Read Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird for Free Online

staring at him,” said Johnson. “So I made some inquiries while you were phoning. He is well known and accepted, although the girl was not his wife. He has not left the island for three weeks at least… So now you know that Bart Edgecombe was attacked by a prisoner, and that his wife has no brother named George. It was, incidentally, a stupid story to tell you.”
    “Not wholly,” I said. I kept my voice calm. “It told me that Sir Bartholomew also knew what had happened, and didn’t want police interference. I should imagine he is expecting you to explain why. At a guess, it concerns his wife, Lady Edgecombe.”
    “Poor Denise,” said Johnson unexpectedly. “No. It only concerns Lady Edgcombe in that she is the neglected spectator in a scene of continuous short-fall pandemonium. Bartholomew Edgecombe was a highly paid servant of the Crown and is now the chief British Intelligence agent in the Bahamas.”
    I am aware that I have a first-class brain. It is always a pleasure to meet with another. I said, “You are his superior?”
    Johnson smiled, wryly, in the gathering dark. “I am his nursemaid,” he said. “And you, for your sins, are his doctor.”
     
    We had grouper for dinner — a good, solid fish with a sauce — followed by a first-rate orange soufflé. It was a change from hotel Franco-American catering:
Jumbo Frog Legs Provençale
.
    It was also a change from Minnie Pearl’s Chicken. I enjoyed my meal, during which Johnson would not talk at all about the Bart Edgecombe business; and even after it, in the coolness of the cockpit with the engine shut off, when he talked a great deal.
    There are four main rocket tracking stations in the Bahamas, with an American staff drawn from the Air Force, Pan American World Airways, and the Radio Corporation of America, as well as one or two smaller two-person affairs on the minor islands. The tracking of moonshots and other missiles from the American rocket range is done by the electronic brains in these stations, a submarine cable transmitting their findings to Cape Kennedy, which is only forty miles north of Miami across a narrow stretch of Atlantic.
    Permission may be obtained without difficulty to see these tracking stations, which have about them nothing either glamorous or peculiarly interesting, and whose staff tend to be jocular in the extreme. It had never struck me therefore that there could be any purpose in espionage in this part of the world. Which was, I suppose, precisely what the public was intended to think.
    “Bart’s a good man,” Johnson said. “Hardworking. Thorough. The last person to run into trouble.” The sun had gone down on a copper band into the sea, and it was now perfectly dark, with the
quock
of a night heron coming occasionally over the water.
Dolly
moved slackly, with the waves and the steam from our coffee coiled white in the warm air, lit from below, where Spry was clearing the meal.
    “So why now?” I asked. “Why should someone try to kill him now? And do you know who it is?”
    “The answer to that is: I don’t know, in triplicate,” Johnson said.
    I was not sure whether I believed him. I said, “Has it happened before?”
    “Not to my knowledge. If it had, he would have reported it. In fact, it’s the sheerest chance that I’m here now. I only arrived three days ago for this thing in Miami. He must have seen a report in the papers.” He finished lighting his pipe, sent the match flaring into the darkness, and said, “Incidentally, there was nothing wrong, he says, with the crab sandwich. He mentioned it to stop any public health fussing, but he’s sure the crab was all right. If it was… How do you think the two doses of arsenic were administered? If there were two doses?”
    “I think there were two quite distinct episodes,” I said. “Arsenic works quite quickly, and the only food Sir Bartholomew had had before coming to the airport had been shared by Mr. Brady. Even if Mr. Brady had poisoned that