Replacing the book, I locked the cash box and returned it to the duty constable, then sought out Inspector Gooch.
‘So,’ he said, poring over a map of east London which had appeared at some point during the morning and been pinned to the wall. Certain landmarks had been circled, including Liverpool Street station and the docks. ‘What news, young Wyndham?’
‘I’ve just come from Jeremiah Caine’s house.’
‘And?’
‘He wasn’t much help. He was unaware of Bessie’s murder and didn’t know of any reason why she might be attacked. He asked me to pass on his condolences, though.’
Gooch sighed. ‘That was good of him. What about his visit to the house that morning?’
‘Claims he was in the area and popped in to see if she was all right. Says he picked up the rent too.’
Gooch noted the hesitation in my voice.
‘You don’t believe him?’
‘I believe he collected the rent. I just don’t think he’s the type of man who just pops in to check on his housekeeper’s health, even if he does happen to be in the area.’
Gooch shrugged. ‘All right, so he just went to pick up the rent and used the excuse of checking up on her to conceal the fact that he’s a money-grabbing bastard. That’s not a crime.’
‘Agreed, sir, but he could have sent his man Doyle to pick up the cash. There’s something else, too. Caine’s wife died some weeks ago, asleep in her bed. The doctor pronounced death by natural causes but it seems Bessie suspected foul play.’
Gooch turned from the map to face me, his brow furrowing.
‘And who told you that?’
‘The maid. A young girl named Lily. She said it was Bessie who found Mrs Caine’s body.’
‘Did she say why Bessie might think that?’
‘She’d no clue. Just that Bessie’s suspicion seemed only to heighten in the past week.’
Gooch rubbed at the back of his neck.
‘I take it you didn’t mention any of this to Caine himself?’
‘No, sir. My conversation with the maid took place after I’d spoken with Mr Caine.’
‘Good, because the last thing we need now is to attract the ire of a man like Caine based solely on the below-stairs gossip of a maid. Now have you any more good news?’
I shifted.
‘Not good news exactly, sir, but it appears that Vogel had recently taken out a loan from the Guardians of the Jewish Poor, to the tune of three pounds –’
‘Well, that sounds like good news to me! The man was in need of money. There’s your motive, Constable.’
‘If I may, sir,’ I said, ‘there’s a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘The loan was in kind, not cash, and he was up to date with his repayments. And according to Bessie’s notebook, he was also up to date with his rent.’
Gooch was thoughtful. ‘That’s rather inconvenient all round. I was rather hoping the motive might be financial. Especially now that the press have reared their ugly heads.’
‘Sir?’ I asked, unsure how Vogel’s lack of a financial motive made things worse.
‘Do you read the papers, son?’
‘Now and again.’
‘Then you must have noticed that certain of our friends in the Fourth Estate aren’t exactly enamoured of the foreigners in our midst, especially when those foreigners happen to be Jews. They’ll have a field day when they learn that our chief suspect in the murder of an Englishwoman is a Polish Jew, especially if we’re ruling out robbery as a motive. The headlines’ll scream everything from rape to ritual sacrifice.’
‘But there’s no evidence of either.’
Gooch shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter, son. These things are written by the unscrupulous and read by the unthinking. Some rags print precious little but trash about perfidious foreigners and treacherous Jews every week. Don’t believe me? Open the Gazette of a Monday morning. The only things guaranteed to be in there are bile about Jews and the weekend’s football scores. And you know why? Because that’s what sells papers. For them, this case is manna from heaven. “Immigrant Jew kills innocent Englishwoman” – now there’s a story guaranteed to rile up the man on the Mile End omnibus and scare the bejesus out of his wife. You think they’re going to hold back now?’
‘Shouldn’t we wait, then, before telling them about Vogel?’
‘They’ll find out. The same way they found out about Bessie’s death in the first place and started camping outside our door.’ He gestured to the station around him. ‘Someone in this place will tell them.’
