The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  At that moment Sam understood why he warmed to the superintendent. Who isn’t drawn to what he pities? In the planters’ clubs and the estate bungalows, they would be saying that Nagel had bungled it. An Englishman would have had Hamilton’s murderer swinging before the body was cold. It was all the fault of the blasted Civil Service, kowtowing to some damnfool scheme hatched by Westminster. Look what happened when you gave them responsibility! No one safe in their beds! In Nagel’s eyes the bewilderment of a child who never meant to climb so high jostled the understanding of a man who has measured the drop below.

  Yet two days earlier, the superintendent’s luck had turned. A scrawny Tamil presented himself at the police station. Rajendran ran a thriving bicycle-repair business in a filthy alley that was known to all the tea pluckers in the district: he would lend two rupees against their anklets, five cents above the going rate.

  For his encounter with authority the pawnbroker wore a tweed jacket above his verty, and cracked, exquisitely polished oxblood brogues on his bare feet. Brought before Nagel, he reached into his inside pocket and produced a handsome half-hunter. The superintendent examined the watch in silence: A. G. H. His heart flipped like a coin.

  Two coolies, a father and son, had brought it in, the pawnbroker said. He thought the younger man was called Velu. They worked on Rowanside, one of the estates Hamilton had traversed on his shortcut. Velu had said that he and his father were taking the same path home when he stepped into the undergrowth to relieve himself. There his toe encountered something smooth and cold. He stooped; retrieved a watch stuck over with black leaves.

  Nagel himself went to Rowanside, put his boot through the door of the ten-foot-square room in the coolie lines. They found the father within. The son, spotted running away from the latrine block, was brought to the ground with a flying tackle by an ambitious constable.

  At the police station the pawnbroker identified the suspects and was allowed to go. He went straight to Shivanathan, who telephoned Nagel and expressed his willingness to represent the men if charges were laid against them.

  Nagel had interpreted this, correctly, as a warning: Shivanathan was letting him know there was nothing to be gained from forcing a statement that wouldn’t stand up in court. As if the superintendent was a brute-fisted sergeant extracting confessions on which judges could hone their weary sarcasms. It was the implicit insult to his intelligence— rather than the slur on police methods—that rankled.

  The DSP cracked his knuckles and glared at Shivanathan, snug as a walnut on the other side of the fireplace. “They’re guilty of theft, at least,” he snapped.

  “But not of murder?” asked Sam.

  Nagel turned to him. He had the policeman’s instinctive mistrust of lawyers. Nevertheless he heard himself saying, “I don’t think so.”

  A moment later, relief at having blurted it out collided with the fear of what he had set in train. He excused himself. In the lavatory the cramps came in waves, crinkling his guts. He hung his head between his knees. He wiped the clamminess from his forehead with a handful of Bromo paper.

  When the DSP rejoined the other two, Sam asked if he could meet Taylor.

  The man had stiff little ruffles of brown hair parted low on the side to show a line of cicatrix-pink scalp. They found him in the White Falls factory, running his fingers through a sample of Broken Pekoe, his pale eyes alight. His tea maker stood by, radiating disapproval.

  Nagel introduced Sam casually, implying that he was helping the police prepare their case against the Rowanside coolies. Without actually lying, he conveyed the impression that the men had confessed. It was admirably done.

  Taylor rattled on all the way to the bungalow. He had a scheme for determining the exact point at which to check the fermentation of tea leaves. He spoke of scientific accuracy and quoted statistics with the fluency of the demented. The company had appointed him manager in Hamilton’s place, at least until the end of the year; he was determined to make a go of things, he said. His dog ignored him, waddling down the steps to Nagel and licking the superintendent’s hand with extravagant delight.

  “Good-for-nothing brute,” said Taylor affably. “Prefers forty winks on my wife’s bed to an afternoon’s shooting.” He offered cigarettes from a yellow tin. His nails were carelessly trimmed and not altogether clean; but beautiful, each with its nacreous half-moon. One of his eyes was smaller and set a fraction higher than the other; the asymmetry rescued his face from blandness by suggesting unreliability.

