Death in the Andamans (35 page)

‘We'll save you one,' promised Charles. ‘Don't go breaking your neck in the dark.'

‘I shall do my best to avoid it,' said Mr Stock primly. ‘Goodnight.'

He began to descend the stairs slowly and rather stiffly. And as he did so, Sir Lionel Masson came quickly across the ballroom: ‘Hullo, Stock — where are you off to?' He did not wait for an answer, but hurried on in a preoccupied voice: ‘By the way, that revolver of Purvis's — I'd better take charge of it.' He held out a hand, and Mr Stock stopped upon the staircase and made his fourth and final mistake.

Had he said ‘I put it in your room,' or any similar lie, the events of that night might have had a very different ending. But some instinct of obedience betrayed him, and mechanically he had begun to draw the revolver from his pocket. A split second later he had recognized the error. But by then it was too late, for the Commissioner had seen it.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘I'll see Purvis about it in the morning. It's quite disgraceful that he should not have kept it locked up.'

Mr Stock did not move, and Nick took a step forward as though to take the gun. But as he did so Copper moved quickly and stood between him and the figure on the staircase below, her cold fingers clinging to his. She could see rage, uncertainty and cunning contending together in the eyes of the shrivelled little killer in the raincoat, from whose features the mask had once more slipped to show the face of murder. Then the Commissioner had brushed past her, and descending the few steps that lay between them, held out his hand.

With a curious little sigh, Mr Stock drew out the revolver. He looked once more into the faces above him, and was silent for a long moment. Then suddenly and unexpectedly he laughed, a loud, shrill peal of laughter; his lips drawn back from his teeth in a curiously animal grimace. And startled by the sudden shrillness of that sound, Kioh, who had followed at the Commissioner's heels, spat indignantly, and bounding forward, streaked between his feet and down the stairs …

It was all over in a moment, before anyone could move or cry out.

Leonard Stock, taken unawares, stepped backwards and missed his footing. Instinctively, his hands came up and his finger must have tightened upon the trigger, for as he fell there was a blinding flash and a crashing detonation, and his body tumbled backwards down the shallow steps and came to rest at the turn of the staircase, where it quivered once, and then lay still.

The bullet had entered under his chin and come out at the back of his head, and he was dead long before they reached him.

23

It was a glorious day. The pearly sheen of morning had melted before the shimmering sunlight of midday, and beyond the curving sands of North Corbyn's the sea was an expanse of smooth, translucent turquoise that stretched away, island-dotted, to the far horizon, where it met and merged into the blue of a cloudless sky.

Valerie and Copper, accompanied by Nick and Charles, had boarded the little fishing-launch
Jarawa,
and complete with bathing-suits and picnic-baskets had anchored off North Corbyn's to spend a day of alternate sun- and sea-bathing.

The Commissioner had been deeply thankful to see them leave. He hoped that they would be able to put out of their minds, if only for that day, the horror and confusion of the night on which John Shilto and Leonard Stock had died; though he doubted if he himself would be able to do so. It had taken some little time to get a coherent account of the events preceding Leonard's death from his overwrought stepdaughter and her friend, and at first he had not believed them. In fact it was not until dawn had broken that an inspection of the sailing boat in the disused swimming-bath, and a long and harrowing interview with Stock's wife, had finally convinced him that a murderer had indeed paid for his crimes by becoming his own executioner.

Two crowded and grimly unpleasant days, full of endless inquiry and discussion, had followed. The bodies of Ferrers, Dan, John Shilto and Leonard Stock had been buried, and though the mists still clung thick about the tiny island, the sea had fallen and communication with the mainland had at last been restored.

Sir Lionel had made an abortive attempt to keep Valerie and Copper in bed, but they had rebelled against staying there and had wandered about the house and the fog-shrouded island looking worn and hollow-eyed; flatly refusing to discuss any aspect of the recent murders and starting violently at every unexpected sound. But on the third day the sun had risen into a cloudless sky, the mists had melted with the dawn, and the harassed Commissioner had instructed his stepdaughter and her friends to remove themselves off the island and to stay off it for as long as possible.

