‘He might have done,’ I said. ‘Or they might have called as we did, and found the notes in his room after his death. Or if he was working for the selling side, his own people would have seen to it that the buyers were advised of the dates.’
I paused. ‘But if his own side killed him, they must know the list was in his room and the police were likely to see it. Won’t they change all the dates?’
‘Perhaps,’ Johnson said. ‘Perhaps they can’t. And this paper wasn’t in the man’s overalls. It was extremely well hidden. Suppose, while Charles is in prison we keep those dates. And suppose we come across one of these transactions and find out who the principals are. Or, better still, who is running the exchange market. For that, dear Ruth, is what I think we have stumbled on. An international auction house. A broker in espionage, one of whose agents was Paladrini.’
I thought of Charles, and Lady Teddington, and all my jokes about pizzas and lawyers. I thought of the sanity of the star charts and the holiday I had been going to have in Naples and the plans Charles and I had made for Christmas and the look in Professor Hathaway’s eyes when Maurice sat in his giltwood armchair airily fantasticating. I knew Johnson was asking me to go with him to all these places and I wondered blearily how he expected to reach them until, a moment later, I remembered. The Dolly, she was called, Charles had said. Johnson had a yacht called the Dolly in Naples. I said, ‘Professor Hathaway’s given us extra leave. The police said we all have to stay ten days in Italy.’
‘I know,’ Johnson said. ‘I told them to say it.’
‘Told them?’ I repeated. I remembered the Chief Commissioner and the 100,000 lire note around the visiting card. Whoever did the telling that time, it wasn’t Johnson.
‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘I wanted ten days to back my own fancy. Did you know Maurice has a yacht called the Sappho in Lipari? He uses her when he goes to Vulcano.’
I knew about Maurice’s autumn trips to Vulcano, though not from Maurice. He steamed his arthritis in the sulphuric hot springs of Vulcano, and Timothy managed his yacht—’With a friend, dear, and of course a little man full-time greasing the engines. Day and night, I promise you, he sits there turning them over and singing to them.’ I said, ‘Will they be there while we are at Lipari?’
‘I should think,’ Johnson said, ‘it’s amazingly likely. And who knows whom else we shall meet? I’m sure Jacko likes sailing. Innes will want to see the Greek theatre at Taormina. You have been instructed to remain for ten days in Italy. Professor Hathaway can hardly object.’
I didn’t get it. I was still staring at him, not getting it, when the lights came on. I stared at him with my eyes screwed up against the brilliance, remembering Jacko’s hurried consultation of Who’s Who in Maurice’s library. Johnson Johnson had been in it all right. His people came from Surrey and he had been to all the right schools and belonged to all the right clubs, with a formidable painting career and a spell in the Royal Navy for good measure. He was who he said he was. The twenty people who had recognized him at Maurice’s party testified to that.
I had taken such trouble to prove to myself that he was harmless that I might never have found out otherwise. Until I saw him suddenly, in all the hard clarity of that new-restored lighting, and knew that when he said he instructed anyone to do anything, he meant exactly that. And whatever had happened over the balloon cart had no bearing at all on the present attitude of the polizia towards him. Because he knew so many things that a nice portrait painter from Surrey couldn’t have known. He knew that the two men from the Villa Borghese were security men. He knew that Paladrini’s death wasn’t suicide. He had had time – when? – to search for the note from Paladrini’s flat he had just read me. The police had been watching the flat and certainly would not have let a member of the public return there without question. In short—
I opened my mouth.
‘Well,’ said Johnson pleasantly, ‘we certainly took a long time getting there. Don’t look so harassed. I’m working with the Rome police but I’m paid out of your taxes. And come to think of it, not even the Rome police knew about it till yesterday. You can tell Charles but not, I beg you, not anyone else.’
I had dropped over the zoo wall, and Johnson had caught me. I said, ‘But you were here at the beginning!’
‘Painting the Pope,’ he agreed. ‘That’s what happens. I’m sitting comfortably somewhere minding my own business and someone asks me to check the ignition of two security agents. Would you mind very much if we sail in rough weather?’
