Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (7 page)

“Yes, again,” I hissed at him, and switched the lights on. The hall and staircase were flooded with light. A rush of footsteps coming down the marble stairs came to a halt and then the steps changed direction and receded in great leaping strides upward.

Jacko said, “Christ, you were right,” and took two bounds toward the foot of the stairs. Then he slowed down and said, “We’ve got him. He can’t get out. You phone the police and stay by the door. I’ll go up after him.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He may be armed. He could hurt you. I’ll phone the villa.” Then I thought and said, “Jacko. He could get out on the cupola.”

It has been done. Every now and then the dome sticks, and the workmen get up there and fix it. From there, the climb down to the ground isn’t impossible. Jacko said, “Hell,” and then, “All right. I’ll follow him upstairs. You go outside and watch, and yell if you see him.”

Upstairs, silence had fallen. I said, “I don’t think he’s gone up the iron stairs. I think he’s in one of the middle rooms, Jacko. Then if I go out and you go to the top, he can open the door here and walk out of it. We’ll stay together. We’ll go upstairs together and search every room till we get him. For example…”

The lights went out.

“For example,” I said, “that’s one reason why he’s on the middle landing. He’s in the developing room.”

It was like the repeat of a nightmare, only worse because there were only two of us. We didn’t run anymore. We walked up the stairs side by side, with our torches searching the landing, but our quarry was one step ahead of us. Before we reached the door of the developing room we heard footsteps ringing on the spiral iron stair just above us, and the door to the telescope banged. A pang for my exposure blipped through the high-performance funk in six colorways which was gripping me: I switched off my torch and Jacko, from years of sheer bloody brainwashing, did the same.

So we crashed through the door at the top of the stairs into darkness, and didn’t even stop to wonder why our intruder hadn’t paused to slide down the bench shelf that would bar it. The telescope loomed in its dome and the segment of sky, frosty with stars, twinkled behind it. Beside it was the lattice giraffe of the Eli Hoist Company of Philadelphia, with something solid and moving within it. A man was climbing the crane jib.

I cried aloud. Jacko didn’t waste time on utterance. He jumped for the steps and caught the spring with the dome switch and pressed it.

There was a grinding roar and, above us, the slice of cold sky began dwindling. The roof of the dome was rolling shut on its ratchets.

The intruder realized it too. I have never seen a man move so quickly. He went up the crane like a lizard, one arm outflung to catch the spring switch and reverse it. Jacko jumped off the steps and dashed forward.

I had a better idea. I hopped with one foot on the ladder and raced it across the full width of the dome floor to jam him.

I was never to get there. Just in front of the telescope the floor disappeared altogether. The stepladder dropped into nothing and threw me, and we went through the hole in the floorboards together.

I have always had little use for screaming ladies.

I was screaming that time without knowing it. I screeched as I fell through the trapdoor, and screamed again as one leg of the steps struck and trapped me.

Everything stopped. The ladder stopped, jammed half through the opening. And I stopped, entangled in slippery alloy, and dangled there with a drop of three stories beneath me.

I heard Jacko’s footsteps racing over, and had enough sense to yell, “Mind the
trapdoor
!” Then he arrived and plunged to his knees by my shoulders. He got one tough, cold hand around my wrist and he gripped it, while he tried to pull my limbs free with the other. The polished metal swung and slithered on the edge of the trap, and juddered and clanged with every move of my body. I got my second arm free. Then the hinges closed and the ladder slid through the opening, dragging my legs and my bruised body with it.

Jacko grabbed my other hand and tumbled backward. There was a jangle of metal; a pause; and an almighty crash from the base of the building. Jacko and I, in a shivering heap by the hole, lay and listened to it.

“
Dear Mr. Frazer
,” said Jacko, in a trembling voice. “
Owing to an unfortunate accident, I am writing to requisition one new collapsible aluminum stepladder
…”

“Dear Jacko,” I said. “Owing to an unfortunate accident, you were nearly writing to requisition a new collapsible female colleague.” His mustache, not by accident, was moving toward me and we had a long and satisfactory kiss. Then he said, “I suppose the bastard’s got away,” and helped me to struggle up, panting. That is the realistic, not to say sensible, streak in J. Middleton.