‘And if I so much as see a
flicker
of you before dinner,' said Sir Lionel, ‘I shall give the whole lot of you seven days' hard labour. So now you know! You can have the
Jarawa
for the day and go out fishing or picnicking or bathing. And now get out and leave me to my labours.' He kissed Valerie, and hustled them firmly out of the house.

The Islands, new-washed by storm and mist and drenched in sunlight, appeared greener and lovelier than ever before, and there were lime trees in blossom in the jungle behind North Corbyn's. Huge, gaudily painted butterflies lilted to and fro on the windless air, the sands of the long white beach were wet and firm underfoot, and the sea that had recently raged so wildly was now as flat as a looking-glass, its water crystal-clear and patched with lavender and lilac where the reefs of coral patterned the sea-floor.

The
Jarawa
had anchored as close to the beach as possible, and its four passengers had waded ashore with the baskets and bathing-towels on their heads to spend the morning swimming and sun-bathing. Afterwards they had eaten a picnic lunch under a tree that spread its branches far over the sands, before settling down to a prolonged and peaceful siesta: from which Copper had been the first to wake, aroused in the late afternoon by the crying of a gull overhead.

Propping herself on one elbow she had looked out across the beach at the tranquil sea, and found it hard to believe that barely a week ago it had risen up in a shrieking frenzy to lash out at the Islands, smashing and tearing. For by now the waves and the wind had already swept away most of the traces of their recent rage, and save for a few prostrate coconut palms and the unusually large number of shells that strewed the sand, there was little visible evidence of those wild days and nights. ‘Except on Ross,' thought Copper soberly. There were four new graves on that little island to mark forever the passing of the great storm.

For the first time since that terrifying night when John Shilto had died and Leonard Stock had become his own executioner, she found herself able to think of it all calmly and with a certain amount of detachment; and after a while, with curiosity. And apparently Valerie too had been awakened by the gull, and her thoughts must have been moving on the same lines, for she turned on her elbow and her voice broke the drowsy afternoon silence: ‘Charles
____
'

‘Mm?'

‘Charles, how did everything happen? I mean about Leonard, and the Shiltos and everything. Did you ever find out?'

‘Ask me some other time,' murmured Charles into the hat that he had tilted well over his nose.

‘I don't want to know another time. I want to know now. I haven't wanted to know before, because I felt that if anyone so much as
mentioned
the grisly subject to me, I'd go off the deep end. But getting away from Ross, and all this heavenly sun and peacefulness, has been like a tonic, and I suddenly feel sane again — and full of curiosity.'

‘I, on the contrary,' said Charles, ‘am full of food and drink, and I require repose and not conversation as an aid to digestion.'

Valerie consulted her wrist-watch: ‘You've had more than two hours, and you've got the digestion of an ostrich. So wake up and tell us all about everything or I shall point you out to a few hermit crabs.'

Charles groaned and turned his back on her: ‘Ask Nick. He knows much more about it than I do.'

‘Nick is included of course. We want lots of information from both of you: don't we, Coppy?'

Copper nodded. ‘I didn't feel I wanted to know before,' she admitted, ‘but I do now. I suppose it's because this place is such heaven that battle, murder and sudden death seem unreal and not so very important by contrast. Sort of “turnip-lanternish”, if you know what I mean. Whereas back on Ross, even on a day like this, it all still seems far too real and frightening, and the turnip-lantern isn't merely two inches of candle and a hollowed-out pumpkin, but a real and rather horrible ghost.'

Nick tilted his hat back from his eyes and grinned at her. ‘And you think that hearing all about the whys and wherefores would help to lay the ghost. Is that it?'

‘No,' said Copper after a brief pause. ‘I don't think anything but lots of time, or perhaps lots of happiness, will lay this particular ghost for any of us. But knowing something about the whys and wherefores will make it less frightening.'

Nick sat up and brushed the sand out of his hair, and propping his back against a conveniently curving tree root, lit a cigarette and said: ‘Fair enough. Wake up, Charles, a voice cries,
“sleep no more!”
In this case, two voices. So let conciliation be your policy.'

