The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  Your father was a sophisticated reader, fluent in the conventions. That Yvette Taylor constructed herself as a victim was in itself cause for suspicion. He looked for the latent confession beneath the occluding surface. That business of the lavender coatee. The small hand resting like a badge of virtue on her swollen belly. She had overdone the symbolism, like any Sunday scribbler. In the signs of innocence he recognized guilt. As I said, he was a sophisticated reader.

  All Hulftsdorf knew your father’s opinion of Mrs. Taylor. I, for one, shared it. Keep in mind her costume, and the way she went to pieces in the witness box. It suggested greasepaint. It looked stage-managed. So when I came to write about the Hamilton case, it was with an untroubled conscience that I winched her viciousness a notch tighter. You could call it the curse of belatedness. Murder, like love, offers only a handful of variants. The story has always already been told; it feeds on ever more ingenious twists. To accuse Mrs. Taylor of doing no more than orchestrating the murder of Hamilton now reeked of old hat. So I described an adul-tress who had arranged the deaths of two men and made a fool of a third. Understand that I was certain I had discovered the truth. It never crossed my mind that the Yvette Taylor I had conjured might have been determined from start to finish by narrative necessity.

  Naturally none of this precludes the possibility of her guilt. Sometimes the endless shifting of figure and ground drives me to despair. I long, like you, for the consolation of certainty. But murder, like all art, generates interpretation and resists explanation. Why do you suppose that your father, having set out to establish the facts of the Hamilton case, found himself unable to do so? Have you never noticed how testimony falters under interrogation?

  But I am only postponing the moment of confession. There is another turn of the screw.

  On an evening in 1957 I saw Jaya for the last time. The murderous events of the following May were still months away. But violence already hung in the air. A charred van helpless on its back, bottle glass frosting a pavement. All over the island there were these premonitory spurts of temper.

  I had spent three months in the western province, hearing the as-sizes. Rigidity sets in quicker in the outstations, preference embalmed as prejudice in the beat of a pulse. Episodes that might have remained unrelated in the capital were stringing themselves together on a common thread of hatred. I returned to Colombo in the grip of a headache, certain that the small acts of savagery breaking out around me were emissaries from the future.

  That night I lay in the clammy shroud of a fever and memories of Jaya swelled to fill my skull. I repeated his name aloud. We had broken years before. In the aftermath of his speech calling for the compulsory repatriation to India of all plantation Tamils, we flung extravagant insults at each other. The icy memorandum in which I queried the legality of his Sinhala Only bill went unanswered. But now, with a migraine pounding at my temples, it was clear to me that Jaya alone could reverse our island’s drift to brutality. I grew delirious. I walked on the ceiling of my bedroom. I flew over an amethyst sea on which Jaya and I strolled, devising the principles of a radiant new grammar.

  He agreed to see me. His secretary returned my telephone call within the hour. Three evenings later I presented myself at the house in Green Crescent. A stir of breeze along the road carried the scent of night-flowering jasmine, scrambled with the ripeness of excrement. At the gate a sentry consulted a list, then slapped his rifle to his shoulder. I no longer trod the light-seared heights of my dreams as I made my way up the drive. Nevertheless I went to the encounter buoyant with hope.

  I had rehearsed with care. Proceed calmly, I advised myself. At the same time, be unequivocal. Flatter him but let him understand that you have his measure. At the top of four stairs I walked into his embrace. Before we had crossed the verandah, his arm like a log across my shoulders, I was confessing fears, babbling entreaties, doling out rebukes, proposing methodologies, contradicting myself and starting over again. “You have the PM’s ear,” I cried, and bit my tongue. The pain brought me to something like my senses.

  In his office room Jaya sat me in a chair carved by a Dutchman. He unlocked an oak cabinet and drew out a decanter. He put a glass of cognac in my hand and produced the pipe he no longer smoked in public. Then he said, “What I have always loved in you, Shiva, is that you are never judicious. An admirable quality in any man, and a great one in a judge.” I knew then that he would not move a finger to save us. Jaya’s compliments were always a symptom of disengagement.

