Ibiza Surprise (22 page)

‘Well, you can relax now,’ said Johnson, and put the pipe in his mouth. ‘He was murdered.’

There was a little silence. No stanza of poor Coco’s poetry could have been more concrete or more chilling than that.

I didn’t want any more brandy and soda.

‘Who killed him?’ I said.

‘He was killed,’ said Johnson, ‘over some rubies. Derek’s instinct was right. It seemed too much of a coincidence that there should be some nonsense going on over rubies and that a man should be killed at the same time. My guess would be that your father got to know, somehow, about the proposed theft of the rubies and that he was killed to keep him quiet.’

‘By Jorge and Gregorio,’ said Derek. Colour had come back into his face.

‘No. By someone else,’ Johnson said. ‘Someone who also killed Coco, because Coco watched your father when he came here by night to visit Mrs van Costa and because on that one vital night, Coco must have seen where he went. I don’t suppose Coco had any motive other than jealousy, coupled with malice, when he sensed that he would soon be asked to go. He must have followed Lord Forsey hoping to uncover some dirt or some trouble. And he certainly found it.’

‘Who, then?’ said Derek. My mother hadn’t uttered a word.

‘We don’t know yet,’ said Johnson. ‘But we shall. We have a very good opportunity, later tonight. Jorge and Gregorio are not the most cooperative of prisoners, and the old man is half dead with fright. Since I couldn’t use force, Lady Forsey, I took the liberty of bugging your cellar. I don’t know who killed your husband, I suspect they don’t know either. But I did find out one thing. There were two copies made of the Saint Hubert rubies.’

Mummy was first off the mark.

‘Huh? There’s another replica? Aside from the one that was smashed?’

‘Check,’ said Johnson. ‘The first one, the one we saw, didn’t pass muster. It was pretty clumsy, as Sarah will remember. A second copy was made.’

‘We didn’t find it?’ I said.

‘No. They took no chances with that one,’ said Johnson. ‘It was already removed from the workshop by person or persons unknown. All ready to be swapped for the original on the one night in the year when the original is within reach of the public, passing through the old city by drumbeat, at night.’

I put my hands over my mouth, and Derek half got up.

‘Tonight?’ he said. ‘During the Procession of Silence tonight? The people who killed my father are going to steal those rubies tonight?’

Johnson took his pipe over to a table, laid it down, and had a swig of his brandy.

‘I looked up Capricorn, She-she,’ he said. ‘It says pension matters are overdue for serious consideration and that you will sparkle tonight.’

‘Never mind my pension,’ I said. ‘Let’s get the police.’

‘Now’ said my mother and Derek simultaneously.

‘Now nothing,’ I said. ‘The heroines I’ve seen come to a sticky end because, while the murderer’s still running around, no one calls in the police. You’ve evidence of two murders and a forthcoming robbery. For crying out loud, dial nueve, nueve, nueve. Policia, Guardia Civil, and Bomberos.’

‘Someone has, dearie,’ said Johnson. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Meet,’ said my mother, ‘the Man from the Prudential.’

‘You meet him,’ I said. ‘I’m going home. I don’t want to go the same way as Clement and Austin and Daddy and Coco.’

‘You go on home, honey,’ said Mummy.

I stayed.

I suppose I would have thought more about Johnson’s work if he hadn’t had glasses. I mean, what special agent on films ever had glasses? Bifocals, anyway. I did wonder in passing why he carried a gun and found safecracking so easy, but he simply said he’d been on special-branch work in the war, and once done, never forgotten. And that when you’d spent a few years on the waterfront, you learned the best way to take care of yourself and your boat. If an internationally famous portrait painter told you that, you believed him. Despite anything Derek upbraided me with afterwards, I am definitely not naive.

It was Derek who went on and on when Johnson was trying to swear us to silence. I knew what Derek was thinking. He thought Janey should know. And he resented Johnson anyway for a perfectly obvious reason. If a British agent had been called in to look into Daddy’s murder, then Daddy must have been what Derek’s firm thought him. A murder in a foreign country is dealt with by the police. Not by people like Johnson.

He gave his word, in the end, because Mummy browbeat him into it. Johnson let her. Johnson was a man of unusual talents. Then he took us, very slowly and clearly, several times over his plan for that night.

