The Ellie Hardwick Mysteries Read online

  ‘Drowning?’

  ‘Yes. It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Even likely. This is not the first death by crocodile the lake has witnessed. In the nineteenth century the Maharajah of the day, a keen sportsman, was duck-shooting from a gilded punt in the centre of the lake. The explosive shotgun device he had had fixed to the prow backfired and hurled the unfortunate prince into the water. Witnesses report that His Highness was carried twice around the lake by one of these creatures, screaming, until he finally died—of drowning.’

  ‘So Phyllis’s death has a royal precedent,’ I burbled. ‘She’d have been pleased . . .’ Was he deliberately trying to shock me? Of course he was.

  ‘I am eager, as you might imagine, to establish how the lady came to put herself within range of a three metre long crocodile. So, perhaps you can help me to fill in the background? We calculate that the unfortunate demise occurred at around one thirty so if you could account for your movements, let’s say, between one and two?’

  I told him about my conversation with Phyllis, admitting it was at my suggestion that she had gone to pick a lotus flower. Tears ran down my face and I was glad of Paula’s stash of Kleenex. I told him about the peacock cry I had heard which, with hindsight, could have been Phyllis’s scream of surprise and horror.

  ‘You were not aware that it is from that place by the pavilion that the crocodiles are fed by the Forest Rangers?’ he asked bluntly. ‘Chickens, pigs and goats are their usual food.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ I whispered. I was devastated. And I didn’t like the way the questioning was going. I rallied. ‘Look, Inspector, the dietary regimen of the estate wild life and the domestic arrangements of the hotel management have not been explained to us. It was doubtless considered less than interesting.’

  He glared at me and I thought I might have gone too far. ‘Don’t challenge!’ I told myself and cried some more.

  And now came the question I had been waiting for.

  ‘Did you see anyone else in the vicinity while you were painting?’

  I sniffed and wrinkled my brow in concern. ‘You’re nor suggesting someone was involved in her death?’ I asked, horrified.

  He sighed. ‘You go unerringly to the heart of our enquiry, Miss Hardwick. Did she fall or was she pushed? That is exactly what I am trying to ascertain. Now, if you would answer my question?’

  ‘Well, there were lots of people milling around by the coach but I only had one person in focus the whole time,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Timothy. Mr. Wickam-Skeith.’

  The lance gaze pinned me to my seat but I squeezed my knees together and stared innocently back.

  ‘He was sitting under the acacia tree between me and the palace about a hundred yards from the lake. He was reading a book. He arrived at . . . oh . . . just after one—we’d all had an early lunch—and got up to go back to the coach just before I packed up at one forty. Is this important? Look, I can show you exactly what was happening at the time of death if that’s what you want to establish!’ I said, allowing a thread of excitement to creep into my voice.

  I heaved my big leather hold-all onto my knee and made a show of searching around in the depths, failing to find what I was looking for. My hand encountered the small sleek shape of my camera and I thrust it deeper into the bag. ‘Drat! I left it to dry under the tree. My watercolour. In all the excitement I forgot about it. Do you think someone could fetch it?’

  A nod to the sergeant sent him scurrying off and Hari Singh and I spent an uncomfortable six and a half minutes discussing Indo-Sarassenic architecture and the incompetence of English bowlers.

  The sergeant had obviously taken time to look at my painting himself as he presented it with a smile and a flourish. The inspector studied it, even scratched at the paint with a manicured finger-nail. I waited patiently. I watched him take in every detail of the peaceful scene: the palace in the background, the arching stable gate, so English with its blue-faced clock, the fingers frozen on one thirty; the bucolic figure of Timothy, looking suitably Victorian, I thought, straw hat on head and book in lap, lounging under the acacia tree. My scale figure. Hurriedly painted in at Phyllis’s suggestion.

  ‘May I keep this for my files?’ asked the inspector.

  I smiled and nodded and began to gather up my things. I thought I’d better not offer to sign it.

  * * *

  I was never quite sure whose relief had been the greater—the tourists’ or that of the Rajasthan Police as we set off for Delhi and the airport. We all climbed aboard the BA jet in the early hours of the following morning. Not quite all. Timothy had stayed behind with the ‘Tracks East’ representative to help organise the funeral. Oddly, we thought, he was not having the body shipped back home but was intending to have her cremated and her ashes scattered in the river in the Hindu custom. Paula and her partner gallantly offered to stay behind at the expense of the tour operator to keep him company.

