Death in the Andamans Read online

  ‘You’re telling us!’ said Charles, accepting a glass of Mr Stock’s shandy. ‘In fact, here we go now. Stand by for fireworks! The cousins Shilto, Copper. Grand reunion scene in three sharp explosions. That’s Ferrers in the beachcomber get-up: the skinny little shrimp with his back to us and seething fury in every line of it.’

  The phrase was descriptive, for there was a tense and quivering animosity about the wizened figure in the stained and crumpled suit of drill who faced John Shilto’s confident advance, and a sudden silence descended upon the company as the older man came to a stop before his cousin and held out a large, fleshy hand. Perhaps because of it, his voice when he spoke sounded unnaturally loud and forced: ‘Well, well! This is a surprise!’ said Mr Shilto with spurious heartiness. ‘I must admit that I didn’t bargain on running into you here, old man. But as we have met, what about taking this opportunity to call bygones bygones? Eh?’

  His laugh rang as loud and forced as his voice, but it appeared that Ferrers Shilto was either short-sighted or else that he did not intend to take his cousin’s proffered hand, for he did not move. The silence deepened and drew out until it seemed to acquire a solid entity of its own, and once again John Shilto’s heavy features became mottled by a dark, ugly tide of colour. He dropped his hand but managed, with a palpable effort, to retain the semblance of a smile: ‘Oh, come on, old man, be a sport! After all, it’s Christmas, you know. “Peace and Goodwill”.’

  Ferrers Shilto laughed — a shrill, cackling, almost hysterical sound — and said, astonishingly: ‘So you’ve found out, have you? I wonder how you managed it? Well a hell of a lot of good may it do you!’

  The words, meaningless as they appeared to the openly listening bystanders, evidently possessed a meaning for John Shilto. And afterwards Copper was to remember the way in which both colour and smile had been wiped off his face as though with a sponge, leaving it pasty white and raw with rage. To remember, too, the hot, bright sunlight and the dappled shadows, the silent group of people, and the strange, fleeting look that she had surprised on one other face …

  John Shilto put up a fumbling and uncertain hand and tugged at his collar as though it were too tight for him, then turning abruptly, he walked away across the lawn with a curious stumbling tread.

  Hurried and somewhat guilty conversation broke out again as the spectators of the recent drama awoke to a belated sense of social shortcomings. But as Ferrers Shilto turned on his heel, Valerie heard Copper draw in her breath in a short hard gasp and saw her stiffen as though the sight of the little man’s face had given her a violent shock. ‘What’s the matter, Coppy?’ she asked sharply: ‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘I believe I have,’ said Copper huskily.

  She forced an uncertain laugh and said in a voice that was not entirely under control: ‘Don’t look so alarmed, Val. I’m not mental. At least I don’t think I am. But — that nightmare I had. I know it sounds fantastic, but the man I saw in it was Ferrers Shilto!’

  * * *

  A period of deep, warm, post-luncheon peace had descended upon Mount Harriet.

  Those members of the picnic party who had failed to secure one of the coveted beds in the house had disposed themselves for slumber on rugs and cushions in various shady corners of the garden, and Valerie, Copper, Charles and Nick, beaten by a short head in the race for the comforting though restricted shade of the fig trees on the eastern edge of the lawn, had retired with all the rugs they could muster to the lorry.

  This capacious and utilitarian vehicle, the property of the Public Works Department, was ordinarily employed in carrying loads of gravel or stone for road repairs, but had on this occasion been borrowed to transport half the party from Hopetown jetty to Mount Harriet. Traces of its workaday occupation still lingered between the boards and littered the corners, but failed to discommode the four who, climbing in over the tail-board, spread rugs and cushions upon the dusty floor and settled down to a peaceful afternoon’s siesta.

  ‘This is bliss,’ said Charles drowsily. ‘Wake me up in time for a late-ish tea, someone. And let us pray that no hearty friends get bitten with the idea of going down to bathe and drive off with us, like last time!’ He settled himself comfortably on his back on the floorboards and closed his eyes: only to open them a moment later as footsteps crunched the gravel outside and some unseen person approached the lorry and, pausing beside it, laid a hand on the edge of the tail-board.

