Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird

You would barely believe that a group of coherent, mixed adults could agree to meet the next afternoon at the golf course at Great Harbor Cay and there compete… for the privilege of marrying Dr. B. Douglas MacRannoch: winner gets the bride… At first all my brain could grasp was that I was being asked to mortgage my whole future for Johnson’s despicable safety. It further came to me that I risked being linked in holy matrimony with a murderer.

Unfolding its delightfully scary tale in the Bahamas, New York, and Miami, the third in Dorothy Dunnett’s series of suspense entertainments presents perhaps the most engaging and certainly the most outré heroine so far. She is Beltanno MacRannoch, a no-nonsense, thirty-two-year-old Edinburgh doctor and spinster who attaches herself to a Nassau hospital to keep a close eye on her ailing father.

But before long Beltanno is discovered keeping an even closer and far more frantic watch on Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, resident Intelligence agent, whose life is in danger, as she learns from his colleague Johnson Johnson, the distinguished portraitist and occasional student of murder. Would-be killers seem common as coconut palms: there is Mr. Tiko, a Japanese golf fancier madly embroiled in the affairs of the MacRannochs; and Wallace Brady, a presentable American bridge builder who sees no reason why Beltanno should continue a spinster; there is Trotter, an English professional soldier dedicated to the organization of the perfect military tattoo, and Krishtof Bey from Turkey, mischief-maker, dancer, and play-boy. Before Johnson Johnson unravels this mystery, Beltanno has been dragged into more emergencies than medical life ever prepared her for.

Match for a Murderer
, with its unexpected action, abundance of authentic local color, and highly individual style, is particular grist for those who like the unusual in their suspense fiction.

DOROTHY DUNNETT is the author of the successful series of historical novels about Francis Crawford of Lymond:
Game of Kings, Queens’ Play, Disorderly Knights
, and
Pawn in Frankincense
. Her first thriller,
The Photogenic Soprano
, had, said
Publishers’ Weekly
, “the taste, originality and flair traditional to the great English mystery story,” and her second,
Murder in the Round
, was “highly recommended” by the
New York Times
.

Mrs. Dunnett plans more books featuring the ubiquitous Johnson Johnson and different heroines. The locales will be Italy, Russia, Ireland, and Peru.

Books by Dorothy Dunnett

Game of Kings

Queens’ Play

Disorderly Knights

Pawn in Frankincense

The Photogenic Soprano

Murder in the Round

Match for a Murderer

First Printing c

Copyright © 1971 by Dorothy Halliday

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

International Standard Book Number: 0-395-12343-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-144078

Printed in the United States of America

The lines from “God’s Garden” by Dorothy Francis Gurney quoted on page 154 originally appeared in
God’s Garden and Other Verses
, published by Burns & Oates, London.

With affection for

Doctor Jennifer (Hardy) Robertson,

who can outclass Beltanno MacRannoch

in every field except maybe

playing the bagpipes

Author’s Note

The author’s thanks are due to the developers of Great Harbour Cay, Bahamas, for suffering her to locate on their beautiful island an outbreak of violence and an exhibition of Celtic nostalgia which have no possible place in that well-ordered and elegant community.

I SHALL CALL IT, with levity, the bifocals syndrome. And yet, I am deeply disturbed. Why should my professional life be cast into chaos by a simple case of presbyopia, adequately safe-guarded? I might by now have finished my paper on Frederickson’s Hyperbetalipoproteinaemia; I might be a rheumatism research fellow at Leeds Public Dispensary; I might at least be part-time medical officer at Holloway Prison.

Why instead am I lying under this palm tree, watching a banana bird?

Because of a killing, you might correctly reply. A killing, and an individual with the classification (creeping, aquatic) of Johnson Johnson.

