Smoke and Ashes

by Abir Mukherjee

  I made to protest, but the commissioner silenced me with a wave of his hand. ‘There’ll be no discussion of the matter, Captain. You’re on remarkably thin ice as it is.’

  I sat back on the sofa.

  ‘That’s better,’ he continued. ‘The major has a plan which we hope will smoke out your Gurkha friend.’

  From the inside breast pocket of his uniform, Dawson extracted his pipe, taking several moments to light it with a match, and then puffed gently as the tobacco gradually began to smoulder.

  ‘We’re going to use Colonel McGuire as bait,’ he said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  From Taggart’s office I headed for the car with Dawson’s words reverberating round my skull. As plans went, it was audacious, which was just another way of saying it was desperate. But with only hours to go before the largest gathering of British residents that Calcutta had seen since the king-emperor’s visit a decade ago, and a madman armed with enough mustard gas to cause carnage, it was time to consider even the longest of shots.

  So Taggart had already known about Rawalpindi. That was a shock, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. Wasn’t it another example of the hypocrisy that Indians accused us of – setting ourselves up as ‘protectors’ in their land while treating them little better than serfs? Sometimes I didn’t blame them for wanting to see the back of us. As for Taggart, he had a habit of knowing more than he let on. He’d been a senior officer in military intelligence during the war, so he could have known of Rawalpindi from the day it had been conceived. Now, though, he was no longer part of the military but the chief of police in Bengal. That meant his dealings with the military, especially with their intelligence arm, often boiled down to a struggle for influence over the policing of the city. In the past he’d used me as a useful instrument to dig into places where Section H might prefer he didn’t go, and I feared that may be it was the same this time. It was possible he’d suspected something from the moment Nurse Fernandes’s body was found up in Rishra, but judging from the expression on his face, I got the feeling he was telling the truth when he claimed that the theft of the mustard gas had come as news to him too.

  Taggart had ordered us to head home and get what rest we could. At seven in the morning, we were to report to Das’s house to urge him to call off his march – which no doubt he would refuse to do. Something told me that act would trigger events which would spiral out of control. But that was a matter for the morning. Right now, all I wanted to do was get to my bed.

  Beside me, Surrender-not was tight-lipped. I guessed the shock had passed and the realisation that he’d cheated death by a whisker earlier was beginning to sink in.

  ‘Are you all right, Sergeant?’ I asked.

  He gave a curt nod and turned once more to stare out at the empty streets.

  We continued in silence for some minutes more before he piped up.

  ‘We could have captured him tonight,’ he said. ‘It is my fault he escaped. And now who knows how many more may die because of my mistake.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You did everything you could. And you heard Dawson’s plan. We’ll catch him yet.’

  ‘Do you think the plan will work?’ he asked. His tone suggested he needed reassurance that his earlier error could be put right, and in such a situation it was beholden on me to give him not my honest opinion, but rather the answer he needed.

  ‘I’m sure it will. The man’s obviously mad. You just need to see how he’s carved up his victims to know that. I doubt he’ll be able to resist passing up the opportunity to kill McGuire, even if he suspects it’s a trap.’

  Surrender-not pondered my words in silence.

  ‘You’re wrong, you know,’ he said finally. ‘He’s not mad. If he was, he’d have killed both of us tonight. But he didn’t.’

  I turned to face him. ‘What are you implying?’ I asked.

  Surrender-not looked out at the streets once more. ‘He has a plan and he intends to stick to it. A man like that doesn’t make mistakes. We should pray that he only wishes to kill McGuire and not thousands of innocent civilians.’

  By the time the car drew up outside our lodgings, even the prostitutes of Premchand Boral Street had called it a night. I staggered up the stairs with limbs like lead, opened the front door and switched on the electric light in the hallway. Surrender-not walked past me and headed for his room. From the living room came the stirrings of our manservant Sandesh, and moments later he padded barefoot into the corridor.

