Now he knew why Jason Colter had sent him here. The man surely had read those anguished letters, in spite of his wife assuming he had not. And it had taken him three years to get his business affairs to the point where he could take maximum advantage of his suspicions — suspicions that were uncannily correct.
On their way back down to the river both were silent. They stood a while on the dock watching two elderly men fishing. Small clusters of insects danced above the water in the rays of sunlight shafting through the trees. After a while they sat on pilings a little distance from the fishermen. Pine filled his pipe, holding the match a time before addressing it to the tobacco, his attention diverted by a strikingly attractive girl who had come down from the kampong and walked out on the dock to talk to one of the fishermen.
She was dark and lissome, and as she leaned over to talk to the old man something on a chain around her neck swung out from between her breasts. It flashed in the sunlight.
“That is Kusu,” said Sembawa.
“She’s beautiful,” murmured Pine, firing another match with his thumbnail. When the girl walked past them, she smiled shyly at Kiri. Although she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, the full-bodied grace of womanhood was in her stride.
They watched until she disappeared into one of the huts in the kampong. He started to ask Sembawa a question, changed his mind, then turned his attention to the pipe, which he relighted.
They left Benskoten Three just before noon on the following day and returned to Singapore.
It was several days before Pine could find passage to Holland. Singapore, with all its attractions, had begun to pall, and he missed London.
He had no plan for handling his meeting with Marie Colter. During the long sea trip he reread her letters with a growing feeling of intrusion. Referring to his notes did not improve his mood. When he began to dislike himself thoroughly, he put the matter out of his mind.
The brief letter he sent her the morning following his arrival in Rotterdam was carried by a messenger, who brought back an affirmative reply.
On the following morning Pine rented a bicycle and pedaled the six miles from Rotterdam to a pleasant brick home on the outskirts of Schiedam on the road to Vlaardingen. It was sunny and warm, and he enjoyed the exercise.
A maid answered his summons at the door. The bell control intrigued Pine with its brass chain and ring that hung down from a brass tube through the door jamb and activated a chime within. He regretted that the plump young woman in the pink apron chose to lead him around rather than through the house, thus depriving him of an opportunity to see the interior mechanics of the device.
Marie Colter was in a back arbor arranging flowers. She came out to meet him, her hand extended.
“Forgive me for meeting you here. Katje should have taken you into the house and called me.”
“No, no. It’s too lovely a day to be inside.” Pine returned the smile that lighted the woman’s face. The white of her even teeth against her tanned face, her blonde hair slightly askew and gently riffled by a breeze, moved Pine in a way he was not prepared for — in spite of having seen her picture.
“Shall we sit here?” She motioned toward a small bench beneath the arbor.
Pine sat. He had had weeks to prepare for this moment but now that it was upon him he felt like a tongue-tied schoolboy. He studied her face intently, in a manner unconsciously developed over eleven years of investigative work. “I don’t know why you carry matches for that pipe,” his friend Fletcher of Scotland Yard had once said to him. “You could ignite it with a burning glance.”
Marie Colter’s hazel eyes met his without flinching. In them he saw a pain that abided.
She helped him. “I know why you’re here,” she said.
“You do?” He waited. Then: “Of course, your sister-in-law. Do you mind telling me what she wrote to you?”
“She only said you were coming because Jason wanted you to ask me something about my husband’s death. I have told everything.” She bit her lip. “I told him in a letter that went with the report sent to him by the Benskoten Rubber Company. But what now, after nearly three years? Helen seemed nervous in her letter.”
Pine thrust his hands into his pockets searching for the familiar reassurance of his pipe. He had forgotten it. It was on the bedside table in the hotel in Rotterdam.
“I am frightened too.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Do you know I have been to Sumatra, to Benskoten Three?”
She tried to speak but could not get the words loose from the roof of her mouth. She shook her head no. “I feel that you know much.” She pressed her hands into her lap to keep them from trembling.
“I know much, but not all. I can guess at some. I’m here to try to learn what is hidden, not to judge you. I haven’t decided what to tell Jason. Before I left London I spent nearly three days learning things about him that would set his sainted mother spinning in her grave — if that’s where she is and if sainted is the word.”
“Do you think I murdered my husband?”
“I think there are things that might indicate you did — motivation, opportunity, perhaps even a witness.”
“I did kill him, but I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Kevin was so hard on those poor people. I could have stood nearly anything except the sadistic way he used the plantation workers.”
She clasped and unclasped her green-stained fingers. “We had a terrible argument one evening about my going into the kampong where I tried to help care for the sick and aid the women giving birth — that sort of thing. He had been drinking, as he always did, only this time he beat me. He was a big man and it’s a wonder he didn’t kill me. He left the cottage to meet a girl, he told me. I had begun to have horrifying nightmares, and that night, around eleven, I awoke screaming.
“I remembered the blowpipe and darts given to me by a Batak father whose fever-stricken son I had cared for and given medicine to. He had taught me to use the pipe, just as an amusement. I had become quite adept. I decided to go down to the empty cottage where Kevin met his women. I got the blowgun and some darts from a storage room off the kitchen.”
“The darts, Mrs. Colter. Tell me about the darts.”
“They had no poison on them — I swear they were harmless. The Batak man told me there was no danger without the poison. I crept up to the cottage. There was a lamp burning inside with enough light shining on the porch for me to see. He — there was a girl there, Kusu, a very young girl I knew from the kampong. Mr. Pine, how can I tell you? She was not more than thirteen, a child. I don’t know why he didn’t take her inside, off the porch. He was in the chair. His back was toward me. I only wanted to frighten him, to make him realize that if he continued in his abuse of all of us his life was in danger.”
She held out her forefinger to show how she had enlarged a small hole in the screen and inserted the blowgun. “I don’t see how I could have missed, but I blew a second dart at him because I was sure the first missed. Then I ran.”
The two of them sat for a while, Pine listening to the birds in the trees at the back of the garden, Marie Colter hunched up and pale beneath her tan.
“I think that’s the one thing I miss most when I’m at sea,” Pine said, “the sound of birdsong. I didn’t realize it until just now.”
“I only wanted to frighten him,” she whispered.
“The darts and pipe — do you still have them?”
“No. I brought them home as a kind of souvenir, but they haunted me so that I burned them. But before I did I had a chemist in Rotterdam check the darts for poison. He said there wasn’t a trace. I think someone may have exchanged poisoned darts for the harmless ones I had.”