Operation Nassau (35 page)

It was not a mistake that Trotter, the sergeant-major, would make. Edgecombe rose before him, the perfect target; and from where I sprawled by the rear of the car I saw Trotter’s hand raise the gun.

I still think I could have stopped him. I know that I put all the strength that I had behind the spring that would take me round the car and drag his gun arm away as he fired.

Johnson stopped me. He flung me sideways with a sudden, swift violence that deprived me of breath, and then pinned me there, gasping and helpless, by the rear wheel of the car.

And so Trotter raised his gun unimpeded, and fired; and a black hole sprang like a coin between Edgecombe’s eyes before he fell slowly sideways and dead, on to the perfect mown grass.

Johnson pulled me away from the car just as Trotter vaulted into the seat and turned on the ignition. He looked round as he put her into gear: I think he saw us all behind him. He must have known the road would be ambushed; the boat gone. But he was an obstinate man. He put off the brake and shot forwards just as Johnson, aiming deliberately, shot him twice through the head.

The car crossed the road under its own momentum, hit the verge and turned over twice. It lay several seconds, wheels spinning, before the explosion burst it apart and the fire, rosily flickering, revealed us all to each other. Tiny Tim and hot chestnuts and Christmas. Flameproof your nightwear. Flameproof your relationships. No one is ever what he seems.

Krishtof Bey jumped down from his golf-cart and Wallace Brady, carrying Krishtof’s rifle, stepped out from the passenger seat of the same cart and bent over the dead body of Edgecombe. I watched them without understanding and almost without interest. Cars drew up and all the persons who had been waiting inert about us had suddenly become very busy. A water-cart arrived and someone began to play hoses on the half-consumed car. I wondered if it was the boy in the red shirt and the fancy straw hat. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea.

A large, closed Buick slid up beside me and Johnson, emerging from a talking cluster of men, took my arm and said, ‘Get in, Beltanno. Spry will take you to
Dolly
and it won’t be long before you’re safe on Crab Island with James Ulric and the Begum. I’ll be there as soon as I can get away.’ He looked at me, and then said, ‘Wait a bit.’

He had a flask of whisky, what else, in his pocket. I watched him pour it and took the cup, remembering the three stiff ones he had poured in Bart Edgecombe’s house, and why I drank it, and he took the cup back. ‘Good girl. Explanations later,’ said Johnson. ‘But you were a magnificent doctor bird. The undoubted backbone or vertebral column of the whole bloody exercise.’

I didn’t say anything. I saw Wallace Brady look over, but I didn’t want to say anything to him either. I got into the car and sat stiffly in it as Spry drove me away from the noise and the light into the warm, airy darkness. A faint hissing came to my ears: the sea, clouded by the night spray of all the myriads of sprinklers, grooming the greens for the next championship match. Who had won - Mr Tiko, perhaps. No one else.

It wasn’t until the car stopped moving that I realized we were at the quay where
Dolly
’s speedboat was lying. The Begum and James Ulric were already on Crab Island, he said. Mr Tiko would be there soon, I supposed. And Krishtof and Wallace Brady. Or were they part of the plot too? Were even Johnson and
Dolly
what they seemed? Did anyone know?

Or perhaps they all knew, except me. The backbone of the whole scheme, he had called me. The dupe. The laughing-stock, the bartered bride, the cropped dummy, the fall guy.

Spry was holding open the door.

I said, ‘No. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go to Crab Island. I want to go straight back to Nassau. There must be plenty of planes leaving, with all this upheaval. Do you think you could take me instead to the airport?’

I thought he would stall me, or try to make some objection, but he didn’t. He took me straight to the airport, and I was in a plane and heading for Nassau inside an hour.

Even from the air you could see it all: the criss-crossing beams of the cars, and the spiralling light and smoke from the dying bonfire of Trotter’s wrecked car. Then the little plane heeled round and flew off, leaving Great Harbour Cay and its golf-course lying behind on the dark sea.

I had to work a month’s notice in the United Commonwealth Hospital, and no one bothered me during that time, although I had two calls from James Ulric asking me if I was all right, and Mr Tiko rang once to say that he had been called back to New York but wished me to know that he would be happy to accede to whatever plans I wished to make for the future. I thanked him, and said that I would write to him presently. I found I was glad, if surprised, that Johnson hadn’t killed him as well. He wrote back that perhaps he would meet me at the MacRannoch Gathering.

