The Ellie Hardwick Mysteries (14 page)

‘Come off it, Bill!' Steve protested. ‘It was plainly an accident. Misadventure . . . whatever you like. Happens all the time. I think the hotel is much to be blamed for not posting danger notices.'

‘What?
And put off the tourists?' said Bill. ‘
BEWARE CROCODILES
—that's going to look good in the foreground of everyone's holiday snaps, isn't it? And, be fair, now—they did warn us about them. But remember this area's suffering from a vast reduction in tourism at the moment. They can't afford for any more visitors to be put off by a shock-horror story like this finding its way onto the internet or page one of the tabloids.' He narrowed his eyes, and swept us all with a barrister's air of secret knowledge. ‘Hmm . . . we might find that useful. And the fact that there's been such a hoo-ha over the next test match series. It's due to take place next month in Delhi. Lots of visitors expected. Boost to the economy. India will beat us hollow, of course, and they're looking forward to that.'

‘But the English team's playing silly buggers . . . threatening a boycott,' said Steve, catching on. ‘It wouldn't take much to turn this into a double media disaster. See what you're getting at, Bill. They'll want to avoid any adverse publicity. Can't afford another fiasco like the Greek one last year . . . Did those blokes ever get back home? Stands to reason. Nothing if not diplomatic, Indians. They'll do the right thing. We'll all be shipped out on the next plane—out of their hair!'

‘Quite agree!' said Colonel Thwaite. ‘That would be their best plan. Swift, sensible, discreet. The last thing they want is news
coverage
of some dotty lotus-gathering memsahib getting herself gobbled up by a crocodile. We'll get our marching orders any minute.'

But an hour later, Timothy was still closeted with the Inspector.

‘What if—heaven forbid!—they were to accuse poor Timothy of murder? What would they do with him?' asked Paula in distress.

‘Arrest him. Hold him. Try him eventually,' said Bill. ‘And we all noticed the local lock-up.'

Several shivered at the memory of the desolate concrete block of a prison we had driven past the previous day.

‘We can't let that happen! Can we?' said Paula. ‘We can't leave him behind in a place like that to struggle with a foreign justice system! Come on—we've got to get together on this!'

‘Quite right, Mrs. Parrish,' said the Colonel. ‘And I think it's clear what our tactics must be.' He smiled a thin smile. ‘Their first error was to leave us all together in the same room.'

Through my grief and shock and self-recrimination an idea had been bubbling. ‘Look,' I said, ‘you don't have to worry about making up a story. If it comes down to giving an alibi, we don't need to dream anything up. I can
prove
that Timothy had nothing to do with his wife's death. But let's not force the Inspector's hand. I'll just go in when my turn comes—he said he'd take us in alphabetical
order.'
I looked around. ‘So that puts just the two Cresswells ahead of me.'

The two Cresswells were duly called and were finished in ten minutes. I took a deep breath on hearing my name announced and strode as confidently as I could on knocking knees into the presence of Inspector Hari Singh and his sergeant. The inspector was seated behind the gleaming expanse of the manager's desk, the office and IT equipment commandeered by the Rajasthan Police.

‘And you, I suspect, are Miss Hardwick?' The voice was deep and smooth but with an edge of grittiness.

I confirmed his suspicions. He waved a negligent hand at a bronze bust which sat in the centre of the mantelpiece. ‘The same name as the honourable architect of this magnificent pile.'

‘The same family,' I admitted. ‘The same profession, though I'm still working at the reputation.'

He grinned and asked a few basic questions. His sergeant tapped away at the keyboard of his lap-top. He studied the screen and gave a confirmatory nod to the inspector. Hari Singh noticed my wondering glance and unbent a little. ‘Sergeant Mishra has a degree from the London School of Economics,' he commented. He waited for my admiring murmur and pursued his theme. ‘The Rajasthan Police do not spend their time hurrying to the scene of
dacoity
and dowry crimes on a camel as some westerners imagine. You are most likely these days to find us hacking our way through the thickets of the cyber-crime jungle. Death by crocodile has a very old-fashioned ring to it.'

