Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (23 page)

I sat still after my refusal, watching the other screens while waiting for them to threaten or to cajole me into agreeing. Of course, they did neither. Instead of words, it was the screaming of Benedict that poured from the set. On and on and on and on.

I know all the sensible arguments. The life, health and sanity of one three-month-old infant of doubtful parentage against the lives of all the men on that list, plus the tearing open of the whole international espionage system with all the harm it could do.

And the personal arguments. My life was safe so long as the list was uncoded. The moment I gave them the code, I was merely something that could be bartered with if it was convenient, and dispensed with if as it happened it wasn’t. The tape of my voice was on its way to my father. They didn’t need me for that either. And from their point of view, my father could hardly make a fuss if in the end I went missing permanently. He had allowed himself to be blackmailed, hadn’t he, into supplying weapons to another country?

I walked round and round the bedroom and bathroom. I threw things. I lay on the bed with blankets dragged round my ears. The screams of pain died to a whimper and then gave way to the loud, snarling wails of a baby in total distress: angry, frightened and starving.

And there one had to face reality too. The hardest heart may relent for a toddler, who has known nothing but love and trust, calling over and over for the parents it thinks have deserted it.

A baby of three months knows nothing except that it has needs, and they have to be made known by demanding. It cries angrily, redfaced and wet, with its nose running. Distress and fright mean soiled nappies. Filthy, intolerable mess, making the air in a closed room unbreathable.

Pick up a toddler and you enjoy, instantly, the power to soothe and reassure.

Pick up a screaming three-month-old and you have a squirming bundle of wet, unpleasant, concentrated essence of resentment, with roughly the same effect on the Samaritan’s ego as a well-marshalled kick in the molars.

To put up with that, you need to know the truth about babies and be prepared despite all that to lump it. Or you need to be by nature, angelic. Not the habit of Hugo Panadek as I knew him.

I think I stuck it for half an hour and then I sat down and began typing out the coding formula. If that is a betrayal of mankind, then I’m sorry. The fault is in me; not in Maggie Bee; not in my parents.

They left the crying on, even then, even when I started on the actual decoding of the documents.

I stopped once and said into the microphone, ‘Is this what you want?’ And the machine typed, under the last name, an address in Melbourne, just the two words,
Go on
. The next time I asked, it didn’t answer.

I was a third of the way through, when the No.1 video picture of the hallway showed a change and I stopped and glanced up. A man, the butler I had seen before, was crossing the floor to the doorway. The sound picked up the noise of his footsteps, then other steps out of the line of the camera. There was a confusion of voices. Then a second man stepped within camera range. He was saying, ‘We have proved to you that the wind can blow in Yugoslavia. Let us now prove that in spite of it, our hearts are warm and hospitable.’ The camera, as he turned, picked up the heavy jowl, the bald head, the trendy moustache of Hugo Panadek, picturesque as ever in black velvet with a high buttoned collar. It explained why the green letters had been so unwilling of late to answer my questions.

Then I saw stepping into the hall the guests to whom his mocking words had been directed. Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, her silver hair swept to one side, discarded chinchillas to reveal another dress in hand-painted Bakst pink with rubies this time on the fragile arm bones. Dr Gibbings was with her; and behind her, the handsome eyes black-lined and lowered, came her daughter Rosamund Booker-Readman, tall and thin in a pin-tucked cream chiffon blouse and cardigan over a cream georgette skirt and strapped shoes.

By contrast the third woman, Beverley Eisenkopp, looked pretty as marzipan with her golden hair and one-shoulder scarlet dress that would have raised a few eyebrows in Tuscaloosa. Behind her, a long way behind, in a silk suit and flowered crêpe-de-chine shirt walked Ingmar’s artistic son-in-law Sultry Simon. And with him, in a crested naval blazer with a pipe deforming the hopeless hang of his grey flannel bags, came the man whose name was among the next dozen to be decoded on my long list. Johnson Johnson, with his black hair brushed and his stupid bifocals glimmering artlessly round at his surroundings.

Seven of them. The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, decanted from the M/S
Glycera
as she unloaded her revelling passengers and invited by Hugo, it appeared, to fill the place settings at dinner and to stay the night before setting out for the airport next morning. Seven guests invited with a daring and a panache beyond all belief, even for Hugo, to cover his actions. A cover which had for its focal point the presence over my head of Benedict Booker-Readman’s parents, his grandmother and his kidnapper, while below, Benedict’s voice cried on and on, so that I tried, drearily, to force myself to go on with my decoding, typing line after slow line with my attention never moving far from what was happening on the eight spying square screens above me.

