Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03

When Sarah Cassells, a 20-year-old British girl who has just completed her training as a chef, hears of her father’s violent death on the Balearic island of Ibiza, off the Spanish coast, she refuses to believe it is suicide. She goes to Ibiza to investigate for herself and immediately becomes involved with an art dealer who organizes travelling exhibits; two beautiful jetsetters; her brother, who is an engineer for a Dutch firm from which a secret piece of machinery has been stolen; a remarkable American woman who is not at all the person she says she is; and Johnson Johnson, the mysterious portrait painter who shows up on his yacht Dolly. As Ibiza prepares to celebrate Holy Week and Easter with the traditional processions, events become more and more macabre.

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House

New York

First Vintage Books Edition, September 1982

Copyright © 1970 by Dorothy Dunnett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Cassell & Company Ltd. and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company under the title Murder in the Round in 1970
.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dunnett, Dorothy.

Dolly and the cookie bird.

Originally published: Murder in the round.

Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

1. Title.

PR6054.U56M83 1982 823'.914 82-40043

ISBN 0-394-71164-5 (pbk.) AACR2

Manufactured in the United States of America

With affection

for Willie Mackinley,

who knows these seas

better than
dolly

BIFOCAL GLASSES are common.

So Janey used to say, before it all happened. Common, like see-through gloves and champagne stoppers and high heels with trousers.

I thought so too, until Janey went on her bender in the last term at St. Tizzy’s and Flo and I had to undress her and pop her contact lenses out on the bed. I think contact lenses are common.

St. Theresa’s is the pricey establishment at which Flo and Janey and I were all pseudo-educated. You couldn’t call it broad-minded on sex, but it was absolute death on religious disparity. Naturally, we went through Zen Buddhists like chaff, and I remember going out for weeks with a Catholic boy, and not only to spite the biology mistress. He was, I recall, to have the interest on £.20,000 capital when he was eighteen. He told me the percentage, and I worked it out in my prep book. It sounded all right. Then I found him snogging with Janey, and we had a row to end all rows, and that was the end of the ecumenical urge at St. Tizzy’s.

I used to wonder if Daddy would have swallowed the Catholic bit because of the money. I think I worried in case he stopped sending me fivers for birthdays, if I upset him too much. Now of course he doesn’t send me fivers, and he couldn’t swallow anything anyway, if you want to put it like that, since he was found with his throat cut, that night in Ibiza.

I remember Flo in the flat, waiting to tell me that Daddy had passed on to better things. I’d been out all that day, cooking a conference lunch for sixteen dental surgeons. I suppose you’d call Flo my very best friend. She was fat, and rather well off, and had a mother I thought fairly decent. Not too Red Cross and County, but rather giggly and ineffective and well-meaning, like Flo. After we both left St. T’s, Flo and I did our course of Mother Trudi Haute Cuisine together. Three months and eighty-nine guineas, forked up by Daddy. And all the qualifications you need to share a flat with another girl and do freelance cooking in London. That was what they told you, at least.

At any rate, I came back to the flat that afternoon with my pockets full of free dental samples and a bit of greaseproof paper with the telephone number of the one unmarried dentist, and there was Flo, looking pained with her teeth sunk into her lip, which meant she wanted to giggle. Sudden death affects a lot of people that way, and after all, there are more dignified ways of committing suicide than taking a razor at night to a boatyard and climbing onto the back of a horse-winch. I suppose, knowing Spain, Daddy thought the gas oven wouldn’t have enough pressure. Or maybe he remembered last time, when Mummy first left him, and Derek came in from cricket and turned the gas off.

Derek was always, so to speak, turning the gas off. He’s my brother. There are only the two of us, and I must say my first thought when Flo told me Daddy was dead was, Hell. Where does the money come from now? For since Derek got himself a nice job in electronics in Holland, the fivers from that quarter have pined away to a joke. I asked Derek for a thousand pounds when I left the Mother Trudi to set myself up in a kitchen, and when I got his reply I felt bloody Bolshie, I can tell you. What’s a thousand quid to an engineer? He doesn’t even have dirty weekends to spend it on: he isn’t that sort of boy. And there’d be nothing from Daddy. He got an income from a trust that would end when he died, and the same trust had paid for my education and Derek’s. After that, we’d get nothing until we were thirty, and even then hardly more than would pay for an E-type Jag apiece. Everyone says that’s a hairdresser’s car. All I can say is, I never met a hairdresser who had one.

