Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘Father!’ Helen stepped forward and tried to take him in her arms. But, an open hand to her shoulder, he pushed her away from him.

  He stumbled across the hall, into the drawing room and out through the French windows, which he opened with a blind, blundering gesture of fingers refusing to do his bidding. Then he staggered over to an Albertine rose, a spume of white frothing over the red-brick wall beyond which the cud plunged downwards, made a sound as of clearing his throat, made it again and suddenly began to vomit. Tears filled his eyes.

  ‘Father. Don’t. Don’t.’ It was Helen.

  He straightened himself, gasping.

  Reaching up, she drew from the breast pocket of his short-sleeved, sweat-darkened shirt an unused handkerchief, unfolded it and first wiped him around the mouth and then pressed it to his clammy forehead. ‘Please. Don’t, don’t, don’t.’

  ‘Christ!’ he muttered. ‘Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ!’

  At that moment the ayah appeared, holding a glass in a hand. She had never before, in all her years of service, poured out from a bottle of alcohol belonging to her masters. She extended the glass, her sari still blotched and stiff with blood and ordure, though she had washed her arms, hands and face.

  ‘Drink it,’ Helen said. ‘ Drink it. You’ll feel better.’

  ‘Is she trying to poison me?’ Toby demanded with a brief, snorting laugh, almost a sob. But he put out his hand, took the glass and drained the whisky at a gulp. Then he asked: ‘ Has anyone told your stepmother?’

  Chapter Nine

  Having returned to her bed, Isabel lay humped, left cheek to pillow and legs drawn up as though to ease some acute abdominal pain, in the darkened room. It was long past the hour when, so regular in all her habits, she would normally be up and about. It was impossible that she could have remained unaware of all the commotion in the house, with people hurrying around and above her in search of the missing child, Helen shouting orders to Clare, standing there in the middle of the tennis court, and first Toby galloping up the drive and then Singh and his two men hurrying up it on foot.

  Toby, his red hair sticking up in dishevelled tufts, put out a hand. ‘Isabel,’ he whispered. Then louder: ‘Isabel.’

  She stirred, drew the sheet over her head. Then she groaned: ‘Oh, go away, go away, leave me!’

  ‘But Isabel … Isabel …’ She did not move, made no further sound. The sheet cocooned her, as the blanket had cocooned the dead child. Toby strode to the window and tugged back the curtains with so much violence that, a brass ring at the end of one of them shooting off the rail, it sagged crazily downwards. The light exploded into the room. ‘ Don’t, don’t!’ she cried out in panic.

  Toby threw himself down on the bed beside her. He attempted to pull back the sheet, as he insisted: ‘Listen to me, listen to me’ but, her fingers gripping it tightly, she would not release it. He put his lips to the sheet, his body shuddering heavily on hers, in a weird parody of the lovemaking which, for so many months now, ever since her pregnancy, she had refused to allow him. ‘ Isabel, darling … Darling … You must get up, you must listen to me. Listen! Listen!’ He put his arms about her shrouded form. Then, all at once, he was sobbing, with terrible, heaving gulps, not unlike his retching by the Albertine rose. ‘ Something terrible has happened.’

  He was amazed when, from under the sheet, he heard her despairing voice: ‘ I know. I know.’

  Chapter Ten

  Later, old Mrs Thompson knocked on the door. Isabel still lay on the bed but she was on her back, her arms to her side, her legs straight together, while her mountainous belly rose up under the bedclothes. Staring up at the ceiling, she did not turn her head when her mother-in-law sidled in crab-wise, the rubber ferrule of her stick lisping across the highly polished linoleum surrounding the Persian carpet.

  ‘What is one to say?’ Mrs Thompson asked, genuinely not knowing.

  Isabel made no answer. The old woman cautiously approached the bed, sat down on the edge of it. She was breathing heavily both from the effort of climbing up the stairs and from the terror which kept squeezing her heart.

  ‘Who would want to do such a thing? Who? To a child, a mere child. He never harmed anyone.’ Mrs Thompson was convinced that ‘a good cry’ would do Isabel ‘a world of good’ – those were the words which she had used to Toby but, slumped in an armchair in the drawing room, while Singh, Dr McGregor and Singh’s men went about their tasks, he had not seemed to hear her.

