by Irene Black
“Eventually Mark woke up to the truth—to what Maighréad was really like. But he always thought she really loved him and that he would eventually banish her ghosts.”
“What the hell are you implying?” Ashok’s natural courtesy was lost under a blanket of apprehension. The woman was obviously lying, fabricating a story to defend Salers, so why was he letting her get to him? Duncan was slumped on the bed, clearly discomfited at having to listen again to the story that had so recently been fed to him for the first time. Felicity, on the other hand, was growing in stature as she spoke. She clearly reveled in her vantage point, in seeing the two men squirm.
“I’m not suggesting that Maighréad was ever a member of the IRA. I don’t think they’d have touched her—too crazy even for them. She’d have been a liability. But no doubt they were not displeased by her mad fantasies. They would certainly have wanted Mark out of the way. Maighréad was doing their dirty work for them.”
“Your suggestions are abhorrent.” Ashok spoke stiffly and with undisguised disgust. “But I grant that Salers has indoctrinated you well, and I congratulate him on the polished way he prepared your speech for you.”
“Don’t patronize me, Dr. Rao. I’ve had to tolerate enough of that from Duncan over the past year. Nobody indoctrinates me.”
“Given,” Ashok said, thinking out aloud, “that there is an iota of truth in all the fictitious claptrap you’re telling, this hardly alters the fact that Salers was abusing his wife. And that he got his just deserts.”
“You think so, Doctor?” Felicity seemed to derive some pleasure from emphasizing, in a slightly condescending way, Ashok’s medical credentials. “Well, let me enlighten you. Maighréad, as I’ve already said, was eaten up with hatred. She hated the Loyalists—naturally enough, I suppose. But she also hated herself. She was consumed with guilt because she’d survived the attack that had killed her family. She talked constantly of suicide, of joining her family in the black abyss, and other such emotive terms. Over the years, her obsession infiltrated every other facet of her personality. She was like a Kamikaze pilot, fuelled by such violent passions that, ultimately, self-destruction was a noble goal.”
Ashok had heard enough. He jumped up. “How dare you,” he shouted, “come here and perpetuate such filth? You may be able to feed him your little lies—” He gestured contemptuously at Duncan. “—but you forget, I knew her. So did Hannah. Not a word of what you’re telling rings true.”
“You and Hannah only saw what you wanted to see, poor fools. She had you in her clutches as surely as I had Duncan.”
“Well, I’ll be very interested to hear what excuses you come up with for your beloved brother’s systematic abuse of Maighréad.”
“No excuses. Just facts. Mark never abused Maighréad. Never. Not once. She did it to herself.”
The room seemed suddenly, oppressively hot. Ashok got up and went to the window. He stared out at the familiar and comforting opulence of tropical vegetation in the garden below. He was crushed. Somehow, counterarguments refused to take form in his mind. He should be demolishing this wicked assertion, killing it dead, preserving the sanctity of Maighréad’s martyrdom. But he could not. It was just as when Hannah had confessed her true identity to him. As if he had suspected it all along.
Finally he found his voice. “If that is so, why didn’t Salers defend himself in court?”
“He could only do that by condemning Maighréad. He was testing her, if you like, testing the love, which he was sure she had for him, deep down. He was convinced that she’d speak up eventually, that she wouldn’t let him go down. But as we all know, she just watched, coldly, when he was sentenced. That woman was devoid of any loyalty, except to her dead family. Everything else was just playacting.”
“None of it makes sense,” Ashok muttered.
“She used you,” Felicity said. “She used Hannah as a weapon against Mark. She watched Hannah use her contacts to pursue him without remorse after the last so-called attack, until she tracked him down. She let her report him to the police and instigate his arrest.”
“If that’s the case, perhaps you’d care to explain to me why she had resisted any earlier attempts to report him.”
