Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (26 page)

The electric fibers on the wall panel shivered. The used coffee cups littered the tables, between the skyphoi and the kylikes and the psykters. The tobacco smoke, lightly veiling the ridgepole, dropped again like Jupiter’s shower in search of a virgin. Johnson, rolling slowly to starboard, produced from one hip a small square of dark gelatin. “I did,” he said. “This was what they all wanted.”

Even Maurice, I recall, straightened like an elderly spring and sat bolt upright, his cigar charring the bedcover. The rest of us stood up, jumped, or, like Charles and me, merely craned forward. “What?” Innes said. Below the pale hair and the bruises his eyes were shining like dome screw covers. “What is it? Have you seen an enlargement?”

“Yes,” said Johnson. He sat back as he had done all along, his pipe in one hand, and held the film like a fag in the other. “You have to see it through an enlarger. That’s why Sophia didn’t know she had the wrong thing until she got it into the Capri Observatory. This is the stuff Innes was after. The leaked data from the Palassio Institute.”

“
That
?” said Charles disbelievingly through my hair. In the heat from the tall marble fireplace his arm around me had sealed itself to my cardigan. Where we had been two, we were one. Where we had been at odds, we were at peace.

“Yes, that,” said Johnson lightly. “You’re a photographer. You know how much they can cram onto one frame of movie film. Look.” He held it up to the light. “You can see the pages on it. Like miniature postage stamps.”

“May I see?” said Charles, and, loosing me, crossed stiffly to Johnson. Bending, he took the film and held it, in his turn, against the light.

“You can’t distinguish it,” Johnson explained patiently. “To do that, you need an enlarger.”

“I know,” said Charles, and taking his hand from the lamplight he walked across to the fire and dropped the film, steadily and defiantly, into the flames.

Innes gripped his wrist as it fell. A second later Jacko, crying aloud, was on his knees beside him. I heard Maurice grunt and Timothy gasp and saw Professor Hathaway, the pouches deepening under her eyes, clasp her hands on the arms of the chair till the knuckles stood out like plaster beading.

As the film frizzled into gas, I sat and watched it and, unlike the others, had no impulse to move. Nor did Johnson.

Charles said, “I couldn’t let you. It’s the only evidence that Sophia was mixed up in it. I was engaged to her once.” He looked as if he hadn’t had any stuffed pork in Parassio, or any food at all for a very long time.

“It doesn’t matter,” Johnson said. Unlike the others he hadn’t even flushed with excitement: on his dark skin his bruises stood out like shadow cretonne on a chesterfield. Charles looked at him, and then at me, his mouth wry, his eyes appealing. He said, “She was a silly little cow. Always listened to the wrong people. I take it you will want to arrest both of us now.”

“Should we?” said Johnson.

Charles straightened and Innes released him. Jacko got up. Timothy, his kind face puzzled, was looking from Charles to Johnson and then, appealingly, back to Johnson again. Charles said, his voice tired and level and very final, “I had nothing to do with it. I suppose Sophia had. But what it was, she never told me.”

“Then you have nothing to fear, have you?” said Johnson with equal gentleness. Charles looked at me and dropped suddenly on the arm of my chair.

“Poor dear,” said Timothy, who had begun pouring out brandies. I saw Innes looking at the time. Maurice followed his glance and said, rather accusingly, to Johnson, “Aren’t you arresting anybody?”

“Who would you suggest?” said Johnson. His pipe, between his teeth, was giving him trouble. I recalled that, until pushed, Maurice had kept his counsel about the complicity of Di and Sophia with all the chivalry due to his station. But Lenny had gone after Di with his blessing, and I felt sure the wires from Naples to the British Embassy, one way or another, had been humming.

“Well, there are a few little questions,” said Maurice. Professor Hathaway glanced at the circling eyes of the blackamoor clock and took a brandy; Charles and Jacko were already sipping theirs. “Such as, where did Sophia find the negative she showed with such disgust to Diana on Capri?”

“Surely you guessed that,” said Johnson. He finished drawing his bonfire with a matchbox, laid the box down, took the pipe out of his mouth and said, staring into the bowl, “Of course, it was in Ruth’s borrowed wristwatch.”

I could feel, around my shoulders, Charles’s arm slacken with astonishment. The veil of smoke lifted as a number of people breathed heavily into it and then dropped again. Innes said, “Of course. Ruth’s wristwatch, which you made her give Sophia. Presumably,” he added crossly, “you had already substituted a worthless film for the Palassio one?”

