Death in Kashmir (41 page)

‘That's what Hugo said. So he was right.'

‘Yes, he was right. All the same, I was worried. It seemed to me that there was something not quite right; something that didn't fit. A false note. But I couldn't pin it down. It nagged at me in the way that a name or a face that one can't quite remember does, and then just as I reached the gate of the Club, I suddenly realized what it was—Lager! You had told me that when you left him alone he would whine and bark without ceasing.'

‘Yes,' said Sarah. ‘It was true. He's a little beast that way. He'll yelp and howl for hours on end.'

‘But he was not yelping or whining when you came back to the boat that night.'

‘No, but that was because—' Sarah stopped suddenly.

‘—because Hugo was on the boat,' finished Charles. ‘Exactly. That's what suddenly occurred to me. The pup had been making no noise. Why? Because someone was with him. Someone he knew. It was then that I remembered what the watcher had said—or rather, what he had
not
said. He hadn't said that Hugo had left the boat: only that he had gone on board. Then Hugo was still on the boat. Where? Why hadn't he shown himself? Had he taken a nap on one of the beds and fallen fast asleep?'

‘Yes, that's what I thought when I first saw him,' confessed Sarah, and shivered suddenly and uncontrollably. ‘So what made you come back?'

‘Because I met Reggie, and because Reggie had been talking to Mir Khan. The dance was over and Reggie and Mir had stayed on talking in the Club garden. Reggie had probably had too much to drink, and he was worried and lonely and off his guard. And when Hugo's name happened to come up in the course of conversation, Reggie confided to Mir that he didn't trust him—he was “up to no good”, was the way he phrased it—and he went on to say that he himself had been watching your boat, and what he had seen…'

Charles drew out another cigarette and lit it, and said through the smoke: ‘Fortunately, Mir is an Indian. Had he been British the chances are that he would automatically have been on the side of a fellow-countryman, and so Reggie's information would have meant very little. As it was, he had no reason to be biased for or against Hugo; but since he knew we were suspicious of anyone who was interested in the
Waterwitch
—and clearly, Hugo was interested—he told Reggie to come with him at once and they'd wake me up. Mir seems to have thought I'd be in bed and asleep by then but that the matter was too urgent to be left. They were actually crossing the drive on their way to my room when they met me coming up it, and Mir told me what Reggie had seen.

‘A few minutes earlier and it might not have meant very much. But now, when I'd just realized that Hugo must already be on your boat, it meant the end of the world—or that's what it felt like!' Charles laughed suddenly, and said: ‘It's a long time since I won the quarter mile at my school. But I must have lowered my own record that night! There wasn't time for explanations. I just said “He's on her boat now!” and turned and ran, with Mir and Reggie pelting behind me——

‘We had to slow down a bit when we reached the field path, because it was vital to move quietly and there was that damned piece of tin somewhere on the path. Even then, Mir put a foot on it, but otherwise we made no noise. We could hear voices; and then the dog barked, so I called out——

‘Hugo couldn't expect to explain away a dead body, or those gloves and that smell. Had it been anyone else who called, I think he would probably have killed you at once, and then gone out with some story that you were asleep, and tried to bluff it through. But he knew I would come on board.'

Sarah said: ‘He had that awful stuff. He could have killed us all. Why didn't he?'

‘Because he couldn't have got away with it. He must have realized within seconds that I wasn't alone, and he can't have known how many people I had out there with me: though he would have known that some if not all of us would be armed. And then he'd be coming out from the light into the dark—the moon was down by then—so we'd see him before he could see us. Worst of all, from his point of view, that filthy weapon of his was only useful at short range and against a single target. It would have been useless against an unknown number of men whose positions he couldn't pinpoint. The odds against him were too great, and he must have realized it and turned that foul gun on himself.'

A silence fell between them. The smoke of Charles's cigarette spiralled up slowly in the quiet air, and behind it the lake lay like a sheet of topaz in the twilight. The sun had dipped behind the Gulmarg range, and the mountains behind Shalimar were no longer rose and cyclamen, but slate-grey and cold blue against a pale jade sky flecked with tiny apricot clouds as soft as a fall of feathers from the breast of a wounded bird. A veil of wood smoke from the evening fires drifted across the darkness of the trees at the far side of the lake and a lone frog began to croak among the reeds.

Charles said: ‘That's Mir coming across the fields. I suppose someone told him I'd be here.' He came to his feet and stood waiting.

‘I have only come to say goodbye,' said Mir walking towards them. ‘No, do not get up, Miss Parrish. I cannot wait.' He shook hands with Charles and smiled down at Sarah: ‘I shall see you again, I hope. But tomorrow I leave Kashmir.'

‘More … work?' asked Sarah, standing up to shake hands and brushing daisy heads off her lap.

‘I am afraid so.'

‘Why do you do this kind of work?' she asked curiously. ‘You don't have to.'

Mir laughed. ‘There you are wrong, Miss Parrish. We all have to do the work we were sent into this world to do. This is my work: I do not know why it should be so, but I know that it is. And I help my country, also. There is some satisfaction in that. Goodbye—and … I wish you much happiness.
Khuda hafiz!
'

He sketched the graceful Oriental gesture of farewell and turning away among the willows, walked quickly back along the field path.

