Das turned to me. ‘You must come in for a cup of tea.’
‘Another time, perhaps,’ I said.
A skinny native constable ran quickly round, opened Das’s door, and helped the old man from the car as though he was some VIP arriving at the Dorchester. Das thanked him, patting him on the arm and the constable beamed as though he’d just been blessed by a saint.
And in the expression on the constable’s face, I saw the future. This struggle we were engaged in – this battle to keep India British – was one we were destined to lose. If even our own men treated the enemy as saints, then what chance did we stand? It stood to reason that many of the Indians who worked for us, in the police force, the army and the bureaucracy, would have thought as the constable did. They worked for us out of necessity: our cash put food in their bellies, but their hearts were with the other side.
I couldn’t blame them. How could I when even describing a man like Das as the enemy felt wrong? We’d arrested him for making a speech seeking equality, and thrown him in a makeshift prison camp, open to the elements on one of the coldest nights of the year, and here he was inviting us in for a cup of tea. It was hard to dislike the man, let alone classify him as a mortal foe.
It struck me that was the real problem. To see a man as your enemy, you needed to hate him, and while it was easy to hate a man who fought you with bullets and bombs, it was bloody difficult to hate a man who opposed you by appealing to your own moral compass.
And we British considered ourselves a moral people. What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality? Gandhi and Das’s genius was that they realised that better than we did ourselves. They recognised that when it came down to it, the British and the Indians weren’t that different, and the way to beat us was to appeal to our better natures – to make us comprehend the moral incongruity of our position in India.
We could only control India through force of arms, but force was useless against a people who didn’t fight back; because you couldn’t kill people like that without killing a part of yourself too. That was a dilemma we’d never be able to solve. Indian independence was coming. The Raj was a sick man at death’s door and all we were doing was delaying the inevitable. The only question was how long it would take us to realise that and call it a day.
NINETEEN
There was an envelope waiting on my desk at Lal Bazar. It was dated 23 December in florid, feminine handwriting.
I ripped it open and drew out the contents, a few flimsy sheets of paper, closely typed, with the words Barrackpore Military Hospital printed in large block capitals at top, and the name Ruth Fernandes beneath it.
‘What is it?’ asked Surrender-not.
‘Someone’s seen fit to send us Nurse Fernandes’s personnel file.’
‘Who? Colonel McGuire?’
I checked the envelope for any cover note but there was none, but I was quite certain who’d sent it. The date written on the envelope told me everything I needed to know. French handwriting is subtly different to the English variety, especially in the way that certain characters are drawn – the number ’1’ in particular. The French always write it with a much longer slant at the top.
‘I doubt it,’ I said, turning over the pages.
‘How can you tell?’
‘There’s no cover note,’ I said. ‘If it had been sent at McGuire’s behest, there would have been one, in fact there’s nothing at all with the sender’s name on it, which suggests it’s been sent surreptitiously. I think this has come from Sister Rouvel, and, if I’m correct, without McGuire’s knowledge.’
I sat down and read through the pages. There seemed little in the way of new information. Under her name and address was a short description of her qualifications and pay grade. Set out beneath that was her service history at the hospital. It began in November 1912, shortly after she’d come to Bengal at the behest of her husband, presumably.
She’d been promoted in October 1915 to head of ward. With the war starting in 1914, I imagined the hospital would have seen a large influx of wounded native troops returning for recuperation and rehabilitation the following year. It stood to reason that Fernandes, with her time served in Barrackpore and her previous experience as a nurse in Goa, would have been a natural choice for promotion.
The next entry was succinct. It read simply: September 1917: Transfer to RAWALPINDI.
Rawalpindi was a garrison town in the Punjab, over a thousand miles from Bengal, close to the North-West Frontier. By November of the following year though, she was back overseeing her old ward in Barrackpore, a position she retained until her death less than forty-eight hours earlier.
The next page was taken up with annual evaluations of her performance. There was a gap for 1917–18, as was to be expected given that during that time she’d been transferred to Rawalpindi.
I tossed the pages over the desk to Surrender-not and waited for him to read them.
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked as he finally looked up.
‘For the most part there’s nothing here.’ He shrugged. ‘But …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why would a staff nurse be transferred from Barrackpore to Rawalpindi?’
‘It was wartime,’ I said. ‘People were moved about all over the place. Things were pretty bad in ’17 and a lot of our Indian troops were from the Punjab. Maybe they needed additional nurses to tend to the wounded men sent back there?’
‘It’s possible.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s odd that her husband made no mention of it.’
It was a good point. The man had moved his wife and family all the way from Goa to Bengal. And while it was not uncommon in India for a man to leave his family to go off and seek work many hundreds of miles away, it was unheard of for women to do the same. Indeed the chances that George Fernandes had simply let his wife go off to the Punjab for a year were minuscule. Maybe Surrender-not had hit on something. So much of police work consisted of painstakingly poring over documents and most of the time you got precious little for your efforts. More often than not, all you got were more questions. But questions weren’t bad. Questions were the loose threads that, if you pulled on them hard enough and followed them for long enough, might just unravel the whole puzzle.