“It was the right time,” Felicity said. “She felt safer in England. In Belfast, she no doubt thought she would attract a Loyalist backlash. When she heard Mark was back in England and trying to trace her, she pounced. But be quite certain. Getting Mark put away was always her ultimate aim. In her twisted mind, he represented all the evils that the English had perpetrated in Ireland. He came into her life to be used, as a scapegoat.” Felicity looked at Ashok’s distress and softened slightly. “One thing I will say. You came nearer than anyone else to penetrating the pestilence that had poisoned her mind. If she hadn’t gone back to Belfast, with the intention of fulfilling what she always felt was her destiny, I believe you might have got her to confess what she’d done to Mark. As it was, there was just a hint of it in her suicide note.”
Ashok, bewildered, tried to recall the contents of the note.
Felicity filled him in. “For the good man is not at home, he is gone a long journey—don’t you remember? The good man—that was Mark. The long journey—prison. I believe that to be the glimmer of a confession.”
* * * *
Christmas morning dawned in eerie silence and a vague stench of burning rubber. Hannah bullied her stiff limbs into action and struggled across Willi to lower herself as quietly as she could off the elegant but rock-hard bed that had provided her with the rudiments of a night’s sleep. Willi was lying on her back, open-mouthed, snoring softly. Hannah envied her the knack of blotting out unpleasantness by turning it into an adventure. She was sleeping like a toddler who had worn herself out at yesterday’s visit to the fair.
Outside, a peacock announced its presence with an ear-piercing wail.
Willi stirred under the dustsheet, opened her eyes, and blinked. “What the hell was that?”
“Happy Christmas to you, too,” Hannah said. “Only a peacock telling you to get up.”
“What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty. In the morning.”
Willi sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Anything happened?”
“No idea. Only just surfaced. You seemed to sleep well.”
“Out like a light. Not that there was a light. Oh Lord, let’s hope we don’t have to spend another miserable evening sitting here in the dark.”
“It was pretty miserable in the night, too, let me tell you. I kept expecting some horrible specter to fly in through the open window.”
“Or Salers,” Willi said grimly.
“Well, I know he’s all skin and bones, but I don’t think even Salers could squeeze in through that small window. There’s barely a six-inch gap.”
“Hannah, you do realize that we overtook him on the road yesterday? You know what that means.”
Hannah smiled. “I was hoping you’d forgotten. Should have known you better than that.”
Willi laughed. “Same here. Anyway, we’ve made it unscathed through the night, so perhaps he got through the roadblock on the bridge and made it to Mysore after all. Or perhaps the rioters got him.”
“No point in speculating. Though I doubt whether anyone could have got past those burning trucks. I’m going to pay lip service to a wash,” Hannah said. “There’s a bit of that river water left. It’s better than nothing.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll go and get some more,” Willi said, picking up a jug and unlocking the door into the hall with the key that the old man had given them.
Hannah went into the bathroom and inspected the muddy brew at the bottom of the clay pot. She scooped it up beaker-by-beaker and filtered it into the washbasin through her iodine filter, until she had enough to splash her body back into life.
She had no towel, so she waited until her arms and face had dried a little in the air before she replaced her crumpled kameez and went back into the bedroom. At once, she stood still and looked ar
ound. Unaccountably, she had a feeling that she was not alone in the room.
“Willi?” No answer. As she glanced across the enshrouded furniture, a whiff of something rotten assailed her nostrils, and she saw, standing in the bay of the window, the figure of a man.
Chapter 14
At the car repair shop, Ashok’s heart leaped when he saw the Fiat. The steering wheel was back in place. The mechanic, however, was less than pleased to see him.
“But Sir, I am telling to come back at eight. Now is seven-thirty. Car is not ready.”
“Is it drivable?”
“Yes, Sir, but still I have to check it over.”
“Never mind that. Just hand me the keys. I need it now.”
At seven forty-five on Christmas morning, Ashok finally drove the Fiat out of the workshop and set off with Felicity to Mysore. He had, with some difficulty, managed to persuade Duncan that it was necessary for him to remain in Bangalore, in case Hannah returned. Felicity, however, might be useful when it came to dealing with Salers.
