Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  She had thought for a moment, her chin on her palm. Then she had nodded: ‘ Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t wear the nightdress laid out for you by the ayah?’

  ‘No. I noticed it was soiled. So I put it in the basket for the dhobi and got myself another.’

  ‘Soiled? How do you mean?’ He had had to make an effort to keep the excitement out of his voice, just as he would do when, back in England, he came on a rare Kipling first edition priced at sixpence or a shilling.

  ‘Well …’ For the first time she had looked disconcerted; she had even begun to blush. Singh had thought: Now we’re getting somewhere. His heart seemed to be hammering against his breastbone. ‘In the way that women sometimes soil their clothes,’ she had murmured. Then she had amplified, almost defiantly: ‘I was beginning my period.’

  Now it had been his turn to be disconcerted. ‘ I see. I’m sorry to have to ask these intrusive questions. But there’s no way of avoiding them.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘So the nightdress would have gone to the laundry?’

  She had nodded. ‘On Monday.’

  ‘And when would it have come back?’

  She had thought: ‘Oh, I should imagine three or four days ago. The dhobi takes anything up to five days – if the weather isn’t good. That’s about normal, isn’t it?’

  ‘And has it come back?’

  She had shaken her head. ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I was hoping that perhaps you were going to tell me what had happened to it. That’s my favourite nightdress. Harvey Nichols. A present from my Aunt Sophie in England.’

  ‘Why hasn’t it come back?’

  She had laughed. ‘I only wish I knew. From time to time something gets ‘‘ lost’’.’ She had put the word into ironic inverted commas. ‘I’m sure you must often have the same experience with your dhobi. And the odd thing is that it’s always something new or attractive. Old handkerchiefs, for example, never fail to turn up.’

  ‘You mean the dhobi stole your nightdress?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. It appears on the list but the dhobi says that, when he unpacked the basket, it wasn’t there. He often says that when something disappears.’

  ‘And who made up the list?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I often do it for my stepmother. On this occasion, it seemed obvious I must do it. She was – fit for nothing.’

  ‘And you checked the laundry on its return?’

  ‘Yes, I checked it. And told the dhobi that item was missing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My father’s terribly hard on the servants for the smallest dishonesty. He got into a rage the other day because a single banana had been taken from the fruit bowl. Booze, cigarettes, small change – it drives him up the wall. But it always amazes me they’re as honest as they are. We pay them so little. Do you realize that nightdress probably cost three times the dhobi’s earnings for a month? If he pinched it and sold it in the bazaar – as I suspect – well, I can’t really be that angry.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with him.’

  ‘Will you? But don’t be too hard on him. No third degree, I hope.’ He had not been able to decide whether she was being ingenuous or disingenuous. How could someone so intelligent have failed to grasp the tenor of his questions?

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking you’re the possessor of a scout knife?’

  ‘Was.’ Again he had been astounded that a question so fraught with dangerous implications should have failed to shake her. ‘I lost it. We went to Biwali for a weekend camp not so long ago and I must have left it or dropped it somewhere. I need another but I’ve had no luck in finding one in a place as small as this. I suppose I’ll have to wait until we get back to the plains.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone about losing the knife?’

  She had thought for a moment. ‘ No, I don’t think so. Oh, I may have mentioned it to Clare. In fact, I think I did. It wasn’t of much importance.’

  He had looked closely at her. It was precisely because she had remained so casual and relaxed that his suspicions had been intensified. Any young girl in her position, obliged to answer questions indicating that she was suspected of a hideous crime, would, however, innocent, show some shock, agitation, indignation. She had shown none. Her naturalness was, in itself, unnatural.

  … Now Singh tried to explain all this to Ross; but the Englishman was irritably and irritatingly obtuse in taking his point. Knocking out his pipe on the ashtray before him, with so much vehemence that Singh feared that he would smash it, Ross exclaimed: ‘If she were the one, she’d have given herself away! Bound to! At some moment or other. A hardened criminal might succeed in … But not someone so young and inexperienced.’

