Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘I see.’ Toby sighed and picked up the copy of The Times, four weeks old, for which he had originally come into the room. ‘It all seems pointless to me.’

  ‘Pointless?’

  ‘Whoever killed my boy – the man, the men – must by now be miles and miles away. You never caught the people who set fire to the mission.’

  Singh nodded. ‘True.’

  ‘These people might be those.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve not found the knife?’

  Singh shook his head. ‘A knife is an expensive thing – for a poor Indian. If it’s needed for further use …’ He shrugged. ‘No knife is missing from the house?’

  ‘The cook and the bearer say not.’

  ‘Yes, one of my men has already had a word with the servants about it. But I thought perhaps your wife …?’

  Toby compressed his lips. ‘It’s not something about which I’d like to ask her now. Not in her present state. In any case, I doubt if she keeps a tally. Knives get lost, broken.’

  ‘This must have been a large knife. It would be difficult to lose.’ Singh glanced at the two men dusting the windows and at the third merely supervising them. ‘Mr Thompson, let’s go into the garden. It’ll be cooler and quieter there. No, not through those windows. We’d better go round.’

  The two men walked in silence down the corridor, Toby’s heavy footsteps dragging behind Singh’s firm, sprightly ones. Singh held open the front door, inclining his head with the same mocking deference with which he used that ‘ Mr’. ‘Please.’ Toby all but tripped on the sill.

  Singh stationed himself in the middle of the tennis court in the soft radiance of the late afternoon. He glanced all round him, as though afraid of eavesdroppers. Then he said: ‘This case certainly has its puzzling aspects.’

  ‘I’d have thought it perfectly simple. Well, yes, of course, it’s puzzling in as much as we still don’t know who precisely …’ Toby found that he was unable to continue ‘killed my son’. His voice trailed away, to strengthen once more: ‘But the rest of it is clear. Surely? I have a number of enemies, no one can reach my sort of position without having enemies. Without intending to do so, one ruins a man. Or one sacks a man. You know about revenge in this country. My wife’s brother …’

  ‘Yes.’ The voice was quiet. ‘ I know about your wife’s brother.’

  ‘And only a short while ago someone tried to poison me.’

  Singh shrugged, turning down the corners of his mouth with a fleeting incredulity.

  ‘If it’s not an act of revenge against me personally, then it might well be an act against the Raj – through one of the most influential and richest of its representatives in this province.’ He peered at Singh from under lowered brows. ‘Mightn’t it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Toby sensed the underlying doubt in the assurance. ‘Well, then, what are these puzzling aspects of which you talk?’

  Singh brought the palms of his hands together, as though in the Hindu gesture of greeting. Toby stared at the gold signet ring, heavily embossed with its monogram, on the Indian’s left little finger. Its ostentation had always irritated him, as it irritated others of the British. ‘What I keep asking myself is – how did this man or men enter?’

  ‘Through the window. The window was open.’

  ‘Yes. But who opened the window? You’ve already told me that every night, last thing, you go round the whole house to make sure that every latch and bolt is fastened. Yes?’

  Toby nodded.

  ‘Well, then? You see my difficulty.’

  Toby frowned down at the tennis court, like a small boy stumped by some elementary problem in mental arithmetic. ‘Someone could have opened the window from inside,’ he eventually said.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘A servant can’t be ruled out. For example – your bearer lets himself and the other servants into the house each morning, with his key to the back door.’

  ‘But Muhammed’s totally loyal. Trustworthy. He’s been with me for, oh, years and years.’

  ‘His key might have been … borrowed. Without his knowing. It might then have been duplicated. You’ve only got to go down to the bazaar to find stalls where keys can be duplicated in a matter of seconds. At those stalls you can also buy keys. A key will often fit a lock for which it was not intended.’

  ‘Yes.’ Toby nodded, biting on his lower lip. ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘That’s a possibility.’

  Toby scuffed with his shoe at the gravel of the tennis court. ‘I see no other.’

  ‘Your governess?’

