I remember very little of that lunch, except that during it, I decided to apply for a Heinz Fellowship in Zambia. After coffee, the Begum announced that the immediate hours of heat were to be spent, by order, in siesta, and that we should forgather later by the swimming-pool. Having tried to catch Johnson’s eye yet again, and been repulsed by those despicable bifocals, I walked upstairs to my room and locked myself in.
I took off my dress and lay on the bed. Without petticoat and girdle, I had to admit, my pores functioned more freely. There was a pink patch, from the second rib down to the navel, where Paul’s oiling yesterday had ameliorated the effect of the sun. Above my head a fan moved like an aircraft propeller, stirring my wig and rustling the long blossoming stems in a Chinese vase in the corner, across an unthinkable expanse of white fitted bearskin. The air- conditioner hummed.
It was peaceful, as under a hair-dryer. In cedarwood fitted cupboards, my new clothes hung out of sight. Beside me on a low table were a Chinese lamp, some new books in glossy dust-jackets, cigarettes, a lighter and ash tray and a vacuum flask of iced water. No telephone. No telephones on the out-islands of the Bahamas. No telephones or radio transmitters on Crab.
The branches stirred, pale pink against the taffeta of the drawn curtains. A frivolous dusk enfolded the room. It was the same shape as my room in Castle Rannoch, but my room at home had no fitted wardrobes and only one deep-set window, looking on to the sea. The cold sea and the rain. I closed my eyes.
No fitted carpet either. My room in Castle Rannoch had a grey stone-flagged floor, with an old and valuable rug. One of the first tests of a candidate had been his response to that rug. The boy who had taken me home from the Oban Gathering had offered to get an uncle to mend it. Last seen of that boy.
Last seen of any boy worth a damn.
I opened my unwilling eyes. The curtain billowed. This room is just like my room in Castle Rannoch except that everything in it is in perfect condition, save for B. Douglas MacRannoch.
Query: What did I have to drink at lunch?
Answer: Tomato juice.
Addendum: Krishtof Bey was at table beside me.
My room at Castle Rannoch connects with a dressing-room at Castle Rannoch used as a bedroom by my succession of nurses. At Castle Rannoch, the doorway would be behind that pink curtain.
The pink curtain billowed.
Even when on automatic pilot my reactions, I am happy to say, are faster than most people’s. I snatched the gun from my pillow before the silk had dropped into place and fired, one, two, three times. Three neat holes appeared in the pink. The stacked branches of blossom dropped like corpses, rigid to one side of the vase. And the vase itself began moving slowly towards me.
I raised the gun, and someone beside me plucked it neatly out of my hand.
‘Stop,’ said Krishtof Bey. ‘It is Tang, and the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would ill-wish your next elective abortion.’
I sat there in my Marks and Sparks knickers and brassiere while the rest of him came out from under the bed. He had my gun in one hand, and a long lassoo haltering the Chinese vase in the other. He was still wearing the gold necklace and the pair of green cotton beach pants. His deltoids were candidly staggering. He said, ‘Dear Dr MacRannoch. My Imam says my fate is not to be shot. I thought you might have a gun.’
I will not pretend to be calm. A mentally subnormal patient subject to hypomanic attacks is good-humoured, requires little sleep and is always complaining of hunger. With my larded midriff maintained as upright as the bedding made possible, I said with gentle authority, ‘I never shoot a man who is sick, Krishtof Bey. I try to help him. Would you like a biscuit?’
The Tartar face tilted and shook slowly in thought. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Have you got a biscuit?’ he said.
I smiled warmly. ‘In the pocket of my coat. Over there, you see, with my dresses.’
The gun did not waver, but I had puzzled him. ‘Do you always carry biscuits about in your pockets?’ he said.
Vodka, I thought. An alcoholic with an acute anxiety neurosis may break at any moment into psychotic episodes. ‘I get hungry,’ I said. ‘In the other pocket you’ll find a flask of Scotch whisky.’
He lay on the bearskin regarding me, his elbow holding the pistol resting quietly on the edge of my bed, and the ends of his hair stirred on his shoulders as he shook his head yet again. A trace of anxiety appeared and vanished. He had, as they all do, a strong streak of cunning. His voice, even, had become soft and gentle. ‘Try to relax,’ he said. ‘Forget the gun. Just lie back, Dr MacRannoch. and I will bring to you the whisky flask and also the biscuits. Close your eyes.’
It wasn’t quite what I meant, but it would do. My distress score rating, o for calm and 100 for panic, dropped to around 25 and oscillated at the ready. I closed my eyes and he got up from the bearskin and moved over to the sliding doors of the wardrobe.
I made a single athletic bound for the door.