  No need to dwell on what followed. I reasoned like a sensible man, then like a lunatic. He smiled and drew on his pipe. What none of his chroniclers will tell you is that politics mattered to Jaya up to a point. Words flowed from him and men wept or committed murder. But he entertained no causal relation between these phenomena. He saw no reason why his Tamil friends could not overlook his oratory; or why his Sinhalese supporters could not overlook his friends. Rivals in his party cried hypocrisy. It was a crude assessment. He polished his speeches until they flashed like instruments. But their action in the world was a matter of indifference to him. He sought only that cool, perfect shine.

  I think of it now as a profoundly modern sensibility. That Jaya— “Jungle Jaya”—possessed a near-mystical affinity with our island, a concentrated instinct for its core, has long been an article of faith. Useless to take issue with mythology, perhaps. But only consider the place. What do you see? For myself, an explosion of leaves. Wind that cracks trees. Iron-skinned jackfruit, heavy as lambs. A country governed by hyperbole, where love and hate are operatically scored. The dial stuck on fortissimo. The needle shaking past the last calibration. Jaya met its opulence with a cool grid of irony and dialectic. It was counterintuitive, a new way of looking at the world. Technical, abstracting. Very twentieth century.

  But my sister will tell you that what we seek to repress returns distorted. Emotion is not so easily excluded from history, you see. Jaya lived to see his theorems of national pride codified into a geometry of racial hatred. The exquisite rigor of the grid turned schematic, its glitter vicious. I think it brought him to a private despair. I have never believed it was misfortune that sent his tires spinning on the road to Kandy. For years he had barricaded himself in that monstrous house of flesh. I think he fled from it, in the end, into truth.

  When I rose to leave that evening, I mumbled something sour about his disdain “not only for men but for justice.” We both knew it was the deadliest charge in my repertoire. Once, that fact would have amused him. But now my contempt grated. He set his pipe down and studied me. “Why, Shiva—you of all chaps know that justice is a slippery beast.”

  I gazed at him dully. We no longer seemed to have anything worth saying to each other.

  “You remember the Hamilton case.”

  It was not a question. I made no answer.

  He said, “I know about Velu.”

  The connection took a moment. Then the spark: Velu was the man who had found Hamilton’s watch. The illumination accompanied by a little shock of astonishment that Jaya should have retained the name.

  He misread my surprise. “You’re wondering how I found out. Have you forgotten that we went about those coolie lines together, you and I, enquiring into conditions on the estates? Those men knew my face. They counted me as an ally. It didn’t matter to them that I was a Sinhalese. Do you find that galling, Shiva?”

  A carriage clock roosting on a pile of document boxes was clucking like a demented fowl. I raised my voice: “You’re talking in riddles.”

  He reached for the decanter and angled it over my glass. I hesitated. But curiosity and cognac is a potent mixture. I sank back into my chair and waited.

  “Nadesan.” Jaya’s gaze was mild, even friendly. “Marimuttu Nadesan. Mean anything to you?”

  A short, whippy man with a milky white shutter pulled down over his left eyeball. I said slowly, “He worked in the factory on Rowanside. Like Velu. There was trouble about trying to organize a union.”

 
“Earned himself a boot up the backside and a discharge ticket.” Jaya had his pipe going again. He was wearing a loose batik shirt, loudly patterned, over a snowy sarong. That kind of getup suited his bulk, a suggestion of regality in the drapes. I had worshiped him at Neddy’s. I had believed him finer than the rest of us, a denizen of the hills come down to the plains, a boy following the clean curve of a ball through the wide future. Of course when people fail to live up to our illusions, we find it impossible to forgive them. So I studied Jaya as he lounged there under that lamp, a large soft man with a syrupy drink at his elbow, and wanted to inform him that he had come to resemble a statue of himself.

  He was telling me that Nadesan had called on him one evening. There, in that very room. “We talked of this and that,” said Jaya, and I allowed myself a vinegary smile. I knew the deft empathy with which Jaya could unravel a man’s defenses. It was a gift, I suppose. Like his prodigious memory. This detail, for instance, preserved from a decades-old conversation: that in forty-eight hours Nadesan had eaten only a slice of bread and sugar. “He was in a bad way, poor bugger. But he thought that in Colombo there would be a chance of picking up work on the docks. No kangany would hire him up-country.”

