Death in the Andamans Page 6

  ‘No,’ said Copper slowly. ‘I think I know what you mean. Everyone seems to be feeling a bit edgy today. I know I am! I was even driven to exchanging a catty scratch with La Stock. And then there were the Shiltos snarling at each other, and even Mrs Purvis got quite crisp when Amabel Withers started on yet another of those gloomy anecdotes about local characters who have been drowned or eaten by sharks or caught by an octopus.’

  ‘I expect it’s the heat,’ said Valerie with a sigh. ‘We haven’t had any rain for days. A really good shower, and we shall all return to normal — tempers included. Don’t do that, Coppy! You’ll stain your arms!’

  Copper, who had leant far out over the window-ledge, drew back sharply. ‘Don’t do what? Heavens above! — what on earth is it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ apologized Valerie. ‘I should have warned you. It’s some red stuff they stain all the outside woodwork with. We’ve even got it all over our house on Ross. I believe it’s earth-oil, or something of the sort. It’s an appalling nuisance because it comes off on everything.’

  ‘It does indeed!’ commented Copper acidly, scrubbing her vividly coloured elbows with an inadequate handkerchief.

  ‘No one warned me either,’ said Valerie with a grin, ‘and I well remember an awful occasion when … Good grief! Look over there! Hi! — Hamish!’ She leant out of the window and yelled down to Captain Rattigan, the earnest and ginger-headed officer in command of the military detachment on Ross who was standing on the drive below: ‘Hamish! — there’s a hell of a storm coming up! You sailing people had better get going pretty quickly if you don’t want to get caught in it. Hurry!’

  Copper turned and saw, far to the south-east, a low band of tawny-coloured darkness that lay along the horizon. It had a hard black edge to it, as straight as though it had been drawn with a ruler, and above it an ugly, ochrous stain was spreading upwards into the evening sky.

  ‘But it’s miles away,’ she protested. ‘It could miss us altogether. Or fizzle out before it gets here.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Valerie shortly: ‘But I don’t like the look of it at all. Come on, we’d better go down.’ She turned and ran for the garden, where a discussion was already in progress as to who should sail home and who go by car.

  George Beamish and Amabel Withers, Ted Norton of the police and Surgeon-Lieutenant Dan Harcourt of H.M.S. Sapphire having elected to return by road, Hamish was busy collecting substitute yachtsmen, and Copper arrived in excellent time to see Mrs Stock take playful possession of Nick Tarrent’s arm and demand to be taken back with him in Dan Harcourt’s place: ‘And don’t try and put me off, Nick!’ she announced gaily, smiling up into his eyes and wagging a roguish and admonitory finger. ‘I’m not a bit afraid of storms and I just adore sailing! And you needn’t pretend that you are taking anyone else, because Dan has only this minute decided to drive back. Haven’t you, Dan?’

  ‘Dear Ruby!’ murmured Charles gently.

  Hamish’s voice made itself plaintively audible above the general babel: ‘Then that’s fixed, is it? Stock, and I are taking one boat, Ronnie and Rosamund and Ferrers another, and Tarrent and Ruby and Shilto will take the third. All right?’

  ‘Cautious chap, Nick,’ commented Charles: ‘Bang goes Ruby’s tête-à-tête!’

  Copper laughed and unaccountably felt her heart grow several degrees lighter. She would not have admitted even to herself quite how apprehensive she was becoming of Mrs Stock’s determined and mature attractions. The eight yachtsmen packed themselves into the lorry and departed, while the remainder of the party set about collecting rugs and picnic-baskets in a leisurely manner. They would take less time to return by road than those who were sailing back across the bay, and since the majority of them intended to catch the six-thirty ferry from Aberdeen to Ross they could allow themselves another half hour on Harriet.

