Karmel glanced at Stitching Woman's daughter, immediately dismissing the thought that she had somehow helped her young lover to kill Cameron Croft. Nothing about her spoke of any violence or deceit. As far as he could tell, the only 'wrong' they could have done together was the act that got her pregnant; that had been enough to cause her to fear for her life should Thahéra’s father have discovered their secret. It was his judgement she had been so dreading. Between his departure for Dahu, to settle the land dispute there, and his return, her body had betrayed her, stretching and growing to accommodate a new life. If the boy was her lover then she must have wondered too if he would cleave to her or to the old tyrant when a choice had to be made. She had a motive for murdering the old man – but none when it came to Cameron Croft.
Nor, having heard him speak and seen his face in an expression other than its scowl of concentration, could Karmel imagine the young man capable of causing the damage he'd noted to the foreigner's skull, the smashed pulpy skin, the cracked, distorted bone. He'd been forced to spy on his female relatives, had reported back to the man he considered his grandfather, had been used and manipulated in ways that he – simple as he was – could not comprehend.
'What are you going to do?' Gauri's voice was rough, exasperated. 'Will you question the boy further? He's exhausted, and has new responsibilities now. Don't you understand what happened to the foreigner? If you wish I can repeat what happened.' She faltered, gasped for breath. 'The foreigner was not meant to die.'
Neither of the older women spoke.
Finally Karmel met her eyes. 'I think I understand. For now we'll let it rest as it is. But if you think of anything you want to say to me, you can write to me in Delhi.' There was a hum of surprise in the room. He took out one of his cards, sodden and limp but still legible, and passed it to Gauri. Then he turned to face Thahéra's sister who had a strange and knowing look on her face. 'Should I send a doctor to Bhukta to examine Sonu? Would you be able to take your son down there for a few days?' She bowed her head in his direction.
Stitching Woman snorted, then began to laugh in great, thunderous bursts, although her face showed no signs of mirth. 'Well done, stranger, well done! You are so magnanimous, now that you've got it all figured out. You've heard us speak of our faults and you have apportioned blame. Your brain has done all the hard work. But how does it make you feel? Hah! How does it make you feel?' Her voice became a shriek.
Hearing her but determined to do things his own way, Karmel rose and climbed down the cabin steps. Freezing air swirled around him. He could hear the noises of the village at work.
What had he just been told? That Cameron's murder had been a mistake. If the old man had done it and the old man was dead then the blame would have been laid squarely at his door. But these women were too honest for their own good and balked at deception. So whom were they protecting? What was there to understand?
He thought he knew what had happened but he had lied to Gauri: he was not going to let it rest.
42
Was Karmel going to return from the mountains with a murderer in tow? Tanya Hàrélal doubted it.
When she thought of how Sara had lied to protect Adam and how Adam hated himself, it only made her angrier with Cameron. He had ended up mutilating so many lives. But what was the use of being cross with the dead? If he had been alive, perhaps no one would have been hurt, no one would even have known about his many lovers, or perhaps all would have shared for love of him! We don't plan our actions expecting to be taken out of the equation before the sum is finished.
And Antonio Sinbari? He had just been the catalyst. He had played on Cameron's greed, Adam's lust and Sara's fear, manipulating them for his own ends. But after all, he was a businessman, trained and ruthless – and who would really expect to win in a game of dice with him?
Deception all round and a waste of life. If Adam and Sara – who were innocent of all but personal betrayals – had covered for each other despite the consequences, it was unlikely that the tight-knit village community of Saahitaal would render up the guilty to justice. Ultimately, if we haven't already killed them, we try to protect those we love.
Tanya forced the tedious drone of the plane's engine to cover the jumble of sounds in her head. The side of her face was wet. She thought about her role in this strange saga and wondered if she was cut out to be a detective: probably more than she was cut out to be a mother.
Why had she gone to Goa? It was ostensibly to prove her father's competence and to right an injustice, which she felt was being perpetrated against him. But maybe it was also to placate him, to remind him that she was his deserving daughter. She sighed, knowing that she had other motives too – ones unconnected to her father that had made her pursue this strange investigation. Possibly she was running away from the fiasco with Lal Bahuba. She flushed with anger and bit her lip at the thought of him. But she knew she wasn't simply fleeing her ill-considered affair: she'd never been the type to hide from her failures.
She was running towards something then – towards self-esteem, a vocation, the antithesis of her mother's passive housebound life. She was trying to demonstrate her talent to someone. She was also – if only she'd allow herself to think it – trying to prove herself to Kailash Karmel.
Outside the plane's windows, unclouded sunshine belied their altitude and made the air seem balmy. Everyone appeared to know what they were doing and where they were going and what would happen when they got there, except her. Turning her face from the sunlit window she decided that sleep was the only cure for the agitation she was beginning to feel. What was the use of trying to win a man who despised her for what she represented?
Yet visions of Karmel rocked her slumbers and it was his smile that fluttered beneath her eyelids as the plane hovered above a rain-slickened Delhi runway.
*
Weary in ways he had never imagined he would be but nonetheless feverish with the need to wrap up his case, Karmel walked around the lake to Thahéra's sister's cabin where he'd left Thahéra sleeping. But when he reached his destination he found only the children there.
