Death in the Andamans (13 page)

Kioh's black, pricked ears flattened and she began to growl softly in her throat — a small, oddly unnerving sound. Then step by step, and still growling, she backed away from the door until she had reached the safe harbourage of Valerie's bed.

‘That's funny,' said Valerie, unaware that she too was speaking in a whisper, ‘she's usually a most truculent animal.' She reached down to stroke the crouching shape, and the cat, whose eyes were still fixed on the doorway, seemed to explode at her touch as though it had been a small charge of dynamite, and whirling about, spitting and snarling, it streaked across the room to vanish behind the wardrobe …

‘Oh my God!' gasped Copper. ‘I believe I've bitten my heart in half — it jumped into my mouth and now it's in pieces. For heaven's sake let's go out and turn up the ballroom lights and see who's there. I can't stand this!'

‘All right,' said Valerie shakily. ‘But I didn't hear anything. I'm sure it's only bats.'

‘Bats my foot!' retorted Copper forcefully. ‘You don't have to hear! You can
feel.
If you don't believe me
____
' Before Valerie could stop her, she had reached over and switched off the light.

‘Copper!'

‘Ssh. Listen.'

They had not long to wait. There was no sound, but after a few moments they felt again that soft vibration of the floorboards, and presently, following it, there came the faint, unmistakable creak of the loose board by the drawing-room door.

‘
Now
do you believe me?'

‘Yes. There's someone prowling about the rooms. Turn the light on, Coppy, I'm going to see who it is.' Once again the bedside lamp made a friendly pool of light in the room, and Valerie said: ‘We'd better put something on. If it's one of the servants, we can't go skittering about in our nightgowns.'

She found that she was still speaking in a whisper and was unreasonably annoyed by the discovery; but somehow she could not bring herself to speak aloud. She flung Copper a gaily striped wrap of towelling, and slipping her own arms into a silk dressing-gown, tightened its belt about her slim waist with a savage jerk as though it gave her courage, and added, still whispering: ‘I expect we'll find it's only Ruby giving her insomnia an airing.'

‘Well, Ruby or no Ruby,' said Copper, ‘I'm taking a golf club with me. I admit I'd be happier with a poker, but a steel-shafted mashie makes me feel almost as good.'

Valerie reached wordlessly for the niblick and Copper was suddenly seized with inconvenient mirth: ‘Oh g–gosh! we must look such f–fools! And I can't think why I'm laughing, because it isn't really a bit f–funny and I'm scared to death!'

‘So am I,' admitted Valerie, ‘but I shall have hysterics if I sit here any longer. I was all right until Kioh made that hellish noise, but that finished me. Come on, Coppy, and for heaven's sake hold my hand!'

Holding firmly to each other with one hand and clutching a golf club apiece with the other, they tiptoed over to the doorway. The main electric light switch for the bedroom was just inside the door, and Valerie turned it on, flooding the room with harsh light. Then pushing apart the swinging shutters, they braced themselves and stepped into the darkness.

To reach the switches for the ballroom involved walking a few yards down the passage to the left of the door. But the light streaming from Valerie's bedroom was sufficient to guide them, and a few seconds later a flood of light wiped out the lurking shadows in the ballroom.

There was no one there, and gaining confidence, they crossed the end of the ballroom and turned on the lights in the dining-room where the long, polished table, cleared of its glittering decorations, gleamed like a strip of dark water. ‘Nothing here,' said Valerie, speaking aloud for the first time in ten minutes. But even as she spoke something moved swiftly in the shadow behind them, and they whirled round, white-faced.

Nicholas Tarrent, clad in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, stood scowling at them from the edge of the dining-room.

‘Oh God, Nick, you gave me such a fright!' gasped Valerie.

‘Nothing to what you've given me! What the hell do you two think you're doing, wandering about at this hour of the night? Brushing up your approach shots?'

Valerie and Copper, who had been endeavouring to conceal their possession of a couple of steel-shafted clubs, had the grace to blush. ‘As a matter of fact,' confessed Copper, already slightly ashamed of her recent fears, ‘we thought we heard someone walking about the house, so we came out to see who it was. We didn't know it was you.'

