Barbara Cleverly (28 page)

‘I don’t think we’ll have to wait long,’ said Joe. ‘There’s an urgency about this last demand – don’t you think? A huge amount called for

I’d say this could well be a last request before he calls it a day. Rumours, uncertainties may have got to his ears. I think, Carter, our man is planning to grab his loot and run. And, I’ll tell you something else – Alice seems to have been caught up in the urgency too. She was out and about pretty early this morning, wasn’t she? She must have got her demand note at crack of dawn, or perhaps even during the night, and gone straight off to Robertson’s shop.’

‘And now I’ll tell you something, Sandilands,’ said Carter. ‘Before she was at the jeweller’s she was here. We’d hardly opened up when she came in asking to see me. Rather an odd request. I was hoping you could shed some light on it as you seem to have got so close to her last night. She wanted to cast an eye over the newspaper list of the Beaune casualties. She said that you’d told her she could.’

‘Did she now?’ said Joe, an edge of concern in his voice. ‘I don’t like this, Carter. She’s moving too fast for us. You didn’t let her take it away, did you?’

‘Of course not! In fact I was so suspicious of her intentions I sat with her and watched her closely while she read it.’

‘And?’

‘Very interesting! She pretended to read the news report of the crash first but it was clear to me that it was the list of the casualties she had really come to check on. Her eyes were continually veering sideways to the right-hand side of the page where the lists are printed.’

Carter got up and retrieved the paper from a locked file. He spread it out on the table between them. ‘Now, whatever she saw printed there had quite an effect on her. She turned pale, she started to breathe faster, she was agitated. No doubt about that. I had to send for a glass of water for her. Look at it more closely, Joe. I’ve had another look and I must say no name leaps out at me. What do you see?’

Joe looked again. Somewhere concealed in this list of English and French casualties was a name which had dramatic importance for Isobel Newton. But surely not? How could she be threatened by someone who had died so long ago? None of these names had any power to harm her. So what then had she seen in these lists?

‘Oh, my God!’ Joe groaned. ‘What bloody idiots we’ve been! Charlie! I now know what people mean when they call us the Defective Force! Get Simpson here! Where the devil is Simpson? You’ve not let him go back to Delhi, have you? We must see him!’

‘No, it’s all right, Joe,’ said Carter in puzzlement. ‘I decided it might not be quite safe to put him in the hotel after all – I put him up with me and Meg. He’s at my bungalow helping Meg to peg a rug. Hang on – I’ll give Meg a ring. We’ve got a telephone installed. We can get him over here in a few minutes. I’ll send a sergeant over with a rickshaw. But tell me, Joe, what have you seen? What did Alice see?’

‘Nothing,’ said Joe. ‘And that’s the whole point. It’s what she didn’t see that’s important!’

Ť ^ ť

Ten-year-old Raghu Mitra stubbed out his cigarette and handed his tin of polish and his brushes and his polishing cloth to a smaller brother. Without a word spoken the two youngest boys took charge of the shoe black stall and the four bigger ones, apparently bored with the business for the moment, took out a yellow ball and began to play catch across the street to the vociferous objections of the rickshaw runners passing between them. Seconds ago the lights had gone out in the window of the jeweller’s shop just as Carter Sahib had said they would.

A man emerged from the shop and set off down the Mall in an easterly direction. A Hindu in white turban, white baggy trousers and white overshirt, he strode out, looking neither to left nor right, unconcerned and unafraid. A man on legitimate business. A man of the bazaar, Raghu guessed, commissioned to carry a parcel which Carter Sahib was very interested in. And that bulge over his right hip would no doubt be the parcel in question. Whooping and hollering and bumping into the messenger, the boys chased their ball down the street. An observant onlooker might have noticed that while two boys ran ahead of their quarry, in whom they showed not the slightest interest, two lagged behind. But he would have had to be a very observant onlooker.

Nearing Christ Church, the boys put away their ball and began to play tag, weaving in and out of the crowds but always keeping their man loosely in the centre of their group, prepared to wheel and turn and change direction like leaves in the wind. Their target made straight for the big main doors of the cathedral and went unhesitatingly in. Raghu made to follow him but was chased away by a doorman. He and one brother remained playing around the doors while the two remaining boys circled the cathedral, keeping an eye on the rear doorway.