There were so many more things that Sarah had wanted to know. So many questions that she had meant to ask. But suddenly they ceased to matter. It was only Charles who mattered, standing before her in the dusk under the willow trees.

The moon had risen while they waited, and now it floated silver and serene in a sky that still held the last faint flow of sunset. It laid a shining pathway across the quiet water and lost itself among the lily-pads at the lake's edge.

Charles's tall figure seemed etched against it in black on silver, while Sarah's white face and pale frock gleamed from the shadowy background of the willow boughs, silver on black.

Charles reached out and took her hands in his, and Sarah said softly: ‘You said that if there was a third time, you'd really mean it.'

‘This is the third time and I really mean it,' said Charles gravely.

‘Good,' said Sarah contentedly.

The two figures, the black and the silver, drew together and became part of the moonlight and the shadows: so still that a heron, alighting in the shallow water at the lake's edge, remained within a yard of them, pricking between the lily leaves, until Lager, returning from a foraging expedition beyond the chenar tree, sent it flapping out across the moonlit Dāl.

Postscript

For those who are interested in facts, the first ski-hut on Khilanmarg was destroyed, together with its occupants, by an avalanche that roared down from the ridge of Apharwat, leaving a track that is still there—a long, wide, silver-grey smear on the mountainside. The ski-hut in this story, which was built to replace it, has by now, I am told, been demolished and re-placed in turn by a hotel with a ski-lift that connects it with Gulmarg.

The original H.B.
Sunflower
(there could be a new one of that name by now), which I have allotted to the Creeds in this book, was our houseboat—rented by my father for several years, together with its mooring in Chota Nagim (‘small' Nagim), the
ghat
with the huge chenar tree, massed willows and the field path that one followed to reach the Nagim Bagh Road and the bridge of that name, or the Club. I should not be surprised to learn that the piece of rusty tin on that path, laid down by our
mānji
to cover a depression where rain would collect in wet weather, was still there.

The Club certainly is. And so too is the bridge and the little island known as the Char-Chenar—four chenars—though the central pavilion and the tiers of rising ground on which it stood have been bulldozed to the level of the surrounding turf, and the thickets of Persian lilac have gone. Sadly, so has the ancient wooden mosque of Hazratal, the sacred hair; so named because it enshrines a precious relic in the form of a hair from the Prophet's beard. It has been demolished in favour of a showy white marble mosque from which the once melodious and haunting voice of the muezzin, calling the Faithful to prayer, has given place to a metallic and vociferous one that emerges, at full blast, from a cluster of outsize loudspeakers, wired for maximum sound at the top of the new minaret.

Importunate salesmen in
shikaras
loaded with every kind of local produce from Kashmir carpets to cabbages and cut flowers still tout their wares alongside every occupied houseboat, and the old, picturesque, wooden houses where the makers of papier mâché, carved wood and embroidered
pashmina
*
live, still crowd together on either side of the Jhelum River where it flows through Srinagar City. The one-time British Residency, standing among its green lawns and gardens in the shadow of the Takht-i-Suliman, looks much the same as it did in the old days, though nowadays it houses a series of showrooms for the display and sale of the many arts and crafts for which Kashmir is famous.

I suspect that by now both of the Nedou's Hotels—the stonebuilt one in Srinagar and the rambling, ramshackle, much-loved wooden one in Gulmarg—have been modernized and ‘improved' out of all recognition. But as far as I am concerned, they will always be there, unchanged and unchanging. Enshrined, like flies in amber, in my memory; complete with the stage upon which I appeared more than once in charity cabarets. For I was the girl to whom my fictional Hugo Creed refers briefly near the end of Chapter 15; the ‘girl called Mollie someone' with whom he once sang a duet: ‘A tasteful ditty about a bench in a park—or was it something about tiptoeing through tulips?' Hugo could not remember. But in fact it was both, though on two separate occasions; and my partner on that bench was not in the least like Henry VIII being a lissom young officer in an Indian Cavalry regiment, one ‘Bingle' Ingall of the 6th Lancers.

Oddly enough, there is a postscript to that particular duet. Years later—over forty of them I fear, during which I had completely lost track of him—we suddenly met again in, of all places, the Book section of a famous department store in San Francisco where I was signing copies of
The Far Pavilions
and
Shadow of the Moon.
He had, it seemed, become a professional actor, married an American girl and settled in a suburb of that city; and having seen in some local paper that I was in town signing books, had dropped in to say, “Fancy meeting you here!” It is a far cry from Kashmir to San Francisco, but as Hugo would probably have said: ‘If I may coin a phrase, “It's a small world.”'

It is indeed! And getting smaller every day.

A
LSO BY
M. M. K
AYE

F
ICTION

The Far Pavilions

Shadow of the Moon

Trade Wind

Death in Kenya

Death in Zanzibar

Death in Cyprus

Death in the Andamans

Death in Kashmir

The Ordinary Princess
(for children)

A
UTOBIOGRAPHY

The Sun in the Morning

Golden Afternoon

Enchanted Evening

DEATH IN KASHMIR
. Copyright © 1984 by M. M. Kaye. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Map of Kashmir drawn by Reginald Piggot

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