Death in the Andamans

by M. M. Kaye

  ‘I dode thig I will, thag you. I thig I’b going to ged one of my colds,’ confided Amabel in dismal tones. ‘They always start with a headache. Id cabe on suddenly with the puddig.’

  Valerie, lending a suitably sympathetic ear, suppressed a giggle with difficulty and said: ‘Let’s leave the men to talk fish, and see if we can find some aspirin for your head. And when you’ve taken it, Charles can see you home. You’ll be much better off in bed if you’re sickening for a cold. Coming with us, Copper?’ The three girls withdrew unobtrusively and went off in search of restoratives for Amabel.

  ‘Dad’s got something much better than aspirin,’ said Valerie. ‘It’s a sort of powder stuff in a capsule, and it acts twice as quickly. I’m not sure I couldn’t do with one myself, to steady the nerves a bit! We’ll go and hunt through his medicine cupboard.’ She pushed open the door into Sir Lionel’s bedroom, switched on the light, and followed by Amabel, vanished through a doorway to the right which led into her father’s dressing-room. Copper could hear the chink of bottles as they hunted through the medicine cupboard, but instead of following them she paused instead by the open french windows that gave on to a small creeper-covered balcony overlooking the garden.

  Below her in the misty darkness one of the guard lights that remained on all night gave out a dim radiance that touched the creepers with faint gold, illuminating a cataract of scented blossoms that foamed across the wooden balustrade and fell in tangled profusion to the ground. And struck by a sudden thought, Copper walked out on to the wet balcony and peered downwards. But by that faint light it was impossible to tell if the thick masses of creeper had been torn or misplaced.

  A breath of wind stirred the mists into ghostly eddies about the old house, and she shivered and turned back again to the comfort of the lighted room.

  Sir Lionel’s bedroom was large and bare and furnished only with a handful of necessities: a cupboard, a narrow bed with a small table beside it, a larger writing-table and a single chair. There were no pictures or ornaments, but a recent photograph of Valerie shared a double leather frame on the writing-table with an older and more faded one of a woman who must have been her mother, for the resemblance between the two faces was remarkable. Copper reached out instinctively, and picking up the frame, examined them with interest. And she was replacing it when something slipped from between the photograph and the back of the frame, and fell upon the table. A sheet of paper covered in thin, spidery writing in cheap, violet-coloured ink. Ferrers’s letter …

  Copper stared at it with a feeling as of cold fingers closing about her heart. It was torn in one place, and it had been badly crumpled, but here and there a few words stood out staringly.

  … should be most grateful if you could give me some idea as to what the law is on such matters. The lagoon is undoubtedly my property, and therefore anything that it contains is presumably mine, but … would prefer to have some official ruling as to where I stand before getting in touch with dealers … acquired an aqualung in Calcutta, and the results have been surprising … As you will realize, I cannot risk … legal angle must be assured …

  Pearls____! So that was it! Not the plantation — the lagoon. He had stumbled upon a pearl bed, and____ Why, of course! She herself had asked a question about pearl oysters just before Sir Lionel had spoken of the letter from Ferrers. That should have told her! It had been the mention of oysters that had reminded him of Ferrers; not Amabel’s reference to a fisherman who had been drowned. And she herself had put an end to the conversation because she had not wanted to be reminded of that sodden, shrivelled little corpse that the sea had flung ashore.

  Pearls … John Shilto must have known. That smell that Charles had complained of at the back of Ferrers’s bungalow: oysters of course. Oysters rotting in the sun …

  A voice from the adjoining dressing-room said encouragingly: ‘That’s right. Swallow it whole. Now in a few minutes you’ll feel a lot better.’ Copper returned to the present with a start, and thrusting the letter hurriedly back into its hiding-place, turned quickly to face Valerie and Amabel as they re-entered the bedroom.

  Returning with them to the drawing-room it was a shock to discover that the fishing story with which Charles had been regaling the company when they left was still in progress, for she felt as though they had been away an hour. But a glance at the clock revealed that they had been absent for barely eight minutes.