Two minutes later the Indian they had followed came out, blinking, into the sunlight. The bulge at his right hip had disappeared. At a flick of Raghu’s hand, his second brother set off to follow the man. Raghu waited. After a while three Europeans came out. Two of them, a sahib and memsahib and tourists by the look of them, wandered off in the direction of the Mall. The third paused, looked to left and right, scanning the large paved concourse in front of the church, and then started to walk casually away. He had a bulge in the left pocket of his smartly cut trousers, Raghu noticed. With a piercing whistle to summon his brothers from the rear door, he set off, trotting ahead of the man back down the Mall. They were following a well-rehearsed surveillance drill devised by Charlie Carter’s Havildar of Police.

As he scampered along he committed to memory the appearance of the European. Carter Sahib himself had taught him this drill. Height: medium, as tall as Raghu’s father. Hair: dark and shiny. Eyes: he hadn’t been close enough to see but he guessed black. Clothes: sahib clothes. Not military. Age: always a problem to guess the age of a European but he would have thought young – in his early twenties.

A quick glance behind reassured him that his brothers were following on. Raghu sat on a wall and waited until the European drew level. He shouted a greeting to the man and with gestures indicated that he thought it would be an excellent idea if the gentleman gave him a cigarette. The young man swatted him away and crossed the road. The two younger brothers now moved swiftly ahead and Raghu trailed behind. The man moved within his unseen box down the Mall and turned off into a narrow alleyway leading towards the bazaar.

This was dangerous. The shoeshine boys closed in, knowing that it took a split second of inattention to lose someone in this twisting maze of streets, though they all knew the bazaar like their own playground. The bazaar was their playground. But the man was hurrying now, not growing careless but confident with the confidence of someone who is on his own ground. Raghu guessed that the man was approaching his bolt hole. A turn to the left and one more to the right.

Rounding the corner, the leading brother signalled that the quarry had been lost. Raghu ran up and scanned the alley. He ran swiftly to the end and looked up and down. Retracing his tracks he pointed to a door in the creeper-hung wall. All the boys noted the door and its exact location. They began to giggle.

Raghu with a gesture indicated that they should return to base as fast as they could. And, stifling their laughter, they raced up the winding streets to the Mall, taking a roundabout way back to police headquarters.

Ť ^ ť

Joe and Carter sat side by side on the balcony, their feet on the balustrade, and settled themselves to wait.

‘At last!’ said Carter. ‘A perfectly logical explanation which doesn’t depend on anyone’s arising from the dead in a cloud of sulphur and uttering terrible curses! Much more my sort of thing!’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Joe. ‘If anything it’s worse! It would terrify me, I can tell you! No wonder Alice Conyers looked a little pale.’

‘We ought to have thought of this, don’t you agree?’ Carter mused. ‘I mean – given all the accounts, all the evidence.’

‘No. Come on, let’s forgive ourselves this much. I don’t believe anyone could have guessed at it from the information we had. And never forget that it hadn’t even occurred to Alice herself. I think I witnessed her reaction when the awful thought first came to her but made nothing of it. It only began to cast a shadow in my mind when I noticed her unnatural interest in that list. And then it’s just a question of logic. If she wasn’t disturbed by the name of a person who had been killed, then what had she seen that had so profoundly shaken her? A gap, that’s what! No name where a name should have been! But we’ll try it out on Simpson when he gets here. Let him be the judge.’

Half an hour later a police tonga dropped Simpson at the door of the station and Carter hailed him. ‘Come on up and we’ll see if we can surprise you!’

The three men stepped inside the building together, Carter continuing cheerfully, ‘My congratulations, by the way, on your performance last night! Here, we’ll be in my office. Had to leave this morning before you were awake so we haven’t had time to fill you in on what’s been happening. I will just say – all that we suspected about the identity switch is confirmed. Sir George is au courant but back-pedalling, I’m afraid, on arresting our little quick-change artiste. Though quite rightly he thinks – and we agree – that we stand a better chance of flushing out the blackmailer and murderer if Alice is allowed to carry on as if nothing had happened.’

‘Blackmailer?’ said Simpson, bemused. ‘Did you say blackmailer? What’s this?’

