Stephanie Page 10

  They got up and moved to go downstairs for coffee. James waved away several offers of help, and proceeded from table to table until he got out to the landing and found the lift.

  Downstairs they met a few friends, but presently these drifted off and James Locke and Henry Gaveston were left to themselves to talk of the old days. Last year James had gone to France, Mrs Aldershot driving, and had been to some of the old places he had been active in during the war. Most of the people he knew were gone, some dying instantly during the war, more having been taken off in the natural course of time. A number remained, some who had sheltered him at the risk of their own lives and that of their families, others who had been active in the Maquis. When the principals were no longer there the children remembered. It had been a fruitful reunion.

  Only Henry probably knew the truth of James’s last drop into France. To the world he said he had landed badly and damaged both ankles in a ditch, which was true enough. But as he crawled out of the ditch he had been arrested by the waiting Gestapo, beaten insensible and thrown into a hut for the night preparatory to being taken away to one of their ‘interrogation’ centres. In the night his guard, seeing James unconscious on a trestle with blood dripping from his head, had thought it safe to doze off. Coming round just before dawn, James had strangled the guard with his left elbow and right thumb and crawled away from the camp leaving a trail of blood that he eventually staunched, and lying up all next day in a spinney within sight of the Gestapo huts. Then he had trekked for the next two days, mainly on hands and knees, through woods and fields until picked up and given food and shelter by some French villagers.

  Over the years this all somehow became too heroic for James, who told his friends the abbreviated story. Not that many bothered to ask. It was: ‘ How are the ankles, old man? … Bad luck. I suppose nothing can be done surgically? … Oh, it has been done … Too bad! Well, I suppose, yes, hmm, it’s good you are able to get about as much as you do in spite, isn’t it.’

  ‘A funny thing about war,’ Henry said, snipping the end off his cigar. ‘For professionals like me it’s different. We volunteer to fight – or to be able to fight if the necessity arises. We’re trained for that purpose. Our life is devoted to it. That’s why a regrettable incident like our little adventure in the Falklands – which would never have happened if our Foreign Office had not given the Argentines the wrong impression – when it had to be launched it was a brilliant operation, daring, highly risky and magnificently executed, a notable achievement. So I regret the casualties less than in the World Wars. Of course I regret every single drop of blood that had to be shed – but every drop was volunteer blood, spilt by professionals in the fulfilment of their professional duty. To me one of the ultimate obscenities of war is the conscript army – invented by the French, you know – in which decent little men with no instincts to fight are virtually dragged from their houses and compelled to murder each other. That is civilisation in its grave.’

  James sipped his port and stared across the room. ‘I agree with every word. But I was thinking while you spoke. Harrison, the greengrocer in our village, died last year – eighty-five or -six, I suppose. He was just old enough to be conscripted into the army in the First World War and he saw the last twelve months of it in France in the South Wales Borderers – had an absolutely hellish time; he came in for everything, trench warfare at its worst. After the war he returned to the village, aged twenty, settled into his father’s shop, married, came in for the shop, lived quietly – quietly hen-pecked, I suspect – until he died. Never went abroad again, never wanted to. Collected stamps and kept pigeons. I’d known him for years, so I went to see him a week or so before he died. When we’d talked for a few minutes the conversation got round to the war – his war. And d’you know what he said to me? He said: “ I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ ”

  Henry laughed. ‘Whatever generalisation you make, there’s always human nature to set you back. That’s why Peter is so often wrong. Seriously, James, we must do this more often, even when there’s no suitable excuse. I suppose it’s always a big effort for you, making the journey to London? Damn it, we only live fifty-odd miles apart. Will you come to lunch when Evelyn’s home?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘In the meantime I’ll keep a special eye on Stephanie over the next few weeks – until Finals, in fact. It’ll have to be a quiet eye, so that she doesn’t see it and resent it, but I think I can manage that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘She’s a very bright girl and very bright girls tend to live on their nerves. I’ll have a word with Bruce Masters, see what he says. And thank you for lunch.’

  ‘Food’s better here now,’ said James. ‘ Seems often to be the case in London clubs that as the food improves the conversation deteriorates. Afraid I’m not here often enough to judge the other side of the cake.’

  Henry Gaveston said: ‘ I wish talk were better in Oxford. People there stick too much to their own hobbyhorses.’

  They got up together. James collected his two sticks from the porter and Henry accompanied him to his car. There was no warden waiting or sticker on the screen. Henry had other business in London and made off with his erect but loose-jointed walk. In spite of his retirement, James knew he still had contacts with the army and the Ministry of Defence who used him as one of their experienced advisers. Certainly there was no one more experienced in combating terrorism than this shambling Bursar of St Martin’s.

  Driving a car, even an automatic, was not easy for James, but, the right ankle being the less painful of the two, he managed fairly well. Mary had been going to drive him up and do some shopping while he lunched, but she had gone down with a bad cold. It was his custom when he returned after driving himself to leave the car by the front door for her to garage later, at the rear of the house, but he decided to put it away at once. In any case his ankles were now so painful with the undue exercise that they were unlikely to get worse.

