Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Professor Hathaway leaned back and inspected him. Her spotted arms protruded from a sagging jersey dress of impeccable quality, and her face wore a nimbus of Manikins. She said, tapping her ash into a dish, ‘Someone is looking for something. Does Ruth carry about any of her innamorato’s more valuable photographs?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well. . .’ said Johnson. ‘You know, Ruth, Professor Hathaway is quite right. It is the missing couture photographs that someone is looking for.’ And he explained, cheerfully, about the burned photographs.

  Everyone listened respectfully. Even I listened respectfully in view of the amount of information he was brazenly withholding. Apparently I destroyed Charles’s film after developing it, on account of some indelicate pictures. Thus destroying, as well, the fashion shots the marauder was after.

  So far as it went, it was gospel. It was soothing as well, since he went on to describe the extremely short-term value of fashion shots. It was my point, and he looked me straight in the eye as he made it. Therefore, he explained, there was little fear of any recurrence. The thieves would discover the film was untraceable. And soon the prints would have no market price anyway. No word, note, of any leak but a couture one.

  They heard him, and then sat and thought about it. The guitarist had switched to ‘O Sole Mio’. ‘Should we inform the police,’ said Professor Hathaway thoughtfully, ‘that Mr Paladrini has left an associate?’

  ‘Do we want police on our cruise?’ remarked Johnson.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacko sourly. His face had turned red and satiny like Eddie’s and Bob’s back in Naples. Being deprived of alcohol during working hours seems to have a fatal effect on astronomers.

  ‘Or,’ said Innes, ‘do we want to trap the bastards ourselves?’

  It was the most surprising thing since the Declaration of Independence. ‘If you like,’ Johnson said. He appeared more astonished than any of us.

  ‘That is,’ said Innes, ‘unless you consider it’s none of my business. Like I would consider some things none of your business. Like forcing your attentions on this lovely girl. And feeding other men’s mouses.’

  His face was red and satiny too. I gazed at it in utter fascination. ‘Mice,’ said Jacko uneasily.

  ‘I found,’ said Innes tragically, ‘the husk in her cage.’

  There was an embarrassed silence, during which it came to everyone except, apparently, Professor Hathaway that Innes was tiddly. Professor Hathaway said, ‘That is correct. Poor Innes told me about this, and I have witnessed the proof of his workshop.’

  Pebble glasses met bifocal lenses in a reciprocal explosion of light. She said, ‘You disconnected Innes’s power. You switched off and examined his machinery.’

  ‘We all did it,’ said Jacko unexpectedly. I didn’t think he had it in him; it must have been that long talk with Johnson. Live with wool and feel that little bit richer.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid we all did it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Innes, but we weren’t sure if you just kept your lunch in it.’

  ‘McVitie’s biscuits,’ said Jacko.

  ‘And it was suspicious, you know it was,’ I said earnestly, ‘firing that revolver.’

  Innes controlled himself with an effort. ‘As the only scientist among you,’ he said, ‘I resent that. Who is James Middleton? A limey with a second-class mental capacity and the sexual application of a woodpecker. Ruth? A fine, intelligent person ruined and exploited by her lovers.’ He turned his face, with what might have been a sob, to Professor Hathaway. ‘Have you ever seen an observatory with a bullwhip in it?’

  ‘Have you ever seen an electronic workshop with a mouse in it?’ said Johnson dryly.

  It wasn’t fair. You could see Innes’s brain trying to function, and then outrage and booze overcame him together. ‘What,’ he said, ‘would you know of a scientific workshop? A parasite. A playboy. A man who lives off other men’s inventions and then turns off the amps of their Incubators? Are you on the level? Who pays you?’

  ‘The Pope,’ put in Jacko.

  ‘And Maurice,’ said Johnson, considering. ‘Is that why you have a gun, Innes? To keep snoopers away from the Incubator?’

  ‘Sure it is!’ said Innes, suddenly focusing. ‘You don’t know what that is. That’s my life’s work. You don’t know what to make of it, but I’ll tell you. There are people not a thousand miles away from the Kremlin who’d give me the earth for that mechanism.’

