Nancy looked from Dickie to Joe and back again. ‘There are things you should know, Dickie,’ she said. ‘Tell him, Joe. He has to be told.’
‘Do you know why I’m here in Panikhat, Dickie?’ Joe asked.
‘Of course. Nancy was telling me you’re on secondment from the Met and she shanghaied you over here to look into the murder of her friend Peggy … Peggy Somersham.’
‘I’m enquiring into the murders of four women and their names are Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton and Somersham …’
Dickie leapt to his feet. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘The mess dinner! On the night of the fire! Are you telling me that each of those men has lost his wife? That she’s been murdered? Can you be certain?’
‘Naurung and I have looked into each death and we are convinced that they were not accidental …’ He turned for confirmation to Naurung who nodded his agreement.
And so, in turn, and with frequent interruptions from Nancy, Joe and Naurung outlined for him the investigations they had carried out and Dickie listened in silence. When their account drew to a close, he muttered, ‘This is the most devilish thing! I won’t say I don’t believe you – I do. I have to. But it is the most appalling thing …’
‘It’s quite incomprehensible. I’ve never heard of anything so evil,’ said Nancy.
‘Haven’t you?’ said Dickie dully. ‘Then you know nothing about Waziristan! It’s badal, Sandilands, isn’t it? It’s badal that we’re dealing with?’
‘I’m afraid that it is. A terrible mixture of revenge and conviction. Our murderer feels he has a God-given right – no, an obligation – to exact revenge. Not only from those who actually killed his wife but from those who failed through their drunken incompetence to save her.’
‘Let’s say it!’ Nancy almost shouted. ‘This clever chap … our murderer … person or persons unknown … It’s Giles Prentice we’re talking about! Giles Prentice killed Peggy and Joan and Sheila and Alicia!’
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Andrew. ‘Why, if he felt so strongly, didn’t he – excuse me, Dickie – just kill off the five officers he considered responsible?’
Dickie gave a bleak smile. ‘His mind doesn’t work in the blunt, straightforward English way that yours or mine or the Commander’s does, Andrew. You say that Dolly suffered from a phobia – a phobia about fire? So – his much-loved wife dies in the worst conceivable way for her – by fire, her nightmare. And he is left for the rest of his life to deal not only with her loss – he’s left with the tormenting thought that her last moments must have been not just agony for her but utter terror. And his revenge – which he is compelled to seek if he considers himself bound by the Pathan code, as you say he does – is to deal out exactly the same treatment to the men he hates. They are not to lose their lives – he wants them to live on in order to suffer, as he’s suffered, a lifetime’s loss and a lifetime’s anguish thinking of the way their wives died.’
Joe watched Dickie finding his way along the track he had so unwillingly taken himself.
‘And, from what we have seen of the bereaved husbands,’ said Nancy, ‘he has been successful. They are each as unhappy as Prentice is himself. And that, I suppose, is what put us completely off his track – we were counting him always as the first victim in a series of victims. The first of five to lose his wife in a hideous way. But Dolly was never part of that. She was the reason for it. She died in March. The other four died in March. Why do I keep saying “died”? – I mean were murdered! And on or around the anniversary of her death. Ritual. It was important to him. He was marking out the time of her death with other deaths.’ She shuddered.
‘And the roses,’ said Joe. ‘Prentice put roses on the graves of the women he’d killed in March each year.’
‘Do you think that could show a more human side to his nature?’ Andrew asked. ‘I find it hard to enter into the mind of such a man but do you suppose that could be his way of – well, apologising – to his innocent victims? His way of acknowledging that they were not his real target, and honouring their memory? Mad, I know – but let’s admit it, that’s what we’re trying to understand – madness.’
‘Excuse me, sahib,’ said Naurung, ‘but I do not believe that there is a more human side to this man. The roses are not a mark of honour and regret as they would be when placed there by a normal person. I think he must be an evil spirit who takes delight in signalling what he has done. The victims may have been innocent and no more than a way of being revenged on their husbands but you will not be forgetting the horror of what he did. He did not need to cut Memsahib Somersham’s wrists to the bone! I think he enjoyed killing these memsahibs. I think he puts roses – blood red roses, remember – on their graves to remind himself of the pleasure he took in killing.’
