The Last Kashmiri Rose

by Barbara Cleverly

  Kitty’s voice came back to him, scathing, acerbic, amused, ‘… and leathery old villains are known to have killed their own offspring if they thought the code demanded it …’

  ‘We’ve been wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’

  The horror of his conclusion froze his muscles. He was unable to move. Unable to make a decision. Run to the Drummonds for help?

  Yes!

  No! That would be to add a mile to his journey. It was probably too late anyway! His mouth was dry, his eyes staring, ears straining for any sound.

  The paralysis passed away and he found himself without further thought outside his bungalow and running on silent feet in the moonlight. Running to Curzon Street. Running to the Prentice bungalow.

  He stopped at the drive gate and moved forward on tiptoe. The house was in total silence. There was no light. The front door, as was Prentice’s custom, stood open. Glancing down the garden, for a moment Joe could fancy he caught a gleam of light from the garden house but it was gone. The servants’ quarters likewise lay in silence. The silence, it seemed to Joe, of complete desertion. Not even a tickle of smoke from kitchen fires. The silence was ominous, the desertion complete.

  With stealth he ran up the verandah steps and stood by the open door. After only a moment’s hesitation he stepped inside, waiting for a second for his eyes to grow accustomed to the deeper shadows of the house.

  All internal doors were open. All, in fact, except one. And surely that one was Midge’s bedroom? He remembered the room. He remembered the light, brittle, cane furniture and the pretty wall hangings that Prentice had thought appropriate to welcome his daughter home. He even remembered the layout of the room and, without hesitation, pushed the door open.

  Sick with relief, on the charpoy under a mosquito net, he saw the recumbent figure of Midge. A second glance was less reassuring. She was lying on her back, an unnatural pose. Her hands were folded on her breast in an almost ritual stillness. He took a pace forward and then another. He bumped into a chair and bent to move it aside. As he picked it up he realised that it was broken. Broken, in fact, into small pieces. Looking again he saw that all the furniture in the room had been broken – smashed. All the hangings had been torn down and the debris had been piled about Midge’s bed. Stepping forward again his foot hit a hard object. A tin of kerosene.

  With desperate hands he tore the mosquito net away and knelt beside the sleeping Midge. And then he saw the dark stain on her breast. With a groan he reached out and touched it. His hand recoiled in horror. It was a spray of red roses, placed between her limp hands. Automatically, he took one of her folded hands and felt for her pulse. Automatically, he lowered his face to hers and breathed. What was that smell? His years in London had not prepared him for much that he found in India but at least he was able to recognise the smell of hashish. He brushed her forehead with his lips. Slightly damp. Midge was alive. Midge was drugged. Midge, it seemed, was intended to suffer the death her mother had suffered twelve years ago. The death on a funeral pyre which had haunted her through the years.

  He extended hands that shook to lift her but a sound behind him caused him to turn.

  Pale in the moonlight and insubstantial, a tall figure stood silent in the doorway watching him.

  Every hair on his head, every muscle in his back signalling terror, Joe breathed, ‘Chedi Khan.’

  Nancy stirred uncomfortably and looked at her clock again. Five minutes past midnight. Andrew had not joined her in their room. Every sense was alert and crying out that all was not well. She had never expected to be able to sleep through the night and had settled down in a chair fully dressed in trousers, an old shirt of Andrew’s and a pair of soft riding boots. She made her way silently on to the verandah.

  ‘Andrew! Something’s wrong,’ she hissed. ‘Joe’s not here, is he? And if he’s not here – that means the danger’s not here … It’s somewhere else. I’m going down to his bungalow.’

  ‘Stay here, Nancy, I’ll get Dickie to go …’

  But Nancy was already running.

  She covered the half-mile to the dak bungalow and paused at the end of the drive to catch her breath. No sounds. The front door hung wide open. She crept quietly up, stood to one side and listened. Only the sound of her own laboured breathing. She moved into the hall and made towards Joe’s bedroom. In the doorway she bumped into a turbaned figure and opened her mouth to scream in uncontrollable reaction. An Indian hand closed around her mouth forcing it shut, killing all sound. Almost stopping her heart. The nightmares of Joan, of Sheila, Alicia and Peggy came starkly before her own eyes. Their last sight had been a vision of terror, an Indian with a snake in his hand, an Indian with hands grasping to throw his victim screaming over the cliff edge, an Indian using his strength to keep a mouth gasping for air under water, an Indian slashing with a razor.