Chand called to him and Sonu smiled shyly. They were making something out of stones behind the cabin with their cousins, their cheeks and noses rouged by the icy breeze. Karmel waved to them and strode straight on.
He had to know who had swung the stick that day and why. He had to hear it from her.
He found Thahéra in her own cabin, on her knees, brushing the floor. There were few signs of the devastation and debris from the previous day: even her hair was bound tightly and invisible beneath a red scarf. The door was wide open and there was no fire, so the temperature was low: his breath made a cloud in front of his eyes.
Thahéra's skirt swirled around her like the Saahi around a rock. She looked up and tried to smile when she saw him but her face was so split and swollen that only her cheeks altered shape. He knelt beside her and gestured for her to come outside but she shook her head and led him to a low bench along the far wall where he had slept on his first night in the village. It seemed like such a long time ago – yet it was barely two weeks.
She had lied to him and lied to him; and he had allowed her to do it.
The weight of his pointless days in Saahitaal was crushing. He felt it as a physical burden. He had been here and despite that there had been violence and he was accepting it as if it didn't concern him. What was the use of pursuing answers to old problems when life went rushing on, careless, unsatisfied by the blood it had already taken?
He couldn't look at her face, so he looked at her feet – the callused skin, the silver rings encircling her toes and biting into the flesh as creepers mould themselves to trees; desire attacked his stomach like acid. If she didn't speak soon, if one of them didn't speak, he knew he was going to lose control and reach for her.
'Did they tell you everything? Did they tell you about me and the foreign man?' Apprehension and seduction danced around each other in her tone. He knew that what he was going to
say would make her feel worse.
He shook his head. She tapped her foot on the ground rapidly. He watched the gesture for a moment and forced himself to continue.
'I've come to find out, from you, about the foreigner. And why you didn’t tell me before when you knew I wished to find out.' She turned her face away from him.
'If I tell you, what will you do?'
'Depends what you tell me.' He knew that he couldn't make promises to a murderer. If she had killed her father, then perhaps he could help her; for what was that if not self-defence? But if she had killed Cameron Croft . . ..
Her ankle continued its rhythmic jerking. He was tempted to bend and kiss it, to trace the hollows of her foot with his lips. To push the hem of her skirt up towards her thigh. If he had been one of the other men on Hàrélal's force, he would simply have seen her as easy prey. In fact, he could have convinced himself that she deserved to be raped. That was how some of his colleagues thought. He had heard them speak thus. He swallowed and nudged her gently with an elbow, then remembered her bruises and apologised.
'I don't have to tell you anything. Who are you after all? Just another stranger – and that too, a city man.' Her voice was bold, hard. He could see her swollen cheek, not her expression.
'True.' He concealed his frustration.
'Go then. There's no use you hanging around, is there, soil collector?' Sarcastic bitterness barely masked the disappointment and grief surging beneath her words.
He hated to do it but he felt he had to. Clamping his hand over her left wrist, he swung her suddenly round to face him. It must have hurt. The luminous grey eyes, already half-closed by the distended tissue around them, shut completely; she made no sound. She was brave – or out of her mind.
'Listen.' He spoke harshly. 'You can tell me what happened now or I can take that boy with me to a police cell in Bhukta and they can kick him till he screams out the answers. Maybe you don't care about him, but I'll wager that your friend Gauri does; and she won't protect you above him, if only because she feels guilty about what she's done to him.'
'The boy? You know about him.' Thahéra seemed to wilt in front of his eyes, her solid shoulders drooping, her firm torso going slack like an emptying sack of flour. It made him nauseous watching it happen. How many times had her father done exactly the same thing to her, bullied her, tried to crack her miraculous confidence: and now he was dead and another man was doing the same thing. He felt his resolve weaken. He couldn't force her to confess.
He was not cut out to be a cop: he wasn't even sure that he considered what she'd done to be a crime and in his undercover role he had failed to detect anything till it was too late. But there was more … and he still couldn't go through with it, couldn't make her tell him that she had been wielding the club that killed the architect. Didn't want to hear it. Wanted to think of her as she had seemed for the first week – a beautiful woman, a happy mother, a hardworking member of an idyllic village – not a victim: suspicious, betrayed and volatile. He had handcuffs in his pouch but didn't reach for them.
They stayed like that for a few minutes, his fingers around her wrist, though more loosely than before, breathing smoky clouds around their faces. Karmel thought of all the things about himself that he could have expressed to her but hadn't. Perhaps deep down he had never felt that she would understand him, only that she wanted him, for some reason of her own. And he had always resisted lust that came without intellectual companionship.
He felt her breathing change; thought she was going to cry. He began to speak, to tell her that it was okay, that she could keep her secrets, that he would not betray her; but the words never left his lips. With animal speed, Thahéra twisted herself up off the bench; Karmel was still clutching her arm and felt his body come off the bench with her. When his grasp tightened instinctively, she bent over and, in a single fluid motion, sank her teeth deep into his wrist.
