The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Ferdy stood where he was, and you could see the drink draining out of him. The Hon. Maggie looked up at him, gasping, and when he jerked his head at the stairs, she collected her straps and ran across the carpet and up them. The service door banged and Dodo tramped out, looked across at Natalie and then followed Maggie up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms. I could hear her thudding about, collecting towels and coping with the start of wisteria.

  Ferdy said, ‘In there?’ and walking over, pressed the study door handle.

  Johnson said, ‘We locked it until the guardia come. But it’s pretty clear, I’m afraid. Gun beside him.’

  Aurelio came in with a tray of black coffee. He was greeny-brown, and the tray was rattling. They all looked at him. You would think I wasn’t there. I got up and said to Natalie, ‘You’re covering up for your van Diemen friend. You all are. It wasn’t suicide. It just looks like suicide. We had plans for tomorrow. He had plans for the rest of his life. He was taping a serial, goddammit!’

  I got choked and broke off. Aurelio, who had been standing staring at me, moved on at a nod from Natalie, and served everyone. Johnson took a cup for me and put it on a table. I said, ‘Someone got in and shot him. I’ll tell the guardia.’

  Natalie started to speak, and then stopped at a look from her lawyer.

  Harvey Kazimierz. A little more silvery than usual behind the rimless glasses and above the bow tie. Stanford and Cambridge, Kim-Jim had said.

  He spoke as if he had taken classes. But then all lawyers talk like that. He said, ‘If there was any doubt, of course we should tell the authorities, but there isn’t. No one could have got into the house. The front door and the gates were locked from the time we all left for the party until Miss Geddes came back. Aurelio and Dolores and Mrs Sheridan’s maid were all together in their own sitting-room. After supper, they switched on a television serial, and they heard Mr Curtis do the same in the study. So he was alive then.’

  ‘Unless it was on a time switch,’ said Ferdy unexpectedly. He crossed the room, dripping, and pausing beside me, gripped my shoulder in one big hand and hugged me briefly, his chin on my hair. Then he walked to the foot of the stairs and stood nursing his coffee and staring at Natalie.

  ‘I think it was,’ said Johnson. ‘But lots of people use a time switch anyway, just in case they forget to switch the tape on when the programme starts. What does it matter anyway? Mr Kazimierz is right. The house was locked up. I don’t see how anyone could have broken in. And even if they did, Mr Curtis would hardly have allowed them to walk up to his chair and stick a gun in his face without some sort of resistance.’

  ‘What about an upstairs window?’ I said. ‘Has anyone been round the house checking? What about someone with a key? What about someone Kim-Jim knew, who could get right up to him before he even pulled out a gun? Your bloody pal threatened he’d kill Kim-Jim if he didn’t get out, and Kim-Jim is dead, and you’re all pretending it was suicide?’ I was shaking.

  It was Natalie this time who put down her cigarette and said quietly, ‘Rita. Come here and sit down.’

  After a moment I went and took the chair beside her. Now the shock was getting less, her colour was coming back to normal. The Hon. Maggie, appearing suddenly on the stairs in a yellow bathrobe, with another over her arm, came down to where Ferdy stood and took his coffee while he put the robe on over his wet things, still looking at Natalie. He was quite sober now, and so was Maggie.

  Behind them both, Dodo also came down the stairs and went and stood beside Natalie with her mouth clamped over her teeth. I could feel the blame pouring all over me.

  Johnson, who had settled down in the chair I had left, was the only one who still looked a bit queer, but then he was, and had looked like that anyway after holding that stupid party.

  If he hadn’t held that party, I should have spent the evening here, and Kim-Jim would be alive.

  Whether he had held the party or not, I should have spent the evening here.

  A glass of something appeared under my nose. Brandy. Natalie said, ‘Drink it, and listen.’

  I took it from her.

  She said, ‘Everything you say is true. You and Kim-Jim were both threatened. The man who threatened you is not in Madeira any longer. And even if he were, he’s a fool, but not stupid, any more than Kim-Jim was. If Roger van Diemen had gone into that study, do you think Kim-Jim would have sat in that chair waiting for him? Or for any stranger who came instead?’

