Death in Kashmir

by M. M. Kaye

  Charles relapsed into silence, occupied by his own thoughts, while Sarah stared ahead of her seeing not the beauty of the moonlit lake, but a small glittering green sequin, winking up at her like a little evil eye from the gravel of the path outside the Club.

  If Charles was right and locking her in had all been part of a plan, then Helen … No! it wasn’t possible! It couldn’t have been Helen. It must have been someone else. Then what had Helen Warrender been doing on that path this evening? How long had the sequin lain there? Or was there anyone else who had worn a dress with green sequins on it? People one knew did not do these things—plot and spy and lend themselves to murder. It could not possibly have been Mrs Warrender. And yet …

  Sarah’s mind went back to the story that Johnnie Warrender was badly in debt. It was no secret, for Helen was eternally referring to the extent of his overdraft, and she also made no attempt to disguise her preference for the society of those who were socially and financially better off than herself. All the same would any amount of money tempt her to involve herself in murder? It did not seem credible …

  Sarah’s thoughts ran round and round in a helpless circle of suspicion and denial, like a squirrel in a cage, as the shikara turned out of the Dāl and crossed a small open stretch of water, heading for the dark, willow-bordered channel that led into Chota Nagim where the Waterwitch and the Creeds’ houseboat were anchored.

  The moon was sinking towards the mountains beyond the bulk of Hari Parbat Fort, and the shikara’s canopy no longer threw a shadow down upon its passengers. The cold clear moonlight illuminated every corner of the boat, and Sarah turned her head and looked at Charles. He was frowning thoughtfully down on something that he turned over and over between his fingers, and she saw that it was the cheap, blue china bead that he had taken from Ahamdoo’s clenched hand.

  For some reason the sight of it filled Sarah with shuddering repulsion: a renewal of the horror she had experienced as she made out the outlines of those plump, rigid fingers among the dead leaves at the bottom of the hollow chenar trunk. She said suddenly and violently: ‘Throw it away Charles! How can you touch it?’

  Charles tossed it lightly into the air and caught it again. ‘Throw it away? Not much! This means a great deal Sarah, if only we can work it out.’

  ‘Why should it mean anything? It’s only a china bead.’

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ said Charles, rolling the bead in the palm of his hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The writing on that bit of paper in the matchbox.’

  Sarah caught her breath. ‘Of course! I’d forgotten. It was something about beads——’

  ‘“The teller of tales threads his bright words as beads upon a string”,’ quoted Charles. ‘Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’ He tossed the bead in the palm of his hand, throwing it and catching it again.

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I don’t. That’s why I’m interested in this bead. Very interested. That line out of a poem would obviously have meant quite a lot to the person for whom it was intended. And I don’t believe Ahamdoo was carrying this for fun. There’s a link between the two, and I mean to find it. This may not be much to go on, but it’s something.’

  Sarah looked at the small blue oblong as it glinted in the moonlight. It was about half an inch in length, made of coarsely glazed china, and the hole through it was large enough to take a fairly thick piece of twine. One saw strings of these beads in shops in the native bazaars and round the necks of tonga ponies: they were said to bring good luck and avert the evil eye, and even the wiry little pack-ponies who had ploughed through the snow on the Gulmarg road had worn ropes of them slung round their necks.

  ‘Could there be anything inside it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Charles, squinting through it at the moon. ‘Not a thing. However I will crack it up when I get back, just to be on the safe side. Hello, here we are in the home stretch. I hope Fudge and Hugo haven’t been waiting up for you. I promised Fudge I wouldn’t keep you out too late. Do they take their chaperoning duties at all seriously?’

  ‘Lager’s the only one who is likely to be awake,’ said Sarah. ‘I only hope he doesn’t bark and wake everyone up.’

