Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Roman Nights

  First published in 1973

  © Estate of Dorothy Dunnett; House of Stratus 1973-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dorothy Dunnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755131576 EAN 9780755131570

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  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  The Dorothy Dunnett Society can be contacted via http://dorothydunnett.org

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dorothy, Lady Dunnett, was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1923, theonly daughter of an engineer, Alexander Halliday, and his wife Dorothy. Whilstgifted academically and musically, she was not encouraged to further hertalents by attending university, and instead joined the civil service inScotland as an assistant press officer. In 1946, she married Alastair Dunnett, who was at the time the chief pressofficer to the Secretary of State for Scotland. He went on to become editor of TheScotsman newspaper, whilst she later worked on a statistics handbook forthe Board of Trade.

  After a brief spell in Glasgow, the couple settled in Edinburgh where theirhome became a centre for hospitality and entertaining, mostly in support ofScottish art and culture. Dunnett had also taken evening classes at theEdinburgh College of Art and the Glasgow School of Art, and from 1950 onwardsshe established a prominent career as a portrait painter, being exhibited atboth the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. She was also an accomplished sculptress.

  Her interest in writing developed during the 1950’s. Her own tastestook her to historical novels and it was her husband who eventually suggestedshe write one of her own, after she had complained of running out of readingmaterial. The result was The Game of Kings, an account of political andmilitary turmoil in sixteenth-century Scotland. Whilst turned down forpublication in the UK, it was eventually published in the USA where it becamean instant best seller. Other titles, such as the Lymond Chronicles and Houseof Niccolo series followed and which established her internationalreputation.

  She also successfully turned her hand to crime, with the Johnson Johnson series. He is aneccentric artist, famous for bifocals, and of course amateur detective. All ofthe titles in the series somehow also feature the yacht ‘Dolly’, despiteranging widely in location from Scotland, to Ibiza, Rome, Marrakesh, Canada,Yugoslavia, Madeira and The Bahamas. There is plenty of sailing lore for theenthusiast, but not so much it detracts from the stories genre; crime. Each ofthem is told by a woman whose profession explains her role in the mystery andwe learn very little about Johnson himself, save for the fact he issomewhat dishevelled in appearance.

  Dorothy Dunnett somehow fitted in her many careers andvoluntary work, along with supporting her husband’s endeavours, yet still foundthe time to correspond widely with her readers from all over the world, and was oftendelighted to meet with them personally. She held the rare distinction of havinga Dorothy Dunnett Readers’ Association formed during her lifetime andcollaborated with it as much as possible. A writer who has been described as one of great wit, charm, andhumanity, yet whose work displayed toughness, precision, and humour, she wasappointed to an OBE in 1992 for services to literature and became Lady Dunnettin 1995 when her husband was knighted. She died in 2001, being survived by hertwo sons; Ninian and Mungo.

  ONE

  I have nothing, even yet, against bifocal glasses. I know some very nice poufs and a couple of stockbrokers and a man who keeps a horn moustache comb in his jumpsuit. I’m a girl who doesn’t shock easily.

  Or so I thought until I first met Johnson Johnson, which was outside the Rome zoo in November.

  He was there because he was waiting for me, although I didn’t know it. I was there on a day’s leave from the Frazer Observatory. If I’d stayed on leave, none of it might have happened.

  You have heard, of course, of Maurice Frazer, the most famous actor-manager of his day, and also the prettiest. When Maurice retired to Italy and bought a villa in the Tibur Hills with two observatories in the garden, his chums put it down to senility.

  An error. Having chosen, so to speak, his new theatre, Maurice proceeded both to act and to manage it. The large observatory, which was made of seven kinds of marble and situated above the rose bower by the swimming pool, was cleaned, refitted, and the telescope checked. The smaller observatory, a pillared Folly hung with wisteria, was emptied of its inadequate resources and left, a shrine awaiting its Mufti. Then Maurice wrote straight off to the Zodiac Trust for astronomers.

  He got two, and I had to be one of them. I acquired the observatory with the telescope, and shared digs with my running mate, a photographer called James K. Middleton. The Folly went to an American, Innes Wye, for an electronic experiment in which the Trust took a passionate interest.

  We had a project as well, Jacko Middleton and I: to photograph a series of stars through a fifty-inch telescope and send the negatives back to the Zodiac. The Zodiac Trust is the Santa Claus of worldwide astronomy. A private foundation richly funded by fish paste, it makes grants to struggling centres. It also processes and disperses information, computerizes statistics, discovers sponsors for expensive projects, and even helps choose the staff to direct them.

  I knew the Zodiac people. I trained with some of them. I was an orthodox astronomer for years, until the existence of Charles made it cleverer to move into the more free-wheeling fringes of the profession.