Krishtof Bey made the kind of leap I am told Nijinsky performed as a large Hybrid Tea, and, hooking my ankle, brought me down on my brassiere thud on the white bearskin carpet. He then flipped me over and with three turns of his lassoo, bound my wrists together before me.
I was not inactive. I have felled a full-scale chromosomal aberration before now; I have brought a six-foot Y Y syndrome to his knees. But never before had I fought a Turkish ballet dancer in full command of his unsuppressed senses. When I found myself at length, hands bound and flat on the carpet, I felt like a foam-plastic prototype in an ergonomics laboratory. Krishtof Bey, his respiration barely stirring his necklace, tossed the gun in the air, caught it, laid it on a table and said. ‘Were you hoping I was a nice, easy manic depressive? I’m not. I just wanted to ask you, Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, about that arsenic poisoning.’ And he sat on my feet before I could kick him and added sweetly, ‘And I dare you to scream.’
It wasn’t rate 100 yet; but it wasn’t too far away from the 90s, at that. The oblique, cynical eyes smiled down at me. All right. He didn’t have the gun. But with muscles like those, and speed like that.
he could choke the life out of me long before any scream of mine could be heard beyond those thick walls. And I knew just how thick those walls were. I cleared my throat. I said. ‘Tell me how you did it.’
I hadn’t expected him really to talk, and he didn’t. He smiled. ‘Tell me what happened to the results of those arsenic tests. Did you write them down?’
‘Yes,’ I said. A sound idea had just occurred to me.
‘And where are they?’ said Krishtof Bey. His voice was over-friendly and feline, like a neurotic Abyssinian. I wished him blocked tear-ducts and ear mites.
‘Johnson Johnson has them,’ I said. ‘And if you kill me, he’ll hand them straight to the police.’
‘Exposing Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe as an agent?’ asked Krishtof Bey. Reclining picturesquely beside me, he was stroking the area of my lower diaphragm with a speculative finger, ‘Poor darling.’
He was not referring to Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. My skin twitched. I said, ‘Of course. Well, the murderer at least must already know he’s an agent.’
‘Suppressive therapy,’ said Krishtof Bey thoughtfully. ‘Against men. Did you take a course. Beltanno? What did they do, inject a nausea response to after-shave lotion?’ He picked up my tied wrists, damn him, and impudently felt my pulse. ‘Then why haven’t you or Johnson told the police already?’ he said.
I quelled a strong impulse to tremble, and tried to concentrate my intellectual powers. If I didn’t watch it, I was going to blow Johnson’s precious cover, as the jargon regrettably went. I wasn’t at all sure whether I cared. I said, ‘Johnson didn’t want trouble. And it was just possible that this was a personal feud against Edgecombe. But if anything happens to me, even Johnson won’t hesitate. I promise you that.’
He grinned. He was still holding my pulse. I said. ‘Why do you want to kill Edgecombe? Was Johnson right? Does he know something about you?’
Krishtof Bey rose to his feet like a milk-pouring commercial run backwards, and struck the fifth position, brown arms outflung. He relaxed, and gazed down his torso at me. ‘Everyone knows about dancers,’ he said. ‘Am I not a magnificent animal?’
‘So are laboratory chimpanzees,’ I said. ‘And you should see their psychoses.’
He bounced lightly and lay on the bed, looking at me. ‘In Izmir at this moment two secretaries are answering my love-mail. Letters from ballet-sick ladies all over the world, with their photographs, Beltanno. In Copenhagen, where I am dancing next month, they will put up the crash barriers and give me a police escort from the house of my host to the theatre. In my diary I have invitations from multi-millionaires, from film stars, from royalty. Today, in a hundred places in the world, someone is saying, “Where is Krishtof Bey? What is he doing? Will he come to my costume ball, will he agree to dance in our opera house; will he come and make love to me if I send him a diamond link-belt, or maybe a Cadillac . . .?’”
His dangling arm drifted down to my thigh and I watched it, my calf-muscles bunched. He withdrew it snappishly. ‘Beltanno, will you relax?’
‘How can I?’ I spat back at him. ‘Until I find out whether you’re going to kill me or rape me?’
‘Oh,’ he said. A charming smile spread over that conceited, deceitful, gorgeous Tartar face. Slow as a crêpe de Chine scarf he began to slide over the edge of the bed; paused, smiled, and landed with a thud on my struggling body.
‘Beltanno. darling, I’m not going to kill you,’ he murmured.
In all my medical reading I have found no clinical description of the kiss which he then pressed upon me, or its effect on the psyche. The chemical responses to near-suffocation are well known, as are the standard reactions to shock: respiration 30 per minute, heart 120, blood pressure 80/50 mm Hg.
One could not do test strips to isolate what I felt at that moment, or invoke the reactions of suckling mice. I stopped struggling.
