Death in the Andamans (27 page)

The minutes ticked themselves away in a deep silence.

‘Time's up! What are you frowning over, Coppy? Thought of something?'

‘Yes,' said Copper doubtfully, ‘but — I know you'll think I'm mad, because it's something that I can't catch hold of. I can only remember that something happened at the picnic that was odd. I can't even remember anything about it, except that something that day made me think “That's queer!” But perhaps I'll remember it later. Anyway, it couldn't have been very important.'

‘Shove down a question mark, Val,' ordered Charles. ‘Here's a red pencil — catch! Copper may think of it later. And now, if that's all, I suggest we get on with the reading.'

Valerie returned to her chair, and picking up the notebook, added a large red question mark to the record. ‘Now,' she said, ‘I'm going to read straight through everything we've written down here, and I want you to please concentrate, and if anything strikes you as particularly important to make a note of it. Here goes
____
!'

She sat down and began to read in a clear emotionless voice while her audience sat silent and absorbed. Charles moved to switch on the light above her head, for it was getting too dark to see, and once during the reading Copper caught her breath in a small gasp and stiffened in her chair. The movement was as slight as the sound, but Nick turned his head sharply, and saw that her face was very white and her eyes wide and terrified.

‘That's all,' concluded Valerie. ‘Has anyone got anything to add to it?'

Two heads were shaken.

‘Did anything strike anyone as being of particular importance?'

Nick glanced sideways at Copper and saw her fingers tighten convulsively upon the arm of her chair. But she did not speak; though neither did she shake her head in denial as he and Charles had done.

‘Then that's that!' said Valerie, shutting the notebook with a bang. ‘And now let's rush out and get some exercise. It's still horribly misty, but a change of air will do us all good.'

She tossed the notebook into a corner of the window-seat, sublimely unaware of how close one twist to its tangled reasoning would have brought them to the truth.

18

It was almost dark when they left the Mess to take a brisk walk around Ross, and the tiny island was still close-lapped in a mist which veiled the last of the lingering daylight.

The faint breeze that had arisen earlier in the day had died with the approach of night, and except for the ceaseless thunder of the surf, which from long familiarity had become barely noticeable, an almost uncanny silence brooded over the island. Not a leaf rustled or a twig stirred, and they could hear the fog-dew dripping from the hibiscus hedges and the gold mohur trees.

For a while the four walked in silence, their footsteps in unison though their thoughts were widely divergent.

Charles, his arm tucked through Valerie's, was thinking of what she had said when she had thanked him for ‘putting on an act'. She had thought it was only for her sake and Copper's that he had done his best to keep their discussions on as light a level as possible. But it had also been for his own, because he had not dared let himself look too closely at the picture of Valerie — his own Valerie — lying asleep in that darkened house while a murderer fresh from his killing crept in from the mists of the grey island and barred the door behind him. For beyond that thought lay the knowledge that tonight she would once again pass the dark hours in the same house.

Registering a mental vow to act upon his recently expressed intention of spending the night at Government House, Charles tightened his hold on her arm and Valerie returned the pressure fervently: though she herself had not been thinking of the dark present, but of some golden, hoped-for future when she and Charles were married …

Nick, walking between her and Copper, his hands in his pockets and his long, loose stride restricted to their shorter steps, was thinking confusedly of the past. Of Calcutta, and of Ferrers Shilto's face against the background of a corridor in the Grand Hotel. He had looked like a frightened, vicious rat — a cornered rat. Who could ever have supposed that they would meet again, and so soon? And how was Copper going to regard the Calcutta incident? Nick had never yet cared what others might think of his actions, but then Copper was not ‘others'… His mouth twisted wryly and he scowled into the gathering dusk.

Beside him, her blond head bent and her slim shoulders a little hunched as though against an imaginary wind, the subject of his thoughts walked with her eyes fixed upon the wet road. And for once — perhaps for the first time for over a week — she was not thinking exclusively of Nicholas Tarrent.