  ‘No one came into this house anyways, after you’d gone, Miz Sheridan,’ Dodo said without warning over my head. She was looking at me. ‘No one, that is, except Miss Geddes. And Mr Curtis was all right then. The phone rang, and he answered it.’

  It was true. I had forgotten. As I went out into the garden, the phone had rung, and he’d turned down the serial.

  As I went into the garden, leaving the terrace windows open behind me.

  The bifocal glasses were watching me. Johnson said, ‘Did you hear that, Miss Geddes?’

  I nodded, looking at him. The brandy had done me no good at all.

  He said, ‘And did you hear him turn the programme up again?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was at the bottom of the garden. But I left the terrace doors open. Anyone could have got in.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Dodo again. She stood like a minnyloth, six feet tall against the light, with shoulders to match. She said, ‘No one came in from the garden after you went out, because Aurelio locked the doors again behind you. Miz Sheridan has valuable things in this house. I thought she would have told you.’

  She paused and added, ‘And no one came out of the study after you went into the garden neither. Dolores left the service door open near the end of the serial so’s we could see when Mr Curtis came out. He liked to eat late, Mr Curtis, and he was going to pick up a snack in the kitchen.’

  The Hon. Maggie, with the make-up now wiped off her face, crossed to the drinks table and poured herself a large tumbler of something, the glass chinking. The robe would have showed off her new suntan, but she clutched it about her like a blanket. She crept back to Ferdy.

  Ferdy said, ‘Then you could tell when he did it. If he switched off the tape.’

  Kim-Jim always switched off the tape at the end of a programme. He liked to edit it while it was running as well. He would never use an automatic switch-off. Johnson said doubtfully, ‘I suppose we could check,’ and he and Ferdy went off to the study, Johnson taking the wrapped key out of his pocket. After a moment, the lawyer got up and went out too.

  Natalie said, ‘Rita. You say Kim-Jim was making plans.’

  I tried to make her see sense. I said, ‘He did a lot for you. He really did. It’s the least anyone can do, to find out what happened. And punish them.’

  She ignored it. She said, ‘Rita. You know why he was retiring?’

  I saw what she was trying to do. I said, ‘His eyes were going. Yes, of course I knew. But he was prepared for it. He was getting a special screen, and tapes and everything. And there were things he was going to do for me. He wouldn’t have taped that programme. Why would you bother with a bloody programme if you were going to kill yourself?’

  The lawyer’s voice said, ‘The tape wasn’t switched off. It went on recording until the end of transmission, and ran itself out. So he must have . . . It must have happened while Miss Geddes was in the garden.’

  They had all come back. Johnson sat down again right away, but Harvey Kazimierz and Ferdy stood together. The lawyer said in a quiet voice, ‘You didn’t hear a shot then, Miss Geddes? How long were you out?’

  ‘No. I fell asleep. Until everyone came back,’ I said.

  Johnson said, ‘Would anyone hear a shot from the service wing? With the door open?’

  Dodo stared at me while she was thinking. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘that the television would drown out that sort of sound. And that parrot, he copies gunfire and barking and every other darned thing, so it wouldn’t prove nothing if we did. But we didn’t.’r />
  There was a silence. Through it, there came the sound of wheels on the drive in front of the house, and two or three voices. A car door slammed.

  Johnson said, ‘Excuse me, Mrs Sheridan. You were saying something just now about Mr Curtis retiring?’

  Natalie said, ‘They’re coming,’ and stood up. She looked at me, and then at Johnson. She said, ‘It’s no way to say this, but of course, it’s why it must be suicide. Rita is here because Kim-Jim was about to retire. He told Rita it was because he was losing his sight, as he didn’t want to distress her. She says he was making all sorts of plans, I suppose for the same reason.’

  She took a deep breath, and looked at me properly, as if she were sorry for me. She said, ‘It was cancer, Rita, and serious. He didn’t have a future. He was really fond of you. He saw you as his heir, in his work and in everything else. He wanted you secure in this job, and learning how to take your place in the world. And when he thought he had it all fixed, he killed himself.’

