‘Were you close friends of Mr Carter?’ asked Surrender-not.
Dewar took a long sip from his cut-glass tumbler. ‘Let’s just say he enjoyed our company.’
‘I suppose that’s one way of putting it,’ I said. ‘From what we’ve been told, it was your logging company he most enjoyed. We understand that he effectively forced you into bankruptcy, then came along and offered to clear your debts in exchange for shares.’
‘It’s true,’ said Dewar, shifting in discomfort. ‘Carter had lately become a significant shareholder in the business.’
‘A significant shareholder? Come now, Mr Dewar. Carter became the majority shareholder, didn’t he? It became his company and you were reduced to working for him. You were at his beck and call. That’s why you had to come last night, despite having no wish to. What I don’t understand is why he would want you to come in the first place.’
Dewar bristled. ‘Because that’s just the way he was. He liked making other people dance to his tune.’
‘That sounds like a decent reason to want rid of him,’ said Banerjee.
Before he could react, Celia Dewar put a hand on her husband’s wrist.
‘Captain,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard the expression, keep your friends close and your enemies closer? Well, Ronald Carter had precious few of the former and a great many of the latter. If you were invited into his presence, you could be sure it was because he wanted something from you or wanted to remind you that he’d already taken something from you and that there was nothing you could do about it. He was the sort of man who took delight in seeing others kowtow to him – not sycophants, he tended to grow tired of them, but rather men whom he knew didn’t like him but who had little alternative but to do his bidding. My husband had no fondness for Ronald Carter, but the same could be said for others in the room.’
‘Such as?’
Celia Dewar smiled. ‘Maybe you should ask Pastor Philips about the land around his church, and the sad demise of members of his flock.’
FIFTY-SIX
Pastor Philips had the physique of a Russian bear and a crumpled, weather-beaten face which, at that precise moment, looked like it was about to burst.
‘That’s a damned lie, ye wee heathen runt!’
Emily Carter had described him as a gentle giant, but from where I stood, there didn’t seem anything gentle about him. He towered over Surrender-not, his cheeks red and spitting fury, like he was contemplating strangling the sergeant with his bare hands, which didn’t seem particularly Christian.
Banerjee stared the pastor in the eye. ‘Sit down, sir.’
There was a steel in his voice, something I hadn’t heard before, and it served to fuel a feeling within me that something in him had changed during his time away in Dacca.
For a moment they both stood facing each other like rutting stags before the pastor seemed to remember that he was a man of God and sat back down on the sofa.
‘I ask you again,’ said Banerjee, ‘is it true that you were paid by Ronald Carter to convince the widows of two members of your congregation to drop their charges of manslaughter against him?’
That, at least, is what Alan Dewar, generously assisted by his wife, had gone on to tell us.
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ fumed Philips.
‘Then maybe you could correct our misapprehension,’ said Surrender-not.
The pastor sat back, wringing his hands together like he was squeezing the moisture out of a sponge.
‘It happened about eighteen months ago. Most of the tribesmen in the valley are employed by one or other of Carter’s concerns. These two were employed by his construction company, part of a gang who were building up the earthworks at Diyung to protect a stretch of the Maibang–Barabond road. It was the tail end of monsoon season, and by rights they shouldn’t have had any business being up there until the weather cleared, but Ronald Carter insisted on it. They were reinforcing the earthworks when a landslide occurred. Three men were dug out of the mud alive. Deakin was the doctor who saved them. Four others weren’t so lucky. Two of them were just boys – thirteen and fourteen.
‘The dead were all members of my congregation. In these parts, it’s often the case that matters like this are dealt with by payment of … let’s call it reparations, rather than recourse to the courts. Carter asked me to intercede on behalf of his companies and I did so. I didn’t like it, but you have to remember that Carter was king of the valley. There was no way some illiterate villagers could have won a case against him.’
Surrender-not did a poor job of hiding his disgust, and this time it was his turn to battle to keep his anger in check.
‘And Carter paid you for your services?’ he spat.
Philips balled his fists. The blood drained from his knuckles.
‘He made a donation to the church fund.’
‘And was that donation by chance larger than the amount paid to the grieving families of the deceased?’
‘The size of it is irrelevant.’
‘Why did you accept Carter’s invitation last night?’ continued Surrender-not. ‘Was it to try to obtain some more donations for your church?’
‘I didn’t want to come,’ he snarled. ‘There’s something unholy about this place.’ He turned to me for support. ‘You saw it last night too, Wyndham. The birds falling like hailstones from the sky as though possessed, then Carter’s death … I came because …’ For a moment he was lost in his own thoughts, then seemed to snap out of it. ‘Look, Wyndham,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing here, but I’ll not be spoken to like that by the likes of a jumped-up subaltern. You better tell your man to mind his place or he’ll be sorry. I know a man’s dead, but that’s got nothing to do with me, and it certainly doesn’t give this babu here the right to insult me.’
I gave Surrender-not a look of warning, then turned to the pastor.
‘I’m certain the sergeant meant no offence,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure he’ll amend the tone of his questions from here on.’
