With an unsteady hand he refilled his glass and Joe took him quickly through the other deaths. ‘Sheila Forbes?’
‘Nasty, dangerous place, that. Could happen to anybody.’
‘Alicia Simms-Warburton?’
‘Those bullock-skin rafts – damn dangerous, if you ask me.’
‘Peggy Somersham?’
‘Wouldn’t know. Never met her. Sorry, I don’t think I’m being much help.’
‘If you’re in the police it’s sometimes just as helpful to know where not to look as to know where to look,’ said Joe and it was not the first time he had said it.
‘Yes,’ said Carmichael, ‘yes, I suppose that’s true. Never thought of it like that. Know where not to look – eh?’
‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘Well, that’s it, I’d say. Thank you very much for your patience. You’ll think I’m an infernal nosy parker, I’m afraid.’
‘No, no,’ said Carmichael. ‘Not at all. Come and see me again next time you’re in Calcutta and choose not such a busy day, if you know what I mean. Excuse my coming down – I’ve got this, er, these, er, to put together before – tomorrow.’
Joe found himself back in the baking street. Very reluctant to walk all the way back up the Chowringhee, he hailed a passing rickshaw and, confident that he had not unmasked a subtle, devious and skilful multiple killer, he made his way back, calling at one or two shops on the way, to the Great Eastern.
Here, amidst the strangeness of Calcutta and following the depression of his interview with Carmichael, he was overjoyed to see Nancy presiding over a small tea table. He strode forward with outstretched hands and seized hers as she rose to greet him. A longing to kiss her was only overcome by the assumption that the room would be full of people she knew and he compromised by kissing her hand and then, after a minute hesitation, her other hand.
‘Ah, my dear Watson,’ he said, ‘I hope you’ve spent your afternoon more profitably than I!’
With the fluent rapidity that he envied, she ordered him some tea and in due course a fresh pot, a plate of sandwiches and a substantial slice of fruit cake appeared.
‘I don’t know whether I’ve achieved much,’ she said, taking out a notebook and setting it on the table, ‘but he’s quite a useful chap, Philip Forbes. After all, he was the MO from 1910 right through until the regiment came back from France. He did a post-mortem examination on Dolly Prentice and Prentice’s bearer and the same for Joan Carmichael. Same, indeed, for his own wife. That was a sad case, Sheila. She was really terrified of heights, you know…’
Joe put down his slice of cake and said sharply, ‘Say that again.’
‘She was really terrified of heights, you know…’ Nancy dutifully repeated and went on, ‘So I said, “Well, why did she go up that path if she was terrified of heights? It’s not the best place in the world for anyone with vertigo,” and he said something so pathetic. As a member of the IAMC, he and Sheila were never really part of the regiment. They were tolerated rather than welcomed and when she was invited to ride out with these people to a picnic, Sheila was flattered and delighted. It was the social breakthrough she’d been waiting for. Poor kid, she was only twenty-three! So although she didn’t fancy that track, she just gritted her teeth and went for it. Oh, snobbery! What crimes are committed in thy name, I sometimes wonder. He has no idea, you know, Forbes I mean, that Sheila may have been murdered. None at all. Just accepts it as a particularly grotesque joke on the part of Fate.’
She was silent for a moment then said hesitantly, ‘Joe, do you think there’s any chance we may have got this wrong? That it was no more than an appalling accident? Given that Sheila was a nervous horsewoman at the best of times, very anxious to do the right thing. Nervous and a bit scared. It communicates itself to the horse, you know.’
‘I’m sure her death was arranged,’ said Joe firmly. ‘And that it was planned for some time before. Someone who had access to the stables and who knew her horse, knew even that she was about to ride out with her new friends, deliberately caused it. I think this someone put a stone under the frog in her horse’s hoof at some time before they set out. You remember that she began to fall back almost at once and waved to the others to carry on without her and that she would catch them up. That delay was just enough to ensure that she was out of sight of the rest of the party at the time she was passing the precipice. I think that someone hiding in the rocks, perhaps the saddhu, leapt out and pushed her over. And her worst fears became a reality and her last thoughts were sheer panic.’
They sat together for a moment in silence. ‘This,’ said Joe, ‘is a pretty bloody sad investigation, you know. Everywhere we turn there’s sorrow and grief.’ And he recounted what Carmichael had told him about Joan.
‘Ah, yes, Joan,’ said Nancy. ‘I’ll tell you something else – Philip Forbes was treating her for cystitis.’
‘Cystitis?’ said Joe. ‘What’s cystitis?’
‘Can there be such ignorance? It’s a bladder complaint. Makes you want to pee all the time. It all hangs together, doesn’t it? Poor Joan, “squatting”, as Naurung would say, in the brushwood and out leaps her very worst nightmare…’
Nancy gasped and dropped her teaspoon in shock and as a waiter hurried to replace it she stared at Joe, white-faced.
‘Her nightmare?’ she said again softly.
‘Thought you’d get there in the end!’ said Joe.
Nancy glared at him. ‘I would guess I was precisely two minutes behind you and that’s not bad for an amateur! But, Joe, if what I’m thinking is what you’re thinking and we’re both thinking correctly, this is pretty bloody disgusting, isn’t it?’ She shuddered and looked at him searchingly, appealing to him to contradict her awful suspicions.
‘We said we were looking for a coincidence, something all these killings had in common, and then we would begin to be able to tease out a thread between them. And this is shaping up to be a pattern, wouldn’t you say? Let’s look at it backwards from here. Peggy: her husband said – volunteered the information – something like, “It was exactly the way she would not have wished to go… Peggy couldn’t stand the sight of blood.”’
‘Oh, my God!’ breathed Nancy. ‘That’s true. She used often to ask me how on earth I could have coped in the war with the blood and the wounds.’
‘And Joan – her husband tells me she had an intense fear of snakes. Now you’re saying that Sheila who fell to her death had an unreasoning fear of heights. Alicia – we can’t check with her husband but – wasn’t there something in her letter to her sister…?’
‘ “… I shall have to cross the river and you know how I feel about rivers!’” Nancy supplied. ‘I wondered about that when we read it! I bet she was afraid of drowning! Don’t you think? Can we check? Who would remember? Kitty probably.’
‘And that takes us back to the first – to Dolly. Death by fire? Lots of people have a fear of fire. It won’t be difficult to check on that. But we’re looking at three definite phobias out of a possible five.’
‘Joe, what sort of a man kills women in the way that holds most terror for them?’
‘It would be all too easy to say a disciple of le Marquis de Sade but no, actually, I don’t think that’s what we’ve got here. You see, there’s no sexual aspect to any of these killings, is there? Unless the doctor had other revelations?’
‘No. And I don’t think he was keeping any sordid details from the mem. I told him I’d been a nurse and he paid me the compliment of talking to me in medical terms and very openly. I was very sad to hear from him though, and this was not generally known at the time, that Dolly Prentice was pregnant when she died. Did you know that?’
‘Good Lord! No. There was no autopsy report with the papers I was given.’
‘Sounds as though someone suppressed it because Dr Forbes definitely did one. It must have been kept quiet out of respect for Prentice. He finds sympathy hard to take, Forbes said. All the same – one does feel sympathy and one begins to understand the ferocious revenge you say he took on the dacoits. Losing your wife and your unborn child in one fell swoop – it’s unimaginably distressing! But apart from that piece of information, nothing at all salacious. I’m sure he would have told me if anything – er – sexually driven had occurred.’