  Suddenly, Isabel sat bolt upright. She stared for a moment at the startled old woman as though she were a stranger, and then said in a thick, hoarse voice: ‘Please give me my brush.’

  ‘Your brush, dear? Yes, yes, of course.’

  The old woman heaved herself off the end of the bed and tottered over to the dressing-table. She picked up the silver-backed hairbrush, once the property of Eithne, and, as she carried it over, absentmindedly removed from it a single, long, black, glossy hair. ‘Shall I brush your hair for you?’ she offered.

  Isabel held out a hand, the sleeve of her nightdress falling away from her plump arm, without an answer. Mrs Thompson gave her the brush. Holding the brush in one hand and a hank of hair in the other, Isabel savagely lashed at it. The old woman stared, leaning on her stick.

  Then Isabel paused in the rhythmical strokes. Above the life swollen within her, her breasts rose and fell. Suddenly, her previously impassive face trembled, widened, seemed to the old woman to shatter to pieces, as she had once seen the windscreen of Toby’s Rolls-Royce shatter when a stone had flown up from the roadside and detonated against it. Isabel wailed and wailed again. It was a sound exactly like the ayah’s ‘Ai-ee!’ when she had first realized that it was blood which blotched the floor and the slat of the servants’ privy and when she had seen that shape in the slime. She hurled the hairbrush to the floor and then angrily demanded of the old woman quailing before her: ‘Why? Why? Why?’

  ‘I suppose it was God’s will,’ Mrs Thompson replied. Though she rarely went to church, she believed in God.

  ‘Oh, fuck God! It was someone’s will but let’s leave God out of it, because God just isn’t there.’

  The old woman felt the imminence of tears. As in the case of the urine which now sometimes involuntarily trickled from her, she struggled to hold them. In a placating, importuning voice she said: ‘ Toby thinks that some of those men – those dacoits …’

  ‘Oh, does he? Does he?’ Isabel sank back among the pillows. Suddenly all the colour had once again ebbed from her face. ‘ How could that little bitch not have heard someone go into the bedroom and take him? How? How?’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘ I don’t know, dear. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  It was a relief to Mrs Thompson when, at that moment, Dr McGregor came into the room with Toby behind him.

  ‘Well, now,’ Dr McGregor said, his speech already slurred from the whisky to which he had helped himself from Toby’s decanter. ‘I came in to see how you were getting on, Isabel. I thought it might be a good idea if I were to give you a wee injection.’

  ‘No,’ Isabel said. She swung her firm, plump legs off the bed and stood up in her nightdress. ‘No, I don’t need anything. I must get dressed.’

  ‘Isabel –,’ Toby began.

  ‘I must get dressed,’ she repeated.

  Chapter Eleven

  Singh had decided that the pit in the privy must be emptied, but he could not order any of his men to empty it. He himself viewed caste as a preposterous anachronism – it seemed as if people, however humble, always needed others, even more humble than themselves, whom they could despise – but it was beyond his powers to defy its canons. So two of his men squatted on their hunkers outside the doorway of the shed, looking on, while the Thompsons’ sweeper and another sweeper summoned from the police station used buckets and shovels to ladle out the ordure into oil-drums. With arms and legs so thin that they looked like constructions of wire and clay, they sighed, grunted and muttered,
totally oblivious of a stench in which they passed their daily lives. One of the policemen held a blue-and-white checked handkerchief over his mouth and nose. The other, more stoical, merely swallowed repeatedly, the adam’s apple bouncing up and down in his scrawny neck.

  Though so late in the year, it was a day of unusual heat. There was a greenish sheen, as of verdigris around the rim of the lake, as it glittered up, a brazen platter, beneath a sky of sulphurous orange. The policeman with the handkerchief remarked that there was likely to be a storm and his colleague, shifting uncomfortably in a uniform too tight for him, the fabric like a truss against his crotch as he squatted, nodded his agreement. The sweepers did not sweat.

