Operation Nassau (19 page)

‘Actually, the Begum is James Ulric’s property,’ Johnson said. ‘But I’ll admit to a crazed liaison with Sergeant Trotter, if it’ll make you feel any better.’ He paused, and said quietly, ‘Brady has been checked out, of course. He’s clean, or appears to be. So are Krishtof Bey and Sergeant Trotter for that matter. All it means is that so far, no one has traced any misdemeanours they may have committed. Brady could have killed Denise. So could Mr Tiko. So could any one of several hundred men of the island’s labour force, if suitably paid. Do you honestly think she would still be alive, Bart, if I had moved in beside you with a revolver?’

Edgecombe muttered something. I heard only ‘protection’.

Johnson looked up. He said, ‘But you don’t get a wet-nurse with this job. You don’t even get good toilet and canteen facilities. You get permission to kill and be killed, with no questions asked. You’ve the training we all have, and the weapons we all have, and a fair number of your house staff, I expect, are in the Spoonmakers’ Union as well. What the hell more do you want?’ He got up and stood over Edgecombe, his hands in his pockets. ‘If someone’s killing you because he doesn’t like the shade of your socks, that’s too bad: that’s natural wastage. If someone’s killing you because you’re an agent, then he’s lying out there taking his time about it for a very good reason. He wants to see who else is going to drop off the rock-face and sprint for the play area.’

Johnson moved across to the drinks table, and uncapping the whisky bottle began to pour three neat doubles into three heavy tumblers. ‘You may have blown your cover, Bart,’ he said crisply, ‘but I’m damned if you’re going to blow mine.’

‘You’ve made your point,’ Edgecombe said. He paid no attention to the drink Johnson laid by his side. Edgecombe said, ‘I suppose I can’t expect you to come to Nassau for the funeral? There won’t be anyone else.’ His eyes were bloodshot as if he had had a blow on the head, but I thought his training showed, if nowhere else, in the remarkable grip he had taken again on himself. Johnson offered me a whisky and I snapped a refusal. I wasn’t in the bloody Spoonmakers’ Union.

Johnson sat down. ‘Doesn’t Denise have any relations?’

Edgecombe shook his head. ‘A few distant ones in the south of England. They couldn’t afford to come, and wouldn’t care anyway. She . . . she’d made her life with me.’

‘But you left her alone a good bit, didn’t you? Didn’t she resent that?’ Johnson said.

Edgecombe shut his lips and put the back of his hand to his mouth. I walked across and standing between Edgecombe and Johnson, put my hands on my hips. ‘What possible business is it of yours?’ I said to Johnson. Pleasantly, I trust.

Edgecombe said, his hand still over his face, ‘He gets twenty-five thousand a year for asking that sort of question. At this sort of time.’

‘Was she alone a lot?’ Johnson repeated. He might not have heard me.

‘Yes. But she had friends,’ Edgecombe said.

‘Did you know who they were?’

‘Not all of them. I couldn’t,’ said Edgecombe with sudden bitterness. ‘Go here: do that: we want this code broken by Monday. . You know this business. I had a wife. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. But I’d had her a long time, long before I entered your stainless profession. I loved her . . “

‘Did she love you?’ said Johnson. ‘Or was she bored and resentful, and open to suggestions by anyone with enough money? Suggestions which would make her a comfortable widow . . except that she didn’t live to become a comfortable widow. Because Denise talked too much when she had too much planter’s punch, didn’t she? Who made up the crab sandwiches you took to New York, Edgecombe?’

Edgecombe’s big, well-groomed face had gone white to the lips. I said sharply, ‘Drink this!’ and gave him the whisky Johnson had poured. He started to speak; and then, as I looked at him, drank it off in one gulp. He put it down and got to his feet and stared at Johnson, until his breathing allowed him to speak.

Then he said, ‘All right. You said that, with Denise lying dead in that diabolical quarry out there. She fell on a harrow . . . can you imagine that? I expect you can; you’ve seen plenty of violent deaths in this job. Before that she was suffocated - by gas, by a cloth - it doesn’t matter. You can imagine that, too. I’d like you to. You can further imagine that we slept here last night, Denise and I, and had breakfast together this morning. I shaved, she dressed. We talked of the day, and our plans for tomorrow . . She was looking forward to her golf . . ‘

He stopped, still breathing hard. I made a little movement, but he waved me off. ‘Beltanno was too good a player. I realized what had happened. Denise wasn’t strong-willed. She didn’t need to be. She had me . . most of the time. She knew her own weaknesses, and we supported one another. She wasn’t spiteful, she wasn’t anything but a nice, pretty woman who was perhaps a bit vain . . ‘

He looked straight at Johnson. ‘She doesn’t deserve on her deathbed to be accused of murder and treason. I don’t deserve that the first posthumous words I hear of my wife are the suggestion that she wanted to kill me.’ He stumbled, and I put my hand on his elbow and kept it there. ‘You may withdraw your attention from Great Harbour Cay,’ said Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. ‘As from this moment, I have resigned from your service. Whatever interest you have kindly heretofore taken in me, I deserve none of it now.’

