Death to the Landlords

Three

Thekady: Sunday Evening

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They reacted after their kind, Lakshman caught the hysterical girl in his arms, turned her forcibly away from the horror and shook her until her broken cries gave place to blessedly subdued weeping. Priya, the nurse, kilted her sari to the knees, and was over the side as nimbly as a cat, standing on the broken stern seat of the other boat, with the water lapping her ankles. She leaned down to the lolling boatman, slid her arm under his shoulders, and turned up his head and face to what was left of the light. He was clear of the water, at least he had not drowned. But one arm was raw meat from the elbow, and he was bleeding fast into the debris of the boat.

‘He is not dead – yet…’

Dominic climbed over into the hull to help her, knee-deep, and straddling Bakhle’s body with one foot braced on either side.

‘If we can get him into our boat, I might be able to stop the bleeding.’

Dominic got his arms round the man’s thighs, and Larry came out of his daze with a shudder and a lurch, and leaned over to take from Priya the burden of the head and shoulders. It was astonishing what a weight this fragile-looking girl could lift, with one arm hooked expertly into the victim’s surviving arm, the other hand steadying his rolling head. The white turban was a trailing rag, dirty and stained, but she did not discard it; it would serve as a tourniquet. They got the limp burden over the side and stretched out on a seat. She looked down briefly at Bakhle’s body, and the green water lay motionless over the ruined face.

She looked up into Dominic’s eyes. All the delicate lines of her features had sharpened and paled; she was a different girl. ‘We can’t do anything for him – he’s dead.’ And she turned to the one who was not dead – yet. On her knees beside him, blood and slime fouling the skirts of her sari, she rolled up the wet turban into a tight ball, and wedged it under the injured man’s armpit; and the rags of his forearm smeared her breast as she did it, and she did not even notice. ‘Romesh, give me your turban – quickly!’

He stripped it off with trembling hands, the whites of his eyes shining in the dusk, and long curls of black hair fell about his ears. She took it without so much as looking at him and bound her pad into place, securing the upper arm tightly over it. She knew how to handle a weight greater than her own, and what she was doing she did with all the concentration and passion that was in her.

Crouched in the stern of the boat, as far as possible from the horror overside, Patti sat limp and shivering with cold, her fist jammed against her mouth, her eyes immense with shock. And after a long, mute moment she turned and leaned over the side, and was direly sick. Lakshman hovered, alert and anxious, one eye on her and one on the boatman’s limp body.

‘We ought to take him in, too,’ Dominic said staring down into the bilge, ‘if we can.’

‘Waste of time, nobody’s going to be able to do anything for him.’

‘We could take boat in tow,’ suggested Romesh, through chattering teeth.

‘We’d lose it as soon as we got it off the mud. Pure chance it happened close inshore. Once in deep water she’d go down like a stone.’

‘What did happen?’ Larry asked feverishly. ‘Could the engine have blown up? Is it possible?’

‘Give me a hand, we’ll try to get him aboard.’

But they were spared that, for as soon as Larry’s weight was added to Dominic’s the boat began to slip away from shore and settle deeper. It was clear that without proper tackle they might only dislodge it and send it off again into deeper water, where it would certainly sink. Hastily they secured the broken hull to the nearest tree, and clambered thankfully back aboard their own boat.

‘Get her going, Romesh, back to the hotel as fast as you can. We’ve got to get hold of a doctor, quickly.’

Romesh sat crouched over his motor, shivering but controlled, and set the boat moving at its best speed out of the bay and back towards the hotel landing-stage. On her knees beside the patient, Priya tightened her tourniquet, and watched the creeping streams of blood thin out and almost cease. But so much had been lost already. Dominic knew by her face that she had not much hope.

‘He is so cold! If only we had turned back earlier, we might have saved him. Romesh, is there anything in the boat, a rug, anything to cover him?’

