Dolly and the Singing Bird (5 page)

“He won’t need to knock up
Dolly
,” Rupert was beginning in peeved astonishment when the snarl of an outboard interrupted him, and there was Johnson, eyebrows rampant and black hair sifted up by the gathering breeze. “Victoria, superchick, Cecil’s got a short in his starting motor and if you don’t get over fast, he’ll either be kippered or out of the race. Lenny, the engine. Madame Rossi, you’re going to be cold. Rupert, your troubles are solved. I’m going to lend you my worry-beads.”

In ten minutes we were under way. To Kenneth, and Rum.

I had never raced in a small boat before. I did not expect to be seasick. I did not expect, on the other hand, to enjoy it particularly. It could be said, in that way, to have exceeded all my expectations.

To begin with, almost before I had changed, the mainsail was raised, causing a great many draughts, and we had cast off our mooring and were under way down the Clyde Estuary to Gourock, where the starting-gun was firing already, at half-hourly intervals, for the departure of each class in the race.

Next there was a great rattling and the mizzen sail went up, causing me to arrive suddenly on the left wall of my cabin en suite with my four cases. It was clear now why Johnson appeared so unconcerned on finding them aboard after all. I was to play pontoon with them for the cruise.

When I hooked back my door, Johnson was alone at the tiller, perched above my head with his feet on the cockpit cushions, the face glassed-in this time by polaroid bifocals, in black. He was whistling. The rattling, the flapping and the calling had all stopped and
Dolly
was sliding along on one glossy white flank, her sunny canvases masking the sea. Around us the hills were bright green, and the blue water was spiked with sails, coloured and white, tilting slightly at odds, like unrehearsed bows in a
tutti
.

I sat down with my back to the saloon wall and my feet on Johnson’s Moroccan wool cushions, and suddenly from below there was a flood of soft music and Lenny appeared at my elbow with a mug of steam-flustered coffee and a ham sandwich, just cut. Johnson took one too and put it on deck, resting the tiller under his elbow. He did not turn his head much, but the dark glasses inclined towards the sails, the bow, the headland, the distant ribbon of small towns and at me. Continuing to contemplate me, “This,” said Johnson agreeably, “is just the commercial. The flip side’ll slay you.”

At the time, I was mildly amused.

The morning passed. I had my first experience of changing direction. On advice, I first retired to my cabin. Then Johnson observed, mildly, “Ready about, gentlemen,” and put the tiller down, and the boat came erect, sails flapping, while the bow began a big swing to the right. For a moment
Dolly
hesitated, and then the wind caught and filled her sails from the new side and turning, she heeled flat out on her right flank. While Lenny scampered about crouching on the foredeck and Rupert in the cockpit had his hands full of whipping white ropes, the two wooden booms holding the sails had swept across, as Johnson prophesied with some confidence that they would.

He and Rupert had ducked. I had no need, being pinned in my cabin by my four cases. It was Rupert who helped me up. “Bit inconvenient, don’t you find?” he said kindly. “You could always leave them on shore at Ardrishaig, and pick them up later… Oo, I say! That’s a bit hasty.”

He was gazing at my biggest case, which I had just swung into the cockpit and thence overboard.

“Why? It’s unpacked,” I replied. It was true. The contents of one I had managed to squeeze into my locker.

“But my God, it’s crocodile, isn’t it?” said Rupert, ululation, despite himself, in his voice.

It was. But, of course, it was also insured. I shrugged. “The other three perhaps
Symphonetta
might be persuaded to take for me.”

Rupert caught Johnson’s eye and started to laugh. “Persuade! Christ, Hennessy’s bearings’ll seize. Madame Rossi, you’re marvellous.”

“Tina,” I corrected him. Better be done with it.

“Rupert,” said Rupert.

“Johnson,” said Johnson, smartly. “Rupert, I don’t awfully want to go about again immediately, but I shall have to if you don’t let the mainsail out at the double.”

I crossed the cockpit and knelt, looking out to sea, on the cushions beside him. I was wearing Pucci trousers and Ma Griffe. “Johnson?” I said. “Just so? Like one’s gardener, or one’s clerk?”

“Or one’s President or one’s floor polish,” said Johnson, watching the main sheet reel out. “It’s my first name as well. Parents palsied, mentally and physically, by the happy event.”

“Johnson Johnson?” I really did not believe it.

“You’ll get used to it,” he replied.

The start of the race I am sure was exciting, but lunch (out of a tin, as Rupert said with disgust) consisted of partridge stuffed with Perigord truffles, preceded by a good Amontillado, and the Sauterne which followed put an end to my interest in nautical things. Assured that we had crossed the starting line, in the end, in reasonably good order, I retired to my cabin and slept.

