Death in the Andamans (10 page)

That last was certainly true, for the house had a guard from the British Detachment on duty day and night, as well as a permanent guard of Indian Police. Every bathroom in the house had a small outside staircase leading to the ground for the use of servants and sweepers, and at night one of the police guard slept at the foot of each staircase, while as an additional precaution, electric lights burned from dusk to dawn in the garden; one at each corner of the house. But Copper did not feel capable of explaining that the sense of unease that the house gave her was in no way connected with anything that might make its way in from outside, but rather with an almost tangible unfriendliness that the big rooms held in themselves.

They had barely finished making the beds when Mrs Stock arrived, muffled in a dripping mackintosh and supported by the anxious Leonard. Valerie led the way into the spare bedroom, and Mrs Stock, waving aside Copper's proffered arm, tottered across the room and collapsed in a damp heap upon one of the newly made beds. ‘Leave me alone!' she commanded fretfully. ‘I don't want
anything.
I only want to go to bed. And don't
fuss
me, Leonard! I shall be quite all right if I'm left alone!'

A belated remnant of social poise returned to her, and she turned to Valerie: ‘So good of you to have me, dear. I don't know
what
I should have done. The house is in
ruins,
and Leonard has done nothing … and after that terrible,
terrible
experience…! I shall never be the same again. Never! No — I'd rather have dinner in bed.
Please go!
' This last was nearer an order than a request, and Copper and Valerie, murmuring helpful suggestions about sending in hot soup and brandy, backed hastily out of the room.

‘That's odd,' commented Valerie, surprised. ‘I imagined that we were in for the dramatic story of her sufferings, told in minute detail. Oh well, I expect we shall get it tomorrow.'

‘There's Nick,' cried Copper suddenly, hearing a voice in the lower hall. She ran across the ballroom and leant over the banisters, listening.

The stairhead posts in the upper hall had been carved by some long-dead Burmese convict, once an artist at the bloodstained court of Thebaw, into the form of gigantic slant-eyed faces with wide, grinning mouths, like the masks of Burmese devil-dancers, one of which, at the top of the stairs, Valerie had christened ‘Hindenburg'. Copper had slipped one arm about it as she peered below, and Nick Tarrent, standing in the lower hall, glanced up and for a brief second suffered a savage shock of fear, for it seemed to him as he looked upward into Copper's white, anxious face that someone stood beside her. Someone whose dark, malignant features peered out of the shadows over her shoulder and grinned in evil anticipation.

The impression was so vivid that he had opened his mouth to cry a warning when he realized that the lurking terror was nothing more than a carved block of Burmese teak. But the momentary stab of fear had shown in his face, and Copper's voice held an added edge of alarm: ‘Nick! — are you all right?'

Nick's relief made him laugh. ‘Yes, of course. A bit damp, but still in possession of life and limb. Charles took us along to his quarters to have a bath and a change. Luckily he and I are about the same size. Dan shoved himself comfortably into a suit of George's, but you should see old Shilto! — every button and seam working overtime.'

‘Where's Charles?' inquired Valerie, joining Copper by the banisters.

‘Just arriving. In fact, here's the rearguard now. George and I got off to a flying start.'

Charles, Dan Harcourt, John Shilto and Hamish Rattigan, followed shortly afterwards by the Purvises and Amabel, came in from the wet, wild night, and mounting the stairs, joined Valerie and Copper in the verandah where drinks and salted nuts had been set out. ‘The Dobbies aren't coming,' announced Charles. ‘Mrs Dobbie is still feeling seasick. They sent their apologies.'

The verandah looked cheerful enough with its gay, chintz-covered chairs and sofas. But outside the rain lashed savagely against the big glass windows that closed it in, while sudden vicious gusts of wind rattled at the hinges and wailed about the house; moaning, whispering, tapping to be let in; screaming like a host of banshees or sighing like a small, lost, lonely ghost …

Valerie stopped mixing short drinks and put down the cocktail-shaker with a thump: ‘This is too miserable for words,' she said. ‘Charles, help me move these things into the drawing-room. The further away we are from the wind and the windows, the cosier we'll be. All those black, wet panes of glass give me the shivers.'