After four minutes the kiss moved down my neck and lingered here and there round my clavicles. My bronchial walls galloped, but I attempted no purposive movement. In fact I had closed my eyes when I became aware that Krishtof Bey had detached himself and was sitting back on his heels, viewing me thoughtfully. ‘Don’t let’s rush it.’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry.’
There was something wrong with my attention span. After a long time I said, ‘Don’t rush what?’ I was still lying on the floor. It was very comfortable.
Krishtof Bey rose to his feet, floated round to my bedside table and poured out two glasses of iced water. He put one on the bearskin beside me and untied my wrists. ‘To counteract the vodka,’ he said. ‘It is true: I could not believe it: you have never been kissed before? A nice woman doctor like you? Not even in medical school?’
I was dissecting male Blumer’s shelves while the others were kissing in medical school. In my year there was one Sohrab, five Abduls and sixteen Mohammeds, but no Krishtof Bey. He brought across the white bath-robe which was all I had for a dressing-gown and I put it on and drank my iced water, sitting in a deep furry chair. I was still fairly comatose, although I wondered why he had stopped kissing me. I even wondered, I believe, if I had done something wrong.
The word vodka was borne in by some kind of slow release capsule. I said vaguely accusing, ‘You did put the vodka into my tomato juice?’
‘Begum’s orders,’ said the Magnificent Animal succinctly. He vanished for a moment behind the pink slubbed-silk curtain and reappeared with a tape-recorder slung from his fingers. It didn’t even occur to me to get up from my chair. I frowned.
‘Begum’s orders?’
‘Yes. Don’t ask me why.’ He was fiddling with the tape-recorder, which gave out a long passage of chirrups. Then he got what he wanted and looked up with that slow, cat-like smile. ‘You didn’t really think I was going to kill you?’
‘You tied my hands,’ I said. I drank some more iced water. I do not know what was the matter with me.
‘True. It is the first time I have had to immobilize a woman before I have kissed her,’ said Krishtof. ‘On the other hand, it is the first time also she has tried to shoot me.’ The tape-recorder, at full volume, had burst into a ninety-piece orchestral rendering of the Breadcrumb Fairy variation from the Sleeping Princess and he rose on the points of his slippers and did a few desultory steps while he was talking. It was very confusing.
Despite it, however, I was coming to myself. I said, ‘Why did you hide in my room? You wanted to know what I had done with the arsenic tests. You didn’t want to kiss me. You wanted to find out how much I knew.’
‘I wanted to find out how much you knew about kissing,’ he said.
He stopped and wreathed my face with his hand in the ballet symbol for affection, as explained in the Covent Garden programmes. I went there once as the guest of a performing ruptured appendix. He moved off, crossing his knees in an unlikely manner. ‘It was a joke, my dear Dr MacRannoch. So correct. So unapproachable. How to kiss you? It was easy. I make you drunk, and I make you frightened.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.
He turned and bourrée’d back over the bearskin, ending in a charming half-hitch. ‘You don’t believe me because you have no confidence in yourself,’ he said. ‘You are very kissable, Doctor. You have a body that might be a dancer’s, a little ruined by golf, but one could set that right. You have strength and precision . . Listen, does the music not move you?’
If it didn’t move me, I thought, the walls were shortly going to fall out backwards. It had moved on to the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, who could obviously afford a larger orchestra than the Breadcrumb Fairy. The iced-water glasses were chattering and the fan over my bed started to stagger. ‘Come!’ said the Magnificent Animal, and pulled me on to my feet.
I am not, as I have reported, a dancer. Neither am I a Hungarian acrobat. As I went over Krishtof Bey’s shoulder and under his arm in a type of cloverleaf system I had time to thank God for the bearskin. Whatever happened to my wig or my intervertebral discs, I should fall soft.
In the end, I pinned down the technique. Dancing consists of a number of simple binary decision-points: whether to stand up or fall down. As we emerged from a back-to-back spin, I would begin to fall down, and Krishtof would raise me with a hand under one thigh and throw me on to his shoulder. I would begin to fall down again, and he would catch me and switch me like full dairy cream by my own upraised arm, while I stood up. He would then plié round about me until I fell down again.
I began to fear for my airways. Rimsky-Korsakov was molesting my eardrums. Basic intestinal disturbances began to threaten my vodka. My wig was going to come off.
I yelled ‘Stop it!’ and kicked him viciously behind the left knee. He sat. The tape-recorder, which was underneath him, went off. In the abrupt silence a patient tapping at my door made itself heard. The Begum’s calm English voice said, ‘Beltanno? Don’t be lazy,.darling. The water polo has started, and it isn’t fair to leave Rodney one swimmer short.’
The sweat showered into my bath-robe. I took a temporary grip of my respiration and said, ‘Krishtof Bey would swim better.’