  He drove through the open garage doors and noticed that his wheelchair was where he had left it this morning. Unusual – but useful as it turned out. He eased himself from the car with a grunt, unshipped his sticks, sank gratefully into his chair and pressed the button.

  The first thing he saw when he came round to the front of the house was the police car. A Rover, he noticed, white with blue stripes. It probably denoted some particular division (traffic, was it?) but he wasn’t up in police matters, having, to his recollection, not spoken to an officer for the last five years.

  There was no one in this car, so presumably the occupants were admiring his garden or taking tea with Mary if she had recovered sufficiently to be in a hospitable mood.

  The concrete ramp enabled his chair to circumvent the steps, and in a moment he was in the hall. Mary had heard him, and it only needed her face to tell him there was ill news.

  ‘Something wrong?’ he asked, his chair gliding silently across the carpeted hall.

  ‘Mr Locke?’ A man in civilian clothes came out of the drawing room.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, I’m Inspector Summers. Good afternoon, sir. I have been here a little while, waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘We rang the Hanover, Mr James,’ said Mary, ‘but you had just left.’

  ‘Ah well, come in, Inspector. Though I see you are in. Has Mrs Aldershot been attending to you?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. After you, sir.’ In the drawing room was a blond young policeman holding his cap.

  Inspector Summers was six feet one and looked tired, as if with the early onset of middle age.

  James wheeled his chair round to face them. Deliberately he adopted a light tone.

  ‘My driving licence expired? I seem to remember –’

  ‘No, sir. I wish it were only that. We were rung up some little while ago by the Oxfordshire police, and it has become my disagreeable duty to call on you this afternoon –’

  ‘Something to do with my daughter?’

  Summers l
ooked up slowly. ‘Is there a reason why you should assume that, sir?’

  ‘A very good reason. She is the only relative I have living in Oxfordshire.’

  ‘Oh, I see –’

  ‘Has she met with an accident?’

  Summers coughed. ‘I’m very much afraid so, sir. She was found dead in bed this morning.’

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  The Boeing 737 from Brussels made a conventionally perfect landing at Heathrow and began to taxi towards the waiting terminal. Among its passengers was a smartly dressed but undernourished-looking Indian. He wore a white ribbed wool long-sleeved pullover, a green silk shirt with a pastel green patterned collar and an emerald green tie with a thin yellow stripe. Over it was a long-waisted grey jacket; and he had black cord trousers, white socks and black sandals. A young man with deep-set, liquid, sad eyes, a long neck, an aquiline nose, curly black hair growing close over his skull like healthy fur.

  It had been a nightmare two weeks for Nari Prasad, and this, this passing through the British customs, was to be the ultimate crisis of the nightmare towards which all the earlier preparation had been moving.

  Practice had not been so bad. After all, grapes, except for the pips, dissolved almost immediately. But the actual packages he had to swallow, though roughly only the size of grapes, were rock hard. Powdered heroin compressed with great force into a substance like solid cement, enclosed in the ends of two condoms, one within the other, and secured tightly with dental floss. He had gagged at the sight and the feel of them. Having been given a moderate meal, he had been dosed with kaolin and lomotil tablets and told to begin. Each container went down with a teaspoonful of strawberry jam. He had jibbed at ten, and at twenty-five he had vomited some up again. At forty he had refused adamantly to touch another one. Dr Arora looked significantly at the hammer which stood on a shelf by the door. It was the sort of hammer used to drive iron stakes into the ground.

  ‘Shall I ring for the two men?’ he asked. ‘It will take but a moment.’

  So eventually eighty had gone down. He felt terrible. As if he had swallowed a load of stones. His stomach was unbearably tight, and pain shot across from one side to the other. He knew any moment he must be sick. He waited only to get outside into the open air to void them into the street, retching and retching until the unbearable load was gone from him.

  But there was to be no outside for him. Once the cargo was aboard there was no release for him at all. Of course he had told Bonni a week ago that he was going to visit his cousins, the Mehtas, in Birmingham, England. She had bitterly whined that she was being deserted, and how did he find the fare and who had pulled strings to enable him to be granted a visa, and what was she to live on? He tried to pacify her by showing her that the visa was only for a month, by assuring her that he must then return, and by giving her a substantial subsidy to pay the rent and to keep herself while he was away. Her kohl-rimmed eyes grew round in surprise at the crumpled handful of hundred-rupee notes he gave her. It dampened down her complaints, and she saw by the look on his face that she dare not ask him where he had obtained the money.

  He did not dare tell her that Mr Srivastava had refused to give him leave and that when he returned to Bombay he would have to look for another job.

  But that lay in the future – somewhere in the unforeseeable future. It was as if that lay on the other side of a mountain range: he could only vaguely visualise it.

  To his considerable surprise Shyam came with him – as far as Brussels. At first he had thought that Shyam also might be carrying stuff like him, but not so. Nari had been warned to eat and drink nothing on the plane but to accept his tray and his liquid refreshments in the ordinary way. When the stewardess wasn’t looking Shyam helped himself to Nari’s share. The organisation had learned that when a person refused all food and drink on a long flight it might be reported by the cabin crew as a suspicious circumstance. Also, to fly to Brussels and to arrive in London on a short-haul flight generally made things easier at immigration.