Dr Gibbings had been here before. He went upstairs to the bedroom in screen No. 8 while Hugo escorted Ingmar and Rosamund to Nos. 6 and 4, with Johnson trailing behind. I saw him enter the bedroom on the seventh screen, and place his overnight case tidily on its crutch. Then my attention was drawn by voices on the first screen, in the hall, where Simon had been stopped by Comer’s wife Beverley. He said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Not now.’

She had never looked lovelier. Even on the small screen I could see the slender, tiptilted nose, the artless eyes, the perfect bones with a trace of Clear Gel highlighting the cheeks and the nostrils. She said, ‘You kept saying that on the boat. Simon, Comer’s gone home. I’m free. We’re both free. Rosamund’s too busy fawning round Ingmar to notice what happens to you.’

She had begun to embrace him when he spat out ‘Be careful’, and a maid went by, smiling. He turned for the stairs. Beverley said, ‘I don’t care about money,’ and Simon swung round.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘What the hell do you think I married Rosamund for? O.K.: so we have fun now and then. I don’t mind. It doesn’t harm anyone. But Rosamund knows, and Comer suspects, and if we’re not careful, Ingmar’s going to be told, and then the fat’ll be in the fire, won’t it?’

He turned round and took her by the arm and putting her hand under her chin, looked down into those prodigious blue eyes with no love in his own face at all, or even desire. ‘There isn’t going to be a divorce. Get that into your head. I’m not going to leave the Warr Beckenstaffs, and you aren’t going to leave Comer. Try and change that, Beverley, and you’ll regret it. Play along, and there may be other parties like the
Glycera
. I like you. You’re good in bed and sometimes out of it. But that’s all. Understand me?’

He didn’t wait to hear whether she understood, but turned and ran up the stairs. A moment later, I saw him enter Rosamund’s bedroom. No one spoke. I typed three more names and addresses. A voice above the crying said, ‘Are you sure? I don’t mean to decry your knowledge of ikons, of course. But are you sure?’

Ingmar, in her own room, talking to Dr Gibbings. And Dr Gibbings replying. ‘It was the genuine ikon. Booker-Readman’s story was that he had lost it, and it had been recovered. It was so unlikely that I took the chance to visit the Eisenkopps with a friend who does know about these things. It was the Lesnovo. Whatever you want to accuse Simon of, it can’t be fraud in this respect.’

She said, ‘That is very surprising.’ She was sitting upright as I had seen her in her cabin on the
Glycera
. However onerous or wild the preceding twenty-four hours had been, there was no trace of it on her desiccated, superbly made-up features. She continued, ‘I should prefer, as you know, that there should be grounds for a divorce, ideally of a criminal kind.’

Dr Gibbings sat down. He said, ‘Rosamund, as you also know, is still very fond of her husband. Perhaps now he will conduct himself better. He is weak. Placed in a difficult position, he might easily blurt out the truth about Benedict.’

Benedict’s voice, exhausted, whimpered and trailed into silence, and then with a hiccoughing sob, began crying again. I had forgotten… heaven help me, until that moment I had forgotten he was Hugo Panadek’s son.

Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff said, ‘There is one way of resolving the problem. Panadek would not be averse to marrying Rosamund.’

I watched without typing.

Gibbings said, ‘He is, of course a man of many affairs and one would conclude wealthy, by the evidence of this castle. But would Rosamund be happy? One imagines that, had it been a match, they would have stayed together at the time of the baby’s conception. Forgive me.’

She was fitting, at leisure, a cigarette into her holder. ‘There is no need. Hugo is a designer. He goes where there are rich men to employ him. Sometimes to the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation; sometimes to other rich European companies. I arranged they should meet; I was not surprised when they parted. All I was concerned about was that Rosamund should have an heir, and that she should have her eyes opened to someone other than Booker-Readman. She had the son. Unfortunately, she failed to find a cure for her infatuation.’

Dr Gibbings stared at the straight figure. He said, ‘I thought Rosamund got pregnant to spite you. To force her marriage through against your wishes?’