‘
Me?
Why, you wretched golfing maniacs, I've only this moment torn myself from my bed. I heard someone prowling about, and when lights started springing up all over the house I thought I'd better come and investigate in case someone had been taken ill.'

‘Do you usually conduct an investigation round a sick bed with a squash racquet?' inquired Copper accusingly.

Nick laughed. ‘You've got me there. I'd forgotten I was still clutching the damn thing. As a matter of fact it was the only weapon within reach, and between you and me, I felt happier with something in my fist. You two ruddy little night-birds have been giving me the cold creeps, tiptoeing around in the dark.'

Valerie and Copper exchanged a swift look. ‘In the
dark?
' said Copper.

Valerie turned to Nick: ‘Had you heard us for long, before the lights went on?'

‘Well, hardly
heard
you. But I felt the floor vibrate every time you passed. And there are a couple of loose boards around: I heard them creak once or twice and I was beginning to think that this would bear looking into when the lights went up. So I came out to see what was up.'

‘Then there
was
someone out here!' said Valerie. ‘It wasn't us, Nick. We heard the boards too. And Kioh saw something in the ballroom. She stood and watched it moving, and it got on our nerves. So we came out to see who it was.'

They had all been talking in undertones to avoid arousing the rest of the house, but now Copper's voice sharpened: ‘Well, what are we going to do? We all heard someone moving about, and unless we make certain that there is no one hiding up here, I for one shan't sleep another wink.'

‘All right. Have it your own way,' said Nick. ‘Come on. Keep your eyes on the ball and don't press.'

Picking their way among the assortment of bowls and basins set to catch the leaks they made their way across the ballroom into the drawing-room, through the wide, glassed-in verandah and back past the dining-room again. They searched the pantry and the larder and along the passage to the turret room, and opened the doors of the nearby bathroom and the small room beside it. They looked behind and under sofas and chairs, bookcases and cupboards, made certain that all the doors and windows that led out of the house, or on to the two balconies that opened off the closed verandah, were locked, and by the time they returned to the ballroom they had searched the top storey of the house as thoroughly as was possible without entering the bedrooms occupied by Valerie's father, the Stocks, or John Shilto.

Sir Lionel's room and the turret room where John Shilto slept were the only two bedrooms in the house possessed of an orthodox door, and as their doors were closed it was unlikely that anyone other than the owners would have passed through them. The bedroom occupied by the Stocks, which lay beyond Valerie's, closed with the usual ineffectual swing shutters, but a faint, rhythmic sound of snoring suggested that at least one of the occupants was sound asleep.

To make their rounds complete, and more for form's sake than anything else, they looked into Nick's room — this with extreme caution to avoid disturbing the peaceful slumbers of Dan Harcourt — and went through the girls' bedrooms before ending up in the ballroom once more. But with the exception of Kioh, whom they flushed from under Valerie's window-seat, still hostile and inclined to spit, they had found nothing and no one. ‘Well I hope everyone's satisfied,' said Nick shortly, his finger on the switch of the ballroom lights. ‘Unless it was your father, Val, or Shilto or one of the Stocks, it was bats or the wind. Or too much plum pudding! Take your choice.'

‘The last, I expect,' admitted Valerie, yawning. ‘Plus a touch of Rosamund Purvis's hysterics thrown in. Well, thanks for your support, Nick. I'm sorry we spoilt your beauty sleep. Come on, Coppy — bed, I think.' She switched off the lights and they turned to go back to their own rooms. But they had barely taken more than a couple of paces into the darkness when they heard Copper gasp.

There had been so much stark fear in that small sound that Nick flung out an arm and caught her against him. ‘What is it, Copper?' His voice was sharply peremptory. ‘Someone brushed past me,' quavered Copper in a dry whisper. ‘They almost touched me — Nick,
listen!
'

All three stood still: and heard, in that stillness, clearly and unmistakably, the creak of the loose board by the drawing-room door, and felt the tremor of the floorboards beneath their feet …

‘This is ridiculous!' said Nick furiously. He thrust Copper away and took a quick stride back to the switches, and once again the ballroom was flooded with light. But there was no one there, and beyond it the drawing-room doors yawned black and empty.

