Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (18 page)

Johnson said, “Why should it matter?” but I didn’t need to ask, nor I suppose did my mother.

Derek said, “You see, if he’d been murdered, in a way it was all right.”

“Well: you can relax now,” said Johnson, and put the pipe in his mouth. “He was murdered.”

There was a little silence. No stanza of poor Coco’s poetry could have been more concrete or more chilling than that.

I didn’t want any more brandy and soda. “Who killed him?” I said.

“He was killed,” said Johnson, “over some rubies. Derek’s instinct was right. It seemed too much of a coincidence that there should be some nonsense going on over rubies and that a man should be killed at the same time. My guess would be that your father got to know, somehow, about the proposed theft of the rubies and that he was killed to keep him quiet.”

“By Jorge and Gregorio,” said Derek. Color had come back into his face.

“No. By someone else,” Johnson said. “Someone who also killed Coco, because Coco watched your father when he came here by night to visit Mrs. van Costa and because on that one vital night Coco must have seen where he went. I don’t suppose Coco had any motive other than jealousy, coupled with malice, when he sensed that he would soon be asked to go. He must have followed Lord Forsey hoping to uncover some dirt or some trouble. And he certainly found it.”

“Who, then?” said Derek. My mother hadn’t uttered a word.

“We don’t know yet,” said Johnson. “But we shall. We have a very good opportunity, later tonight. Jorge and Gregorio are not the most cooperative of prisoners, and the old man is half dead with fright. Since I couldn’t use force, Lady Forsey, I took the liberty of bugging your cellar. I don’t know who killed your husband: I suspect they don’t know either. But I did find out one thing. There were two copies made of the Saint Hubert rubies.”

Mummy was first off the mark. “Huh? There’s another replica? Aside from the one that was smashed?”

“Check,” said Johnson. “The first one, the one we saw, didn’t pass muster. It was pretty clumsy, as Sarah will remember. A second copy was made.”

“We didn’t find it?” I said.

“No. They took no chances with that one,” said Johnson. “It was already removed from the workshop by person or persons unknown. All ready to be swapped for the original on the one night in the year when the original is within reach of the public, passing through the old city by drumbeat, at night.”

I put my hands over my mouth, and Derek half got up. “Tonight?” he said. “During the Procession of Silence tonight? The people who killed my father are going to steal those rubies tonight?”

Johnson took his pipe over to a table, laid it down, and had a swig of his brandy. “I looked up Capricorn, She-she,” he said. “It says pension matters are overdue for serious consideration and that you will sparkle tonight.”

“Never mind my pension,” I said. “Let’s get the police.”

“Now—” said my mother and Derek simultaneously.

“Now nothing,” I said. “The heroines I’ve seen come to a sticky end because, while the murderer’s still running around, no one calls in the police. You’ve evidence of two murders and a forthcoming robbery. For crying out loud, dial nueve, nueve, nueve. Policía, Guardia Civil, and Bomberos.”

“Someone has, dearie,” said Johnson. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Meet,” said my mother, “the Man from the Prudential.”

“You meet him,” I said. “I’m going home. I don’t want to go the same way as Clement and Austin and Daddy and Coco.”

“You go on home, honey,” said Mummy.

I stayed.

I suppose I would have thought more about Johnson’s work if he hadn’t had glasses. I mean, what special agent on films ever had glasses? Bi-focals, anyway. I did wonder in passing why he carried a gun and found safecracking so easy, but he simply said he’d been on special-branch work in the war, and once done, never forgotten. And that when you’d spent a few years on the waterfront, you learned the best way to take care of yourself and your boat. If an internationally famous portrait painter told you that, you believed him. Despite anything Derek upbraided me with afterward, I am definitely not naïve.

It was Derek who went on and on when Johnson was trying to swear us to silence. I knew what Derek was thinking. He thought Janey should know. And he resented Johnson anyway for a perfectly obvious reason. If a British agent had been called in to look into Daddy’s murder, then Daddy must have been what Derek’s firm thought him. A murder in a foreign country is dealt with by the police. Not by people like Johnson.

