Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 Read Online Free PDF Page B

dinner table. He looked the sort of man who kept spaniels and went in for old beams and growing delphiniums, or maybe tropical fish. His hair and his eyebrows were black, but there really wasn’t much of his face that wasn’t covered with glasses. On Ibiza, the Lloyds don’t wear DJ’s except for a party, though of course everyone changes. If Johnson had changed, I wouldn’t like to have seen what he had on beforehand: I could see Janey eyeing the woolly and the old crumpled bags, and I could guess she was storing the lot inside her Jane Austin hairdo. Janey can imitate anybody. So can I. We used to do a couple of Cockney charwomen in our Thursday free period, when we had to sew for the poor; and we’d have the whole form in hoots. But of course, Johnson hadn’t come to dinner, really: only to give over my handbag.
    I don’t know whether he expected Janey’s father to pounce on him, or why he didn’t dodge him if he did: he can’t have needed the money. If you believe William Hickey, Johnson Johnson makes more money than Annagoni and Kelly and Hutchinson all rolled into one, painting portraits, and he can afford to be choosey. Mind you, Janey is elegant, and over dinner she had decided to fascinate: I could hear her going into her act. It was just as well she did, for Gilmore, beyond her, was sulking. He’d been even later to table than I was and hadn’t looked at me once. He had a pink place on his jaw where it had hit the wall of my bathroom. It was a bit of foul luck, for I really had been looking all right, with my hair piled up on top and my eyelashes wet. He was Scorpio: I asked him over a swallowed martini.
    We had artichoke hearts, but Mother Trudi wouldn’t have been too delighted over the veal. Once, when Janey let go for a minute, I asked Johnson Johnson if he kept tropical fish. The bifocals turned all merry, whether with the recollection of me in my bath or the question, I wouldn’t actually know. He shook his head.
    “Too sexy,” he said.
    “Fish?”
    “Have you ever
watched
them?” he said. “You can’t cure it, either. Friend of mine used to give his guppies a session of group psychotherapy.”
    “What happened?”
    “They were found making suggestions to a small party of fry,” Johnson said. Then Janey got him again.
    After dinner we walked in the garden, where the Greek gods had all gone from the swimming pool, although there was still a nymph or two under the bougainvillea, and the fountains were on. I was beside Gil, and it was rather warm and cosy and hopeful when Father Lloyd flicked on a switch and all the floodlighting came on: I swear they had tungsten halogen behind every mosquito. There was also a grotto with fiber-glass stalactites. Gilmore vanished, and I said to Johnson, “What have you done with my letter?”
    I thought he’d say, “What letter?” and he did. I said, “The one in my handbag. From my father.”
    He could have had the bloody pills. When I found the letter was missing, I felt rotten, I can tell you. It was sheer chance I had got it at all. I’d left Flo with her mother and gone back to the London flat to pack for Ibiza, the day after poor Derek went back to Holland. And there it was, with a lot of other stuff on the mat, in Daddy’s writing, dated the day he had died.
    It didn’t say anything about cutting his throat. I telephoned Derek that night to tell him: I thought it might help. He hadn’t been brooding or suffering cancer or something: he’d just been so stoned, I think, that he suddenly got fed up and did it. He was stoned when he wrote the letter: there was a bit in the middle that made no sense at all. But it was all I had: the last thing from Daddy; and Johnson had taken it.
    Johnson wasn’t indignant or offended or even very excited. “I hadn’t, you know,” he said mildly. “I don’t even collect stamps. But your bag was open when I found it.”
    “The pills didn’t fall out,” I said coldly.
    “Well, they did, sweetie: and I