Copper was re-living an apparently trivial incident that had occurred two days before, and hearing again a single line from the notebook that was lying discarded on the window-seat in the ante-room of the empty Mess. An incident and a statement that contradicted each other. Had
no
one else noticed it? Would no one else remember it? Would Valerie? She longed desperately to tell Nick; to beg for his advice and reassurance. But Nick had suddenly become a stranger; and he, too, had got something to hide. Perhaps they all had? Even Charles — even Valerie…!

Why had Nick been so angry with her for pointing out that he might lie under suspicion of murder? Admittedly, she had wanted to hurt him. She had tormented herself with the knowledge that he must, in the past, have attracted more than his fair share of fluttering feminine adulation, and she resented bitterly the recurring suspicion that she might appear to him as just another infatuated little idiot who took his casual attentions as proof of something more serious, and entirely non-existent.

Nick, she had thought, would probably expect her to believe that although the rest of the island might be under suspicion, he alone could do no wrong in her too openly admiring eyes, and she had therefore decided to show him that he meant no more to her than any other member of that fatal sailing party. But the result of her ill-advised disclosures had been to turn Nick from a friend into a stranger from whom she could not ask for help. And even if she could do so, would she dare risk it? Dan had been a friend of Nick's, and Nick might
____
Copper's hunted brain returned helplessly to its original groove and started on the same round once more, like a caged mouse on a wheel.

Silent and preoccupied, the four walked down the dim deserted roads past the hospital and the little bazaar whose doors, close-shuttered against the damp sea-mist, still showed friendly chinks of yellow lamplight in the growing darkness. On a clear night they would have seen the sprinkled lights of Aberdeen across the narrow strip of heaving waters that separated Ross from the mainland. But tonight the mist lay thick upon the yeasty seas, and as they looked into that blank, shifting wall they might have been isolated by hundreds of miles of empty ocean.

They passed the sheds that stood behind the jetty, where their footsteps, muffled until now by the wet ground, suddenly rang loud, and came out by the little bandstand that had once, long ago, been a centre of social life in the glittering tropic evenings, though no band had played there for many a long year. Beyond it their feet left the crushed coral of the roadway and encountered the yielding sponginess of rain-soaked grass as they crossed the Club lawn, beyond which the breakers still sent up ghostly fountains of spray.

A small dark building at the edge of the lawn, barely discernible in the dusk, sent a cold shiver down the spine of more than one of the four who passed it, and instinctively they drew closer together: remembering that sometime last night, in the misty rain-spattered darkness, someone had carried Ferrers Shilto's body to that same small building, and that for more than twelve hours afterwards it had hung there in the blackness above the shadowy tank, while the turtles snapped and splashed in the storm-clouded water below and Dan lay dead in the Guest House.

As if by mutual consent they turned simultaneously and walked quickly across the lawn to where a yellow glow from the Club windows gleamed comfortably through the mist. But apart from the barman and a Burmese waiter there was no one there but Ronnie Purvis, whom they found aimlessly flicking over the pages of a nine-weeks-old illustrated London weekly at one end of the deserted ballroom, and who was plainly the worse for drink.

Apparently he had been there for several hours, imbibing steadily, and had long since passed the convivial stage and the subsequent quarrelsome one, and Nick, eyeing him with detached interest, wondered if this was a usual procedure with him or whether he had merely set himself to get drunk as a relief from other and grimmer realities.

Charles, who knew him better, did not even wonder. Ronnie was a frequent victim of what he himself termed ‘one over the eight', but he seldom if ever went in for really hard drinking; and then never alone. Mr Purvis was a man who liked company with his whisky, and rather than drink alone would normally have combed the island for a companion. Yet tonight he had been deliberately drowning something in drink. And it was certainly not sorrow. Funk, diagnosed Charles dispassionately: the fellow's scared stiff about something and has been trying the effects of Dutch Courage. Now I wonder what the hell he's so frightened of?

