by M. M. Kaye
Sarah said: ‘I can’t let you go like this. Something—anything—might happen! Look, if you’ll wait just a minute while I get my skis and put on a few clothes, I’ll come with you.’
‘No. You’re a grand girl Sarah, but you’re not a good enough skier. You’d probably break your neck on that run, and that would hold me up.’ She smiled at Sarah’s anxious face. ‘I’m all right. Really I am. Look.’
She thrust her hand into a pocket of her ski-suit and drew out the little automatic. For a moment the moonlight winked and sparkled on the cold metal, and then she slipped it back again and fastened the pocket with a small steel zipper.
‘Do you mean to say you’ve been carrying that thing around in your pocket all day?’ demanded Sarah, illogically shocked.
‘Not in my pocket: in its holster, here——’ Janet patted her left armpit. ‘But I realized at the last minute that no one was going to notice a lump on my ski-suit at this time of night, so I took it out and put it in my pocket instead; easier to get at it there. Not that I shall need it tonight. Or ever, I hope. But I have to carry the whole works with me, because I daren’t risk leaving it behind, for fear that some helpful tidy-upper like Meril comes across it and starts asking a whole floorful of agitated questions.’
Sarah said abruptly: ‘Janet, what do you get out of this?’
Janet paused, and her face in the moonlight was suddenly sober and thoughtful. After a moment she said slowly: ‘None of the things that most people work for. No great material rewards or public success. Excitement perhaps; but most of all, fear. Fear that makes you sick and cold and brainless and spineless.’
‘Then why——?’
‘My father,’ said Janet, ‘was a famous soldier. And my grandfather and my great-grandfather. All my family have always been soldiers. But my eldest brother was killed on the Frontier in ’36, and John died in Italy, and Jamie in a Japanese prison camp. I am the only one that’s left, and this is my way of fighting. One has to do what one can. It isn’t enough just to be patriotic.’
Sarah thought suddenly of another Englishwoman, long dead, who had faced a German firing-squad, and whose immortal words Janet Rushton had unconsciously paraphrased: Patriotism is not enough.
She held out a hand. ‘Good luck, Janet.’
‘Thank you. You’ve been a brick, Sarah, and I’m terribly grateful. I wish I could show you how much I appreciate it.’
Sarah smiled at her; a companionable smile. ‘For a sensible girl,’ she said, ‘you certainly talk an awful lot of rubbish. Take care of yourself.’
‘I will,’ promised Janet. ‘Don’t worry.’
She leant forward and swiftly, unexpectedly, kissed Sarah’s cold cheek. The next moment, with a strong thrust of her ski-sticks and crisp swish of snow, she was gone—a dim, flying figure in the cold moonlight, dwindling away over the long falling levels of the snowfields to merge into the darkness of the forest. A shadow without substance.
Sarah turned away with a little shiver and made her way back to the hut: suddenly aware of the intense cold which had numbed her hands and feet and turned her cheeks to ice. Janet was right, she thought, shivering. I shall catch pneumonia—and serve me right!
The moonlight slanting over the deep, smooth snow on the ski-hut roof turned it to white satin, below which the log walls showed inky black with shadow. And the night was so quiet that Sarah could hear, like a whisper in an empty room, the far, faint mutter of thunder from behind the distant mountains of the Nanga Parbat range on the opposite side of the valley. But she had not taken more than two steps towards the hut when she heard another sound; one that was to remain with her and haunt her dreams for many a long night to come. The creak of a door hinge …
Sarah checked, staring. Frozen into immobility by the sight of the door that she had so recently closed. Someone must have eased it open while she talked with Janet in the snow, and was now closing it again—slowly and with extreme care—and presently she heard the faint click as the latch returned softly to its place. But it was a long time before she dared move, and standing in the icy moonlight she recalled, with a cold prickling of the scalp that had nothing to do with the night air, Janet’s carelessly confident words of a few moments ago, when she had spoken of the Blue Run: ‘There won’t be a murderer waiting down there for me at this time of night.’