‘Iman Din will be in the hall downstairs,' quavered Valerie. ‘He's supposed to stay awake, but he always falls asleep and someone may have passed him. Let's go and wake him up.'

They went quickly over to the banisters, and turning on the lights above the staircase, looked down into the well of the hall.

But Iman Din, the old, white-whiskered
chaprassi
*
who slept at the foot of the hall stairs by night, was not asleep. He was standing by the bottom step of the staircase, looking up at them as they leaned over the carved banister rail above him, and he did not look as though he had been recently awakened from sleep, but rather as though he had been standing there, listening, for some considerable time.

‘Well, I'm damned!' said Nick explosively. ‘The old coot must have heard us pottering round hunting burglars, and he hasn't even raised a finger to help us or to find out what all the activity was about. Useful sort of guardian for our slumbers. Ask him if anyone has passed him, Val.'

Valerie leant over the banisters and spoke to the old man in Urdu. He answered her in the same tongue, and Copper saw her start and jerk back, frowning.

‘What does he say, Val?'

‘Nothing; only some nonsense.' Valerie was plainly disturbed and not a little angry.

Nick said: ‘The point is, could anyone have come up those stairs tonight without that whiskered Methuselah spotting them?'

The old man shifted his gaze to Nick, and spoke in slow, accented English: ‘Who should enter? The Sahib sees that the door is barred' — he gestured with a claw-like hand towards the massive front door with its heavy iron bolts. They caught a glimmer of light from the guard room through the glass panes of the side door, and heard the sentry on duty ground the butt of his rifle on the stone flags outside.

‘Don't beg the question,' snapped Nick. ‘Could anyone have come up these stairs since Harcourt Sahib came home?'

‘Assuredly,' said the old man gravely. He turned again to Valerie and spoke swiftly in the vernacular.

Nick began to lose his temper. The hands of the hall clock pointed to a quarter to three; he had had very little sleep and his experience in the storm had not been pleasant. Above all, Copper's panic had awakened something in him that he had as yet not stopped to analyse. ‘See here,' said Nick dangerously, ‘if I find that you or your pals have been trying any funny stuff in the house tonight, I'll come down and wring your neck. First you say that the door is barred and no one can come in, and then that someone could have come up these stairs. Well, there was someone up here five minutes ago, and you're coming up to help find out just who it was!'

‘The Sahib is angry,' said Iman Din gravely. ‘He does not understand. But I will show that no
man
passed this way.' He started to mount the shallow stairs, and Valerie gripped Nick's arm: ‘No,' she said breathlessly. ‘No, let's go back to bed, Nick. We've looked through the rooms once. Go back, Iman Din.'

‘Rubbish,' said Nick curtly. ‘Come on up. And you two clear off to bed. Iman Din and I will scoop in this sleepwalker.'

Iman Din, continuing his ascent, put his foot upon the top step of the staircase, and, as always, it creaked sharply.

‘There!' said Copper. ‘That's the first sound I heard. Somebody
did
come up these stairs.'

‘Of course there was someone up here! And I believe this old devil knows who it was. What did he say to you, Val?'

‘Nothing. Just native rubbish.'

Nick caught her by the shoulder, and swung her round to face him. ‘Well, let's hear it. You're being damned irritating, Val, and for two pins I'd smack you. Odd as it may seem I could do with some sleep. But as long as people are going to perambulate up and down the hall the minute the lights are out, I can't see myself getting any. Come on, out with it.'

‘Oh, very well,' snapped Valerie. ‘If it's any help to you, he says it's a ghost.'

There was a short and pregnant silence. Then: ‘Ghost, my Aunt Fanny!' said Nick angrily. ‘No ghost could make the floor vibrate like that, or weigh enough to make those boards creak. Don't be a mug, Val!'

Iman Din's wise old eyes travelled from one to another of the three faces before him, and then past them to the doorway of the darkened drawing-room. He let his breath out in a little sigh and said: ‘The Sahib says one pressed upon the board which speaks. Look, and I will show
____
'