Free The Tropical Issue by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

amazed to see him, except that when I spoke to him last, he was in London. I wondered if he had an interest in Mrs Sheridan’s film. And of course, Madeira was the place for Sexual Strategy in Flowers, so long as creepers came into it.
    This time, he was togged up in Brideshead Revved-Up; all cream flannel and open-necked silk; and his arms were full of orange flowers, which he dropped into my water jug.
    I didn’t see he had a camera under his beard until it was already in action, photographing me in bed with the flowers beside me. They were funny flowers as well. Each had a great poking beak and a crown of bright orange spikes with a wee blue one sprouting in front of it.
    By the time I saw what he was after, it was too late. I flung the teapot at him, but he was already shutting the lens cap and grinning.
    ‘ Strelitzia parvifolia . Birds of paradise, darling,’ he said. ‘Vulgar, vigorous, and their spelling is utterly ghastly. You’ve got tea all over Natalie’s lovely carpet.’
    ‘What a pity,’ I said. ‘I hope she doesn’t send you a bill that’s too big for you.’
    ‘ My Scotch Bird of Paradise. I always thought he meant fancy birds with big tail-feathers.
    ‘She won’t mind. She thinks I’m the only photographer in the world who can make her look good on her wrong side, you unfairly gifted genetic mutation.
    ‘Now,’ said Ferdy, sitting on the side of my bed and sliding his hand as far as he could get under the covers, to show there was no ill feeling, ‘now what about this nonsense yesterday? Someone tried to scare you off Natalie?’
    I was glad Mrs Sheridan had told him the truth, and not the camera story. As well as being a goat, Ferdy is a guy who knows his world and can give sensible advice when he feels like it. He heard exactly what happened to me, and he listened to Natalie’s reasons for not calling in the authorities.
    And he agreed with Natalie.
    He was quite firm, and perfectly reasonable. ‘I know, darling. The call for revenge is burning in that stout little heart. But it’s not going to do your career and Kim-Jim’s a power of good to be labelled publicly as a pair of sex-fiends after Natalie’s money, and that’s what the media boys will make of it.
    ‘I know,’ repeated Ferdy earnestly, ‘that you think I don’t want Natalie’s love life dragged into the open because Natalie is going to lay me a lot of lovely golden eggs in the near future and, of course, you’re right. But Rita . . . She’s going to lay you some also. And Rita, you do like eggs? Whites of, handy for hair?’
    I told you. He’s an idiot. I had hoped very much, as the gossip king of the western semiphore, that he would tell me what the kitchen wouldn’t. Even supply a few names and addresses.
    But he didn’t know any. No one but Natalie, he said, knew exactly whom Natalie was laying. Apart, of course, from Kim-Jim.
    I said, ‘I don’t want to be bumped off. I don’t want Kim-Jim bumped off either.’
    ‘My darling Rita,’ said Ferdy, ‘the fellow will have come to his senses and got on the first plane for Australia, I shouldn’t wonder. Portuguese police don’t like girls being beaten up and taxi drivers coshed and eminent ladies’ mid-life crises threatening to appear live on Cable.’
    ‘And if he happens to know Natalie as well as we do, and is sure that she won’t go to the police?’ I said. It was my jaw that was hurting. ‘Otherwise, why drive me all the way to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, once he’d clouted me?’
    ‘Maybe he thought you were going to flake out,’ Ferdy said. ‘Dodo said you looked just like—’
    ‘—a slab of junked meat in Emergency.’ I finished it for him, narkily.
    Under every muscle in Ferdy’s face and behind every whisker there was a laugh busting its guts to get out and shriek as he looked at me.
    I took one of his Birds out of my water jug, and twisted its neck for it, but he just tut-tutted, picked it up, and put it in his top pocket like an