I came out of sleep a long time later, very slowly. It was warm. I was lying on my back, being rocked softly from side to side, as if in a cradle. There was a sound of lapping water, like notes of music,
pizzicato
, with small agitated runs between. There was, all about and above, a stirring, a bumping, a minuscule groaning. I rolled over and out of the cabin and into the cockpit. We were becalmed.

We were all becalmed. Between green coast and distant green coast; from the far hills of Arran and the nearer hills of Cowal and Argyll to the Renfrewshire coast and the sandy beaches of the Cumbraes, the estuary lay deep as a mirror, scattered with the goosewings of yachts. Here were the red sails of
Binkie
, the patched striped spinnaker of
Seawolf
, the vast china-blue genoa, like some minatory, chiffon-draped Turandot, of
Symphonetta
, languishing with the larger sisters behind. We were all made equal by the absolute calm, and there was nothing to do.

“Hullo,” said Johnson’s voice. Rupert, at the tiller, was stripped to the waist and lying face down on the decking beside it, three-quarters asleep. Lenny, I could see forward, his back propped by the coachhouse while he made buggy-winkles. (That is what he said later.) Johnson, I now located, as he spoke, above my head on the roof of my cabin. He was half hidden by a small canvas, held erect on a strange device like a piano rack, which projected upwards from above my cabin door. On the deck beside him was a palette carrying paint and two pots of liquid, and beside him was a pile of white hogshair brushes. He was wearing his usual bifocal glasses and an open-necked shirt, and I noted that at least there was hair on his chest, unless it was a wig. I have known, since I began filming, wigs of every variety.

“Hullo,” said Johnson. “Happy days at the races. Christian, lock up the water.”

“Lock up the water if you like,” said Rupert’s voice, muffled. “So long as you don’t lock up anything else.”

“I got the last hint,” said Johnson. “But I still won’t ask a man to drink and drive. Lenny, an iced beer for Madame Rossi.”

“Not unless everyone joins me,” I said definitely. Rupert stirred.

“Rupert on iced beer is a sex maniac,” said Johnson.

“I like sex maniacs,” said I.

“In that case,” said Johnson, briskly, “we’ll all have one. Lenny…?”

And suddenly it happened that while I lay drinking my beer, he was painting me. He was talking about
Dolly;
and about what he called the therapy of small-boating.

Through the rough white stuff of the canvas, I could see large scrabbled areas of tone taking shape. “No one sails then because they just like it?” I asked. He had not asked me to keep still, and I did not.

“Oh, you’ll find plenty of people attached to the sea for its own sake: ex-Navy types, or characters with shipping or shipbuilding interests; or people who are just good at it; rowing Blues and middle-aged peers whose grandfathers sailed their steam yachts in Oban Regatta. There’s the Farex-and-potty brigade, who want to toughen their toddlers, and small, decent blokes, like the Buchanans, who enjoy mastering the thing and risking a bit of small-scale adventure as they go. Of course—” he uncapped a fat tube of raw sienna and squeezed a heap on the polished mahogany “—plenty of others sail as you’ve sailed, to have a ball socially; entertaining co-respondents or clients, or dancing on deck all night to a record-player, or horsing up a burn with a splash-net like one of the natives…”

“Johnson doesn’t approve,” said Rupert, turning over to toast his stomach and chest. The smell of warm turpentine lingered inside the cockpit.

“Not at all,” said Johnson. His glasses flashed up and down. “Why be immoral in a flat in a fug, when you can do it at sea and be healthy?”

All the canvas was covered, and I could no longer see what he was doing. “Rupert,” I said, “why does Johnson go to sea?”

Rupert Glasscock turned his big heifer’s head to contemplate Johnson, and Johnson looked back through his bifocals. “Because he hasn’t got a flat,” said Rupert after some thought, and failed to prevent a brush loaded with vermilion from completing a crude cartoon on his spine.

Then there was a call from Lenny and both Rupert and Johnson jumped to their feet. Far across the blue, glassy water there was a smudge, like a finger mark in wet paint. In a second the palette, the brushes were stowed, the canvas was flung, with apology, into my cabin, and all three men were busy with ropes. There was wind, I deduced, on the way.

After a while I got up and went into my cabin, where Johnson’s painting lay, right side up, on the bunk.

Thinly suffused with sweet colour; flat and soft as a painting on silk, my own face lay mistily there. Made-up for Gilda, I looked like that.

