Operation Nassau (30 page)

I sat down. I was no picture. My turban had stayed somehow in place, but my sunsuit was filthy with oil and salt water and sweat, and I had larded cream all over the sunburn on my arms and my shoulders and nose. I stared back at Johnson as he stood leaning there drinking his tea; and to my disgnst a pricking sensation made itself felt behind my puncta lacrimalia. I controlled myself and said, stiffly, ‘We’ve missed the barbecue, I’m afraid.’

‘We rather did down the National Morbidity Survey as well,’ Johnson said. ’Didn’t we?’

He put down his cup, and twitching a tissue out of its holder leaned forward and wiped the surplus cream off my nose. Then he sat down beside me in the same suave and damnable silence, and putting up his two hands like a milliner, straightened the turban over my naked crop of tufted black hair. And like a child, a schoolgirl, a nurse under reprimand, I burst into tears. Into, I discerned distantly some moments later, the creased bosom of Johnson’s beach shirt.

He made no remarks, but merely patted me on the back with one hand and produced a concatenation of tissues with the other until the worst of the outburst was over; and it took a long time. I can’t remember ever crying like that. I suppose I had, some time, when I was a child. Eventually I wiped my eyes for the last time and blew my nose for the last time and lifted my head and sat soggily up. ‘Post-operative reactions,’ I said in bleary apology.

‘Partly. But some post-MacRannoch reaction, I fancy, as well,’ Johnson said. He got up and, unlatching a locker, produced and began to pour two glasses of whisky. He held one out to me. ‘To Beltanno Douglas MacRannoch, human being. Don’t marry Mr Tiko.’ he said.

I took what he gave me and drank it. ‘Why not?’ I said. It was all very surprising, I suppose. Except that I had no emotions left to be surprised with.

‘I’ve done an Eysenck personality inventory on you both,’ Johnson said, and put his glass on a locker and held it. We were sailing hard, on the port track. Someone was sober, and working. ‘You wouldn’t suit.’

‘Whom would I suit?’ I said impatiently.

Johnson took a long drink and then leaned back and took off his glasses. ‘In a long life, I’ve heard that said in many ways, but never grimly,’ he said. ‘The answer, of course, is most people, however poorly supported by data to date. Most people, provided you let go of James Ulric MacRannoch.’

‘Let go of my father?’ I exclaimed.

‘That’s what I said. You know you’re the cause of his asthma?’

Nonsense. I was rather stiff, I recall, in my answer. My father has been hypersensitized against pollen, house dust, Aspergillus fumi-gatus, the wheat weevil, dandruff and budgerigars. Without me, he has quite enough to be going along with.

Johnson ignored me. ‘And he is the cause of your belligerent bachelor doctorhood. He said he wanted a line of baby MacRannochs. But you gave him what you thought he really wanted, didn’t you? You turned yourself into a son.’

It was a lie. It was none of his business. I would consider it later. I said, ‘Amateur psychiatry, Mr Johnson?’

‘And avoidance behaviour, Dr MacRannoch.’ said Johnson.

We stared at one another. My whisky, somehow, had almost got finished. ‘He’s going to marry the Begum,’ I said.

‘He would have married her years ago,’ said Johnson uncompromisingly, ‘if he’d got you off his hands.’

‘If I don’t marry Mr Tiko . . I don’t want to marry.’ I said.

‘You don’t need to marry. All you want are a few nice, meaningful, human relationships, like Krishtof Bey. Let me recommend a well-tried and traditional therapy. People.’

‘People are Harry,’ I said.

‘Well, Christ! You turned him off and disposed of the carcass,’ said Johnson. ‘And anyway, what’s the matter with him? He had his post-operative shock before the operation, that’s all. What do you expect? A world peopled with B. Douglas MacRannochs?’ He paused. ‘I suppose you can get it, if you opt out and go for research. We’re all the same in ash weight of bones.’

I had a splitting headache, but I wasn’t going to stand for that kind of nonsense. ‘Some people,’ I said, ‘prefer pure thought to the painful vacuity of ill-considered social exchanges.’

I was rather pleased with that. Johnson sat down on the bed.

‘Now you mention it,’ he said, ‘that’s why I took off my glasses.’

And putting his two hands hard on my shoulders, he kissed me.

It was an extremely nice kiss. It didn’t go on quite as long as Krishtof Bey’s, nor was it unpleasant or torrid. Half-way through he shifted his grip so that the leverage was better; and since he had wiped off my cream, I didn’t have to worry what he did with my nose. At the end, he drew off and said, ‘You’ve been practising. Can I have afters?’

