A Very Pukka Murder

by Arjun Gaind

  “Oh, it was a bottle of wine, Your Majesty.”

  Sikander’s eyebrows shot up. Could she mean the Oloroso? Could Lowry be the one who had provided the very bottle that Sikander had found in the dead man’s bedroom?

  “Was it wine, Madam, or sherry?”

  “Aren’t they one and the same?”

  Sikander let out a vast sigh. Ordinarily a comment like that would have sent him right off the deep end, but he had come to quite like Jane, enough that he realized he could not fault her for her ignorance. The poor thing had endured a difficult life denied of the privileges he had always taken for granted. He understood that it was unfair to expect someone of her low background to have developed the same fine tastes he possessed.

  “When you are in better mettle, my dear, remind me to explain the difference, but for now, let us return to yesterday and the Resident’s other visitors. Other than the estimable Mr. Lowry, that is.”

  “Well, his Munshi came by at about one-thirty to deliver some letters.” She frowned. “Actually, now that I think of it, he seemed in quite a temper.”

  “How so?” Sikander asked, his ears perking up.

  “Well, ordinarily, the Munshi is a very quiet, well-mannered man, but yesterday I heard him arguing with the Major.” She leaned forward, until her face was just a few inches away from his own. “He was shouting actually, which was very surprising.”

  Sikander frowned. That wasn’t just surprising, but downright shocking. The thought of an Indian raising his voice to his master was unheard of. It could only mean that something irrevocable had happened between the two men, a break that had pushed the Major’s assistant past the brink of reason.

  “Do you have any inkling what they were arguing about?”

  “Not really. I was making some tea, and all I overheard was their raised voices. I came dashing in to see what the hullabaloo was about before things managed to get really ugly, but they quieted down as soon as I entered the room. They insisted on acting like nothing was wrong.”

  “Hmm,” Sikander mused, assimilating this snippet of information. How very fascinating! What could have been the cause of such a vociferous argument? Whatever it may have been, it had to be well out of the ordinary, especially if it had caused someone like the Munshi to lose his composure. When they had spoken earlier, he had struck Sikander as rather a harmless fellow. But if the Major had managed to push him to so flagrantly exceed the boundaries of acceptable behavior, it had to be something worth investigating further.

  “Who was the third visitor?”

  “Oh, it was Captain Fletcher. He was the one who escorted the Major back from the New Year’s Ball last night.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I…I am not sure, sir. I did not check the clock at the time. All that I can say is that it was very late, and that the Major, well, he was rather under the weather.

  “You mean he was drunk?”

  She nodded once, not willing to confirm this insinuation. “He was almost insensate, which is why Captain Fletcher had to accompany him, I imagine. Upon their arrival, I sent for Ghanshyam to help the Major to his room, but he was nowhere to be found, so I had to pitch in. It took some effort, but together the two of us managed to drag him upstairs to his bedroom.”

  “And Captain Fletcher left after that?”

  “Yes. He offered to stay, but I certainly did not keep want to keep him here.”

  She faltered, just a momentary hesitation but it was enough to give him the distinct sense that she did not entirely like the Captain, that she was more than a little uncomfortable around him.

  Sikander decided to pursue this intuition more closely. “Do you know the Captain well, Madam?”

  “Well enough,” she said guardedly.

  “It seems to me that you have little regard for him. Why is that?”

  Jane did not reply, instead pursing her lips until they were almost invisible.

  “Did he ever make overtures toward you?”

  She blanched, before giving him the faintest of nods.

  “Only once. I rebuffed him quite strongly. He tried to press his suit but I made it clear I had no desire to be courted by him.” She shuddered. “He is a rough man, sir, with coarse manners.”

  “I believe he and the Major were great friends, but they had a falling out some weeks previously.”

  She shrugged. “Yes, they had rather a heated argument. Right in front of me, in fact. I had the misfortune of bearing witness to the whole sordid mess.”

  “Is that so? Would it be indelicate of me to ask what caused this rift?”