But a reference to Rawalpindi did nothing to progress my theory of a romantic assignation gone wrong. Still, the fact that George Fernandes hadn’t mentioned his wife’s year-long absence was curious. Just as importantly, it didn’t help the theory that her murder was carried out by Congress-supporting vigilantes – the only explanation that seemed to matter to Taggart and the politicians. To them, Ruth Fernandes was more important in death than she’d ever been in life, and the truth, if it didn’t fit their preferred narrative, counted for as much as a gob of spit in a downpour.
The Hindus believed that a person’s destiny was linked to the positions of heavenly bodies at the instant of birth – that their fates were written in the stars. Ruth Fernandes may have been a Christian, but that hadn’t prevented her fate from being sealed the minute she was born. From that moment, three things would always mitigate against her: she was poor; she was a native; and she was a woman. In India, that meant her life counted for little, and, unless it could be made to fit a wider narrative, her death would matter even less.
But her case had landed on my desk, and while it probably didn’t matter to her, I’d never been one to give up on lost causes, maybe because I was one myself. I’d keep going as long as there were questions to ask and loose threads to pull; not as a riposte to Surrender-not’s father and his belief that we didn’t care about the ordinary victims, but because at the end of the day, there was precious little else in my life that seemed noble.
‘Any news yet from Sergeant Lamont on the strength of George Fernandes’s alibi?’ I asked.
‘Nothing concrete,’ said Surrender-not. ‘He left a message saying he’d interviewed the neighbours. They confirm he went around knocking on doors and asking after his
wife at around half past eight yesterday morning. That fits in with his story, but it doesn’t mean he couldn’t have gone out earlier and killed her. Lamont’s continuing his inquiries.’
‘And where are we with the post-mortem?’
‘The body has been transferred to the Medical College mortuary. Dr Lamb has it scheduled for tomorrow.’
‘See if you can’t persuade him to move it up to this afternoon. Tell him that Taggart wants it made top priority.’
Surrender-not looked at me dubiously. ‘What are we hoping to find?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe Lamb will tell us that her wounds were caused by some oriental ceremonial knife, or something else that connects her to the dead man in the opium den.’ Though what that might be was frankly beyond me. The truth was I didn’t know what I expected to find, but getting the post-mortem carried out felt like momentum, and in the absence of any clear direction, any momentum felt like progress.
‘I suppose we’ll know when we see it,’ I said.
‘There’s no chance you’re mistaken about the link with the body you found in the opium den?’
I fixed him with a stare. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’
‘We’ve discussed this, Sam. Going back there would end your career.’
That much was probably true, but it didn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Before I could respond, our peon, Ram Lal, a stick of a man in a blue shirt and a dhoti as grey as his hair, burst in, clutching a note and panting like a terrier. Surrender-not chided him for entering without first knocking, but there was little point. The old man was in his sixties and the days of learning new tricks were firmly behind him. The odd thing was that there were times when he’d knock fastidiously and then, ignoring calls to enter, wait until someone actually opened the door to let him in. There seemed no rhyme or reason to his behaviour. Ram Lal made his apologies and was about to exit so that he could this time knock and re-enter, when I put a stop to the farce.
‘Just give me the chitty,’ I said, pointing to the note, crumpled in hand.
‘Hã, sahib,’ he said, placing it on the desk and flattening it out, before nodding several times and backing his way out of the room.
I picked up the chit. It had my name on one side, and on the other was a handwritten note from Lord Taggart. I scanned it quickly and turned to Surrender-not.
‘There’s been another murder.’
TWENTY
We didn’t have far to travel this time. Barely a five-minute drive to an elegant mock-Georgian town house off Park Street. A flight of steps ran from street level up to an open front door, beside which stood the obligatory copper, minding the stable door after the horse had bolted – or, as in this case, been murdered in its bed. This particular horse had been an Englishman called Dunlop, who, according to the note from Taggart, was a scientist of some repute. That was all very good, but I’d never heard of him. Still, I guessed his fame would soon spread. It was rare for an Englishman to be murdered in Calcutta, more so in this fashion, and I’d no doubt the gory details of his death would be plastered all over the front page of the Englishman by tomorrow morning.
His bedroom was on the second floor, up a couple of flights of narrow, dimly lit stairs, and guarded by another bobby from the local thana. With a nod, he stood aside and opened the door with an almost military demeanour.
The room itself was spartan. A wardrobe, a writing desk, a watercolour of the Relief of Lucknow on the wall, and a dead man of about fifty, lying atop bloodied sheets on the bed. Dunlop had a grey, angular face and a long, thin nose. As for his eyes, it was impossible to tell as someone had seen fit to pluck them out and carve him up like a Sunday roast. On his chest, the blue pyjamas he wore were despoiled by two stab wounds.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Surrender-not.
‘The same injuries as those inflicted on Ruth Fernandes.’
‘But look at the hands. No damaged fingers.’