  The conversation turned naturally to Home — for this was Christmas Eve and the acute nostalgia of the Exile for familiar scenes and the years that have been and will return no more, seized achingly on the little group under the frangipani trees. Memories of other Christmases. Of holly and mistletoe, mince pies and carol singers. Even Copper was conscious of a brief pang of homesickness, and for a fleeting moment Nick, Valerie and Charles, the green islands and the enchanted sea grew dim and unreal, and she was a child again, climbing on to a nursery chair to hang gay, glass balls on a Christmas tree …

  She shook herself as though to be rid of the memory, and having helped to stow the last of the rugs in the cars, strolled to the far edge of the lawn where the breeze which had strengthened at the approach of sunset blew her ash-blond hair into a tangled halo about her head. Below and to her left on the quiet sea off North Bay a tiny white sailing-boat was moving sluggishly towards Ross. It was too far out to be one belonging to the Mount Harriet party, and Copper imagined it must be Valerie’s father returning from a peaceful and private afternoon’s sailing. She watched it idly for a few moments, and then as her eyes strayed beyond it, stiffened suddenly to alarmed attention.

  They heard her calling from the far side of the pepper trees, but the breeze took the words away, blurring them to unintelligible sounds. ‘What do you suppose she wants?’ inquired Valerie: ‘Charles darling, do have a good look round and see that we haven’t left anything.’

  Copper reappeared suddenly, running across the lawn, and said breathlessly: ‘Come and look at this!’ She dragged Valerie at a run to the far side of the garden, the others following more slowly: ‘Look!’ said Copper, still agitated. They looked in silence; gazing in the direction of her pointing finger to where H.M.S. Sapphire, no longer at her moorings, steamed slowly out of the harbour, her bows set to the open sea. ‘They’ve gone!’ said Copper blankly.

  ‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Valerie, correctly translating the thought: ‘There hasn’t been nearly time for the dinghies to do more than get clear of Hopetown jetty. That is, if they’ve even started yet, which I doubt — what with Ruby insisting on helping to get the sail up!’

  Copper’s strained attitude relaxed and she laughed a little unsteadily as Charles said: ‘Let’s ask Dan,’ and turned about to hail Dan Harcourt, who was strolling towards them across the lawn. ‘Come and take a last, lingering look at your departing home, Doc. Were you by any chance aware that your mess-mates were proposing to light out and leave you marooned?’

  Dan Harcourt glanced along Valerie’s pointing finger and his jaw dropped. ‘Great Scott! Why — what on earth____?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Copper. ‘Don’t you know anything about it either?’

  ‘No. There must be something up: someone staging a riot in some insalubrious coastal spot, and the Navy ordered to show the flag for moral effect.’

  He grinned suddenly and largely: ‘I say, what a bit of luck for me getting left behind! Sickening for all the other poor types having to spend Christmas striking warlike attitudes. I bet they’re cursing! Nick will have missed it too: pretty lucky for both of____’ The sentence broke off in a little shiver that made his teeth chatter.

  Copper swung round sharply and he laughed and said: ‘Sorry. Goose walked over my grave. Hadn’t we better get going if we’re going to catch the ferry?’

  They piled into the three cars and left Mount Harriet behind them. And at no point during the drive down the steep hill road did one of them think to look back to where, behind them, that ominous belt of tawny darkness grew and broadened with uncanny swiftness, blotting out the brightness of the quiet evening sky.

  Barely had the last car passed through the gates and rounded the first bend of the jungle road when the new-found silence of the deserted house was again disturbed. This time by the bell in the small telephone box in the corner of the verandah by the dining-room door. The phone rang shrilly, its urgent metallic cry echoing eerily through the silent house.

  It rang for perhaps five minutes, and then ceased. And silence flowed back and closed over Mount Harriet like a quiet cloud.

  6

  �
�It’s getting very dark,’ said Copper. ‘Are we going to miss the ferry?’

  Valerie leant forward and peered at the dashboard clock. ‘No, we’re all right. We’ve got nearly half an hour yet and it shouldn’t take us more than twenty minutes from here.’

  ‘Um,’ said Copper dubiously. ‘I’ve never yet been on a picnic with you and Charles when we haven’t missed the ferry.’

  Charles said: ‘Pessimist!’ but applied his foot with more force to the accelerator and took the next bend at fifty.

  ‘Why is everything such a queer yellow colour?’ persisted Copper restlessly. ‘You ought to switch on the headlights, Charles. You’ll run off the road in a minute — it squiggles so.’

  ‘Look, who’s driving this car?’ demanded Charles. ‘You or me?’