Some five miles out of the center of Bangalore, Ashok was pulled over by the police.
“You are heading, Sir?”
“Mysore—medical emergency.”
The two policemen were young but for all that determined. They pressed him further, and he spun them a yarn about having come from UK to perform a very delicate operation; technique unknown in India; life in the balance. He showed them his documents and harangued them with technicalities until there could be no doubt in their minds that he was speaking the truth.
“Very well, Sir—but the young lady, no.”
“She’s my nurse,” Ashok protested.
“Sorry, Sir. Report has come of three young foreign men waylaid by rioters outside Nanjangud late yesterday night. Mistaken for journalists. So you see I can’t take responsibility for letting your nurse through, even as far as Mysore. If you care to pull off road and wait until our chief arrives, you can ask.”
“How long?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe one hour. I really don’t know.”
“I can’t wait for that.” Ashok turned to Felicity. “You’ll have to go back.”
Felicity nodded, placed a hand on Ashok’s arm, and looked at him, resigned. “You’re a good man. If there’s any way...treat him with humanity.”
Against his will, Ashok touched her hand briefly, and a whisper of sympathy passed across his face. He drove off.
It was less turbulent than he had anticipated on this stretch of the road. All the more maddening that he hadn’t been able to persuade anyone to take him to Mysore the previous day. He began to doubt whether public transport as far as Mysore really had been halted. He should have known better than to believe the locals in Bangalore. Too late now. At least he had his own vehicle. He was well aware that the real trouble would start on the road beyond Mysore.
As he drove into the town, he heard a sudden clanking sound from somewhere beneath his feet, and the car began to career over the road. Somehow he managed to pull it to a halt before it crashed into a set of market stalls. Within minutes, people surrounded him. He spoke to some of them rapidly in Kannada and handed over a wad of notes. With a bit of luck and the promise of an equal sum on completion, they would have the car fixed by the time he got back. But it was a major blow. Now he would have to seek alternative transport.
Mysore was calm, a little too quiet perhaps. Groups of silent men on street corners appeared preoccupied rather than merely whiling away idle hours. But perhaps, Ashok reasoned, if he hadn’t been looking for signs of abnormality, he wouldn’t have noticed any.
He hurried from one taxi office to the next. Men slouched around like worker ants waiting for the Nippon to finish its deadly job. Taxi to Nanjangud? they repeated incredulously. Where’ve you been for the past twenty-four hours?
He ran over to the bus station. Ordered confusion reigned. Buses going nowhere lined up patiently, their prospective customers huddled in groups on the ground, dug in, quietly waiting with their little bundles, tattered suitcases, rope-tied boxes. Suckling infants, old men wizened as the trunks of ancient banyan trees, young women like ripples of sunlight on the sea in dusty, dazzling saris. Ashok’s enquiries at the ticket office drew a blank. No one seemed to understand his request or at least take it seriously. Perhaps they thought he was an escaped lunatic. What other explanation was there for his ignorance?
Finally, in desperation, Ashok tackled the dozing autorickshaw drivers near the entrance to the bus station. At first he was greeted with disbelief then with suppressed laughter, until finally one of them said, “If you really want to go, ask Pandi. He’s crazy enough for anything.”
“Pandi?”
The one who had spoken gestured to the far end of the row of autorickshaws, where an elderly driver was sleeping in the back seat of his vehicle with his legs slung over the front.
“Eh! Pandi! This fellow is wanting to go to Nanjangud. Just the sort of outing you’d enjoy, isn’t it?”
The man opened one eye and scrutinized Ashok. “One hundred rupees,” he announced nonchalantly, “and I take you there.”
“Done,” Ashok said, reflecting that he’d have said yes if the man had demanded dollars. He climbed into the back of the rickshaw, while the remaining drivers discussed the event with obvious amusement. .
Amid a fanfare of ear splitting Indian pop-music from the rickshaw’s radio, they roared off out of the city.
