by M. M. Kaye
‘Small, portable transmitters,’ interrupted Janet shortly, ‘not only don’t work well among mountains, but transmissions can be picked up by people they’re not intended for. And worse still, traced! It would have taken no time at all for word to get around that someone was transmitting in code from the valley, and then the hunt would have been up—and the game with it!’
‘Oh. Yes, I see. But surely you could have telephoned?’ said Sarah—intrigued by this glimpse of the mechanics of spying, but puzzled by the slowness and elaboration. ‘The lines must have been mended by then. Or why not just send off a telegram?’
‘In India?’ said Janet scornfully. ‘Just how long have you been out here?’
‘Only a month and a bit,’ admitted Sarah. ‘Why?’
‘Well for your information, there is no such thing as a secure telephone in all India—let alone in Kashmir! The Viceroy and the C-in-C and the Director of Central Intelligence, and one or two other bigwigs, probably have a scrambler apiece; but no one else would be able to get their hands on one. Certainly not in a Native State! The lines go through endless telephone exchanges and can be tapped almost anywhere by a child of two. As for telegrams, they get passed from hand to hand and everyone reads them—see Kim!’
‘But if they were in code?’
‘Codes,’ retorted Janet impatiently, ‘are the worst give-aways of all, because except for very brief ones that sound like sense—and boring sense at that!—a message in code instantly focuses attention and curiosity, and plenty of suspicion, on both the sender and the receiver. In our business no one writes down anything. Unless…’ she hesitated, and for a brief interval her gaze seemed to leave Sarah and turn inward again to some disturbing mental picture that her words had conjured up; and when she finished the sentence it was in a completely different tone, and almost inaudible: ‘… unless we have to—if there’s time.’
Another icy little prickle ran down Sarah’s spine, and goaded by it, she said with a trace of tartness: ‘But the message Mrs Matthews got in Srinagar must have been in code. The Christmas catalogue.’
‘Yes, that’s true. But since it came through the post, it got held up for a good many days by the storm—like that man who came up to see us. And no one could have read anything different into it, or even realized that there was anything else to read, except the person it was addressed to. Because only that person would have the key. A different key each time! It’s almost the only code in the world that’s impossible to crack, because nothing’s written down, and you go by numbers—and the words are in another book. But unfortunately it doesn’t work except for fairly short messages, because it isn’t just any numbers. And what we had to say needed a lot of words and explanation.’
‘It all sounds appallingly complicated to me,’ observed Sarah disapprovingly.
‘So is learning to walk a tightrope over Niagara, I imagine! Or finding one’s way across the Gobi Desert. And this is worse than either. In the end we got another message, in much the same way as the other one. It told us to move up to Gulmarg for the Ski Club Meeting, and that the agent who would contact us here would be a skier. And also how we could meet him without anyone knowing.’
It had sounded a pretty good idea, said Janet. Skiing in Gulmarg, in her opinion, being an infinitely better reason for coming to Kashmir in winter than trying to bag a snow-leopard. But the brief message had concluded with a single, dreaded word that in their tabloid dictionary stood for ‘Watch out—you have obviously been spotted!’ It had shaken Janet badly, for despite the suspicions that had been raised by the deaths of those two agents, she had persuaded herself that the second was almost certainly due to a genuine accident, and that if the first was not, there was no need to suppose that the killers had any suspicion as to who the victim was travelling to meet. But now one small word had destroyed all that …
‘I was so sure we were safe,’ whispered Janet. ‘I didn’t believe that anyone could possibly suspect a middle-aged, gossipy widow who liked to paint and knit and go to coffee parties and whist drives, or a girl who played golf and tennis and went out sketching, and danced and picnicked with subalterns up on leave. But I suppose we must have made a slip somewhere … Or else someone has turned traitor: that–that does happen…’
Her voice broke and died out, and she swallowed convulsively as though her mouth had suddenly become dry. Once again her hunted gaze travelled swiftly and furtively about the little room—to the crackling radio, the closed, blank doors and the windows where the faded curtains hung still and undisturbed. And when she spoke again it was still in a whisper.
