by Peter Hayes
He was Jai Prasad, one of England’s top scholars. She was Vidya, his young, royal, and beautiful new wife. They should have been sublimely happy, and perhaps they were, until into the picture slipped Xander Donne, an American anthropologist and ex-student of Prasad’s. “Donne was the son Jai never had,” said Assistant Dean Claude J. Remus, “and like some sons, he was a disappointment. Jai had been grooming him to continue his work, but recently there had been, by all accounts, a serious rift between them.”
Several witnesses noted a palpable tension between adopted son and surrogate dad when on July 28, Donne attended a wedding dinner at the professor’s London home.
The following evening the professor was murdered. In his study. Not with a candlestick. Or even a knife. Hardened police investigators are appalled by the wild attack, which appears to have been made with a sword or machete. Several of the good doctor’s fingers were found beneath the sofa.
Whodunit? Who knows? Such crimes have become a staple of life in this and other cities. New Scotland Yard is not without leads, however.
The body was allegedly discovered by the royal widow and reported to police by the prodigal son, who just happened to be visiting the dead man’s home at 6:07 in the morning!
One of the more distinguished guests at the professor’s wedding dinner the night before confides, “We were all looking forward to meeting the bride. She’s royal, you know. And, I will say, she fits the role. Still, there was something odd going on. She seemed to be taking such an interest in Donne. And he, in her. It was . . . bizarre. Of course, the marriage wasn’t a love match, you understand, but arranged.”
When O when will we ever learn, folks, that nothing but love joins two people together?
As of last night, senior police investigators were openly speculating that the young stepmum and surrogate son did the old man in. Why? “Try lust,” a source in the department says. According to police, both wife and ex-student, who eluded all attempts by the Big Guy to reach them, have denied involvement in the slaying. They have, nonetheless, retained a criminal attorney and are cooperating with the investigation “reluctantly,” says a source. In fact, it’s feared they may have fled.
Where to? Mrs. Prasad’s lawyer declined to comment.
And, as of now, police haven’t a clue.
I was stunned, then appalled, then absolutely livid. It was amazing how, without offering up one shred of hard evidence, the columnist had managed to convict us of murder—using even our lawyer as proof of our guilt.
Yet more disturbing was the realization that this story was only the preface to our arrest—a chumming of the waters of public opinion, so to speak, so that when the collar was made it would be greeted with the appropriate applause.
I know the smell of shit coming at me. And I wasn’t waiting till it hit the fan. I phoned the front desk and announced we were checking out. For I was damned if I’d let them arrest us for murder! Even if we were granted bail, tried and eventually proven innocent, we’d begin by spending a couple of weeks in some human sewer like Brixton prison. Plus I had something called “work” to do. As for Jai’s funeral, Vidya had been informed that they wouldn’t be releasing the body until they’d concluded a battery of tests.
And so I decided we’d head for Dorset, intent on putting several shires and as many borders as I could between ourselves and the salivating metropolitan police. Oh, we could still be arrested. But why make it easy? Our local constabulary was notoriously territorial—and resentful toward New Scotland Yard. In the meantime, I intended to use every law enforcement, legal, academic, diplomatic and civil contact I could think of to get Houlihan & Co. to back off—or, at least, to think twice.
Vidya’s reaction was to listen to my plan, then nod in agreement. There were no arguments, questions, or panicky looks. Coming from a third-world country gave her few illusions, I think, about the benefits of police custody.
She packed us both, and while she did, I dipped back in the “enchanted” book . . . .
I ordered auspices be taken and, as they were favourable, I went to my tent and worshipped my weapons. I bowed to my sword, Tears of the Widow, asking her protection and that she never be wetted by innocent blood.
When I was done, I watched the priests perform the ritual offerings of fruit, water, leaves and ghee, even as they invoked the Mother’s Thousand Names1:
She places Her children on the thrones of kingdoms,
both earthly and spiritual;
Power of royal abundance;
Queen of this body;
Ruler of the four divisions of the army;
O, Giver of empires!
