Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird by Dorothy (as Dorothy Halliday Dunnett Read Free Book Online Page A

smiling, and I saw that my native sixth sense had not failed me. The player was Japanese.
    “What’s the pitch?” said Wallace Brady eventually, after we had driven in silence to the hotel complex, walked through the darkened casino with its covered tables and clicking, glimmering rows of one-armed bandits and up through the simulated leopard skin to a lounge where we could sit and have coffee. “You don’t like playing golf with poor performers? I thought gilt-edged was weakening there for a bit.”
    He had, after all, paid for the round. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I enjoyed the game very much. I dare say I have more practice than you do. I play whenever I can.”
    “Outside Mickey Wright, I don’t know who you’d have trouble beating,” said Brady. “Did you ever think of becoming professional?”
    I have, of course. There is a great deal of money in golf. But one needs money, or backing, to start with. I said, “Someday, perhaps. My father has multiple allergic sensitivity, and it will be difficult to leave Nassau until he improves.”
    He had an extremely deep suntan, in which his eyes were quite pale, but the eyeballs unveined and apparently healthy. It was hard to guess his profession. “You miss your home, Doctor MacRannoch?” he said.
    Across the lounge I had just spotted the back of Johnson’s head. The question reminded me of my anger. “Unfortunately,” I said, “I have little chance to do so. My father is head of a Scottish clan, Mr. Brady, and is prone to bring his surroundings with him, wherever he goes.”
    “His drapes, you mean?” He looked slightly bewildered.
    “His clansmen, I mean,” I said, no doubt with some grimness. “Even here. It was there on the register. T. K. MacRannoch.”
    “You don’t say?” He looked duly astonished. Then he said, “Well, I wouldn’t bawl out the old man too quickly. There are an awful lot of Scots in the Bahamas.”
    “There may be, but they are not all MacRannochs. The word gets around. Even among the unwanted, like T. K. MacRannoch, the word travels like typhoid,” I said. “I knew it. Father is planning a MacRannoch clan Gathering.”
    “Here?”
    I wasn’t thinking of Brady. I was thinking of James Ulric’s bronchial spasms.
    “Here, or at the Begum’s house,” I said, on reflection.
    “But,” he said, “I thought the Begum spent the winter at your castle in Scotland.”
    I stared at Wallace Brady with surprise, and then with increasing suspicion.
    I hadn’t told him that. I had no desire to talk about the Begum, who is the decayed English widow of an extremely rich Indian prince, and who annually rents Castle Rannoch as a shooting lodge from James Ulric MacRannoch.
    While he disports himself in the sunshine, the Begum Akbar from the time of my senior school days has moved into the castle with her clothes, her butler and maid, and using our gillies, our cook, and our housestaff, has killed deer and fished salmon and shot our grouse with her friends. I had never met her. I would never go home when she was there, and I had avoided her house here on Crab Island by Nassau. It was she who had found our present villa and rented it in advance for my father. It was because of the Begum, I was sure, that James Ulric had come to Nassau at all. They were welcome. I do not care for life on the edge of a Barclay card.
    But I had said nothing of all that to Brady. I said, “How do you know that? You knew about Father before I mentioned him to you?” Then an unlikely thought struck me. “Mr. Brady. What do you do for a living? On Great Harbour Cay?”
    To do him credit, he looked me in the eyes as he answered. “My firm has a project there,” he said. “A big constructional project. I’m a civil engineer, Doctor MacRannoch.”
    There was a deadly and sundering silence, fully understood by both parties.
    “You build bridges,” I said. I opened my handbag, selected my car keys, snapped it shut, and stood up. “I’m sorry I