The Damascened Blade (3 page)

Unaware of the plans that were being made for her future, Lily Coblenz sat amongst the debris of empty glasses, ashtrays and discarded buttonholes as the ball drew to its conclusion. An ADC appeared at her elbow. ‘Sir George,’ he said deferentially, ‘would be delighted if he might have the next dance.’

Instantly Lily sparked up into complete wakefulness. ‘Tell Sir George,’ she said graciously, ‘that I too would be delighted!’

She tried not to hear the sigh of relief with which Edward Dalrymple-Webster greeted this; she tried not to hear Nick Carstairs’ ‘Get me a brandy, Neddy. God knows I’ve earned it!’ and with a courteous smile she allowed the ADC to escort her to Sir George’s table.

Sir George watched the young woman weaving her way around the dance floor towards him. Damned little nuisance she might be but she certainly had style. He compared her confident carriage and elegant get-up with that of the other women present – mostly military and civil service wives. In her slender cream silk dress, its simplicity relieved only by a rope of black pearls (a gift, it was rumoured, from a susceptible nabob), she made the others in their pink satins, mauve tulles and raspberry chiffons look like a box of bonbons, he thought. ‘Well coupled up, short back . . .’ He appraised her for a moment and added, ‘Nice mover!’

‘Ah!’ he said expansively, rising to his feet as she approached. ‘You are the most elusive young woman, do you know that? I’ve been the whole evening trying to attract your attention – trying to hack my way through the throng of admirers. When you get to my age you don’t expect preferential treatment.’

‘Sir George,’ said Lily firmly, ‘you don’t fool
me
! I’ve been trying to catch your eye the whole evening so it seems that we have at last both achieved our heart’s limited desire!’

George had noticed that the girl’s language veered between the two extremes of Edith Wharton heroine and Zane Grey ranch-hand. Tonight it seemed the Edith Wharton heroine was on parade and he was grateful for that.

The band moved smoothly from a foxtrot into the waltz from
The Merry Widow
. ‘Just about my pace,’ said Sir George comfortably, slipping a practised and surprisingly muscular arm around her shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said cheerfully, ‘how much trouble this dotty idea of yours has landed me in! You can’t imagine how close I have come to saying on more than one occasion, “Quite out of the question,” because that’s what everybody’s been saying. But I’ll cut a long story short – you leave for Peshawar tomorrow. By train. You’ll be up there for a week and then you’ll be back here again. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ll be
pleased
to see you but I will certainly be
relieved
to see you.’

Delighted, but not surprised to have got her own way, Lily favoured him with a flirty toss of the head and a knowing glance. ‘My! Your sweet talk, Sir George, fairly makes my head spin!’

With dignity they stepped on to the floor together and Sir George resumed, ‘There will be two companies of Scouts whose role is exclusively to look after you! And, further, I have arranged for you to come under the direct care and supervision of a policeman. A London policeman.’

Lily stopped in mid-swirl. ‘Scouts? A London bobby? Sir George, what is this?’ she said with suspicion. ‘Are you going to add a London nanny and a Yeoman of the Guard too? I don’t like the sound of this! Is it meant to put me off? Because I warn you – it won’t!’

Sir George laughed. ‘Don’t get the wrong impression! When I say “Scouts”, I’m not talking about little boys in knee pants doing their best to be prepared! I’m talking about the irregular forces which man the frontiers of Empire in this part of the world. Pathan other ranks, British officers . . . very tough men indeed! Best shots in the British Army, best horsemen too. They can run thirty miles under a hot sun, barrampta a village and be back in time for tiffin.’

‘Carrying a mule on their back?’ said Lily, unimpressed. ‘If they were Texas Rangers they could!’

Sir George cleared his thoat and swept her into a tight reverse turn. ‘At all events you’ll find they’re very businesslike. They won’t stand any nonsense!’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Lily apprehensively.

‘I mean what you’re afraid I mean. They won’t let
you
get away with anything and you’ll have to do what you’re told. Is that understood?’

‘What I’m told? Who’s going to tell me?’

‘The man I just mentioned, the, er, the London bobby as you call him. The man I’m putting in charge of the whole security operation. He’s an officer from Scotland Yard who just happens to be up in those parts.’

