The Game - Laurie R. King [117]
Say one thing for Holmes: He always appreciated the little gifts I brought him, and this no less than any. He even permitted me to tell the story properly: creeping past the inhabited buildings at the air field and to the silent godowns; the makeshift pick-locks I had fashioned from hair-pins; the discovery of no fewer than three of the big triple-engined Junkers planes, awaiting assembly; a disconcerting number of machine-guns and light artillery; and (best for last) the biggest godown with its store of cotton bales, floor to ceiling, and neatly arranged beside them, drums of the other materials one would need for making explosives.
Oh yes; Nesbit was going to love this.
The more, perhaps, if we could find him Kimball O’Hara as well.
We slipped away from the serai during the night, again disguised as a pair of itinerant Moslem magicians, and headed west into the broad plateau that formed the centre of the state, a rich source of pulse and cane, wheat and vegetables. I had been, I thought, remarkably patient; no more.
“Holmes, it is your turn. What happened after you left Simla?”
“Remarkably little,” he replied. “Quite odd, really.”
“As a narrative, Holmes, the statement is by no means sufficient.”
“No? I suppose not. Very well. Bindra and I left the hotel early. I had decided that the train out of Simla being unlikely to provide a rich source of information concerning that itinerant monk O’Hara, we should walk out of the hills.”
“Walk? That must have taken days—what was Bindra’s reaction to that?”
“He was not pleased. I did offer to provide him with a ticket back to Kalka, but for some reason the boy decided he would rather stay with me. So we walked, and caught rides on bullock-carts and tongas, and stopped regularly to thaw ourselves out in wayside hostelries, drinking tea with the locals and gossiping about this and that.”
“Monks, particularly,” I suggested.
“By all means, especially considering the way a certain scoundrel of a red-hat Buddhist monk had just made off with my purse and train ticket, leaving me to trudge through the snow and survive on cups of tea bought with the few coins that remained in my pocket.”
“And did any of them recall another such monk, oh, say about three years before?”
“Surprisingly few. And both of those who did—the sweeper of one inn and the cook in another—remembered him as going uphill, towards Simla, not away.”
“So he took the train out,” I said, disappointed.
“Or went overland to the north. In the summer months, the passes there would be reasonable, for a man who loves the hills at any rate. One thing did come to light: A band of dacoits—robbers—was working in the area north of Simla during that time.”
“Do you think—?”
“I think it highly unlikely that Kimball O’Hara was the victim of casual dacoitry.”
Still, it gave me thought, as I walked along. A while later, another question came to mind.
“What did Bindra make of your tale of woe?” I asked.
“The boy seemed unsurprised. In fact, he tended to embellish my stories rather more than was necessary.”
And that, too, was thought-provoking. The child was shrewder than he appeared and without doubt unscrupulous, but I could not bring myself to picture him as a spy planted in our midst, by Nesbit or anyone else. For one thing, the child was too young for that sort of sustained purpose of mind: Holmes had habitually used youthful Irregulars in his Baker Street days, but only for specific and limited missions.
But if the child was not there under orders, why did he stay? And more to the point, why did he not question the oddities of Holmes’ behaviour?
The mysteries kept me occupied all that day, but they remained mysteries.
We set up that night in a village of perhaps ninety souls, earning a handful of copper for our pains, but with the coins supplemented by a generosity of food and fodder. The village got a bargain, because in my absence Holmes had