by Ruskin Bond
Allen was arrested at Rajpur and brought back to Mussoorie under escort. He was taken immediately to the victim’s bedside, where the body still lay, the police hoping that he might confess his guilt when confronted with the body of the victim; but Allen was unmoved, and protested his innocence.
Meanwhile, other soldiers from among Mr Clapp’s friends had gathered on the Mall. They had removed their belts and were ready to lynch Allen as soon as he was brought out of the shop. The situation was tense, but further mishap was averted by the resourcefulness of Mr Rust, a photographer, who, being of the same build as the corporal, put on an army coat with a turned-up collar, and arranged to be handcuffed between two policemen. He remained with them inside the shop, in partial view of the mob, while the rest of the police party escorted the corporal out by a back entrance. Mr Rust did not abandon his disguise or leave the shop until word arrived that Allen was secure in the police station.
Corporal Allen was eventually found guilty, and was hanged. But there were many who felt that he had never really been proved guilty, and that he had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence; and looking back on the case from this distance in time one cannot help feeling that the soldier may have been a victim of circumstances, and perhaps of local prejudice, for he was not liked by his fellows. Allen himself hinted that he was not in the vicinity of the crime that night but in the company of a lady whose integrity he was determined to shield. If this was true, it was a pity that the lady prized her virtue more than her friend’s life, for she did not come forward to save him. The chaplain who administered to Allen during his last days in the ‘condemned cell’ was prepared to absolve the corporal and could not accept that he was a murderer.
One of the hill station’s most sensational crimes was committed on 25 July 1927, at the height of the ‘season’, and in the heart of the town, in Zephyr Hall, then a boarding house. It provided a good deal of excitement for the residents of the boarding house.
Soon after midday, Zephyr Hall residents were startled into brisk activity when a woman screamed and a shot rang out from one of the rooms. Other shots followed in rapid succession.
Those boarders who happened to be in the public lounge or veranda dived for the safety of their rooms; but one unhappy resident, taking the precaution of coming around a corner with his hands held well above his head, ran straight into a levelled pistol. And the man with the gun, who had just killed his wife and wounded his daughter, was still able to see some humour in the situation, for he burst into laughter! The boarder escaped unhurt. But the murderer, Mr Owen, did not savour the situation for long. He shot himself long before the police arrived.
The final crime I’d like to write about is the most convoluted of the three, which is probably why it drew the attention of the world’s greatest crime writers. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a lifelong interest in unusual criminal cases, and his friends often passed on to him interesting accounts of crime and detection from around the world. It was in this way that he learnt of the strange death of Miss Frances Garnett-Orme in Mussoorie. Here was a murder combining the weird borders of the occult with a crime mystery as inexplicable as any devised by Doyle himself.
In April 1912 (shortly before the Titanic went down) Conan Doyle received a letter from his Sussex neighbour Rudyard Kipling:
Dear Doyle,
There has been a murder in India… A murder by suggestion at Mussoorie, which is one of the most curious things in its line of record.
Everything that is improbable, and on the face of it impossible, is in this case.
Kipling received details of the case from a friend working at the Allahabad Pioneer, a paper for which, as a young man, he had worked in the 1880s. Urging Doyle to pursue the story Kipling concluded: ‘The psychology alone is beyond description.’
Doyle was interested to hear more, for India had furnished him with material in the past, as in The Sign of the Four and several short stories. Kipling, too, had turned to crime and detection in his early stories of Strickland, the Anglo-Indian policeman. The two writers got together and discussed the case, which was indeed a fascinating affair. (The extracts from their correspondence were sent to me by Peter Costello, a biographer of Doyle.)
It was during the summer ‘season’ of 1911 that Miss Frances Garnett-Orme came to stay in Mussoorie, taking a suite at the Savoy, a popular resort hotel. On 28 July she celebrated her fortyninth birthday. She was the daughter of George Garnett-Orme, a district registrar of the country court of Skipton-in-Craven in Yorkshire. Her family was important enough to be counted among the landed gentry. George Garnett-Orme had died in 1892.