I thought frantically, Ischia, Lipari, Taormina and Capri, in November. With a British agent on board and a mugging in every port, I shouldn’t wonder . . . I was damned if I’d do it.
But if I didn’t do it, Johnson would think I didn’t want to help spring Charles from clink, and I did. I wanted Charles in my scene, taking photographs and delivering obituary verses, carefree as a bird. I wanted Charles.
I said, ‘I don’t mind rough weather,’ but it didn’t ring as true as I would have liked. The fact is, I was afraid of rough weather and nastiness, but there seemed little object in saying so. Everyone is, and you just have to get on with it, and make up obit verses and laugh at them.
Back in Velterra, Johnson dropped me off at my digs and I brought him in to tell Jacko that I was sailing on Dolly from Naples. ‘Ischia,’ I said airily. ‘And, of course, Lipari and Taormina. And Capri on the twentieth, to end with.’
‘You lucky bitch,’ said J. Middleton enviously. ‘And if they spring Charles, I suppose you’ll do it together.’
‘I suppose so,’ I answered. I didn’t tell him they weren’t going to spring Charles: not for ten days at least, if ever. I didn’t tell him the reason for the itinerary either, but he hit on part of it.
‘Hey,’ said Jacko. ‘You’ll be at Capri on the date of the meeting. The date on the fish in that balloon-vendor’s flat? You sneaky blighters!’
‘Want to come?’ said Johnson lightly.
He had Jacko around his neck before he got quite through speaking. We went through the same thing with Innes. Innes remembered the date in Capri as well, and we didn’t tell him about the others in between. We didn’t tell Innes any more than we told Jacko, but he fairly jumped at the invitation when Johnson made it. I said crossly, ‘What about Poppy?’ and Innes said his landlady would look after her he was sure, and he had a very strong stomach. Then I thought that maybe I was denying Innes his first anthropological experience, and felt ashamed of myself.
But it was uncanny how all Johnson’s predictions came true. Even to the interview in Maurice’s villa when we related our plans to Professor Hathaway, and she gave her rabbity smile and said that she was hoping the invitation included herself.
There was the very beginning of a silence, swept away by Maurice’s most delicious cries. Of course she must go. And he and Timothy would fly south to meet her. ‘I have a yacht there,’ said Maurice. ‘A little thing called the Sappho, so appropriate, although I warn you, the heads are too tiny. You will dine on her. They will dine on her, Timothy. If the weather isn’t too dreadful, you may sail on her . . . Such nights. You will see stars on Sappho, I promise you, Lilian, such as your dull telescopes have never shown you before. You may never come back . . .’
If the film had gone from Maurice’s vase, Johnson had once agreed, then one of us must have taken it. Mr Paladrini was dead, but we – all of us – were still living. And we – all of us – for one reason or another, it seemed, were to share in some part of Dolly’s voyage.
We left for Naples the following morning, Saturday, November II, in a rainstorm. I had been warned that Charles couldn’t have phone calls. But before we set out I posted him a long letter with SWALK on it to make him laugh, telling him everything and ending.
Silent thoughts and tears unseen,
Wishing your absence was only a dream.
It crossed with one of his to me which came with another obituary:
We said farewell that autumn day
/> My heartstrings felt the tug
You laid your hair down far away
And left your heart in jug.
It takes four hours to drive to Naples and it rained all the way. Sheets of water sprayed up on each side of the Fiat, in which I was cravenly sitting with Jacko. Maurice’s chauffeur-driven limousine rolled majestically behind, bearing Innes and Professor Hathaway, talking.
The Fiat did a hundred and twenty on the autostrada and got to Naples ahead of the Maserati, with Jacko slumbering heavily in the back, on the way to rehabilitation after a brisk farewell warm-up of pages one to six of his address book. The yachting haven is on the north side of the bay. Johnson wove past all the stalls selling varnished shell ashtrays and splashed over a long concrete jetty lined with covered boats.
