‘That might have been it for me,’ she continued, ‘a fallen woman.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘And I can tell you, a middle-class woman has further to fall and little chance of redemption. But then the war came along, and the WAAC, and that was my ticket out of that life. I joined up, learned a trade, and the rest you already know … sort of. I came out here after the war, met Caine, who was now calling himself Carter. I recognised him at once. He’d no idea who I was, of course. The last time he’d seen me, I was twelve years old and veiled in funereal black.
‘That’s when I decided to repay him for what he’d done to my family.’
It was quite a story, yet I wasn’t wholly convinced. ‘You couldn’t find another way of killing him? You had to marry him first? That seems rather convoluted.’
She shook her head, as though I were being obtuse. ‘You fought in the war, Captain. After four years of death and destruction, would it have been enough to merely accept the German surrender and all go home? No, we needed some form of vengeance, of reparations, something to make the pain and the suffering worthwhile. It was the same for me with Jeremiah Caine. I wanted, I needed, some measure of restitution too. I wanted to kill him, but I wanted his money too.’
‘So you married him.’
‘It wasn’t difficult to persuade him. He practically begged me to become Mrs Carter.’
‘And the bruises?’ I asked. ‘Were they part of the illusion? Self-inflicted injuries to arouse my pity?’
‘They were real enough,’ she protested. ‘His abuse started immediately after our wedding night when he realised I wasn’t exactly virginal.’ She gave a laugh. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? That he should be so offended by my lack of purity, when his murder of my aunt was the very cause of it. Of course he threatened to divorce me, but he never went through with it. I suppose the loss of face he’d have to suffer in front of all these people up here whom he lorded it over would have been too great.
‘But that’s not to say I wouldn’t have met the same fate as Aunt Helena. I remember being thankful there was no electricity up here. He’d have to come up with another way to get rid of me. It got me thinking …’ She looked ruefully at the transformer and the oscillator on the workbench. ‘Then, one day, Ranjana was complaining about the metal bedstead in his room, and it just came to me in a moment of divine inspiration. It took a while to assemble all the pieces, but finally, the battery arrived and you helped bring it up here. Then, the other night, when the birds were dying and that fakir mentioned Ronald’s death, it felt like fate was telling me it was time to act.’ She looked up at me. ‘The thing I haven’t worked out is whether the fakir knew I was going to murder Ronald that night, or whether I did it because he mentioned it. You won’t believe me but I felt as though something took control of me and almost guided my hand.’
I stared at her, the violent bruise clearly visible on her face, and suddenly I thought of Bessie the night we’d found her in Grey Eagle Street. I thought of all the people who’d died because of the malevolent spell cast by Jeremiah Caine: of Helena, of Israel Vogel and Tom Drummond, and maybe even poor Philippe Le Corbeau, though we would never know for sure, and in that moment, any remaining doubt I had disappeared. I walked over to the workbench, picked up the transformer and began to pull apart the wire coils.
Emily Carter stared at me. ‘What are you doing?’
I pointed to the oscillator. ‘You need to get rid of that. Throw it off a mountain somewhere, and burn that mosquito net. Better still, I’ll do it.’
She stood there in shock. ‘You’re not going to arrest me?’
‘Your husband didn’t just kill his first wife. He also murdered someone I once cared about. She was clever and beautiful like you, and I let her down. He deserved the death sentence for his crimes. Maybe you were just destined to be the executioner.’
She kissed me gently on the cheek.
I pulled the last of the wires from the transformer, threw them under the seat of the gutted Bugatti and covered the whole thing once more with the tarpaulin.
Then, picking up the mosquito net, I shoved it back in its makeshift sack and left the barn.
SIXTY-FOUR
On the way out, I picked up a can of turpentine and trudged back up the hill, then round to the rear of the house. At the foot of the garden stood a secluded spot, screened from sight by a row of babul trees. There, I threw down the sack with the mosquito net, unscrewed the cap on the turpentine and doused the whole damn lot.
