Death in Kashmir Page 5

  Sarah stood for a moment looking about her, her back to the door. After the comparative warmth of the firelit room the verandah was an icy cavern of pale shadow that stretched emptily away past closed, secretive doors and shuttered windows. The white, glistening waste of snow lay piled all about the rough wooden walls and hung thick and heavy upon the low roofs, blotting out the sharp angles of the buildings and drawing soft, curved lines against the frosty sky.

  Far away across the marg* a tree cracked sharply with the sound of a distant pistol shot, as its sap froze inside the rough bark. The thin sound, a pinprick in the silence, echoed faintly round the bowl of the sleeping marg, and Sarah, who had moved towards her own door, checked sharply. But it was not that faint sound which had stopped her.

  The moon had risen higher into the night sky and half the verandah now lay in shadow. Only a narrow bar of cold white light remained at its edge, fretted with the sharp pattern thrown by the verandah railings. But in the reflected light from the wastes of snow beyond the railings, Sarah could see quite clearly on the film of white snowflakes that lay upon the verandah floor the prints of her own fur-lined slippers.

  But there was now another set of footprints upon that pale and fragile carpet. The footprints of someone who had walked on tiptoe down the deserted verandah and paused outside Janet Rushton’s door …

  3

  The sight of those footmarks was more shocking to Sarah than anything that Janet had told her, and as she stared down at them she felt as though she had been abruptly and violently propelled out of a make-believe world into one of chilling reality. For though it would not be true to say that she had disbelieved Janet, she had consciously allowed for a certain amount of exaggeration due to the effects of sorrow, fear and shock. Now, suddenly, it had become real to her. Because the proof was here before her eyes.

  Her first instinctive reaction was to warn Janet. But even as her hand went out to knock once again on that door, she checked and turned back to look down again at those betraying prints. Whoever had made them had clearly not stayed listening very long; which meant that they had not been able to hear anything and been forced to retreat, disappointed. And since Janet had suspected that there might be an attempt to eavesdrop, and had guarded against it—and had also, in Sarah’s opinion, endured enough for one night!—there seemed little point in bursting in on her a second time merely to tell her that she had been right.

  There was, of course, something far more useful that she herself could do: follow that line of prints and find out where they led to! But even from here she could see that they had entered the verandah by way of the three stone steps at the far end, and left again the same way. And since the possibility that whoever made them might be lurking somewhere among the black shadows cast by the end of the hotel wing, waiting to see if anyone would do just that, was too daunting to be faced, Sarah fled back to her own room, and once safely inside it locked and bolted herself in.

  After all the alarums and excursions of the past hour she had not expected to be able to fall asleep again. But here the experience gained during the war years, when she had learned to make use of every opportunity to snatch what sleep she could between air-raids or the departure and return of home-based bombers and fighters, stood her in good stead.

  Her eyes had already closed and she was almost asleep, when it occurred to her that the second set of footprints, like her own, had been made by a woman …

  It was at breakfast next morning that Reggie Craddock, the Secretary of the Ski Club, made his announcement.

  He referred briefly to the tragic death of Mrs Matthews, and to his own previous warning that the Blue Run was unsafe for skiing. The snow, said Reggie Craddock, was rotten in places, and due to the thawing of a stream, most of the track was ice and very dangerous. No one, under any circumstances, was to ski in or near the run for the remaining four days of the Spring Meeting, and anyone found doing so would be automatically suspended from membership of the Club. He added the bald information that Mrs Matthews’ body was being taken down to Srinagar that day for burial, and sat down with evident relief as a babble of low-toned conversation broke out around the tables.

  Sarah glanced across the dining-room to where Janet Rushton’s blond head gleamed in the brilliant morning sunlight that streamed through the snow-fringed window-panes. Janet’s face showed no visible traces of her last night’s panic, and Sarah, noting that she was wearing a dark tweed coat and skirt in place of her usual ski-suit, presumed that she would be accompanying her supposed cousin’s coffin down to Srinagar and attending the funeral there. At the moment she was talking to Hugo Creed—a large and jovial character, built on generous lines, who was temporarily on the non-skiing list owing to an unfortunate altercation with a tree on Red Run.