  Copper opened her mouth to speak, but stopped at a grimace from Charles. ‘Ronnie!’ mouthed Charles silently; and indicated by dumb show that if Mr Purvis discovered their occupation of the vehicle he would undoubtedly add himself to their party. Whereupon the four lay quiet and made a creditable attempt to cease breathing, and after a moment or two the hand was withdrawn and the footsteps moved away in the direction of the house.

  ‘Saved!’ sighed Charles. ‘That tedious Romeo would have pressed in and talked the entire afternoon.’

  ‘It wasn’t Ronnie,’ announced Copper, peering through a crack in the side of the lorry. ‘It was the Shilto cousin — Ferrers.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Valerie. ‘I thought it was Ronnie, too. I wonder why? What do you suppose Ferrers is doing wandering around loose? I’d rather hoped that after the Big Scene the padre would put a leash on him. Charles, do you suppose____?’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ said Charles firmly. ‘I see no evil, I hear no evil and I speak no evil. Not at the moment, anyway. I am suffering from post-prandial torpor and I intend to slumber. So pipe down, light-of-my-life, and let us have not only peace but quiet.’

  The lorry had been parked in the shade of the house, and presently a faint, unexpectedly cold breeze stole across the garden, cooling the clogging warmth of the afternoon to a more pleasant temperature. A drowsy silence fell, in which Charles snored gently and a wandering bluebottle investigated Nick’s unconscious chin …

  * * *

  Afterwards not one of them could be quite certain at what point they had awakened. But awakened they were, all four of them. And by the time they had arrived at full consciousness they had overheard sufficient to make them realize that this was no time to rise and disclose themselves. Therefore they lay still, concealed by the high wooden sides of the lorry, while a scant yard away the cousins Shilto exchanged words of an uncousinly nature.

  Piecing together, in the light of after-events, what they could remember of that conversation, it appeared that John Shilto had offered to buy back his cousin’s plantation at more than twice the price he had originally received for it; giving, as a reason for this astounding gesture, his desire to put an end to the old quarrel between them. This offer Ferrers was in the process of rejecting with every indication of scorn and loathing when the occupants of the lorry awoke to the fact that they were involuntarily eavesdropping on a private conversation.

  ‘— and if,’ announced Ferrers Shilto, concluding a speech generously interlarded with expressions of a distressingly personal and opprobrious character, ‘you imagine for one minute that I am going to be had for a mug twice over by a crook like you, you can think again! You could offer me forty times the sum you swindled out of me for that stinking, rat-ridden, pestilential plantation, and I wouldn’t take it! And what’s more I shall make my will tomorrow — just to be sure that you never get your hands on it! No, my beloved cousin, this is where I get my own back at last. That plantation is mine. Every single, slimy acre of it, wet or dry. And if you so much as set foot on it, I’ll have my servants thrash you off it!’

  His voice rose until it cracked hysterically, and the elder Shilto, with one parting vitriolic epithet, turned on his heel and retired from the field of battle.

  Presently Ferrers too departed, and Charles, having made a cautious survey, announced that the coast was clear. ‘An exhilarating interlude, wasn’t it? Teeming with drama, passion, human interest and mystery. The works! I enjoyed it immensely. What sort of dirty work do you suppose our John is up to now? Or have we witne
ssed a miracle and is he a genuine victim of remorse and the Christmas spirit? A sort of latter-day Scrooge? Somehow, I doubt it.’

  ‘What about “speaking no evil” now?’ inquired Valerie.

  ‘Ah, but that was when I was feeling somnolent and well fed. As I am now no longer either, I am only too willing to believe the worst of everyone. So let us dismiss the case of Shilto versus Shilto and concentrate instead on getting some tea before my disposition deteriorates still further. Hand me down those rugs, my love.’

  They walked round the side of the house, and passing under the creeper-clad porch, crossed to the far end of the lawn to where the remainder of the party were grouped about a well-covered tablecloth spread in the shade of the frangipani trees.

