Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (15 page)

He wasn’t there, so I scouted off (in the Maserati) to find him. I hadn’t expected Janey to be very forthcoming about the exchanges between Derek and herself last night, and she wasn’t. No one said anything about spying, and I thought it very unlikely Derek had unburdened himself to that extent. He had told her that he had come back briefly, for a personal talk with his father, and that was all, she said, that he had mentioned. Then when he caught sight of Mummy last night, he went off like a rocket, because, Janey assumed, Daddy had said nothing about the primary purpose of the Ibiza exercise being to allow the stagey bitch and the old drunken cadger to get together again. Although she didn’t put it quite like that at the time.

With all that had happened, the spying story seemed to me to become less and less likely. It was much more possible that somehow, Daddy had stumbled on the funny business with the rubies, and someone had made sure he wouldn’t give them away. In which case, Derek was surely quite innocent, and might even, in his ignorance, know something involving Jorge and Gregorio. The nuisance was that I couldn’t imagine Gregorio manhandling another man onto the back of that horse. And for Jorge, it would have been quite impossible.

Coco could have, of course. I played with the idea that Coco might have been in league with Jorge and Gregorio and might have killed Daddy because he found out about the collar, summoning me out of sheer ill-will in order to confront me with Mummy and confuse the issue still more by making her presence public.

If that were so, it was quite on the cards that Jorge or Gregorio had something to do with his death. On an impulse, I passed Derek’s hotel, and parking the car in the Avenida General Franco, walked up through the Dalt Vila to Austin Mandleberg’s gallery.

An old, sallow-faced woman in black was whitewashing the walls with a long-handled brush dipped in a bucket. When she saw I meant to say more than good morning, she set the brush down, wiping her hands on her apron, and gave me a long story. It was in the local thick accent, and I couldn’t make out a word. After a bit, I said, “Momentito,” and embarked on my own tale: Señor Mandleberg had been taken ill—not seriously, Señora—and was safely in the Casa Veñets with Señor Lloyd, where he was being nursed back to health. Any urgent messages to go to Señor Lloyd. This was the address; this the telephone number; could I see Señor Gregorio?

Only then, making a great effort to speak clearly with all ten fingers, did she manage to convey a few, shattering facts. Señor Gregorio was not at home last night. His bed had not been slept in, and no clothes were missing. Also, although the three young men had arrived, Jorge was missing also, and the chica of the house where he boarded said he also had been out all last night. Meanwhile, who was to open the gallery? Receive the visitors? Conduct the shop?

I told her to close everything and tell the three men to go home: Señor Austin would come later and make his arrangements. It was possible, I said, that he knew all about Jorge and Señor Gregorio; we hadn’t wished to disturb him this morning to ask him. I left her standing, her gnarled hands clasped and her deep-set eyes smiling gratefully under the gray, scraped-back hair. She was probably aged about thirty.

I got to the big silver teléfonos kiosk on the Vara de Rey and rang Janey. After a bit, Mr. Lloyd came to the phone. I told him again what had happened and waited. I wasn’t going to inform the police and get everyone excited if there was nothing to get excited about. On the other hand, there had been two deaths already, and if there were going to be any more, I didn’t want them on my conscience. After a bit Janey’s father said hang on and he’d try and see Austin.

I hung on, feeding the phone rows of pesetas, until finally he came back and said better do nothing. “Gregorio might have come back,” I said. “He might have found the rubies gone and guessed he’d been found out and got off the island?”

“It had occurred to me,” said Janey’s father, who had, I was discovering, several irritating habits of a tycoon. “And since there are only two ways of leaving the island, you may leave that side of the inquiry to me. If they have gone, it is perhaps the best thing that could happen.”

“Poor Austin,” I said. “No director.”

“If the man was a criminal, I hardly think Austin will be any worse off,” Mr. Lloyd said. “I am obliged to you for calling, Sarah. I trust we shall soon see the end of the matter.”

I don’t know how tycoons get to be tycoons. I came out of the phone box, shoveling pesetas thoughtfully into my handbag, and found my way blocked by Mummy.

“Hello, darling,” she said. “I saw you in the phone box; you could hold a dance in it, couldn’t you? Do you know where Derek is?”

