It caught Panadek in the shoulder and he yelled. And the ball turned and made for him.
It would have been poetic justice to let it go, but I had had enough poetry for one night. So had Johnson, it appeared. We shouted ‘Stop!’ at the same moment and then, feeling stupid, alternately until someone found the switch and the ball rose slowly into the ceiling and both doors opened.
Hugo still leaned against the wall, his hand gripping his shoulder and blood running down between his long fingers. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You ought to have been the toy designers and I ought to have been the nanny.’ Then he felt in his jacket and drawing out the brown manila envelope, tossed it towards us. ‘If it contains a page from the Politika, I don’t want to know it.’
‘It contains a page from the Politika,’ Johnson said.
They had replaced the burst tyre on the Mercedes-Benz. Johnson drove down the mountain very carefully. We didn’t say very much because we were both flogged. Indeed Johnson’s hands, when he took them off the wheel, were trembling. And I was wrestling, as it happened, with my conscience.
Then, instead of going round to the harbour where Dolly was, Johnson drew up at the Hotel Mimosa in Herceg-Novi.
There was a blue and white police van standing outside, under the orange trees. I said rudely, ‘Oh bloody hell,’ and sat there with my eyes full of tears.
Johnson glanced at me and then away again. He said, ‘There were some things that neither Hugo nor Eisenkopp could have done. Engineering the Warr Beckenstaff for you. The M.M.A. badges that identified the party at the Wonderland. The torn note in your pocket. The introduction of Lazar to Charlotte. The way Panadek found out about the whole of Gramps’s scheme, right from the beginning . . . But I didn’t know you knew.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not until I saw that futile apron nappy round Benedict’s legs in the basement. He’s been wearing a kite nappy for weeks now.’
Bunty came out between two policemen as we went through the doors. She too looked just the same, with frizzed hair standing out round her earrings. She had her high-heeled boots on and if she was pale, the make-up hid it. She just looked annoyed. In fact, she pretended not to see me as they went past. I wondered where Gramps had picked her up and how they came to have joined forces.
She was a hard case; out for herself and for money: the fate of the Croats would mean nothing to Bunty. Was it through the nanny network, for example, that she found out that Mike Widdess worked for MI5, which let her sell the information later to Gramps? I didn’t know yet if she worked alone, or with partners. Or if her team or Gramps had faked that car crash in which Mike Widdess died. Perhaps we should be surprised, looking over her record, to find how often she had been employed in a household where the child had been threatened with kidnapping.
One had to suppose that she had played along both Gramps and Panadek in other ways too. Panadek for merely the hell of it. I expect he gave her gifts. He certainly rummaged her rooms and her mail, and when he found out what she was up to, he had merely to plant his microphones and stand by for the prize money. Or rather, the Folio.
Panadek, whom she thought of simply as a sucker to go to bed with, had been too clever for Bunty all along.
Johnson was speaking to someone in Serbo-Croat. He turned back to me and said, ‘Their room’s on the first floor.’ I didn’t think he had remembered. Then I saw I was looking again at the reflection of myself in his face. I said, ‘Where did the glasses come from?’
‘I keep a spare set in the car,’ Johnson said. ‘Didn’t you notice?’
I hadn’t. Indeed, if you asked, I could have sworn he did at least half of that journey down those serpentine bends without any glasses at all. Then I forgot about it, because we came to a door and Johnson stopped and said, ‘You go in.’
It was Sukey’s crying that burst on the ears as soon as I turned the handle. Grover wasn’t crying although his face was all swollen with past excesses, and there were green tracks down to his chin, and he had wet himself all through his Daniel Hechter trendy tapestry two-piece. He was trying to feed Sukey with an arm round her lolling head and a cup of water pressed overflowing into her toothless mouth. Wherever Bunty had been, she hadn’t been near them for hours and hours.
Then I went in and Grover looked round. His face, so like Comer Eisenkopp’s, was white and defiant and frightened. Then he recognized me, and said, ‘You was not hurting Sukey.’
‘I know you weren’t,’ I said. ‘Sukey’s going to have a nice dinner now, and so is Grover.’
I was in the middle of saying it when Beverley burst through the doorway beside me. They must have sent for her. Her red dress was stained and her careful blonde hair was a mess. What she had, she was going to have to make the best of. No more money for the Radoslav Clinic. Not as Comer’s wife, anyhow.
Then she ran to the bed and kneeling, flung her arms round both Grover and Sukey, crying so that both the kids began screaming at once. But it was the right kind of yelling; open and hearty and angry, with no panic in it. I backed to the door, and came out, and faced Johnson.
‘I know. Bloody kids,’ he said, and gave me his handkerchief. Then we drove to the Dolly.
I flew home the next day, to my father.
I only ever fell in love with one man, and he was married. Then his wife died, and the next time we met he had bifocal glasses and a yacht and was a walking chemical factory.
Meanwhile I had other girls’ children.
