The Last Kashmiri Rose Page 10

  ‘And Dolly Prentice? What about her?’

  ‘Oh, she was wonderful! She’s been dead twelve years and she was at least twenty years younger than me but I still miss her. She was my friend, she was everybody’s friend. There was a quality about her that all admired. She could light up a room just by walking into it and if she was talking to you, you felt honoured and all the better for her conversation. I know it sounds sentimental and absurd but ask anyone who knew her and they’ll all say the same. Wait a moment.’

  Kitty clapped her hands and called for the bearer. She spoke briefly to him and he bowed and left the room to return carrying two dusty and ragged, leather-covered books.

  ‘The Prentice family albums,’ said Kitty. ‘I don’t know that Giles would approve of my showing you these but I shan’t inform him of my intentions. It comes under the heading of helping the police with their enquiries, wouldn’t you say?’

  She waved for the servant to place them on a table between them and began carefully to turn the pages. ‘Now, these escaped the fire. About the only things that did. They were kept in a metal trunk in Giles’ office at the end of the bungalow with the family papers. When they were salvaged, of course they were brought to me. Giles and Midge both know I’ve got them in safe keeping but they have never asked to have them back and, somehow, it never seemed the right moment to return them. Midge comes over to look through them and hear me tell stories of her mother but Giles has never shown any desire to have them returned. Too painful.’

  She found the photograph she was looking for and pushed it towards him. ‘There, you can see something of her style. She was beautiful. There was an elfin quality about her that appealed to everybody.’

  Joe looked with admiration and sadness at the bright, mischievous face raised to the camera. Yes, Dolly would have enslaved him too, he thought.

  ‘And her reputation remained intact?’ he asked delicately.

  ‘Well, she could have said, with Queen Elizabeth:

  ‘“Much suspected of me,

  Nothing proved can be.”

  ‘And so it was. I would suspect there was a string of affairs or at least flirtations and if I was minded to do so I could name names.’

  ‘And Prentice? Was he aware of all this? Did he mind? Was he very devoted?’

  ‘What can I say? He had a reputation for devotion and it’s true that when he had to leave the station he took her with him whenever he could. And that’s unusual. Most of the officers are only too glad to leave domestic bliss behind for a few days, I’d say. But devoted? Truly I’d say he wasn’t. I’d almost be prepared to say he was indifferent to her, though you wouldn’t find many to agree with me. Fond of her perhaps and he never mistreated or neglected her certainly but, compared to all the other men on the station, indifferent.’

  ‘How did he come to marry Dolly? On the surface they don’t seem to have a great deal in common.’

  ‘Dolly had an Indian background. Rather like Nancy and dozens of other girls – if you want to have a place in India there’s only one way to achieve it – you have to marry a man who is making his career here. After school, Dolly came out on the fishing fleet and never was likely to be a “returned empty” as we rudely used to call the poor plain girls who went back home without a husband. She had her pick of the eligible men that year 1902, was it? Of course, by far the best catch is a three hundred pounds a year dead or alive man …’

  ‘Dead or alive?’ asked Joe puzzled.

  ‘A civil servant, like the one Nancy’s got for herself, the best paid and having the advantage that if he dies, you go on drawing your husband’s salary in full for as long as you live. Not a bad bargain, I think you’d agree?’

  ‘It beats police arrangements, certainly,’ said Joe.

  ‘And Dolly had her offers from that quarter but – and to many people’s surprise – she chose Prentice. And here they are on their wedding day.’

  ‘He was a handsome man,’ Joe commented.

  ‘Oh, yes. Physically an outstanding man. And he still is. Fiendishly handsome, don’t you think? But there was something about him which did not appeal to most girls. He didn’t flirt. All those years in the hills were no preparation for the trivialities of polite society. He had no idea, I think, of making himself attractive to women. It’s my opinion that he had been sent back to the regiment here in Bengal with advice from his senior officers to make a serious push for promotion and there is a point beyond which it is difficult to proceed if you do not have a wife. There’s a saying in the Indian army: “Subalterns may not marry. Captains may marry. Majors should marry. Colonels must marry.” Prentice was determined to make colonel. He got Dolly in his sights and carried off the prize of the season.’