Perhaps not. Perhaps because a murderer had been waiting here all the time. Close beside her under the snow-shrouded roof of the little dark ski-hut on Khilanmarg.
4
It was not until Reggie Craddock’s alarm-clock announced with a deafening jangle that it was 5 a.m., and sounds of movements on the other side of the partition betokened the reluctant arising of Messrs Craddock, Kelly and Khan (the remainder of the party being impervious to the joys of predawn skiing), that Sarah at last fell into an uneasy sleep.
She had lain awake for hours, huddled shivering among the blankets in her narrow bunk. Listening to the monotonous rumble of snores that proceeded from the other side of the wall, and the snuffling breathing of Meril Forbes. And seeing again and again the stealthy closing of that door.
Someone had been standing there, watching and listening. And if it had merely been somebody roused from sleep, as she herself had been, surely they would have called out? In that bright moonlight it would have been impossible not to see Janet and herself, or fail to recognize them; and anyone who thought they heard voices and decided to investigate, would have hailed them. Besides … Sarah shivered again as she remembered that closing door: it had been eased shut so slowly, so very gently …
There were eleven people in the hut, including herself and Janet. But she could not eliminate any of them, because by the time she had plucked up the courage to move again and re-enter the hut, whoever had closed the door had had ample time to slip quietly back into their own bunk.
Sarah went over in her mind all she knew of the party gathered in the ski-hut.
There was Reggie Craddock, the Secretary of the Club: a stocky little man in the late thirties, who possessed a handful of cotton mills and a consuming passion for winter sports. He had served during the war with an Indian regiment and had only recently been demobbed, and having been born and spent the best part of his life in India, he was well known from one end to the other of that gregarious country. It seemed unlikely, on the face of it, that Mr Craddock of Craddock and Company, lately a member of the Bombay Grenadiers, would be employed in subversive activities or mixed up in murder.
Then there was Ian Kelly. Of Ian she knew a little more since he was a young man who liked to talk about himself, especially to pretty girls—in which connection it may be pointed out that Miss Sarah Parrish was a very pretty girl. But nothing he had told her had led her to believe that he could be in any way mixed up in espionage. In the first place, he had been dancing attendance on her throughout the day of Mrs Matthews’ murder, and so could not conceivably have performed that deed himself. He had also, in the last year of the war, won an M C and been three times mentioned in dispatches. That in itself seemed to preclude the possibility of his being employed as a foreign agent.
Johnnie Warrender … There was very little she knew about Johnnie Warrender, beyond the fact that he possessed an irritating wife and apparently played—or had played—polo. She must ask Fudge about him. He seemed a pleasant enough person; wiry and restless, verging on the forties, and with an open-handed and hail-fellow-well-met disposition. His failing appeared to be drink, for hardly an evening passed without Johnnie getting what he himself described as ‘creditably illuminated’, while his bar bill at the end of each month must have reached four figures in the local currency.
Mir Khan. Another unknown quantity. She had been introduced to Mir Khan by Ian Kelly during her first day in Gulmarg, but she had never had much speech with him. He was a friend of Reggie Craddock’s, and Reggie appeared to have an enormous admiration for him. Though how much of this was due to the fact that Mir could out-ski Reggie any day of the week, and was
reputed to be one of the finest shots in India, she did not know, since she was aware that her countrymen’s attitude towards proficiency at games and sports was apt to cloud their judgement, and that provided a man could smite a ball farther, or with more accuracy, than his fellows, and could be counted upon to hit a sufficient amount of birds on the wing, they automatically voted him a ‘good chap’ and pronounced him to be an ‘excellent feller’ and ‘one of the best’.
Mir possessed these abilities to a marked degree; in addition to much charm of manner and a string of strange prefixes to his name that marked his affiliation to a princely house. He had been shooting snow-leopard beyond Gilgit, and had stopped off at Gulmarg for the Ski Club Meeting on his way south. But there was no reason to suppose, because he was popular and charming and friendly, that he was not also anti-British.