That was a joke. As a medical student at Edinburgh University I considered such lapses beneath me. I did not attend Union dances or Christmas balls. I noticed that those who did so were the same as those who vanished for coffee during whole-body dissection, leaving me to do the work of three on each side of a male Blumer’s shelf. They were the same who turned over in their sleep when the bell rang from the delivery room, where I alone walked barefoot through the tunnel and stood in my pajamas, rapt and shivering, while the consultant discoursed on the unhurried arrival of triplets.

None of this, I must truthfully say, sprang from any feeling whatever of service to ailing humanity. I did not become B. Douglas MacRannoch, M.B., from any love of my fellow men, all of whom I held in well-founded disdain. I achieved it as a means to a research fellowship which would enable me to get shot of my father.

My mother died at my birth, a woman of limited impact, leaving me the only offspring and heir of a madman.

That to others this man appeared sane was not the least of my undeserved burdens. Christened James Ulric MacRannoch, he is known simply as the MacRannoch, a title indicating that in the eyes of the Lord Lyon King of Arms, he is forty-fifth Chief of Clan Rannoch and Keeper of Rannoch Castle, Argyll, Scotland.

In youth short and dark, like myself, the MacRannoch is now white haired, volatile, and subject to nasal polyps and asthma in winter, during the Perth bull sales, and when the stock market wavers. Until recently, he has assuaged his martyrdom happily by going abroad every autumn and letting the castle to foreigners.

The day came, however, when I received a cable at the British Research Council, Cambridge, where, fully qualified, I was peacefully investigating the habits of a Coxsackie-B virus. My father’s condition had become strikingly poorer. A Scottish summer was out of the question. He must leave the country. He must remove, perhaps for good, to a warm, even climate, such as the British West Indies.

Neither he nor his specialist quacks would be shaken. I gave up my job with the B.R.C., packed my cases and those of my father, and in a short space of time was installed, irrespective of my personal feelings, as medical officer in the United Commonwealth Hospital, Nassau, in the self-governing British island group off the Florida coast called the Bahamas.

As a literate member of society you are not, I take it, familiar with skin diving, rum punches, calypso nightclubs, surfing, dancing, gambling, and lying oiled in the sun. That some people do so indulge, many of them failed medical students, is fortunate for the Bahamians who have no taxes, a warm climate, and small scope or aptitude for intensive cultivation and industry. Sunshine, palm trees, and hibiscus flowers naturally improve the exterior appearance of any hospital, and made soothing the drive to my work, in the 1961 Ford Anglia I purchased for £20 from an outgoing houseman. To a trained mind, however, a hospital is a hospital wherever it may be; the work was routine; my C.M.O. and fellow doctors were not unduly conversational, and I was able to play an excellent game of golf almost every day. My father’s health improved, and he began to talk about bridges.

My father’s paranoia, to which I have made slight reference before, takes the form of an absolute and unreasoning obsession to do with the building of bridges. Its focal point is the family seat, a small but finely preserved twelfth-century castle on a sea rock off the west coast of Scotland. My father’s object in life, apart from corresponding with and dispensing hospitality to the world population of exiled MacRannochs, has been to form a permanent bridge from the castle across to the shore.

It is not only that he is a martyr to an abysmal and incurable seasickness. There is a family legend that the thirteenth MacRannoch of MacRannoch, on building the castle did indeed achieve such a bridge, with the help of the fairies. And what the thirteenth MacRannoch could do, the forty-fifth is determined to surpass.

It has brought him nothing but trouble. The seabed is deep; the currents strong and irregular. Every bridge my father has built so far has been a failure; and indeed his personal involvement on the day the fifth bridge fell down resulted in tragedy. Two days later, the melancholy news was broken to my father in hospital that I, then a child at school, was and must remain forever the sole heir of the MacRannochs.

His asthma dates from that day.

I was giving some thought to his condition as I stood on the up escalator in Kennedy Airport, after some months’ residence in Nassau with my father. Visits to New York from the United Commonwealth Hospital are not frequent, but an interesting renal case due for specialist care had clashed with a diver flown in with the bends. One of my fellow doctors, working extremely hard, managed to clear his own schedule in order to fly with the diver to Miami, while I was asked to take the renal by air to New York. It was winter.

