Death in Kashmir

by M. M. Kaye

  She had quitted the place with such deep relief, feeling thankful that she need never see it again. But a mixture of curiosity, bravado, and a promise given to the dead girl had brought her back, and ever since her return she had been living in a constant state of fear and tension. So why did she stay, when it would be so easy to send a cable to the Pierces in Ceylon, to hire a car and be in Rawalpindi in less than a dozen hours, and on the Frontier Mail speeding south the same day? If she were in her right mind she would be thinking of packing and leaving immediately, if this was any concern of hers. Yet she knew that she had no intention of going, and was, on the contrary, conscious of a feeling of intense exhilaration, even though last night on the Waterwitch she had experienced pure, undiluted terror, and again that morning, both in Ghulam Kadir’s shop and as she stared up the dark staircase at the side of the stage in Nedou’s Hotel. But it did not seem to matter. All that mattered was that she was young and alive, and life was glorious and exciting—because she was going to dine with Charles.

  Sarah smiled to herself a little ruefully in the moonlight, and thought: You may as well admit it, you’re not staying on here and allowing yourself to be scared out of your wits just for the fun of it or from any altruistic motives. You are staying because you’ve fallen in love with a man who is engaged to a beautiful blond called Cynthia! You’ve had a lovely time playing at being in love and enjoying having men fall for you, but now you’ve burnt your fingers. And Cynthia or no Cynthia, you don’t really give a damn how many people get themselves bumped off, or if the whole British Empire and the sub-continent of India goes up with a bang, as long as you can stay around near Charles.

  Women, decided Sarah cynically, are wonderful! At which point her musings were interrupted by Captain Mallory, correctly dinner-jacketed, who joined her at the verandah rail carrying two glasses of sherry.

  ‘Here’s to you, Sarah.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sarah sipped her sherry and looked at Charles over the rim of her glass. ‘Who is Cynthia?’ she demanded abruptly.

  ‘Cynthia? Sounds like a song: “Who is Cynthia, what is she, that all her swains commend her?” What Cynthia—or should I say which Cynthia? Or do you mean my sister?’

  ‘Your sister! Have you got a sister called Cynthia?’

  ‘I have indeed. You’ll like her.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sarah smiled widely and dizzily. Yes, she was young and alive, and life was glorious and exciting because she was going to dine with Charles …

  Except for a depressed gentleman wearing tweeds and a pince-nez, and a youthful couple who were holding hands under the table-cloth and conducting an intense conversation in whispers, the dining-room in the residential block of the Club was empty, and Charles and Sarah dined in the comparative privacy of a table set by a bow window, from where they could look out over the lawns and the lake to the mountains. The depressed gentleman finally departed, to be followed shortly afterwards by the intense couple. But Charles and Sarah sat on deep in conversation …

  Sarah was enjoying herself. Her green eyes sparkled and her copper curls glinted in the wan light of the drably shaded ceiling bulbs, and the conversation, by mutual consent, did not touch on the business that had brought Charles to the valley. It was not until almost the end of the meal that she remembered to tell him of the search that had been made of her room and the opening of her parcels. ‘You hadn’t anything there, had you?’ asked Charles frowning. ‘Anything incriminating, I mean?’

  ‘No, thank goodness. The only incriminating thing I’ve had was that little automatic, and I’d carried that about with me in my bag. Lucky I did!’

  ‘Very,’ agreed Charles soberly. ‘But I can’t understand why anyone would have been interested in the stuff you bought this morning. That makes it look as if it could be only a bit of curiosity on the part of your mānji. Let’s hope so, anyway.’

  A white-coated khidmatgar appeared with coffee and inquired if they would prefer it served over in the ballroom or out on the lawns, but Sarah did not want to move: ‘It would be cold by the time it got over there anyway, and the kind of coffee they make in this country is bad enough when it’s hot.’

