Very softly and cautiously the key began to turn in the lock, and inch by inch the door swung open. In the doorway Shantila beckoned, the fingers of one hand pressed to her lips.
‘Quickly!’ It was only the hurried ghost of a whisper, urging her. ‘You must go… my uncle is afraid now… you’ve seen him now, you know him, you can tell about him…’
Anjli crept to her side. They stood for an instant almost cheek to cheek, listening.
‘He wants to kill you,’ Shantila’s lips shaped soundlessly, ‘so that you cannot tell. They told him, keep you safe, not hurt you… but now he’s afraid…’
The careful disguise of Old Age, and all his expertise in the part, had been no protection to him in the end.
They edged their way silently into the corridor, and carefully Shantila re-locked the door. With held breath they tiptoed past the bathroom and the lavatory, and gingerly turned the last key that let them out into the sunshine of the compound.
The heavy wooden doors were locked, but the thick crossbars and the iron stanchion that held them in place made good aids for climbing, and they were both lightweights and agile. Anjli hauled herself up to the top of the gate and straddled it, leaning down to offer a hand to Shantila scrambling after her. Through the leaves of the single tree the noonday sunlight sprinkled the film company’s old utility with gold. And somewhere within the rear premises of the old house a man’s voice uttered a great, mangled howl of terror and dismay.
‘Quick, give me your hand!’ Anjli hauled strongly, and in a moment they lay gasping together over the crest of the gate. The rickety wooden door they had locked behind them shook and groaned to the impact of a heavy body, reverberated again and again, but held fast. The two girls scrambled over the gate and lowered themselves to hang by their hands. Shantila fell neatly on her feet, Anjli grazed her elbow against the rough wood and left a smear of blood on her sleeve. Behind them a window on the first floor opened, a deep sash-window that gave on the flat roof of the bathroom, and Govind Das came leaping through it with a convulsed face, and eyes half-mad with fear and hate, and let himself down in a scrambling fall to the compound. He saw, and they knew he had seen, the small, clenched fingers loose their hold on the crest of the gate. He heard, and they knew he heard, their light feet running like hares away down the crooked lane, and out into the street.
It was not for comfort they took hands and matched their steps; it was so that neither of them should be the fleeter, for now they were one creature in one danger, and there could not possibly be any half salvation.
The iron strut of the compound gates rattled against the wall, the unlocked gates hurtled wide and shuddered to the impact. In a moment the engine of the film company’s utility started into life, and Govind Das drove it out into the lane, and away at high speed towards Connaught Circus, where Anjli and Shantila fled from him hand in hand.
Round the corner in Parliament Street, where the spacious side-walks and the green shade trees began, traffic was indulging in its midday siesta, only an occasional car rolling at leisure down the wide, straight road. Screened by a little grove of bushes, a telephone kiosk sat in the green border between road and pathway. A large motorcycle-rickshaw with a deep green awning was parked beside it, and within the box Girish had just dialled the number of Sawyers’ restaurant, and was talking to the Swami Premanathanand.
‘I lost them. Bad luck with a bullock wagon. But I overtook the same taxi only a minute later, going on round the Circus from here towards Irwin Road, empty. They’re somewhere in this block, right on the Circus, between Janpath and Parliament Street. Yes, I’m certain. I know his number. I’ll get the police to pick up the driver, and when he finds out what he’s up against he’ll surely talk, for his own sake.’
He was listening to the Swami’s brisk reply, and gazing out through the glass panels of his kiosk when everything happened at once. Past him down Parliament Street from the Circus came two young girls in identical white shalwar and blue kameez, gauze scarves flying. They held hands, and ran like athletes, with set faces and floating plaits, ran as if for their lives. Unwisely but understandably, they had chosen to run in the roadway, because there was almost no traffic, and the few saunterers on the paths would have held them up to some extent. But even one car is enough to be dangerous, especially one driven as crazily as this black veteran coming hurtling down behind them from the circus. You’d have thought he was actually trying to run the children down…
Girish made never a sound. The telephone receiver dropped from his hand and swung for a moment, distilling the Swami’s dulcet tones into empty air. The door of the kiosk hurtled open and slammed shut with a force that broke one pane of glass, and before the pieces had finished tinkling to the floor, Girish was astride his motorcycle and had kicked it into life and motion. He sailed diagonally across Parliament Street, straight into the path of the oncoming car. The girls were hardly ten yards ahead when the impact came, and they leaped tormentedly forward like hares pursued, and never looked behind.
Govind Das saw from the corner of his eye the heavy rickshaw surge forward, bent on ramming him. He had just enough sanity and just enough driving instinct left to take the only avoiding action possible. He swung the wheel to the left, to minimise the crash, and the motor cycle took him obliquely in the right front wing and swept the car onward into the grass belt between roadway and path. In an inextricable mass of metal the two vehicles lurched to a stop, and subsided in a dissolution of plates and parts, the horrid noise eddying away in diminishing echoes between the trees. In the stunned moments before anyone came running. Govind Das dragged himself dizzy but uninjured out of the driving seat, and slid away hastily from the scene. A car stolen from the film company’s premises… a reckless driver… a crash… what was there new in that? All he had to do was take care of the girl, and then get back and report the car missing.
He could still see the two little figures in blue and white, well ahead now. They had made a mistake, they were heading for the great iron gates of the Jantar Mantar Park, down there on the left of the road. He needn’t even hurry.
He looked back once, and the driver of the motorcycle – was he crazy, or something? Govind Das didn’t even know him, had never set eyes on him before! – still lay in the road, huddled beside the wreckage. Dead or alive, did it matter? No doubt an ambulance would be along for him in a matter of minutes, as soon as someone grasped what had happened here. Govind Das turned contentedly, and loped gently after Anjli Kumar, towards the park gates from which there was no escape. This wall would be too high for them to climb.
Girish had swung his legs clear of the machine and jumped just before the moment of impact, but the impetus of his rush had carried him into the wing of the car just the same, though with less violence. He hit the road hard and flatly, knocking the breath out of his body, and his head struck the metal of the car body with enough force to stun him for some seconds. He opened his eyes upon the gravelly surface of the road, one cheek skinned, the grains of dust like boulders against his lips; but the first painful movements assured him he was alive, and had no breakages. Dazedly he drew up his knees under him, and raised himself from the road.
There had been no one very close to the scene of the crash, but from both directions now people were coming on the run. Hastily Girish withdrew himself behind the crumpled bulk of the two vehicles, and melted backwards into the shelter of the trees. Easy to vanish here, and he had no time to answer police questions, not yet, not until those children were recovered alive. They had disappeared utterly from view now. He removed himself far enough from the wreck to escape notice, and then moved out into the roadway and stared ahead down the long, straight vista of Parliament Street. They were nowhere in sight, yet he could not believe that they had run so far ahead in the time. There were two possible turns off, somewhat ahead but still possible, Jai Singh Road on the right, and the lane opposite to it. And before that, of course, there was the gate into the park.