After a sufficient meal of creamed chipped beef on corn bread, two dollars, I had walked through the city, jostled by Chinese, Germans, South Americans, Swedes, and ladies in Fortissimo garterless panty girdles with blue wigs. The Tishman Building had red stars blinking in and out all the way up its multiple stories, and Korvette’s still had a four-story Christmas tree in green lights. The Plaza fountain was outlined in white stars, and there was a line of expensive, lit fir trees down Park. The Steuben display was three stories high, of spinning snow crystals three feet in diameter. In the window they had a crystal cheese wedge with a gold mouse, 18 carat, price: $600. In Lord and Taylor’s a snow leopard lay in a gilt cage with a diamond bracelet clasped around its white neck. I will not mention Tiffany’s.

All the way to Kennedy Airport, I had thought of my father, who has squandered the MacRannoch fortune all his life on St. Jean Cap Ferrat and bridges. I was still thinking of him with, no doubt, a severe cast of expression when the door of the BOAC Monarch Lounge at the head of the escalator was flung crashing open. A distraught woman in blue darted out, stopped dead with her eyes on the small medical grip in my hand, and said, “Oh, Nurse. Could you come quickly? Something terrible’s happened.”

I am a person of well-balanced psyche, with a large spectrum of complete psychological control. I need it all when I am summoned as Nurse. I said, “My name is Doctor MacRannoch. I am prepared to help. You have, however, an exceedingly capable medical staff of your own. I suggest you summon them.”

My tone braced her sufficiently. “I have,” she said. “They’re coming. But he’s collapsed in there. He may be dying…”

“Show me,” I said.

The patient was in the men’s lavatory: a well-nourished large-featured man in his fifties with longish, waving gray hair, a mohair suit of good cut and an English Guards tie. His face was vaguely familiar, although I could not at once place it and he was in no state to communicate with me, at the moment being engaged in getting rid of the entire contents of his stomach in no uncertain fashion.

There was a strong smell of brandy, which seemed to remove some of the urgency from the situation. Kneeling beside the unlucky man, I caught the stewardess’s attention and lifted my eyebrows.

A younger man, an American, who had been supporting the patient by the head said, “He isn’t drunk. He tried to tell me. He thinks it’s crab sandwiches.”

“Oh,” I said. A different matter. Gastro-intestinal infection is a tricky thing, and no good doctor would treat it lightly. I said, “When did this happen?” His pulse was quick and irregular and his fingers were cold; he resisted any efforts to lay hands on his abdomen, which puzzled me slightly.

“He had a brandy out there,” said a cockney voice, surprisingly, behind me. “And a cup of tea. Then he said he felt faint and I brought him in here. He was complaining of this hellish pain in his stomach.”

“And the crab sandwiches,” I said rather sharply. “Did he have these in the Monarch Lounge too?”

My patient raised his head from the washbasin and looked at me with unfocused eyes. “Denise made them. My wife,” he said. “I ate one and put the rest down the loo.” He stared at me and said, “My stomach hurts. Over here.”

I did what I could until the doctor and then the ambulance came, helped by the senior stewardess, who was more competent than I had feared. She was worried, naturally. “He only helped himself to a brandy,” she kept saying. “And a cup of tea with a biscuit. He couldn’t have got anything wrong out of that. I mean, other passengers have been eating and drinking all day.”

I said, “He believes it was one of his own sandwiches. It might even have been something wrong with his breakfast. In any case, he’s now out of danger, I fancy. Although it was a nasty attack and the sooner the hospital has him, the better.”

The American said, “It wasn’t his breakfast. We had that together, and I ate everything he ate. At the Bull and Bear, as a matter of fact.”

He was a tall, underweight man in his early thirties, Wallace Brady by name. I could feel the stewardess’s surprise as I bent over my patient. She said, “Do you know him? I thought you and Sergeant Trotter had come in together.”