A chilled silence followed Naurung’s confident statement.
‘This man must be caught,’ said Andrew in anguish. ‘What can you do, Joe? It’s outside everyone’s experience here. What would you do if this were happening in London? What do investigators do when they’re brought face to face with a multiple murderer or an evil spirit – and it’s one and the same as far as I’m concerned.’
Joe had been expecting this question. It was a question he perpetually put to himself and he was not satisfied with the answer. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said slowly, ‘that with all the might of Scotland Yard behind them, to say nothing of contacts with other police forces, what they do in these circumstances is wait.’
‘Wait?’ said Naurung urgently. ‘Wait? Is that all we can do? And do you mean wait for the next tragedy to happen? Wait until our man strikes again?’
‘I don’t like it either,’ said Joe. ‘We could charge him and lay the facts as we know them before him – scare him, if you like, though he’s not a man who scares easily but with what result? He’d either laugh in our faces or perhaps worse – disappear. Oh, he could disappear, all right. Like an eel into the mud. And then where would we be? No. I want him where I can see him. And …’ His face suddenly distorted with loathing. ‘… let him overplay his hand and we will have a better chance of taking him. Think for a moment – what evidence have we got that would stand up against him? Andrew – you are the man who would have to deal with this, the ultimate authority in Panikhat. Would you feel able, on the strength of what we have so far, to issue a warrant for his arrest?’
Andrew shook his head.
‘Wait until he strikes again, you say?’ said Dickie. ‘Look, I know what you’re all thinking and I can quite see why no one wants to put the thought into words so I’ll do it myself. I think we all know who the next – and last – victim is, don’t we? According to the grisly schedule he’s set himself, come next March it’s whichever lady has made Dickie Templar the happiest of men.’
‘Oh, no!’ Nancy was horrified. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But no. Certainly not! You’re not suggesting that Midge, his own daughter …? No. Not even Giles is that mad. But I can quite see why he looked as though he’d seen a ghost when Midge greeted you last night.’
‘No. I think he won’t turn his anger on Midge but we are dealing, as you say, Drummond, either with madness or evil and I’m taking no chances. I’m certainly going to marry her but I won’t marry her until he’s under lock and key. I was thinking out loud, trying to guess how he’ll react now that I’ve ruined his equation. How is he going to deal with an enforced change in his plans? I think he’ll work out his revenge before she is able to marry me. He must know by now that I’m planning to leave for Calcutta and then on to Peshawar to rejoin my regiment the day after tomorrow …’
‘I’d come to the same conclusion,’ said Joe. ‘He’ll try to kill you, Dickie.’
Dickie gave a sharp laugh. ‘So I’m to be the tethered goat? I can see that and I agree to it. But, tell me, which of you fellows is going to stand by with a rifle when the tiger comes for me?’
Looking round at their stricken faces, he banged his fist on the table, rattling the coffee cups. ‘Ayo Gurkha
li!’ he said. ‘It means, “The Gurkhas are here!” It’s what we shout when we go into battle!’
‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ repeated Naurung.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DICKIE LOOKED AT each in turn resentfully. ‘This is all quite unnecessary. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself and I can’t see any reason why any of you should risk your necks for me.’
Andrew took no notice of his protest but calmly went over the arrangements they had just made. ‘From eight until five to midnight, I will be on watch. From midnight to five to four, Joe, and from five to four until relieved, Naurung. Is that agreed and understood? Dickie, you can be as proud and independent as you like but remember who we are dealing with – an obsessed and revengeful killer. I am not a Pathan but I am well aware of melmastia – you’ll know what I mean. You are my guest, Dickie, and you will spend as many hours of the day as you can bear here and all hours of the night with someone by you on a rota. I don’t mean that someone should shadow you every moment but one of us should be within hail at all times. As Joe has pointed out, nothing should change in my domestic arrangements – any door or window that is normally open will stay open, no special orders will be given to the servants. Same for Joe. We will not discuss the matter again unless we’re absolutely sure we can’t be overheard. We each have a firearm, it should be kept ready for use at all times.’
