Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (11 page)

‘She wrote two letters,’ said Priya suddenly, raising her heavy dark eyes. ‘She had them sealed and stamped in her bag, ready to post. If she had any knowledge – if there was anything troubling her – may she not have put it into her letters home?’

‘We had already thought of the same possibility, Miss Madhavan. The bag is virtually undamaged. We have opened the letters. They are exactly what would be expected of a young girl’s letters home – quite straightforward accounts of her travels, only omitting, understandably, the ugly experience at Thekady. There is nothing there for us. Naturally they will be passed on to her family. But what made you think of that? Had she behaved as if she had some secret and dangerous knowledge? Her collapse at Thekady now almost suggests that she believed she knew something of perilous importance, and was frightened to confide it – frightened to a degree which cannot quite be accounted for by the shock of the discovery, which was common to you all. And under which, I must say, you yourself behaved with exemplary fortitude.’

She hardly heard the compliment, though if she had it might have given her both pleasure and pain. She was peering into pure air before her, frowning anxiously.

‘I don’t know… She’d had such a sheltered life until she came to India, naturally she was very much upset by the manner of Mr Bakhle’s death. She had never known anything like that. I don’t know, it would be easy to misinterpret what was no more than the after-effects of shock. What can I say? I hardly knew her. Surely you must have looked through all her belongings. Was there nothing?’

‘Nothing. For of course you are right, we have looked.’

‘And the diary she left behind – it was very important to her, she ran at once to recover it – like the wind she ran.’

‘Ah, the diary!’ Inspector Raju drew a long breath. ‘What has become of that? Who will tell us? We have sifted through every scrap of paper that remains in that office, Miss Madhavan. But we have found no diary.’

In the hours before dawn, when at last he fell asleep after long contention with wakeful images that would not be shaken off, Dominic dreamed of hearing a car’s engine climbing steadily up the. track from the main road, endlessly climbing and climbing and refusing to give up or be discouraged, though every yard gained was replaced by an equal distance unrolling ahead. A part of his mind was still awake enough to realise that this was one of those frequent frustration dreams that come between waking and sleeping, usually in the last hours before arising, and go on for an eternity that turns out to have been contained in the twinkling of an eye. The frustration is there because the minuscule particle of time involved compresses the eternity too strictly for any fulfilment ever to be achieved. The car would never complete the climb, never arrive anywhere. He knew that as he slid away into deeper sleep.

But when he opened his eyes on the rose-radiance of dawn, and his ears to the chattering of the sparrows on the verandah, and the passing scream of parakeets come and gone like a flash of light, he felt in his bones and blood that something was changed since yesterday. He showered and dressed, and went out through the quiet house, where nothing stirred but the distant soft movements of barefoot servants, to the terrace, and straight across it to the top of the steps.

Below him the Land-Rover still stood forlornly waiting; but beside it was parked, with almost pedantic neatness, an elderly black Morris. It seemed the car of his dream had completed the climb, after all, and arrived at its destination. He was not aware of ever having seen this car before. It had the discreetly old-fashioned, anonymous, average look of the hired car, and betrayed nothing whatsoever about the man or woman who had recently driven it.

Dominic went looking for him. The terrace continued round the corner of the house and all along the north-east wall; and at an hour when everything that wakes turns its back on the chill of the night and looks eastward into the first rays of the sun, this jutting corner seemed to be the place where anyone already waking would naturally go. There was a stone seat just round the corner, draped with a hand-loomed rug. And there was a man sitting cross-legged on the seat, his hands cupped in his lap, his face upturned to the rising sun.

His colour was pale bronze, and in the reddish, gilding rays of dawn, launched horizontally like lances along the mist-blue and dust-amber land, he might have been indeed a bronze, made not so far away in Tanjore in the high period of the art, three centuries and more ago, for all his clothing melted into the same range of glossy metallic shades. Not even the darkness and texture of hair broke the unity, for his head, with close-set ears and beautiful, subtle shaping of the skull beneath the skin, was shaven naked as his face. Lofty, jutting bronze brows arched above large, closed eyelids; the long lips were folded together peacefully in the faintest and purest of smiles, and the thin, straight nose inhaled so softly and tranquilly that not even the act of breathing seemed to inflect his charged stillness.

But he was not asleep. As soon as Dominic’s advancing figure cast a shadow on his nearer shoulder, the bronze cups of his eyelids lifted from exceedingly bright, mild, knowing eyes, dark brown and deeply set; and when two more steps had projected the shadow across his body he dwindled magically but gracefully into a middle-sized elderly gentleman wearing a saffron robe with a frayed hem kilted comfortably round his loins, and a fawn-coloured trench coat draped over his shoulders. His naked feet – his sandals lay beside the bench – were slim, bony and whitened with dust. He looked way-worn, but not tired. And he looked up at Dominic with a bright, gratified smile, and joined his palms gently under his chin in greeting.

