Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Lots of people, of course, wear white canvas sneakers, although not perhaps such stained ones as these. I stopped dead, gripping Helmuth like a boa constrictor, and then started moving slowly again. It had been pitch dark under the cork trees. If it was the man I had spotted last night, he had probably seen as little of me as I had of him. And even if he had seen me, it wasn’t to say that he had been there with any evil designs against me personally. As Johnson said, it was possibly just an assignation. And finally, even if he was unfriendly, he couldn’t be unfriendly to any harmful degree in a wine shop in the open air at nine in the morning. I went on in.

  The man in the canvas shoes got up and said: ‘Strewth.’

  It was Flo’s cousin, Clem Sainsbury.

  I think I said the right things. I know I went scarlet, and then probably green. I forgot about the corkwood. After an absolute four-year famine of men, I now had four in a day. Even Janey couldn’t take all of them. Clem came over and kissed me, to the silent fascination of everyone in the wine shop, and I introduced Helmuth, and we sat down.

  As I think I mentioned before, Clem is big and rugged and blond, and instead of wearing a sheepskin, he had on stained cook’s trousers and a T-shirt and a tatty old pullover with mistakes in the cable stitch, which I bet was Flo’s knitting. He had a string bag of shopping beside him. We ordered: I had fizzy stone ginger.

  Then he said: ‘And how’s Flo and the cooking? Hard luck about the other thing, Cassells.’ He always called me Cassells.

  ‘I know,’ I said. He was just the same. Clean-cut, with a rather blunt knife.

  Clem said: ‘Were you coming to see us? We haven’t swabbed the decks yet.’

  I didn’t get it. Then, coupled with his excessive lack of surprise, I got it all right.

  ‘You’re with Johnson on Dolly?’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t tell you,’ said Clem, without resentment. ‘Bloody pirate. I’ve signed on for six months. It’s all right.’

  ‘Just you and Johnson?’

  ‘There’s a working skipper, called Spry. Two can sail her, but if the painter is painting, then time is holy. Not that he bugs himself working, so far as I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Do you like him?’ I said.

  ‘Never met him,’ said Clem. ‘We converse with the bifocals. If you like glass, it’s OK.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘Mr Lloyd wants him to paint Janey.’

  ‘Wo-owl,’ said Clem. When I was with Clem, I thought in four-letter words all right. You knew Clem was hog and you were sow, and even if you became chief engineer in the Russian merchant navy, you’d stay sow to him. With other boys I tried to be feminine, but Clem had the opposite effect.

  I sat there drinking stone ginger and laying off about my career as God’s gift to catering, and he heard me out like a lamb.

  ‘You must get pretty sick of it,’ said Clem. ‘Don’t you? It’s a hell of a life, holed up in other folks’ kitchens, thumbing anchovies on to Ritz biscuits. You lose weight, and you don’t want to eat, and in a year or two’s time you’ll have slipped disks and fallen arches and a cat and a real William and Mary card table with bun feet, and that’s your bloody lot. You want to marry some nice chap and cook for him and your kids.’

  ‘I know I do,’ I said. Patiently. He just hadn’t been listening. ‘Tell me any other job where I can take the waste caviar home and spoon it into the budgie. At sixteen guineas a whack?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a budgie,’ said Clem.

  ‘It jumped into the fish bowl and died.’ I swallowed the last of the pop and got up. ‘Come on,’ I said to Helmuth. His eyes were half shut.

  ‘Bye, Cassells,’ said Clem. He heaved himself up and surveyed me, his face puckered in thought. ‘You’ve got guts, coming here after what happened. Can you really stick it? Do you like it? Are the Lloyd people decent?’

  ‘Oh, they’re all right,’ I said. I swallowed. The great sentimental idiot. ‘I like it. They’re sweet, down in the town here.’

  ‘Um,’ said Clem. He studied me a bit longer, then grinned, and stopped to fish in his net bag. Then he straightened and looped me a double cherry over each ear. ‘Ole.’ he said. ‘OK, Cassells. Be good.’

  ‘Look where it’s got you,’ I said. All right, he was a bore. But a nice one. I left, trailing Helmuth. To work.

