Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird by Dorothy (as Dorothy Halliday Dunnett Page A

through Out Patients’ twice for the same thing. “She likes seamen and waiters,” I said. “But she has eleven brothers and sisters.”
    Johnson swerved from the houses and turned. “So she wouldn’t take him home. But she might hide him.”
    The beam swept around again and I nodded. “The water tower is closed to the public at four-thirty,” I said. “But she’d have a key. Shall I go and find her?”
    I had imagined he might want to question her. Instead, he took my remark as a further incentive to burglary.
    “No need,” said Johnson. “I always carry a hairpin. It keeps my hairnet out of my eyes.” And watched by Trotter and myself, he fiddled for a moment with the water-tower door. There was a click, and it swung slowly open.
    I think we all hesitated. Sergeant Trotter said, “It isn’t right, you know. We should call the police.”
    “We’ll call them when we find him,” Johnson said. “As you pointed out, after the wet, his gun can’t likely be working. And hell, he did shoot at us. What’s more, he’s got my wallet, I think.”
    Trotter stared at him. “You mean he went to all that trouble to steal…”
    “It had two thousand dollars in it,” said Johnson simply. “So if you don’t mind, I mean to go in.” And pushing the door wider, he entered the blackness within.
    The beam swept around as he did it, and a glow of reflected light lay on the paving just inside the door. The stone was spotted and blotched with dripped water, and the trail led around the turnstiles, past the elevator door, and up the twisting stone steps which led to the top of the tower. For a moment there was silence. Then Johnson, stepping around the turnstile in his turn, lifted a storm lantern off a hook at the side of the lift, and switching it on, flashed it up the first turn of the stairs. He said, hardly raising his voice at all, “I think you’d better come down. We’re armed, and you are not. And there’s really no other way out, is there?”
    The answer was a shot which drilled straight through a carousel of transparencies by my right ear. Johnson’s gun in my hand, I jumped to one side and fired straight at the flash. There was a scream, and then utter silence.
    “Christ.
Beltanno
,” said Johnson.
    “We have the best grouse moors in Scotland,” I said. I felt cheerful. “But a flesh wound merely, I am afraid. Your gun.”
    Johnson took it. Trotter closed his mouth and then opened it to say, “He’s running upstairs. What’s at the top of this thing?”
    I said, “The stairs spiral around the elevator shaft and come out in the same chamber. It’s over a hundred and twenty feet high. From there you climb a few steps to a circular walk around the tower, with a wall just chin high around it. Above that is the revolving core of the tower with the searchlight fixed to it, inside a kind of coronet of fairy lights. They don’t work.”
    “I’ll take the lift,” Trotter said.
    I said, “He’ll get there before you.”
    “Not if I’m on his heels,” Johnson said. The running footsteps had stopped. He raised his voice. “Doctor MacRannoch, go for the police. Quickly!”
    “Right,” I said. I ran for the door, banged it, and silently returned. Sergeant Trotter, in the distant light of Johnson’s storm lantern, found the switch for the elevator and, stepping inside, closed the doors. Johnson, the light at arm’s length, began climbing the stairs. There was a rattle, and the silence was split by the whine of the lift. There was no sound from above.
    I tried to remember the inside of the tower. Mostly visitors go up in the lift with Dahlia, who switches off her normal loud slur as soon as she gets them inside and begins to emit information in short high bursts like a soprano computer:
The water is eighteen feet deep… rises two hundred and sixteen feet above sea level… view of eighteen miles all around
, ending as the lift stops with
mind the step
in the same breath. Sergeant Trotter was