Then he felt the small goatee beard on his chin.
Inside his mind the last island of resistance slid away into the dark unremembered past.
‘Dr Krishnamurti Singh,’ the inspector stated.
Among the suitcases in the doorway Judith Elliott watched the police cars drive away toward Hampstead village. Upstairs the two children romped about in the nursery.
‘How horrid! I’m glad the children didn’t see him arrested. He was struggling like an animal.’
Elliott paid off the taxi-driver and then closed the door. ‘Who was it, by the way? No one we know, I hope?’
Judith glanced around the hall, and noticed the telephone receiver on the floor. She bent down and replaced it. ‘The taxi-driver said it was some Harley Street psychiatrist. An Indian doctor. Apparently he strangled his wife in the bath. The strange thing is she was already dying of a brain tumour.’
Elliott grimaced. ‘Gruesome. Perhaps he was trying to save her pain.’
‘By strangling her fully conscious? A typical masculine notion, darling.’
Elliott laughed as they strolled into the lounge. ‘Well, my dear, did you have a good time? How was Molly?’
‘She was fine. We had a great time together. Missed you, of course. I felt a bit off-colour yesterday, got knocked over by a big wave and swallowed a lot of water.’ She hesitated, looking through the window at the park. ‘You know, it’s rather funny, but twenty minutes ago I tried to ring you from the station and got a Harley Street number by mistake. I spoke to an Indian. He sounded rather like a doctor.’
Elliott grinned. ‘Probably the same man.’
‘That’s what I thought. But he couldn’t have got from Harley Street to Hampstead so quickly, could he? The driver said the police have been looking for him here all afternoon.’
‘Maybe they’ve got the wrong man. Unless there are two Dr Singhs.’ Elliott snapped his fingers. ‘That’s odd, where did I get the name? Must have read about him in the papers.’
Judith nodded, coming over to him. ‘It was in this morning’s.’ She took off her hat and placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Indians are strange people. I don’t know why, but yesterday when I was getting over my wave I was thinking about an Indian girl I knew once. All I can remember is her name. Ramadya. I think she was drowned. She was very sweet and pretty.’
‘Like you.’ Elliott put his hands around her waist, but Judith pointed to the broken glass in the fireplace.
‘I say, I can see I’ve been away.’ With a laugh she put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed him, then drew away in alarm.
‘Darling, where did you get this peculiar suit? For heaven’s sake, look!’ She squeezed his jacket, and the water poured from her fingers as from a wet sponge. ‘You’re soaked through! Where on earth have you been all day?’
The Screen Game
Every afternoon during the summer at Ciraquito we play the screen game. After lunch today, when the arcades and caf terraces were empty and everyone was lying asleep indoors, three of us drove out in Raymond Mayo’s Lincoln along the road to Vermilion Sands.
The season had ended, and already the desert had begun to move in again for the summer, drifting against the yellowing shutters of the cigarette kiosks, surrounding the town with immense banks of luminous ash. Along the horizon the flat-topped mesas rose into the sky like the painted cones of a volcano jungle. The beach-houses had been empty for weeks, and abandoned sand-yachts stood in the centre of the lakes, embalmed in the opaque heat. Only the highway showed any signs of activity, the motion sculpture of concrete ribbon unfolding across the landscape.
Twenty miles from Ciraquito, where the highway forks to Red Beach and Vermilion Sands, we turned on to the remains of an old gravel track that ran away among the sand reefs. Only a year earlier this had been a well-kept private road, but the ornamental gateway lay collapsed to one side, and the guardhouse was a nesting place for scorpions and sand-rays.
Few people ever ventured far up the road. Continuous rock slides disturbed the area, and large sections of the surface had slipped away into the reefs. In addition a curious but unmistakable atmosphere of menace hung over the entire zone, marking it off from the remainder of the desert. The hanging galleries of the reefs were more convoluted and sinister, like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals. Massive towers of obsidian reared over the roadway like stone gallows, their cornices streaked with iron-red dust. The light seemed duller, unlike the rest of the desert, occasionally flaring into a sepulchral glow as if some subterranean fire-cloud had boiled to the surface of the rocks. The surrounding peaks and spires shut out the desert plain, and the only sounds were the echoes of the engine growling among the hills and the piercing cries of the sand-rays wheeling over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds.
For half a mile we followed the road as it wound like a petrified snake above the reefs, and our conversation became more sporadic and fell away entirely, resuming only when we began our descent through a shallow valley. A few abstract sculptures stood by the roadside. Once these were sonic, responding to the slipstream of a passing car with a series of warning vibratos, but now the Lincoln passed them unrecognized.
Abruptly, around a steep bend, the reefs and peaks vanished, and the wide expanse of an inland sand-lake lay before us, the great summer house of Lagoon West on its shore. Fragments of light haze hung over the dunes like untethered clouds. The tyres cut softly through the cerise sand, and soon we were overrunning what appeared to be the edge of an immense chessboard of black and white marble squares. More statues appeared, some buried to their heads, others toppled from their plinths by the drifting dunes.
Looking out at them this afternoon, I felt, not for the first time, that the whole landscape was compounded of illusion, the hulks of fabulous dreams drifting across it like derelict galleons. As we followed the road towards the lake, the huge wreck of Lagoon West passed us slowly on our left. Its terraces and balconies were deserted, and the once marble-white surface was streaked and lifeless. Staircases ended abruptly in midflight, and the floors hung like sagging marquees.
In the centre of the terrace the screens stood where we had left them the previous afternoon, their zodiacal emblems flashing like serpents. We walked across to them through the hot sunlight. For the next hour we played the screen game, pushing the screens along their intricate pathways, advancing and retreating across the smooth marble floor.
No one watched us, but once, fleetingly, I thought I saw a tall figure in a blue cape hidden in the shadows of a second-floor balcony.
‘Emerelda!’
On a sudden impulse I shouted to her, but almost without moving she had vanished among the hibiscus and bougainvillaea. As her name echoed away among the dunes I knew that we had made our last attempt to lure her from the balcony.
‘Paul.’ Twenty yards away, Raymond and Tony had reached the car. ‘Paul, we’re leaving.’
Turning my back to them, I looked up at the great bleached hulk of Lagoon West leaning into the sunlight. Somewhere, along the shore of the sand-lake, music was playing faintly, echoing among the exposed quartz veins. A few isolated chords at first, the fragments hung on the afternoon air, the sustained tremolos suspended above my head like the humming of invisible insects.
As the phrases coalesced, I remembered when we had first played the screen game at Lagoon West. I remembered the last tragic battle with the jewelled insects, and I remembered Emerelda Garland…
I first saw Emerelda Garland the previous summer, shortly after the film company arrived in Ciraquito and was invited by Charles Van Stratten to use the locations at Lagoon West. The company, Orpheus Productions, Inc. — known to the aficionados of the caf terraces such as Raymond Mayo and Tony Sapphire as the ‘ebb tide of the new wave’ — was one of those experimental units whose output is destined for a single rapturous showing at the Cannes Film Festival, and who rely for their financial backing on the generosity of the many millionaire dilettantes who apparently feel a compulsive need to cast themselves in the role of Lorenzo de Medici.