Rum Affair (33 page)

Equally, I should not hear from my audiences that year, or the following year, or perhaps ever again, that silence after the
Aushaltung,
when I have finished singing and for seconds, worshipping, they withhold the intrusion of their applause.

I should now be famous as any gutter child might contrive to be famous. I had made a fatal mistake.

I looked around me. It was high noon and beautiful; the trees and hills all washed green by the storm. From a blue, empty arch the sun blazed down on the bay, and, like a flock of silver-toed birds, left its track on it. A small class of yachts, at first a thicket of slivers against the deep trees, turned, and became a scatter of slit triangles as they made for their mark. A big steam yacht lay still closed and asleep, with a solitary seaman in overalls swabbing the deck.

There was
Symphonetta,
with her speedboat gone. Hennessy and the rest would be on shore. The boys had shown their mettle and would be proud of it: he might even be proud, with reluctance, of them. Some of his misconduct he had paid for, in diamonds.

And there was
Binkie.
Evidence of the Buchanans’ stormy passage was all about: bunk cushions and mattresses drying lay lashed and neatly ranged from back to front of her decking, and strange flags of teacloth and towel flew from her rigging. Her bowspit was broken and I saw a tangle of wire still to be mended on deck. She had not got off lightly after all on her self-imposed mission. No one need ever know, I supposed, how tamely the Navy had considered it. Her scars would speak for themselves.

I stirred, and the single man standing waiting for me by the companionway, far down
Evergreen’
s spotless bow, stirred and straightened as well. I had left this to the last, this encounter with Johnson. He had told me indirectly that morning most of what I wanted to know.

It was a morning, I thought, for Sortilège. I had put my hair up in the way Michael had taught me, when I could not have the help of Janine. It was bleached and sticky with salt, but good enough against the tan of my skin. On my suit was a doctor bird in uncut stones and enamel: I had a pearl and enamel dome ring to match. I wondered, as I walked slowly towards him, if Johnson had begun yet to realise what he had done.

He did not seem to have changed. The black hair, the eyebrows, the thick woolly pullover and the glassed-in verandah of his face, on which the sun shone in two baffling discs of white light: these were the same. I pinned down, fleetingly, my abomination of these ungainly, mirror-like glasses. They were ungentlemanly. As I came up to him, he said: “What is your real name?”

“It is Valentina Lakowski. Or Twiss,” I said, to deny him the pleasure of adding it. “For the charge sheet?”

“For the charge sheet. Don’t hope, Tina,” said Johnson. “There’s too much now piled up against you. Between us, I’m afraid we have silenced your voice.”

“I shall still have my voice. Other people won’t be able to hear it, that’s all,” I said. “It was a Judas kiss, then, that night in Edinburgh?”

He appeared, damn him, to rake his memory. Then: “No,” he said. “That was pure sex and champagne bubbles. I didn’t know you were in the opposite team – not for certain – at least until we got to Lochgair.”

“Why Lochgair?”

“I wirelessed headquarters from
Evergreen.
They told me a man had been seen leaving the flat just about the time Chigwell’s murderer bolted in Rose Street. They gave me his description. And it didn’t tally with your description at all.”

“So that’s how you traced Gold-tooth to
Vallida?”
I said. I’d wondered. But of course, someone would have been watching the Rose Street flat all the time. Poor, stupid Kenneth. “I suppose Chigwell was one of your people too?” I said. “I always wondered why that body never appeared in the headlines.”

“He was, but Gold-tooth, as you called him, didn’t know it until he’d killed him, in pure mistake for Holmes, who had left shortly before. It was only while he was tidying up and preparing to fake suicide that Gold-tooth found Chigwell’s papers and photograph, which made it pretty clear who he was. And then, Kenneth’s note pointed pretty clearly to an imminent visit by you.