There came a cough from the hallway and I turned to find a native officer sporting a toothbrush moustache and betel-nut-stained teeth, who introduced himself as Constable Mondol.
‘Are you in charge?’ I asked.
‘Yes, sir. From the Park Street thana.’
‘Well, let’s have it.’
‘We were called to the property by the maidservant, just after eight o’clock this morning,’ he said. ‘The sahib was found here in this room, as you see him.’
He spoke quietly, as though he felt honoured just being in the home of an Englishman, and that the murder was a minor inconvenience, like a passing rain shower at a garden party.
‘Who found him?’
‘The memsahib of the house,’ he replied, ‘Mrs Anthea Dunlop. She came to check on him when he failed to appear for breakfast.’
That spoke of a certain type of relationship. The fact that she came to look for him herself rather than sending the maid suggested that relations between them remained cordial.
‘Where is she now?’
‘Downstairs, sir. In the parlour. You wish to interview her?’
‘We’ll get to her in due course,’ I said. ‘Any idea how the killer gained entry?’
‘The roof, probably,’ said Mondol. He gestured upwards with one finger, lest I be in some confusion as to where the roof might be. ‘The door has been forced. It is likely he left by the same route.’
Too often people in Calcutta spent small fortunes on domestic security, investing in iron bars, thick padlocks and thicker durwans. Yet they forgot about the doors to their roofs, which were often little more than weather-beaten, worm-eaten planks of wood. Because we spent most of our lives on one horizontal plane, too many people neglected to consider the vertical. Not that I was complaining. It was precisely because Callaghan’s men had forgotten the roof that I’d been able to make my escape from the opium den three nights back.
I took in the scene once more. Something felt off, like a wrong note in the middle of a piece of music, but what it was evaded me. ‘Has anyone tampered with the scene?’ I asked.
Mondol shook his head. ‘Not since we arrived, and the maid says nothing has been touched since the body was found.’
‘Let’s go and take a look at the roof,’ I said, motioning towards the door.
We followed Mondol out of the room and up the stairs to the roof.
The door had been locked with only a barrel bolt, which actually looked quite sturdy and which was still in place. Unfortunately, the lock keep into which the barrel slotted had been forced from the door jamb. Judging by the state of the wooden door frame, I doubted that forcing the lock would have taken too much effort.
Stepping out onto the roof, I walked over to the ledge at the side of the house. The building was part of a terrace, sandwiched between identical town houses and about one-third of the way along the row of buildings. Only a raised ledge separated each house from its neighbour. Surrender-not appeared behind me and came over.
‘You think he came across the other roofs?’ he asked.
‘Let’s find out,’ I said, stepping over the ledge and onto the roof of the adjoining building. Surrender-not followed and we crossed two more roofs till we reached the end of the terrace. The ledge there overlooked a sheer drop of three storeys to the street below. Retracing our steps, we walked to the ledge at the other end of the row. There too we faced an identical drop to the road.
‘No obvious route up here,’ I said. ‘Which means he either obtained access through one of the other houses, or scaled a drainpipe.’
We walked back to the roof of Dunlop’s house and over to the gutter at the rear. A lead pipe ran from a hole in the roof down to the ground, converging en route with other pipes from the floors below.
‘It’s possible,’ said Surrender-not as he stared over the edge.
At one time I might have been sceptical. Other than where pipes branched off, there seemed little in the way of hand-holds or other purchase, but in India I’d seen men scale ninety-foot coconut palms w
ith nothing more than their bare limbs and a whispered prayer to the gods. To these people, a drainpipe was about as challenging as a ladder.
‘Check the ground at the base of the drainpipe for footprints,’ I said. ‘And get Mondol to knock on the neighbours’ doors, just on the off chance he broke into someone else’s place first.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Surrender-not nodded.
‘In the meantime,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have a word with Mrs Dunlop.’
TWENTY-ONE
Anthea Dunlop was seated on a floral sofa in a parlour that looked like it had been transported from a tea room in the Lake District, complete with a shelf full of mounted china plates and an embroidered Bible verse, framed and mounted on the wall. The woman was staring into space, making no effort to move the few strands of grey hair that had come loose from the severely tied bun and which hung limply at the side of her face.
I negotiated my way around a doily-covered side table and took a seat opposite her. On a sideboard next to her sat a number of framed photographs, including one of a couple in wedding dress.
‘Mrs Dunlop?’
She looked up. In her hands she clutched a rosary.
‘I’m Captain Wyndham of the Imperial Police Force. I’m sorry for your loss. However, I’m afraid I need to ask you some questions.’
‘I’ve already spoken to the Indian officer,’ she replied.
‘I’m sure you have,’ I said gently, ‘but I’ve been charged with leading the investigation into your husband’s death and, if I may, it would be best if I could hear the details from you first-hand.’
She paused, then nodded. ‘Of course, Captain.’
‘I understand you were the one who found him,’ I said. ‘I’d be grateful if you could tell me what happened in your own words.’
She began turning the rosary over between her fingers.
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