  “Frankly, I think it was the Major’s fault entirely. From what I can piece together, he had made the Captain a solemn promise to help him gain his Majority, and I think he let him down quite badly. When this promised promotion failed to materialize, the Captain was understandably sore, and in his wrath, he threatened the Major.”

  “What kind of threat?”

  Jane shivered involuntarily. “He said the Major would regret betraying him, and that he would get even with him, even if it was the last thing he did. Of course, I doubt he meant it. I think he was so angry he may have said rather more than he intended to, harsh words that I suspect he may have come to regret later, but sadly, it was too late for apologies. The Major was quite incensed with him. Before their quarrel, you see, the Captain had often joined him for supper, but that ended rather abruptly once they had words. In fact, I hadn’t seen the Captain for the better part of a fortnight, not until he arrived in the Major’s company last night. To tell the truth, that was why I was so glad when he left. The last thing I wanted was another uncomfortable scene that late at night.”

  Sikander sat back, lapsing into a disconsolate silence as he considered what Jane had just revealed to him.

  “What happened after Captain Fletcher had departed? Did you go back to bed?”

  “No, not quite immediately. Before I could retire, I heard the Major calling for me.”

  “He was awake?”

  “Yes. He seemed to have recovered somewhat, well enough to tell me to fetch him some more wine.” Jane shook her head disapprovingly. “I told him he had imbibed quite enough for one night. I offered to make him a cup of tea to calm his innards, even though the bawarchi had departed for the night. He refused, and insisted that I bring him something to drink, even if I had to go down to the bazaar to get it.”

  “Let me guess. That was when you remembered the bottle that Mr. Lowry had brought by as a gift.”

  “Yes, I did. When he demanded a drink, I fetched it from the larder for him.”

  Sikander leaned forward, finally beginning to understand what had happened to Jane. “Tell me, Madam, did you happen to open it first?”

  “Of course! I had to uncork it before I took it up to him in his room, and decant it.”

  “Now be truthful, my dear. It is absolutely imperative that you do not lie. You poured yourself a glass, didn’t you, before you took the bottle up to the Major?”

  Her cheeks colored and he was certain that she was going to deny this accusation, but then, with a vast sigh, her head bobbed up and down.

  “I did,” she admitted shamefacedly. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I just couldn’t resist.” She gave Sikander a guilty smile. “It has been years since I have partaken of harsh spirits, sir, but it was the New Year and I was damnably tired of the Major and his deviltries, and so I thought, what could one wee glass hurt, especially if I watered it down with a bit of lemonade…?”

  Of course, Sikander thought. That was what had saved her. She had thought the sherry to be like arrack or some other raw liquor, in need of diluting, and while ordinarily, he would have thought it a cardinal sin to add lemonade to an Oloroso, this once, he was willing to forgive her such barbarity, considering it had managed to save her life.

  Suddenly, like a s
cintilla of light sparkling in a dark room, it seemed to dawn on Jane just how deeply she was entangled in the Major’s murder. “Oh, God, it was the wine that was poisoned, wasn’t it?”

  “I can’t be sure of that,” Sikander said, “not until I have done some chemical tests, but yes, it seems likely.”

  “You think it was Mr. Lowry who did it…?”

  “It’s possible,” Sikander murmured. “I will have to investigate if he had a genuine motive to want to be rid of the Major, but yes, he has just become one of my prime suspects.”

  “He used me,” she gasped, clutching at her chest. When added to the cumulative horror of the Major’s death and her own close escape, it just too much for her to take. Something in those magnificent eyes wavered, an inundation of panic which she had hitherto managed to hold back by sheer force of will, now overflowed its banks like a flood.

  “Oh, he’s really dead, isn’t he?” Jane let out an immense groan. She began to rock back and forth. Without even realizing what she was doing, she crammed one fist into her mouth, biting down on her knuckles wretchedly. And then, to his dismay, she began to keen, a shrill threnody which seemed to wrack through her like a fit, seemingly beyond her ability to control.

  It frightened him, the intensity of this hysteria. Sikander tensed, gritting his teeth. He had never been comfortable with emotional displays, particularly from women. The problem was that he never knew quite how he was expected to react. He supposed he should say something to console her, but the thought of saying the wrong thing made him balk, leaving him unexpectedly at a loss for words.

