Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 Read Online Free Page A

scaling and added, “In which case he’s got them.”
    “Or someone has,” I said. “Charles, there were two of them in the Villa Borghese. Do you think they met in the Gents, and our man passed the roll of film on to his mate?”
    “And then blew himself up,” Charles remarked. He pulled himself together.
    “
We will not build a cross for you
    With angels all a-simper
    Because, my friend, you left us with
    A bang and not a whimper
.”
    His foot, slipping off a defaced marble elbow, landed in a pool of pale slimy lily leaves. He swore and began climbing again.
    “Or was killed by his mate for the film.” I had got to the top of the wall and was in no mood for obituaries. I said, “Charles? Shouldn’t we go back and tell all to the police?”
    He was too busy at that moment to answer, so I jumped first into the darkness of the Via Ulisse Aldorrandi.
    I didn’t fall. I was caught by two waiting hands, one of which patted my head and then gripped me. The same grasp received Charles and arrested him likewise. Limp as shot game birds, we hung side by side on the pavement.
    “I shouldn’t tell them, you know,” said our unknown captor, vaguely surveying us. “The Roman fuzz are so old-fashioned, like Directoire knickers. I have a car, if you want to push off discreetly.”
    It was too much. I could hear Charles begin to gasp with incipient hysteria and I had trouble, myself, with my uvula. I said, “Who are you? We don’t know you, do we?”
    “My name,” the man said, “is Johnson Johnson. A man of regular habits, with the fastest vertical liftoff in Italy.”

----
Chapter 2
    « ^ »
    We took this man Johnson Johnson to Maurice’s party, and if that seems unlikely, you haven’t considered the problem.
    We got into this beaten-up Fiat 500, and the man said, “Where to?” and Charles said, “The railway station would be marvelous,” with what I can only call prodigious presence of mind.
    “Nonsense,” said Johnson Johnson. He was English, that went without saying, and I have seldom seen a man less remarkable. You would remember nothing, not even his coloring, if it weren’t for his bifocal glasses, glittering under the peak of a golfing cap. He had on a Harris Tweed jacket, and under it a hand-knit jersey, the cuffs of which nearly covered his knuckles. “Nonsense,” he said. “Where to? I’ll drive you all the way.”
    “Brindisi,” said Charles, and I would have kicked him had we been sitting together. I said, “We stay north of Rome, at Velterra. I work at the Maurice Frazer Observatory.”
    “Do you?” said Johnson Johnson with interest. He had not yet started the car. Over the wall, we could hear shouting and see the light of torch beams glancing through the tree branches. “I thought it was owned by a film company.”
    “It’s been refitted and modernized,” I said. “The Zodiac Trust are encouraging Maurice to use it for projects.”
    With lemurlike innocence, the glasses surveyed me. “So you’re an astronomer. And is your friend an astronomer also, or are you merely cohabiting?”
    At this point, Charles opened the car door. The light, coming on, illuminated in full technicolor the bloodstained camera lying on the car seat and also brought us, full strength, the volume of shouting from over the wall. He shut the car door very gently.
    “Charles,” I said with some effort, “is a photographer. We were chasing after the man in the loo, who had stolen his camera. We think he wanted to pirate his advance fashion photographs. It would be lovely, really, to be taken to the station; it was so nice of you to rescue us. A police thing would be very boring.”
    “I do agree,” said Johnson Johnson. “Especially if Charles is the Marquis’s son. Charles Digham?”
    “Digham,” affirmed Charles sweetly. My heart sank. “And this,” he added, “is my friend, Miss Ruth Russell. You haven’t said, sir, what brought you to the zoo?”
    The glasses stared at him. “I thought I