‘She did die . . . um . . . by crocodile, then?' I asked, mortified. ‘We didn't know for certain. No one's told us anything.'

‘The remains are at present undergoing a post-mortem examination at the Medical College Hospital but a preliminary inspection by our police doctor indicates that death was caused by loss of blood, shock and possibly drowning following the severance of limbs.'

‘Drowning?'

‘Yes. It's possible,' he said. ‘Even likely. This is not the first death by crocodile the lake has witnessed. In the nineteenth century the Maharajah of the day, a keen sportsman, was duck-shooting from a gilded punt in the centre of the lake. The explosive shotgun device he had had fixed to the prow backfired and hurled the unfortunate prince into the water. Witnesses report that His Highness was carried twice around the lake by one of these creatures, screaming, until he finally died—of drowning.'

‘So Phyllis's death has a royal precedent,' I burbled. ‘She'd have been pleased . . .' Was he deliberately trying to shock me? Of course he was.

‘I am eager, as you might imagine,
to
establish how the lady came to put herself within range of a three metre long crocodile. So, perhaps you can help me to fill in the background? We calculate that the unfortunate demise occurred at around one thirty so if you could account for your movements, let's say, between one and two?'

I told him about my conversation with Phyllis, admitting it was at my suggestion that she had gone to pick a lotus flower. Tears ran down my face and I was glad of Paula's stash of Kleenex. I told him about the peacock cry I had heard which, with hindsight, could have been Phyllis's scream of surprise and horror.

‘You were not aware that it is from that place by the pavilion that the crocodiles are fed by the Forest Rangers?' he asked bluntly. ‘Chickens, pigs and goats are their usual food.'

‘No, I didn't know,' I whispered. I was devastated. And I didn't like the way the questioning was going. I rallied. ‘Look, Inspector, the dietary regimen of the estate wild life and the domestic arrangements of the hotel management have not been explained to us. It was doubtless considered less than interesting.'

He glared at me and I thought I might have gone too far. ‘Don't challenge!' I told myself and cried some more.

And now came the question I had been waiting for.

‘Did you see anyone else in the vicinity
while
you were painting?'

I sniffed and wrinkled my brow in concern. ‘You're nor suggesting someone was involved in her death?' I asked, horrified.

He sighed. ‘You go unerringly to the heart of our enquiry, Miss Hardwick. Did she fall or was she pushed? That is exactly what I am trying to ascertain. Now, if you would answer my question?'

‘Well, there were lots of people milling around by the coach but I only had one person in focus the whole time,' I said thoughtfully. ‘Timothy. Mr. Wickam-Skeith.'

The lance gaze pinned me to my seat but I squeezed my knees together and stared innocently back.

‘He was sitting under the acacia tree between me and the palace about a hundred yards from the lake. He was reading a book. He arrived at . . . oh . . . just after one—we'd all had an early lunch—and got up to go back to the coach just before I packed up at one forty. Is this important? Look, I can show you exactly what was happening at the time of death if that's what you want to establish!' I said, allowing a thread of excitement to creep into my voice.

I heaved my big leather hold-all onto my knee and made a show of searching around in the depths, failing to find what I was looking for. My hand encountered the small sleek shape of my camera and I thrust it deeper into
the
bag. ‘Drat! I left it to dry under the tree. My watercolour. In all the excitement I forgot about it. Do you think someone could fetch it?'

A nod to the sergeant sent him scurrying off and Hari Singh and I spent an uncomfortable six and a half minutes discussing Indo-Sarassenic architecture and the incompetence of English bowlers.

The sergeant had obviously taken time to look at my painting himself as he presented it with a smile and a flourish. The inspector studied it, even scratched at the paint with a manicured finger-nail. I waited patiently. I watched him take in every detail of the peaceful scene: the palace in the background, the arching stable gate, so English with its blue-faced clock, the fingers frozen on one thirty; the bucolic figure of Timothy, looking suitably Victorian, I thought, straw hat on head and book in lap, lounging under the acacia tree. My scale figure. Hurriedly painted in at Phyllis's suggestion.

