Operation Nassau: Dolly and the Doctor Bird; Match for a Murderer

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Johnson said, ‘Hold it. I don’t mind being micro-honed and then made into a full-width parcel shelf with lagged edges. But I must get back to Mother Spry before morning. They’ve found my clothes for one thing.’

  I’d forgotten he had been burgled. ‘You can get them tomorrow.’ I said.

  He twisted round and sat up, fingering his bandages tenderly. I should have to get him a shirt and jacket of James Ulric’s. ‘I’m flying to Miami in the morning,’ he said. ‘One-man exhibition in the Fontainebleau Hotel, and I’d better turn up or they’ll lynch me in effigy . . . Do put down that needle. You look like a vet in a rabies zone instead of a nice girl with a hell of a family life.’

  I sat down slowly on the cork seat. Personal remarks of this kind I find confusing. I said, to return to professional ground, ‘Sir Bartholomew is being sent to the Jackson Memorial in Miami tomorrow. For dialysis.’

  ‘Don’t rat out of it,’ said Johnson. ‘I said the hell of a family and I mean the hell of a family. However, we can take that up later. Look. I don’t like the idea of Edgecombe travelling in public just yet. I’m chartering a Twin Otter. Would they let him come with me?’

  ‘Without question,’ I said. ‘If you don’t send them a bill.’

  ‘I won’t. If you would come with him.’

  ‘He doesn’t need me,’ I said. ‘A houseman would do. I should have to be away from my work for the better part of two days.’

  ‘Free transport, Nassau to Miami, return,’ said Johnson. ‘For both you and Bart Edgecombe. I can’t see the United Commonwealth objecting. Would you come if they let you?’

  I shifted my ground. ‘In any case, surely it’s an unnecessary precaution? It wasn’t Sir Bartholomew they were trying to murder tonight. It was you.’

  ‘Wearing Bart Edgecombe’s clothes,’ Johnson said.

  The needle sagged in my hand. He was right. I had forgotten. To go to dinner, Lady Edgecombe had lent him Bart’s tie and jacket. A distinctive tie and jacket which might well mislead someone who didn’t know Edgecombe too well. Someone who assumed that Denise Edgecombe’s escort that night was her husband, not Johnson.

  I had another thought. ‘In that case -’

  ‘In that case, we mustn’t eliminate Sergeant Trotter after all from our list of vague suspects. He didn’t kill me,’ said Johnson. ‘But then, he knew I wasn’t Bart Edgecombe. The waiter made his mistake, we chased him, and when it became obvious that the waiter was caught and would be questioned. Trotter took him from me and mysteriously allowed him to escape. To his death. No, Bart isn’t safe.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. I’ll go with him to Miami tomorrow.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Johnson. I ignored the banality, but he actually looked pleased. ‘And you’ll join us in an after-shave fizz at the Fontainebleau?’

  ‘If my patient’s programme allows,’ I said. I shook out half a dozen barbiturates into some tissue and held out the screw. ‘Take one of these once you are settled in bed. You know perfectly well that there are limits to what you should do with your history.’

  The bifocals flashed with affront. ‘Bloody hell, what’s this, echo- location? You were supposed to be treating my blisters, not orienteering all over my torso,’ said Johnson. I’ll have you thrown out of the Magyar PEN Club.’

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I’ll publish my memoirs through somebody else.”

  I got him a python-printed silk shirt of my father’s and matching Bermudas, ignoring his pleading, and drove him straight back to his car. On my return, I walked into my bathroom and found James Ulric, in beetle-wing taffeta, on my bamboo chaise-longue. He was smoking a cigar.

  ‘My God, Beltanno,’ he said. ‘A virgin for thirty-two years, and then you get laid between the loo and the bidet. Could you not move him out on the landing?’

  I gathered up the litter in silence, and draped Johnson’s trousers over one arm. I wondered how much my father had seen and heard: I rather thought nothing.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I could not move him out on the landing. I have the landing to keep for the queue.’

  I walked out and took over James Ulric’s bathroom, since I had to wash somewhere. His scales were six pounds under true. I reset them for him.

  I slept soundly. Thank you.

  FIVE

  I went to see Dahlia early next morning. She knew about her boyfriend already but was not unduly upset as she had fallen in love with an Italian croupier on Paradise Island. She admitted cheerfully that she had given her water-tower key to the waiter to be copied: they kept their draughty assignations, I suppose, on the top, and much good it did the poor man. His name was Pentecost.