  The apu appeared with a tray. They drank sublime tea from thick Pettah china. All the while, Nagel improvised questions. Had Hamilton had anything to do with coolies on other estates? Had he ever spoken of Rowanside, and if so what had he said? Any shred of evidence that pointed to prior dealings with his murderers would be useful in making the charges stick, he assured Taylor.

  Taylor repeated his opinion that robbery was the motive for the murder. On more than one occasion he had voiced his concern about the wisdom of carrying so large a sum back to the estate and offered to accompany his friend; but Hamilton had always laughed him off, saying there was nothing to fear.

  Sam, sitting back in a rattan armchair that gave off an odor of spaniel, decided that Taylor talked too much, was probably capable of petty duplicities and doubtless a fool. But he couldn’t see audacity in the man.

  Then Yvette Taylor came out of the house.

  She was young, that was the first thing Sam noticed, much younger than her husband: twenty-two or -three at most. Fairhaired, fine-boned. The men got to their feet. She nodded at the visitors, but didn’t hold out her hand. What she thought of Ceylonese on her verandah was plain. Which explained the china. There would be a good set in a lead-paned cabinet, thought Sam, fluted English bone in a shade between rose and apricot. He pictured the apu lifting out a translucent cup; and the expression on Mrs. Taylor’s face as she caught him at it.

  She was wearing a green cotton housedress sprigged with white flowers. Sam saw himself divesting her of it: her small high breasts, shell-tipped. The vision left him stunned, his chest aching. Nagel, he saw, was studying his boots. He understood that women would unfailingly underestimate Mrs. Taylor; and that their husbands, meeting her, would always picture her undressed.

  Her accent was not quite right, the vowels skewed.

  She said, “Hadn’t you better scrub up, Gordon? Lunch will be served any minute.”

  That night Sam devised punishments for her rudeness, her pale hair twisted through his fingers, forcing her head into place.

  On the weekend he stayed in his hotel room, the table that served him for a desk littered with carbon copies of statements and reports. He studied the photographs. Hamilton’s face: pear-shaped, clean-shaven, ruched about the eyes. He was thirty-seven and looked ten years older.

  A photograph of the jungle path where the body had been found pulled Sam’s gaze. He returned to it again and again. He scrutinized it with the aid of a magnifying glass. At last he understood what it meant.

  On Monday, before leaving for court, he penned a note to Nagel. Ask the apu what Taylor bagged that afternoon. And search the bungalow. He added a postscript: I’m certain it was all her idea. But you’ll never get either of them to admit it.

  The season began. Racing, flower shows, a fashion parade at the Grand Hotel. There were dances three nights a week at the Downhill: paper lanterns along the verandah, a five-piece

  Colombo band called The Sensations. The saxophonist went under the name of Freddie Fonseka, but his flat nose and woolly hair branded him a Kaffir. The Dutch had brought them over from Africa to deploy against the island’s kings. The regiment’s ferocity was legendary: those they didn’t kill in battle they treated to castration, disembowelment, a catalogue déraisonné of protracted deaths. Fonseka was rumored to be leaving for Paris; he ended every night drunk on a foul cocktail of his own invention, three parts toddy to one of white rum and guava juice. Sam was of the opinion that such people were untameable.

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nbsp; Midweek the crowd was younger, Fonseka’s saxophone more sweetly lunatic. These evenings soon acquired a reputation, so that stricter parents kept their daughters at home and men far outnumbered women. Yet couples always crowded the dance floor, or whispered where shadows pooled inkiest in the garden. Eurasian girls were known to be fast. Sam kept his eye on one of them: slender, long-waisted, a girl with a tilted smile and a wing of black hair. Grace Sinclair: father an English planter who hit the bottle, mother a village woman. Grace worked at Cargills, behind the millinery counter, and was clever with her fingers, sewing all her own clothes. One dress, a sheath of jacaranda-blue satin cut on the bias, inspired some of Sam’s gaudier ruminations as he sat in court, hearing a witness recite the fluent lies they had rehearsed together, seeing Grace’s muscles move under the clinging cloth.

  He ran around with her for a week or two, then dropped her. Girls like that expected no better.

