The one possibility he did not wish to countenance seemed the most probable – the killer lived in the vicinity, had noted his presence and guessed his errand with little difficulty.
Hoisting the tightly bound corpse onto his shoulders, he pushed his way through the door into the watery darkness outside. His flashlight illuminated a patch of ground about a metre round but he could faintly make out lights twinkling in dwellings across the mountainside, although the one adjoining his own was unlighted. Turning his back on the whole village, he made his way through the trees for about ten minutes.
His task was more arduous than he had anticipated for, though the moisture had made much of the soil damp and easy to handle, he had nothing but his hands to dig with and kept cutting himself on tree roots. At last he had sufficiently covered the body to be certain that no casual villager passing would stop to dig the body up. Scattering leaves and earth over the whole thing again, despite his fatigue and tension, he realised that he had not cleaned up the cabin and that a visitor coming unexpectedly upon the disordered bed would wonder what he had been up to.
He hurried back, fighting nerves. Branches and flowers traced their spidery fingers over his face or snagged his clothing. His boots sank into the much-softened earth; there was a moist, fresh smell in the air and the wind was beginning to blow bitterly cold. It was past eight o'clock. He reached the cabin almost at the same time as Thahéra. She was carrying a tray. When Karmel took it from her, she made as if to leave but he asked her to sit with him during the meal, forgetting, in his pleasure at her presence, the mould and mulch and mud on the sleeping bag and the smell pervading his room, then embarrassed and stammering in surprise when foetid air rushed out at them through the open door.
Karmel ate in silence.
Thahéra had accepted his explanation of the sullied cot – accidental spillage as he transferred samples from container to container – and had even helped him to clean it up. The floor was neatly swept again, the sleeping bag ensconced in its former position as a buffer between human flesh and vicious rope mattress.
As they had worked side-by-side Karmel's agitation had grown until he had nothing in his mind, no coherent thoughts, no conversation, only a space the shape and size of the woman beside him. He'd felt his arms beginning to itch in all kinds of places. He'd felt the hair on his scalp tingling and the saliva in his mouth tasting as foreign as the gruel she had served him. His armpits were drenched in sweat. She kept her eyes upon him as he ate, never meeting his ravenous gaze but watching astutely the jerky motions that lifted food to his mouth or brushed strands of hair from his eyes. As soon as the plate was empty she reached for it and fled, allowing him a glimpse of her smile.
Outside in the gloom a stealthy figure stood watching the lights of the village. Stooping low, it descended the pathways Karmel had travelled and remained for a few moments staring down at the roughly hidden corpse. Head bent, the figure appeared to stand guard but was, in reality, weeping.
Later that evening, Karmel found himself wide awake. Plagued by a sexual longing that he could neither satisfy nor master, he too decided to wander the village by darkness. A spiky chill rain followed him and split his torch beam like shards of glass.
He tramped downwards from his cabin, full of energy because of his earlier nap and determined to find out more about the village than it seemed willing to tell him. His watch told him that it was barely eight and there were lights glowing in several directions. He walked towards the town's shabby brick toilet, built no doubt for some visiting dignitary in years gone by and now allowed to rot by the locals who were better off relieving themselves downstream of their village. His choice of direction was dictated less by his physical need, although he acknowledged a certain tightness in his abdomen, than by his wish for an alibi, should he be challenged by anyone and questioned as to his prowling. As he walked, he thought about Delhi and the ways in which he had created a life for himself there.
At fifteen he had been a bright and intelligent scholar, the pride of teachers at the Delhi Mission School, where he was placed by Mrs Letti, his generous benefactress, after she rescued him from the streets. In those days, nothing was too insignificant for him to know and knowledge was all he craved. He excelled at literature, languages and history, topped the class tests, made no friends of his own age but spoke always with those many years his senior. The fact that he could also pick locks and cauterise wounds, sneak unseen into dark spaces and repeat verbatim conversations he heard held his would-be tormentors at bay. Sons of petty businessmen and of minor local dignitaries, whose parents thought that a Christian education would stand them in good stead, they were bored and angry enough to have lynched Karmel – had he not kept his wits about him.
He practised his English diligently at first, listening to television programmes about wild life and cricket commentaries on the radio in the hotel where he worked at night, operating the lifts and carrying luggage. His smile guaranteed him good tips, but he used it less and less frequently, preferring to remain unnoticed and to overhear the conversations of guests. The English language became his passion, accompanying him through sleepless nights and enclosed, neon-lit Sundays. When he finally decided to apply for a position with the Delhi police force, he had acquired an understated dignity that drew older people to him and made his contemporaries lower their voices in his presence – if they noticed him at all, that is. And yet, beneath the steady exterior, fear boiled and snaked its way through his veins: he had no family, no credentials and no idea what would be required of him. He invented his bio-data, lied through the interview and failed to be accepted onto the force. And there it would have ended, had Hàrélal not taken him on first as protégé and then as an assistant during criminal investigations. No one knew what he was doing, questioning suspects in the middle of the night, and no one dared to ask, because Hàrélal's protection meant a lot in those days, despite the fact that he was only a Deputy Chief. The first time Hàrélal left him in sole charge of a case, Karmel was twenty and terrified.
