Ibiza Surprise
Page 23
It was only a hunch, and there was no real reason then to think that Gregorio had been concealing anything. Since questioning, in any case, was quite useless and would have scared Clem off any scheme he might have, Johnson simply hired him to come and live as mate with Spry and himself on board Dolly.
It was then that he heard that Daddy had spoken of writing to me the day he died and that Janey had actually posted a letter. He wired London and got them to watch for it. He also got them to watch me and the flat.
I said: ‘Hey!’
‘Your father had got himself into a dangerous business,’ said Johnson. ‘He might well have wanted to warn you, or to tell you something about it, or even to justify himself to you, after all those years, in case something went wrong. We had to know what he had written. It might even have told us his murderer.’
‘Well, it didn’t, did it?’ I said. ‘I should think it was the dullest letter he ever wrote in his life, probably because he was too stoned to think straight. The bit in the middle was gibberish. In any case, I’ve been thinking. Clem doesn’t call me She-she, but Mummy does. Daddy could have picked that up from her. It was his letter, I expect, all the time.’
‘It wasn’t, you know. I wrote it,’ said Johnson.
I gazed at him, the knife and fork limp in my hand.
‘You didn’t,’ said Janey. ‘He gave me that letter to post himself, Mr Johnson. And I posted it.’
‘But it didn’t arrive,’ Johnson said. ‘And we wanted it to arrive, because it was obvious that the people who killed Lord Forsey were going to be very interested in what he might have said to his daughter. So we concocted another. I’m sorry about the slip, Sarah, over your name. It was no part of the plan that you should come haring over to Ibiza, even though you were quite right, if for the wrong reasons, in thinking your father had not killed himself. I wrote it, and I put that cockeyed section in the middle for a purpose, so that anyone hearing you speak of it would assume that it might well contain a message in code, even if you yourself did not understand it. In fact, you spoke of the incoherence in the letter in the phone call you made to Derek in Holland, reassuring him about what your father had said.’
‘I didn’t tell you about the call,’ I said.
‘Neither did Derek,’ said Johnson. ‘Your line was tapped. You were very well protected, you know, Sarah. We watched the flat day and night.’
I thought of the one-armed bandit and the two and six for the pizza.
‘Oh, big deal,’ I said crossly. ‘Pity you couldn’t prevent someone from breaking in and pinching Flo’s jewellery. You mean to say,’ I said, my voice getting high as I realised the iniquity of it, ‘that someone actually stood by and watched while a bloody spy walked in and raked through our drawers ?’
‘That was the point. No one broke in,’ Johnson said.
‘They did,’ I said icily. ‘I do beg your pardon, but I have the bruises to prove it.’
‘All the same,’ Johnson said. ‘No-one entered the flat, from the time you left to go to the film to the time you reduced the assets of the Bunting Fun Parlour.’
I felt myself going scarlet.
‘So?’
‘So there were two people in the flat all the evening,’ Johnson said. ‘Flo had no reason to invent a burglary, she could search the flat when you were out any time that she chose. That only left George.’
‘George?’
‘You didn’t see the masked man at the door, he supposedly did. George could have doped one of Flo’s drinks and slapped ether about later on. He could easily have run past you in the dark, slammed the flat door without going out, and have been back in the sitting-room by the time you telephoned, fixed Flo, and found him. In fact,’ said Johnson, ‘we investigated George and found quite an interesting history. He was an old ally of Clem’s. He stuck close to Flo for the same reason that Clem passed so casually from girl to girl among all your crowd: to pick up tips about the houses you worked in.
‘Did it never occur to you, Sarah, that you and the other girls like you are the biggest single network of gossip about the moneyed houses of Britain that has developed today? You know the staff and the scandal and the domestic habits of every house you so casually enter for a weekend or a week. You know what jewels are kept in the bank and what goes into an old sock in the breadbin. You know what parties they go to, what they’ll wear, what they’re worth. And you all talk about it.