‘
Namaste
, my son!’

‘
Namaste
, my father! I’m glad you are here.’ His very presence resolved everything into a matter of serene understatements.

‘You are not surprised?’ remarked the Swami Premanathanand, with a distinct suggestion of disappointment.

‘Never surprised by you. But very glad of you.’

‘I flew from Delhi to Madurai – it is a tedious business, thought it is so quick. And from Madurai I have driven that hired car – a car quite unknown to me, I am used only to my own.’ His own was a forty-year-old Rolls, visually reduced by sheer hard labour to a flying scarecrow, but mechanically nursed like an only child. He was slightly surprised by his success with this modern degenerate, and a little proud. ‘I arrived nearly an hour ago, but I did not wish to disturb anyone. I am afraid this is a house not well-blessed at present with dreamless sleep.’

‘I dreamed I heard you coming,’ said Dominic.

‘That was not a dream, I was thinking of you. As I promised,’ he said, ‘I gave thought to the problem of what might best be done. And I thought that my responsibility in this matter is very great, and that I ought to be here with you.’

He rose, and slipped his feet into his worn sandals, his long, prehensile toes gripping the leather thongs.

‘Shall we go into the house?’

Purushottam, puffy-eyed from want of sleep but eased and heartened at the sight of his visitor, made his ceremonial greeting, and bent to touch in veneration the Swami’s hands and feet. Larry hovered, long and dubious and aggressively American where his scepticism was called into resistance, everything about him from his bristling crew-cut to his thick-soled travelling shoes making a point of its complete un-Indianness. Priya offered her
namaskar
shyly but with composure, and answered the grave smile with a pale, withdrawn smile of her own. Lakshman was respectful, dutiful and more obstinately the paid courier than at any time during the last few days, so that there should be no mistake as to where he stood, and how immovably he stood there.

And the police, after an hour or so of cagey assessment, maintained with scrupulous politeness and reverence, opened their ranks and let the newcomer in. That was perhaps the greatest compliment paid to the Swami Premanathanand that day.

It was Inspector Tilak who called the afternoon conference, and presided at the head of the table, with Inspector Raju tactfully on his right hand; though as officer in charge of the original case the direction of the discussion was smartly and gratefully handed over to the Keralese officer as soon as proceedings opened. The Swami took his place at the foot of the table; but Dominic, seated halfway between, found himself experiencing repeatedly the kind of optical illusion in which up becomes down, out becomes in, and the foot of a table is translated into its head. It did not disconcert him; he had seen it happen before where the Swami was concerned, even when, as now, that enigmatic person was doing his best to suppress the tendency. His face was attentive and respectful, his eyes mild, and his voice asked gently for guidance rather than making suggestions; and with his usual timeless but astute courtesy he listened carefully to everything everyone else had to say, as they went over once again the entire history of the case.

‘So as I understand it,’ he said diffidently, when he had absorbed everything, ‘we have here two deaths which are certainly closely connected, and there are some facts about them which need not be questioned. That they are the work of experienced terrorists, most probably Naxalites. That the bombs were made by the same hand, almost certainly in Bengal, and therefore that someone brought them south to the agent chosen to use them. Now the agent at Thekady is known – unhappily after the event and after his own inadvertent death. Whether he was to be used again for the same role is something we do not know; but since he was killed by his own act, clearly he cannot be responsible for what has happened here. There remains the supplier. I am not so naive as to suppose that other Natalite agents may not be available in the south; but they are unlikely to be experienced with such comparatively sophisticated weapons as these. And also it is wasteful to acquaint too many people with the plans for such an act. Even those who sympathise are safer knowing nothing. One person, the messenger who brought the bombs, was already in the secret, and is the most probable person to have pursued the intent to the end. Have I followed you correctly?
⁸

‘Perfectly,’ said Inspector Raju.

‘And is it established that this person must have brought the bombs south only recently?’

The two inspectors glanced at each other, and Inspector Raju said, after only a momentary hesitation: ‘In the first one some folded sheets of newspaper had been used as wadding inside the case. We have identified a Calcutta newspaper, dated not quite four weeks ago.’

‘So we are looking, in effect, for someone who has come from the north since that date. Someone who does not belong here. A stranger. It should not escape us, of course,’ he said mildly, ‘that there are several such in this room now, including myself. Naturally those of us who have known one another for some time will feel that that line is hardly worth pursuing, but we must not ignore it altogether. There were also, at Thekady, a number of such people, visitors to the wild life sanctuary. And those, I know, are being kept under observation since that time. But none of them, as far as we yet know, has been anywhere near Malaikuppam.’