Synopses of ‘Johnson Johnson’ Titles
Published by House of Stratus
Ibiza Surprise
Life in Ibiza can be glorious and fast, especially for those who have money. Sarah Cassells is an intelligent girl and has many admirers. Having completed her training as a chef, she hears of her father’s violent death on the island, and refuses to believe it when told it was suicide. She becomes involved with a series of people who might be able to shed some light on events, including her brother who is an engineer for a Dutch firm from whom a secret piece of machinery has been stolen. As Ibiza prepares to celebrate an annual religious festival events become more convoluted and macabre. Sarah has choices to make; none are simple, but fortunately Johnson Johnson, the enigmatic portrait painter and master of mystery sails in on his yacht ‘Dolly’. Together they may get at the truth, but with murder, espionage and theft all entwined within the tale, there are constant surprises for the reader - and for Sarah!
Moroccan Traffic
The Chairman of Kingsley Conglomerates is conducting negotiations, which are both difficult and somewhat dubious, in Morocco. He is accompanied by executive secretary Wendy Helmann. However, there are soon distractions when unorthodox Rita Geddes appears on the scene. Wendy discovers that there is much more at stake than the supposed negotiations, and finds herself at the centre of kidnappings, murder, and industrial espionage. Explosions, a car chase across the High Atlas out of Marrakesh and much more follows. Of course, the prior arrival of portrait painter Johnson Johnson is in many ways fortuitous, but he has some ghosts of his own to lay.
Operation Nassau
Dr. B. McRannoch is in the Bahamas with her father who has moved there from Scotland because of asthma. She is a savvy and tough young lady who shows much independence of mind and spirit. However, when Sir Bart Edgecombe, a British agent who has been poisoned with arsenic falls ill on his way back from New York, she becomes involved in a series of events beyond her wildest imagination. Drawn into an espionage plot where there are multiple suspects and characters, it is only the inevitable presence of Johnson Johnson that saves the day. As with all of the Johnson series, nothing is quite as straightforward as it at first seems, and there are many complicating factors to grip the reader as well as the added bonus of another exotic location.
Roman Nights
Ruth Russell, an astronomer working at the Maurice Frazer Observatory, is enjoying herself in Rome – that is, until her lover, Charles Digham, a fashion photographer and writer of obituary verses, ha
s his camera stolen. The thief ends up as a headless corpse in the zoo park tolleta. Johnson Johnson, enigmatic portrait painter, spy and sleuth, is in Rome to paint a portrait of the Pope and is therefore on hand to investigate in one of Dunnett’s usual thrilling and convoluted plots that grips the reader from cover to cover. There is something far more deadly at stake than just the secrets of a couture house …
Rum Affair
This mystery is told from the point of view of the ‘Bird’; Tina Rossi, a famous coloratura soprano who arrives to sing at the Edinburgh Festival, only to find a murder victim in a cupboard, whilst at the same time her lover, top scientist Kenneth Homes, has gone missing. Saved from the long arm of the law by Johnson Johnson, a world renowned portrait painter and enigmatic solver of mysteries, Tina joins him on a yacht race to the Hebrides - there are connections anyway as Homes was conducting top secret research in the area. Here, though, there is yet more trouble and the mystery deepens as Johnson’s yacht ‘Dolly’ nears the island of Rum, where it turns into a race for life rather than prize money. This is the first title in the Johnson Johnson series and in common with the remainder involves an intricate plot and solution which is far from immediately obvious.
Split Code
Joanna Emerson, a trained nursery nurse, is hired as a nanny, albeit reluctantly, to the infant heir of a cosmetics fortune. She then becomes caught up in a complex kidnap plot. She is also an expert in codes and her purpose is to gain an insight into the opposition plan? But how does kidnapping further anyone’s interests? Commencing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the story moves quickly through locations, as with many of Dunnett’s stories. On this occasion Joanna ends up on a crippled yacht off the coast of Yugoslavia. As always, both behind and aside from the plot and it’s inevitable conclusion is enigmatic portrait painter, yachtsman and former spy, Johnson Johnson. Bullets are flying, most of them in Joanna’s direction. Just how can this end?
Tropical Issue
Rita Geddes is a dyslexic makeup artist whose appearance seems to change with the weather. She is called to Johnson Johnson’s apartment, which he has let to a friend who wishes to use his studio, to fix the makeup of the famous Natalie Sheridan. However, Johnson, who is seemingly recovering from an accident, which turns out to be a murder attempt, is also present - as is it seems a mysterious figure seen by security outside of the apartment. What follows is murder, mystery and mayhem, with Johnson and his yacht Dolly, as always, at the centre. The reader will not be involved in second guessing a simple plot, however, as it is as intricate as fast moving, and far from a straightforward ‘whodunit’. The journey through this gripping story also moves from London to Madeira and the West Indies with equal pace.
www.houseofstratus.com
Dorothy Dunnett, Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends