Death in Kashmir (6 page)

‘Yes,' said Janet Rushton slowly. ‘Agents can be killed. That was why I didn't believe you when you came to my door tonight. I thought it was a trap. That you had come to kill me.'

‘You
what!
'

‘Why not? If anyone had told you a few hours ago that I was a Secret Service agent, would you have believed them?'

‘Well…'

‘Of course you wouldn't! Because I don't look like your idea of a Secret Service agent.'

‘Yes, I suppose so. I see. No wonder you pulled a gun on me! I thought you must have gone mad; or else I had.'

‘I know,' said Janet wearily. ‘I realized that if you weren't one of—
them
—then I would have done something that was going to be appallingly difficult to explain away. But I had to do it, because the other risk was so much greater.'

‘How do you mean? What other risk?'

‘If you had been one of them and I had hesitated for fear you might not be, I should have had no second chance. It was better to risk letting myself in for a lot of awkward questions and complicated lying than to risk that. You see, it's not just my own life that's at stake. It's far more important than that. Now that Mrs Matthews is dead I'm the only person who knows what she knew. I was never any more than a sort of second string to her. She gave me all my orders. But now I'm on my own and I've got to keep alive. I've
got
to! I can't let her down. I can't let it all be lost.'

The tired, passionate voice cracked queerly on the last word and after a moment Sarah said curiously: ‘What made you decide that I was on the level?'

Janet Rushton smiled wanly. ‘Oh, partly intuition I suppose, but mostly simple arithmetic.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Don't you? It's very easy. You hadn't any weapon on you and you had told me the truth—there
had
been someone at the window: someone who must have been there quite a while, for they had made a very neat job of filing through that catch. Well, if you weren't on the level you wouldn't have warned me.'

‘Oh I don't know,' said Sarah with a smile. ‘I might have planted him there as a sort of decoy duck.'

‘Yes. I thought of that too. You learn to think of most things in this job. But that didn't add up either. If you had planted someone at that window you could only have done it to provide an alibi: an excuse for getting in or for getting me out, supposing I had refused to open the door to you. Your reasoning could have been that before letting you in I might run to the bathroom window and check up on whether you were speaking the truth, and then, convinced of your
bona fides
by a sight of the decoy duck, I would of course have opened the door.'

‘Then what makes you think—' began Sarah.

‘I didn't go to the window first,' interrupted Janet. ‘I made certain instead that you had no weapon on you; and by the time I got to the window, whoever had been there had heard us and gone. It did occur to me then that possibly it was a plot: not to kill me, but to gain my confidence. But if it had been that, then it was an entirely pointless gilding of the lily for your decoy to take on a long, cold and exceedingly tricky job on my window merely to provide an alibi, when the briefest demonstration would have served the same purpose equally well.'

‘I see,' said Sarah slowly; and shivered. ‘You seem to have it all worked out. And—just for the record of course—I am on the level, you know.'

‘I know,' said Janet, with an odd inflexion in her voice. She raised her tired, hunted eyes from a contemplation of the glowing logs in the small brick fireplace, and gave Sarah a long and curiously calculating look.

The logs fell together with a little crash and a sudden spurt of flame, and Sarah stood up slowly and said: ‘What is it you want me to do?'

Something taut and watchful in Janet Rushton's face relaxed, and she said: ‘You're certainly not stupid.'

‘Not particularly. You wouldn't have told me all this merely in order to stop me chattering at the breakfast table. If that was all you were after, you'd have fallen back on the complicated lying. You were weighing it up all the time I was telling you the story of my life, weren't you? I'm quite sure you could have thought up a convincing explanation for me, but you decided to tell the truth instead. There had to be a reason for that.'

‘There is. The reason is that I'm–I'm desperate. I'm in a corner, and so I'll have to take a chance.'

‘And you're taking it on me. Is that it?'

‘Yes. You appear to have a reasonable amount of intelligence, and you couldn't have done well in the W R A F, or been such a good skier, without a fair amount of physical courage. And I need help. Will you help me?'

