The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It rang twice, and cut off.

  It was enough for Natalie.

  She sat instantly, calling for Amy. ‘The system’s connected again! You don’t mind if I make a few calls?’

  The telephone system might have come back to life, but Tom Mix had disappeared into a haze.

  It didn’t come back. I lay there like the dogs and the parrots and the snakes and Natalie and said, ‘Amy!’

  Amy was swearing into the telephone, and drumming her hand on the rest. She said, ‘Nope. There’s no sound on the wire. No effing dice, Mrs Sheridan. O.K., Rita, what’s your worry?’

  I explained dopily, wishing I hadn’t mentioned it.

  Amy was undisturbed.

  ‘Cohn!’ she yelled.

  Everyone who had been asleep woke up.

  The parrot fixed her with an uneasy eye, looked away, and then gurgled under its breath, scraping a claw on its perch.

  Tom Mix suddenly returned.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Johnson, with interest.

  ‘Bloody parrot,’ said Amy.

  I felt suddenly cold, which in that heat was practically frightening. I said, ‘What’s the parrot to do with it?’

  Natalie said, ‘If it’s Cohn, Kim-Jim taught it to watch all these films. You remember. It talks all the time.’

  ‘Sure effing does,’ Amy said. ‘Switches the programmes all the time, too. Every time the effing phone rings.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Maggie was listening too, and Raymond, and Dodo and Natalie, turning round with the telephone still stuck vainly in her ear.

  ‘And calls the effing dogs,’ Amy continued. ‘Ultrasonic sound. Parrots have it. Imitate the sounds you can’t hear on the T.V. control pad. Change the effing programme.’

  ‘When the telephone rings twice,’ I said.

  I had the full attention of Johnson’s bifocals.

  ‘Explain,’ he said.

  I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It reminded me of something.’

  Raymond said, ‘Rita. It does matter. You look terrible. What?’

  They were all looking at me. This couldn’t be what Johnson meant.

  This could be what Johnson meant.

  I said, ‘It reminded me of the night Kim-Jim died in Madeira. He was watching video in his study. I passed his door, and heard the telephone ring twice. Then he turned the video off while he answered it. That’s how we knew he was still alive long after everyone had gone. That’s how the police were sure it was suicide.’

  Maggie said, ‘But we know it was suicide. The gun, the wound and everything. He had cancer. The only person around was you, and my God, you’re his sister.’

  Ferdy said, ‘Wait a minute. What you’re saying, Rita, is that it was the parrot that switched off the video?’

  ‘We’ve just seen him do it,’ I said.

  Ferdy stared at me, thinking, and nursing his bad shoulder absently. ‘Consider, then, children,’ he said.

  ‘Bird responds to telephone ring, and puts the video off. Poor old K-J doesn’t put it on again, so is presumed done for. Call unimportant: could be a ring-through of the one I made to what’s-his-name . . . Aurelio, to tell him we were getting a free ride home. But still doesn’t help very much. Guy was alive when I left him, and dead by the time the phone rang.’

  ‘It doesn’t help at all really,’ Johnson said. ‘Except, of course, that if Kim-Jim were murdered, it shows us what time the murderer wanted his alibi for.’

  Maggie said, ‘Look. We’ve had enough killings tonight. Kim-Jim wasn’t murdered. The police said so.’

  Johnson said, ‘But look what we’ve found out since then about the Curtis family. The police might think it well worth while now to have another look. Think of all the new possible motives. Revenge by someone who thought Kim-Jim was in the drugs business. Execution by someone who thought he knew too much and might give away his own family. A murder of passion, over Natalie. A murder for gain, by someone with designs on Rita.

  ‘It’s only an idle thought, but so many of the principals are dead now, that it might be quite easy to find someone who is willing to talk, now that he knows there’s no one around to make him pay for it.’

  Maggie said, ‘But it doesn’t alter the facts. Rita’s brother was alive when we all left. The house was locked. The kitchen people were in each other’s company all the time. And the only person roaming about after was Rita.’

  ‘That is true,’ Dodo said. ‘The girl came home early. The play was still on. The Queen Elizabeth play in the study.’

