Death in Kashmir (12 page)

There was no mistaking what had caused it. Someone had died in this little cold room—and within the last twenty-four hours, for the blood in the cracks between the floorboards was still faintly sticky. It could not have been Janet, because Janet had been killed by a blow on the temple, and there had been very little loss of blood, while whoever had made the stain upon the floorboards had lost a very great deal of it—more than a man might lose, and live. Besides, it was out of the question that any murderer would have risked carrying a dead body a mile or so round the
marg
to dump it on the worst stretch of the Blue Run.

Quite suddenly Sarah remembered the ski-tracks she had seen leading away from the gate; the two tracks that had not been parallel, but so close upon each other's heels that they almost seemed a single track. And in a swift flash of intuition she saw the ugly explanation of those tracks, and did not doubt that were she to follow them they would lead round the roadway that skirted the
marg,
and, deviously, through snow-blanketed undergrowth and small side paths to the edge of the Blue Run. Or that they had been made by Janet and her murderer—Janet walking ahead, driven like a sheep to the slaughter-house, with a gun at her back, to stand at last in the bright moonlight at the foot of the icy slope on the Blue Run awaiting the savage blow that killed her, with that scornful half-smile that death had not been able to wipe from her face.

Sarah straightened up with a little sigh and leant against the table, steadying herself with her hands on the dusty surface. She looked round the room slowly and intently, and down at the ash and the cigarette-stubs on the table, and the single blood-soaked stub that lay on the stained patch of floor. There had been at least two men, then: one who had lit the lamp and waited here for Janet, and rolled and smoked his own cigarettes; and the other who had waited in the hall, sitting on the chair behind the door and smoking a popular and widely advertised brand …

Sarah slipped the box of matches into her pocket and forced herself to unbolt the door and return down the dark passage to the hall, and once there she struck another match and held it above her head. But beyond the scattered cigarette ash, the burnt-out stubs and the small triangular fragment of rubber on the chair behind the door, she could see nothing that might give a clue to the identity of the person who had sat there waiting in the dark. Even that strange, elusive suggestion of an odour, that had tainted the close air when she first entered the house, had gone—dissipated by the cold current of air from the open door.

The match spluttered out, scorching her fingers, and she dropped it on the floor and lit another and another, and stood for a long time staring intently about the small shadowy hall as though she could force the silent bolted doors, the dark walls and the blank, shuttered window-panes to tell her what they had seen.

Yet there was, decided Sarah, little they could have told her beyond what they and the ski-tracked snow outside had already shown her; and checking the sum total of that mute evidence she made her own deductions.

The man who had lit the lamp and set it in the window must have waited a long time in the cold sitting-room at the end of the passage, for there were close on a dozen cigarette-ends scattered upon the table top and lying on the dusty floor. Because Janet had been late——

Owing to an unexpected twist of fate that had prevented Hugo Creed joining the party on the previous day, she had, at the eleventh hour, taken his place. With the result that when the signal lamp was lit she was not, as expected, in her room at the hotel, but in the ski-hut on Khilanmarg, and expert skier though she was, that long run down in the moonlight must have taken her over half an hour, so that someone else had got there before her. Someone who carried a gun and must have killed not only Janet, but the agent she was hurrying to meet: the man who had lit the lamp and waited for her in the small cold room at the end of the passage, and who had died on the dusty floor among the scattered cigarette ash.

Yet why hadn't Janet, hurrying silently over the snowy
marg,
heard the reverberation of that shot and been warned in time? The night had been so still. So deadly still that even enclosed within the walls of a room, the sound must have echoed across the
marg.
How was it possible that Janet had not heard it? Or had it been fired after she had entered the dark house? The chair behind the door and the two cigarette-stubs seemed to disprove that theory, for one of the latter had been smoked as far down as possible, while the other had not been lit long before being abandoned, and it had not been pressed out but thrown, barely half-smoked, onto the floor. Both spoke clearly of someone who had waited, sitting at ease in the darkness behind the doorway, and who had not had so very long to wait …

It was then that Sarah remembered one of the few sounds that had broken across the silence of the icy night. The sharp cracking of a forest tree as sap froze under the bark or an over-burdened bough broke under its weight of snow, and which had sounded like pistol shots. The crack of a distant automatic would have passed for a more familiar sound, and there would have been nothing to warn Janet that she was walking into a trap. Janet, who had said:
‘Tomorrow I can go away … and be free again!'

