Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (18 page)

They knocked on Larry’s door, and elicited a sleepy grunt from within, and then a clearer utterance promising compliance. In a few minutes they heard him moving about, and the splash of the shower. They tapped on Priya’s door and got no answer.

‘Still asleep,’ said Purushottam. ‘Ought we to disturb her?’

They waited a little while, listening for any sound of activity from within. Then they knocked again, but still there was no answer. Larry opened his door to them, towelling his crew-cut vigorously, and still there was no reply from Priya.

‘Perhaps she’s dressed and gone out already, before we came,’ said Purushottam, arguing with himself. His face had grown pale, and his eyes large. ‘May I go through by the balcony, and see?’

They followed at his heels, across the room and out to the balcony beside the iron stairway. Priya’s window stood open, the curtains half-drawn across it, just as when they had passed it quietly on coming in. The quietness began to seem ominous, the pre-dawn light inauspicious, though it had not seemed so then.

Purushottam tapped at the glass. ‘Priya? Are you awake? Priya!…’

He knew she was not there; there was no sense of her presence, no lingering hint of her movements in the air, nothing. He opened the window wider, and went into the room.

The nearer of the two beds still bore the light imprint of her body, and was disarranged only as it would have been if she had recently risen from it in a perfectly normal way; but it was cold. The door was locked, and the key in the lock. Nothing seemed to be disturbed. But in the shower-room the film of water and the splashed drops from her overnight shower had already dried completely; the hand-basin, too, was dry, the towels were dry. The sari she had worn yesterday was draped neatly over the back of a chair in the bedroom, ready to put on again. Priya had neither washed nor dressed this morning. Of all her belongings, nothing was missing but her white night sari and her dark silk dressing-gown, and the sandals of light fawn leather she habitually wore.

‘Look,’ Larry said, hushed and uneasy, ‘she was writing a letter last night.’

The letter, to her Punjabi room-mate in the Nurses’ Home at Madras, was necessarily in English. It had reached one and a half pages, and then been tidily abandoned for the night, folded into her writing-case with the address and salutation protruding. And on top of the case was another sheet torn from her writing-pad and folded in two. ‘There’s a note here, addressed to someone – that’s Tamil, isn’t it?’

Purushottam came flashing anxiously across the room, and took it up with a soft cry of hope and relief. ‘It’s to me!’ But even in the act of unfolding it he was shaken afresh by awful doubts, and looked again at his own name. He had never seen Priya’s writing until now, in the neat, precise English of her letter; but these fiercely formed characters in Tamil gave him no sense of handling something which had come to him from her.

His hands were shaking as he began to read; they were like stone when he ended, and all the light was gone from his face, which for one moment was stunned and dead, until the dreadful certainty came.

‘He’s taken her – taken Priya.’ He raised his eyes to their faces. ‘Because the krait was a failure… because I was out of reach when he came to see what had gone wrong. This time he meant to make sure. You want to know what he has to say to me?’

He read, translating slowly, freely and coldly, like a voice out of a computer:

‘ “It is you we want, not her. Now you shall come to us, and of your own will, if you want the girl to go free. You will come to the fisherman’s hut on the dunes to take her place,
and come alone
. If I do not see you coming –
alone
– by seven o’clock, I cut her throat.” ’

The sheet of notepaper with its words carved deep like stabs dropped from his hand, done with. He was back on the balcony before they had wrenched themselves out of their appalled daze and realised what he was about. They started after him, Larry catching at his arm.

‘The police – we must get them! They’ll have to —’

‘No police,’ said Purushottam, biting off the word and shutting upon it lips drawn pale and thin. ‘No police, no tricks, no anything. There isn’t time.’

‘But we’ve got to do something! They’ll turn out all the forces they’ve got – they’ll get her back —’

‘Dead!’ said Purushottam. ‘You know what time it is? Well past six.’

‘But the police have resources —’

‘
No
! I say no police. Not a word to anyone, no hunt, nothing. If you try to be clever, Priya will simply be murdered at once. Do you doubt it?’

They did not doubt it. ‘But the police are as capable as we are of moving discreetly, they have resources, they’ll arrange it so that —’

‘Fool!’ said Purushottam without heat, his feet clattering on the iron staircase down which Priya had been dragged in the night. ‘Have you forgotten how the hut lies? You could cover the whole sweep of the dunes from it. No one could approach without being seen long before. And Priya would die.’

Dominic said – it was the first thing he had found it needful to say, and it was no comfort at all, but it was the truth: ‘At best she may – you know that. If she can identify him now.’

‘Yes, I do know. But even such people as he
may
keep their word – I daren’t stop hoping. If we start a hunt, then she will certainly die. To give him a better chance to get away. And to kill me by another way.’