‘After that message came, I was afraid … terribly afraid. Mrs Matthews wasn’t. She was wonderful. But she took extra care. She carried a gun everywhere, and she made me carry one. She saw to it that our doors and windows were locked and barred at night, and that we didn’t eat or drink out of any dish or jug that someone else hadn’t helped themselves from first. I’d have given anything, then, to leave. But we had to wait for the one who was to meet us here. We had to. But he still hasn’t come, and now Cousin Hilda is dead; and I’m afraid … I’m afraid!’
Sarah reached out a steadying hand and said with an attempt at calm good sense that she was far from feeling: ‘Now you know you don’t mean that. That’s just hysteria.’
Janet Rushton jerked back in her chair and said angrily: ‘You don’t believe me! You think I’m either mad or imaginative, don’t you? Don’t you?’
‘Actually,’ said Sarah slowly, ‘I don’t. Though heaven alone knows why I don’t! But I do think you are exaggerating the situation a little. Major McKay is an Army Doctor and both he and Dr Leonard say that Mrs Matthews’ death was an accident. So for all you know it may have been just that. An unlucky accident.’
Janet Rushton’s laugh was not a pleasant sound as she brushed Sarah’s hand off her knee: ‘Listen, my poor innocent, I may be frightened, but I’m not a fool. My nerve may have cracked a bit, but my brain hasn’t—yet! I’ve already told you that Mrs Matthews carried a gun. Well it wasn’t on her when she was found, and there could only be one reason for removing it. The murder had to look like an accident, and if there had been a loaded automatic on her it would have raised doubts in even the woolliest of minds; not to mention giving rise to a lot of awkward questions. People, even middle-aged widows, do not usually carry loaded weapons unless they are afraid of something.’
Sarah said: ‘Couldn’t it have dropped out into the snow when she fell? Or perhaps the coolie who found her may have stolen it?’
‘She wore it in a little holster under her arm—like I do in the daytime—and someone must have searched her body to find it. No coolie would have touched a corpse found under these circumstances, because he would have been too afraid of being accused of having something to do with her death. And even supposing a coolie had tried to rob the body, do you suppose for one moment that he would have gone to the trouble of removing the holster as well? It would have been easy enough to slip out the gun, but it can’t have been so easy to remove the holster and the sling. It must either have been cut away or her ski-coat taken off and replaced, which could only have been done while her body was still warm, because afterwards she—it——’
‘I know,’ said Sarah hastily, ‘I saw them bring her in. But how do you know the gun wasn’t there when they found her? Major McKay may have taken charge of it.’
‘Because,’ Janet’s voice was once more barely audible, and she shivered uncontrollably, ‘I found her at about four o’clock. Before the coolie did.’
‘You!’
‘Yes. I–I was worried. I hadn’t seen her since dinner-time the night before, because when I went to her room after breakfast she’d already left and the room servant said she’d gone off with the Khilanmarg party. So it wasn’t until you and Reggie Craddock and the Coply twins came back early from Khilan, and said you hadn’t seen her, that I began to get really worried. I went out to look for her myself. I don’t know why I went straight to
the gully … except that Reggie had warned us that the snow there was dangerous, and I was afraid that——’ Janet left the sentence open, and then finished abruptly: ‘Anyway, I found her.’
‘But—’ whispered Sarah breathlessly, ‘but that must have been long before the coolie found her! Why didn’t you fetch somebody?’
‘What was the use? She was dead. She had been dead for hours. Even I could see that. Besides, I couldn’t afford to have my name brought into it, so I came back to the hotel by a different route and said nothing—it had begun to snow again by then, so I knew that my tracks would be covered.’
Sarah said sharply: ‘What are you going to do now? Why don’t you go to the police?’
