Purushottam’s sombre face did not change; the idea was not new to him. Nor did it seem to impress him very much, after the day they had spent here together, and the sights they still carried burned within their eyes, and could not stop seeing.

  ‘But,’ said Inspector Raju, “There are many landlords, some more obvious targets than our friend here. Here is a new bomb outrage, at the home of the land-owner who happens to be entertaining the witnesses closest to the Bakhle killing at Thekady, and that bomb outrage just happens to wipe out one of those witnesses, instead of the host. I am not very fond of coincidences. I always tend to look round behind them – almost to believe that they are not coincidences at all. Therefore I would like you to consider the possibility that an agent of the Naxalites may very well have moved here from Thekady to Malaikuppam, not because his next victim had already been marked down here, but because he was following you, the witnesses.’

  ‘But in that case,’ said Larry, galvanised into speculation almost against his will, ‘if he wanted to get rid of us, why not plant his bomb in the Land-Rover, and time it for when we were well away from here? It would be the safest method I can think of.’

  ‘Because, Mr Preisinger, for the past two nights Mr Narayanan’s watchman has been making your Land-Rover his base. He is a romantic, and to him a Land-Rover is an exotic wonder. You may be sure no one has had the opportunity of violating that sacred vehicle. Moreover, supposing there was a choice among witnesses – some, say, who knew virtually nothing, one who had some special knowledge – they would have preferred to aim, at least, at getting the vital one, and letting the others go. Many deaths are acceptable in a pinch, but need not be wastefully incurred where they are not necessary. And Miss Galloway had made use of the office yesterday evening. She may have been under observation then – even so closely that someone knew she had left her diary there. I do not say it is so. I say only that it is something to be considered, and I ask you to consider it.’

  ‘She wrote two letters,’ said Priya suddenly, raising her heavy dark eyes. ‘She had them sealed and stamped in her bag, ready to post. If she had any knowledge – if there was anything troubling her – may she not have put it into her letters home?’

  ‘We had already thought of the same possibility, Miss Madhavan. The bag is virtually undamaged. We have opened the letters. They are exactly what would be expected of a young girl’s letters home – quite straightforward accounts of her travels, only omitting, understandably, the ugly experience at Thekady. There is nothing there for us. Naturally they will be passed on to her family. But what made you think of that? Had she behaved as if she had some secret and dangerous knowledge? Her collapse at Thekady now almost suggests that she believed she knew something of perilous importance, and was frightened to confide it – frightened to a degree which cannot quite be accounted for by the shock of the discovery, which was common to you all. And under which, I must say, you yourself behaved with exemplary fortitude.’

  She hardly heard the compliment, though if she had it might have given her both pleasure and pain. She was peering into pure air before her, frowning anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know… She’d had such a sheltered life until she came to India, naturally she was very much upset by the manner of Mr Bakhle’s death. She had never known anything like that. I don’t know, it would be easy to misinterpret what was no more than the after-effects of shock. What can I say? I hardly knew her. Surely you must have looked through all her belongings. Was there nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. For of course you are right, we have looked.’

  ‘And the diary she left behind – it was very important to her, she ran at once to recover it – like the wind she ran.’

  ‘Ah, the diary!’ Inspector Raju drew a long breath. ‘What has become of that? Who will tell us? We have sifted through every scrap of paper that remains in that office, Miss Madhavan. But we have found no diary.’

  In the hours before dawn, when at last he fell asleep after long contention with wakeful images that would not be shaken off, Dominic dreamed of hearing a car’s engine climbing steadily up the. track from the main road, endlessly climbing and climbing and refusing to give up or be discouraged, though every yard gained was replaced by an equal distance unrolling ahead. A part of his mind was still awake enough to realise that this was one of those frequent frustration dreams that come between waking and sleeping, usually in the last hours before arising, and go on for an eternity that turns out to have been contained in the twinkling of an eye. The frustration is there because the minuscule particle of time involved compresses the eternity too strictly for any fulfilment ever to be achieved. The car would never complete the climb, never arrive anywhere. He knew that as he slid away into deeper sleep.

