Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (27 page)

I said coldly, “Do I gather that when I was sent to stay at their home on the island, you held Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe and his wife in equal suspicion?”

Johnson was reassuring. “But of course you were perfectly safe. You were always perfectly safe: you were the evidence that Edgecombe had been poisoned; you were to be the evidence that he had been grievously assaulted. Nothing was going to happen to you. But I had begun to realize that if I wanted to pursue my suspicions, I ought to stay apart from both of the Edgecombes until the facts, whatever they were, had become plainer. So I remained on Crab Island while Denise drowned her sorrows in drink, and her husband reached the conclusion that drunk, she could no longer be trusted. That was my cardinal error.”

I remembered. Big Daddy. The only time I had seen Johnson drink more than he could easily carry. I said, “Sir Bartholomew killed his own wife?”

If he remembered at all, there was no trace of sentiment in his manner. “I don’t suppose she knew everything,” Johnson said. “But a little too much. Enough to become nervous about all these mysterious accidents; enough to send her to the bottle for comfort. And when she was drunk, she talked. So she became the victim of another of those accidents aimed at Sir Bartholomew.

“The brooch she lost was his anniversary present. Do you remember how he drew attention to it, and got her to put it into her pocket? Brady remembered it clearly. A moment later, with his arm around her waist, it would have been very easy for him to slip it out and place it just where he wanted. She didn’t struggle when she was pushed over the edge. She made no attempt to run away, nor were her footmarks the deep, staggering kind you would expect from someone held against her will, an ether pad over her mouth. She knew who it was. She let him walk her to the edge of the excavation, maybe under the pretext that he had seen her brooch there. He may have embraced her and drugged her while she was in his arms. At any rate, analysis has shown that she was never inside the tarpaulin. It was flung down afterward, on top of the body…”

He paused, and added, “The little scene after with Edgecombe, which so drastically lowered my ratings, was one I should apologize for. It was extremely necessary to reassure Edgecombe that I had no doubts at all about him. You helped a lot.”

I remembered standing there shaking with anger, my hand on Bart Edgecombe’s shoulder. Bart, who had just killed his wife, and Johnson, who suspected it. I had helped everyone, it appeared, but myself.

Johnson was watching. I drew a long, even breath, and dismissed my emotions. Edgecombe, for his own ends, had warned me about Johnson. Edgecombe had told me that he was married, but not that he was a widower. Edgecombe and Johnson, I had to remember, had been trained in the same school… “So you didn’t suspect Mr. Tiko,” I said. “Or Wallace Brady?”

“I suspected everyone,” Johnson said, in the same even, conversational voice. “But Lady Edgecombe was a rather large woman and Mr. Tiko is a very small man. Brady was another matter. By the time we got to Crab Island my money was on Trotter for henchman, but I tried the small experiment of the arsenic test papers to see what we would flush. And talking of flushing…”

I took the reel of tape he handed me in dignified silence. I tried not to imagine the full score for the Polovtsian Dances thundering through the chaste cabins of
Dolly
. I said frigidly, “At any rate, I’m glad it enabled you to see your way clear to beginning your portrait.”

Johnson glanced at the almond-eyed face on the canvas. “I must admit, I deferred it until I was certain I shouldn’t have to end it in Pentonville. Brady was in my view also clean from that moment. He couldn’t have invented that performance. Not really.”

He sat, obviously thinking humorous thoughts about my all-American suitor. I said pointedly, “And did you find the papers you’d lost?”

“In Trotter’s room,” Johnson said. “An interesting outcome, because they were still intact. Which meant either that Trotter was blackmailing a murderer, or that he had pinched them for Bartholomew Edgecombe in case I destroyed them. In which case they would have been discovered safe and sound on some appropriate occasion in the future. Edgecombe, remember, wanted to prove he’d been poisoned. Then he came back from the funeral, and the arsenic papers disappeared from Trotter’s room.”

“Into Edgecombe’s?” I asked,

“Edgecombe was far too clever for that. No, they vanished. Perhaps he posted them to somewhere in Nassau. We haven’t found them yet, but we will. At the time, it was another petered-out trail. Except that their disappearance on the very day Edgecombe returned seemed coincidental. And since Denise was dead, suspicion was now in fact fairly firmly pinned on Sir Bartholomew himself. Given that, as you can see, the
Haven
episode made his guilt and Trotter’s complicity very likely indeed. The key point there was that he engineered his own accident to enable him to leave
Dolly
plausibly. As I told you, I got Brady to mess about with the speedboat, and to suggest that they didn’t come back for you or for Trotter.”

