Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (14 page)

He wasn’t the only one. I was thunderstruck, in my own way, behind him. Even Bunty, struck by the sound of our exclamations, came drifting over and stood beside me, glass in hand, to peer at the painting.

I saw her eyebrows lift right up into the unravelled wool ball of her hair. I was even ready for the dig in the ribs when it came.

‘Will you look at that?’ said Bunty in a whisper which nearly blew out the windows. ‘It’s the bloody image of the picture you took from the…’

Then she broke off gasping because I stood on her toe cap.

None the less, she was right. The picture Simon was selling to Comer was not, clearly, the picture he had thought he was selling to Comer. Instead it was the perfect twin, in its aged cracked beauty, of the ikon stuff in the loo pan, which Rosamund had rushed to get rid of.

It was even better. That had been an illegal copy. This, no one could have any doubt, was the original.

I flew to Toronto next day. Aunt Lily was surprised to see me, and even more surprised to learn that I had come to hire her a geriatric nurse-housekeeper.

She phoned my uncle Tom to come home early for lunch, and then listened, perched among the briefs on her desk while I told her the essence of Simon’s dilemma. ‘You mean I’ll have to give up my Gojukai karate classes?’ she said plaintively as I finished. ‘Hell’s bells, we were to get into eye gouging on Thursday.’

I reassured her. The Booker-Readmans would never check her condition. I’d persuaded Rosamund that I’d fix it without even needing her lawyer, although I should have trusted Aunt Lily, sufficiently primed, to deceive anybody. And Charlotte I had taken aside and persuaded that Simon had paid me to leave from motives of private expediency.

In nanny terms, that had only one meaning: he had his eye on a girl for the vacancy. I had left Charlotte plunged into rapt speculation.

Then Uncle Tom arrived home, to my aunt’s extreme annoyance with company, whom he installed in his study before coming upstairs to greet me.

In fact, he hardly greeted me at all. He said, ‘Hi. Thanks for phoning, Lily; but I knew she was coming before you did. Honey, there’s someone waiting in my room to see you.’

That was to me, and from the way he said it, I knew it wasn’t a Husky, or one of the party at Winnipeg, or anyone, indeed, who was connected with the lighter side of this our pilgrimage through the life cycle. I looked at Aunt Lily, whose expression told me she didn’t know either, and then left the room without speaking and ran down to the three thousand books lightly mounted on wallpaper that Tom calls his study. I opened the door. It was midday and the sun was shining, but the door opened on darkness. The curtains had been drawn. I could just see the man who had pulled them together: a tall man in a shapeless overcoat and dark glasses, who crossed the room as I watched, peeling his coat off, and bending down, switched on the table lamp. Then, lifting his hand, he took off the concealing dark glasses.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘Shut the door and come in. We’ve not much time, and a good deal to talk about.’

It was my father.

My father’s side of the family are all big. Tom and Lily are tall and stringy and, like my father, their muscles and bones show up like basket-weave when they are tired.

My father was tired, with that enthralling combination of rigor mortis and indigestion that comes from long, cramped time-saving journeys by jet plane. He held my shoulders hard and kissed me in the way he always did, and then we both sat down on different sides of Uncle Tom’s desk.

I crossed my ankles and folded my hands in my lap and said, ‘You’ve just flown in from London? To see me?’

‘To see you,’ he said. ‘I’m going back this evening. In fact, I’ve never been. I know everything that’s happened to you. Not very jolly, in spite of all the low comedy.’

‘It hasn’t happened to me,’ I said. ‘It’s happened to the baby I was looking after. Your friend Johnson has a theory that all the kidnap attempts have been pure coincidence.’

‘My friend Johnson,’ said my father with some asperity, ‘had no call to begin that portrait in the first place and is taking too damned long to finish it.’ Someone tapped on the door and he raised his voice. ‘Who is it?’

‘Your friend Johnson,’ said Johnson peaceably, coming in. He looked just as he always did.

1 said, ‘I left you in New York.’

‘I came by the same plane you did,’ Johnson said. ‘I was the hostess with the blue and white sash and the wiggle. Sir?’

‘And you’ve been a bloody nuisance,’ said my father testily, addressing the world’s best known international portrait painter. ‘Sit down. I haven’t told her anything yet.’

Johnson sat down and seeking permission, proceeded to fill his pipe. The top of his head gave nothing away. My father said, ‘You’ve been a good girl, Joanna, and it really isn’t fair to go on without letting you know what you’re in for. Because everything that’s happened to date has just been a plastic mock-up for what’s going to start now. And this time, if you want to go on with it, you’ll have to play more than a passive rôle.’