‘Such a lot you don’t know yet! We haven’t been holding out on you but things develop at a pace, it seems, in Simla. Better fill him in, Joe!’

Joe gave him the main details of his moonlit interview with Isobel Newton and as the full story unfolded and all his suspicions were confirmed Simpson began to relax and even to smile.

‘Glad I was proved right,’ he said at last. ‘Glad I didn’t put those people at the seance through such misery for no good reason! There was hell to pay when you shot off into the night, Joe, and Carter fled as well leaving me and Minerva Freemantle to deal with the riot that ensued. Quite a riot! Well, just Minerva when it came down to it because, having reduced the company to blank dismay and terror even – as arranged – I faded away into a broom cupboard. The one in the passageway with a false back. Hardly able to move, horrified by what we’d conjured up

I could hear them shouting and screaming and, as far as I could tell, falling over each other for ages and then it all went quiet. In the end Minerva came and got me out. She was in quite a state too! I couldn’t work out whether she was laughing or crying! Even she was a bit hysterical, I think. She’d shipped Miss Trollope off home with friends and spun the story to everyone that it had all been a terrible mix-up. A crossed line from the beyond, if you like

a spiritual not-known-at-this-address. A vengeful entity had turned up at the wrong seance and had to be redirected! Just to make sure it doesn’t happen again she’s promised to strengthen the formula for the prayers she says at the beginning to ward off malevolent spirits.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Joe, suddenly guilty. ‘Poor old Maisie! Fences to mend there, I’m afraid!’

‘But now,’ said Carter, ‘follow another idea with us.’

Simpson nodded.

‘We want you to go over as fully and as carefully as you can all the events leading up to the crash. Yes, I know you’ve done it once but there was something we missed the first time

Something you missed. Can you start from the moment you arrived at the train and set eyes on Isobel Newton? Tell us everything you remember. Where she was standing, what she was doing, what she said. Everything.’

‘Well, my first impression of Isabelle de Neuville – can I call her that? It’s how I still think of her – was that she was a damned nuisance! I was lame and anxious to get into the first class compartment where my seat was booked and here, right in the doorway, was this Frenchwoman, blocking my way. She was haranguing her maid. In aristocratic French but shouting like a fishwife – I thought it a very odd scene

Odd behaviour.’

‘Tell us about the maid. Was she

um

refined

in any way elegant too?’

‘ ’Good Lord, no!’

‘Is your French good enough to know the difference? I don’t mean to offend you, old man, but I know I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,’ said Carter placatingly.

‘I would. I was convalescent for a time with the Comte and Comtesse de Lausanne during the war. Used to play chess with the old man. Improved my French a lot and, well, yes, I think I’d spot a good accent when I heard it. But the maid, you say? Now she was another type entirely. Oh, pretty good to look at, don’t mistake me, but not the same class as her mistress at all. Her language was coarse and she had a thick accent. A regional accent, I think.’

‘A bit ooh-lŕ-lŕ, would you say?’ said Joe with a quick look at Carter.

‘Oh yes. Very pronounced cadence. Could almost have been Italian. So – swearing like a poilu – but what a beauty! Dark hair and eyes, about twenty-three or so I would guess. Mistress or maid – it was hard to know which one to look at!’

‘And what were they arguing about? Can you remember?’

‘Certainly! I pretended not to listen! But it was fascinating stuff! I couldn’t tear my ears away. Isabelle gave her an envelope and that’s when it all started. The maid tore it open and looked inside. She started yelling about her wages. Claimed she hadn’t been paid for months and she wasn’t going to let Isabelle get away with it any longer. Then she examined the train ticket that was in the envelope. More shrieks and screams! Third class! Isabelle had provided a third class ticket for her and she found this totally unacceptable – way beneath her dignity. And she was right, poor girl. I sympathized with her.’

‘And tell us how they resolved it.’

‘They didn’t! Isabelle obviously was not going to give way and in the end the maid just got fed up and turned on her heel almost in mid-sentence and stormed off down the platform towards the third class carriages. At last I was able to make my way into the compartment and claim my seat.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Poor girl! She can’t have had a very comfortable journey and, of course, it all ended in death and destruction. No one from the third class survived.’