There was a thin blanket folded on one of the seats. They tucked that over him, and waited, silently, for the boat to round the last green spur and thread the last belt of dead forest to the hard. Patti, stunned and mute, sat with a handkerchief pressed to her lips, and made not a sound. Nobody had any longer anything to say. Not until they touched, and Romesh jumped ashore and made the boat fast. Then Dominic ordered:

‘Run, go straight to the manager and tell him. Send for a doctor first, and send someone down with a stretcher or a door to carry him up. And blankets! After that, tell him to call the police.’

‘The police?’ said Larry, shaken. ’Yeah, I suppose they’ll have to come into it, even if it was an accident —’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ said Dominic briefly, and stooped to lift the unconscious man’s head and shoulders. ‘Unless I miss my guess, it was a bomb. And we heard it go off – remember?’

They remembered; and now they understood. A distant, muffled report, like a shot in a quarry, and a puff of luminous dust hanging in the sky, a tiny cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.

Exactly where the police came from they never discovered, but they were there within the hour. An inspector, his sergeant, and two uniformed men appeared in two cars; an ambulance was already there before them.

Most of the day-trippers had departed with the bus, but there were still a number of people around the hotel, and now no one could be allowed to leave until he had been interviewed and received police permission to proceed. The entire household was gathered withindoors under the supervision of a watchful and slightly officious Tamil constable, while the hotel’s boatmen and the police officers salvaged the remains of Mahendralal Bakhle and his launch. Patti was clearly in no state to be of any assistance to anyone, she sat silent and cold with shock, staring before her; and since they had been six people in the boat, and five could give just as clear an account without her, the inspector, of his own volition, sent the doctor to give her a sedative, and bespoke from the hotel a room where she could be rolled up in blankets and left to sleep. By that time it was clear that they would not get away from Thekady that night.

‘But it is terrible! ’ lamented Mrs Mani, dropping tears of alarm and indignation into her scented handkerchief. ‘It is a dreadful thing! Poor Mr Bakhle! Such a tragedy – such a distinguished man!’

‘A frightful accident!’ her husband echoed, and there was no pretence about his agitation. Had they not been in that very boat all the morning? Suppose it had happened then? ‘To think that only a few hours ago we were speaking with him! He showed us his garden… And what do we know? Why must we be kept here? Now we have to pay for our car an extra day, with the driver, and we had intended to be back in Madurai tonight…’

A frightful accident. That was what they were all thinking, no doubt, and that was bad enough.

The Bessancourts sat patiently among the palms, rocksteady, waiting to be interviewed when their turn came. Their programme was not so rigid that a day’s delay could upset it. They had nothing with which to reproach themselves, and nothing to fear; they would tell what they knew, which was merely their own movements during the day, and that would be that. And since they were not players in the drama, but merely caught up accidentally in its fringes, they did not expect the police to give them a high priority in their list, and were resigned to a long wait, but a dignified one. Madame Bessancourt, from some survival kit of her own, had produced a large, half-finished sweater, and was doggedly getting on with her knitting.

They were kept waiting more than another hour before Inspector Raju came into the main lounge, where the guests were assembled.

‘I should like first to see Mr Preisinger and Mr Felse and their party, who found the damaged boat. Also their boat-boy. If you will come this way.’

A small office had been placed at his disposal; with chairs enough to accommodate them all, the room was full, for one corner was already occupied by Sergeant Gokhale and his notebook. The sergeant was young, alert, and spruce to the point of being dandified, and apparently quite prepared to take down statements given in English. Like his superior officer, he was in plain clothes; evidently they were dealing with the detective branch. Romesh came in last, summoned from somewhere behind the scenes, his face wary and tired, and a little frightened.

Inspector Raju was tall and lean and greying, a man perhaps in his early fifties. He had a thin, lined face and intelligent eyes that missed nothing, from the stains on the sari Priya had as yet had no opportunity to change, to Romesh’s shrinking uneasiness; and his complexion was no darker than a sallow European tan at the end of an average summer.