  The album with its melancholy parade of singed and stained but evocative images was entrancing Joe. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Kitty. ‘Take your time.’

  She waved a hand again to her bearer who interpreted her gesture without a word and presented a cigarette box at her elbow and a lighted match. At her invitation, Joe helped himself to a cigarette.

  ‘And this is Midge?’ he asked, pointing to a tiny child being supported on a pony by a smiling syce.

  ‘Yes, that’s Midge. Very dark, you see. Takes her colouring from her father.’

  Joe was silent for a moment as he gazed at another portrait. A tall, dark young man dressed in the baggy white trousers, loose white shirt and tight waistcoat of a Pathan tribesman smiled in a confident and swaggering way at the camera.

  ‘Ah, I see you’ve found Prentice’s bearer.’

  ‘Chedi Khan?’

  ‘Yes. Now how do you know that? Am I going to have to respect your detective abilities after all? Chedi Khan. That’s the name. Haven’t heard it for years. But I would never forget the man! No one who saw him ever would. I can still remember the flutterings he made in the hen coop when he appeared on the station with Prentice for the first time! The women swooned! Discreetly, of course!’

  ‘He has a strong look of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik.’

  ‘We haven’t yet had the pleasure of moving pictures in Panikhat, so I am not able to comment. But Chedi Khan certainly cut a most romantic figure about the station. He was about six foot two and, as you see, handsome as the devil. He moved like a panther – stalked through the station looking neither to left nor right and he was subservient to no one but Prentice. His hair was black and he wore it long on his shoulders … sometimes he would twine a red rose through it. That was surprising enough but the most amazing thing about him was his eyes. They were blue. Yes, turquoise blue and he would ring them with kohl which made the effect even more devastating. Apparently some of these northern tribesmen do have light skins and blue eyes. They say the colouring goes right back to the invading armies of Alexander the Great. Extraordinary.’

  ‘But where did Prentice acquire such a servant? If servant is what he was …’

  ‘He certainly didn’t behave like one. He was a law unto himself. The story is that he was committed to Prentice’s care when he was a boy after some flare up on the frontier. Where Prentice went, Chedi Khan followed.’

  ‘And what were his relations with Prentice’s family? Is it known?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say known for certain. That was a very tightly knit household by Indian standards. He seemed to be devoted to Dolly and to Midge. Of course, there were wagging tongues to hint that in the face of Prentice’s indifference, Dolly found special comfort in her husband’s bearer. And perhaps she did … No, Commander, it would not be unknown,’ she finished in response to Joe’s enquiring glance. ‘And when the two bodies were discovered entwined together in the wreckage of the bed in Dolly’s room, well, you can imagine that the station biddies had all their suspicions confirmed!’

  ‘It puzzles me that anyone should have been still in their beds in those circumstances,’ said Joe. ‘According to the report there was a lot of noise – servants screaming, fire roaring … there were
even shots. Loud enough to attract the attention of officers half a mile away in the mess …’

  ‘It was no puzzle to anyone who knew Dolly,’ said Kitty thoughtfully and she was silent for a moment while she decided how far she might confide in Joe. ‘Look here, Commander, you haven’t seen much of station life but perhaps enough to judge that for many women it’s a boring and lonely life. It’s rarely necessary for a memsahib to lift a finger for herself and when her morning task of supervising the servants is complete, there is little else to occupy her time and certainly not her mind. Dolly was bored. She drank. She’d been drinking a bit for months before the fire. It’s an old story. I would guess that when the dacoits set fire to the bungalow she was lying dead to the world already.’

  ‘But Chedi Khan?’