Spry phoned, before it was over, to tell Johnson that Clem had now wakened but wasn’t up to much. He suspected concussion. They couldn’t lay hands on a doctor. We heard Johnson hesitate.

He said to Spry: ‘I want you to take over guard duty at Mrs van Costa’s within the next hour. Could you leave Clem? Or isn’t it safe?’

Johnson’s face, as he laid down the receiver, bore perceptible signs of concern.

‘He’s going. He thinks Clem will sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s rotten luck, but we really can’t do anything else, with Austin laid up as well. She-she, where is Mr Lloyd planning to stand? At the Monument? In the Vera de Rey?’

All the processions in Ibiza arrived at the boulevard and took a turn round the Monument.

‘He said something about the Monument,’ I said. ‘Janey and Gil and I should be with him. He was joining friends there.’

‘But the four of you, and possibly Derek, will be the only guests for dinner tonight?’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘I’ve only ordered enough food for four.’ I paused and said: ‘Johnson, why should someone cosh Clem?’

Johnson’s black eyebrows rose, but his voice remained perfectly calm.

‘Are you sure it was Clem whom they wanted to cosh?’

The ash broke from Mummy’s cheroot as she sat suddenly upright.

‘Me? It was an attempt to hurt me?’

‘I should think so,’ said Johnson. ‘It’s perfectly easy to hide in the fo’c’s’le and escape up through the hatch later, when the fuss has died down. You’ve got short hair. In the half-light he might easily have mistaken his victim.’

‘Clem is a dear boy,’ said my mother, wide-eyed. ‘But I must say I am not flattered. What is more, I don’t get it. If Coco had imparted to me any of his vital secrets, surely by now I’ve had time to pass them on?’

‘Maybe. . .’ said Johnson.

‘I know something I don’t know I know?’ said my mother.

Johnson nodded his head.

‘I don’t know anything I don’t know I know,’ said my mother in a positive voice. ‘Or if I do, I’ll sue my psychiatrist.’

‘You do that,’ said Derek coldly. ‘Then if someone does wipe you out, Sarah and I will share in the proceeds.’

It was one thing I had never thought of, that Derek and I were heirs to everything both Daddy and Mummy had possessed. Since we thought neither of them had a bean of their own, I for one had never given it more than a sigh in the passing. But now. . .

Johnson finished briefing us just after that, and I got up with Derek to climb into the Maserati and drive back to the Lloyds’. Just as I was getting in, Johnson called me back to tell me something he’d forgotten. Derek looked at me as I climbed into the driver’s seat for the second time.

‘What was all that?’

‘He forgot to ask what time we usually finished dinner.’

I put her into gear and drove off. The concrete kerb and the cactus at the edge of the drive shone intense green and white in the headlamps; and then we were on the grey, pockmarked road, with its broken, yellow dirt at the edges. The pale stems of a fir wood swam towards us, the grey-green clouds closing over our heads. Dazzling red-and-white triangles and circles appeared far off, like eyes, and flew past us, 50, 30, and warnings: children, skidding, cedaelpaso. Red-and-white netting, bright at a corner. A cyclist, a double red lamp clipped to each side of his calf. A swaying grouping of lights, that turned out to be a lorry, with extra sidelights on the top of its load. A bus, with triple lights also. Ibiza – the yacht club – the broken inn opposite the Talamanca road with its sign: bar-stop.

The last of the road lights glittered on something on the mat under my feet. I changed down as we rounded the corner, and holding her in low gear between the long, dark avenue of bare trees, bent and fished the thing up. It was one of Coco’s bits of tin bunting, from the Casa Mimosa. It said only: death.

In the end, I made them all curried chicken except Derek, who got eggs Mornay and lumped it.

There had been no trouble over getting Derek added to the party, although there was a slight air of inquiry over how we had spent part of the day. A good few hours had passed since leaving Gil. I said I’d been having a sitting with Johnson and then I’d come across Derek by chance in Ibiza.

‘Helmuth told us,’ said Mr Lloyd, pouring himself a San Miguel pilsner cristal. It was a rather hot curry. ‘Wasn’t Mrs van Costa there too? You apparently blocked the whole roadway.’