‘I dare say,’ said the Begum. ‘But there’s no response from his room.’
His necklace heaving, I was delighted to see, the Magnificent Animal rose to his feet, and the oblique gaze on me, was retreating slowly towards the door behind the pink curtain. ‘Try again,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I heard him a moment ago.’
‘Right,’ said the Begum. Krishtof and I stared at each other. ‘I’ll try him. But get up, darling, won’t you? I want you to enjoy meeting people.’
He had got to the Chinese vase with the blossoms. Without looking down he broke one off, kissed it theatrically and cast it into the room mournfully, as from Armand to Marguerite. Then the door between our two rooms fastened softly behind him. In a moment I heard the Begum’s knock on the outer door to his room. I couldn’t hear what he answered.
I remained perspiring, my sympathetic nervous system all shot to hell. He was not only a murderer: he was an irresponsible murderer. To what he had just done to me, I would not subject the fittest man in my acquaintance. Had he taken any precautions? Had he asked any single question about my cardio-respiratory history? Had he even asked if my teeth were my own?
No.
All I had received from Krishtof Bey was a four-minute kiss.
I was not myself. I sat down on that bearskin and lamented.
In the end, I did go down to the pool, largely because I wasn’t going to stay too long in that room alone. It took me some time to get ready. On my way out I found and delivered a cavalry charge on Johnson’s modest oak door, but he didn’t answer. When I got out into the garden in my sunsuit, sandals and wrap-around glasses, I discovered the reason.
He had begun to paint Krishtof Bey. Since presumably one cannot swim in bifocals, he was fully dressed in an old crew-necked sweater and what looked like cook’s trousers. Krishtof, sitting behind the collapsible easel, was perched on the shady steps of the Begum’s thatched bar. He had changed into a thinner gold chain and a pair of pale tailored trousers. His stringy hands, clasping one knee, formed a pattern of light and shade against the spectacular torso, brown and lightly relaxed. His face was observant. Indeed, one could not disagree with anything about either his clothes or his posture. The taste was markedly Johnson’s.
Beside them Trotter, Brady and an assortment of muscle-bound newcomers were splashing about playing water polo, watched by the Begum and my father on deep-buttoned reclining chairs in brilliant colours. Krishtof Bey said, ‘Is it permitted to wave to a girlfriend?’
‘No,’ said Johnson, continuing the motions of window-cleaning with a long, pale-handled brush. ‘Waggle your ears. Hullo, Beltanno. Not swimming?’
‘Not with two potential murderers; not in that pool. ‘I may have pulled a muscle,’ I said. ‘I thought your sitter was to play water polo?’
‘He may have strained his knee,’ Johnson said. The glasses bent over his palette. ‘You should take your muscle to Trotter. Trotter used to be the muscular therapy adviser to the London School of Oriental Studies. The whole of Zen Buddhism would have fallen down without Trotter.’
I assumed he was joking. The water polo was ending. As I watched, Sergeant Trotter himself nipped up the diving-board and executed a swallow and somersault. It was impressive. ‘Flaming hoops next,’ I said. I was trying to exercise telepathy. Johnson’s hand continued to scrub at his canvas.
‘Flaming hoops next,’ said my father’s voice, and I looked round icily, but he hadn’t even heard me. Then I saw they had flaming hoops, or at least a pile of bamboo circles wrapped in swathes of wet cotton. The pool boy, whose given name was Louis B. Mayer MacRannoch, lit one and spun it up through the air. Sergeant Trotter, reappearing at the top of the diving-board, swallow-dived efficiently through it.
I couldn’t believe it. ‘The Bamboo Conch Club,’ I said.
‘No, dear. The MacRannoch Gathering,’ said the Begum’s cool voice. ‘Come and sit down. Hank, George, Missa, Louis and Jake.
That is Catherine. And that is Wallace Brady climbing up to dive through the hoop. Can he dive? We shall soon know. I beg you to watch him. He is risking his handicap solely for you.’
Wallace Brady, a nicely built American figure in maroon striped bathing-shorts, took off from the platform and plummeted successfully down through a hoop. A respectful voice said, ‘Dr MacRannoch? I hear you’ve muscular trouble.’
It was Sergeant Trotter, a well-hewn example of Canadian redwood. I said, ‘I thought you were practising for the MacRannoch Gathering.’
‘Oh, no. A little touch of afternoon entertainment,’ said Sergeant Trotter. ‘And it gives the boy practice, you know. Where is it, then? Back? Turn over. I’m a trained masseur, no need to worry.’ Fingers like heavy-grade forceps flipped me over and a red-hot poker struck me hard behind the left shoulder-blade. I gasped.