Abode of Truth.
You who never break Your word!
By the time they were chanting name 835, She Who Exists in Remote and Lonely Places, we were mounted and prepared to go, our horses dancing in anticipation.
Dusk had fallen. It was that moment when the sun has set but its light has not yet fled the air, and the sky still brims with an opalescent splendour. Adding its rays was the jewel of the moon.
We followed a track, breathing through the ends of our turbans so as not to inhale the thick brown cloud in which we lived, moved and had our being. Dust! It was as much a presence as the sun or the omnivoyant eye of God.
At the Chambal, we paused for our horses to drink. Its waters in the windless twilight were slabs and sheets of beaten silver, flawlessly fitted into the shore, as though cut and shaped by master craftsmen. Then the hooves of our horses shattered the illusion—or rather, they turned the silver molten—as we splashed across the river border into that “hell full of good things.”2
Vidya entered from behind and laid cool fingers on my neck. “Ah,” she said when she saw what I was reading.
We were out of London in half an hour. Vidya had the keys to Jai’s Mercedes, which was parked outside the mews. I directed her to A4. She drove, I thought, with surprising panache, out-feinting and outgunning several London cabbies. Watching her drive, I realized again that I knew very little about this young woman with whom I was riding off into the sunset—other than that I was in love with her, I mean. Then again, I did know this: she was royal. Not that I was overly impressed by her title, as India had once supported more than three hundred amirs, nizams and rājas in several hundred princely states—some no larger than a failing fort, a dusty village or two and a stretch of eye-burning sea.
Nor did Vidya’s kingdom exist any longer. Whatever its former historical status, it would have been subsumed by the nation at independence—years before Vidya was even born. Later, when the princely houses were stripped of their privileges, her family had departed, leaving the ancestral lands and mandirs in the care of a couple of beturbaned wastrels who had watched them molder back into jungle.
This, at least, is what Jai had told me of a visit home Vidya had made when she was young. And though the older peasants had pranāmed and hailed her father—mahārāja ki jay!—there was nothing left but sun and dust, nowhere to even sleep, and the royal family had left soon after, never to return.
Outside London, we stopped for tea and I gorged myself on scones and triple clotted cream. We must have spent an hour plus in the tea shop before once again pushing off. I had some idea it would be better for us if we didn’t travel in the daylight.
Now I drove and I drove fast, noting the towns along the way. Beer Hacket. Hanging Langford. Droop. Glanvilles Wooton. Bishop’s Caundle. With any luck, we’d be home by ten thirty.
Then just beyond Salisbury, on a dark and empty stretch of road, we ran out of gas. The Mercedes sputtered, then coasted to a stop as I wrested it onto the soft shoulder. It’s true we hadn’t stopped for petrol, but the gauge still indicated half a tank.
It was dark, though the sunset lingered in the west. My cell phone was out of range. A dim scape of fields and woodland stretched in all directions. Every few minutes, a car or truck would blind us with its lights, hurtling by so furiously that the idea of flagging it down or even sleeping in th
e car so close to the road seemed crazy. I thought of hiking into Salisbury, but the gas stations were long closed by now. And what about Vidya? I wasn’t going to leave her alone on the roadside.
Most painful, though, was what our predicament seemed to say about me. Stupid. Incompetent.
“Right,” Vidya said crisply. “Nothing for it then but to kip down.” And she pulled from her suitcase a bundle of shawls, took her purse and jewels, then headed off the highway into the field.
“Vidya,” I yelled after her. “Hey, Vidya!”
The ground didn’t make such a bad bed after all. Its hardness was more than made up for by Vidya’s tender presence and the soaring spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The church hovered above the tree line in the night like a mother ship or jeweled apparition. I wondered how many other lovers had lain in this field, staring at its revelation.
Beer, Hacket! Light the Bishop’s caundle. They’re hanging Langford! And while you’re at it do something, please, about Glanville’s wooton. Look at it droop!