  Copper apologized hastily and leant out to look back at the sky between the double wall of trees behind them. They heard her catch her breath in a harsh gasp, and Dan Harcourt, who was returning with them in place of John Shilto, leant out in turn and whistled expressively. ‘Great Caesar’s Ghost____! Here, step on it, Charles, or inside another five minutes we’re going to be overhauled by the father and mother of a storm!’

  Above and ahead of them the sky was still clear and serene, but behind them it had turned to a leaden pall of darkness against which the tangled mass of the jungle and the tall tops of coconut palms stood black and motionless, and not a leaf stirred. Even the ferns and orchids and the long, delicate festoons of creeper that swung down from every overhanging branch hung so still that they appeared to be rigid, and the rattling swiftness of the ancient car seemed the only sound in all the breathless, waiting islands.

  Charles tilted the driving-mirror so as to give himself a view of the lowering sky behind him, and said: ‘Crippen! We’re going to be lucky if we beat this! Hold on to your hats, and we’ll see if we can knock sixty out of this galloping bedstead.’

  He switched on the headlights as they bucketed out of a side-turning and swung left with a screech of tortured tyres into a long, straight stretch of road lined with shadowy coconut palms. But the storm was overhauling them with relentless swiftness, and by now more than half the sky was darkened by it and the far hills had been blotted out. ‘Hurry, Charles!’ implored Valerie.

  ‘It’s no good telling me to hurry,’ retorted Charles with something of a snap: ‘Address your admonitions to this blasted mousetrap! — she’s bursting her stays as it is, and even if we could by some miracle kick another five miles an hour out of her, she’d fall to pieces in the process!’

  ‘This would happen on Christmas Eve!’ mourned Valerie. ‘Charles, do you think the others will hold the ferry for us? We were the last to leave and we’ve got the worst car, so the Dobbies and George and Amabel and Co. are bound to have arrived by now.’

  Charles said: ‘You forget they’ve got to decant Hurridge and Ted Norton first. We’ll probably be at the jetty as soon as they are. Listen!… What’s that?’

  For some minutes past they had been vaguely aware of a curious humming sound that was barely audible above the noise of the car. But now, suddenly, it deepened until it sounded like the croon of wind through telegraph wires, and grew steadily in volume until the whole island seemed to vibrate to it as the fabric of a church will tremble to the low tones of an organ.

  Charles shouted: ‘Hold everything — here she comes!’ And even as he spoke, the storm was upon them.

  It hit the breathless immobility of the evening with the impact of a sixteen-inch shell. Shattering the brooding stillness into a thousand tortured fragments as the wind leapt upon the island; shaking it, savaging it, tearing it as though it were a terrier with a rat: bending the tall trunks of the coconut palms as though they had been saplings, and lashing them to and fro in a wild confusion.

  Trails of jungle creeper, ripped from their airy moorings, leaves, twigs and orchids, fragments of branches and startled insects whirled across the windscreen of the car and tangled themselves about the radiator as the car rocked and bucketed onwards, keeping to the crown of the road with difficulty. Valerie could see Charles’s lips forming wicked words on discovering that the windscreen-wiper was out of order, and she groped for some cotton waste and leant out, the wind whipping her hair across her eyes: The car lurched to a standstill as Charles applied the brake and dragged her back into her seat with a relentless hand. ‘—! —!’ yelled Charles; his words completely unintelligible against the roar of the wind. He snatched the cotton waste from her and performed the operation himself.

  Valerie was aware of Copper shouting something in her ear as the car bounded forward again: ‘Nick!’ shouted Copper, white-faced with terror: ‘The boats! They’ll be out in this!’

  Dan Harcourt, who had caught a word or two above the fiendish flapping and rattling of the aged car and the whining howl of the wind, yelled back reassuringly that they’d be all right and had probably got in about a quarter of an hour ago, and …

  Valerie turned sharply to look at him. In the reflected glow of the headlights his face betrayed nothing but confidence, but having sailed more than once with him during the past week she knew that Dan must be very well aware of the time it would take to sail from Hopetown to Ross with a fair wind. And there had been no breath of wind for half an hour before the storm … They can’t possibly be more than half-way by now, she thought with panic: and shrank back against her seat as the first swollen drops of rain splashed heavily against the windscreen.

