A quick glance behind reassured him that his brothers were following on. Raghu sat on a wall and waited until the European drew level. He shouted a greeting to the man and with gestures indicated that he thought it would be an excellent idea if the gentleman gave him a cigarette. The young man swatted him away and crossed the road. The two younger brothers now moved swiftly ahead and Raghu trailed behind. The man moved within his unseen box down the Mall and turned off into a narrow alleyway leading towards the bazaar.

This was dangerous. The shoeshine boys closed in, knowing that it took a split second of inattention to lose someone in this twisting maze of streets, though they all knew the bazaar like their own playground. The bazaar was their playground. But the man was hurrying now, not growing careless but confident with the confidence of someone who is on his own ground. Raghu guessed that the man was approaching his bolt hole. A turn to the left and one more to the right.

Rounding the corner, the leading brother signalled that the quarry had been lost. Raghu ran up and scanned the alley. He ran swiftly to the end and looked up and down. Retracing his tracks he pointed to a door in the creeper-hung wall. All the boys noted the door and its exact location. They began to giggle.

Raghu with a gesture indicated that they should return to base as fast as they could. And, stifling their laughter, they raced up the winding streets to the Mall, taking a roundabout way back to police headquarters.

Chapter Twenty

«^»

Joe and Carter sat side by side on the balcony, their feet on the balustrade, and settled themselves to wait.

‘At last!’ said Carter. ‘A perfectly logical explanation which doesn’t depend on anyone’s arising from the dead in a cloud of sulphur and uttering terrible curses! Much more my sort of thing!’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Joe. ‘If anything it’s worse! It would terrify me, I can tell you! No wonder Alice Conyers looked a little pale.’

‘We ought to have thought of this, don’t you agree?’ Carter mused. ‘I mean – given all the accounts, all the evidence.’

‘No. Come on, let’s forgive ourselves this much. I don’t believe anyone could have guessed at it from the information we had. And never forget that it hadn’t even occurred to Alice herself. I think I witnessed her reaction when the awful thought first came to her but made nothing of it. It only began to cast a shadow in my mind when I noticed her unnatural interest in that list. And then it’s just a question of logic. If she wasn’t disturbed by the name of a person who had been killed, then what had she seen that had so profoundly shaken her? A gap, that’s what! No name where a name should have been! But we’ll try it out on Simpson when he gets here. Let him be the judge.’

Half an hour later a police tonga dropped Simpson at the door of the station and Carter hailed him. ‘Come on up and we’ll see if we can surprise you!’

The three men stepped inside the building together, Carter continuing cheerfully, ‘My congratulations, by the way, on your performance last night! Here, we’ll be in my office. Had to leave this morning before you were awake so we haven’t had time to fill you in on what’s been happening. I will just say – all that we suspected about the identity switch is confirmed. Sir George is au courant but back-pedalling, I’m afraid, on arresting our little quick-change artiste. Though quite rightly he thinks – and we agree – that we stand a better chance of flushing out the blackmailer and murderer if Alice is allowed to carry on as if nothing had happened.’

‘Blackmailer?’ said Simpson, bemused. ‘Did you say blackmailer? What’s this?’

‘Such a lot you don’t know yet! We haven’t been holding out on you but things develop at a pace, it seems, in Simla. Better fill him in, Joe!’

Joe gave him the main details of his moonlit interview with Isobel Newton and as the full story unfolded and all his suspicions were confirmed Simpson began to relax and even to smile.

‘Glad I was proved right,’ he said at last. ‘Glad I didn’t put those people at the seance through such misery for no good reason! There was hell to pay when you shot off into the night, Joe, and Carter fled as well leaving me and Minerva Freemantle to deal with the riot that ensued. Quite a riot! Well, just Minerva when it came down to it because, having reduced the company to blank dismay and terror even – as arranged – I faded away into a broom cupboard. The one in the passageway with a false back. Hardly able to move, horrified by what we’d conjured up… I could hear them shouting and screaming and, as far as I could tell, falling over each other for ages and then it all went quiet. In the end Minerva came and got me out. She was in quite a state too! I couldn’t work out whether she was laughing or crying! Even she was a bit hysterical, I think. She’d shipped Miss Trollope off home with friends and spun the story to everyone that it had all been a terrible mix-up. A crossed line from the beyond, if you like… a spiritual not-known-at-this-address. A vengeful entity had turned up at the wrong seance and had to be redirected! Just to make sure it doesn’t happen again she’s promised to strengthen the formula for the prayers she says at the beginning to ward off malevolent spirits.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Joe, suddenly guilty. ‘Poor old Maisie! Fences to mend there, I’m afraid!’

‘But now,’ said Carter, ‘follow another idea with us.’

Simpson nodded.

‘We want you to go over as fully and as carefully as you can all the events leading up to the crash. Yes, I know you’ve done it once but there was something we missed the first time… Something you missed. Can you start from the moment you arrived at the train and set eyes on Isobel Newton? Tell us everything you remember. Where she was standing, what she was doing, what she said. Everything.’

‘Well, my first impression of Isabelle de Neuville – can I call her that? It’s how I still think of her – was that she was a damned nuisance! I was lame and anxious to get into the first class compartment where my seat was booked and here, right in the doorway, was this Frenchwoman, blocking my way. She was haranguing her maid. In aristocratic French but shouting like a fishwife – I thought it a very odd scene… Odd behaviour.’

‘Tell us about the maid. Was she… um… refined… in any way elegant too?’

‘ ’Good Lord, no!’

‘Is your French good enough to know the difference? I don’t mean to offend you, old man, but I know I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,’ said Carter placatingly.

‘I would. I was convalescent for a time with the Comte and Comtesse de Lausanne during the war. Used to play chess with the old man. Improved my French a lot and, well, yes, I think I’d spot a good accent when I heard it. But the maid, you say? Now she was another type entirely. Oh, pretty good to look at, don’t mistake me, but not the same class as her mistress at all. Her language was coarse and she had a thick accent. A regional accent, I think.’

‘A bit ooh-là-là, would you say?’ said Joe with a quick look at Carter.

‘Oh yes. Very pronounced cadence. Could almost have been Italian. So – swearing like a poilu – but what a beauty! Dark hair and eyes, about twenty-three or so I would guess. Mistress or maid – it was hard to know which one to look at!’

‘And what were they arguing about? Can you remember?’

‘Certainly! I pretended not to listen! But it was fascinating stuff! I couldn’t tear my ears away. Isabelle gave her an envelope and that’s when it all started. The maid tore it open and looked inside. She started yelling about her wages. Claimed she hadn’t been paid for months and she wasn’t going to let Isabelle get away with it any longer. Then she examined the train ticket that was in the envelope. More shrieks and screams! Third class! Isabelle had provided a third class ticket for her and she found this totally unacceptable – way beneath her dignity. And she was right, poor girl. I sympathized with her.’