Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (7 page)

“Anything that’s around,” I said. “I like a Bentley convertible.”

“Oh, my goodness, so do I, darling,” said Coco. “Race you who sees one first.” He had a glittering smile. He added, “I hear you’re a cook.”

Gil said, “Sarah’s here as Dad’s guest.” He looked pale and cross, and I was thrilled to the core.

“Making up for having mislaid old Forsey?” said Coco. His golden, permed sideburns glistened in the hot sun. “Honestly, Sarah, it wasn’t Daddy Lloyd’s fault. He wasn’t even there when the old bugger walked out on him.”

“
You
were,” I said.

“At the party? Of course,” Coco said. He leaned on the bonnet, found it hot, and transferred the hand to his medallion. He couldn’t have got a finger into his pockets. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? If he’d stayed and taken a lovely up-trip with us, he’d be here, live and well. But true love beckoned.”

Gil said, “Coco, you’re high.”

“No, I’m not,” said Fairley, but I suddenly began to see the point of the dark glasses. He said, “If he wants to do naughty things with the lamp out, it’s nothing to do with us youngsters. All I can say is, he was in an indecent hurry.”

“Coco, shut up,” said Gil, but I stopped him.

“Did you see my father leave the party? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know dear, but I can guess. He was in Helmuth’s car, and going hell for leather in the usual direction.”

“Where?” Gil and I said together, but Coco wouldn’t tell. “Lady’s honor, darling,” he said, and smirked, and when we pressed him, doubled up with soprano laughter that nearly split his white pants. When he finished gasping, he said, “I think Sarah should come to the party tomorrow, sweetie, and see for herself.”

“She doesn’t know Mrs. van Costa,” said Gilmore, drawling, with an edge to his voice. Mrs. van Costa was the owner of the tennis courts and the present sponsor of advanced concrete verse.

“Gilly dear, don’t be naïve,” said Coco, laughing harder than ever. “Do come. Bring her, Gilly, and your America antique, the Mandleberg. Does she have something to wear? Janey could fix her.”

“If not,” I said, “I’m sure you could, darling,” and let in the clutch. The Maserati shot off with a roar.

Dolly
was big and white and beautiful, and tied to the quay at the yacht marina, so that all I had to do was to cross the tarmac yard, crammed with cars next to the boatyard, and walk through the yacht club’s aluminum mesh gates. There were a lot of bikes parked inside and some pollarded trees. The club was quite small; gray and white with big yellow shutters and Venetian blinds, with a concrete patio on the other side looking straight onto the sea. I turned right, down the patio steps, and walked along to the end of the quay, the wire mesh wall of the boatyard running high on my right. On my left was the water, hazy blue, dimpled and glassy, and the shining sterns of big, blissful yachts tied to a row of pale concrete bollards. Behind me, they stretched in long rows on the other side of the clubhouse, and more remotely, side by side along the built-up, thin jetties running this way and that in the sea.

It was the innermost heart of the harbor, far from the big ships which lay on the waterfront under Ibiza itself which faced me now, over the water, mirrored pink in the turning pink waves. Air from the sea stirred against my hot face. I took off my dark glasses, turned, and walked to the long varnished gangplank that led up to
Dolly
. On deck a small middle-aged man in a peaked cap was sitting splicing a rope. He jumped up. “Miss Cassells? Come this way. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Clem are just sitting for’ard up there.”

We walked round a sort of rooftop, which must be over one of the cabins, and then sidled past a huge cockpit with a natty fringed awning and past a second mast to the front of the boat, which was littered with cushions and air beds and books and binoculars and Clem Sainsbury’s red, half-naked torso spread out under the rail where he seemed to be chucking food down to the fish. He squirmed back at my footsteps and said, “Hi, Cassells,” and got to his feet without glancing at a square inch of my skin under neck level. “I’ll get Johnson. This is Spry, by the way. He’s the only man who can sail this tub, so be nice to him.” The man in the peaked cap grinned and went aft, and I sat down on one of the air beds. I nearly lay down, and then thought better of it. One thing at a time.

In a minute, two bright reflected beams crawled over the air beds followed by Johnson’s bifocals. His legs were all right, but he wouldn’t stop a bus in mid-Mayfair: he had on a short-sleeved shirt over beach pants, and everything that would button was buttoned. There was nothing to see on his face but a polite smile, eyebrows, and glasses.