The bastard had, of course, got away, and not out of the dome ceiling either. As I fell through the trap, he must have nipped down the crane and fled past us. From that moment on, it was simple. While Jacko was hauling me out, a colliery band could have marched down the stairs to the front door, playing Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary if they knew it. When we had redeemed my plate and capped and clamped the 50-Inch for the night and retired to the kitchen for two therapeutic mugs of black coffee, we had reached a few shaky conclusions.

The intruder must have had a key to the front door.

He must be familiar with the dome, to know about the trapdoor used for silvering.

Since imagination boggled at the idea that two men could be impelled to visit us, it seemed likely that this burglar was the same as the previous one. That is, the survivor of the two from the Villa Borghese.

In which case, what had he wanted? More pictures?

“Couldn’t be,” said Jacko. “He’d smashed Charles’s camera. In any case, if he’s clever enough to get hold of a key, he’s clever enough to find out that Charles has been in Naples and hasn’t developed any pictures here recently.”

“Then what?” I said.

“Let’s search,” said Jacko. “Then let’s call the police. That lark with the trapdoor wasn’t burglary. That, dearie, is what they call obsolescence planning. We’re in deep, and we’re not going to get any deeper.”

I didn’t say anything, but I helped him search. Nothing was out of place and nothing, so far as we could see, had been taken. We flooded the building with light, even to the sacred precincts of the dome, and all we found were the chips and scars from the fall of the steps, and the spray of castors and screw nails and hinges strewn about the ground floor by the wreckage. We began to clear it up.

It was then that Jacko said, “Hullo?” and I went over to look.

He was holding up a key. “Look what I found in the shovel. Middleton’s deviant filing system. I knew I’d dropped it somewhere.”

I toured my sweeping brush around a few boxes. “Keep going. You should find my entire nervous system down here somewhere. And what gold-plated coffer did that sacred key open?”

“Fort Knox,” said Jacko, “is quite safe from me. It’s the key to the plate store. The damn thing is empty in any case.”

“Give,” I said.

He stood holding the key. “You don’t trust me.”

“You’re quite right I don’t,” I said, and caught it as he chucked it over. “And while we’re about it, what about my key for the front door?”

“What, now?” he said.

“Bloody now,” I said. He had saved my life but at that moment his lack of grip on the subject of keys had got on my nerves. I pocketed the new key he delved for and gave me, and then trudged pointedly upstairs to put the other key where it belonged. I said, over my shoulder, “How many new front door keys are there?”

“Yours and mine,” Jacko said, gazing upward. “One to Innes, for breakfast; one to Maurice because he paid the locksmith. You could defrost that thing while you’re about it.”

I forbore to say that that was precisely my errand. I walked into the stockroom, which we had searched in some detail already.

We kept our store of plates in the largest deepfreeze on the market, which happened to be an immovable tank of a meat safe. Stocks are run-down at the end of the season, and the last plates transferred to the fridge.

Once empty, the freezer is switched off and promptly defrosted. If, that is, you haven’t mislaid the means to unlock it.

I introduced Jacko’s key into the lock, turned it, and dragged the big freezer door fully open.

Inside, the safe was not empty. Inside, picked, packed, freeze-dried and dead as a cod steak in batter, lay the second man from the Villa Borghese.

Your photograph is faded now

The rose you picked me, flat and sere

Your love-notes faint

Your violin still

And gone the bliss of yesteryear.

We did not dream then, you and I

As hand in hand we trod Life’s way

That here that warm and loving heart

Would lie so chill (—18° C) in death today.

“So, Scotch-killed side in the meat safe. If you were in Wyoming, you could have a Wyoming steak fry,” said Maurice next morning. “You’re not a prude, darling?”

“She’s not a prude,” said Johnson firmly. “But she doesn’t want to start her morning watching you get out of the bath either. Shut the door.”

“She could do worse,” Maurice said, his voice echoing comfortably from among all the verde antico and clouds of bath oil.

He emerged, draped like Lucullus in terry bath sheet, and settling himself on his pillows said briskly, “Hostess corner, Timothy. Five coffees please, and nothing exciting on the sugar. This is our morning for being practical. Now, Ruth dear. Now, Jacko. Tell Maurice everything.”