Surrender-not of course did nothing of the sort.
‘Why did you come, Mr Philips?’ he said. ‘Was it to plead your case before Carter in the hope of squeezing more cash out of him?’
When Philips spoke, his voice was a whisper. ‘Carter insisted I come. I tried to discuss the matter of money with him, told him that the tribals needed their church – it’s a focus of their community – but he said he’d deal with the matter in the morning.’
‘Except by this morning, he was dead,’ said Surrender-not.
Philips looked up. ‘Maybe it was divine retribution?’
‘Maybe it was,’ said the sergeant, ‘but if so, by which god?’
Philips failed to see any humour in the comment.
‘There is only one true God,’ he said.
After that, Surrender-not had very little left to ask the pastor, and two minutes later, I hustled Philips, still fuming, from the room.
‘You better keep that wee shite in check, Wyndham,’ he growled. ‘Just who does he think he is, turning up here dressed like that, interrogating his betters? Bloody uppity Bengali – you should remind him that he’s not in Calcutta now. He might get away with that sort of insolence back there, but we don’t take too kindly to it up here in the hills.’
I tried pouring oil on troubled waters.
‘I’ll speak to him.’
‘Make sure you do.’
‘I’ve one last question,’ I said. ‘Did you perchance hear a thunderstorm last night?’
The pastor stared at me quizzically.
‘Forget thunder and lightning, I don’t think it rained at all last night.’
Surrender-not was by the French windows, staring out at the rain.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ I asked. ‘First Dr Deakin, then the Dewars, now Philips. Are you deliberately trying to aggravate people?’
He turned slowly to face me as I walked back to where he was standing.
‘A man
is dead,’ he said.
‘I know that, but that man was an evil bastard and there’s no evidence that he died of anything other than natural causes. What’s more, there’s nothing to suggest that any of these people had a hand in his death. For Christ’s sake, Surrender-not, what’s got into you?’
He gave me a look unlike any I’d seen from him before.
‘Please don’t call me that.’
‘What?’
‘You know what. We’ve known each other for almost three years. I have saved your life and stood by you in times when no sahib did. You call yourself my friend, yet you don’t even make the effort to call me by my real name?’
‘You know,’ I stammered, ‘that I have trouble with the pronunciation. And everyone in the department calls you Surrender-not …’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Only sahib officers call me that. The Indian officers and the constables do not.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that as my friend, you should call me by my name, not some mockery of it.’
‘You insult a pastor because you’re upset about my pronunciation of your name?’
‘I insulted the pastor?’
He took a step back.
‘I addressed him with no derogatory epithets. He on the other hand called me a heathen runt, a jumped-up subaltern. You have nothing to say about that? He took a bribe to settle a case involving two dead Indians, but I am the one who is being insulting?’
‘That’s not what I –’
‘Dr Deakin called me a darkie and Mr Preston mocked me as Mahatma. You didn’t find those insulting? Or do you believe that an Englishman can say whatever he likes to an Indian, but when an Indian has the temerity to question an Englishman, then that is an insult to the sahib?’
‘What’s brought all this on?’ I asked limply.
With one arm, the sergeant gestured out of the window. ‘Look around you, Sam. This past year, while you were in an opium haze, the country out there burned. It has changed. Even the common man is waking up to the insults of British rule. If the best of you cannot treat an Indian with dignity, then what hope is there?’
I stared at him, standing there in his white cotton dhoti and leather sandals, and, in a moment of painful clarity, realised he was right. But realisation of wrongdoing is a million miles from admission of guilt, and I certainly wasn’t honest enough to admit anything of the sort to him.
Something in his features changed: a flicker of the eyes and then a softening of his expression.
‘I’m sorry. I should not have said that about your … addiction. It was wrong of me.’
There it was: the olive branch, extended once again by the Indian; because it was in his nature, because he was a man of conscience, and because in India an Englishman could never be the one to apologise.
‘Forget it … Surendranath,’ I said.
Despite himself, he smiled.
‘Did I get it right?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You murdered it, but I appreciate the effort. Maybe you should just call me Suren for short?’
‘I could do. Or I could stick at it. There’s probably still some time for me to practise before you throw all of us sahibs out of India.’
FIFTY-SEVEN
The rain had stopped and glowing embers of a red sun dipped below the cloud line to the west. Surrender-not, Surendranath rather, was seated on the sofa where his suspects had sat earlier, poring over the jottings in his notebook like a student before an exam.
I too had been thinking: reflecting on our conversation. In hindsight, I should have realised something was wrong when he’d turned up dressed like Rabindranath Tagore. In the three years I’d known him, he’d only once worn the traditional dhoti, and then only for a function on an especially auspicious day during the festival of the goddess Durga. Now suddenly he’d arrived here dressed from head to foot in homespun like the perfect Congress-wallah. Something in him had changed since he’d waved me off from Howrah station a few short weeks ago, or more likely the change had started earlier and I’d been too caught up in my own drug-addled affairs to notice. Maybe he’d been considering it all through the last year of the general strike. The Congress Party had called for Indian officers in the police and the civil service to resign their posts, and a good many had done so, but not Surendranath, and it had driven a stake through his relationship with his family. Now though, with the strike ended, maybe there was space for cooler heads and warmer relations to prevail. I supposed he’d spent much of his time away in Dacca in contemplation of such things.