‘The police?’ said Janet scornfully. ‘Of course I can’t go to the police! What would I tell them? Give away the results of months of work and planning, and ruin everything at the eleventh hour? Or say I “just had a feeling” that it wasn’t an accident—and be told that I’m a hysterical female for my pains? No. There isn’t anything I can do but wait.’
‘Wait?’ repeated Sarah incredulously. ‘Wait for what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I’ve told you. We have to meet someone here. I can’t go until he comes. Mrs Matthews is dead, but I know all that she knew. And I have to pass it on to the right person. After that, like you said, it’s somebody else’s pigeon and not ours—mine—any longer.’
Sarah wanted to say ‘suppose he doesn’t come?’ but stopped herself in time: it seemed an unnecessarily cruel remark in the face of the girl’s desperate fear. She said instead:
‘Why don’t you take a chance and write it down for once—the important part—and risk posting it? Yes, I know you said that agents in your department don’t put anything in writing because letters can go astray or be stolen and cyphers can be decoded. But it also seems,’ she finished crisply, ‘that agents can be killed!’
‘Yes,’ said Janet Rushton slowly. ‘Agents can be killed. That was why I didn’t believe you when you came to my door tonight. I thought it was a trap. That you had come to kill me.’
‘You what!’
‘Why not? If anyone had told you a few hours ago that I was a Secret Service agent, would you have believed them?’
‘Well…’
‘Of course you wouldn’t! Because I don’t look like your idea of a Secret Service agent.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I see. No wonder you pulled a gun on me! I thought you must have gone mad; or else I had.’
‘I know,’ said Janet wearily. ‘I realized that if you weren’t one of—them—then I would have done something that was going to be appallingly difficult to explain away. But I had to do it, because the other risk was so much greater.’
‘How do you mean? What other risk?’
‘If you had been one of them and I had hesitated for fear you might not be, I should have had no second chance. It was better to risk letting myself in for a lot of awkward questions and complicated lying than to risk that. You see, it’s not just my own life that’s at stake. It’s far more important than that. Now that Mrs Matthews is dead I’m the only person who knows what she knew. I was never any more than a sort of second string to her. She gave me all my orders. But now I’m on my own and I’ve got to keep alive. I’ve got to! I can’t let her down. I can’t let it all be lost.’
The tired, passionate voice cracked queerly on the last word and after a moment Sarah said curiously: ‘What made you decide that I was on the level?’
Janet Rushton smiled wanly. ‘Oh, partly intuition I suppose, but mostly simple arithmetic.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you? It’s very easy. You hadn’t any weapon on you and you had told me the truth—there had been someone at the window: someone who must have been there quite a while, for they had made a very neat job of filing through that catch. Well, if you weren’t on the level you wouldn’t have warned me.’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Sarah with a smile. ‘I might have planted him there as a sort of decoy duck.’
‘Yes. I thought of that too. You learn to think of most things in this job. But that didn’t add up either. If you had planted someone at that window you could only have done it to provide an alibi: an excuse for getting in or for getting me out, supposing I had refused to open the door to you. Your reasoning could have been that before letting you in I might run to the bathroom window and check up on whether you were speaking the truth, and then, convinced of your bona fides by a sight of the decoy duck, I would of course have opened the door.’
‘Then what makes you think—’ began Sarah.
‘I didn’t go to the window first,’ interrupted Janet. ‘I made certain instead that you had no weapon on you; and by the time I got to the window, whoever had been there had heard us and gone. It did occur to me then that possibly it was a plot: not to kill me, but to gain my confidence. But if it had been that, then it was an entirely pointless gilding of the lily for your decoy to take on a long, cold and exceedingly tricky job on my window merely to provide an alibi, when the briefest demonstration would have served the same purpose equally well.’
‘I see,’ said Sarah slowly; and shivered. ‘You seem to have it all worked out. And—just for the record of course—I am on the level, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Janet, with an odd inflexion in her voice. She raised her tired, hunted eyes from a contemplation of the glowing logs in the small brick fireplace, and gave Sarah a long and curiously calculating look.
