Death in the East

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘But we can’t prove it.’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s almost eleven. Maybe we should get to the telegraph office?’

  SIXTY-TWO

  The forest fell still, the preternatural quiet broken only by the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. Suren and I walked in silence towards the telegraph office, our reserve belying a rising tension. Not that there was much left to discuss. For his part, I knew the results of the post-mortem would decide whether he had a case against Carter’s erstwhile friends, or if he’d have to chalk it down to natural causes, however odd, and let them walk free.

  The office was little changed from my previous visit. The paint still peeled from the wooden boards that fronted the hut and the same pye-dog lay dozing in the morning sun as it had done two days earlier. To all intents, time had stood still here, yet in those forty-eight hours, circumstances had changed beyond recognition.

  The hinges yielded a shriek of protest as Suren pulled open the door and paused.

  ‘After you, sir,’ he said with a smile.

  I eyed him suspiciously, unable to recall the last time he’d called me sir.

  ‘Enough of your lip, Sergeant,’ I said, stopping beside him. ‘Anyway, this is your case. It’s only fitting that you read the telegram first. I’ll wait out here.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He was about enter, then halted and turned towards me.

  ‘Do you think they’re innocent?’

  I shrugged. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want them to be innocent?’

  With one hand I rubbed the stubble on my cheek.

  ‘Now that is a good question.’

  Suren entered the hut, and I strolled over to a thick tree stump out in the sunshine, close to where the dog lay napping, and sat down. From my seat, I looked out across the forest clearing towards the road into town. There, less than a mile away, three men sat, unaware that the whole course of their lives hung in the balance, dependent upon a few words transmitted telegraphically from twenty miles distant, printed on a slip of paper that was even now being read by the sergeant.

  I thought about Suren’s final question and realised that for me their guilt, or otherwise, presented a certain conundrum. I had no love for the man who’d called himself Ronald Carter, and I was hardly unhappy at the fact of his demise. But if Messrs Deakin, Dewar and Philips hadn’t killed him, that meant the bastard had died peacefully in his sleep and evaded justice of any kind for his crimes. As far as I was concerned, it would be a far better state of affairs if they actually had murdered him, even if it left me with the dilemma of having to arrest them for committing the act.

  There came once more the creak of unoiled hinges and I turned to see Surendranath walk out, his expression funereal.

  I stood up.

  ‘Well?’

  He handed me the slip of blue paper. I read it, then folded it into a square and placed it in my pocket.

  Surendranath gave a sigh.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go and deliver the news.’

  We fell into stride beside each other, and walked silently back along the road to Jatinga.

  Once more I knocked on the door of Highfield in a manner more civilised than I’d done the previous day. Once more it was the maid, Ranjana, who opened it. Surendranath asked her to call her memsahib and then assemble the other guests in the library.

  Some minutes later Suren and I entered the room, to be met with ashen-faced stares from the Carters’ guests. The furniture had been returned to its original positions after our sessions of interrogation the day before, and now the sofas sat facing each other in front of the fireplace and separated by a mahogany coffee table.

  The Dewars occupied one sofa, while Emily Carter, flanked by Deakin, took the other. Pastor Philips took up station by the French windows while Charlie Preston, after giving the polo shirt I was wearing a rather curious look, propped himself up against the globe of the drinks cabinet.

  Suren gave a cough, artificial and intended to silence, then walked to the centre of the room like the prophet Daniel visiting the lions. Six sets of eyes tracked his movements and six faces stared at him, some in expectation, others with expressions and no doubt sentiments less benign.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said gravely. I braced myself. ‘We have received the results of the post-mortem performed on Mr Ronald Carter. It states that the cause of death … could not be ascertained. In light of this, there are no grounds to delay you here any further. You are all free to –’

  His final words were lost amid the curses and sighs of relief. Only Emily Carter remained emotionless.

  One by one they rose, and in groups of two and three left the room, some studiously giving me the cold shoulder, others making a point of proffering a few choice words which I duly took on the chin.

  The exception was Charlie Preston, who managed to see the funny side.

  ‘I must say, old man, this has been a right wheeze. I hope you’ll come and visit us again soon. And keep the polo shirt,’ he said. ‘Think of it as a gift.’

  I turned to Surendranath and handed him the telegram.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘A souvenir of your first case in charge.’

  He unfolded it and read it again:

  CAUSE OF DEATH UNCLEAR.

  CAUSE OF SCORCH MARKS ON TORSO UNCLEAR.

  NO TRACE OF MORPHINE OR OTHER TOXIC SUBSTANCES DETECTED.

  ‘I honestly thought they’d killed him,’ he said. ‘I still can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Carter drops dead hours after the fakir foretold it.’

  ‘Maybe it is, or maybe they just used some toxin which the doctors couldn’t detect,’ I said. ‘Look around. We’re in the middle of a subtropical forest. Who knows what exotic poisons the tribes round here distil from the trees?’

  I thought of the herbal remedy I’d been fed for ten days up at the ashram. Who was to say there weren’t other such potions out there, ones that were less benevolent?