‘I knew it,’ said Sergeant Trotter with quiet triumph, withdrawing his fingers. ‘Golfers, they always get tightened up there. Take up running, I tell them. Swimming. Loosen up. You ought to know that, you being a doctor,’ he said to my suffering back.
My spine was rising and falling like dough on a rolling-pin. As my face shifted up and down the deep-buttoned plastic I observed, ‘I am much obliged to you, although I feel it needs very little. I understand Mr Krishtof has quite a painful left knee.’
‘Yes?’ said Sergeant Trotter, pausing with interest.
Afterwards,’ said Johnson. He took a pound tube of flake white and leaned on it, while a low glistening hill formed on his palette. Krishtof Bey said feelingly, ‘Afterwards may be too late.’
‘Middle-Eastern soft-bellied drop-out,’ said Johnson pleasantly.
‘Pavement artist,’ said Krishtof Bey.
There was an amiable silence, broken by the rasping of Trotter’s thumbs on my neck. People splashed in the pool. I could hear James Ulric conversing in a creaking cackle with Missa or Catherine or Louis or Jake on his other side. My muscles began to warm up and spread out, like treacle. I allowed my eyelids to close against the dark glasses.
Sergeant Trotter said, ‘I reckon Mr Johnson ought to burn them arsenic notes of yours, if he has them.’
In a trice, my fibres had sprung into their natural bunches again like strong gutta-percha. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I managed.
‘Mr Krishtof mentioned Mr Johnson had those tests,’ Sergeant Trotter explained. ‘Mr Brady was of the opinion that they ought to be destroyed, and I must say I agree.’
‘I think you’re probably right,’ said Johnson. He stepped back, stuck a brush in his fist and pushed his glasses up his insignificant nose. The picture, pale and stylish with no third dimension as yet, was undoubtedly that of Krishtof Bey, tinted and drawn by a draughtsman. He said, ‘I’ll put a match to them some time. I can’t remember which book I put them in. Or were they in that grip they mislaid for me at Coral Harbour?’
I said, ‘You were lucky, you got yours back . . ‘and stopped what I was saying. Of course. That was why my case too had been taken. For the same reason as Johnson’s. ‘I lost mine too, between Nassau and Great Harbour Cay. Someone wondered what we might have committed to writing,’ I said. I added impatiently, ‘You must remember what you did with the papers.’
I have no patience with crassness. Wilful crassness. Did he not realize he was endangering not only my life but his own? That between the covers of Portnoy’s Complaint lay the seeds of premature death?
‘Oh, it’ll turn up,’ said Johnson. ‘They call it information retrieval among console computers.’
‘It’s a pity we haven’t a console computer,’ I said. ‘An integrated data-processing system could find some work to do here and there.’
The bifocals turned, elevated and lower Ds, and then reversed to gaze on the canvas. ‘I would have you know,’ said Johnson comfortably, ‘that I am multiprogrammed with impeccable software. What about you?’
‘I am a small, edge-punched component,’ I said bitterly, ‘whom nobody wants.’ And closing my eyes, allowed Trotter to resume kneading my back.
No accidents befell me over the rest of that day, largely because I spent every waking minute taking precautions. I would have been suspicious of Arli, the Wonder Dog who Types with his Nose. Now Krishtof, Brady and Trotter all knew that I was a witness to the fact that there had been an attempted murder, and that I was a prosecution witness in potential. They also knew that there was evidence of this, and that it was in Johnson’s possession. That afternoon, I had regarded Krishtof Bey as a confessed murderer. By making Johnson’s share in this public, he had later strengthened my suspicions. If anything befell Johnson or my notes, neither Brady nor Trotter could claim total ignorance. They were bound to fall under suspicion as well.
On the other hand, Krishtof might have been speaking the truth.
If I believed he was speaking the truth. I had to believe that he had questioned me, snatched my gun and hidden under my bed in order to prepare me for a major onslaught of passion.
In my experience, there was no precedent for this.
On the other hand, my experience was limited. In vitro and in vivo.
I spent a number of cogitant hours in the undemanding and, it must be said, amusing company of Missa, Catherine, Louis and Jake, as well as the Begum and my father; and at bedtime, followed Johnson upstairs like an empty chair on a ski-lift. At his closed door, he turned and confronted me. ‘Beltanno.’
‘Yes?’ I said, stepping backwards.
He sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come in and tell me about it.’
The door, I noticed, following him in, was not even locked.
The lights were blazing as well.
And every drawer, shelf and cupboard in the room had been swept as clean as a whistle, and all their contents dumped in the middle of the floor.
Johnson, his arms dangling, stood beside me and surveyed it. ‘Dear, dear,’ he said. ‘It looks like the changing-room in a rehabilitation centre for knitted soft toys.’
‘Are you surprised?’ I said bitterly.