  Singh shrugged. ‘Anyway – I got nowhere with her.’

  ‘Did you take up the question of the nightdress with the dhobi?’

  ‘Of course.’ Once again it exasperated Singh that the Englishman should feel obliged to check on something so obvious. ‘As I expected, he said he’d never seen the garment. Told me that the girl had accused him of pinching it but was emphatic that he certainly hadn’t done so. Mrs Thompson confirmed that at other times other items of laundry have gone missing – only two or three weeks ago the old lady lost a blouse. That time the dhobi said it must have been stolen off the line.’

  ‘And the knife? Did you ask the governess about it?’

  Singh picked up the ashtray between them and fastidiously emptied its charred debris into the waste-paper basket. He straightened, nodded.

  He had knocked at Clare’s bedroom door and she had called out: ‘Yes? Who is it?’

  ‘Inspector Singh.’

  ‘Oh … Oh, all right. Come in.’

  When he had entered, she was scrambling, barefoot, off her bed, her skirt unzipped and the top of her blouse open. With agitated fingers she had first pulled up the zip and then done up the buttons of the blouse. A hand had gone to her dishevelled hair, patting it into place. ‘ I was having a little nap. I’ve been sleeping terribly badly since … since … It would be even worse in that room but it’s bad enough in here.’ Her lower lip had trembled, distended itself. As she had stood facing him in her stockinged feet, her hands clasped tightly before her, she had looked so terribly thin, small and vulnerable that she had moved him to pity and then to anger with himself for feeling an emotion so alien to his nature. Almost roughly he had told her: ‘Oh do sit.’

  She had sunk down on to the edge of the bed and from there had looked up at him with a shrinking, beseeching look. Almost as though I were about to rape her, he had thought.

  ‘I wanted to check something with you.’

  Her tongue ran over her upper lip, like a child’s exploring for traces of chocolate. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you know Miss Thompson owned a knife?’

  ‘A knife?’ The leaden-hued lids had blinked repeatedly over the terrified eyes. Then she had looked up at him and in a whisper had answered: ‘ Yes. Yes, a scout knife. She used to wear it on her belt when she went to the Bluebells.’

  ‘And have you any idea of what’s happened to it?’

  She had peered all about her, like some hunted animal looking desperately for a hole or cranny through which to escape from its predator.

  ‘Have you?’ He had been disgusted to find that he actually enjoyed the spectacle and the smell (yes, he could smell it) of her terror of him.

  At last she had gazed up at him. ‘ She told me she’d lost it. After that weekend they spent camping at Biwali. She came back and told me she’d lost it. Left it somewhere, dropped it somewhere. That’s all I know.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  She had put her fingers to her lips, as she had done outside the privy when the body of the child had been found. It was a gesture similar to that which she used when she presse
d a handkerchief, too ragged for any other purpose, to her lips to take off excessive lipstick. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  … ‘Well, that confirms the girl’s story,’ Ross said, with obvious satisfaction. ‘You haven’t much to go on. Unless, of course, you think that the governess was her accomplice.’

  Singh shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think that. But it’s perfectly possible that Helen told Clare she’d lost the knife at Biwali merely in order to have a witness later. She then hid it until she needed it.’

  ‘That argues premeditation over a period of – what? – two, three weeks.’

  ‘Why not? The murder must have been premeditated – if she did it. She can hardly have decided on the spur of the moment to go down to the room, grab the child and kill him.’

  ‘The trouble is – you just haven’t got a case. Not one that stands up. There are some suspicious circumstances – nightdress, knife, both of them mislaid – but to a jury … No one’s going to convict on the strength of just them. I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.’ Ross massaged his crotch with a large hand. ‘If you’d found the nightdress or the knife …’

  ‘We’ve looked for both, of course – in and around the house, everywhere. But in this sort of countryside – hilly, woody, much of it uninhabited – it’s hard enough to find a man, let alone things as small as that. Under a rock, down a well, in another privy. She goes for long rides, usually by herself. I’d need a huge force of men to be sure every possible place had been covered.’

