what was left of Mahendralal Bakhle, in the muddy shreds of his tussore suiting. His chest was pitted with shrapnel wounds, and his gold-rimmed glasses, disintegrated into lethal slivers of metal and glass, had obliterated his eyes more thoroughly than the reflected light of the sun had hidden them at noon, and penetrated beyond into his brain. No bubbles arose through the water that covered his mouth and nostrils. The arms that lolled on either side his body terminated in the mangled shreds of hands.
Suddenly Patti uttered the most frightful sound Dominic had ever heard, a long, rending, horrified scream that rasped her throat and scarred their ears. And having once begun, she screamed and screamed, and could not stop.
Three
« ^ »
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
‘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
‘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,