That Mr Purvis was frightened was as patently and disturbingly plain to everyone in the room as the fact that he was drunk. His usually bronzed features (Ronnie subscribed to the popular theory that ‘all handsome men are slightly sunburnt') were a curious putty colour, his hands so unsteady that the leaves of the periodical he held shook as though they were in a wind, while his eyes were as wide and glaring as a frightened cat's, and any unexpected sound or movement caused him to start violently.

There was something about his obvious terror that was infectious, for Nick could see its reflection in Valerie's face. He saw, too, that the fear which had been in Copper's eyes ever since Valerie had read through the contents of the notebook had deepened to something still and panic-stricken, and rising abruptly, he crossed the ballroom floor and switched on every light in the big room. An action that at least had the effect of dispelling the lurking shadows, though it failed to add much cheerfulness to the scene.

The Club had been decorated in honour of the Christmas festivities with branches of casuarina intertwined with strings of fairy-lights, but the branches were already wilted and sad-looking, and the flood of light seemed only to intensify the dreariness of the empty, damp-stained dance floor and make it seem larger and blanker and more deserted than before.

Charles ordered a round of drinks which were brought by the slant-eyed, soft-footed Burmese boy, who materialized noiselessly out of the shadows beyond the ballroom. But alcohol did little towards raising anyone's spirits. Ronnie Purvis was beyond making even an effort at conversation, and though Charles and Valerie struggled valiantly, their efforts to dissipate the general gloom were markedly unsuccessful.

Copper was making a pretence at reading an out-of-date copy of the
National Geographic
magazine, but Nick, who was watching her without appearing to do so, saw that although she turned a page at regular intervals her eyes were fixed and her gaze unmoving and he was unpleasantly reminded of Rosamund Purvis, and Dan's voice saying something to the effect that he believed if someone came up behind her and touched her on the shoulder, she'd scream the roof off. The same, decided Nick, might well be said of Copper at that moment: except that Copper wouldn't scream — she wasn't, thank God, the screaming kind. But she might easily faint …

Outside the Club the sullen swell crashed monotonously against the stone and concrete of the sea-wall, and occasionally a larger wave, more powerful than its fellows, would fling up an arc of spray to rattle against the ballroom windows, causing Ronnie Purvis to start violently with every repetition of the sound.

Charles put down his unfinished drink and rose abruptly: ‘Come on, let's get out of here. Leave that beastly lemon drink of yours, Val; you can get another one up at the house. I've had enough of this.'

His companions rose with alacrity, and Ronnie stumbled to his feet, his mouth twitching. ‘I – I think I'll come with you,' he said thickly. ‘G–gloomy hole this. R–rotten Club. M–mind if I walk up with you as f–far as my bungalow?' He clawed at Charles's arm as though he was afraid of being refused and as if some special terror lay in having to walk, alone, the few hundred yards that stretched between the Club and his front door.

‘Of course not,' said Charles impatiently, disengaging his coat-sleeve from Ronnie's clutching fingers: ‘Put down that drink and come along.' He turned on his heel, and Mr Purvis, interpreting these instructions according to his own desires, paused to swallow what whisky remained in his glass before running unsteadily after him.

The air outside felt almost cold after the stuffy closeness of the atmosphere inside the Club, and though night had fallen there was still no breath of wind, and the light rain that was sifting down upon the island barely stirred the leaves beneath its silent fingers. It powdered Valerie's dark hair with stars and turned Copper's pale gold head to silver, and made a glimmering haze about the lamps that lined the roads between the dim sentinel columns of the coconut palms.

They dropped Ronnie Purvis at his bungalow, though it was patently obvious that he would have greatly preferred to accompany them to Government House. ‘Can't go home alone,' mumbled Ronnie, swaying dangerously and clutching at a lamppost to steady himself: ‘That's what they're waiting for … Ge' me alone, so they c'n shoot me. Shtole m'revolver. S'gone. Looked everywhere.'

‘What's that?'
said Charles sharply. ‘Did you say your revolver had been stolen?'

‘Not shtolen … taken; so's I carn s–shoot 'em first!'