Ellis Peters - George Felse 09 - Mourning Raga by Ellis Peters Page B

for a moment if he had a garden up there, or at least small decorative trees in tubs, like the one beside the front door below. All the whites of the white walls were a shadowy, lambent grey, for as yet there were no colours, only cardboard forms, not solids but merely planes. She came to the gate of filigree iron, and for a moment wondered what she would do if it turned out to be locked or chained; but the latch gave to her hand soundlessly. At the end of the garden wall, drawn aside from the roadway, a small van sat parked in the worn, straw-pale grass. Did that mean that someone had come home? Or was it merely the property of the man next door, the plump lady’s husband, who was probably a travelling salesman, or a veterinary surgeon, or something else modestly professional with need of transport?
    She let herself into the compound. The house was dark and quiet, and Kishan Singh, with no need to rise early, was surely still fast asleep. But in the distant corner of the earth yard a small gleam of light shone, and the now familiar scent of dust and humanity and incense, funereal, vital and holy, stung her nostrils as she tiptoed across the front garden.
    In front of his corner kennel, under his lean-to roof, Arjun Baba sat just as she had seen him three days ago, huddled in his brown blanket against the night’s cold, peering down sightlessly into the minute flame of his brazier. A glossy red reflection picked out the jut of cheek-bones and brow from the tangle of grey hair and beard that hid his face. When he heard her step he raised his head, but did not turn towards her. She had a feeling that three days had been lost, and all that had passed in them was a fantasy, not a reality; or perhaps that those three days had been demanded of her as a probation for what was still to come. Perhaps he had not even expected her. Yet she was here.
    She crossed the few yards of bare, beaten earth with the soft, gliding walk of a woman in a sari, and sank to her heels, squatting to face him across the brazier.
    ‘Namaste! Uncle, I am Anjli Kumar. You called me, I have come.’
    The old man shifted slowly in his blanket, and linked his hands beneath his chin in greeting. A creaking voice blew through the tangle of grey hair and said hoarsely: ‘Namaste!’
    ‘Uncle, you have something to tell me?’
    The ancient head wagged in the ambiguous manner she had learned to interpret as: Yes. Slowly he shrugged back the blanket from his shoulders, and lifted his eyes to her face.
    It was the gleam of the brazier that warned her. She had braced herself unconsciously to contemplate once again the opaque white membrane of cataract filming over the sightless eyes, and instead there was a bright darkness with a hard golden high-light, the sharp pheasant-stare of eyes that saw her very clearly. For an instant she stared back transfixed and motionless; then without a sound she recoiled from him and sprang to her feet, whirling on one heel to run like a deer.
    A hand reached out across the brazier and caught her by the long black braid of hair, dragging her back. She opened her lips to cry out, but the blanket was flung over her head, and hard fingers clamped the dusty folds tightly over her mouth and nostrils, ramming the cloth between her teeth. A long arm gripped her round the waist and swung her off her feet, and in a moment she felt something drawn tightly round her arms above the elbow, pinning them fast. She tried to kick, and the voluminous folds of the blanket were drawn close and tied, muffing every movement. A hand felt for her mouth, thrust the woollen stuff in deep, and twisted a strip of cloth round her head to fasten the gagging folds in place.
    The hair-line of gold along the horizon had thickened into a pale-rose-coloured cord. Just before the first backdoor tradesman pushed his hand-cart into the alley between the houses, the little van parked on the grass started up, and was driven decorously away towards the main