There was only one with the cockpit canvas stripped off and she was a gas: a big, snow-white ketch with two tall pitch-pine masts, glittering with naval brass and expensive teak and fine paintwork. A man in a peaked cap standing under the waterproof awning nipped up to the aft deck as the Fiat drew up and hopping ashore, sprinted up to us with a broad grin on his face. He was a short, powerful man with large ears and the gold lettering around his capband said Dolly. His name, it turned out, was Lenny Milligan, and his accent, greeting us all, was ripe Cockney. He helped haul out the luggage, and we walked towards the lushest seagoing pad in the harbour.
I don’t know why it surprised me. Next to Who’s Who. Maurice kept an up-to-date Lloyd’s Register in his library. We all knew the Dolly was a gaff-rigged auxiliary ketch of 59 tons with a 60 BHP auxiliary engine. What’s more, the owner’s name in the list bore an asterisk, which meant that Johnson Johnson held a Board of Trade Master’s Certificate.
I was glad of it. The Tyrrhenian Sea in November is no place to be without the Board of Trade Master’s Certificate, and perhaps even with it.
Below decks, Johnson’s yacht was deep-carpeted and warm and candidly comfortable. In the desperate silence of ignorance, Jacko traversed with me the cushioned saloon whose panelled walls contained all the civilized comforts. Johnson had a television set and a stereo record player and a radio and a fridge and a full-scale bar within which Lenny, in a white jacket, was already making himself busy. We passed through a door at the forward end and into a passage which contained the door of the galley on its right and that of a single-berth cabin on its left.
‘Mine,’ said Johnson, indicating the last. He opened a third door facing us at the end of the short passage and ushered Jacko gently in. ‘The forward stateroom. You’ll share this with Innes. Lenny sleeps in the fo’c’sle beyond it, but he won’t disturb you if he can help it. He comes and goes by a hatch to the deck.’
There were two single bunks in the stateroom and the covers and curtains and cushions were Swiss and patterned in pure fadeless dyes of bright colour. What Johnson didn’t put on his person, he put, it seemed, on to his ship and his palette. I said, ‘I can’t wait to see where the Professor will doss.’
Jacko was trying the bed. Johnson led the way back to the saloon. He said, ‘She’s not a very large yacht, remember.’
I stopped where I was, which was in front of a bookcase. I said, ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Johnson, his bifocals perfectly limpid. ‘Very few boats have double beds. Double feather beds with monogrammed sheets and four pillows.’
I sat down. Jacko, emerging behind me, said, ‘Oh, my Gawd,’ and started to cackle. The cackle became a shriek. ‘You can put each other’s rollers in, Ruthie.’
I said, ‘I am not sharing a bed with Professor Hathaway.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Johnson comfortably. ‘Although it was an enticing vision of splendour, I must confess. You are, however, sharing a stateroom. Come and see.’
I glared at him, smacked Jacko’s head, and tramped out of the saloon and up into the cockpit. There, he opened a door leading aft.
He had given us his own master stateroom. It didn’t contain a double bed, but it did have every other amenity known to man, including two quilted bunks and a bathroom. I wondered who occupied the other bed when he had the boat to himself. He brought in my case and said, ‘She’s a nice old stick. I hope you won’t find it too awful.’
I said, ‘Who was Dolly?’
Jacko was unpacking. Behind me, Lenny was laying glasses out on a tray. Johnson put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the stateroom door and just grinned. ‘A one-eyed coloured Gay Power bus driver in Peckham,’ he said sweetly. ‘Why do you come to the clinic?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Granted,’ he said.
Then we all went into the saloon and drank gin until the Maserati arrived. We’d got the Professor but we hadn’t, thank God, brought the telescope.
After lunch, the Director left to make her statutory call on Bob and Eddie in the training post, taking the three of us with her. The trip to the hills was uneventful, if you discount a series of the mid-brown torrents which poured down the mountain on top of us, and the hideous discomfort of the student establishment, which had been shipped out piecemeal from England and erected by none other than Bob and Eddie, who would never add a touch of distinction to your rock garden.
They were birds of passage, in any case, creating a centre for others to live in. Professor Hathaway complimented them on their log book, and they became even more cheerful when they heard that they were to drive down to Dolly for dinner. Jacko, Innes and I hung about adding the light relief till it was over. Then we all piled into two cars and slid down the hill to the harbour.