He thought about it a while. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you can over-do this natural-fibre thing. I wonder if your notes have gone. Actually, I did remember where I put them. In this drawer.’
The drawer was empty.
‘They’ve gone,’ said Johnson.
I was silent in my disillusionment.
‘Someone else had the random access device. Who, I wonder? It could have been anyone. But they might,’ said Johnson, ‘have folded the stuff and put it back in the drawers.’ A large moth rose groggily from a larval pile of old socks: Johnson smacked his hands on it and stooping, gathered an incohesive clot of his possessions to his bosom. The lights went out.
‘Oh,’ said Johnson.
I didn’t say anything. I was no longer relying on the leading luminary of Britain’s intelligence services abroad. I got the gun out of my bag and pointed it into the darkness. Now the killer had made off with the evidence, he was half safe. All he had to do to be wholly safe was to get rid of us. I said, ‘Johnson?’
‘Beltanno,’ said Johnson. His voice came out of the darkness on the other side of the room: I could hear the sound of socks dropping. He said, ‘Can you clap your hands?’
‘I’ve got a gun,’ I said, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘Johnson, who has the room on the right?’
‘Your right or my right?’ said Johnson. There was the sound of more socks dropping. He said, ‘Listen. Clap your hands.’
‘My right,’ I said. ‘Remember this is a copy of the castle at home? There’s a concealed hatch to the right of the fireplace. It leads straight into the bedroom next door.’
‘Clever,’ said Johnson. ‘Who has the bedroom next door?’
I said, ‘That’s what I’m asking you.’ To the right of me somewhere, something was creaking. I was sure of it. I took a fresh grip of the gun and turned slightly, facing the sound.
‘All right,’ said Johnson obligingly. There was a pause, during which clearly I heard the creaking again. Johnson said, ‘Two senior members of Frei Korper Kultur from Sylt?’
I said, ‘What? I’m going to fire. Stand still, or I’m going to fire.’
‘I am standing still,’ said Johnson’s voice from the same place, touched with anxiety. ‘But the rib-knits are falling simply all over the place. Who was in the next bedroom then?’
I was listening. I then said as lucidly as my engorged vascular system would allow, ‘Here. Who has the next bedroom here?’
‘I wish you would clap your hands,’ Johnson said with some wistfulness. ‘I don’t know. Wallace Brady, I think?’
‘Yes,’ said a third voice, a soft voice out of the darkness on my right. ‘Wallace Brady it is.’
I fired.
The lights came on.
In front of the hatch by the fireplace stood Wallace Brady, his pale irises surrounded by an even paler rim of shocked scleral tissue, his shoulders straightening after a duck. Behind him on the plaster was a wide splintered hole. ‘You shot at me!’ he said.
‘Marvellous!’ Johnson said. He dropped all the woollies, and moving forward, laid a hand on Brady’s limp arm. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘I didn’t expect it. I told her to clap.’
‘I wish she had,’ said Wallace Brady. ‘I didn’t expect it either.’
The glasses turned to where I stood transfixed, the smoking gun in my nerveless right hand. ‘Go on, Beltanno,’ said Johnson. ‘Do it again.’
‘Hit him?’ I said, unexpectedly in the top third of my register. My knees were trembling. I could have sworn he was sober.
‘You can’t hit a civil engineer,’ Johnson said. ‘They never stay still long enough. Try the ceiling. Or clap.’
I was alone with a drunk and a murderer. I went along with it, playing for time. ‘I can’t clap with a gun in my hand.’
‘Give me the gun,’ said Johnson impatiently. He took it and stood twirling it between us and waiting. ‘Now go on. Clap.’
Foolishly, I applauded.
The lights went off, came on, went off, came on and went off.
There was a short silence. ‘Again,’ said Johnson’s voice impatiently. I clapped. The lights went on.
‘Lovely. Wasn’t it?’ said Johnson. ‘Acoustic switches are my absolute buzz. Come in and have a drink, Wallace. I’ve got some Glenfiddich somewhere, I think, if the bastard has left it. Did you wonder where that hatch was going to lead you?’
‘I knew where it was going to lead me,’ said Wallace. ‘But thanks for the let-out. I was just too bloody nosy for the good of my skin.” He looked at me. ‘I suppose you thought I was a burglar?’
‘She thought you were whoever has just slithered off with her arsenic tests,’ Johnson said. He gazed at Brady and Brady looked down, embarrassed. ‘My God,’ said Johnson with interest. ‘Did you think we were conducting an Arthurian agape in four-ply? We just came in, and the room was like forget it. Hallelujah!’ He pounced. ‘The survival kit.’
He put the whisky down, assembled the glasses, and disappeared into the bathroom for ice. I clapped my hands slowly, twice. The light went out, lingered, and came on again. Wallace Brady was sitting in an attitude of extreme discomfort, looking at me. He said, ‘I want to apologize.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It must all have sounded quite extraordinarily odd.’