After all, thought Sarah, tossing in the darkness, it is his country and we are the ‘White Raj’—the conquerors, even though we’re on the verge of quitting! Was it Mir Khan who had stood watching in the darkness from the hut door? Where had he been on the day that Mrs Matthews died? As far as she could remember, with Reggie Craddock and a party on the slopes beyond Khilan. All the same she put a mental query against Mir Khan …
That left only the Coply twins. Cheerful, charming, overflowing with good spirits, they had arrived in India at the tender age of eighteen, only a few months before the fall of an atom bomb on Hiroshima had ended the Second World War. To their disgust they had seen no active service, and this was to be their last leave in India before they left to join their regiment in Palestine.
Sarah would have dismissed them as possible suspects if it had not been for two things; both of which, under the present circumstances, she found a little disturbing. There was Russian blood in them, and they had been out skiing alone on the day of Mrs Matthews’ death. Their father, now a General in the Indian Army, had married a White Russian, and the twins themselves were bilingual. Sarah had met Nadia Coply in Peshawar, and had written her down, with the cruelty of youth, as being fat and affected.
It was Nadia, a strong-minded woman, who was responsible for christening the twins Boris and Alexis, but time and a British public school had substituted Bonzo and Alec, and Bonzo and Alec they remained. Certainly Nadia, if her own stories could be trusted, had been a member of the old Russian nobility, for she was fond of relating with a wealth of dramatic detail how as a small child—‘and so beautiful’—she had sat upon the knee of the Tsar and been fed with bon-bons from a jewelled box. A woman with her antecedents would be hardly likely to have anything but enmity for the Communists. Still—there was Russian blood in the twins and they had been out alone together for most of the fatal Thursday.
Sarah turned restlessly in the darkness. If only it were possible to know exactly when Mrs Matthews had died. But no one would ever be sure of that. The intense cold could play tricks with bodies, and even the doctors would not give an opinion on it. They had said that they thought she must have died roughly four or five hours before her body was brought back to the hotel, which had been at 7 o’clock. But Janet had found her about four, and her body had been stiff already, because Janet had said——Sarah’s thoughts shuddered away from the remembrance of that frozen, contorted corpse.
The Coply twins could not be responsible. They were so young. And yet—and yet? Sarah remembered photographs she had seen of German prisoners shortly after the fall of France. Batches of fair-haired boys in their teens and twenties, who only a short time before had been machine-gunning women and children in the streets of small market towns, and dropping high explosives upon roads packed with helpless civilian refugees. No. Youth by itself was no alibi in these days. Youth could be hard and ruthless and intolerant, and without pity for old age and weakness.
What of the women?—for it had been a woman who had made those footsteps, though Sarah was convinced that the faceless creature who had sawn through the latch of Janet’s window was a man. Fudge could be written off at once. Meril wouldn’t have the guts, and allergic as she was to Helen Warrender, Sarah could not believe that that determinedly elegant and feline woman, with her constant references to the ‘Right People’, would involve herself with anything so socially damning as murder.
Reggie Craddock, Ian Kelly, Johnnie Warrender, Mir Khan, the Coply twins, Fudge, Meril Forbes and Helen. One of those people. Sarah’s aching brain reviewed them all, over and over again in an endless procession, until the muffled whirring of Reggie’s alarm clock broke the evil spell of the night, and she fell asleep at last: to dream of Janet, helpless and panic-stricken, pursued down endless dark verandahs by faceless figures.
She awoke tired and unrefreshed to the smell of burning bacon fat and the welcome sound of a boiling kettle, to find that the rest of the party were already out taking advantage of the early morning snow, with the exception of Meril Forbes, who was preparing breakfast with a vast amount of energy and ineptitude. There was no sign of Janet.
‘Mrs Creed said to let you sleep,’ said Meril, flapping helplessly at the reeking smoke that filled the living-room from the neglected frying-pan. ‘She did try and wake you once, but you seemed so fast asleep that she said we’d better leave you. They’re skiing in the Gully; all except Reggie. And Mir, I suppose.’
‘Who’s they?’ asked Sarah, wrinkling her nose at the fumes.
‘Oh, all the rest of them,’ said Meril vaguely.