  ‘Kerdū, sahib?’

  I replied with a nod, then went through the living room and out onto the veranda while he went off to prepare the juice. The moon bathed the veranda in its pale light, and a thin breeze was blowing from the direction of the river. I sat down on one of the wicker chairs. It had been a long night, one that had seen some of the pieces fall into place. I’d discovered the link between the murders of Alastair Dunlop, Ruth Fernandes and the dead man in Tangra – Prio Tamang; we’d foiled the attempted murder of Mathilde Rouvel, looked our killer in the eye and learned the secret of Operation Rawalpindi. It would have been a good night had it stopped there, but then had come Dawson’s bombshell about the missing mustard gas and suddenly things were far worse than I’d feared.

  And there was still the matter of the killer’s identity. I’d seen enough to know that he was a Gurkha, possibly still serving in the military. The problem was, there were thousands of Gurkhas in the army; tens of thousands if you included those who’d fought in the war and were now demobbed. The chances of Dawson’s men identifying him before time ran out were slim. Yet as Sandesh appeared on the veranda with my kerdū pulp, there was one other question that vexed me, the one Surrender-not had raised about the timing.

  The tests had taken place in 1917. Why had our attacker waited over four years before seeking his revenge? Maybe it was tied somehow to the movement of the remaining mustard gas stocks from Barrackpore to Fort William, but I didn’t see how. I was missing something. It was there, amorphous and just beyond my grasp. Whatever it was, I realised I wasn’t going to figure it out by staring into the middle of the night. Instead I took the glass of kerdū from Sandesh, drank it down and headed for bed.

  I shuffled along the corridor and into my darkened room. I didn’t bother with the lights as I knew the layout precisely. Kicking off my shoes, I removed my socks, unbuttoned my shirt and trousers and, letting them lie where they fell, made straight for the bed. I untucked one side of the mosquito net, lifted it and climbed in. One of the constants of Calcutta life was the interminable battle against mosquitoes. Someone had decided it was a good idea to build the city over a swamp, and that had sealed Calcutta’s fate. It was the ideal breeding ground for all sorts of objectionable creatures, but the malaria-carrying mosquitoes were the worst. Everyone in the city, from the lieutenant governor to the lowliest rickshaw-wallah, was at their mercy, and every night, part of Sandesh’s routine was to hoist the mosquito nets over our beds, then lower and stow them away each morning.

  I carefully tucked the net back between the mattress and the bed frame and made myself comfortable. There was a certain sense of inviolability that came with being inside of the net, as though it were a shield from all that Calcutta could throw at you. I closed my eyes.

  A moment later, I sat bolt upright.

  Reaching for the side of the net, I wrenched it up, hauled myself off the bed and made for the light switch. Turning it on, I grabbed my shirt and trousers back off the floor and quickly put them on again, then headed for the door.

  I hurried along the hallway and banged on Surrender-not’s door, then without waiting for a reply, I barged into his room and switched on the light.

  ‘Get up!’ I said.

  Surrender-not sat up in his bed and groggily rubbed the sleep from his face.

  ‘Get dressed. We need to question Mrs Dunlop again.’

  He seemed incredulous. ‘Now?’

  ‘It has to be now,’ I said. ‘There’s no more time.’

&n
bsp; ‘Why?’

  ‘The mosquito net,’ I said breathlessly. ‘If Dunlop had been murdered in his bed, and nobody had touched the scene of the crime, why was there no mosquito net over his bed?’

  Surrender-not stared at me through the thin white mesh of his own mosquito net.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you in the hallway. First, though, I need to make a couple of telephone calls.’

  THIRTY

  The first call had been to the transport pool at Lal Bazar, requesting that a car be sent to us immediately. The second was to the Park Street thana, ordering them to send officers back to the Dunlop residence at Park Street. I asked that Constable Mondol, who’d been there earlier in the day, be present. Constables generally lived in police force accommodation provided near or next to their thanas, and the good thing about India was that native officers didn’t tend to question an order issued by a sahib, even if that meant being roused from their beds in the middle of the night.