  I repeated, ‘Cancer. His heir,’ like a zombie. I didn’t believe her. He would never have told her that, and not me.

  She said, ‘In every sense. I witnessed his will the other day, Rita. He left you everything he owned.’

  I felt funny. They all looked at me, and then towards the hall, where you could hear Aurelio letting people in.

  ‘And so,’ said Johnson, ‘I think we should settle for suicide. For if we bring up the idea of murder, the only person with the time, the opportunity and the motive, ridiculous though it seems, is Miss Geddes.’

  I saw Johnson’s eye catch the lawyer’s, and Kazimierz came over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You can be jailed for a long time in a foreign country if they get the wrong idea. I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else. But you’ll never find out, one way or the other, if they stick you behind bars. Will you leave it to us?’

  A hint. A warning. A threat.

  Whichever it was, I agreed.

  They knew, I suppose, by the way I looked that they’d only put me off for the moment.

  If they were going to stop me, they’d have to kill me, too.

  Two days later, the Curtis family arrived from California to take the body back home for burial. It took two more days to make the arrangements, and for the Madeira police to decide that we could leave the island too if we wanted to.

  I’m not sure, even yet, how I could have got through that time without Ferdy.

  To begin with, he shed the Hon. Maggie like underwear. It wasn’t really fair, as she was fit to turn into a total drunk alone at the Sheraton, and the boys she knew weren’t going to help her do anything but drink harder.

  Between them, Johnson and Natalie had her to meals and were nice to her, considering, and after a while she began to perk up. After that, it seemed you fell across her wherever Johnson was, and sometimes you would even find her looking for Johnson, who had been there a moment before but had rolled quietly away.

  She had meant, I suppose, to use Johnson to make Ferdy jealous. Instead she was on the way to getting a crush on him herself. From what I’d heard, there had been plenty of dramas in her life before. She’d be lucky if this got the length of a drama.

  I didn’t mind, because it freed Ferdy to help me. Not to help me get over Kim-Jim’s death, but to help me find out who caused it.

  I’d expected everyone to be against me, as they had on the night of the shooting. I’d kept my mouth shut then, when the guardia came, and the doctor, and the consular advisers, and all the questions began. When they talked about suicide, I didn’t speak. But when I went to Ferdy afterwards and said, ‘O.K. I went to that rotten party of Johnson’s because you said you’d help me find Eduardo. So now what about it?’

  When I went to Ferdy and said that, I thought he and Natalie would be fiercely against my starting any sort of enquiries. But they weren’t.

  It was Natalie who gave me the number of the clinic Kim-Jim had been treated at, and let me check it with Directory Enquiries, and then let me phone them in Lisbon and get them to tell me what had been wrong with him.

  It was cancer. Affecting more than his eyes, and eating him up. He had had a month or two to live, that was all. They were sending a formal report to the authorities and to his family.

  I went off and sat in his workroom for a long time. It was still neat, because I’m a tidy worker as well. It had always been neat because he’d known he would never use it again.

  All the stuff in these cupboards now belonged to me. His television, his cassettes, his radio equipment. His investments. The money lodged in the banks whose papers they’d found in his desk. I wasn’t badly off already, but once the will was proved and everything properly wound up, I need never work again, even while Robina was still alive.

  I hadn’t gone through his papers myself, or anything he had. I’d left his room as it was, with the photographs. Only, I’d taken back my yellow cat.

  It stood with mine, in my room, with the same knowing black smile on its face. My mother had one too, but not my aunt. Already, there were more cats than people.

  Then Ferdy had come in and said, ‘Look. About Eduardo. Where do you want to go? To his house again?’

  I’d drawn up a list of what I wanted to do, and Ferdy did it with me.

  Eduardo wasn’t at home. He had left the sledges, we understood, and had taken casual work, they didn’t know what. He had promised to come when he had a day off.

  At the sledges, the story was different. Eduardo had been sacked for staying away once too often. Of course, he would get work somewhere else in the season. If not in a hotel, then at his father-in-law’s. There was always work in bananas.

  I remembered the cauldron. I said, ‘I thought the family worked with cane?’

