Death in Kashmir (36 page)

‘No, there is that,' said Charles slowly. He went over to the nearest window and stared out into the moonlight: ‘It will be dawn in less than four hours.' He swung round on Sarah. ‘Have you got that gun?'

‘Yes,' said Sarah. ‘It's under my pillow, if you want to know.'

‘Good. Well you do just as you said. Lock yourself into your bedroom, and if you hear anyone move on the boat before morning, yell the roof off and don't hesitate to shoot.'

‘I know,' said Sarah: ‘I hear someone trying the bedroom door, and
“Bang!”
—I've shot the
mānji,
who was trying to bring me my morning tea. I hope you'll bail me out?'

Charles laughed. ‘I'll do that. We'll move you off this boat tomorrow, anyway. It's not worth the risk. I wouldn't leave you on it tonight if I hadn't got it under pretty close observation.'

‘You've
what?
' said Sarah. ‘You mean——?'

‘Oh, I've had some of our people watching this boat in shifts since this morning—I mean yesterday morning,' corrected Charles, glancing at his watch.

‘Where are they now?' asked Sarah, interested. ‘I didn't see anyone.'

‘You weren't meant to. One of them is keeping an eye on the approach from upstream and another from the bridge end, to keep a check on anyone who comes past here by water; and a couple of chaps are posted on the landward side. Anyone who looks as if they are coming towards this boat will be followed. I want to know the names of any intending visitors.'

‘Where are you going now?' asked Sarah. ‘Back to—back to the island?'

‘No. I've sent the boat back there. That's a job they can do better without me. I'll walk back to the Club from here.' He turned away, and Sarah accompanied him out onto the prow.

The night air was cool and fragrant after the stuffy atmosphere of the little houseboat drawing-room, and Charles walked down to the foot of the gangplank and stood there, peering into the shadows beyond the big chenar tree. He drew the torch out of his pocket and flashed the light briefly, twice, and a figure detached itself from the shadows fifty yards or so from the boat, where the willows grew thickest, and moved into the moonlight.

Sarah heard a faint rustle of footsteps on grass and presently a tall Indian stood at the foot of the gangplank. He wore a dark blanket wound about his shoulders and drawn over his head so that it threw a deep shadow over his features, and Sarah could only catch a gleam of eyes and teeth.

Charles spoke in a low voice in the vernacular and the other answered as softly.

‘Has anyone been near the boat?'

‘No one Sahib; save the
mānji
who has returned to the cookboat and is now asleep, and the big sahib who brought back the Miss-sahib's dog. There have been no others as yet, either from the water or the land.'

‘Remain then and watch. Now that the Miss-sahib has returned, allow no one to enter the boat before morning.'

The man saluted and withdrew noiselessly into the shadows and Charles turned and came back up the gangplank, and said: ‘Wait here, Sarah. I'm just going to take a look round the boat to see that the
mānji
hasn't left anything unlocked.'

He went away down the narrow duckboard that ran all round the outside of the boat on the level with the window-sills, trying each window and door as he passed, and disappeared round the far end. Presently he reappeared again from the opposite side having completed the circuit of the boat.

‘OK. Everything appears to be locked up safely. You'd better bolt this door too, just to be on the safe side.'

‘All right,' said Sarah slowly. She felt a sudden aversion to entering the stuffy atmosphere of the cramped and shuttered little boat in which Janet had lived and worked, and hidden her secret.

A bittern called from a reedbed on the far side of the backwater: a lonely, mournful cry. Sarah shivered, and seeing it Charles said: ‘You're quite sure you're all right? You don't think you'd better go over and ask Fudge and Hugo for a bed?'

‘No I don't,' said Sarah with asperity. ‘Good-night, Charles. I won't say “thank you for a lovely evening” because it's been the most gruesome evening I've ever spent, and I hope I never have another one like it. But thanks all the same.'