He said, ‘You can hear quite clearly behind that damned hatch.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Brady said, ‘Do you think I took the papers? I could have.’
‘So could Krishtof Bey and Sergeant Trotter,’ I said.
Johnson came in with the ice and Brady walked over to him and said, ‘There’s something I’m just not too clear on. You said downstairs this morning that all this wasn’t an accident. Then you told us all that Beltanno had proof that it wasn’t. I just wanted to ask you why you had to shoot off your mouth about Beltanno? Doesn’t that expose her to attack by the murderer?’
‘How funny,’ I said. ‘I wanted to ask him that too.’
Johnson handed round the drinks, sat down and looked at him, his bifocals twin circles of blankness. ‘I’m being paid by Mr Tiko,’ he said. ‘So that he can inherit three million dollars.’
For a moment, I think Wallace Brady believed him. I was almost more irritated with him than I was angry with Johnson. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said snappishly. ‘Mr Tiko inherits the Chieftainship, and I’m quite sure my father will see that’s all there is to inherit.’
‘Even if your father marries the Begum?’ said Johnson. He put down his whisky and began comfortably filling his pipe. ‘That’s quite a lot of loot to get rid of, even if he invests in Government stock. Anyway, who’s complaining? You sold me up the river to Krishtof Bey and look what happened. My underwear is exposed. And we are both sitting targets.’
‘Tell the police,’ said Wallace Brady.
It was good advice. Good, sensible layman’s advice which Johnson was in no position to take. I thought of that row with Edgecombe yesterday, at Great Harbour Cay. If someone’s after you because you’re an agent, then he’s taking his time about it for a very good reason.
Edgecombe was the sprat. Johnson, if not the whale, was at least the halibut. I watched Wallace Brady, who was sitting sipping his whisky with his pale eyes on Johnson. Johnson said, ‘I’m not going to get mixed up in it, children. Bad for business. You tell them, Brady.’
‘Right. I shall.’ Brady got to his feet, kicking a space in Johnson’s dog-eared possessions. He wore, with some distinction, the Bahamian undress dress uniform of casual silk shirt and light trousers.
‘But you’ll have to wait until four-thirty tomorrow,’ Johnson said.
It doesn’t do to underrate Johnson. Of course. No telephones, and fixed-schedule radio-telephone facilities.
It didn’t do to underrate Wallace Brady either. ‘That’s all right, I’ll borrow the launch first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘And do it from Great Harbour Cay. Or I could fly to Nassau if necessary.’
Johnson, peacefully smoking, was still undisturbed. ‘So you could,’ he said. ‘I wish we had the evidence to send with you. But you could take Dr MacRannoch. After all, she’s got to explain why she sat on it for so long.’
Brady said slowly, ‘I’d forgotten that.’
So had I. I must stop drinking alcoholic drinks prepared under doubtful conditions.
Wallace Brady kicked a couple of shirts out of his way and strode across to stand over Johnson. ‘You don’t want the police, do you?’ he said. ‘It would spoil the leisurely high-society image. Dirty little men running over the Begum’s nice holiday island; maybe taking you off to a crowded hotel room in Nassau, or forcing you to stay and give evidence in some stuffy court. Beltanno doesn’t matter. Or Edgecombe.’
‘Well, honestly,’ said Johnson, taking the pipe out of his mouth. He looked slightly pained. ‘If Edgecombe’s an agent, then the last thing he wants is the police. We know that already. And if I don’t testify, and Beltanno testifies without evidence, your rushing off to Nassau will do precisely nothing but create an unholy mess, for Edgecombe and Beltanno most of all. Particularly if Edgecombe denies he ever told her he was an agent, as he is extremely likely to do. You see, there’s no solid proof.’
‘Yes,’ said Brady. He was pallid with suppressed anger. ‘There’s no solid proof. I didn’t take Beltanno’s arsenic notes, Johnson. What if Krishtof and Trotter didn’t steal them either? What if you emptied your own drawers and scattered your own papers just to save yourself trouble? Where are the notes, Mr Johnson? In your pocket?’
‘Good God,’ said Johnson. He rose slowly, pipe in hand, to his feet. Wallace Brady was half a head taller.
‘Turn out your pockets,’ said Brady. ‘Or I’ll turn them out for you.’
Johnson put his pipe down. ‘Look,’ he said. An expanse of exasperated glass turned first on Brady, then on me. ‘A minute ago everyone was urging me to burn the damned things. I’ve just told you. You can’t use them without harming Beltanno.’
‘I know. I don’t want to use them. I just want to show you up. Johnson Johnson, for the selfish British bastard you are,’ said Brady. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense, any of it. It didn’t make sense, unless Brady wanted these papers himself. And had looked for them. And had failed to find them.
