The Tropical Issue by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

had no more chats with Johnson Johnson before she left London.
    Ferdy, who was busy on the artwork for a big, glossy book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, to be printed in Luxembourg, reported that Johnson was apparently still making great strides considering, and had mentioned something about a bill for phone calls to Troon and Glasgow and Lisbon, as well as blue and magenta stains in the bathroom.
    I thought of the blond boyfriend, and the security men, and all those bloody phone calls and the perfectly good quiche I’d made him, and told Ferdy that if his pal Johnson was fussed over anything, he could get Lady Emerson to pay for it.
    Once, on my way past from Claridge’s, I’d seen a po-faced woman out walking Bessie past the flats, and another time, Bessie with Mrs Margate. Then, just before I went north, I saw Mrs Margate ouside a coffee-bean shop by herself.
    I didn’t ask Ferdy, but it looked to me as if the capable woman had soon got her books.
    And maybe even that old Bessie had got hers as well, if the Owner had crawled from his expensive new sickbed and coped with something apart from mail orders.
    Male orders?
    It was, luckily, none of my business. I was going to a new job, a rather special new job, in Madeira.

 
     
Chapter 4
    Abroad, it turned out, was very like Troon on an English Bank Holiday. Waiting early that evening to be met at the airport, I couldn’t understand what anyone said, even when they were speaking English.
    I expected Mrs Sheridan’s car, but she had sent a hired driver who stood about, with a peaked cap and dark glasses and a big placard saying SRA RITA DA GODES.
    It was some time before we found one another, even after the Arrival Hall was quite empty.
    To get to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, I’d been told, you have to go from the airport through Funchal, the main town of Madeira. You begin by driving along the coast.
    It was warm.
    I expected that. The B.B.C. had filmed a programme about it, Volcanic Islands of the Atlantic , and a pal had taped it. Madeira the Floating Garden; the Island of Gentle Summers and Mild Winters.
    Before my dark glasses got too dark to bother looking through, I noticed a lot of blue water and red roofs and purple creeper, and a harbour with the sun about to fall into the water.
    Then the Mercedes turned uphill to cut out the town, and ran into a lot of rutted roads with no walls and steep paths going up to farm cabins, and finally into a side lane that seemed to lead nowhere.
    There were a few trees and a lot of dry earth about, but no sign of any houses at all, never mind a posh villa with swimming pool. It wasn’t the sort of countryside you would find Natalie Sheridan in, unless she was making a documentary.
    The sun went down, and I couldn’t see much of anything any more. The driver was nothing but a dim shape in front of me.
    I gazed at it, waiting for him to slide back the partition and grovel. I wasn’t going to be ratty with him. Anyone can get lost.
    Instead, he got out of his door and jerked open mine.
    I think I still expected him to start making excuses. I took off my dark glasses so that I could see him better, or as well as I could see anything under the brim of this Humphrey Bogart fedora I was wearing.
    I couldn’t see him better because, under his hat, he had a stocking on.
    I could see he was tall. I could see his uniform jacket was too small for him. There were four inches of shirt cuff and skin between his fists and his sleeves.
    I said, ‘You’re not the man with the placard!’
    I wasn’t too put out yet, because the cuffs had cufflinks in them. The worst I was expecting was rape.
    ‘Senhora Rita da Godes?’ he said. ‘You couldn’t even read it, you illiterate bitch. You should be deported.’
    In English. In educated, foul-tempered English with loathing in every vowel.
    A nutter. I won’t say I’m used to it, but if you’re not in a home for the aged you meet them.
    The rule is get out of it, fast. He was leaning in on one