‘Now – I had, of course, a brief verbal statement from Mr Felse on my arrival. It was laudably concise and accurate, everything I needed at that time. But now I want you all to think back and give me a full account of your day, in detail. There is time. And what one omits, another may remember. Perhaps Miss Madhavan could give her account first, then she may go to join her friend. There is no need for me to see Miss Galloway tonight; by morning she may be more herself. It was, I know, an ugly experience.’ His eyes flicked one appraising and appreciative glance at Priya, who had also suffered the same experience, but sat here composed and calm. ‘You do understand that you will have to pass the night here? I have asked that arrangements shall be made for you.’ Another thought struck him. ‘But perhaps you have not your luggage with you, since you were not expecting to stay?’

‘We have everything in the Land-Rover,’ said Larry. ‘We’d intended driving back to Madurai this evening, so we settled our account at the forestry bungalow.’

‘Good, then we shall not be putting you to any great discomfort, though I am sorry for the delay. Yes – very well, Miss Madhavan?’

Priya accounted for her day briefly and thoroughly, taking time for thought. When she had finished she said punctiliously: ‘I am trained, of course, to be able to deal with casualties. It is an acquired skill, not a virtue. I think Miss Galloway has really lived a very sheltered life, though I am sure she would not think so herself. Could I ask you, Inspector, if my patient – if he is still alive?’

If he hesitated, it was only momentarily. ‘So far, he is, and that is thanks to you. But I would not hold out too much hope for him. It was necessary to risk rushing him down to hospital, he needs surgery at once, and of course they are already giving him blood, but—Well, we shall see! Thank you, Miss Madhavan! You can go to your friend now.’

Priya went; and one by one the others added what they could to the picture of the day. Raju called on Dominic last of all.

‘And what was it that made you think this might not be an accident, Mr Felse?’

‘I didn’t see how it could be. I could imagine a minor blow-out from an engine, but nothing of this kind. This had wrecked the whole boat, every seam had started. And the violence of the injuries… it looked more like some kind of explosive gadget, deliberately planted. And that made me think of the sound we’d heard, and the cloud we’d seen. It would have been somewhere over those stretches of the lake.’

‘And the timing? You did not notice the exact time of the report?’

‘By pure chance, yes, I did. Not because of the explosion, but because we’d just decided we ought to start back, and Romesh was actually turning the boat then. I did a sort of mental check on how long it would take us to get back. It was then ten minutes to five.’

‘Thank you, that is useful. Very well, now you may all go. But you will not leave the hotel until given permission.’

But as they were filing out at the door he suddenly called: ‘Mr Felse!’ And when Dominic obediently turned back he added in a lower tone: ‘Come back for a moment, Mr Felse, and close the door. Sit down again.’ He sat back in his chair and sighed, and then smiled at Dominic very persuasively: ‘May I say that you have been most useful to us in this case? But for you I doubt if we should have been called in so quickly, and but for your party, and especially that admirable young woman, we should not have stood even the slim chance we stand now of ever getting a statement from the boat-boy Ghose. I don’t rate it high, but at least it exists. I think I owe you a little information in my turn. You may like to know that you were perfectly right. We have been going over the boat very carefully – that is why we delayed so long before seeing you. There was indeed an explosive device planted in it. As far as we can judge up to now, it was taped under the engine. From the position of the bodies it would appear that Mr Bakhle was at the wheel himself when the explosion occurred, and Ghose was behind him, in the stern. The firing mechanism was a small clock, and we have found the dial and parts of the bomb. It would seem that it was timed for five o’clock.’

‘Then it fired in advance of the time,’ said Dominic.

‘So it seems. A faulty device, but it was effective, all the same. You see the force of the timing. If the boat was taken out during the afternoon watering period, it was likely to be wrecked somewhere at the extreme of its range, well away from any inhabited place, and therefore, in all probability, from all help. It was an entirely professional job, Mr Felse – well put together, and no bigger than a medium-sized torch. And an important land-owner – and let me be frank, one much disliked locally – has been wiped out.’

‘It seems,’ said Dominic carefully, ‘that Mr Bakhle preferred to stay somewhat nearer home than usual this afternoon. He had guests this morning, and perhaps he was tired, and didn’t feel like going far. If the boat had really been at the limit of its range for the usual time allotted, it would have been where we were, out in open water. And it would have sunk totally, probably without trace.’