She must have come up the short, snow-covered path confidently, and never known, until she pushed open the door into the dark hall, that freedom of a different sort was waiting for her that night. And perhaps when the spring sunshine had melted the snow from the forest, some wandering woodcutter might stumble across the rotting corpse of the man who had lit that lamp and waited for her, and whose blood had soaked into the floor of the cold, shuttered house among the pine trees. Though even that was unlikely, for there were too many lonely ravines and tangled gullies in the forests, where a body might lie undiscovered until the jackals and the prowling leopards had scattered its bones.

Another warning growl of thunder reverberated among the mountains, and the rising wind slammed the open shutter of the room at the end of the passage, sending Sarah's heart into her mouth. But close upon the heels of that sound there came another and far more frightening one—the soft creak of a floorboard, twice repeated, from one of the three rooms that lay behind those locked doors. It broke Sarah's nerve, and in a frenzy of panic she dropped the matchbox and ran headlong from the house.

Lightning quivered across the
marg
as she snatched up her skis and ski-sticks and fled down the snow-covered path and through the gate that now swung crazily in the wind. But though the instinct of self-preservation urged her to run and keep on running, once out of sight of the house common sense reasserted itself, forcing her to stop and fasten on her skis—it being obvious that whoever had been lurking on the far side of one of those locked doors could not have been wearing skis, and once she had strapped on her own she could easily outdistance anyone on foot.

Her fingers were so clumsy from cold and panic that it took her the best part of three minutes to fasten the stiff straps. But she managed it at last, and picking up her ski-sticks from where she had dropped them in the untrodden snow, she turned off the road to cross the
marg.

The first snow had begun to fall as she left the house, but now all at once, with the wind behind them, the whirling white flakes were driving down so thickly that she could not see more than a yard ahead of her. Sarah hesitated briefly, and then changed direction, intending to do a traverse on the slope which would bring her out towards the main road that ran from the Gap to the Club. The road leading up to the hotel branched off this halfway, and though it would take longer, there was less chance of losing herself in the storm. But she had barely gathered speed when a dark form loomed up through the driving snow immediately ahead of her.

She swerved wildly, but too late, and cannoning into something solid, would have fallen but for a hand that gripped her arm and held her upright on the slope. Panic struck her afresh, and she tried to wrench herself away; but the grip on her arm might have been steel, and a man's voice said harshly: ‘Who are you? What the devil are you doing here?'

Sarah opened her mouth but found she could make no sound. Her throat seemed contracted with terror, and the wind drove the thick snowflakes into her eyes and blinded her, turning her face to a solid mask of snow.

‘What's the matter? Lost your voice?'

Her captor put out a hand in a heavy ski-glove and brushed the snow roughly from her face, peering down at her from the whirling dimness. She had a fleeting impression, blurred by the driving snow, of height, and a pair of eyes, flint-grey and very angry, before her own eyes were once more blinded by snowflakes.

The voice, which she could not recognize, muttered something under its breath, and for a moment the grip on her arm was relaxed. In that instant, with a strength born of fear, Sarah wrenched her arm free, thrust strongly with her ski-sticks and was away.

The slope was in her favour, and since the unknown man was facing the opposite way, it would take him a second or two to turn in his tracks. The storm was in her favour too. She thought she heard a shout behind her, and swinging sharply to her left, vanished into a seemingly solid wall of whiteness.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, blinded with snowflakes and buffeted by wind, breathless, shaken, and having lost her way at least half a dozen times, Sarah reached the hotel.

