ideological struggles in India, would not worry the people who plant bombs to do their work. To them Miss Galloway, I’m afraid, merely represents the loss of a little explosive. They have more.’
Quietly and carefully Dominic said: ‘You’re saying, Inspector, that the attack was meant for Purushottam. Not for Patti.’
‘I am saying that quite clearly that is the inference you have all drawn from the occurrence. It is, indeed, the inference anyone would draw. So much so, that now I am only wondering, and perhaps asking you to consider the possibility, too, whether that is not what we are all meant to think. Here is another landlord, a vulnerable target, obviously the bomb was meant for him.’
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
‘But in that case,’ said Larry, galvanised into speculation almost against his will, ‘if he wanted to get rid 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
