor.”

I felt myself going scarlet. “So?”

“So there were two people in that flat all the evening,” Johnson said. “Flo had no reason to invent a burglary: she could search the flat when you were out any time that she chose. That only left George.”

“
George
?”

“You didn’t see the masked man at the door: he supposedly did. George could have doped one of Flo’s drinks and slapped ether about later on. He could easily have run past you in the dark, slammed the flat door without going out, and have been back in the sitting room by the time you telephoned, fixed Flo, and found him. In fact,” said Johnson, “we investigated George and found quite an interesting history. He was an old ally of Clem’s. He stuck close to Flo for the same reason that Clem passed so casually from girl to girl among all your crowd: to pick up tips about the houses you worked in.

“Did it never occur to you, Sarah, that you and the other girls like you are the biggest, single network of gossip about the moneyed houses of Britain that has developed today? You know the staff and the scandal and the domestic habits of every house you so casually enter for a weekend or a week. You know what jewels are kept in the bank and what goes into an old sock in the breadbin. You know what parties they go to, what they’ll wear, what they’re worth. And you all talk about it.

“I don’t suggest Flo was a willing partner of Clem’s, but he must have found her over the years a pretty valuable source of information about money and jewelry and other kinds of secrets: industrial, military. These were his business. Clem stole for a living, and like a great many other people, he used the Austin Mandleberg traveling show as a means of conveying his booty from one country into another. It was vital to him, as well as to Mandleberg, that no one should discover the secret of Art in the Round.”

“So you knew about Clem?” Mr. Lloyd said.

Johnson shook his head. “Not then. We knew Sarah’s flat had been bugged: we found the mechanism and left it there, so that when she got the false letter, the news of it went straight to George and his partners. We thought they would make another effort to break in and read it, when we hoped to identify them. Sarah put paid to all that by accepting your perfectly innocent invitation to come to Ibiza. It was fairly certain she’d bring the letter in question with her. That’s why Austin Mandleberg was on that plane and why her luggage took so long at the airport: it was being very thoroughly searched. When they didn’t find it, it seemed a fair guess that the letter must be in her handbag. Hence the rush to get it back when you dropped it, Sarah, at the edge of the road.”