Death in Kashmir (8 page)

Sarah was conscious of a sudden wave of relief. She had watched the small dark figures of the homeward-bound skiers vanish among the pine woods with a feeling of heavy foreboding that she had not wished to analyse, but which she now realized had its roots in the fear that somewhere down in that rapidly darkening hollow far below, death lay in wait for Janet; death tiptoeing along the black, snow-powdered verandahs of the old hotel, or lurking among the shadows at the foot of Blue Run. But now Janet would not be there. She was here, and safe; far above the shadows of the black, watching trees and the secretive wooden walls of the old hotel. Here in a clean, fresh, frosty world. Safe …

Sarah laughed aloud in sheer relief. ‘Come on,' she said, ‘race you to the hut.'

She was a good skier; but Janet was an excellent one, and drawing ahead effortlessly she arrived with a swish of flung snow at the hut a full sixty seconds ahead of Sarah, who found her leaning against the far corner of it and dusting the snow off her suit. Her gaze was on the dim hollow far below them and her face in the waning light was once again strained and anxious.

She said abruptly and in an undertone: ‘I shouldn't have stayed up here. It's too great a risk. I've been a fool. I should have gone back with the others.'

‘Risk?'
repeated Sarah sharply. ‘What do you mean? What risk is there in staying up here?'

‘It's not that,' said Janet. ‘It's … oh well, perhaps it doesn't matter.' She turned to glance up at the steep slope of the mountainside that rose behind the small hut, and at the clear star-pricked sky above it, and added with apparent inconsequence: ‘Anyway, there's a moon tonight.'

A tangle of dark figures shot past them in a flurry of snow to collapse in a confused heap before the hut door. ‘Get your skis out of my hair, Alec!' demanded Ian Kelly. ‘Where are the others, Sarah?'

‘Some of them have arrived and some of them are just arriving,' said Sarah. ‘Hello, Reggie. Where have you been?'

Reggie Craddock and his two companions, a tall slim Indian with a face that would have graced a Greek coin, and Meril Forbes, a thin sandy-haired girl with pale eyes and a multitude of freckles, came round the side of the hut and joined the group by the door.

‘Up to the top of Gujar Gully,' said Reggie, unstrapping his skis. ‘By the way, you all know each other, don't you? Miss Forbes, and Mir—I can't remember all your names, Mir.'

The tall Indian laughed. ‘One is sufficient. But we have all met before.'

‘Speaking for myself, very painfully,' said Ian Kelly. ‘I cannoned into Mir coming down Red Run two years ago and I'm still black and blue. Where did you learn to ski, Mir? Up here?'

‘No, in Austria, and then in Italy. I had not skied up here before this year. It is good snow.'

‘Best in the world!' asserted that loyal Secretary of the Ski Club, Reggie Craddock. ‘By the way, I'm thinking of doing a run to the Frozen Lakes tomorrow morning. Five-thirty start. Anyone coming with me? What about you, Janet?'

‘No thanks. Too much of a slog. I feel like idling for a change.'

‘I will go,' said Mir Khan, ‘and so will Ian. It will do him good. He is putting on weight. Two years ago he was a gazelle—a fawn!'

‘Ah youth! youth!' sighed Mr Kelly. ‘I was young then—at least nineteen. All right, I'll martyr myself. Coming with us, Sarah?'

‘I'll think about it,' said Sarah. ‘Come on, Janet, let's see if anyone's got the lamps lit and the stove going. I'm frozen.'

The door closed behind them and within minutes the last gleam of daylight faded from off the mountain tops. Stars glittered frostily in the cold sky, and far away, beyond the towering peak of Nanga Parbat, a flicker of lightning licked along the ranges. But overhead the sky was clear and cloudless, and paling to the first pallid glow of the rising moon.

The interior of the ski-hut was partitioned into three sections: a living-room with a men's dormitory leading off from it to the left and a women's dormitory to the right. A double tier of bunks ran round three sides of each dormitory wall; fourteen bunks to each room, with an additional three bunks in the living-room in case of need. But the days when the ski-hut could be filled to capacity had gone, and Reggie Craddock had been both surprised and pleased at being able to muster the handful who now replaced the thirty-one of earlier years.