At any rate, there was Flo and the woman who owns the flat, waiting to tell me the sad tale; and apparently the phone had been ringing all morning, and the trustees had called, and a friend or two of Daddy’s, and the press. Flo had given the newspapers the Tatler picture of Daddy and me at the Malaysian banquet. I’d made the dress myself, and it looked it, but Daddy had sprung the cash for a hairdo, and someone he’d had lunch with had lent him the family tiara, and I’d spent half an hour over my eyes.
The United Kingdom High Commissioner shares a joke with Lord Forsey of Pinner, and the Hon. Sarah Cassells, his daughter
. He was never sober enough to be photographed after the Tatler went out of print; although I don’t suppose that had anything to do with it.

Derek was flying out, they said, to identify the body. I didn’t want to identify the body, but I’d have liked to have gone to Ibiza which is a Spanish island in the Mediterranean, just south of Majorca. I phoned a couple of cousins with the sad tidings, and they both invited me to stay, after a bit, but nobody forked out, and I hadn’t even been paid for the dentists yet. About that stage I went into the bedroom and phoned the telephone number on my piece of waxed paper, but he was working late that night and then going away for a fortnight. In March, I ask you.

In the next room the woman who owned the flat was saying in heavy West Kensington… “her mother?”… and Flo was explaining. Good luck to her. The press could track down Geraldine, Lady Forsey, and tell her: I didn’t care. My mother is an American bitch who married poor Daddy for his title and then walked out on him. And on us. She’ll be sitting in the Lincoln Center right now, drinking bullshots with Lenny Bernstein. Music, painting, the Dance. Culture. The artistic experience. A far cry, at any rate, from a Spanish boatyard and a bankrupt and permanently sloshed nobleman riding around and around in the dark on a horse-winch. I approved of him, rather. I mean, you talk of them at school as if they were dotty, and he was a drunken old sot. But I did approve of him.

I wished I could have gone to Ibiza.

It was Flo’s night for having her George up to the flat, and I was sort of between boyfriends, so I phoned a few more numbers in my book, but they were all busy, or studying for exams, or something, so I had a hot dog and went to the flicks and bought a pizza pie off the proceeds of my special fruit machine on my way home. I can win up to two-and-six on it if I’m careful, but I don’t do it too often in case the Fun Parlor switches the lemons, or something.

Anyway, the pizza pie was still warm, and I charged up the stairs to the flat whistling like stink and rapped on the door before I put my key in, for good measure. George usually brings some beer. I like fizzy stone ginger.

The light was out, which was a bit off, as it was after half-past eleven, and I’d got to get back sometime. I said “Flo-o,” very politely, and groped for the switch, but the light didn’t come on and I forgave them. Flo couldn’t cope with a fuse. The torch in the hall drawer was flat. I went on calling Flo-o but no one answered except the old bitch in the flat above, who banged on the ceiling, so I dropped my coat and my scarf on the floor and dragged a chair across to the meter and stood on it. On top of the fuse box were wire, screwdriver, scissors and a Woolworth’s torch in full working order. Unlike Flo, I believe in doing things properly. I switched the torch on and looked for the lever to throw the light circuit off. It was thrown up already, and the handle snapped off.

Now that, Flo wouldn’t do. And George is a motor car salesman and would do his necking for kicks in Selfridge’s window if the bylaws would let him. My legs felt like candles all of a sudden, but I didn’t need to think what to do. I jumped down, and galloping through to the bedroom, torch in hand, I picked up the phone and dialed 999

Someone in the flat sniggered. My hot dog came straight back up into my throat and I swung the torch round, still hanging on to the phone, which was perfectly dead. I had time to see Flo with her new culottes all creased, laid out cold on the floor, then something banged my wrist, hard, and the torch fell and went out.

To hell with that. I’m five foot seven stripped, and I was head prefect
and
principal bat at St. T’s. I’ve sat with two medical students in the back of an old Hillman Minx at three in the morning and come away without losing a button. I ducked in the pitch blackness and ran for the door; and as the man, whoever he was, crashed against me, I kicked him hard in the shins, drove my elbow into his middle, and hauling open the bedroom door, rushed through and slammed it, yelling. I got the key turned just as he laid hands on the handle inside. The old idiot upstairs bumped on the ceiling, and I made for the main door to the stairs.

I forgot, blow it, the chair under the meter. As I went flying. I could hear the door panels cracking behind me and horrible thuds as someone shouldered and kicked them.

The bloody thing was warped anyway. It gave with a crash as I picked myself up and something came at me like a steam engine. I seized the chair and stuck it out in his way.

The thud this time brought down the pictures, and for a moment I thought he was winded. I was going to lay him out with the frying pan and tie him up with the nylon line from the bathroom, with Flo’s tights still pegged all along it. But he got up in such a whirl of shoes and fists and pieces of chair that I was a bit daunted, to tell you the truth, and before I could do a thing more, he had jerked open the front door and vanished.

