Death in the Andamans Page 4

  Valerie paused to flick a fallen leaf at a big scarlet dragon-fly that was sunning itself on a mangrove root, and said thoughtfully: ‘I suppose Ferrers must always have had a yearning for romance in spite of — or because of? — Ponder’s End. And perhaps John Shilto knew it, and so knew that he’d fall for the plantation scheme. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Ferrers swallowed it hook, line and sinker and could hardly wait to hand over his little capital to cousin John and come rushing out East to become a millionaire planter and live on a coral island. That was about fifteen years ago and old history by now. But I gather that it didn’t take Ferrers more than fifteen days — or possibly fifteen hours — to find out that he’d been badly swindled, or that the rich planter off whom he had bought the plantation was in reality dear cousin John himself.’

  ‘But what’s the matter with it?’ demanded Copper. ‘It looks all right to me.’

  ‘Well, for a start, over half of it is water. The plantation was supposed to cover about five hundred acres, but when Ferrers got out here he discovered that at least half of that was taken up by a tidal lagoon. You can’t see it from here. It’s right over there, about half a mile from the house, and a thin strip of the plantation cuts it off from the sea except for a narrow channel; which makes it technically part of the property. As for the palms, they may look all right but they hardly ever bear, because of the creeks which run through the plantation. Coconuts won’t thrive properly near mangrove mud, you see.’

  ‘What a filthy trick!’ exploded Copper, straightening up with an indignant jerk that almost precipitated her into the muddy waters flowing sluggishly eight feet below. ‘Why, it’s no better than stealing! I can’t understand why any of you even speak to that man!’

  ‘It’s difficult not to, in a community as small as this one,’ said Valerie with a wry smile. ‘Yes, it was a pretty rotten bit of dirty dealing. But then some people seem to be born into the world to be swindled, and poor Ferrers is obviously a Grade-A example. No one but an utter mug would have paid over their entire capital without having a searching look at the goods first.’

  ‘He obviously trusted his cousin not to let him down!’ said Copper indignantly.

  ‘I suppose he did,’ agreed Valerie. ‘Anyway, he wouldn’t have known if it was a good proposition or not even if he had come out and looked at it. You don’t stand much chance of becoming an expert on coconuts in Ponder’s End, and I expect John wrote merrily of copra and oil and “raw nuts” and so on, and it all sounded most impressive. Anyway, Ferrers came. And he’s been here ever since. You see, he didn’t have the money to get back, and of course no one out here would ever buy the place off him. It’s the original White Elephant.’

  ‘And that was more than fifteen years ago,’ said Copper slowly. ‘Oh, poor Ferrers!’

  ‘He makes just enough to live on,’ said Valerie, ‘and I dare say he would be as happy here as in some dull little semi-detached villa, if it wasn’t for his rage at being done down. He never forgets it for half a second. He and John haven’t spoken for years, and I imagine they don’t catch sight of each other more than they can help.’

  ‘A bit difficult in Port Blair, surely?’ commented Copper: ‘I should have thought that it was next to impossible to avoid anyone in a community consisting of a handful of people all living practically in each other’s backyards. How do they manage it? Wear blinkers?’

  ‘Well, it is a bit tricky,’ confessed Valerie, ‘but of course we all help. They don’t go about much, and no one ever asks them to the same parties. When John is present you steer the conversation off coconuts, mangrove and Ferrers, and when Ferrers is around you do the same of coconuts, mangrove and John. Quite simple, really.’

  ‘Haven’t they ever met by mistake?’

  ‘Only once, I believe. Some muddle over the Government House garden party, about two Chief Commissioners back. Everyone is asked to those sort of crushes of course, but usually neither Shilto, or only one, turns up. On this occasion they evidently both thought the other had refused, so unfortunately they both turned up. I believe there was a most impressive scene. Insults fairly ricocheted around, and in the end Ferrers had to be forcibly removed by half the guests while the other half sat on John’s head. It gave Port Blair a topic of conversation for months afterwards, and is still occasionally resurrected by the “old guard” at deadly parties when everything else has given out.’