  ‘Come and talk to me for a change, Copper,’ invited Ronnie Purvis. ‘There’s room for a small one this end. Move over, Hurridge, and let us grab this damsel off the Navy. Have some sandwiches: the damp ones are cucumber and the mangled and messy ones are jam.’

  ‘Cucumber, please,’ decided Copper, inserting her slim person between the nattily yachting-suited figure of Ronnie Purvis and the large, khaki-clad bulk of Mr Albert Hurridge, the Deputy Commissioner. She was guiltily aware that her preoccupation with Nick Tarrent had had the effect of making her completely uninterested in every other person on the Islands with the exception of Valerie and Charles, and seized now with a temporary fit of remorse, she listened patiently to the Deputy Commissioner’s incredibly dull and anecdotal conversation, bore equally patiently with the stereotyped flirtatiousness of that self-satisfied lady-killer Mr Ronald Purvis, and did her best, though without much success, to include his silent, faded wife in the conversation.

  Ronnie Purvis was a member of that well-known genus, the compulsive philanderer, who imagines that his job in life is to brighten it for every woman he meets. Inordinately vain, he was possessed of a vain man’s cheap attraction, and no one had ever quite understood how he had come to marry poor, dull, faded Rosamund Purvis. For if Mrs Purvis had ever had any claims to prettiness, the heat and fevers of the tropics had shrivelled them away long ago, and at thirty she succeeded in looking a good ten years older than her husband’s bronzed and athletic thirty-six.

  People were apt to refer to Mr Purvis as ‘poor, dear Ronnie’, and to add that it was a tragedy that he should be tied to that limp, uninteresting woman. Few would have believed the truth: that Rosamund Purvis had been a Bachelor of Arts at twenty-two, and one of the most brilliant students of her year at Oxford. A dazzling future was prophesied for her; and then, a year later, she had met Ronald Purvis, home on leave from India, fallen helplessly in love with him, and married him. That had been seven years ago, and the loneliness of forest camps, the damp, sticky, cloying heat of the Andamans, the birth and death of two successive children, and her husband’s eternal philandering, had combined to turn the once-pretty and intelligent woman into the colourless nonentity that Port Blair knew as ‘Poor, dear Ronnie’s dreary wife’.

  Meanwhile poor, dear Ronnie continued to flirt desperately with any and every girl he met, and to explain to them in turn, in sad, brave tones, how little his wife understood him — a phrase only too often in use, and which can generally be taken to mean that, on the contrary, she understands him only too well. He also continued, at thirty-six, to look as young as he had at twenty-five, and to conduct those of his flirtations which progressed into ‘affairs’, with unblushing openness in his wife’s house.

  ‘I can’t think why on earth she stands it,’ Charles had once said to Valerie: ‘If I was in that woman’s shoes, I’d clear out and leave him to his messy little affairs. She’s got no guts.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s in love with him?’ suggested Valerie.

  ‘Rats!’ retorted Charles inelegantly.

  But as it happened, Valerie had been right. Rosamund Purvis despised her husband and bitterly resented his infidelities. But she still loved him, and so she stayed with him: tired, disillusioned, middle-aged at thirty, knowing herself an object of pity and contempt to the settlement …

  Ronnie, however, was not having his customary success at the present moment. Valerie he had failed to impress from the first, and her subsequent engagement to Charles Corbet-Carr had effectually put a stop to any romantic adventures he may have anticipated in that direction. In the position of Public Boyfriend Number One, Mr Purvis had worked systematically through the present scanty female population of Ross and Aberdeen, and was suffering from the pangs of acute boredom at the time the Maharaja had docked at Chatham, bearing on board Miss Caroline Randal.

  One look at the new importation and Ronnie decided that the gods had indeed been kind to him, and calling up all his well-worn stock-in-trade of charm, boyishness, impudence and romantic technique had confidently advanced to conquer.

  But alas for high hopes! H.M.S. Sapphire and Lieutenant Nicholas Tarrent had between them effectively ruined the merry season of Christmas as far as Mr Purvis was concerned. And since he was not accustomed to competition, the spectacle of Nick Tarrent cheerfully monopolizing the new importation had done much toward souring his otherwise cheerful disposition: though little towards lowering his self-esteem, and Copper found herself parrying his ardent advances throughout the meal, while one half of her mind was engaged in actively disliking Ruby Stock and wondering what she could be saying to Nick that necessitated her draping herself across one of his shoulders?