‘But a boat…’ said Dominic.

Halfway across the garden, Purushottam spared him one quick glance, from very far away, and the brief ghost of a smile. ‘Yes. If there was time, by water one might reach them. Even that would be a risk. But there’s no time. It would be past seven before you got hold of a boat.’

It was true, and they knew it; the chances of beating that deadline were practically nil, without a motor-boat, and a motor-boat, even if one were to be had, might by its sound alert the kidnapper and precipitate what they most wished to prevent. Nevertheless, Larry suddenly swerved away from the hapless procession heading for the dunes, and turned and ran like a hare, not for the hotel, but for the village. At least to try – to make some sort of attempt to defeat what outraged him. Purushottam checked, and looked after him in exasperated distress.

‘He’s crazy! He’ll only kill her!’

‘No,’ said Dominic with awful certainty. ‘He won’t have time.’

‘No – that’s true. He won’t have time.’ Purushottam sank his face between his palms for a moment, and shook his head from side to side helplessly. ‘I did this to her. She never should have known me!’

‘I don’t believe she’d say so,’ said Dominic, ‘even now.’

They were motionless there in the garden for only a moment. But even so Dominic heard, shrill and indignant on the air, wafting from one of the first-floor balconies: ‘Sushil Dastur!
Sushil Dastur
!’ And Gopal Krishna’s booming response, equally indignant but even more incredulous: ‘He is not there! No one has seen him! Where can he have got to? What is he thinking off?’ Mutually complaining, voices out of another world, they faded into the interior of the hotel.

But perhaps not another world, after all! Sushil Dastur, stooping at the doorway of a room where a krait had been introduced to do the dirty work for men…

Purushottam seemed not to have heard. He lifted a pale, set face out of his hands, and turned with determination towards the road, and the rising folds of sand.

‘Don’t go away! Come with me. As far as you can… You see I can’t do anything else. There isn’t any time left. I have to go. I have to do what he says, and hope he has a sort of honour. There’s nothing else I can do. One step wrong — one foot out of place – and she will be the first to die.’

‘I know,’ said Dominic. ‘I won’t leave you. Not until you give the word.’

Priya crouched in heavy darkness against the seaward wall of the hut, her back against the matting, the harsh coils of old fishing nets scoring her arms and shoulders. Her wrists were crossed behind her, and tethered uncomfortably tightly to a staple in one of the timbers of the wall. While her numbed fingers retained some sensitivity she could feel the grain of the wood with them, and touch the cold iron. Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the dark she could distinguish shapes and shades, the vague, formless monsters that were piles of coiled rope and cord, and stacked nets, and oars, and the heavy bamboo poles with which many of the boatmen steered their craft. But in particular nets; great coils of net, mesh within mesh. She sat upon a low mound of them, and the air she breathed was thick with the thready dust of coconut fibres, and their rank scent, and the smell of the many hauls of fish they had brought in in their time. The odour, too, of oil and joss and sweat, the irrational sweat of excitement and exultation.

She had drawn herself as far back against the wall as she could, and pulled in her feet and made herself small, to put as much distance as possible – whatever she did, it was all too little – between herself and the man. She saw him as two blurs of pallor in the darkness, one his head and one his loins. Here in the hut she could have sworn that the cotton cloths he wore were white, if she had not seen them in her own room at the hotel, and outside in the starry night, and known them for the faded peach-yellow that holy men wear. He had nothing on but those two lengths of thin cloth, and the oil with which his body was smeared. To make him hard to hold should anyone ever get to grips with him, and to enable him to withstand a long period in the water should he have to swim for it. He had his back to her now, but she knew better than to move a muscle; he could turn like a snake, and he still had the knife in his hand. He had made a horizontal slit in the matting shutter of the small window space, close to the door on the landward side, and he was watching the long expanse of the dunes through it, waiting for the light to come. Sometimes he talked to himself, low-voiced, forgetful of her. She did not exist for him except as a means to an end, she had realised that now. Sometimes he laughed, quite a sane laugh, contented, self-congratulatory, chilling her blood.

He was waiting for Purushottam. She knew that now; it was her sorrow that she had not realised it in time, and avoided the two fatal mistakes she had made. Now it was too late to redeem them; she had missed her chance.

She had started out of a dream to the awareness of someone in her room, and close to her bed, and in instant alarm for Purushottam she had opened her lips to cry out his name but never got beyond the first syllable before a hand was clamped over her mouth. That had been her first mistake, because it had told the intruder that she was indeed what he had come for, a sure and infallible bait for the man he wanted to trap. And then she had felt the cold fire of the knife against her throat, the fine prick of its tip deliberately biting under her ear, and a man’s voice, muffled to a hoarse undertone, had told her to be silent or dead, as she chose. She should have taken the omen and grasped its full possibilities at once. Why had she come away with him so tamely?