  But when he opened his eyes on the rose-radiance of dawn, and his ears to the chattering of the sparrows on the verandah, and the passing scream of parakeets come and gone like a flash of light, he felt in his bones and blood that something was changed since yesterday. He showered and dressed, and went out through the quiet house, where nothing stirred but the distant soft movements of barefoot servants, to the terrace, and straight across it to the top of the steps.

  Below him the Land-Rover still stood forlornly waiting; but beside it was parked, with almost pedantic neatness, an elderly black Morris. It seemed the car of his dream had completed the climb, after all, and arrived at its destination. He was not aware of ever having seen this car before. It had the discreetly old-fashioned, anonymous, average look of the hired car, and betrayed nothing whatsoever about the man or woman who had recently driven it.

  Dominic went looking for him. The terrace continued round the corner of the house and all along the north-east wall; and at an hour when everything that wakes turns its back on the chill of the night and looks eastward into the first rays of the sun, this jutting corner seemed to be the place where anyone already waking would naturally go. There was a stone seat just round the corner, draped with a hand-loomed rug. And there was a man sitting cross-legged on the seat, his hands cupped in his lap, his face upturned to the rising sun.

  His colour was pale bronze, and in the reddish, gilding rays of dawn, launched horizontally like lances along the mist-blue and dust-amber land, he might have been indeed a bronze, made not so far away in Tanjore in the high period of the art, three centuries and more ago, for all his clothing melted into the same range of glossy metallic shades. Not even the darkness and texture of hair broke the unity, for his head, with close-set ears and beautiful, subtle shaping of the skull beneath the skin, was shaven naked as his face. Lofty, jutting bronze brows arched above large, closed eyelids; the long lips were folded together peacefully in the faintest and purest of smiles, and the thin, straight nose inhaled so softly and tranquilly that not even the act of breathing seemed to inflect his charged stillness.

  But he was not asleep. As soon as Dominic’s advancing figure cast a shadow on his nearer shoulder, the bronze cups of his eyelids lifted from exceedingly bright, mild, knowing eyes, dark brown and deeply set; and when two more steps had projected the shadow across his body he dwindled magically but gracefully into a middle-sized elderly gentleman wearing a saffron robe with a frayed hem kilted comfortably round his loins, and a fawn-coloured trench coat draped over his shoulders. His naked feet – his sandals lay beside the bench – were slim, bony and whitened with dust. He looked way-worn, but not tired. And he looked up at Dominic with a bright, gratified smile, and joined his palms gently under his chin in greeting.

  ‘Namaste, my son!’

  ‘Namaste, my father! I’m glad you are here.’ His very presence resolved everything into a matter of serene understatements.

  ‘You are not surprised?’ remarked the Swami Premanathanand, with a distinct suggestion of disappointment.

  ‘Never surprised by you. But very glad of you.’

  ‘I flew from Delhi to Madurai – it is a tedious business, thought it is so quick. And from Madurai I have driven that hired car – a car quite unknown to me, I am used only to my own.’ His own was a forty-year-old Rolls, visually reduced by sheer hard labour to a flying scarecrow, but mechanically nursed like an only child. He was slightly surprised by his success with this modern degenerate, and a little proud. ‘I arrived nearly an hour ago, but I did not wish to disturb anyone. I am afraid this is a house not well-blessed at present with dreamless sleep.’

  ‘I dreamed I heard you coming,’ said Dominic.

  ‘That was not a dream, I was thinking of you. As I promised,’ he said, ‘I gave thought to the problem of what might best be done. And I thought that my responsibility in this matter is very great, and that I ought to be here with you.’

  He rose, and slipped his feet into his worn sandals, his long, prehensile toes gripping the leather thongs.