  ‘It sounds very exhilarating,’ observed Copper, ‘I wish I’d seen it. But I still can’t understand why, when they know what a swindler he is, anyone ever invites John Shilto to anything!’

  ‘My poor dear! In these islands if you once started cutting people off your visiting-list because you disapprove of things they’ve done or said in what is humorously termed their “private lives”, you’d have an extremely sticky time with your entertaining. Now I’m being cynical and catty, so I’d better stop.’

  ‘Ferrers Shilto,’ said Copper thoughtfully, ‘was on the Maharaja with me when I came down from Calcutta. What was he doing in Calcutta if he never leaves the Islands?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve met the little man, have you? I think he goes up about once a year to see to the business end of what few nuts he does manage to sell.’

  ‘I didn’t actually meet him,’ said Copper. ‘All I saw of him was the top of his pith hat when he came on board. But I saw his luggage. Very aged Gladstone bags. The Captain said he was seasick, but as the sea was like a mill-pond most of the way I was vaguely curious.’

  ‘Probably the after-effects of a terrific yearly jag?’ suggested Valerie. ‘For all we know, Ferrers may have hidden depths. What do you suppose has happened to Charles? He’s had time to fetch enough water to fill a swimming-pool by now. Let’s go and____ Oh, here he is. What have you been doing, darling?’

  ‘Drinking Ferrers’s beer,’ said Charles, sloshing water out of a battered bucket into the radiator. ‘And now that both I and this hellish vehicle have received adequate liquid treatment, I propose that we set forth on our travels again. Get in you two.’

  ‘What about Mr Shilto?’ inquired Valerie, complying. ‘Has he sent for a taxi, or is he going to try the alternative solution, and hike?’

  ‘God knows!’ said Charles cheerfully. ‘I did not pause to ask. Ferrers’s back premises stink like a sewer, so I was not disposed to linger. I’ve no idea what the little man is using to manure his plantation — decayed octopi and sea-slug, at a guess. The pong is fearsome. John Shilto went out to investigate, and I left him to it. It will do him no harm to be asphyxiated. Let’s go____’

  He pressed the self-starter and released the brake; and as he did so John Shilto came rapidly down the path between the palm trees, and breaking into a run, reached the car just as it began to move. His face was curiously flushed and he seemed to be labouring under the stress of some powerful emotion, for his pale eyes glittered with ill-suppressed excitement and his breathing was hurried and uneven.

  He jerked open the rear door of the car and tumbled in beside Copper, and having settled himself back and slammed the door, said breathlessly: ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think after all that I ought to come with you.’

  He wiped the sweat off his face, and becoming aware that his three companions were staring at him with unconcealed astonishment, forced a rattle of singularly mirthless laughter.

  ‘I – I have been thinking,’ he said. ‘About Ferrers, you know. It is really high time that we buried the hatchet — high time! The — ah, misunderstanding between us may have been partly my fault, and if so it is only right that I should try and make amends. We must shake hands and let bygones be bygones. He is my only relative — first cousins and all that. Blood is thicker than water and it is not right that____ Yes, yes, we must certainly see if we cannot make a fresh start … shake hands … After all, we must not forget that today is Christmas Eve, and “The Better the Day, the Better the Deed” — eh?’

  Mr Shilto paused expectantly as though for comment.

  ‘Oh �
�� er — quite,’ said Charles inadequately.

  He released the clutch with unintentional abruptness, and the car shot forward down the sun-dappled road that leads to Mount Harriet.

  4

  Mount Harriet, the highest point in the Islands, was the hot-weather resort of the officials from Aberdeen and Ross, and the Christmas Eve picnic was an annual affair that took place in the grounds of the deserted summer-time Government House that crowned the flat-topped peak.

  Charles brought the car to a standstill on the weed-grown drive, and Ronnie Purvis, the Forest Officer, a slimly built man in a spotless white yachting-suit, pulled open the door and greeted Copper with practised charm: ‘At last, my lovely one! I’d begun to think you weren’t coming and that my day was going to be ruined. But you’re certainly worth waiting for. You look good enough to eat, and I don’t know how you do it! Come and hold my hand…’

  Copper descended from the car and said firmly: ‘I don’t feel like holding anyone’s hand in this heat thank you, Ronnie. All that I’m interested in at the moment is a cold drink. And the colder, the better! Hullo, Amabel — did you have a good trip over?’