‘That is indeed the probability. Though with explosives there is always an element of chance. In our country, as in yours, Mr Felse, there are certain categories of people, distinct even among terrorists, whose favourite tools are the gun and the bomb. I am interested in your attitude to this affair, and I feel it only right to suggest to you that you and your friends, merely by virtue of being the first arrivals on the scene, and close and intelligent witnesses at that, may be at some risk yourselves. The evidence, as you have said, was most probably meant to disappear into deep water. But it did not, and you have become closely involved with it. I don’t say there was much for you to deduce – I do say that the Naxalites would have preferred not to run that risk.’

‘Naxalites?’ Dominic looked up at him sharply. ‘You really think they could be in it? Here?’

‘Here and anywhere. They may have originated in Bengal, they certainly have not stayed there, though they are less organised elsewhere. One of their weaknesses, indeed, is that the strings have almost always to be pulled from Bengal. But they extend everywhere, from Darjeeling to the Cape. “Death to the landlords!” is as valid a rallying-cry in the south as in the north.’

There was more than that; Dominic could tell by something withdrawn and watchful in the deep-set grey eyes. They had recovered part of the mechanism – the strings were almost always being pulled from Bengal – there could be ways of identifying where that bomb had been manufactured, perhaps even by whom.

‘Then the probability,’ he said slowly, ‘is that we have an agent from the north working here – not necessarily a Bengali, but sent from there. And you, I think, were already looking for him before this happened.’

The inspector smiled. ‘Mr Felse, you will do well not to enlist in our police, and not to learn any more.’

Dominic smiled, too. ‘I’m halfway there, as luck will have it. My father is a detective-inspector in England, I grew up in the tradition, even if I didn’t join the force. I grudge it that the lunatic Left, in any country, should discredit the legitimate Left by trying to turn killing into an approved weapon, and I hate it when their phoney grievances alienate sympathy from the genuine grievances that are there all the time, and need to be noticed and taken seriously. I don’t say even Bakhle was expendable – but surely Ajit Ghose wasn’t. One more life, a perfectly innocent one, is all in the day’s work, it seems.’

‘One or a hundred, I assure you. It’s all right – in this room we are quite private, I have seen to that, and Sergeant Gokhale here, though an impudent and insubordinate young man, is perfectly discreet.’ Sergeant Gokhale cocked one dark eye at his superior and smiled faintly, undisturbed at being discussed in this manner; they had evidently worked together amicably for some time. ‘But I should not theorise outside this room, not even among your friends. Here you may.’

‘I was thinking of the bomb,’ Dominic said. ‘If it was set to go off at five, then it was planted – or at least activated – since five this morning. I don’t know if the boat was used yesterday…’

‘It was, both morning and evening. And in the evening it was refuelled and serviced by the head boat-boy here, who is absolutely reliable – a local man who has worked here for many years. No, I think we can ignore the possibility that someone affixed that device at one visit, and then came back today to set it. We can concentrate on the time since five this morning…’

‘Then who had access? Judging by the time when we met Bakhle’s boat this morning, it was rather late in leaving…’

‘You are right, it did not leave until well after seven, and it came back about eleven. So from five until seven-twenty-five it was at the landing-stage, and again from eleven until three-fifteen. During the first period access would be very easy for anyone connected with the boat service or the hotel. Possibly even for outsiders. During the second there would be quite a number of people around, and though access would be easily possible, it would also be risky, since anyone unauthorised might very well be challenged if he approached the boat, and would in any case run the risk of being noticed, remembered and identified afterwards. One would choose the early morning in preference, I think. And then there were the morning guests, Mr and Mrs Mani and their servant. I shall be seeing them, of course. They are from Bengal…’ He let that tail away gently into silence, one eye on Dominic. He didn’t believe in it very seriously, but he had an open mind.