“I wondered,” I said, “how you reached the simple decision to allow Violet of New York off the hook, and not me?”

Daffodil, stirred by the prospect of high jinks in the bedrooms, had produced a reasonable supper for two. I recall at this moment attempting to fix Johnson’s bifocals with one or both of my eyes, across my daiquiri and chicken with whiskey. He merely went on talking, his lenses bent on dissection.

“Violet of New York,” said Johnson, “is a very tough cookie who kept Edgecombe out of mischief, on my orders, for the rest of the day until we arrived. On the other hand, if Bart Edgecombe had your signed arsenic tests, he had no longer quite the same need to worry over your health. I thought you would be safer on
Dolly
.”

I laid down my knife and fork. “But you knew that something was going to happen to
Dolly
.”

“I know,” said Johnson. “But I also thought that, whatever it was, Trotter would halt it.”

“So the
Haven
,” I said, “was a dreadful surprise.”

“I shouldn’t like to exaggerate,” said Johnson thoughtfully. “Trotter halted it.”

“And went back to shore vowing vengeance on Edgecombe for leaving him. Did Edgecombe in fact intend Trotter to die?” I asked. “Or was it simply your happy suggestion through Brady?” I realized now why Johnson had had to dive into the sea; why it was so necessary to police what Trotter was doing on
Haven
.

“I don’t know,” Johnson said after a moment. “I think he meant to get rid of Trotter, as in fact he got rid of Pentecost’s friends in the outcome by running them into a trap. He talked freely of Trotter’s claims as a suspect. I don’t think Edgecombe would have risked a lifetime of blackmail from Trotter, when with a little care, Trotter might act as his scapegoat. I suppose he got Trotter to help in the first place because of something he knew of Trotter’s past army career. They were uneasy bedfellows. At any rate, the moment when Edgecombe learned that we weren’t all dead, and saw Trotter glaring at him across his own bedclothes, must have been one of the worst in his life.

“Because this time, the whole thing had happened in public. No one could pretend a boat loaded with explosives and following a radio signal came there by accident. If we’d all died, it wouldn’t have mattered. The story would have involved a runaway boat and an accidental collision. No one need have suspected a thing. But here was a boatload of witnesses, including such a weak vessel as Harry, who was bound to demand that the police be told.

“Trotter made a show of agreeing, and I helped set a deadline of twenty-four hours. To Edgecombe, it would appear that this was all the leeway I thought we could reasonably secure ourselves before the whole thing had to be made public. He would expect me in that time to redouble my efforts to trap his would-be assassin. So far as he was concerned, he would know that he had only twenty-four hours in which to engineer my death once and for all. And now, of course, there was no point in an elaborate faking of accidents. It was an affair of murder. The
Haven
had shown that up clearly. Hence the golf game.”

I stopped trying to eat. “What do you mean, hence the golf game? Mr. Tiko finished the jigsaw, that was all. You can’t pretend you foresaw…” I broke off. “Or do you have the brazen gall to tell me…”

“The Begum,” said Johnson apologetically, “told me to give her ten minutes.”

I stared at him. “The golf game. She engineered it at your suggestion?”

He nodded.

“It took fifteen minutes,” I said viciously. “And I nearly said no.”

“Well,” said Johnson, “I’m glad you didn’t. We shipped Edgecombe under sympathetic guard to Great Harbour Cay, where he was out of Trotter’s vengeance-bent reach and I, incidentally, was safe out of his — but not before I had planned the great trap and put the details before him. He was most enthusiastic and agreed to cooperate by turning up at the right hole at the right time. We left him plenty of time to get hold of Pentecost’s friends or anyone else who took his fancy and arrange to have his empty car shot at or blown up or whatever he pleased.

“Then Spry went along and combed the ground near the fourteenth green until he found the getaway car. He did more. When Trotter arrived at the clubhouse, he told him about it. According to Spry’s story, it was merely a good open car which he had found oddly abandoned. But the chances were that Trotter would know about it, and would realize that it was there for a purpose — a useless purpose, as it would have turned out. Edgecombe hadn’t told his men that they would be surrounded by police and observers; that this time, in staging an attack on himself, they were to be the victims as well as I.

“At any rate, we got the proof that we wanted. Three of my own private witnesses saw Trotter fire into the bushes between Edgecombe and myself, and saw Edgecombe rise under cover of this fire and, as he thought, successfully kill me. I did a superb Fairbanks fall, and I don’t need to tell you the rest. The police hiding there by the getaway car saw nothing but Trotter’s last stand, in which he succeeded at last in shooting down Edgecombe, the man who knew too much of his past. They saw Trotter kill Edgecombe and try to escape. They saw me shoot at the car and kill Trotter. Poor, insane Trotter. The case is now closed.”