  The boys from the Park Street thana had reached the Dunlop house before we arrived, and we were let in by a young constable who escorted us up the stairs.

  It hadn’t taken Mondol’s men long to find traces of something amiss, and soon we were standing once more at the entrance to Dunlop’s study.

  Mondol himself was kneeling on the floor. He looked up and grinned, then pointed to a brownish stain between on the tassels of a rug that covered much of the floor.

  ‘There,’ he said, almost triumphantly.

  ‘That could be anything,’ said Surrender-not sternly.

  Mondol bent down, lifted a corner of the rug and pulled it back. The varnish on the floorboards was thin and in certain places had worn through. In one such spot, not much larger than the palm of a hand, the boards were partly stained.

  I walked over and knelt down beside him, then ran my finger over it.

  ‘Someone’s tried to clean up,’ I said.

  I got to my feet, then addressed Mondol. ‘Bring Mrs Dunlop in here. Then search this place from top to bottom.’

  His brow creased. ‘For what, sir?’

  ‘For whatever was used to clean up,’ barked Surrender-not. ‘Rags or cloths or sheets stained with blood. Check the refuse. Check the fireplaces.’

  The constable nodded and turned on his heel.

  It appeared Dunlop might have been killed right here in his study. I took the seat behind the dead man’s desk and stared at the photographs on the wall. Those that Surrender-not had dragged down with him as part of his dying swan routine, and which had not been damaged, had been replaced, and the floor swept of shattered glass. Still, there were several empty spaces where photographs had previously hung, their absence made conspicuous by the discoloured outlines of their frames on the wall.

  The door creaked open and, accompanied by a constable, Anthea Dunlop entered, looking like thunder, wrapped in a dressing gown.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this, Captain? I take it you realise it’s the middle of the night. Your behaviour is tantamount to harassment. Rest assured, I shall be lodging a complaint with your superiors in the morning.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mrs Dunlop,’ I said, ‘but what we have to discuss can’t wait till morning.’

  She eyed me suspiciously. ‘I was rather given to understand that you weren’t supposed to be discussing anything further with me.’ She gestured to Surrender-not who stood next to the door. ‘I’m sure your assistant hasn’t forgotten.’

  ‘I doubt our friends in the military are going to object this time,’ I replied, directing her to the chair opposite. ‘In fact they seem to be positively keen to encourage our investigations. You have a telephone, I believe. We can call them if you wish?’

  She stood there, raging silently, and for a moment I felt she was actually considering it, but then she thought better of it and sat down.

  ‘What do you wish to know?’

  ‘For a start, Mrs Dunlop,’ I said, ‘how about you tell me why you lied to us?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  I looked her in the eye. ‘Your husband wasn’t killed in his bed, was he?’

  There was a flicker, something in the eyes. Just as there had been the first time I’d questioned her. It wasn’t fear, exactly, but something else. Was it defiance? I watched as her hand went to the pocket of her dressing gown, then came back up empty. Maybe she was searching for her rosary. It didn’t look like she needed a handkerchief.

  She sighed bitterly. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true,’ I said. ‘Because I doubt his research into malaria went as far as sleeping without a mosquito net. I think you know who killed your husband. I think you’re covering for them. What I don’t know is why.’

  It was a statement calculated to shock, but there was no alternative – I didn’t have time for niceties – and to be honest, I was too tired to care. Given she was a recently widowed woman one might have expected the waterworks to start, but Anthea Dunlop didn’t shed a tear. Instead, she looked up at me.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Captain. I’ve told you already, I’d taken a sleeping draught. I found Alastair lying in his room in the morning.’