  The guitarist hit a sour note and slogged on gallantly. The echoes of Innes’s voice sank and died among the riveted tables. There was no doubt about it. In terms of asking to be slugged by two foul Italians in stocking masks, Innes had just won the Dracula challenge trophy. ‘Don’t be silly, Innes,’ said Lilian Hathaway, puffing peacefully at a fresh Manikin. ‘You could exhibit the whole thing in Hanley’s and no one would be any the wiser.’ She turned to me. ‘You saw the machine. Did you or Jacko make anything of it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Quite. Because there is nothing at this point to make,’ said Lilian Hathaway. ‘In any case, I understood we were talking about couture thieves, not espionage by enemy aliens. Mr Johnson made a profound miscalculation in severing the power supply to your workshop, and for that he will make a donation of five thousand pounds to the Zodiac Trust Fund. On the other matter I am not perfectly clear. Is the miscreant, in your view, still hoping to trace the photographs from Lord Digham’s camera?’

  Innes was sitting looking at the Director like a White Russian receiving word of Biological Ajax. Jacko looked horror-struck. Johnson himself, quite unaltered, did not appear to notice that he had just lost five thousand pounds. ‘It seems possible. For a time,’ he said, meditating.

  ‘Then,’ said Professor Hathaway, ‘I suggest you accept Innes’s suggestion and attempt, as he suggests, to capture the bastards.’

  She did know that Innes was sozzled. ‘Especially,’ added the Director, ‘if he has a revolver. Do you possess firearms still, Innes?’

  ‘Yesh,’ said Innes, and made an untidy clutch at his armpit. Then his fist semaphored out with a Dardick in it.

  He took a moment, narrow-eyed, to consider it. Jacko squeaked. At a nearby table someone, of indeterminate gender, let out a bellow.

  Innes didn’t hesitate after that for a moment. He wheeled his arm carefully around, took aim, adjusted professionally and fired fifteen bullets into the fish tank.

  In this natural aquarium of warm sea everything from bream to swordfish can be knifed or shot. I had had my reservations about Innes, but that moment when I saw him, gun smoking, standing there knee deep in lobster and octopus was a watershed. I was sure the Supreme Soviet would like to see Innes’s Incubator. But one look at Innes and they’d all send him straight to a funny farm.

  THIRTEEN

  We left Ischia, as I remember, next daybreak. Innes didn’t put in an appearance at breakfast and neither, to be candid, did Ruth Russell.

  The weather broke down, and only the integrated optics of Johnson and Hathaway, that spanking comedy team, kept the action going as we heaved south to our next date at Lipari.

  They say we called at Amalfi, but I can’t vouch for it. I remember mountains plunging down to the water’s edge, with coloured cube houses spilled everywhere, and the tunnels and viaducts of a motorway.

  I remember a square with a small mossy fountain and five million steps to a cathedral. Innes and Professor Hathaway went inside and met the Apostle St Andrew, to Innes’s benefit, while Jacko, Johnson and I walked about in the rain in a huddle like a self- reproducing tiddlywinks cluster and helped Lenny to shop.

  No one attacked us. At midday I decided I wanted my sickbed. We walked back to the boat in the same cohesive cluster and got into our bunks for the journey. Professor Hathaway’s guidebook was open at Lipari. The air is pure, so pure and warm, it said, that our souls want to be a wing, to glide around, our hand would like to rest softly on another, and our eyes would like to meet those of a known person, whose nearness we
deeply love.

  It didn’t mention how to spring him from jug.

  Johnson and Lenny sailed out of Amalfi, in a pure, warm air blowing about eight on the bloody Beaufort scale, and the rain lashing down. After becoming exceedingly well acquainted with the water filling the Gulf of Salerno, we fled into a fishing harbour called San Marco and spent the night offshore in a cat’s cradle of other boats’ cables.

  Nothing happened next day, except that you could see the spray coming over the sea wall without ever leaving your cabin.

  In the afternoon we climbed up through orchards of lemon and almond and cherry trees to the mountain town of Castellabate and found a cosy crumbling taverna and a paper shop.

  My newspaper said that the English playboy photographer was still in prison, and that representations for his release were being made by the British Ambassador. There was also a small paragraph on another page to the effect that the famous English playwright Maurice Frazer, who had now made his permanent home outside Parassio, was paying a short visit to the Aeolian Isles for health reasons. His companion, Mr Timothy Harrogate, said that they hoped to make their usual visit to Taormina.