  Leonard Stock had given up the unequal struggle and departed to bed, and Charles evidently took their reappearance as a signal for breaking up the party, for abandoning his salmon in midstream he jumped up and offered his escort to Amabel as the lesser of two evils — the greater being the continued company of Mr John Shilto.

  ‘I dode thig you need bother,’ said Amabel flatly. ‘I’b going back in a rigshaw, and one of the orderlies will come along, adyway.’

  ‘Then just let’s make sure you get off,’ urged Charles, a thought tactlessly. ‘Hullo, Copper old girl. You look as if you’d seen a ghost. What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Copper stiffly. ‘I’m – I’m a little tired.’ And then somehow Nick was standing between her and the inquiring glances that Charles’s comment had provoked. ‘Same here,’ he said lightly. ‘Bed for everyone, I think.’

  The house-party trooped yawning into the hall, and Nick put a cup into Copper’s cold hand and closed her nerveless fingers about it, holding them there with a strong warm clasp. ‘It’s only black coffee,’ he said in an undertone, ‘but it’s hot. Be a good child and get it down. It’ll pull you together.’

  Copper essayed a shadow of a smile and drank obediently, her teeth chattering against the rim of the cup.

  The others were saying their goodbyes at the head of the stairs by the time she had finished, and Nick took the empty cup from her hand and followed her into the hall. John Shilto departed unsteadily for his room and Charles and Valerie went down into the front hall to see Amabel into her rickshaw. But when Copper would have followed them, Nick put a restraining hand on her arm. He leant against the banisters, his shoulder to the carved stairhead and his eyes on the group in the hall below, and spoke without turning his head: ‘What’s happened, Copper?’

  ‘I found the letter,’ said Copper in a strained whisper.

  ‘The devil you have! Where?’

  ‘In Sir Lionel’s room. It was hidden behind a photograph in a leather frame. I – I picked the frame up, and the letter fell out.’

  Nick continued to lounge against the banister rail and to watch the departure of Amabel with apparent interest, but his voice compensated for his lack of gesture: ‘Take a pull on yourself, darling. It’s pretty obvious that whoever took it wouldn’t want it found on or near him, but at the same time didn’t want it destroyed. And the Commissioner’s room would be about the best hiding-place in the house, for no one would think of searching for it there — least of all Sir Lionel! — and when it’s wanted again whoever put it there has only to wait until Sir Lionel is safe in his office, and sneak in and collect it.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Copper in a steadier voice. ‘I don’t really know why finding it should have scared me so much. It’s – it’s all this secrecy, I suppose. Everyone having something to hide.’

  ‘Even I,’ agreed Nick ironically. ‘Tough luck, Coppy! I wonder what dark secret young Amabel is concealing behind that guiltless countenance? And if it comes to that, what are you?’

  Copper was saved the necessity of answering by the return of Valerie and Charles.

  ‘Dear Amabel!’ said Charles, mounting the stairs. ‘How I love that girl! Her forebears must have driven a flourishing trade in the undertaking business, and I imagine that Burke and Hare figure pretty prominently in the Withers family tree.’ He draped himself limply about the stairhead and added: ‘You don’t think that we could have been on the wrong track over this murderer business, do you? I mean after this evening’s performance I wouldn’t put it past Amabel to have pulled off the job herself for the sole purpose
of adding another snappy anecdote to her collection of Morgue Memories.’

  Nick was not amused. He said tersely: ‘Has she gone? Good. Then if the coast is clear, let’s get back to the drawing-room for a bit. This spot is a damn sight too public and Copper has got something to tell us.’

  They returned to the empty drawing-room where Charles helped himself to a generous nightcap and Copper related her discovery of the letter. And its contents.

  ‘Pearls!’ said Valerie breathlessly. ‘Gosh!’

  ‘Gosh is right,’ agreed Nick. ‘Pearls. Or in other words, dollars and cents and the pound sterling. Some people might even consider them worth murdering for.’