  Janet had been commiserating with him and Major Creed had evidently said something that amused her, for her laughter came clearly across the room, and hearing it, Sarah was tempted to wonder if the happenings of the previous night had not been a particularly vivid nightmare, or the product of a feverish imagination? But though she might possibly have been able to discount Janet’s story, she could not forget those clear, betraying prints on the snow-powdered floor of the verandah.

  Later that morning, on her way to the post office to send off a letter to her Aunt Alice, she had stopped to look behind her more than once, haunted by an uncomfortable feeling that she was being followed. But except for a few distant figures stumbling upon the nursery slopes below the hotel, the shimmering sweep of the snow-blanketed marg was empty and glittering in the clear sunlight that was thawing the snow to a soft slush under her skis, and there were fewer skiers than usual, since several of the older members had accompanied Janet down to Srinagar, from where they would return after a post-funeral luncheon at Nedou’s Hotel.

  She was on her way back from the post office when she saw the Creeds, who were watching a beginners’ class on the nursery slopes, and went over to join them. She had known them in Peshawar and been driven up to Kashmir in their car, and despite a considerable disparity in their ages, Mrs Creed (Antonia by baptism, but ‘Fudge’ to her many friends) had become a particular friend of hers.

  ‘Hello, Hugo,’ hailed Sarah, coming to anchor beside them: ‘Why isn’t Fudge pushing you around in a bath chair? I thought you were supposed to be on a bed of sickness?’

  ‘Not quite, my child,’ said Hugo comfortably, closing his eyes against the sun-glare. ‘No bones broken, or anything like that. A mere matter of bruisery. I’m as stiff as an old boot, and Fudge has been rubbing me with pints of embrocation, with the result that I smell like a sewer. You can wind me from five hundred yards, but I am becoming hourly more supple.’

  He brushed away some melting snow from the bench he was seated upon, clearing a space for Sarah: ‘Come and sit down. I know of few more invigorating pastimes than watching one’s fellow-man earnestly endeavouring to remain upright while sliding down a snow slope of one-in-one with six feet of planking strapped to his boots. Take that one, for instance: observe the exaggerated caution of his advance. Now he’s off—that’s the stuff!—now he’s gaining speed—his skis are crossing—now he’s dropped a stick——Wait for it!… Magnificent! The purler of a lifetime. I have no doubt that Messrs Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would have paid him thousands to record it for a custard-pie comedy, and we get it all free. Bravo, sir! Bravo, indeed!’

  ‘Do shut up, Hugo!’ begged Fudge. ‘Don’t laugh at him Sarah! It only encourages him. That’s Major McKay. Reggie says he’ll never make a skier, but he will try; he spends hours on the nursery slopes. He’s looking simply furious, poor dear, and spitting out snow.’

  ‘And doubtless a few teeth as well,’ said Hugo, interested. ‘Did I ever look like that when I was learning to ski, Fudge?’

  ‘Worse,’ said Fudge, ‘far worse. Like Henry VIII doing the splits.’

  ‘I resent the comparison,’ said Hugh with dignity. ‘Anyway, you have got your numbers wrong. Henry certainly, but not ei
ght. Five, I think. Or whichever one Laurence Olivier recently introduced to the public. Many people commented at the time upon his close resemblance to myself. “Larry old boy”, they said, “or is it Hugo?” Quite embarrassing it became. Cease giggling, Sarah. It does not become you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sarah laughing, ‘but I’ve often wondered who you reminded me of, and of course it’s Henry VIII.’

  ‘There!’ said Fudge triumphantly, ‘What did I say? Thank you, Sarah.’

  ‘It’s a plot,’ sighed Hugo. ‘But I forgive you, Sarah. You’re so pretty. When I have sent this harridan of mine to the block, may I hope that you will step into the vacancy thus created? No security of tenure, of course.’

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ promised Sarah. ‘Are you two coming on the Khilan party tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Fudge. ‘Hugo won’t be able to make it, worse luck, but I am deserting him for the night. I wouldn’t miss my last chance of a night at the ski-hut for anything.’