  ‘My name is Bond. James Bond,’ said the parrot. It let off a lot of gunfire and added, in a strong American accent, ‘I guess there’s just you and me left.’

  It was beastly. I said, ‘It said that as we were leaving. As we left Kim-Jim to come to your party.’

  ‘Did it?’ said Johnson. ‘With the gunfire?’

  Maggie said, ‘Well, what’s that to do with it? That’s rifle fire your star-struck little green friend has just come out with. The thing that killed Kim-Jim would produce one single bang, I suppose. Or pop. Or whatever.’

  ‘I think,’ said Natalie, ‘the point Johnson is making is that the parrot may have produced its gunfire sounds after being triggered off, so to speak, by a real one. Is it possible?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ferdy. ‘No gunfire in Queen Elizabeth’s day, unless they’d got to Plymouth Hoe. Talking of Spaniards, did anyone ever track down the filthy dozen who did down Dolly? My shoulder and I would like to meet them.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Raymond said. ‘Being smugglers by trade, they’re a bit elusive. They’re maybe even a bit dead, if the Curtis family wanted it that way. But they’ve found the first step in the chain. The place where the dope was loaded into the Dozen’s boat by Clive Curtis’s other partner.’

  Natalie said, ‘Other partner? Who? Where was this?’

  ‘Oh, let’s leave it,’ said Johnson. ‘They only got half the story before the wires went. Once the storm’s fully over, we’ll hear it all. And the police say that now his sister is dead, Clive seems quite keen to talk.’

  Natalie said, ‘So they don’t know who the man is in Colombia?’

  ‘Not in Colombia,’ Johnson said. ‘Or maybe originally. But the boat that attacked Dolly had loaded the dope in Tobago. You didn’t see them, Ferdy?’

  Raymond grinned. ‘I bet he’s glad he didn’t,’ he said. ‘Or it might have been Goodnight Ferdy, like it was Goodnight Kim-Jim.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Kim-Jim’s voice.

  It was fairly horrible. It was such a good imitation that we turned round.

  The parrot liked that. He clucked and bobbed, and then gave a repeat performance.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Kim-Jim’s voice again. ‘Have yourself a good time. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  Everyone avoided looking at me. Ferdy got up and stretched. I looked at Johnson.

  I said, ‘Those are Kim-Jim’s last words. I told you at the time. Those are the exact words Kim-Jim said to Ferdy as we left for your party. And Ferdy said, “I have news for you. Tonight, old boy, you are enlarging your scope. See you tomorrow.’”

  Natalie said, ‘But how could the parrot . . . ?’

  ‘From the tape,’ said Johnson. ‘The tape Ferdy faked up, to make you think Kim-Jim was alive, when he’d just killed him. They’ll produce it in court. They’ll also produce Carl Thomassen. The fourth man at the Brighton Beach Hotel. He’s just been arrested at the airport, Ferdy. Give up. Give up.’

  ‘Would you?’ said Ferdy. ‘That’s a bloody insult, old boy. Braithwaites never give up. Ask the family. Graveyard’s full of them.’

  Because he hadn’t been running about volcanoes, he was the freshest of us all, in spite of his wounded shoulder and his sling.

  His bald head always made you think he was old, but he walked and ran and everything like a dancer. And was good at kissing. And would take No for an answer, after a struggle.

  He had a revolver, a
nd his back to the door.

  ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘It was such a nice, well-paying business. I mean, sexy flowers are all very well, but it palls.

  ‘Natalie, hang on to that girl. She’s got your nose licked.

  ‘Maggie, you’ve got a technique worth millions. Stop showing it to millions.

  ‘Rita, my Scotch Bird of Paradise, don’t trust anybody. Especially not that low-geared, witty, implacable bastard, my friend over there . . .

  ‘Goodbye, J.J. It’s been nice knowing you, but expensive. If Frances Emerson hadn’t offered me your studio, I suppose I’d be a millionaire and you’d be wining and dining, a drunken self-pitying ruin, in some expensive harbour on Dolly . . .

  ‘Actually,’ Ferdy said, ‘I’m sorry about Dolly. I hope that collection of wogs has duly been crucified. They weren’t meant to wreck your little ship. Or lose their tempers with you. Or bloody lose the place and drill me instead of one of the others . . . You knew, I suppose, from the way that they kicked you, that someone close to you was behind it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He had pulled himself upright. He was full in the sights of Ferdy’s revolver.