I reached into my pocket and fished out cigarettes and a book of matches. I opened the crumpled packet, withdrew the last cigarette, and with oddly shaking fingers, popped it into my mouth. Crushing the packet, I tossed it onto the pile and stared at the book of matches: a gaudy thing of red and gold that reminded me of one of Preston’s ties and which I must have picked up in Chinatown weeks earlier. From its face, a fat Buddha looked out and beamed contentedly. I opened it. From the forest of twenty red-topped cardboard matches that had once stood like a platoon of soldiers, only two remained, the rest reduced to nothing but jagged stubs. I tore out the penultimate and struck it against the thin strip of emery on the reverse and watched it spark to life. Cupping it against the wind, I held it to the tip of my cigarette, inhaled, then blew out a cloud of smoke. I looked at the weak flame, slowly burning its way down to the end of the short cardboard wick, and uttered a prayer. For a moment I stood there transfixed.
I didn’t hear him approach.
‘Are you going to do it?’
I spun round to see Suren standing there. His expression was one of almost serene calm. The flame flickered and died between my fingers.
He walked over, stood beside me and peered down at the sack. A corner of the mosquito net poked out one side.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t work it out?’
‘I almost didn’t myself,’ I said, staring straight ahead. ‘I only managed it because of a wartime fondness for electrical components. How did you figure it out?’
‘I had the advantage of watching your odd behaviour.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘My behaviour’s been odd all year.’
‘True,’ he smiled, ‘but not like this. I may not have known what the components were, but once I saw the battery, and your reaction to it, I knew something was wrong.’
‘You want me to explain it?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. I suppose it was the wife who killed him.’
‘Yup.’
‘Stands to reason,’ he said, still staring at the pile. ‘I might have trouble talking to pretty women, but you can never say no to them.’
I turned to face him. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘Isn’t it?’ There was disappointment in his eyes. ‘We should arrest her. Anything less would be a perversion of justice.’
I felt the bile rising in my throat. ‘Justice? You think that murdering bastard deserved justice? Did you think that maybe his death was justice? Maybe Emily Carter was the instrument of that justice. Maybe she was Lord Indra’s thunderbolt or the tool of an avenging Jehovah. Either way, there’ll be precious little justice in seeing her hanged.’
Surendranath gave a bitter laugh. ‘Since I was a boy, I have been told by Englishmen about the virtues of English justice: “It is honest and fair and has no truck with sentiment or partiality.”’ He recounted the words in the voice of an English schoolmaster. ‘And yet, when it comes down to it, your standards of justice are as arbitrary as anyone else’s. How then do you dare to presume to tell Indians what is right and wrong in our own country?’
‘Now isn’t the time for a political debate,’ I said. ‘And as you may have noticed, I’m hardly a poster boy for the British Empire. All I know is, Emily Carter doesn’t deserve to go to the gallows for the death of her tormentor.’
Surendranath stared at the trees. Long seconds ticked by, and still he said nothing.
‘Well?’ I asked eventually.
He turned and looked me in the eye.
‘B
urn it.’
The flames took hold remarkably quickly, their orange tongues dancing hypnotically, and for the longest moment, Surendranath and I stood there, watching as the netting turned to ashes.
‘Are you going to report this to Turner?’ I asked.
‘Report what? That you burned a mosquito net in a garden?’
The smoke suddenly grew black and acrid. I coughed as the rubber insulation around the copper wire which Emily Carter had sewn into the stitching of the net began to char and burn. Suren held a handkerchief to his mouth. Soon there was nothing left but a pile of black ash and thin filigrees of copper wire.
As I turned to leave, Suren took hold of my arm.
‘Remember what happened here today, Sam,’ he said. ‘There may come a time when I ask you to look the other way too. For justice, or for me.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
London, July 2019
Death in the East was not the novel I set out to write. True, I had wanted to write my take on the classic locked-room mystery, however, initially I had no intention of setting any of it outside of India.