It had been my idea, after a long and heated discussion with Jacko, to telephone Johnson from the Dome at first light that morning. And it had been my misfortune that the voice from the villa which answered had been Maurice’s. Stonewalling an eminent and inquisitive playwright who wants to know why you are telephoning his house guest at seven in the morning is not very easy. In the end Jacko simply took the phone from my fingers and told him. As he pointed out to me afterward, it was up to Maurice after all to decide what you did with a corpse in your meat safe. It was his house and his Dome and he was the permanent resident. Then we spoke to Johnson, and here we all were, in Maurice’s bedroom. The Pope, Johnson said, had canceled his sitting that morning.

“He probably had a Message,” said Maurice. “You must be quite, quite careful, you know. You can upset the balance of nature. A definite
implosion
of corpses.”

“Two,” said Jacko succinctly. He looked terrible, and he had had four more hours’ sleep than I had. We had never been in Maurice’s bedroom before. It was decorated like a carpeted tent, with a twelve-foot four-poster bed covered with the Rape of Persephone in petit point. The tables were crowded with skyphoi and kylikes and psykters and there was a bronze figure of a warrior in prayer, standing life-size by the drawn curtains: like the Romans, Maurice thought daylight unhealthy. Apart from the loot there were five modern works of art, one of which was plugged into an electric outlet on the baseboard. “You like it?” said Maurice who had earned his living, after all, by observing his fellows.

It consisted of a panel of hardwood, thickly furred with fragile wire filaments. Timothy brought in the coffee and the wires shivered like dogs in the eddy. Then the door shut and the wires went on slowly twitching, individually and erratically, first in one quarter of the work and then in another. ‘My eyes jumped about, trying to catch them at it. Maurice said, “Your coffee, darling. And was your second friend headless as well?”

“He’d been shot,” I said shortly. “A little, round hole through the temple.”

“And out again?” Johnson said. The filaments twitched.

“And out again,” Jacko confirmed. “And the wound wasn’t blackened, so we know he was shot from a distance.”

“Well, of course he was,” said Maurice. “He was shot when he was running away from the Dome four days ago after wrecking poor Charles’s camera… You have, I take it, settled your doctrinal differences with Charles?”

I stared at Johnson and the bifocal glasses stared back at me blandly, lightly steamed up with coffee. Since my phone call Maurice had been brought up to date, it seemed, in the Dome’s affairs. I said, “Yes.”

“And since the dead man was frozen quite solid,” continued Maurice, selecting a cigar and preparing to light it, “he couldn’t be your second intruder, particularly as the meat safe had been locked and the key lost ever since the first break-in. How convenient, by the way.”

Timothy, Johnson and I all looked at Jacko, who went beige under his coiffure and said, “Lovely; but don’t forget, I found it again.”

“Naturally,” said Maurice, leaning back and blowing long, expensive smoke rings among the festoons of his canopy. “Your ally had failed to extract the body and sooner or later the meat safe would be forced open for defrosting. Better divert suspicion from yourself immediately.”

“Except,” said Johnson, “that Jacko could have removed the body during any one of his duty spells with no trouble at all. Don’t be provoking.”

Jacko’s face began to return to its normal color. “If I can’t be provoking, I’m not going to play,” said Maurice happily. “Timothy, ring up the police.”

Coffeepot in hand, Timothy looked at him. “You know what will happen. Television cameras. Reporters.”

Maurice breathed out cigar smoke, coughing, and glared at him. “Sunk in oblivion, neglected, dragging out my meager existence in this stinking backwater, does it matter that the world has forgotten Maurice Frazer? It shall be reminded!”

“You can’t do it,” Timothy said, frowning. “You have two drinks parties, a Discussion Group at the British Council and dinner with the Marchese already.”

“On the other hand,” said Johnson gently, “there is a body to explain away. Who shot our friend from the Villa Borghese and why? Who took the key, and who returned it? Ruth?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My head ached. “The murderer, I suppose, took the key, and came back last night to remove and dispose of the body.” I looked toward Jacko for help. “Then he must have dropped it. When he bent over the trapdoor in the dome, it must have slipped from his pocket. We found it below, in the wreckage. Jacko?”

