Death in Kashmir (9 page)

She fastened the last strap, and straightening up, pulled on a pair of fur-lined skiing-gloves and picked up her ski-sticks. In the clear moonlight Sarah could see that her eyes were sparkling and she looked young and gay again, and as if a heavy load had been lifted from her shoulders.

‘What are you up to?' demanded Sarah. ‘What's happened, Janet? Where are you going?' Her whisper was sharp in the stillness.

‘Hush! You'll wake the others. Come over here.' The snow crunched crisply under their feet as they moved out into the moonlight and away from the shadows of the ski-hut.

Janet said: ‘He's come, Sarah. He's come at last. Now everything will be all right and tomorrow I can go away from these horrible mountains and be free again. Look over there!'

She caught Sarah's arm and pointed with one gloved hand to where, far below them, the moonlight filled the bowl of Gulmarg with milky light.

‘What?' whispered Sarah. ‘I can't see anything.'

‘There, among the trees, to the left of the Gap.'

On the far side of Gulmarg, from among the furry blanket of the distant treetops that showed iron-grey in the moonlight, a single speck of light glowed like a minute red star in a stormy sky. A pin-point of warmth in the immensity of the cold, moonlit world that lay spread out before them.

‘I can see a speck of light, if that's what you mean,' whispered Sarah. ‘A red light.'

‘Yes, that's it. We've been waiting for that light for days. Ever since we came up here one or other of us would watch for it every night, and I'd begun to think it would
never
come. That's partly why I decided to stay the night up here—to tempt my luck. I knew that if it did I could see it from here just as well as from my room at the hotel. Perhaps better.'

Sarah said: ‘But what are you going to do? You can't go down there now.'

‘Of course I can. I'm a good skier. Better than almost anyone here. I can get there in under half an hour.'

‘Don't be absurd!' They had been speaking in whispers, but Sarah's voice rose perilously: ‘You'd never find your way through that forest by night.'

‘
Ssh!
You'll wake somebody. I'm not going that way: I'm going down Slalom Hill and the Blue Run. Reggie Craddock did it in ten minutes and I can do it in eight. After that I'll cut straight across the
marg.
Say another twenty minutes at most.'

‘Janet, you're mad. You can't do it! And you can't go by Blue Run. You heard what Reggie said about it—and–and——'

Janet laughed softly, her breath a white mist on the still air. ‘It's all right, Sarah. Don't look so horrified. I'll keep to the edge of the run, and I know the route like the back of my hand. Don't worry, there won't be a murderer waiting for me down there at this time of night, and I'll be back long before morning. If I'm not—if I'm delayed, I'll go straight back to the hotel instead and pretend I got up early for the run down. Tell the others that, will you, if I'm not back in time?'

Sarah said: ‘I can't let you go like this. Something—anything—might happen! Look, if you'll wait just a minute while I get my skis and put on a few clothes, I'll come with you.'

‘No. You're a grand girl Sarah, but you're not a good enough skier. You'd probably break your neck on that run, and that would hold me up.' She smiled at Sarah's anxious face. ‘I'm all right. Really I am. Look.'

She thrust her hand into a pocket of her ski-suit and drew out the little automatic. For a moment the moonlight winked and sparkled on the cold metal, and then she slipped it back again and fastened the pocket with a small steel zipper.

‘Do you mean to say you've been carrying that thing around in your pocket all day?' demanded Sarah, illogically shocked.

‘Not in my pocket: in its holster, here——' Janet patted her left armpit. ‘But I realized at the last minute that no one was going to notice a lump on my ski-suit at this time of night, so I took it out and put it in my pocket instead; easier to get at it there. Not that I shall need it tonight. Or ever, I hope. But I have to carry the whole works with me, because I daren't risk leaving it behind, for fear that some helpful tidy-upper like Meril comes across it and starts asking a whole floorful of agitated questions.'

Sarah said abruptly: ‘Janet, what do you get out of this?'

Janet paused, and her face in the moonlight was suddenly sober and thoughtful. After a moment she said slowly: ‘None of the things that most people work for. No great material rewards or public success. Excitement perhaps; but most of all, fear. Fear that makes you sick and cold and brainless and spineless.'