Charles and John Shilto carried the table of drinks between them, and the party moved gratefully into the more cheerful atmosphere of the drawing-room where the sound of rain and wind was less obtrusive. But Copper laid a hand on Nick's sleeve and stopped him as he was about to follow them: ‘Nick … what happened? We were terribly worried about you.'

‘We?' inquired Nick with the ghost of a grin.

‘I,' corrected Copper gravely. ‘We were only half-way home when the storm hit us, and I was convinced you'd be drowned.'

‘Your conviction was shared,' said Nick lightly. ‘To tell you the truth, Coppy, I thought we were done for, and I still can't make out how we all managed to get away with it.'

‘Not all,' said Copper with a shiver.

‘You mean Ferrers? Oh, he'll be all right. Probably been picked up by now, if he hasn't swum ashore.'

His tone was light enough, but he avoided Copper's eyes and she flushed resentfully: ‘Don't talk to me as if I was in the kindergarten, Nick! You know he hasn't got a chance, don't you?'

Nick shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well — yes. I'm afraid he's done for all right, poor devil. God, what a jolly Christmas Eve!'

‘Tell me what happened to you,' commanded Copper, perching on the arm of a verandah chair and clasping her hands about her knees.

Nick hesitated for a moment and jerked his shoulders uncomfortably as if to shrug off an unpleasant memory. Then, ‘It was the queerest thing I've ever experienced,' he said. ‘We heard it coming. It made a noise like an express train in a tunnel, rushing towards us; very faint at first, but getting nearer and quicker and louder. And then it hit us as though it were something solid made of reinforced concrete. We hadn't time to think and barely time to get the sail down. It caught us broadside on and just flattened us out. One minute we were pegging along in a flat calm, and the next second we were in the water with all hell let loose round us …

‘We tried to count heads, and as far as I know everyone was O.K. Then the rain arrived, and after that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. The boats kept bumping into each other, bottom-side up, and the sky was pitch black and the rain ricocheted off the water in a boiling fury. There wasn't anything to do but just hang on like grim death. I don't know where everyone else had got to, but I managed to get Ruby astride the keel of my boat, and I think someone else was hanging on to the other end, though I've no idea who it was. And there we stuck for what seemed like an hour or so, until the forest-launch bumped into us and nearly slaughtered the lot of us.'

‘But hadn't you all drifted apart by then?' inquired Copper.

‘Oddly enough, no. I'd an idea that we'd be picked up at opposite sides of the bay, but I gather we weren't more than twenty feet apart when the launch found us. Though even then Hamish's boat took a bit of finding; we must have passed her a dozen times without spotting her. It was only when we'd got everyone on board that we realized Ferrers was missing.'

‘But didn't anyone see him go?'

Nick gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘No. And it's not surprising, with three boats all barging about in the smother and everyone concentrating on sticking like a limpet to the nearest bit of woodwork. Ronnie Purvis says he thought he was on the end of my boat, but the chap on the launch says he thinks he only pulled in Ruby and myself and that there wasn't a third person with us. So you can see how easy it would have been to lose sight of Ferrers.'

Copper shivered, and said: ‘He probably got caught under the boat when it turned over, and never came up at all.'

Nick shook his head. ‘He came up all right, because he was one of the first people I remember seeing when I came to the surface. He was hanging on to the next boat, and I remember noticing, in the silly way that one does notice unimportant trifles in moments of stress, that he was wearing a clumsy great garnet ring about the size of a sixpence. His boat bumped into ours just before the rain came, and he was holding on to the centre-board with one hand. I thought for a minute that he'd cut himself. And then I saw that it wasn't blood but a red stone.'

‘What wasn't blood?' inquired an interested voice from behind them.

Nick turned swiftly and smiled into Valerie's inquiring face: ‘Nothing, Val. Just idle chatter.'

Valerie said: ‘Then for Pete's sake come and chatter in the drawing-room! The party is being very sticky, and I can't imagine why anyone turned up. I know if I'd spent an hour or so being soaked in the bay I'd have insisted on going straight to bed. Even Rosamund is looking a bit on edge, and everyone else is frankly bad-tempered. So come in and pull your weight. Hullo, here's Dad.'

‘I'm sorry to be so late,' said Sir Lionel, entering upon Valerie's words: ‘I'm afraid, Val, that none of your other guests will be able to get here. The ferry can't run, and Norton has gone back with the forest-launch, so he won't be here either.'