  Ferdy said, ‘Once you would have paid me to do this.’

  I didn’t know what he meant, but I saw Raymond’s face, and the fear on it.

  Johnson said, ‘Actually, no. But as you say, we both go back a long time. So it’s your choice. Gold watch for long service.’

  There was a silence. No one moved. No one spoke.

  Then Ferdy said, ‘You’re a bloody unfair bastard. I ought to take you at your word. Tell your little bottom-wipers there not to trust you. That this is what you do. That this is why you live while everyone else round about you gets theirs . . .

  ‘Have yourself a good time, my dear friend Johnson Johnson,’ said Ferdy, with a sudden, terrible smile. ‘For tonight, sure as death, I am enlarging your scope for you.’

  He waved with his gun, and went; and Raymond, starting to his feet, dropped into his chair again after one brittle glance from the Owner.

  A moment later, we heard the gun fire.

  Natalie said, ‘You knew he would do that? How did you know?’

  ‘Sexual strategy of bloody human beings,’ Maggie said. She was crying. ‘And it bloody stinks.’

  An hour or two after that, a car came to take Natalie and Dodo to a hotel, from which they were to fly to Miami as soon as the airport opened in the morning.

  Fred Gluttenmacher, comfortably asleep all night on board the Paramount Princess and, apart from three hookers, the sole object of attention of its entire crew since the storm began, was to join her there and fly with her, discussing on the way what to do about replacing the co-producer of Josephine.

  Before that, both Natalie and Dodo had been subjected to a short pep-talk by a senior police representative, in which I gathered it was made clear that, there being some sensitive areas on both sides of the case, if she didn’t publicise theirs, they wouldn’t publicise hers.

  Or so Johnson said. He was there while Natalie said goodbye to me.

  She still didn’t care for me, but her computer-brain, which had hardly registered me except, as Ferdy had dog-nosed, as a show-piccaninny, was full of relevant information now.

  She had seen both my cropped hair and my wig. No doubt she drew her own conclusions. She knew about my link with the Curtises, but also that the authorities, for their own reasons, would rather it didn’t get about.

  She had promised to keep it quiet, and I thought she would. Natalie never gossiped. She had enough power. She didn’t need to.

  She had style, as well. She would have offered me that post again, if I had wanted it. The post Kim-Jim wanted me to have, that she thought was above me. The work on the film that she’d passed to Clive Curtis.

  She didn’t, for the opposite reason. I didn’t like her, but I appreciated that. And I wished her well for her film, although I wouldn’t go to see it.

  At the last moment, Amy found Porter on the floor, and loaded him into the car as well, with the consent of the police. Tomorrow, the hangover and the funeral arrangements. The next day, not even Porter knew what.

  Everything hurt. Thinking hurt. Raymond, Maggie and Johnson, deep in their chairs, didn’t talk even to each other and neither did Amy, treading heavy-footed among us, preparing to send us to bed.

  When she took the parrot out, I said, ‘Will you keep Cohn?’

  She looked at Johnson.

  He looked weary to death. He said, ‘It isn’t Cohn.’

  I should have known, if I’d thought. I said, ‘Amy trained it?’

  It would have been easy. All they needed to do was tape the real Cohn, and play it over and over for one of Amy’s St. Lucians.

  They could even have put together, from Kim-Jim’s tapes, a duplicate of those last words he was supposed to have spoken to Ferdy. And hearing them, Ferdy would assume he was trapped.

  Raymond had been at Faflick’s in England, as I had been. Maybe spying on me. Maybe because Johnson had spotted, as I had spotted, that the parrot had something to do with the time Kim-Jim died.

  Because two rings of the telephone must have been a signal, not a call which Kim-Jim answered. The telephone was not beside his chair. With the telly on, it would have taken him the length of at least one ring to hear it.

  And by the time he switched the telly off and got to the phone, there would have been several rings more.

  But I hadn’t known that it was Ferdy the alibi was for.

