Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Beside and in front of me, there was silence. Johnson of course knew the house. Brady had probably helped her to build it. They were waiting with unconcealed interest to see what I would do.

  There were quite a number of things I could do, including make a fool of myself. I regulated my impulses. I said patiently, ‘I do manage to take your point. So far as I know, no patent was ever applied for. I suppose this makes my father the only Clan Chieftain to lodge in two seats. One for each buttock.’

  The bifocals dwelled on me for a long, lingering moment. ‘Beltanno,’ said Johnson, ‘the steel industry needs you.’ He turned to Brady. ‘And you know what she thinks? She thinks they’re all lying around in there wearing beads and stoned out of their skulls on French Blues or Black Bombers or one of the lighter character rums.’

  Wallace Brady turned his pleasant, sun-tanned all-American gaze on my knees, and then smoothly, up to my face. ‘The intelligent rich don’t do that,’ he said. ‘The intelligent rich play children’s games and tell each other true ghost stories prior to going to bed with each other. Other stimuli they do not require.’

  ‘They don’t play golf?’ I said. I wondered if it was Johnson’s company. Wallace Brady hadn’t talked like that on Great Harbour Cay.

  ‘You and I play golf,’ said Brady. ‘Golf is played by the intelligent candidates for ascendancy.’

  I thought of the price of those golf-bags. ‘A few seem to have made it,’ I said; but Brady shook his head firmly.

  ‘First-generation tyros. Until you see a man playing a children’s party game, you may know he doesn’t belong to the real aristocracy of wealth.’

  The car door was opened by a manservant, who directed a coloured boy to take out our cases. I walked up the steps and entered, with more than a few misgivings, the dark and echoing hall of my own home. Her footsteps padding through what appeared to be a series of vacant apartments, the Begum appeared, smiling, her hands outstretched. She wore a dark blue sari of floating organza. ‘Beltanno! Wallace!’

  She stopped and lowered her hands. ‘Johnson. What are you looking for?’

  ‘Paper games,’ said Johnson. ‘Or Monopoly would maybe do. Or 3-D noughts and crosses?’

  The Begum looked at him critically. ‘You have that stuffed and smiling look,’ she said. ‘Like a piece of hand-carved ethnographica. What are you doing? Auditioning for Mensa?’

  The glasses glittered. ‘You’re not too far off it,’ said Johnson admiringly. ‘Actually, it’s an I.Q. and stock-holding index. No doubt your half-year figures were buoyant?’

  ‘They were,’ said the Begum Akbar calmly, leading the way into the morning-room. She appeared in no way amazed.

  ‘And your intelligence is undoubted. Therefore . . Ah!”

  He pounced.

  ‘We think it’s the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,’ said the Begum serenely, ‘but the Club never give you a subject and they won’t answer letters, damn them. Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said. Brady, grinning foolishly, had followed Johnson to the immense baize table set out in the window with the largest jigsaw puzzle I have ever seen.

  ’Thelma,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Damn you, darling,’ said the Begum in her careful, mannered English voice. ‘It’s the Queen of Sheba. Krishtof recognized the cut of her trousers.’

  ‘She’s smoking a cigarette.’ Johnson said. He slid another piece into place and surveyed it.

  ‘She was in advance of her time,’ said the Begum calmly. She opened the french windows and called into the bushes. ‘James! Your daughter is here.’

  A lithe Turkish figure in a gold necklace and a pair of green cotton beach pants stepped out of the hibiscus and did a mild leap into the morning-room. ‘He’s paddling,’ said Krishtof Bey. ‘Bloody hell!’ He stood rigid over the table.

  ‘She’s smoking a cigarette,’ said the Begum placidly. ‘Black or white, Beltanno?’

  ‘White,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a lie!’ said Krishtof Bey furiously. ‘It doesn’t fit!’

  ‘It does,’ pointed out Wallace Brady. I admired him for the way he was keeping his head.

  ‘So do the trousers,’ said Johnson.

  ‘It’s Rita Hayworth in Salome?’ said the Begum tentatively.

  Krishtof Bey snorted. ‘She didn’t smoke a cigarette in Salome.’

  ‘She might have, off-set,’ said the Begum helpfully. ‘James? Does Rita Hayworth smoke?’

  ‘Is she on fire?’ said my father, appearing dripping in the window, cackling. He looked like Picasso. He emitted a roar. ‘Who put that damned fag in her mouth?’

  ‘His mouth,’ I said.