In the end though, circumstances meant that I had little choice. Like many people, I’ve been saddened by the condition in which Britain, and much of the world, finds itself. From the United States to Europe and Asia, the rise of populism has seen the growth of anger, extremism, fear of the other, and the erosion of tolerance and decency.
In the UK, much of this anger has been directed at immigrants: on those coming to our shores either as refugees or simply in search of a better life for their families.
But this country characterised by fear and intolerance, is not the Britain I know and love, and it is not the Britain which offered sanctuary to the Jews of Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1914, or the Asians fleeing persecution in Uganda in the 1970s. Nor is it the Britain which invited the Windrush generation from the Caribbean, or those from the Indian subcontinent like my father and mother, to come here in the 1950s and 60s to help rebuild a shattered post-war nation and fill our need for cleaners, bus drivers, carers, nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and so many other roles.
But every step forward, it seems, is met by a backlash: a fear of things changing for the worse. But each time intolerance has raised its head, from Mosely’s Blackshirts to Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood and the National Front of the 1970s, the good, decent majority of this country has taken a stand against it. I have hope that the same will happen this time.
And I wanted this to be a book about hope. About remembering who we are as a nation, so that we may try to live up to those standards of tolerance and decency and fair play that I believe still run through us.
P.S. Birds really do commit suicide in Jatinga.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It’s hard to believe that this is the fourth Wyndham and Banerjee novel to see the light of day, and as usual there are so many people who deserve credit for sculpting the finished article.
In particular, I owe thanks to Rabbi Rashi Simon for the insight into the Jewish community of the East End, and to Ariella and Carl Tishler for being my first readers and educating me on Jewish culture. Any errors are mine, and not theirs.
Thanks also to my uncle, Dr Gautam Banerjee, for his invaluable advice on the physics of electrocution. I hope we came up with a means of murder that might have made Agatha Christie proud.
A special thank you too, to all the booksellers, especially the staff at Waterstones, for being such great supporters of Wyndham and Banerjee. I wouldn’t have a career were it not for your love for the books.
I’m indebted once more to the team at Harvill Secker: to my editors, Sara Adams and Jade Chandler; to Anna Redman, Sophie Painter, Dan Mogford and Katherine Fry. I’m also grateful to Jane Kirby, Monique Corless, Lucy Barry, Penny Liechti and all the foreign rights team for helping Sam and Surrender-not travel across continents. Thanks too, to Liz Foley, Rachel Cugnoni, Richard Cable, Bethan Jones, Noor Sufi, Beth Coates, Tom Drake-Lee and the wider team at Vintage for all their support, and to my agent, the very talented and ridiculously handsome Sam Copeland, and the team at Rogers, Coleridge and White for all their hard work.
Thanks of course, to all those good friends who let me borrow their names without worrying too much about what I’d do to them: to Martin and Wesley Spiller, Shalin Bhagwan and Vimal Bhana; and to the Red Hot Chilli Writers, Vaseem Khan, Ayisha Malik, Alex Caan, A. A. Dhand and Imran Mahmood: thanks for all the bakwaas.
Thank you also to Ruby Chamberlain for looking after the terrible two, and finally of course, thank you to my darling wife, Sonal, for putting up with me. Twelve hundred years and counting …
VINTAGE – home to the world’s greatest authors and books. Where new writers are discovered, bestselling books are found and yesterday’s classics revived for a new generation of readers.
Our authors represent the very best in creativity and quality and have won the most prestigious prizes the book world has to offer including the Man Booker, the Samuel Johnson and the Nobel.
Born in New York in 1974, and arriving in London in 1990, VINTAGE publishes beautiful books with the very best design for people who love to read.
@vintagebooks
penguin.co.uk/vintage
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Abir Mukherjee 2019
Cover photo © plainpicture
Abir Mukherjee has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This novel is a work of fiction. In some cases true life figures appear but their actions and conversations are entirely fictitious. All other characters, and all names of places and descriptions of events, are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons or places is entirely coincidental.
First published by Harvill Secker in 2019
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473556010
Death in the East Page 36