  Jacko was a scientific photographer who could take pictures through an astronomical telescope. Charles Digham was a self-employed photographer who could and did take pictures of practically anything, provided it was visibly groovy. Outside that, he pursued a life of simple hedonism, composing and collecting doggerel obituary notices and working hard, he reported, on other guys’ test-beds. Charles and I, in spite of this, had what our friends call a stable relationship. That is, we had lived together for years, and it suited us.

  I believe I wondered what my landlady would say when she heard my
boyfriend was coming to join me in Italy. In the event, I need hardly have worried. She opened another bottle of vino and pushed the spare bed from Jacko’s room back into mine, which fouled up Jacko’s personal relationships but pleased Charles immensely.

  That was in October, when Maurice Frazer had had us for three of the four months we’d booked for. By then I knew that whatever Maurice might take exception to, it wasn’t an irregular lifestyle. I was glad. I liked running the Frazer Observatory.

  The Frazer was built like a wedding cake, and was referred to as the Dome, because of the cupola over the telescope. The ground floor had a lush restroom, a kitchen, and offices. The middle floor, reached by a white marble staircase, held the darkroom and workshops and storeroom. Between the middle floor and the telescope was a steep spiral staircase in iron.

  Every observatory is round and has spiral staircases. That is why astronomers go everywhere in single file with their elbows tucked in, which is quite comfortable, except in bed sometimes.

  Jacko and I took turnabout with night duty, or sometimes split up the night work between us. Our digs were ten minutes away in Velterra, but you could bunk down in the restroom if you wanted. Singly. In the Dome, science was science.

  You could say the same of our U.S. friend in the Folly. Innes Wye, from Wyoming and Wakefield, ran Mouse Hall, the smaller pillared frivolity housing the object we called Innes’s Incubator. No one knew what it was except Innes and the Zodiac Trust. Rumour had it that he was testing a new way of infusing tea by passing an infrared ray through a Chianti bottle, which was a sick joke (Jacko’s) because Innes didn’t drink and we couldn’t. Innes and Jacko didn’t like one another.

  Usually I got along with them both, except when Jacko arrived at the Dome as he did this November morning, and strolled straight into the restroom where I was sleeping. I flung an ashtray at him, which made its usual nick in the door as he banged it shut, snickering. He called through it, ‘Had a thick evening then, angel?’

  I’d had a long, boring night as he very well knew, up in the breezy dark of the Dome, with my eye on the telescope cross wires. When I trailed through to the kitchen ten minutes later he had the kettle on and the Instant on the table and was raking among the developing liquid in the fridge for last week’s Supermercato wrapped bacon. Innes, who doesn’t like Italian food, keeps the Dome kitchen stocked up with tinned corn and peanut butter and Sanka and eats there instead of at his digs, which are in a different part of Velterra from Jacko’s and mine.

  This is all right, but leads to a certain amount of friction when improvident people like Jacko and Charles and myself become peckish on duty at night-time, or can’t be bothered going back to our digs for breakfast. Or have two breakfasts, like Jacko. He said, still raking, ‘Hell of a bright was your beloved, at breakfast. He’s got a new obituary notice for you.’

  I said, ‘I hear Innes coming. What breakfast?’

  ‘My first one,’ said Jacko. ‘This is my second one. I’d have a third one if that American bastard would eat like a Christian. Why let Charles lay you, and not your old physicist buddies?’

  ‘Because he writes good obituary notices,’ I said. I was meeting Charles at three on the steps of the Villa Borghese, where he had a photo assignment with four models and half the Italian fashion collection. Jacko was on duty tonight. I poured out the coffees and found the olive oil for Jacko’s bacon, and sat down again with an apple and the Messaggero open at all the film advertisements, while Jacko stood with his frying pan over my shoulder reading aloud all the entries on the opposite page under: massages aesthetics.

  They ranged from AAAA Very young attractive masseuse, independent house, every afternoon, to AAAAAA Ambiente elegante, brave brave manicure and explain why Rome’s principal newspaper is nicknamed Il Massaggero and never gets into the red. We were just working out the price of forty-two capital A’s at L.210 a word when Innes’s voice said, ‘That’s my bloody bacon!’

  Innes Wye is a very clever man, but he is small, and his voice is rather high, and he is apt to talk about a role of soft galactic X-rays in the alignment of dust, for example, in the coffee break. ‘And I’ll tell you something else!’ said Innes to Jacko. ‘You’ve got your bloody playmates all over my darkroom again!’

  He had, too. The developing tanks were all full of busts and bottoms and blow-ups of Jacko’s latest models. What was more, Jacko knew that Innes would see the pictures and Jacko knew that Innes would be offended, so I said, ‘Yes, I was going to say to you, Jacko, I want to do my plates before lunch.’

  ‘I’ll get them out,’ said Jacko casually. ‘Bacon. Innes? Shirred Eggs with Thick-Cut Salami and Straw Taters? Old Plantation Blueberry Pancake with Wild Berry Syrup? Spaghetti?’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said. I fished in my basket and tossed out yesterday’s shopping: some eggs, a tin of caffe solubile and two gold packets of salami, L. 250. ‘I don’t see why Innes should feed us. Shove it in the fridge somewhere.’