“What are you muttering?” Vidya laughed.
“Oh, nothing . . . . Funny. I never saw you as into camping.”
“Are you sure you know what type I am? Actually, I have spent time in the bush.”
“The first night as a boy I slept outside, I saw a shooting star. And you know what shocked me, thrilled me, really? How completely silent it was.”
Vidya said nothing; her eyes were closed.
I lay back and stared at the stars and at the waning moon clearing the trees. In its light, I studied Vidya. My eyes craved her. Her lines, like some sexual, magical architecture, drew me. My gaze kept returning to the plane of her face and to the exotic Tartar uplift of her cheeks. She wasn’t a small girl: she had a luscious female heft about her, yet I found myself once again astonished by the fineness of her throat and shoulders. Lying there, looking at her was like drinking light—that bright elixir for which my soul had long been panting and athirst. And if that sounds like a line from an Irish drinking song, so be it; it’s the way I felt.
Thus, I was surprised to find her open-eyed and watching me.
“Who were you with before Jai?” I asked.
“None of your damn business, is it?”
I put my hand between her legs. “Is this my business?”
She looked at me, but said nothing.
“You didn’t answer.”
“Hanh!”
Her cunt was bare, shaved hairless—something I found wanton and exciting. I probed until I split the flesh, divulging a cleft slicker than silk. I wormed in my middle finger up to the knuckle. At the invasion, Vidya opened her eyes and stared at me. Her clitoris was engorged, and I began to stroke it front to rear, as my first true love had taught me. I expected some coyness on her part but she impaled herself. I teased one breast. Its dark nipple was appealing, and I toyed with it until it became hard. I continued to finger her, stroking her clit and pinching her nipple—rather cruelly, if the truth were known, for she seemed to like it.
Vidya was tumescent now, her body involuntarily relaxing and clenching, her nostrils flared, her back arching. I scraped my nails up along her belly, eliciting the very lowest of moans. I purposely didn’t kiss her, only diddled and frigged her, imagining her the spoils of war—a princess bound and forced to submit to my every whim and pleasure.
What a delight it was, what bliss! I swear, the sexual charge of that one encounter outweighed half the pain that I’d endured!
And all the while I watched her, the image of rapture. She was my polyglot, globe-trotting Deshi baby with a ring in her nose and a stiff British accent, a soft African undulation to her hips, skin the color of an octoroon and the cheekbones of a Tartar.
“Now it’s time to come,” I said and rammed my finger in her, hard. She began to pant—it sounded like snoring. Then her breathing stopped. Her eyes widened and she bared her teeth as though she was about to scream. I clapped a hand on her mouth and watched and felt her climax beneath me.
For a moment, she hung there, poised, and then, just as suddenly, she melted, released. The ragged tide of her breath resumed and she lay unmoving, except for her heaving breasts.
After some time, she touched me and I felt her feel the hardness of my erection. But I was more than sated by her satisfaction and I removed her hand, kissed her mouth, plumped the shawl beneath my head and, snuggling into her, fell fast asleep.
I awoke to a serious ringing in my ears, to the odor of gun smoke and something heavy pressing my legs. I sat up uncertain at first where I was, much less what was happening. Vidya was partly risen on her side. At the end of her arm, a puff of white smoke was slowly dispersing, and it was then I saw the diminutive pistol half-hidden in her hand. For a moment, I thought, I was dreaming! Then that it was aimed at me!
“. . . the hell?” I scooted my legs out from under whatever was on them. It was, I saw now, the body of a man! Vidya, her arm still extended, reached out with her other and, gripping the body’s head by its forelock, lifted it. The bearded face, its eyes like ciphers, had a small, nearly bloodless wound below the left eye. Vidya opened her fist and let the head drop.
“What . . .”
“He had a knife.” Which was when I observed in the grass beside me the clip-pointed blade of a large Bowie knife. “He was bending down to cut your throat with it.”
“You shot him?” I asked her. “Just like that?”
“You’d have preferred I’d waited until he’d killed you?”
