The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I bought an apartment in Glasgow, for a lot of money. I answered a bunch of calls from people who had rung Troon while I was away. I thought I ought maybe to get a secretary. I rang back the man who wanted to talk about the make-up for the film of the American book, and flew to London to see him, and got the job.

  I went to see a lot of old films, and a lot of new ones.

  I bought a new Abu fishing case, and re-stocked it.

  I went to see Johnson, but this time I left my fishing case behind me.

  There were new security men on duty, who bowed me in between the two little round trees, and through the plate-glass door and past the desk to the lift, where they pressed the button for me.

  Changed days. I was no different really. Except that my hair was one colour instead of two, under this opera hat I had on, and I’d put on my new check knicker suit for visiting invalids.

  No one had written Ta Love on the door of the lift.

  I thought about it, and decided that I didn’t want to go to 17b after all. I waited until the lift stopped, and then I pressed the button for ground again.

  I made to get out on the ground floor, but Lady Emerson was standing there.

  We looked at one another. I said cheerily, ‘He’s much better, isn’t he?’ and tried to get past, but she didn’t budge.

  She looked much the same, if maybe a little less tweedy, it being the end of August.

  She made a speech. She said, ‘I expect this is the last place in the world you really want to be. If he was rotten to you, I don’t think you should go up. If he wasn’t, then it would be a kindness to let him see you and explain. And to me, too. I was the one who originally brought you here.’

  I didn’t see how she made that out. I found we were both in the lift. I nearly didn’t bother to dictacount her, but finally I did.

  I said, ‘As I remember, I came here in the first place to make up Mrs Sheridan, because Kim-Jim and Ferdy fixed it between them.’

  I didn’t want to talk about either of them. But after all, I had eavesdropped on her sniffy telephone call to the Owner. When she’d asked about this girl Ferdy had brought in.

  Frances Emerson said, ‘They arranged your job. I arranged for Ferdy to borrow the studio. Jay guessed. That’s why he was so bloody-minded about you all tramping about . . . We’d better go up.’

  I let her press the button. I said, ‘Why? Why did you want us all to work in his apartment? Had it to do with his job?’

  ‘Yes, it had,’ she said. ‘In a way. He’d been involved with the Madeira business, you see, before his . . . illness. We thought he ought to take an interest in it again.’

  ‘We?’ I said.

  ‘Really . . . Bernard, my husband,’ she said. ‘It’s his business.’

  I gazed at her. Poor bloody Johnson.

  ‘So you knew all about me,’ I said.

  She had very direct eyes. She didn’t dodge anything. She said, ‘Yes. Most things.’

  ‘About the dyslexia? Before he explained it?’

  She still didn’t look away, but this time she flushed a little.

  She said, ‘Yes. I knew before he did. Actually, we were taking a risk. We weren’t at all sure that you and your brother weren’t involved in what was going on. We did take precautions, but Jay’s own team didn’t like it. Raymond was furious with us. That’s why he kept hovering round, and why he was given such a bad time when Jay finally came across him.’

  Mary-had-a-little-lamb country . . .

  And of course—

  I said, ‘The security men? That’s why they searched me?’

  She looked half guilty, half tickled. ‘You won that one,’ she said. ‘You should have seen the fuss in Establishment over dry-cleaning their uniforms.’

  I said, ‘Wait till they get the bill for dry-cleaning a set of bloody bloomers with ostrich feathers.’ I only half listened to myself, I was thinking so hard.

  ‘We weren’t very popular with Boy Johnson,’ said Lady Emerson ruefully.

  The lift had come to a halt. I said, ‘You don’t seem to have given much thought to his point of view. He was hardly over whatever had happened to him. Which wasn’t a plane crash. Was it?’

  She opened the doors and we walked out of the lift and both stopped.

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Lady Emerson. ‘There is no other explanation that could possibly be put about without doing a lot of harm, and most of it to Jay himself.’

  ‘How?’ I said. ‘By the people who did it? Are they still about?’

  She had her hand on Johnson’s door.

  ‘He doesn’t think so,’ she said, and pressed the doorbell.

