by M. M. Kaye
‘Exactly!’ agreed Charles grimly. ‘In fact the chances of your being allowed to survive any discovery on this boat are nil. That’s why I’m packing you off to Ceylon tomorrow.’
‘Charles—wait a minute. All this that you’re working on, it’s very important, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’
‘How important? Is it only going to affect one or two people or hundreds of people—or what?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charles slowly. ‘That’s the hell of it. We simply do not know yet. But it could be millions.’
‘Well then, do you think you’ve got any right to take chances with something like that? Suppose they are suspicious of me? It doesn’t really matter, because they can’t be quite sure. As long as I’m on the boat you stand a better chance of keeping other people off it, and unless it can be proved that I’m up to my neck in this, I doubt their doing anything very drastic just now. Can’t you see that?’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Charles thoughtfully. He stood still, his hands deep in his pockets, staring down at the faded carpet, and presently he jerked his shoulders uncomfortably and said: ‘All right, you win. But with conditions.’
Sarah said: ‘It depends on the conditions.’
Charles ignored the remark. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you will carry a gun with you always, and use it without hesitation in a crisis. If you shoot some innocent citizen by mistake, I’ll get you out of it. But as I’ve said once already this evening, the golden rule in the present situation is shoot first and argue afterwards. I’ll give you a heavier gun. That one hasn’t much stopping power. Next, you will get a set of bolts and fix them to every available door and window. You can do that, can’t you?’
Sarah nodded.
‘Finally,’ said Charles, ‘you will go nowhere by yourself. Always keep in company when you leave the boat. Is that clear?’
‘As pea soup,’ said Sarah flippantly. ‘All right. I’ll do it. But where do we go from there?’
‘We take this boat to bits if necessary,’ said Charles. ‘And as we haven’t any time to lose, we may as well get on with it now. Sleepy?’
‘At the moment,’ confessed Sarah, ‘I don’t feel as if I shall ever be able to sleep again.’
‘Good,’ approved Charles callously. ‘In that case let’s get on with it. How far did you get with the books and what were you looking for?’
‘A loose sheet of paper or else pages marked so that you could read off a code. That was all I could think of!’
‘And not a bad idea either. Oh well, let’s get to work.’
They settled themselves on the floor, surrounded by stacks of novels, and proceeded to go through each one methodically; looking down the spine of each book and investigating the thickness of each cover with a penknife. The night was at last both quiet and still, and although they could occasionally hear a far-off growl of thunder no breath of wind returned to disturb the lake, and the houseboat lay motionless at her moorings in a silence broken only by an occasional soft arpeggio of plops as a frog skittered across the water from one lily-pad to the next, the splash of a leaping fish or the cheep of a sleepy bird from the branch of the big chenar tree.
They worked methodically, stacking each book to one side as they finished with it, and reaching for the next. Hour after hour seemed to slip by, and Sarah’s back began to ache and one of her feet had gone to sleep. She began to listen for sounds on the bank outside and to start nervously at each tiny night noise.
Charles, who had apparently never once glanced in her direction, appeared to be aware of the state of her nerves, for now he looked up from his work and smiled at her.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I told you no one would come back tonight. I think we’ve done enough for the moment. Let’s put this lot back. Sorted on the right-hand shelves, unsorted on the left. OK?’
He stood up, and reaching down a hand pulled Sarah to her feet.
‘Ouch!’ said Sarah, collapsing on the sofa and massaging her left foot to restore the circulation while Charles replaced and stacked the long line of books. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said defensively to Charles’s back, ‘I wasn’t thinking of anyone trying to come on board—not with that man of yours on the bank. But suppose someone was watching from much further off? After all, they’d be able to see that a light was burning in this room, even though the curtains are drawn.’
‘You forget,’ said Charles with a grin, ‘that you are a nervous spinster living alone. You would be more than likely to have a lamp lit in reserve on a night like this. In fact I bet you left one on when you went to bed, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes. The pantry one,’ confessed Sarah a little shamefacedly.