Through it all, Johnson had not even moved. His glasses, motionless, reflected the chair, the table. Edgecombe’s pale face and the blue of my beach shirt, as I stood and supported him. I had forgotten I was still in my swim-suit. The anger I was suppressing became a strengthening pain in my stomach. I controlled myself. Johnson said, levelly, ‘As soon as you are exposed as an agent, your career as an agent is ended. Nothing has changed.’

‘Something has,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘I put a strong sedative in Sir Bartholomew’s whisky, Mr Johnson. If you want to distress him still further, I suggest you come back in two hours.’

Johnson said, ‘Is he distressed?’

I had Edgecombe’s pulse under my fingers. I said, ‘Would you like to come and feel this?’

Johnson shook his head. He was looking at Edgecombe. Sir Bartholomew stared back at him. I could feel his weight press on my arm as the drowsiness gathered. Edgecombe said, ‘I told you the truth.’ The rancour had gone out of his voice.

‘I know,’ Johnson said. ‘But I had to be sure. We swear loyalty ten times over to our employer, and mean it. But we cover up for the person we love.’

Edgecombe said, his voice gentle, ‘She wasn’t mixed up in anything. Not Denise,’ and Johnson, walking forward, stopped, ignoring me, and took Edgecombe’s other arm, turning him towards the shut bedroom door. ‘You would know. I accept that,’ he said. He walked Edgecombe to the door and opened it on the empty bedroom. ‘I never apologize for the inexcusable,’ he added.

Sir Bartholomew put one hand on the doorpost and with the other patted my shoulder. ‘You see? Brains and tenacity,’ he said. ‘Should I accept his apology?’

‘He didn’t offer one,’ I said grimly.

‘Oh. My mistake,’ said Sir Bartholomew vaguely. But he smiled at Johnson before he turned in the door, and closed it gently behind him. And below the bifocals Johnson’s lips, I saw, stirred in an answering smile.

It had disappeared when he turned towards me. ‘That was interfering of you, Doctor,’ he said. ‘But not as disastrous this time as it might have been. If you could take a moment now to veil your splendid nubility. I should like to see where Denise Edgecombe died.’

I didn’t speak to him even after I dressed. I cannot remember addressing a word to Johnson through all the dreadful, drawn-out proceedings of the long day. The police came, and another doctor, and questions were asked, but in a climate of reverent pity. Lady Edgecombe had died from a fall, after being made dizzy by the inadvertent use of a gas tarpaulin. So all the experts said, and who were Johnson and I to contradict them. Or perhaps it was because of Johnson, behind the scenes, that the formalities were so smoothly completed.

Denise, taken from her resting-place in the nurse’s tidy white trailer, was flown at last to Nassau, her husband beside her. Johnson let them go, and restrained me also from following. ‘There is nothing you can do. He will be under the eye of the hospital, and besides, he can take care of himself.’

‘I want to go to the funeral. I was their guest,’ I said. They were the first words I had spoken to him directly, since that sadistic discussion that morning.

‘He doesn’t want you. I’m sorry, but that is the truth. He doesn’t want anyone. And I wish you to come to Crab Island,’ Johnson said.

We were back in Bart Edgecombe’s empty house. I was watching his maid pack up Denise’s things, and Johnson, french windows open, was standing on the sundeck over the golf-course, absently filling his pipe. ‘A splendid idea,’ I said. I picked up an ashtray and, marching out, placed it on the table beside him. ‘A big, cheerful party with the Begum and James Ulric, and who? Krishtof Bey ogling and Sergeant Trotter giving his famous imitation of a Royal Canadian Mountie on top of a camel. That’ll soon cheer us up.’

‘You’d find it compatible compared with the clubhouse,’ he said. ‘Stage people hate death.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ I said. I badly wanted a quarrel.

‘Some people come to terms with it,’ Johnson said. ‘The Begum, for one. And your father, for another . . . Why didn’t you tell me about Pentecost’s family?’