  ‘Shall we go into the house?’

  Eight

  Malaikuppam: Thursday

  « ^ »

  Purushottam, puffy-eyed from want of sleep but eased and heartened at the sight of his visitor, made his ceremonial greeting, and bent to touch in veneration the Swami’s hands and feet. Larry hovered, long and dubious and aggressively American where his scepticism was called into resistance, everything about him from his bristling crew-cut to his thick-soled travelling shoes making a point of its complete un-Indianness. Priya offered her namaskar shyly but with composure, and answered the grave smile with a pale, withdrawn smile of her own. Lakshman was respectful, dutiful and more obstinately the paid courier than at any time during the last few days, so that there should be no mistake as to where he stood, and how immovably he stood there.

  And the police, after an hour or so of cagey assessment, maintained with scrupulous politeness and reverence, opened their ranks and let the newcomer in. That was perhaps the greatest compliment paid to the Swami Premanathanand that day.

  It was Inspector Tilak who called the afternoon conference, and presided at the head of the table, with Inspector Raju tactfully on his right hand; though as officer in charge of the original case the direction of the discussion was smartly and gratefully handed over to the Keralese officer as soon as proceedings opened. The Swami took his place at the foot of the table; but Dominic, seated halfway between, found himself experiencing repeatedly the kind of optical illusion in which up becomes down, out becomes in, and the foot of a table is translated into its head. It did not disconcert him; he had seen it happen before where the Swami was concerned, even when, as now, that enigmatic person was doing his best to suppress the tendency. His face was attentive and respectful, his eyes mild, and his voice asked gently for guidance rather than making suggestions; and with his usual timeless but astute courtesy he listened carefully to everything everyone else had to say, as they went over once again the entire history of the case.

  ‘So as I understand it,’ he said diffidently, when he had absorbed everything, ‘we have here two deaths which are certainly closely connected, and there are some facts about them which need not be questioned. That they are the work of experienced terrorists, most probably Naxalites. That the bombs were made by the same hand, almost certainly in Bengal, and therefore that someone brought them south to the agent chosen to use them. Now the agent at Thekady is known – unhappily after the event and after his own inadvertent death. Whether he was to be used again for the same role is something we do not know; but since he was killed by his own act, clearly he cannot be responsible for what has happened here. There remains the supplier. I am not so naive as to suppose that other Natalite agents may not be available in the south; but they are unlikely to be experienced with such comparatively sophisticated weapons as these. And also it is wasteful to acquaint too many people with the plans for such an act. Even those who sympathise are safer knowing nothing. One person, the messenger who brought the bombs, was already in the secret, and is the most probable person to have pursued the intent to the end. Have I followed you correctly?8

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Inspector Raju.

  ‘And is it established that this person must have brought the bombs south only recently?’

  The two inspectors glanced at each other, and Inspector Raju said, after only a momentary hesitation: ‘In the first one some folded sheets of newspaper had been used as wadding inside the case. We have identified a Calcutta newspaper, dated not quite four weeks ago.’

  ‘So we are looking, in effect, for someone who has come from the north since that date. Someone who does not belong here. A stranger. It should not escape us, of course,’ he said mildly, ‘that there are several such in this room now, including myself. Naturally those of us who have known one another for some time will feel that that line is hardly worth pursuing, but we must not ignore it altogether. There were also, at Thekady, a number of such people, visitors to the wild life sanctuary. And those, I know, are being kept under observation since that time. But none of them, as far as we yet know, has been anywhere near Malaikuppam.’

  ‘As far as we know,’ agreed Inspector Raju drily. ‘But some were as close as forty to fifty miles on Tuesday night, and with cars it is not so difficult to move from one place to another. The Manis, for instance, decided after all to keep their hired car and driver rather than go by train over these last stages of their tour. They spent only one night at Rameshwaram. On Tuesday night they were at Virudhunagar, and last night at Tirunelveli. From either it would be no great journey here. Oh, they have reported their presence everywhere scrupulously. But there are still eight hours in the night. We shall check on everyone.’