  Nancy struggled and caught her elbow on a uniform belt buckle. A voice spoke urgently in her ear. ‘Memsahib! It is I, Naurung! Please be quiet!’

  ‘Chedi Khan!’

  Unbelieving, Joe stared at the tall figure of a Pathan warrior standing motionless, silhouetted in the moonlit doorway. Long fringed waistcoat, baggy white trousers and shirt, pagri twisted into a turban, embroidered slippers, curved knife thrust through a belt. But then he saw in the apparition’s right hand the gleam of a slim dark barrel and Joe shrank from the menace of a Luger P’08.

  His hand shot to the holster of his own pistol.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Sandilands!’ The dry drawl of Prentice’s voice stopped him short.

  Helplessly, Joe tried to speak and gestured towards Midge.

  ‘Leave it! Leave it!’ said Prentice. ‘She’s asleep. There’s nothing you can do. In fact everyone in our little circle is asleep except for you and me. Old Andrew can sleep the sleep of senility, Nancy can sleep the sleep of surrendered innocence, and Templar, of course, can sleep the sleep – I imagine – of powerful sexual excitement and happy anticipation.’ He paused. ‘The only difference between him and Minette is that he will wake in the morning. But in the meantime, come with me.’

  He gestured with his left hand. The right held the pistol pointed unwaveringly at Joe’s stomach. ‘Come with me, Sandilands,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it would be convenient if you raised your hands. Although you would be dead long before you had succeeded in drawing your cumbersome firearm. Just go ahead of me. We’ll go in here.’

  He indicated the door of his office. ‘You’ll see a box of matches on the table. Part of my evening’s preparations, as you can probably imagine. Be kind enough to light the lamp and pray take a seat. We might as well be comfortable. Time passes so agreeably in your company.’

  Painfully Joe found his voice. ‘Prentice!’ he said desperately and, hating himself for the clich´es that poured from him, ‘There is no way in the world that you’ll get away with this! Proceed with this and you’re a dead man! George Jardine has a report. He knows all that we’ve discovered and all that we’ve guessed. By your actions tonight you have put the keystone on our enquiry. It’s no part of my job to give you advice but I’ll give you some – run! Get out of it. Hide yourself. If you don’t there’s no escape for you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be hunted down. Others will pick up the trail.’

  ‘Escape?’ said Prentice. ‘Of course I escape. I’d be a poor schemer if I hadn’t made appropriate arrangements.’

  ‘And,’ said Joe, unable to keep the quaver out of his voice, ‘you would kill your daughter, the daughter of your wife?’

  ‘The circle has to be closed.’ Suddenly it seemed he was in the grip of a passionate intensity as he said, ‘I’ve worked for this moment for twelve years. Since the year 1910. Blunderer though you are, you probably don’t need to be told that.’

  ‘I know very little of your wife,’ said Joe, ‘though many have spoken of her to me. She sounds to have been a free and beautiful spirit. I don’t wonder – no one wonders – that you loved her so deeply. But, Prentice, can you imagine that the four
women who’ve died and now your daughter to be added to the toll of death will comfort that bright spirit? You’ve made blood sacrifices enough to quench the thirst of Kali herself! Dolly would never have demanded such retribution!’

  For a moment Prentice looked at him with genuine surprise. ‘My wife? You speak of my wife’s death?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘My wife! Oh, dear! Sandilands – for all the veneer of sophistication, for all the clever pontificating about police methods, for all the questions and answers, you remain at the last a plodding London bobby with about as much imagination in this situation as a cocker spaniel – or a Bulstrode! I ask myself what do you know about life? Life, that is, outside the boundaries of Wimbledon, outside Belgravia, outside the hunting counties of England? Nothing whatever!