If I hadn’t been scarlet with sunburn I suppose I would have been flushed up to the eyes. He kissed me again, briefly, and then sat grinning maliciously at me and holding my hands.

Believe it or not, I had forgotten that tape-recorder on Crab. I even returned the smile, gasping a little. ‘I thought I should remind you,’ said Johnson frankly. ‘Anyway, everyone else seems to have had a ball, barring perhaps Mr Tiko. What was all that stuff again about painful vacuity?’

‘And pure thought,’ I said.

‘And pure thought. For some people, yes, Beltanno.’

‘But not for me?’

‘You haven’t had a pure thought since you were born,’ said Johnson cheerfully. ‘You’re a mixture of horrible complexes, and you know it. But underneath that freeze-dried exterior lies a splendid unprogrammed community known as Beltanno B. Loving.’

Outside the door, Trotter’s voice called from the cockpit, and we heard him go forward, and the rush of Spry’s feet. ‘We’re back,’ said Johnson. ‘Back from danger: back from isolation: back into the great big world. Are you sorry?’

‘Are you?’ I said. Until that moment, I had forgotten.

He said, ‘It’s my chosen profession. I’m sorry that this time it seems to have co-opted yourself, but don’t let it fret you. One more day will see the whole business finished, provided we can keep Harry quiet. Can we keep Harry quiet?’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘How? Will you bring the police over? Will they tell you who did all these things?’

Johnson got up. He collected my glass and his own, and putting them both in their slots, relatched the locker and put on his bifocal glasses. They flashed at me under the skylight: familiar, anonymous, unreadable. He said, ‘No need. I know who did all these things. I’ve known, actually, for a fairly long time.’

Johnson may have thought he had spotted the culprit, but he refused blandly to drop even a hint. It was beneath me to argue. But I wanted to.

The green Daimler convertible was waiting for us when we landed on Crab Island, and we laid Harry in it and made for the barbecue, which was half over, as it had taken us all afternoon to tack south against that misguided wind. Spry had given us something to eat and we had all had more whisky. Trotter and Johnson quarrelled all the way to the house over whether to call the police forthwith or give Edgecombe twenty-four hours to try and deal with it.

I didn’t blame Trotter for wanting to broadcast his recent perils to the horrified ears of officialdom. Someone had tried to blow up a boatload of people, including me, and I thought it was time he was found and led away firmly in handcuffs. I can’t imagine therefore why I argued on Johnson’s side.

Not that it made a great deal of difference, since we couldn’t say who Johnson was. We arrived, and all we had got Trotter to promise was to give Edgecombe a hearing before informing the London Times, the British Minister for Defence and the University of Miami’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. The assumption, of course, was that Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe was still alive; but we couldn’t appear to question that either.

All the same, when we drew up at the steps of the castle and Johnson made his way up to the doors with Harry folded over his shoulder, I found it hard to disguise my uneasiness. Behind us, strains of stereo music and laughter came from the beach and the gardens and there were a lot of flushed-out flamingoes snaking moodily over the pathways and lawns. Then we followed Johnson inside, and the Begum’s butler came into the hall, and Johnson said, ‘Another casualty, I’m afraid, but not a serious one: just a bump on the head. Do you have a bed he could rest on?’ And as houseboys appeared and removed Harry, dangling limply from his second injection, Johnson added, ‘Tell me, how is Sir Bartholomew?’

The Begum’s permanent staff were white, discreet, and formidably efficient. ‘Sir Bartholomew is remarkably well, sir, considering,” said the Begum’s butler. ‘He’s still in his room resting, but the nurse was quite pleased with him, so she said. I believe he is to come down for dinner.’ He paused. ‘I’m quite sure he’s awake, sir, if you wish to visit him. Miss Violet has been with him for most of the afternoon.’

Miss Violet, I thought, has-probably saved his life. But I didn’t say so.

She was just leaving as we reached Edgecombe’s room. She looked just the same except that she wore a net snood with a bow instead of the floppy white hat. Her make-up was impeccable. She asked us, I remember, how many fish we had caught, and Johnson said we had disposed of it all to a factory ship. Neither of them smiled.