There was a long silence. He was filling his pipe, leaning back on one of my father’s Chippendale dining chairs. I realized we had been sitting there a long time, and rising, led the way back to the sitting room.

Gracious living. The hi-fi radio caught my eye and kneeling, I switched it on and, unthinking, moved one or two knobs, while Johnson settled back, prodding tobacco. The soulful inanities of the song called
Yellow Bird
floated around the air conditioning:

Yellow Bird, up high in banana tree

Yellow Bird, you sit all alone like me —

You can fly away

In the sky away

You are luckier than me.

I switched it off sharply. I said, still kneeling, “I didn’t ask you. You said until Edgecombe had my notes, I was sacrosanct. So why was I hit on the head?”

Johnson, head down, puffed devotedly at his pipe. He took it out of his mouth, looked at it, and inserted it between his teeth finally, as if forced to a distasteful concession. A haze of smoke wandered after “Yellow Bird,” unaccompanied by sound. I said, with growing suspicion, “What have I said to cause that kind of gap?”

“You have posed,” said Johnson, “a problem in ethics.”

“Oh,” I said. I allowed myself, slowly and lucidly, to think of Miami, and the dog track, and that unpleasant race through the car lot. I said, “Krishtof Bey doctored my tomato juice. On the Begum’s instructions?”

“Right,” Johnson said.

“The Begum?” I said, frowning in uneasy thought. The Begum, who had been distinctly troubled by the extent of my injury, the next day at the hospital. Troubled and guilty. Why had they taken my dress, I had asked myself often enough, and yet hadn’t assaulted me while I lay there in the parking lot unconscious? How had they known that a call for a doctor would bring out a woman? Why had they stopped to do something so senseless as crop my hair into bristles?

So that the Begum, began an incredible thought, falling into my laboring senses — so that the Begum could bring me a wig and a dress, and so that Johnson…

“Pally Loo-loo?” I found myself saying, accusation ringing in every ludicrous syllable.

“A very fine bitch,” said Johnson guardedly. His pipe emitted a column of protective black smoke.

“Who never won a race in its life,” I said. I could feel my face as stiff as washed unwashable leather. “Whose money was it? The Begum’s?”

Johnson said, “I thought you’d got over this hang-up about money. You can’t deny we gave your social habits a skin-pop.”

“I don’t deny it,” I said. “The lesson was made all too blindingly clear. Without the wig and the wardrobe I was Dracula. Who was going to look at me twice?”

“No one,” Johnson said. “Because the first time around, you sank your teeth in his jugular. We all know James Ulric didn’t read Spock. And since James Ulric did all the harm, you may as well let James Ulric’s bank account fix it. There are three men hanging about wanting to know if you’ll marry them.”

Mr. Tiko, Wallace Brady, and Krishtof… “
Three
men?” I said, frankly astonished.

“Two men,” Johnson corrected himself on the instant. “Krishtof Bey is anxious to live in sin with you, but will marry you if you’re going to be fussy.”

The mild figure puffed at its pipe stem, and I gave him the same alarmed attention you would give to a circular saw. “The Begum phoned,” I said casually, “asking if she ought to get married. I referred her to you.”

“She phoned me as well,” Johnson said. “I said yes. Beltanno, I told her, will be permanently attached one way or the other by the end of the MacRannoch Gathering. Six
p.m.
on the thirtieth at Great Harbour Cay, tickets five guineas a whack. Only genuine MacRannochs need apply.”

“My God,” I said, and I said it with reverence. “What’s he doing?”

“Continuous flights,” said Johnson, “from Nassau to Great Harbour Cay, where at seven-thirty
p.m.
the Combined Tattoo and Highland Event will be held by floodlight in a new stadium built at the airport, followed by a State March with pipers to the new MacRannoch residence on Crab Island, where the Grand Banquet will be held. There have been two thousand acceptances.”

“Tattoo?” I said flinchingly.

“Supervised by Brigadier Walter McCanna, Sergeant Trotter’s superior,” Johnson said. “The army felt they had been put on their mettle. Nothing has been lost. Except, I believe, the trained sheepdogs rounding up the flamingoes, excised because of the rabies laws.” He grinned. “You really ought to attend. It’ll be an occasion unmatched in history. Especially when the two thousand walk over the bridge from Great Harbour Cay to Crab Island.”