‘Scotland Yard?’ For a terrible moment a vision appeared before Lily of a helmeted, confidential, fatherly London Sergeant of Police, possibly with a restraining pair of handcuffs in his back pocket. ‘What’s the good of that? You folks have been lining up to tell me this frontier is wilder than the Wild West. What would I do with a bobby out there? I know about bobbies. He’ll be armed with nothing more than his night stick! . . . This isn’t going to be a stroll down Piccadilly, you know!’ Lily was pleased to return in a starched English accent a phrase she had heard addressed to herself several times over the past few days.

‘This chap is quite a – ah – quite what
you’d
call “a tough guy”. He’s Commander Joseph Sandilands, DSO, Royal Scots Fusiliers, ex-Military Intelligence.’ Sir George smiled at a happy thought. ‘Joe Sandilands halted the advance of the Prussian Guard for four hours. Single-handed. So – with the aforementioned companies of Scouts, of course – he should be a match for
you
!’

Chapter Three

Joe Sandilands sat at ease. The day had been spent in the company of a Scouts’ patrol which he had learned to call a ‘gasht’. He couldn’t remember when he’d more enjoyed a day – a day spent happily in all-male company. He’d watched with admiration the meticulous precautions and the well-drilled routine. He’d admired the camaraderie between all ranks and now, at the end of the day, admired and appreciated the comforts of the fort. He was very glad to have a double gin, he was looking forward to a second. Shamefacedly he was glad to take off his boots and wished he was equipped with a pair of chaplis, the stout nailed sandals the Scouts and their officers wore. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and thought a pair of sun goggles would have been welcome.

Hungry, he wondered what was for dinner and if he had time for a swim in the large concrete tank which did duty for a swimming pool. His friend James Lindsay, having dismissed the gasht, came up to join him. ‘Better slip along to the office, Joe, before you seize up – it seems there’s a cable for you. Let me just finish here and then we’ll meet for a swim. Dinner at half-past seven or thereabouts.’

And, unsuspecting, Joe went to read his cable. It was long. It ran to several pages. It was perhaps predictably from Sir George Jardine. It was friendly, it was colloquial, it was lengthy, it was unequivocal. It told him that he’d been awarded the job of looking after a demanding, irresponsible, independently minded, fabulously wealthy and totally infuriating American heiress. ‘She’s coming out from Peshawar tomorrow and you’re to welcome Miss Coblenz to the fort and show her something of the North-West Frontier, Joe. Bit of local colour and excitement, you know the sort of thing. She’s looking for an experience I understand is no longer available to adventurers even in the wilder parts of her own largely now civilized country. She tells me she can “shoot like Wyatt Earp and ride like an Apache” – I wonder where she read that? – so I think it will be a sound idea to keep her well away from both guns and horses. As far as that’s possible in a frontier fort, of course.’

Dumb with horror, Joe slumped on the edge of the tank, a towel round his shoulders and this terrible document in his hand, and here he was joined by James Lindsay who eyed him with curiosity.

‘What’s the matter, Joe? A further round of dizzying promotion? Knight Commander of the Star of the Indian Empire?’

It had been three years since they had last met but time had changed neither man and they had picked up their easy friendship without the slightest hesitation, a friendship based not only on shared memory and shared background but on something less overt, less explainable, amounting perhaps to an ability to catch each other’s thoughts and moods with ease. It had not been a friendship either had expected or worked towards; it seemed to have announced itself from their first meeting.

They had met on the Western Front. James’s mind went back to that pit of horror under the ridge at Passchendaele and his commanding officer’s words: ‘Royal Scots Fusiliers should be coming into the line on your right. Your first job is to get in touch with
them
. I can’t give you any more men, you’ll have to do the best you can with what you have. Don’t know anything about these chaps . . . Borderers . . . Lowlanders . . . Sweepings of Glasgow . . . But they’re probably all right. Look, lead this yourself. Leave Bill in command and work your way over to the right until you hit something solid. I can’t say more than that but – good luck! Here – before you go, have a swig of this!’ And he passed across probably the most welcome drink in James’s life. A silver flask in a leather case from – he noticed – Swaine, Adeney & Briggs of London but now filled with Glenfiddich, a touch of reassuring London elegance in the mud and stink.