  She poured out the pale, unappetizing brew and handed a cup to Charles, inadvertently spilling some on her dress in the process. ‘Bother!’ exclaimed Sarah cheerfully: and reaching for her bag, opened it to pull out a handkerchief. Something else came out with it and fell onto the tablecloth—the little papier mâché matchbox container that Ghulam Kadir had presented to her that morning.

  ‘Complete with box of matches, I see,’ said Charles, idly turning it over with one finger. “You’ve been favoured. Mine was only the case without the box of matches.’

  ‘So is this one,’ said Sarah. She put away her handkerchief and picked up the little box. ‘No it isn’t! But I’m almost sure … Why, it’s not mine at all. Look! Mine had almost the same design, gold chenar leaves on cream. But it had those little furry chenar seeds in the pattern where this has got bulbuls. I know what must have happened! We all put our things down when we were hunting for my bag just after we’d been given these boxes, and I suppose I must have picked up someone else’s by mistake. They’re very alike.’

  ‘You did what?’ said Charles sharply. ‘Here! Give me that box! It’s a thousand to one chance, but——’ He drew out the box of matches that the little case contained, but there were no matches inside it. Only a small slip of folded paper.

  ‘A thousand to one chance,’ repeated Charles in an awed whisper, ‘and, by God, we’ve pulled it off! This is what they were searching for of course, when they went through your room with a small-tooth comb.’

  He smoothed out the scrap of paper on the palm of his hand. It bore a single line of graceful curving eastern writing, and Charles studied it, frowning.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Sarah urgently. ‘Can you read it?’

  ‘I can read it all right, but I haven’t an idea what it means. It’s a line from a poem in Persian.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Well, rather freely translated, it says “the author”—literally, the teller of tales—“threads his bright words as beads upon a string”.’

  ‘“The teller of tales threads his bright words as beads upon a string”,’ repeated Sarah slowly. ‘What on earth does it mean? Is it a code?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Charles. ‘It may mean anything. Perhaps it’s a password. Anyway, we’ve got something at last. And what is better, the very fact that it hasn’t reached the person it was intended for will almost certainly have thrown a largish-sized spanner into the works. I should imagine that no ordinary hair-tearing is in progress somewhere.’

  Charles rolled up the small scrap of paper and tucked it into his breast-pocket. ‘Now for heaven’s sake Sarah, try to remember where that match case was when you picked it up. Can you get any picture in your mind of where it was lying or whose things it was with? If we could only get a line on who had it originally, the battle would be practically in the bag. Think, Sarah!’

  Sarah put her head between her hands and frowned down at the tablecloth for a long minute.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I just haven’t got an idea whose it could have been. Someone found my bag for me—Hugo—and I saw this box and thought it was mine. It was so like, and I hadn’t had time to look at any of the other people’s boxes. I suppose I just picked it up and stuffed it into my bag. I think I picked it up off the big carved table. Or it could have been on the divan? I can’t be sure. But–oh no——!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Don’t you see, if this really is the message that was due to be passed to someone, then that someone must be one of us! One of the party in the shop. A European. English…!’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Charles slowly, turning the little box between his fingers. ‘We’ve got to think of everything. Every possibility. There were several other people who visited that shop this morning besides the ones we met there, and i
t is just within the bounds of possibility that someone who had left before we arrived made the same mistake that you made. Put a box down and picked up the wrong one. There were quite a few of these matchbox cases scattered around the showroom tables.’

  ‘But you don’t think it’s likely?’ said Sarah shrewdly.

  ‘No,’ said Charles slowly. ‘I don’t think it’s likely.’

  ‘Then you think it could——’

  ‘I think that the sooner we dispose of this ornamental trifle the better,’ said Charles grimly. ‘Under the circumstances, I imagine you’d be safer walking about with a time-bomb in your pocket than with this box.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘No? Then the sooner you do the better.’

  ‘I don’t mean what you’ve just said, I mean I don’t believe that’s the message. Why would anyone bother to wrap it up like that?—be so devious? It sounds silly and complicated and–and far-fetched to me!’

