Barbara Cleverly - The Last Kashmiri Rose

The long afternoon wore on.

With no hope of sleep that night and mindful that he would have to be on duty at midnight, Joe lay down on his bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, his Browning automatic pistol with a full magazine in its holster, and linked his hands behind his head. He gazed at the ceiling. His thoughts chased him down dark corridors and he longed to put on a light, to read a book, or check for the tenth time that his gun was properly loaded and ready but, they had agreed, nothing unusual. So – no light at this hour. The police detective, if anyone were watching, was fast asleep as normal.

He went over in his mind the road he would have to follow in the dark to reach Nancy ’s bungalow to relieve Andrew’s watch. He had looked it over, even paced it carefully in the daylight when he was sure that Prentice was at work, exercising on the maidan a good mile away. He had borrowed a pair of gym shoes from Andrew and was confident that he could arrive unannounced by betraying noises.

But now, with his watch held up to the moonlight saying thirty minutes to go before he relieved Andrew, Joe was tense. He was not deceived by the softening conversation between Dickie and Prentice. In fact, the more he thought of it, the more contrived it seemed.

Prentice was sending a signal which read, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.’ He was more than ever convinced that Prentice would strike that night. He was a military man after all, like Joe, and Joe reasoned that any soldier with two nights to carry out a vital offensive would not leave it until the second night. If he was unsuccessful on the first occasion he would have another one available to him.

Twenty minutes to go. He calculated that it would take him seven minutes walking carefully along the shadowed route he had picked out to reach the bungalow and another minute to slip in through the back door and take his place on the verandah outside Dickie’s room. It was vital that he appear at exactly five minutes to midnight as he had arranged with Andrew. Any earlier or later and he might find himself taken for an intruder and have his head blown off. He swung silently out of bed and padded to the window to judge the strength of the moonlight. The moon and the stars combined to create an illusion of daylight, a clarity so intense Joe felt he could have read a book by their gleam. He slipped a concealing dark jacket over his white shirt and waited.

He looked down in the direction of the Drummond bungalow, wondering whether Dickie, exhausted by his practice on the polo field, had managed to snatch any sleep at all. He knew, in the circumstances, he would never have been able to sleep himself. All was quiet.

Prentice looked in the other direction towards the military lines and Curzon Street.

‘Prentice! You bastard! What are you thinking tonight?’

He was aware of Dickie’s imminent departure, was perhaps obsessed by it. He had to move and he had to move soon. Tonight? Tomorrow night? Waiting!

‘If we were hunting, I’d say that we’d stopped the earth, stopped the fox. That’s what I am! I am the earth-stopper!’

Again, his mind weary from this exercise, he went over their arrangements. Three watchers watching the earth, thinking round the problem, thinking through it, thinking of all angles, relevant or irrelevant.

‘Dickie, are you all right? Midge, are you all right?’

He smiled to himself at the thought that, imperceptibly, in his mind, the two lovers had become one. Impossible to think of one without the other.

He gazed through the window and looked up at the yellow moon, the March moon, and a thought so chilling, a thought so devastating, hit him with an intensity that for a moment threatened to loosen his bowels.

‘We’ve stopped the wrong earth!’

‘Prentice has all the murderous patience of a Pathan in pursuit of a blood feud. Prentice is a man of method. He is not going to abandon his established pattern. His ritual. For Christ’s sake! – he doesn’t want Dickie dead! He wants him alive and suffering! Like all the others! He wants him deprived of the love of his life with the rest of his life to live in that knowledge. And marriage doesn’t come into it! That’s our own Western way of thinking. It’s enough for him that Dickie loves her and Prentice reasons like a Pathan. An eye for an eye, a loss for a loss. Appropriateness. Fittingness. Dickie has never been in any physical danger himself.’

And a second thought to agitate him – ‘March! We’re still in the month of March! He doesn’t need to wait for another year.’

Kitty’s voice came back to him, scathing, acerbic, amused, ‘… and leathery old villains are known to have killed their own offspring if they thought the code demanded it…’

‘We’ve been wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’

The horror of his conclusion froze his muscles. He was unable to move. Unable to make a decision. Run to the Drummonds for help?

Yes!

No! That would be to add a mile to his journey. It was probably too late anyway! His mouth was dry, his eyes staring, ears straining for any sound.

The paralysis passed away and he found himself without further thought outside his bungalow and running on silent feet in the moonlight. Running to Curzon Street. Running to the Prentice bungalow.

He stopped at the drive gate and moved forward on tiptoe. The house was in total silence. There was no light. The front door, as was Prentice’s custom, stood open. Glancing down the garden, for a moment Joe could fancy he caught a gleam of light from the garden house but it was gone. The servants’ quarters likewise lay in silence. The silence, it seemed to Joe, of complete desertion. Not even a tickle of smoke from kitchen fires. The silence was ominous, the desertion complete.

With stealth he ran up the verandah steps and stood by the open door. After only a moment’s hesitation he stepped inside, waiting for a second for his eyes to grow accustomed to the deeper shadows of the house.

All internal doors were open. All, in fact, except one. And surely that one was Midge’s bedroom? He remembered the room. He remembered the light, brittle, cane furniture and the pretty wall hangings that Prentice had thought appropriate to welcome his daughter home. He even remembered the layout of the room and, without hesitation, pushed the door open.

Sick with relief, on the charpoy under a mosquito net, he saw the recumbent figure of Midge. A second glance was less reassuring. She was lying on her back, an unnatural pose. Her hands were folded on her breast in an almost ritual stillness. He took a pace forward and then another. He bumped into a chair and bent to move it aside. As he picked it up he realised that it was broken. Broken, in fact, into small pieces. Looking again he saw that all the furniture in the room had been broken – smashed. All the hangings had been torn down and the debris had been piled about Midge’s bed. Stepping forward again his foot hit a hard object. A tin of kerosene.

With desperate hands he tore the mosquito net away and knelt beside the sleeping Midge. And then he saw the dark stain on her breast. With a groan he reached out and touched it. His hand recoiled in horror. It was a spray of red roses, placed between her limp hands. Automatically, he took one of her folded hands and felt for her pulse. Automatically, he lowered his face to hers and breathed. What was that smell? His years in London had not prepared him for much that he found in India but at least he was able to recognise the smell of hashish. He brushed her forehead with his lips. Slightly damp. Midge was alive. Midge was drugged. Midge, it seemed, was intended to suffer the death her mother had suffered twelve years ago. The death on a funeral pyre which had haunted her through the years.