By the time his cry of surprise and pain had echoed around the room, she was out of the cabin and stumbling towards the trees, shaking with sobs, gasping 'Enough! Enough!' to herself, like a punishment or a lesson and then, sadly, 'What does he want from me? What, in God's name, does he want?'
43
Several hours walk away, Sadrettin's party made slow progress on their return journey to Bhukta. They were cheerful and chatted amongst themselves, Rimi so relieved that she allowed Narayan's attentions without complaint and Taylor almost delirious at the thought of a dry bed and a shave. Sadrettin stayed well ahead with the bearers, hefting his own pack. He had begun to admire the stolid men with whom he was walking; both of them were roughly the same age as he was. They described to him vividly what it felt like to be alone with the animals up on the pastures, detached for days and nights on end, with sometimes hostile skies and bitter winds, singing round the fires at night; thinking wistfully of wives and children down below; and he saw with sudden clarity what it meant to be chained to a sterile life. His life.
Listening to their tales of mountains and loneliness and comradeship, he began to think about what it was going to be like getting out of the business world. He had justified his recent decisions to himself in terms of self-interest and rationality but had not been prepared for the irrational sense of freedom he'd felt when he pinched Rimi's grey folder. It was as if the rivulets of mud slipping down the mountain as they walked carried with them, piece by piece, Sadrettin’s former self.
Suddenly he thought about the time he had watched impassively as hired thugs destroyed a couple of squalid tin hovels erected too close to one of the Randhor-Sinbari resorts. A small girl with hungry eyes and eczema had run to him, asking him to desist, to wait until her parents returned from whatever business they were about. He remembered how he had seen her face for a second, surprised even that she should have parents, and then had made her invisible. In the wind that pursued them down the mountain he fancied he could her even now, as clearly as he had failed to then, ‘Sir, you can do what you like with me, but don’t break our home!’
He'd helped Sinbari to do so many corrupt and immoral things and he'd done it all in the hope that one day the man would … what? Take him into his arms? Love him? He could barely articulate to himself what a fool he'd been expecting passion from a lump of anthracite. Preventing this man from doing this one last thing, thwarting his plans, seemed like small recompense for this wretched, grovelling creature he had become.
‘Saadi!’ Rimi’s voice tugged at him. ‘What’ll we tell the boss about my file? Darling, you know him better than anyone. Could you say that you lost it? If I tell him … then he’ll dismiss me at once.’ She looked miserable. Narayan too was watching him with anxious eyes. They were both panting, having raced ahead to catch up with him.
Sadrettin looked around him, at the winding trail they followed, the saturated branches, hanging low with flowers, the luminous sky glimpsed through the leaves. He smelt the blossoms and sucked in the crisp mountain air. His ankles sank deep into mud at every step and he had to brace his knees to prevent himself from sliding, but his muscles felt fresh – taut and tested for the first time in years. He nodded at Rimi, realising that he couldn’t start a new life based on another cowardly deceit. ‘I’ll tell him I took it.’ He turned to continue walking, but Rimi threw herself at him anyway, screeching, ‘Oh Saadi, why won’t you look at me? You know how I feel. You’re the one beautiful thing in this whole creepy, shit-hole of a place! If I had to stay here one second longer . . ..’
She never finished her sentence. Unable to listen to a single word more, Sadrettin dragged himself away from Rimi's crawling fingers and rushed on. For, despite his colleagues’ recent disenchantment, he understood the allure of this place. And, like Cameron Croft, he sensed its moneymaking potential. He knew that a few days work would have convinced Narayan and Taylor and Cornell of what Rimi had first suspected: the boss was onto a good thing here. And knowing this, Sadrettin felt a smile begin inside. Yes, surely there would be another party sent into the hills; maybe there
was a copy of Croft's file back in Delhi; he didn't know.
But he was not going to let Sinbari colonise these mountains anytime soon – or at least he was going to make him pay dearly for the seven years he had stolen, and for his exclusive resort at Truth Lake.
At that same instant, turning away from their contemplation of the silent lake, Thahéra's friend and her sister watched as she threw herself onto the ground by a clump of trees. Neither of them spoke. They had left the young couple, exhausted, asleep in Gauri's cabin. With Stitching Woman's help they had only just finished wrapping the old man's body. It had been an excruciating process, his stiff limbs refusing to submit to their ministrations, his hands still clawing at his mottled throat. Throughout their grim task Stitching Woman had berated them, her face livid, her dusty eyes jumping from one to the other as she sewed Devsingh's shroud. Then, making their excuses, they had walked out together towards the water to escape her belligerent and taunting presence. Now they watched from a distance as Thahéra, murmuring incoherently, buried her face in some moss.
'What now? Haven't we had enough for one night?' Thahéra's sister stood still, her face in shadow. 'If she doesn't stop this show, everyone will see.'
'And that bothers you?' Gauri too watched her friend askance, as if seeing the full glare of Thahéra's agony might blind a normal human being. She forced herself to remember her in happier days, when they had been working side by side, tickling the children, smoking together in the gloom. Thahéra had listened to her poetry, eyes full of mischief at some foolish verse. Gauri had considered her a true companion, as close a friend as she'd ever need. But last night – all of that was wiped clean away.
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