‘Hell!'
moaned Charles, propping himself on a reluctant elbow and reaching for the beer. ‘All right. Which bit of the recent unpleasantness do you two harridans require me to elucidate?'

‘We don't want a “bit”,' said Valerie. ‘We want chapter and verse, right from the very beginning.'

Charles imbibed half a glass of beer and ruminated, and presently he said: ‘Remember that sort of lagoon that was part of the “plantation” which John Shilto palmed off on to Ferrers? Well, it turns out to be simply crawling with pearl oysters.'

‘Do you mean to say that all these years it's been right under
____
'

‘Look,' said Charles, ‘if you propose to interrupt this enthralling narrative with girlish cries, I shall return to my slumbers. You confuse me. Where was I? Oh yes. Well somehow or other, we shall never be certain how, Ferrers discovered the fact that though half his plantation was worth about fourpence ha'penny, the other half was probably worth, at a conservative estimate, about a million sterling.'

‘Gosh!'
said Valerie, awed. ‘I didn't think there was that much money in the world!'

Charles grinned. ‘It is a pretty good slice, isn't it? A pity we didn't do a bit of paddling there ourselves. Imagine old Ferrers's fury on realizing that he'd spent fifteen or sixteen years in a state of extreme poverty and simmering rage, while all the time a film star's salary was sitting in his backyard, only needing a bathing-suit and a bucket to be collected. I'll bet that thought did something towards tingeing his cup of joy with cascara!

‘Well, to continue with the saga, the little man popped over to Ross, borrowed the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
off the padre, and read up everything he could find under the expression “Pearls”. He then took to spending half his time in a bathing-suit in the lagoon, and evidently hauled up a goodish few shells, which he spread around in the sun behind his house until the flesh rotted and he could open them and dig in the debris — which accounts for the appalling stink that was hanging about the place. He must have collected more than a hundred fair-sized pearls this way, but he realized that he was only touching the fringe of the matter. To get at the real boodle he needed a diver. Or better still, a diving-suit. So one day he packed his toothbrush, pocketed his pint of pearls, and made tracks for Calcutta.'

‘Of course!' said Copper. ‘What a fool I am! I wondered, when Val first told me about him, how he'd managed to put up at the Grand if he was so poverty-stricken. I suppose he sold the pearls?'

‘That is the supposition, my sweet. Anyway, he managed to bring back a complete diver's suiting with him, and he couldn't have swapped
that
for a sandwich! He got going with it, and business boomed. He hauled up bucketloads of shell and the plantation began to smell like a sewer. And here the first fly mixed itself up in the ointment. Someone, it was quite obvious, was shortly going to ask questions about this extraneous perfumery. And when they did, where exactly did he stand in the eyes of the law? Had he complete and legal right to the produce of his pond, or would the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, or some similar collection of bewhiskered bandits, sneak up on him and collar two thirds of the loot? It was certainly a problem, and after a bit of brooding he wrote off to the Commissioner and popped the question — disguising the reason for this request with some merry tale about an argument with a friend in Calcutta.'

Valerie laughed. ‘I shouldn't have given the little man credit for so much imagination,' she commented.

‘Oh, he had a certain amount of brain under that thatch,' said Charles. ‘And this brings us to Christmas Eve:
“Noel! Noel!”

‘On Christmas Eve we stop at Ferrers's bungalow to get water, and John Shilto smells a rat — or, let us be accurate, about a ton of rotting oysters. I smelt it too, and it meant nothing more than nasty stink to C. Corbet-Carr. But John Shilto had been to Ceylon, and the odds are that he's smelt that smell before. This bit is only guess-work of course, but I imagine he snooped around and stumbled on the truth. Not the complete truth, but only half of it — probably due to the fact that Ferrers had a passion for oysters, and as his servants were a slovenly crew, there were certain to be a goodish few shells permanently cluttering up his backyards. But “pearl” shell is a bit different. And John Shilto spots that difference all right!