  5

  ‘… Jarawas,’ said Mr Hurridge.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Copper, suddenly realizing that the Deputy Commissioner was once again in full spate.

  ‘Jarawas,’ repeated Mr Hurridge impressively. ‘I do not think you fully realize the fact that we are all actually sitting in Jarawa country at this very moment.’

  He observed Copper’s look of blank incomprehension and said in a slightly injured tone: ‘I do not believe you have been listening to one word that I have said, Miss Randal.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Copper. ‘I’m afraid I was thinking of something else. What were you saying?’

  ‘I was speaking of the Jarawas,’ said Mr Hurridge with dignity. ‘They are a tribe of aborigines that inhabit parts of these islands.’

  ‘I thought they were called Andamanese,’ said Copper brightly.

  ‘No, no. The Jarawas are entirely distinct from the Andamanese: they are quite untameable little people who live in the forests, and no one has ever managed to learn their language or become friendly with them. They use bows and arrows and shoot on sight, and they are as wild today as they were when Marco Polo first wrote of the Islands.’

  Mr Hurridge, now well away, launched into a long and pompous account of raids made on outlying settlements and lonely forest outposts by the savage little men, and of the impossibility of successful expeditions against them owing to the denseness of the wild jungle in which they lived. Mount Harriet itself, said Mr Hurridge, was well inside Jarawa country, and a dozen paces beyond the far edge of that smooth lawn would take one into the Jarawa jungles____

  ‘We could all be murdered at any minute,’ said Amabel Withers with automatic pessimism: ‘It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t let ’em scare you, Copper,’ cut in Ronnie Purvis. ‘The Jarawas have hardly ever been known to come near this end of the island. And anyway they only kill for food or iron, or water in dry years; never for fun.’

  ‘If that’s supposed to cheer me up,’ said Copper with a shiver, ‘it doesn’t. I thought this place was supposed to be nice and peaceful; no wild animals, not many snakes, and nice friendly Andamanese. Now I shall have heart failure whenever I hear a twig snap. Come and hold my hand, Mr Norton: I’m going to peer over the hedge at this Jarawa country, and I feel I should like some police protection.’

  The tea party broke up and wandered across the lawn, and presently Valerie had taken Copper into the house and shown her a sight that was to remain clear in her memory for the rest of her life. They had mounted the staircase side by
side and turned into a wide, glassed-in verandah that ran round three sides of the top storey of the house, where Valerie had pushed open a window and said, ‘There____!’ And Copper had found herself gazing down at what must surely be one of the loveliest views in the world.

  Far below her the Islands lay scattered over a glassy sea that was so still and smooth and shining that the wandering currents showed like paper streamers straggling across a ballroom floor after a carnival night when the dancing is over and the dancers have gone. The air had cooled with the approach of evening and the Islands were no longer veiled by a shimmering heat-haze, but clear-cut and colourful: lilac and lavender, blue and green and gold in the tropic evening____

  ‘Keats must have dreamed of this view,’ said Copper. ‘These are his “magic casements, opening on the foam — Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn”.’

  ‘Y–es,’ agreed Valerie hesitantly. ‘But there are times when I wonder if the magic is white or black?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Copper curiously.

  ‘I don’t know. Only — well, sometimes there is a queer sort of feeling about the Islands. Oh, not in the way you meant last night. But but they seem so out of this world. As though civilization and the twentieth century had only made a little scratch on the surface, and underneath they were still strange and … And “forlorn” and “perilous”, I suppose! I believe that if one lived here for too long they might do odd things to one. To one’s character, I mean. Change it, and make it different and____ Oh, I can’t explain. I’m probably talking nonsense. You know, it’s odd, but all day I’ve had a queer feeling; rather as though I were an overwound watch-spring wondering what happens when the breaking-point is reached? A loud, twanging noise perhaps, and all my nice, orderly, civilized little ideas flying in every direction in a gloriously crude and uninhibited manner. Now I am talking nonsense!’