The album with its melancholy parade of singed and stained but evocative images was entrancing Joe. ‘May I?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ said Kitty. ‘Take your time.’
She waved a hand again to her bearer who interpreted her gesture without a word and presented a cigarette box at her elbow and a lighted match. At her invitation, Joe helped himself to a cigarette.
‘And this is Midge?’ he asked, pointing to a tiny child being supported on a pony by a smiling syce.
‘Yes, that’s Midge. Very dark, you see. Takes her colouring from her father.’
Joe was silent for a moment as he gazed at another portrait. A tall, dark young man dressed in the baggy white trousers, loose white shirt and tight waistcoat of a Pathan tribesman smiled in a confident and swaggering way at the camera.
‘Ah, I see you’ve found Prentice’s bearer.’
‘Chedi Khan?’
‘Yes. Now how do you know that? Am I going to have to respect your detective abilities after all? Chedi Khan. That’s the name. Haven’t heard it for years. But I would never forget the man! No one who saw him ever would. I can still remember the flutterings he made in the hen coop when he appeared on the station with Prentice for the first time! The women swooned! Discreetly, of course!’
‘He has a strong look of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik.’
‘We haven’t yet had the pleasure of moving pictures in Panikhat, so I am not able to comment. But Chedi Khan certainly cut a most romantic figure about the station. He was about six foot two and, as you see, handsome as the devil. He moved like a panther – stalked through the station looking neither to left nor right and he was subservient to no one but Prentice. His hair was black and he wore it long on his shoulders… sometimes he would twine a red rose through it. That was surprising enough but the most amazing thing about him was his eyes. They were blue. Yes, turquoise blue and he would ring them with kohl which made the effect even more devastating. Apparently some of these northern tribesmen do have light skins and blue eyes. They say the colouring goes right back to the invading armies of Alexander the Great. Extraordinary.’
‘But where did Prentice acquire such a servant? If servant is what he was…’
‘He certainly didn’t behave like one. He was a law unto himself. The story is that he was committed to Prentice’s care when he was a boy after some flare up on the frontier. Where Prentice went, Chedi Khan followed.’
‘And what were his relations with Prentice’s family? Is it known?’
‘I wouldn’t say known for certain. That was a very tightly knit household by Indian standards. He seemed to be devoted to Dolly and to Midge. Of course, there were wagging tongues to hint that in the face of Prentice’s indifference, Dolly found special comfort in her husband’s bearer. And perhaps she did… No, Commander, it would not be unknown,’ she finished in response to Joe’s enquiring glance. ‘And when the two bodies were discovered entwined together in the wreckage of the bed in Dolly’s room, well, you can imagine that the station biddies had all their suspicions confirmed!’
‘It puzzles me that anyone should have been still in their beds in those circumstances,’ said Joe. ‘According to the report there was a lot of noise – servants screaming, fire roaring… there were even shots. Loud enough to attract the attention of officers half a mile away in the mess…’
‘It was no puzzle to anyone who knew Dolly,’ said Kitty thoughtfully and she was silent for a moment while she decided how far she might confide in Joe. ‘Look here, Commander, you haven’t seen much of station life but perhaps enough to judge that for many women it’s a boring and lonely life. It’s rarely necessary for a memsahib to lift a finger for herself and when her morning task of supervising the servants is complete, there is little else to occupy her time and certainly not her mind. Dolly was bored. She drank. She’d been drinking a bit for months before the fire. It’s an old story. I would guess that when the dacoits set fire to the bungalow she was lying dead to the world already.’
‘But Chedi Khan?’
‘A Muslim so he certainly wasn’t under the influence of alcohol. Who knows? The bodies were trapped under a beam. Perhaps he’d been trying to wake her up… make her move… left it just too late. Chedi Khan was devoted to Prentice and what would he do but spend his life defending the memsahib? Well, that’s always been my version of the story anyway’ She looked at him with the trace of a challenge. ‘And I would be obliged if you would accept it as the authorised version, Commander. There are the living to consider and to me they are more important than the dead. And perhaps even more important than the truth.’
Joe nodded his acquiescence and understanding. He would leave it there – for the moment.
It occurred to him that a proper autopsy would have revealed the contents of Dolly’s stomach. Drunk? Drugged? The fire started to conceal evidence? He couldn’t recall a medical report on Dolly’s body and made a note to himself that he would need to enquire further. His mind automatically sped down a widening avenue of speculation.
‘Can you remember how Giles Prentice reacted when he heard what had happened?’
‘He was devastated. He didn’t utter or move for a week. He was in no fit state to care for Midge, of course, and she, poor dear, was out of her mind with panic and distress. My husband and I scooped her up and brought her over here and cared for her. She lived with us for nearly a year. Too disturbed to be sent away to school so I taught her her lessons myself. Bright little thing! But terribly highly strung and who shall wonder?’
Her face clouded at an unwelcome memory. ‘She was sitting at my feet one day while I was sewing, reading her way through my children’s old books and she came across an old Victorian volume – India Told to the Children I think it was called. Suddenly Midge pointed to a page, screamed and began to sob. It was a long time before we could calm her down. In fact, we had to fetch Giles to reason with her.’
‘What on earth had she seen?’
‘A depiction of the ritual of suttee. A beautiful young Indian lady, dressed in her finest clothes and her jewels, was lying on a blazing funeral pyre by the side of her husband’s dead body. Just the thing for a children’s book, I think you’ll agree!’
‘And Prentice took her back to live with him again?’
‘Eventually. She stayed with us until their new bungalow was built.’
‘At number 3, Curzon Street?’
‘That’s right. Next door to the ruins of the old bungalow. Very odd of Giles, I thought, to build so close to the old site – it must have brought back bad memories every day. But then he already owned the land. He was always an unpredictable fellow! Though in military ways, perfectly predictable. When he came back to his senses after the disaster the Pathan in him took over. He gathered up a troop of Greys – at the express request of the Collector because there was much public sympathy and outrage, as you can imagine – and he rode off. They came back after ten days. No one has ever seen troops so exhausted. Not one of them has ever spoken about that sortie.’
She shivered. ‘But I think the dacoits learned the meaning of the word “Pukhtunwali”.’
Chapter Nine
There was a silence filled only by the rhythmic creaking of the punkha. Kitty was lost in the horrors of the past.
While Joe gave her the time to order her thoughts and emotions, his own mind was busy absorbing the details and weighing the importance to his enquiry of the bloodstained events of that March twelve years before. He was forming no theories, making no judgements yet; he was simply taking in as much as he could of this series of alien and macabre events. This was often the way in cases that he had worked on. In the initial stages, a voracious acquisition of facts and impressions characterised his approach. He made no predictions, advanced no theories until he was certain that he had learned as much as there was to be learned about the crime. He knew the danger of constructing a neat explanation which could then be shot to ribbons by the late entry of a new piece of information.