‘As far as we know,’ agreed Inspector Raju drily. ‘But some were as close as forty to fifty miles on Tuesday night, and with cars it is not so difficult to move from one place to another. The Manis, for instance, decided after all to keep their hired car and driver rather than go by train over these last stages of their tour. They spent only one night at Rameshwaram. On Tuesday night they were at Virudhunagar, and last night at Tirunelveli. From either it would be no great journey here. Oh, they have reported their presence everywhere scrupulously. But there are still eight hours in the night. We shall check on everyone.’

‘We are fortunate in having an officer who knows the district as Inspector Tilak does,’ said the Swami warmly. He already knew from Purushottam’s cook and watchman that the inspector was a native, born and raised not twenty miles away. ‘So he will have everyone’s goodwill and assistance in his inquiries about any strangers recently seen in these parts.’ That hardly followed, Dominic thought, until he remembered that the stranger they were looking for was a Naxalite terrorist. In theory the extreme left-wing Marxist forces were on the side of the great suppressed majority; but in practice the members of that submerged class were the most likely of all to die in the ideological carnage, and nobody knew it better than they did, or resented it more bitterly.

‘May I continue? I am talking chiefly to clarify matters in my own mind. Then we have the present outrage, and this unknown person who is responsible for it. It seems that we are confronted with two possible theories: one, that X was following up a pre-arranged pattern of events in attempting the murder of Purushottam, one more representative of “the chief class enemy”: two, that he followed Miss Galloway here in order to wipe out what he had cause to believe might be a dangerous witness against him in the previous case. In short, in the first case the bomb was meant for Purushottam, in the second for the victim it actually claimed, Miss Galloway. Let us take the second case first.

‘If it was Miss Galloway he wanted, then he must have followed the Land-Rover here, otherwise there would have been no way of tracking it afterwards on a cold scent to this particular place. Then again, X must have observed Miss Galloway using the office for her typing, and supposed – perhaps because of the diary she left behind? – that she was likely to do so again, or why plant the bomb there? But if he was there watching her during the evening, why risk the bomb at all? Why not a knife on the spot, or his hands? The office is one of the remotest buildings, with windows away from the court. Entry and exit would not be difficult, a cry could be cut off quickly, there was darkness to cover his retreat. He would have been a fool to take a more devious but extremely haphazard way. This militates against the theory, but does not altogether invalidate it, for we all know that sometimes men under pressure
are
fools, and
do
take the most inept ways of achieving their ends. And perhaps this one, previously merely the messenger, was too afraid of being personally responsible, too wary of ever actually showing his face. Better an inefficient attempt from a safe distance than a possibly disastrous direct confrontation. So let us still bear the theory in mind as a possibility. And what is in its favour? The matter of the diary, which Miss Galloway discovered she had left behind, but which was not in her handbag when she was found, nor anywhere in the office. So perhaps, after all, someone
was
watching, someone who wanted that diary removed and destroyed. Someone who both planted the bomb that night, and stole the diary. Miss Madhavan, did you ever notice this diary? Can you tell us what it looked like?’

‘She had a little red leather address book and stamp-case,’ said Priya, ‘and a big red leather writing-case. The diary could have belonged to the same set.’

‘This we have found,’ said Inspector Tilak. ‘But no diary.’

‘I don’t actually recall seeing her writing up a regular entry in any book. But that needn’t mean anything. It would be only a matter of a few lines, perhaps not even filled in each day. After all, I was with her for such a short time, only about ten days.’

‘Nevertheless,’ the Swami maintained, ‘it remains a possibility that she had written down in it something of vital importance – perhaps something she did not even realise to be important at the time. If so, it can only have been something connected with the bomb outrage at Thekady. Now you were all together there, as we know. Even before the two parties joined, at the forestry bungalow, Miss Madhavan was with her, travelling with her, sharing a room with her. Now what can Miss Galloway have seen or realised that the rest of you did not?’

They could think of no possible juncture at which Patti’s experience at Thekady had been different from theirs.

‘And yet,’ said Larry slowly, ‘when we found the boat she did come to pieces – to a rather surprising degree. I mean, it might be only a temperamental difference – I was knocked pretty useless myself at first. But she went down for the count, they had to give her a sedative and let her sleep through until next day.’