Sarah held out her hand. ‘Shake,' she said gravely; and smiled.

The other girl's fingers, cold and tense, closed tightly over hers for a brief moment. ‘Thank you,' said Janet with real gratitude, and getting up from her chair she crossed to the writing-table, pulled open a drawer, and taking out an envelope and a fountain pen returned with them to Sarah.

‘If my luck's in,' she said, ‘you may not have to do anything. In fact, I hope to God you won't! But just–just in case, I'd like to have your address on this, and to know that if you should ever get it you'll do something about it. I'm not sure what, but I shall have to leave that to you, and I've a feeling that you won't let me down.'

‘I'll try not to,' replied Sarah soberly. ‘But why
my
name? Surely——'

‘I daren't put anyone else's.
I daren't!
Because it could give that person away. But you're different. You're not one of us and you don't know anything. You are only someone I met skiing, so it's just possible that this will get to you without trouble if–if anything should happen to me.'

‘Nothing's going to happen to you,' said Sarah firmly. She took the proffered envelope, noting as she did so that it was sealed, and though not empty, did not contain very much—certainly not more than one or at the most two sheets of thin writing-paper. And accepting the pen, she scribbled her name and address on the envelope and returned it.

Janet stood weighing it thoughtfully in her hand, and when she spoke again it was so softly that Sarah could barely catch the words and had the impression that she was talking to herself:

‘The next problem is going to be getting this safely locked up when no one else is around, which isn't going to be easy if I'm being watched. Unless … Yes, that would do. I can take it down with me tomorrow——' She gave a small, brisk nod, as though in confirmation of some plan, and thrust the sealed envelope into her pocket. ‘And now,' said Janet in her normal voice, ‘I think you'd better get back to your own room.'

‘Are you quite sure you'll be all right?' asked Sarah uneasily. ‘After all, that window's open now, and a child could deal with the door-latch. I'll stay if you like. Suppose he—it—whoever it was—comes back?'

‘Don't worry,' said Janet. ‘No one is in the least likely to have a second try tonight. The lights are enough to advertise the fact that I'm awake and ready, and I shall leave the bathroom light on and wedge a chair under that door handle.'

‘Well, if you're certain it's OK,' said Sarah doubtfully. ‘Anyway, promise me that if you hear any unexplained noises you'll bang on the wall and yell.'

‘I promise,' said Janet with a pale smile.

She crossed to the door, and drawing back the bolt opened it cautiously and glanced rapidly up and down the deserted verandah before turning back to Sarah. ‘It was nice of you to come,' she said awkwardly. ‘I–I can't tell you how grateful I am.'

‘Nonsense,' said Sarah lightly. ‘I was meant to come. Predestination or whatever it's called. Fate, I suppose: “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may,” and all that. Good-night, dear.'

The door closed softly behind her, and once more she heard the click of the key turning in the lock and the muffled rasp of the bolts as they were pressed home. A few seconds later the radio was switched off and the night was quiet again.

Sarah stood for a moment looking about her, her back to the door. After the comparative warmth of the firelit room the verandah was an icy cavern of pale shadow that stretched emptily away past closed, secretive doors and shuttered windows. The white, glistening waste of snow lay piled all about the rough wooden walls and hung thick and heavy upon the low roofs, blotting out the sharp angles of the buildings and drawing soft, curved lines against the frosty sky.

Far away across the
marg
*
a tree cracked sharply with the sound of a distant pistol shot, as its sap froze inside the rough bark. The thin sound, a pinprick in the silence, echoed faintly round the bowl of the sleeping
marg,
and Sarah, who had moved towards her own door, checked sharply. But it was not that faint sound which had stopped her.

The moon had risen higher into the night sky and half the verandah now lay in shadow. Only a narrow bar of cold white light remained at its edge, fretted with the sharp pattern thrown by the verandah railings. But in the reflected light from the wastes of snow beyond the railings, Sarah could see quite clearly on the film of white snowflakes that lay upon the verandah floor the prints of her own fur-lined slippers.