  They all turned and looked accusingly at me. The Begum stirred her coffee.

  ‘They all want to know how you know.’ She looked round. Sergeant Trotter, in a clean shirt and white trousers, came hesitatingly into the room. ‘Rodney! Some coffee,’ said the Begum. ‘The Queen of Sheba’s a man.’

  Sergeant Trotter stopped looking hesitant. ‘Get along with you,’ he said. ‘With them trousers?’

  ‘Unisex,’ said Johnson. ‘Or how Solomon got wise. I agree with Beltanno. You are looking at two virile forms. Krishtof, tell us who dresses like Turks, apart from Turks?’

  ‘I thought Turks dressed like Indians?’ I said innocently.

  ‘English dress like Indians,’ the Begum pointed out, with justice. She thought. ‘Racing-car drivers dress like Turks. And Old Harrovians. And men from pirate radio ships. And antique-dealers. And fashion photographers.’

  Johnson picked up another piece of the jigsaw. ‘There’s a dog here,’ he said.

  The room was plunged into gloom, broken by the chinking of coffee-cups. The Begum put hers firmly down. ‘I will not have my day controlled by ten thousand interlocking pieces of wood,’ she said. ‘Johnson, I wish to break into light conversation. Who killed Denise Edgecombe?’

  She was an irresponsible woman. I had always suspected it.

  There was a cracking silence, wrecked by the clatter as Sergeant Trotter’s cup jumped in its saucer. Johnson’s bifocals and eyebrows, I was glad to see, had parted company. For a moment he looked like the rest of us: frankly subnormal. Then he said, ‘Who do you have serious conversations with: morgue attendants? So far as the police know, it was an accident.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the Begum. ‘Wallace, do you think it was an accident?’

  Wallace, a devotee of good taste if ever I saw one, was markedly reserved. ‘If you had seen the poor lady in that quarry, Begum, you wouldn’t have any doubt. Of course it was an accident. Why should anyone want to kill Lady Edgecombe?’

  Even my father, I was glad to see, was staring at his soulmate with extreme disapprobation. ‘What did you want to say that for? Pretty woman. Nothing wrong with her.’

  ‘Except boredom,’ said Krishtof Bey surprisingly.

  ‘Not when you danced with her,’ said Wallace Brady. I had forgotten that.

  ‘No. She had been a good dancer. Not an easy thing to give up,’ said the Turk. He moved across to the coffee pot, executing a swift half-dancestep as he went: reminding you what an agile body he undoubtedly had. ‘It gets into the blood. Better to produce, to teach. Hard to leave it altogether.’

  ‘Sir Bartholomew understood it, I think,’ I said. ‘He was most gentle with her.’

  ‘Yes. The slightest touch of patronage, don’t you think?’ said the Begum. ‘I am sorry no one will take up my scandal. My theory was that Denise poisoned her husband, and then killed herself, hoping to land him with the blame. No supporters?’

  ‘Like the Queen of Sheba,’ said Johnson, ‘it’s a novel idea. Could you play thirteen holes of reasonable golf just before killing yourself?’

  ‘My dear man,’ said the Begum. ‘I can’t play golf. I thought it was like making love. If you were enthusiastic, you could do it anywhere, no matter how adverse the circumstances.’

  ‘You can,’ said Johnson, seated with his tobacco pouch on his knees. �
�But golf takes a lot longer.’

  ‘Attend,’ said the Begum: and. reaching out a leisurely arm for the soda-siphon, depressed a squirt accurately into his pipe. ‘I will not be balked of my fun. What if they are both killed, Sir Bartholomew and Denise Edgecombe? Could someone be attempting to wipe out this family?’

  I avoided looking at Johnson. Krishtof Bey, with a fresh cup of coffee, was doing a slow glissé prowl back along the edge of the carpet; Sergeant Trotter, sitting poker-backed on one of the Begum’s most comfortable armchairs, was looking bored and uneasy; Brady was trying to catch one of Johnson’s eyes. I had been trying for some moments to impound the other.

  Johnson shut his eyes, thus eluding us both. My father, who had been padding about for some time, leaving wet naked footmarks on the parquet, said, ‘Where’s that damned paper, Thelma? Who should want to dispose of the Edgecombes? Played a perfectly rational game of contract, both of them.’