‘I meant to make some inquiries myself,’ I said brusquely. And so I had. Only there had been so little time. I said, ‘Who told you? Dahlia?’

‘Eventually,’ Johnson said. ‘She disappeared after you saw her, and my people only found her this morning. By then it was too late.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘The family had gone from Bullock’s Harbour. Someone put two and two together and guessed that the water-tower would lead us to Dahlia. They left yesterday to go work on Abaco. So they said. Of course, now there’s no trace.’

I was silent. I had meant to do that myself, when I first set foot on Great Harbour Cay. Instead I had swum, and bought myself clothes and listened to the doctor birds on the hibiscus bushes. And had lain on a beach chair with Paul’s warm hand massaging my spine, while Denise Edgecombe fell to her death. Johnson said, ‘I know Bart asked you to stay here. But it would send you crazy, Beltanno.’

‘So would Crab Island,’ I said.

‘It won’t,’ he said. ‘Or if it does, I’ll bring you straight back to this house. Or to Nassau. Or anywhere else you want to go.’ He paused, and then said, ‘I’m taking Wallace Brady over with me . . Do you know, Beltanno, what it means to finish a job?’ And I understood that. No apologies for the inexcusable: no reference, either, to Pentecost. I thought of Brady’s voice indignantly refuting my own ironical suggestion. Leave things long enough and they’ll find their own answer.

Whatever one thought of Johnson, he was concerned at the moment with bringing the author of two deaths to light. And for that he wanted my help. I didn’t want to go to Crab Island. I wished to avoid the Begum, more than ever in the company of my father. The friends she surrounded herself with, I did not know. The three I knew, Brady, Krishtof and Trotter, were each still men of mystery: figures of unproved suspicion. And Johnson himself I distrusted, after this morning.

He had been watching me, while lighting his pipe. He took it out of his mouth. ‘Have you ever seen,’ he said, ‘a bronchial patient being lambasted out of a spasm? Perhaps you’ve had to do it for your father.’

I had, twice. I didn’t say anything.

‘It isn’t pleasant,’ he said.

The maid had finished. I walked back into the room and turned on one of the lamps. I thought of my own lapse with Pentecost. ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘it may be necessary.’

He came in and stood in the doorway, the lamp igniting the bifocals, the pipe glowing red in his hand. He had extraordinarily thick dense black hair, with no hint of grey. But he was older, of course, than I was. ‘Sometimes it shouldn’t be,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Denise Edgecombe should not have died.’

I looked at him. ‘You said yourself. Who could have stopped it?’

‘I could,’ said Johnson. ‘I personally. Big Daddy, could. But I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’ I said. He had had, I think, a shade more whisky than even a Top Person could carry with no sign at all.

But he had not had as much whisky as that. ‘Probably because you had that blue thing on at that airport.’ he said, sticking his pipe in his mouth. ‘How many inches above the knee did it come? Ten? Twelve? . . I want you to wear the blue thing on Crab Island, Beltanno. And the swim-suit. And everything else you’ve got. Don’t become a case history. Mix your professions like me.’

‘Do you need me on Crab Island?’ I said.

I thought he was going to quip for an answer, but he didn’t. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘In the Spoonmakers’ Union?’

‘In close affiliation to it. A Tong, perhaps.’

‘All right,’ I said.

We dined briefly in the clubhouse, beleaguered at a table with Mr Brady and Mr Tiko, to whom with some misgivings I introduced Johnson Johnson.

I had no need to worry. Johnson, it was clear, had not heard of the heir to the MacRannochs. Mr Tiko on the other hand had heard of Johnson Johnson. They discussed Japanese painting, to the confusion of the long chain of well-wishers who came to commiserate with us over Lady Edgecombe’s sudden death, and to inquire in the nicest possible way into her domestic circumstances.

We separated early, Johnson to sleep in a rented roundette for the night, I to retire alone in the Edgecombes’ silent big house. But first, he came in and watched while I checked the mesh frames at every window, and locked the french windows. I had my gun by my bed.

‘I fancy you’re safe, with Bart away, but it doesn’t do to take risks. Nervous?’ he asked.

I shook my head, as near truthfully as makes no difference. One takes one’s precautions. Then it is merely a matter of willpower.

‘Good girl,’ said Johnson.

‘And Bart Edgecombe?’ I said.

‘I give you my word,’ said Johnson. ‘Nothing will happen to him in Nassau. And after it’s over, I’m bringing him back on Crab Island with me.’