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

untie Jacko. He’s been left in the darkroom.”
    I ran blundering along to the darkroom. The lights were smashed; the floor was a mess of crunched glass, but someone lying on it was pounding for attention with his feet. It was Jacko, with ropes at his wrists and his ankles. I touched his face, and found a cloth tied also over his mouth. I loosened it, and he spat out a hunk of wet cotton and said, “Put the power switch on.”
    The power board is on the wall of the darkroom, and I was dimwitted not to have thought of it before. I left Jacko and scrabbling over the wall, found and pulled it. A moment before that, a clatter of running footsteps echoed suddenly from the circular passage outside. Charles, my phlegmatic Charles, exploded at the top of his voice, “
Ah, God damn it to hell
!” and then called more distantly, “Innes! Innes! He’s left through the loo window. Do you see him?”
    There was a bang as Innes opened the door, and another clatter as Charles rattled down the marble stairs to the bottom and then ran out to join him. Their voices receded, calling.
    I looked at Jacko in the reflected light from the passage. He was covered in blood, mostly from the cut glass, but he did not look concussed, only furious. I said, “How did it happen?”
    “He hit me on the head from behind,” Jacko said. “I was changing the plates, and I’d left the bloody Vee filter here in the darkroom. When I woke up, he’d bound me.”
    I said, “What did he want?” There were plenty of knives. I had him half freed already.
    “He didn’t tell me,” said Jacko sarcastically. “But I can tell you, he made a hell of a mess of Charles’s camera. Then he smashed the lights and I had to stand on my shoulders and kick on the dome power switch. Look at my bloody jacket.”
    “We lost him,” said Innes, coming in with a torch at that moment. He turned it on Jacko. “Come on, let’s get you into the bathroom and sponged down. We lost the guy in the bushes. But I’m going to get on that phone as soon as you’re fixed up and get the police onto his tail.” He swept his torch around the wrecked room. “What in hell do you suppose he was after?”
    “He’s smashed up Charles’s Zeiss Icarex,” said Jacko for the second time. “He’d left it in the dome and I’d just brought it down when it happened.”
    “Not my camera. Hell,” said Charles from the doorway. “That must be your camera, Ruth. The man must be bonkers.”
    Jacko, mopping his face with a handkerchief, was moving with Innes’s guidance to the door. “No, it’s Charles’s,” he said. “I found it there when I came on duty.
Digham
it says under the lid.” He stopped, and looked back at us, as Charles and I stood both staring at him.
    Charles said slowly, “Then…”
    “Then,” I said, “it was my camera they stole in the zoo. You took
my
camera to work with this morning.”
    His face was marked, just a little, by the fighting. The graze stood out against the paleness of the rest of his face. He said, still staring at me, “I thought there was more unused film than I’d expected. So it was your film they pinched.”
    “Some tasteful shots of the Fontana di Trevi?” I said. “Preceding some even more tasteful shots of Di’s sexytunica from the Villa Borghese this morning. What was in your own camera?”
    He turned the torch on it. It lay, a warped, twisted wreck on the work bench. It had been attacked, repeatedly and efficiently, with a hatchet. There was no film inside it. I said, “He didn’t want you to take any pictures with that one again. And he’s got the film.”
    “With yesterday’s fashion batch on it,” Charles said. “Which was, as it happens, top secret.” He whistled. “I’ll have to tell the couture houses. Thank God I sent the other exposed film back with the van. I rang this evening. It’s all perfectly safe.”
    “Police?” I said.
    “Yes,” said Charles.
    “No,” said Johnson, arriving unheard in the