  ‘No,’ replied the damsel addressed: ‘There wasn’t any wind, so George had to row and he got blisters. They’ll probably go septic. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

  Miss Amabel Withers, daughter of the Port Officer, was a plump, stolid maiden with a quite remarkable bent for pessimism, and her concluding remark, which might have been taken to mean anything from a comment on the weather to a reflection on the uncertainty of human existence, was a favourite observation that did not require an answer.

  Copper turned to grin at the blistered George, a freckle-faced subaltern who was unaccountably enamoured of young Miss Withers, and said: ‘Bad luck, George. Still, it may not actually come to gangrene, and if it should, we can always amputate. I can’t think why any of you were mad enough to take out a boat on a day when there isn’t…’

  She broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished, for at that moment a tall man who had been lying in a patch of shade at the far side of the lawn stood up and lifted a hand in greeting and, as always at the sight of Nick Tarrent, Copper’s heart gave a little lurch. Abandoning her sentence, together with George Beamish and the importunate Mr Purvis, she went straight across the lawn to him. And it was not until she was within a yard of him that she realized that he was not alone, or that a long, green wicker chair stood in the same patch of shadow, and in it, stretched at full length and wearing a scarlet linen dress that exactly matched her lipstick and the varnish on her long, pointed nails, languorous and seductive as a harem favourite, lay Ruby Stock …

  Mrs Leonard Stock was a striking-looking woman of what is usually termed ‘uncertain age’, who might well have been accounted a beauty had her face not been spoiled for that accolade by an expression of discontent that had been worn for so long that it had eventually become an integral part of her features. But few critics would have found fault with her admirable figure and shining, blue-black hair, her great pansy-brown eyes and the smooth golden texture of her sun-browned skin. As the beautiful daughter of a subordinate in India’s Post and Telegraphs Department, Ruby had been born and brought up in that country, and after completing her education at a convent school in the south of India, become the reigning belle among her set in Midnapore. But from the first, she had been both ambitious and consumed by envy of all those of a higher social status than herself, and that envy drove her like a spur until it became the mainspring of her being. Some day, she vowed, she would be the equal of any of the supercilious wives of high officials to whose dinner parties and lunches she was not invited. And with this end in view she had married Leonard Stock, son of an English country parson, who occupied a minor post in the Indian Civil Service.

  Leonard was not earning anything approaching the pay that several other suitors of the dashing Ruby De Castres could offer, but for all that he was considered among her set to be a good match. First and foremost because he was what Anglo-India refers to, snobbishly, as a ‘Sahib’, and secondly, because rumour had it that although his present position in the Civil Service was a modest one, he would go far.

  Rumour, however, as is frequently the case, had been misinformed. Leonard Stock was a pleasant enough little man, amiable, friendly, and unassuming, but totally incapable of firmness or decision — as Ruby De Castres, now Ruby Stock, was to discover within a few brief months of her marriage. Facing the fact that her husband would never rise to any heights if he remained in Midnapore, she had urged him to accept a position in the administration of the Andamans when that opportunity had offered. And so the Stocks had come to the Islands, and at first all had been more than well with them.

  Here no echo of her past life had penetrated, and Ruby manufactured, with that facility of invention and superfluous falsehood that is so frequently the hallmark of her type, a father who was a retired Lieutenant-Colonel, an ancestral estate in Ireland, and a Spanish great-grandmother. She entertained lavishly, and to her Leonard’s anxious remonstrances over their steadily mounting bills, merely retorted that it was necessary for them to keep up their position if he was ever to get on in the world. And when the four years’ tenure of his post in the Islands was up, she persuaded him to apply for an extension.

