Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett

stepping carefully, crossed the Red Square and stood, gazing through his long-lashed soft eyes, directly in front of us.
    Booted, dimpled and inconvenient, it was Hugo Panadek, Comer Eisenkopp’s Design Director. He had gold rings in both ears and a wolf-smile under the bush on his lip. Indeed, he looked quite different out of gorilla-skin. He said, ‘So. You would shoot either or both of the parents!’
    ‘To Hugo!’ screamed Grover. I set him down and he rushed straight off the path and into the Adriatic. It only came to his ankles and he was out of earshot, so I left him.
    ‘Of course,’ I said to Hugo. I kept my voice mild. ‘Don’t you know it’s every trained nurse’s dream, a world full of well-mannered kids and no adults? Do you know Charlotte Medleycott?’
    One soft eye turned to Charlie, who was grinning. ‘You have been to Data-Mate again,’ said Hugo Panadek accusingly. ‘Every time she comes to the Eisenkopps, it is to say that she has run through another eight boyfriends. Who is it this time?’
    I looked up in the air, in all directions. ‘Over there,’ I said. ‘Inside the Alaskan Timberwolf. I’ve got him second-hand, actually, at the moment. What is it that compels bachelors to jump into fur suits this season?’
    ‘The company,’ said Hugo. ‘Sometimes the company, alas, is too chilly. Nurse Joanna, what do you do in the evenings?’
    I said, ‘Lift bachelors out of their furry suits and unpin their diapers. Do you come here a lot?’ Grover was attempting to scale a papier mâché range of mountains. I rescued him. The castle on the top, of the Mad Ludwig variety, had its windows lit and a plastic dragon endlessly breasting the waterfilled ring of the moat.
    A discarded banana stick impeded its progress and Hugo, reaching over, removed it tenderly, and inspected its working parts. ‘The real dragon,’ he said, ‘is ten feet long.’
    ‘And fire,’ said Grover.
    ‘And has fire in its mouth. The real moat . . .’
    ‘Is a whimming place,’ Grover said. ‘Hugo whim there.’
    ‘In his fur monkey suit?’ I said. I could feel my bland slipping.
    ‘In my part of the world,’ said Hugo Panadek, ‘you don’t need a suit to go swimming in. Read the notice. It is a real castle. The fortress of Kalk, Yugoslavia. Owner, Hugo Panadek.’
    I wouldn’t have believed Hugo, but I believed Grover all right. Grover knew all about Hugo’s castle, and so I suppose did Bunty, corkscrewing presently round a sloping platform in Johnson’s arms. I said, ‘Well, congratulations. It must be famous, to appear in Missy’s Golden American Wonderland, yet. Did you have to supply the blueprints?’
    ‘This is no trouble,’ said Hugo. ‘I design for a living.’ He waved a hand. ‘I design the Wonderland.’
    Charlie scraped a couple of Mallards off the Acropolis. ‘You mean you’re Missy?’ She stood, her arms full of kids and her end- curls sticking out at the side like demented butterfly wings, showing him thirty-two perfect teeth in her ecstasy. ‘You’re Missy. Hugo?’
    ‘You want proof?’ Hugo said, his lashes descending. ‘Well, I have enough shares of Missy to be able to show friends a good time, let us say. Where is Bunty? What do you all wish to see?’
    That was when I remembered the time, and what we were all supposed to be there for. ‘The Great Shoot-Out,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to be doing a reconstruction of Benedict’s kidnapping, or at least of what the kidnapper planned to do afterwards. He’d been working beforehand at The Great Shoot-Out.’
    ‘Oh, I remember all that,’ said Hugo. ‘The Carl Schurz Park. The police came and grilled Bunty and did a conducted tour of the johns. It sounded like the worst-organized heist of all time. No wonder The Great Shoot-Out has been losing money. If you pardon my curiosity, what do you think you will find that the cops didn’t?’
    ‘Ask Bunty,’ said Charlie. ‘Here she comes. Bunty, what are we hoping to find