  The only other fact of interest I elicited from her (Quis bene interrogat, bene diagnoscat) was that Pentecost had been one of a family of four brothers from Bullock’s Harbour. And Bullock’s Harbour is the native settlement on Great Harbour Cay.

  I meant to tell Johnson when we met at the airport, but there was no time to touch on it. Sir Bartholomew, with his wife in attendance, a little washed out, was ushered into the Twin Otter and I followed as the ambulance drove off, with my overnight case and medical bag in one hand. From the amount of zipped pigskin luggage entering the Otter’s hold, I gathered that Lady Edgecombe didn’t intend to spend all her time at the hospital. She was wearing a beige trouser-suit of some elegance, and even Johnson had smartened up remarkably, in a tropical suit of rather elderly cut and a long suede tie with an unclothed woman neatly affixed to the lining.

  I may have been looking at it rather pointedly. At any rate he scanned himself searchingly, as we revved for take-off and said, ‘Do you like it? I have a new skinny body hug, but I thought the clients would worry.’

  I lifted up, without speaking, the underside of his tie, and he looked at it with bewilderment. ‘How extraordinary.’ he said. ‘It was a Christmas present from my agent’s secretary, along with a pair of little-league baseball shoes with genuine Nescohyde Vinyl Uppers and Safety Rubber Cleats.’

  ‘Your agent’s secretary wants watching,’ I said, taking out and handing him my nail-scissors. He removed the lady with care. With, indeed, a regrettable artistry.

  The Twin Otter cruises at 8,000 feet and does a comfortable 150 m.p.h. The journey to Miami was less than an hour and we had coffee half-way: ‘The Beautiful People eat a leisurely breakfast. Why shouldn’t you?’ quoted Johnson; and Lady Edgecombe smiled while Sir Bartholomew grimaced weakly. He was looking forward, clearly, neither to his dialysis nor to the prospect of further attempts on his life. I could see the bulge where Johnson’s gun (or his pipe) lay in his pocket. He gave no sign of discomfort from his invisible burns and had already suggested that I forget them.

  I did. Like plucks of crabmeat, small fleshy clouds hung over the blue sea below, and ladders of fine cloud streamed past higher up. There are seven hundred islands in the Bahamas, and they lie avocado-coloured in a marbled green and blue sea which shoals to apricot and light apple green as it lifts to the beaches. So white is the sand and so clear is the water that land and sea blend in a thin watered green, and you must stare to see the faint dermatoglyphic patterns which show you fly over water. Off Bimini, speedboats passed over the blue like smoke-tailed rockets crossing the heavens. ‘There’s Miami,’ said Johnson.

  And it was the Florida coast. Flat and skeined with sheets of flat water. Groups of skyscrapers white and polished as eye teeth passing below us, surrounded by vacant stretches of plain and of water, and the stubble of acres of houses, set in palm trees and blue pools and a sparkling mosaic of cars. ‘There is no reason,’ said Johnson, ‘why any one of you shouldn’t have a fully sodded lot there in Leisureville.’

  ‘Leisureville is rather attractive,’ said Lady Edgecombe. ‘I was shown over it once. Or maybe it was Canongate-on-the-Links. They’re very careful whom they admit.’

  ‘But you have your perfect setting, Denise,’ said Johnson. ‘On Great Harbour Cay.’

  ‘Denise misses the company a bit, off-season,’
Sir Bartholomew said into the ensuing small silence.

  I had been neglecting him. I said, ‘You’ll be in very good hands. I shall see you settled and comfortable, and I shall be on call if they want me. You’ll be surprised how simple it all is.’

  ‘I dare say,’ he said, and smiled at me. With his wife there, and the two airmen, nothing could be said. But he must be wondering, as Johnson was wondering, why after all these years should he be singled out for attack now? And for such sordid and painful attacks, as if personal malice were in some way involved, not simply the task of one agent to dispose of another.

  Johnson said, ‘You’ve got the best of it, you fully sodded lot in Miami. I’ve got to go and be buddy to forty society ladies and gentlemen I’ve had the misfortune to immortalize on canvas. I’ll expect you both at the Fontainebleau whenever you’re free, Denise, Dr MacRannoch. Ask for Timpson, my agent. Nice chap. Lives in Miami. Made of fine bonded copper with a verdigrised patina.’