I had been playing a passive rôle. I wondered what big executive in Mike’s Department had fed my father that story and induced him to come across instead of confronting me personally. I let it pass.

Johnson was having no trouble at all lighting his pipe. Clouds of grit began to move past the lamplight. My father said, ‘You were told that Mike Widdess’s death was not the accident it appeared. You were also told that your share in his work had come to light, and an attempt might therefore be made to exploit you.

‘That was to put you on your guard, and to explain why the Department wanted you to accept this job with the Booker-Readmans. Two pieces of information were kept from you. One was the fact that Mike Widdess, when he died, had just finished coding some top secret lists known by the stupid name of the Malted Milk Folio. He had no papers connected with this in his house. There was no reason to believe that his murderers knew of it. Until this week, when it was found that the Folio lists had been photographed.’

‘It wasn’t in a self-destruct acid container with three triple locks? ’ I said rashly.

‘It wasn’t,’ said my father. ‘Because it was entirely in code. Your code which, as we all have cause to know, is virtually unbreakable.’

There was a reverent silence, due on Johnson’s part possibly more to boredom.

I had a bizarre mathematical brain even at school. Since I wanted to nurse, I might never have found any use for it if my father hadn’t suggested Mike Widdess. Mike Widdess worked for Intelligence. And my peculiarities, even before they were trained, were exactly those needed for code making.

It isn’t a job which need take up much time. Much of the heavy work is done by computers. The application of the code is someone else’s affair. I devise it and I provide the key. I am given someone else’s code and I break it down and again, supply the key. When I do my coding and my nursing for the same employer, life is even more simple.

Until your employer is killed and his papers searched. Including the papers which tell his killers that you, Joanna Emerson, can unlock any code they happen to light on.

‘I see,’ I said after a pause. ‘Oh, I do see. That’s why I haven’t been attacked until now? They didn’t need me until they had these particular papers. And now they have them, they’ll try to force me to decode them?’

‘That’s part of it,’ said my father.

I looked at Johnson. ‘And you were right then. The attempts to kidnap the baby had nothing to do with me or my coding? It was just a plain, simple heist by someone gunning for grandmother’s bank account?’

The two half moons stared at me through the grey cloud of smoke, but he didn’t answer. It was my father who said, ‘Johnson knew it wasn’t a coincidence. He had to say something to satisfy you. I told you you didn’t know everything. You haven’t asked, for example, how Mike Widdess’s killer knew about the coded Folio.’

I hadn’t asked anything because I was still assimilating, furiously, the fact that Johnson knew more about this than I did. When I had achieved some aplomb I said tartly, ‘The killer knew Mike worked for the Department. The same man could have had other information as well. He could have been a double agent.’

‘He wasn’t,’ my father said. ‘At the time he was killed, only Mike and one other person knew about this group of papers. If someone else found out, it was because Mike was forced to tell him. There are ways.’

There are, of course, ways. And a car crash is as good a way as any of disguising them. My father went on, ‘Everything that Mike knew of value is now being checked over by his people to prevent any misuse. That’s called locking the stable door. His killer got away, however, with three things that mattered. The information about you. A description of the set of papers I’ve called the Malted Milk Folio. And the name of Widdess’s chief, in whose house the papers were kept.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said warmly. ‘I might give it away under drugs or duress or kindness or something. I don’t suppose I dare ask, either, what was in the Folio?’

My father is used to dealing with student sarcasm. His hands in his pockets, he lay back and looked at me. ‘Those, indeed, were the reasons why you weren’t told,’ he said calmly. ‘Now it’s necessary you should run the same risks as the others in the field, and you have a right to know.

‘The name Widdess gave to his killer was mine. The Malted Milk Folio contains, in alphabetical order, the names and addresses of every British agent working internationally with me or under me. One of whom, as you may have guessed, is the perverse gentleman on your right.’

At school, I should have been dazzled. Even before I worked with Michael Widdess I became aware that people of balance and status might expect, from time to time to be co-opted by their country for help or advice in this area. I knew my father sometimes was.

That he or anyone I valued should elect to make this his whole employment now filled me only with fear, and a dull kind of puzzlement. Life in the Department had not been gay or gallant for Widdess. Just humdrum and painstaking and sordid. And he had worked – and so had I – for my father.

With Johnson there, I couldn’t say ‘Why?’ With my father there, I couldn’t say what I wanted to Johnson. I looked, no doubt, quite moronic. It occurred to me to wonder if my father had become a crack shot before or after he had taken the Department. I said to Johnson, lightly, ‘How good a shot are you? ’ and he shook his head behind the smokescreen. But he didn’t answer.