  His brother-in-law did, they said. But his father-in-law – didn’t I know? – was overseer of Coombe’s Bananas.

  We had borrowed Aurelio’s estate car. As he got behind the wheel again, Ferdy whistled. ‘Rita, my Bird of Paradise. I don’t see how he can have done poor bloody Kim-Jim any harm, but I begin to believe that the sledge run wasn’t an accident. Van Diemen paid your Eduardo to wreck us, and meanwhile got himself out. The chap’s crazy.’

  The sun fell on this vine called a Golden Shower covered with big orange trumpets and I could see the twinge on Ferdy’s face as he drove past, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t even put his camera into the back. A good pal, was Ferdy.

  He just said, ‘O.K., let me guess. Up the hill to the baby farm? Or the airport first?’

  We went to the airport first.

  They confirmed that Mr van Diemen had lost an afternoon flight to Lisbon, and had rebooked for the following morning.

  They confirmed that on the second occasion, the booking had been taken up.

  They agreed that they knew Mr van Diemen well by sight. He came through all the time.

  They couldn’t confirm that the man who actually flew was Mr van Diemen. It had been a very full plane. The most they could say was that no one remembered speaking to him. It would take some time to trace the steward and hostesses on that particular plane, never mind find out when they might land again in Madeira. If it was important, perhaps Mrs Sheridan would write a letter? Or was this a police enquiry ?

  They had been pretty helpful, considering, and Ferdy had been brilliant but he had to sheer off at that.

  What was clear was that there was no proof, at the moment, that Roger van Diemen had actually flown out the second time, and not someone else using his ticket.

  The Coombe Banana Company’s office were helpful as well.

  As far as they knew, Mr van Diemen had left when he said. They hadn’t heard from him since. They didn’t expect to, until his next visit. Yes, he travelled regularly between all parts of the Coombe empire. If he had completed his business in Europe, he would probably be in South America or the Caribbean by now. The Liverpool office might be able to supply us with his movements.

  ‘He doesn’t sound crazy,�
� said Ferdy. ‘At least, they’re still entrusting all their bananas to him. I suppose in a firm of that size, someone would notice if the Financial Director had gone off his rocker. Maybe it’s just lust for Natalie that does him in. Do I look crazy?’

  ‘I thought Natalie was lusting for you,’ I said.

  I looked at him. He was frowning. I said, ‘If that guy didn’t fly out, he’s still here.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Ferdy shortly.

  He was still frowning. I made an effort. ‘So,’ I said, ‘if you make it with Natalie, for God’s sake keep it quiet. You want to finish the flower book.’

  ‘What do you mean, if I make it with Natalie?’ Ferdy said. The frown had disappeared. He whooped. ‘Rita! You care!’

  The car turned off the coast road and began climbing again into the mountains. The sun went in. We passed another shower of dangling trumpets and then plunged into pine trees.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ferdy said. I could see songs from Prince Eager climbing up inside his neck. The thought of sex always cheers him up and he’s not the sort, anyway, to mope about anything much.

  ‘Don’t worry. From now on, I shall confine my practices entirely to flowers. Madeira, the Island of Sin. All the bloody bees’ll come off with V.D.’

  It didn’t snow, but we ran into mist higher up, and it was no joke rounding the bends, with trucks and taxis and things looming up with their lights on. At one point we were held up for five minutes by a flock of sheep on the road, and then later on by a skidded lorry trying to get out of a ditch.

  There was no mist around Eduardo’s mother-in-law’s house, and you could see the boiler boiling in the back yard with no trouble. I thought the sight of Ferdy getting out of the car and walking up to the front door was worth the Vicarage Cross, and told him later.

  At the time, I couldn’t get a word in edgeways because of the great welcome he was getting, and invitations to come in and see the baby the Senhor had blessed with so many escudos, and drink a glass of wine to his health.

  We did, too. We walked through about every room in the house on our way to that baby, and met all its relatives, young and old through four generations, ending up with the baby’s mother parked in bed like a double airship, cheerfully feeding the baby, and not from a bottle, I can tell you.