on the seat’s hard edge. He half turned so he was looking directly at her. ‘I’m going back to India. Not permanently, but I’ve no idea how long I’ll be. I thought it only courteous to a lover, or should I say a former lover, to bid her farewell.’
Daisy’s mouth dropped open. She was stunned, too surprised to speak, too surprised to dwell on being demoted to a former lover. In any case, he spoke truly. Their love seemed to have gone missing somewhere along the way, and right now she hadn’t the energy or the will to try to recapture it.
‘But why?’ she stumbled. ‘Why go back? Why go now?’
She felt stupidly upset. Twice this week India had swum into her world, seemingly out of nowhere, and left her bewildered. Ever since the package from Jocelyn had dropped through her letter box, she’d felt it burdening her mind. And now Grayson had arrived with India on his lips and the burden had just grown heavier.
He leaned back against the unyielding sofa cushion and took his time to answer. ‘Why now? Because there’s trouble. And I’m needed.’
That did nothing to calm her nerves. ‘Trouble? What trouble?’
‘You must have read about the situation—what’s been happening in India since Independence.’
‘You mean the killings? Yes, I’ve read about them. It’s been awful. But what have they to do with you?’ An unspecified fear tightened her face, until she felt her skin drawn hard against her cheekbones. Her voice must have sounded panicked because he tried to soothe her.
‘Most of them have nothing to do with me and, at the moment, the country is generally peaceful. It was the speed of Partition that caused so many problems—huge swathes of the population suddenly on the move, Hindus and Sikhs going east, Moslems west. But people are more or less settled now. Most of them have got to where they want to be, and there are only a few areas where all the old horrors—murder, arson, rape—are still going on. But they’re going on in one spot that interests me in particular.’
If he was trying to soothe her, he wasn’t succeeding. ‘And where’s that?’ Somehow she knew without asking.
‘Yes, you’ve got it.’ He’d read her mind, as he so often did. ‘Jasirapur. At least not the town itself but an area of Rajputana some distance away—sorry, I should say Rajasthan now.’
‘I still don’t see what it has to do with you,’ she argued stubbornly. ‘The Indian authorities must be in charge.’
‘Javinder has to do with me. Do you remember him?’ Grayson smiled as he put the question to her. She knew he was recalling the time they’d spent together at the cantonment hospital.
‘Of course, I remember.’ Javinder Joshi had been Grayson’s assistant in Jasirapur. She had helped nurse him back to health after he’d been badly hurt in one of the riots that had been frequent before the war.
‘He’s gone missing and, since he’s one of our intelligence officers, London is interested in finding him. Which is where I come in. I was the SIS man in Jasirapur before Independence and a close colleague of Javinder’s. They reckon I have the best chance of discovering what’s happened to him.’
‘I don’t see that at all.’
Why was she so anxious to stop Grayson going, she wondered, when she’d allowed herself to drift from him with hardly a backward glance? And what could he do if he went to India? The country was vast, Rajasthan was vast. If the people on the ground hadn’t been able to find Javinder, why should Grayson be successful?
‘Surely, someone in the local office must have searched for him?’
‘In a desultory kind of way, I imagine. But they don’t have the manpower and the situation is confused. Thanks to Partition, we’ve had the greatest migration in human history and that includes the civil administration. Add in the fact that the Europeans have all but disappeared, and India has been left running the show on a skeleton staff.’
‘It still doesn’t make sense. Why send you? It’s years since you’ve been there. There must be someone else they could send, someone who’s worked in India more recently.’
‘Apparently not. The security service only ever had a small presence in Jasirapur and nearly all the ICS officers who worked alongside me have either retired or returned to England.’
‘Javinder can’t just disappear. He’s probably taken leave of absence. Maybe someone in his family is ill and he’s had to take off quickly, without notifying anyone.’ She sounded desperate, she knew. And there was a part of her that was.
‘Unfortunately, he has just disappeared. Javinder is responsibility itself. He would never simply take off. I’ve spoken to the current admin team and they’re pretty sure he was investigating an unusual spate of violence that broke out a few months back. They think he had a lead as to who was behind it, but naturally as his work is secret, he told them virtually nothing. They were guessing, though they can’t be sure, that he was travelling north.’
Daisy was silent for several minutes and, when she spoke, her voice was devoid of emotion. ‘It’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘It could be. Javinder may have been a little too successful in discovering the culprits. That’s why I wanted to say a proper goodbye.’
The threat hung in the air and her stomach cramped with tension. He had been in danger before and she knew how that felt. She didn’t want to feel that way again but here she was, before he’d even left the country, feeling sick at the thought that he might once more be walking towards serious trouble. She swallowed hard.
‘And you’re going alone?’
‘No.’ His face had grown sombre but now it broke into a warm smile. ‘That’s the good thing. I’m taking Mike.’
‘Mike Corrigan?’
‘The very same.’
‘But surely he’s never had anything to do with India? I remember you telling me that he’d always worked in Eastern Europe.’
‘True enough, but wherever he’s worked, he’s a good operative and a good friend. And the trip will be a kind of swan song for him.’
She tried mentally to calculate Corrigan’s age. ‘He’s retiring? I wouldn’t have thought him old enough.’
‘Not retiring. He’s being moved. New brooms are sweeping through the security service and his injury has made it difficult for him to work in the field. He’s been seconded to another part of the organisation. To a section that’s strictly admin—so no more adventures.’
‘I know his leg was bad, but he seemed to manage.’ Mike’s limp hadn’t appeared to impede him when Daisy and he had met during the Sweetman crisis. But that might no longer be the case. Sweetman had forced him into crashing his car and Mike had ended up with broken bones and a split head.
‘He’s managed okay, more or less,’ Grayson agreed. ‘But by the time you met him, he hadn’t worked abroad for some years. And since the incident with that fanatic, his health has become more of a problem. His leg has always given him stick but now he’s experiencing giddiness, fearsome headaches, that kind of thing. Smashing into a lamp post head on isn’t to be recommended.’
‘So