  What Singh had hoped to find was a knife, thrown into the pit with the dead child. What the sweepers found was first a blanket, similar to the one which Clare had fetched for Helen, and then, improbably and grotesquely, a brassière. Both were so much smeared and caked with filth that Singh, summoned by one of the two policemen, first had difficulty in deciding what they were. Later, the blanket was found not merely to be heavily stained with ordure but also to have blood on it.

  In the gloom and stench of the privy, the flies, of which the sweepers had been totally oblivious, fretting him with their ceaseless buzzing and their settling on his face and bare arms, Singh felt a sudden, ineluctable weariness, such as often now overcame him in the course of his work. It was as though, all at once, a traveller paused in his lengthy journey and, deciding that he could not face yet another road, yet another railway station, yet another gangway to board yet another ship, had to resist the abject, insistent urge to turn and retrace his steps back to his by now far-off home.

  Chapter Twelve

  In a locked room at the police station, the small body now lay packed in dry ice. In Toby’s long, low ceilinged, empty office, Dr McGregor, biting on the stem of his pipe, frowned down at the sheet of paper before him, while with the nail of a forefinger he picked gently at a spot on the corner of his chin. Then he got up, shoulders hunched, and began to pull open the drawers of desks and filing cabinets and to open cupboards. ‘Blast!’ He said it aloud. Toby must have some booze somewhere, if only to offer to the bigwigs who came to see him on business. One cupboard, high in the wall above Toby’s desk, would not yield to McGregor’s persistent turning of the handle and tugging. Stingy bastard! Obviously he kept his booze under lock and key. He put a hand to the flask at his hip, as though momentarily hoping that, by some magic, it had refilled itself; but then, reality reasserting itself, he withdrew the hand. He thought of going out to look for the bearer or even for Toby. But when he had last asked for a refill, before he had come in here to write his preliminary report, Toby had gazed at him with the same fastidious distaste for his drinking which he himself felt for Toby’s philandering.

  McGregor again settled himself at the desk and the nicotine-stained forefinger again picked at the spot. Then he took up his broad-nibbed fountain-pen and, mouth dry and a slight feeling of pressure behind the eyes, he began to write:

  … The blanket and pyjamas caked with excrement and blood – more of former than latter. Excrement? Cross that out. Night-soil.… Throat cut to bone by some sharp instrument, from left to right … Right to left? No, no, left to right. He picked up the empty glass next to him, raised it to his lips, tipped it and his head back simultaneously. Completely divided all membranes, blood-vessels, nerve-vessels, air-tubes. Christ, what a filthy, fucking country! Toby was right. In eighteen months, thank God, he’d be out of it, back home, but Toby, with all his business interests, would have to stick it out.… Afterwards found stab on body, evidently made by some broad, sharp, long, strong implement, as it penetrated through pyjamas passing below pericardium and diaphragm and severed cartilages of two ribs, extending three-fourths across chest. He bit on the stem of the pipe, gazed at the green glass shade of the lamp, reaching out to him on its spindly brass arm, and then resumed. Pericardium must have been pushed out of place by compression of side, or it would have passed through that. Could not have been a razor. He rested his chin on his outstretched arm, thinking of his own cut-throat razors, kept in a mahogany case, one of which, each morning, his bearer would sharpen for him on a leather strap. Must have been – he paused, then made a faint question-mark above the ‘must’ – a sharp-pointed, long, wide and strong knife. Am I repeating myself? Check that later. Wound not less than four inches deep. Also two small cuts on left hand but only vestigial appearance of blood on them.

  Time, time of killing? He got up, went to the door, the glass in his trembling hand, and then shambled back, with that humped stance of his, one shoulder higher than the other and an elbow uptilted, almost as though he were deformed. Am of opinion that child – no, no, cross that out – that deceased had been dead at least eight or nine hours before I examined him at approximately eleven-thirty. Then quite cold and rigidity had set in. Guess that he was killed in early hours of morning. Guess? Well, yes, it was a guess, he had performed a number of autopsies but he still abjectly distrusted his judgement. Killed in early hours of morning. Yes, in this country, that was the dangerous time, between dark and dawn, when, silently, thieves clambered through windows which seemed too small even for a child or, as nimble as monkeys, shinned up drainpipes. Blackened appearance all round child’s mouth most likely produced by violent thrusting of brassière into mouth to prevent screaming. He paused again, the empty pipe clenched between small, yellow teeth. Or could have been produced by hand thrusting downwards. My opinion death from suffocation preceded infliction of wounds. Otherwise, quantity of blood would have been much greater. Child of that size would have sent out with a gush, at one jet, quantity of blood not less than three pints, whereas I do not think there was more than … Well, what? Estimate, estimate.