He gave his word, in the end, because Mummy browbeat him into it. Johnson let her. Johnson was a man of unusual talents. Then he took us, very slowly and clearly, several times over his plan for that night.

Spry phoned, before it was over, to tell Johnson that Clem had now wakened but wasn’t up to much: he suspected concussion. They couldn’t lay hands on a doctor. We heard Johnson hesitate. He said to Spry, “I want you to take over guard duty at Mrs. van Costa’s within the next hour. Could you leave Clem? Or isn’t it safe?” Johnson’s face, as he laid down the receiver, bore perceptible signs of concern. “He’s going. He thinks Clem will sleep,” he said. “It’s rotten luck, but we really can’t do anything else, with Austin laid up as well. She-she: where is Mr. Lloyd planning to stand? At the Monument? In the Vera de Rey?” All the processions in Ibiza arrived at the boulevard and took a turn round the Monument.

“He said something about the Monument,” I said. “Janey and Gil and I should be with him. He was joining friends there.”

“But the four of you, and possibly Derek, will be the only guests for dinner tonight?”

“I hope so,” I said; “I’ve only ordered enough food for four.” I paused and said, “Johnson, why should someone cosh Clem?”

Johnson’s black eyebrows rose, but his voice remained perfectly calm. “Are you sure it was Clem whom they wanted to cosh?”

The ash broke from Mummy’s cheroot as she sat suddenly upright. “Me? It was an attempt to hurt me?”

“I should think so,” said Johnson. “It’s perfectly easy to hide in the fo’c’s’le and escape up through the hatch later, when the fuss has died down. You’ve got short hair. In the half-light he might easily have mistaken his victim.”

“Clem is a dear boy,” said my mother, wide-eyed. “But I must say I am not flattered. What is more, I don’t get it. If Coco had imparted to me any of his vital secrets, surely by now I’ve had time to pass them all on?”

“Maybe…” said Johnson.

“I know something I don’t know I know?” said my mother.

Johnson nodded his head.

“I don’t know anything I don’t know I know.” said my mother in a positive voice. “Or if I do, I’ll sue my psychiatrist.”

“You do that,” said Derek coldly. “Then if someone does wipe you out, Sarah and I will share in the proceeds.”

It was one thing I had never thought of: that Derek and I were heirs to everything both Daddy and Mummy had possessed. Since we thought neither of them had a bean of their own, I for one had never given it more than a sigh in the passing. But now…

Johnson finished briefing us just after that, and I got up with Derek to climb into the Maserati and drive back to the Lloyds’. Just as I was getting in, Johnson called me back to tell me something he’d forgotten. Derek looked at me as I climbed into the driver’s seat for the second time. “What was all that?”

“He forgot to ask what time we usually finished dinner.”

I put her into gear and drove off. The concrete curb and the cactus at the edge of the drive shone intense green and white in the headlamps; and then we were on the gray, pockmarked road, with its broken, yellow dirt at the edges. The pale stems of a fir wood swam toward us, the gray-green clouds closing over our heads, Dazzling red-and-white triangles and circles appeared far off, like eyes, and flew past us-—50, 30—and warnings: children, skidding,
ceda el paso
. Red-and-white netting, bright at a corner. A cyclist—a double red lamp clipped to each side of his calf. A swaying grouping of lights, that turned out to be a lorry, with extra sidelights on the top of its load. A bus, with triple lights also. Ibiza—the yacht club—the broken inn opposite the Talamanca road with its sign:
bar—stop
.

The last of the road lights glittered on something on the mat under my feet. I changed down as we rounded the corner, and holding her in low gear between the long, dark avenue of bare trees, bent and fished the thing up. It was one of Coco’s bits of tin bunting, from the Casa Mimosa. It said only:
death
.

IN THE END, I made them all curried chicken except Derek, who got eggs Mornay and lumped it.

There had been no trouble over getting Derek added to the party, although there was a slight air of inquiry over how we had spend part of the day: a good few hours had passed since leaving Gil. I said I’d been having a sitting with Johnson and then I’d come across Derek by chance in Ibiza.

“Helmuth told us,” said Mr. Lloyd, pouring himself a San Miguel pilsner cristal. It was a rather hot curry. “Wasn’t Mrs. van Costa there too? You apparently blocked the whole roadway.”