  Copper had never imagined such rain. It came down like a river in full spate. A heavy, opaque curtain of water that descended on them out of the inky sky with the terrifying suggestion of a tidal wave, blotting out the road before them so that they appeared to be driving into a shifting, liquid wall. The aged car leaked profusely from a dozen points, and by the time they reached the outskirts of Aberdeen bazaar its four passengers presented the damp and bedraggled appearance of survivors from a shipwreck.

  There was a brief lull in the storm as they arrived at the jetty where they found four occupants of the other two carloads, the Reverend Dobbie and his wife, and Amabel and her George, grouped in an unhappy huddle in the iron-roofed shelter on the quay. The other two members of the party, Ted Norton and Deputy-Commissioner Hurridge, being resident on Aberdeen were mercifully exempt from braving the stormy strip of harbour water in an attempt to return to Ross, and though Amabel also lived on Aberdeen, she had been invited to several Christmas parties on Ross and would be putting up for a couple of nights with the Purvises.

  As the Ford drew up under cover of the shed, a bearded Sikh in a dripping mackintosh cape came forward and presented a damp envelope to Charles, who ran his eye down the single sheet of paper and said: ‘It’s from Amabel’s father. Mr Withers says we’d better not attempt to cross over to Ross unless there is a lull. He says he phoned to Harriet to try and stop the others sailing, but as it took ages to get through, he missed us, and that we’d better park ourselves on him and Mr Hurridge for the night.’

  ‘Oh no! Charles,’ protested Valerie. ‘We’re giving a party tonight. We must get back! The worst is over — it’s not blowing nearly so hard now. Do let’s go, please!’

  ‘We’ll put it to the vote,’ decided Charles, climbing reluctantly out of the driving-seat and joining the group in the shed: ‘Who’s for going, and who’s for staying?’

  After a few moments of animated discussion it was unanimously decided to risk the crossing and dispense with Mr Hurridge’s hospitality. ‘Come on then,’ urged Charles, ‘let’s make a dash for it. We can’t get much wetter than we are already!’ And plunging out of the shelter of the shed they fled along the open jetty to where the ferry heaved and shrieked at her moorings.

  It needed the combined threats, orders and pleadings of the eight would-be passengers to induce the native crew to attempt the trip, for the wind still howled through the narrow straits between Aberdeen and Ross, and the driven rain, lashing downwards at an acute angle, ricocheted off the heaving waters in a sh
eet of steel. But since the fury of the rain had temporarily beaten the sea into comparative submission, they cast off hastily: the clumsy craft backing reluctantly away from the jetty and rolling like an elderly and drunken duck.

  Copper never forgot the twenty minutes that followed. A dozen times it seemed that they must be swamped or driven back on the jagged teeth of the rocks off the jail point as the labouring ferry heeled over to the wind. ‘Hell!’ said Charles after the first five minutes. ‘We never ought to have done this. I’d no earthly right to let you come.’

  ‘I expect we’ll be swept out to sea,’ pronounced Amabel gloomily. ‘It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd!’ snapped Valerie. But it was a disturbing thought, and more than one of the passengers conjured up an unpleasantly vivid mental picture of the ferry being swept through the harbour mouth and out into the angry, desolate leagues of ocean beyond Ross; though neither George nor Copper were among their number — George being occupied with the welfare of his Amabel, and Copper with visions of Nick Tarrent being drowned in the bay, dashed upon the rocks of North Point, or possibly eaten by sharks.

  Amabel, struck by a melancholy association of ideas, did not improve matters by suddenly embarking at the top of her voice on a gruesome story of several private soldiers who, long ago, while trying to row from Aberdeen to Ross upon a stormy night were swept out to sea and finally thrown upon the beach of Havelock, a tiny island many miles down the coast. Their boat being smashed upon the rocks and starvation looming imminent, one of their number had attempted the desperate swim between Havelock and Ross to fetch help. But the distance between the two islands being anything from fifteen to twenty miles of shark-infested sea, it is not surprising that he was never seen again; or that having scoured the coasts, the rescue party that eventually landed upon Havelock should find the survivors dead of thirst and starvation, with the details of their tragedy scratched upon a sun-dried scrap of paper.