Vidya said she’d been awakened by the crunch of breaking glass. A truck was parked behind our Mercedes. Someone had smashed one of our car’s windows, unlocking its doors. Under the dome light, she watched a form moving about inside. As we had brought our valuables with us, she’d been willing, she said, to let the intruder take what he wished and go. But when he got out, instead of departing, he’d switched on a flashlight, playing its beam along the edge of the shoulder until it lit the swath of broken grass where we’d entered the meadow. Then, she said, he’d returned to his truck. And when he got out again, he had the flashlight in one hand and the long, dangerous knife in the other.
Only then, she said, had she drawn the pistol from her purse, watching, with a growing alarm, as the man entered the meadow, using his torch to follow our track. When he was so close it seemed that he might step on me, she’d shouted, “Stop! Now! Drop the knife. Or I’ll fire!”
But if surprised, he didn’t show it, but only leered, she said, shining the flashlight’s beam in her eyes. Maybe he didn’t see the gun. For without another word, he’d readjusted his grip on the Bowie’s handle, and then “like a butcher getting down to his business,” began bending over my sleeping form . . .
“Check his pockets,” Vidya said. “Who is he?” I knelt down, surprised to find a pair of handcuffs on his belt. I opened his billfold, looking for a badge. There was none. Nor do cops carry Bowie knives. Vidya took from his hand the still-burning flashlight and we read the name on his driver’s license: Henry Carlson Lewis Jones. Age 53. With an address in Surrey. “Know him?” I asked.
“No.”
I started to replace it when Vidya said, “Wipe off your prints.” She did the same with hers on the pistol, then let it fall beside the corpse. After that, she gathered our things, and started back to the roadway.
She moved with a certain purpose—a very different woman than the shell-shocked widow I’d encountered only nights ago. She opened the truck’s tailgate and rummaging through the assortment of junk within, withdrew two pairs of work gloves, plus a four-foot length of rubber hose. She gave me a pair and put on the other. “Now bring the truck up alongside the Mercedes.” I did. She handed me the hose. “Now siphon some petrol from his tank to ours.” I was doing that, too, when the crack of a gunshot made me flinch. I could just make out Vidya in the field by the body. What the hell was she doing? Shooting him again?
Moments later, she returned. “Right,” she said, and taking the hose, threw it back in the truck.
“Now drive,” she urged. “And I’ll follow.”
Once more, I did as I was told. The only thing to do was to leave the scene and continue on, saying nothing. To have called the police would have been suicidal.
When our report of a killing we hadn’t committed had brought upon us such suspicion and grief, to report another, two days later, that we had committed (even if in self-defense) would not only immeasurably add to our woes, but would multiply them exponentially. For the government of Britain does not recognize the right of its citizenry to bear arms. And while cutting down greatly on the number of shootings, the penalties for asserting that right are severe. Possession of a handgun carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence. Firing a semiautomatic pistol in public can, theoretically, get you ten.
In other words, what Vidya (and I) were doing was both patently criminal and perfectly right. Clearly, our only sane and sensible option was to cover up our connection to the killing. Every other road—even full vindication of our having acted in justifiable self-defense—could well lead us to half a decade in jail. Or should I write, gaol?
I drove slowly, keeping my eye on the lights of the lorry. After nine or ten miles, its engine sputtered, running out of gas. A turnoff appeared, and, alerted by the pick-up’s blinker, I paused at the fork, as Vidya drove some yards down a wooded lane, parking the truck there.
A minute later, she got in the front passenger’s door.
“How are you doing?”
“Tolerable, under the circumstances.”
“Why, may I ask, did we just do that?” I motioned with my head toward the reparked lorry.
“Because if we’d left the truck back there, there’s a good chance when the police found it, they’d find the body. In a day or two, its odor will be rank. I’m just trying to be prudent and careful, that’s all.”
I thought prudent and careful were odd words to use given she’d just shot a man in the face.
I resumed driving. “Where’d you get the gun?”