  Charles said grimly: ‘Some person quite obviously has!’ He finished his drink and put down the empty glass with a thump. ‘Well, it’s a comfort to have something solid to go on at last, after an entire afternoon devoted to floundering around in a sea of woolly conjecture. That ring theory of Copper’s about everyone intending to take a crack at Romeo Purvis and copping old Ferrers by mistake, has been sticking in my gullet. As a motive, it appeared to my limited brain pure dishwash. But here at last we have a good, solid motive for any number of murders. Offered a sufficient quantity of gleaming globules as an inducement, I might very well try my hand at a little light murdering myself.’

  He turned about and indicated Valerie with a wave of his hand: ‘Just cast your eye over there. The small whatnot which, if you look closely, you will observe pinned to my loved one’s bosom, was reluctantly donated by myself to mark her last birthday, and set me back a matter of forty-five quid. And what does this bauble consist of? Three — count ’em — three undersized lemon pips which the jeweller who stung me with them insisted were pearls of genuine and not Japanese manufacture, mounted in roughly ten bob’s worth of gold. Therefore, by a simple process of calculation — and deducting fifteen quid as an absolute maximum for mounting and making — those three miserable blobs of tallow are worth just about ten pounds apiece, and are barely visible at a distance of two yards. It therefore stands to reason that a pint-size mug of passably decent pips would probably net something in the neighbourhood of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds. Am I right?’

  ‘Just about,’ concurred Nick. ‘So how’s that for a motive for murder?’

  ‘It will do to go on with,’ said Charles.

  ‘Then – then it was John Shilto!’ Valerie spoke in a half-whisper. ‘But how did he find out?’

  Charles gave a short laugh. ‘Probably smelt a rat — or rather a load of rotting oysters — when he went up to the bungalow that morning. You can’t open a live oyster nearly as easily as a dead one, so it saves time to let ’em die in the sun and then start in looking for pearls. He probably did a snoop round the back premises to see what in the name of Sodom and Gomorrah Ferrers was using to manure his plantation with, and stumbled across the shells. I know he’s been to Ceylon, so he may well have seen the pearl fisheries there, and tumbled to the fact that those shells did not merely mean that Ferrers enjoyed eating oysters.’

  Nick frowned thoughtfully into the black night beyond the window-panes, and said slowly: ‘Yes. I think it looks more and more as though it must be John Shilto. But I don’t think we can just scrub the possibility of its having been someone else.’

  ‘I agree. And I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Charles,’ said Valerie impatiently. ‘Of course it can’t be anyone else! Where would anyone else come in? Ronnie, for instance?’

  ‘Same place as everyone else, I imagine! Ronnie could probably do with a bucketful of pearls.’

  ‘Who couldn’t?’ asked Nick. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I could do with them myself. And by the way, Copper, you can now add another black mark to my charge-sheet. If I remember rightly it was only the absence of any motive that stumped you: apart from that you could probably have made out an excellent case against me.’

  Copper did not answer, but Valerie, seeing her wince, rushed hotly to her defence: ‘That isn’t in the least amusing, Nick! If Copper ever suggested that there might be a case against you it was quite obviously to warn you that, outside of ourselves, you might be considered by some other people to be equally suspect with the rest of the sailing party — and that you should be prepared to face the fact!’

  Nick grinned and said without irony: ‘Accept my apologies, Val: there will be no more acidity in court. But returning to Purvis, I doubt if he’s got the nerve to commit murder. Though if it comes to that, I don’t believe that the Stocks have either! On the other hand, it seems to me to stand out a mile that both Ruby and Leonard know something — or think they know something. A rather dangerous state of affairs, I should have thought, with a murderer around. So I think that at this point a talk with dear Ruby might be profitable, for if that woman really was peering over the banisters some time during the night watches, the chances are that she can make a pretty shrewd guess at the identity of the murderer.’

  ‘Um,’ said Charles. ‘Possibly. On the other hand, if Ruby thinks that she knows who did it, why the hell is she keeping her mouth shut?’

  Nick shrugged. ‘You have me there,’ he confessed. ‘I could probably dream up half-a-dozen fairly plausible reasons, given time, but the only ones that occur to me at the moment seem a bit flimsy. However you might consider these: sheer panic; the inability to produce any concrete proof beyond her own word which, unsupported, might be insufficient to secure a verdict. Or black terror for fear that she might be the next victim on the list if she admitted to any knowledge of the murder.’

