Ibiza Surprise by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

She-she,’ said Janey. ‘That’s your whole trouble. He knew how to live. Daddy never had a decent party in his life till old Forsey swanned in and the whole of Cine Citta and the Almanach de Gotha poured in after.’
    ‘You got value for money,’ I agreed, adding quickly: ‘It was sporting of your father to ask me. I can imagine what a shake-up it must have been, without taking me on as well.’
    ‘Well, don’t start grovelling,’ said Janey. ‘He was probably just afraid of the talk. It was a rather wild party.’
    ‘Derek didn’t tell me how it happened,’ I said. It was one way to make her talk.
    ‘God knows how it happened,’ said Janey. She turned over, her red hair bouncing over her face. ‘Daddy had to go to the mainland, and Gil and I threw this party. Lobby was there, and Coco Fairley, and Guppy, I told you. They’d come round from St Tropez, and the Hadleys had flown over from Formentor, and a whole bunch who were sharing a villa at that place in Minorca. You know how it happens. Parlour games in the house and more parlour games in the pool. You couldn’t see the water for ping-pong balls and bottles next day. So they tell me. Then Coco started handing out sugar.’
    I am a prig, I suppose, since Janey says so. Certainly, LSD on sugar was one of the trips I hadn’t yet tried.
    ‘Did Daddy take it?’ I said.
    ‘In general? I shouldn’t think so,’ said 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 teenagers.
    ‘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 flannelling? 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