  Anne-Marie had got breakfast, but no-one was down. I had mine and did my stint in the kitchen: by half-past eleven, everything was laid out and covered with foil, and I went for a swim. Janey was in the pool, without anything on. I suppose Helmuth was used to it. Afterwards we lay in the sun for a short fry before driving to Gallery 7. She has a beautiful body.

  We had a lot to catch up on. Janey had had a mink coat at fourteen and a Daimler sports car for her seventeenth birthday: name-dropping and place-dropping didn’t occur to her. But she knew all the jet-set gossip all right. We had just got through her love life, which was like the haberdashery at Harrod’s and of about the same lasting significance, when Janey said out of the blue: ‘Will you mind going to Dolly? To the yacht marina, I mean? That bloody boat-winch is there.’

  ‘I don’t mind all that much,’ I said. ‘I mean. If you knew Daddy.’

  ‘You’re a born prig, She-she,’ said Janey. ‘That’s your whole trouble. He knew how to live. Daddy never had a decent party in his life till old Forsey swanned in and the whole of Cine Citta and the Almanach de Gotha poured in after.’

  ‘You got value for money,’ I agreed, adding quickly: ‘It was sporting of your father to ask me. I can imagine what a shake-up it must have been, without taking me on as well.’

  ‘Well, don’t start grovelling,’ said Janey. ‘He was probably just afraid of the talk. It was a rather wild party.’

  ‘Derek didn’t tell me how it happened,’ I said. It was one way to make her talk.

  ‘God knows how it happened,’ said Janey. She turned over, her red hair bouncing over her face. ‘Daddy had to go to the mainland, and Gil and I threw this party. Lobby was there, and Coco Fairley, and Guppy, I told you. They’d come round from St Tropez, and the Hadleys had flown over from Formentor, and a whole bunch who were sharing a villa at that place in Minorca. You know how it happens. Parlour games in the house and more parlour games in the pool. You couldn’t see the water for ping-pong balls and bottles next day. So they tell me. Then Coco started handing out sugar.’

  I am a prig, I suppose, since Janey says so. Certainly, LSD on sugar was one of the trips I hadn’t yet tried.

  ‘Did Daddy take it?’ I said.

  ‘In general? I shouldn’t think so,’ said Janey. She slid a blade of grass, delicately, along a thin trail of ants. The ants swerved. ‘He used to say his acid content was too high already. In any case, that night he was out of the house.’

  Of course he would be, I thought. If Lloyd was away, Daddy wouldn’t be interested in a romp with a lot of boring teenagers.

  ‘Out to dinner?’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t say. But he hadn’t eaten when he went out at eight.’

  He had eaten somewhere, though. Or so the Spanish police report had said. But not in any restaurant anyone had been able to trace. Janey was still tactfully pursuing her ants. But, I thought, Daddy didn’t make secret assignations. Daddy was a person who had friends, publicly and at the highest possible level, and when he visited them, all the world knew it.

  Janey said: ‘He’d popped out before, of an evening. He maybe felt a bit rotten, and just wanted to be alone. Or maybe he was just bored.’

  ‘But he’d eaten,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe he had an evening with Derek,’ said Janey. She moved the grass, and the ants all straightened their lines.

  ‘Oh, hardly,’ I said. If she had lost interest, I wasn’t going to flog the conversation to death. ‘Derek was in Holland. He didn’t come to Ib
iza till after the suicide.’

  ‘He did, actually,’ said Janey, and turned her gorgeous made-up green eyes in my quarter. You couldn’t see her contact lenses at all. ‘I saw him up in the Vila the day before your poor old progenitor did himself in.’

  I finished sitting up. ‘Today’s joke. Janey, you wouldn’t know Derek if you fished him out of your face cream.’

  ‘I should. I remember him from St Tizzy’s,’ said Janey. She got up and slung on her bathrobe. ‘I’d had drinks in the old town with the Rothas, and we were larking about. I thought he saw me too, but if he did, he dodged away. It was Derek.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I thought maybe he put it in the letter,’ said Janey.

  My dear She-she. I don’t know what made me say it. I hadn’t meant to say it to anybody. I think I was getting a bit frightened. ‘The letter wasn’t from Daddy,’ I said.

  Janey stopped dead and turned. After a bit she said: ‘Oh, look. Now who’s flannelling? I posted that letter myself. He asked me to the afternoon of the party.’