  ‘Clare?’ Toby’s eyes widened, his face suddenly became congested.

  ‘Her Christian name is Clare? Oh, yes, of course … She must be a heavy sleeper.’

  Toby squinted angrily at the Indian. ‘She’d taken a pill. A pill my wife gave her. For her migraines, she suffers from migraines. You know how silently a dacoit can move. The Elsworths – you must remember. They slept undisturbed while a man – men – ransacked their bedroom and went off with all her jewellery and furs.’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’ Singh was not at that moment interested in the story of the Elsworths’ burglary. ‘In the lavatory, the servants’ lavatory up there, my men found a blanket. Well, we know what that was used for – the child, dead or alive, was wrapped in it. He was wrapped in it and then carried out through that window.’ He pointed. ‘ We also found a brassière.’

  ‘A brassière?’ Toby screwed up his small, green eyes, as though trying to focus them on something in the distance.

  Singh nodded. ‘Apparently it belonged – belongs – to Miss O’Connor. Clare,’ he added.

  There was a silence. Then Toby asked: ‘And what do you infer from that?’ There was a sudden firmness, as of challenge, in his previously hoarse, tremulous voice.

  ‘Well …’ Singh drawled the word and then hesitated, deliberating how much it would be politic to reveal to Toby and so, through him, to the household. Then he went on: ‘It confirms Mr McGregor’s supposition. Your son was suffocated, that was how he died. Later – the mutilation took place. He was suffocated by the brassière being pressed against his mouth.’

  Toby gazed at him, his green eyes protuberant under lids puffy and reddened by sleeplessness and grief. ‘I see.’

  Singh began to walk slowly across the tennis court; Toby followed. The Indian plucked at a fern trailing out of the brick retaining-wall and squeezed it in his palm, as though it were a saturated sponge. Then he threw it away with a gesture of impatience. It had stained his palm green. ‘Miss O’Connor – there’s never been any trouble with her, has there?’

  Toby licked his lips. ‘Trouble? None at all. She’s always been’ – he swallowed – ‘perfectly satisfactory.’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘A boyfriend?’ There was a dazed look in the small, green eyes.

  ‘An attractive girl. Young. It seems likely.’

  ‘Well, yes … there was a soldier. She had a soldier friend. Perhaps still has him. I don’t know his name. I know little about it, it’s not something with which I’d concern myself. But my wife mentioned to me …’ Toby did not tell Singh of how Isabel had had to reprimand Clare for meeting the boy when she was out with Peter.

  ‘He never visited her here?’

  ‘Good God, no!’

  ‘She was fond of your son?’

  ‘Of course! Everyone was fond of him. He was …’ Toby’s voice broke. ‘One couldn’t help being fond of him.’ Again that strong, firm note, as of challenge. ‘I can’t, for the life of me, see the drift of these questions.’

  Singh smiled. ‘ The life of a policeman is one of continual questions.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  A slow, expected death has a way of irresistibly sucking the members of a family together down its dark funnel. This death, as violent and unexpected as the explosion following the detonation of a bomb, had the opposite effect of blowing the members of the Thompson fam
ily in separate directions, however much they struggled to cling to each other. They were awkward and tongue-tied in each other’s presences. Each was afraid of seeming callous by talking too much or too loudly or too often of trivial things. Each felt under the scrutiny, not merely of the Indians in their midst, but of each other. Each felt an embarrassment as acute as their grief.

  Isabel wandered about the house, her face grey and stern. ‘You don’t have to bother about all these things, forget about them,’ Toby urged her. ‘They don’t matter. Mother can see to them. Or Helen or Clare.’ But she would not be deflected. She insisted on resuming her daily routine of unlocking the store-cupboards and apportioning out to the cook everything that he would need for the next twenty-four hours. She supervised the cleaning of the house, imperiously ordering the servants in Hindustani ‘There! There! No, there!’ as she pointed to some piece of fluff still stuck to a rug or to some specks of dust still glittering in the sunlight on a table. At meals, she sat erect, her jaws chomping steadily, as though there were some heroic merit in forcing herself to eat food which plainly nauseated her. When, at night, Toby crept into her room from the dressing room to see if she were sleeping, she would close her eyes and draw deep breath on breath, in a simulation which he found profoundly moving.