  The move was a fatal one, and he knew it. But he was too weak to resist, for Ruby answered his half-hearted protests with tears and temper, and eventually he gave in. With the result that his post in India, to which he could have returned, was filled. Other men moved up to close the gap, and now he must either continue to ask for and obtain extensions, or find himself out of a job. That had been sixteen years ago; and the Stocks were still in the Islands …

  Beautiful, ambitious Ruby, the erstwhile belle of Midnapore, was now a soured and embittered woman who clung to her fading charms with despairing tenacity as being her only defence against the dragging monotony of her existence. And since women were few in the Islands, there had always been some man, often several, tied to her apron-strings. The pursuance of ‘affairs’ had become the sole interest of her shallow, childless life, and as a result of this she looked upon every other woman in the light of a possible rival.

  Until the arrival of Valerie, Mrs Stock had possessed no serious competitor in Port Blair, and she had resented the girl’s youth and distinction with an acid inward bitterness and an outward display of gushing friendliness. But Valerie had not proved the rival she had feared, for her instant annexation by Charles Corbet-Carr had made her impervious to the attentions of all other men. Copper Randal, however, posed a definite threat.

  Ruby had decided on sight to add Nick to the ‘chain-gang’, as Port Blair was wont to refer, ribaldly, to Mrs Stock’s admirers. But from the first it was painfully apparent that the option, if any, on Nick Tarrent’s affections was held by that newly arrived tow-headed chit from Government House. Wherefore Mrs Stock’s greeting of the aforementioned chit was characteristic____

  ‘What on earth kept you, darling?’ (Ruby had read somewhere that people in fashionable social circles constantly referred to each other as ‘darling’.) ‘No — don’t tell me, I can guess. You had a puncture! Such a romantic road, isn’t it? I expect John Shilto is completely épris by now! Quite a catch my dear, I assure you. Dear me, how useful punctures are! I wonder how people did without them before there were cars?’

  The tinkling laugh that accompanied this pleasantry was not untinged with malice, and Copper’s smoke-blue eyes widened into an expression of child-like innocence: ‘Well, of course you’d know, Mrs Stock,’ she countered sweetly.

  ‘Game, set and match, I think!’ murmured Nick to his immortal soul. Aloud he said briskly: ‘Hullo, Copper. You’re abominably late. I gather you brought the drinks with you — and about time too! I could do with one. And I’m sure Ruby could too. Let’s go and collect them.’ He took Copper firmly by the arm and walked her rapidly away across the lawn before Mrs Stock had time to reply.

 
‘Oh dear, that was beastly of me,’ said Copper remorsefully. ‘But she did ask for it! All the same, we shouldn’t have just walked off and left her.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nick grimly, ‘but I had no desire to act as referee at a cat-fight. You are too quick on the uptake for one so young. It shocks me. It also appeared to shock poor Ruby considerably. Shall I mix you a gin sling, or would you rather have shandy?’

  ‘Shandy, please. The box with all the gingerbeer and the rest of the soft drinks is still in the car, I think.’

  ‘Here it is,’ said Leonard Stock, appearing beside them with a bottle-filled packing-case. ‘Where shall I put it? Good-morning, Miss Randal.’

  ‘Dump it somewhere in the shade,’ advised Nick. ‘Here, let me help you.’

  ‘Don’t bother, I can manage.’ Mr Stock deposited his burden in the shadow of a group of flame trees and hunted through the bottles for one containing gingerbeer: ‘Shandy, I think you said. We might make a large jug of it. I could do with some myself. It really has been a very trying morning. Quite exceptionally airless. I had hoped that there would be a breeze up here; one can usually count on it. But there does not seem to be a breath of wind anywhere today.’ He fumbled in his pockets for a handkerchief, and having wiped the palms of his hands, dabbed ineffectually at the sweat that trickled down his face and neck.

  ‘Hullo, Leonard,’ said Valerie, joining them. ‘You’re looking very hot and bothered. And so you should be! — what’s all this we hear about you bringing Ferrers Shilto along to join the glad throng?’

  Mr Stock threw a hunted look over his shoulder and said in an agitated undertone: ‘Yes, I – I’m afraid we did. But how were we to know? You see, the padre and Mrs Dobbie brought us in their car, and as they wanted to ask Ferrers about bringing some bedding — he’s staying with them for Christmas you know — we stopped at his bungalow, and … Well, it seemed only neighbourly to ask him to come on with us to the picnic, for of course we had no notion that John would be here. None! It really is most awkward.’