Fudge Creed, who was engaged in drying socks at the iron stove that stood in the middle of the women's half, welcomed Sarah and Janet with enthusiasm, and dropping her voice to a feverish whisper said: ‘My dears! Thank heavens you've come: another ten minutes and I should have sunk through the floor. I never realized before how lowly are my antecedents, and how few, if any, of the right people I know. I don't believe there is a single peer whom I can call by his first name—let alone his nickname!'

Janet burst out laughing and looked at once younger and less anxious. ‘Helen, I suppose! Where is she?'

‘Having her skis waxed next door.'

‘I thought I heard female voices from the men's side as we came through. All most reprehensible!'

‘Ssh!'
warned Sarah. ‘Here comes your little chum.' But it was not Helen Warrender who pushed open the door and entered, but Meril Forbes: a colourless young woman in every meaning of the word, who despite an over-abundance of freckles might have been quite pretty had it not been for the hunted expression she habitually wore. Meril had the misfortune to be an orphan and to possess, as her sole relative and guardian, an elderly and autocratic aunt who lived more or less permanently in Kashmir. If she had ever possessed any character or will of her own, it had long ago been submerged in the strong waters of her aunt's personality, for Lady Candera was one of those domineering old ladies who employ outspokenness to the point of rudeness as a form of social power politics, and are feared and deferred to in consequence.

‘Hello, Meril,' said Janet, sitting down on the floor before the stove, and tugging off her boots. ‘Glad to see you were able to come up for the meeting after all. I thought I heard something of your not being able to make it. What happened? Aunt Ena suffer a change of heart?'

Meril's face flushed faintly under its powdering of freckles. ‘Something like that,' she admitted. ‘First she said she wouldn't hear of it, and then suddenly she told me I could go.'

‘If I were you, I'd take a chopper to the old pest,' advised Janet candidly. ‘No jury would convict. You've got a sweet, kind nature, Meril; that's your trouble. What you need is to get roaring drunk and recite the Declaration of Independence to your aged aunt.'

Meril Forbes smiled wanly. ‘She's been very good to me on the whole, you know. I mean, if it hadn't been for her, I should have had nobody. She's done a lot for me.'

‘Oh well,' said Janet, getting up, ‘as long as you feel like that about it. What do you suppose there is for supper? I've had nothing but some sandwiches since breakfast.'

‘I can tell you,' said Fudge, with some satisfaction: ‘Mutton broth and stew. Both good—I made 'em. Lots of coffee—me again. And lemon cheese-cakes sent up by the hotel. What do you suppose I've been doing while you three were frivolling around the snow-slopes with your boy-friends? Cooking the supper—that's wot!'

‘Bless you. I had visions of having to do it myself. Let's go and knock the stuffing out of it without delay.'

The remainder of the party were already gathered about the stove in the living-room, sipping cautiously at a weird concoction of hot rum, lemon, and various other mysterious ingredients procured and manufactured by Johnnie Warrender.

‘Ah—
les
girls!' exclaimed Johnnie, waving a steaming glass. ‘Come and try a snort of this, darlings. Just the thing to keep out the cold. A “Hell's Belle”—that's what they're called. Jolly good name, too, hell's bells!' He laughed uproariously. It was evident that Johnnie was already ‘well on the way'—a not unusual condition for him. Sarah accepted a glass and retired with it to the farther end of the room where she sat sipping it gingerly and observing her fellow-guests with interest; in particular, Johnnie's wife, Helen, who was talking to Mir Khan and Reggie Craddock.

The other women in the party were wearing slacks and woollen pullovers, as were the men. But Helen Warrender, alone of the party, had brought a more exotic change of clothes for the occasion: a smartly draped wool dress, low-necked and short-sleeved, in a vivid shade of emerald green. Her silk-clad legs ended in green shoes with rhinestone buckles, and there were a pair of large rhinestone clips at the neck of her dress, and matching ones on her ears.

This was another woman who, like Meril, could have been pretty, perhaps even beautiful, if her face had not been marred by its expression: in her case one of chronic boredom and discontent that no amount of cleverly applied make-up could conceal. A lavish use of lipstick failed to disguise the bitterness of the sullen mouth or the downward droop of its corners, while the glittering, scarlet nail-polish that she favoured only seemed to emphasize the restlessness of the hands that fidgeted ceaselessly with an endless chain of cigarettes, lit one from the other and thrown away half smoked.