I imagined the newspaper headlines; the impact they would have. The East End had seen more than a few riots over the years.
‘So you see, son,’ said Gooch, ‘it’s imperative we find Vogel, and quickly.’
TWENTY-THREE
February 1922
Assam
The dirt track down from the ashram was bordered by the ever-encroaching forest. It veered sharply left and a panorama opened up ahead. I stopped mid-stride, awestruck by the view.
An amber sun was rising, changing from blood red to gold. Beneath it a tapestry of verdant hills stretched to a distant blue horizon, the valleys between them shrouded in swathes of silken morning mist. In the distance sat Jatinga, its white bungalows snaking down the hillside, their roofs piercing gaps in the forest canopy like rocks in an emerald sea. The air was fresh, perfumed by the scent of wild flowers carried on a dawn breeze.
A week earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed any of it.
I set off once again, attuned to the sounds of the forest: the birdsong and the buzz of insects and the crunch of stones under foot. Earlier that morning, I’d said emotional farewells to my comrades in the European hut, reserving an embrace for Adler.
From Brother Shankar I’d received the warm admonishment, ‘Stay out of trouble, and maybe wait a few days until you take a drink,’ and though it was good advice, I wasn’t about to follow it, not without a fight. And so the journey to my new lodgings incorporated a short detour via the local post office, a small, whitewashed hut of a building about a mile outside of town. Beside the entrance, a brown-and-white mongrel lay dozing in the morning sun. It looked up and greeted me with a disaffected yawn, then closed its eyes once more.
Inside, I hastily scribbled a short telegram addressed to Surrender-not, my junior officer, care of his aunt’s address in Dacca. I passed it to the old man behind the counter. The message was simple:
PRESENCE REQD URGENT.
PRESTON RESIDENCE, JATINGA.
BRING WHISKY.
I left the post office with a sense of satisfaction. The last year had been difficult. I hadn’t exactly treated Surrender-not well, especially at a time when he was facing enough troubles of his own, what with half his family considering him a traitor for working for the British. I resolved to make amends, starting with a few days’ holiday for the lad, here in Jatinga, away from the dust and hustle of deltaic Bengal.
Set among neatly tended gardens, Preston’s house was a handsome wooden bungalow, raised off the ground on stilts and encompassed by a wide veranda on which sat the usual assortment of cane furniture that was as much a feature of colonial life as the gin and tonics sipped upon them. I climbed the steps to the front door and knocked.
‘Just a minute,’ came a voice from somewhere inside, and I duly waited, until some moments later it opened and I found myself face-to-face with the man I’d last seen the morning we’d found Le Corbeau’s corpse.
‘Mr Preston.’
Charles Preston stood barefoot and with the buttons of his shirt undone, a mop of brown hair, still damp, plastered to the top of his head.
‘Captain Wyndham. Shankar said to expect you today.’ He ran a hand through his wet hair. ‘I say, you seem to have caught me at rather an inopportune moment. I was just getting dressed. Come in. I hope you don’t mind me finishing while you settle in.’
I followed him into a spacious sitting room and placed my case on
the floor. The walls were decorated with framed charcoal etchings of the male human form in various contortions: the sort of art that some consider tasteful, and others consider an offence under section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. Against one wall rested a sofa of a rather modern design, strewn with shirts and the odd pair of trousers, and in the corner, a wooden dining table and three chairs, a fourth having been placed by a window and pressed into service as a makeshift clothes horse.
‘This way,’ he said, walking off into a hallway. ‘This is your room.’
I caught him up at the entrance to a bedroom which, alongside the usual furniture, contained a shelf lined with cameras and photographic equipment.
‘You’re a photographer too?’
‘It’s a hobby of mine. Anyway, make yourself at home,’ he said, disappearing back into the hallway. ‘Hope you don’t mind the mess.’
‘Maid’s day off?’
‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. No, not really. She only comes twice a week. I share her with a couple of the other chaps who live nearby.’ He wandered back into the sitting room, adjusting a flamboyant red silk tie. ‘We each have her two days a week, and on the Sunday she doth rest.’
He looked me up and down and it struck me that he must have known that I was, at least until a few days ago, an opium fiend.
‘Look, old man,’ he continued, ‘I know it’s jolly uncivil of me to dash off just as you set foot in the front door, only I have a rather busy day ahead. You’re more than welcome to stay and make yourself comfortable.’ His face suddenly brightened. ‘Or, if you prefer, you could come up to the club for a spot of breakfast. It’s nothing fancy, but they do manage to rustle up a rather decent bacon and eggs.’
After a week and a half of nothing but rice, dal and vomit-potions, bacon and eggs sounded like ambrosia.
Five minutes later, we were walking along a dirt track that led to the main road into town. Over his shirt, Preston had donned a blue linen jacket. His tie, this time, seemed less offensive to the eyes than the one he’d been wearing the day we’d found Le Corbeau’s body, but he made up for it with a silk handkerchief which poked ostentatiously from his breast pocket. All in all, he seemed to dress in what was a distinctly un-civil-engineering manner. He also struck up a running commentary on the residents of each house we passed.
‘That’s the Granby place,’ he said, pointing out a rather shabby bungalow, the paint on its boards stained grey from the rains of the last monsoon. ‘Made his money in rubber, they say, then lost it all to drink. As for the wife, well, you didn’t hear it from me, but …’
I stopped listening. A car drove past, a large black car, like the one I’d seen at Lumding station. I shook my head. That had been almost a fortnight ago and Lumding was seventy miles away. I was no longer a man in the grip of the O. I had to stop the paranoia.
I forced myself to relax. The car rounded a corner and was gone.
‘It’s mainly forestry, you see,’ I heard Preston say. ‘Everyone thinks Assam is nothing but tea plantations, but those are a few hundred miles away. In these parts it’s all about lumber and rock. Most of the white men you’ll see round here are involved in some way with the former or the latter, unless of course they’re employed by the government, or by God.’
‘God?’
‘Missionaries. Presbyterians mostly. Hundreds of them. It’s getting so that you can’t cast the first stone without hitting one of ’em. They come up to convert the locals to their version of the straight and righteous path. Doing a decent job of it too if you go by the number of churches that keep springing up. I wouldn’t mind, but they’re always harping on to the tribespeople about the iniquities of alcohol, and it’s hard enough to get a decent drink in Jatinga without the locals suddenly thinking you’re the Devil incarnate.’
The heart of the hill station of Jatinga, if you could call it that, consisted of a few wooden buildings clustered around a church, this one firmly C of E and, according to Preston, used exclusively by the area’s white residents. Beside it stood a small school and a general store, run by a family of merchants from far-off Gujarat who’d been here as long as anyone could remember.
‘Very handy they are, too,’ said Preston. ‘They’ll manage to get you pretty much anything within two weeks, save for alcohol. They claim their caste isn’t allowed to drink it, which is fine, but they could bring it in, couldn’t they? I mean, they don’t drink rat poison either, but they still stock it.’
‘Where can a man get a drink round here, then?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much the only place is where we’re going now: the Jatinga Club.’ He eyed me warily. ‘Hang on, has Shankar said it’s OK for you to drink?’
‘He provided some non-binding advice.’
Preston pondered for a moment.
‘In that case, the bar opens at noon.’
The view from the terrace of the Jatinga Club was as fine as I’d seen for a long time, and I didn’t just mean the plate of bacon and eggs which was placed on the table in front of me by a white-jacketed waiter. In the foreground stood the houses of Jatinga’s British community, and beyond, Preston explained, further down the hillside and clustered around a temple, were the many mud-brick dwellings of Indian incomers to the area, the ubiquitous Bengalis that made their living from servicing the British, and the Gujarati and Marwari traders that made their living servicing the Bengalis. A good way further still were the bamboo and thatch huts of the local tribespeople, whose land this had been since time immemorial. In the distance the verdant Khasi hills shone green and beyond them the grey silhouettes of larger mountains stood out like bas-reliefs against the pale blue sky.
