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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I could feel Krishtof preparing to get up and hit him. Johnson said mildly, ‘Don’t stop unless you’re inclined. The tide turns in an hour and a half. Actually, the Begum and James Ulric are coming along just behind me.”

  Krishtof Bey got up and gave me a hand to rise to my feet, but all the time the slanting black eyes were on Johnson, and he was smiling. I distrusted that smile. So apparently did Johnson. I can give no precise account of what actually happened, but one smooth movement followed another smooth movement and Johnson entered the ocean in a dim shower of spray, followed immediately and without premeditation by Krishtof Bey.

  The Begum and James Ulric walked by as they were picking themselves up. ‘Beltanno!’ said James Ulric sharply.

  ‘Yes, Father?” I said from the shadows.

  ‘Are those two layabouts falling out over you?’

  Krishtof Bey and Johnson, rising with uniform dignity, could be seen making their way out of the sea. All at once it seemed purposeless to withhold the truth. ‘Yes.’ I said.

  Moving up, my father peered closer. ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘No.’ I said.

  ‘What happened to that fellow Broody I offered seventy-five thousand to marry you?’

  ‘That was Wallace Brady,” I said. ‘I told you. He’s somewhere about.’

  ‘You’re drunk,” said my father grimly. ‘You’re high. You’re out of your mind. You think you’ve got so many dangling you can afford to let two of them drown?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’ve got Mr Tiko.’

  ‘I’ll believe that,’ said my father, ‘when I find myself inside the Silver Bells Wedding Chapel, Reno, toasting you both in Gold Nikka. I warn you again. You marry that bloody Nip, and I’ll cut you off with a yen.”

  ‘He’s a MacRannoch.’ I said. The moon had moved round a trifle, but I didn’t care. I was drying off a bit, anyhow. I didn’t know where Johnson and Krishtof were. The Begum stood smiling, but offered no comment. She didn’t need to with James Ulric batting.

  ‘In bloody name only,’ said my father, between his straggling teeth. ‘They eat raw fish. They speak Japanese. They all bath together, with geisha girls scrubbing their wee yellow backs. They have bad eyes and lead unhealthy lives.’

  ‘Mr Tiko plays better golf than you do.’ I said.

  There was a silence. ‘That’s a lie.’ said James Ulric.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Wallace Brady will tell you.’

  Wallace Brady, the builder of bridges, like all builders of bridges, was sacrosanct. There was another long silence, and then my father started to wheeze. I had to go into the house for hislsoprenaline, and his F.E.V. had gone up by a quarter already. It was the first attack that he’d had since the winter, and I thought it a pity. Because I couldn’t hypersensitize him against Mr T. K. MacRannoch.

  Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe arrived the next day, which was Friday: and, although excessively quiet, was at pains to merge in with the household, and to make no demands on the Begum. He spent a good part of the evening ruminating over the jigsaw, in which the Queen of Sheba was now seen to be stepping out of an Alfa Romeo. Afterwards he went off to bed rather early, although I noticed he called on the way at Johnson’s door, and was there a long time. I wondered what they were hatching. Whatever it was, Edgecombe looked tired when he came out. He had lost a lot of colour and weight in the last week, and had had his hair cut. I suppose it was Denise who had thought it dashing, hanging over his collar.

  I make no apology for taking a close invisible interest in Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. I had no doubt by this time that whatever was going to happen to him was going to happen to me. And with his arrival, my available protection was halved.

  But what everybody appeared to have forgotten was that I was due back in Nassau on Tuesday. After three more days no one could use me as bait or anything else. I should be away from the scene. I should be Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, Scotland’s contribution to Unisex.

  Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known what that meant, far less bringing myself to apply it.

  I wish it were three weeks ago.

  No, I don’t.

  Next morning a small extra briskness in the calm air of the house was the only sign that the Begum was expecting seventy-five people for an afternoon beach party and barbecue. My father, who had quarrelled with her over the guest list, locked himself after breakfast in the study, from which sounds of industry emerged from time to time. The original box file marked The MacRannoch Gathering had now bred a stack of fat folders, with titles like Caber, Steel Band, Highland Dancing, Cherokee Indians, Piping, Commando Raid, Columbus, Community Singing and Fire Dancers on Motorbikes. The date, I had noticed, was now only five weeks distant, and the guest list ran to three thousand names, with mine at the top. Beltanno.