  Besides, Claudia and Jaya were up for the season. At his brother-inlaw’s insistence Sam moved into their house, a mock-Tudor cottage with sloping green lawns and seven bedrooms. He loved the prickly, dark-green smell of the pine tree outside his window. At midday in April its shade still struck cold; or so it seemed to him, standing beneath its arms with his eyes shut, breathing scented air.

  He had thought England would smell like that: deep and crisp and even.

  The house was full of guests and visitors dropped in at all hours. Fonseka showed up one midnight, rolling drunk in a sharkskin jacket, and vomited into a satinwood umbrella stand. The sickly scent of ganja perfumed the night. At three in the morning Jaya was cha-chaing with the wife of a minor Venetian aristocrat. Later he perched on the piano stool and sang, “They’re changing sex at Buckingham Palace, His Highness will now be addressed as Alice . . .”

  Once, Sam would have dismissed his brother-in-law’s gaping need for novelty and clamor as nothing more than quintessential foolishness. Now he was disturbed by nuances he sensed rather than understood. In that mood, even the presence of the saxophonist could seem sinister. Would his father—or Jaya’s—have tolerated that creature under his roof?

  At the height of the season, Jaya turned up to the Governor’s Ball wearing a dinner jacket and a sarong. An aide showed him the door. The incident did the rounds as a witticism: “Heard Jaya’s latest?” But Sam knew from Claudia that his brother-in-law had exchanged letters with Gandhi. In that house, with its fox-hunting prints on the stairs and its bound volumes of Chums in the breakfast room, he was vouchsafed a vision of what lay ahead. Politics. Change. He sweated through a nightmare in which he was trying to find his way home, to a house that lay behind a high stone wall, and that he glimpsed, from time to time, at the end of a lane or through trees; but the path he followed left him floundering on the side of a hill, where there were only low, dark leaves for cover, and riders approaching.

  Instinct catapulted him toward the source of all his craving. Maud was staying with friends, in a house overlooking the lake. He called on her late one Saturday morning and found her taking breakfast with Marcus Fernando in a summerhouse webbed with creamy jasmine. Marcus had the remains of an egg hopper in front of him and a dot of yolk on his chin. He greeted Sam extravagantly and avoided meeting his eye. Maud offered her cheek, still gnawing at a wing: he smelled garlic and Elizabeth Arden.

  Nine out of ten women would have chosen not to face the merciless silver light reflected up by the lake. Sam accepted a cup of tea and drank it while cataloging her chipped nail varnish, a black hair coiled on the rim of her plate, a smear of lipstick on her glass. Long ago he had realized that disgust was the only reliable weapon against his need.

  She told him—and Marcus, of course; it would be all over the hill station by dinner—that the Jayasinghes had begun to remark on Claudia’s failure to have a child. Ayurvedic treatment had been mooted, consultations with leading gynecologists in Colombo and London having failed to produce a result.

  “Could be a charm,” said Marcus. “Happened to our gardener’s daughter. Her husband called in a soothsayer, who found human hair and nail clippings buried near the entrance to their compound. Within a year she had a baby. Only a girl, mind you.”

  Claudia had not uttered a word about any of this, although Sam had concocted occasions to be alone with her. He made a point of quizzing her about her relations with Jaya; and whenever a discreet opportunity arose, examined what he could of her flesh to ensure that she was no longer mutilating herself. Her manner had often struck him as evasive, but evasion was her natural mode. Now it occurred to him that she might be contriving to deny her husband his conjugal rights. His knees came together in a little spasm of delight.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with that child,” Maud was saying. “It’s always problems and whatnot.” She arched her back and stretched her arms, languid movements that invited inspection. “In my day we never needed doctors to make babies.” She was wearing a mint-green chiffon housecoat over bottle-green pajamas. And a necklace Sam had never seen before, square-cut topazes linked with gold.

  When he stood up to leave, she said, “Cheerio, Sam,” and brought the palms of her hands together in the traditional way. It was done lightly, her yellow gaze mocking. But he had noticed that Jaya used the gesture systematically these days in lieu of shaking hands.