It was what Ingmar had told me. Ingmar had told me, I now knew, just what she wanted me to believe.

For a long time Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff looked at him. Then with one of her graceful, spare gestures she leaned forwards and tipped the ash from her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘Hermann,’ she said. ‘When you found an empire it is your duty, after a certain age, to find and train a crown prince for your successors. There are many competent people about me, but none of my blood. I had only a daughter, a dilettante who disliked business. There are various time-honoured ways to make a woman breed. I chose the quickest.’

Dr Gibbings said, ‘Ingmar: you may be dead before that child is walking.’

‘I know it,’ she said. ‘But while he is alive, my people – including you, Hermann – know that one day there will be an accounting. Meanwhile, I am taking him with me to England with Rosamund. Where is the painter’s yacht? The
Dolly
?’

‘Off Dubrovnik harbour,’ Gibbings said. ‘Will you take the girl and the bodyguard also?’

‘Both. The bodyguard is a fool, but the girl is good,’ Ingmar said. ‘I want them ready to travel tomorrow. Ask Mr Johnson to telephone and prepare them. I take it a telephone message can reach them?’

‘By radio telephone, yes.’ Dr Gibbings hesitated. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff smoked calmly, watching him, and then said, ‘But you think the request should come from me. Yes?’

Gibbings smiled. ‘He is not impressive to look at, but…’

‘Say no more.’ She picked up her phone. And on the screen above, after a moment, Johnson crossed his room and picked up his. He was speaking into it when his door opened and Hugo came in.

He didn’t know, yet, who Johnson was, but a pain ran through my stomach. Soon he would know: just as soon as he had time to come down below, and read the long list I was decoding. To see Johnson walk into the castle should have been the finest Godgiven event of the day.

Instead it was the worst. He wasn’t here to rescue me or the baby. He had no idea we were here. If his men had tracked the
Dolly
at all, they had followed her no further than Gospa od škrpjela. If they had picked up my radio dental signal, they would have been led well away from the fortress of Kalk.

Johnson was a trained agent. He wouldn’t be careless, in the company he was keeping. But neither would he know, as the evening wore on, that he was in the stronghold of the enemy, and that his private mission was private no longer.

Now, his hand over the phone, he was saying to Hugo, ‘I have to try and get a message to
Dolly
for Mrs Warr Beckenstaff. How’s your Serbo-Croat?’

‘Mean,’ said Hugo. ‘But I shall do my best.’ He spoke into the phone. There was a pause. Then he spoke again, and turned to Johnson. ‘
Dolly
is not answering. She is in the anchorage east of Dubrovnik?’

Johnson had taken his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She had orders to go there, and not to move. My man Milligan is permanently on board. And of course, Donovan, with Joanna and the baby.’

Hugo said, ‘The harbour master says she is not in the anchorage. Wait. I shall ask them to check.’ He spoke again. When he eventually turned back, he had his hand over the phone.

‘Your yacht is not in that anchorage, nor in the basin at Gruz. You are sure your man wouldn’t move without reporting it?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Johnson. He put his pipe down. ‘Ask him when the
Dolly
was last seen at the anchorage.’

‘He has told me. She was seen about nine,’ Hugo said. ‘Nine last night, before the Bora started. Then there was heavy rain and wind, as you know. It was not until morning that it was noticed that she had gone from the roadstead. I have asked them to search the coast. She may have dragged her anchor. The wind was severe.’

‘Even if she did, Lenny would have reported,’ Johnson said. ‘Unless she was wrecked.’

‘You have courage to say so,’ said Hugo. ‘Or is it better than the other possibility? That she has been hi-jacked?’

Johnson had picked up his pipe again. ‘With two able-bodied men on board? No. It’s sea trouble if it’s anything, and that doesn’t bear thinking of. Look. Ask them to search. Ask them to phone as soon as they hear anything. Meantime I don’t think it would do any good to upset the family here before any more can be known. Do you agree we just tell Mrs Warr Beckenstaff we can’t raise the
Dolly
meantime? She can think it’s a fault in the telephones.’

I heard Hugo agree, and finish his telephone call, and they discussed it a moment longer. Leaving, Hugo said, ‘I shouldn’t worry. They’ve probably sneaked off round the bay where the action is. The beds’ll be full of naval ratings: you know what nurses and ice hockey kings are.’