The prospect seemed a bit bourgeois after Gil and Coco and fast Maseratis, but I was prepared to be sweet. Something must have been wrong with my smile, for before I said a word, Johnson came to a halt, his hands full of martinis, and shook his head slowly. “This is the bonzai sex department. Perfect, but teeny. How is Coco?”

I turned my head, the way a Forsey should turn her head. “Telepathy?”

“Binoculars,” said Johnson. “Have a martini. There isn’t a thing in it except sodium amytal. What was he so mad about, apart from your driving?”

“He was inviting me to a party,” I said, sipping the martini. My hair kept getting into it.

“When?” Clem came and sat on the hatch lid, a large beer in his hand.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. Janey can toss her hair back, but mine doesn’t bounce quite the same. “What’s so funny?”

Johnson stopped chortling first. “I fear the skids are under Coco,” he said. “Tomorrow night, Mrs. van Costa is entertaining the three members of the Russian trade mission and their attaché to dinner. You haven’t met Mrs. van Costa?”

“No,” I said. “Tell me about her.”

“Well, we can tell you one thing about her,” said Clem Sainsbury. “She doesn’t know about tomorrow night’s party. She’ll do a vertical takeoff in four different stages.”

“What brought you out here, Miss Cassells?” said Johnson, circling the ice in his tumbler. He took a drink and rested his back on the rail. “A pilgrimage because you cared, or a picnic because you didn’t care, or something else altogether?”

“Something else altogether,” I said. I had seen out of the corner of my eye an odd erection, behind the high netted fence of the boatyard: a thing like a miniature bullring, built of thick white cement. Chains ran from it into the water.

“That’s the winch,” said Johnson. He didn’t miss much.

“Who found him? My father?” I said. I saw Clem look at Johnson briefly, then turn to me. “The night watchman at the yacht club saw him,” he said. “First, that is. Then he roused the rest of us sleeping on board.
Dolly
wasn’t here then, of course: I had a temporary job looking after another ketch called
Firefly
while the owner had gone back to London. I slept aboard most times, but that night I was a few boats along, on
Sheila
, whose chargehand was an old pal of mine. We talked so late, I just kipped down on
Sheila
and didn’t know a thing till Pepe started howling blue murder.”

“It was
Firefly
, you see, that was winched up,” said Johnson. The sun was glaring its last above the buildings behind us, and his bifocals had turned each a hot, glittering red. “A bunch of whizz kids from your friend Janey’s party came rolling along from Santa Eulalia, saw
Firefly
lying all darkened, and thought they’d give Clem here a call. When they found he wasn’t aboard, they had an even brighter idea. They roused the man with the horse, paid him a fortune in British cigarettes and dollars and probably pot, and got him to move
Firefly
round and winch her up to the shore. Based on the old Boy Scout princiole of removing your sleeping pal’s tent, only not quite so innocuous because when Clem had come back from his presumed bender and finally found his missing boat, he’d have to stump up pretty handsomely to get his boat run down again. At any rate, the freak-out departed, leaving the horse to finish the winching, and Lord Forsey presumably passed by—resolved, it seems, on self-destruction—and with a fine sense of the macabre, climbed aboard. The only thing we don’t know, but presumably you do, is his reason for killing himself.”

I should have kept my mouth shut. It’s one thing being dramatic with Janey, but another letting all the town know. It must have been the martini. “I think he was murdered,” I said.

This time, it came off. They sat staring at me, their drinks in their hands, and Clem’s mouth had come a little bit open. Then Johnson said, “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who by?”—Clem.

“I don’t know.”

“Then why…” Johnson broke off, and straightening up off the rail, looked at his watch and said, “Wait. Let’s go back to the cockpit and make ourselves comfortable. Clem, see if Spry could cough up more drinks and some tapas, and then come back yourself. Sarah…” He stopped, his eyebrows lifted over the glass.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ve known Clem for ages.”

“My name,” said Johnson sorrowfully, “is Johnson Johnson. Fore and aft exactly the same. All my life it has prevented an intimate atmosphere. Try and ignore it. Americans call me J.J.”

We walked back along deck to the cockpit, which had its awning drawn back. The cushions were stunning. “I don’t see you as J.J.,” I said, settling. “I don’t see you as Johnny either.”