Miss Frances Garnett-Orme came to India in 1893 with the intention of marrying Jack Grant of the United Provinces Police. But he died in 1894 and she went back to England. Upset by his death following so soon after her father’s, she turned to spiritualism in the hope of communicating with him. We must remember that spiritualism was all the rage in the early years of the century. Seances and table-rapping was part of the social scene both in England and India. Madame Blavatsky, the chief exponent of spiritualism, was probably at the height of her popularity around this time—she spent her ‘seasons’ in neighbouring Simla, where she had many followers.
Miss Garnet-Orme’s life was unsettled. She was drawn back to India, returning in 1901 to live in Lucknow, the regional capital of the United Provinces. She was still in contact with Jack Grant’s family and saw his brother occasionally. The summer of 1907 was spent at Nainital, a hill station popular with Lucknow residents. It was here that she met Miss Eva Mountstephen, who was working as a governess.
Eva Mountstephen, too, had an interest in spiritualism. It appears that she had actually told several of her friends about this time that she had learnt (in the course of a seance) that in 1911 she would come into a great deal of money.
We are told that there was something sinister about Miss Mountstephen. She specialized in crystal-gazing, and what she saw in the glass often took a violent form. Her ‘control’, that is her connection in the spirit world, was a dead friend named Mrs Winter.
As a result of their common interest in the occult, Miss Garnett-Orme took on the younger woman as a companion when she returned to Lucknow in the winter. There they had settled down together. But the summers were spent at one of the various hill stations. Was there a latent lesbianism in their relationship? It was a restless, rootless life, but they were held together by the strong and heady influence of the seance table and the crystal ball. Miss Garnett-Orme’s indifferent health also made her dependent on the younger woman.
In the summer of 1911, the couple went up to Mussoorie, probably the most frivolous of hill stations, where ‘seasonal’ love affairs were almost the order of the day. They took rooms in the Savoy. Electricity had yet to reach Mussoorie, and it was still the age of candelabras and gas-lit streets. Every house had a grand piano. If you didn’t go out to a ball, you sang or danced at home. But Miss Garnett-Orme’s spiritual pursuits took precedence over these more mundane entertainments. Towards the end of the ‘season’ on 12 September, Miss Mountstephen returned to Lucknow to pack up their household for a move to Jhansi, where they planned to spend the winter.
On the morning of 19 September, while Miss Mountstephen was still away, Miss Garnett-Orme was found dead in her bed. The door was locked from the inside. On her bedside table was a glass. She was positioned on the bed as though laid out by a nurse or undertaker.
Because of these puzzling circumstances, Major Birdwood of the Indian Medical Service (who was the civil surgeon in Mussoorie) was called in. He decided to hold an autopsy. It was discovered that Miss Garnett-Orme had been poisoned with prussic acid.
Prussic acid is a quick-acting poison, and would have killed too quickly for the victim to have composed herself in the way she was found. An ayah told the police that she had seen someone (she could not tell whether it was a man or a woman) slipping away through the large skylight and escaping ove
r the roof.
Hill stations are hotbeds of rumour and intrigue, and of course the gossips had a field day. Miss Garnett-Orme suffered from dyspepsia and was always dosing herself from a large bottle of sodium bicarbonate, which was regularly refilled. It was alleged that the bottle had been tampered with, and an unknown white powder had been added. Her doctor was questioned thoroughly. They even questioned a touring mind reader, Mr Alfred Capper, who claimed that Miss Mountstephen had hurried from a room rather than have her mind read!
After several weeks the police arrested Miss Mountstephen. Although she had a convincing alibi (due to her absence in Jhansi) the police sought to prove that some kind of sinister influence had been exerted on Miss Garnett-Orme to take her medicine at a particular time. Thus, through suggestion, the murderer could kill and yet be away at the time of death. In Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the poisoner was in a distant place by the time her victim reached the fatal dose, the poison having precipitated to the bottom of the mixture. Perhaps Miss Christie had read accounts of the Garnett-Orme case in the British press. Even the motive was similar.