‘I don’t suggest Flo was a willing partner of Clem’s, but he must have found her over the years a pretty valuable source of information about money and jewellery and other kinds of secrets: industrial, military. These were his business. Clem stole for a living, and like a great many other people, he used the Austin Mandleberg travelling show as a means of conveying his booty from one country into another. It was vital to him, as well as to Mandleberg, that no one should discover the secret of Art in the Round.’
‘So you knew about Clem?’ Mr Lloyd said.
Johnson shook his head.
‘Not then. We knew Sarah’s flat had been bugged. We found the mechanism and left it there, so that when she got the false letter, the news of it went straight to George and his partners. We thought they would make another effort to break in and read it, when we hoped to identify them. Sarah put paid to all that by accepting your perfectly innocent invitation to come to Ibiza. It was fairly certain she’d bring the letter in question with her. That’s why Austin Mandleberg was on that plane and why her luggage took so long at the airport. it was being very thoroughly searched. When they didn’t find it, it seemed a fair guess that the letter must be in her handbag. Hence the rush to get it back when you dropped it, Sarah, at the edge of the road.’
‘You were following us?’ I said. I thought of the kiss, and then didn’t.
‘I picked up the bag after you’d gone. Mandleberg left it behind quite deliberately, of course,’ Johnson said. ‘His face when he came back and found it had gone was a study. He raked about for the better part of an hour and then drove up and down the road inquiring at houses before he finally gave up and went home. As soon as he’d gone, I laid the letter by itself back in the ditch and brought the handbag here, to hand over to you.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘I thought you would,’ he said smoothly, damn him. ‘It was rather a neat trick. Before I took you and Janey and Gilmore back to the ditch, I phoned up Spry at the yacht club and told him to tell Clem what had happened and that I wouldn’t be long. Spry said Clem took all of three seconds to announce that he must rush out and buy something in town. He let him get a headstart and then followed him. A bicycle is a wonderful thing. It was Clem whose white shoes you saw in the wood that night, Sarah. I knew it must be, but I didn’t want him unmasked just yet. Spry was there, watching him. And I knew that Clem would have found and read your father’s letter. He would know it was harmless. He would think, of course, that it was genuine, and the incoherence was caused, as you first thought, only by drink. And he would go ahead, as I hoped, with his plans, whatever they were.’
Mr Lloyd said, in a subdued voice: ‘It was Clem who murdered Lord Forsey? But the macabre setting?’
‘That was accident again, I believe. I don’t know why Clem was at the gallery on the night Forsey went there. He may even have had his suspicions aroused. At any rate, he must have surprised him, perhaps trying to open one of the sections which Lady Forsey pressed with such effect earlier today. There was a fight, and Lord Forsey was killed.
‘What then? My guess is that Clem was going to dump the body, take a dinghy out and drop it into the sea with a stone round its neck. He got it as far as the boatyard, perhaps in a wheelbarrow. It’s downhill all the way, and the workshop certainly had one. At any rate, when he looked for his boat, he found she had gone. It was small wonder that what happened tonight half overturned what was left of his brain, just like
tonight, he must have looked for her, wildly, with a bloodstained body lying dead in the cart, sleeping ships beside him, and a party of late-night revellers coming along the road.
‘Then he saw it, the classical practical joke. The boat he’d been working on, upon dry land, with the winch going round and round, and not a hope of getting the dinghy or anything else. And people approaching. So he took a desperate chance. He lifted Forsey out of the barrow and hitched him upon the horse. He was a powerful man. And he took out of his pocket the blade that had killed him, wiped it, and pressed Forsey’s fingers on the handle. Then he fled to his friend’s ship, the Sheila, and got into bed. The boy in the ship didn’t even waken, and he spun him some tale in the morning; Sheila was leaving almost immediately anyway. As it happened, we’ve never traced that boy since. So still,’ said Johnson, ‘there was no real evidence, until Sarah realised she had seen a replica of the Saint Hubert rubies.’
‘Coffee, dear?’ Mummy said.
I got up and started to collect plates.
‘That was after Coco died.’ Gilmore said thoughtfully. ‘I suppose Clem killed him too? Why?’