  ‘Or,’ I continued, ‘maybe it truly was the work of the gods. Vengeance for his past sins.’

  Suren glanced over. ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to.’

  ‘Can we go home now?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying yourself, Sergeant.’

  He shook his head. ‘This place is too cold and too hilly for Bengalis.’

  ‘You think this is bad?’ I said. ‘You should try Scotland. But very well. Go and pack and I’ll meet you up at the club in half an hour.’

  He gave me a knowing look. ‘Let me guess, you’re going to say your goodbyes to Mrs Carter.’

  Five minutes later, I accompanied him to the front door where the scene resembled checkout time at the Ritz. The Dewars and Deakin were milling around, awaiting the arrival of horse-drawn transport, while Thakur struggled down the stairs with their valises. Suren, in a gesture of magnanimity, wished them a safe journey, then set out on his own one back to the Jatinga Club.

  I made stilted conversation with them. According to Alan Dewar, Preston had already left, heading for his bungalow, and Pastor Philips was still in his room, presumably packing or saying his prayers.

  Of Emily Carter though, there was no sign, and as to her whereabouts, her guests in the hallway were no wiser than I. Bidding them goodbye, I headed for the stairs and up to the first floor. There, I knocked on each door in turn, hoping that one would be opened by the lady of the house and not the Baptist preacher.

  There was no response from either of the first two rooms, but then I reached the third door and everything changed.

  I knocked, perhaps a tad more vigorously than was necessary or proper, but none of that would have mattered had the door been firmly shut. It wasn’t, and instead, the force of my knock caused it to swing open to reveal Ranjana, standing on the bed, fiddling with a mosquito net. I assumed this had been one of the
rooms occupied by the Carters’ guests, and now that they’d left, the maid was taking the chance to tidy. She swung round in surprise, lost her footing and for a moment it seemed she might topple to the floor. At the last second though, she grabbed hold of the mosquito net and steadied herself.

  ‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ I said. ‘I was looking for your memsahib.’

  She looked at me with those expressionless eyes that servants reserve for their social betters whom they consider to be wasting their time, and made to step down from the bed.

  ‘I find her for you, sahib.’

  ‘No hurry,’ I said apologetically. ‘Please, finish what you were doing.’

  The girl nodded, then returned to unfastening the mosquito net from the large hook that hung from the centre of the ceiling. She untied it, and as the diaphanous sheet fell to the floor, I had an epiphany.

  The mosquito net.

  With a certain grace and a disregard for British standards of decorum, she silently descended from the bed and began to gather up the net, pleating its yard of muslin neatly before storing it in a chest at the foot of the bed, all the while trying her best to ignore the British detective who was staring intently at her every action.

  She turned for the door.

  ‘One moment, sahib. I fetch memsahib.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, and caught her by the shoulder. ‘I need to see the net that was hanging over your master’s bed the night he died.’

  She looked at me as though I was mad, but she knew better than to question a sahib. With a nod, she led me down the corridor to Ronald Carter’s room, turned the handle and entered.

  Ranjana opened the almirah, knelt down and rummaged in its base then re-emerged with the mosquito net in her hands. Just from looking at it I could tell this net was different from the one in the other room. It looked stiffer, less delicate and wasn’t folded nearly as neatly as the other had been. And then I saw a glint of metal.

  ‘Place it on the bed,’ I said.

  Wordlessly, she obeyed, and then I ordered her out of the room. I examined the thing, then looked up at the hook on the ceiling from where it had hung the night Carter had died. Then I wrapped it in a bedsheet, picked it up and headed out of the room, suddenly knowing exactly where Emily Carter would be.

  SIXTY-THREE

  ‘I thought I might find you here.’

  Emily Carter spun round, a hand held to her mouth in shock.

  ‘Captain Wyndham. You frightened me.’

  I somehow doubted that.

  She glanced curiously at the bundle in my hand as a nervous smile played on her lips.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  She ran a hand over the workbench.

  ‘I suppose you could call it spring-cleaning.’ As if to emphasise the point, she took the box containing the Hudson car battery and placed it in a wooden crate beside her. ‘I’ve decided to get rid of the car. I’m not sure I’ve the heart to work on it now that Ronald’s gone.’

  ‘It’s probably for the best,’ I said. ‘From the look of it, I don’t think you’d ever have got that thing working again.’ I glanced at the crate. ‘I mean, fitting a battery to a 1913 Bugatti would suggest you don’t know the first thing about the car.’

  I walked over to the tarpaulin that covered the Bugatti, pulled it off and knelt in front of the radiator.

  ‘See this?’ I said, pointing to the handle that jutted out from between the front fenders. ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’

  Emily Carter bridled, tossing back her mane of blonde hair.

  ‘You mean the crank handle?’

  I stood up. ‘Very good,’ I said with an intended insincerity. ‘That Bugatti never needed a battery because the starting mechanism was this crank handle. It was mechanical, not electrical.’

  Her eyes darkened, though her face remained impressively impassive.