Inside, Edgecombe was looking better, lying in bed with a book beside him and his bandaged arm laid stiffly beside it. Johnson and Trotter found two chairs and sat down, talking, and I shut the door and went to perch on the bed. Johnson stopped discussing fish and said, ‘Bart. We want your advice. After you left, someone made a bonus effort to detonate
Dolly
. We know it’s aimed at you; we know the whole thing is classified, but Sergeant Trotter here thinks perfectly rightly that we can’t keep this to ourselves any longer. This time, we might all have been killed: next time we may be less lucky.’ He paused. ‘Trotter wants to call the police right away. I’m willing to give you twenty-four hours to cover your tracks, or call in your superiors, or whatever you do in your dream world. Then I think really we shall have to take action.’

He had struck, I observed, just the right note of uneasy officiousness. He was, of course, buying time: preventing Trotter and Harry from making the whole business instantly public. I hoped Edgecombe was well enough to appreciate it.

‘My God,’ said Edgecombe blankly. He looked from me to Johnson and Trotter. He said, ‘I wanted to come back, but Brady was so damned insistent...’ He broke off and repeated, ‘My God, I’ve been lying here thinking, if they haven’t come back there can’t be anything wrong, because I’m not on board. How did it happen? Hell, how could it happen when I wasn’t there?’

We managed to raise his temperature a couple of points before we left him, which made me a little arbitrary with Johnson: I put both men out and stayed behind to administer a mild dose of quinol-barbitone. Then I sat beside Edgecombe until he stopped apologizing. Between them, he and Johnson had persuaded Trotter to let them have their precious twenty-four hours, although I didn’t see what they were going to do with it. Find out who set off
Haven
maybe, although I thought it unlikely. Wait for another attack on Bart Edgecombe, perhaps? Edgecombe grinned when I suggested it to him.

‘I expect so,’ he said. ‘But in the nature of a controlled experiment next time, I think. Johnson will tell me. Meanwhile within these four walls I’m all right. No hatches; no hidden doors: plenty of microphones, a radio transmitter and an extremely strong lock on the door. You’re the one, poor girl, who’s had all the danger. I should think you’ll look back on all this as the weirdest two weeks of your life.’ He leaned back drowsily, his hair ruffled, and took my hand as it lay on the coverlet. ‘Are you falling for Johnson?’

‘Good heavens,’ I said. ‘What makes you think so?’

‘People do,’ Edgecombe said. ‘Because he likes to surprise them.’

I smiled, professionally. ‘Doctors aren’t easily surprised.’ After a moment I said, ‘What sort of people?’

‘His wife,’ said Edgecombe gently, ‘for one.’

He was, in many ways, a feminine man. He would have made a good general practitioner. He understood women. He had understood Denise.

Unlike Johnson, who appeared feminine, and wasn’t. I said, without much of a pause, ‘I wish it would finish. He says he knows who it is, but he won’t tell.’

‘I wonder if he does,’ Edgecombe said.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Johnson might have been bluffing. I said, ‘It was Brady who loaded the
Haven
. And Brady who made sure he escaped before
Dolly
blew up. It was Brady who was there on the golf-course when your wife . . .’

I broke off. This wasn’t the treatment he needed. But he answered me as I got to my feet. ‘So your guess would be Brady? But wasn’t it risky for him to be on board
Dolly
at all? What if my accident hadn’t happened? What if you hadn’t insisted on sending me back in the launch?’

‘He would have made an excuse, surely,’ I suggested. ‘A pain; an urgent appointment. But for Trotter and Johnson, none of us would have survived to check it.’

‘Then what about Trotter?’ said Edgecombe.

‘Trotter?’ I stared at him, I remember. That exhausted, obstinate sun-blistered little man in the ratlines, conning us through all the shallows. The steadfast swimmer on the end of a cable, dragging himself on to that live bomb of a boat.

‘It was Trotter who caused the death of the waiter, or so Johnson said. At the water-tower.’

I said, ‘But for Sergeant Trotter we shouldn’t be alive. Any of us.’

‘Of course,’ said Edgecombe. ‘He had to save his own skin. But for all you know, he may have been quite as anxious as Brady to take that launch back from
Dolly
, or to create a chance to leave you all and get back to Crab Island. Maybe Brady spoiled his plan, that was all.’

I was silent. It was not as easy as I had imagined.

‘Or it might have been Krishtof Bey,’ said Edgecombe sleepily. ‘Who stayed behind and risked nothing at all. I rather like the idea of Krishtof Bey. That young man is by no means the romantic egoist that he seems.’ He looked at me and smiled, his eyes heavy. ‘Poor Beltanno. Surrounded by decent young men, and you daren’t choose, do you? In case one of them is a very nasty young man indeed.’