  The shikara had turned out of the main stream and was now being paddled softly up the backwater of Chota Nagim, and Sarah peered ahead to where the Waterwitch lay moored in the shadows of the willow trees beyond the Creeds’ boat. She had turned out all the lights in the boat before she left, with the exception of one over the front door that lit the prow and the top of the forward gangplank. But the mānji had evidently considered this insufficient, for now a welcoming orange glow lit up the drawing-room windows, adding a warm note of colour to the waning moonlight and the black shadows as the shikara nosed its way gently through a patch of lily-pads and bumped alongside.

  There was no one on board except Lager, warm from sleep and whimpering an enthusiastic welcome, and Charles looked about the narrow crowded drawing-room, and having tried the lock on the door, said: ‘Did you get those bolts I told you to put on your doors and windows?’

  ‘Not yet,’ confessed Sarah. ‘But the mānji said he’d have them fixed by tomorrow. I’ll be all right. Lager will protect me, and this time I’m going to lock myself into my bedroom as well, and anyone who likes can come on board and burgle the boat—I shall put my head under the bedclothes and refuse to move.’

  Charles frowned and jerked his shoulders uneasily. ‘Can I count on that?’ he asked, unsmiling.

  ‘I promise,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ve had enough of rushing in where angels fear to tread. And quite enough “alarums and excursions” for one night. Don’t worry. Look at Lager. He’s simply bursting with beans and bounce, and if anyone puts a foot in the boat tonight he’ll bark his head off and wake up everyone for miles. There’s no storm tonight, and you could hear a mouse move in this quiet. Listen.’

  She held up a finger and the silence seemed like a wall about them.

  ‘You see? It was different last night. The storm was making such a racket that a troop of elephants could have boarded the boat without my hearing them; and Lager had been drugged. But you could hear a pin drop tonight, and if I yelled, Hugo and Fudge and the mānjis and Hugo’s bearer would all be buzzing round like bees. Besides, I shall turn all the lights on and no snooper is likely to come sneaking up on a brilliantly illuminated boat in the small hours of a night like this.’

  ‘No, there is that,’ said Charles slowly. He went over to the nearest window and stared out into the moonlight: ‘It will be dawn in less than four hours.’ He swung round on Sarah. ‘Have you got that gun?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s under my pillow, if you want to know.’

  ‘Good. Well you do just as you said. Lock yourself into your bedroom, and if you hear anyone move on the boat before morning, yell the roof off and don’t hesitate to shoot.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sarah: ‘I hear someone trying the bedroom door, and “Bang!”—I’ve shot the mānji, who was trying to bring me my morning tea. I hope you’ll bail me out?’

  Charles laughed. ‘I’ll do that. We’ll move you off this boat tomorrow, anyway. It’s not worth the risk. I wouldn’t leave you on it tonight if I hadn’t got it under pretty close observation.’

  ‘You’ve what?’ said Sarah. ‘You mean——?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had some of our people watching this boat in shifts since this morning—I mean yesterday morning,’ corrected Charles, glancing at his watch.

  ‘Where are they now?’ asked Sarah, interested. ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘You weren’t meant to. One of them is keeping an eye on the approach from upstream and another from the bridge end, to keep a check on anyone who comes past here by water; and a couple of chaps are posted on the landward side. Anyone who looks as if they are coming towards this boat will be followed. I want to know the names of any intending visitors.’

  ‘Where a
re you going now?’ asked Sarah. ‘Back to—back to the island?’

  ‘No. I’ve sent the boat back there. That’s a job they can do better without me. I’ll walk back to the Club from here.’ He turned away, and Sarah accompanied him out onto the prow.

  The night air was cool and fragrant after the stuffy atmosphere of the little houseboat drawing-room, and Charles walked down to the foot of the gangplank and stood there, peering into the shadows beyond the big chenar tree. He drew the torch out of his pocket and flashed the light briefly, twice, and a figure detached itself from the shadows fifty yards or so from the boat, where the willows grew thickest, and moved into the moonlight.

  Sarah heard a faint rustle of footsteps on grass and presently a tall Indian stood at the foot of the gangplank. He wore a dark blanket wound about his shoulders and drawn over his head so that it threw a deep shadow over his features, and Sarah could only catch a gleam of eyes and teeth.

