The Necklace of Skulls: (Writing as Ivor Drummond) by Roger Longrigg

Author:Roger Longrigg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Necklace of Skulls
ISBN: 9780755135080
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

9

Ishur Ghose listened to Colly’s story with the closest attention. He asked him to repeat his description of the two older men and the young one. He wanted to hear all of the conversation about farming which Colly had understood. He was interested in the drugged cigarette. He said he did not believe that the nervous mannerism, of stroking the chin with the thumb while listening, could have been assumed: he himself, he said, would once have been capable of such sophistication of disguise and performance; Mr Tucker and the accomplished Count were doubtless capable of it; but surely not a man who tried to murder a low- caste mechanic for a few rupees.

“These guys were Thugs,” said Colly. “You don’t accept that, but I do. They wouldn’t worry how much money I had, not primarily. But why did they pick on me?”

“There are two possible explanations, Mr Tucker, both of which have undoubtedly occurred to your own keen brain. The first, which I am afraid is the more probable, is that in some inadvertent fashion you gave yourself away to these men. In a den of thieves that is a dangerous thing to do. A den of murderers, to speak more exactly, as this gurdwara gives every appearance of being. What slip you made, if you made one, is a question about which one can only conjecture. Did you by any chance use your left hand for eating? Europeans are very apt to do so. No? Then it was something else. You looked one hundred percent correct, that I can vouch for.”

“My little chums saw I was a phoney, guessed I might be a spy, and took the appropriate action?”

“It is hypothesis number one, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, it is, goddam it, but. . . Actually I thought I was pretty good in there. I kept my head down and my nose clean. If I committed some big social gaffe, wouldn’t that show on somebody’s face? Wouldn’t somebody laugh or look shocked or something?”

“That is true. A sharp point. A blunder on the large scale would have been remarked on, visibly and audibly. That I grant you. But you were evidently being watched by hypersensitive eyes, alert for any falsity, any tiny wrong note in your performance, if I can so express myself. But all this is only one hypothesis, and there is another possibility. You said the police told you that many persons have disappeared from the gurdwara, the hostel, in recent months?”

“Yes. I forgot the figure. Quite a few.”

“Then your recent acquaintances – Thugs as you believe, simple thieves as I must still believe – have been killing men in that place. A man all on his own is clearly the easiest man to kill. You were one such. You had no wife to scream and make a commotion, no friends to defend you. And you do not look, if you will forgive me the personal observation, a very powerful man. You are not built on the lines of our friend the Count.

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