‘I thought as much. You’d have to be an exceptionally strong-minded woman not to. No, I don’t think you need worry about a light in this room being suspicious. And if your boat should happen to attract any more visitors tonight, Habib will deal with that.’
‘How much does he know?’ asked Sarah curiously. ‘About all this, I mean?’
‘Enough to be going on with,’ said Charles noncommittally. ‘No one knows much more than that—except for one, or possibly two men at the top.’
‘Janet said something like that,’ mused Sarah. ‘She said that she and Mrs Matthews were only links in a chain…’
‘Mrs Matthews was a little more than a link,’ said Charles. ‘But Janet was right. Too much knowledge too widely spread can be very dangerous. That’s been proved over and over again: this particular business being a case in point! Somewhere along the line someone has either been bribed, blackmailed or tortured into telling what they know. We’ve got a reasonable number of people, like the man who met me in Babamarishi, up here in Kashmir: all of them working on their own particular line, and by no means all of them knowing each other. They are the real nuts and bolts of the whole system; but not the spark or the petrol. And, unfortunately, not at a level to be handed the kind of information that Mrs Matthews and Janet Rushton seem to have stumbled upon—which was their bad luck.’
He was silent for a time, staring unseeingly at the flame of the oil lamp that etched harsh lines and hollows in his face, and presently Sarah said: ‘Charles——’
‘Yes?’
‘Who are “they”—the ones you call the “opposition”? The people who killed Janet and Mrs Matthews and–and all the others? I asked Janet that, but she wouldn’t tell. So I supposed that they were the usual Freedom Fighters—the “Quit India!” lot. But now that we’re quitting anyway, and they know they’ve won, I can’t see that there would be any point in that.’
‘There isn’t.’
‘Then who?’
‘Work it out for yourself,’ said Charles unhelpfully.
‘That’s no answer and you know it. You can’t fob me off like that now—not after scaring me nearly out of my mind tonight; let alone in Gulmarg! Is it politics, revolution, mutiny, drug-smuggling, or what? You say “nobody knows”. But you must have some idea.’
Charles sat down on the arm of the sofa, and said slowly: ‘Yes. We have an idea. You see Sarah, every country in the world has an Intelligence Service—a Secret Service, if you prefer to call it that. Here in India it’s often kept busy with what Kipling called “The Great Game”. That game runs from beyond the Khyber to the frontier of Assam, and further. We have to keep an ear to the ground all over India, because a whisper heard in a bazaar in Sikkim may touch off a riot in Bengal. We have to keep eyes and ears in every town and village——
‘Well, something very queer has been happening in India during the last year or so. Something beyond the usual underground stuff. There have been, for instance, a phenomenal number of burglaries. Not just the usual line in theft, but really big money. Carefully planned robberies of State Jewels worth millions. Things like the Charkrale rubies and the Rajgore emeralds, that are almost beyond price. Some of these jewels have turned up in surprising places, but we have discovered that for some reason most if not
all of them have passed into or through Kashmir. This State has been a sort of collecting house—a pool.’
Sarah said: ‘I remember about the emeralds. I mean, that was why you were playing polo the day that—’ she stopped suddenly, and Charles looked at her curiously. ‘Those emeralds,’ he said after a pause, ‘are here in Kashmir.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Sarah, startled. ‘Have you got them?’
‘No. But we know they are here. We thought we had taken every possible precaution against them getting over this border, but someone’s been too clever for us. They are here.’
‘But what for?’ asked Sarah.
‘Well, in the first place, for re-cutting. A great many of the stones have been re-cut here, in grubby little jeweller’s shops poked away among the back streets of the city. But the best of the stuff has gone out across the passes by Gilgit and over the Pamirs.’
‘Where to?’
Charles looked at her slantingly under his lashes. ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said dryly: ‘I told you to work it out for yourself.’
‘But–but they’re our allies!’ protested Sarah, horrified.
