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

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 teen-agers. “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 Ibiza 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 flanneling? 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.

----
CHAPTER 4
    « ^ »
    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