Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

I said: ‘Coco Fairley says he knows where Daddy was going. He hinted at something pretty dirty. If I go to the party tomorrow, I might get him to tell me.’

  ‘Take me with you,’ said Clem. Strong arm stuff always brought out the best in him. I was jolly grateful, but it was giving me a headache working out how also to avoid spoiling my chances with Gil. And then I’d think of the drums, and of Daddy. I wished, suddenly, that I was happily married to an absent millionaire and had a nurse and an under-nurse and five children by Caesarean section.

  ‘Or I could stick in the background,’ added Clem, more realistically. I could see Clem helping hand round the hypos.

  ‘That would be super,’ I said, and shivering, again got to my feet.

  ‘Clem can tell me what happens,’ said Johnson. ‘And if you want us, we’re here. And don’t tell anyone else what you suspect. Who else knows at the moment? Janey?’

  ‘Only Janey,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t talk. Not about that kind of thing.’

  ‘All right. No one else,’ Johnson said. As we walked aft to the gangplank, the yacht-club lights glittered briefly on his bifocals. ‘If you’ve been brought out here, it’s because someone thinks you’re important. Stay important, and the chances are he’ll do nothing drastic. Become a danger, and the chances are that he will.’

  Clem drove me home. I hadn’t said anything about Derek. If Derek was in it, I’d have to cope somehow myself.

  I was too late to put on the potatoes. I’d made a lobster in aspic that afternoon, and I shoved it on the table to follow grilled grapefruit with sherry. Since there were no guests, Mr Lloyd asked me to sit at the table myself. I ate a bread stick – it was all I could manage – while Gilmore Lloyd amused himself and Janey, speculating on how I had spent the evening on Dolly.

  The new papers had come in. I had a look at them as I was going upstairs. Lord Luck was sort of noncommittal about Virgo and Scorpio, but said that Capricornians would find that a discussion this evening had restored all their confidence. Of course, he might have been thinking of Clem.

  FIVE

  Next morning, Derek arrived.

  Janey, who had obviously just finished a thing with Guppy Collins-Smith and was looking for new material, elected to come shopping before breakfast with me, although she called me an extraordinary lot of different names when I tried to wake her. I memorised the ones I didn’t know already and got her some coffee, while she climbed into a trouser suit and popped in her lenses. She had a sort of thin, shiny make-up she got from America which filled in all the bags, although actually today the Russians hadn’t left any bags, as she’d dropped them at the Hotel Mediterranea at half-past six to read through stacks of papers about the castle, the cathedral, the salt mines, and the excavations at Es Puig des Molins before having dinner with the director of the Museum of Archaeology.

  On the way to Ibiza, I told her about the discussion on Dolly, missing out the bit about her father not going to Barcelona and stressing the bit about not saying anything to anyone. I don’t know what Gil had said about that night in my bathroom, but she was definitely unexcited on the subject of Johnson. On the other hand, Gil had certainly told her about Coco Fairley’s party. She didn’t bat an eyelid about his offer to take me, and when I probed tentatively about doing them a quick meal that evening, she told me impatiently not to be draggy. I was only being boring anyway because I always liked being a martyr.

  I don’t. I like doing things for people. I like cooking for them and planning treats and surprises. The trouble is you can’t do anything for Janey, for she has it all, and is tired of it anyway. We talked like Guppy Collins-Smith’s grandmother, who was a friend of the dear, late Queen, all the way from there into Ibiza. Janey and Guppy said the old creep had been given the plush loos from Marlborough House as a keepsake, but I didn’t really believe it.

  It was nice in Ibiza, fresh and warm, with no sign of all the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ stuff of the evening before. According to Mr Lloyd, that kind of thing was going to go on all week, with the really big thing tomorrow night, when the whole town climbed into robes and dragged floats all the way down from the cathedral, like students’ charity week, only you didn’t throw pennies. He quelled Janey’s levity by reminding her that in this country, these were rites sacred to the Church and that anyone treating them offensively would find it rather hard to do business here in the future. Then Janey got tired of the subject anyway, although Mr Lloyd started planning with Gil how best to see the Friday night thing. I didn’t fancy it much. Not from what I’d seen of it. Not with a killer maybe around.