  The Begum’s large long-sighted eyes rested on me. ‘Your father holds the theory that against a sure knowledge of cricket and bridge, the criminal classes are powerless,’ she said. ‘He is wrong. It is the man with the brown-ale-making set and the night tidy who will attract violence. Suppose Sir Bartholomew was poisoned by the food or the drink he had at the airport. Suppose he was poisoned again when he became worse on the plane. Suppose Johnson here, who was so neatly set alight at the end of Leviticus’s drum solo, was singled out because he wore Sir Bartholomew’s jacket? Suppose Denise was gassed and pushed down that slope?’

  Wallace Brady looked across at me. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Paper games.’

  ‘Well, Beltanno?’ said the Begum; and they all, even my father who was searching inside the harpsichord, looked round at me.

  I breathed slowly and steadily, avoiding a second glance at Johnson, whose despicable eyes were still shut. I said, ‘It sounds dramatic, but I think you should look at the probabilities. Who had anything to gain, as my father has said, from killing the Edgecombes?’

  Sergeant Trotter said, ‘Well, it usually boils down to money. Who gets the nest-egg?’

  ‘There wasn’t any,’ said Johnson. He sat up, opening his eyes, and, taking out a clean handkerchief, began to dry the blackened bowl of his pipe, reproachfully. ‘They were comfortable, but far from the top of the cheese trolley. No heavy insurance either, and no family.’

  ‘No Queen of Sheba either, Thelma,’ said my father, and cackled. He appeared to have found what he wanted: he sat down in another chair with a thick file of papers on his knee. ‘You’re on the wrong track.’

  The Begum stretched her elegant legs on her lounge chair. The furniture on Crab Island, I had to admit, was lusher than Castle Rannoch had ever possessed. ‘There are other reasons for murder. He was in the diplomatic service abroad. What about you, Rodney? Did you get cashiered in Aden for selling cut-price juke-boxes to oil sheiks? Does Sir Bartholomew know the secret of your horrible past?’

  Sergeant Rodney Trotter was a little man in quite excellent health. But for a moment the veins stood out on his cheeks, and I thought his upper plate was going to drop. He said, ‘Why me?’

  ‘You were at the airport and on the plane and in the Bamboo Conch Club,’ said the Begum. She was clever. And idle. And enjoying herself.

  ‘I wasn’t on the golf-course,’ said Trotter.

  The Begum stretched herself luxuriously. ‘If you could pay a waiter at the Conch Club, you could pay a groundsman at Great Harbour Cay,’ she said.

  ‘Then why pick on me?’ said Sergeant Trotter. He was becoming angry. ‘It might have been anyone, by that reckoning. Anyone else on that plane. Someone on the B.O.A.C. staff.’

  ‘But I gather,’ said the Begum gently, ‘no one else knew Sir Bartholomew, or had any dealings with him, or indeed was likely ever to see him again. No one else in the Monarch Lounge was going to stay on or near Great Harbour Cay. Except, of course, for Mr Brady.’

  More sophisticated by far than Trotter, Wallace Brady had of course been waiting for it. He grinned at the Begum, his hands clasped over his pale cotton stomach. ‘I’ve been here six months, and I’m going to be here a good few months yet. If Bart Edgecombe knew any dirty secrets from my past, I feel we would have slugged it out long before now.’

  James Ulric, hugging his file, produced an actionable grin. ‘Maybe it wasn’t an old blot in the games book, Brady. They tell me you were seeing a lot of Denise.’

  Wallace Brady got up. ‘Begum,’ he said. ‘Enough is enough. The lady we are talking about is dead, and you’re acting like it was a game. The Edgecombes were neighbours of mine, and I did all a good neighbour would do. That’s all there ever was to it. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take Beltanno out and show her the gardens.’

  The Begum got up, but James Ulric didn’t stir. He nodded at me. ‘Some day that girl will be worth nearly three million dollars,’ he said. ‘You should get your hooks into her, now Denise is out of the way. Although she tells me she’s going to marry an effing Japanese . . Have you asked him yet?’ he demanded.

  I stared at him and said, ‘No. But I shall.’

  ‘Who?’ said Wallace Brady. He was looking at me as if I’d just knocked down his hamster on a Suzuki 120.

  ‘Mr Tiko.’ I said.

  ‘Great jumping Jesus,’ said Wallace Brady.

  ‘I suppose,’ said my father, ‘I should ask him to the Gathering? We are having a Bahamian Steel Band leaping through flaming circles on motorbikes. Since accidents are so plentiful, no doubt he could have one.’

  ‘I shall arrange it.’ said Krishtof Bey.