She wore a pale blue tunic with trousers and a silver chain, and her urchin cut was brushed down and her eyelashes cropped. At the curb was a Humber Imperial. It must have been at least thirty years old. I guessed the soap-opera star had either locked up the sports car or she had crashed it, and this was the best the island hire service could afford in the style she demanded. No Seats for Mummy; I said, “At his hotel, I should think. Have you been there?”

She shook her head. “He isn’t. And he hasn’t left for the airport. He ordered a packed lunch and went off after breakfast; he said to queue for a bus. What are you doing?”

“Looking for Derek,” I said. “We may as well join forces. Would you rather be cool in the Maserati?”

“It is rather dashing,” said Mummy, looking it over with approval. “I don’t know if Dilling can drive a Maserati. But Clem, I’m sure, does.”

“Clem?” I said.

“My bodyguard,” explained Mummy. “When Mr. Johnson phoned, he insisted. Never less than two able-bodied males, in full-time attendance. If someone had just said that to me,” said Mummy, “around thirty years earlier.”

I looked through the front picture window of the Imperial and waved. Clem’s face, shiny with sweat, grinned modestly back. Mummy made beckoning gestures. “Come and join us,” she said; and we all piled into the Maserati. I put my dark glasses on again and gave Dilling the wheel.

It was a nice tour. We did the bus queues first, and then went out at random on the San Antonio road, clutching a badly printed timetable which Mummy insisted on reading, changing from her dark glasses to her long-distance glasses to her reading glasses with extreme rapidity and with a non-stop flow of comment.

It turned out, to my surprise, to be quite a sensible choice. There were about eight different services out of Ibiza, but they nearly all left before breakfast, or not until lunch. There was one for Santa Eulalia at 9:30 A.M., but I’d passed it myself, by the grace of God, and Derek wasn’t on it. But the buses for San Antonio left every hour. I looked, with a certain respect, at my mother. Considering she had been up all the night with doctors and police and undertakers, she looked remarkably fresh. Coco’s nearest relative, she said, was a sugar planter in Trinidad who was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and how nice to think of all that money going to a good cause.

“What money?” I said.

“The money from his posthumous works, dear,” said Mummy. “You know how values rocket on death. And he was a good poet.”

“You’d better watch no one pinches the bull-rushes,” said Clem, and chortled but briefly, out of respect for the dead. Mummy took him up and we went right on talking. It turned out she thought the Plymouth Brethren was the name of a hot trumpet combo on Radio Luxembourg. Dilling put her right. In the middle, we saw a bus in the distance, and chased it, but it turned out to be full of Spaniards staring at Mummy. Derek wasn’t in San Antonio either. We crawled up and down streets and then sat under the trees on the seafront, and I had a fizzy stone ginger, without seeing a whisker. Then we piled in the Maserati and set off back, on the round trip through San José.

“We shan’t find him,” I said. The general support and hilarity were making me incautious. “He’ll be with Jorge and Gregorio.”

“Who?” said Mummy.

There was no harm in telling that story. Mummy was in no position to spread slanderous rumors, and Clem was on Johnson’s side anyway. I related the tale of the rubies.

“Why?” said Mummy, at the end. “Did he hope to sell them as real?”

“He couldn’t do that: they were too well known. And they were bad copies anyway,” I said. “No, our guess was that they were meant to replace the real ones somehow, while the genuine collar was stolen and sold.”

“I thought they kept them in the bank,” Clem remarked. “Or is there a vault in the church or something?”

“I think they’re kept in the bank. Somewhere safe anyway,” I said, “eleven months of the year. The only time they come out—”

“Is in the holy processions. Of course,” said Mummy, delighted. “The night procession of penitents. They must have planned to take the real ones—”

“Today,” I said. I’d heard Johnson work it all out. “Tonight is the great procession, and they go back to be locked up right after. Just think of it. Someone was going to have Asprey luggage this summer. And now he’s got to run for his life.”

“Suppose Gregorio turns up and says he knows nothing about it?” said Clem. “You haven’t much proof. It might have been Mandleberg.”

“Well, hardly,” I said. “He wasn’t even there. And tell me how he could have a false safe not only made but put in, without Jorge or Gregorio knowing? He wouldn’t even have known he had been burgled, if Mr. Lloyd hadn’t rushed down with a gun.”

“What about Tony Lloyd then?” said Mummy. “Maybe he was directing this man Gregorio in Mr. Mandleberg’s absence. That would explain why the two men haven’t turned up. Maybe he spent the morning quietly getting them out of the country.”