  “Don’t worry, Madam,” he said, trying not to seem too brusque. “Everything will be fine, I promise you.”

  “Why are you being so kind to me?” Jane said, uncertainty flaring on her face once more, like a tragic coating of rouge.

  “Let’s just say I cannot resist a damsel in distress,” Sikander replied. “Why, often I find myself causing young ladies distress intentionally just so that I can rescue them later.”

  Sadly, this attempt at levity failed to find its mark. Jane remained somnolent, as cold as a cadaver. “What is going to happen to me now?”

  Her voice was so barren, so empty it made Sikander flinch.

  “As I said, Madam, everything is going to be just fine.”

  Forcing his lips into a smile, Sikander broke from habit and reached out to fold Jane’s fingers into his own. She shrank away from him, trying to wrest free, but he refused to let go, holding on with a dogged tenacity.

  “Don’t you worry. I will take care of you. You have my word on that.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Once he was certain that Jane was settled comfortably, Sikander decided it was time for him to depart.

  He bid farewell to Helene, but it was an uncomfortably cold parting. Though he made one last desperate attempt to kiss her in the hope that it would mollify her pique, she averted her cheek very deliberately. In the end, he had to settle for offering up an awkward profusion of gratitude for her help, to which she replied with a snort so thunderous that it compelled him to beat a hasty retreat.

  Rather than returning to the palace for his customary afternoon nap, Sikander decided to make a quick detour to see if he could corner Captain Fletcher, who now seemed doubly suspicious to him, given what Jane had just revealed.

  The Rajpore Gymkhana was situated at the very outskirts of the British town, bordered on one side by the Cantonment and on the other by the azure ribbon of the River Oona. It sprawled across nine acres, a panoply of carefully maintained lawns, at the center of which stood an expansive main clubhouse constructed in the mock Tudor style.

  In Colonial patois, a gymkhana was the combination of the Hindustani word gend or “ball,” and khana, Persian for “house,” hence, a ball-house, or quite literally, the house for games. It was a uniquely British-Indian institution, one part gymnasium and two parts gentlemen’s club, as parochial and exclusive as Boodle’s or the Savage, a private sanctuary to which the Sahibs could retreat for a few hours each evening to partake of a burra peg or two while sitting on moldy wicker furniture and reminiscing about all they had left behind in jolly old England.

  The gymkhana’s actual origins were quite humble. It had begun as a sporting association, founded and funded thanks to Sikander’s grandfather’s enthusiastic largesse, when the old Maharaja had decided to donate some land and a yearly endowment of three hundred rupees to the English to build a place where they could indulge their leisure in manly pursuits like pig-sticking and polo and cricket.

  But as time had passed, the club had evolved into something more. It had become a formidable bastion of English Colonialism, a testament to the British way of life, a veritable shrine to their bland passions. What had begun a humble tented pavilion had grown into an establishment that put Sikander’s own palace to shame, with its three covered shuttle courts, four grass tennis courts, two swimming pools, a seven-table billiards room, a card room where bridge and whist were played, a private boathouse, and even a golf course, of which his grandfather had been a great patron. That was one passion of the Occidentals that Sikander had never quite been able to understand—the dubious lure of wandering around all day under the blistering sun wearing tweed and gaiters while assaulting a gutta percha ball with a stick.

  For the memsahibs, there were two halfway decent restaurants, a well-cared for library which stocked the latest periodicals from Calcutta, a theater where the Rajpore Dramatic Circle regularly mangled Shakespeare’s tragedies, and a formal dining room with a dance floor. Nonetheless, in spite of these many and diverse facilities, Sikander disliked visiting the club. Part of it was because he despised most of the members, thinking them precisely the sort of insufferable arrivistes he tried most to avoid. But beneath this innate snobbery, there was a far more pernicious reason he rarely patronized the gymkhana. In a typical display of English arrogance, it was decidedly whites only. The only natives permitted inside, other than Sikander, who was the sole Indian member, were the three hundred employees who ran the place with silently ruthless efficiency, the menials and the ayahs, the bearers and the groundskeepers, the ball boys and the cooks, that myriad of invisibles who made sure that the careful machinery of British leisure was never disrupted, not even for a solitary moment.