Charles smiled down at her, his face drawn and tired in the moonlight. He laid the back of his hand lightly against her cheek in a brief caressing gesture and said: ‘Go on in and let me hear you bolt the door,' and she turned away obediently and went in.

19

The bolt shot home and Sarah leant tiredly against the closed doors and listened to the sound of Charles's footsteps descending the gangplank.

The little boat rocked and creaked for a moment, and then steadied again and the silence flowed back once more.

Lager came pattering back into the room from some expedition into the darkened rooms at the other end of the boat and frisked about Sarah's feet, and she gathered him up into her arms and sat down in one corner of the shabby sofa, feeling very tired. Too tired for the effort of getting to bed, and yet not in the least sleepy.

Sitting huddled and relaxed, her chin resting on Lager's silky head, she remembered that she had told Charles that the night was so still that you could hear a pin drop. It had been true while he was beside her, but now that he was gone and she was alone the night seemed full of little sounds; the soft lap of water against the side of the boat, the scutter of a rat somewhere beneath the floorboards, the creak of a board contracting in the night air and the croak of frogs from among the lily-pads; Lager's gentle breathing, and the soft
click, clack
as the bead curtain in the doorway between the drawing-room and the dining-room swayed in a draught.

Slowly, very slowly, a queer sense of uneasiness stole into the cramped little room: a feeling of urgency and disquiet that was almost a tangible thing. It seemed to tiptoe nearer to Sarah and to stand at her elbow, whispering—prompting—prodding her tired brain into wakefulness and attention. As though, perhaps, Janet herself had entered the room and was trying to speak …

For a moment the feeling that someone—was it Janet?—was watching her was so vivid that Sarah jerked round and looked behind her. But the room was empty and there was no gap between the motionless folds of the cheap cotton curtains that shielded the dark squares of the window-panes and shut out the moonlit night.

But there was still something there that clamoured with a wordless persistence for attention, and Sarah's tired brain shrugged off its lethargy and was all at once alert and clear. She sat quite still; tense now, and very wide awake, staring about her.

The room was just the same, and nothing appeared to have been moved since she had left it. There were the chairs with their shabby cretonne covers and the sofa on which she sat. The over-ornamented tables with the dust of long years lingering in the endless crevices of their intricate carving, and the lines of tattered books and aged periodicals that leant limply against each other on the long wooden shelf that ran round the narrow room. A yellowing calendar dating from the restless, long-ago twenties still hung from a nail on the wall beside the carved walnut-wood desk, and the time-worn Axminster carpet that had been made in some murky factory of Edwardian England, and travelled ten thousand miles from the loom of its birth to end its days on the floor of a houseboat on the Dāl Lake among the mountains of Kashmir, still spread its faded reds and blues under her feet … That carpet could tell a tale, thought Sarah, gazing down at its worn surface.
‘The teller of tales threads his bright words as beads upon a string…'

A frog skittered across the water outside and a soft breath of wind from off the mountains ruffled the leaves of the chenar trees. The draught lifted the threadbare Axminster in a soundless ripple and stirred the quiet cotton folds at the windows, and the curtain in the doorway that led into the dining-room swayed and clicked. Beads—red and green and white and yellow: glass beads, winking and glinting; china beads, opaque and smooth. Blue china beads …

Click … clack … click.
A small voice in the silence saying over and over again,
‘Look!… look!… look!'

Something clicked, too, in Sarah's brain, like the shutter of a camera, and she was unaware that she spoke aloud: ‘Of course!' said Sarah. ‘“As beads upon string!” Of course. Why didn't I think of it before?—it's there—in the curtain. Janet's record!'

She dropped Lager onto the floor and stood up.

Why hadn't she noticed before that there was no design about the curtain? That the beads fell into no pattern? Small beads interspersed at brief irregular intervals by large blue china beads. That was it—irregular intervals. Dots and dashes, short beads and long beads, with blue china beads to mark the divisions. So simple. As simple as a page of Morse code … and so very quick and easy to make——

Sarah found herself trembling with excitement as she ran to the desk and snatched up her writing-block and a pencil, and pulling forward a carved chair, sat down facing the curtain and began to write down the order of the beads from the top to the bottom of each string in turn.