‘They were very flattered and excited about having an introduction to Mr Bakhle,’ Dominic said. ‘But I suppose that would be the line to take if they wanted the introduction and the invitation for a special purpose. Not very likely Naxalites, on the face of it, they have a lot to lose, and nothing to gain, which is usually the determining factor. Though not always, I suppose. But more important, all the letters of introduction in the world couldn’t have guaranteed them an invitation to share his boat.’

‘That is true. Also terrorist agents do not commonly proceed in threes, and for one to be such an agent without the risk of being suspected by the others might be difficult. Still, there could be vital secrets even between husband and wife, much more between master and servant. And as for possessions – have you noticed that the tenets of a creed are sometimes religiously observed by the rank-and-file adherent, but do not seem to be binding on the leaders of the cult? There are Naxalite bosses who are themselves greedy and tenacious landlords. Well – and you cannot think of anyone else who had ample opportunity, and was also from Bengal?’

‘Yes,’ said Dominic, after a long pause during which they looked each other measuringly in the eye, with a degree of wonder and curiosity. ‘Only it makes no sense. Yes, I didn’t miss the connection. Nobody had more opportunity than Ajit Ghose, nobody could hop in and out of that boat with as obvious a right as he could. For him it would have been easy, he was taking out that boat today, nobody would think of questioning him. And he comes from Bengal, and he’s been here only a short time. Romesh told us. And he told us more – that originally he was down as Bakhle’s boat-boy for today, and Ghose contrived to have the duties changed, so that the job went to him instead. I haven’t forgotten. But it would be crazy! He stood to blow himself up, too. If he did it, he did blow himself up.’

‘He may not have intended any such development. Terrorists have died by their own bombs before now.’

‘Not with that much room to manoeuvre. He could have fixed it to go off when he wasn’t aboard —’

‘How? You think a man like Bakhle would ever go aboard first and wait for his boatman? At the landing-stage, whatever pretext he might have made to absent himself, it would not have been a practical proposition. He would have been under suspicion immediately. No, if it was to happen in the boat, it had to be well out on the water, and therefore he had to be there. But don’t forget the circumstances. They were close to shore, and it would appear that Bakhle himself was at the wheel at the time, apparently quite a frequent habit of his, and perhaps not difficult to contrive more or less at will. Thus Ghose would be behind him, while Bakhle’s attention would be focused ahead. I have already confirmed that Ghose is a strong swimmer. May he not have intended to slip overboard shortly before the hour, and swim ashore? The boat was to founder. What would the boatman be then but a lucky survivor who happened to be blown overboard, and had no chance to help his passenger? If he wished to continue here and behave as an innocent victim, I think his chance of success would be pretty good. If he wished to disappear, having accomplished his immediate mission, that, too, would be easy. But…’

‘But,’ said Dominic flatly, ‘the timing mechanism was faulty, and the bomb went off ten minutes early.’

‘It is possible. I don’t say more. We shall be examining his belongings, and tracing his antecedents. As we shall in the case of everyone else concerned.’ He rose to indicate that the interview was over. ‘Meantime, remember only that your position, and that of your friends, just may be a slightly exposed one, if someone fears that you may have noticed too much and too accurately.’ And he added: ‘A last point – your really devoted Naxalite might well contemplate the sacrifice of his own life with equanimity, if it was a necessary risk in the cause of taking Bakhle’s. I don’t say he would surrender it gladly, or refrain from all possible precautions; but he would not let that consideration stop him. As usual, it is only among the top ranks of the hierarchy that total cynicism prevails. The rank-and-file can be truly dedicated.’

Dominic was halfway to the door when he halted and looked back. ‘But if you’re right, then the terrorist is already hors de combat - even if he’s still alive.’

‘So?’

‘So there seems no continuing threat to any of us.’

Inspector Raju said gently: ‘It is not yet certain that the solution I have outlined is the correct one. But even if it is… Mr Felse, Ajit Ghose, though literate, is almost without education. He may have planted the bomb – he certainly did not make it. Someone supplied him with it, and taught him all he needed to know to make it effective. Someone, somewhere, will be busy observing the results.’