  He himself, haggard and wild-eyed, the skin of his face raw and nicked from his morning shave, his sandy hair sticking up in tufts, and his tie pulied into a tight, hard knot, would repeatedly massage his jaw with his hand, in the gesture of someone suffering from toothache, as he drew deep sigh on sigh. Continually, he retreated into his office, conscious of Mr Ram and Hilda peeping at him with a voracious pity and a no less voracious curiosity, as he shut himself up behind the frosted glass door which, in the past, he closed only on some confidential interview. Behind that door, he would pull papers off his in-tray, study balance sheets, attempt to draft a letter; but his brain had suffered a paralysis, it would not function. Later, Hilda would find innumerable pieces of paper screwed up in his waste-paper basket, many of them with no more than a few disconnected words on them, some of them wholly blank. ‘He’s in a bad way,’ she would confide to Mr Ram, and he would reply, shaking his head: ‘Well, are you surprised?’

  The old woman now spent hours on end in her room, even eating many of her meals up there off a tray. The knitting grew, almost without her realizing it, beneath her knobbly, arthritic fingers. A jumper for Peter: she appeared to have forgotten that. Sometimes she stared down at the lake from her seat by the window and then her mind would retravel, in reverse, each stage of the journey which had brought her here to something so terrible. She would be carried down the hill in a dandy, perilously swaying at each twist in the road or sudden incline, by four sweating coolies, and then she would get into a car and be driven, giddy from the innumerable hairpin bends, one coifing round beneath another, on and on, until she would step out at a cavernous railway station, echoing with high-pitched, alien voices, and board the special coach set aside for her on the train. Then the train would carry her to … But at that moment the chain of reverie, coiling backwards, would snap. Who would accompany her on the train? Toby had accompanied her from Bombay but would he accompany her back again? And if not Toby, then who? She shuddered and reached out again for her knitting.

  Toby would put his head round the door. ‘Everything all right?’ he would ask in a flat, hollow voice.

  ‘Yes, darling.’ Then, more than once, she had cried out that question, by now so familiar to him from innumerable letters and telephone calls: ‘ Oh, Toby, what can I say?’ But he would vanish without answering it, perhaps even without hearing it. He had never been a demonstrative child, she had never been a demonstrative mother. The habit of reticence was too strong for them.

  Isabel never came to the old woman’s room now that she did not have Peter to bring with her on his reluctant daily visits.

  But Helen often came. When she crossed the landing from her own room to her grandmother’s, she brought the relief of a cold compress applied to burning skin. She was as strong as Isabel but her strength, unlike Isabel’s, seemed to have been achieved without any strain. Well, that was understandable, the old woman decided. Helen had lost a half-brother, Isabel an only son. Can I bring you anything? Shall I read to you? Would you like your chair closer to the light? Perhaps this book might interest you? ‘Oh, Helen, what a dear girl you are!’ Repeatedly the old woman cried it out. But though Helen was so solicitous, her visits were always brief. ‘Stay with me, oh, do stay with me a little longer!’ the old woman could not help exclaiming on one occasion; and Helen had then looked embarrassed as she assured her: ‘Oh, I’ll be back in a moment, Granny, truly I will. Promise.’ But the promise had not been kept; and when Helen did at last return several hours later, it was only to ask yet again what she could do for her grandmother.

  Visitors, curious, embarrassed and, in some cases, possessed by an almost erotic excitement, would call at the house. Isabel would insist on receiving them all, however little known or little liked, though Toby would urge her, as over the household chores: ‘You don’t have to, it’s not necessary.’ ‘What can I say?’ This or that visitor would again ask the familiar question and Isabel, sitting bolt upright in her chair, would slowly lower her head and gaze at the plump, white hands in her lap. The visitors would all agree that it would be better if this icy barrier of stoicism were to crack and dissolve; but it never did so. ‘ It’s not human,’ one of them would confide to another, as they walked through an alley of over-arching roses to where their coolies waited beside their dandies.