  He must have been stoned out of his crust.

  Krishtof Bey never came down for breakfast. I had mine. I asked the Begum, who was lying in a lounge chair, if I could help with the barbecue, but of course with a staff like the control centre at Cape Kennedy she said no and meant it. Rodney Trotter suggested fishing, and I got my swimming things while he collected some live bait for amberjack.

  By the time I got back, I discovered two other people wanted to go, and Johnson had volunteered to take us in Dolly. Spry ferried us out in the launch: myself, Trotter, a picturesque investment broker from Nassau whose first name was Harry, and a middle-aged beautician in a wide floppy hat who was referred to simply as Violet of New York.

  Climbing Dolly’s companionway behind her broad, Paris-dressed pelvis, I wondered privately who was supposed to be standing guard over Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe while Johnson, Spry and myself slaughtered amberjack. Johnson himself responded to my hints and raised eyebrows with an expanse of impossibly vacant bifocals. I held my own embittered counsel and was rewarded ten minutes later when the launch departed and returned to Dolly once more bearing Edgecombe.

  With him, in zebra-striped surf shorts and towel, was my friend Wallace Brady: up one ladder and down two possible snakes. Edgecombe was with us, but also with two of our suspects, Trotter and Brady. In which case he might have been better off alone with Krishtof on Crab Island. I wondered which of them had persuaded Sir Bartholomew to come. Johnson, or Brady.

  The anchor came up. Johnson put the big six-cylinder engine into gear and we began gently to motor out of the anchorage. Then he turned her into the wind and the sails ran up as Spry broke them out, helped by Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe and Trotter.

  But for my father’s paranoia, we should have had a family yacht at Loch Rannoch. It seems odd to spend all one’s childhood on a rock in the sea and know as little as I did about sailing. But at least I knew how to fish. And to shoot.

  The seventy thousand square miles of Bahamian waters are full of extraordinary fish, from Striped Grunts to Queen Triggerfish. Or take the Wahoo, if you can catch it. It can manage forty m.p.h. on a good day, and the world record is 149 lb. ‘I once caught a wahoo.’ said Sergeant Trotter dreamily, as Dolly lay on her side. ‘But I’d rather have bone-fish. A nice quiet afternoon in the shallows, lying flat in a skiff with the sun on me plumbago. . .’

  The silence, after the pounding of the Mercedes-Benz engine, was like the bliss of a warm water bath to a cripple. The sea lay clear as shellac underneath us, jade and turquoise: cerulean and peacock, sheared white by the blade of our bow. The island skeined past, low and green and feathered with palms. A seabird flew by. The light from Dolly’s mainsail, spilled straight from the sun, ached into my eyes, and I put on my dark glasses. We had all moved, redisposing ourselves in the sun and the air and the silence, our voices sounding small and lonely and clear. Harry the broker was already oiled and stripped to his trunks, lying prone on the foredeck: and I saw that Wallace Brady had settled beside Johnson and was untangling a fishing-line in long, muscular hands, without speaking. In his tanned face, his strange light eyes remained pale as a fish’s.

  We had passed his bridge, its white cais
sons glittering in the sunshine: the thump of the generators travelling over the water, and the distant voices of men from the pile-driver and supply-boats on the far side. Brady had stood up and waved, and someone waved back. Where he sat now, I saw he still had a bruise on his chin where Johnson had hit him. On the other hand, I noticed Johnson had a cut lip where Krishtof Bey had followed through first.

  The walking wounded were insensibly growing. If you counted James Ulric’s asthma, the only unblemished scout in the Save Edgecombe Club was the Begum.

  Now I can realize how far I had been reduced, deliberately reduced, below my own high intellectual watermark. Then, I merely felt pleased that I had exchanged my wig for a neat cotton turban, and, holding my face up to the sun, listened to Violet of New York discoursing about the glandular troubles of civet cats while Bart Edgecombe made conversation with Trotter about his Tattoos.

  Then Edgecombe turned his grey head to me, and grinned, and said, his voice public, his eyes conspiratorially private, ‘I rather like the way Johnson keeps throwing us together. Or is it you and Wallace Brady he’s throwing together?’