“Check,” said Jacko. “Let’s call in the television cameras.”

“You heard,” said Johnson. “Maurice is busy today. Then who was the murderer?”

Inspiration visited me. “Of course. The
balloon man
!” I exclaimed.

Everyone, it appeared, knew about Mr. Paladrini and our chase up the Corso. There was a ripple of animation. “Except,” said Johnson, “that one wonders how Mr. Paladrini was able to find his way about the Dome. Even to locating a trapdoor in darkness?”

“And,” said Maurice, smiling bewitchingly, “to possessing a new key to open the front door with, my darlings.”

“You had a key, Maurice,” I said. “Who did you lend it to?”

Not a hair in the white mink was disturbed. Smiling, Maurice gently applauded me, the cigar notched with grace in one finger, and said, “No one. But then, I can’t shoot. Italians can’t shoot either. They come here every Sunday, poor dears with their elephant guns and the sparrows go
berserk
, but marksmanship, no. On the other hand…”

“Yes?” said Johnson. He had an envelope on his knee and was doing little sketches of Maurice with a red ball-point pen: as I watched he gave him a cloud, a harp, a pair of wings and a halo.

“Astronomers are perfectly unbelievable shots,” said Maurice fondly. “All that work with the cross wires. I tell you. Take Ruth or Jacko or that other young man with the machinery to any rifle range and I guarantee you. Two shots out of three straight into the gold. Or the temple. I can’t of course speak with any certainty about Digham. But photography, I should have thought, needed
the
most accurate eye. I thought you sent for him?”

“I did,” said Johnson. I was beginning to change my mind, too, about Johnson. I had appealed to him that morning as to an ally. And since then, it seemed to me, he had taken altogether too much upon himself and his nasty bifocals. I said coldly, “He’s probably out shooting Landrace Cutters with a submachine gun.”

“Don’t be bitter, dear,” Maurice said. “Why shouldn’t it have been Charles on the Dome roof last night? He knows the observatory better than most. It was his camera, if I remember rightly, that our frozen friend wrecked. Might he not have been a little carried away the other night outside the Dome and shot him?”

“He might,” said Johnson. “Except that he hadn’t a key to the Dome. Neither had Ruth. And according to both Ruth and Jacko, a key was used to open the Dome door this evening. The lock hasn’t been marked or splintered or in any way forced.” He paused and then said, “In any case, there is something we are all forgetting. Whoever entered the observatory last night opened that trapdoor deliberately, with the intention of killing either Ruth or Jacko, or both. It was only thanks to Jacko in fact that Ruth survived…”

The wall panel twitched. Maurice suddenly ground out his cigar and said, “Yes. Then who else had a key?”

“Innes,” said Timothy dulcetly. He laid an arm along the back of Johnson’s chair and gazed at his drawing. “I emptied his pockets last night: keys make such a difficult bulge and you can’t ask
too
much of bespoke work. Maurice, he’s got you exactly. And all those clouds, like my chintzy hop pillows. Maurice thinks I’m a fusspot, but I swear they make me sleep like a baby.”

“Like Innes,” said Jacko.

“Oh, well,” said Timothy. “He was knocked out, you know. One had to try to revive him with
something.‘’‘’

“Aftershave lotion,” I said this time.

“Yes,” said Timothy. “Silly me.”

Johnson contemplated his drawing and then, detaching the page, proceeded to fashion it into a splendidly contoured paper dart. “And do you think,” he said, “that Innes, resuscitated from his aftershave, could have nipped about climbing cranes yesterday evening?”

“No,” said Timothy with regret. He opened his palms as Johnson launched the dart in a graceful parabola near him. The dart sailed past him and landed on Maurice’s bedcover. Johnson’s hand, at the extremity of its sweep, brushed the coffeepot and a full cup, poised just beyond it, tilted and emptied its contents against Maurice’s artistic wall.

There was a flash of flame, a barking report and a wisp of smoke traveled lazily up to the putti. The thicket of filaments, arrested in mid-twitch, hung on the wall, inanimate as the corpse in the freezer.
Make a wall happy this weekend
. Johnson said, “Oh dear. What have I done?”