  ‘Commander, I have to tell you – you are pathetic! I can’t easily believe you supposed my target was Dickie Templar. I can’t any more easily suppose that you imagined my grief was for Dolly!’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ABRUPTLY JOE SAT down in a chair and they gazed at each other across the desk in silence until Prentice resumed, ‘How often I’ve heard the phrase used – “The night of the tragedy” … “The death of your wife”. No one, English or Indian, has ever noticed or registered the fact if they did notice that Dolly did not die alone.’

  ‘Chedi Khan,’ Joe whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Prentice roughly, ‘Chedi Khan. Are you beginning to understand?’

  ‘What of him?’ said Joe. ‘He died, by all I hear, trying to save your wife and God bless him. What is this you’re trying to say?’

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything,’ said Prentice in sudden anger. ‘I am saying, if you have ears to hear, that Dolly was nothing. Nothing! At best she was a promiscuous little trollop and she deserved to die. She died as she had so often lived – drunk! I wouldn’t sacrifice a dog to save her and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep to avenge her. But …’ He said the names slowly as though reciting a litany, ‘Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton, Somersham and Templar on that night – “the night of the tragedy”, if you care to call it that – where were they? Drunk and indifferent! They were a few minutes’ ride away. Their appearance, merely the sound of their arrival, would have scared off the dacoits before they’d had a chance to do much damage. If they’d moved when the alarm was given, had they any manhood, any honour – honour, that is, as we would understand it in the north – they would have spent their blood to save him. But they let him die! They didn’t, I suppose, even know that they’d let him die. But, as the years have lengthened and the grass has grown, each has paid. Each has been condemned to a lifetime of bereavement. And now Templar! The Ghurka hero! Now Templar pays his bill.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Joe. ‘You are mad. This is madness! Dementia!’

  ‘Mad? You may say mad, you may believe mad but – Chedi Khan was the love of my life. He was clear and he was clean. He was beautiful. He loved me and I loved him. I would have done anything for him. I could think of nothing that would more fulfil my life than to have been allowed to die for him. He filled me with joy, he filled me with hope, he filled me with promise for a life that would have opened before us, but, as it is, and through their neglect, he died with a drunken woman in his arms, alone and in anguish! How should I forgive those who took this away from me? He made my heart sing! It was many months before I could bring myself to believe that he was gone and the years have not softened my loss.’

  Joe listened, aghast.

  ‘More Pathan than the Pathan.’ Again it was Kitty’s voice he heard. And here before him was a tribesman, ruthless, inflexible, convinced of the rightness of his conduct. His aquiline profile, his dark eyes hooded and watchful, made a nonsense of the cultured English accent.

  ‘And you learned to think like this – like a Pathan – in your infancy?’ said Joe. ‘As they say: “As the twig is bent, so will the tree grow.” Distorted. Forever distorted.’

  ‘Still the policeman! Minutes from death, Sandilands, and you’re still trying to understand.’ He smiled pityingly. ‘And again failing utterly!’

  He paused, wondering, Joe feared, whether to shoot him dead out of boredom and have done with it or to succumb to the urge he had seen so often in killers, an urge to explain themselves. To make someone, even the arresting officer, aware of their compulsions. They work in solitude, they cannot confide in anyone, cannot justify their actions and, the moment they are discovered, they have an uncontrollable need to pour out their story. He gambled on this same need in Prentice.

  ‘No wonder people took you for an Indian,’ he said. ‘You’re very familiar to me – we’ve had several conversations – but even I would find it hard to distinguish you from a real native …’

  Prentice gave a short bark of derision. ‘Clod!’ he spat out. ‘You don’t see it, do you? You’re as perceptive as that crass Superintendent Andrew keeps in office. The unseeing idiot interviewed me twice and each time he could see no further than a brown skin, a layer of saffron and ash, a caste mark and a turban. I am Indian! Half Indian to be precise. My father was English and my mother, my real mother, was Pathan, a Pahari from the mountains.’

  Joe gaped at him in astonishment. What had Naurung senior said about his interview with the ferryman? ‘He was Indian, sahib, to the soles of his feet.’