  ‘There’s wifely devotion for you,’ observed Hugo sadly. ‘Does she forego her selfish pleasures to stay and anoint my creaking joints with yet more embrocation? Not on your life! She leaves me cold and rushes off to ski with snakes-in-the-grass like old Reggie. Hello, Reggie. Rounded up your numbers for the hut tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reggie Craddock, panting up the slope below them, his skis slithering and skidding on the slushing surface. ‘Hell take this sun! The bally place is a bog. If this thaw keeps up, goodbye to our last four days skiing.’

  ‘Never mind,’ comforted Hugo. ‘You can all have a jolly time tobogganing on the slopes with the hotel tea-trays. Nice, clean, boyish fun. Who’s for the hut tomorrow?’

  The ski-hut stood on the snow slopes of Khilanmarg, which is the long plateau, high above the bowl of Gulmarg, where the tree-line ends and the forests run out at the foot of Apharwat, the long bare ridge of mountain, seamed with gullies, that rises above it for another fourteen thousand feet. Khilanmarg, the Meadow of Goats, is well named, for in summer it provides a grazing ground for flocks of goats and sheep who crop the grassy levels and scramble about on the rocks and the steep slopes of the mountainside above. But in winter the snow turns it into perfect skiing ground, and it was a practice of the Ski Club members to go up in parties to Khilanmarg and sleep the night in the ski-hut, which gave them more skiing time on the following day, since it eliminated the long pull up through the forest paths from Gulmarg, fifteen hundred feet below.

  Reggie said: ‘Quite a goodish crowd staying the night, and some only coming up for the day. Fourteen of us for the hut I reckon. Let’s see, there’s Sarah here, and Fudge of course, and the Coply twins. And Mir Khan and Ian Kelly, and those two birds from Calcutta—what are their names? Thingummy and Something.’

  ‘Thinley and Somerville,’ prompted Fudge.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. And myself of course, and Meril Forbes and the Curtis girl, and Helen and Johnnie Warrender. That’s the lot I think.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Is Helen really coming?’

  ‘So she says. Why?’

  ‘Nothing, only——’

  ‘Miaow!’ interjected Hugo.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything!’ protested Fudge indignantly.

  ‘I’m sure you weren’t. I know how dearly you love Helen.’

  ‘Now who’s being catty? Miaow yourself! But I won’t pretend she doesn’t madden me. She’s like–like——’

  ‘Quite,’ said Hugo. ‘Biscuit crumbs in the bed. You need say no more.’

  Sarah, who had been checking names on her fingers, said suddenly: ‘But that makes thirteen, not fourteen. You’ll have to rake in someone else, Reggie. You can’t take up a party of thirteen. It would be unlucky.’

  ‘It was fourteen when I made out the lists,’ said Reggie, ‘I must have forgotten someone.’

  ‘Me,’ said Hugo sadly.

  ‘Of course. Damn!’

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ said Hugo with a gracious wave of his hand.

  ‘I wasn’t. I was just wondering who to rake in to take your place.’

  ‘It can’t be done. There’s only one of me: the country carries no spares. I am what Fifi et Cie would doubtless label an “Exclusive Model”.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t chatter so much,’ said Reggie irritably. ‘I can’t think straight while you babble. Do you suppose we could get Tomlin to take your place?’

  ‘He’s sprained his wrist.’

  ‘Curse, so he has. What about Stevenson?’

  ‘He’s umpiring the beginners’ race tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh well, I expect we shall raise someone. Anyway, I’m not superstitious myself, and if Fudge and Sarah will refrain from commenting on the fact, I don’t suppose anyone else will think of counting heads. Sarah can keep her fingers crossed and drape charms round her neck if it really worries her.’

  ‘Sound common sense,’ approved Hugo. ‘“A Solomon come to judgement!” If you can bring yourself to believe that certain things are unlucky, you must also be able to believe that certain other things are lucky. So if you see my dear wife plodding up to Khilan tomorrow, Reggie, festooned with horseshoes, bristling with white heather, and clutching a four-leaved clover in one hand and an outsize log of wood in the other, you will know that she is merely taking suitable precautions against disaster.’

  ‘There’s the lunch gong,’ said Reggie. ‘I think I’ll push off. Good Lord—look at McKay! Golly what a toss! It’s a wonder they don’t break their necks, isn’t it? Has he been doing that sort of thing all morning?’