* * * *
Hannah stared at the silhouetted figure against the backlit window. She detected nothing intrinsically frightening about it. It was neither large nor looming. On the contrary, the figure seemed diminutive and shriveled. In spite of this, Hannah felt the familiar frisson of cold fear pass through her that had, until she met Ashok, dogged her since the whole business began. Although his features were obscured, Hannah knew that this was the man who had bedeviled her life for so long.
For several seconds, there was no movement in the room.
When Hannah finally spoke, the sound of her own voice seemed like an echo. “Where is my friend?”
“Don’t worry, my dear. She’s quite safe. Just a little held up at the moment.” He gave a laugh, which turned into a cough, a tearing, rasping sound.
I could run for the door, Hannah reckoned, as the man’s cough turned into an uncontrollable hacking fit; but something held her back, kept her riveted to the spot.
The fit passed, and the man straightened up. He had read her mind. “Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s locked.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Oh?”
“This has gone on long enough. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Game’s over now, Hannah Petersen.”
“What is your game, Salers? Why are you persecuting me?”
Hannah was still standing next to the bathroom door, where she had been when she first became aware of the intruder. He had resumed his rigid stance in the bay.
“Tut tut. Such emotive language. I just wanted to get to know you.”
“Why?”
A pause. Had she hit a weak spot?
When he spoke, the words seemed blocked, like leaves in a drain. “But, my dear, to set the record straight. I had to find out what made a twisted mind like yours tick.”
Voices penetrated the room from outside. Two women with wash-loads balanced on their heads chatted unsuspectingly as they walked up the track to the river. The man turned awkwardly and forced the grimy drapes across the window, retching, as he did so, from the dust that was unleashed by his action. As daylight was obscured, the man’s features materialized. Hannah gasped as he stepped into the center of the room.
He was thin to the point of emaciation. His skin had the translucence of one who is on the edge of existence. It was stretched grayly across his face, as though pinned back. His mouth looked as if it were part of this operation, the ends permanently pulled towards his ears in a parodied grin. It seemed that only a mummified corpse remained
. The eyes were sunk deep into the skull and ringed with sooty black, limp, like two dead jellyfish. Yet stripped of the dark glasses, the face of Mark Salers was unmistakable, despite the ravages of disease and the passage of time.
Twisted mind, Salers had said. What did he mean? It was he, not Hannah, who had the twisted mind. Why was he saying these things to her?
Salers gestured towards the white shape of a sheeted chair some six feet from the bed. “Sit down,” he said brusquely. He dragged himself over to the bed, and with a supreme effort climbed onto it, sighing with undisguised relief as, propping himself up on the two pillows, he leaned back against the headboard.
He’s on his way out, Hannah tried to reassure herself. The man’s no danger anymore. Just a pathetic, stinking wreck. He can’t have had the strength to hurt Willi. He must have locked her up again—like at the tombs. The thought should have stilled her fears, but the man’s pervasive aura of evil remained undiminished. She willed herself to ignore the part of her brain that was telling her to run for it. No. There has to be an end to this, she decided. She sat down on the chair that Salers had indicated.
“What did you mean, about setting the record straight?” Hannah asked slowly.
“Bitch,” the man replied, the eyes flashing into life for one chilling instant. “You know exactly what I mean.”
Despite the man’s decrepitude and Hannah’s attempts to convince herself that he was harmless, something in his behavior screamed danger. Perhaps it was the gratuitous pleasure he seemed to be deriving from watching her reaction to his words. Keep him calm, she told herself. Keep him talking. Don’t show any emotion.
“Why did you attack me in the tombs,” she said, “if you were only trying to get to know me? You had a knife.”
He snorted contemptuously. “Knife? Don’t be so silly. I was trying to give you that box.”
So Willi had been right. The weapon at the tombs was nothing more than the pearls.
“Why? Why the pearls?”
“Oh come now. Don’t pretend you haven’t worked that one out. I thought you’d enjoy my little guessing game—now the book’s finished.”