“That’s right. I gave her a lift. Dilling had gone on a trip with the Humber and left Mrs. van Costa stranded,” I said. He could interpret the leading phrase there any way that he liked. Johnson had said, “Don’t mention Clem’s head, and don’t tell them I’ve been with your mother.” He hadn’t needed to tell us to keep quiet about Rodgers and Hammerstein. I had a moment’s unease when Austin asked Derek if he’d found out anything that mattered at the office of the Salinera Española, S.A., but Derek just said no, they didn’t keep any records. Thereafter there wasn’t much to be heard but the opening of beer cans.

I got dressed, ages behind everyone else, to the sound of the record player, and came down in my black crochet dress and black anorak to find Janey and Austin, with his bandage undone, dancing to “Itchycoo Park.” He broke off after a bit and gave me a whirl. Janey said, “You’re in hot-cross bun country all right. Why the black, She-she? You’re not Roman, are you?”

I wasn’t anything, except obeying instructions to wear something dark.

Then Mr. Lloyd came in wearing a fur-collared car coat, and Gilmore dressed in a sweater, with a great scarlet wool cloak for Janey. I didn’t look at it. I was so busy not looking at it that I hardly said goodbye to Austin, who was curling up with a good book in the grotto. We all piled into the Buick, waited patiently for Derek who was in a sports jacket with a raincoat over his arm (“A
raincoat
?” said Janey), and then Mr. Lloyd let in the clutch, and we snarled up into the gear changes which would land us in Ibiza. The moon had got up, and the telegraph poles and the trees were black now against the light sky. Where the planting was sparse, you could see the hazy blue of low hills on the left, till they flattened, just before the bend round the harbor. Then the lights of Ibiza leaped out before us: blue-gray, with the Cathedral floodlit a deep golden yellow. We crawled in, behind the crowds and the buses, and parked.

The holy images for the procession were dressed in the Cathedral in the afternoon, Johnson had said. Nobody had seen it being done, because
Dolly
had spent her time sailing back from the Salinas anchorage with Jorge and Gregorio and guarding them until it was safe to drive them to Mummy’s villa. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Johnson had learned that there was another set of false rubies: that the scene was set for the theft of the real ones after all.

But, said Johnson, he also understood that the dressing was done by the senior officials of the Church, plus a handful of devoted Ibizencans. This, in his opinion, made it impossible for anyone to depend on being able to substitute the false rubies for the real at this stage.

From then on, they were guarded by never less than six people, most of them priests. By afternoon, all the images had been fixed on their litters, and candelabra, real or electric, and flowers, real or waxen, set round about.

Johnson, he had said, would be with the Saint Hubert. How he proposed to manage that I couldn’t tell. The order of the procession was always the same: it started at the highest point of the old town, the images assembling from all their various churches, and then wound its way down the lanes, accompanied by its files of churchmen and penitents, plus contingents of armed forces and local officials, spaced out with sad music and drums. It sounded wild. In the big cities, Johnson had told me, the statues alone could weigh up to five tons, and needed thirty stevedores underneath to carry them. I wondered if Johnson proposed to get underneath the Saint Hubert before it left the Cathedral or if the union would veto it.

I had only three firm instructions from Johnson. To stick to the Lloyd party. If I could, to keep them together. And not, under any circumstances, to go off by myself. He had added a comment. If a theft had been planned, it was likeliest to happen in the low town, where the thief could get away easily. If Mr. Lloyd stayed in the low town it would, said Johnson, be nice.

Mr. Lloyd thought it would be nice, too, until he saw the Vara de Rey, which was pandemonium from end to end and three high in the middle with people standing on people round the Monument. I saw quite a few of the types who sit with their woolly socks on the chairs every morning outside the Mediterránea, including the German girl in the lime-and-gold sari and the five million bangles, the girl with the ticking nightshirt and boots, and the boy with the skinny sweater and necklace, who went about with the barefoot fat woman with pink and orange and green paisley painted all over her face. It was mild, and the lamplight shone under the palm trees. I got pinched black-and-blue while we struggled, fruitlessly, to find Mr. Lloyd’s friends. After a bit he got fed up and said, “Let’s get out of the scrum. We should be in the Alt Vila. Much more dramatic.”