In my mind’s eye, clear as a photograph, sprang a picture of the cold green straits between Castle Rannoch and the mainland of Scotland running deep over the sea-rounded boulders of James Ulric’s five spavined bridges, buried with his virility.

“Oh Christ,” I said, varying it. “It’s got to be stopped.”

“You won’t stop it,” said Johnson with ghoulish cheerfulness. “But I’ve organized a sort of Dunkirk of small boats around the piers, and we’ll save them all if their kilts keep them afloat long enough. They deserve a resident doctor.”

I thought of it. I forgot the thirteenth hole and Denise’s body, lying in its gully under the tarpaulin. I forgot the burning wreck of the car with Trotter’s body lying inside, Johnson’s bullet in his head. I forgot about Edgecombe and the insane single-mindedness which had involved us all in his own sordid game. Instead I considered, fascinated, the spectacle of James Ulric MacRannoch and his affianced if elderly bride, greeting two thousand filibegged MacRannochs and arraying before them a Bahamian steel band jumping through flaming hoops.

I thought of Brady. I thought of Krishtof Bey. I thought of a dress I had seen in the window of Bonwit Teller’s at Christmas time, set in salt snow and swansdown, with silver lights running down the shop shades. There had been a matching long silver wig.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Are you going?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not a MacRannoch.”

“Sailing off,” I said, “into the sunset?” I said it collectedly. I had had a good deal of practice.

“Sailing off,” he said, “to paint a stout Italian princess who runs a shoe business in Naples. Don’t think I don’t regret it. As jobs go, this one would have sickened a soap boiler. If anyone made the thing bearable, it was B. Douglas MacRannoch. The one person who, through thick and thin, continued to say what she meant.”

“I shall miss you,” I said. “I think you’ve been a good teacher.”

“I should like to be missed,” said Johnson. He kissed my hand on the doorstep, and then my cheek, but not in the manner of
Dolly
. The lesson was over.

I closed the door slowly and went and looked at his picture.

The MacRannoch Gathering, Tattoo, and Highland Event on Great Harbour Cay is of course a matter of history.

I flew there into the sunset with a cloak over my trouser suit of silver lamé and white ostrich feathers, and my long silver wig sparkled in the plane windows. The Begum and James Ulric waited to greet us on a dais covered with MacRannoch tartan and a row of gray potted thistles slumping ear to ear in the still, tropical heat.

The Begum, her hair dyed black and her eye make-up thicker than ever, was wearing a stiff brocade sari with the MacRannoch sash over it. My father in full Highland dress looked like a small wishing well in need of a tidy. His mouth dropped open when he saw me, hitting the amethyst in his jabot with a crack. Then he said, “Beltanno! Well, this is just what we were hoping for. B. Douglas, meet your new stepmother.”

The Begum’s smile was broad, and gave nothing away except a general sort of satisfaction. “You haven’t been hasty?” I asked.

The Begum’s smile became broader. “Not while you look like that, darling,” she said. “And look who’s behind you.”

It was Wallace Brady, in a white tuxedo and rosebud, with a smile like a rutting stud oyster. I smiled back. “Hullo,” I said. “Where’s Mr. Tiko?” There is no point in fostering too great a sense of security.

“He’s coming,” the Begum said quickly. James Ulric was having his pipe-cleaner hand kneaded by a stonehenge of New Zealand MacRannochs. “There are still quite a few planes to come in. I’ll send him along to you. Wallace, will you take her into the stadium?”

We walked off arm in arm, and he was telling me how wonderful I was, and how much he had missed me, which was pleasant. They had laid a tartan-lined walk on the runway, which was almost impassable for crowds of people studded with cairngorms and daggers and milling around discussing their feet. “What have you been doing?” said Wallace Brady. I told him.

The stadium had been contrived from a section of runway flanked by two broad-raked stands hung with tartan. At the far end, the runway disappeared into the maw of a marquee from which, clearly, the performers were to emerge. Flags fluttered above it. I said, “Will they have a fat woman?” and Wallace Brady said, “No, but I hear the clowns are really something.”

I began to warm to him once again. I let him lead me to the row of armchairs behind the first garlanded ledge. The MacRannoch’s pew, I deduced. I said, “But you’re not a MacRannoch?”

“I’ve got special dispensation,” said Wallace Brady, and followed me along the front row of the stand.

A figure in full Highland evening dress rose from the furthest seat, bowed, and said, “And so have I,” in a strong Turkish accent.

I stared at Krishtof Bey. He had his false eyelashes on.

Wallace Brady laughed. “Where did you get it?”