  * * *

  It was a month before I screwed up the courage to unpack my camera. I didn’t want to know. I’d taken my old-fashioned but reliable Leica with me—the kind that still used film. When I collected the developed prints, I finally settled down to examine them. I found myself feverishly flipping through the images of gilded palaces and domes, caparisoned elephants, heavily-laden camel trains, crowds of laughing girls with copper milk pots on their heads. I was looking for Day 14. And there it was, bringing back the sunny clarity of that last golden afternoon. The stable clock stood at twenty minutes past one, the peacocks strutted on shaven lawns, the lotus-fringed lake sparkled enticingly and in the shade of the acacia tree there lounged Timothy Wickham-Skeith.

  I was limp with relief. I had been ready to destroy the evidence of my lie—if it was a lie—to the police. During our detention in the Polo Bar, I had been totally unable to remember whether Timothy had been under the tree. I remembered painting him in, goaded by Phyllis’s waspish comment about scale, but I couldn’t have stood in a court of law and sworn that he had been there at the crucial time. I could have produced my photographs for the inspector there and then but I wasn’t confident enough to gamble a man’s liberty on what would be revealed. But my instinct had been right all along and I was glad to have the evidence of his innocence.

  ‘Why don’t you just take a photo, Ellie?’ Phyllis had said.

  I had taken her advice.

  In fact, I’d taken three photos. It helps to have a panorama when I’m recording architectural scenes. I turned to the remaining shots. The right of the trio of pictures showed a gang of langurs gambolling at the foot of a cedar tree and the wing of the hunting lodge in the background. The left showed the lake’s edge and the west wing. On the carriage sweep stood the coach with remembered figures clustering about it. And there was another figure on the lakeside path determinedly making its way southwards, one arm raised in greeting. The green silk shirt looked familiar to me. I got out my magnifying glass and checked. I was not mistaken. It occurred to me that this person might have sighted Phyllis for if Phyllis had been behind me moving west towards the lake edge simultaneously—and she was—I calculated that these two figures would have met up with each other exactly at the pavilion where Phyllis had fallen foul of the crocodile.

  I looked and looked again at the innocent-seeming scenario. And, of course, at the moment the camera had recorded its evidence, no crime had been committed. No accident had occurred. The meeting could have been innocent and unplanned. What could have happened in ten minutes? What actions or words had resulted in a hideous death so shortly after that arm was raised in greeting? It didn’t take long for Phyllis to push someone to the limit with her vicious tongue, I remembered. One comment was often enough. It must have been a spur of the moment impulse to give her a shove into the lake. Something any one of us might have done. But then, any one of us would have seen her being snapped up by a stealthily lurking crocodile and tried to help her. At the very least, screamed a warning and run about shouting for assistance.

  It couldn
’t have been premeditated. Could it? I thought not. But post-meditated? Did the word exist?

  Disturbed, I slipped the photographs away in the depths of my sock drawer. I left them there until I decided what to do with them.

  * * *

  A week later I had still come to no decision and India was drawing further away from me, becoming a burnished memory and a series of well-worn stories. An e-mail message accompanied by two paper-clip symbols popped up onto my screen late one night. Inspector Hari Singh of the Rajasthan Police sent his compliments to Miss Hardwick and drew her attention to the following attachment.

  ‘Affair officially of no further interest to the Indian Police. Action by architect, perhaps?’ he had added mysteriously.

  I got the first surprising enclosure up on screen. The inspector, I guessed, must have kept, all these weeks, an IT marker out on names he was interested in. I wondered briefly if my own had been on his list. I bet it had! And here, finally, was evidence that two names had sprung his electronic trap. It was a page from the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of London, two days ago. The Court and Social page. Bemused but intrigued, I had read down to the end of the ‘Forthcoming Marriages’ column before I saw it. ‘Professor Timothy Wickham-Skeith of Oxford and Ms. Paula Parrish of Godalming. The engagement is announced between . . .’

  I summoned up the second attachment. Another print-out from an English paper. Yesterday’s ‘Oxford Post’. The same information was on offer but with the accompaniment of a colour photograph of the happy pair. Tim was looking much younger, fit and tanned, I thought. Paula was looking up at him with glowing eyes. She had changed her green silk shirt for a vibrant pink one, to echo her romantic mood perhaps. The article ‘Love amongst the ruins’ told how the bereaved professor had found consolation. Love had apparently blossomed under a fragrant frangipani tree in the ruins of the royal city of Fatepur Sikhri. Did this sound like the first beat on the drum of publicity? To my suspicious mind it did.

  I remembered the determined figure on the lake path and thoughtfully took out the triptych of photographs. ‘Poor old Timothy! Poor old feller!’ I thought. ‘Out of the frying pan . . .’ And I knew what the inspector was urging me to do.

  I hit the reply button and sent back a short message: ‘Action taken this day.’ Then I found an envelope and slipped the three photographs inside. I added a note of the ‘thought this might be of some interest’ type, signed it, copied the professor’s address from the screen onto the envelope and stuck a first-class stamp on it.

  He’d work it out. If he wanted to.