“Gold-tooth hadn’t meant to compromise you. As soon as you’d gone, he came back and got rid of the body. The hanger, I must admit, I took to Rhu all by myself. I underrated your nerve. And I salute your nerve, Tina. You might have pulled your chestnuts out of the fire right from the start if your husband had been just a little less greedy. If he had restrained himself from blackmailing Dr Holmes without telling you. It was a damned nuisance to me, I may mention. For while Michael was breaking his neck to prevent you and Holmes from getting together, I was breaking mine to bring it about. We had to know whether Holmes was mixed up with you in the spying or not.”

The glasses flashed. “In the event, of course, it was all very clear. What I overheard in the Land Rover settled it, even without the tape recording in Rum.”

“Poor Kenneth,” I said automatically. Through the D’s of his bifocals he was watching not me, but the gulls. “I really tried not to hurt him. I did my best to get hold of that tape.”

“I know you did,” said Johnson mildly. “And you’ll be relieved to know that it’s safe. I loaded the machine at Kinloch Castle that night with a dummy one, in case someone quixotic or criminal made a snatch for it. So the evidence exonerating Kenneth is quite intact. Also the evidence against yourself . . . But it was pretty clear long before that, that you didn’t want Gold-tooth caught, for example, because he was on the same side as yourself. Otherwise you’d have told both Kenneth and me what happened that night on the
Vallida.
It would have touched Kenneth to know how much you valued him; and we could have had Gold-tooth chased and your diamonds recovered in one piggish stroke. He had another pen bomb and a revolver on board, by the way, as well as his little mine crate, tucked away in the stores. He was a professional, that one.”

“I noticed,” I snapped, “that you didn’t risk touching Kenneth too much by telling him I had tried to buy off his life.”

“No,” Johnson admitted. “It puzzles me yet why you did. After all, your own principals wanted Holmes out of the way, both to take the blame for all the security leakages and to stop his advanced work. Yet you didn’t want him murdered, did you? I wonder why? Because he still had your letters, perhaps. Or because, if you could shift all the blame on to Twiss, and also disperse any of Holmes’ own misgivings, you might contrive to continue your career, with his love and his secrets as well? It was obviously vital to get to him. One fine day he might come to his senses, and think it important to tell someone to whom he gave the second lab key in Nevada.”

I liked Johnson. “Go on,” I invited.

He was looking straight at me, through the long and short focus. “You are enjoying it. I’m not.”

“Why not?” I said. “Another success for you. I don’t want your pity. If I’ve made a mistake, I can pay.” I paused. “Find a nice girl for Kenneth,” I said.

Slowly, Johnson lifted one hand and took off his glasses. Underneath was a tired human face. “Poor Kenneth. But the instinct was right. The instinct that brought you together. He was the fire you needed to warm your hands at. But he was the one who got burnt.”

It was tiresome to have Kenneth talked of as if he were in knickerbockers, but there was no time to wrangle. I said: “We should have had longer on
Dolly.”

“Yes. I tend to think so, too,” said Johnson. “For a number of reasons. This among them.” He had replaced his glasses.

“This” was something square, wrapped in brown paper. He slipped the coverings off, and extended it.

It was my portrait, now vividly finished. It was my head and shoulders and clasped hands as I reclined on the tweed cushions of
Dolly,
a rum and lemon provided by Lenny to hand, while the blue sky and still bluer sea were racing behind. My hair was unpinned and stirred in pale shining folds on my shoulders, my dress was chiffon, my emeralds glowed in the sun.

But it was the face that arrested you. The young bones, the supple sweetness of Gilda had changed with the crisp strokes of paint upon paint. The nose, so deliciously shortened, had gained a shadow hinting at its true length; the eyes were not misty, but liquid and cool; the mouth, beautifully drawn, was the trained mouth of a singer.

It was my own face, the face I was born with. The face I cannot escape.

I looked up at the flashing bifocals, and I smiled, a wide, pretty smile; and I thanked him for his help and his care and his beautiful painting and then, packed, I set off downstairs. I set off downstairs as I had done, over and over in childhood. To the nameless persons waiting below.

Published by House of Stratus

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