  Neatly overalled, Mrs Margate came to the door, and showed us where to put our things. She had a nice smile, and the look of anxiety had left her face, along with the weariness.

  There was no dog, of course. Raymond’s famous visit to Pets Inc. had been to do with parrots. And watching me, furiously, in case I harmed his precious Boy Johnson.

  I went the wrong way, and found myself in Natalie’s bedroom. Before I came out, I noticed how different it was. So was the hall. All the gilt and flock paper and contract plants had gone, which was a deadly waste, as it was all new that spring.

  Instead, everything was a lot quieter and shabbier, and I wondered even if the Owner had had a bit of bad luck, such as having to rebuild two hundred thousand quids’ worth of shattered yacht; until I had another look.

  The stuff was really nice, if a bit worn, and a lot of it was antique. It looked as if it had come from another house, maybe with bigger rooms, but it fitted in all right.

  The biggest change was in the studio, which had lost all its plants and half its furniture too, and was partly occupied by a wooden platform with an armchair on it, and an ancient easel and painting table, both clearly in use.

  There was no sign of Johnson. The canvas on the easel showed the head and shoulders of some man, blocked in lightly. The smells of oil and paint were thick and ripe, like they used to be in art college, and Lady Emerson sneezed.

  The sliding glass windows moved, and someone came in from the balcony.

  ‘Bless you, Frances,’ said the Hon. Maggie; and caught sight of me.

  ‘Rita! You came!’

  ‘Nearly not,’ commented Lady Emerson. ‘She was sneaking away as I came in.’

  Maggie looked nice but covered-up, in a striped seersucker suit with a wisp of silk at her neck. She had kept up her tan, but changed the straight cut for a crimp-perm.

  Fair enough. Win them, lose them. With Ferdy gone, Johnson was the natural successor.

  Lady Emerson said, ‘Raymond and Maggie work for Jay, as I expect you’ll have gathered.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t,’ said Maggie. ‘We were all kept apart from one another on this job as if we had hepatitis. Raymond and I nearly went crazy.’

  ‘And Lenny?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s Bernard’s sailing man really. My husband’s,’ Lady Emerson said. ‘But we loan him out to fashionable watering-holes now and then with his judo pyjamas and a book of sauce recipes. He really is a very good cook. And, of course, the best possible man on a boat like . . . on a boat.’

  There were no potted plants on the piano, or tantalised fruits. There were still a lot of books lying about, but with markers in them. The piano was shut.

  I said, ‘It was awful, what happened to Dolly.’ I was angry.

  Lady Emerson looked at me quickly. She said, ‘Among all the other horrible things that went on? Why that especially?’

  ‘If you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand,’ said Maggie with surprising bluntness. She added, ‘He’s rebuilding her, God bless his dividends. I hope I get a shot when she’s done. He’s decided to stay on the job, Frances? What’s going on in his head now?’

  ‘If you’re not there, you can’t understand,’ said Lady Emerson with resignation. ‘Look, is Raymond coming? My instructions are to remove you both and leave Rita.’

  I was surprised. I th
ought I was going to get Johnson filtered through all his protectors. I had found the idea quite comforting.

  Raymond appeared, inside the room this time instead of out on the fire escape, strode across and kissed my cheek and said, ‘Hullo. You look fine. Are you all right? You’re getting lunch: Connie’s making it. We’ve been chucked out. Small sitting-room. Have you got your rights and lefts on, or will I take you?’

  It was like a sort of briefing for hockey: all quite matter-of-fact, including the brush on the cheek.

  I said, ‘You’d better show me which door again. Or Mrs Margate.’

  ‘Connie,’ he corrected, and stopped. ‘Hey, the St Lucia Rotary Club!’

  I looked about. I said, ‘What?’

  ‘Hurricane Disaster Fund. List of subscribers came in yesterday,’ Raymond said. ‘J. Johnson, Esquire, as you might expect. And forsooth, Miss M. Geddes, one thousand pounds? Rita?’

  What Natalie had said had hurt. I didn’t want her money. I said, ‘What do you think? It’s for the rebuilding and upkeep of the Narc—’

  I paused.

