The more she thought of it, the more she realised that today’s visit had been foolish. Karan Rana had been wounded in France and sent to England to recuperate. She knew that to be the truth, since she’d had it from Anish’s own lips. But where in England, she didn’t know. It was her own wild hope that he’d been sent to Brighton where her mother had nursed Indian soldiers back to life. A wild hope that Karan had known her mother and, even wilder, that he had known her mother’s lover and therefore her own father. Grayson had warned her it was an impossible quest and she must learn to accept that he was right. She had discovered nothing; more than that she had received a warning not even to try. Suri had been a little too knowledgeable about her and the thought made her deeply uneasy.
His warning was still reverberating in her head when she walked up the veranda steps of number six Tamarind Drive and bent her mind to the next problem: how to explain her long absence this morning to Grayson and Mike. The expedition had taken much longer than she’d expected and they would have returned for lunch an hour ago and be worried to find her gone without a word of explanation.
As she came through the door, Grayson’s face lit with relief.
‘Thank God, Daisy. We were just about to send out a search party. Ahmed had no idea where you’d gone.’
‘I thought I’d take a drive in the country.’ Her tone was airy, as though this was the most natural thing to do in the middle of the day in the middle of an Indian summer. If she’d hoped to deflect disapproval, she’d hoped wrongly. But it was Mike, rather than Grayson, who appeared the most annoyed.
‘A drive in the country? In this weather? If that’s so, you need your head examined. Grayson wasn’t joking when he said we were about to launch a search. We could have had the entire Jasirapur police force looking for you. And why exactly?’
She was taken aback by his vehemence, but put it down to genuine concern. ‘I’m sorry, Mike. Truly, I never meant to worry either of you. I hadn’t realised I’d gone so far or that it would be quite so hot. I had to take shelter for a while, that’s why I’m so late.’
Grayson looked at her steadily. ‘You know Rajasthan better than that, Daisy. It’s April. It’s hot. What could be so important that you’d risk driving under a burning sun for so long?’
‘It wasn’t important,’ she said quietly. ‘I was mistaken.’
She was relieved when he walked to the table and rang the small brass bell to tell Ahmed they were ready to eat at last. He wasn’t going to pursue the matter, not in front of Mike she thought, but she was sure that once they were alone he’d want to know just where she had been.
They ate the entire meal without speaking a word. It was clear that Mike was still furious with her, while Grayson seemed lost in his own thoughts. But when Ahmed had cleared the plates and set out three individual dishes of crème caramel, he broke his silence.
‘This may be the time to tell you both that I’ve decided to leave tomorrow.’
She saw that Mike looked shocked, as shocked as she felt.
‘I think I’ve worked out the general direction Javinder took,’ Grayson said coolly, ‘and I don’t want to waste more time hanging around Jasirapur.’
‘But all you know is that he took off travelling north, and you’re not even sure of that.’ She was amazed that he would try to follow the young man on such meagre information.
‘I think I can probably narrow it down a little more now.’
‘But how?’
Grayson spread his hands wide and gave a rueful smile. ‘It’s taken a while but, over the last few days, odds and ends have come my way. You know how it is.’ That was the problem; she didn’t know.
‘More instinct, Gray?’ Mike put in, a grim look on his face. ‘What you’re proposing is madness.’
‘You’d be surprised at how helpful instinct can be. It’s often more reliable than paid sources.’
‘You can’t really be serious.’ Mike’s face had turned blood red.
But, when Grayson didn’t reply, he appeared to make an attempt at swallowing the anger he evidently felt and, when he spoke, it was in a coaxing tone. ‘Look, the paperwork can go hang for a few days. In any case, I’m not finding anything in the office that’s remotely useful. Let me come out and about with you—we’ll dig around locally together. With both of us on the job, we’re more likely to uncover something.’
‘I appreciate the offer, but I’ve waited long enough. At this very moment Javinder may be hurt, ill even. And definitely in trouble or he’d have found a way of contacting us. So speed is important. I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up other intelligence as I go.’
When his friend gave another impatient shake of the head, Grayson held up his hand as if to stem the flow of condemnation coming his way. ‘I know you’re worried, but you shouldn’t be. I’m going to be fine and don’t forget, I’ll have you here, back at the sharp end. That gives me confidence.’
She could see that Mike wasn’t convinced, and neither was she. The thought that Grayson would be leaving the next day filled her with mild panic. She didn’t want to be left behind in Jasirapur with only an irate Mike for company. She got up and began clearing the bowls onto the tray that Ahmed had left. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mike’s hand reach out and seize one of the spoons from the table. As she looked up, he rapped it loudly against the wooden surface to gain their attention.
‘Aren’t you going to make any attempt to stop him going on this mad journey, Daisy?’ The angry red flush had died but Mike’s lips were compressed into a thin line. ‘It’s the least you could do. After all, you must be here for some reason.’
She was astonished. The attack had come from out of nowhere and it was a struggle to defend herself. ‘I’m here for my own reasons,’ was all she managed.
‘That’s clear enough,’ he said bitingly.
‘I don’t understand. Just what are you accusing me of?’