“Nor does anyone else,” said Johnson. “It worries me sometimes.” He didn’t look worried. “Now, what made you suspect that your father was murdered?”

As the sun sank, I told the story of the letter Janey posted from Daddy, the letter which turned up so late and which I didn’t believe was from Daddy at all.

Clem said, “But why send you a fake letter?”

“Well, to set my mind at rest, I suppose. To stop me thinking any further. There was certainly nothing worrying in it. It couldn’t have been more harmless.”

“You’ll need to think again about that,” Johnson said. “If the murderer sent you a letter to stop you investigating a murder, he’d have made your father hint about suicide.”

“Unless he wasn’t sure,” said Clem, “that he was going to be able to fake it as suicide.”

“Then why write at all?” Johnson said.

We brooded. The sun disappeared. The sky was quite empty, and where it should meet the water there was no horizon at all. The yachts and the boatyard went dim.

“Unless the mistake in the letter was deliberate,” said Clem suddenly. “To bring Sarah out.”

“But why?” I said. The bikini was no longer warm enough, and shivering, I buttoned the mandarin jacket right up. “Why should anyone kill Daddy? Why should anyone want me out here?”

“If you don’t know, no one does,” Johnson said. “But I think you ought to be careful. For example, who could have written that letter, of the people still on the island? Who would know your address, or how to get a letter to you? Who knows you’re sometimes called She-she? Who could copy Lord Forsey’s hand and be reasonably sure of imitating his style? Not many, surely.”

“Mr. Lloyd,” I said, thinking hard. “And Janey and Gil, I suppose. Not Austin Mandleberg: he hadn’t come yet, and he didn’t know Daddy. A good few of the boys at Janey’s party, I expect. Anyone who knew Janey would be apt to meet Daddy, and perhaps get a thanker or something from him that would do… I can’t think of anyone else. There must be friends we don’t know.” And Derek, my brain said; but my mouth didn’t blab it. If, as Janey says, Derek was here.

“I think we can leave unknown friends out of it, Sarah,” said Johnson. “If you were induced back here for some reason, the person who wants you is probably in touch with you now. All the same, it’s a fairly long list… Wait.” A match, burning unregarded in his tanned fingers made me realize how quickly the dark falls in Spain. Johnson relit the pipe he had taken from the jacket lying behind him, and took it out of his mouth. “It couldn’t have been Tony Lloyd. He’d gone to Barcelona the day of the party.”

“He didn’t go to Barcelona,” said Clem.

There was a little silence. Far across the still waters, from the black piling of houses which was the old town of Ibiza, a throbbing had started: a pulse, hardly discernible, stirring the warm evening air. “How do you know?” Johnson said.

“I heard at the yacht club. Alec Brewer had expected to run into him: he had business on the mainland the same day. Lloyd went to the airport and took the plane to Barcelona all right, but he didn’t stay there. He took the next plane to Palma, Majorca.”

“From which he could have flown back in half an hour any time in the day,” Johnson said. “Without running into so many business friends, either.”

Janey’s father, who had suggested that I should come to Ibiza. And I had to cook supper for him tonight. The evening air, stirring the rigging, groaned and whined faintly over our heads, and almost under the threshold of hearing, the throbbing from the old town continued…
Thud
, quiet.
Thud
, quiet.
Thud. Thud. Thud
.

“The drums,” said Johnson. I stared at the town. And as I stared, I saw something moving against the dark houses: a sinuous, barely discernible thing made of insensible prickings of light. It moved. It crawled all over the town. It crept, wherever one looked, among the dark Arab houses and spread down to the quayside, where it lay reflected in the far water, pinpoints of light upon light. “Look,” said Johnson, and put the binoculars into my hands.

Dolly’s
bows and calm, rippling water. The shapes of many yachts and fishing boats, edging the sweep of the harbor. Then, across the width of the bay, the trading ships and the ferries, lying at the foot of the town. And above the ships and the ferries, and moving down from the Dalt Vila, slowly, lazily, to the thudding roll of the drums, a file of endless black figures, faceless figures who moved chained like a black trickle through street after street, torch in hand, limbs swaying like robots’ below the black spires of their hoods.

“Easter is coming,” said Johnson. “And the processions of penitents. The natives won’t like Coco’s party.”

I had a pain in my middle. I said, “Should I go back to London?”