  ‘A Muslim so he certainly wasn’t under the influence of alcohol. Who knows? The bodies were trapped under a beam. Perhaps he’d been trying to wake her up … make her move … left it just too late. Chedi Khan was devoted to Prentice and what would he do but spend his life defending the memsahib? Well, that’s always been my version of the story anyway.’ She looked at him with the trace of a challenge. ‘And I would be obliged if you would accept it as the authorised version, Commander. There are the living to consider and to me they are more important than the dead. And perhaps even more important than the truth.’

  Joe nodded his acquiescence and understanding. He would leave it there – for the moment.

  It occurred to him that a proper autopsy would have revealed the contents of Dolly’s stomach. Drunk? Drugged? The fire started to conceal evidence? He couldn’t recall a medical report on Dolly’s body and made a note to himself that he would need to enquire further. His mind automatically sped down a widening avenue of speculation.

  ‘Can you remember how Giles Prentice reacted when he heard what had happened?’

  ‘He was devastated. He didn’t utter or move for a week. He was in no fit state to care for Midge, of course, and she, poor dear, was out of her mind with panic and distress. My husband and I scooped her up and brought her over here and cared for her. She lived with us for nearly a year. Too disturbed to be sent away to school so I taught her her lessons myself. Bright little thing! But terribly highly strung and who shall wonder?’

  Her face clouded at an unwelcome memory. ‘She was sitting at my feet one day while I was sewing, reading her way through my children’s old books and she came across an old Victorian volume – India Told to the Children I think it was called. Suddenly Midge pointed to a page, screamed and began to sob. It was a long time before we could calm her down. In fact, we had to fetch Giles to reason with her.’

  ‘What on earth had she seen?’

  ‘A depiction of the ritual of suttee. A beautiful young Indian lady, dressed in her finest clothes and her jewels, was lying on a blazing funeral pyre by the side of her husband’s dead body. Just the thing for a children’s book, I think you’ll agree!’

  ‘And Prentice took her back to live with him again?’

  ‘Eventually. She stayed with us until their new bungalow was built.’

  ‘At number 3, Curzon Street?’

  ‘That’s right. Next door to the ruins of the old bungalow. Very odd of Giles, I thought, to build so close to the old site – it must have brought back bad memories every day. But then he already owned the land. He was always an unpredictable fellow! Though in military ways, perfectly predictable. When he came back to his senses after the disaster the Pathan in him took over. He gathered up a troop of Greys – at the express request of the Collector because there was much public sympathy and outrage, as you can imagine – and he rode off. They came back after ten days. No one has ever seen troops so exhausted. Not one of them has ever spoken about that sortie.’

  She shivered. ‘But I think the dacoits learned the meaning of the word “Pukhtunwali”.’

  Chapter Nine

  THERE WAS A silence filled only by the rhythmic creaking of the punkha. Kitty was lost in the horrors of the past.

  While Joe gave her the time to order her thoughts and emotions, his own mind was busy absorbing the details and weighing the importance to his enquiry of the bloodstained events of that March twelve years before. He was forming no theories, making no judgements yet; he was simply taking in as much as he could of this series of alien and macabre events. This was often the way in cases that he had worked on. In the initial stages, a voracious acquisition of facts and impressions characterised his approach. He made no predictions, advanced no theories until he was certain that he had learned as much as there was to be learned about the crime. He knew the danger of constructing a neat explanation which could then be shot to ribbons by the late entry of a new piece of information.

  And there was something about this, the first death of a memsahib, which tugged at his attention. He had devised his own theory, drawing on evidence from the rash of multiple murders which had shocked the population of Europe over the last fifty years, that it was the first killing of any series and the latest which were the most likely to give away the identity of the killer. The first murder, being the first, was inevitably the most amateur, the most sloppy, the most nervously executed of the crimes. If the killer went on to survive this undiscovered, he would improve his technique, take fewer chances, cover his tracks more expertly the second and third and fourth times. If his career continued to flourish he might become overconfident, feeling himself immune to detection, and by the time the police were investigating his fifth or sixth offerings, their acquired skill might just be the equal of his.