The cockney voice (first class—cockney?) said, “No, I was just sitting near when the old chap began to act dizzy.”

“I knew him,” said the American, Brady. “He’s a neighbor of mine. We met this morning by chance. We were going back on the same plane to Nassau—he was only here for twenty-four hours. And there wasn’t a thing wrong this morning.” He looked at the television screen by the door and added: “Damn. We’ve lost the last plane.”

I only half heard him because the airport doctor had arrived with two nurses and I was busy. We got the man on the stretcher and watched him being carried away. The doctor, effusive in his thanks, shook his head at last and said, “Why the hell should he eat a crab sandwich?” and the American, who was still standing beside us, said, “His wife made them and he forgot to have them last night. He didn’t want to disappoint Lady Edgecombe.”

Edgecombe. I began dimly to remember. A former minor ambassador, I rather fancied. Retired and living on one of the Bahamian Out Islands. Living on a generous pension, perhaps, and devoted to gracious living, Lady Edgecombe, and crab.

It was nothing to do with me, and I was pleased that it wasn’t my case. On the other hand, public health is a doctor’s concern, and the man would be returning to Nassau. I laid in my bag, before I left, a small specimen bottle marked
Edgecombe, Kennedy Airport
, and the date. It was a minor precaution. I saw no reason to mention the fact. I was more concerned, as I remember, with the nuisance of having lost the last plane back to Nassau that day.

It did not occur to me, as I left the airport and made my way to the hotel in which the BOAC, with its customary propriety, were paying my expenses overnight, that I had just taken the most significant step of my life.

Since I am not what a patient of mine once seriously referred to as a night person, and had no desire to see a homosexual play, a rave musical, or a small intimate nitery, I watched the news summary on television, and retired at 9:30.

At 10:15
p.m.
the airport doctor rang, a courtesy call, to inform me that Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe had received the necessary treatment, was quite out of danger, and was now resting comfortably in the hospital. I thanked him, and went back to sleep.

At 11
p.m.
the telephone rang again, and an unknown American voice said, “Is this Doctor MacRannoch?”

“It is,” I said. Night interruptions are part of a doctor’s life, which is why I go to bed early. “Who is speaking?”

“Doctor Douglas MacRannoch?” The voice was muted and overfamiliar in manner, reminding me of a chocolate commercial to which I am not at all partial.

“Speaking. Who is calling?”

“Doctor MacRannoch,” the voice said again lovingly. I can use no other word. “Today you saved a man’s life. Just don’t do it again, will you? Just don’t do it again.” And there was a tap followed by the pneumatic drill noise of a broken connection. I quickly put the phone down.

At that moment, someone banged on my door.

I sat still. The Trueman is a respectable business hotel just off Times Square with perhaps twenty-five stories of bedrooms, mostly occupied by travelers who mind their own business and seldom stay more than one night. The staff are adequate but quite uninvolved, their main concern being to make the beds if possible by 8 a.m. each morning. At night the guests may do each as he pleases.

One of the guests, it seemed, was pleased to knock on my door in a city where I knew no one. On the other hand, the telephone was by my side, and I had put the chain on the door, receiving my customary electric shock as I did so. Since both the ringing of my telephone and my voice had undoubtedly also been heard, I filled my lungs and said, “Yes? Who is it?” just as the knock was repeated. At the same time I lifted and opened my medical bag, which stood on the chair by my bed, and began to locate and fill a standard plastic syringe with 10 cc. of a seven-percent solution of Pentothal sodium.

The knocking stopped. “Doctor MacRannoch? I beg your pardon,” said another American voice through the door — a voice I had recently heard. “I do beg your pardon if you were asleep, but this is Wallace Brady, remember? I’ve just been to the hospital and seen Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. I’ve got something to tell you.”

“I know.” I said. I finished filling the syringe, wiped it, repacked my bag and reached across for my dressing gown. “I’ve just had a call from Doctor Radinski. I hear he has made a good recovery. Thank you for coming to tell me.”