My father said, ‘Some day you’ll want to ask questions. Just now we must hurry. For you see, as my daughter, how important a hostage you are. You can decode the list of agents, and provide the key to all existing government codes. And you can be used as a stick against me.

‘That, we guess, is why the baby has been threatened so often. No one will be surprised when he is kidnapped at last and you, his nurse, are kidnapped as it happens along with him. The Booker-Readmans will receive the normal ransom demand. They may keep it quiet from the police. Certainly this time there will be nothing facile or public about the arrangements. This kidnapping will be planned to succeed, and as far away from a sophisticated police system as the kidnappers are able to manage.’

‘Italy, for example,’ I said. ‘Or no. Now the gig has been moved to Dubrovnik. But why the baby? Now they’ve got the Folio photos, why don’t they go ahead and simply snatch me?’

‘To make it easy for me,’ said my father. ‘Don’t you see? If my daughter is openly kidnapped, immediately it is a matter for Government intervention. Even if I wished to negotiate privately I should never be allowed to. But who in Government is to know, when the Booker-Readman baby is kidnapped, that I am the target and not the Booker-Readman parents? That all the time the baby is held, and the ransom for its release is being negotiated, I am in secret negotiation also for the release of my daughter? Whatever secrets I choose to trade, my reputation, if I’m careful, needn’t suffer. And your kidnappers have a hold over me for the future.’ He failed to read my face and added, ‘I’m sorry, Joanna.’

I said, ‘Apologise to Benedict. I take it therefore that I am being asked to allow myself to be kidnapped?’

My father said, ‘We have no other way of finding Mike’s killers. They have the Folio, or its photo-copy. You have the key to decode it. They will never rest, whatever happens, until they have you. We have the advantage of surprise. They think we know nothing. Let them take you.’

‘You mean,’ I said sarcastically, ‘I’ve got to arrange to sneak them past Donovan?’

I went on because of the silence. ‘Or am I being naïve?’

My father turned his head. ‘Never naïve. Say stupid,’ said Johnson kindly. ‘Donovan is one of mine. Your genuine back-up, substituted for the Data-Mate Charlotte thought she was getting.’

‘You might,’ I said coldly, ‘have ruined her chances. Suppose the real Donovan had been an elderly millionaire with no dependants?’ I thought of all those hearty ice hockey embraces and turned hotter scarlet.

‘If he has to use Data-Mate,’ said Johnson mildly, ‘then he must suffer from drawbacks even I can’t quite imagine. As it was, I am led to believe that Charlotte did all right. Forget Charlotte.’

I did, with my teeth clenched. I said, ‘All right. You tell me. What’s going to happen?’

There was a pause. Then Johnson answered me. ‘To get it straight: we think the snatch will be made during the three days the baby will be in Yugoslavia. We don’t know yet who the principals are, but we’re prepared to treat as hostile any member of your immediate circle included in the Yugoslav party. To keep up our hard-won appearances, I shall stay with the Warr Beckenstaff guests on the
Glycera
. We board on a Wednesday, go to bed at breakfast-time Thursday and fly back out with you on Friday. From Wednesday to Friday you will be on
Dolly
with the baby and Donovan. There will be a skipper of mine aboard, and a hi-ho chorus of twenty inconspicuous staffmen all over the Yugoslav coast line.

‘Within these three days, we have to let them snatch you. We have to let them show you their copy of the Malted Milk Folio. We have to discover who they are and who runs them. In a foreign country, complete surveillance isn’t easy. But you and the baby will both be safe as we can make you.’

My hands were cold.
We are prepared to treat as hostile any member of your immediate circle
… I said, ‘Hugo Panadek belongs to Yugoslavia.’

‘And for that reason,’ Johnson said amiably, ‘is probably the least likely candidate. He also mended the Vladimir Brownbelly tape, when he could just as easily have destroyed it. And got you the sack, which nearly wrecked the whole villainous plot, I imagine. With help, of course, from Simon and Beverley.’

I found it hard to believe that Simon and Beverley were innocent parties merely because they had been found in a Jacuzzi bath. If you started to work out motivation, I shouldn’t have gone to Cape Cod at all if Charlotte’s horses hadn’t thrown Donovan. And if I hadn’t gone to Cape Cod, the Eisenkopps would never have been invited to Dubrovnik. Also, of course, there was the fact that without Rosamund, I shouldn’t have been going to Dubrovnik either. I thought of something else. ‘You must have some suspicions. What about Comer and his key to the Booker-Readmans?’