Tower of Silence (2 page)

The inevitable joke about crystal balls followed, lightening the atmosphere, as Patrick had intended. The most effective way of imparting unwelcome information was often to wrap it up inside a bit of a joke.

But he hoped that none of the men would forget Mary Maskelyne’s reputation. Or that her vicious intelligence had outwitted prison warders and killed four people.

As the years slid past, it had become easier for Mary to look back to the start: to see her life since she was fourteen, almost as if it were a tapestry she could unroll at will. For long stretches the pattern was plain and dull and flat, but here and there were sudden exciting splashes of life and colour.

One of the earliest splashes of colour, one of the milestones, had been the juvenile court, of course. Mary could see it as a vivid jigsawing of colours on the tapestry, and she could remember it very clearly indeed. She could remember how a distant aunt had come to be with her, and how there had been a social worker, and she could remember how she had deliberately chosen to wear her most grown-up clothes. Dress
young
, the aunt and the social worker had said beforehand. As young as possible. Wear your school uniform. The younger you look, the more sympathy you’ll get from the court. But Mary
had worn the tangerine mini-skirt and the dark brown figure-hugging sweater that went with it. Clumpy-heeled ‘moddy’ shoes and diamond-patterned tights. She had washed her hair the night before the trial started and smoothed it into two shining wings on each side of her face, and she had applied black eye-liner in the Cleopatra fashion of the day. This was going to be pretty boring; she knew what the verdict would be before it was given, which meant it would be utterly tedious to have to sit through days of people talking and giving evidence and arguing as to whether she was sane or mad, and whether she understood what she had done or not. At least if she could dress up, people would look at her, and there might be articles in the newspapers and bits on TV.

She was not mad, she was completely sane, and she understood perfectly well what she had done. Her parents had deserved to die, and when they had heard the evidence the judge and the people on the jury would think so as well.

When the jury foreman had given the verdict Mary had not believed it. At first she had thought she must have heard wrongly, and then that they were playing a sick joke on her. After all the attention they had accorded her, all those letters sent to her–twenty-seven men wanted to marry her the minute she reached sixteen, and at least as many girls had written asking her to tell them how she got her hair to look like that–after all that, the single, cold word
Guilty
had been like a blow across the eyes, and she had had to put up a hand to shield her face.

And then, almost instantly, she had understood that
this had been the only possible verdict. You had to see the thing in a broader context: you had to understand about sending out signals, warning evil people who could have seen an acquittal as a sign that murder was permissible. Yes, it was right that the jury should give a guilty verdict.

But she had known, with absolute conviction, that when the judge pronounced sentence it would be the very lightest of punishments. They would not send her to prison, she knew that, because girls of fourteen did not go to prison. It would most probably be probation. The judge would say that what Mary had done was justifiable and understandable, and he would set her free, just as a judge last year had set free a woman who, having endured years of cruelty and sexual abuse from an alcoholic father, had eventually lost control and killed him.

Waiting for the judge’s sentencing, the courtroom hushed and solemn, she had stared disdainfully over the heads of the people in the court. She had known that they were all watching her, and she had known they were awed at what she had done. She had ignored them, fixing her eyes on the judge, her face already half-arranged in a gracious little smile of acceptance. He would understand, this wise old man, about dispensing justice and about vindication of wrongs. He would know that only the strong and the honourable dared take the law into their own hands, as Mary had done. He would admire her, so young, so brave, so cruelly treated by the world.

The courtroom was charged with anticipation. They
were all waiting to hear that she was to be set free–Mary could feel it.

The judge laid his hands, palms downwards, on the polished surface of the bench, and said that after consideration and after studying the psychiatric reports he could reach only one decision.

Mary Maskelyne was to be incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure in an institution for young offenders. After four years she was to be reassessed, and, if thought appropriate, transferred to an institution for the criminally insane.

It had taken three prison officers to restrain Mary and carry her back to the cells below the court.