  ‘And even then they’d probably miss out.’

  Singh picked up a pencil from the tray before him and stabbed at the blotter. ‘And yet … and yet I have this hunch.’

  Ross shrugged and then flung out an impatient arm. ‘Hunches are no good.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The inquest was over.

  Singh walked away from it with that deadly weariness, increasingly familiar to him, of a traveller who has lost all heart and energy for continuing his journey. He was sure that he was right: Helen had killed the child. But he was also sure that he would never be able to prove that he was right. Helen, coolly unshaken, had maintained her story. Clare had again confirmed that Helen had told her of the loss of the knife. When Singh had asked the other three members of the family if any of them had also heard of its loss, Isabel and Mrs Thompson had remained silent but Toby had stirred in his chair and had then said that, yes, he seemed to remember that he had done so. ‘Seem?’ Singh had taken up sharply, and Toby had then replied with a fretful ‘Yes, I did, I did.’ When, later, Singh had asked Isabel once again about the theft of the nightdress, she had stared abstractedly into space as she sat at her desk, yet another letter of reply to condolence half-written before her, and had then said, of hand: ‘As I told you before, small things – and even big ones – are always going missing. We keep saying we must get rid of that dhobi, but all the others are just as bad – or worse.’

  As Singh walked past the saluting men on guard outside the square, red-brick police station, the decision suddenly came to him: he would give it all up. Yes, the traveller would tear up his tickets and itinerary and head back for home. Why not? He did not need the money. He did not need this country, which had never, even in childhood, been really his. He would settle, briefly or forever – he did not yet know – in London or Paris or New York. He would dabble in picture dealing or take his piano playing more seriously or just do nothing at all. He would pick up a newspaper and read in it of the theft of some furs or jewellery, the burning down of a mission station or the murder of a child, and it would have nothing to do with him, nothing at all. He would fastidiously turn to the next page and read a review of a book, a concert or an exhibition.

  One of his sergeants, catching a glimpse of him at the end of the corridor, hurried to join him in his office. Eagerly he said: ‘We’ve got a new line on that mission station fire. Khan was in the bazaar and he heard …’

  Singh waved a hand, as though brushing away a fly. ‘Oh … Oh, tell me about it later! Not now!’

  The sergeant backed out. Singh opened the drawer of his desk, took out a copy, six weeks old, of The Times, and began to do the crossword.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Clare was packing; but in the months during which she had been with the Thompsons she had bought so many clothes with her wages that she had no idea how she would manage to fit them all into the two cheap, battered suitcases which were the possessions neither of herself nor of any one member of the family but of the family as a whole. She pushed the overflowing contents of one of the suitcases downwards with both of her hands and then she perched herself on the lid, which creaked ominously beneath her weight, its thin, dry, scuffed leather in danger of splitting. She felt on the verge of tears with the frustration of it. From the top of the wardrobe, she took down three large paper bags. She would have to transfer some of her things into them.

  There was a knock at the door. She stood perfectly still beside the suitcase, her hands rigid to her sides and her mouth half-open. Could Singh have come yet again to torment her? The knock was repeated, louder. She cried out: ‘Yes, yes, who is it?’

  ‘Me. Toby.’

  She crossed to the door and pulled it open.

  ‘Sorry if I’m disturbing you. I wanted to give you this.’ He held out a khaki envelope.

  She shook her head vigorously from side to side, her sleek, black hair swinging like a bell. ‘No, no!’

  ‘Please.’ He thrust it at her. But she would not take it. ‘Please!’ Then he placed it on top of one of the inelegant, bulging suitcases. He stared at her in a terrible anguish. ‘It all went wrong,’ he said, from behind the hand which he had raised to his mouth. ‘I’d … I’d planned something so different.’

