Among the suitcases in the doorway Judith Elliott watched the police cars drive away toward Hampstead village. Upstairs the two children romped about in the nursery.
‘How horrid! I’m glad the children didn’t see him arrested. He was struggling like an animal.’
Elliott paid off the taxi-driver and then closed the door. ‘Who was it, by the way? No one we know, I hope?’
Judith glanced around the hall, and noticed the telephone receiver on the floor. She bent down and replaced it. ‘The taxi-driver said it was some Harley Street psychiatrist. An Indian doctor. Apparently he strangled his wife in the bath. The strange thing is she was already dying of a brain tumour.’
Elliott grimaced. ‘Gruesome. Perhaps he was trying to save her pain.’
‘By strangling her fully conscious? A typical masculine notion, darling.’
Elliott laughed as they strolled into the lounge. ‘Well, my dear, did you have a good time? How was Molly?’
‘She was fine. We had a great time together. Missed you, of course. I felt a bit off-colour yesterday, got knocked over by a big wave and swallowed a lot of water.’ She hesitated, looking through the window at the park. ‘You know, it’s rather funny, but twenty minutes ago I tried to ring you from the station and got a Harley Street number by mistake. I spoke to an Indian. He sounded rather like a doctor.’
Elliott grinned. ‘Probably the same man.’
‘That’s what I thought. But he couldn’t have got from Harley Street to Hampstead so quickly, could he? The driver said the police have been looking for him here all afternoon.’
‘Maybe they’ve got the wrong man. Unless there are two Dr Singhs.’ Elliott snapped his fingers. ‘That’s odd, where did I get the name? Must have read about him in the papers.’
Judith nodded, coming over to him. ‘It was in this morning’s.’ She took off her hat and placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Indians are strange people. I don’t know why, but yesterday when I was getting over my wave I was thinking about an Indian girl I knew once. All I can remember is her name. Ramadya. I think she was drowned. She was very sweet and pretty.’
‘Like you.’ Elliott put his hands around her waist, but Judith pointed to the broken glass in the fireplace.
‘I say, I can see I’ve been away.’ With a laugh she put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed him, then drew away in alarm.
‘Darling, where did you get this peculiar suit? For heaven’s sake, look!’ She squeezed his jacket, and the water poured from her fingers as from a wet sponge. ‘You’re soaked through! Where on earth have you been all day?’
Every afternoon during the summer at Ciraquito we play the screen game. After lunch today, when the arcades and caf terraces were empty and everyone was lying asleep indoors, three of us drove out in Raymond Mayo’s Lincoln along the road to Vermilion Sands.
The season had ended, and already the desert had begun to move in again for the summer, drifting against the yellowing shutters of the cigarette kiosks, surrounding the town with immense banks of luminous ash. Along the horizon the flat-topped mesas rose into the sky like the painted cones of a volcano jungle. The beach-houses had been empty for weeks, and abandoned sand-yachts stood in the centre of the lakes, embalmed in the opaque heat. Only the highway showed any signs of activity, the motion sculpture of concrete ribbon unfolding across the landscape.
Twenty miles from Ciraquito, where the highway forks to Red Beach and Vermilion Sands, we turned on to the remains of an old gravel track that ran away among the sand reefs. Only a year earlier this had been a well-kept private road, but the ornamental gateway lay collapsed to one side, and the guardhouse was a nesting place for scorpions and sand-rays.
Few people ever ventured far up the road. Continuous rock slides disturbed the area, and large sections of the surface had slipped away into the reefs. In addition a curious but unmistakable atmosphere of menace hung over the entire zone, marking it off from the remainder of the desert. The hanging galleries of the reefs were more convoluted and sinister, like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals. Massive towers of obsidian reared over the roadway like stone gallows, their cornices streaked with iron-red dust. The light seemed duller, unlike the rest of the desert, occasionally flaring into a sepulchral glow as if some subterranean fire-cloud had boiled to the surface of the rocks. The surrounding peaks and spires shut out the desert plain, and the only sounds were the echoes of the engine growling among the hills and the piercing cries of the sand-rays wheeling over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds.
