Free Barbara Cleverly by Ragtime in Simla Page A

hardly believe that it was in the same day that he had driven up the Kalka road with Korsovsky. But the guest bungalow when he finally reached it was everything he could have asked of comfort and luxury. His clothes had been unpacked, his bed was ready, an eiderdown lay across it as a precaution against the cold Simla nights. There was even electric light. Joe fell into bed and into a restless night. Dreams and visions troubled him and more than once he woke with a shock believing himself to be hearing once more a double shot from behind encircling boulders. Visions of Alice Conyers-Sharpe perpetually intruded between him and sleep and, following him into his dreams, she bent over him, her hypnotic eyes fixed on his. ‘Find him!’ she said. ‘You’ve got to find him!’ Alice faded and he was climbing with Carter a sliding scree slope from which stones fell booming into an abyss below. ‘Find him!’ said Carter.
    Twice he got out of bed to stand by the window looking down on silent, moonlit Chota Simla to the south. A very distant dog and only a somewhat less distant rattle of a trotting horse broke the silence. From Sir George’s garden came the faint fragrance of jasmine and lily of the valley. He drained the carafe at his bedside, appreciating the chill water and, thankful for the absence of a mosquito net, he fell, finally exhausted, into sleep.
    It was a bad night but what Sir George’s staff thought suitable for breakfast went a long way to compensate for it. There was a plate of porridge, there was a rack of toast, four rashers of bacon and two fried eggs and, inevitably, a pot of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade together with an urn of coffee that would adequately have supplied the officers’ mess of a small regiment. Heartened by this and grateful for the clean clothes that had been laid out for him, Joe was preparing to set off on a voyage of exploration round Simla but his eye was caught by a note from Sir George.
    ‘If you look in your spare room, you will find your luggage and that of Feodor Korsovsky. My car has been released to me by the police and these items were with it. I thought you might like to go through his things. Carter has had a preliminary rootle around. He sends you the keys and invites you to do the same. I suppose, in due course, it will all have to be returned to K’s next of kin (whoever that may turn out to be) but in the meantime you and Carter may be able to glean a thing or two. Come and see me when convenient. I shall be out all morning and certainly for the first half of the afternoon. Dinner perhaps?’
    Joe was impressed. Among his mental list of things to do had been the question of the whereabouts of Korsovsky’s luggage but, predictably and characteristically, Sir George was one jump ahead of him. Joe looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. He wondered at what hour officialdom in Simla got to work.
    There were two large cases. Expensive luggage, Joe noticed, with a Paris label. The clothes were mostly French apart from the dinner jacket which was made in New York and the shirts which were made in London. The shoes were hand-stitched and barely worn. Amongst the toiletries was a bottle of bay rum from a barber in Duke Street, St James’s. An expensive set of lawn handkerchiefs came from a haberdasher in Milan; in a black metal box was a patent safety razor from New York with a packet of razor blades, each bearing the portrait of King C. Gillette, claiming to be the inventor. It was the luggage of a very much travelled and incessantly travelling man. But the collection was curiously impersonal and was answering no questions.
    Joe took out each item carefully and piled everything neatly on the floor. At the very bottom of the first trunk were one or two books and underneath that a layer of newspaper. Joe examined the books carefully, shaking them to dislodge any papers which might be hidden between the pages, but the well-worn copies of War and Peace in Russian, Les Trois Mousquetaires in French