The original of Johnson’s portrait looked down at his garments with pride. “
La Sylphide
, Act 1. The Lincoln Center forwarded them. Observe the frills at the wrist. The cross-binding of cords on the calves. The crested buttons. The buckles. The sporran.”

Wallace Brady gazed at the sporran, which was exceedingly hairy. “For Chrissakes, what’s that?”

“The head of a former conductor of the Budapest opera and ballet,” Krishtof Bey said. “In the last scene of
Scheherazade
I excised it. He kept regrettable tempi.”

I laughed. I suddenly felt very cheerful. I shook hands with the tall, kilted figure of Brigadier McCanna, the tattoo director, and without qualms watched him leave to prepare for his program. He looked nothing like Trotter.

The seats filled up. A message came that Mr. Tiko was at Nassau Airport and hoped to be with us shortly. The sun went down and the floodlights came on in a faintly dismaying eau-de-nil color, coinciding with the distant sound of inflating bagpipes. Preceded by the Pipe Major in a cloud of red-hot fluttering tartan, my father and stepmother marched hand in hand down the runway to a storm of clapping and took their places in the principal armchairs beside us. The minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Nassau, rising up unexpectedly beside them, announced a prayer and a psalm into the public address system, catching most of the MacRannoch men undoubtedly on the hop: their women kicked them onto their feet.

During the eighth verse the Begum leaned over to whisper that Mr. Tiko seemed to be having some sort of trouble in Nassau. My father grunted and shaded his error of pitch from a third to a full semitone. Krishtof Bey flinched. I tried to visualize James Ulric’s head as a sporran.

The psalm ended; we all sat down; the marquee at the end grew a spotlight and the Massed Pipes and Drums of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Scots, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards and the Federation of Malaya Police marched out in a rhythmic, befurred body. The great MacRannoch Tattoo and Highland Event had got under way.

There are some memories the mind works to preserve, and others which demand to be jettisoned at the earliest convenient moment. I cannot now remember precisely when I noticed that something was wrong: it was certainly after the putting of the 16-pound ball and the flinging of the 56-pound weight, and probably after the combined display of massed limbo dancers and firefighting demonstration by units of the Nassau Brigade (music:
I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire
).

Certainly the matter came to a head during the jeep assembly exercise by two teams of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (music:
Pack Up Your Troubles
). Hurrying wheels bisected the runway, with electrical and mechanical engineers running doggedly after them and falling on their medals with great regularity. It looked like a drunk clockmaker’s workshop. The moment the first jeep stood, splayed and creaking in a welter of washers, they announced the winners and shoved in the British Legion Boys’ Band blowing
Semper Fidelis
, while the Mechanical Engineers and their jeeps were shoveled up off the field. A uniformed lieutenant, politely excusing himself along my row of the stand, turned out to be bearing a message from the tattoo director. The brigadier wanted a doctor.

In my silver lamé and feathers, silently I followed him out.

In the marquee the trouble was glassily obvious. Amid a dishevelment of jeeps sat or lay the giggling members of the two mechanical teams. “Rum?” I said. “They’re all that high on rum?”

Brigadier McCanna spoke heavily. “One tot. I can’t understand it. It’s regulation, back at the Castle. One tot to put heart into them. And see them!”

I saw them. I touched one on the shoulder and he yelped. I rolled his sleeve up and he smiled and lay down on the ground. A thin white bandage, one of Currie’s best jobs, encircled his upper left arm. The United Commonwealth Hospital had run short of frigates this month.

I said, “Don’t you know what happens if you give a blood donor alcohol?” and Brigadier McCanna, staring at me, said, “My God,” with the greatest simplicity. He added, “What can I do?”

“Sort out the sober ones,” I said (music:
Reel for My Hame
), “and trust to the ingenuity of your MacRannoch friends.”

Nothing short of stereotaxic surgery will ever obliterate the events of the rest of that night. The brigadier, six feet high in cock’s feathers, holding up five Italian Bersagliere on his shoulders in the Musical and Physical Training Display. The high jump Wallace Brady competed for in singlet and kilt, and the sixteensome reel Krishtof Bay danced as my partner before racing off to take four different parts in Fighting Men Through the Ages.

The MacRannochs greeted it all with a violent and warming enthusiasm. The applause, the cheers, the encores increased until the program wallowed on to its end, and in the marquee Wallace, Krishtof, and the brigadier met, full of exhausted hilarity, for the Final March Past of Massed Bands and Salute. Pipes tuned, drums thudding and thundering, they would walk past the saluting MacRannoch, and behind would fall in the chief and the two thousand clansmen, to cross to Crab Island and dinner.