  ‘I can feel thrown together,’ I said heavily, ‘without any outside help whatsoever.’ I dislike double talk. I dislike haphazard danger. I dislike not being in anyone’s confidence.

  I asked Johnson how he felt after his sea bath, and he said. Fine: that he had developed Cheyne-Stokes breathing at breakfast, but Cheyne-Stokes wouldn’t pay him a cent.

  I turned my back on him. Someone switched on a stereo cassette of that cello piece by Saint-Saёns and all the men started to warble it. Spry came round with Royal Hawaiian macadamia nuts, fifteen shillings for three and a half ounces, and a tray of strong planter’s punch. I helped myself freely to everything and watched Dolly run gently north and west before the soft south-east wind to the fishing- ground.

  It was a short sail, as we had to be back. Edgecombe guided Johnson into the currents, their heads together over the chart, and too soon for the sluggards Dolly went about and idling, dropped all her canvas. Then we were lying in the full sun again under bare poles, and Spry was handing out fishing-tackle and lures. Violet, holding on to her hat, went below and returned with a jam jar of shrimps and Rodney Trotter, who had brought his own rod. The handsome Harry, now sitting beside me, was gazing speculatively at the undynamic figure of Johnson.

  ‘Now who,’ he said, ‘would have expected such mad efficiency?’

  The bifocals turned and got him into alignment. ‘I only look like this,’ explained Johnson, ‘because there wasn’t enough zinc in my egg.’

  Bart Edgecombe, baiting his hook, grinned without turning. ‘And he only looks efficient,’ he said, ‘because Dolly’s a cow. A cutter for imperious youth, a yawl for respectable middle-age and a ketch for the old and feeble. Old Balinese proverb.’

  ‘My ethos can stand it,’ said Johnson. ‘Is this tub drifting too fast? We’re just about at slack water.”

  ‘The wind has freshened,’ said Brady. ‘Does it matter?’ And indeed, we seemed in no need of searoom: the two-hundred-foot mast on Great Stirrup Cay was the nearest sign of the Great Harbour Cay group of islands, far on our left as our bows pointed upwind and south. I stared at it through my dark glasses and said, ‘What is it? A radio mast?’

  ‘The tracking-station,’ said Edgecombe mildly, after a moment. I hadn’t heard of it. I suppose it was public knowledge that one of them lay in these islands. But I realized now why Bart Edgecombe had chosen to live where he had. And remembered afresh, as we gently rocked there on the warm turquoise sea, that somewhere, there was a gun at his head.

  Brady said, ‘We are drifting,’ and Johnson, who had pulled out the chart, said, ‘Yes. I think the anchor. Come on, Bartholomew. You’ve got to work for your bloody beads and striped blanket. Is this the right place?’

  ‘Yes, but Brady’s right. There are shoals to the north-east back there, and some coral heads beyond that, and out west. If the tide’s on the turn I should watch it, but you’ll be perfectly safe with your anchor. Anyway, the chart’ll give you your bearings.’

  ‘All right. Let it go,’ Johnson said. His pencil, poised, made a mark on the chart among several beer-rings. Spry moved forward, but Edgecombe, already in the bows, had picked up the anchor. Brady and Trotter, in the cockpit, were arguing about British and American scarphing. They both sounded knowledgeable.

  The second anchor for this kind of ketch weighs about ninety pounds, so Spry told me later, and when it is heaved overboard, the three-quarter-inch cable for it comes flying up from the fo’c’sle through navel pipe and fairleads and over a chain-gipsy which spins it out over the stempost. Even when performed with precision, in a well-maintained boat with greased winches, it is not an exercise which is ever quite fool-proof. The chain can cross-link on its way up from the locker, or as it is rendering round the chain-gipsy. A projecting shackle-pin can cause an abrupt jam. Coming into a crowded anchorage you can find your anchor stuck, half-way to the bottom. Or jammed higher up. and kicking a hole in your hull. Or pulled up short as it flies through the air so that it plunges rolling back towards you and the deck, its iron flukes twisting.

  That was what happened to Bart Edgecombe. The chain jammed and then somehow ran back, almost before the anchor got over the side. It kicked back: and in a moment those ninety pounds of galvanized iron would have been down on the deck and scooping Edgecombe’s legs over the side.