‘Then why——?'

‘My father,' said Janet, ‘was a famous soldier. And my grandfather and my great-grandfather. All my family have always been soldiers. But my eldest brother was killed on the Frontier in '36, and John died in Italy, and Jamie in a Japanese prison camp. I am the only one that's left, and this is my way of fighting. One has to do what one can. It isn't enough just to be patriotic.'

Sarah thought suddenly of another Englishwoman, long dead, who had faced a German firing-squad, and whose immortal words Janet Rushton had unconsciously paraphrased:
Patriotism is not enough.

She held out a hand. ‘Good luck, Janet.'

‘Thank you. You've been a brick, Sarah, and I'm terribly grateful. I wish I could show you how much I appreciate it.'

Sarah smiled at her; a companionable smile. ‘For a sensible girl,' she said, ‘you certainly talk an awful lot of rubbish. Take care of yourself.'

‘I will,' promised Janet. ‘Don't worry.'

She leant forward and swiftly, unexpectedly, kissed Sarah's cold cheek. The next moment, with a strong thrust of her ski-sticks and crisp swish of snow, she was gone—a dim, flying figure in the cold moonlight, dwindling away over the long falling levels of the snowfields to merge into the darkness of the forest. A shadow without substance.

Sarah turned away with a little shiver and made her way back to the hut: suddenly aware of the intense cold which had numbed her hands and feet and turned her cheeks to ice. Janet was right, she thought, shivering. I shall catch pneumonia—and serve me right!

The moonlight slanting over the deep, smooth snow on the ski-hut roof turned it to white satin, below which the log walls showed inky black with shadow. And the night was so quiet that Sarah could hear, like a whisper in an empty room, the far, faint mutter of thunder from behind the distant mountains of the Nanga Parbat range on the opposite side of the valley. But she had not taken more than two steps towards the hut when she heard another sound; one that was to remain with her and haunt her dreams for many a long night to come. The creak of a door hinge …

Sarah checked, staring. Frozen into immobility by the sight of the door that she had so recently closed. Someone must have eased it open while she talked with Janet in the snow, and was now closing it again—slowly and with extreme care—and presently she heard the faint click as the latch returned softly to its place. But it was a long time before she dared move, and standing in the icy moonlight she recalled, with a cold prickling of the scalp that had nothing to do with the night air, Janet's carelessly confident words of a few moments ago, when she had spoken of the Blue Run:
‘There won't be a murderer waiting down there for me at this time of night.'

Perhaps not. Perhaps because a murderer had been waiting here all the time. Close beside her under the snow-shrouded roof of the little dark ski-hut on Khilanmarg.

4

It was not until Reggie Craddock's alarm-clock announced with a deafening jangle that it was 5 a.m., and sounds of movements on the other side of the partition betokened the reluctant arising of Messrs Craddock, Kelly and Khan (the remainder of the party being impervious to the joys of predawn skiing), that Sarah at last fell into an uneasy sleep.

She had lain awake for hours, huddled shivering among the blankets in her narrow bunk. Listening to the monotonous rumble of snores that proceeded from the other side of the wall, and the snuffling breathing of Meril Forbes. And seeing again and again the stealthy closing of that door.

Someone had been standing there, watching and listening. And if it had merely been somebody roused from sleep, as she herself had been, surely they would have called out? In that bright moonlight it would have been impossible not to see Janet and herself, or fail to recognize them; and anyone who thought they heard voices and decided to investigate, would have hailed them. Besides … Sarah shivered again as she remembered that closing door: it had been eased shut so slowly, so very gently …

There were eleven people in the hut, including herself and Janet. But she could not eliminate any of them, because by the time she had plucked up the courage to move again and re-enter the hut, whoever had closed the door had had ample time to slip quietly back into their own bunk.

Sarah went over in her mind all she knew of the party gathered in the ski-hut.

