Khaki Mischief by Molly Whittington-Egan

Author:Molly Whittington-Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906000738
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing

Chapter Ten

The Red Gleam

Through the moonlit streets, with their huddled, sleeping figures, Clark pedalled off to the Agra Cantonment Railway Station, to set up his alibi. If you could call it that. Considering that he had had months in which to perfect it, upon investigation, as we shall see, it was so weak as to be positively incriminating.

Long before the climax, he should have abandoned his routine of arriving home at 10.30 or thereabouts, and established a new pattern of being a night-prowler. It was easy enough to prove that he was, literally, elsewhere, but not so easy to demonstrate a convincing reason for being away from home much later than usual. It is characteristic of the man that his planning and his research were shallow and faulty.

Ostensibly, he was bent upon a pre-arranged meeting with a friend who was passing through Agra on the midnight express—the Delhi mail train. In order to establish that purpose, he arrived at around 11.30, sat in the stationmaster’s room, and made sure that Assistant Stationmaster D. F. Menzes knew exactly why he was there.

After the imaginary meeting—for no such friend had been laid on—as the train steamed out of the station, Clark cycled home at an appropriate speed, in the full expectation of finding there a dead wife, a hysterical daughter, a rifled bungalow, and an absence of badmashes.

But he had reckoned without the dog that did bark in the night. The compound was swarming with badmashes, and, inside, Louisa and Maud lay asleep and alive. The timing was going wrong. Clark stood aghast. The gang were afraid of the bull-terrier and refused to go in unless he removed her.

Julie had heard them arrive, soft-footed, heard them scrabbling at doors and windows, whispering and arguing, and they would have to kill her first if they wanted to get in. Before they finished her, though, she would have notched her jaws into someone’s throat. Two of the men had taken off their shoes, for stealth, and bare flesh cringed.

Strangely, perhaps, the dog’s barking did not wake Louisa and Maud. Perhaps she always barked at night sounds, and they had learned to ignore her. Two upright, walking, not sleeping memsahibs might well have caused panic and flight—or a blood-bath.

It was afterwards supposed that Clark had stupidly forgotten the dog, but the issue is more complicated than that. Putting her outside before he left would have caused comment, especially since he had delivered a warning about thieves.

More likely, he had told Budhu that she would be closed in one room—probably his bedroom. There is no evidence that she was tied up. Budhu listened as she barked—they could not see her—but he could not make out which room she was in—Clark’s bedroom or the hall, which was the ante-room to Louisa’s bedroom. The dog seemed to be moving about, and he could not be sure that she was not loose. As he dithered, the other men had lost confidence.

Quickly, Clark slipped in through a side-door, dragged out the bitch by her collar, and shut her up in an outhouse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.