But there was no Hercule Poirot in Mussoorie, and in court this theory could never be made convincing. The police case was never strong (they would have done better to have followed the ayah’s lead), and it appears that they only acted because there was considerable ill-feeling in Mussoorie against Miss Mountstephen.
When the trial came up at Allahabad in March 1912 it caused a sensation. Murder by remote control was something new in the annals of crime. But after hearing many days of evidence about the ladies’ way of life, about crystal-grazing and premonitions of death, the court found Miss Mountstephen innocent. The chief justice in delivering his verdict, remarked that the true circumstances of Miss Garnett-Orme’s death would probably never be known. And he was right.
Miss Mountstephen applied for probate of her friend’s will. But the Garnett-Orme family in England sent out her brother, Mr Hunter Garnett-Orme, to contest it. The case went in favour of Mr Garnett-Orme. The district judge, W. D. Burkitt, turned down Miss Mountstephen’s application on grounds of ‘fraud and undue influence in connection with spiritualism and crystalgazing’. She made an appeal at the Allahabad High Court, but the lower court’s decision was upheld.
Miss Mountstephen returned to England. We do not know her state of mind, but if she was innocent, she must have been a deeply embittered woman. Miss Garnett-Orme’s doctor lost his flourishing practice in Mussoorie and left the country too. There were rumours that he and Miss Mountstephen had conspired to get hold of Miss Garnett-Orme’s considerable fortune.
There was one more puzzling feature of the case. Mr Charles Jackson, a painter friend of many of those involved, had died suddenly, apparently of cholera, two months after Miss Garnett-Orme’s mysterious death. The police took an interest in his sudden demise. When he was exhumed on 23 December, the body was found to be in a perfect state of preservation. He had died of arsenic poisoning.
Murder or suicide? This puzzle, too, was never resolved. Was there a connection with Miss Garnett-Orme’s death? That too we shall never know. Had Conan Doyle taken up Kipling’s suggestion and involved himself in the case (as he had done in so many others in England), perhaps the outcome would have been different.
As it is, we can only make our own conjectures.
KIPLING’S SIMLA
Every March, when the rhododendrons stain the slopes crimson with their blooms, a sturdy little steam engine goes huffing and puffing through the 103 tunnels between Kalka and Simla. This is probably the most picturesque and romantic way of approaching the hill station although the journey by road is much quicker.
The train journeys taken to Simla stand out in my memory—the little restaurant at Barog, just before we get to Dharampur, where the roads for Sanawar and Kasauli branch off; and the gorge at Tara Devi, opening out to give the weary traveller the splendid and uplifting panorama of the city of Simla straddling the side of the mountain.
In Rudyard Kipling’s time (in the 1870s and 80s), travellers spent the night at Kalka and then covered the sixty-odd hill miles by tonga, a rugged and exhausting journey. It was especially hard on invalids who had travelled long distances to recuperate in the cool clear air of the mountains.
In his story ‘The Other Man’ (Plain Tales from the Hills), Kipling describes the unhappy results of the tonga ride on one such visitor.
Sitting on the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the Other Man—dead. The sixtymile uphill jolt had been too much for his valve, I suppose. The tonga-driver said, ‘This Sahib died two stages out of Solan. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out by the way, and so we came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bakshish?’ ‘It,’ pointing to the Other Man, ‘should have given one rupee.’
Today’s visitor to Simla need have no qualms about the journey by road, which is swift and painless (provided you drive carefully), but the coolies at the Simla bus stand will be found to be as adamant as Kipling’s tonga driver in claiming their baksheesh.
Simla is worth a visit at any time of the year, even during the monsoon. The monsoon season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas, with the mist trailing up the valleys, and the hill slopes, a lush green, thick with ferns and wild flowers. The call of the kastura, or whistling thrush, can be heard in every glen, while the barbet cries insistently from the treetops.