But she had been half asleep and half in shock, incapable of connecting what her senses told her. A dance of fantastic details assaulted her eyes, her ears and her reason. The head that stooped over her was monstrous, swathed in saffron cotton wound twice over his face, muffling his features into a grave-mask. The hands that held the knife to her throat and covered her mouth were long and sinewy and strong. His body was naked but for the saffron loincloth, and glistened with oil. She was aware of the intent stare of his eyes through the cloth; though she could not see them, she knew that they could see well enough. The cotton was no thicker nor closer-woven than cheesecloth, it hardly hampered his vision at all, but it made him invisible.

Confused and disorientated as she was, it was no wonder that when he took away his hand, telling her flatly: ‘Make one sound, and I kill you!’ she lay mute and still, shrinking from the prick of the knife. No wonder that she rose from the bed at his orders, and put on her dressing-gown and sandals, and went down the iron staircase with him silently, the point of the knife pricking her onwards all the way. By then she had been aware that he was not solely dependent on the dagger. He made sure of being at the window before her, and from the place where he had propped it behind the curtain he retrieved a rifle, and slung it over his shoulder with a dexterity that told her he was well used to handling it. She had thought at first that she might be able to elude him, once in the garden, and escape in the darkness, but a rifle has a longer reach than a knife, and even in the dark, how can you be sure of evading it? And he had thought of the possibility, too, and made provision for it. She was no sooner on the ground than he had a hand twined in her hair, and dragged her back by it under the staircase, and there drew her hands behind her and knotted them fast with the girdle of her dressing-gown.

‘Walk!’ he ordered her, spitting the word almost soundlessly into her ear. ‘Out to the road. And silently!’

And she had done it, had done everything he had ordered, his one hand always tight on the tether that bound her wrists, the other pricking her on with the ceaseless reminder of the knife. Up the undulating slope of the dunes, a moon-world in the lambent night, the smooth, dry sand sliding in and out of her sandals cool and light, like small silken hands stroking. A surrealist dream, austere and frightening. No wonder she had done everything she was told to do, and sought to keep the blade away from her throat at all costs.

But how she regretted now the slowness of her understanding! Not until they were well away from the house, from the road, from all listening ears, did she realise that she had mistaken her role and missed her once chance. She was nothing. What could this nocturnal assassin, in the saffron remnants of his old disguise as a holy man, want with her? She was accidental, simply an outsider who had blundered into a private war. Purushottam was still the quarry, must be the quarry. This man had come for Purushottam tonight. If he had taken her instead, it was because for some reason he could not reach Purushottam. She was only a second best, a second string – an alternative route to the prize.

So then, too late, she recognised her own mistakes. Her first waking thought had been for Purushottam; that must have been a gratifying confirmation of the enemy’s thinking. What she should have done, as soon as the muffling hand was lifted from her mouth, was to scream and scream and arouse the entire house. She would probably have died, yes – though not certainly, since nothing was ever certain – but she could not then have been used to induce Purushottam to venture his life for hers. She should have realised when she watched the invader fold the sheet he had torn from her writing pad, and score that savage superscription across it, and laugh silently, one eye always trained upon her as she fumbled stiffly into her sandals, one hand always ready on the knife. If only she had understood in time she might even have achieved the capture and arrest of her killer, and made the future safe for others. She thought ‘others’, but she meant Purushottam. And who knows, the killer might not even have killed. Petrified by the first tearing scream, he might have thought of his own life first, and run with no thought but to save it. The trouble is that one never has time to consider the issues fairly until it is too late.

Now she was here, bait for a trap, and there was nothing she could do.

‘He will get my message,’ crooned the man, self-congratulatory and exuberant, watching the bare, motionless sea of the starlit dunes, and stroking the butt of his rifle lovingly. ‘He will come! Shall I let him see you, before I fire? Shall I let him come all the way, to find you here dead before I kill him?’

Priya said nothing. She had not uttered a sound since he thrust her in here before him, stumbling among the nets. There was no point in speaking with him, none in pleading or reasoning; that she knew. Whatever eloquence she had was being expended inwardly, and directed towards whatever it was that she had made out of her odd, heretical heritage, something huge and approachable and not insensible to human outrage and anger; not necessarily just, but better, involved and indignant and compassionate, something that could be argued with, like Krishna enduring without offence the reproaches of Arjuna, and stooping to unravel for him the complexities of duty and compulsion and love.

