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

swirling softly round her shoulders, for the first time she looked Indian.
    ‘Watch your step when you go for your bath, Tossa, we’ve been invaded. Two huge cockroaches – I suppose they come up the plumbing. Put the light on five minutes before you go to run your bath, and I bet they’ll take the hint and run for the exit.’ She was being, perhaps, deliberately cooler than she felt about these hazards, just as she probably was about her experiences of the morning; but the slight over-statement was merely that, not a falsification. Presented with a burden, she practised the best way of carrying it. Confronted by a problem, she would walk all round it and consider how best to grapple with it. They were beginning to understand their Anjli.
    ‘That’s nothing,’ said Tossa, ‘a gecko fell on me this morning in bed.’
    ‘I know, I heard you squeal. There’s another one going to fall on you any minute now.’ He was clinging with his tiny, splayed feet to the high ceiling just above Tossa’s head, close to the light fixture, lying in wait for flies, a whitish green lizard no more than four inches long, of which more than half was tail. He was so young and small that he was still almost translucent, and only the faint, rapid palpitation of his throat indicated that he was alive, and not a worked fragment of alabaster. ‘I’d rather have geckos than cockroaches, any day. Anything with up to four legs,’ said Anjli, quite seriously, ‘is my brother. Over four, and they’re out.’
    ‘What about snakes?’
    ‘Things with no legs are out, too. But not as way out as things with eight. Who was it on the phone? Cousin Vasudev?’
    ‘I called Mr Felder,’ said Dominic, ‘but he wasn’t back from shooting yet. They’re going to ask him to call back.’ No need to tell her the voice on the phone had belonged to Ashok Kabir; she would have resented being left in ignorance, even in the bath.
    It was another hour before Felder’s call came through. Anjli was in bed by then, but with her nose buried in
The Life of the Budda
, and at the first ring she was out and streaking for Dominic’s sitting-room door. The conversation was brief, and apparently satisfactory.
    ‘Of course!’ said Dominic, heaving a vast breath of relief. ‘How very simple you make it sound! Thanks a lot, that’s what we’ll do.’
    ‘And let me know what happens, will you do that? I shall be worrying about that kid from now on until I know, but I’m betting you it will bring results, all right. For the next few days you can get me at Clark’s Hotel, Benares – OK?’
    ‘OK, and thanks again. Hope everything will go right with the shooting.’
    ‘Now you’re believing in miracles! Never mind, it’s gone well today. And you take those girls and have a look at Delhi, don’t waste a minute. So long, then, I’ll be hearing from you!’
    He was gone, energetic and bracing as ever, leaving his effect behind like a potent wine. Dominic hung up, relaxed and grateful.
    ‘What did he say?’ They were both at him in a moment, one on either side. ‘
What’s
so simple?’
    ‘He says, with Mrs Kumar’s death notice plastered all over the evening press – and you can bet it will be in the dailies tomorrow, too, – Satyavan will be absolutely certain to see it, wherever he is, and he’ll come running to pick up his responsibilities. No son will let anyone else run his mother’s funeral. All we’ve got to do is sit back and wait, to see if your father turns up for the ceremony. And the odds are strongly that he will.’
    Nobody said – nobody even thought, in the exhilaration of the moment – ‘
if he can
!’
     
    For two days they were on equal terms with all the other carefree European tourists in Delhi. They walked about the busy shopping streets round Connaught Place until their feet ached. They proceeded, half-stunned with grandeur, the full length of the King’s Way from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan, once the Viceroy’s