  At first Jaya assumed his visitor was trying to cadge a meal and a few rupees. “I was reaching for my pocket. But Nadesan was after help of a different kind.”

  He paused. His gaze rolled over me; that deadly mildness. I had trained myself to counter it with composure. Only now, as his glance flicked away, I caught the satisfaction in it; and saw, too late, that poise might be as revealing as agitation.

  When he spoke, he might have been remarking on the weather. “Nadesan knew who had murdered Hamilton.”

  I helped myself to more cognac.

  He said that Velu and Nadesan had been drinking together. Taylor had just hanged himself. On the estates, in the bungalows and the lines alike, it was the only topic of conversation. But Velu went further. He put his mouth close to Nadesan’s ear and breathed what he had done. He was very cock-a-hoop at the latest turn of events: the sweetness of it, an Englishman dying in place of a coolie.

  “He told Nadesan he had planned the murder for months, tracking Hamilton each time he returned with the wages along the shortcut through the jungle. When the evening he had settled on arrived, he waited until he heard Hamilton’s horse. Then he flung himself face down beside the path and lay still, his gun concealed beside him.

  “Hamilton reined in his horse. Several slow seconds later, Velu heard him dismounting. A chink of brass. The dull tread of a boot. Hamilton had taken three steps when Velu sprang to his feet and shot him. At the last minute he snatched up the dead man’s watch; but panicked as he ran and dropped it behind a bush.”

  My years on the Bench had tuned my ear to perfect pitch: the recital rang false from start to finish. Which was of a piece with Velu; as I recalled, the man was born to swagger.

  I began with the most obvious flaw his story. “Velu tried to pawn Hamilton’s watch. Why would a murderer draw attention to himself?”

  Jaya gestured with his pipe: Who knows? “It was a calculated risk. He chose a Tamil pawnbroker, remember. The fellow might not have gone to the police. And Velu took good care that his father was present when he pretended to stumble on the watch. The old man had worked on Rowanside for forty years. The periya dorai himself went down to the police station to put in a good word for him. A gold watch . . . Even Nagel could understand the temptation. But everyone who knew the old man swore he would never have had anything to do with murder.

  “And then Velu had a glorious stroke of luck. Obey showed up. Obey!” Jaya grimaced like a schoolboy. “Conferring in hushed tones with that arrogant dolt Nagel. Examining clues with his magnifying glass. A coolie was far too crude a suspect for him. No psychology, you see. In his view people like Velu murdered brutishly from tedious motives. So the great detective dreamed up his crackpot theory about Taylor and persuaded Nagel to arrest him.”

  I tried to interrupt, but Jaya was in full flight. “The utterly incredible thing is that both Obey and the DSP believed they were giving their careers a boost. It still amazes me. Did you know that Billy Mohideen tried to warn Obey? Waste of time, of course.” He thrust out his chest. “I know the English, old boy. Fair play and all that.” He gave a little snort. “God, what a stiff-necked fool.”

  “But none of it hangs together.” I rose from my chair and began to pace about the room. “Why would Nadesan do the dirty on Velu? Hamilton stood for everything he hated. Why would he denounce a fellow worker for killing him?”

  “Because it was Velu’s father who went to see the dorai and told him that Nadesan was a Red trying to stir things up on Rowanside. The old man was desperate to crawl back on side. And Nadesan discovered that socialism is a very poor insulation against the craving for revenge.”

  “So why not go straight to the police?”

  “You think they would have believed him? A Bolshie agitator? It would have sounded like a cock-and-bull yarn cooked up to discredit Velu and his father.”

  I was shaking my head. “It’s all wrong. What happened to the money? And where would Velu have got hold of a gun?”

  Again that dismissive wave of his pipe. “A fellow like that always knows how to get his hands on a gun.”

  “What about the money?” I repeated. “One of the bags was found half burned behind Hamilton’s bungalow. How do you square that with Velu being the murderer?”