I stared at Johnson and Johnson, bemused, stared back at Brady; and Brady, with a grunt of exasperation, lifted his strong golfer’s right hand and lunged.
I clapped my hands.
For a moment the instant darkness took them both by surprise. Then I heard the thwack as their frames interlocked.
Grunts, like whispers, are impossible to identify in the dark; and so is hard breathing. I retreated to the fireplace and listened as the struggle unrolled its course over socks, trousers and papers, yelpingly up to and over a drawer and momentarily into the base of a lamp. There was a crash, but clearly of the wrong calibre. Brady used a short, pithy word and I heard Johnson laugh annoyingly. Then the bumps and wheezing started again.
They must have been evenly matched. Neither ever got disengaged for long enough to manage a clap. But one of them contrived to get a single hand free.
They were close to me, on their feet and still pantingly wrestling when the pistol went off. As the light came on I saw it drop from Brady’s right hand, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. Before he could bring his fist up to defend himself, Johnson had hit him.
It was nicely judged. I wasn’t going to have a broken jawbone to deal with. Wallace Brady merely followed one shoulder down into a pile of old Pringle sweaters and lay there, while Johnson went through his pockets. He got up, his respiration fast but quite even, and observed, ‘He hasn’t got them either. All the same, he made an awful fuss to cover up not going to the police, I thought. Didn’t you?’
‘I was too busy dodging,’ I said. There was a fresh bullet hole to the right of the fireplace, just a foot above where my head had just been.
‘He just wanted the light to come on,’ said Johnson blandly. I could see his eyes. They were ordinary, with white circles round them. I said, ‘He’s smashed your bifocals?’
‘What? No! No,’ said Johnson, and fished out a maroon leather case from his pocket He extracted and put on the lenses. He added, ‘I take my teeth out as well.’ I would have respected him, had I not been well aware that his teeth were his own. It struck me to wonder how in the course of that fight he had found time to case up his glasses. I remembered why I had followed him to his room. I said, ‘Right. I have something to say to you.’
Johnson knelt and correctly rolled up Wallace Brady’s left eyelid. Nothing was taking place under it but the doll’s-eye movements of the deeply unconscious. Johnson got up, put his pipe in his mouth and wandered over to sit in a chair. He struck a match. ‘You want to know why I told all, after we had agreed that we shouldn’t,’ he said.
I said, ‘I don’t need to be told. You’re using me as your ready-rigged bait.’
‘Bright girl,’ he said without so much as taking his pipe out of his mouth. ‘All right. Now suppose you triumph over hysteria and enable us to move on to a stable host-parasite relationship. What, so far, have we hooked?’
I looked at the wall over my head and sat down with deliberation. ‘Wallace Brady,’ I said. ‘You know all I know about that. And Krishtof Bey. You will find it extremely hard to believe the latest news there.’
‘You know me. I’ll believe anything,’ said Johnson. ‘Tell me all you think I’m fit to be told.’
But he wasn’t disturbed. At the end of my pungent if expurgated recital, he merely said, ‘Yes. That’s more or less the scene as I heard it.’
I don’t know how I got on my feet. I said, ‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘What you think I mean,’ Johnson said. ‘You’re bugged, your room’s bugged, and there isn’t a move you make around the house or the garden that Spry or myself isn’t watching. You may be bait, but you’re barbed bait. Don’t worry, Doctor. All you have to do is enjoy yourself.’
I thought of the four-minute kiss. I said, ‘You bloody little cold-bellied stinkpotter.’
‘Oh no,’ said Johnson, looking hurt. ‘Blowboater or Ragwagoner if you must.’ He got up and pressed the hatch and began lugging Brady’s inert body towards it. I supposed he was going to search Brady’s bedroom as well.
I stood and watched him. I could go to the police. I could go back to the hospital. I could leave.
I couldn’t do anything and still remain Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch. I was a responsible citizen who had been enlisted by a high-grade professional. On the other hand, if he was painting Krishtof Bey by the pool, how the hell did Johnson expect to hear what happened or didn’t happen all the time in my bedroom? I stopped dead with my hand on the door and said, ‘A tape?’
Johnson was watching Brady’s non-slip composition soles and heels smoothly recede through the hatch. ‘Rolls Out on Wheels for Easy Clean,’ he observed. He straightened. ‘Yes, a tape. But I edit it,’ he said. ‘In fact, some bits of it I really don’t hear at all. And whatever else I have done or not done to you, Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, I think I have shortened your shelf life.’
I slammed the door, but, being the Begum’s door, it closed with a click.
I couldn’t find the bug. I undressed with the radio roaring and fell asleep to the strains of Tchaikovsky. I will narrate none of my dreams.