‘Don’t be stupid, Sandilands!’ The dry drawl of Prentice’s voice stopped him short.

Helplessly, Joe tried to speak and gestured towards Midge.

‘Leave it! Leave it!’ said Prentice. ‘She’s asleep. There’s nothing you can do. In fact everyone in our little circle is asleep except for you and me. Old Andrew can sleep the sleep of senility, Nancy can sleep the sleep of surrendered innocence, and Templar, of course, can sleep the sleep – I imagine – of powerful sexual excitement and happy anticipation.’ He paused. ‘The only difference between him and Minette is that he will wake in the morning. But in the meantime, come with me.’

He gestured with his left hand. The right held the pistol pointed unwaveringly at Joe’s stomach. ‘Come with me, Sandilands,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it would be convenient if you raised your hands. Although you would be dead long before you had succeeded in drawing your cumbersome firearm. Just go ahead of me. We’ll go in here.’

He indicated the door of his office. ‘You’ll see a box of matches on the table. Part of my evening’s preparations, as you can probably imagine. Be kind enough to light the lamp and pray take a seat. We might as well be comfortable. Time passes so agreeably in your company.’

Painfully Joe found his voice. ‘Prentice!’ he said desperately and, hating himself for the clichés that poured from him, “There is no way in the world that you’ll get away with this! Proceed, with this and you’re a dead man! George Jardine has a report. He knows all that we’ve discovered and all that we’ve guessed. By your actions tonight you have put the keystone on our enquiry. It’s no part of my job to give you advice but I’ll give you some – run! Get out of it. Hide yourself. If you don’t there’s no escape for you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be hunted down. Others will pick up the trail.’

‘Escape?’ said Prentice. ‘Of course I escape. I’d be a poor schemer if I hadn’t made appropriate arrangements.’

‘And,’ said Joe, unable to keep the quaver out of his voice, ‘you would kill your daughter, the daughter of your wife?’

‘The circle has to be closed.’ Suddenly it seemed he was in the grip of a passionate intensity as he said, ‘I’ve worked for this moment for twelve years. Since the year 1910. Blunderer though you are, you probably don’t need to be told that.’

‘I know very little of your wife,’ said Joe, ‘though many have spoken of her to me. She sounds to have been a free and beautiful spirit. I don’t wonder – no one wonders – that you loved her so deeply. But, Prentice, can you imagine that the four women who’ve died and now your daughter to be added to the toll of death will comfort that bright spirit? You’ve made blood sacrifices enough to quench the thirst of Kali herself! Dolly would never have demanded such retribution!’

For a moment Prentice looked at him with genuine surprise. ‘My wife? You speak of my wife’s death?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘My wife! Oh, dear! Sandilands – for all the veneer of sophistication, for all the clever pontificating about police methods, for all the questions and answers, you remain at the last a plodding London bobby with about as much imagination in this situation as a cocker spaniel – or a Bulstrode! I ask myself what do you know about life? Life, that is, outside the boundaries of Wimbledon, outside Belgravia, outside the hunting counties of England? Nothing whatever!

‘Commander, I have to tell you – you are pathetic! I can’t easily believe you supposed my target was Dickie Templar. I can’t any more easily suppose that you imagined my grief was for Dolly!’

Chapter Twenty-Four

Abruptly Joe sat down in a chair and they gazed at each other across the desk in silence until Prentice resumed, ‘How often I’ve heard the phrase used – “The night of the tragedy”… “The death of your wife”. No one, English or Indian, has ever noticed or registered the fact if they did notice that Dolly did not die alone.’

‘Chedi Khan,’ Joe whispered.

‘Yes,’ said Prentice roughly, ‘Chedi Khan. Are you beginning to understand?’

‘What of him?’ said Joe. ‘He died, by all I hear, trying to save your wife and God bless him. What is this you’re trying to say?’

‘I’m not trying to say anything,’ said Prentice in sudden anger. ‘I am saying, if you have ears to hear, that Dolly was nothing. Nothing! At best she was a promiscuous little trollop and she deserved to die. She died as she had so often lived – drunk! I wouldn’t sacrifice a dog to save her and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep to avenge her. But…’ He said the names slowly as though reciting a litany, ‘ Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton, Somersham and Templar on that night – “the night of the tragedy”, if you care to call it that – where were they? Drunk and indifferent! They were a few minutes’ ride away. Their appearance, merely the sound of their arrival, would have scared off the dacoits before they’d had a chance to do much damage. If they’d moved when the alarm was given, had they any manhood, any honour – honour, that is, as we would understand it in the north – they would have spent their blood to save him. But they let him die! They didn’t, I suppose, even know that they’d let him die. But, as the years have lengthened and the grass has grown, each has paid. Each has been condemned to a lifetime of bereavement. And now Templar! The Ghurka hero! Now Templar pays his bill.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Joe. ‘You are mad. This is madness! Dementia!’

‘Mad? You may say mad, you may believe mad but – Chedi Khan was the love of my life. He was clear and he was clean. He was beautiful. He loved me and I loved him. I would have done anything for him. I could think of nothing that would more fulfil my life than to have been allowed to die for him. He filled me with joy, he filled me with hope, he filled me with promise for a life that would have opened before us, but, as it is, and through their neglect, he died with a drunken woman in his arms, alone and in anguish! How should I forgive those who took this away from me? He made my heart sing! It was many months before I could bring myself to believe that he was gone and the years have not softened my loss.’

Joe listened, aghast.

‘More Pathan than the Pathan.’ Again it was Kitty’s voice he heard. And here before him was a tribesman, ruthless, inflexible, convinced of the rightness of his conduct. His aquiline profile, his dark eyes hooded and watchful, made a nonsense of the cultured English accent.

‘And you learned to think like this – like a Pathan – in your infancy?’ said Joe. ‘As they say: “As the twig is bent, so will the tree grow.” Distorted. Forever distorted.’

‘Still the policeman! Minutes from death, Sandilands, and you’re still trying to understand.’ He smiled pityingly. ‘And again failing utterly!’

He paused, wondering, Joe feared, whether to shoot him dead out of boredom and have done with it or to succumb to the urge he had seen so often in killers, an urge to explain themselves. To make someone, even the arresting officer, aware of their compulsions. They work in solitude, they cannot confide in anyone, cannot justify their actions and, the moment they are discovered, they have an uncontrollable need to pour out their story. He gambled on this same need in Prentice.

‘No wonder people took you for an Indian,’ he said. ‘You’re very familiar to me – we’ve had several conversations – but even I would find it hard to distinguish you from a real native…’

Prentice gave a short bark of derision. ‘Clod!’ he spat out. ‘You don’t see it, do you? You’re as perceptive as that crass Superintendent Andrew keeps in office. The unseeing idiot interviewed me twice and each time he could see no further than a brown skin, a layer of saffron and ash, a caste mark and a turban. I am Indian! Half Indian to be precise. My father was English and my mother, my real mother, was Pathan, a Pahari from the mountains.’