  Raymond was watching me anxiously. ‘Don’t spoil it,’ he urged.

  I knew what the word was. It was the one bloody word I had learned in the whole awful disaster.

  I opened my mouth, and murdering the whole of my childhood, I threw it away.

  ‘. . . the Nemesis Department,’ I said.

  Raymond put his hands under my arms and, lifting my feet off the ground, spun like a top, crowing, ‘She qualifies! She qualifies! You get the Johnson sorority pin and join us in daily singing of the company song . . . Christ, you’re going to be late, and he’ll kill me.’

  He set me down. I felt great. I remembered why I was there, and didn’t feel quite so great.

  Raymond said, ‘Look, he won’t make you feel bad. If you want to belt out something, then go ahead. He likes it that way.’

  It sounded as if the embroidery had worked. I therefore said, ‘How is he?’

  ‘Making great strides, considering,’ said Johnson’s voice irritably from the doorway. ‘It really is very nice to see you, and a different colour too, but you are supposed to be cheering me up, not the Bowling Club here. The vodka’s getting warm.’

  He waited for me. I thought he’d be in pyjamas, but he was wearing a nice easy sweater, and had both hands in the pockets of a pair of comfortable and expensive light trousers.

  Behind the bifocals, he still had some suntan on top of hospital white, which produced a tone quite close to Beige, and certainly less than Weird Effect, which is how I’d last seen him. He’d had his hair cut.

  As I came up, he said, ‘May I?’ And withdrawing a hand, dropped a kiss on one cheek as Raymond had done.

  ‘Graduation Day,’ he said. ‘The rest of the time, as you know, we hit you. Come along in.’

  He took me into the small study with his hand on my arm, and shutting the door, pointed me in the direction of a seat.

  This room, too, had lost all the shiny, new look of the spring apartment. There were a lot of bookcases I didn’t remember, and a long oak table.

  I looked at the window to see what sort of curtains he’d chosen, and for the first time noticed the man standing there.

  A tall man, with brown hair that curled a bit over his ears, and a fresh complexion glazed by constant sun into a golden tan, and very light, steady eyes.

  The twin of Roger van Diemen, the Financial Director of Coombe’s, left for dead with his owl mask among the cocaine on St Lucia.

  He stood harmlessly before me. And Johnson, when I looked round, just gazed placidly back.

  ‘Let me introduce you formally,’ said Johnson, ‘to Mr Roger van Diemen. He is alive. He is one of us. And he is standing there very, very frightened because he doesn’t want a bag of peanuts in his vodka . . .

  ‘Roger, sit down. The worst is over. Rita, only a week in hospital could have brought me to the point of hysteria where this seemed the sensible thing to do. Take up your vodka and listen.

  ‘Now, Roger. Explain.’

  Among all the other things Johnson was, he could be a bastard. Lady Emerson was quite right, and I’d seen quite a lot of it. As I’ve said, I wouldn’t want to be trained by him.

  He hadn’t told me, allowing me to blunder off after Roger van Diemen, that Roger van Diemen was in the same intelligence department as himself. He had known perfectly well that he was high on drugs and unhinged with jealousy and anxiety over Natalie. It was van Diemen’s increasing unreliability that had attracted the attention of his colleagues in the first place.

  But nothing could be done about it, because he had been picked by Clive Curtis to be the lynchpin of his new smuggling scheme, using Coombe International. And whatever he did, from bashing me in the Mercedes to trying to smash Kim-Jim and me out of his way on the sledge run, Johnson wasn’t going to expose him, or warn me about it.

  Not until the drug business was safely over, and the leaders identified and caught. Not while van Diemen might get himself caught and exposed as a member of the precious Department.

  And Johnson was a bastard, because he forced Roger van Diemen to sit there and tell me about it. Tell me that he was, in a way, to blame even for Kim-Jim’s death. The Curtises didn’t want their prize contact removed by the police because he’d made some wild attack on his rival. So they forestalled him.

  Van Diemen didn’t know then who they were. He didn’t know if they knew Kim-Jim was ill. He thought they were afraid Kim-Jim knew something about them. So Kim-Jim had been killed, and through a faceless go-between, whom he now knew had been Ferdy Braithwaite, he had been warned and rushed out of Madeira.