'Young man. Stop a minute. Stop a minute and speak with me.' Karmel started out of his thoughts and into a vision of cloth and light and wrinkled woman. She was seated in an alcove, coloured orange by her lamp, and her hair hung uncovered in metallic strands down her back. Karmel decided that her profile looked as if she was perpetually waiting, a tilted mark, a question.
'Greetings, older sister. You startled me on my way to the toilet.'
'You can finish your errand later. Now come and keep me company.' Her voice was so soft that she hardly seemed to be speaking at all and yet he heard her clearly above the patter of the rain. Her house stood sandwiched between two others. He stepped through the doorway, finding for once that he did not have to bend. On a neatly made bed in the far corner of the room another woman lay asleep under a quilt. Her face was peaceful, and resembled that of his companion with mocking accuracy.
'Are you staring at my daughter? She's beautiful, no?' When Karmel nodded, she continued, 'So, you're our Thahéra's new guest.' Then, abruptly, 'Is she kind to you?' Her voice gave an impression of loudness that was unnerving.
'Kind? She has been very, yes, yes.' Karmel found his heart pounding in a slightly sickening rhythm to the woman's speech. She had not once raised her eyes to look at him, but he sensed her absorbing his responses through every pore. The beautiful girl on the bed stirred and turned over in her sleep, the blanket covering her just enough to accentuate her large breasts and pregnant stomach. Karmel looked away.
'Call me mother.'
'Er –'
'Young man – you find it difficult to call a woman mother but you will shamelessly flatter until you get what you want. You think you are different because you've suffered. You don't even have a mother, do you and you were about to tell me that you had never called anyone mother. No – don't speak. Don't tell me that I'm right. I don't ask anything unless I already know the answer and that should be your guide too. In your line of work.'
&nbs
p; Karmel felt faint. Was this woman some kind of spy sent here to check up on him? Who in the whole world knew that he was motherless except his boss, who would never be so cruel as to tell this to a complete stranger. This woman. This Stitching Woman, who seemed to make more and more quilt and hem as her tongue darted in and out. Mentally he spluttered, enraged, curious. But she jumped in before he could speak.
'Ask me about Thahéra.'
'What can you tell me, mother?' She laughed raucously when he called her 'mother' and he flinched, thinking that the young woman would wake, but she barely stirred.
'She is some years older than you, but not many. Her older boy is not really her son, he is her husband's son by another marriage. He watches her all the time when her father is gone, but he isn't sure if he should any more. Twice abandoned and foolish, the boy is! She's always been kind to him, as she is to everyone, but he fears too much. Doesn't know whom to trust! She does not care about her husband but then not many of the women here do care much. For their men. They love the children, but the men just come and go. Long distances, short distances. They ask for food – and other things, then they leave again. Thahéra's no different.' The monotonous whisper was interrupted by another terrible laugh. 'No different when it comes to men.'
Karmel ran a hand through his hair. Stitching Woman looked up at him and he realised with a twinge of fright that her eyes were opaque, irises covered by cataracts like cloth window blinds in an up-market office, impenetrable, improbable and witch-like.
'Go on now,' she said. 'Ask me something. I know you want to. But think carefully about the answer first.' Her hands didn't stop moving but something about her waiting posture convinced Karmel that he could surprise her; she expected him to ask about Thahéra. He spoke slowly and respectfully.
'Tell me, mother, tell me about how many foreign visitors you've had in the last year.' Inwardly he chuckled for he was fairly sure of the answer and his satisfaction showed on his face as the faintest of smiles. It took a second for her to adjust to the change of topic but then she too twisted her wrinkled face into what could have been a smile.
'Three have been here. Two were together for a while. One I encountered only once. One I see all the time.'
'Did you ask their names?'
'No.'
'Was it a man and a woman who were together?'
'No.'
'Two men? And you saw the woman once only?'
'What do you think?'
'And which one of them do you see all the time?
'You already know the answer.'
'Do I? Well that may be. You didn't ask their names but you know everything already. So tell me their names.' Her hands flittered back and forth over the cloth. She frowned, warning Karmel that she was insulted by his flippant reference to her wisdom. Then, abruptly, she raised those milky irises to him.
'What I know is that it is time for you to leave.'
And he left, despite the curiosity and irritation engendered by her nebulous replies. He struggled up towards his cabin, using the torch continually, shining it around him at the dripping foliage and the saturated ground. He urinated a few feet from his wall, then scribbled notes for some hours, drawing diagrams that linked Adam and Sara to the third foreigner, that linked Adam to the man and made Sara an outsider, that falsified all the evidence he had collected so far, that confirmed his intuition of the tourists' deceit. His mind returned to the face of Stitching Woman, to her irises, so strangely cloaked in white. How much could she actually see, he wondered, and what was her evidence worth?