She was only just in time, for the snow that had blotted out the
marg
as she struggled across it was but a fraction of the storm to come. All that night it raged over Gulmarg in a screaming blizzard of whirling snow and shrieking wind. Snow and wind that wiped out for ever the tell-tale tracks across the
marg
and along the deserted forest road. And two months later, when the
marg
was green again and summer visitors came riding up the steep winding track that led up from Tanmarg at the foot of the hill, the
chowkidar,
the Indian caretaker of one of the huts among the pine woods, spring-cleaning the hut for the arrival of its tenants, found a dusty, red-glassed Petromax lamp in one of the rooms, and quietly annexed it. There was also a curious stain on the grimy floor, but when the carpet was laid it could not be seen.

The storm had raged for two days and nights: turning from snow to hail, and from hail to driving, blinding rain that washed away the thick snowcaps from the huddled roofs and brought the avalanches thundering down the steep slopes of Apharwat.

On the third day they buried Janet in the sodden little cemetery that the rain had temporarily thawed to a point where the ground was no longer frozen solid. And that done they went down the hill to Tanmarg and the waiting cars, through the slush and the dingy patches of discoloured snow, while a sad wind moaned through the forests behind them.

‘Goodbye, Sarah. Pleasant journey. Write to me sometimes. Thal is a boring spot. Not that we shall be there much longer I gather.'

‘Goodbye, Ian. Of course I will. Goodbye, Meril. See you again sometime, I hope.'

‘Oh, sure to. You'll be up in Srinagar for the summer anyway, won't you?'

‘No. I'm going to spend the summer with some friends in Ceylon.'

Reggie Craddock came up blowing on his fingers and looking ill and cold: ‘Goodbye, Fudge. You and Hugo are giving Sarah a lift down, aren't you? One of the damned buses hasn't arrived, so I suppose I shall have to hang about for hours just to be sure everyone gets off safely. I'm sorry this show ended the way it did. Ghastly business. I suppose I should have set a guard on that run, or roped it off or something. Pity women hate doing what they're told. Damnable affair. Oh well, hope we shall see you again this summer. I shall be in Srinagar again if I can get any leave. Odd to think it may be the very last time any of us will ever get the chance. Can't really believe it, somehow. You and Hugo coming up, I suppose?'

‘Yes—for a fond farewell and all that. I don't suppose there'll be many people up. See you then; and don't worry too much about—about Janet and Mrs Matthews, Reggie. You couldn't have prevented it.'

Reggie nodded moodily and turned away as Major McKay pushed through the crowd of chattering coolies.

The Major too looked tired and harassed, and it occurred to Sarah that unpleasant as the two tragedies upon the Blue Run had been for the members of the Ski Club, the main weight of unpleasantness must have fallen upon him. He was limping slightly, and his normally ruddy countenance appeared pallid and depressed under the patches of sticking-plaster, souvenirs of his dogged struggles upon the nursery slopes, that adorned it. He shook hands punctiliously with Fudge and Sarah, and having wished them a good run to Peshawar, turned to Meril Forbes: ‘You're for Srinagar, aren't you Meril? What are you doing for transport?'

‘Oh, I'm all right, thank you,' said Meril. ‘Aunt Ena has sent the car for me. It's only your bus for Rawalpindi that hasn't arrived yet.'

‘Well it isn't going to be any use to me when it does arrive,' said the Major morosely: ‘I've just heard that I have to go to Srinagar again. I thought we had dealt with all the formalities connected with this unfortunate business, but it seems—well, the point is, do you think you could give me a lift in your aunt's car?'

‘Of course I can. How horrid for you, though.'

‘I'm afraid your skiing holiday hasn't been too pleasant, George,' said Fudge sympathetically.

‘I cannot imagine that it has been pleasant for any one of us,' said Major McKay austerely. ‘Personally——'

A fanfare of blasts upon an electric horn interrupted him, and Fudge said hurriedly: ‘That's Hugo. He wants to get to 'Pindi in time for tea. I must fly. Goodbye, George. Goodbye, Meril dear. Come on, Sarah.'