  ‘What you don’t realize is that the East is devious. It will always prefer to walk bye-ends to an objective rather than march up to it from the front; and it’s the failure of the West to understand this that trips us up so often. Besides, as I’ve already told you, that shop was no more than a post office—for collecting and being collected from only. Whoever sent that message would not have delivered it there personally, or gone anywhere near the place. It probably passed through several hands en route, just to muddy the trail and make sure that it could not be traced back to its source.’

  ‘“Bye-ends”, in fact,’ said Sarah.

  ‘That’s right. Everyone who touched it would certainly have taken a good look at it, and made nothing of it. But you can bet your bottom dollar that it would have made sense to the one it was intended for—and to no one else! Come on, Sarah, let’s go and dance…’

  He stood up, and taking her arm led her swiftly out of the house and along the moonlit path to where strains of music from a large radio-gramophone in the ballroom showed that the dance had officially begun.

  By this time, the Club was looking considerably gayer. Several of the high bar-stools were occupied by partnerless males, while between eight to ten couples were dancing to music provided by the Club’s radio-gramophone: among them, several people whom Sarah knew …

  Meril Forbes, wearing pale blue taffeta, was dancing with Major McKay, and one of the Coply twins was partnering an unknown blond. Reggie Craddock was there, and so was Helen Warrender: the latter, wearing a décolleté creation glittering with green sequins and more suited to a Vice-regal Ball than a Club gramophone hop, was dancing with a tall bowlegged man with a vast straw-coloured moustache whom Charles said was a Colonel Grainger; adding that he was a four.

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’ inquired Sarah blankly.

  ‘Polo handicap. He was considered to be worth four goals to any side he played for. Johnnie was a seven.’

  ‘What is he now?’

  ‘A has-been,’ said Charles briefly.

  ‘Isn’t that Johnnie at the bar?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘I expect so, that’s his usual pitch and that is what it did for him, poor devil.’

  The record ran to a close and the dancers stood about the floor and applauded in a desultory manner while the Club Secretary put on another one. ‘Hello Meril,’ said Charles, pausing beside Major McKay and his partner. ‘Your Aunt Ena here tonight?’

  Meril started nervously and turned. ‘Oh!… Oh hello Charles. Er … No. Aunt Ena wasn’t feeling very well. She was coming. I mean…’ Meril fumbled nervously with a small evening-bag embroidered with multi-coloured beads and sequins, dropped it and made a clumsy dive to retrieve it.

  She was forestalled by Charles who handed it back and said with mock severity: ‘Do you mean to tell me that your aunt thinks you two are sitting soberly at the Institute?’

  ‘Well—well, yes,’ said Meril on a half gasp.

  Charles looked at Major McKay’s blushing countenance and whistled expressively. ‘George, I’m surprised at you! I had no idea you concealed so much duplicity and rash courage behind that innocent façade. Have you considered what Aunt Ena is going to say when she discovers that far from escorting her niece to a lecture on “Three Years in Borneo”—with hand-coloured slides—you have taken her out on a round of mad revelry?’

  ‘Well—er—as a matter of fact,’ began Major McKay uncertainly, ‘I—er—that is——’

  ‘I asked him to bring me!’ interrupted Meril defiantly. Two bright patches of colour burned in her usually pale cheeks and Sarah noted with surprise that she looked positively pretty. ‘I hate lantern lectures and I hate the Institute, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t dance instead. After all, it can’t really matter a bit to Aunt Ena. She went to bed.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t put it past George to have slipped something in her coffee,’ said Charles cheerfully. ‘You want to watch these doctors, Meril. Darned dangerous chaps.’

  ‘My dear Charles,’ said Major McKay huffily, ‘a joke’s a joke, but you really should not——’ he caught Charles’s eye, grinned, and said unexpectedly: ‘Thanks for the suggestion, all the same. I will bear it in mind.’

  Charles laughed and pulled Sarah back onto the dance floor.

