Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (13 page)

For a moment, Johnson’s glasses were still. “Alone?” he said.

“Of course, alone. For goodness’ sake,” I said, my voice rising in spite of myself. “Austin and Gilmore and Clem are the only three boys I know who couldn’t have murdered my father.”

“It’s a sweeping claim,” Johnson said, “but I know what you mean. Unless they’re hunting in couples.”

“Oh, my Gawd,” I said wearily, and he laughed and poured me more wine and began to talk about other things.

Later, when we’d had ice-cold gazpacho, and paella with all the right things in it—squid and octopuses and chicken and lobster tails and paprika and sherry and peas and onion and pimento and pork, all done with saffron rice and shimmering in the quiet air—he took me out of the garden, between walls and through archways, up steps and along passages, climbing further and further until we came out at the highest point in the town, the little piazza of the Cathedral.

In spite of the time, the doors of the Cathedral were open. It was very small, with its high, square clock tower looking out over the flat sea and land far below, and the light from inside fell across the beaten pebbles and dirt of the little square, and the short old walls of the
curia
and the museum adjoining. A black lane led, Johnson said, to the castle now used as a barracks, and a big double green door to the episcopal palace. The wall was peeling, but the palm branches laced in the wrought-iron balconies were still fresh from Sunday.

The smell of Easter lilies and carnations came through the church door. “I can’t go in,” I said. “Can I?”

“I don’t see why not,” Johnson said gravely.

There was a scarf tucked in the neck of his tatty jersey: he hooked it undone and held it out.

It was silk, and Hermès, at nine guineas a whack. He was so ordinary, one forgot. I folded it over my hair and my shoulders and slipped in, keeping well to the wall. I didn’t expect Ibiza to see eye to eye with polythene.

It was only a little church, dim and Gothic, and filled with the smell of incense, wax, and massed Easter flowers. The altars were all draped in purple and the holy figures concealed. People were kneeling instead before a shrine decked like a bridal with carnations and lilies and roses, with candles and silk. No one looked up. We stood for a moment, looking at the dazzle of light, and then my eye caught something else in an alcove. “Look,” I said.

It was a hand litter, propped on two benches, bearing the Virgin, weeping, candelabra unlit at her feet. Her robes, of heavy velvet worked in gold thread were quite real, and the handkerchief she held in her hand was banded with gorgeous lace. There was a jeweled dagger stuck in her robe. “Are they going to carry that in the procession tomorrow?” I said.

“That and three or four others. Plus a cartload of flowers, a number of great whacking batteries and sundry cloaks, veils and robes with solid gold adjuncts. Or silver at least. Quite a load to carry down all these perpendicular lanes.”

“I didn’t know they wore clothes,” I said. “I mean, real ones. The stones in the dagger aren’t real, too, are they? What if somebody nicked them?”

“Up there, in full view of the worshipping throng?” Johnson said. “It’s not very likely. In any case, there’ll be someone here all through the night. The very best jewels will come out tomorrow, when the figures are finally dressed. People donate the stuff. Conscience money, maybe you’d say. In Seville, women lend jewelry, too. Sometimes the Madonnas wear hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds. But that’s Seville, not Ibiza. Ibiza’s only got the Saint Hubert.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “The Saint Hubert collar?”

“It’s on all the postcards,” Johnson said. “In fact, I thought we might see it here. It was left to the Church by a banker called Hubert, on condition it was worn by an effigy of his name saint alone. Wait a minute. Let’s try in there.”

“There” was through a couple of doorways and into a long, marble-flagged room at the back, with tattered notices directing traffic to the Cathedral museum. It was a robing room, clearly, with stacks of ancient old cupboards and a chest of drawers in black oak, labeled like an apothecary’s with the names of the owners: Canon Giménez, Canon Tamas, Canon Anton. Heavy, gold-embroidered vestments belonging to the top dog, I supposed, lay out on a table, beside a broken electric candle and a saucer containing a slice of dry bread and a lemon. Johnson went across to look at a dim painting done on cracked wood, which hung on the plain, whitewashed wall. I began to look at some postcards.

They were presumably for sale on less-exalted occasions. One was of the float with the Madonna we’d just seen inside. The other was of the Saint Hubert. “Strewth,” I said. “Madame Tussaud’s.”