All in all, decided Sarah, Mrs Warrender struck a strident and incongruous note on the rough-and-ready surroundings of the ski-hut. A note as artificial and out of place as the rhinestone ornaments that twinkled and flashed in the smoky light from the kerosene lamps.

The room was very hot, and the waves of heat from the crude iron stove, allied to the thick haze of cigarette smoke, the babble of voices and the fumes of Johnnie's ‘Hell's Belle', combined to make Sarah very sleepy, and as soon as possible after the meal, although it was still barely past nine o'clock she retired, yawning, to her bunk.

The others were not long in following her example, for they had risen early and it had been a long and healthily tiring day. Moreover, the best skiing tomorrow would be before breakfast while the snow was still crisp and dry from the night frost. By ten o'clock the last oil lamp had been extinguished and the ski-hut was dark and quiet.

It must have been an hour before midnight when Sarah awoke, for the moon was well clear of the heights above Khilanmarg, and its cold clear light, intensified by the glittering wastes of snow, lent a queer luminous quality to the darkness in the little ski-hut.

She lay still for a minute or two, gazing out at the shadowy, unfamiliar outlines of the narrow room with its dimly seen tier of bunks, and listening to the muffled and rhythmical rumble of snores proceeding from the other side of the partition, where Mr Reginald Craddock was presumably sleeping on his back. A wandering breath of wind from Apharwat soughed under the snow-hung eaves and whispered its way across the empty white levels, and down in the pine forest a branch cracked sharply, breaking under the weight of snow.

A moment later that distant sound was repeated from somewhere inside the hut. And of a sudden the darkness thinned, and Sarah found herself looking at the clear outlines of the little iron stove which less than an instant before had been a dark blur. A second later she realized why this was so: someone had opened the hut door.

For a moment or two she lay still, listening. But beyond that sudden creak of a hinge there was no further sound, and she sat up cautiously and peered out over the edge of her bunk.

There was only one entrance to the ski-hut, and that was by the door that led into the living-room. But the inner door between the women's side and the living-room was open; and so also was the outer door of the hut, for the living-room was bright with moonlight and by its reflected glow Sarah could just see the faintly snoring bundle in the next bunk that was Meril Forbes.

The bunk beyond it was Janet's, but it was empty, and the reflected light from the open doorway of the room beyond showed the tumbled blankets and glinted faintly on the sides of the little stove. And suddenly, horribly, Sarah remembered again that line of footprints on the empty verandah, and the way the light had glinted along the barrel of the little automatic in Janet Rushton's hand …

The next moment she was out of bed and thrusting her feet into her ski-boots. Pulling her heavy coat off the bunk, she dragged it about her shoulders, and was at the door and across the living-room, and looking out into the night. Something moved against the wall of the ski-hut, and as a shadow blotted the gleaming brightness of the snow she said,
‘Janet!'
in a gasp of relief.

The shadow checked, and Janet's voice said in a sharp whisper: ‘Sarah! What on earth are you doing out here? Get back at once before you catch pneumonia!'

‘I heard the door creak when you went out,' explained Sarah between chattering teeth. ‘It woke me up, and when I looked out of my bunk and saw you weren't there I was afraid something had happened.'

She wriggled her arms into the sleeves of her coat, and buttoning it up about her stepped out into the snow, and as an after-thought, turned and very quietly closed the door: there was no necessity to wake others in the hut. The hinge creaked faintly again, and the latch fell into place with a soft click.

Janet Rushton was leaning against the wall of the hut, strapping on her skis. She was fully clothed and wore a neat dark skiing cap tied over her yellow curls, and a thick woollen muffler about her throat. She sang softly, just under her breath, as she tugged at the stiff straps and buckles: an old tune that Sarah had heard the dance bands play on the radio and at dances in wartime England—how long ago?

‘The moonlight and the moon,

And every gay and lovely tune that's played for you,

Were made for you.

The Summer and the Spring,

And that golden wedding ring,

Were only made for you,'

sang Miss Rushton.