The letters made no sense but they read off smoothly in dots and dashes. Long beads and short beads and blue china beads. It'll be in code of course, thought Sarah, but Charles will know it. She scribbled on in the silence.

A night bird called again from among the reeds, and another breath of wind from across the lake ruffled the lily-pads and sent the water lapping softly once more against the side of the boat. Lager snored peacefully on the sofa, but all at once Sarah's pencil slowed and stopped, and her eyes became fixed and still …

Someone was watching her. She was quite sure of it. A queer, unmistakable, prickling shiver of awareness crept up her spine and tightened the skin of her scalp, and she had to force herself to look over her shoulder. There was nobody there, and with the curtains closely drawn no one from the shore or the lake could possibly see into the room, while if anyone had come up onto the duckboards or paddled close in a
shikara
she would have heard them in this stillness. Her nerves must be playing tricks on her.

Yet the feeling of being watched, and the awareness of another presence close at hand, persisted and grew stronger and stronger until it was not a feeling any more, but a deadly certainty, and Sarah sat rigid, straining her ears to listen.

Somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the bead curtain a board creaked sharply, and a faint tremor of movement shook the floor beneath her feet. So she had been right! There
was
someone on the boat. A creaking board by itself was nothing—they creaked all night and for a dozen trivial reasons—but that quiver of movement that had run through the
Waterwitch
was unmistakable. Someone, somewhere on the boat, had taken a step in the darkness.

Sarah listened, tense and trembling: thinking that no one could come on board, either from the lake or from the land, without making far more noise and a great deal more vibration than that which had been produced by a single stealthy footstep …

It was only then that she remembered, with a wild rush of relief, that Charles had left a watcher on the bank. Several watchers! The one out there now must have put a foot on the gangplank and caused that slight tremor, for no stranger would have been able to come onto the boat without being seen by one of Charles's men. It was stupid of her to panic. She was perfectly safe.

She picked up her pencil again. And once more a board creaked in the darkness and the little boat vibrated to soft footsteps. Once—and again—and again …

Lager stopped snoring and lifted his head, his eyes bright and alert and his head cocked a little on one side.

Someone was moving on the boat. No. Not
on
the boat.
In
the boat——

The doors and the windows were locked and barred and there were watchers on the bank; but none of that was any use. No one was trying to board the boat, for someone was there already. Someone who had been there all the time, waiting in the darkness beyond the sly, winking lines of the bead curtain.

Sarah sat quite still, not daring to move, her body rigid with fear and her mind darting about like a terrified animal in a trap.

Charles had said she was safe—she had a gun and there was a watcher on the bank not twenty yards away. She had only to cry out. But the gun was under her pillow in the bedroom, away in the blackness beyond the bead curtain, and she seemed to have lost the power to move or breathe. She opened her mouth to call out, but her throat seemed to have dried up. It was as if she were trapped in a waking nightmare.

She heard Lager jump off the sofa behind her and land with a little
flump
on the floor, and he pattered over and stood beside her, peering into the darkness beyond the glinting beads. The boat vibrated gently to soft footsteps as someone moved across the dining-room, and now it seemed to her that she could hear breathing—or was it only the wild thudding of her own heart that sounded so loud in the silence?

Something flickered and moved in the darkness beyond the bead curtain: eyes were looking at her and a hand came forward to draw aside the curtain—a horrible hand …

Sarah tried to scream, but no sound came from her fear-constricted throat, and Lager, beside her, thumped the floor with his tail as the curtain swung aside. And it was only Hugo who stood there in the doorway looking down at her.

‘
Hugo!
Oh Hugo—oh God! you gave me such a fright! Hugo you
beast
—I nearly died of heart failure. I suppose you've just been snoring away on my bed ever since you brought Lager back—and I thought——
Oh Hugo!
'