Gillian had meant well, talking about buying a little bungalow if Teind House were sold, but Selina did not actually want to live in a little bungalow; she did not want to live anywhere that might mean neighbours and people calling on her to borrow lawn-mowers or invite her to coffee mornings or Tupperware parties.

(‘Selina, darling, people don’t have Tupperware parties any more,’ Gillian had said, and Selina had said, well, she knew that of course, but still.)

She liked the remoteness of Teind, and she liked living with the bricks and timbers and windows that had belonged to her mother’s family for so many generations. As a child she had helped the aunts to look after the house, because that was what girls did. Some people went away to school, and for a long time after she came to Scotland this had worried Selina quite a lot, because she had not known
if she might have to go away, but Aunt Rosa had said, and Aunt Flora had agreed, that going away to school was not necessary. Boys had to go away to school–Matthew had done so–but that was because boys had to work. They had to support wives and families–although Matthew had not, in the event, done either–but girls did not have to worry about that. Girls got married and became housewives and mothers.

Selina would attend the village school each day, which was just a few minutes’ walk from Teind House, they said. She could learn all she needed there, and be home in time for tea. After the first few days, Selina discovered that most of the other pupils took a packed lunch; they all sat together in the gymnasium and ate their sandwiches and in the winter they took a flask of hot soup. It was rather friendly and nice, and in the half-hour before afternoon classes started all kinds of things went on. Little unofficial clubs and groups to which you belonged depending on the kind of thing you found interesting. There were domino tournaments and hopscotch contests. There was much scoffing by the boys at the girls, and much head-tossing by the girls towards the boys.

The older girls talked about clothes, which came off rationing that spring, and giggled over furtive copies of
Forever Amber
. Transistor radios were still a thing of the future, but somebody smuggled in a portable gramophone so that everyone could listen to Johnnie Ray singing about Hernando’s Hideaway, and Frankie Laine and the Mule Train. Frankie Laine was a dreamboat, all the older girls said so.

In the aunts’ youth people had liked songs from musicals:
Rosemarie
and
The Desert Song
, or sentimental ballads like ‘Night and Day’. Great-uncle Matthew had once shocked their parents by singing ‘Minnie the Moocher’ at a Christmas party, but that had been when he was much younger of course.

Aunt Flora and Aunt Rosa did not approve of domino tournaments at lunchtime or of dreamboats who sang the blues. They did not approve of sandwiches and flasks of soup either, most unwholesome, said Aunt Flora. Selina would do better to come home each day and have a proper nourishing meal.

At weekends and holidays there were always things to be done in the house. There was furniture to polish and flowers to arrange, and there was a proper routine. Friday was polishing day, just as Monday was wash day when Jeannie from the village came up to deal with the laundry, and the wash-house behind Teind smelt of steam and soap. Tuesday was ironing day and Thursday was baking day. You had to have orderliness, the aunts said firmly. And baking on Thursday and polishing on Friday meant that the house smelt of lavender and beeswax for the weekend and there were cakes in the tin for visitors. The vicar sometimes called on Saturday, and there might be guests to afternoon tea on Sunday before evensong. If it was after evensong or before Sunday lunch, it had to be sherry or Madeira and wine biscuits.

Great-uncle Matthew never helped with the polishing or the baking, of course. He made notes about local history and wrote letters to people, and had a stamp
collection. He saw to incomprehensible things called annuities and insurances and had luncheon in Stornforth with the hospital governors on the third Wednesday of every month. He enjoyed these meetings: he always came back looking quite spry, although it did not take him long to sink back into his usual disapproving humourlessness.

Once, when Aunt Flora had to have a thyroid operation and Aunt Rosa sprained her ankle the very same week, there had been a great to-do over the preparing of Matthew’s meals. Somebody had asked why Matthew could not prepare his own meals, which Aunt Rosa said just went to show. In the end Aunt Rosa had managed to hire a temporary cook from an agency in Stornforth, but it had not been very successful. The woman had not known how to make egg sauce for the baked ham that was Great-uncle Matthew’s favourite Saturday evening supper, and after she left Aunt Rosa had had to hobble into the scullery to put everything back in the right place, and discovered that garlic had been used in the omelette pan.