  We had forgotten him. Even the Begum turned round sharply, and he smiled up at her from where he reclined on the carpet. ‘Am I not a suspect too?’ he said. ‘I have been in all the right places at all the right times, although I have not yet found a motive. The lovely Denise? But I barely met her. A sordid event in my past? But all dancers have lascivious pasts: it is expected of them. No one can blackmail a dancer.’

  ‘Let’s pretend,’ said Johnson suddenly, ‘that you were wanted for some major crime, say in Turkey, which would involve a long prison sentence. A top dancer wouldn’t remain a top dancer, would he, if he had to spend ten years breaking stones in a quarry?’

  Krishtof Bey put both hands to his head, spun round and fell full length, with a light thud, at Johnson’s feet. ‘Save me! Save me!’ he screamed.

  I gazed at the magnificent lumbar area of his vertebral column as the Begum said, ‘Foolish boy. No one suspects you. You haven’t the application.’

  The dancer rose compactly to his feet, his face rigid with hauteur.

  ‘You say no application to me? When I practise seven hours a day?’

  ‘You don’t practise hate seven hours a day,’ said the Begum calmly. ‘That is a European trait, Krishtof. Beside, you would kill with a knife.’

  ‘And you?’ said the dancer. He tossed back his long hair and seizing her chiffon scarf from a chair, draped it swiftly over his head and shoulders, one slender hand holding it in place. His walk and carriage had changed: he was the impudent replica of the Begum herself. ‘You, Thelma, have been much in evidence. What did Sir Bartholomew and his wife know of you that you preferred The MacRannoch and his daughter should not know?’

  For a moment the beautiful, ageing face was quite still: then she drew the scarf from his hands and flicked it lightly round his throat. ‘That my friends don’t play cricket or bridge. Who are the false eyelashes for?’

  ‘Johnson,’ said the dancer immediately, his faun’s mouth lifting. He had quick wits. Nor did the lightly accented voice have any trouble at all with his English. I saw with misgiving that his eyelashes were false. He gazed through them at Johnson’s Aertex shirt and shambling trousers. ‘He is going to paint me, is he not? In the sun, in my natural state. An animal, a leopard. Lithe and lordly. Pan, leaning against a tree trunk. A hibiscus flower here and there?’

  Johnson looked uneasy. ‘I’m a rather splashy painter,’
he said.

  The Begum drew her veil lightly from Krishtof’s throat. ‘Are you trying to shock Johnson?’ she said. ‘You won’t.’ The brittle gaze, wavering round, rested on the impassive bifocals. ‘You boring, smug little man,’ she said. ‘I was hoping for a colourful morning. And now you say all these events are pure accidents.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Johnson. He was filling his pipe. The muscles of my abdominal wall recoiled like a spring and I choked. No one noticed.

  ‘You did,’ said my father. ‘You said -’

  ‘You said they were accidents,’ said Johnson. ‘Actually, Sir Bartholomew was poisoned with arsenic, and his wife Denise was undoubtedly killed. Beltanno will corroborate.’ He struck a match and puffed at his pipe.

  Everybody stared at him. The Begum sat down, and after a moment Krishtof Bey slid to her feet. My father remained seated, his bony finger still keeping the place in his unspeakable papers. Trotter and Wallace Brady, by contrast, both slowly rose to their feet. No one spoke.

  Johnson wagged the match, dropped it, and took the pipe comfortably out of his mouth. ‘All right, Thelma?’ he said. ‘Status redeemed? Pumped up the pre-lunch adrenalin?’

  Someone let out a long sigh. The Begum half relaxed, still staring at Johnson. ‘You hideous creature. You are trying to re-enter my good books?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Johnson. ‘I never touch a good book before lunchtime. It is nearly lunchtime?’

  ‘Then they were accidents?’ Brady said. He was still standing.

  ‘Beltanno says not,’ said Johnson blandly. ‘She took stomach tests, which the hospital didn’t. And she’s got signed papers to prove it. It was arsenic.’

  Sergeant Trotter’s parade-ground voice, though muted, was still cold and carrying to a degree. ‘Then why don’t the police know?’ he said.

  ‘Because Sir Bartholomew asked Beltanno not to tell them,’ said Johnson; and they all turned again and looked at me.

  A large number of well-adjusted persons go through life ignorant as a cabbage of their own likely reactions in sudden emergency. Mine are not only within my awareness: they are timed and graded according to the emergency. This I would rate as an acute abdomen. I thought with commensurate speed.