  Jaya was looking down, fiddling with the amber mouthpiece of his pipe. “Brilliant, unformulated cunning,” he replied after a moment. “I don’t suppose he planned it. But the night was rainy, moonless. Easy to creep down a hill and toss a couple of canvas holdalls onto the White Falls rubbish heap. If they were found, suspicion would fall on Hamilton’s own household. Which is exactly what happened.”

  “But the money itself,” I insisted. “Surely you don’t believe Velu left it to burn? The man made forty cents a day. Think of the temptation. It would have begun with tots of arrack for his cronies. A bottle of whiskey for himself. Gold nose studs for his mother. And Nagel would have had him behind bars before the undertakers had finished measuring Hamilton for his coffin.”

  Jaya had his pipe going again. In the blue smoke rolling between us, I thought I glimpsed the edge of his smile. But all he said, peaceably enough, was, “I haven’t got to the end of what Nadesan had to say.”

  He paused. “Well?” I said, impatient with these histrionics but obliging him nevertheless with his cue. “What happened?”

  “Velu died,” answered Jaya. “The night after Nadesan was sent packing. He picked a fight during a game of cards and someone slashed his throat open with a broken bottle. Gambling was banned on Rowanside. No one would admit to being at the game. All the men provided each other with alibis. The police didn’t press too hard—you couldn’t expect them to exert themselves over a dead coolie—and that was that.”

  “It’s the one plausible thing you’ve said,” I snapped. “Your ending at least is in character with a toddy-fueled loudmouth. But that drivel about murdering Hamilton! It’s obvious Velu invented the whole story to impress Nadesan. A socialist will believe anything as long as it’s sufficiently incredible.”

  When he laughed I turned away.

  I was standing by a long window that gave onto the night-filled garden. As I peered up at the sky with its worn sliver of moon, it occurred to me that darkness was what was always there, the ground on which the world was painted. Each day the canvas grew further abraded, and a little more darkness showed through.

  Behind me, Jaya went on talking. Nadesan had begged him to go to the police, he said. Vouch for his character, act as an intermediary. Get him reinstated on one of the estates. “He was afraid the Red dawn wouldn’t rise over the hills without him. One of those fellows with a mission, Nadesan.”

  I took off my spectacles, rubbed my eyes. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I told him not to be a damn fo
ol. An Englishman had hanged himself. No one wanted to dig up a stink around that corpse. I slipped him ten chips and advised him to get himself a one-way passage on the next boat to Madras.”

  It was irresistible. “Of course. The blueprint of your grand plan for all Tamils.”

  Thirty seconds of ticking silence went by. Then he said, in that same mild, implacable tone, “You know, you were a shade too insistent about the money.”

  I turned on my heel.

  This time there was no missing his smile. “Oh, Nadesan knew everything. He knew that Velu confessed to you, and that you ordered him to keep his mouth shut. You said that at worst Hamilton’s watch would cost him a few months with hard labor, and that there was no need to put up his hand for the gallows. You were a man of the law a long way after you were a Tamil, my friend.”

  I tried to say something. He put down his pipe and began to applaud: a slow, ironic clapping. “A first-rate brain. I always envied you that, Shiva. The way you turned their prejudices against them. A coolie: by definition, a brute. If a creature like that had murdered Hamilton, the motive had to be robbery. Base gain. Inconceivable that such a man might murder impersonally, from principle. Inconceivable that Hamilton might simply have been the unlucky representative of a race Velu had every reason to detest. You grasped that straight away, didn’t you? The nonappearance of the money was the psychological weak point in the case against Velu. It unsettled Nagel. Made him receptive to Obey’s romance about Taylor.”

  He tilted his glass, and for a moment the orange liquid lent its carnival tint to his face. “You were right to muzzle Velu,” he said. “A dead Englishman—what did it matter? They shouldn’t have been here in the first place. That was the real crime, the one that counted. Your submission about the plantations was on a desk in London. The revelation that Hamilton had been murdered by a coolie would have damaged your cause beyond repair.”

  At the first syllables he cut across my protest. “You and I have always been realists, although we rave like dreamers. Velu got off. You got your judgeship. There were reforms on the estates. Keep those things in mind, when you come here with your po-faced prattle about justice.”