But there was now another set of footprints upon that pale and fragile carpet. The footprints of someone who had walked on tiptoe down the deserted verandah and paused outside Janet Rushton's door …

3

The sight of those footmarks was more shocking to Sarah than anything that Janet had told her, and as she stared down at them she felt as though she had been abruptly and violently propelled out of a make-believe world into one of chilling reality. For though it would not be true to say that she had disbelieved Janet, she had consciously allowed for a certain amount of exaggeration due to the effects of sorrow, fear and shock. Now, suddenly, it had become real to her. Because the proof was here before her eyes.

Her first instinctive reaction was to warn Janet. But even as her hand went out to knock once again on that door, she checked and turned back to look down again at those betraying prints. Whoever had made them had clearly not stayed listening very long; which meant that they had not been able to hear anything and been forced to retreat, disappointed. And since Janet had suspected that there might be an attempt to eavesdrop, and had guarded against it—and had also, in Sarah's opinion, endured enough for one night!—there seemed little point in bursting in on her a second time merely to tell her that she had been right.

There was, of course, something far more useful that she herself could do: follow that line of prints and find out where they led to! But even from here she could see that they had entered the verandah by way of the three stone steps at the far end, and left again the same way. And since the possibility that whoever made them might be lurking somewhere among the black shadows cast by the end of the hotel wing, waiting to see if anyone would do just that, was too daunting to be faced, Sarah fled back to her own room, and once safely inside it locked and bolted herself in.

After all the alarums and excursions of the past hour she had not expected to be able to fall asleep again. But here the experience gained during the war years, when she had learned to make use of every opportunity to snatch what sleep she could between air-raids or the departure and return of home-based bombers and fighters, stood her in good stead.

Her eyes had already closed and she was almost asleep, when it occurred to her that the second set of footprints, like her own, had been made by a woman …

It was at breakfast next morning that Reggie Craddock, the Secretary of the Ski Club, made his announcement.

He referred briefly to the tragic death of Mrs Matthews, and to his own previous warning that the Blue Run was unsafe for skiing. The snow, said Reggie Craddock, was rotten in places, and due to the thawing of a stream, most of the track was ice and very dangerous. No one, under any circumstances, was to ski in or near the run for the remaining four days of the Spring Meeting, and anyone found doing so would be automatically suspended from membership of the Club. He added the bald information that Mrs Matthews' body was being taken down to Srinagar that day for burial, and sat down with evident relief as a babble of low-toned conversation broke out around the tables.

Sarah glanced across the dining-room to where Janet Rushton's blond head gleamed in the brilliant morning sunlight that streamed through the snow-fringed window-panes. Janet's face showed no visible traces of her last night's panic, and Sarah, noting that she was wearing a dark tweed coat and skirt in place of her usual ski-suit, presumed that she would be accompanying her supposed cousin's coffin down to Srinagar and attending the funeral there. At the moment she was talking to Hugo Creed—a large and jovial character, built on generous lines, who was temporarily on the non-skiing list owing to an unfortunate altercation with a tree on Red Run.

Janet had been commiserating with him and Major Creed had evidently said something that amused her, for her laughter came clearly across the room, and hearing it, Sarah was tempted to wonder if the happenings of the previous night had not been a particularly vivid nightmare, or the product of a feverish imagination? But though she might possibly have been able to discount Janet's story, she could not forget those clear, betraying prints on the snow-powdered floor of the verandah.

Later that morning, on her way to the post office to send off a letter to her Aunt Alice, she had stopped to look behind her more than once, haunted by an uncomfortable feeling that she was being followed. But except for a few distant figures stumbling upon the nursery slopes below the hotel, the shimmering sweep of the snow-blanketed
marg
was empty and glittering in the clear sunlight that was thawing the snow to a soft slush under her skis, and there were fewer skiers than usual, since several of the older members had accompanied Janet down to Srinagar, from where they would return after a post-funeral luncheon at Nedou's Hotel.