  Perhaps that was why he had always felt out of place there, uneasy, surrounded by so many hostile white faces. Sikander had always prided himself on being rather a fearless sort, and he knew only too well that without his munificence to subsidize its operations, there would be no club at all, but that fact did not reduce the awkwardness that gripped him when he visited the place one whit. If anything, it made him even more self-conscious, cognizant that his membership was only tolerated because he was the one with the deepest pockets, and that most of the other patrons would always see him as a servant rather than a peer.

  As the Rolls approached the gymkhana, Sikander took a long moment to contemplate turning back. A surge of trepidation ran through him, an uncharacteristic reluctance, but gritting his teeth, he reminded himself that he had no time to squander. He was experienced enough to know all too well that a murder was most easily solved within the first forty-eight hours of its commission. That was when the trail was at its freshest, while the body was still warm. Once it cooled, it became that much more difficult to find the killer, regardless of how talented the detective might be. After all, the human memory was a fragile, mutable thing. As time passed, witnesses changed their stories. Details that had seemed crystalline at first blurred in the mind, and with every wasted moment, every bit of evidence seemed less tangible, like smoke dissipating before a breeze.

  Understandably, the Maharaja’s advent at the club managed to cause quite a furor. Out on the immaculately trimmed greens, a polo match had just concluded its final chukka and a horde of brightly clad soldiers were cantering their horses back to the club paddocks, directly intersecting his pa
th. When the Rolls thundered past them like a storm on wheels, the horses startled, whinnying and bucking with panic and nearly managing to unseat half the Rajpore Regiment polo team. Sikander grinned and waved one hand at them in apology, before rolling to a gradual stop outside the main entrance, throwing up a vast cloud of gravel in his wake, and managing to make an abominable racket.

  Leaving the car idling, Sikander squared his shoulders and strode into the club. Past the wide arched entrance, a broad arcade ran the entire length of the gymkhana, a wide verandah whose parquet-tiled floor was dotted with an uneven arrangement of wicker tables and chairs. On his immediate left, a pair of French doors led toward the ballroom, which was adjoined by the bar and the formal dining room, next to which a dog-legged staircase led upstairs to the billiards room and card room and library.

  Just inside the vaulted entrance-way, the Maharaja paused, sticking to the shadows so that nobody would notice him. He adjusted his gloves with an exacting fastidiousness, casting a rather jaundiced eye around to take in his surroundings. As always, the club’s ostentatious décor made him cringe. It was like he had taken a wrong turn and stepped straight into one of Flora Annie Steel’s dreadful novels, from the tattered tiger heads mounted on the walls to the muslin nets that swathed each table like spiderwebs in a futile attempt to keep mosquitoes at bay, not to mention the turbaned punkah-wallahs who stood at discreet intervals, pulling at ropes to keep the linen fans hanging from the roof creaking back and forth noisily.

  It surprised him how seedy the club looked by light of day. When he had last visited just the night before, the place had been at its festive best, as gaily decorated as a temple, the walls festooned with bunting and shiny streamers, the grounds lit up by hundreds of Chinese lanterns, giving the place a delightfully Oriental decadence. But now, without the flattering cloak of night and the roseate glow of champagne to dull his wits, it seemed even more dilapidated than usual. A musty smell hung in the air, that ripe odor of mold and rancid cooking oil. The tiles underfoot were cracked and uneven, the oak-paneled walls crisscrossed with termite tracks, the paint on the ceiling peeling as a wide web of cracks spread outward like the lines on an old woman’s palm. The wicker furniture was far too creaky, the potted ferns that lined the verandah were limp and listless, and there was a yellow tint to the tattered chintz tablecloths. All in all, it gave the gymkhana an air of weary decay, as if to illustrate that the grand days of the Raj were long past and all that remained was a tired echo of decrepit glory.