‘Listen, you,’ thought Priya vehemently towards the anonymous power that hid itself from her but was patently there somewhere, too nearly palpable to be a figment of her imagination, ‘I don’t know what to call you, but since you must be everything in any case, what does it matter? You know all about us, all of us, I needn’t tell you anything.
Don’t let them win
! Not unless you’re on the side of evil, and that’s impossible. Don’t let Purushottam come here tamely to be killed, as I’ve come. That’s all that matters. If he survives, then
we have won
! There must be something one of us can do to unwind this wound-up machine, and break it. That’s all I’m asking for. Then it wouldn’t matter so much, dying… after all, everybody has to, in the end.’

She had begun to be aware, while she closed her eyes upon this emphatic wrestling with God, that the images were forming in her mind in a kind of insistent but disciplined rhythm, as though the tabla had just struck into the improvisations of the sitar for the first time, halfway into a raga; the key moment when the first acceleration begins, and the first formal excitement. It took her some moments to track this drum-note down, even after she opened her eyes; it was soft and private, felt rather than heard, like the tabla, a vibration rather than a sound. She sensed it throbbing in her spine, gently insistent, and sprang into full consciousness with a shock of wonder and disbelief.

It really existed, and deliberately it was hardly a sound at all, only a very soft, steady, rhythmic pressure, barely even a tapping, against the matting wall at her back. Once she had grasped its source, she began to trace it to its exact location; it had reached the thick, woven wall right behind her, and just above the level of her bound hands. When first she had become aware of it, it must have been approaching, slowly and stealthily, from her right side, testing and waiting all the way for a response. Someone was outside the hut, feeling his way to where she was, demanding an answer from her, while she had been demanding an answer from whatever God was.

The mat wall pressed once, twice, against the small of her back. Painfully she hoisted her bound hands, grown prickly and numb from the tight cord, and thrust outwards with them, once, twice, three times, tapped with impotent fingers, scratched with her nails against the fibre.

Hard fingers pressed back against her fingers in recognition and reassurance. The rhythm of the tabla ceased. Whoever he was, he had found her.

‘He will come,’ whispered the man with the rifle, turning his featureless cotton face towards her for a moment. She saw light – already, even in this enclosed place, there was light of a kind – flow down his sinewy arms and long torso, and die into the pallor of the sadhu’s cloth twisted round his loins. ‘He will come, and this time he will be mine. You want to see him die, you, woman?’

Behind Priya’s back, with aching, insinuating gentleness, the tip of a knife eased its way between the stitches that seamed the coconut-matting wall. She felt the steel touch her arm, sliding by above the wrist without grazing. She heard the first fibre of the first stitch part, and thought it a terrible and wonderful sound, like the trumpets outside the walls of a city under siege. Very carefully she shifted her position a little, sitting forward on the coils of net, and posing her body steadily between her captor and the knife.

They reached the loftiest rise of the dunes, and Purushottam’s headlong march wavered as soon as the ridge-thatch of the distant hut broke the suave undulations of the sand like a clump of stiff grass. He turned and looked at Dominic, seemed to be searching hopelessly for something to say by way of good-bye, and then would have walked on without a word, after all, because there was nothing left to say. But Dominic laid an arresting hand on his arm.

‘No, not yet. Look, it’s only just after half past six. Take every moment you safely can.’ Safely! How could they be sure that the word had any longer a meaning for any of them? How did they know, even, that Priya was still alive? Dead hostages are quiet hostages, make no attempts at escape, identify no suspects. But in so far as there was still any hope at all, they had to preserve it as long as they could.

‘He must see me coming before the deadline,’ said Purushottam, in the level, low voice that had hardly varied its tone since they had found the note. ‘Before seven, not at seven.’

‘He’ll see you the minute you go over that crest. Forty yards. Even if you go at ten to seven, you’ll be nearly halfway to him by the hour. Wait till then.’

He shook his head, but he stayed. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, it matters. The one moment we throw away may be the one that makes the difference. At least give it a chance.’

‘You expect a miracle?’ said Purushottam, with the most painful of smiles. ‘I’ve been thinking – he must have a gun, don’t you think so? I think a rifle. Because he’s set me up as a target he can hardly miss, even at long range. The one thing moving in all this space, and no cover anywhere. Not that I’m looking for cover. And the sea right there at his back – that’s the way he means to get away.’

If he’s a poor enough shot to want me at short range before he can be sure of killing me, he thought, unable to break the habit of hope, I might be able to rush him yet. He wouldn’t be able to take his eye off me then to turn on Priya, and inside a hut that size a rifle will be an unwieldy weapon. If I could reach him, hit or not hit, I might at least be able to give her the chance to get away.

The sun was already well above the horizon behind them, climbing with amazing speed. The dunes put on colour, and became a rippling sea of lights and shadows.