Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (4 page)

Romesh exchanged the smallest flick of a hand with the other boatman, and grinned to himself. When he laughed he looked even younger, and childishly mischievous.

‘So that’s the wealthy and distinguished business contact,’ Dominic remarked, when the other boat was out of earshot. Romesh looked up brightly from the wheel. ‘You know him, sahib?’

‘Never saw him before. Never heard of him until last night. His guests told us they would be sharing his boat today, that’s all. Do
you
know him?’ He added with interest: ‘He has a house somewhere here on the lake, hasn’t he?’

‘Quite close, sahib, over there, not far from the road.’ He was shaking gently with suppressed mirth. ‘I am laughing because Ajit Ghose, that boat-boy, he is new here one month only, he does not know!
I
was on list to take that boat today, and this Ajit, he thinks to himself, this client is very rich man! So he gets list changed, to have that boat for himself. I saw what he want, but I let him do it. Me, I know this Mr Mahendralal Bakhle. He is rich, but he is not generous. It will not be so fat a tip as Ajit thinks.’

‘
What
did you say the man’s name was?’ Patti asked sharply, turning to stare after the diminishing boat with abruptly quickened interest.

‘Mahendralal Bakhle. You know that name, memsahib?’

‘Not exactly – it just sounds familiar, somehow. I think I’ve read it somewhere,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there something about him in the papers – about trouble on his farms, and some labourers who were killed? I’m nearly sure that was the name.’

‘It is possible. He is a big landlord, own much land down in plains, near Sattur.’

‘But surely,’ Dominic objected, ‘there’s a limit to the amount of land any one person can own now – twenty-five acres, or something quite modest like that.’

‘Oh, yes, sahib, that is true, but there are ways. Some landlords say that they part with their land, give it to their womenfolk, but often it is not true. Mr Bakhle, he still controls everything, all that land.’ Romesh’s English failed him, and he waved a frustrated hand, and addressed himself to Lakshman in Malayalam.

‘He says,’ Lakshman reported, ‘that Bakhle was mixed up not long ago in some very nasty trouble with his Harijan labourers. That must be what Miss Galloway is thinking about. They wanted a rise in pay, and then there was an armed raid on their village, and several people were killed. Everyone seems sure that Bakhle had hired the strong-arm men to do the job for him.’ He lifted his shoulders in helpless distaste. ‘It could happen. Such things have been known.’

Priya, who was so silent and self-contained, and yet missed nothing, said simply: ‘I have known such casualties come into our wards. There is very strong feeling among the Harijan labourers, and there is also great pressure being used against them.’

‘Not, in fact, a very popular man, this Bakhle,’ Larry deduced.

‘With reason, it seems,’ said Patti, casting a last long, dark look after his boat before she turned her back on it.

‘Very much disliked, so Romesh says,’ agreed Lakshman. ‘But also very much envied and courted. Money is money, it talks loudly everywhere.’

‘Prefer present company,’ said Romesh boldly, and showed his teeth again in a bountiful smile.

‘Well, thanks,’ said Larry drily. ‘Even if this doesn’t turn out to be a very generous tip, either?’

‘Even if there is
no
tip.’ Romesh asserted firmly, and brought the boat gently to rest, with a tiny hiss of compressed ripples, against the shoulder of the hard.

The Manis must have been invited to lunch at the villa, for they did not reappear at the hotel until nearly three-thirty, when it was time to embark again for the afternoon watering. Sunday whites and Sunday saris were assembling again in the party launch, and among them the sombre Bessancourts sat like monuments to France. And in from the gardens came Sudha Mani, the folds of her rose-coloured sari fluting round her plump ankles, her bracelets jingling with triumph, Gopal Krishna treading ponderously at her back, and Sushil Dastur at heel like a tired little dog.

‘Sushil Dastur, go and order tea.’ She sank into a cane chair among the palms and fanned herself gracefully. ‘And see what kinds of sweets they have, and choose me some of those I like. Be quick! No, give me the flowers, you are dropping them.’ She installed her booty on a spare chair, and beamed at Patti and Priya, who were just going out to the landing-stage. ‘From Mr Bakhle’s garden! So beautiful, aren’t they? He has such a fine garden. Was it not wonderful this morning?’

‘Wonderful!’ they agreed truthfully.