“On the journey to Lipari. Professor Hathaway kindly gave Ruth phenobarbitone in the course of the evening. You tried to take her watch yourself just before breakfast, you may remember. Not to mention… Innes,” said Johnson severely, “I did take exception to your making the poor girl swim about in her evening dress.”

“It was Di who shouldered me in,” I said rather colorlessly. They had all wanted the watch. I hadn’t quite realized it at the time. I hadn’t realized it until Sophia snatched at my wrist by the swimming pool.

Maurice said, “How fascinating it all is. Have I grasped it? At the Fall Fair, Diana receives the nuclear film in the Baedeker. It is then placed in Ruth’s wristwatch from which Innes, Di and Sophia successively attempt to remove it, not knowing that Johnson has already done so. The intention, one might suppose, was that Ruth should deliver the film to some other party, presumably in the Villa San Michele at three p.m. yesterday. But Ruth, poor dear, does not appear to know she is to deliver the watch to anybody, or that the contents of the watch have been tampered with. On the contrary, she goes so far as to allow Sophia to sink her teeth into her ear, an episode of unforgettable pageantry, in order to protect it. Therefore Ruth is an unwitting courier. Who, I wonder, was the Institute’s nuclear film intended for?”

“Sophia, of course. Don’t be so script-minded, Maurice,” said Professor Hathaway. “She ought to have had it, no doubt, the weekend Ruth and Jacko were to have spent down in Naples; I expect the San Michele rendezvous on the twentieth was a holding date, in case anything went wrong. In fact Sophia went into action, as we know, long before the twentieth.”

“Premise accepted,” said Maurice blandly. “Then, second question. Who placed the nuclear film in Ruth’s borrowed wristwatch?”

Charles took his arm from behind me and put his brandy glass down. His hand, I noticed, was perfectly steady. “The film wasn’t put into Ruth’s watch,” he said. “It was put into the watch while I still had it.” He turned to me. “I told you I saw Sophia in Naples? And that she wanted her presents returned?”

I nodded.

Charles said, “I made up my mind to take them. She knew I was coming with you and Jacko to visit the hill post that Saturday. I knew I should be able to find her, either in Naples or in Capri. Ruth, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but there was no point in dragging it all up. I was on my way to finish with her, and I’d never have seen her again. So on Friday I put on the watch, to take it to Naples.”

“The Friday you were arrested,” said Johnson.

“Yes. Then Ruth discovered hers was cracked and, God help me, I gave her Sophia’s to put on. I remember getting a kick out of it. Through no fault of mine, I wasn’t going to have to see Sophia again. And instead of going back to Sophia, my girl was wearing her bloody timepiece.”

His voice split and he drank some brandy quickly. Innes said, lucidly, “Then when and by whom do you consider the nuclear negative was inserted?”

“By Di,” said Charles. “I’ve worked it out. While we were with the police after the balloon cart business on the Thursday, Di left Rome and went back to Jacko. The watch was in my digs. There was nothing to stop her from opening it.”

Everyone except Maurice and Professor Hathaway looked at Jacko, who blushed and went a shadowy white behind his mustaches. He said, “That could be right. I don’t know when she actually got back from Rome. I was out having a bite to eat when she said she rang me. She came around to the Dome a bit later.”

“For a photographic session?” asked Professor Hathaway.

There was a lurid silence during which the disinterment of criminal nastinesses was replaced by the auguries of professional disaster. Jacko thought deeply, rapidly and wistfully and answered, “Yes.”

“Ah. Of Diana, in various traditional attitudes,” said Professor Hathaway, gazing at him through the pebble spectacles with the mesmeric firmness of one about to pin back the ears of a multitude. “Of course,” said the Director of the Trust, glancing to the wan form slumped in thought on her left, “Doctor Wye had torn up all your pictures.”

I wondered through what grapevine she had learned that, and decided it was probably Johnson. Recollections of Poppy, smothered in Johnson’s three-ply Geelong underwear made me reach, in a sophisticated way, for Charles’s nearest hand. He let me take it and then squeezed mine, at intervals, in between allowing Timothy to give him more brandy. Professor Hathaway said, “You have no idea, James, what a wide audience your studies of Diana have been reaching. Chile. Germany. Pretoria. Egypt. Okayama. Argentina. Zelenchukskaya even; or so I am told. Does it embarrass you?”