  ‘But you already knew that,’ I continued, ‘as would any mechanic worth their salt, especially one who’d served in the WAAC as you did.’

  Emily Carter said nothing.

  ‘You didn’t need the battery for the car, did you? You needed it as a source of electricity to murder your husband.’

  She shook her head. ‘Maybe it’s my turn to educate you, Captain. It’s impossible to electrocute someone with a car battery. The voltage is too low.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, walking over to one of the crates, ‘and that may be why I thought little of it at first. Then yesterday I saw your houseboy hauling this box of things here from the house. That made me curious and this morning my colleague and I came over and had a look inside. Of course there were car parts, but that was just camouflage for the components you really wanted.’

  I reached into the crate and pulled out the hollow metal block with the wires coiled around it, then brandished it in front of her.

  ‘This is a transformer, isn’t it? And if you wire it the right way, you can use it to increase the voltage in a circuit. And that –’ I pointed to the device on the workbench with the small metal plate which read General Electric Company – ‘if I’m not mistaken is an oscillator, otherwise known as a motor generator, and I’m guessing you know what it does?’

  This time she dropped all pretence.

  ‘It converts direct current to alternating current.’

  I nodded. ‘And AC is better for triggering a heart attack than DC. Don’t ask me why.’

  ‘So you think I went into my husband’s room with a car battery, a transformer and an oscillator, wired it up to his chest, without him waking, electrocuted him, then cleared away the whole contraption without anyone noticing and miraculously locked the door from the inside?’

  I looked at her, I have to say, with a hint of admiration.

  ‘I admit, I had been thinking along those lines. I just couldn’t figure out how you got back out of the room. But now? Now what I think is that you are one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ she said, her voice deadpan, ‘but I still don’t see how you think I managed to kill Ronald.’

  ‘In that case, let me explain. A number of things made me suspicious. When my colleague, Sergeant Banerjee, was questioning you, you said that the first you knew something was amiss was when you were awoken by the noise of me trying to gain entry to the house. That you came from your room to find me banging on your husband’s bedroom door.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I did.’

  ‘Except your bedroom is on the first floor. The same floor as your husband’s and the rooms of all your guests. But when I first saw you yesterday morning, I was standing outside your husband’s door and you came, not along the corridor, but down from the second floor. At first I couldn’t explain why you would lie to us.’

  Emily Carter looked to the ground and shook her head.

  ‘Then the boy, Thakur, told me you sometimes used a room up there as a workshop, and that the room was directly above your husband’s bedroom. Why would you need a workshop on the second floor of the house when you already had this whole barn to work in? I decided to take a look. But when I went up there last night, the room was empty, because you’d already asked Thakur to clean it out and bring all the equipment back down here.’

  Emily Carter gave a dismissive shrug and brushed a pile of dust from the workbench onto the floor. ‘I still don’t know what you’re driving at, Captain, and unless you’ve got anything tangible to add, I’d be grateful if you left. I have a husband to bury and a lot of work to –’

  ‘I think you connected up your electrical devices – the battery, the transformer and the motor generator – in the room on the second floor. I think you raised the floorboards in the centre of the room and connected it to the bolt that holds the hook which descends into your husband’s bedroom, and then you connected it to this.’

  I opened the bundle, took out the mosquito net and tossed it at her feet. The reflection from one of the insulated wires glinted in the light.

&
nbsp; ‘It’s ingenious,’ I said. ‘You ran copper wire through the stitching of the sides of the mosquito net, connected it up to the bolt on the ceiling and then completed the circuit by touching the ends of the wires to the bed frame and the springs in the mattress. You waited for your husband and your guests to fall asleep, then, in the dead of night, made your way upstairs to the room above, connected up your battery to the transformer and the oscillator, and linked them to the bolt holding the hook to which the mosquito net and its wires were connected. The voltage would have been enough to cause his heart to pack up. I’m guessing the burn marks on your husband’s body were where the mattress springs came closest to his flesh.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to you,’ I said. ‘In all my years, I can’t recall coming across a more innovative method of murder. Electrocuting a man in a place where there’s no electricity. It verges on the artistic, and, given the circumstances in which he disposed of his previous spouse, it’s almost poetic. However did you think of it?’

  ‘I knew who he was,’ she said simply. ‘Helena Gibb was my aunt.’

  ‘His first wife?’

  Emily nodded. ‘She was my father’s sister. He died in 1900, leaving my mother with three young children to raise. It was Aunt Helena who provided for us, for our upkeep, our education. And then she died. I was twelve. The first time I met Jeremiah Caine was at Aunt Helena’s funeral. It was only months later that the papers reported she’d been murdered, electrocuted in her bed. By then of course, he’d fled and supposedly been drowned at sea.

  ‘Anyway, Helena’s death meant the end for us. Without her support – her money – my mother fell apart. I had to leave school to care for her and my sisters … I had to … do things no woman, let alone a girl, should be forced to do … but I did them, to save the others.’

  She wiped a tear from her cheek and it felt like a stab at my chest.