In fact, Hubert, robed and bearded and mitred, looked rather a patsy, with one hand uplifted in classical blessing and the other parked on the head of a stag. The litter was huge, with lots of ormolu, candles, and frills and a sort of tree at each corner.

“Saint Hubert,” said Johnson. “You’ll see him tomorrow. Or are you going to Seville with Austin?”

“We haven’t settled it yet,” I said. I was thinking of something else. I said, “I’ve seen that collar somewhere before, do you know that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Johnson obligingly. “Where?”

The incense was making my head ache. I stood still and tried to think back. Then I remembered. “In the exhibition,” I said. “In Austin Mandleberg’s exhibition. Or no, it wasn’t. It was in the basement downstairs. I sneaked off to look at the workshop, and I didn’t take more than a glance, because someone turned up. Jorge, the old boy who works there. But I’m sure the necklace lying on one of the benches was exactly the same shape as that. Rubies?”

“Rubies,” said Johnson with interest.

“That’s it. They were red. I thought they were there for mending or cleaning.”

“No. The Saint Hubert rubies,” said Johnson thoughtfully, “are cleaned, they say, in Barcelona.”

“Oh. Then I must have been wrong,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” said Johnson. “Describe the room and the old man you saw in it.”

I did, and also Gregorio, the director. “He lives in the basement, I think. The rest of the staff seem to come in daily. Why do you want to know all this?” I asked. It was rather exciting. “D’you think someone’s pinched them?”

“Maybe. Or maybe even just made a copy. But it would be nice to know which. Do you think Mandleberg knows?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” I said. “Anyway, he’s been away for months and months: Janey checked when we were sleuthing. He really was in Paris when he said he was.”

“Then the staff of the Mandleberg gallery may be indulging in a fiddle without him,” said Johnson. “I wonder if Señor Gregorio believes in the power of prayer?”

“Why?” I said.

“Because I’d like to pay him a visit, and I’d like it even more if he were safely in church,” Johnson said. “But I’ll take you home first.”

I had nothing to lose, except a trip to Seville and Gibraltar. “I’ll come with you, if you’ll paint my picture on
Dolly
,” I said.

The black brows shot up. “Are you sure? I’m not wholesome at all.”

“I don’t want to
eat
you,” I said. “Just to get painted.”

He took my arm. “We may end up like your mother, phoning the Consul de S. M. Britanica, from jail.”

“She phoned the Consulado del Estados Unidos,” I said. “I’ll come. Will you paint me?”

We walked back through the church and out into the square. The moon was still there, and the leaves of the three little trees stirred in front of the lanterns, throwing flickering shade over the old, gray carved stone and worn steps and the tops of the trees in the small, dusty garden underneath. From the barracks unseen behind us, a faint beat of undistinguished pop music made itself heard, from some invisible transistor.

The view was fantastic. At our feet, the blocks of white houses stepped down into darkness. You could see the dim lights of the market and the few neon signs in the low town: a bank, a cinema, the red Philips shields. There was floodlighting near the harbor, and far out, the big aviation petrol installation blazed with blue flares. But elsewhere there was little. The new road to Talamanca, bridging the harbor, with its lights pooling the dust and the water. On the right, the dark spit of land dividing the bays, and the flashing beam of the lighthouse. On the left, the line of lights round the marina, ending in emerald green.

The country beyond was all dark with, here and there, the finest sprinkle of lights. Johnson said, “I drive a harder bargain than you do. I’ll paint you if you promise not to go to Seville or Gibraltar. Or anywhere else where Clem can’t keep an eye on you.”

“But Austin—”

The bifocals flashed in the lamplight. “Austin Mandleberg,” said Johnson pointedly, “I make no doubt belongs to Rotary, is head of the Lodge and chairman of the local hospital fund, loves his old mother, and is kind to little children and animals. Other people are not quite so pure-minded. I still want you under surveillance.”

I was struck. “Was that why you drove all the way from
Dolly
to Casa Mimosa when Clem phoned you?”

“Yes, it was,” said Johnson. He was smiling, but his voice was perfectly level. “I wanted Clem with your mother. For if Coco was murdered, it was because of something he knew, which he might have passed on to your mother.”

“But he didn’t,” I said. “He was threatening us about it when Dilling took him away.”