  Though the pain went away after the first six hours of the flight Nari was unbearably uncomfortable. He felt his belly must be distended, and it was so tender he could hardly fasten his seat belt. Three times on the plane from Bombay he went to the lavatory to pass water, but so far the organisation had been as good as their word and he had no desire to pass anything else.

  In a way he was glad of Shyam’s company, though he no longer looked on him as a friend. He slept most of the way – that last cup of coffee must have been doped – but when he woke it had been a small relief from the pressures in his abdomen to see the stout familiar figure beside him, Shyam also dozing or watching the film or thumbing through a magazine.

  Changing at Brussels was of course the calculated risk. They touched down at 6.30 a.m. and didn’t leave for England until 11.30. Shyam saw him off.

  ‘Well, I wish you good luck, Nari Prasad, bhai. Not to worry. It will all go just as easy as landing here. No problem. No one will bother you. By this time tomorrow you will be a rich man, with four weeks’ holiday and money to spend! I will hardly know you when you return to Bombay with a new English suiting and money still left!’

  On the last lap he was allowed to eat a little of the light refreshment put before him. He felt hungry yet sickly, and when he put food in his mouth he nearly retched. He took another pill Shyam had given him, and that steadied his nerves.

  England looked just how he had expected it to look, the weather grey and sunless as they came in over the reservoirs and the huddled houses; and when they trooped out of the plane a light rain was falling. Yet how happy and excited would he have been had he been coming in for the first time on a legitimate visit!

  The passengers – only a quarter of what the big plane could have carried – were divided into three streams, British, members of the EEC, and others. Nari joined the others; but on this plane there were only twelve such, of whom a mere three were coloured. Did this not make him more conspicuous, not less? The reasoning of his masters did not make sense to him.

  Those ahead of him took a long time to get through, though how quickly the British were passed! He looked with envy at the dozen or more black faces in the British queue.

  It was lunchtime. This too was part of the organisation’s reasoning. His stomach rumbled. It was now empty, but he felt no hunger, only terror.

  His turn at last. The passport officer was a ruddy-faced young man with a close-cropped light ginger beard. He took the passport, opened it, stared at it for a while, turned to the visa.

  Then he said: ‘You are here on a visit?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Nari, and then thought he should not have been so respectful. ‘I am visiting my cousins in Edgbaston, Birmingham.’

  ‘Could you give me their name and address.’

  Nari gave it, then added: ‘I think I filled that in on the form on the plane.’

  ‘Is this your first visit to England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are a lawyer by profession?’

  ‘Yes. I work for Srivastavar, Seth and Co. of Mazagon Street, Bombay.’

  ‘Do you intend to visit other parts of England?’

  ‘I shall be hoping to. This will depend on how much time my cousins will be able to spare me.’

  ‘What do your cousins do?’

  ‘Mr Satish Mehta keeps a post office.’

  Another pause. ‘ You left India only yesterday, I see, but changed planes in Brussels. Why was that?’

  Nari looked into light brown eyes which were courteous but penetrating.

  ‘I am bringing my nephew, Shyam Lai Shastri, to join his mater and pater who live in Brussels. Shyam is thirteen and I was asked to help him.’

  Another pause. Then the passport was handed back. ‘Thank you, Mr Prasad.’

  Nari walked through with knees that would barely support him. He walked through! One obstacle over! The worst and highest peak yet to come.

  The delay had been considerable a
nd his bag was already circulating on the luggage conveyor belt. He picked it up, walked towards the green exit.

  Two or three groups went through unchecked, but a customs officer stopped him. ‘May I see your bag, sir?’

  A tall dark fellow of about forty-five with a peculiar accent Nari did not know. Perhaps it was Scottish. Perhaps Welsh. He flushed and offered the bag, then, remembering, felt in his pocket and produced the key. The officer waved him to unlock it. Nari did so. At the same time a spasm of intense pain passed through his abdomen, contorting his thin face as it came and went.

  The case came open. The customs officer riffled through the shirts, the underwear, the folded jacket and trousers, the shaving things, the toilet water, the lucky charms. When the clothes were provided for him – including the good things he was wearing – Nari had wondered at the high quality of everything. He did not know the street value of what he carried in his bowels.

  The suitcase clicked shut. Even that was not the cardboard thing so often seen.

  ‘And your other bag, sir, please.’

  He handed over his small black bag. The customs officer seemed to take longer over this, as if there were something suspicious in it. In the background another official had been hovering with a dog on a leash. While the second bag was being searched he strolled round with the dog and they passed close to Nari, the dog sniffing, and then went off to the end of the room. The place was now empty, except for the officers and one newcomer who looked as if he might be Vietnamese or Cambodian. Two officers converged on him and began to ask him questions. Another spasm of pain racked Nari.

  He was aware that the officer dealing with him had said something.

  ‘Pardon? I am not hearing what you say.’