  Charles produced a sound uncommonly like a snort. ‘B____! I mean, rubbish! Do you mean to say she couldn’t pick a time when she was surrounded by a mass of citizens, and then blow the gaff? Of course she could! She’s only got to get in a huddle with a few of the local inhabitants, and then say, “There is your murderer! Grab him!”’

  ‘But suppose she wasn’t believed?’ said Copper in a low voice. ‘Supposing it was someone – someone…’ Her voice trailed off into a whisper as Charles swung round to face her: ‘Supposing it was who, Coppy?’

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ said Copper uncertainly. ‘Just — anyone. I mean, supposing she didn’t know for certain, but – but only____’ Once again her voice failed, and she stopped.

  ‘Only what?’

  Copper did not reply, and Nick’s eyes narrowed speculatively as he watched her. But Valerie, who did not appear to have noticed her hesitation, said with a sigh: ‘I’m afraid all those laborious notes I made this afternoon are going to need rewriting, now that we’ve got hold of this pearl motive. What about getting our hands on Ferrers’s letter? We could do that easily, because the parent is still working like a beaver down in the office, poor pet.’

  Nick shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you. You see now that we know where it is, it seems to me a good scheme to leave it severely alone and tell no one, but merely keep an unobtrusive watch on that door tomorrow and see who goes to fetch it. Presumably whoever put it there has some reason for wanting it back; otherwise he’d have destroyed it.’

  ‘Which is not quite so easy as it sounds,’ commented Charles. ‘Torn up scraps of paper can be collected and read. See Crime Club. Also traces of burnt paper, in a house where a paper is missing, are apt to wear a suspicious look. However, just between you and me, what about shelving the entire question until tomorrow? My head is reeling with a varied and malignant collection of clues, motives and suspicious acts, and unless I am much mistaken, a collapse into complete lunacy is imminent. Let’s talk about the weather instead.’

  He drank deeply, and turned to Valerie. ‘By the way, Star-of-my-soul, what alibi did you hand your respected parent to account for my spending the night here? He murmured something to me about the state of the Mess roof, to which, being unprepared, I had no adequate comeback.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ apologized Valerie guiltily. ‘I should have warned you. I knew Dad would say it was all nonsense if I said I’d asked you to stay he
re because I was afraid there might be a murderer in the house, so I told him that the storm had broken the Mess roof and your room wasn’t fit to sleep in.’

  Charles exhaled noisily: ‘And what,’ he inquired, ‘do I say when he comes down tomorrow to view the damage? Just that it was all a hearty little joke? Or that I’ve just that minute mended it with glue and stamp paper?’

  Valerie laughed, and reached out to ruffle his hair. ‘It’s all right, darling, you know he never goes near the Mess if he can help it. And anyway, it achieved its object. You are sleeping here.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Charles. ‘But I intend to — and that right speedily!’ He drained his glass and stood up. ‘Bed, I think, is indicated. And lots of it.’

  One by one the lights snapped out until, except for one in the lower hall, the big house was in darkness. And twenty minutes later Copper and Valerie, tucked inside their respective mosquito nets and with their beds tonight placed side by side in Valerie’s room, heard Sir Lionel’s footsteps mount the stairs and cross the ballroom. Valerie called out a good-night, and a moment after his answer they heard his door shut.

  ‘Night, Val.’

  ‘Night, Coppy. Sleep well.’ Valerie slid an arm out from under her mosquito net and switched off the little bedside lamp that stood on a table between them, and darkness and quiet swept down upon the room, broken only by the flitter of a bat’s wing and the whisper of the fan blades cutting into the warm damp air. But presently she spoke again, her voice an anxious undertone: ‘I’m glad Charles is here tonight. But – but I wish he wasn’t sleeping in Dan’s bed…’

  Copper did not reply, and supposing her to be asleep, Valerie turned on her side, tucked one arm under her pillow, and went to sleep.

  21