The afternoon cruise was curiously different from the morning one; a completely changed light draped the hills, clear, yellowish, very still. The sky was washed nearly clean of cloud, and of a wonderfully pale, bright and remote blue. They remembered that dusk would come early here, and deceptively; there would still be full daylight in the open water when the many deep inlets were already drenched in darkness. But as yet it was bright sunlight, only just slanting towards the west.

‘Look, Bakhle’s out again!’ Larry pointed a finger into one of the still, green aisles of the lake as they passed; and there was the immaculate white launch idling gently off-shore, with the silk-clad figure of Mahendralal Bakhle lolling at ease on his cushions, perhaps asleep, or near it. He had no voluble guests to entertain now, and the boat-boy was ready to respond to his every inclination, mindful of that fat tip he expected at the end of the day from a man so rich. The thought made Romesh chuckle happily and wickedly to himself as he observed them.

‘That Ajit Ghose, he is so clever! Those people from Bengal, they think everyone in the south is stupid.’

‘Their mistake,’ said Patti drily. ‘He’s from Bengal, is he?’

‘Yes, memsahib. He is not bad fellow, only he does not talk with us much, not friendly. Maybe only he is a long way from home.’

‘And you don’t know why he came south to work? I’d have thought the south had its own unemployment problem.’

Romesh shrugged and let that go, having nothing to say on the subject. ‘See – elephant!’ His pointing finger indicated them with precision, high on the steep hillside where the sun filtered through the trees and turned animals and earth to moving gold and static gold. In orderly file they paced after their tusker leader, the cows and calves following confidently; and though they seemed to move with the deliberation of doomsday, they covered the ground at an amazing pace, bearing obliquely downhill to the water. And now they were more playful and more relaxed than in the morning, scratching themselves meditatively on the ghostly trees, surging through the breast-deep water with a bow-wave breaking in phosphorescence before them, the little ones bouncing and frolicking in abandoned joy, the elders curling their trunks over them protectively.

Patti said: ‘I love elephants!’ And after a moment of silent watching she said sadly: ‘Why can’t we have a community like that, as placid and as natural and as perfect!’ And indeed there was a conviction of untroubled happiness and kindliness here which at this moment seemed to justify her.

‘Some worlds,’ Larry said dourly, ‘are simpler than others. You take what’s dished out to you, and pay for it. Not like the Spanish proverb!’

‘Look!’ whispered Lakshman. The boat lay motionless now, and under the slope of trees it was premature dusk. ‘They’re going to cross!’

What moved them to it no one could guess, but the tusker and his younger fellow had waded far out into the water, and the cows were moving without haste after them, and marshalling the little ones with them. The whole herd was surging steadily into the lake, and setting course unmistakably for the other shore. Forward they lurched until tusks and trunks and massive shoulders and twitching ears had all vanished under the water, like ships sinking at their launching; but when only the domed, glistening tops of their heads remained visible, the lurching gait changed, and they swam. Like animated black stepping-stones, the herd sailed across the narrow arm of the lake with hardly a ripple, unhurried, majestic, oblivious of the boat that lay off in entranced silence, watching their passing from some thirty yards away. Occasionally a trunk came up for air, waved gently for a moment, and was again withdrawn, or the tip of an ear ruffled the surface. The watchers hardly drew breath until the cluster of rounded stones drew near to the steep shore opposite, and the leaders heaved their huge shoulders clear of the lake, streaming water and phosphorescence, and thumped imperturbably up the slope and into the tall grass, to disappear among the trees. The cows thrust up their heads one by one and followed, nuzzled by their calves, and all the glistening herd passed out of sight with hardly a sound.

Patti drew a long, awed breath. ‘My God, and I never even knew they could!’

They looked at one another like people awakening from a dream. After that, anything was going to be an anti-climax.

Why look for more elephants? They had been so close that they could almost have leaned over and patted the littlest calf on its bobbing pewter head as it sailed by. And while they had been spellbound here, the day had lurched a long step towards its ending, at least here between the shrouding forested hills. In the opener water it would still be bright.

‘Have we still got time to go on to the wider part?’ Larry asked. ‘It must look marvellous in this light.’

Lakshman conferred with Romesh, and Romesh in his obliging fashion hoisted a shoulder, and flashed his grin, and said that they need not worry about staying out beyond their time, they had plenty of fuel, and there would be no more cruises after this one. So they headed for the open water, silvery and placid mile on mile to the dam; and the day changed its mind and came back to full sunlight as soon as they were out from between the enfolding arms of the forest. Several times they saw elephants again, and several times deer, and the sky over them became the clear, pre-sunset sky of a summer day at home, shading down from deepest blue at the zenith to jade green at the rim of the world. The few feathers of cloud were coloured like roses, in variations of pink and gold.