Lenny did the dinner. We had baby clam soup poured over toast squares, and breaded veal escalopes with frail bones like thrushes and fried slices of salty, crumbled artichokes, frilly green inside their brown coatings. And sweet pastry rings made with brandy, and served red hot and with a sifting of sugar and cinnamon. And coffee.
I ate my way through it all, and Johnson filled my glass from a tinselled Murano glass wine jar and I didn’t stop him. I had a liqueur called centerbe, and maybe another one.
So did Bob and Eddie, who were wearing collars and ties in honour of Professor Hathaway, and red satiny faces in tribute to Johnson’s centerbe. Eddie, enunciating like an elocution teacher, said ‘You’ll never guess who we met the day Charles came to Naples. Sophia Ow.’
The Ow was because Bob had kicked him. It was no news that they had had a drink with Charles during his visit to Naples. Anyone who knew me in England also knew Charles. Eddie had been loud in his indignation over the jailing and I had explained how it was all a mistake because of Charles’s flatmate. They told me a few stories about Sassy that had been going round the network that not even I knew.
But I didn’t know about Sophia. Sophia Lindrop was a sharp little blonde who had been educated at Roedean and Zermatt and three foreign universities, including Hamburg. She was in the same circuit as Charles. She was engaged to Charles when I first met him.
There was no point in embarrassing anybody, so when Bob launched into a desperate account of some Italian pop concert, I let him get on with it. I didn’t have any more centerbe. In fact, to be candid, I excused myself pretty soon and got rid of the centerbe I’d had already, as well as the clams and most of the veal cutlets. It was a terrible waste.
I was standing up on deck after, feeling low and looking at the lights over the water when the saloon door opened and shut on the chatter and Johnson vaulted up and strolled over beside me. He had left his pipe behind. He was altogether too damned perceptive. After a moment he said, ‘A little fair girl, isn’t she? Lenny saw them together, as it happens. Not, I should have thought, very disturbing competition.’
It was none of his bloody business. I wasn’t going to go through life spending every second day crying on Johnson. I didn’t answer. He waited and then put his arms on the rail and said thoughtfully, ‘So. Disturbing competition. Perhaps even the someone else he was engaged to, who was so furious.’
I had fo
rgotten I had ever told him that. I talk too much. I blew my nose and glared at Vesuvius. Johnson said, ‘I wonder just how much she dislikes you. Enough, would you say, to have your cabin searched?’
I ran away from him. I got down to the loo just in time to part company with the rest of the veal cutlets. I heard the saloon door open and shut, and then open and shut once again. When I came to the door of the stateroom Johnson was standing there, with a bottle of mineral water in one hand and a glass in the other. He said, ‘I think this might help. May I come in?’
He came in anyway and I backed and sat on the bed. When you came to look at it, the cabin was perfectly neat. I took the glass and held it chattering against the neck of the bottle as he poured. I said, ‘You said our things had been searched.’
He put down the bottle. ‘The whole ship had been searched. I called in the carabinieri but there was no trace of the intruders. It had been done very neatly. And nothing that we know of had been taken.’
There was the least firmness in the words that we know of. I said, ‘I burned the negatives from the meat safe. I told you.’
‘I know you did,’ Johnson said. ‘But the character who pinched the dud film from Maurice’s vase doesn’t know it. He’s developed that roll, and he thinks the blank pictures were planted. Now he means to find out which of us has the real film.’
There was a long silence. I found I was still holding the glass of mineral water. I drank it off and put it beside a guidebook lying beside the Profs bed. It said, ‘stromboli – an unimaginable and stupendous reality in a painting of both exultant and terrifying eurhythmy. The Exhaust Pipe of the Tyrrhenian Sea.’ I said, ‘So now he knows we haven’t got it. Maybe he’ll try Di and Maurice and Timothy. And when he finds they haven’t got it either, he’ll give up. After a while, even couture pictures, surely, lose their value.’
Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus Page 16
