The Deceivers (12 page)

He ran out into the passage. He met Sher Dil coming in at the back of the bungalow, and through the open doors, saw the jail watchman gesticulating on the verandah.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The prisoner in the jail has escaped, sahib,’ Sher Dil said. ‘The watchman has come with the message. He says the prisoner half strangled him.’

The watchman fell on his knees in an apparent agony of abasement and fear, so that the huge keys at his waist jangled with his trembling. Not so long ago he would have been thrown off a tall building on to a spike for this. Custom still demanded that he crawl and tear pieces out of his ragged beard. If he behaved calmly it would strengthen people’s suspicion that the sight of a little gold had blinded him to the escaper’s intentions.People always distrusted policemen, irregular cavalry, and jail-keepers.

William said quietly, ‘Get up man, and tell me what happened.’ He sensed Mary behind him.

‘Protector of the Poor, at first cockcrow the villain called for a lotah for purposes of nature. I took it to him. I was not going to let him out of the cell, of course. He flipped a handkerchief through the bars and around my neck. Aiih, it was quick, quicker than the eye can see, and as the Presence knows I am nearly blind in the service of -- I continue, I continue, Presence. He held me there so that my breath was stopped and all my past rose up before me and the night went black. It was a dark night. He whispered, snarled through the bars, and I pressed up against them with my senses flying and a pain like hammers in my head! He said, “Let me out or you die!” I struggled! The noose tightened! Tightened!’

The watchman, kneeling on the verandah, seized his own neck with both hands and jerked his head in fierce pantomime. He had seen in William’s eye that no severe punishment hung over him. His eyes rolled. The wings of his narrative genius carried him aloft. Sher Dil’s mouth was set in a disbelieving, silent sneer.

‘Look!’ The watchman raised his head, and on the thin old neck William saw a livid circling weal. ‘I was afraid. I opened the door and he came out, and -- and I do not know what happened next. I fell to the ground and knew no more until the morning on my eyelids awakened me, and I had a great headache -- which I still have.’

William eyed the old man dispassionately. The first part of the story must be true. He felt his own neck and remembered the terror in that square of cloth. The second part? A small jewel had probably changed hands, in consideration of which the old jailer remained senseless till daylight, time enough for Hussein to get well away.

It was good, because Hussein might so easily have kept the cloth taut and saved himself a jewel -- and lost a red coat. Now two people had been in that lopsided man’s power, and for the sake of a red coat he had let them both go.

William said to the jailer, ‘Take heart. There’s no great harm done this time. Here’s a rupee. Go and buy some toddy, and be more careful in future.’

Sher Dil did not conceal his surprise at the calmness with which William took the affair, and went away shaking his head. William turned and re-entered the bungalow.

Mary said, ‘Are you going to go after the thakur just the same?’

‘Yes.’ He put his arm around her, needing her warmth, and they went into the bedroom to dress properly.

In the evening Daffadar Ganesha came with his report. Sher Dil let him into the bungalow and slammed the door of the study behind him. Sher Dil knew by now that another journey was in prospect; excitement filled the air, which he was not to share and must not talk about; and once more he would be left behind while the new young woman went with William.

Ganesha shuffled his feet uneasily and kept his arms tight by his sides, as though he feared to knock something over if he moved an inch. He was a dark-brown, heavy man with a wrinkled forehead, much animal courage, and few brains. By question and answer William dug the story from him. Mary listened, took notes, and sometimes asked for translations of phrases she had not understood.

The traveller’s name and title was Thakur Rajun Parsad. On the road he wore a white turban, a blue silk robe embroidered with saffron yellow trimmings, white jodhpurs, and red slippers. He was a thakur and a small landowner. He lived near Moradabad and was on a journey to Nagpur. In Madhya he had bought some provisions, but not a great quantity, not enough to carry his party on to Khapa, which would be the next place of any size in the direction he was going. William heard that item with relief: it would be easier to trace him if he bought food at wayside villages. In his party was an older man, name unknown, whom the thakur always addressed as ‘Hey, you!’; overheard phrases indicated that the other man was a poor relation who depended on the thakur’s generosity for his bread and butter, paying with flattery and the service of minor errands. There were five servants in the party: a bearer, a groom, a sweeper, a cook, and one bodyguard armed with a matchlock. They were going to set off at dawn.