‘Nasty foreign stuff,’ said Aunt Rosa and Aunt Flora shuddered, and they went on a shopping trip to Stornforth to buy a new omelette pan and to replace all the tea towels.

Gillian had suggested that a suitable letter be sent to Stornforth Bird Sanctuary and to the nearest Tourist Information offices, advertising the bed-and-breakfast facility at Teind House, and had even discovered someone in Inchcape who would come to help with the
extra housework and cooking when people were staying.

‘She doesn’t need much in the way of cash,’ said Gillian. ‘It’s one of the warder’s daughters at Moy. Lorna Laughlin from the school suggested her. She’s only about twenty–I think she dropped out of university last summer, and she just wants something to do. Her name’s Emily Frost.’

‘Shouldn’t I see her–interview her or something?’ Selina knew people did this. The aunts had always interviewed the daily cleaners who came to Teind House, even though it was generally somebody from the village whose family they had known all their lives. And in India, before Selina and mother went to live in the Alwar village which father thought was safer for them than Delhi, they had had houseboys and Selina had had an ayah, but mother had always interviewed them before agreeing to give them work. You could not be too careful, she had said. There were such dreadful stories these days and India was a simmering cauldron, father had said so only that week, and then had jotted the expression down in his notebook to use in an article sometime or other.

But the little English settlement just outside Alwar, with its wonderful smudgy purple backdrop of hills in the distance, was perfectly safe. ‘Your father would not have sent us here if it had not been,’ mother had said, patting her hair complacently.

But John March, writing of India’s unrestful state, writing of Gandhi’s hunger strikes, and of the dark cloud of partition that was to hover for years in the aftermath
of India’s independence, had not known that in sending his wife and his small daughter into the little colony at Alwar–consisting mostly of English wives and families of the doctors and teachers and lawyers who had come out here in the aftermath of World War II–he was sending the one to her death, the other to a nightmare from which she was never fully to emerge.

It had been the end of the afternoon when it happened: the time when people had got up from after-lunch naps, and the scents of sandalwood and jasmine lay drowsily on the country air. Servants and houseboys had begun preparing their employers’ evening meals, and there was a faint drift of the spices the Indian people used for their cooking–tamarind and cumin and ginger.

‘But the spices,’ Selina’s mother always said unhappily, ‘are too often used to conceal the fact that the meat is not as fresh as one would like.’

But on that afternoon, playing in a group of children–five English, one Canadian–Selina had cared nothing for her mother’s fastidious discontent. She had been absorbed in that day’s game, which was a new one called the Maiden Tower. Christabel Maskelyne’s father had told them the tale of the princess who had been imprisoned in the doorless tower in a place called Baku because she would not marry her father. This had been interesting, although nobody had properly understood the bit about marrying her father, because everyone knew you did not marry your father. Still, it was a good story, and it was going to make a good game. Christabel
had thought they could pretend that a maharajah, which meant a prince, came to rescue the princess, and so there was going to be a journey through the mountains, with the maharajah riding on an elephant, and servants bearing gifts of gold and ivory.

Selina was the princess, in one of mother’s evening scarves and a dab of Max Factor lipstick on her forehead, and Douglas, the boy from Toronto, was the maharajah because his Canadian accent made him sound a bit foreign. Christabel, wearing a discarded curtain for a cloak, with a kitchen knife for a sword, was the princess’s wicked father, and everybody else was a servant. They had put a ladder against a tree for the doorless tower, and Selina was going to look down and say, ‘Oh, who is this handsome prince,’ and then Douglas had to climb up the ladder for the rescue while Christabel waved her arms in the air to indicate impotent fury. After this everybody would say things like, ‘We bring you gold from the east, princess,’ and, ‘Let us flee to the shining palace in the mountains.’

They had just reached the part where Selina was saying, ‘Oh, who is this—’ when somebody said, ‘What’s that?’