The logs fell together with a little crash and a sudden spurt of flame, and Sarah stood up slowly and said: ‘What is it you want me to do?’
Something taut and watchful in Janet Rushton’s face relaxed, and she said: ‘You’re certainly not stupid.’
‘Not particularly. You wouldn’t have told me all this merely in order to stop me chattering at the breakfast table. If that was all you were after, you’d have fallen back on the complicated lying. You were weighing it up all the time I was telling you the story of my life, weren’t you? I’m quite sure you could have thought up a convincing explanation for me, but you decided to tell the truth instead. There had to be a reason for that.’
‘There is. The reason is that I’m–I’m desperate. I’m in a corner, and so I’ll have to take a chance.’
‘And you’re taking it on me. Is that it?’
‘Yes. You appear to have a reasonable amount of intelligence, and you couldn’t have done well in the W R A F, or been such a good skier, without a fair amount of physical courage. And I need help. Will you help me?’
Sarah held out her hand. ‘Shake,’ she said gravely; and smiled.
The other girl’s fingers, cold and tense, closed tightly over hers for a brief moment. ‘Thank you,’ said Janet with real gratitude, and getting up from her chair she crossed to the writing-table, pulled open a drawer, and taking out an envelope and a fountain pen returned with them to Sarah.
‘If my luck’s in,’ she said, ‘you may not have to do anything. In fact, I hope to God you won’t! But just–just in case, I’d like to have your address on this, and to know that if you should ever get it you’ll do something about it. I’m not sure what, but I shall have to leave that to you, and I’ve a feeling that you won’t let me down.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ replied Sarah soberly. ‘But why my name? Surely——’
‘I daren’t put anyone else’s. I daren’t! Because it could give that person away. But you’re different. You’re not one of us and you don’t know anything. You are only someone I met skiing, so it’s just possible that this will get to you without trouble if–if anything should happen to me.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to you,’ said Sarah firmly. She took the proffered envelope, noting as she did so that it was sealed, and though not empty, did not contain very much—certainly not more than one or at the most two sheets of thin writing-paper. And accepting the pen, she scribbled her name and address on the envelope and returned it.
Janet stood weighing it thoughtfully in her hand, and when she spoke again it was so softly that Sarah could barely catch the words and had the impression that she was talking to herself:
‘The next problem is going to be getting this safely locked up when no one else is around, which isn’t going to be easy if I’m being watched. Unless … Yes, that would do. I can take it down with me tomorrow——’ She gave a small, brisk nod, as though in confirmation of some plan, and thrust the sealed envelope into her pocket. ‘And now,’ said Janet in her normal voice, ‘I think you’d better get back to your own room.’
‘Are you quite sure you’ll be all right?’ asked Sarah uneasily. ‘After all, that window’s open now, and a child could deal with the door-latch. I’ll stay if you like. Suppose he—it—whoever it was—comes back?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Janet. ‘No one is in the least likely to have a second try tonight. The lights are enough to advertise the fact that I’m awake and ready, and I shall leave the bathroom light on and wedge a chair under that door handle.’
‘Well, if you’re certain it’s OK,’ said Sarah doubtfully. ‘Anyway, promise me that if you hear any unexplained noises you’ll bang on the wall and yell.’
‘I promise,’ said Janet with a pale smile.
She crossed to the door, and drawing back the bolt opened it cautiously and glanced rapidly up and down the deserted verandah before turning back to Sarah. ‘It was nice of you to come,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I–I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Sarah lightly. ‘I was meant to come. Predestination or whatever it’s called. Fate, I suppose: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may,” and all that. Good-night, dear.’
The door closed softly behind her, and once more she heard the click of the key turning in the lock and the muffled rasp of the bolts as they were pressed home. A few seconds later the radio was switched off and the night was quiet again.