Thus reinforced, at the head of a section, slipping, swearing and wading through the mud, he had set off into the darkness into the shower of mortar bombs and, leprously lit by flares, hoping as he turned each corner in the traverse to encounter the relieving Fusiliers, he saw at last the stolid figure of a sentry standing on the fire step. James greeted him as he turned the corner. ‘Are you the Scots?’ But there was no reply. He went forward and shook the man by the elbow. Faithful unto death, perhaps, but dead. James’s torch illuminated a haggard face, dead for some time. But at this unpropitious moment there was at last the sound of fresh voices, there was the sticky tramp of muddy boots, and a man came into view.

James’s torch caught a familiar cap badge and dwelt for a second on the identifying thistle and the swaggering motto –
Nemo me impune lacessit
. ‘No one provokes me and gets away with it!’ James translated and smiled as, below the cap, the light picked up black curling hair, dazzled dark eyes in a lean and smoke-blackened face, the flash of white teeth bared in a grimace against the glare of the torch. ‘Can’t say I haven’t been warned!’ James thought.

What do you say to a total stranger in a place like this? What James did say, extending a dirty hand was, ‘You’re a long way from the Borders?’

‘Bugger the Borders!’ came the reply. ‘And put that bloody torch down!’

That was all they had time to say because at that moment a German mortar bomb came lumbering over the line, ricocheted from the parapet and fell straight into the trench some yards away. They dug each other out and spent the rest of that campaign fighting shoulder to shoulder and sometimes back to back, both amazed to have survived. James, the bolder of the two, came through the war unscathed. Joe, the more calculating and more careful of life whether his own or that of his men, did not. A head wound put Joe out of action for a while but not out of the war. His injury chanced to coincide with the virtual collapse of the Russian front. Bolshevik infiltration of Imperial Russian units was detected and people began to say, ‘If it can happen to them it can happen to the Indian units on the Western Front. The Jerries are nothing if not skilled propagandists, you know.’ And Joe found himself moved out of the shooting war and pushed in at the spearhead of the Military Intelligence operation to identify and counter the infiltration. His quick wits, his language skills and personal knowledge of the battle arena brought him success and esteem and his abilities had not gone unremarked when, after the war, he had decided to join the police force.

James had spoken lightly but, truly, he was curious to know the secret of his old friend’s rapid promotion to his present eminence in the police force. He remembered the derision with which he and other friends had greeted Joe’s decision to leave the army and become a policeman. ‘’ullo, ’ullo, ’ullo! Wot’s all this ’ere, then?’ they would say whenever they met Joe, and James had admired the patience with which Joe had received these sallies.

‘Promotion?’ said Joe, reading the cable again. ‘Quite the reverse! It would appear I’ve been demoted to escort duties! Army Nanny? Military Gigolo? Not sure . . . What do you make of this?’

Silently Joe handed the cable to James. ‘Just read this rubbish and use your wits. How the hell do I get out of this? Sir George! God Almighty! After the last round I thought he was my friend!’

‘He is your friend. He’s everybody’s friend. Yours, mine, intimate friend of every scoundrel, eyes in the back of his head, a finger in every pie and a foot in both camps, shouldn’t wonder. But he obviously has an especially high opinion of
you
. It’s no secret, I think, that you were of considerable help to him down in Bengal. Cleared up that series of killings. Your reputation stretches to the limits of Empire, you see!’

Joe snorted.

‘Got your man, didn’t you?’

‘The case was concluded successfully in the eyes of the establishment,’ said Joe carefully. ‘And that’s as much as I can say, even to you, James. My hands were tied with red tape and I was gagged with a wad of moral blackmail. The Empire was served but not Justice.’

‘Oh, I say! Less said, the better, eh? And then he sent you off up to the Simla hills to cool off?’

‘Ostensibly. He shot me straight into a year-old unsolved murder that had been nagging at him and this was followed the minute I arrived by a second similar killing. Before you ask – yes, I solved that one too. Though “solved” is perhaps an overstatement. The killer is known to me and to Sir George but, the demands of diplomacy perpetually overriding those of justice in India, I’m afraid there’s a murderer still at large in the country.’

‘That wouldn’t suit Honest Joe!’