Barbara Cleverly - The Last Kashmiri Rose

He extended hands that shook to lift her but a sound behind him caused him to turn.

Pale in the moonlight and insubstantial, a tall figure stood silent in the doorway watching him.

Every hair on his head, every muscle in his back signalling terror, Joe breathed, ‘Chedi Khan.’

Nancy stirred uncomfortably and looked at her clock again. Five minutes past midnight. Andrew had not joined her in their room. Every sense was alert and crying out that all was not well. She had never expected to be able to sleep through the night and had settled down in a chair fully dressed in trousers, an old shirt of Andrew’s and a pair of soft riding boots. She made her way silently on to the verandah.

‘Andrew! Something’s wrong,’ she hissed. ‘Joe’s not here, is he? And if he’s not here – that means the danger’s not here… It’s somewhere else. I’m going down to his bungalow.’

‘Stay here, Nancy, I’ll get Dickie to go…’

But Nancy was already running.

She covered the half-mile to the dak bungalow and paused at the end of the drive to catch her breath. No sounds. The front door hung wide open. She crept quietly up, stood to one side and listened. Only the sound of her own laboured breathing. She moved into the hall and made towards Joe’s bedroom. In the doorway she bumped into a turbaned figure and opened her mouth to scream in uncontrollable reaction. An Indian hand closed around her mouth forcing it shut, killing all sound. Almost stopping her heart. The nightmares of Joan, of Sheila, Alicia and Peggy came starkly before her own eyes. Their last sight had been a vision of terror, an Indian with a snake in his hand, an Indian with hands grasping to throw his victim screaming over the cliff edge, an Indian using his strength to keep a mouth gasping for air under water, an Indian slashing with a razor.

Nancy struggled and caught her elbow on a uniform belt buckle. A voice spoke urgently in her ear. ‘Mem-sahib! It is I, Naurung! Please be quiet!’

‘Chedi Khan!’

Unbelieving, Joe stared at the tall figure of a Pathan warrior standing motionless, silhouetted in the moonlit doorway. Long fringed waistcoat, baggy white trousers and shirt, pagri twisted into a turban, embroidered slippers, curved knife thrust through a belt. But then he saw in the apparition’s right hand the gleam of a slim dark barrel and Joe shrank from the menace of a Luger P'08.

His hand shot to the holster of his own pistol.

‘Don’t be stupid, Sandilands!’ The dry drawl of Prentice’s voice stopped him short.

Helplessly, Joe tried to speak and gestured towards Midge.

‘Leave it! Leave it!’ said Prentice. ‘She’s asleep. There’s nothing you can do. In fact everyone in our little circle is asleep except for you and me. Old Andrew can sleep the sleep of senility, Nancy can sleep the sleep of surrendered innocence, and Templar, of course, can sleep the sleep – I imagine – of powerful sexual excitement and happy anticipation.’ He paused. ‘The only difference between him and Minette is that he will wake in the morning. But in the meantime, come with me.’

He gestured with his left hand. The right held the pistol pointed unwaveringly at Joe’s stomach. ‘Come with me, Sandilands,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it would be convenient if you raised your hands. Although you would be dead long before you had succeeded in drawing your cumbersome firearm. Just go ahead of me. We’ll go in here.’

He indicated the door of his office. ‘You’ll see a box of matches on the table. Part of my evening’s preparations, as you can probably imagine. Be kind enough to light the lamp and pray take a seat. We might as well be comfortable. Time passes so agreeably in your company.’

Painfully Joe found his voice. ‘Prentice!’ he said desperately and, hating himself for the clichés that poured from him, “There is no way in the world that you’ll get away with this! Proceed, with this and you’re a dead man! George Jardine has a report. He knows all that we’ve discovered and all that we’ve guessed. By your actions tonight you have put the keystone on our enquiry. It’s no part of my job to give you advice but I’ll give you some – run! Get out of it. Hide yourself. If you don’t there’s no escape for you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be hunted down. Others will pick up the trail.’

‘Escape?’ said Prentice. ‘Of course I escape. I’d be a poor schemer if I hadn’t made appropriate arrangements.’

‘And,’ said Joe, unable to keep the quaver out of his voice, ‘you would kill your daughter, the daughter of your wife?’

‘The circle has to be closed.’ Suddenly it seemed he was in the grip of a passionate intensity as he said, ‘I’ve worked for this moment for twelve years. Since the year 1910. Blunderer though you are, you probably don’t need to be told that.’

‘I know very little of your wife,’ said Joe, ‘though many have spoken of her to me. She sounds to have been a free and beautiful spirit. I don’t wonder – no one wonders – that you loved her so deeply. But, Prentice, can you imagine that the four women who’ve died and now your daughter to be added to the toll of death will comfort that bright spirit? You’ve made blood sacrifices enough to quench the thirst of Kali herself! Dolly would never have demanded such retribution!’

For a moment Prentice looked at him with genuine surprise. ‘My wife? You speak of my wife’s death?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘My wife! Oh, dear! Sandilands – for all the veneer of sophistication, for all the clever pontificating about police methods, for all the questions and answers, you remain at the last a plodding London bobby with about as much imagination in this situation as a cocker spaniel – or a Bulstrode! I ask myself what do you know about life? Life, that is, outside the boundaries of Wimbledon, outside Belgravia, outside the hunting counties of England? Nothing whatever!

‘Commander, I have to tell you – you are pathetic! I can’t easily believe you supposed my target was Dickie Templar. I can’t any more easily suppose that you imagined my grief was for Dolly!’

Abruptly Joe sat down in a chair and they gazed at each other across the desk in silence until Prentice resumed, ‘How often I’ve heard the phrase used – “The night of the tragedy”… “The death of your wife”. No one, English or Indian, has ever noticed or registered the fact if they did notice that Dolly did not die alone.’

‘Chedi Khan,’ Joe whispered.

‘Yes,’ said Prentice roughly, ‘Chedi Khan. Are you beginning to understand?’

‘What of him?’ said Joe. ‘He died, by all I hear, trying to save your wife and God bless him. What is this you’re trying to say?’

‘I’m not trying to say anything,’ said Prentice in sudden anger. ‘I am saying, if you have ears to hear, that Dolly was nothing. Nothing! At best she was a promiscuous little trollop and she deserved to die. She died as she had so often lived – drunk! I wouldn’t sacrifice a dog to save her and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep to avenge her. But…’ He said the names slowly as though reciting a litany, ‘ Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton, Somersham and Templar on that night – “the night of the tragedy”, if you care to call it that – where were they? Drunk and indifferent! They were a few minutes’ ride away. Their appearance, merely the sound of their arrival, would have scared off the dacoits before they’d had a chance to do much damage. If they’d moved when the alarm was given, had they any manhood, any honour – honour, that is, as we would understand it in the north – they would have spent their blood to save him. But they let him die! They didn’t, I suppose, even know that they’d let him die. But, as the years have lengthened and the grass has grown, each has paid. Each has been condemned to a lifetime of bereavement. And now Templar! The Ghurka hero! Now Templar pays his bill.’