‘I blame myself,’ I said.
The sergeant looked up.
‘For what?’
‘For your new-found nationalist zeal. I should never have told you to take some time to think about your future.’
‘True. That was a mistake. As you say, nothing good ever comes from giving a Bengali time to think.’
I walked over and eased myself into the chair opposite.
‘So, what do you think? Did one of our fine group of guests bump him off, or did he die of natural causes?’
Banerjee put a hand to his chin like a bespectacled, dhoti-clad version of Rodin’s Thinker.
‘Where to begin?’ he sighed. ‘A man, guilty of murdering others, dies in a locked room, with burn marks on his body, hours after his death is foretold to him by a fakir and after he has given orders for the killing of another man. Is his death murder, or from natural causes? If murder, then how, and by whom? If from natural causes, then what a remarkable set of coincidences that his death should time almost exactly with the moment he’d sent men to kill another?’
‘How could he have been murdered?’ I asked. ‘The door was locked from the inside, with the key still in the lock. I saw it there. Inside the room, the windows were shuttered, and Carter found in his bed with no evidence of a struggle. That would suggest that he went to bed alive and that no one had access to the room after he’d locked the door.’
‘All of the guests who stayed here last night had reason to dislike their host,’ said Banerjee, ‘Philips, Dewar, Preston …’
‘Not Deakin.’
‘Are you sure? Maybe the doctor had a change of heart. Maybe he was disgusted at Carter’s violence towards his wife. Maybe she persuaded him to do it. Or maybe it was that landslide last monsoon that cost the lives of Philips’s parishioners and Dewar his business. Deakin was the first doctor on the scene. He helped pull the bodies from the mud, including those two children. It may have affected him. He would know the work was being carried out on Carter’s orders, in which case it might have changed his opinion of his old friend. Maybe the three of them planned to kill him together? They’d all been invited to stay, and assuming Carter had sent invitations at least a few days in advance, they’d have had time to concoct a plan.’
‘Which would be what, exactly?’
The sergeant shrugged. ‘To get Carter inebriated, then for the doctor to inject him with something, or maybe just slip something into his drink. Of course, when Carter also invites Mr Preston and is called away by the servant, they’re forced to improvise. Dewar takes Preston for a walk on the lawns while the doctor slips out of the room, possibly with the intention of telling Carter he needs to administer another morphine injection.’
‘What about the burn marks on his body?’
‘Maybe he somehow received them beforehand?’
‘That’s quite a story,’ I said, ‘and that’s all it is: a story. There’s no evidence to corroborate any of that.’
‘There are still the results of the post-mortem to come,’ Banerjee replied. ‘If he was poisoned, then I’d hope we’d see some evidence in the report.’
‘You’d need to do more than hope, my friend. Let’s say you’re right, and Dewar, Philips and Deakin did indeed kill him –’
‘Mrs Carter too, possibly.’
I ignored the comment.
‘If there’s nothing in the post-mortem report suggesting a poisoning,
they’ll go scot-free, even if they admit the whole thing to you as they skip out of the door.’
The sergeant nodded grimly.
‘D’you want to call it a night?’ I asked. ‘We’ve interviewed all of the guests.’
‘There’s still the servants,’ said Surendranath.
Thakur was a lanky chap with a bad case of acne and the ungainly limbs of a fledgling stork. He shuffled into the room in blue trousers that were an inch too short and a threadbare woollen jumper that had probably provided nourishment to a fair few moths through the summer months. Under a thicket of black hair he had dark, intelligent eyes and wore a guarded expression.
The boy introduced himself, and Surrender-not offered him a smile and a pat on the shoulder as he showed him to the sofa, then took a seat beside him.
‘You speak good English.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the boy. ‘I learn in church. Every Sunday, memsahib make me go. She is teaching me herself also.’
‘How did you come to be working for Mr and Mrs Carter?’
‘My uncle works for Master sahib as driver. When Master sahib tell him he needs one boy to do odd jobs – fetching, carrying, this sort of thing – my uncle suggest me.’
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘Two years, almost.’
‘And you live in the house?’
The boy nodded. ‘My village is two days’ journey from here. I return home every six months for one week.’
‘To see your parents?’ asked Banerjee.
‘That is correct, and my wife.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen. I will be seventeen in two months.’
Surrender-not considered this for a moment, then returned to his questions.
‘Tell me what happened when your master and memsahib returned from the club last night.’
Thakur paused, running a hand across the fluff on his chin.
‘Master sahib and guests are coming home late in evening, long time after all birds is falling. Memsahib is taking guests to drawing room, but Master sahib, he is calling me to one side and telling me to fetch one man, Bogoram Deori, from tribal village.’
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