‘They are no one’s allies. They never have been … Except just for as long as it happens to suit their own book, and not one second longer! They will even ally themselves—and will continue to ally themselves—with the most blatantly fascist, reactionary and brutal regimes, solely to serve their own interests—and no one else’s! There are a lot of things that the people of other nations will stick at doing because of that outmoded idea, “moral principles”; but they will stick at nothing, and their goal is always the same. Themselves on top; and everyone else either kneeling, or if they won’t kneel, flat on their backs or their faces and very dead!’
‘But the money—those jewels … I don’t understand why … Do you mean it could be needed for starting something against us—another mutiny?’
Charles laughed; and then sobered suddenly. ‘No. It’s not that. As you’ve just told me yourself, there wouldn’t be any point in starting one now that the British are quitting India.’
‘Then why should you worry about it? Surely it’s no longer your affair when you’re clearing out?’
‘Because the world has shrunk, Sarah. It’s shrinking every day. It is no longer a matter of indifference to people in South America when a Balkan State blows up. Whatever is going on here is something that may affect us all, and we’ve got to find out what it is. We’ve got to!’
Sarah said: ‘Is that why Mrs Matthews came up here? Because of the money, and the jewels and all that?’
‘Yes. Because every single lead we followed seemed to end up in Kashmir. We thought at first it was merely theft on a big scale and nothing more; but it had to be stopped. We put a lot of people onto it, but they were mostly small fry. Pendrell was a fairly big fish, and he got onto it. And he died. So we sent along another of the same—equally good—Mrs Matthews; and they got her as well. Two people have sent us the Top Secret signal, the one we only use for something white hot. Something’s brewing all right, Sarah. Something black and damnable. And we’ve got to get onto it and scotch it before we quit this country, because after that——’
‘The deluge,’ finished Sarah.
‘Perhaps. In the meantime, as I’ve already said, your guess is as good as mine. How many more of these beastly books have we got left to go through?’
‘About forty,’ said Sarah with a sigh. ‘I’ll do them tomorrow. Ouch!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Pins and needles again. I’ve rubbed them out of one foot, but I’ve been sitting on the other and now that’s died on me too.’
Charles went down on his knees, and pulling off the small green slippers, rubbed the circulation back into Sarah’s numbed feet.
‘Isn’t it lucky that I have such nice ones?’ mused Sarah complacently.
Charles looked up and laughed. ‘Frankly, no,’ he said. ‘At the moment I should prefer it if they were the usual twentieth-century bunch of radishes that one sees so often on the bathing boats.’
‘Why?’ inquired Sarah curiously.
‘Because they are distracting my attention. And also because I should feel distinctly better if I could find something about you that I didn’t like.’
‘Oh,’ said Sarah in a small voice. Charles replaced her slippers and stood up, brushing his knees.
‘Would it be any help,’ suggested Sarah meekly, ‘if I told you that I snored?’
‘Do you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Charles gravely, ‘—and take the first opportunity of finding out. Thanks for the suggestion.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Sarah primly. ‘I am always happy to oblige any gentleman with whom I pass the night.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Charles, ‘it’s morning!’
‘I was wondering when you were going to notice it.’
Sarah went to the window and drew back the curtain. Outside, the lake and the mountains were no longer black but grey, and to the east the sky was faintly tinged with silver and saffron. Birds were beginning to cheep and rustle in the trees, and faint but clear, from the direction of Nasim, came the melodious cry of the muezzin of the mosque of Hazratbal, calling the Faithful to prayer …
‘Damn!’ said Charles softly. ‘I shall have to move quickly! Good-night, Sarah—I mean, Good-morning. Go and get some sleep. You’ll be all right now. I’ll be seeing you——’
There was a soft whistle from the bank.
‘That’s Habib,’ said Charles; and was gone.
Sarah heard the muffled rasp of the pantry door being shut and then the boat trembled to swift footsteps upon the gangplank. There was a rustle among the willows and then silence.