‘May I keep this for my files?' asked the inspector.

I smiled and nodded and began to gather up my things. I thought I'd better not offer to sign it.

* * *

I was never quite sure whose relief had been
the
greater—the tourists' or that of the Rajasthan Police as we set off for Delhi and the airport. We all climbed aboard the BA jet in the early hours of the following morning. Not quite all. Timothy had stayed behind with the ‘Tracks East' representative to help organise the funeral. Oddly, we thought, he was not having the body shipped back home but was intending to have her cremated and her ashes scattered in the river in the Hindu custom. Paula and her partner gallantly offered to stay behind at the expense of the tour operator to keep him company.

* * *

It was a month before I screwed up the courage to unpack my camera. I didn't want to know. I'd taken my old-fashioned but reliable Leica with me—the kind that still used film. When I collected the developed prints, I finally settled down to examine them. I found myself feverishly flipping through the images of gilded palaces and domes, caparisoned elephants, heavily-laden camel trains, crowds of laughing girls with copper milk pots on their heads. I was looking for Day 14. And there it was, bringing back the sunny clarity of that last golden afternoon. The stable clock stood at twenty minutes past one, the peacocks strutted on shaven lawns, the lotus-fringed lake sparkled enticingly and in the shade of the
acacia
tree there lounged Timothy Wickham-Skeith.

I was limp with relief. I had been ready to destroy the evidence of my lie—if it
was
a lie—to the police. During our detention in the Polo Bar, I had been totally unable to remember whether Timothy had been under the tree. I remembered painting him in, goaded by Phyllis's waspish comment about scale, but I couldn't have stood in a court of law and sworn that he had been there at the crucial time. I could have produced my photographs for the inspector there and then but I wasn't confident enough to gamble a man's liberty on what would be revealed. But my instinct had been right all along and I was glad to have the evidence of his innocence.

‘Why don't you just take a photo, Ellie?' Phyllis had said.

I had taken her advice.

In fact, I'd taken three photos. It helps to have a panorama when I'm recording architectural scenes. I turned to the remaining shots. The right of the trio of pictures showed a gang of langurs gambolling at the foot of a cedar tree and the wing of the hunting lodge in the background. The left showed the lake's edge and the west wing. On the carriage sweep stood the coach with remembered figures clustering about it. And there was another figure on the lakeside path determinedly making its way southwards, one arm raised in
greeting.
The green silk shirt looked familiar to me. I got out my magnifying glass and checked. I was not mistaken. It occurred to me that this person might have sighted Phyllis for if Phyllis had been behind me moving west towards the lake edge simultaneously—and she was—I calculated that these two figures would have met up with each other exactly at the pavilion where Phyllis had fallen foul of the crocodile.

I looked and looked again at the innocent-seeming scenario. And, of course, at the moment the camera had recorded its evidence, no crime had been committed. No accident had occurred. The meeting could have been innocent and unplanned. What could have happened in ten minutes? What actions or words had resulted in a hideous death so shortly after that arm was raised in greeting? It didn't take long for Phyllis to push someone to the limit with her vicious tongue, I remembered. One comment was often enough. It must have been a spur of the moment impulse to give her a shove into the lake. Something any one of us might have done. But then, any one of us would have seen her being snapped up by a stealthily lurking crocodile and tried to help her. At the very least, screamed a warning and run about shouting for assistance.

It couldn't have been premeditated. Could it? I thought not. But
post
-meditated? Did the
word
exist?

Disturbed, I slipped the photographs away in the depths of my sock drawer. I left them there until I decided what to do with them.

* * *

A week later I had still come to no decision and India was drawing further away from me, becoming a burnished memory and a series of well-worn stories. An e-mail message accompanied by two paper-clip symbols popped up onto my screen late one night. Inspector Hari Singh of the Rajasthan Police sent his compliments to Miss Hardwick and drew her attention to the following attachment.

‘Affair officially of no further interest to the Indian Police. Action by architect, perhaps?' he had added mysteriously.