Death in Kashmir

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Author's Note

Pronunciation Guide

Map

Part I: GULMARG

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part II: PESHAWAR

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part III: SRINAGAR

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Postscript

Also by M. M. Kaye

Copyright

 

For GOFF

and the delectable valley

With all my love

 

‘Who has not heard of the

vale of Cashmere…?'

Thomas Moore,
Lalla-Rookh

AUTHOR'S NOTE

When I first began to write murder mysteries—‘whodunits'—I would try to write at least two thousand words every day: Sundays excepted. If I managed to exceed that, I would credit the extra number to a day on which I knew that some unavoidable official duty or social engagement would prevent me writing at all. It was my way of keeping track of the length of each chapter and controlling the overall length of the book, and at the end of each day I would make a note against the date of the number of words I had written and considered worth keeping. Which is why I have on record the exact day and date on which I first met my future husband, Goff Hamilton, then a Lieutenant in that famous Frontier Force Regiment, the Corps of Guides.

It was on a Monday morning and the date was 2 June 1941, and I happened at that time to be living in Srinagar, the capital city of Kashmir, which is one of the loveliest countries in the world. Goff, who was up on short leave, fishing, had called in to give me a letter that he had promised a mutual friend to deliver by hand. I presume I wrote something that day, since I was actually at work on my daily quota when he arrived. But there is no entry against that date—or against a long string of dates that followed.

The manuscript stopped there, halfway through a chapter. Because what with getting married, having two children, working for the WVS and also for a propaganda magazine, and living in a state of perpetual panic for fear that Goff would not get back alive from Burma, there was no time to spare for writing novels. It was not until the war was over and the British had quit India, the Raj become no more than a memory and Goff and I and the children were in Scotland, living in an army quarter in Glasgow and finding it difficult to make ends meet, that I remembered that I could write, and decided that it was high time I gave the family budget a helping hand.

I therefore dug out that dog-eared and dilapidated student's pad in which I had begun a book that I had tentatively entitled
There's a Moon Tonight,
and read the two and a half chapters I had written during that long-ago springtime in Kashmir.

It didn't read too badly, so I updated it to the last months of the Raj instead of the first year of the war, and when I had finished it, posted it in some trepidation to a well-known firm of literary agents in London, who fortunately for me, liked it. I was summoned to London, where I was handed over to one of their staff, a Mr Scott, who was considered the most suitable person to deal with my work on the grounds that he himself ‘knew a bit about India'. He turned out to be the Paul Scott who had already written three books with an Indian setting, and would one day write
The Raj Quartet
and
Staying On,
and as he became a great friend of mine, my luck was clearly in that day. I hope that it stays in, so that readers will enjoy this story of a world that is gone and of a country that remains beautiful beyond words, despite mankind's compulsive and indefatigable efforts to destroy what is beautiful!

I would also like to mention here that having recently seen the TV versions of Paul's ‘Jewel in the Crown' and my own ‘Far Pavilions', and been constantly irritated by hearing almost every Indian word mispronounced (some even in several different ways!), I have decided to let any readers who may be interested learn, by way of a guide which follows, the pronunciation that my characters would have used in
their
day. In some cases no syllable is accented, in others the syllable on which the accent falls will be in italic type, and the rest in roman. The spelling will be strictly phonetic because too many words were not pronounced as they were spelt, e.g.
marg
(meadow), though spelt with an ‘a', was pronounced
murg!
And so on … Thus leading to considerable confusion!

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

The right-hand column shows how each word should be pronounced: the stress is on the italicized syllable(s).

Part I

GULMARG

‘The white peaks ward the passes, as of yore,

The wind sweeps o'er the wastes of Khorasan;

But thou and I go thitherward no more.'

Laurence Hope,
‘Yasin Khan'

1

Afterwards, Sarah could never be quite sure whether it was the moonlight or that soft, furtive sound that had awakened her. The room that except for the dim and comforting flicker of a dying fire had been dark when she fell asleep, was now full of a cold, gleaming light. And suddenly she was awake … and listening.

It was scarcely more than a breath of sound, coming from somewhere outside the rough pinewood walls that divided that isolated wing of the rambling hotel into separate suites. A faint, irregular rasping, made audible only by the intense, frozen silence of the moonlit night.

A rat, thought Sarah, relaxing with a small sigh of relief. It was absurd that so small a thing should have jerked her out of sleep and into such tense and total wakefulness. Her nerves must be getting out of hand. Or perhaps the height had something to do with it? The hotel stood over eight thousand feet above sea-level, and Mrs Matthews had said——

Mrs Matthews!
Sarah's wandering thoughts checked with a sickening jar as though she had walked into a stone wall in the dark.

How was it that awakening in that cold night she had been able, even for a few minutes, to forget about Mrs Matthews?

Less than a week ago, in the first days of January, Sarah Parrish and some thirty-odd skiing enthusiasts from all parts of India had arrived up in Gulmarg, that cluster of log cabins that lies in a green cup among the mountains of the Pir Panjal, more than three thousand feet above the fabled ‘Vale of Kashmir'. They had come to attend what was, for most of them, their last meeting of the Ski Club of India. For this was 1947, and the date for India's independence—the end of the Raj and the departure of the British—had been set for the following year.

Beautiful mountain-locked Kashmir was one of India's many semi-independent princely states which, by treaty, were in effect ‘protectorates' of the Government of India, ruled over by hereditary Maharajahs, Nawabs, Rajas or Ranas who were ‘advised' by a British Resident. And though access to this particular State was not easy, since it is walled in on every side by high mountains, it has been regarded for centuries as an ideal hot-weather retreat from the burning plains—the Great Moguls, in their day, making the journey on elephants, horses or in palanquins.