Lager yawned and stretched and thumped his tail sleepily. ‘Well thank goodness you’re all right!’ said Sarah.
15
It was past ten o’clock when Sarah awoke to find Fudge Creed standing by her bedside, shaking her.
‘Wake up, you idle creature!’ said Fudge. ‘Do you usually oversleep to this extent? Anyone would think you’d been on the tiles all night!’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Sarah yawning. She sat up, ruffling her hands through her red curls. ‘Morning Fudge. Is it a nice day?’
‘Heavenly!’ pronounced Fudge pulling back the window curtains and letting in a ballet of sunblobs that danced across the ceiling. ‘Your mānji reports that your breakfast has been ready for the last hour and a half, so I imagine it’s uneatable by now.’
‘Tell him I’ll be ready for it in fifteen minutes,’ said Sarah, sliding out of bed and stretching to get the sleepiness out of herself.
‘Will do. And when you’ve finished, you’re coming out shopping with us. We want to get some papier-mâché bowls to send off as a wedding present; and as Hugo thinks you’d like to see the city and the river, we thought we’d go to the Fourth Bridge shops. They make lovely stuff there. What about it?’
‘It sounds just what the doctor ordered,’ replied Sarah buoyantly, relieved at the prospect of getting away from the boat for an hour or two. Charles had said ‘Don’t go anywhere alone,’ but he had not told her to stay on the boat, and she felt she had had quite enough of the Waterwitch for the time being. Having dressed she asked the mānji to buy a dozen bolts complete with screws and sockets in the bazaar, before sitting down to a belated breakfast which, as Fudge had predicted, was considerably the worse for wear and bore signs of having been kept hot over a charcoal brazier.
Sarah presented the kidneys to a grateful Lager and distributed most of the scrambled egg to a pair of friendly little bulbuls who hopped and twittered and flirted their pert black crests on the duckboard outside the open dining-room window, and drinking the lukewarm coffee she wondered why, after the alarms of the past night and her recent order concerning bolts for repelling intruders, she should feel so exceptionally gay and lighthearted?
‘Oh w
hat a beautiful morning!’ sang Sarah. ‘Oh, what a beautiful day!’
‘Hell and damnation!’ yelled a voice outside the window. There was a crash and a thump, and Hugo erupted through the window clutching a dripping paddle: ‘Why is it,’ he demanded heatedly, ‘that although I was presented with a Rowing Blue by my misguided University, I remain incapable of paddling these flat-bottomed, over-canopied punts for five yards without turning at least three complete circles and soaking myself from the waist up? Morning, Sarah. You’re looking almost as good as you sound. Do you feel as good as you look?’
‘I feel terrific!’ said Sarah. ‘It must be the air or something. I feel like rushing out and doing pastoral dances in a cornfield.’
‘Well how about rushing out to the Fourth Bridge and holding my hand while Fudge reduces me to bankruptcy among the papier mâché merchants?’
‘Are you thinking of rowing us there?’ inquired Sarah cautiously.
‘Have no fear! I am, alas, too corpulent for prolonged exercise and too incompetent a performer with one of these beastly fancy paddles to attempt it. I propose to drive. We might have lunch at Nedou’s on the return journey: how does that strike you?’
‘Wizard!’ said Sarah. ‘Just wait while I get a hat. “I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way…”’ She vanished, singing, in the direction of her bedroom, while Hugo abstractedly finished off the toast and marmalade.
It was midday by the time they reached Ghulam Kadir’s papier mâché shop at the Fourth Bridge, for Hugo had insisted on stopping at the Club for a beer en route, where they had found Reggie Craddock and Mir Khan, who had decided to accompany them.
Ghulam Kadir’s showrooms overlooked the river and were stacked and piled with articles in papier mâché. Bowls and boxes in every conceivable size and shape, vases, candlesticks, dressing-table sets, lamps, platters, tables and dishes. On all of which birds and butterflies, leaves, flowers or intricate oriental designs had been painted in miniature and embellished with gold leaf.