Not far from Christ Church is the corner where a great fictional character, Lurgan Sahib, had his shop—Lurgan being the curio dealer who took the young Kim in hand and trained him as a spy. He was based on a real-life character, who had his shop here. Kipling wrote Kim a few years after he had left India. His nostalgia for India, and in particular for the hills, come through in his description of Kim’s arrival in Simla in the company of the Afghan horse dealer, Mahbub Ali.
‘A fair land—a most beautiful land is this of Hind—and the land of the Five Rivers is fairer than all,’ Kim half chanted. ‘Into it I will go again… Once gone, who shall find me? Look, Hajji, is yonder the city of Simla? Allah! What a city!’
They lead their horses below the main road into the lower Simla Bazaar—‘the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five!’ And together they set off ‘through the mysterious dusk, full of the noises of a city below the hillside and the breath of a cool wind in deodarcrowned Jakko, shouldering the stars.’
Shouldering the stars! That is how I always think of Simla—standing on the Ridge and looking up through the clear air into the vault of the heavens, where the stars seem so much nearer… And they are reflected below, in the myriad lights of the shops and houses.
For those who want a bit of history, Simla came into being at the end of the Anglo-Gurkha War (1814-16), when most of the surrounding district—captured by the Gurkhas during their invasion—was restored to various States; but the land on which Simla stands was retained by the British—‘for services rendered!’ Lieutenant Rose built the first house, a thatched wooden cottage, in 1819. His successor, Lieutenant Kennedy, built a permanent house in 1822, which survived until it was destroyed in a fire a couple of years ago. In 1827, Lord Amherst spent several months at Kennedy House and from then on Simla grew in favour with the British. Its early history can be read about in more detail in Sir Edward J. Buck’s Simla, Past and Present, copies of which sometimes turn up in second-hand bookshops.
From 1865, until World War II, Simla was the summer capital of the Government of India. Later, it served as the capital of East Punjab pending the construction of Chandigarh, and today, of course, it is the capital of Himachal Pradesh.
It is not, however, as a capital city that Simla attracts the visitor but as a place of lovely winding walks, magnificent views, and romantic links with the past. Compared to some of our hill stations, it is well looked after; the streets are clean
and uncluttered, the old Georgian-style buildings still stand. And the trees are more in evidence than at other hill resorts.
Simla has a special place in my heart. It was there that I went to school, and it was there that my father and I spent our happiest times together.
We stayed on Elysium Hill; took long walks to Kasumpti and around Jakko Hill; sipped milkshakes at Davico’s; saw plays at the Gaiety Theatre (happily still in existence); fed the monkeys at the temple on Jakko; picnicked in Chota Simla. All this during the short summer break when my father (on leave from the Air Force) came up to see me. He told me stories of phantom rickshaws and enchanted forests and planted in me the seeds of my writing career. I was only ten when he died. But he had already passed on to me his love for the hills. And even after I had finished school and grown to manhood, I was to return to the hills again and again—to Simla and Mussoorie, Himachal and Garhwal—because once the mountains are in your blood, there is no escape. Simla beckons. I must return. And, like Kim, I will take the last bend near Summer Hill and look up and exclaim: ‘Ah! What a city!’
‘Romance brought up the nine-fifteen’, wrote Kipling and there is still romance to be found on trains and at lonely stations. Small wayside stations have always fascinated me. Manned sometimes by just one or two men, and often situated in the middle of a damp subtropical forest, or clinging to the mountainside on the way to Simla or Darjeeling, these little stations are, for me, outposts of romance, lonely symbols of the spirit that led a certain kind of pioneer to lay tracks into the remote corners of the earth.
Recently I was at such a wayside stop, on a line that went through the terai forests near the foothills of the Himalayas. At about ten at night, the khilasi, or station watchman, lit his kerosene lamp and started walking up the track into the jungle. He was a Gujjar, and his true vocation was herding buffaloes, but the breaking up of his tribe had led him into this strange new occupation.