Dickie shrugged in a gesture of surrender. ‘Oh, all right, Andrew,’ he said. ‘All right, you’ve said your piece.’
‘I haven’t said my piece,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve issued an order.’
And so the day had developed. It had been an ordinary day in Panikhat. Midge and Nancy rode out together, Dickie, mounted by the Bengal Greys, played a leisurely chukka or two of polo. It was hard to tell how Naurung had spent the day, though he seemed never to be in the way or out of it. Joe, acutely conscious of many requests from Uncle George for a situation report, sat himself down to collect his thoughts.
‘I’ll have to send this handwritten,’ he thought. ‘It’s too hot to have it typed here!’
And he began:
Dear Sir,
Pursuant to your instructions, I duly proceeded on the 10th inst. by train to Panikhat, accompanied by …’
The standard police phrases rolled from his pen. He forced himself to concentrate, he forced himself to write neatly, well aware that an ambiguous phrase could be replayed by a Bengali typist in florid and inappropriate prose. Towards the afternoon he decided that he could do no more; he suddenly needed the calm company of Kitty and walked across to her bungalow. As he walked up her drive he heard the cheerful voice of Midge.
Rounding the corner, he saw them sitting together over a tea table. Midge was doing the talking. Joe listened. What, he wondered, would she find to say? ‘I’m engaged to be married but my father is a multiple murderer. It’s probable that my affianced will be murdered during the course of the day.’ Something of that sort? But no. He overheard a highly coloured account from Midge of her adventures at her finishing school in Switzerland. She was even describing what she’d worn at an end-of-term dance, how much it had cost and confessing that she hadn’t yet paid for it.
Kitty listened with affection, obviously enjoying herself, prompting Midge by shrewd questions to further and indiscreet revelations.
He made himself known and joined them both on the verandah. After a while and to Joe’s acute embarrassment, Prentice rode up the drive. He was dirty and sweaty. He’d obviously been working.
‘Morning, Kitty. Morning, Sandilands. There you are, Midge. Looking for your young man. Any idea where he is?’
‘On the polo ground,’ said Joe, having just seen him there. ‘Knocking a ball about with the Greys. I’ll ride down with you.’
‘If you find him, Daddy, you’re to be nice to him,’ said Midge. ‘Not like you were last night!’
She turned to Kitty. ‘Daddy doesn’t quite approve of Dickie.’
‘I don’t disapprove of Dickie especially,’ said Prentice equably. ‘If I disapprove of anybody – I disapprove of you!’
It was affectionately said.
‘Who,’ asked Kitty, ‘could disapprove of Midge Prentice, I’d like to know?’
‘Daddy can,’ said Midge.
‘I wanted to see Templar,’ Prentice confided as they rode down together. ‘Midge is right. I was a bit brusque with him last night. I don’t approve of this engagement. I expect you’ve heard all about it? Minette’s far too young – and young for her age. But I came the heavy father. Some excuse, of course, but I said more than I meant. No call for a row.’
In the face of such normality, it was difficult – it was almost impossible – to believe in the existence of the dark current. And the encounter between Dickie Templar and Prentice had – so far as such a thing could be in the circumstances – been entirely normal. Prentice, on the one hand, reserved but friendly, Dickie polite but determined.
Joe heard Prentice say, ‘We should talk. Now, you’re off the day after tomorrow – correct? Today’s a bit full already but there’s nothing wrong with tomorrow. Why don’t we make an appointment as it were? Come and lunch with me at the Club. There are rather a lot of women about the place here, what with Midge, and Nancy. And, indeed, the all-seeing Kitty. I feel a bit – scrutinised. Let’s have a moment or two when we’re not being scrutinised. Eh?’