‘That’s right. I gave her a lift. Dilling had gone on a trip with the Humber and left Mrs van Costa stranded,’ I said. He could interpret the leading phrase there any way that he liked. Johnson had said: ‘Don’t mention Clem’s head, and don’t tell them I’ve been with your mother.’ He hadn’t needed to tell us to keep quiet about Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I had a moment’s unease when Austin asked Derek if he’d found out anything that mattered at the office of the Salinera Espanola, SA, but Derek just said no, they didn’t keep any records. Thereafter, there wasn’t much to be heard but the opening of beer cans.

I got dressed, ages behind everyone else, to the sound of the record player, and came down in my black crochet dress and black anorak to find Janey and Austin, with his bandage undone, dancing to Itchycoo Park. He broke off after a bit and gave me a whirl.

Janey said: ‘You’re in hot-cross bun country all right. Why the black, She- she? You’re not Roman, are you?’

I wasn’t anything, except obeying instructions to wear something dark.

Then Mr Lloyd came in wearing a fur-collared car coat, and Gilmore dressed in a sweater, with a great scarlet wool cloak for Janey. I didn’t look at it. I was so busy not looking at it that I hardly said goodbye to Austin, who was curling up with a good book in the grotto. We all piled into the Buick, waited patiently for Derek who was in a sports jacket with a raincoat over his arm (‘A
raincoat?’
said Janey), and then Mr Lloyd let in the clutch, and we snarled up into the gear changes which would land us in Ibiza. The moon had got up, and the telegraph poles and the trees were black now against the light sky. Where the planting was sparse, you could see the hazy blue of low hills on the left, till they flattened, just before the bend round the harbour. Then the lights of Ibiza leaped out before us: blue-grey, with the cathedral floodlit a deep golden yellow. We crawled in, behind the crowds and the buses, and parked.

The holy images for the procession were dressed in the cathedral in the afternoon, Johnson had said. Nobody had seen it being done, because
Dolly
had spent her time sailing back from the Salinas anchorage with Jorge and Gregorio and guarding them until it was safe to drive them to Mummy’s villa. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Johnson had learned that there was another set of false rubies, that the scene was set for the theft of the real ones after all.

But, said Johnson, he also understood that the dressing was done by the senior officials of the Church, plus a handful of devoted Ibizencans. This, in his opinion, made it impossible for anyone to depend on being able to substitute the false rubies for the real at this stage.

From then on, they were guarded by never less than six people, most of them priests. By afternoon, all the images had been fixed on their litters, and candelabra, real or electric, and flowers, real or waxen, set round about.

Johnson, he had said, would be with the Saint Hubert. How he proposed to manage that I couldn’t tell. The order of the procession was always the same: it started at the highest point of the old town, the images assembling from all their various churches, and then wound its way down the lanes, accompanied by its files of churchmen and penitents, plus contingents of armed forces and local officials, spaced out with sad music and drums. It sounded wild. In the big cities, Johnson had told me, the statues alone could weigh up to five tons, and needed thirty stevedores underneath to carry them. I wondered if Johnson proposed to get underneath the Saint Hubert before it left the cathedral or if the union would veto it.

I had only three firm instructions from Johnson. To stick to the Lloyd party. If I could, to keep them together. And not, under any circumstances, to go off by myself. He had added a comment. If a theft had been planned, it was likeliest to happen in the low town, where the thief could get away easily. If Mr Lloyd stayed in the low town it would, said Johnson, be nice.

Mr Lloyd thought it would be nice, too, until he saw the Vara de Rey, which was pandemonium from end to end and three high in the middle with people standing on people round the Monument. I saw quite a few of the types who sit with their woolly socks on the chairs every morning outside the Mediterranea, including the German girl in the lime-and-gold sari and the five million bangles, the girl with the ticking nightshirt and boots, and the boy with the skinny sweater and necklace, who went about with the barefoot fat woman with pink and orange and green paisley painted all over her face. It was mild, and the lamplight shone under the palm trees. I got pinched black and blue while we struggled, fruitlessly, to find Mr Lloyd’s friends.

After a bit he got fed up and said: ‘Let’s get out of the scrum. We should be in the Dalt Vila. Much more dramatic.’

‘Well, you won’t get there now,’ Janey said. ‘Look at the crowds.’ She was mad anyway because Derek wasn’t looking at her and the others hadn’t turned up. I expect she wanted to play them off against one another.

Mr Lloyd said: ‘The procession won’t have started. We can get there if we try. Hang on to each other.’