  ‘Daddy asked you to post a letter to me? On the day he . . . hooked it?’

  ‘Right,’ said Janey. She began walking again up to the house. ‘For Chrissake, She-she. You had us all raking the ditch for it, last night.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t from him. You say you posted it on the day of the suicide. That letter didn’t come until ten days later, the day before I left to come here.’

  ‘Spanish correos,’ said Janey succinctly. We were going up the marble stairs.

  ‘All right. And he was sloshed,’ I said bitterly. ‘But that doesn’t explain why he wrote me a letter starting, My dear She-she. He never called me She-she in his life.’

  ‘So?’ said Janey. Wisps of red hair coiled about under the pile on her head.

  ‘So I think he was murdered,’ I said.

  I didn’t exactly expect the Confederates’ Rebel Yell, but Janey simply leaned on her door handle and said: ‘I thought maybe that was why you came. But who’d want to kill him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Well, why not find out?’ said Janey. ‘I know what I’d do.’

  On the way into Mandleberg’s workshop we did it. We sent a cable saying Come at once. Sarah, to Derek.

  FOUR

  Austin Mandleberg’s gallery was in the Dalt Vila, the walled bit of the town on the hill. I’d seen the main gateway, flanked with broken statues at the edge of the fruit market, but I hadn’t been into it yet.

  Physically, there’s no break between the old bit of Ibiza and the new, except for this whopping great wall built around the base of the hill. Actually, it’s about a thousand years’ difference. Janey edged the Maserati through the raging turmoil of the Mercado and up this long, narrow ramp to the portals, and the moment we crawled in under it, we were in quiet and shadow. An old woman in black, and two girls with long hair and brown boots flattened against the grey, peach-mortared stone of the buttresses, and then we were turning sharp right into a tall, shadowy room, half-arcaded, and roofless to the blue sky, at the other end of which was the only exit: another arched portal giving on to the sunlit cobbled plaza of the old Moorish town of Ibiza, under the lee of the tall white houses lodged in a cliff of dazzling masonry on our left.

  I hardly had time to take it in: the round glassy cobbles, the kids playing, the pump, the washing hanging high in the sun, a grocer’s, a little, dark wine shop, a cafe with tables out in the sun, a lot of songbirds in cages. Then Janey swung left in a hairpin bend that rolled me on to her shoulder, and we were going up a perpendicular alley about six inches wide, with the wall of the roofless entry room on our left, and on our right, small shops ̶ I caught a glimpse of antiques ̶ broken by stretches of wall. Suddenly the passage widened, and the cobbles gave way to tarmac, and we were in a small square between more little antique shops and bars, with stepped lanes and paths leading up on the right, and a stony slope on the left which seemed to go up to the ramparts. From the square led a broad, garden-lined avenue, still rising steeply, labelled Avenida General Franco Beyond the strip of park on our right, you could see a low-level dirt road, lined with crowded four-storey houses and bars, with small, low, broken doors and children crying, and flights of steep steps overhung with low trees and bougainvillea and cacti. Strings for washing draped every wall, with plastic clothes-pegs in bunches, like lovebirds. The two roads joined with steps at another hairpin bend, and I lurched to the right as Janey fluted the Maserati’s horn and spun the wheel coolly, her dark glasses flashing. She had been here before. She had been to Austin Mandleberg’s gallery before, often, but hadn’t bothered to mention it until a minute ago.

  It wasn’t much further. The tarmac road went on, with a pavement, past a patch of garden and a green-shuttered church and up to a flat place facing some broad, grassy steps. There, Janey changed gear and swung right. I had a glimpse behind us of a wide, modern square with a lot of trees and a long white building with arches, and even of a sudden flash of blue sea at the end; then the Maserati swung its back to the view and went on climbing, this time past beautiful two- and three-storey houses linked together, painted brown or dazzling white. As the convertible crawled slowly onward, I looked from side to side at green double-leafed doors and wrought balconies, spilling over with red potted geraniums and creepers. Some of the windows had elaborate grilles: behind one, somewhere, someone was playing the piano. We passed, on our left, a flight of broad white-walled steps, and then a long stretch of white wall over which the garden above spilled its treasures; cactus creepers, a trail of white roses, a mat of pink and scarlet geraniums. Above the steps, you could see palm trees, purple blossoms, and a lemon tree, its globes like gold disks in the sun.