  It was in fact a surprisingly accurate description of the bronzed Timpson, who stepped forward to meet Lady Edgecombe and myself inside the undulating white frontage of the Hotel Fontainebleau later that morning. After the cool of the hospital the sun blazed on the flights of white steps leading up to the two sets of doors: inside Lady Edgecombe sighed with relief in the vast space of the lounge with its islands of armchairs and tables on several acres of squared marble floor. Above us blazed oval chandeliers the size of small swimming-pools: the room, if you could call it a room, seemed crowded with American citizens in wigs and dark glasses purring at one another, with cigarettes spiralling smoke from their knuckle-rings.

  Mr Timpson, however, was a personable middle-aged man with a neat dark suit and strong deductive powers: he had us singled out in a moment, and, taking my medical bag, drew us through the heavier socializing to the back of the hall, which was on a lower level. On the way Lady Edgecombe, I noticed, acquired a glass of champagne while I lifted a tumbler of ice water.

  I had put on a fresh cotton shirtwaister that morning, and already it was looking limp. I had just noticed, through the throng, that the back wall of the big room was a gallery, on which some forty large paintings had been hung against velvet drapes, when I became aware of a tall, cool, scented presence, blocking my way like a single tree-trunk in a mill race.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ an English voice said with amusement - I swear with amusement, ‘that you’re Beltanno MacRannoch?’

  ‘I am Dr Douglas MacRannoch,’ I said automatically. She was five foot ten inches at least, although her shoulders had rounded with age, giving her tallness and thinness an extreme of dry elegance. Her hair was still black mixed with grey, and expensively dressed over the prominent bones of her face. Her eyes in particular were extremely fine and heavily made up: she also wore a bright lipstick. Her head and all of her body were shrouded in blue and silver silk voile, caught with a large sapphire brooch on one shoulder. None of her rings, I should judge, was worth less than five thousand pounds. ‘The Begum Akbar?’ I added.

  To rent Castle Rannoch, its staff, its shooting and fishing, season after season, at James Ulric’s price requires, I have always known, a very special kind of bank balance. The kind that comes with deceased Indian princes, for example. The Begum, I had heard, had spent her brief married life in North India, far from the fields of her native Huntingdonshire, and on her husband’s death had not remarried, but had amused herself acquiring houses in different parts of the globe, and surrounding herself with neurotic idiopaths like my father, whose excesses appeared to amuse her.

  I had kept well out of her way. I thought of the files on James Ulric’s desk and positioned myself to follow in Mr Timpson’s closing wake. ‘How nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I must rush. Mr Johnson is expecting us.’

  ‘I know. He told me,’ said the Begum. She smiled at Lady Edgecombe. She had small, irregular teeth and a firm chin, which gave her smile a strong element of attraction. Lady Edgecombe’s trim eyebrows lifted and she smiled back. The Begum said, ‘I’m hoping you’ll both come and look at my portrait. I’m the Begum Akbar, known as Thelma usually.’

  ‘I know. I’m Denise Edgecombe. I live on Great Harbour Cay. May I say,’ said Bart Edgecombe’s wife, ‘how perfectly lovely your sari is.’

  I didn’t say anything at all. I was brooding over the dishonesty of Johnson Johnson. He had said nothing to me about the Begum being here. Or of having painted the Begum for that matter. I began to wonder what else he had neglected to tell me.

  ‘Come,’ said the Begum. ‘It is the third portrait on the left, between the Duchess and the Governor. The Press came a short while ago to photograph us all standing beside our commissions. It’s a kind of club, isn’t it; the sitters of Johnson?’

  I was silent, and so was Lady Edgecombe beside me. I don’t suppose either of us had realized what a big name he was. Presumably all the paintings here had been lent back for the exhibition, and the subjects had come too, to drink champagne and be photographed and meet Johnson again. He had disappeared again in a welter of spectacle frames: Timpson equally had vanished. The Begum, exchanging smiles and waves and snatches of conversation as she swayed through the crowd, arrived with a certain iron persistence before her own portrait and tapped the silk shoulder of a long-haired young man standing before it. ‘Krishtof, I won’t have you study it. It gives too much away,’ said the Begum. ‘You have met Beltanno and Lady Edgecombe, have you not? Dear Krishtof is coming to stay as my house-guest.’