Perhaps.

I worked very hard at my job. Perhaps a holiday was what I had needed. Or perhaps it was energy released by the act of resignation. It had pleased my father, even when I informed him that in future I proposed to draw on our joint account. He had never wanted me to work. He had only wanted me to become married. And so I might have, if I had never met Johnson.

I didn’t ask him about the outcome on Great Harbour Cay, and there was nothing of moment in the Nassau Guardian, only the heading Edgecombe Rites Monday and a large, respectful obituary on Sir Bartholomew, fatally wounded while grappling with an Army deserter in his Great Harbour Cay garden. There was a brief recapitulation of Lady Edgecombe’s recent tragic demise. I read them both sketchily and stopped thinking about it again.

I took a week-end trip to New York and bought some clothes and went to a theatre and had a large Bossa Nova in the interval, which was a mistake, as it made me think of Miami all over again. Next day I wore my dark glasses in hospital, but no one commented adversely.

I had never found the hospital atmosphere so clear and so pleasant as it had been this last month. Perhaps because they knew I was leaving. Perhaps because of my wig? My C.M.O. took me out to lunch and unfolded two risqué jokes and a long account of how he had always wanted to be a veterinary surgeon while I had two Yellowberries without noticeable effect. I was getting used to them. I was getting used to everything except being utilized and being ignored.

My father rang up for the third time and said the Begum wanted to know if she could get married, and I said, Ask Johnson. He said Johnson had gone away, and what was it to do with him anyway? It was too complicated to explain, so I rang off.

It was two days later, operating day, when I got home to be met by Daffodil at the door, and the smell of pipe smoke curling round from the hallway. A gentleman had called in to see me. A Mr—

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Good evening, Mr Johnson.’

He was standing in my father’s sitting-room in a crumpled shirt and tie, evidently put on in my honour, and a serious look round the bifocals, saying nothing at all. I uttered a few common-place bromides while Daffodil closed the door and walked with reluctance away from the keyhole. Johnson said, ‘I apologize for coming along uninvited, but I knew you wouldn’t see me if I telephoned. The Begum tells me I have made an impression midway between Mussolini and a Chubb T.D.R. safe. I am here to adjust my image. You weren’t expected to suffer all that without a word of decent explanation.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I got the dose without the anti-depression pill. It was my own fault for leaving so quickly.’ I didn’t ask him to sit down.

‘You were seen,’ said Johnson gravely, ‘drinking Yellowberries. But if you don’t want to listen, I’m not going to pressure you. The other reason I came was to carry out a commission.’ He glanced at the wall. ‘I’ve been asked to leave you a painting.’

I walked two steps in and looked where he nodded. A square artist’s canvas, unframed, had been propped between the floor and the wall. Out of it, cheerful and enigmatic, gazed the dark face of Krishtof Bey, his hands clasped below at his knees.

‘With the sitter’s compliments,’ Johnson said. ‘I was also to convey to you Wallace Brady’s competitive love, and James Ulric wants to know if you’ve married that little buff Wop yet.’

‘Nip,’ I said automatically. I stared from Johnson’s bifocals to Krishtof Bey’s large eyes with their shameless false lashes. There was no doubt at all. He was a fiendishly good painter. I said, ‘You are a bloody Mussolini.’

‘It’s a lie,’ he said calmly.

‘I ought to turn you out. I don’t want any more dirt on my hands. I don’t want to hear -’

‘You do;’ said Johnson. ‘You want to know why Wallace Brady isn’t in prison and you want to know if Krishtof Bey is married or not.’

‘He isn’t,’ I said. ‘I looked him up in Who’s Who.’

There was an attentive movement of the bifocals. ‘You don’t mean the Begum’s folio edition?’ Johnson said. ‘You should try an up-to-date one. You’ve missed half his love-life. I don’t suppose it said a word about my six children.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But it mentioned Judith Cicely Ballantyne.’

The bifocals remained completely impassive. ‘The daughter,’ he said, ‘of perhaps the most famous Russian spy the world has ever known, Igor Vasily Balinski. She married me on Kremlin orders to extirpate all my secrets, and when the truth came out later, we shot each other. They gave her a Soviet State funeral. Her aim had always been poor.’