  Charles spoke in a low voice in the vernacular and the other answered as softly.

  ‘Has anyone been near the boat?’

  ‘No one Sahib; save the mānji who has returned to the cookboat and is now asleep, and the big sahib who brought back the Miss-sahib’s dog. There have been no others as yet, either from the water or the land.’

  ‘Remain then and watch. Now that the Miss-sahib has returned, allow no one to enter the boat before morning.’

  The man saluted and withdrew noiselessly into the shadows and Charles turned and came back up the gangplank, and said: ‘Wait here, Sarah. I’m just going to take a look round the boat to see that the mānji hasn’t left anything unlocked.’

  He went away down the narrow duckboard that ran all round the outside of the boat on the level with the window-sills, trying each window and door as he passed, and disappeared round the far end. Presently he reappeared again from the opposite side having completed the circuit of the boat.

  ‘OK. Everything appears to be locked up safely. You’d better bolt this door too, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sarah slowly. She felt a sudden aversion to entering the stuffy atmosphere of the cramped and shuttered little boat in which Janet had lived and worked, and hidden her secret.

  A bittern called from a reedbed on the far side of the backwater: a lonely, mournful cry. Sarah shivered, and seeing it Charles said: ‘You’re quite sure you’re all right? You don’t think you’d better go over and ask Fudge and Hugo for a bed?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Sarah with asperity. ‘Good-night, Charles. I won’t say “thank you for a lovely evening” because it’s been the most gruesome evening I’ve ever spent, and I hope I never have another one like it. But thanks all the same.’

  Charles smiled down at her, his face drawn and tired in the moonlight. He laid the back of his hand lightly against her cheek in a brief caressing gesture and said: ‘Go on in and let me hear you bolt the door,’ and she turned away obediently and went in.

  19

  The bolt shot home and Sarah leant tiredly against the closed doors and listened to the sound of Charles’s footsteps descending the gangplank.

  The little boat rocked and creaked for a moment, and then steadied again and the silence flowed back once more.

  Lager came pattering back into the room from some expedition into the darkened rooms at the other end of the boat and frisked about Sarah’s feet, and she gathered him up into her arms and sat down in one corner of the shabby sofa, feeling very tired. Too tired for the effort of getting to bed, and yet not in the least sleepy.

  Sitting huddled and relaxed, her chin resting on Lager’s silky head, she remembered that she had told Charles that the night was so still that you could hear a pin drop. It had been true while he was beside her, but now that he was gone and she was alone the night seemed full of little sounds; the soft lap of water against the side of the boat, the scutter of a rat somewhere beneath the floorboards, the creak of a board contracting in the night air and the croak of frogs from among the lily-pads; Lager’s gentle breathing, and the soft click, clack as the bead curtain in the doorway between the drawing-room and the dining-room swayed in a draught.

  Slowly, very slowly, a queer sense of uneasiness stole into the cramped little room: a feeling of urgency and disquiet that was almost a tangible thing. It seemed to tiptoe nearer to Sarah and to stand at her elbow, whispering—prompting—prodding her tired brain into wakefulness and attention. As though, perhaps, Janet herself had entered the room and was trying to speak …

  For a moment the feeling that someone—was it Janet?—was watching her was so vivid that Sarah jerked round and looked behind her. But the room was empty and there was no gap between the motionless folds of the cheap cotton curtains that shielded the dark squares of the window-panes and shut out the moonlit night.

  But there was still something there that clamoured with a wordless persistence for attention, and Sarah’s tired brain shrugged off its lethargy and was all at once alert and clear. She sat quite still; tense now, and very wide awake, staring about her.

  The room was just the same, and nothing appeared to have been moved since she had left it. There were the chairs with their shabby cretonne covers and the sofa on which she sat. The over-ornamented tables with the dust of long years lingering in the endless crevices of their intricate carving, and the lines of tattered books and aged periodicals that leant limply against each other on the long wooden shelf that ran round the narrow room. A yellowing calendar dating from the restless, long-ago twenties still hung from a nail on the wall beside the carved walnut-wood desk, and the time-worn Axminster carpet that had been made in some murky factory of Edwardian England, and travelled ten thousand miles from the loom of its birth to end its days on the floor of a houseboat on the Dāl Lake among the mountains of Kashmir, still spread its faded reds and blues under her feet … That carpet could tell a tale, thought Sarah, gazing down at its worn surface. ‘The teller of tales threads his bright words as beads upon a string…’

  A frog skittered across the water outside and a soft breath of wind from off the mountains ruffled the leaves of the chenar trees. The draught lifted the threadbare Axminster in a soundless ripple and stirred the quiet cotton folds at the windows, and the curtain in the doorway that led into the dining-room swayed and clicked. Beads—red and green and white and yellow: glass beads, winking and glinting; china beads, opaque and smooth. Blue china beads …

  Click … clack … click. A small voice in the silence saying over and over again, ‘Look!… look!… look!’

  Something clicked, too, in Sarah’s brain, like the shutter of a camera, and she was unaware that she spoke aloud: ‘Of course!’ said Sarah. ‘“As beads upon string!” Of course. Why didn’t I think of it before?—it’s there—in the curtain. Janet’s record!’

  She dropped Lager onto the floor and stood up.

  Why hadn’t she noticed before that there was no design about the curtain? That the beads fell into no pattern? Small beads interspersed at brief irregular intervals by large blue china beads. That was it—irregular intervals. Dots and dashes, short beads and long beads, with blue china beads to mark the divisions. So simple. As simple as a page of Morse code … and so very quick and easy to make——

  Sarah found herself trembling with excitement as she ran to the desk and snatched up her writing-block and a pencil, and pulling forward a carved chair, sat down facing the curtain and began to write down the order of the beads from the top to the bottom of each string in turn.

  The letters made no sense but they read off smoothly in dots and dashes. Long beads and short beads and blue china beads. It’ll be in code of course, thought Sarah, but Charles will know it. She scribbled on in the silence.

  A night bird called again from among the reeds, and another breath of wind from across the lake ruffled the lily-pads and sent the water lapping softly once more against the side of the boat. Lager snored peacefully on the sofa, but all at once Sarah’s pencil slowed and stopped, and her e
yes became fixed and still …

  Someone was watching her. She was quite sure of it. A queer, unmistakable, prickling shiver of awareness crept up her spine and tightened the skin of her scalp, and she had to force herself to look over her shoulder. There was nobody there, and with the curtains closely drawn no one from the shore or the lake could possibly see into the room, while if anyone had come up onto the duckboards or paddled close in a shikara she would have heard them in this stillness. Her nerves must be playing tricks on her.

  Yet the feeling of being watched, and the awareness of another presence close at hand, persisted and grew stronger and stronger until it was not a feeling any more, but a deadly certainty, and Sarah sat rigid, straining her ears to listen.

  Somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the bead curtain a board creaked sharply, and a faint tremor of movement shook the floor beneath her feet. So she had been right! There was someone on the boat. A creaking board by itself was nothing—they creaked all night and for a dozen trivial reasons—but that quiver of movement that had run through the Waterwitch was unmistakable. Someone, somewhere on the boat, had taken a step in the darkness.

  Sarah listened, tense and trembling: thinking that no one could come on board, either from the lake or from the land, without making far more noise and a great deal more vibration than that which had been produced by a single stealthy footstep …

  It was only then that she remembered, with a wild rush of relief, that Charles had left a watcher on the bank. Several watchers! The one out there now must have put a foot on the gangplank and caused that slight tremor, for no stranger would have been able to come onto the boat without being seen by one of Charles’s men. It was stupid of her to panic. She was perfectly safe.

  She picked up her pencil again. And once more a board creaked in the darkness and the little boat vibrated to soft footsteps. Once—and again—and again …

  Lager stopped snoring and lifted his head, his eyes bright and alert and his head cocked a little on one side.