Death to the Landlords

one and a half pages, and then been tidily abandoned for the night, folded into her writing-case with the address and salutation protruding. And on top of the case was another sheet torn from her writing-pad and folded in two. ‘There’s a note here, addressed to someone – that’s Tamil, isn’t it?’

Purushottam came flashing anxiously across the room, and took it up with a soft cry of hope and relief. ‘It’s to me!’ But even in the act of unfolding it he was shaken afresh by awful doubts, and looked again at his own name. He had never seen Priya’s writing until now, in the neat, precise English of her letter; but these fiercely formed characters in Tamil gave him no sense of handling something which had come to him from her.

His hands were shaking as he began to read; they were like stone when he ended, and all the light was gone from his face, which for one moment was stunned and dead, until the dreadful certainty came.

‘He’s taken her – taken Priya.’ He raised his eyes to their faces. ‘Because the krait was a failure… because I was out of reach when he came to see what had gone wrong. This time he meant to make sure. You want to know what he has to say to me?’

He read, translating slowly, freely and coldly, like a voice out of a computer:

‘ “It is you we want, not her. Now you shall come to us, and of your own will, if you want the girl to go free. You will come to the fisherman’s hut on the dunes to take her place, and come alone. If I do not see you coming – alone – by seven o’clock, I cut her throat.” ’

The sheet of notepaper with its words carved deep like stabs dropped from his hand, done with. He was back on the balcony before they had wrenched themselves out of their appalled daze and realised what he was about. They started after him, Larry catching at his arm.

‘The police – we must get them! They’ll have to —’

‘No police,’ said Purushottam, biting off the word and shutting upon it lips drawn pale and thin. ‘No police, no tricks, no anything. There isn’t time.’

‘But we’ve got to do something! They’ll turn out all the forces they’ve got – they’ll get her back —’

‘Dead!’ said Purushottam. ‘You know what time it is? Well past six.’

‘But the police have resources —’

‘No! I say no police. Not a word to anyone, no hunt, nothing. If you try to be clever, Priya will simply be murdered at once. Do you doubt it?’

They did not doubt it. ‘But the police are as capable as we are of moving discreetly, they have resources, they’ll arrange it so that —’

‘Fool!’ said Purushottam without heat, his feet clattering on the iron staircase down which Priya had been dragged in the night. ‘Have you forgotten how the hut lies? You could cover the whole sweep of the dunes from it. No one could approach without being seen long before. And Priya would die.’

Dominic said – it was the first thing he had found it needful to say, and it was no comfort at all, but it was the truth: ‘At best she may – you know that. If she can identify him now.’

‘Yes, I do know. But even such people as he may keep their word – I daren’t stop hoping. If we start a hunt, then she will certainly die. To give him a better chance to get away. And to kill me by another way.’

‘But a boat…’ said Dominic.

Halfway across the garden, Purushottam spared him one quick glance, from very far away, and the brief ghost of a smile. ‘Yes. If there was time, by water one might reach them. Even that would be a risk. But there’s no time. It would be past seven before you got hold of a boat.’

It was true, and they knew it; the chances of beating that deadline were practically nil, without a motor-boat, and a motor-boat, even if one were to be had, might by its sound alert the kidnapper and precipitate what they most wished to prevent. Nevertheless, Larry suddenly swerved away from the hapless procession heading for the dunes, and turned and ran like a hare, not for the hotel, but for the village. At least to try – to make some sort of attempt to defeat what outraged him. Purushottam checked, and looked after him in exasperated distress.

‘He’s crazy! He’ll only kill her!’

‘No,’ said Dominic with awful certainty. ‘He won’t have time.’

‘No – that’s true. He won’t have time.’ Purushottam sank his face between his palms for a moment, and shook his head from side to side helplessly. ‘I did this to her. She never should have known me!’

‘I don’t believe she’d say so,’ said Dominic, ‘even now.’

They were motionless there in the garden for only a moment. But even so Dominic heard, shrill and indignant on the air, wafting from one of the first-floor balconies: ‘Sushil Dastur! Sushil Dastur!’ And Gopal Krishna’s booming response, equally indignant but even more incredulous: ‘He is not there! No one has seen him! Where can he have got to? What is he thinking off?’ Mutually complaining, voices out of another world, they faded into the interior of the hotel.

But perhaps not another world, after all! Sushil Dastur, stooping at the doorway of a room where a krait had been introduced to do the dirty work for men…

Purushottam seemed not to have heard. He lifted a pale, set face out of his hands, and turned with determination towards the road, and the rising folds of sand.

‘Don’t go away! Come with me. As far as you can… You see I can’t do anything else. There isn’t any time left. I have to go. I have to do what he says, and hope he has a sort of honour. There’s nothing else I can do. One step wrong — one foot out of place – and she will be the first to die.’

‘I know,’ said Dominic. ‘I won’t leave you. Not until you give the word.’

Thirteen

Cape Comorin: Saturday Morning

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Priya crouched in heavy darkness against the seaward wall of the hut, her back against the matting, the