  ‘I have misjudged George,’ he said. ‘I believe he may even be capable of rousing Meril to stand up for herself, when Lady Candera finds out what he’s up to and orders him never to darken her doorstep again.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Sarah with some asperity, ‘Meril won’t need any rousing. If she is to be believed, it was her idea that they duck this lantern-slide lecture and take in the nightspots instead. So it’s my bet that you and Fudge, and anyone else who is interested, can go ahead and buy the fish-slices and plated toast-racks in perfect safety.’

  ‘You sound a little crisp, Sarah darling. But then to you, Meril is only a sort of Boneless Wonder. You haven’t seen as much of her aunt as we have. If you had, you would realize why we get such a kick out of seeing old George advancing cautiously to the rescue. It gives us the same feeling we’d get watching some solid London Bobby, backed by the full resources of the local fire brigade, crawling up a forty-foot ladder to rescue a kitten that has got itself stranded on a factory roof.’

  Sarah laughed. ‘I know. And I’m not really being crisp. It’s only that it goes against the grain to see one of my own sex—specially one who can ski like Meril and has a nice figure and could even be pretty if she made the least effort—behaving with such—such hysterical flabbiness!’

  ‘That’s what comes of serving in the W R A F and wearing uniform,’ said Charles with a grin. ‘The sight of a really womanly woman, complete with fluttering nerves, timidity and the vapours, not to mention migraine and a horror of mice, inspires you with acute irritation.’

  ‘It does indeed! This is the Atom Age—more’s the pity—and anyone as spineless as Meril Forbes should be dumped straight back into a Brontë novel where she belongs. However, if she can sneak off dancing the minute her aunt’s eye is off her, I feel there’s hope for her yet. If she has any sense she’ll get roaring drunk and go home and recite——’

  Sarah checked, frowning, and missed a step.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Nothing—it’s just that I suddenly had a funny feeling that I was quoting something that someone else had once said…’ And even as she spoke, she remembered.

  Of course. It had been Janet, speaking impatiently in the Khilanmarg ski-hut: ‘What you need, Meril, is to get roaring drunk and recite the Declaration of Independence to your aged aunt…’ But she refused to think of Janet tonight, and she thrust the memory resolutely away from her and was grateful that the ending of a record at that moment gave her an excuse to change the subject. The Secretary dutifully played a few more records, and then closed the gramophone for a break, and the dancers scattered to various tables on the edge of the ballroom or to the bar or the verandah.

  Charles led Sarah to a chair on the l
awn outside and hailed a loitering khidmatgar to order drinks. Twice a car purred past them, bringing late arrivals; dances came and went, and they had been there for some little time when they heard the crunch of gravel on the path beyond the lawn as someone walked down it in the direction of the car park.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Charles, turning in his chair.

  ‘Reggie, I think,’ said Sarah, peering through the mixture of moonlight and shadow. ‘But I couldn’t really see. Why?’

  Charles did not answer, and presently they heard a car start up. It drove off and, by the sound, turned to the left in the direction of Nasim, and when they could hear it no longer, Charles stood up and said: ‘Let’s go back and dance. We’ve got about another quarter of an hour to fill in before we need start.’ They walked back together across the lawn, and as they re-entered the ballroom, he glanced down at her and said: ‘Do you think you could look as if you were romantically interested in me? In about a quarter of an hour’s time we are due to leave this Club, ostensibly to go moon-gazing together. Try and look the part, will you?’

  ‘“Merely corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”?’ murmured Sarah wickedly.

  Charles laughed and pulled her into his arms. ‘Perhaps. Anyway they’ve put on a suitably inspiring tune for us to dance to.’

  They moved out into the floor as a rich and fruity tenor voice from the gramophone announced that ‘People will say we’re in love!’

  ‘Let us hope so,’ said Charles. He was an excellent dancer and Sarah dropped her long lashes and relaxed to the sweet swing and sway of the music: