Death in the Andamans

by M. M. Kaye

  ‘I, on the contrary,’ said Charles, ‘am full of food and drink, and I require repose and not conversation as an aid to digestion.’

  Valerie consulted her wrist-watch: ‘You’ve had more than two hours, and you’ve got the digestion of an ostrich. So wake up and tell us all about everything or I shall point you out to a few hermit crabs.’

  Charles groaned and turned his back on her: ‘Ask Nick. He knows much more about it than I do.’

  ‘Nick is included of course. We want lots of information from both of you: don’t we, Coppy?’

  Copper nodded. ‘I didn’t feel I wanted to know before,’ she admitted, ‘but I do now. I suppose it’s because this place is such heaven that battle, murder and sudden death seem unreal and not so very important by contrast. Sort of “turnip-lanternish”, if you know what I mean. Whereas back on Ross, even on a day like this, it all still seems far too real and frightening, and the turnip-lantern isn’t merely two inches of candle and a hollowed-out pumpkin, but a real and rather horrible ghost.’

  Nick tilted his hat back from his eyes and grinned at her. ‘And you think that hearing all about the whys and wherefores would help to lay the ghost. Is that it?’

  ‘No,’ said Copper after a brief pause. ‘I don’t think anything but lots of time, or perhaps lots of happiness, will lay this particular ghost for any of us. But knowing something about the whys and wherefores will make it less frightening.’

  Nick sat up and brushed the sand out of his hair, and propping his back against a conveniently curving tree root, lit a cigarette and said: ‘Fair enough. Wake up, Charles, a voice cries, “sleep no more!” In this case, two voices. So let conciliation be your policy.’

  ‘Hell!’ moaned Charles, propping himself on a reluctant elbow and reaching for the beer. ‘All right. Which bit of the recent unpleasantness do you two harridans require me to elucidate?’

  ‘We don’t want a “bit”,’ said Valerie. ‘We want chapter and verse, right from the very beginning.’

  Charles imbibed half a glass of beer and ruminated, and presently he said: ‘Remember that sort of lagoon that was part of the “plantation” which John Shilto palmed off on to Ferrers? Well, it turns out to be simply crawling with pearl oysters.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that all these years it’s been right under____’

  ‘Look,’ said Charles, ‘if you propose to interrupt this enthralling narrative with girlish cries, I shall return to my slumbers. You confuse me. Where was I? Oh yes. Well somehow or other, we shall never be certain how, Ferrers discovered the fact that though half his plantation was worth about fourpence ha’penny, the other half was probably worth, at a conservative estimate, about a million sterling.’

  ‘Gosh!’ said Valerie, awed. ‘I didn’t think there was that much money in the world!’

  Charles grinned. ‘It is a pretty good slice, isn’t it? A pity we didn’t do a bit of paddling there ourselves. Imagine old Ferrers’s fury on realizing that he’d spent fifteen or sixteen years in a state of extreme poverty and simmering rage, while all the time a film star’s salary was sitting in his backyard, only needing a bathing-suit and a bucket to be collected. I’ll bet that thought did something towards tingeing his cup of joy with cascara!

  ‘Well, to continue with the saga, the little man popped over to Ross, borrowed the Encyclopaedia Britannica off the padre, and read up everything he could find under the expression “Pearls”. He then took to spending half his time in a bathing-suit in the lagoon, and evidently hauled up a goodish few shells, which he spread around in the sun behind his house until the flesh rotted and he could open them and dig in the debris — which accounts for the appalling stink that was hanging about the place. He must have collected more than a hundred fair-sized pearls this way, but he realized that he was only touching the fringe of the matter. To get at the real boodle he needed a diver. Or better still, a diving-suit. So one day he packed his toothbrush, pocketed his pint of pearls, and made tracks for Calcutta.’

  ‘Of course!’ said Copper. ‘What a fool I am! I wondered, when Val first told me about him, how he’d managed to put up at the Grand if he was so poverty-stricken. I suppose he sold the pearls?’

  ‘That is the supposition, my sweet. Anyway, he managed to bring back a complete diver’s suiting with him, and he couldn’t have swapped that for a sandwich! He got going with it, and business boomed. He hauled up bucketloads of shell and the plantation began to smell like a sewer. And here the first fly mixed itself up in the ointment. Someone, it was quite obvious, was shortly going to ask questions about this extraneous perfumery. And when they did, where exactly did he stand in the eyes of the law? Had he complete and legal right to the produce of his pond, or would the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, or some similar collection of bewhiskered bandits, sneak up on him and collar two thirds of the loot? It was certainly a problem, and after a bit of brooding he wrote off to the Commissioner and popped the question — disguising the reason for this request with some merry tale about an argument with a friend in Calcutta.’

  Valerie laughed. ‘I shouldn’t have given the little man credit for so much imagination,’ she commented.

  ‘Oh, he had a certain amount of brain under that thatch,’ said Charles. ‘And this brings us to Christmas Eve: “Noel! Noel!”

  ‘On Christmas Eve we stop at Ferrers’s bungalow to get water, and John Shilto smells a rat — or, let us be accurate, about a ton of rotting oysters. I smelt it too, and it meant nothing more than nasty stink to C. Corbet-Carr. But John Shilto had been to Ceylon, and the odds are that he’s smelt that smell before. This bit is only guess-work of course, but I imagine he snooped around and stumbled on the truth. Not the complete truth, but only half of it — probably due to the fact that Ferrers had a passion for oysters, and as his servants were a slovenly crew, there were certain to be a goodish few shells permanently cluttering up his backyards. But “pearl” shell is a bit different. And John Shilto spots that difference all right!

  ‘Placing two and two together and adding them up to a total of six, he erroneously decides that Ferrers hasn’t spotted it; and legging it down the path after us, pitches that yarn about the soothing effects of Christmas and how he yearns to clasp his cousin by the hand — which is not surprising, considering that to all intents and purposes the hand contains a fistful of pearls! But alas for day-dreams, Ferrers not only knows the difference between edible and pearl oysters, but he is sitting on both his hands and has every intention of continuing to do so.’

  Valerie said: ‘Yes, that bit seems all right. But it wasn’t John who killed Ferrers. It was Leonard. How on earth did Leonard get on to it?’

  ‘Cast your mind back, my angel,’ urged Charles. ‘Remember when we stopped at Ferrers’s bungalow his boy told us that the Stocks had been in and had taken him on with them? The Stocks had the Dobbies on board, and Ferrers was coming to Ross to spend a couple of nights with them. Behold the peculiar workings of Fate! Mrs Dobbie wishes to shove in some inquiry about bedding — is he bringing his own or isn’t he? — and it is a hot day and Ruby wants a lemon squash. So they all troop up to the bungalow where, according to Ruby, they find Ferrers in high spirits …

  ‘They suggest that he comes on to the picnic with them and goes back with them to Ross afterwards. The idea is well received, and while he’s packing a toothbrush, Leonard, who was always a bit of a snooper, takes a stroll round the back of the house to see if Ferrers is using a school of stranded whales to manure his plantation — which is what it smells like. Here he stumbles across a quantity of pearl shells, but they only appear to indicate that Ferrers likes oysters. And it is not until he pokes his nose into the shed behind the house that his brain begins to buzz a bit. You see, there was a diving-suit in that shed.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ demanded Valerie.

  ‘Ferrers’s Burmese house-boy saw him rubber-necking around. And here Ruby takes up the tale. She says that Leonard came back looking rather excited, and as
Ferrers was still absent and they were tired of waiting, they popped into his room to assist with the packing. Apparently they walked in without knocking and caught the master of the house on his hands and knees, with the matting rolled back from a corner of the floor____

  ‘Leonard’s arch inquiry as to whether he was looking for something produced a quite unaccountable explosion of wrath, and for a brief space high words buzzed briskly to and fro. Then Ruby appears to have suggested acidly that from the fuss he was making anyone would suppose he had something to hide, which pungent truth seems to have brought him to his senses, and he apologized all round and mumbled something about having seen a scorpion. He put back the matting and something rolled out of it. Ruby says she saw her husband put his foot on it, and when Ferrers’s back was turned, pick it up and put it in his pocket. She meant to ask him about it afterwards but forgot. However we now know that it was a pearl, and that Leonard, who was no fool, was also putting two and two together, and unlike John Shilto, totting them up to the correct total.’

  Valerie shifted restlessly: ‘Do you mean to say,’ she demanded, ‘that Ferrers went off to Harriet leaving a lot of pearls lying around the house?’

  ‘They weren’t lying around. They were very neatly stowed away under a loose floorboard. And he wasn’t looking for a pearl that he’d dropped. He can’t have known that he’d dropped one. He was merely stowing away the swag, and the one Leonard picked up was just sheer bad luck as far as Ferrers was concerned.’

  ‘And for that matter,’ interrupted Copper, ‘as far as Dan and John Shilto and Leonard himself were concerned.’

  ‘Well, yes. If you care to look at it that way,’ admitted Charles. ‘Now let’s think. What comes after that? Oh yes. Quarrel between the cousins Shilto and departure of sailing party.’ He turned to Nick, who was meditatively blowing smoke rings at the chips of blue sky that gleamed through the network of green leaves overhead, and said: ‘As a member of the sailing party, Mr Tarrent will now take over. En avant, mon brave — the floor is yours.’

  Nick blew another smoke ring and said: ‘You already know what happened when the storm hit us, and since we now have an accurate account of the murder, typed by Stock himself for the purpose of shoving the blame off on Shilto, we know how he spotted that his next-door neighbour was Ferrers — which proves that there was some sense in Copper’s ring theory after all! The idea of knocking Ferrers on the head probably jumped into his mind then and there.

  ‘He had been steering his boat and was still clutching the tiller, which had come adrift when they turned turtle. He wanged Ferrers over the back of the head with it, causing an impacted fracture which laid him out in one. Ferrers vanished abruptly, and Leonard decided that murder was child’s play. But he hadn’t seen that there was somebody on the other side of Ferrers — Rosamund Purvis!

  ‘It’s not surprising that he didn’t spot her, for her head was a good deal nearer the water than Leonard’s because she was holding on to the rudder, and she herself saw very little; what with smashing rain and splashed-up sea, and that howling wind. But she saw enough to realize that someone had been deliberately murdered within two feet of her!’

  ‘Of course!’ said Valerie suddenly. ‘We ought to have realized from the way she behaved that something more than ordinarily nasty had happened. She was much too sensible and stolid a person to have reached that pitch of hysteria over a sailing spill and the fact that one of the party, whom she disliked, had been drowned.’

  Nick flicked the stub of his cigarette at an inquisitive hermit crab, and leant back with his hands behind his head: ‘I agree. But we can now understand why the poor woman was so worked up. You see, she knew that Ferrers hadn’t been drowned. She knew he’d been murdered for she had actually seen it done: he’d been killed within a foot of her. But she had no idea who had done it! She says that she let go of that boat as though it was red hot, and after a few minutes crashed into what she hoped was another one. After that of course it was no use saying anything, as having once let go of the original boat, she had no means of finding out who else had been on it.’

  ‘But what about Ronnie?’ asked Valerie. ‘Why was he so scared? Don’t tell me he saw it done too!’

  ‘No. He didn’t see it done, but he got hold of the weapon.’

  ‘The tiller? But I thought Leonard threw it away?’

  ‘He did, but being wood it floated, and some time later it biffed into Ronnie, who grabbed it. The sea was getting rougher by this time and he was afraid of being washed off his boat, so he stuck the tiller through his braces with some hazy idea that it might help to keep him afloat if he lost his hold.

  ‘It was still there when the forest-launch picked him up, and he says he hauled it out and dropped it on the floor of the cabin, and it wasn’t until about half an hour later, when they’d given up the hunt for Ferrers and were heading home, that something about it caught his eye. There was a band of metal about the business end of that tiller, and something had got wedged between it and the wood. The sea had washed off all traces of blood, but it hadn’t been able to dislodge that bit of flesh and a tuft of grey hair.’

  ‘Ugh!’ shuddered Valerie. ‘How beastly!’

  ‘Yes, it gave Ronnie a bit of a jar too. He picked the thing up to take a closer look at it and discovered that there not only was a ragged scrap of flesh and grey hairs wedged between the wood and the metal, but it was quite out of the question that it could have got there by accident. By that I mean the tiller could easily have biffed into someone while floating around loose, but unless it had been applied with a considerable amount of beef behind it, that scrap of flesh could not possibly have got wedged so far down the crack …

  ‘Even then, the idea of deliberate murder didn’t enter his head. He says he was too shaken up to think straight, and his immediate feeling being one of disgust, he heaved the tiller overboard. But after a bit, when his brain began to function, he started putting two and two together. With the result that at the dinner party that night there were actually three people present who knew that a murder had been committed: the one who had done it, and the two who knew that it had been done, and how, but had no idea who had pulled it off.’

  ‘Hence Rosamund’s acute attack of St Vitus’s Dance,’ put in Charles. ‘Not a particularly comfortable feeling, having to sit around in a party one member of which you know to be a murderer, but without the least idea which one it is. I don’t wonder she was a bit jumpy. Or Ronnie either! If I’d been in their shoes I should have locked myself in my own room and refused to move without a strong police guard. I rather imagine — though of course Ronnie denies it hotly — that his dear wife’s firework-display made him suspect that she’d done in Ferrers herself.’

  Valerie said: ‘And I suppose Rosamund will also deny that she ever thought Ronnie did? Of course it’s obvious she did from the way she insisted on going off to the hospital and wouldn’t stay with us or go back with him. At least she could be certain that Truda hadn’t done it!’

  A brief silence followed on Valerie’s last words, for they were thinking, all four of them, of the same thing. The dark hours that followed Rosamund’s departure.

  ‘How do you explain that?’ asked Valerie at length. It was not necessary to ask what she was referring to.

  ‘There isn’t any explanation,’ said Nick slowly. ‘Unless you’re prepared to accept Iman Din’s.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Valerie with a shiver, ‘that – that it was Ferrers who came back that night?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Nick. ‘I’m not prepared to swear to it one way or another. It may only have been an optical illusion due to the lightning, and the noises may have been made by cats or bats or rats. On the other hand, after a brief stay in these islands I’m prepared to believe almost anything. And then of course there is always that time-worn remark of the late William Shakespeare’s: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” — and that goes for Copper’s nightm
ares too! So let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

  ‘Yes, do,’ said Charles cordially. ‘And here I too propose to leave you and take one last, long, lingering splash into the sea before giving my attention to tea. Anyone coming with me? Right! I’ll race you for the last marron glacé!’

  The four rose simultaneously and raced down the beach into the water.

  * * *

  ‘I,’ said Copper, shaking salt water out of her eyes, ‘am going to get tea ready while you finish the story. Go on, Charles.’

  Charles ceased rubbing his head with Valerie’s towel, and looked indignant. ‘Good Lord, Coppy, you don’t want to hear any more, do you? I thought I had successfully glutted your appetite for meticulous detail.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Charles! Of course you’ve got to finish it. Go on.’ Copper vanished round the back of the tree where they had built a little fire of driftwood, while Charles took up the tale once more.

  ‘We now come,’ said Charles resignedly, ‘to Christmas Day and the reappearance of Ferrers. Which you must admit was a shocking bit of bad luck for Leonard — Ferrers being washed up on that particular beach. Practically anywhere else, and he’d have arrived so badly bashed up by rocks that neither Dan nor anyone else would have spotted anything odd about him. But as it was, there were probably several things that made Dan brood a bit. What was it Vicarjee said, Nick?’

  ‘Oh, just that a drowned man usually goes a sort of bluish colour, and as I remember, Ferrers was anything but blue. And that there should have been froth round his mouth and nose — or anyway inside his mouth, and something peculiar about “washerwoman’s hands” that I didn’t quite follow. Anyway, there were evidently enough signs missing to make Dan wonder if the man really had been drowned. He can’t have spotted the crack on the back of the head, because he never turned the body over; and it wasn’t easy to spot unless you were looking for it, for twenty-four hours in the water had washed it clean, and that mop of hair covered it up fairly thoroughly. But I suppose the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that there was something fishy about the whole thing, and — well you know the rest. He pushed off to see for himself …