  ‘Please leave me. Please!’ Her voice rose so shrilly on the second ‘Please!’ that he looked apprehensively over his shoulder for fear that someone on the other side of the closed door might have heard her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Clare. It’s something we must both forget – somehow, somehow.’ He turned away. ‘God knows how!’

  She picked up the envelope, astonished by its weight. ‘Take this,’ she said brutally. ‘I don’t want it.’

  But, shaking his head, he opened the door and slipped out through it, closing it quietly behind him.

  Clare almost went after him. Then she stood motionless, balancing the envelope in her hand. She knew, without opening it, that an envelope so heavy must contain many, many notes. More, probably, than all her wages over these weeks. More than she had ever held at any one moment in her life. She raised the envelope to her mouth, as though she were going to tear it open with her teeth. Then she stooped over the suitcase, raised its lid and concealed the envelope under a pile of pink, frilly underclothes.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Isabel, seeing the stuffed paper bags in the hall – Toby had vanished – told Clare contemptuously: ‘ You can’t possibly travel like that. I’ll give you a holdall. I’ll send the bearer for it.’

  ‘How shall I get it back to you?’

  ‘I said – I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Oh, but …’

  Isabel drew a deep sigh, her nostrils dilating, as she did when, exasperated with one of the servants, she checked herself from shouting to no purpose.

  When the bearer returned with the holdall, Isabel herself transferred the clothes, heavy with scent, with an impatient efficiency, her mouth held taut in what was almost a grimace. At one point, when a blouse unrolled in her hands, she held it up before her, examining it with the wariness of some second-hand dealer, before she rolled it up again. Clare wanted to snatch it away from her but restrained herself. It was as though those large, plump, white hands were touching some intimate part of her body, in contemptuous appraisal.

  ‘There!’ Her task done, Isabel pulled across the zip of the holdall, locked it and handed Clare the key. ‘Don’t lose that,’ she admonished. ‘Put it somewhere safe.’ Head on one side, she surveyed the holdall. ‘Does
n’t look too bad. It belonged to my predecessor.’ Clare wondered if she were now regretting the gift.

  Old Mrs Thompson was shuffling down the hall in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers. ‘ Clare, dear,’ she said, with genuine warmth. ‘I’m so sorry you’re going. I’ve decided to spend the day in bed, I feel my age today. But I had to come down to say farewell and to wish you good luck.’

  Isabel glanced at the watch pinned, on a gold chain, to the front of her dress. ‘ What’s become of that brother of yours? If he doesn’t arrive soon, you’ll miss that bus, and if you miss that bus, then you’ll miss that train.’ She did not conclude: ‘And if you miss that train, you’ll be on our hands for another night.’ But that was the implication.

  ‘I can’t think what’s happened to him.’ Clare wished that her youngest brother, whose school fees she had been partly paying, had not volunteered to come and fetch her back home. At the time, listening to his eager, indistinct voice on the telephone, as it approached, receded, approached on erratic waves of sound, she had been touched almost to tears. But she should have known that he would arrive late, might even arrive tomorrow, might never arrive at all. Typical. Again, as when she had tried to stuff too many things into the cheap, bulging suitcase, the frustration of it all made her want to burst into tears.

  ‘He’ll be here in a minute or two,’ Mrs Thompson soothed. ‘Probably he had difficulty in getting a horse or a dandy down at the depot. I’m sure that’s it.’

  ‘My brother doesn’t ride. Can’t.’

  ‘Well, then, that explains it! Dandies are often scarce at this time in the morning. Don’t worry, dear. It’ll be annoying for you but lovely for us to have you here for another night.’ She meant it.

  Isabel looked at her mother-in-law derisively and then went over to the window and peered out.

  ‘Oh, I all but forgot!’ the old woman went on. ‘ Helen asked me to say goodbye to you from her. She was hoping to see you but apparently she woke up very early this morning and, since it was such a lovely day, decided to go out for a long ride. She popped into my room at about, oh, six-thirty to tell me – she must have heard me moving around. She just had her chotak hazri and left.’