I was entranced. Handling it lightly by the edges, I picked the wet canvas up, and stared at the arrangement of earth and soil and mineral pigments which the mind behind those bifocal glasses had transformed into my face. Beneath my feet, the deck tilted as the sails far above me, touched with wind, started to pull. My door swung open and sunlight filled all the cabin, bringing with it the smell of leaves, and flowers, and the salt tang of the sea. Dazzling with sun, the fresh-laundered curtains over my porthole filmed and fluttered against the blue sea beyond, and the sea itself glittered, coarse blue and white in the hearty young wind.

Dolly
leaned over with sudden decision, and something tipped, with a clack, from the other end of my bed. I laid the painting down, wedging it flat with my jewel case, and went to retrieve and secure what had fallen.

It was a coat hanger.

I hadn’t left a coat hanger there. I had it in my hand, vaguely wondering whose it was, when suddenly, without question, I knew. That powerful hanger, with the riveted hook, the hook which had never come out despite the dead weight it carried, was none of mine or Johnson’s ownership.

It was the hanger on which the dead body of Chigwell had been suspended, by his own large and well-fitting overcoat, in the wardrobe in Rose Street that night.

Johnson, when I called him, did not come at once. When the incredible nautical crisis, whatever it was, had been resolved and he finally entered, I had pulled myself together; although I could not bring myself, yet, to pick up the thing from where I had dropped it again, on his plushy blue rug by the bunk. Johnson’s eye, travelling past both it and me, lit upon his painting, still jammed on the bed, and saying, “Oh, that. Thanks,” he picked it up and disappeared, carrying it to the slotted overhead fitment where he kept his unfinished work in the saloon. I heard him come back to the tiller.

By that time I was out in the cockpit. “It wasn’t that.
Will you leave the bloody boat and listen, you fool
?” I spat at his moony bifocals. He handed the tiller to Rupert and followed me into my cabin.

Johnson did not share my distaste. As I told him what had happened he sat with the thing in his hands, turning it over and over. “There was no hanger like this on the boat,” he said. “It’s certainly Chigwell’s.”

“But how could it be?” I do not smoke. There are times when I wish that I did. “The police know you were involved. But if they’ve found the body, they wouldn’t do this. Neither would Kenneth. And apart from the police and Kenneth, the only person who could connect either of us with Chigwell’s body is—”

“The murderer,” said Johnson. He was silent, his hands quiet on the wood. “Not the nicest of thoughts, is it? We had him saving his skin, or else intent on pursuing your friend Dr. Holmes. It seems he’s not doing either. He’s following you.”

“Could he be on board?” I asked. It was a sensible question. I tried to sound sensible asking it.

“No,” said Johnson. “There’s no doubt about that. But it would have been easy to put the hanger aboard while we were sitting in the thick of the traffic at Rhu. It’s been there all day, I expect, but you haven’t noticed it. Probably Lenny picked it up and shoved it on to your bunk, thinking it yours… That’s
how
it was done.
Why
it was done is another matter. I think—” he hesitated.

“What?” Now we had facts, or near possibilities, I felt suddenly better. Dead men cannot swim.

“I think you should go back and get police protection. Hang the scandal. A two-day tabloid headline is better than losing your life.”

“No.”

“Look,” said Johnson patiently. “I’m sure your friend Holmes would be the first to agree. After all, he’s none too safe either, is he? I should think the chief of security would do his nut if he thought Holmes’s life was in danger.”

“No,” I repeated. “You say the man who planted the hanger isn’t on
Dolly
. Right. That’s more than you can say of any piece of ground in this kingdom. I’m staying on
Dolly
.”

It looked pigheaded, no doubt. Almost I confessed about my plan to meet Kenneth on Rum. But not quite. Not yet. Not until I knew from Kenneth what had been happening. For Johnson or no Johnson, the kind of work Kenneth was doing was no topic for loose conversation. There were research laboratories on Rum: Nature Conservancy laboratories, pursuing all kinds of eclectic problems to do with ecology and red deer.

There were other laboratories, too. And in South Rona, not far to the north, was the base of the atomic submarine
Lysander
, just now undergoing some of her instrument trials. If Kenneth was on Rum, he was not there for tagging red deer.

There was a long silence. Then, unexpectedly, Johnson said, “Right. What you need is a stiff whisky. Give me five minutes to check course and you shall have it. Next, tonight we’re due in at Ardrishaig, and just north of Ardrishaig is Lochgair where friends of mine have a bloody great liner called
Evergreen
, with the most powerful radio receiver on the west coast of Scotland. After we check in, I’ll motor
Dolly
up to Lochgair and we’ll telephone everyone we can think of for news of any scandals in Rose Street. For all we know, by this time, the police might have found the body and murderer both. In any case, you won’t set foot ashore, and you ought to be safe. Done?”