“Well, you won’t get there now,” Janey said. “Look at the crowds.” She was mad anyway because Derek wasn’t looking at her and the others hadn’t turned up. I expect she wanted to play them off against one another.

Mr. Lloyd said, “The procession won’t have started. We can get there if we try. Hang on to each other.”

I hung on, with my arms stretched like chewing gum, until Gilmore complained, and I actually had his lizard belt with the bull clip off twice. The curbs were packed with beak-nosed Spanish women with lots of eye-black and jewelry, and old types with long, gathered, black sleeves, black silk headsquares, and cut-velvet shawls with silk fringes under their pigtails. Children seethed. We crossed five streets and got to the market, where the stalls were dismantled and the square jam-packed with crowds. The balconies of all the town houses round the walls were also crowded with people and draped with red and yellow, the national colors.

There Mr. Lloyd had an earnest discussion with a man in a uniform, and next thing, we were scurrying up the ramp to the Portal into Dalt Vila. We went under the long arch of the Portal and into this roofless place I’ve mentioned before: a kind of paved, high-walled room which connects the arch into the old town with the arch into the new. There, Mr. Lloyd hustled us behind one of the pillars and we stood, looking around us and waiting.

It was a super place, I must say. We faced a blank wall about thirty feet high, in the right corner of which was cut the portal onto the ramp. Through the arch, you could see the whole market lying below: the lights and the people. We stood with our backs to another blank wall and inside a long, pillared portico, which held up a strip of tiled roof jutting over our heads. On our right, our wall was joined to the wall of the portal by another arcade: a double arch with a room built above, with no windows but a green double door giving onto a rusty, railed balcony. The roof of the high room was tiled, and behind it, the end wall rose up another six feet or so, covered with creepers, with a path at the top. There were plants growing out of all the cracks in the stones, and a sort of yellow flower in the tiles over our heads: I had seen it, turning up the hairpin bend in the Maserati with Janey. On our left, the fourth wall was a short one, and the whole lower part nearly formed the entry and the pools of lamplight on the white walls and the moon shining on the cobbles, like an incline of paperweights, round which the procession would come.

I was staring at it, mesmerized, when an officer came up and asked us to move. Mr. Lloyd talked to him severely in a low voice, but it didn’t do any good. We shifted out of the guard place and through the arch into Dalt Vila itself.

It was all right. We stood looking at the outside of the arch, among the crowd in the square, squashed up to one another, giggling, and making witty remarks, until Mr. Lloyd suddenly said, “Hush.” Then we heard it, high up in the darkness. The flat tuck of the drums.

I felt Derek shiver. My curry was also starting to do salaams. I wondered what Johnson was doing: what could one man do? I wished I’d been able to stay nursing Clem. I wondered if Spry knew what to do for concussion. Clem would make a decent husband. A nice one. One who didn’t throw paper-bag parties. My stars. He couldn’t even afford paper bags.

The people round about us were Spanish. The woman next to me turned out to be one of the helps in the fish market, and she kept smiling and talking in short, clanging outbursts of patois. Instead of the jersey and skirt and the square-fronted apron, she wore a black crepe dress and a black lace mantilla. She still smelt of fish. I asked when the float of Saint Hubert appeared in the procession, and she said nearly last. I don’t think she approved of him. I suppose he was a bit secular to have all those rubies. The drums were getting louder, I thought. I looked at Janey’s father.

He looked preoccupied. If he were going to snatch twenty thousand pounds’ worth of rubies, I suppose he would look preoccupied. I supposed anyway he had seen it before: they had had the villa in Ibiza a long time, before his wife died. You forgot Janey was half-Spanish. I wondered why she wasn’t a Catholic, and then thought that perhaps the mother wasn’t. He would have no religious scruples, anyway, about pinching jewels from the Church. And I didn’t suppose he cared a damn about deer. But would he have killed my father and brought me out to Ibiza? Then I remembered what Johnson had said. If he thought Daddy had written to me, then he might.