  Isabel also replied to all the letters, even though most of them concluded: ‘Please don’t bother to answer this.’ She would sit at her desk in the drawing room, if Singh and his men were not in occupation, and would pen answer after answer in her firm, generous hand. The recipients were amazed how she not only thanked them for their condolences, sympathies and kind thoughts but also asked for news of their ailments, their gardens, their servant problems, their children at home in England. They agreed that she was a remarkable woman.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Singh gently, insidiously questioned each of them in turn.

  He and the old woman got on best of all, since she alone felt no resentment at an Indian sitting opposite to her and putting question after question.

  ‘Do you generally sleep well?’

  She laughed. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I’ve reached that age, you know.’ Then she added skittishly: ‘My husband used to say that you stop needing sleep at the same age that you stop needing sex.’ So far from smiling, the Indian looked vaguely shocked. Oh, dear! She should not have said that.

  ‘And on that particular night – how did you sleep?’

  For a moment, she puzzled over that, her head on one side. Singh, watching her, thought: she must once have been extremely pretty. Then she said: ‘Well, much as I always do.’

  ‘You heard no unusual noise?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘The walls here are so thin. I’ve often noticed how you can hear voices from other rooms.’

  ‘Yes, it’s not a well-built house. Not at all. See that damp around the window-frame? And the crack in the ceiling over there? My son says that many of the houses in India are badly built. Kutcha – isn’t that the Hindustani word?’

  Singh ignored the digression. ‘Your grand-daughter. Can you hear her in her room from here?’

  Again the old woman put her head on one side. ‘ Sometimes,’ she said at last. ‘If she’s talking, I sometimes do hear. Or if she’s moving about – slamming a drawer shut, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Did you hear her move about on that night?’

  The pale blue eyes shifted sideways as the old woman pondered. Then she nodded: ‘I think I heard her going along the corridor to the bathroom we share. I think so.’

  ‘You mean – after she had gone to bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have you any idea what time that mig
ht have been?’

  The old woman sighed. ‘None at all. I sleep a little, I lie awake a little, I sleep a little. That’s how it is all night … She often goes along to the bathroom in the night. There’s nothing odd about that.’

  ‘No, I’m sure there isn’t.’

  He rose to his feet, pulling the cuffs of his shirt down so that each showed its half-inch below the sleeves of his pale grey jacket. ‘You’ve been very kind to spare so much of your time and attention.’

  She felt a sudden desolation now that he would leave her. He was the first person who had had a proper conversation with her since, well, since It had happened.

  ‘What a terrible tragedy it’s all been!’ she said. ‘My poor son! And my poor daughter-in-law!’

  Singh did not answer, merely bowed slightly and nodded. Then he said: ‘Thank you, Mrs Thompson.’

  The useless knitting again began to grow under the stiffly moving fingers.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Clare herself precipitated Singh’s second interview with her.

  As he approached the house on the fourth day after the killing, she came towards him from the verandah, where clearly she had been awaiting his coming. Her knees close together, the legs flung outward while the arms flailed, she ran in that awkward, uncoordinated manner of hers, so different from all her other neat, graceful movements. Though a storm the previous night had caused the temperature to plunge, Singh noticed that the faint moustache above her upper lip and her wide, low forehead were both glistening with sweat.

  ‘Inspector! Inspector!’ she panted, as though appealing to him to intervene in some theft or assault.

  ‘Yes, Miss O’Connor?’ He halted, his expensive crocodile-leather briefcase dangling from a hand. The other hand went up to his dark glasses, removed them, deftly folded them against the cream silk of his shirt and then slipped them into his breast pocket. How suddenly plain she looked, her eyelashes sandy against her dark skin now that there was no mascara on them, her eyes lacklustre, and her cheeks fallen in on innumerable tiny wrinkles. He felt an easy contempt for her, marooned between one race and another, and also an uneasy pity.