Dolly and the Singing Bird

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House

New York

This fast-paced, sophisticated and often hilarious mystery by a distinguished historical novelist introduces Johnson Johnson, a famous but enigmatic portrait painter whose interests, it soon becomes obvious, range far beyond painting, and his sailing yacht, the
Dolly
. The singing bird of the title is Tina Rossi, the world’s leading coloratura soprano, who goes to the Edinburgh Festival largely because it will give her a chance to see her lover, scientist Kenneth Holmes, who is working on top-secret research on the Hebrides island of Rum. But when she goes to their secret meeting place she finds not Kenneth but an unknown corpse Then Johnson Johnson turns up; Kenneth is accused of sabotage; and Johnson and Tina sail in a race through the Hebrides on the
Dolly
—and it turns out that far more than sport is at stake.

First Vintage Books Edition, September 1982

Copyright © 1968 by Dorothy Dunnett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Cassell & Company Ltd. in 1968. Originally published in the United Slates by Houghton Mifflin under the title
The Photogenic Soprano
in 1968
.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dunnett, Dorothy.

Dolly and the singing bird.

Originally published: The photogenic soprano.

Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, 1968

I. Title.

PR6054.U56P5 1982 823'.914 82-40044

ISBN 0-394-71162-9 (pbk.) AACR2

Manufactured in the United States of America

Men with bifocal glasses: I spit.

I have surprised you, no doubt. I have a name for hard work and magnificent singing; and very little for temperament. But now, all that is changed—since Johnson came into my life.

That August, I had two concerts to give at the Edinburgh Festival—you may have heard me. I had been singing in Holland and Germany and was four pounds overweight; therefore I travelled incognito: my manager Michael’s idea.

So in London I had no welcome at the airport, no bouquet, no private lounge, no free champagne and coffee and no small English change for the telephone. Also Michael’s idea: I found I was travelling under his name: Mrs. Twiss.

While he is a brilliant manager and répétiteur, sometimes Michael can bounce back disturbing echoes of the Tottenham Court Road. I mentioned on the plane that I felt certain reservations towards the name Twiss as a chic incognito. I removed my dark glasses. The air hostess went pink and hung up my Balenciaga. Five people asked for my autograph. Michael would have gone pink also, except that he was airsick, as ever. We arrived in Edinburgh, not a second too soon.

There, to begin with, all was perfectly normal. I was met by the director of the Festival with wired roses and heather; there were more flowers at my hotel and eighteen invitations, as well as my maid, my secretary and my solicitor with some papers concerning a lawsuit for me to read over and sign. I rehearsed, I rested, I had my hair set with my platinum hairpiece and was interviewed by the press.

Michael had told them what to ask. They asked some other irrelevant questions. They asked if I intended never to marry. They asked if it was true that I could sing G sharp in alt.

I replied that should the right man come along, I should certainly give up my singing for love. I said that if someone would recite the whole of “Tam o’ Shanter,” I should sing G sharp in alt.

Someone did, and so did I, fortunately right in the centre: the press conference ended with tremendous rapport and the publicity footage in the evening paper pleased even Michael my manager. Also the pictures were quite delightful. I am, after all, the only really photogenic coloratura soprano alive. My only problem, just about then, was in staying alive.

The first concert went well. Thalberg, who had come from Munich to conduct for me, was sober both at rehearsal and performance, and was so far disturbed by my following that he took his teeth out before coming on stage and required to be helped from the podium. But there was still no doubt who received the larger ovation. Wearing the Bonwit Teller dress I cannot sit down in, I was recalled eleven times to the platform, while the good folk of Edinburgh drummed their Hush Puppies on the concert hall floor.

I find Edinburgh braces the throat. I had never sung Donna Elvira better, with the registers perfectly blended since that week’s work with Michael at Düsseldorf. In the artists’ dressing room Thalberg kissed my hand, first replacing his teeth. He then chaffingly used an insulting expression and I made a fitting reply. It is a cut-throat business, like any other. He then left to join his friend in the North British station hotel; and I left, to keep an assignation with a clean-living lover called Kenneth.

I am not, of course, promiscuous. With the work I have to do, this would be impossible. Occasionally, between touring and filming and recording, one meets a partner of like mind, but only occasionally. It is hard to pick out from the proposals and the mere propositions the men who like Tina Rossi for what she is, and not for what she can earn.

Kenneth Holmes and I had met the previous year in Nevada, where Michael and I had flown for a rest during a long and strenuous American tour. Kenneth was the hearty, ball-playing kind, with style, good looks and brashness ridiculous in a highly trained engineer. He was working in the States under an exchange scheme, and had been given an expensive laboratory, which he had to himself.

