Hugh Miller - Borrowed Time

Ram Jarwal woke Mike at six o’clock with a cup of coffee and told him he should be ready to leave in twenty minutes. Mike drank the coffee while he dressed. By the time he was ready, Ram was outside, tightening the laces on his walking boots.

It was a glorious morning. The sun shimmered through a light high mist and the air was fragrant and moist. Mike watched Ram do up the bolts and double-lock the cabin door.

‘It’s hard to imagine anyone would take the trouble to come all the way up here to burgle a cabin,’ Mike said. He had been gazing down the sides of the valley, which seemed incredibly steep. ‘On the other hand, some people might see it as a challenge.’

‘Some people might see it as an opportunity to get inside and wait for whoever lives here,’ Ram said. ‘Homicide robberies are not uncommon. The best you can do is make sure there’s no place for someone to hide. Before I moved in, I had all the trees within fifty metres cut down.’

Mike stood for a moment looking down into the valley. He pointed to a dark cluster beside a green thicket a hundred metres below them. ‘What’s that — the black patch? It looks like it’s moving.’

‘Vultures,’ Ram said. ‘They’re waiting for the police to leave.’

‘Police?’

‘There was a bulletin on VHF at five o’clock. A murder can’t stay hidden here for long. Vultures were spotted on the hillside. The police came up and found the body of a young man, they think he might be a Pakistani. Decapitated.’ Ram shrugged. ‘Another sadly frequent event.’

They set off walking south-east. They crossed sloping farmland and dusty roads, cutting across the natural lines and divisions of the land, taking shortcuts through woods and across gullies to a stretch of natural road. It was solid rock, the blunt edge of a ridge from which they could see terraced rice fields laid out like patchwork, every shade of green and yellow. A looming backdrop of dark hills to the north and east intensified the colours and provided a windbreak for hundreds of acres of cultivated land.

‘The pictorial view of Kashmir,’ Ram said. ‘From a distance everything is so orderly.’

After an hour the mist cleared, and even though they were high in the hills Mike and Ram began to sweat. They stopped to take water.

‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Mike said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t imagine it was anything like this.’ He pointed ahead of them, to a cluster of houses with a larger building at their centre. ‘Have we come to a community?’

‘Bahadur. The white cube bigger than the others is Reverend Young’s medical centre. The school is inside his mission, which is farther down the slope.’

‘This is where I do my UN fact-finder bit, is it?’

‘With a minimum of acting required,’ Ram said. ‘This morning we simply introduce you. Discussions can come later. Reverend Young is expecting us, so there should be something cool waiting — he makes an admirable lemonade.’

They walked down the slope to Bahadur. Ram led the way through narrow twisting streets to the mission. As they approached he looked puzzled.

‘I’ve never seen the door shut before.’

He went up the two little steps and knocked on the door, waited, then pushed it. It opened. He went in, took three steps across the tiny entry hall and turned.

‘Come in, quick,’ he told Mike. ‘Close the door.’

Mike pushed the door shut and caught the smell at once, heavy on the warm air. It was unmistakable, the odour of decomposing human flesh.

Ram went into the room beyond. Mike heard him groan.

‘What is it?’

Mike went through. It was a bare white room with two small windows high on opposite walls. On a wheeled examination table in the centre of the room lay the body of a priest, stretched out, the arms tied together under the table. The black vestments were covered with blood. The face had been beaten to a pulp. Shards of white skull bone stuck up from the scarlet mass, catching the light.

‘Is it Reverend Young?’

‘I assume it is,’ Ram said. ‘I recognize the ring on his hand.’ He touched the mangled head with a fingertip and drew it back. ‘Not more than a couple of hours dead. Another hour and the stench will be unbearable.’

They went outside. Ram fished out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll get the police down here. Nobody will have seen a thing, of course. There are never ever any witnesses. Not even if it was done in broad daylight in the middle of the street.’

Ram spoke for a minute to the phone, then switched it off and dropped it back in his rucksack. ‘The police will take care of everything,’ he said. ‘We can go. And it’s best we do, before the locals take it into their heads that you brought bad luck with you.’

As they walked back up the slope Mike felt they were being watched, but he saw no one. ‘Have you any idea who could have done it?’ he said.

‘Plenty of cut-throats to choose from,’ Ram said. ‘But I couldn’t narrow it down to one or even a dozen. As I said, I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Reverend Young.’

Sabrina arrived at Kulu on time, and the first stage of her planned transformation to a WHO official went to schedule. Wearing a shalwar kameez- traditional tunic and trousers — and a scarf over her head, she went directly to a lockup garage in an underpopulated suburb north of the town and let herself in with a key she had been given at Dehra Dun.

The car waiting for her was a ten-year-old two-door Peugeot 205, metallic blue with dabs of rust on the roof and the lower edges of the doors. The engine had been reconditioned and made reliable, there were new tyres and secure locks. A creative after-touch was the attachment of a loose aluminium plate to the underside of the engine mounting, which rattled and vibrated and made the car sound frail and barely roadworthy.

Sabrina’s change of clothes was in a holdall in the boot of the car. Staying low-key was always difficult, given her height, her figure and her looks, but UNACO Kitting and Outfitting had made the best selection they could: billowy blouses, long flowing skirts and baggy trousers in brown and ochre shades, stout boots and a couple of shapeless canvas jackets.

She took only a minute to change. Looking every inch the overseas social worker in her flapping shirt and sturdy footwear, her long hair done up in a bun and tucked into the brim of a floppy sun hat, she opened the garage door, got behind the wheel of the Peugeot and drove out into the sunlight of Kulu.

What happened next, she later decided, was an unprofessional lapse of a kind she could never let happen again. She stopped the car a few metres along the dusty road from the garage, went back and locked the garage door. She came back to find that her shoulder bag had gone from the front passenger seat.

She stood for a moment and stared at the empty seat, forcing herself to be calm, trying to raise a clear memory of how things had looked before she turned away from the car and went back the few steps to lock the garage door.

Anger and anxiety obscured her memory. She was mad at herself for being so careless, and she was seriously worried because her documentation, her gun and her folding money were all in the vanished bag — to say nothing of her Swiss Army knife. She forced her mind away from consequences and told herself firmly to think only along positive lines. Even so, she couldn’t help visualizing Philpott, seeing him turn puce as he learned that one of his so-called prime agents had behaved like the worst kind of amateur.

She leaned both hands on the bonnet of the car and closed her eyes. She could see herself driving out into the light, feeling sudden warmth through the windscreen. She had braked, put the engine in neutral and got out, leaving the door open. She had no recollection of anyone else being near.