‘No!’ said Joe abruptly. ‘It is important that you stay. What I have to say concerns you, your future and your past very closely.’
Dickie looked puzzled. Nancy and Andrew exchanged glances.
Joe produced his notebook. ‘Templar, I have a list here of names which I copied from the mess records last night before the Manoli binge. They refer to the night of the 17th of March twelve years ago. It was a Saturday and it was the night the Prentice bungalow burned down. There were five officers of Bateman’s Horse dining that night. Their names are: Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton, Somersham and Templar.’
Nancy sat up with a jerk and Andrew put down his coffee cup very carefully. Neither spoke.
‘Take your time to remember and tell us exactly what happened that night. As I say, it is vitally important.’
Dickie was silent, his expression grave. Finally he said, ‘Important for whom? For you?’
‘For me, yes, certainly, but mostly for you yourself.’
‘Well, this is all very mysterious. And, quite honestly, it’s not something I have any pleasure in thinking back on. But if you have to know I’d better tell you, I suppose… It’s Prentice, isn’t it? Has he been talking? Has he asked you to rake all this up again? Is he trying to use this as a wedge between me and Midge?’
Joe shook his head. ‘Prentice has said nothing to me. As far as I am aware he has never spoken of it to anyone. Just try and recall the events of that evening if you can.’
Dickie paused for a moment, focusing on the past.
‘There were five of us dining in the mess that night. Most of us had cried off going to some awful Panikhat Week event – a midnight picnic, I think.’ He shuddered. ‘Being eaten alive by mosquitoes while you ate cucumber sandwiches and drank tepid champagne wasn’t my idea of fun. All the same, I wish now I’d gone… There we all were in the mess, some of us pretty drunk – no, I have to say, somewhat paralytic. I was not. In fact I was fed up with the rest of them. I didn’t like the Greys officers and they didn’t like me. They’d adopted the terrible practice of not speaking to junior officers and not expecting junior officers to speak unless spoken to. A lot of regiments used to be like that and cavalry regiments especially. I got fed up with them. “Snobbish, conceited, ill-mannered louts,” I said to myself at the advanced age of eighteen! I went off to have a pee to get away from them and looking out of the window I saw, for God’s sake, that the bloody place was on fire. Was anyone taking any notice? Not as far as I could see. Drawing a deep breath, I went back and told them. While they were drinking themselves senseless, the cantonment had caught fire. What were they going to do about it?
‘Well, you can believe it or not but what they were intending to do about it was absolutely bugger all! Oh, sorry, Nancy! Ticked me off for mentioning it! Junior officers were not expected to rush in announcing a fire apparently. They were interested enough to walk on to the verandah and ascertain that the rumpus – by that time there were shots to be heard too – was coming from Prentice’s bungalow. That made them laugh. They all hated him, I think, for one reason or another, and they just stood there and watched the spectacle. One of them actually called for a brandy and stood sipping it while the bungalow went up. That was Simms-Warburton. He was really blotto… “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,” I remember he said. “Your house is on fire, your children are gone. Except that they aren’t – took his wife and daughter with him, I suppose. He usually does.”
‘ Carmichael was the senior officer present. And he’d drunk more than any of us. Could hardly move.’
‘Five glasses of port,’ said Joe.
‘Was it? Hmm… And you can add the claret he’d drunk earlier. He loathed Prentice and couldn’t see any reason for rushing to save his bungalow. “Stay where you are,” he said. “It’s not our job to go running around after a fire. Leave it to the Queen’s – they’re on duty. This is the army, you know. And to be more precise, the Indian army. Not the bloody Boy Scouts! So, stay where you are! I’ll make that an order if you like.”
‘And so we stayed where we were, for precious minutes – perhaps for as long as a quarter of an hour – and finally I could bear it no longer and Philip Forbes, the regimental doctor, backed me up and we went down there. The rest trailed down after us. I wouldn’t be surprised if, over all, we had wasted half an hour.’
Suddenly his tone changed and, haunted afresh by the memory, his face stiffened as he resumed, ‘You asked if I remembered. Of course. I shall never forget. And when we got there, the dacoits had got away and Dolly Prentice was dead. And Prentice’s bearer was dead, apparently going to the rescue, brave chap that he was. And it was only by the mercy of Providence and the brilliant improvisation of Midge’s ayah that she wasn’t killed too! Those buggers were high on hash. They’d have put anything white – man, woman or child – on the bonfire if they could. And…’
He stared vacantly around the company for a moment. ‘… it might so easily have been Midge. She was on the menu all right!’
There was a silence which Nancy broke. ‘But you were there. You saved her. That’s what’s important.’
Dickie looked gratefully up. ‘That may be,’ he said, ‘but perhaps I could have done more. I could have got them going earlier! I could have shouted at them! God knows, for a long time after it happened, I could think of nothing else. And now all that you’ve told me brings it back again.’
‘I must ask you, Dickie,’ said Joe, ‘if Prentice was aware of your – the group’s – negligence? Because negligence it would seem to have been.’
‘He knew. Oh yes, he knew. He went a bit barmy when he got back from Calcutta and they told him the news. He just sat about and wouldn’t speak to anybody. Cut himself off completely and wouldn’t be doing with words of sympathy from anyone. Then he pulled himself together and started making enquiries and we were all waiting for the wrath to descend on us. But it never did. He decided apparently to take it out on the people who were really responsible and set off on a punitive raid after the dacoits. He knew who they were – he’d been rousting them out of village after village for months. His information was always of the very best. This time he made a thorough job of it and cleared out the whole rats’ nest. But I could tell from the way he looked at us – he knew. Hard to pin down and it could just be my conscience enlarging on it, of course, but I thought I caught his eye on each of us at one time or another… Ever looked a cobra in the face, Commander, eye to eye?’
Joe shook his head.
‘I have. Chills you to the bone. But I can tell you this – I’d rather outface a cobra than Giles Prentice.’
Andrew voiced the thought they were each turning over. ‘It took some courage to appear last night and meet him again after all these years. Especially when you knew you were about to ask if he would kindly allow you to relieve him of his only daughter.’
‘Courage?’ said Dickie. ‘I don’t know about courage. Awkward, perhaps, but for me not more than that. After all, I’m not the beardless, unattached youth I was in those days. I’ve been on the frontier off and on for ten years. You might say I’m, to an extent, the same type as Prentice. And I knew what I wanted.’
Nancy looked from Dickie to Joe and back again. ‘There are things you should know, Dickie,’ she said. ‘Tell him, Joe. He has to be told.’
‘Do you know why I’m here in Panikhat, Dickie?’ Joe asked.
‘Of course. Nancy was telling me you’re on secondment from the Met and she shanghaied you over here to look into the murder of her friend Peggy… Peggy Somersham.’
‘I’m enquiring into the murders of four women and their names are Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton and Somersham…’