I was resting. I wished peace, relaxation, security; and he gave me all these. Afterwards, he continued to send me notes and small gifts. Then he left for London, and later for a place called Rum in Scotland, I heard.

From Talloires, which is our official base, Michael makes up my diary months and years in advance. But it was Christmas this year when he negotiated, at my request, two appearances for me at Edinburgh, to be followed by ten days of rest. And in my handbag now, as I changed in my hotel and shook off Michael Twiss and my maid and slipped out of a side door in the darkness, was a note saying simply, 22B Rose Street tonight love love love Kenneth.

Rose Street is a small lane of pubs and warehouses and boutiques and minor mews openings which lies behind the main street of Edinburgh. It took me five minutes to reach it, slipping head down past the knots of lingering revellers and the suggestive voices in doorways. In dark glasses, headscarf and raincoat, I was surely unrecognisable.

Silly, of course. You would expect this of a fifteen-year-old, stealing out of the dormitory; not of Tina Rossi the Polish-Italian nightingale. But I could not do, airily, what Thalberg does. I would not subject my career to the risk.

I was hurrying, the last little bit. I remembered so well the set of his shoulders and collarbone, his fingernails, and the rough brown hair his Bronx barber reduced to a plush. I found the entrance to No. 22 and ran upstairs, and across a small wooden bridge to a conversion with a bay tree on either of its steps and a door painted yellow—22B. The flat of a school friend, Kenneth once said. The only place for a rendezvous if you want peace and privacy…

I took out the key which came along with the note, and opened the non-drip primrose door.

It was warm inside, with a smell of sweet peas and pipe smoke and hot soup which was exactly Kenneth’s thoughtful but not extravagant identity on a sharp August night. The flat was small, over-lit and vividly decorated, in the kind of thing popular about ten years ago, say in Kensington. I walked slowly past the green Morris wallpaper and looked at the six satin steel doorknobs, and called softly, “Kenneth!”

No reply.

“Kenneth? Where are you?”

Still no answer. Sleeping, probably. I began opening doors.

A bedroom, untenanted. Another bedroom, with towels, soap and a wardrobe full of clothes, none of which I recognised as Kenneth’s, although the bedcover was rumpled as if someone had packed or unpacked there, and the pipe smoke was very strong. Puzzled, I wandered on.

A bathroom, with the basin wet and still warm, and a grubby towel hanging. A kitchen, minuscule, with an electric cooker bearing a panful of canned soup. The can, empty, and a canopener. The cooker was switched off, although the soup was still warm. What then was the buzzing sound? I located it; a refrigerator with the door not quite closed. Inside were two raw steaks in paper, a packet of chips and a bottle of champagne, barely chilled. I shut the door guiltily, and moved on.

The last door led into the sitting-room. The chairs were all ebonised and upholstered in burlap and lurex, and the pot-plants could have done with a watering. In the hearth, a wood and coal fire burned brightly yellow and red, although coal had spilled on the swept tiles and recently smoked itself dead. Before the fire on a small table was a tray set for two, with champagne glasses standing ready. The chairs on either side of the table were empty. The room was empty. Kenneth was not there.

I did not at first quite believe it. The flat felt tenanted. The wood of a chair cracked. Coal shifted, distantly, in the grate. I went back, quickly, through all the rooms I had already visited, and opened a cupboard or two in addition. I called, then; and even unlatched the yellow front door and studied the street. There was a couple kissing in one of the doorways, and a man lighting a cigarette on the kerb glanced up momentarily, but of Kenneth there was no sign at all. I shut the door and came slowly back.

I considered. Kenneth had, perhaps, not yet arrived. Or, he’d gone out for some cigarettes. Or a friend had called and whisked him off for a drink. Or the owner of the flat had returned. The possible answers were many.

In the bathroom, the grubby towel fell off the rail with a slither, and I jumped, like a fool. Then I pulled off my raincoat and headscarf and, letting them drop on the floor, I sat down in front of that splendid fire and applied some common sense to the problem.

It was then that I noticed the little card on the mantelpiece. It was quite an ordinary card, a pasteboard die-stamped visiting card, with
Dr. Kenneth Holmes
and his London address printed on it. I got up and took it down and turned the thing over. On the back, in Kenneth’s characteristic big writing, were three solitary words.
Darling, I’m sorry
.

Darling, I was sorry too; and I ripped his Goddamned pasteboard in pieces to prove it. But in a little while, when I recovered my temper, I also came to my senses. The deliberate farewell without explanation was not in Kenneth Holmes’s nature. Kenneth is, I suppose, the most painfully honest individual I have ever encountered. The argument we had before he would seduce me I shall never forget.