“So I am told,” Johnson said. “I’m also told that several people now know that Mrs. van Costa is Lady Forsey, your mother. Suppose then that your father was murdered also because of something inconvenient that he knew. Who is to know whether,” said Johnson, “your father told Lady Forsey the night that he died? And whether she in turn has told you?”

“She hasn’t,” I said.

“We’re talking about appearances, not what actually happened. Why did Derek come back?” said Johnson suddenly.

I smiled. “To see Janey,” I said.

Johnson took my arm again and walked me slowly down the steep slope. “You’re a rotten-bad liar. I happened to be in the Telégrafos y Correos office the day you sent off your cable. What made you think Derek might have killed off his father? Surely he had made a life of his own by now in Holland? It isn’t likely, you know.”

“You know,” I said, “too bloody much.”

He stopped. “Sarah. I don’t want another murder. Yours or anyone else’s. You don’t want scandal. I don’t want to be mixed up in an international incident. If it can solved quietly, let’s do it. But I can’t work in the dark.”

The lane was pebbly and steep, and you could almost touch the high, continuous buildings on each side with your two outspread hands. Even in the dark you could see they were fine houses, with crested stonework and heavy bossed doors and, lower, with deep sills filled with cactus and cages and flowers, and sometimes a high, rattan-roofed sunroom, with roses and creepers in round Moorish pots, spilling over in the glow from a lantern. Wire skeined the canyon below us, black against the near blue-black sky. The sound of a drumbeat, suddenly, just out of sight—Tuck. Tr-r-uck. T-r-ruck, tuck tuck, and Johnson abruptly broke off.

We had turned off the main passage by then and were plunging down something much more dicey: a broken lane bordered with dank, peeling houses, where the light hardly reached, except to pick out a sunken, barred window, a swaying curtain of reeds, a double door rotting in all its planks. Above us, the houses on each side suddenly joined forces, two stories high, and we entered a tunnel, utterly lightless—Johnson’s dry, warm hand gripping mine hard. Then the blackness became dimness, and we turned right and passed down between steps and walls and big buildings, the cobbles firmer and broad to the foot until we reached a wide flight of steps to the left, tumbling down against a high wall to what seemed a small square. Johnson took one step down, and I said “
Look
.”

They were passing through the small square far below: so silently that but for the drum I shouldn’t have seen them. They were roped together, in two long, thin lines: tall faceless men in long-sleeved black gowns sashed in purple, a crucifix glinting on each. Over each head was a long, slender cone sheathed in light purple which fell to the shoulders. Each nose was merely a cut triangle of cloth; each eyehole a circle of flesh. Drums glinted, with gold fringe and purple, and short bugles shone in the hand. But while we watched them, they were silent, picking their way up the difficult path, the tall spires swaying against the shadowed white walls, the shod feet and bare alike making no sound.

They passed. “The penitents,” Johnson said. “They will have carried their image round the low town and are now delivering it back. Does penitence frighten you? No, I’m sure. As I’ve said before, you’re too young.” He was leading me down the wide steps.

“I’m frightened,” I said. I hoped he’d forgotten.

He hadn’t. He stopped and said quietly, “So. Did Derek come to Ibiza before? Before your father died?”

I gave up. I needed help, and he was helping, more than anyone. I said, “Yes. Janey saw him. He came to see Daddy, and he had a quarrel with him on the Friday. That’s all he told me.”

“He didn’t tell you what the quarrel was about? Not your mother: he didn’t know evidently that she was here.”

“No.”

“What then? Not you: you go your own sweet way, or so the evidence tells me. Not money: he’s one of the technical salariat and doing very well, thank you. Some other aspect of his job? Was your father queering his pitch? Making a display of himself with people Derek thought mattered?”

He was quick. “It was because of his job,” I said, my eyes on the square. “He had found out his employers regarded Daddy as a bad security risk. They thought he was an enemy agent.”

“
What
?” said Johnson. “Oh Christ, my dear girl,” and he started laughing under his breath, so hard he had to take his bifocals off, and I looked at his eyes. I don’t know what color they were because the surprise was somehow so great. His eyes were tired. He said, “And what did your father say?” He had put the glasses back on.

“Derek didn’t tell me,” I said. “We sort of quarreled ourselves, and I walked out. I haven’t seen him since till tonight.”