After a long hesitation William decided that the daffadar and one policeman should accompany him and Mary on the trail; and that both police should wear native clothes but carry concealed horse pistols. Many people would think it strange for the Collector to travel in this manner, but to the casual observer it would be less conspicuous, and the policemen might be able to get more information from wayside villages.

Now there was another day to get through, and another night, if he was to obey Hussein’s injunction and keep a day’s march behind the thakur. He could not work, and all day and all night hot and cold ripples moved over his skin. The curtain of the unknown shook in the wind, ready to part for him. The thakur and six innocent men were going to their deaths, and he was cold with the cold of their graves. He wrestled with himself, and in the end, as at the beginning, he knew he had no choice.

On the fourth day they reached the Nerbudda River at Chikhli. The ferrymen were sure that no one of the thakur’s description had crossed the river. The night before, a ploughman on the hillside above Taradehi had been sure that he had seen the thakur. The thakur and his party had vanished between Taradehi and Chikhli.

William and Mary and the two policemen turned their horses and rode slowly back up the trail. The killing had been done in daylight, and if they looked they must find a trace. There must have been a struggle.

Tall trees closed their branches overhead. They trotted along a dark-green tunnel, damp and hot and loud with the bells of a wayside stream. Three miles up, Ganesha, at the rear, stopped and raised his voice, to be heard above the water.

‘Blood, a spot on a tree -- here.’

Low down on the trunk of a sapling a single splash of blood had dried matt black against the shining pale bark. They looped the reins of the horses on a branch and began to search carefully. Casting round from the blood-marked sapling, they forced through springy bushes and into the jungle. Something glittered at the foot of a big tree. William bent, stirred the soggy leaves, and lifted up a small, bright pick-axe, very sharply pointed, well oiled, and apparently little used. A painted pattern of whorls and triangles writhed up the haft. The prints of bare feet showed faintly near the pick-axe, where the leaves did not cover the earth.

Scraping leaves aside with her hand, Mary called out, ‘Here -- the earth has been disturbed.’ William’s heart bumped, but it was not a big or deep patch that they found. Ganesha dug quickly, forcing his fingers into the soil. When the hole was a foot deep he fumbled in the dirt and slowly brought out a rupee. Sticky brown stuff mixed with dirt clung to the coin. Ganesha felt it, smelled, and said in astonishment, ‘Sugar!’

There was nothing else. William wrapped the rupee in a handkerchief, put it in his pocket, and led the way back to the path.

He was suddenly very tired, and overborne by silent, insistent voices muttering, ‘I am dead. Who am I? Where am I? You killed me.’ A lowering gloomy heat oppressed the shadows. He flopped down on the ground and jabbed the point of the pick-axe with aimless anger into the path.

‘A spot of blood. Sugar and silver. This!’’ He jerked the handle of the pick. A clod of earth came up and crumbled where it lay. A bright yellow thread shone in the hole. The three stared down.

Ganesha said stolidly, ‘The thakur’s coat.’

Mary whispered, ‘Right in the path -- under the feet of every traveller. Oh, William, these are the most evil, cruel people in the world.’

Up and down the winding path footmarks and hoofmarks overlapped in profusion. No one would think to dig here. William himself had not dug; he had stuck in the point of a pickaxe and found a saffron thread. Hussein had told him to note and remember every detail of the thakur’s dress. Otherwise it would have been only a thread in the path. He picked it out and put it in his pocket.

He said to the policemen, ‘You two stay here. Let no one pass. Hold any who come. The memsahib and I will ride to Chikhli and bring men.’

‘Achchi bat! ‘

William climbed into the saddle and, with Mary following, galloped south.

Late in the evening, his body aching and his head swimming, he could have sworn that this was the grove by Kahari, that time went backwards. Here were the same flares and lamps, the same doubting, patient peasant faces, the same flash of pick blades in the light, the thuds as they struck the earth. Two late travellers tried to pass and were brought to him. He stared dully into their faces, made the shy woman draw back her veil. He had not seen them before. He waved his hand wearily, ‘You may go.’ This road was little used.