By the time I got there, the stairs were empty, and I was shaking anyway like a speedometer needle and my hot dog was giving me trouble. I groped my way into the bathroom and got rid of it, and then got back into the hall, dragged another chair forward and climbed on it. The light switch was still broken and off, but the power circuit hadn’t been touched. I got down, and feeling my way past the sagging door, found the bedside lamp and plugged it into the 13-amp socket. Light.

Flo stirred. She looked like her mother, who is all right but doesn’t know how to make up. Then she sat up suddenly, and this time she looked really awful. “My God,” she said. “Have I fainted?”

I sat down beside her and held her poor old cold hands. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ve been burgled. You were only knocked out, or drugged.”

I’ve never seen such an improvement in anybody. “Oh, thank heavens,” said Flo faintly. “I thought I was preggers.”

I promise you. Talk about inefficient.

We found George much later, after I’d told all my story and we’d got Flo’s culottes fixed and looked at the mess in the room. Every drawer in the place had been hauled out, and even the bedding unscrambled—or at least Flo said it wasn’t like that when she last saw it. She’d lost the charm bracelet she got from her last boyfriend but one, and was livid. According to her, the doorbell had rung, and George had left her to answer it. She heard him speaking, and then a silence, and she had just started to the door to find out why he hadn’t come back when the lights all went out. The next thing was an ether pad over her face. “Well, look on the bright side. You hadn’t had the pizza,” I said.

George we discovered humped on the floor in the sitting room, and it was rather plain from the start that the Lotus Elan touch was a bit wanting. He looked a disaster and obviously felt it, and it was clear from the way Flo was shuffling about that she knew that as far as George’s associations were concerned, her wagon was fixed. All we ever got out of him, even after we switched from instant coffee to Flo’s half-bottle of Japanese whiskey, was that he had been knocked down by a middle-aged man with a stocking over his face. He was also stinking of ether.

I had the pizza pie myself, after we telephoned the police at my suggestion from the flat up above. We got to bed finally at three, after the police had fingerprinted the rooms and asked a whole lot of questions. All we’d lost were Flo’s bracelet and my American earrings from Mummy, which had been too nice to throw away. I was always getting presents from Mummy which were too nice to throw away.

My three good family pieces were all right because I was wearing them. I always wear them, sometimes under my clothes and sometimes on top. It reminds me, if I needed reminding, that I am the daughter of the fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner… Of the late fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner. Hell.

George slept the rest of the night on the sofa, and I cried with my head under my pillow until Flo gave me six aspirins and the rest of the Japanese whiskey, and I had a wonderful night.

My brother Derek flew over for Daddy’s funeral. I didn’t want to go: I had a hundred and fifty brandy snaps to make for a wedding in Hampshire, and brandy snaps by Flo are simply well-rolled tarmacadam. However the lawyer-trustee, whom I rather go for, came back from his shoot and took me to a nice plushy lunch at the Café Royal in order to jaw me, and then Derek rang up to say he was back from Ibiza and would I take a taxi round to the Dorchester, which he would pay for.

Daddy never stayed at the Dorchester; he couldn’t afford it; but of course he’d been there hundreds of times at private parties and functions, and I knew how to swan in and where. I had a goodish cloth coat, which I’d shortened rather a lot, and a super black hat of Flo’s like a highwayman, and long black boots.

Derek’s room had a high bed with kicked Queen Anne legs, and there was a battery of taps like Bofors guns in the loo. Derek’s pad was usually the Hilton, with non-stop taped music and an ice-water tap and big lamps for snogging in strategic places all over the room. Not that Derek would bother with girls. He is just split-level minded and goes for efficiency.

We are not much alike. I’m fair, like the Forseys, but Derek is brown like Mummy was before she had it turned pink. He’s not much taller than I am, which he hates, but he bathes a lot oftener. Derek is a great soap-and-shoe-polish man. He even went through a health-regime fad: sauna baths and nut rissoles; the lot, but he grew out of it and isn’t a bad cook at that. At least when he takes you out you can be sure of a good meal and a decent bottle of wine, although he won’t touch spirits nor smokes. He isn’t bad really: he’s just anti-Daddy, and I don’t suppose you can blame him.

Anyway, he hadn’t much to say about Daddy now. It was suicide all right: they’d found the razor dropped from his hand. He was still sitting on the horse, no doubt neck-high with Vat 69. Out of respect for the dead, Derick did manage to keep the disgust out of his voice, but he said the funeral was to be quiet and quick down at Pinner after the Spanish police had done their stuff, and what the hell did brandy snaps have to do with it. In the end, I got thirty quid out of him for a draggy black outfit I’d spotted in Fenwick’s, and agreed to turn up. If I stuck at it all night, I worked out, I could do my baking and Flo’s bit as well.