  One morning he woke up and found he was famous.

  Success exposes a man’s true nature while adversity encourages dis-simulation. Nevertheless Sam was unprepared for the generosity with which Nagel played down his own part in bringing the

  Hamilton case to a conclusion. The superintendent made it plain—to his superiors in the force, to the reporters who besieged him—that the crucial tip-off had come from Sam Obeysekere. He himself could claim no credit for solving the mystery, said Nagel, in a much-quoted interview. He was no more than the instrument of another man’s brilliance.

  Taylor’s arrest for the murder of Angus Hamilton made the front page of every newspaper in the island; there was even a paragraph in the London Times. Details of the case could not be discussed, pending the trial; and Sam took care to remind the reporters who arrived from Colombo and Calcutta and even Singapore of the presumption of innocence. They parroted his platitudes, and filled up their columns with trivia, gross flattery (the dashing Mr. Sam Obeysekere . . .) and lurid speculations about Taylor’s character and motives.

  A photograph of Sam appeared above the caption Our Sherlock Holmes. He cut it out of the newspaper with his nail scissors and kept it until the end of his days between the pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress, bound in royal-blue boards, the first prize he had won, for General Proficiency, at Neddy’s.

  He received offers from twenty-seven marriage brokers.

  In Shivanathan’s dry congratulations, he heard the grinding crank of envy. He remembered that Shiva, too, had been privy to Nagel’s story, but had failed to see its significance. The entire affair was an illustration of the difference between flair and a mechanical ability.

  The coolies from Rowanside were charged with the theft of Hamilton’s watch and the obstruction of justice. Shiva’s defense took the line that as both men were illiterate, they had seen only a decorative hieroglyph in the planter’s initials and had no idea of the significance of their find. It was a typically lawyerly contortion. But the case was heard by a magistrate who had been in the colony just over six weeks: not quite long enough to erode his intention of keeping an open mind. He sentenced the pair to eight lashes apiece, a sentimentality from which his career would never recover.

  One day, the two men were waiting for Sam as he emerged from court. They prostrated themselves before him and kissed his shoes. A shriveled crone in a dull red cotton sari crept forward and handed him a twist of picture cord from which was suspended a cylindrical copper amulet, bound with scarlet thread and greasy to the touch. Her Tamil was whispered and in any case unintelligible to him, but he gathered he was to wear it around his neck.

  At the Downhill that evening, stan
ding at the bar with his instep on the brass rail, he put his hand into his pocket and encountered the thing. As soon as he could do so unobserved, he dropped it into the nearest wastepaper basket.

  The court ruled that the Fernando brothers’ patrimony was to be divided equally between them: exactly as their father’s will had provided. Marcus and his brothers embraced tearfully, assuring each other that their feud had been a misunderstanding fostered by the bally lawyers. That night they threw a riotous party to which none of their counsel was invited. The next day Ronnie brought charges against Marcus and Clifford for invading his dressing room while intoxicated and defecating in his slippers.

  Taylor’s trial came up before the Colombo Assizes, some weeks after Sam had returned home. Seats in the public gallery were awarded by lottery. Whenever he had a spare half-hour, he pushed his way through the crowds awaiting news of the latest developments in the Hamilton case, nodded at the officers on the door and found himself a place at the back of the courtroom. Despite the discretion of his entrance, heads always turned.

  Fellows he had never set eyes on before—Tamils, by the look of them—accosted him in the Hulftsdorf corridors or in the street, and seized his hand. Baskets of Jaffna mangoes arrived daily at his chambers. But on the third morning of the trial there was a polecat, its throat cut, left at his door.

  Nagel gave his evidence with commendable calm. A week before the trial opened he had been returned to the rank of chief inspector. The trick to carrying off any egregious move is to treat it as preordained, a matter of destiny not policy. The officer who replaced Nagel had twelve years’ seniority over him; ergo, he was better fitted for the post. It was obvious to everyone who met him that the new superintendent, plucked from the malarial lethargy of the east coast where he had spent his days lying in a hammock strung between two jamfruit trees, was a lumbering blockhead. But he was the senior man. That he happened to be English was irrelevant.