Death in the Andamans Read Free

at all. It was real. Horridly real! I was here, in this room. And I not only felt that switch click, I heard it. The only unreal thing was the light being green.’ She shivered again, and turning her head, sat up in sudden astonishment and said: ‘Why, it’s morning!’
    The clear pale light of dawn had seeped unnoticed into the room as they talked, dimming the electric bulbs to a wan yellow glow. Copper slid out from under the mosquito net, and crossing to the windows drew back the curtains: ‘It must be getting on for six. I don’t know why, but I thought it was the middle of the night.’ She leant out over the window-sill, sniffing the faint dawn breeze that whispered through the mango trees on the far side of the lawn, and said: ‘It’s going to be a marvellous day, Val. Come and look.’
    Valerie snapped off the bedside lamp and joined her, and the two girls knelt on the low window-seat to watch the growing light deepen over the sea and stretch along the ruled edge of the far horizon.
    Below them lay a wide strip of lawn bordered on the far side by mango, pyinma and casuarina trees that overlooked the grass tennis-courts, a tangled rose garden and two tall, feathery clusters of bamboo. Beyond this the ground sloped down to the beach so steeply that the clear, glassy water that shivered to a lace of foam about the dark shelves of rock appeared to lie almost directly below the house, and only the tops of the tall coconut palms that fringed the shores of the little island could be seen from the upper windows. Sky, sea and the level stretch of lawn seemed to be fashioned from Lalique glass, so still and smooth and serene they were: the still, smooth serenity that presages a perfect Indian Ocean day.
    The fronds of the coconut palms swayed gently to a breath of scented air that wandered across the garden and ruffled Valerie’s dark hair, and she stretched a pair of sunburnt arms above her head and sighed gratefully. ‘So cool! And yet in another hour it will be hot and sticky again. A curse upon this climate.’
    â€˜That’s because you’ve been here too long. You’re blasé,’ said Copper, her eyes on the glowing horizon: ‘After that endless London fog and rain and drizzle, I don’t believe I could ever have too much sun, however hot and sticky.’
    â€˜You wait!’ retorted Valerie. ‘I may have been in the Islands too long, but you haven’t been here long enough. Two more months of the Andamans and you’ll be thinking longingly of expeditions to the North Pole!’
    *   *   *
    Valerie Masson, born Valerie Ann Knight, was the stepdaughter of Sir Lionel Masson, Chief Commissioner of the Andamans. A childless man, Sir Lionel had been a widower for close upon seventeen years; during which time he had paid school bills and written cheques at frequent intervals but, since his visits to England had been infrequent, had seen little or nothing of this stepdaughter who had taken his name. He knew that the child was well looked after in the home of a couple of devoted aunts, and his only anxiety on her behalf (in the rare intervals in which he thought of her at all) was the fear that in all probability she was being badly spoiled.
    His appointment as Chief Commissioner to the Andamans had coincided with Valerie’s nineteenth birthday, and it had suddenly occurred to him that he not only possessed a grown-up stepdaughter, but that it might be both pleasant and convenient to install a hostess in the big, sprawling house on Ross. The idea was well received. Valerie had welcomed it with enthusiasm and for the past two years had kept house for her stepfather, played hostess at Government House, and enjoyed herself considerably. Which last was not to be wondered at, for although she could lay no particular claim to beauty, her dark hair grew in a deep widow’s peak above an endearingly freckled face in which a pair