  The door opened and Toby, changed now from his riding-breeches and short-sleeved silk shirt into dinner jacket, stood there, as though the office were not his. McGregor stared at him. Amazing thing, habit! Only that morning a patient of his, with no more than a few days to live, skin and bone, nothing more, had insisted that the Indian barber must be summoned because on the first and third Thursday of each month he always had his hair cut. And now here was Toby in a dinner jacket …

  ‘How’s it going?’

  McGregor shrugged. ‘ Like to get my notes down when they’re still fresh in my mind. Of course, so far I’ve done only a preliminary examination.… They’ll have to do –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Toby cut him off, as though he could not bear to hear of it. He went over to the window and, hot forehead pressed to chill glass, stared down towards the lake, a silvery streak with lights glittering round it. ‘Yes, yes,’ he repeated mechanically. Then he muttered, as he had muttered before: ‘What a bloody country!’

  McGregor got up, went to him and, with extreme awkwardness, put an arm round his shoulder. ‘ What can one say?’ It was what, in the future, many of the British were to ask Toby and Isabel. Their horror at the murder was as far beyond their ability to express as the Himalayas around them to climb.

  Toby moved away, not caring to have this dishevelled little man, the combination of whisky and hunger sour on his breath, touch him so intimately.

  ‘We’re going to eat,’ he said. ‘Or try to eat. You’ll join us, won’t you?’

  McGregor shook his head. ‘Thanks. But I’ll be finished in a jiffy and then I’ll make for home. The wife’s expecting me.’ He could not bear the prospect of sitting with the bereaved family, all either silent or making effortful conversation, while they forced their cold Sunday supper down throats closing against every mouthful.

  ‘Another drink then?’

  ‘Well, that’s mighty civil of you, mighty civil.’ McGregor tried to show his gratitude, even though a truly civil man might have omitted that ‘ another’.

  ‘Fine. I’ll send Muhammed along. Whisky, isn’t it?’

  As though Toby did not know. But never mind, no sweat. At least he could polish off the rest of the preliminar
y report in a matter of minutes, once he had that drink down the hatch.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Am I intruding?’

  Toby pushed between the three men crowded round the French windows through which he had entered from the garden and approached Singh, who was perched, arms folded, on the edge of Isabel’s desk.

  ‘Not at all.’ Singh rose. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Thompson?’ As always, he gave a slight, mocking emphasis to the ‘Mr’. To Toby he himself was merely ‘Singh’.

  ‘How long is all this tamasha going on?’

  ‘Tamasha?’ Singh drew his sleek eyebrows together, as though puzzled by the Hindustani word, meaning confusion or to-do.

  ‘It’s damned inconvenient. And upsetting too – at a time like this. This is precisely the sort of time when one would hope to be left alone and in peace.’ Yet Toby had kept a tally of those friends, acquaintances and business associates who had left them alone and in peace and those who had telephoned or written their letters of shock, outrage and condolence. He would not easily forgive the former.

  ‘I can understand that, Mr Thompson. And truly I’m sorry. But we have our duty to do.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But I honestly can’t see why you and your men have to continue to hang around the house.’

  Singh gave a gentle, understanding smile. ‘ Well, at this precise moment we’re fingerprinting this room. As you see. That has to be done. Then we’ll match the fingerprints.’

  ‘You mean, you’ll want our fingerprints?’

  Singh nodded. ‘The family’s. The servants’. A process of elimination. If we find a print not belonging to any of you, then we’re on to something.’ He explained as to a child, patient and reassuring.