‘I’d come to the same conclusion,’ said Joe. ‘He’ll try to kill you, Dickie.’
Dickie gave a sharp laugh. ‘So I’m to be the tethered goat? I can see that and I agree to it. But, tell me, which of you fellows is going to stand by with a rifle when the tiger comes for me?’
Looking round at their stricken faces, he banged his fist on the table, rattling the coffee cups. ‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ he said. ‘It means, “The Gurkhas are here!” It’s what we shout when we go into battle!’
‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ repeated Naurung.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dickie looked at each in turn resentfully. “This is all quite unnecessary. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself and I can’t see any reason why any of you should risk your necks for me.’
Andrew took no notice of his protest but calmly went over the arrangements they had just made. ‘From eight until five to midnight, I will be on watch. From midnight to five to four, Joe, and from five to four until relieved, Naurung. Is that agreed and understood? Dickie, you can be as proud and independent as you like but remember who we are dealing with – an obsessed and revengeful killer. I am not a Pathan but I am well aware of melmastia – you’ll know what I mean. You are my guest, Dickie, and you will spend as many hours of the day as you can bear here and all hours of the night with someone by you on a rota. I don’t mean that someone should shadow you every moment but one of us should be within hail at all times. As Joe has pointed out, nothing should change in my domestic arrangements – any door or window that is normally open will stay open, no special orders will be given to the servants. Same for Joe. We will not discuss the matter again unless we’re absolutely sure we can’t be overheard. We each have a firearm, it should be kept ready for use at all times.’
Dickie shrugged in a gesture of surrender. ‘Oh, all right, Andrew,’ he said. ‘All right, you’ve said your piece.’
‘I haven’t said my piece,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve issued an order.’
And so the day had developed. It had been an ordinary day in Panikhat. Midge and Nancy rode out together, Dickie, mounted by the Bengal Greys, played a leisurely chukka or two of polo. It was hard to tell how Naurung had spent the day, though he seemed never to be in the way or out of it. Joe, acutely conscious of many requests from Uncle George for a situation report, sat himself down to collect his thoughts.
‘I’ll have to send this handwritten,’ he thought. ‘It’s too hot to have it typed here!’
And he began:
Dear Sir,
Pursuant to your instructions, I duly proceeded on the 10th inst. by train to Panikhat, accompanied by…’
The standard police phrases rolled from his pen. He forced himself to concentrate, he forced himself to write neatly, well aware that an ambiguous phrase could be replayed by a Bengali typist in florid and inappropriate prose. Towards the afternoon he decided that he could do no more; he suddenly needed the calm company of Kitty and walked across to her bungalow. As he walked up her drive he heard the cheerful voice of Midge.
Rounding the corner, he saw them sitting together over a tea table. Midge was doing the talking. Joe listened. What, he wondered, would she find to say? ‘I’m engaged to be married but my father is a multiple murderer. It’s probable that my affianced will be murdered during the course of the day.’ Something of that sort? But no. He overheard a highly coloured account from Midge of her adventures at her finishing school in Switzerland. She was even describing what she’d worn at an end-of-term dance, how much it had cost and confessing that she hadn’t yet paid for it.
Kitty listened with affection, obviously enjoying herself, prompting Midge by shrewd questions to further and indiscreet revelations.
He made himself known and joined them both on the verandah. After a while and to Joe’s acute embarrassment, Prentice rode up the drive. He was dirty and sweaty. He’d obviously been working.
‘Morning, Kitty. Morning, Sandilands. There you are, Midge. Looking for your young man. Any idea where he is?’
‘On the polo ground,’ said Joe, having just seen him there. ‘Knocking a ball about with the Greys. I’ll ride down with you.’
‘If you find him, Daddy, you’re to be nice to him,’ said Midge. ‘Not like you were last night!’
She turned to Kitty. ‘Daddy doesn’t quite approve of Dickie.’
‘I don’t disapprove of Dickie especially,’ said Prentice equably. ‘If I disapprove of anybody – I disapprove of you!’
It was affectionately said.
‘Who,’ asked Kitty, ‘could disapprove of Midge Prentice, I’d like to know?’
‘Daddy can,’ said Midge.
‘I wanted to see Templar,’ Prentice confided as they rode down together. ‘Midge is right. I was a bit brusque with him last night. I don’t approve of this engagement. I expect you’ve heard all about it? Minette’s far too young – and young for her age. But I came the heavy rather. Some excuse, of course, but I said more than I meant. No call for a row.’
In the face of such normality, it was difficult – it was almost impossible – to believe in the existence of the dark current. And the encounter between Dickie Templar and Prentice had – so far as such a thing could be in the circumstances – been entirely normal. Prentice, on the one hand, reserved but friendly, Dickie polite but determined.
Joe heard Prentice say, ‘We should talk. Now, you’re off the day after tomorrow – correct? Today’s a bit full already but there’s nothing wrong with tomorrow. Why don’t we make an appointment as it were? Come and lunch with me at the Club. There are rather a lot of women about the place here, what with Midge, and Nancy. And, indeed, the all-seeing Kitty. I feel a bit – scrutinised. Let’s have a moment or two when we’re not being scrutinised. Eh?’
The long afternoon wore on.
With no hope of sleep that night and mindful that he would have to be on duty at midnight, Joe lay down on his bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, his Browning automatic pistol with a full magazine in its holster, and linked his hands behind his head. He gazed at the ceiling. His thoughts chased him down dark corridors and he longed to put on a light, to read a book, or check for the tenth time that his gun was properly loaded and ready but, they had agreed, nothing unusual. So – no light at this hour. The police detective, if anyone were watching, was fast asleep as normal.
He went over in his mind the road he would have to follow in the dark to reach Nancy ’s bungalow to relieve Andrew’s watch. He had looked it over, even paced it carefully in the daylight when he was sure that Prentice was at work, exercising on the maidan a good mile away. He had borrowed a pair of gym shoes from Andrew and was confident that he could arrive unannounced by betraying noises.
But now, with his watch held up to the moonlight saying thirty minutes to go before he relieved Andrew, Joe was tense. He was not deceived by the softening conversation between Dickie and Prentice. In fact, the more he thought of it, the more contrived it seemed.
Prentice was sending a signal which read, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.’ He was more than ever convinced that Prentice would strike that night. He was a military man after all, like Joe, and Joe reasoned that any soldier with two nights to carry out a vital offensive would not leave it until the second night. If he was unsuccessful on the first occasion he would have another one available to him.
Twenty minutes to go. He calculated that it would take him seven minutes walking carefully along the shadowed route he had picked out to reach the bungalow and another minute to slip in through the back door and take his place on the verandah outside Dickie’s room. It was vital that he appear at exactly five minutes to midnight as he had arranged with Andrew. Any earlier or later and he might find himself taken for an intruder and have his head blown off. He swung silently out of bed and padded to the window to judge the strength of the moonlight. The moon and the stars combined to create an illusion of daylight, a clarity so intense Joe felt he could have read a book by their gleam. He slipped a concealing dark jacket over his white shirt and waited.