  The Turkish dancer. So that was why he had flown to Nassau. He was on his way to stay with the Begum. ‘I have not only met Lady Edgecombe: I have danced with her,’ said Krishtof Bey cheerfully. The mongoloid face gave as little away as his hostess’s: the slanting eyes smiled in a manner one could describe without whimsy as evil. His hand, when he gave it to me, was long and thin and stringy with muscle. He wore a cinnamon tunic and trousers with gold Turkish slippers and the discreet bodyguard of his friends, I noticed, was between him and the crowd. I said. ‘Has Johnson painted you as well, Mr Krishtof?’

  ‘This he is going to do,’ said the dancer. ‘In the nude, do you think, Dr MacRannoch? Or with one small flower? The après-midi d’un faune?’

  ‘The Miracle in the Gorbals?’ I suggested.

  He was not abashed. ‘But nothing is outwith a doctor’s experience! The naked man you have seen in his thousands.’

  ‘True.’ I agreed. ‘Mainly cadavers.’

  ‘And that is how you think of us?’ He came very close, with his almond eyes trying to mesmerize mine. ‘Cold? Unresponsive? Repellent?’

  The Begum chuckled. Lady Edgecombe, beside me, was visibly out of patience. ‘On the contrary,’ I said shortly. ‘There are few things more beautiful than the blood vascular system of the grown human body. Until you have dissected two cutaneous arteriovenous anastomoses, you have no idea what elegance is.’

  ‘Give up, Krishtof,’ said Johnson’s deep, comfortable voice just behind us. ‘You can’t outplay Dr MacRannoch. We’ve all had a shot.’

  Krishtof Bey had retreated slightly, but the almond eyes had never left mine. He was smiling. ‘Pardon, but I do not think,’ he said gently, ‘you have yet found the proper approach.’

  ‘Lunch,’ said Johnson hastily.

  In the end the Begum took us all to lunch at the Columbus Hotel. I made a telephone-call, out of duty, to the Jackson, heard that Sir Bartholomew had been successfully treated and was resting, and after a quick comb through my hair and prod at my shirtwaister, finally joined the Begum, Lady Edgecombe, Krishtof and Johnson on the seventeenth floor.

  The dining-room on the seventeenth floor of the Columbus is three-quarters glass, and its windows look down on the streaming cars of Biscayne Boulevard and the palm tops of Bayfront Park behind. Beyond that is a blue sheet of water, crossed by the ranks of long, low white bridges which lead to Dodge Island and the rest of Miami on the horizon.

  The others were ready to leave the cocktail lounge whe
n I arrived. I told them the news from the hospital while Krishtof Bey got me a tomato juice. I carried it into the dining-room, where we sat beside the scarlet swagged curtains and rhapsodized over the view.

  Or rather the other four did. Sipping my tomato juice, I reflected that it resembled nothing so much as a child’s cutout cardboard picture-book, brought me once by a dim MacRannoch aunt from Australia. Before us, the swing bridge opened regularly to allow handsome white yachts to speed on their way: between its arches tunny-fishing boats were constantly sprinting, like foreshortened twin prams. Beyond the first bridge a seaplane skimmed down and landed, taxi-ing across to its berth on Dodge Island. A scarlet helicopter, buzzing past the hotel, crossed the inlet and made for the small field, airsock flying, which we had already noted on our way here. You could see the Disneyland scenic railway: the concrete complication of switch-overs which we had just finished crossing.

  The sun shone out of a cloudless blue sky on all that clean, luxurious activity, and I drank my tomato juice grimly, thinking of Bart Edgecombe lying in hospital, and Pentecost with the gun in his hand, and the fire swirling up Johnson’s borrowed jacket. Krishtof Bey, as if he had read my thoughts, said gently, ‘What caused the upset to Sir Bartholomew, Dr MacRannoch? Was it ever found out?’

  It was a natural sort of inquiry. That is, I suppose it was a natural sort of inquiry. I schooled my face, but I judged my pulse rate all the same to be in the region of eighty to ninety a minute. ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know quite for certain,’ I replied. ‘But it seems fairly sure the fault was his own. Some sandwiches which had become tainted,’ I spoke quietly, out of Lady Edgecombe’s range of hearing. No one had mentioned crab sandwiches to the woman who made them.

  ‘Ah? Then do not let us dwell on it,’ said Krishtof Bey cheerfully. ‘Here is the menu.’

  I have felt hungrier. We had palm hearts, a matter of flaccid white tubing, followed by prime rib steak and apple pie a la mode.