Imray Came Back. Part 1

One day Imray was there, in the little town in the north of India where he lived and worked, and the next day he was not. He disappeared. One day he was with his friends, having a drink at the bar, laughing with them, friendly, and then the next morning he was not at his office, his house was quiet, and nobody could find him.

‘Where did he go?’ his friends asked each other at the bar. ‘And whyso suddenly? Why did he say nothing to us?’

They looked in the rivers near the town, and along the roads, but they found nothing. They telephoned all the hotels in the nearest big city, but nobody there knew anything about Imray. Days went by and Imray did not come back. His friends in the town slowly stopped talking about him. They sold his old car, his guns and all his other things, and hisboss wrote a letter to Imray’s mother, back in England, and told her that her son was dead. Disappeared.

Imray’s house stood unlived-in and quiet for three or four long, hot summer months. The hottest weather was finished when my friend Strickland, a policeman, moved to live in it. People said that Strickland was a very strange man but I always went to see him and have dinner with him when Iwas in the town working for a day or two. He had one or two other friends too; he liked his guns, he liked fishing and he liked his dog – a very big dog, called Tietjens. Tietjens always went to work with Strickland and often helped him in his police work, so the people of the town were quite afraid of her. Tietjens moved into the house with Strickland and she took the room next to Strickland’s,where she had her food and where she slept.

One day, some weeks after Strickland went to live in Imray’s house, I arrived in the town at about five o’clock one afternoon and found that there were no rooms at the hotel, so I went round to Strickland’s place.

Tietjens met me at the door, showing her teeth, not moving. She knew me quite well by this time but she did not want me to go in. Shewaited for Strickland to come and say a friendly ‘Hello’ to me before she moved away. Strickland was happy to give me a room for two or three days, and I went to get my bag from my car.

It was a nice house, with a big garden. Inside, there were eight rooms, all white and clean. Strickland gave me a good room and at six o’clock his Indian servant, Bahadur Khan, brought us an early dinner.

‘I mustgo back to the office station for an hour or two after dinner, I’m afraid. My men are questioning a man down there, and I want to know what answers they’re getting,’ Strickland said.

He left me at the house with a good cigar, and with Tietjens, the dog. It was a very hot, late-summer evening. Soon after the living-room watched the rain and thought about my family and friends back home inEngland. Tietjens came and sat next to me and put her head on my lag, looking sad. The room was dark behind me and the only noise was the noise of the rain driving down out of the night sky.

Suddenly, without a sound, Strickland’s servant was there, standing next to me. His coat and shirt were wet from the rain. ‘Sorry, sir. There’s man here, sir. He’s asking to see somebody,’ the servant said.

Iasked him to bring a light and went to the front door, but when the light came, there was nobody there. When I turned, I thought I saw a face looking in through one of the windows from the garden. It disappeared quickly.

‘Perhaps he went round to the back door,’ I said to the servant, so we went through the living-room and the quiet, dark kitchen to the back door. But there was nobody there. Iwent back to my chair and my thoughts by the window, not very happy with Strickland’s servant and not very happy about the face at the window, the strange visitor in the rain. I took some sugar with me to give to Tietjens, but she was out in the garden, standing in the rain, and did not want to come inside. She looked frightened, I thought.

Some time later Strickland arrived home, very wet,...