  He spoke in a flat, dry voice, his hands locked together between his knees, accepting a very bitter medicine, and making the best of it. Johnson was absolutely silent. I sat holding my drink, and then put it down because the ice kept making a noise.

  I listened, and thought my own thoughts. When Ferdy had driven me selflessly up that rotten hill to Eduardo’s, he had already warned van Diemen to leave.

  It didn’t really matter to Ferdy if Kim-Jim was dead. I remembered how, more than once, he had tried to pump me about all I knew about Natalie. They must have hoped I would be a good source of blackmail material. It must have been disappointing to find I wasn’t.

  And, of course, in time van Diemen had come to his senses, and had begun to give Johnson the help he needed to open up the smuggling racket and expose the leaders.

  I wondered when that had happened. After the row with Natalie in the Barbados house, maybe. That was when Johnson suddenly had all the information he required about the Brighton Beach meeting and the rest.

  Or perhaps, as soon as Kim-Jim was removed and I came into his money. Then he could afford to turn back to his job again.

  Van Diemen was talking about the Carifesta meeting as the turning point in the chase. It had narrowed down the number of suspects. Because of the scare about intruders, it had resulted in the change of plan.

  The premature load of cocaine had been scheduled for Miami. Instead, much more handily, it was going to St Lucia, and to Amy Faflick’s underground caverns. Braithwaite already knew of them from Natalie. The Curtises had been told. Van Diemen had encouraged the idea.

  It let the Department go into action, with some prospect of keeping van Diemen’s part in the business private.

  At that point, I said, ‘Wait a minute.’

  Johnson moved, and lifted his glass. Van Diemen raised his pale eyes and waited.

  I said, ‘The Brighton Beach meeting. We didn’t need to listen in to that, or try and bug it. You were there, reporting on everything that happened.’

  ‘That is correct,’ van Diemen said.

  ‘So that all we were there for was to be discovered?’ I said.

  I glared at Johnson. ‘That was why you wanted the disguises? You knew we’d be seen. We had to be seen, to make the scheme work.’

  Another thought struck me. ‘What would you have done if my
bloody watch hadn’t conked?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Johnson peacefully, ‘we should have thought of something. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The storm diverted the plan for us anyway. Everyone had to go to St Lucia for safety.’

  ‘And you expected Dolly to be boarded?’ I said.

  Johnson said, ‘After what we turned up in Tobago, it seemed very likely. The unsolicited violence was a bit of a facer. As . . . Braithwaite told us himself, it wasn’t his fault. Clive’s, perhaps. Or just that the men got out of hand. The storm was a bit unfortunate too. But it let us take Clive himself, and end it there. And we were able to whip Roger away unseen, after the fake shooting at Amy’s.

  ‘Natalie won’t mention him. He returns to being a perfectly respectable Financial Director of Coombe’s without any stain on his character.

  ‘That, O my prosthetic soul,’ said Johnson, ‘was why it was so important that you shouldn’t give vent to your perfectly just and understandable anger and denounce Roger all over the countryside.

  ‘And if you were determined to pursue him as the murderer of Kim-Jim, all we could do was give you your head, within limits, and see that you were protected, as far as possible. And hope that you did uncover the right man, and didn’t catch up with Roger and make things awkward for him. You may now slap me down.’

  They had no need to go through this. In sitting there and letting me fire at them, they were doing the right thing, and it was up to me not to take advantage of it. But all the same, there was one item that needed airing.

  I’ve tried most things, but I’d never get into the heavy drug scene. That’s a killer, to yourself and everyone you know.

  I said, ‘I see why you had to go on using Mr van Diemen until the Coombe business was out in the open. I don’t see how the Department can go on using and protecting someone who injects, mainlines drugs.’

  Roger van Diemen said, ‘I am stupid, but not so stupid. I don’t inject, Miss Geddes.’

  ‘I saw the tracks,’ I said.

  Johnson said, ‘Then you know how they are done. Collodion, liner and nail polish. It was done by make-up, Rita. He had to appear vulnerable. He was, but not to that extent.’