There was a little silence. Then, “Made your point,” said Maurice dryly. “Or do I mistake a subtle gesture of reproach when I see one? Take a note, Timothy: a telephone call to the electrician. Also, I think Lord Digham is trying to enter the room.”

I got up and sat down again. It was true. The door had opened and Charles was standing there, his oldest cloak slung over his shoulders and, I suspected, his pajama top lurking underneath his scarf and sweater. He said, “Ruth?” and then, “Christ, I thought I’d never get in. I’ve been standing out there for fifteen bloody minutes, trying to get your bloody staff to knock on that door, Maurice. What do you need, the Keys of Saint Peter to get into the Throne Room?” He said to me, “Are you all right?”

I was used to urbanity. Not having urbanity was, I found, perfectly agreeable too. I said, “Yes, I’m all right. Why couldn’t you walk in yourself? Oh, Charles, of course. The Mouse Alarm?”

“The revolting noise,” said Charles, “that this former matinée idol in his dotage chooses to inflict on human beings because he is frightened of mice. I couldn’t get into the room. I couldn’t get anyone else to come in and tell you to switch the bloody thing off. All I know is that someone tried to kill Ruth in the Dome. What’s been happening?”

“Dear Charles,” said Maurice. “Matinée idol I may have been, but I don’t recall ever being reduced to using the word
bloody
three times in six sentences, even in someone else’s feeblest dialogue. If the noise offends you, why are you here entertaining us now?”

“Because it’s stopped,” said Charles. “It stopped this moment. Ruth? What happened?”

Maurice sat up. “You’ve wrecked my Mouse Alarm,” he said to Johnson.

But Johnson, rising, was leading Charles gently to a seat beside me. “I’ve wrecked his Mouse Alarm,” he said kindly. “It’s a long, long story and Ruth and Jacko will tell it. In the meantime —”

The telephone rang and Maurice snatched it up pettishly. He said, “Pronto?” and then held it out at arm’s length toward Johnson. “I wish,” he said, “that you would ask your friends
not
to telephone before lunchtime. It spoils my appetite.”

“For what?” said Charles dulcetly. The urbanity, I was sorry to see, was making a comeback. Johnson, on the telephone, was saying, “Oh? Where? No, but I’ll remember. What number? Right. Thank you.” He listened for a few moments longer and then said goodbye and hung up. We all looked at him.

“Well,” he said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re
going
?” said Maurice.

“It was the Pope,” suggested Jacko.

“Actually,” Johnson said, “it was a man who knows a man who had his photograph taken recently.”

He wasn’t looking at anybody, but I got up and walked over to him. “Mr. Paladrini? You’ve got Mr. Paladrini’s address? Charles, the man who sold the balloons at the zoo. We’re going to find him.”

“Why?” said Maurice’s voice baldly behind us. “If, of course, one may ask.”

It was a little difficult to recall why. I stared at Johnson and Johnson said cheerfully, “Because there was a message in the balloon Ruth received making a rendezvous of some kind at the Fall Fair. She got it clearly by accident, and didn’t even realize until later what it was. At any rate, we went to the Fall Fair and recognized the balloon trader in superior guise taking part in it. We chased him, and he ran away from us.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Maurice huffily. “And for no other reason you are going to call on this gentleman?”

“Well, for one other reason,” Johnson said. “The balloon may have been intended for one of the men from the Villa Borghese. It is, at least, a possible link with them. And anything which might lead to an explanation of what has happened so far in the Dome can’t be altogether a bad thing, I imagine. That is, unless you want to call in the police. Pacifists, vegetarians and anti-blood-sport enthusiasts, make your opinions known. I don’t like murders and I like nice girls like Ruth Russell, but we can all go home and finish our knitting if the majority verdict prefers it. Charles?”

“To hell with knitting,” said Charles. “I’ll come with you. But not Ruth. She’s had enough trouble.”

“You can’t come,” I said. “Charles, you have to retake all those pictures this morning.”

Charles stared at me. “I’m coming,” he said.

“I beg your pardon,” Johnson said mildly. “I’m not asking for volunteers, merely a vote of confidence. Jacko? Timothy? Maurice? Paladrini or policemen?”