‘Yet she had seen only what you saw. So it was not something
witnessed
then. Could it have been something
recognised and made sense of
then? Something that linked up with something else she already knew, and had not realised she knew? Go back, Miss Madhavan, to the journey up to Thekady. Go over it in detail in your mind, and see if there is not at some point something which she did, and you did not do, something she saw, and you did not see.’

Priya opened her tired eyes wide, and stared back into the recent past, and began to recount the whole commonplace detail of that bus trip into the hills, proceeding with a patience which expected no excitement on arrival.

‘We got off at the bungalow, and took a room. No one else left the bus there. The French couple were already there, and the Manis arrived just as we came out to walk down to the fruit-stall below. It was while we were at the stall that Larry’s Land-Rover passed on its way up to the bungalow, but it was nearly dusk then, especially there among the trees, and they didn’t notice us. Then we walked back. There was nothing else, I think – except that Patti looked to see if the sadhu was still sitting by the lingam, and then she went back and gave him some small coins. For luck, she said.’

For luck! Whatever force had been allotting Patti her luck had made sure that all of it was bad.

‘Sadhu?’ said Inspector Raju, taking his long, worrying fingers abruptly out of his tangled grey hair. ‘What sadhu?’

‘Just a sadhu. He was sitting by the Siva lingam, one bend of the road down from the bungalow. I don’t remember noting him when we drove past in the bus, but we saw him as we went down to the stall, and then on the way back Patti turned back to give him some money. Suddenly she said: “Wait for me a moment!” and gave me her parcels to hold, and she walked back to him. I saw her reach in her bag for some coins, and heard her put them in his bowl.’

‘Now this,’ said Inspector Raju, unsheathing his pen, ‘is interesting. I know that road as I know my hand, and never yet have I seen a sadhu choose that particular place to sit. Did your friends also see him?’

‘No, he wasn’t there when we drove back to Madurai,’ Lakshman said for them all. ‘And we hadn’t noticed him on the way up.’

‘So only you two girls saw him face to face, and might know him again?’

Priya hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t know him again – I don’t think I could ever be sure. He wore a devotional mark like this…’ She drew the three lines and the small upright oval joining them. ‘But he was sitting back among the trees, and it was getting dusk. I didn’t go near, I just waited for Patti.’

‘So she was the only one who got a close look at him?’

‘Is he so significant?’ Larry ventured. ‘I thought they were liable to turn up pretty well anywhere, come when they chose and leave when they chose.’

‘That is very true, but nonetheless this is curious. Consider this spot of which we are speaking! One bend of the road below the bungalow, where buses stop and a few people alight – one bend above the fruit-stall, where some at least of the passing cars might be expected to make a stop. But not
at
either of them. At a spot where no one is going to halt but the occasional archaeologist, and only if his attention has already been called to the meagre remains there. Those who live by alms must go where people are expected to be.’

‘But there must be times when they’re not concerned solely with extracting money from people,’ said Larry.

‘Those who sincerely desire a solitude where thought is possible will not be found sitting, from choice, beside a motor road. No, this is not a proof of anything, but it is a most curious detail.’

‘It is also,’ the Swami pointed out delicately, ‘an apt occurrence of just what we were looking for – a stranger in the picture, however briefly. Someone who did not belong to the staff or the visitors at Thekady, or the bungalow, or the bus, or any part of that ordinary weekend excursion. Is it possible that she saw that face again elsewhere and recognised it? Perhaps at the lake, in quite a different connotation? He may be irrelevant, of course. But it would be no harm to inquire if such a Saivite devotee has also recently been seen near Malaikuppam.’

‘We will see to that at once,’ said Inspector Tilak, making notes with great vigour.

‘Then, if I may, I would like to consider the other possibility. For in this case we must find the right course of action, in addition to taking thought. If the bomb was meant for Purushottam, and not for Miss Galloway, many things are simplified. The Land-Rover need not have been followed here. The terrorist came here because this was where his assignment awaited him, and the arrival of Mr Preisinger’s party was merely coincidental. As we have said, a little reconnaissance would show that Purushottam has been spending his days in trying to make sense of his father’s affairs. In short, a bomb planted in his office and timed to go off at almost any time during the day, between meals, would have an excellent chance of securing his death. It was meant for him, and only by reason of the slight delay in the Land-Rover’s departure, and perhaps also of this idiosyncrasy of exploding ahead of the fixed time, did it kill Miss Galloway instead. Those are the two theories. Either is possible. But the reason we must take this last one seriously has little to do with which will eventually turn out to be the right one. It is simply this: In the one case, if they meant to kill Miss Galloway, they have succeeded, therefore they will wish only to disappear into the landscape and not be traced. In the other case, if they intended to kill Purushottam, they have failed.