‘That's all right,' said Valerie. ‘I realized that no one else would be able to make it. We were really only waiting for you and Dr Vicarjee and Truda and Frank.'

Vicarjee was the Bengali doctor, Miss Truda Gidney the matron and only European nurse in the small hospital on Ross, and Frank Benton the Commissioner's personal assistant.

‘In that case,' said Sir Lionel, ‘we can go into dinner, because Vicarjee and Benton went out shooting together and are stranded in Aberdeen and can't get back, and Miss Gidney sent a message to say that both hospital ayahs had leave today and are in the same predicament, so she doesn't think she should leave.'

‘Poor old Truda,' said Valerie. ‘I wouldn't have her conscience for the world. Fancy having to spend a night like this in an empty hospital, without even a patient to keep you company? No one's sick just now, so she might just as well have come. But I can see her point. Well, if no one else is coming, we may as well go into dinner. Come on, Rosamund, you must be starving.'

She took Mrs Purvis's arm and led the way into the dining-room.

8

Dinner that night was not a cheerful meal. There had not been time to order the removal of the superfluous chairs or to rearrange the seating, and the vacant places lent a gloomy air to the long, gaily-decorated table.

Valerie had ruefully bidden her guests to disregard the place cards and to sit where they liked, and the depleted Christmas Eve party huddled together at one end of the table, sitting close to each other as though in need of mutual comfort and support. But in spite of the artificial sprays of holly, the glittering strings of tinsel and the mounds of gaily-coloured crackers that lay piled on the white cloth, a proper Christmas spirit was noticeably lacking, and conversation plodded heavily through a bog of social trivialities with frequent halts in miry patches of silence.

If only, thought Valerie despairingly for at least the fourth time during the meal, Leonard wouldn't break every silence by saying brightly,
‘It must be twenty past — an angel's passing!'…
I wonder who invented that idiotic saying anyway? If he says it again I shall scream! She sighed heavily, and pushed a piece of plum pudding around her plate with a moody fork, while somewhere behind her in the shadowy depths of the ballroom a monotonous little
drip, drip, drip,
told her that the rain had discovered a weak joint in the armour of the roof tiles, and that the first of a series of small, gleaming pools was in process of forming on the polished wood floors of the living rooms.

The house leaked abominably in wet weather, and Valerie thought resentfully of the array of bowls and pails that would presently litter the floors and lie in wait to entrap the feet of the unwary, and beckoned reluctantly over her shoulder to a servant who padded forward on noiseless feet and having received a low-voiced order vanished in the direction of the pantry. Presently the dull drip of water on wood changed to the small, metallic
plink
of water dripping into an enamelled bowl, and on the far side of the table Copper abandoned her methodical manufacture of bread pellets and lifted her head sharply: ‘Listen — the leaks have started. Now I suppose we shall have to go to bed in a swamp. I wonder if Kadera has remembered to move my bed? The last time it rained, a vindictive leak dripped right on to my pillow and I dreamt I was bathing — and woke up to find that I was.'

Valerie laughed and turned to Mr Shilto who was sitting on her right: ‘Is your house as bad as this one, Mr Shilto? The last time it rained we had so many leaks that we might just as well have been living under a sieve.'

But her effort at making light conversation fell on stony ground, for Mr Shilto, who had been staring with blank fixity into the darkness beyond the candlelit table, neither turned his head nor shifted his gaze, and Valerie realized suddenly that he had not spoken since the beginning of the meal and did not know she had spoken to him now. I suppose he's bound to be a bit distrait, she thought, curbing an unexpectedly strong feeling of irritation, after all, his cousin has just been drowned, and even though they were on bad terms with each other, sudden death is always pretty shocking.

Not, she had to admit, that there was anything to suggest shock in John Shilto's pale, puffy face. It wore, if anything, a look of gloating excitement, and it flashed into her mind that he had at that moment an odd look of Kioh, her stepfather's Siamese cat, when she was stalking a bird or a lizard. Becoming aware that she was staring at him, fascinated, she spoke hurriedly and at random: ‘The last time it rained, there were so many leaks that we ran out of pails and basins and had to start on the cups and saucers. The P.W.D. are always promising to get it put right, but you know how it is with them. They talk a lot, but nothing
ever
happens!'