‘There’s no accusation, though if you choose to interpret it that way, you can. Put simply, I’m unsure just why you thought it a good idea to gatecrash this trip. It certainly wasn’t to help. In fact, judging by the scare you gave us today, just the opposite.’
‘Mike, please …’ Grayson began, but his colleague had pushed his chair roughly back from the table and picked up the battered briefcase he never seemed without. ‘I’m going back to the office. I’ve work to do.’ And he banged out of the door.
Grayson stood for a minute, watching after him, then turned to face her, his dark blue eyes troubled. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what that was about. He’s not himself, it’s clear enough.’
She cut his apology short. ‘It’s fine. It really doesn’t matter.’
And it didn’t. She’d wondered before if Mike resented her coming on this journey and it seemed that she’d been right. He resented her badly. She was sorry for it but there was little she could do. In time, his antagonism might soften. She certainly hoped so. Living with that degree of animosity would be far from easy. But other than being open and friendly in her dealings with him, she could do nothing to improve matters. What she must do, though, was to make this trip to India count. Over their silent lunch, she had begun to toy with a new idea, and when Grayson followed in his colleague’s footsteps and she was left alone in the house, she set to thinking it through.
Anish’s maternal family, in the guise of Ramesh Suri, had been no help. Indeed just the opposite; there had been threats and she took them seriously. But what of Anish’s paternal relatives? There must be someone left in the family that she could talk to. And now she was thinking more clearly, she realised it would be far more likely that Karan Rana would have contacted his birth family rather than ask Parvati to keep his few possessions until he returned to India. By that stage in his life, she calculated, he would have written the letter his son remembered. The letter Anish had spoken of ten years ago. She could still see his face, clouded with emotion—fury, grief, disillusion, all there. As a child, he said, he had worshipped his fat
her, made a hero of the soldier who had died on a First World War battlefield. But then he’d read his father’s letter, the one Karan had written to his wife to say that he’d fallen in love with another woman. He wasn’t a hero after all, Anish had said, he was a little man capable of deserting his wife and child for a prostitute. And when Daisy had protested that it might not have been that way, Anish had rounded on her angrily. What else could she be? He was married with a small child and the woman must have known that. What else can you call it but prostitution? She should have remembered that letter before she began playing detective. After writing it, Karan would hardly have sent his belongings back to a now abandoned wife. If those papers or letters or even a journal existed, he would have sent them home to his father for safekeeping when he knew he was to fight a second time in France.
But the Rana family had proved elusive. As far as she knew, no one in the regiment had managed to find them, and she had little idea where to look. She thought it likely they lived some distance from Jasirapur. Another complication. But she couldn’t let that stop her. She’d found Anish’s uncle on his mother’s side, hadn’t she, and, if she tried hard enough, she could find his father’s family. It was not going to be easy though. According to Mrs Forester, the adjutant had tried but failed to make contact, and that in itself was strange. One thing Daisy had learned from her previous stay was that most Indians knew not only where every member of their own kin resided but also where their neighbours’ friends, colleagues and relatives hailed from too. Yet Dennis Laughton had been unable to discover a single clue. No, it wouldn’t be easy, but it was the last hope she had of finding out what she needed to know. Quite simply, who she was.
She was Daisy Driscoll, of course. Illegitimate child, penniless orphan, a widow of almost seven years. But also a servant, a shop girl and now a professional woman. She’d occupied all these boxes, but who she really was remained a mystery. Over the years, she’d tried to fill the void with work, even with marriage, but nothing had succeeded. The void hadn’t always been there, at least not obviously. For much of her life she’d been only vaguely aware of something missing, had deliberately refused in fact, to think of her roots. But from her first step on Indian soil, things had changed. It was as though, out of nowhere, a secret spring had bubbled into being, and, as the months and years passed, had become wider, fuller, and fiercer flowing. Now she was helpless against its tide, and could do nothing but allow herself to be borne aloft to wherever it took her.
So what to do? Someone in this town must know something. She would start by seeking out anyone willing to talk. She could do the trivial stuff, the weather, her bungalow, the town itself, anything to get conversation flowing. If she could gain the confidence of her chance-met acquaintance, she might gradually steer them towards the subject that was uppermost in her mind. It would take time and patience but it would be worth it. And if she wanted people to talk to, where better to start than in the bazaar.
Grayson didn’t broach the subject of Daisy with his colleague. That afternoon, he was in and out of the office and Mike was busy on the telephone, or in the bowels of the basement, searching for documents he’d decided were temporarily lost but worth finding. He might be vociferous in his opposition to this journey, but Grayson was conscious that his friend still clung to the hope that he might come across something in Javinder’s records that would give them a more definite path to follow. Mike was a frustrated man, he knew. Frustrated by his inability to work in the field and no doubt, too, frustrated by the pain he suffered. For years that had been a constant in his life, his legs smashed in an earlier adventure in Eastern Europe and, more recently, the head-on collision engineered by that fanatic, Sweetman.