We stared at one another, on the heels of this farrago. Whatever other precepts I had hurled out of the window, I could still respect privacy. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Sit down. What will you drink?’

He remained standing. He said thoughtfully, ‘Why should you suppose that had any truth in it?’

Ever since I had met him here in this house, the night he had taken me sailing on
Dolly
, he had been deceiving me. He must have been. Hardly anything he told me during all those subsequent days had been truthful. Why then should I believe that his wife was dead, and that he had loved her? He wanted me to listen, and sympathetically. He had made sure that I would.

I thought about it, standing there with the cap of the Haig bottle unscrewed in my hand. It wasn’t hard, once I did think about it. ‘I believe you,’ I said, ‘because I watched you shoot those two men on the golf-course.’

He said, ‘I only shot one.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You took Edgecombe’s life. It only happened to be Trotter who fired the bullet that killed him.’

Johnson moved. He removed the cap from my fingers and taking up the bottle of whisky, he set out two glasses and poured. ‘If you will allow me,’ he said. The lower lenses perched, two bald Chads, on the edge of his glass as he lifted it, unsmiling, to toast me. He said, ‘To the Scottish teaching hospitals and all they produce.’

I let him drink, and sit down, and put his whisky on the table beside him before I asked the question I had forbidden myself until now even to think about. ‘All the time,’ I said, ‘from the beginning, that day in the airport - who was trying to kill Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe?’

I thought I was ready for anything. I thought no answer he could give would surprise me. Instead he said, ‘You’ve had a month of worry, haven’t you, Beltanno? That was what I had been hoping to save you. You see, no one was trying to kill Bartholomew Edgecombe. You were only intended to believe someone was.’

‘Playacting?’ I said helpfully. I wondered if he expected me to believe him this time as well. I said, ‘The arsenic at the airport? The further dose on the plane? Pentecost’s attempt at the Bamboo Conch Club? The attempts to warn me off there and in New York and at Coral Harbour? The attack on me at Miami and the disappearance of your luggage and mine before my notes vanished on Crab Island? Denise’s death? The attempt to blow up Edgecombe on
Dolly
? The grenade someone threw at his car here that night?

‘No one was trying to kill Bart Edgecombe, were they?’ I said with some forgivable sarcasm. ‘Except that someone did kill him, and you did nothing at all to prevent him.’

‘We had an industrious week or two, didn’t we?’ said Johnson, his eyebrows raised, his glasses filled with mild contemplation. ‘You and the Mighty Leveller, raking together a scratch and dent sale. Of course I did nothing to stop Bart Edgecombe’s murder that evening. I’d just spent twenty-four hours organizing the whole bloody opera. I couldn’t kill Edgecombe myself: the Royal Academy wouldn’t be happy. Trotter had to do it.’

‘He hated both you and Edgecombe,’ I said slowly. ‘Trotter’s plan misfired at the Bamboo Conch Club, but he made sure you wouldn’t catch that waiter, or that if you did, the waiter wouldn’t live to confess. He could have caused all the disasters on
Dolly
, expecting to make some excuse to disembark before
Haven
struck her. He saved our lives, but only because he had to save his own. And on the golf-course that night, you fell to his bullet.’

‘You’ve killed him,’
Edgecombe had shouted at Trotter.
‘You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead.’

‘I dare say you thought so,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘It looked like it from every angle but mine. Trotter aimed into the bushes where we both were, but he was actually shooting at Edgecombe. And Edgecombe, who was expecting it, was tough and quick and above all, a splendid opportunist. He ducked when he saw Trotter lift his revolver and, turning, took his own sights. When Trotter fired, Edgecombe fired as well. Of course he thought I was dead. He had just shot me himself, as I looked at him, full in the chest.’

God bless the drip-dry titanium underwear. I said, ‘He might have chosen your head.’

Johnson said, ‘I tried not to give him the chance. But it was a risk that had to be taken.’

I knew my voice had gone flat. I said, ‘You expected Sir Bartholomew some time to turn on you? Your own colleague and agent?’

He smiled a little, nursing his whisky, but his glasses were bleak as the North Sea in the deepening dusk. He said, ‘Edgecombe and I were on opposite sides from the moment I landed in Nassau. He was a double agent, Beltanno: a man being paid by and cheating both sides. We suspected it, but his other employers had found out for certain. They offered him his life on one condition only. That in return, he delivered them mine.’