I must say the thought had been in my mind too. I said, “The only thing is, he hardly needs the money, you’d think. He runs half the foreign commerce in southern Spain already. And I don’t suppose even these rubies, broken down from their mounts, would give more than, what, twelve thousand, eighteen thousand pounds?”

“It isn’t much,” Mummy agreed. “But it mounts up, honey, you know. Maybe that’s just how he got to run half the trade on the coast. It sure helps grease the wheels.”

I said, “The thing is, do you think Daddy found out? Do you think that’s why he was killed, not the other thing? And do you think Derek might know it?”

She took off her glasses. Inside the rings of horsehair I could see that her eyes after all were bloodshot and a good deal less than fresh after her violent night. “My darling girl, I don’t know,” said Mummy. “For all I can detect behind the nut cutlets, Derek might be preparing to pinch the rubies himself.”

“That,” said Clement firmly, “is nonsense, Lady Forsey. Apart from anything else, how could Derek possibly organize a thing like that from a large firm in Holland? He’s probably never even heard of the rubies.”

But he had. Janey had phoned him last night. Although we didn’t know that, of course, when we spotted Derek at the cross-roads to the airport, with one foot on a bicycle. Mr. Lloyd’s Buick was standing beside him.

Clem saw them first and got Dilling to draw in behind them; while I explained to Mummy who Mr. Lloyd was.

“I know, honey. You told me,” she said. “The gentleman with a gun who tried to blow apart your Mr. Johnson. If you would bring him, I’d like to meet your Mr. Johnson someday.”

“His fees are a thousand guineas and over,” I said coldly. Mummy is pathological about being painted. She has been done in forms tachist, surrealist and cubist, in paint, wax, mud and gravel. Someone even sculpted her once in Scotch cheddar, and she kept it until the microbes had chinchilla earmuffs and the housekeeper fainted.

She tapped me on the neck with her reading glasses as we got out. “Don’t be old-fashioned: no one uses money nowadays,” she said. “You arrange payment in kind.”

“That’s all right,” I said rather nastily. “You’ve got lots of kind.”

“And you keep yours for special occasions. Let’s see,” said Mummy, “who gets painted first? Dear Derek. Whoever would have thought of a push-bike?”

I put on my dark glasses. Derek would have thought of a push-bike. If he didn’t want to be followed. We piled out and walked over to join them.

Derek stood quite still and glared, but Mr. Lloyd waved when he saw me. He was evidently alone in the Buick. I introduced Mrs. van Costa and Clem, and he gave a quick look at the pale blue trouser suit and the chains and kissed Mummy’s hand. He said to her, “I don’t know how much you know…?”

“I know it all, pretty well, I guess,” said Mummy. “Sarah here has been telling me. But what brings you out here?”

Derek said, “We think we’ve found what happened to Jorge and Gregorio.”

The subsystem logic flip-flops were working. Since Janey phoned, he’d been on the track of Jorge and Gregorio all night. Gregorio had gone to church and then had visited the house of some friends, which he had left about three in the morning, since when no one had seen him at all. At Jorge’s lodgings, Derek had discovered that a man had called for Jorge in the early hours of the morning with an urgent message from Mr. Mandleberg. Jorge had dressed and gone out, and had been seen no more.

“It wasn’t Austin,” I said. “He was flat out and besides, there was someone with him until at least three o’clock.”

Clem said, “There is a third person in the ruby thing, then. Do you think, Derek, this is why your father was killed?”

“I’m sure of it,” Derek said plainly.

Mr. Lloyd said, “It’s the first I’ve heard of this theory, but I’ll tell you my end. The airport clerks tell me neither Jorge nor Gregorio has flown out. The
Compostela
left Ibiza for Barcelona at four o’clock yesterday, so they weren’t on that. The steamer people know them both well and say likewise that they haven’t sailed on anything else: they haven’t bought tickets, and they couldn’t have slipped on board unseen. Now the airport and the docks are alerted; they won’t get out either way. And I imagine, now they know the game’s up, it’s very important to them and to the unknown third man that they do get out. And there are only two ways they could do it. One is by private boat, and I’ve checked that no one put out after 2
a.m.
this morning in a boat likely to make landfall anywhere else. In fact, only one large boat did leave the island very early this morning, with a crew list we can’t check.”