‘Tea, sir?’ asked the waiter, and my stomach turned at the thought. Instead I sent him off in search of a pot of coffee and turned to Preston.
‘That house there, the three-storey one with the blue shutters. Who lives there?’
‘Good eye,’ said Preston, as though my noticing the grandest building in sight was somehow impressive. ‘That is Highfield, the house of Mr Ronald Carter, our local bigwig.’
Preston, who’d spent the last ten minutes dripping gobbets of gossip about Jatinga’s British inhabitants with all the fervour of a Grimsby fishwife, now failed to elaborate. Which begged the question …
‘What’s he like?’
He placed his cutlery on his plate and looked up. ‘Nasty piece of work. Treats the town and all in it as his personal fief. They say he bought his wife – she’s a beauty, by the way.’
‘I think I’ve met her,’ I said. ‘Up at the ashram.’
‘Possibly. I hear she helps out there. Anyway, he’s old enough to be her wicked stepfather, and one way or another, most people around here are in his pocket.’
‘Not you, though?’
‘I,’ he said, lifting an egg-stained fork and waving it towards me, ‘have the good fortune to report to, and be paid by, the authorities in Calcutta. Carter has no pull there.’
‘How’d he make his money?’
Preston shook his head. ‘No idea.’ He gestured at the vista with one hand. ‘He owns pretty much everything that you can see before you, though. They say he bought the land from the local tribespeople for a song. Convinced them it was haunted.’
‘Haunted?’
‘Mmm,’ he said, finishing a mouthful of fried egg. ‘Inhabited by evil spirits. To be honest, they didn’t take much convincing. I’m surprised no one else round here thought of it first. After all, the bloody place really is haunted.’
I looked at him incredulously.
‘Don’t believe me? How about I show you tonight?’
TWENTY-FOUR
February 1905
East London
A sharp wind was blowing in off the river. On Wapping High Street, men and women wrapped up as best they could and hurried through it, between sporadic pools of lamplight. A cold, stinging rain fell steadily from a sky heavy with the stench of soot and industrial effusion, as I, in my civvies and wet through, negotiate
d a path along the greasy cobblestones, dodging the wreckage of broken crates, gutter vegetables and horse shit.
From the road, the Turk’s Head was nothing more than a black void of an entrance into a narrow alley. The pub itself – a two-storey ramshackle building of brick and board – faced the river; and beside it, a treacherous set of wooden stairs led down to a small wharf where lay the rotting hulks of several old boats.
I ducked under the door frame into the warmth of the interior and scanned the room. Across the flagstoned floor was a counter of dark wood, behind which stood a solitary barman. To the left, towards the river and under a bay window, sat a series of low tables, all occupied by men with nowhere better to be, and against the far wall, a dying fire crackled in the hearth. Harmsworth was seated at the table closest to the window. He’d clocked me first and had already risen to his feet.
He met me at the bar with a smile on his face and an outstretched hand, which, when I failed to shake it, he turned into a pat on the arm. Without his hat, he looked younger: early thirties, with slicked dark hair half an inch longer at the back and sides than was seemly.
‘Good to see you, Constable,’ he said. ‘Sorry to drag you out in this weather.’
‘It’s no problem,’ I said, and the truth was I had little else to do.
‘What can I get you?’
‘What’re you drinking?’
‘Stout.’
‘That’s fine for me.’
Harmsworth turned to the publican. ‘Two pints of Imperial.’ He turned back to me. ‘So no trouble finding the place then?’ It was a question not really in search of an answer, just small talk the likes of which two barely acquainted men were expected to indulge in prior to the broaching of more pressing matters.
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