The long afternoon wore on.
With no hope of sleep that night and mindful that he would have to be on duty at midnight, Joe lay down on his bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, his Browning automatic pistol with a full magazine in its holster, and linked his hands behind his head. He gazed at the ceiling. His thoughts chased him down dark corridors and he longed to put on a light, to read a book, or check for the tenth time that his gun was properly loaded and ready but, they had agreed, nothing unusual. So – no light at this hour. The police detective, if anyone were watching, was fast asleep as normal.
He went over in his mind the road he would have to follow in the dark to reach Nancy’s bungalow to relieve Andrew’s watch. He had looked it over, even paced it carefully in the daylight when he was sure that Prentice was at work, exercising on the maidan a good mile away. He had borrowed a pair of gym shoes from Andrew and was confident that he could arrive unannounced by betraying noises.
But now, with his watch held up to the moonlight saying thirty minutes to go before he relieved Andrew, Joe was tense. He was not deceived by the softening conversation between Dickie and Prentice. In fact, the more he thought of it, the more contrived it seemed.
* * *
Prentice was sending a signal which read, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.’ He was more than ever convinced that Prentice would strike that night. He was a military man after all, like Joe, and Joe reasoned that any soldier with two nights to carry out a vital offensive would not leave it until the second night. If he was unsuccessful on the first occasion he would have another one available to him.
Twenty minutes to go. He calculated that it would take him seven minutes walking carefully along the shadowed route he had picked out to reach the bungalow and another minute to slip in through the back door and take his place on the verandah outside Dickie’s room. It was vital that he appear at exactly five minutes to midnight as he had arranged with Andrew. Any earlier or later and he might find himself taken for an intruder and have his head blown off. He swung silently out of bed and padded to the window to judge the strength of the moonlight. The moon and the stars combined to create an illusion of daylight, a clarity so intense Joe felt he could have read a book by their gleam. He slipped a concealing dark jacket over his white shirt and waited.
He looked down in the direction of the Drummond bungalow, wondering whether Dickie, exhausted by his practice on the polo field, had managed to snatch any sleep at all. He knew, in the circumstances, he would never have been able to sleep himself. All was quiet.
Prentice looked in the other direction towards the
military lines and Curzon Street.
‘Prentice! You bastard! What are you thinking tonight?’
He was aware of Dickie’s imminent departure, was perhaps obsessed by it. He had to move and he had to move soon. Tonight? Tomorrow night? Waiting!
‘If we were hunting, I’d say that we’d stopped the earth, stopped the fox. That’s what I am! I am the earth-stopper!’
Again, his mind weary from this exercise, he went over their arrangements. Three watchers watching the earth, thinking round the problem, thinking through it, thinking of all angles, relevant or irrelevant.
‘Dickie, are you all right? Midge, are you all right?’
He smiled to himself at the thought that, imperceptibly, in his mind, the two lovers had become one. Impossible to think of one without the other.
He gazed through the window and looked up at the yellow moon, the March moon, and a thought so chilling, a thought so devastating, hit him with an intensity that for a moment threatened to loosen his bowels.
‘We’ve stopped the wrong earth!’
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘PRENTICE HAS ALL the murderous patience of a Pathan in pursuit of a blood feud. Prentice is a man of method. He is not going to abandon his established pattern. His ritual. For Christ’s sake! – he doesn’t want Dickie dead! He wants him alive and suffering! Like all the others! He wants him deprived of the love of his life with the rest of his life to live in that knowledge. And marriage doesn’t come into it! That’s our own Western way of thinking. It’s enough for him that Dickie loves her and Prentice reasons like a Pathan. An eye for an eye, a loss for a loss. Appropriateness. Fittingness. Dickie has never been in any physical danger himself.’
And a second thought to agitate him – ‘March! We’re still in the month of March! He doesn’t need to wait for another year.’
The Last Kashmiri Rose Page 24