  We parked the car on the quay. The Juan March was in from Valencia, unloading furniture and motor scooters and pastas para Sopa and people. On the quay, already unloaded from other ships, lay stacks of pink tiles, rusty grey radiators, telegraph poles, and bed frames and mattresses. I never ever saw so many mattresses going backward and forward at one time as I did on Ibiza. On one ship they were sending red boxes of Henniger down a chute, and then sliding them from hand to hand down a long chain of men over the polished stone flags of the quay. We passed some kids practising jumping with a roundel of rope trapped between two sets of legs, a wall that said Prohibido lugar a la Pelota, and long trails of stunning blue fishnets, with men, bent over, mending them. Then we dived into the little streets of the town.

  This time Janey hustled me on, and I didn’t have time to stop at the little shops that could be closed over entirely by shutting two unpainted doors, or at the walls studded with blue and yellow repro Majolica, or at the snazzy boutiques with shifts hanging out on a pole. If you looked up, above all the shoe shops and tiled farmacias, you saw the high living quarters: the balconies hanging with washing – clothes, sheets, embroidery under a polythene cover – the plastic pails, the geraniums. It was blazing hot. The walls were covered with monster thermometers, all hopelessly registering centigrade. I had on a little striped dress with long sleeves, and it felt about ninety already. Janey took off her jacket. She had a matching sleeveless tucked shirt underneath and a blonde crocodile belt.

  I got some fruit, some groceries, and some of that ham with sliced olives in it, and a stack of Fantas in two flavours for Derek, while Janey swanned around being gorgeous to shop boys and then catching my eye when they did something silly. We’d got from there to the main market, and I was having a fearful discussion about some big red and green tomatoes, when this hired car came zooming round from the Calle Antonio Palau, and in it was Derek.

  He hadn’t noticed us. Janey was quicker than I was. She flung a tomato into the taxi, and it stopped dead with a screeching of brakes. A donkey bolted, and thousands of people quite quickly appeared, as the driver got out. Janey stepped up to him, said six words or so, and gave him a dazzling smile. He stopped boning and began to smile back. So did the crowd, with a few oles thrown in. I paid for the tomato. Derek, roused at last from whatever early- morning trance he’d been in, put his head out of the window and saw me. ‘Sarah!’

  His eyes were bloodshot. I must say he looked pretty foul. Then his gaze travelled round to the right. ‘Miss Lloyd!’

  Then Janey smiled, and I got it. The fresh material had not only arrived: it had been sent for.

  He wanted to book in at the Mediterranea, but that was overruled. There was no sense in inviting Johnson’s attentions. He must, said Janey, stay at Casa Venets, with me. He objected quite a lot, actually, but I put most of it down to having to come by night flight: Derek is a very slow starter in the morning. It also turned out that he was seething about being nicked away from his precious experiments, particularly as we both seemed so healthy. I let Janey explain.

  It was a line we had thought up that morning, about nasty rumours going around concerning Daddy and his reason for suicide and my anxiety to clear his good name. On the spur of the moment, thinking doubtless of Coco, Janey threw in a bit about Daddy’s name being linked with a woman’s. It sounded more feas
ible actually, considering the name he already had among the discerning as a high-grade sponger and drunk.

  In the middle of it, Janey said casually: ‘Sarah wondered if Lord Forsey let anything slip to you just before he was found. The time when you came over.’

  ‘When?’ said Derek. ‘That was after Father died.’ When he hasn’t shaved, Derek looks awful.

  ‘No, before that,’ I said. ‘The other time. Did he say anything to you then?’

  ‘The other time?’ said Derek. Fluently.

  I got fed up.

  ‘Listen, live wire,’ I said. ‘You were seen in Ibiza on Friday, the day before Daddy died. What were you doing here? If you saw Daddy, what did he say to you?’