Still, his attack on Daisy had been startling. It was so unlike the Mike Corrigan he’d known and though he tried to make excuses for his friend, it picked at him like a sore place. He hadn’t wanted to bring Daisy to India. True, he’d made the suggestion a very long time ago that she return some day, but he’d felt strongly that now wasn’t the right time. His reluctance, though, had stemmed from the worry he’d felt at bringing her to a country that was still unsettled and placing her close to a mission that could be dangerous. It hadn’t been because of any likely tension between his two companions. That was unexpected. But Mike was hardly his old self and Daisy was finding him heavy weather. And since they’d arrived in India, she’d become far more tense herself, and that hadn’t helped matters either. It was this identity thing, the old, old problem. She was a great deal more exercised about it than she ever revealed. He could understand, or at least part of him could understand, why she was so intent on discovering the true story behind her birth. He felt sympathy, but he could never fully enter into her feelings. His own experience of childhood had been a million miles from hers. It did mean, though, that he was more objective, and could see how badly the search was disturbing her, how badly it was distorting her life.
Each time she had a lead or even the smallest possibility of finding one, she ended disappointed and it cut her deeply. He wished she would accept that she would never know her father’s name and that her mother’s story would remain a mystery. Only then would she gain peace of mind. But she wasn’t going to let it go, he knew. She would worry away at it until there was nothing left. And maybe nothing left of her. She’d looked so lovely that first morning here. A new dress, her dark shiny curls brushed back and held in a smooth band. She’d been happy, smiling. Looking forward. Something had happened to take the smile away and he wished fervently that he could restore it. He had no illusions about her feelings for him. She was unlikely to fall back in love, but that didn’t stop his own heart having other ideas.
Tomorrow he must leave her behind in Jasirapur and he needed Mike and she to be good friends, to look out for each other until he returned. She hadn’t appeared badly upset by the attack, but he knew she was good at hiding how she felt. Before he left, he must try to mend fences between them. It would have to be this last evening, he decided, somehow he would have to get them talking together. Not at the bungalow. It needed to be neutral territory, where whatever had flared between them could be forgotten. He would take them both out to dinner, that was it. And it would be a chance for all three of them to raise a toast to the success of his journey.
CHAPTER 7
The afternoon was long, most of it spent gathering equipment for the next day’s journey, and when he finally got back to the bungalow, they were both at home. It had taken him a while to prise rope, torches and a shovel out of the hardware store. He’d ordered them two days ago, in fact as soon as he’d arrived in Jasirapur, but at the counter the proprietor had shaken his head in astonishment that a customer could be making such an extraordinary request. In the end, Grayson had marched through the shop into the storeroom beyond and helped himself. A first aid kit was already stowed, along with two jerry cans of fuel and two huge plastic containers of purified water.
He parked the jeep out of sight in the shadow of the jambul trees that lined one side of the drive. The vehicle was a reminder of what lay ahead in the morning, and he had no wish to provoke another angry exchange. Crunching his way towards the house, he felt the first softness of evening. It was sufficiently cool now for Daisy to have ventured onto the veranda and he found her looking out over the trimmed grass. He sauntered up the wooden steps, hearing the rustle of bushes in the whisper of a breeze. The garden was deeply peaceful, and he sat down beside her to enjoy it. She looked up and smiled a silent greeting.
‘You always loved the old garden, didn’t you?’ he said at last.
‘It was hardly a garden, more a wilderness. But yes, it had life, vitality. At night when the stars shone so brightly, it was magical. Like a theatre set made out of silver.’
As they watched, the sun dipped slowly from sight and, when he spoke again, it was into the gathering dusk. ‘Has it been tough coming back?’
‘At times,’ she admitted, ‘but I still have that feeling—it’s very strange
—that somehow I belong. And after all that’s happened to me here.’
‘So maybe I was right to suggest you return—despite all my qualms?’
She reached across and squeezed his hand. ‘You were. You usually are—about me.’
He got up from his chair and stood facing her. Then bent his head and kissed the top of her hair. It was as soft and sweet smelling as he remembered. One of her curls tickled his nose.
‘I wish we could stay like this,’ he said. He didn’t know what he meant by that, only that he was happy, and for the moment so was she. She stirred in her seat and he remembered that he was in India on business and that the serious stuff was about to begin.
‘I was wondering if we should try the local cuisine tonight?’
‘We usually do.’
‘Not Ahmed’s cooking. A restaurant in town. What do you think?’
She didn’t answer immediately but followed him into the bungalow. Mike was coming out of his bedroom as they walked through the door. ‘I thought we’d go out to dinner,’ Grayson said. He had the two of them together now. When better to put his plan into action?
‘Ahmed will already have prepared a meal,’ Mike returned.
‘I rang him earlier and warned him we wouldn’t be needing anything tonight.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Gray. I’m not going out.’ Mike went over to the table. The usual clutter of papers was spread across its surface.
‘There’s a new restaurant opened at the Paradise. It’s supposed to be the smartest place in town. Let’s give it a go,’ Grayson urged.
Mike hunched over his paperwork. ‘I don’t think so. Thanks for the invite, but you go. I’ve brought some work back that I need to get through before tomorrow.’
‘All work and no play …’
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