Ganesha supervised the digging. The trooper-policeman lay snoring in the path. The lamps shone on the sweating backs of the diggers. Of a sudden their heads came up, and their faces were not doubting now but incredulous and fearful. They dragged out a foreshortened brown body, crying aloud with sharp exclamations of compassion and horror.

William was sitting a little way back with Mary, but not far from the digging men. The forest that had been his friend for so many years was not friendly these days.

All seven of the thakur’s party lay under the path. Ganesha came at last and asked him respectfully to come and look. The bodies lay in a row beside the lamps.

The thakur he thought he recognized; he had learned so much about the man. The beautiful coat was stained and torn; the empty saddlebags had been under the corpse and now lay beside it. In another’s bloodstained second-hand clothes he saw written, ‘Poor relation’; and the expression on that face had remained obsequious even in the frozen amazement of dying. Here were the marks of the servants of Kali -- a weal round every throat, the broken joints, the great wounds in chest and stomach. In these newly-killed victims the bellies gaped open, and the entrails, bursting out, were heavy with loose dirt and slimy with mucus. Cut stakes, the points sharp and bloody, had been there in the pit with them, and a log and a club. The thakur’s necklace was there, round his neck, and the charm on it. ‘Fourth-grade stones,’ William muttered to himself.
They
knew.

He was turning away when a digger at the end of the trench cried out, ‘Another!’

William stammered, ‘Th-there were only seven. What -- what do you mean?’

The man held up a whitened skull.

William’s knees had no strength in them. He covered his face. ‘Dig.’

The bodies coming up now had been dead a long time. None of them had any flesh on the bones. Soon, as the minutes crawled by, twelve skeletons lay beside the seven bodies. William’s mind baulked at the scope of the horrors. He did not hear Ganesha at his side. Mary shook his elbow gently, and Ganesha repeated his message.

‘That is all, sahib, we think.’

Mary jumped to her feet. ‘William, we must go to Mr Angelsmith at Khapa at once. Don’t you realize that this is in his district? We passed the boundary near Taradehi, you told me. We can find out at Chikhli who did cross the ferry. We can catch them if they’re still together.’ He thought it over. He was glad Mary had made him think. He said, ‘There are other ferries down river -- Kerpani, Barmhan. These murderers might have used one of them after they did -- this.’

‘Perhaps. But let’s try Chikhli first. And -- oh, William, it’s dreadful to be relieved about anything now, but don’t you see this means that the murderers are working in other districts as well as yours? That Hussein was speaking the truth?’ Her eyes were blazing.

‘I suppose so.’ He rose to his feet. He’d have to get George’s help. He’d have to cross-examine the ferryman at Chikhli more closely, follow his nose and see where it led him. It was no good trying to explain to George about the ‘servants of Kali’ yet. George would not believe him. He’d have to treat it as plain murder until Hussein came back and explained further -- if Hussein ever did come back.

He said, ‘Ganesha, leave the trooper here on guard, tell him to see that no one touches the -- great God, he’s still asleep! You come on with us.’

They galloped down the path under heavy clouds, the branches whipping their faces.

The chuprassi squatting in the shade of a tree outside George’s courthouse rose uncertainly to his feet when he saw them riding up. It was about ten o’clock in the morning. At last, recognizing William for an Englishman, he ran into the building. A minute later George Angelsmith strode out through the waiting crowd of pleaders and litigants. Hurrying without seeming to hurry, he ran down the steps to seize Mary’s bridle and helped her to the ground.

‘What in heaven’s happened?’ He looked from one to the other. They had crossed the river and ridden twenty miles through the last of the night and the first of the day, and they were tired and very dirty. ‘Is -- is there an uprising?’

William stretched his aching thighs. ‘No. Murder. Same people. More of them.’

They were walking up the steps through the standing, inquisitive-faced crowd. George slowed his pace and stared at William. ‘Murder? The same people? But what -- ‘

He cut short the query, and Mary said, ‘It’s in your district this time, Mr Angelsmith.’