  ‘It’s plastic,’ said Janey sardonically, and drew in just past the garden and halted.

  The antique and art businesses, it was clear, were doing all right. Austin Mandleberg’s antique shop and gallery was three storeys high, with an open, arched door with a fanlight which gave on to a deep pillared hall, paved with black-and-white marble and dotted with eight-foot jugs, young palm trees in them. Against the wall on the left were two antique chairs flanking a large panelled door and a Spanish lantern that would have floodlit a ship. On the right wall was merely a small painted door, closed. Straight ahead, a palatial set of white marble steps rose up and swirled to the right, showing a lot of elaborate wrought-iron balustrade. A neat notice at the foot of the steps said, simply, Gallery 7, and another, to one side of the panelled door, said Austin M. Mandleberg. I pulled off my headscarf and got out.

  I’d changed to pink slacks and a long-sleeved, chain-store blouse, with a heavy link belt I take everywhere. Janey was in thin, ice-pink suede, sleeveless and fringed at the ends. She had one pale, square ring and a pair of thin, twisty gold earrings. It wasn’t that she was making a special effort for Austin. Janey makes a special effort all the time.

  She walked straight in and opened the door on the left, while I hung about after, catching it as it crashed back behind her. She didn’t warn me that there were three sunken steps just inside. I nearly landed in Austin’s antique shop on my pink Courtelle pelvis.

  The little man with dark crinkly hair who came forward to greet us turned out to be Senor Gregorio. The resident manager wore a tight-fitting suit and white collar. He had a big nose and bushy eyebrows and bags under his eyes you could have kept shoes in. He had hardly finished cooing over Janey when Austin ran down the steps, came across, and kissed both our hands. Continental stuff. Then he took us around.

  Actually, I can’t tell you a thing about that room, because I was so sorry for Austin. I mean, he’d be busy talking about an alabaster coffer with the apostles carved inside the lid, or some Punic pottery, or a silk shawl, or a bunch of swords, or a painted Saint Peter, or some old maps and keys and pieces of spidery embroidery,
and there was Janey ̶ making challenging statements which had nothing whatever to do with what he was saying and making him laugh when he knew he was supposed to be talking to me. I got in a few shots as well, but Janey nicked the ball whenever I paused to draw breath, and it was such a pain in the neck watching poor Austin’s native American courtesy struggling with his commercial desire not to offend the daughter of a confirmed ikon buyer, that I dropped out of the game and lingered around, watching him topping his drives.

  Anyway, Janey was the expert on antiques. Going about with Daddy, of course, I’ve picked up a bit, and when I’m around cooking in a decent-sized house, I know what to admire. But, of course, Janey had been finished and trailed all through the Uffizi. The first man she ever went to bed with was a waiter in the Piazza VittorioEmanuele: she said she didn’t want to practice on her friends.

  At any rate, we took ages to get to the silver, which was the only bit that seemed faintly interesting, and when we did, Janey and I both did our stuff well enough, anyway, to be presented with two dangling chain earrings apiece. Austin was still standing there, flushed with the success of his great thought, when Gregorio appeared, beaming, and took Austin off to the telephone.

  He was away for a while. Janey sniffed around and after a bit, started opening cupboards and trying things on. I felt in a mood for adventure and walked up the steps and back into the hall again. I tossed up, mentally, between the marble stairs and the little green door in the opposite wall, and in the end, picked the door.

  I crossed the hall, which was empty, and turned the door handle. It opened. Inside was a dark flight of steps running downward, with a half-landing and a twist at the bottom. I went down, out of curiosity, but it only gave on to a long, dirty corridor leading to rooms where Gregorio or someone probably lived. The door at the foot of the stairs was half-open, but that was a dead loss as well: an empty workroom, full of benches and litter, with one or two bits of jewellery being mended or cleaned or something. An old man, who had been hidden inside a cupboard, moved out, and I scuttled before he could see me. A pity. I felt a view of Austin Mandleberg’s bedroom, for instance, would have put me definitely one up in the race. I bet Janey hadn’t seen it yet, anyway.