‘On the evening that he died, Lord Forsey visited his wife,’ Johnson said. ‘I rather think Coco must have followed him and found that he went straight from there to Austin Mandleberg’s house. It would have been fatal for him to tell anyone. Clem didn’t know who Mrs van Costa was, although Mrs van Costa’ – he smiled at Mummy –’had very kindly contacted me as soon as I arrived with Dolly and had made herself known. He constituted himself Sarah’s bodyguard simply so that he might put a stop to any secrets Coco felt like imparting. He did, too. He waited until Dilling had gone, then doped and drowned him.’
I had only got halfway to the door.
‘But you made Clem stay the night to guard Mummy?’ I said.
Johnson smiled again, the bifocals flashing.
‘Your mother was safe: Clem had heard with his own ears that Coco hadn’t had time to betray him. I wanted him out of the way. As it happened, it was that evening, with Sarah’s help, that we were able to find the replica collar and prove that Jorge and Gregorio must somehow be in that part of the conspiracy, at least. If Clem had known that, he would have lost no time either in killing the two or getting them out of the country. Mandleberg was incapacitated, for the moment, with a gun wound.
‘I let it appear that they had left the country under their own steam. We kidnapped each of them from his own house, then took them together to the salt flats and down to the anchorage. But instead of putting them on board the steamer, Spry received them on Dolly, which he had sailed round from her berth in Ibiza that night. They were tied up in the fo’c’s’le and taken back to Ibiza while Clem was asleep in the Casa Mimosa. Then, when day dawned and we wanted Jorge and Gregorio off Dolly, Lady Forsey invented a reason for driving out from the villa, and of course Clem had to go as her bodyguard.
‘In fact, they met you, Sarah, and went in pursuit of Derek, who was being so very energetic in his search for Jorge and Gregorio that he almost wrecked the whole thing. She found Derek and you, Mr Lloyd, on your way to the salt flats, and managed to persuade you because of the heat, and helped for his own reasons by Clem, to cut short your inquiries. If you hadn’t, you would almost certainly have heard about Dolly. Meanwhile, of course, Jorge and Gregorio had been safely removed to Lady Forsey’s house, and Clem and Lady Forsey went on to be entertained painlessly here, at Mr Lloyd’s invitation. When the excuses for that visit ran out, Lady Forsey took Clem, on orders, to Dolly, where he had his unfortunate accident.’
‘Who hit him?’ said Mr Lloyd.
‘Spry did,’ said Johnson. ‘Actually. Although when he came to, we rather gave him to believe it had been Austin.’
Mummy sat up.
‘You told me,’ she said, ‘that someone had mistaken Clement for me.’
‘Well, I had to make some excuse,’ Johnson said, cheerfully. ‘Couldn’t have Clem blaming us for the dent on his head. As it was, we knew very soon after that that there was a second and better copy of the Saint Hubert collar in existence, and that it was, therefore, very likely that an attempt to steal it would be made that night. Clem, we think, was actually to encompass the robbery, with Austin presumably getting a cut for having provided the replica. Whether the stolen necklace was afterwards destined for the Gallery 7 hiding place or not, I don’t know. Anyway, as soon as we figured that out, our first step was to make sure that Austin believed that Clem’s injury was far worse than it was. By the same token, Austin was already making himself out to be pretty feeble, whereas in fact he had every intention of nipping out as soon as you had all gone and accomplishing the theft by himself.
‘You can imagine Clem’s state of mind when he woke up on Dolly and learned that Austin had come and gone and had had every chance of delivering that blow. He lost no time, I can tell you, getting into Ibiza. He had no idea Spry was on his tail. He got to where, according to plan, two sets of penitents’ clothing were waiting: one for himself and one for Austin, who was to help with the diversion. One set had gone, proving that Austin, far from being at death’s door, was planning to snatch the rubies himself.
‘In fact, that was precisely what Austin did, although in better faith than Clem suspected: he really thought Clem was incapacitated on Dolly.’