  It was the wrong answer. Or maybe she just said it in the wrong way. Whatever the case, she was lying. She was asking me to believe that a murderer entered her home, found her husband, brought him in here, killed him, cleaned up the mess and placed a rug over the one area where the traces of blood couldn’t be removed, then left without her or anyone else in the house noticing. Even for Calcutta, the story stank. Not for a moment did I consider she’d killed her husband herself, but that didn’t mean she was innocent.

  ‘Is someone threatening you?’ I asked. ‘Is that why you’re shielding them? If so, we can protect you.’ It was the second time that night I’d offered police protection to a woman. Mathilde Rouvel hadn’t believed I could protect her. This time the reaction was different. Anthea Dunlop obviously didn’t think she needed protection.

  ‘I’ve told you, Captain. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Her tone was casual; almost flippant. It certainly wasn’t the tenor of a woman trying desperately to convince me of the truth of her story.

  And then it struck me. She believed her husband’s death was justified. She was a religious woman, a devout Catholic with a clearly defined sense of right and wrong. Maybe her husband had done something she couldn’t condone. It was clear she felt no guilt over his murder, but from her expression it seemed lying to me was proving a little harder. Suddenly I understood that earlier flicker in her eyes. She wanted to tell me – to explain why her husband had to die and why she’d been right to protect his killer.

  All I had to do was ask the right question.

  ‘Mustard gas,’ I said.

  She looked at me in horror. ‘What?’

  ‘When did you find out your husband wasn’t researching a cure for malaria but was working on creating a more toxic strain of mustard gas for the military?’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  ‘Did you know before you even left England? At the very least, you must have realised the nature of his work when you came out here and took up your position as a nurse at the hospital in Barrackpore. It must have been difficult, a God-fearing woman such as yourself, having to live in the same house as a man who was developing weapons of mass murder.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said forcefully. There were tears and anger in her eyes. ‘He told me he was working on a countermeasure. And I’d believed him until …’

  ‘Until what?’

  ‘Until Colonel McGuire told me the truth.’

  ‘McGuire?’ I asked. ‘The director of the hospital? Why would he tell you?’

  ‘Grief,’ she said. ‘It was the end of 1917. His son had been wounded at Passchendaele. The boy had been burned terribly in a gas attack and died in hospital a week later. And here he was, in charge of a facility where they were running a mustard gas research programme. The irony wasn’t lost on him
. He took it stoically at first, but there was one occasion, I had cause to go to his office and he was drunk. He wasn’t making much sense, kept roaring on about the wrath of the Lord. He saw it as God’s punishment for his role in facilitating evil.

  ‘Of course I confronted Alastair about it. He told me he had no choice in the matter, that he was working for the good of king and country. I made him promise me he’d stop once the war was over. And he did. He took the position at the School of Tropical Medicine.’

  She wiped the tears from her eyes.

  ‘Then that letter arrived from London, recalling him to Porton Down to continue his research. I begged him to turn it down, but he refused. He never saw the evil in what he was doing, only the scientific challenge: the goal of perfecting ever more effective poisons. It was when he accepted the post that I realised he was no longer the man I’d married. I don’t know that I would have done anything about it if that man hadn’t showed up about a month ago.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  She fell silent.

  ‘I don’t know what hold this man has over you,’ I said, ‘but you should know that we suspect he has acquired a substantial quantity of poison gas and that he intends to use it on innocent civilians. Our only hope of stopping him rests with you telling me everything you know.’

  I watched the struggle play out in her eyes.

  ‘Mrs Dunlop,’ I said gently, ‘this man is about to murder countless people. You have a chance to atone for your husband’s work. You can help me stop him.’

  She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

  ‘Gurung,’ she said. ‘His name is Lacchiman Gurung. He’s a rifleman in one of the Gurkha regiments.’

  ‘Do you know which one?’

  ‘No.’

  I looked over at Surrender-not, who already had his notepad out and was scribbling down the details. ‘Get on the telephone to Dawson. Tell him the man we’re looking for is Rifleman Lacchiman Gurung.’