  ‘Without ceasing,’ replied Hugo. ‘It’s very nearly perpetual motion. Still, it provides the bystanders with a lot of good, clean fun, and if his rugged bulldog spirit forbids him to chuck the whole idea and take up ballroom dancing instead, he will undoubtedly succeed in breaking his neck in the near future, ruining a perfectly good pair of skis in process. Then we can all have a jolly laugh and you can put the nursery slopes out of bounds.’

  ‘Considering Mrs Matthews is being buried today, I don’t think that’s a particularly funny remark,’ observed Reggie Craddock frostily.

  ‘Oh God!’ said Hugo. ‘“We are not amused!” Sorry, sorry, sorry. Lead me lunchwards, Fudge, before I put my foot in it further. Coming, Sarah?’

  The rest of the day passed without incident, and watching Janet Rushton at supper that evening Sarah decided that she was either a remarkably good actress, or had allowed the shock of finding Mrs Matthews’ body to exaggerate her fears.

  That night there were no unusual sounds from the other side of the thin wooden wall of her bedroom; but Sarah found herself unable to sleep, for the deathly silence of the previous night was broken now by a soft chorus of drips from the thawing snow on the roof falling with a stealthy, monotonous patter into the piled snowdrifts below the verandah rail, pitting them with small, dark, ice-fringed holes. There was a breeze too: a faint uneasy breath of wind that sighed and whispered along the dark verandahs and under the snow-laden eaves, and combed through the black deodar forests behind the hotel with a sound like far-off surf.

  An hour or two after midnight it died away and frost drew a silent finger along the rooftops; checking the thaw and re-hanging fantastic fringes of icicles from every gutter and ledge. Silence flowed back across the marg, and Sarah slept at last. To be awakened by a discreet tap upon the door and the arrival of her morning tea.

  Bulaki, her down-country bearer, reported that it had snowed in the early hours of the morning and that the hotel’s Kashmiri servants said that bad weather was coming. He looked cold and unhappy, and his dark face appeared blue and pinched and as woeful as a monkey’s. He inquired between chattering teeth if it was still the Miss-sahib’s intention to spend the next night in the Khilanmarg ski-hut, and on receiving a confirmatory answer observed darkly that no good would come of it.

  The ski-hut, said Bulaki, was damp and insecure. It was also a place of evil omen, for had not the first ski-hut been buried by an a
valanche—and with no less than three young sahibs within it at the time? He himself had spoken with a man who had helped to dig out the bodies of those same sahibs, and … At which point Sarah had cut him short with some haste, and having repeated her intention to spend the night in the Khilanmarg hut, requested him to pack what she would need for the expedition while she was at breakfast.

  Twenty minutes later she stepped out into the snow-powdered verandah and descended the hill to the dining-room, which was situated in a large block some distance below the wing in which she slept. The hotel buildings lay scattered over the top and sides of a steep little hill that rises out of the centre of the shallow bowl in the mountains that is Gulmarg—the ‘Meadow of Roses’. A bowl that in summer is one vast, green golf-course, walled about by forests of pine and deodar and chestnut, and dotted and encircled by innumerable little log huts that bear a strong resemblance to those of a mining camp in any Cowboy film.

  Despite Bulaki’s warnings of bad weather it was a glorious morning. The sun had not yet reached into the bowl of Gulmarg, but it lit up the mountain tops that rose above it and glittered upon Sunrise Peak in a dazzle of light. Breakfast was a hurried meal, and immediately after it some twenty or so members of the Ski Club packed their rucksacks with sandwiches and Thermos flasks, and strapping on their skis set off on the long climb through the pine forests up to the open snowfields of Khilanmarg.

  * * *

  The day had been all too short, and with the lengthening shadow of evening a chill had crept over the snowfields, and those of the party who were returning to the hotel drained the last drops of tea from their Thermos flasks, ate the last crumbs of cake, and buckled on their skis for the homeward run. One by one their small figures, dark against the rosy-tinted snow and dwarfed by the lowering bulk of Apharwat whose steep sides rise up from the gentle slopes of Khilanmarg, swooped away across the sparkling levels to vanish among the shadows of the pine woods.