  The killing of Dolly Prentice, being the first and by far the most convincingly accidental, was, Joe considered, the most significant. The pattern was like and yet not like the pattern of the subsequent killings. As in the other four cases there was the probably lethal presence of a native – in this the supposed dacoits. It occurred to Joe that not one witness mentioned actually having set eyes on a dacoit, though there were reports that the servants had seen them and been herded roughly out of the building by a gang of four or five armed men. Could someone – Prentice? – have hired them, lured them or tricked them into an attack on the bungalow? During his absence? And then have pursued them and got rid of the living evidence against him? Joe decided to rein in his imagination; no man would put at risk his wife, his daughter, his bearer and his household of devoted servants indiscriminately.

  He turned back the pages of the album and looked again at the wedding photograph. Even from the sepia-tinted paper, Dolly sparkled with happiness and some other quality … satisfaction? Pride, perhaps? Was there a touch of the same emotion he had caught in the eye of an old tiger hunter in a painting in the mess – ‘See what a fine beast I have conquered’?

  Joe looked at her conquest. Colonel, then Major, Prentice. Tall, athletic, commanding. Yes, a tiger. But he doubted that Dolly had her graceful foot on his neck. He remembered Kitty’s saying about marriage in the army – ‘Colonels must marry’. Was the man merely doing his duty for the sake of promotion? And Dolly, had she chosen the man or the station commander he would become? Had she been aware of his background, aware of his essential wildness?

  ‘You’re saying that Prentice, um, reverted to the code he was familiar with from his early youth … this Pukhtunwali … to exact retribution from the bandits who were responsible for his wife’s death? Would it still have such significance for him, after so long?’

  Kitty lit another cigarette and considered his question. ‘Oh, yes, I think so. On the surface Giles Prentice is the pukka cavalry officer, punctilious, cold, arrogant, but I’ve always thought there was another layer to his character, something more volatile bubbling beneath the austere surface. And the Pathan code, well, it’s very – what shall I say? – very seductive in its simplistic, masculine way.’

  ‘Is there more to it than a duty of revenge?’

  ‘Yes. But not much. There is the duty of melmastia – that’s hospitality. It is expected that a Pathan will offer food, lodg
ing, protection, even lay down his life to protect anyone who seeks shelter with him. Many British officers “take safe conduct” as the saying is. And come to admire the Pathan way of life while doing so. And secondly there’s the right of nanawati which means “coming in”. A Pathan has to offer protection to anyone who asks him for it, even his worst enemy. If a man comes to him with a tuft of grass in his mouth to indicate that he is subservient like the animals and with the Koran on his head, Pathans may not refuse nanawati. But the first and most important duty is badal – vengeance. Vengeance must be exacted for any injury done to the Pathan or to his family or tribe. He may wait many years before he accomplishes it – may even have forgotten the reason for it – but avenged he must be. There is a story – quite a recent one and I know it’s true because the incident was investigated by my cousin – that a perfectly innocent English officer was shot dead on the frontier by a tribesman. When he was asked why he had shot the officer who was unknown to him, the Pathan replied that his great-grandfather had been killed by an Englishman and he was taking revenge. “But after one hundred years?” my cousin asked, disbelieving. “One hundred years … yes …” said the Pathan, “perhaps I have been a little hasty.” And there are stories which tell of leathery old villains who have killed their own offspring when the code demanded it!’

  ‘So, in pursuing the dacoits, Prentice was avenging the death of Dolly?’

  ‘Yes. I’d rather not think about it but I would guess that’s exactly what he did. There was something so chilling in the intensity, the implacability of the man. He had a face of granite, an expression as fierce as all three Furies combined when he rode off on his punitive raid. But, then, you don’t have to be Pathan in your way of thinking to insist on your revenge. There were many British officers to encourage him. A burning bungalow, a burning memsahib, a terrified child, these woke fearful memories, you can imagine.’