  That meant that Maurice had flown down already. And that Sappho was in Lipari, where our souls wanted to be a wing. I didn’t know that Timothy’s second name was Harrogate and I doubted it even then. ‘The wind is dropping,’ said Johnson at that moment, looking over his spectacles.

  It was. While Lenny was making supper the fishing boats began to move out of the harbour and Innes and I went to watch them.

  I was beginning to have hopes of Innes. I had felt more warmly about him since that Sunday at the Aragonese Castle and Professor Hathaway’s faith had never been shaken, even after the saturation attack on the fish tank. She had paid, with perfect dignity, for the damage and recouped from Innes next morning, putting the whole thing down to an infusion of Chianti and seasick pills.

  Ever since, she had tucked him under her wing and he hadn’t had a drop. It did occur to me, looking at him with his old-fashioned face and trendy tie and tidy American socks, that if a killer did come aboard, all he would have to do to dispose of Innes was feed him a liqueur chocolate. I said, following a train of thought, ‘I wonder if Poppy is pining. Innes, why don’t you get her a boyfriend?’

  ‘Can’t afford a big family,’ Innes said. It was the first joke I had ever heard him make. He added, ‘Are you all right now?’

  He asked me that every time he saw me, even waiting in a queue at the heads in his Happy Coat. I nearly said I was, because I couldn’t afford a large family and then decided not to rib him. Instead I started talking shop, a hoot for Jacko, if he had heard me. I thought at the time it was to draw out Innes, but it was probably because I was beginning to want comforting too. Astronomy, they say, is the safest of all the professions.

  Innes is a Steady-State man, having done a sabbatical on radio astronomy at Cambridge. He is usually apt to hold forth about quasars and pulsars and has been known to devote whole lunchtimes to black holes, which according to theory are nonluminous stars which have exhausted their thermonuclear energy and are lurking about, concealing whole galaxies, for all anyone knows, to the satisfaction of all the Steady-Staters.

  I have nothing against professional argument: if, for God’s sake, you are going to sit for hours at the end of a telescope without thinking about it, you might as well work in a clock factory. I just believe that lunchtimes are for lunch and that theorizing goes with beer and short-sleeves and lying about in other friends’ flats after midnight. This time I got off to a good responsible start: all about, as I remember, what we were going to do once we knew whether Maurice wanted us back after Christmas. I didn’t say a derogatory word about a science research body – any of them. I avoided the subject of the food at the Trust, and the bloody air conditioning and the man from Kitt Peak who thought the universities ought to run all the observatories.

  It was Innes who picked all those subjects. While I stood with my jaw dropped, he began to let off steam about the Zodiac. I tried to introduce Wobble Excitation and he sidetracked into the bloody incompetence of the computer room. He then told me who was sleeping with whom in the typing pool. I knew it all, but I was so shocked I could hardly look at him.

  Finally he asked if Charles was a drug addict, and I said No more than anyone else, and saw at last from his face what he was on about. It was so surprising that I turned my back on all the wolf whistles. ‘Innes!’ I said. ‘You don’t think I am Under Another Man’s Influence? May I tell Charles?’

  ‘Charles is in prison,’ Innes said. I was right. His nostrils bulged and went in again.

  ‘Innes,’ I said. ‘I love my Charles. I love Johnson, too. I loved three boys at school and eight at university and several more subsequently. I also adore Lilian Hathaway and I think Jacko is priceless and I don’t mind you, at that, when you aren’t being stuffy. But I don’t let anyone run my life, even the person I’m going to bed with, which happens to be Charles and no one else, dearest Innes. Do I look,’ I said rather crankily, ‘like a weak-minded female?’

  And, heaven help me, Innes said, ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘I had a theory.’

  ‘About me?’ I said.

  ‘About the guy who was hunting those photographs. Anyone as persistent as that, I figured, must think the photographs are still in existence.’

  ‘They’re not,’ I said.

  ‘Johnson seemed to have doubts about that,’ Innes said.

  ‘And that’s another man with a galloping neurosis,’ I said. I was sorry afterward, but I was outraged. An entire conversation conducted with the sole purpose of psychoanalyzing my relationships. First Johnson, then Lilian, and now Innes. I ask you. Am I a nymphomaniac?