There was Reggie Craddock, the Secretary of the Club: a stocky little man in the late thirties, who possessed a handful of cotton mills and a consuming passion for winter sports. He had served during the war with an Indian regiment and had only recently been demobbed, and having been born and spent the best part of his life in India, he was well known from one end to the other of that gregarious country. It seemed unlikely, on the face of it, that Mr Craddock of Craddock and Company, lately a member of the Bombay Grenadiers, would be employed in subversive activities or mixed up in murder.

Then there was Ian Kelly. Of Ian she knew a little more since he was a young man who liked to talk about himself, especially to pretty girls—in which connection it may be pointed out that Miss Sarah Parrish was a very pretty girl. But nothing he had told her had led her to believe that he could be in any way mixed up in espionage. In the first place, he had been dancing attendance on her throughout the day of Mrs Matthews' murder, and so could not conceivably have performed that deed himself. He had also, in the last year of the war, won an M C and been three times mentioned in dispatches. That in itself seemed to preclude the possibility of his being employed as a foreign agent.

Johnnie Warrender … There was very little she knew about Johnnie Warrender, beyond the fact that he possessed an irritating wife and apparently played—or had played—polo. She must ask Fudge about him. He seemed a pleasant enough person; wiry and restless, verging on the forties, and with an open-handed and hail-fellow-well-met disposition. His failing appeared to be drink, for hardly an evening passed without Johnnie getting what he himself described as ‘creditably illuminated', while his bar bill at the end of each month must have reached four figures in the local currency.

Mir Khan. Another unknown quantity. She had been introduced to Mir Khan by Ian Kelly during her first day in Gulmarg, but she had never had much speech with him. He was a friend of Reggie Craddock's, and Reggie appeared to have an enormous admiration for him. Though how much of this was due to the fact that Mir could out-ski Reggie any day of the week, and was reputed to be one of the finest shots in India, she did not know, since she was aware that her countrymen's attitude towards proficiency at games and sports was apt to cloud their judgement, and that provided a man could smite a ball farther, or with more accuracy, than his fellows, and could be counted upon to hit a sufficient amount of birds on the wing, they automatically voted him a ‘good chap' and pronounced him to be an ‘excellent feller' and ‘one of the best'.

Mir possessed these abilities to a marked degree; in addition to much charm of manner and a string of strange prefixes to his name that marked his affiliation to a princely house. He had been shooting snow-leopard beyond Gilgit, and had stopped off at Gulmarg for the Ski Club Meeting on his way south. But there was no reason to suppose, because he was popular and charming and friendly, that he was not also anti-British.

After all, thought Sarah, tossing in the darkness, it
is
his country and we
are
the ‘White Raj'—the conquerors, even though we're on the verge of quitting!
Was
it Mir Khan who had stood watching in the darkness from the hut door? Where had he been on the day that Mrs Matthews died? As far as she could remember, with Reggie Craddock and a party on the slopes beyond Khilan. All the same she put a mental query against Mir Khan …

That left only the Coply twins. Cheerful, charming, overflowing with good spirits, they had arrived in India at the tender age of eighteen, only a few months before the fall of an atom bomb on Hiroshima had ended the Second World War. To their disgust they had seen no active service, and this was to be their last leave in India before they left to join their regiment in Palestine.

Sarah would have dismissed them as possible suspects if it had not been for two things; both of which, under the present circumstances, she found a little disturbing. There was Russian blood in them, and they had been out skiing alone on the day of Mrs Matthews' death. Their father, now a General in the Indian Army, had married a White Russian, and the twins themselves were bilingual. Sarah had met Nadia Coply in Peshawar, and had written her down, with the cruelty of youth, as being fat and affected.

It was Nadia, a strong-minded woman, who was responsible for christening the twins Boris and Alexis, but time and a British public school had substituted Bonzo and Alec, and Bonzo and Alec they remained. Certainly Nadia, if her own stories could be trusted, had been a member of the old Russian nobility, for she was fond of relating with a wealth of dramatic detail how as a small child—‘and
so
beautiful'—she had sat upon the knee of the Tsar and been fed with bon-bons from a jewelled box. A woman with her antecedents would be hardly likely to have anything but enmity for the Communists. Still—there was Russian blood in the twins and they had been out alone together for most of the fatal Thursday.