  His eyeballs rattled. I swear it, like a computer selecting its programmes. He said: ‘Oh, that. Now I see what this is all about. Yes, I was in Ibiza. For one day, that’s all. I was back in Holland by lunchtime on Saturday. And Father didn’t tell me anything, Sarah, that had any bearing on his suicide, so you can forget that side altogether. As far as the other thing goes, we discussed something which is absolutely personal, and I don’t want to talk about it. If I did, I’d have told you about that visit long ago.’ He looked at me. ‘The rumour story was cooked up, wasn’t it? You were worried in case I’d stayed on and driven the old boy to make away with himself?’

  I looked down. He is, after all, a successful engineer. One forgets that.

  ‘You didn’t like each other,’ I said.

  ‘No, we didn’t. And if you want to know, we had one hell of a row on parting that Friday. But it wasn’t enough, if you’ll believe me, to drive anyone to cut his own throat.’ He paused. ‘What’s all this, anyway? Is there a suggestion it wasn’t suicide? Or is this just something you’ve both dreamed up on your own?’

  The Maserati swept up the Lloyds’ drive and stopped. I could actually hear Janey’s brain going round: my own wasn’t even running in neutral.

  Janey said: ‘Don’t be an idiot, of course it was suicide. Only people talk. People want to know why. If one person saw you that time, maybe others did too. Sarah thought for some reason you were trying to keep that visit dark. And you ought to be warned, that’s all, not to.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to be unlucky, aren’t you?’ said Derek. ‘Because I don’t believe in chatting to strangers about my family affairs. And in my book, you and Sarah are strangers.’

  People are bitchy to Janey, sometimes, but seldom plain rude. She got out of the car, very elegantly, stretching her long, bare, brown legs.

  ‘Then if we’re strangers, you can’t very well stay here, darling,’ she said. ‘Think how people would talk.’ And slamming the car door, she sauntered in through the wrought-iron porch.

  For dramatic exits, you’d go a long way to match it. Unfortunately, one has to be practical. Derek helped me unload the groceries at the back door, not forgetting the ham with the olives in it and the tomatoes. I transferred the Fantas from a paper bag to a holdall and shoved them back in the boot. Then I drove him back to the Hotel Mediterranea, which is the only new show hotel actually inside Ibiza, and saw him booked into a room. I followed him up because my tummy was churning, and I wanted to use his marble-tiled bathroom: there wasn’t any hot water, and the soap wouldn’t stay on the basin, but everything else worked. When I came out he was sitting on the windowsill of his room, looking down on the morning collection of hippies, and the boy had just put two large whiskies on the table.

  ‘Come and sit for a minute. I expect you can do with one,’ Derek said.

  I thought of all those bloody Fantas and stared at him. I had been deceived.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, sit down,’ Derek said. ‘I’m not a Boy Scout. But I didn’t murder Father either. That’s what all that was in aid of, wasn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And why you came to Ibiza?’

  I nodded again. Neat Whyte & Mackay at nine o’clock in the morning is not my usual form, but I started in on it. Circumstances were exceptional.

  ‘Then you’re a silly ass making that girl your confidante,’ said Derek scathingly. ‘She’ll run your life for you. They have to be boss, that kind, or nothing. You may think you’re bosom companions, but I bet you’re worth a giggle a minute to her own private circle already.’

  ‘Honestly, Derek,’ I said. Whisky or no, it was the same old dishwater Derek, all right. ‘I’m in her private circle. We’re friends. She was trying to help. For goodness’ sake, she saw you in Alt Vila the night before Daddy died. And Coco Fairley says he was up to something shady. We thought it would be just you to go all cubs’ honour over the Pater. And you didn’t know Daddy like I did. He was an awful old softie inside.’

  ‘You drank that far too quickly,’ said Derek. He frowned.

  ‘I always cry when I’m bullied,’ I said, and stood up. The floor waved a bit, reminding me all of a sudden of Johnson. ‘Cessation,’ I said. It sounded all right, so I sat down.

  ‘What?’ said Derek. He fished out a large, immaculate handkerchief and chucked it over, looking both peevish and preoccupied. He said: ‘Now listen to me. I know you think you’re the swingiest chick this side of Chelsea, but you’re going to drive back to the house for your luggage, and then you’re going to take the next plane with me back to Holland. I’m not having you turn into another drunken, layabout tramp like your father.’