In the face of Janet’s parting request Sarah did not like to inquire after her, but since Meril had not mentioned her the chances were that she really had got back in time, and without her absence being noticed. She was probably out skiing with the others.
Sarah dressed, shivering in the cold hut, and went outside.
The sun was still hidden behind the rim of Apharwat, but its reflected glow made a glory of the snowfields. The sky was a pale wash of turquoise against which the mountain peaks cut violet patterns, and from somewhere among the pine woods below the marg a thin line of smoke from a woodcutter’s fire rose unwavering into the still, morning air. But despite the clear radiance of the dawn there was something curiously threatening and oppressive about the breathless chill of the morning; a vibration of unease. And Sarah, looking away across the distant valley, saw that the great rampart of the Nanga Parbat range was hidden by a pall of dark, grey-brown cloud that spanned the horizon from east to west and tinged the sky above it with a foreboding yellow stain. As she watched, lightning flickered in the belly of the cloud and she could hear, faintly, from across the cold mountain ranges, the mutter of a far-distant storm.
Meril Forbes’ voice, harried and anxious, exclaiming: ‘Oh bother! I’ve burnt the bacon again!’ recalled Sarah to a sense of duty, and she offered herself as assistant cook and was gratefully accepted. There was nothing much to be done about the bacon, so she turned instead to the task of preparing large quantities of coffee and toast. But the thought of Janet worried her, and presently, deciding on the indirect approach, she said carelessly: ‘Who’s looking after Bonzo and Alec? I imagine Reggie didn’t take them with him?’
‘Not much!’ said Meril, clattering cups and saucers at the far end of the room. ‘They’re as much use on skis as a couple of porpoises. Worse! No, they’ve gone off to Christmas Gully with the others, to practise breaking their necks. They went off about an hour ago, and if they’re not back soon I think we might start breakfast without them, don’t you? The others won’t be back for hours if they’ve gone to the Frozen Lakes.’
There was a crisp swish of snow outside and a cheerful voice announced: ‘Home is the skier, home from ski, and the hungry home from the hill! Sarah, my beautiful, you are a lazy little grub and a disgrace to your nation. Why didn’t you come with us instead of hogging it in your bunk?’
‘I am allergic to early rising,’ said Sarah firmly. ‘What are you doing around here, Ian? We didn’t expect you back for hours. Where have you left the others?’
‘To their own devices. We decided to go our separate wa
ys. I expect old Reggie’s still messing about somewhere at the back of Apharwat, and Mir went off to Mary’s Shoulder: said he wanted to practise jump-turns or something. I thought I’d had about enough, after mucking about for a couple of hours admiring the sunrise, so I decided to come back and admire you and the bacon instead.’
‘Oh dear!—I’m afraid the bacon’s burnt,’ said Meril guiltily. ‘But you can have a boiled egg.’ She went to the door and peered out. ‘Here are the others coming now. Where’s Janet, Ian? Has she gone to the Lakes with Reggie, or did she go with Mir?’
‘Neither,’ said Ian. ‘She didn’t come with us. You forgot we were torn from our snug bunks at the ghastly hour of five ack emma. She’ll have gone with the others.’
Meril looked puzzled. ‘But she didn’t. I mean, she’d gone already when they went, and we thought she must have decided to go with you.’
‘Well she didn’t,’ said Ian firmly, ‘and if I may be permitted to bring the conversation back to food, if you think one egg is enough for me, Meril dear, you have committed an error of judgement. I require at least six.’
Meril said anxiously: ‘But then if Janet didn’t go with you——’
Sarah interrupted hurriedly: ‘She must have gone off early on her own, I think. She said something last night about fetching up at the hotel for breakfast; probably wanted to see the beginners’ race this morning.’
The arrival of the Coply twins, smothered in the snow of frequent falls, together with Fudge and the Warrenders, put a stop to the conversation; and half an hour later, as they were washing up the breakfast things, Reggie Craddock put in an appearance, having abandoned his proposed trip to the Frozen Lakes owing to doubts as to the weather. There was no sign of Mir Khan, who was apparently still engrossed in the practice of jump-turns on the snow ridge known as Mary’s Shoulder.