Gilmore said, “That’s the music,” and if you strained, you could just hear it, far up the hill. Not creepy stuff in the least, wails and rollings of drums, but stern, tinny tootles, four beats to the bar, above the conversational roar of the crowd. Above our heads a caged finch, wakened by the noise, suddenly started to twitter, and some others answered him. Gilmore said, “Don’t be alarmed if some of the stations look a bit tottery. The canopy poles are fitted with fairly loose sockets so that the whole shooting match sways if they want it. It whips up the excitement.”

“Do they never tip one right over?” I said.

Gilmore shrugged with his eyebrows. “It’s been known,” he was kind enough to explain. “In places like Seville, they go in for sensationalism a bit more than Ibiza. You might get a hitch here if the bearers stop for a swig in a side street. Now and then there’s a little contretemps, too, if the candles get too near the costumes. But that’s about the extent of it.”

Derek said suddenly, “I wish we could see the start of the thing. I think I’ll try and work up a bit, and then come down alongside it. Would you mind?”

I didn’t know who he was asking, but I said I wouldn’t mind, and Mr. Lloyd said he wouldn’t, although he didn’t think he had a hope, and Janey didn’t say anything. In fact, I minded more than somewhat because I had to choose whether to go with him or stay with the Lloyds.

I was a coward. I stayed. If Derek was going to do something awful, it was now clear to me that I wasn’t going to stop it. But at least I wouldn’t know anything about it.

He went, and we stood with the crowd and looked at the steep incline before us, edged with tall, balconied houses, down which the procession would come. It would come down into the square, and folding back on itself, would march through the arch into the empty guardroom before us, and turn left, through the Portal and down the ramp to the town. After that, the long threading of streets to the Vara de Rey, the circumnavigation of the Monument, and back and up through the Dalt Vila again. The thought made my legs ache: I looked at those glassy rounds of scratched stone and thought of Johnson.

“Here it comes,” Mr. Lloyd said. And we looked up and saw the top of the slope crowded, in silence, with tall, faceless, peaked masks and torches, and smelt the incense, in silence, rolling down on our heads. Then a masked, barefooted man advanced alone down the path, his purple robe brushing the cobbles, a banner in purple and gold held high in his hands, and a double file of purple robed figures came silently after, linked hand to hand by a thin, swinging black cord. On their heads were the tall cones of purple I had seen with Johnson before, and purple hung over their features. In one hand, each carried a torch like a lily sheaf, and a priest in white walked between them, moving from side to side, encouraging.

They came down the long path in silence, and padding round, turned their backs on us all and marched steadily through the arch, past the gallery, and left through the other arch leading to the low town. At the entrance they slowed for a moment, and you could hear, from the changed quality of sound outside and below the high walls, that the crowds out there had seen them. Then they resumed their slow, swinging pace and continued, and we turned to the high slope again and watched to see the file of penitents end and what was to follow.

Although only half my mind was thinking about the procession, I remembered it afterward with fantastic clarity. Of course, the setting was fabulous, and whatever anyone says, I am hung up on creepy processions. I remember the heave in the curry when behind all the wagging, thin peaks a red glow appeared, which turned out to be a little float, carried on four penitents’ shoulders, with a figure of Christ knee-deep in candles and greenery, with whopping Victorian lamp brackets at every corner. The penitents were coming down a bit warily, clacking along with kind of walking sticks to fix under the litter when the weight got too much. They came down the hill without stopping and turned through the arch, the guard space, and the other arch and disappeared, going steadily out of sight. Janey said, “Ooo look. White ones,” and the crowd behind us swayed and pushed us forward, so that we had to redress our line.

The white penitents wore layers of coarse snowy-white cloth, white peaks and masks, with big red crosses sewn over their bosoms. They had red crosses, too, on the plastic lanterns which they carried on long, thick, white poles. Behind them was another blaze of flowers and light: a float with the Madonna and Son, filled with red carnations and arum lilies, with pink plastic foam thoughtfully bound on the poles to save the shoulders of the sailor boys carrying it, their navy caps slung round their backs. They were the first naked faces we’d seen since it started. I noticed Janey craning a bit.