  The conversation died, and I helped to kill it. But there was, I thought, a gleam in Innes’s eye when I left him that had something almost wistful in it.

  He had certainly wanted to pump me. But he had wanted, I thought, something else maybe as well. Perhaps Innes was tiring of Poppy. Perhaps he was beginning to wonder if he could afford a family. Every mammal, they tell you, has its own display patterns and mating habits. Pigs, for example, chew their sows’ ears during sex.

  No kidding. We all have the same lousy problems.

  The next rendezvous, Johnson had said, was tomorrow on the island of Lipari. The island of Lipari was a long, long way south and Johnson and Lenny took us there, thank God, while we were sleeping.

  Or while I was sleeping.

  I didn’t know each of the others got up in turn through the night to help him, even Professor Hathaway. I didn’t know either until the next morning that she had put a phenobarbitone in my cappuccino to make sure I shouldn’t. The general impression seemed to be that for failing to stand up to life’s little buffets, I had to be cosseted. I got up, very cross, at first light and plunged into the cockpit to find Johnson and Stromboli, smoking together.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Johnson. ‘Did Innes wake you? We found him downstairs, trying to shake you out of a dying coma. I had to explain that you’d been zonked by the Director.’

  Behind his head, Stromboli rose from the sea like a pyramid bottle with smoke rising from the neck. It was olive green, with spillings of lilac and brown and grey down its sides. A lot of little white blockish houses lay scattered at its foot. Johnson’s bifocals, dividing their attention between the burgee and me, were noncommittal as ever. The sails were up, and there was no sound at all from the engine.

  I had a faint, nightmarish recollection of being grabbed by somebody and rolled backward and forward. It was the most interesting piece of information I had received on the voyage. I said, ‘If it wasn’t for Innes, I suppose I should have missed the whole of my bloating morning feast? Where is my tè and pane, twenty grams?’ A pale, steamy cloud was rising slowly from the volcano, while new whiter plumes began to appear at the brim of the crater like lace, and blossom upward in their turn.

  ‘If you go in,’ said Johnson calmly, ‘you’ll
find Lenny with his running spikes on. We’re going to circumnavigate the volcano on the recommendation of Professor Hathaway’s guidebook. It says Stromboli should be seen just before dawn, shaded in the morning haze, hollering lowly.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I could hear it.

  ‘Not that,’ Johnson said. ‘That’s a joke Jacko has discovered in his paperback.’ He added, without changing his tone, ‘Don’t play with Innes. He doesn’t understand obituary doggerel.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to ask him to invent any,’ I said irritably, and went in to have my miserable breakfast. Innes was up on the foredeck with the Professor, timing the eruptions which came every twenty minutes in a sort of creaming cauliflower shape in a nice tint of café au lait, rising to a burgeoning mushroom and dispersing in transparent apricot. A long lilac streamer hung behind when it had vanished. Close to, the old lava was layered like oyster shells, and the new falls were grey and turgid like mud, with the green and yellow of whin at their edges. Jacko, having failed to witness either Ingrid Bergman or a major natural disaster, continued to stay below with his paperback and Johnson finally took down the sails and, starting the engine, turned Dolly’s head south for Lipari.

  I said to Innes, ‘I’m sorry you were worried this morning. They made up their minds to keep me out of trouble.’

  ‘Is that what they told you?’ said Innes.

  ‘That’s what the Professor told me,’ I said. I was surprised. Innes and the Professor were as thick as thieves.

  ‘I’m sure she meant it,’ said Innes enigmatically. Lenny was out of sight and Professor Hathaway had wandered to the other end of the boat. He turned and, putting his hand on mine, looked into my eyes. Really looked, as if he wanted to get a formula across and wasn’t sure what grade the student belonged to. ‘You took phenobarbitone,’ said Innes tensely, ‘but it might have been anything. Watch what you eat. Watch what you drink. And if you take my advice, don’t trust anyone.’

  I nodded. There seemed nothing constructive I could add to it. And I had one consolation as the yacht breasted the waters and the Exhaust Pipe of the Tyrrhenian Sea dropped behind us on the horizon.