Death in the Andamans by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t feel like holding anyone’s hand in this heat thank you, Ronnie. All that I’m interested in at the moment is a cold drink. And the colder, the better! Hullo, Amabel — did you have a good trip over?’
    â€˜No,’ replied the damsel addressed: ‘There wasn’t any wind, so George had to row and he got blisters. They’ll probably go septic. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
    Miss Amabel Withers, daughter of the Port Officer, was a plump, stolid maiden with a quite remarkable bent for pessimism, and her concluding remark, which might have been taken to mean anything from a comment on the weather to a reflection on the uncertainty of human existence, was a favourite observation that did not require an answer.
    Copper turned to grin at the blistered George, a freckle-faced subaltern who was unaccountably enamoured of young Miss Withers, and said: ‘Bad luck, George. Still, it may not actually come to gangrene, and if it should, we can always amputate. I can’t think why any of you were mad enough to take out a boat on a day when there isn’t…’
    She broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished, for at that moment a tall man who had been lying in a patch of shade at the far side of the lawn stood up and lifted a hand in greeting and, as always at the sight of Nick Tarrent, Copper’s heart gave a little lurch. Abandoning her sentence, together with George Beamish and the importunate Mr Purvis, she went straight across the lawn to him. And it was not until she was within a yard of him that she realized that he was not alone, or that a long, green wicker chair stood in the same patch of shadow, and in it, stretched at full length and wearing a scarlet linen dress that exactly matched her lipstick and the varnish on her long, pointed nails, languorous and seductive as a harem favourite, lay Ruby Stock …
    Mrs Leonard Stock was a striking-looking woman of what is usually termed ‘uncertain age’, who might well have been accounted a beauty had her face not been spoiled for that accolade by an expression of discontent that had been worn for so long that it had eventually become an integral part of her features. But few critics would have found fault with her admirable figure and shining, blue-black hair, her great pansy-brown eyes and the smooth golden texture of her sun-browned skin. As the beautiful daughter of a subordinate in India’s Post and Telegraphs Department, Ruby had been born and brought up in that country, and after completing her education at a convent school in the south of India, become the reigning belle among her set in Midnapore. But from the first, she had been both ambitious and consumed by envy of all those of a higher social status than herself, and that envy drove her like a spur until it became the mainspring of her being. Some day, she vowed, she would be the equal of any of the supercilious wives of high officials to whose dinner parties and lunches she was not invited. And with this end in view she had married Leonard Stock, son of an English country parson, who occupied a minor post in the Indian Civil Service.
    Leonard was not earning anything approaching the pay that several other suitors of the dashing Ruby De Castres could offer, but for all that he was considered among her set to be a good match. First and foremost because he was what Anglo-India refers to, snobbishly, as a ‘Sahib’, and secondly, because rumour had it that although his present position in the Civil Service was a modest one, he would go far.
    Rumour, however, as is frequently the case, had been misinformed. Leonard Stock was a pleasant enough little man, amiable, friendly, and unassuming, but totally incapable of firmness or decision — as Ruby De Castres, now Ruby Stock, was to discover within a few brief months of her marriage. Facing the fact that her husband would never rise to any heights if he remained in Midnapore, she had