So he left suddenly. So he did not wish to compromise me. At the same time, nothing would give Kenneth more agony than the thought of my arriving tonight and finding him gone, with such a cursory message. Surely, somewhere, if I looked, I would find a clue to his sudden departure? Or another message, perhaps, somewhere else in the flat? I got up, took a deep breath, and began systematically to look.

Nerves are not one of my weaknesses, but I did not enjoy that search. Muffled by plastic foam underlay, my footsteps made no sound. Only, sometimes, in a room I had just passed, a floorboard would creak, or a door swing in some draught. For all its modern furnishing, the house was quite old. But although I did not like it, I searched that flat thoroughly, and I had my hand on the last door, on the wardrobe door in the hall, when the doorbell at my ear suddenly rang.

It was after midnight. In the empty flat, where all the lights still burned in the tenantless rooms, and the fire smouldered low, the noise shrilled with alarm. After a moment’s silence, it rang again, and went on insistently ringing. At the same moment, under my hand, the door of the hall wardrobe moved of its own accord, pushing against my hand, my arm, my shoulder and finally falling wide open, while from its depths something dark and heavy and silent suddenly moved.

And I stood there and just watched it topple towards me: the person of a slow, cold-eyed, powerful man who followed me on to the carpet, arms flailing, his brute weight flattening even my trained, resilient lungs.

I fell with his hair brushing my face, and the scrape of his unshaven chin on my cheek; and anger swallowed my fright.

I shoved hard. I held him off and drew breath to shout to the men who stood on the far side of that yellow front door, whose voices I could hear and under whose hand the bell was ringing, ringing above us both still.

I remember all that. And I remember the moment when I looked at my own clenched hand holding off his, and realised that his fingers were limp, his wrist cold, his limbs rubber. When I realised that my cold-eyed attacker was dead.

He lay on the carpet staring upwards from those pale open eyes while the doorbell rang and rang, and the round, black hole in his shirt showed how he had died. In Kenneth’s flat, from which Kenneth had fled. Outside the door, a voice said, distantly, “I don’t like the look of it, sir, if the lady’s in there alone.” And then, raising itself, it said, “Hallo! Will you kindly open up in there? It’s a matter of urgency. This is a police officer speaking.”

Instinct is a marvellous thing, I dare say; but I prefer to use my good sense. You, perhaps, with a strange man lying dead at your feet would have welcomed the police with an exhibition of nervous relief. I, on the other hand, kept my head.

I won’t pretend I had recovered. But I could isolate the two essentials. If I were to pursue the course I set myself, the name of Tina Rossi must not be involved in either scandal or killing. And Kenneth Holmes must, if possible, be protected from persecution and scandal as well. So I stood over the dead man, and drew a long steadying breath and shouted at half pitch, “Hallo! I’m sorry, I must have dropped off to sleep. Will you wait a little while, please?”

And while the same voice on the other side of the door was saying, relieved, “Yes, of course, madam. Sorry to disturb you. Take your time,” I had the body gripped by one arm and a leg and was dragging it back to the wardrobe. I locked the door and dropped the key in my bag.

Then I put my dark glasses on, patted my hair, took one last look at the cupboard and, marching to the yellow front door, jerked it ajar. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” I remarked.

There were three men on that doorstep between the two bay trees, and two of them, thank God, were genuine policemen. Of the third I had a first impression only of a pair of bifocal glasses, their half moons bright in the light, and a smile of boundless vacuity. The senior officer said, “I hope you’ll excuse us troubling you, but it’s a matter of robbery with violence, and we’re making a door to door enquiry. Would you mind if we entered?”

They came in, stumping past the hall wardrobe and into the sitting room. The fire was almost out, and in front of it, the table with the two empty champagne glasses made one think of underfinanced operetta. I said, “Please sit down. Just how can I help you?” Dear God, dear God who looks after coloratura sopranos, they hadn’t recognised me. I could be Miss Smith from Blackheath, visiting my brother-in-law. I listened hard, while the sergeant intoned.

It was simple enough. Three flats in the nearby square had been broken into this evening, and Mr. Bifocals, who rented one of them, had disturbed the thief and given chase, helped by the law. The fugitive had disappeared into Rose Street and could have entered two or three possible houses. This flat was one. Had I seen anyone, asked the police sergeant briskly. And would I object if they had a wee look, in case someone had come in unbeknownst? I was not, he enquired bluffly, the tenant? He was told that a Mr. Chigwell normally lived here, although he sometimes lent it to friends… He was tactful in the extreme.