Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown Page B

sure,” said Clem, “that he was going to be able to fake it as suicide.”
    “Then why write at all?” Johnson said.
    We brooded. The sun disappeared. The sky was quite empty, and where it should meet the water there was no horizon at all. The yachts and the boatyard went dim.
    “Unless the mistake in the letter was deliberate,” said Clem suddenly. “To bring Sarah out.”
    “But why?” I said. The bikini was no longer warm enough, and shivering, I buttoned the mandarin jacket right up. “Why should anyone kill Daddy? Why should anyone want me out here?”
    “If you don’t know, no one does,” Johnson said. “But I think you ought to be careful. For example, who could have written that letter, of the people still on the island? Who would know your address, or how to get a letter to you? Who knows you’re sometimes called She-she? Who could copy Lord Forsey’s hand and be reasonably sure of imitating his style? Not many, surely.”
    “Mr. Lloyd,” I said, thinking hard. “And Janey and Gil, I suppose. Not Austin Mandleberg: he hadn’t come yet, and he didn’t know Daddy. A good few of the boys at Janey’s party, I expect. Anyone who knew Janey would be apt to meet Daddy, and perhaps get a thanker or something from him that would do… I can’t think of anyone else. There must be friends we don’t know.” And Derek, my brain said; but my mouth didn’t blab it. If, as Janey says, Derek was here.
    “I think we can leave unknown friends out of it, Sarah,” said Johnson. “If you were induced back here for some reason, the person who wants you is probably in touch with you now. All the same, it’s a fairly long list… Wait.” A match, burning unregarded in his tanned fingers made me realize how quickly the dark falls in Spain. Johnson relit the pipe he had taken from the jacket lying behind him, and took it out of his mouth. “It couldn’t have been Tony Lloyd. He’d gone to Barcelona the day of the party.”
    “He didn’t go to Barcelona,” said Clem.
    There was a little silence. Far across the still waters, from the black piling of houses which was the old town of Ibiza, a throbbing had started: a pulse, hardly discernible, stirring the warm evening air. “How do you know?” Johnson said.
    “I heard at the yacht club. Alec Brewer had expected to run into him: he had business on the mainland the same day. Lloyd went to the airport and took the plane to Barcelona all right, but he didn’t stay there. He took the next plane to Palma, Majorca.”
    “From which he could have flown back in half an hour any time in the day,” Johnson said. “Without running into so many business friends, either.”
    Janey’s father, who had suggested that I should come to Ibiza. And I had to cook supper for him tonight. The evening air, stirring the rigging, groaned and whined faintly over our heads, and almost under the threshold of hearing, the throbbing from the old town continued…
Thud
, quiet.
Thud
, quiet.
Thud. Thud. Thud
.
    “The drums,” said Johnson. I stared at the town. And as I stared, I saw something moving against the dark houses: a sinuous, barely discernible thing made of insensible prickings of light. It moved. It crawled all over the town. It crept, wherever one looked, among the dark Arab houses and spread down to the quayside, where it lay reflected in the far water, pinpoints of light upon light. “Look,” said Johnson, and put the binoculars into my hands.
    Dolly’s
bows and calm, rippling water. The shapes of many yachts and fishing boats, edging the sweep of the harbor. Then, across the width of the bay, the trading ships and the ferries, lying at the foot of the town. And above the ships and the ferries, and moving down from the Dalt Vila, slowly, lazily, to the thudding roll of the drums, a file of endless black figures, faceless figures who moved chained like a black trickle through street after street, torch in hand, limbs swaying like robots’ below the black spires of