They turned back at last. Romesh was just bringing the boat about in a long, sweeping curve, the water hissing along its side, when they all heard a distant, muffled report, not at all loud, but borne across the mirror of lake as though it came from everywhere at once, or from nowhere.

‘What was that?’ Larry demanded. ‘I thought there was no shooting here. It isn’t a hunting reserve, it’s a wild life sanctuary.’

‘That is right, sahib,’ Romesh confirmed. ‘But sometimes wardens must shoot injured animal, or rogue animal.’

‘But it didn’t sound like a gun to me,’ Dominic said. ‘More like what you hear at a good distance when they’re blasting in a quarry. But I don’t suppose there such a thing for a hundred miles around here.’

They listened, straining their ears, but the sound was not repeated. They had the broadest expanse of the lake to themselves, and the silvery hush of the hour was like a glass bell enclosing them.

‘Ah, we’re dreaming!’

But they had not been dreaming. Looking ahead as they sped towards the narrows, they saw a tiny puff of iridescent cloud rise and assemble in the sky far before them, and there hang shimmering like gilded dust for some four or five minutes before it disintegrated. In a countryside almost without aerial pollution, even a shot in a quarry would have produced little more than that. And before the arms of forest rose on either side to shut them in, it was gone.

The successive bends of lake became surfaces of steel mirror, reflecting pastel channels of sky, and shut in by black walls of forest. But wherever a wider bay opened the light took heart and returned. It was well after six o’clock when they came back to the place where they had seen the elephants cross, and instinctively looked again at the shore from which they had set out, where a few dead trees provided scratching posts in the shallows, and man-tall reeds grew, a paler patch in the dusk.

‘What’s that?’ Larry asked, pointing. ‘There in the reeds, look – something white… ’ Reddish elephants they had seen, but a white elephant would be too much to ask. Deer, perhaps? Anything pale would look white at this hour.

They peered, and caught the gleam he had been the first to see. Too white for deer, and too motionless; something low in the water, half obscured by the vertical stems of the reeds. ‘Wait!’ said Dominic sharply. ‘Ease up, Romesh, there’s something queer there— Take us in towards it a bit.’

Romesh slowed down, and obediently turned the boat’s nose into the bay. They drew nearer to the pale patch, and it took on shape, veiled as it was, the curve of a white hull, a tarter of canvas trailing overside into the water.

‘It’s a boat – but it’s foundered – it’s filling!—’ Dominic leaned over the side, and caught the quicksilver gleam of water inside the settling hull, and something else, pale wisps and bulges of cloth, awash among the bilge and hanging limply over the distant side. ‘Something’s happened— Closer, Romesh, get us alongside. My God, there’s someone in her!’

They were all braced intently at his back as he kneeled on the seat and leaned far over to get a hand on the gunwale of the other boat. Patti’s voice said, in tones of stunned and frozen unbelief: ‘There can’t be! It’s only old rags – it’s an old boat, it must have been abandoned here long ago…’

‘Impossible, we couldn’t have missed seeing it.’

The reeds rustled, brushing their hair and sleeves. Dominic got a hand on the rail and steadied them alongside; and now they could all see down into the unmistakable shell of Mahendralal Bakhle’s smart white launch, awash from end to end with sluggish water.

All its seating nearest the engine was torn and splintered, and the motor itself hung drunkenly forward into the wash, a mass of twisted and fused metal. Every seam had been started, and oozed water and slime. The boat-boy lay with one arm trailing over the side, gashed by flying splinters and raked raw by blast, a few rags of his clothing dangling. And in the bottom, the water whispering from side to side over his shattered face as the boat swayed, lay what was left of Mahendralal Bakhle, in the muddy shreds of his tussore suiting. His chest was pitted with shrapnel wounds, and his gold-rimmed glasses, disintegrated into lethal slivers of metal and glass, had obliterated his eyes more thoroughly than the reflected light of the sun had hidden them at noon, and penetrated beyond into his brain. No bubbles arose through the water that covered his mouth and nostrils. The arms that lolled on either side his body terminated in the mangled shreds of hands.