  ‘He has enough to do, feeding Poppy,’ said Jacko. ‘How’s Poppy, Innes?’ And as Innes still stood there, glaring at him, Jacko added in exasperation, ‘Give us a break, mate. We’re all big, grown-up scientists and we can drink and smoke and go to X films and everything. My God, I wonder you don’t put a G-string on Poppy.’

  Poppy (or Poppaea, according to Innes) is a white mouse who lives in Mouse Hall by the Incubator. She is trained and looked after by Innes, who feeds her sunflower seeds and cleans out her cage on a Saturday.

  Innes said, ‘It is nothing to any of us, I imagine, how you spend your spare time. But you have heard Ruth say she wishes to develop her night’s work. I imagine she hardly wishes to do it in the ambience of a low-grade Soho nightclub.’ And bending, he brought out two chaste eggs and cracked them.

  I finished my coffee and got the hell out of it. I had my log to write up and my lists to tick off and my plates to develop, once I had stacked Jacko’s porn where it would attract less attention. I had time to be pleased that Jacko was on duty that night. Two more weeks and we should all have left Italy and scattered for Christmas. Winter skies are no good for photography and electric storms interfere with the power lines, so that I was reduced sometimes already to opening the cupola of the Dome with my muscles, not to mention manhandling the whole bloody weight of the 50-Inch. When Charles dropped in, he was able to help me.

  We shared my digs, as I have said, because I was tied to Velterra. The rest of the time he spent in Rome, in a rather lush flat with a bar fitted into a sedan chair. I shall never, I suppose, get to the end of all Charles’s friends but I knew Sassy Packer, the idiot he was sharing it with, and most of the set who wandered in and out half the day and all, but all, of the night. I never did discover whose flat it was in the first place.

  We gave a party or two there, but it was easier to live near the observatory. Gradually, Charles’s gear landed up in my wardrobe and he only went to the flat when he was working. Today he was working, and the car had broken down anyway, so I changed, and repainted, and yelled ‘See you at the party’ to Innes, and then caught the Rome train at Parassio. I wonder – I often wonder – if the car hadn’t been out of use, what would have happened.

  Rome in November isn’t beloved of tourists. The visitors are mostly businessmen, doing the rounds with their secretaries. The pavement pavilions in the Via Veneto were steamed up with the resident foreign element having a quick hamburger and cappuccino, but your Roman proper had gone off to lunch. I climbed up the street, feeling underprivileged, to the Aurelian Wall at the top, walked through the crumbling arches and over the park to the villa.

  The Villa Borghese (17th C., the property of the City of Rome) shuts at two, and the run-out of picture fakers and art students and culture vultures usually starts before that: the attendants want to get at their gnocchi. From the uproar floating down from the vestibule, I gathered that Charles and the four leggy ladies were still doing their stuff around the Titians. The closed-circuit TV in the entrance hall showed six empty ro
oms and then Charles’s back, very kinky in jodhpurs. He was talking to an Afro-wigged model in a transparent two-piece sexy tunica who, I saw to my sorrow, was Diana. I walked forward into the sculpture hall saying, ‘Help for the photographer,’ and two men with collars and ties on followed me in without buying a ticket.

  Before we got to Room I, one of them drew alongside and opened a smiling conversation. By Room VII he wanted to know where I was going to lunch. Charles was in Room VIII, and when we greeted one another, my opportunists politely retreated. Italian manhood does a lot for one’s ego, especially when confronted with three scowling Art Deco chicks and Diana Minicucci, whose mother was Bernadette Mayflower of Hollywood, and whose father is Prince Minicucci, the industrialist. I stood with Charles’s hand in mine and said, ‘Hul-lo Diana. We’ve seen you already this morning. You’re absolutely all over poor Jacko’s developing tanks.’

  She groaned in a desultory way, above almost as many unclothed molecules as had been on view in the darkroom. ‘He has the coldest hands,’ she said. ‘I do blame your telescope. Or is it his circulation?’

  ‘It doesn’t make me cold,’ I suggested.

  The six pairs of eyelashes considered me. ‘Ruth sweetie, you haven’t a chilly pore in you. And if you did, dammit, you’ve got your own heating system.’ She glared at Charles, who blew a solid raspberry at her. The terrible thing about Di Minicucci is that she is rich and pretty and fearfully likeable.

  ‘Wait,’ said Charles gravely, ‘for the seasonal lull. That’s it, girls. I’ll be five minutes, darling.’

  This to me. I looked around at the lighting man and the dressers and the hairdressers and the couturiers’ men, and the gaggle of attendants and illegal gaggle of onlookers and finally, at the TV screen out on the landing, which showed two men in collars and tie, standing somewhere surveying a Rubens. ‘Where for lunch?’ I said to Charles hopefully. It was a long, long time since my apple.