It embarrassed me, I can tell you. I looked from Professor Hathaway to Jacko with my brain wheezing. I said, “They went to other observatories?”

“From the Zodiac Trust,” said Professor Hathaway mildly. “In exchange for other material
from
them. You wouldn’t expect astronomers to have such a lively interest, would you, in earthly bodies? But they apparently did. Every now and then, from among a pile of plates arriving or departing for comparison or specialist reduction, there would slip out a disconcerting picture which would find rapid cover without, of course, being reported to the head of the observatory. And that, as it happens, was only one method of exchange employed by these extraordinary persons.

“You must be aware, James,” said Professor Hathaway, tipping the ash from her Manikin, “that in the worldwide network of observatories, there exists a ready-made system of communication which lends itself to a number of telling abuses. Who would put a flawed photographic plate through an enlarger? Yet they are sent to the center for reduction with the good plates, and who knows what microprints they may not incorporate in some hazy corner? Astronomers are excellent photographers. And if they cannot doctor the plates, there is always the parcel of undeveloped plates which passes periodically from one place to another without fear of broaching by customs. And if that fails, there are Jacko’s pictures and their like: good harmless fun which causes no more than a giggle if they fall into the wrong hands and would never, in a sporting profession, be reported to the authorities. Maurice?”

“I am listening,” said Maurice. “Agog.”

Narrowing her eyes above the belching tip of her half-consumed Manikin, Professor Hathaway groped with both hands through her large tapestry handbag and handed something to Maurice. “Perhaps,” she said, “you haven’t yet seen one of James’s productions.”

It was a picture of Di: an old one, in which she was wearing a fringed outfit someone had brought her from Cairo. I recognized it upside down as Maurice studied it at arm’s length on the four-poster. I said, without thinking, “He’s altered her necklace.”

I saw Jacko go slowly scarlet at the same moment as I felt the tide of red rising over my own neck and face. Charles, rigid beside me, was staring at Jacko.

“The necklace — Ruth is right — is certainly the most interesting part of the photograph,” said Lilian Hathaway calmly. “In fact, I found it so interesting that I decided to share my interest with Johnson. He is here because I asked him to come here. Pass around the photograph.”

No one spoke as it went around. Everyone looked at the necklace, and avoided looking at anyone else. Very few of them looked at her face; the smart, beautiful, likable face we had been friends with.

“You said,” said Professor Hathaway, “that the necklace had been changed. It had, in a very alarming way. Each of these circles, which once contained round clear stones of a pale character, is now filled with approximately four manuscript pages of classified material. The photograph arrived at the Trust from this station a month ago. The person who received it has been under observation. More pictures were to go, I am sure, with the packet due to go off ten days ago. Unfortunately, Jacko’s pictures were destroyed and I appeared, to supervise the rest of the packing. That was why it was decided to entrust the rest of the information to Sophia.”

“To send from Capri?” said Innes. “Through her network of communications?”

“Of course. She was already suborned when she worked at the Trust. She only left when her place was taken by another.”

Johnson had lied to me. Jacko stood up. He said, “Wait a minute.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” said Johnson coolly. “Are you going to try and convince us you knew nothing about this?”

The fire roared up the chimney, dark red behind the gauzy curtains of tobacco. A trickle of sweat, hovering over my neck, suddenly made a cold dash down my back. I shivered and sought in vain around my hip for a handkerchief. A clean one appeared before me, which I recognized as Timothy’s. Timothy said, “Maurice. I think it is bedtime.”

Maurice smiled. “What? Before the last murder? Timothy,” he said, “you have no soul in the matter of exits.”

“You said,” said Johnson to Jacko, “that you could defend yourself.”

“Dear boy,” said Maurice regretfully. “I always said your hobbies would lead you into nothing but trouble. Much better stick to stump work, like Timothy.”

“I also prefer stump work,” said Professor Hathaway, surveying him, “but I doubt if any court would accept it as a character reference. You understand, James, that it is the connection between the Minicucci family and the Zodiac Trust which is exercising us. Prince Minicucci, we are led to understand, was the head of a select organization which dealt in the exchange of illegally acquired information, whether military or industrial. In this he made use of his daughter and of people like Sophia, I make no doubt, and Mr. Paladrini. But information has been coming from this observatory and elsewhere into the Zodiac Trust since Sophia left us. We are left to wonder therefore who is responsible.”