‘Hence the punch-up?’ said Gil.
‘Hence the punch-up. Austin, carrying the rubies, fled for the house, with Clem hotfooting it after him. Unluckily, we were all rather close behind. Clem dropped back then and let Austin race by himself into the house, sure he knew, anyway, where Austin would hide the collar. Then he mingled, in his masked robe, with the rest of us as we all pelted past and was a spectator in all that nonsense in the gallery.
‘He wasn’t worried by then about Austin’s fate. All he wanted was a chance to open that secret drawer and get away with the rubies. He got them out, too; only he couldn’t get out of the room because I’d put a police cordon round the house with orders not to let anyone through. So when you, Gil, by sheer chance found the drawer, and when Austin, seeing that it was empty, knew Clem had taken the rubies, Clem realised that Austin would name him in a matter of seconds. So he shot him and tried to escape, with the rubies stuffed in his pocket. None of you,’ said Johnson gravely, ‘realises even yet the full extent of Sarah’s genius. To Sarah we owe the home-made bleep, or homing signal, which ensured that wherever any of you went we were able to find you.’
‘How?’ said Mr Lloyd, sharply.
‘Curry,’ said Johnson, simply. ‘I followed two Pakistanis for miles. Otherwise it worked. It worked, of course, in the final resort, by allowing us to trace Sarah herself. We were with her from the start to finish, although we didn’t always let her know it.’
Mummy said: ‘Not bad, She-she.’
‘It was my high spot,’ I said. ‘Actually, I thought Mr Lloyd had killed Daddy.’
’I had?’ Mr Lloyd looked amazed and then laughed. ‘What possible reason could I have had for doing that?’
‘I don’t know. But you were awfully ready with a gun in Austin Mandleberg’s workshop, and you might have wanted the rubies. And then on the night of Janey’s party, the night Daddy died ‘
‘I wasn’t even. . . ‘ said Mr Lloyd, and paused. ‘. . .here.’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter. Heavens,’ I said. ‘The coffee.’
I went out and did a lot of cup rattling and came back with seven mugs and the kettle and a big jar of instant: to hell with beans in a crisis. I didn’t escape it, though. The minute I got back in, I could hear Janey talking in her bright voice, the one she used after they found out her bed hadn’t been slept in at St T’s. She turned it on me.
‘I was just going to say, I wish you’d told me your nasty suspicions. I could have set your tiny brain bells at rest. That was the night Daddy flew off to Barcelona.’
‘I don’t suppose he did go there,’ said Janey, languidly. ‘But he’d have a perfectly good alibi in Majorca. Wouldn’t you, Daddy?’
Gilmore shifted in his chair and said: ‘Oh, shut up, Janey.’
But Janey went on staring at Mr Lloyd, and her father looked back at her, without changing colour or anything, just a long, steady stare. He said, without much tone: ‘Yes. I had.’
‘She sounds rather decent,’ said Janey. ‘I can’t think why you don’t do something about it. I mean, I can’t hang around doing the flowers forever.’
Mr Lloyd got up very suddenly without touching his coffee and said to Janey: ‘Will you come out a minute?’
Janey got up without a word, and Gil rose at the same moment.
‘Can I come too?’
They were halfway to the french windows when Mr Lloyd stopped suddenly and turning, said: ‘I’m so sorry. Would you excuse us?’
He had gone very red now. Mummy waved graciously, and Derek said: ‘Of course, sir.’ Johnson was lighting his pipe.
There was a short silence while I poured the coffee.
Then Mummy said: ‘You’re a damned liar, She-she. You thought it was Derek. But I must say you did that rather well. Didn’t she?’
‘Sarah has the most delightful subconscious,’ said Johnson, ‘of any young woman I have ever met. Her conscious decisions are lousy.’
‘Well, goodness, if Louie’s lot knew about the girl in Majorca, Janey was bound to know too. She didn’t have to say anything. But I bet her father was relieved that she did.’
Mummy put down her cup. ‘If Tony Lloyd marries this woman in Palma .’