This was not in the script, but Christabel thought you should improvise in games, and so Selina said, ‘Oh, do you hear my father’s men coming?’ And then stopped and looked across the gardens, because she had heard it as well.

The sound of something clanging and banging–something that went on and on clanging, and made your heart jump in fear, because you knew deep inside that
something bad was going to happen, and something very fearsome indeed was coming to get you.

And then one of the others said, ‘It’s a bell,’ and another said, ‘It’s the alarm bell in the old tower. It means there’s a raid or something—’

For a moment they had stood looking at one another, none of them quite knowing what to do, the smallest ones not even sure what a raid was. Then Douglas said, ‘Listen–I can hear horses coming. And men shouting,’ and Selina, who was still in the tree and therefore higher up than the others, saw a group of men running towards them, shouting as they came. The shouts echoed through the sleepy squares, and the men’s feet churned up the dust as they ran, so that they seemed to be coming out of a vast whirling cloud of smoke. They were wearing turbans and raggedy cotton gowns, and brandishing knives, and as they came hurtling across the quiet English garden she saw that the ones at the front had guns and she clutched at a branch of the tree, because her legs had suddenly gone trembly. Something bad was about to happen–the alarm bell was still ringing, on and on, and that meant something frightening and terrible was going on…

Other people were screaming by now, and several of the children’s mothers were running towards the March house. Selina could hear her own mother and she could hear Christabel’s mother as well. Somebody was shouting something about Sikh dissidents, and somebody else was shouting about Muslim spies, and the garden with its pleasing scents of jasmine and spices, and the huge splashes of colour from the rhododendrons, was suddenly
becoming a place filled with anger and fear; it was turning into a dust-storm because the rioters were beating huge whirling clouds out of the hot, dry ground. And all the while came the insistent clamour of the alarm, and you felt that if it did not stop you would go mad or your ears would burst from it…

Selina half fell, half slid down from the tree, dry-burning her hands on the ladder’s frame because she came down too fast, landing on the ground with a thump. The others were clustering together, no one quite knowing what they should do, the two smallest children beginning to cry.

The dust-shrouded, knife-wielding men erupted into the garden, and surrounded the little group of children. Selina saw Christabel kick out at one of the men who snatched her up in his arms and Douglas swing a punch at another. Yes, they must fight these men, they must be very brave and beat them off until their parents reached them—The rest of the thought was cut abruptly off as Selina was grabbed from behind and swung into the fierce grip of a dark-eyed man, his cotton garments streaked with dirt and caked in mud, his teeth showing in a grin so frightening that Selina forgot about being brave and fighting, and squealed with panic and terror.

‘Quiet, little girl! You stay quiet and no one hurt, understand?’

But no one else was being quiet; everyone else was screaming, and people were stampeding everywhere, trampling over the jasmine and the leopard lilies and
crushing them underfoot–mother was going to be furious about that when all this was over…

Selina was yelling and crying with the rest by this time, her face half jammed against the man’s shoulder, so that the smell of his body was thrust into her nose. It was a horrid smell–unwashed skin and stale sweat–and his breath was horrid as well: sour and clotted with the spicy food he ate. Selina started to feel sick, but she tried to take in deep breaths because she absolutely must not be sick all over him.

By the time she had taken enough deep breaths, and had managed to wriggle around a bit so that the man was not huffing his smelly breath all over her, the other men had carried the children out of the trampled-on garden and were running along the road. Several of them were screeching in triumph, but the children were screaming just as loudly. Douglas was yelling at the men to set them free, and Christabel–dear brave Christy–was hammering with her little fists on the shoulders of the man who was carrying her. Selina felt better just seeing Christy do that; it encouraged her to inflict a few blows on her own account, but her captor instantly said, ‘You not do that. You not strike me. You keep quiet or we kill.’

And then they were all being tumbled into a kind of cart drawn by a small pony. Before they could even think about scrambling out and running off, two of the men climbed in after them, and the pony started off at a smart trot, jolting them out of Alwar, and along the bare, dusty road that wound up to the northern hills.