  Ferdy, who had been a victim, as I had, of the sledge run, and who had barely escaped with his life on board Dolly.

  But who had killed Kim-Jim, it seemed. Who was the man I had sworn to follow and find. Whose death, by his own hand, was in the end worse than the death of my own father and sister, because still, in my mind, he was my joyous friend, of whom I was proud.

  How can you know whom to trust?

  I fell asleep, and got covered up somehow. Much later, a voice I had heard somewhere before said, ‘Don’t wake her. Ah, she’s stirring. Let’s have a look, then.’

  It was daylight. ‘Well, young lady,’ said a man I had certainly seen somewhere before. ‘You seem to be making very good progress. Just let me look at this shoulder once more.’

  Henry. Henry, the well-mannered doctor who had dropped into the Owner’s flat, and discussed Bessie. Whose depth-charges had been mentioned only yesterday.

  He had on an open-necked holiday shirt, showing a lot of new suntan, and was peering at my various dressings. I said, ‘You patched me up yesterday?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Not much rumoured abroad, you know. I’m on holiday round the coast.’

  ‘What a coincidence,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Why not? And if there’s some valuable property around that people want an eye kept on, then why not, again?’

  He replaced the bandages. ‘That won’t even leave a scar. I’ll write you a prescription. I expect you’d like to get home pretty soon, anyway.’

  I said, ‘You strapped up Mr Johnson, then? How is he?’

  ‘Remarkable,’ Henry said. ‘Remarkable, considering. Nothing that a little embroidery here and there won’t put to rights. He’s flying back as soon as possible, I’m glad to say. A week in hospital, or two, and he’ll be walking around. A limit to what drugs can do. Ah, there you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘Fully paid-up member of the Friendly Burial Society. Goodbye, Henry, and thank you.

  ‘Rita, I am sending you to the airport in half an hour, and in twelve hours you will be in London. A grateful government will provide you with any accommodation you want, or Maggie would be happy to share with you, or you may have friends of your own whom you would prefer to stay with anyway. Or go to Troon or Glasgow. Which?’

  Henry had gone out of the room. I looked at Johnson the way he was without his drugs and said, ‘I’d rather stay with friends. Thank you. My luggage is in . . . is in Ferdy’s house.’

  ‘It’
s being collected,’ Johnson said. ‘Amy and the others are sleeping. I’ll say goodbye for you. Also, I wouldn’t presume to fix you up with a job, but the American film project you were interested in is still open, and you could always ring them.’

  The information ran to a stop. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m trying to sort out your life in what feels like the middle of a quadruple bypass. If Connie rings you in a couple of weeks, will you come and let me talk to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Look, forget about me. You don’t owe me anything.’

  ‘It’s been the Fun Bus for Under-Fives. I know,’ said Johnson. ‘See you in London. Why hang about? The St Lucia Rotary Club rang this morning to bloody cancel my lecture.’

  Chapter 23

  Three weeks later, I lifted the phone in London and heard the voice of Connie Margate, Johnson’s housekeeper, asking me to go to Flat 17b again.

  In between, I hadn’t been idle. I had a lot of business to see to. Accountants. Stockbrokers. Bills.

  I went up to see my aunt in Troon, and arranged for her to take over proper ownership of Robina’s house, with a sum of money to pay the rates and give her a living.

  She was horrified at my hair and my blisters and the speed with which I was taking big decisions without a man to advise me, and I got out of it as fast as I could.

  In Glasgow, I saw my friends and had my white and red hair made all the same colour as the natural red, and went to sit beside Robina, who didn’t know me, but liked the nurse that brought her the bedpan.

  I sat, and inside my head I told her that her daughter Robina had been shot, and her son Colin was in prison on a drugs charge, and that her son Kenneth James was in his grave, killed by this great photographer pal I liked working with so much.

  And that her first husband, Old Joseph, was a heap of clean, small, yellowed bones, with not a shred of flesh on them, at the bottom of a hot grey pool in the West Indies.

  I thought, inside my head, that, it would have been Gordon Geddes’s final triumph, to see what had become of his wife’s bummer of a first husband with the cheap set of values.

  Then I thought that, in fact, he rated a bit higher than that. He would have been sad, for Robina’s sake.