  That time I shot to my feet, and I didn’t care whether I could say cessation or not.

  ‘Like hell I will! Talk about Janey bossing my life! She’s got a damned sight more horse sense than you have, and what’s more, she doesn’t sit on her fat bottom handing out bloody naive advice. In any case, who asked you to stick your bloody nose in?’

  ‘You did,’ snapped Derek. ‘At a time when every minute away from my firm happens to matter. But then, I’m not normal. I haven’t had a lover a week since I was fourteen. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t take LSD. I don’t consider the rest of the world my inferiors and that it owes me my own brand of superior fun. I don’t get so sick of my self-centred life that I’d make monkeys out of decent, hard-working people, for five minutes’ fun.’

  Poor, bloody Derek. I sat down very, very quietly, not feeling angry at all and said nothing for quite a long time, until I realised that I ought to continue the argument. ‘And who do you live for?’ I said.

  There was a little pause. Then: ‘I have principles,’ he said.

  I said: ‘So have I. And one of them is to stick to my family and my friends. Janey can laugh at me. She’s welcome. I’ve dined out on a few stories about her. But not ones that matter. By the same token, she could have made quite a good thing about telling how she saw you sneaking about the Alt Vila that night. But instead she chose to help me keep it dark. You were the one who flung it back in her face.’

  ‘Maybe I should have told her,’ said Derek. His voice had gone very tight, and you felt he ought to be clearing his throat, but he wasn’t. Sometimes he didn’t look like Daddy at all. ‘Maybe I should have told her why I came to see Father and relied on her kind nature to do the right thing. After all, you say you would trust her.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything of the kind,’ I said. ‘In some things I wouldn’t trust her an inch.’ Men for instance. I said: ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, Derek.’ He would honestly drive anyone to drink. ‘What was it you came to see Daddy about? I don’t know how the firm managed to spare you.’

  ‘They sent me,’ said Derek. ‘In a way.’

  There was a silence. I felt like a piano with the dampers all jammed. ‘Why?’ I said. My whisky was finished.

  ‘Because,’ said Derek clearly and nastily, ‘they had reason to believe that that renowned peer, the fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner, was dabbling in the sale of technical and treasonable secrets, and they had given me to understand that if this were so, I had become an unemployab
le security risk in this industry and any other competitor on this side of the Iron Curtain, at least.’

  ‘That’s punk,’ I said. ‘For goodness’ sake, Derek. When was Daddy ever in Holland?’

  ‘Just before the aural sensator was stolen,’ he said.

  I stared at him. The incongruity of poor, charming Daddy trotting round Europe with a cartload of secret electronic equipment hadn’t yet struck me: I was only going by Derek’s green face.

  ‘So you killed him,’ I said.

  My brother took three strides towards me. He bent down, and clamping his hands on my forearms, raised me out of my chair and held me, barely erect, his face so close to mine that I could see his eyes were all bloodshot. Until then in all our lives, a peck on the cheek was all we had ever exchanged. Now, I could feel the heat from his skin, and smell the whisky, and see the stubble glittering round his jaws and his chin.

  He said: ‘You think that, as a matter of course. People kill other people. Why not someone you know? Why not me? I say I have principles, but talk doesn’t mean anything, not in your circle. Trust doesn’t mean anything. Kinship doesn’t mean anything.’

  My heart was behaving all at once like a body-skin hammer. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter all that much to you,’ I said. ‘You need to see a bloody psychiatrist.’

  He said: ‘Ha!’ and opened his hands so that I lost my balance and sat down again, with a bump, in my chair.

  I found I was crying hard, but silently, at least. I got hold of the handkerchief again, my hand shaking, and mopped up till it had stopped, taking deep breaths until the hiccoughs had gone. Then I collected my bag and the carryall with the Fantas and got up. My legs were still shaking.

  I said to Derek: ‘I think you’re all wrong. I think there’s something wrong with you, too. I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going back to Janey’s.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Curl up in your fantasy world. This is reality, Sarah. You’ve got to face it some time.’