  With an impatient gesture, Prentice shook one sleeve of his baggy shirt down to his armpit, revealing a muscular brown arm. ‘No need for dye! I can appear naked before any Englishman and all he sees is an Indian. It was easy to get close to those stupid, unseeing Englishwomen. For them a brown man is a sight to make them avert their eyes, less important than a piece of furniture.’

  The tone was bitter and Joe instantly seized on this. ‘You have no liking, I think, for memsahibs? You showed your victims no pity, in fact I would say that you took considerable satisfaction in killing them.’

  ‘No liking? I loathe them. You probably know that it is the charming English tradition for a gentleman to put aside his Indian mistress when he at length marries? When my father married a woman fresh from England, he cast my mother off though he continued to visit her. The Englishwoman, fulfilling his requirements in all other respects, did not have the children he wanted her to have. I was born to my Pathan mother and my father had the cruel notion of making his wife acknowledge me as her own. We were stationed at a very remote outpost of the far north-west and there were few to know and none to tell about his deception. My real mother was made to appear as my ayah and I grew up at her side, loving her and loving the Pathan way of life. My English mother hated me, naturally, and went out of her way to make my life uncomfortable. Indeed, she was most ingenious in her cruelties.’

  ‘“Give me a child for the first seven years of his life and he is mine for ever.”’ Joe quoted. ‘Who said that? The Jesuits, was it? And, equally, hatreds and fears acquired during those tender years would affect your life ever after.’

  ‘Who are you quoting? Freud? Jung? Sandilands? Spare me the psychology! I will simply say that Englishwomen with their white faces, their sharp tongues and their idle ways became anathema to me.’

  ‘But you married Dolly?’

  ‘I took a wife to further my career, Sandilands.’

  ‘And Midge?’ Joe hardly dare ask.

  ‘Oh, I think … no, I’m quite sure … that she is my daughter if that’s where you’re leading. But the child Dolly was carrying when she died … well, who knows?’

  ‘But the women that you killed,’ said Joe, desperately, ‘each in a different way and each in a manner that would be most terrifying to her …?’

  ‘And, again, you forget Chedi Khan! We pulled him out of a blazing village and the fear of fire remained with him to the end of his days …’

  A picture came into Joe’s mind of the rows of fire buckets lining the corridor of the burned bungalow. Not to calm Dolly’s fears but Chedi Khan’s.

  ‘… and, at the last, it was fire that caught him. I think every day
of what it must have cost him, the terror he must have felt as he turned back and fought his way through the flames to try to save – what? – a drunken, worthless Englishwoman!’

  ‘But Midge – Prentice, you must know that from that night twelve years ago, the fear of fire has been strong in Midge’s heart! You have pity for Chedi Khan and his terror, can’t you feel the same emotion for Midge?’

  ‘I close the circle,’ said Prentice again. ‘It is just. It has to be. She won’t be alone. My work is done and I will go with her.’

  At this last chilling declaration Joe gave up all hope. At last he understood. There was no reason he could use, no persuasion, no bargaining with a fanatic who had decided to kill himself.

  For some time he had been aware of slight sounds in the house behind him. Joe had raised his own voice in an attempt to cover them. Could Midge have regained consciousness? Was she listening? If so she would understand what was going on and run for help. Perhaps she would come into the room? Even that might provide just the distraction Joe needed. Such was the intensity of his thought, Prentice had been unaware of the sounds. But now he fell silent, the silence which precedes violent action. ‘“The dreary, doubtful hours before the brazen frenzy starts”,’ thought Joe but in this case not hours so much as seconds. To cover any further sounds, Joe leapt to his feet as though in acute distress, and began to yell wildly at Prentice.

  ‘You bastard!’ he screamed. ‘You’d murder your daughter, and carry that as a curse through all eternity?’

  The muzzle of the Luger followed Joe’s movement, trained on his abdomen.

  ‘You may call it murder …’

  A figure appeared in the doorway. A figure holding a .22 Smith and Wesson target pistol.

  Nancy rested the barrel across her left forearm and fired.

  The bullet hit Prentice in the shoulder and spun him round. His gun jerked from his grip, slid across the desk and clattered to the floor on the far side. She fired again but the bullet went wide. She fired a third time, hitting him squarely in the chest. A gout of blood spewed from his mouth and trickled down his white shirt.