Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown Page A

for?” I said.
    There was a little pause. Then, “I have principles,” he said.
    I said, “So have I. And one of them is to stick to my family
and
my friends. Janey can laugh at me. She’s welcome. I’ve dined out on a few stories about her. But not ones that matter. By the same token, she could have made quite a good thing about telling how she saw you sneaking about the Alt Vila that night. But instead she chose to help me keep it dark.
You
were the one who flung it back in her face.”
    “Maybe I should have told her,” said Derek. His voice had gone very tight, and you felt he ought to be clearing his throat, but he wasn’t. Sometimes he didn’t look like Daddy at all. “Maybe I should have told her why I came to see Father and relied on her kind nature to do the right thing. After all, you say you would trust her.”
    “I didn’t say anything of the kind,” I said. “In some things I wouldn’t trust her an inch.”
Men, for instance
. I said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Derek.” He would honestly drive anyone to drink. “What was it you came to see Daddy about? I don’t know how the firm managed to spare you.”
    “They sent me,” said Derek. “In a way.”
    There was a silence. I felt like a piano with the dampers all jammed. “Why?” I said. My whiskey was finished.
    “Because,” said Derek clearly and nastily, “they had reason to believe that that renowned peer, the fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner, was dabbling in the sale of technical and treasonable secrets, and they had given me to understand that if this were so, I had become an unemployable security risk in this industry and any other competitor on this side of the Iron Curtain, at least.”
    “That’s punk,” I said. “For goodness’ sake, Derek. When was Daddy ever in Holland?”
    “Just before the aural sensator was stolen,” he said.
    I stared at him. The incongruity of poor, charming Daddy trotting round Europe with a cartload of secret electronic equipment hadn’t yet struck me: I was only going by Derek’s green face. “So you killed him,” I said.
    My brother took three strides toward me. He bent down, and clamping his hands on my forearms, raised me out of my chair and held me, barely erect, his face so close to mine that I could see his eyes were all bloodshot. Until then in all our lives, a peck on the cheek was all we had ever exchanged. Now, I could feel the heat from his skin, and smell the whiskey, and see the stubble glittering round his jaws and his chin. He said, “You think that, as a matter of course. People kill other people… Why not someone you know? Why not me? I say I have principles, but talk doesn’t mean anything, not in your circle. Trust doesn’t mean anything. Kinship doesn’t mean anything.”
    My heart was behaving all at once like a body-skin hammer. “It doesn’t seem to matter all that much to you,” I said. “You need to see a bloody psychiatrist.”
    He said, “Ha!” and opened his hands so that I lost my balance and sat down again, with a bump, in my chair.
    I found I was crying hard, but silently, at least. I got hold of the handkerchief again, my hand shaking, and mopped up till it had stopped, taking deep breaths until the hiccoughs had gone. Then I collected my bag and the carryall with the Fantas and got up. My legs were still shaking. I said to Derek, “I think you’re all wrong. I think there’s something wrong with you, too. I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going back to Janey’s.”
    “Of course,” he said. “Curl up in your fantasy world. This is reality, Sarah. You’ve got to face it some time.”
    “That’s
your
reality,” I said. “It’s not the same as mine. Mine is Daddy’s.”
    “I know,” Derek said. I could feel him standing, watching me as I went out, but he didn’t say anything more.
    I stopped at Spar on the way home and returned all the Fantas.
     
    I was having breakfast in the kitchen when Gilmore came in juggling three tennis balls,