  ‘We are fortunate in having an officer who knows the district as Inspector Tilak does,’ said the Swami warmly. He already knew from Purushottam’s cook and watchman that the inspector was a native, born and raised not twenty miles away. ‘So he will have everyone’s goodwill and assistance in his inquiries about any strangers recently seen in these parts.’ That hardly followed, Dominic thought, until he remembered that the stranger they were looking for was a Naxalite terrorist. In theory the extreme left-wing Marxist forces were on the side of the great suppressed majority; but in practice the members of that submerged class were the most likely of all to die in the ideological carnage, and nobody knew it better than they did, or resented it more bitterly.

  ‘May I continue? I am talking chiefly to clarify matters in my own mind. Then we have the present outrage, and this unknown person who is responsible for it. It seems that we are confronted with two possible theories: one, that X was following up a pre-arranged pattern of events in attempting the murder of Purushottam, one more representative of “the chief class enemy”: two, that he followed Miss Galloway here in order to wipe out what he had cause to believe might be a dangerous witness against him in the previous case. In short, in the first case the bomb was meant for Purushottam, in the second for the victim it actually claimed, Miss Galloway. Let us take the second case first.

  ‘If it was Miss Galloway he wanted, then he must have followed the Land-Rover here, otherwise there would have been no way of tracking it afterwards on a cold scent to this particular place. Then again, X must have observed Miss Galloway using the office for her typing, and supposed – perhaps because of the diary she left behind? – that she was likely to do so again, or why plant the bomb there? But if he was there watching her during the evening, why risk the bomb at all? Why not a knife on the spot, or his hands? The office is one of the remotest buildings, with windows away from the court. Entry and exit would not be difficult, a cry could be cut off quickly, there was darkness to cover his retreat. He would have been a fool to take a more devious but extremely haphazard way. This militates against the theory, but does not altogether invalidate it, for we all know that sometimes men under pressure are fools, and do take the most inept ways of achieving their ends. And perhaps this one, previously merely the messenger, was too afraid of being personally responsible, too wary of ever actually showing his face. Better an inefficient attempt from a safe distance than a possibly disastrous direct confrontation. So let us still bear the theory in mind as a possibility. And what is in its favour? The matter of the diary, which Miss Galloway discovered she had left behind, but which was not in her handbag when she was found, nor anywhere in the office. So perhaps, after all, someone was watching, someone who wanted that diary removed and destroyed. Someone who both planted the bomb that night, and stole the diary. Miss Madhavan, did you ever notice this diary? Can you tell us what it looked like?’

  ‘She had a little red leather address book and stamp-case,’ said Priya, ‘and a big red leather writing-case. The diary could have belonged to the same set.’

  ‘This we have found,’ said Inspector Tilak. ‘But no diary.’

  ‘I don’t actually recall seeing her writing up a regular entry in any book. But that needn’t mean anything. It would be only a matter of a few lines, perhaps not even filled in each day. After all, I was with her for such a short time, only about ten days.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the Swami maintained, ‘it remains a possibility that she had written down in it something of vital importance – perhaps something she did not even realise to be important at the time. If so, it can only have been something connected with the bomb outrage at Thekady. Now you were all together there, as we know. Even before the two parties joined, at the forestry bungalow, Miss Madhavan was with her, travelling with her, sharing a room with her. Now what can Miss Galloway have seen or realised that the rest of you did not?’

  They could think of no possible juncture at which Patti’s experience at Thekady had been different from theirs.

  ‘And yet,’ said Larry slowly, ‘when we found the boat she did come to pieces – to a rather surprising degree. I mean, it might be only a temperamental difference – I was knocked pretty useless myself at first. But she went down for the count, they had to give her a sedative and let her sleep through until next day.’