Two of them were in the plains, so that left only one of them, who was probably the man they had come to find, Cameron Croft, unless yet another foreigner had taken up his abode in the area. Was Croft still here then? Was he hiding somewhere in the trees? Had he killed another man and left the area weeks ago?
More likely, the old hag was speaking metaphorically and meant that she could see his face in her minds' eye – that he was dead and she knew it! Perhaps Adam had reached the village before his girlfriend; he'd certainly had plenty of time to kill Croft. That would account for why Stitching Woman had seen two men several times over. That would explain why Sara was lying – to cover for her boyfriend, Adam, to give him an alibi. And it would account for the expression on Adam's face as he'd told his tale, the expression Karmel had neither been able to charm away nor to comprehend: deepest, most painful, guilt.
In one diagram, he put the motive down as jealousy, conjured inside his head a picture of the foreign tourist confronting his erstwhile friend on a hillside, hitting him with a tree branch, the body rolling and rolling, until finally it stopped by the river. He had a vision of the two men running, one of them tripping, hitting his head against a rock, then lying still. Anything could have happened, but the most important thing was that Sara and Adam had set out to deceive him. He became more and more convinced that Cameron Croft was dead and that they knew it and had lied about the identity of the corpse.
Now he would have to find evidence that proved Croft had indeed stayed in the village. His identification would still be circumstantial but it would mean that the corpse had, for the time at least, a name.
He wrote till his wrist hurt, then lay in bed and shivered and ached for a comforting touch, his mind dancing back and forth over the imagined countenances of the two women he'd been close to.
Neither of their features had resembled Thahéra's. Mrs. Letti's front teeth were broken, and her kisses had been firmly maternal, but she'd had beautiful hips and robust arms. Once he'd seen her pouring water over her head in her back yard, fully clothed, her neck bent forward in a graceful arc and he'd felt a swell of excitement that made him shake. Her funeral had been a solemn occasion; the small bequest she made him more than enough to cover the deposit on his apartment.
Tanya Hàrélal was daring and dishevelled and deeply spoilt, with huge dark lips, wide eyes and a mischievous chin. Everything about her irritated him, from her confident scientific explanations to her teasing smiles. That hadn't stopped him from listening to her complaints about her life or from thinking her sexy. When she told him she wanted to be a boy, to be a son, powerful and condescending, he'd laughed in her face. She didn’t realise that her money and connections were more potent than anything masculinity could have conferred on her.
They'd watched each other covertly throughout her teenage years, she pushing against him in doorways, he drawing back sharply, denying his lust; even when she was fifteen and he half a dozen years older, she'd inhabited more of his fantasies than he had ever been happy about. He was certain too that he had meant something to her: at twenty-one he must have seemed quite heroic to a passionate girl. The way she ran to the door when he called at her father's house would have been enough to give a less modest man hope. But knowing that she associated him with danger and action, with the world she felt she'd never inhabit, he'd put her enthusiasm down to interest rather than love and battled with his body and his heart. Anyway, she was a rich girl, the daughter of his boss, and he didn't need any more trouble in his lifetime than he'd already had.
Thinking about Tanya he wondered why he, like so many humans, was attracted to unattainable people. He wondered if it was like that in other countries. In the flamboyant and unfettered garb of some young Europeans, was it possible to read their ease with themselves and each other, with family, work and world? Were they able to love where they desired and to continue desiring those they loved: not if their films were to be believed. And what about the veiled women he sometimes saw when he was on duty at the airport – their men, sociable and obese, or lean with fiery eyes, always slapping each other on the backs while the women gazed out through their window on the world: did their apparel circumscribe their passion, bounding it for those with legitimate rights, or did it simply fuel the curiosity which pushes one to rebel, to look where one should not, to open closed doors?
Who had the answers? Pleasure was a slippery eel, to be found in the torture of denial and in th
e easy gratification of one's wishes. Where had the pursuit of pleasure led the two young tourists and their erstwhile 'friend' Cameron Croft – To death? To murder?
15
The coterie of jeeps bearing the Sinbari delegation wound its way up through narrow passes, steep roads, sprawling villages, dimly lit and sleeping. The air was laden with the smell of rain. Most of the passengers, including Sadrettin, had long passed a stage of terrified nausea. They now slept, propped against each other and drooling slightly.
Rimi Charoot had tried without success to curl her voluptuous form around Sadrettin or to persuade him to rest his head upon her shoulder. Now she made sure that her thigh was squeezed firmly against his as he slept. Taylor and the others had watched her efforts with admiration, for Sadrettin was considered by most to be either dangerous – the boss's flunkey – or else in deep sexual denial.
Having travelled for sixteen hours by road, they were hoping to reach their destination, a village called Malundi, on the following day. By the time they arrived at the command outpost, the most civilised town in the area, Bhukta, everyone was asleep and there was no way they could persuade a gatekeeper to open the gates until sunrise. So they all alighted and bundled into the local guesthouse where they were greeted with lukewarm food, scalding tea and damp straw mattresses.
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