  He didn’t have time to escape, but he did what anyone would have tried to do: he fended it off with his hands. I heard him shout and saw the blood spurting. The anchor crashed on the deck. Brady jumped out of the cockpit and in two strides got hold of Edgecombe’s arm: he had a handkerchief out, already scarlet with blood. Trotter followed, looked for me, and, choosing his priorities, dropped and began grimly to tear at the windlass. Spry, after a movement from Johnson, went forward to help him.

  By that time. I was beside Edgecombe myself. I think my main preoccupation as I took his arm wasn’t the long open wound, tearing through the fascia and anterior brachial muscles and ending round the base of the thumb; even though I registered that it had somehow missed a main artery, and equally that it would be as ugly a scar, at the very best, as any arm lesion I ever had seen.

  It was the fact that in this disaster-fraught climate, pure accident could claim its share. No one had pushed Edgecombe: no one had been anywhere near him: no one could have caused the fault in the chain. It was, as usual, merely Fate kicking.

  But nothing was said, or could be said: thought was for later. Meanwhile the medical box was produced, and. aided surprisingly by the face-lifted Violet. I made a workmanlike job of the tear. The medicine-chest was impressive and included surgical needles and silk in a stopped glass tube, as well as dressings and mercury sublimate. Johnson produced a blanket and bowls of warm water and brandy. He also had ampoules of morphia and three new syringes wrapped in foil, but I shook my head and he packed them away. Edgecombe didn’t need them, and there was no need to advertise their existence. I wondered what other scenes, in other ports, Dolly had survived with the help of that competent chest.

  Spry made some tea while we cleaned up, and Edgecombe and Johnson had a brief talk in the saloon, Edgecombe’s bandaged right arm cross-slung before him.

  Trotter appeared suddenly at the top of the companionway and said, ‘We’ve freed the gipsy. Do you want to get under way? She’s still drifting.”

  ‘You haven’t had your fishing yet. Beltanno and Violet . . “Edgecombe was getting over the shock, although his face was still pale under the bright reddish tan.’ I couldn’t have done better if I’d been run over by a trolley in Guy’s. Look, J.J., there’s no need for a fuss. I’m as comfortable here as I’d be anywhere else. Get your anchor out and go on with your fishing.”

  Johnson looked at me. I said, ‘No, I want him back. He’d better have an anti-tetanus jab, for one thing. And he ought to rest properly.’

  ‘Then I’ll go back in the launch,’ said B
art Edgecombe wearily. It was, I suppose, what they had planned. It left both Trotter and Brady on Dolly. And only Krishtof Bey to worry about at the castle.

  I said, ‘That’s a good idea. And it’s faster. I’ll take him, if you’ll show me what to do.’

  ‘No, the launch is heavy. It needs a man,’ Johnson said. Trotter, waiting patiently at the top of the companionway. said, ‘I’ll steer, if you like. Provided Sir Bart here can pilot.”

  Edgecombe looked quickly at Johnson and said. ‘I don’t mind, but perhaps Harry or someone would be better. They get more chances for fishing than Trotter.’

  Trotter looked surprised and a little impatient. ‘No. I’ll take him,” he said. ‘No trouble at all. I’ll help Spry to get the Avenger unshipped.’ He disappeared.

  We couldn’t talk, because Violet of New York was still there screwing rings on the pegs of her fingers. Johnson said to me, ‘Beltanno, you’d better go with him. Maybe one or two of the others would like to get back as well. Violet?’

  ‘You want me back,’ Violet said. She had repowdered her face, which had the fine texture of hospital rubber sheets: her eyelashes were painted dark blue. She didn’t fuss. She picked up her jar, and said philosophically, ‘I guess that’s the sort of life that shrimps have. You want them, Beltanno? They taste real good on toast with a little sesame seed.’

  I took the jar and she smoothed down her hat and followed by Johnson led the way up on deck. There was a heavy splash, and then a rattle from the fo’c’sle as the anchor-chain ran out. I could hear her feet overhead and pulley-blocks squeaking as the launch was winched down into the water. I put the jar on the table.

  There was no doubt that Edgecombe ought to go back. His pulse-rate was higher than I had hoped for, and he was lying inert with his eyes not quite closed. The man called Harry appeared silently on the stairs, and I said, ‘How fast is that launch?’