Smoke and Ashes

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘Immediately, sir,’ he said, making for the door.

  I turned back to Anthea Dunlop. ‘Why did he come to you a month ago? Was he one of the subjects your husband carried out his tests on?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, but he was the father of one of them. His son, Bahadur, was only fifteen when he signed up. Bobby, we called him. He was a tiny boy, even for a Nepalese. I expect they’d have rejected him if it hadn’t been wartime. He was recruited for the tests by Prio – Prio Tamang, that is. Tamang was a hospital orderly but he also acted as an unofficial gallah-wallah, one of those men who go round the Nepalese hill villages and sign up boys for the army.’ She smiled to herself. ‘I suppose none of this would have occurred if Bobby hadn’t been quite so tiny.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘The tests,’ she said. ‘Alastair’s tests. He’d told me that part of developing a countermeasure meant exposing the subjects to small amounts of gas. He said they weren’t harmful and that when lethal concentrations were used, the men were given gas masks. The accident occurred on one of the high-concentration trials. The gas masks were army issue, you see, and Bobby’s head was too little for even the smallest size to fit. During the trial, his mask slipped.’

  She paused and looked past me.

  ‘I remember they brought him in to the infirmary. We’d seen injuries before, but nothing like this. Both his eyes were burned through and his breathing was ragged. He survived for almost three days in agony, before he finally passed away.

  ‘During that time, I looked after him as though he were my own son. Afterwards, I felt I had a duty to write to his family. His father was stationed on the Western Front, and I sent him a letter, telling him his son was at peace. I expect the censors took their black pencils to it, but at least some of what I wrote made it to Lacchiman. He wrote back, thanking me for my kindness towards his son and that was an end of it. At least it was, until a month ago when he turned up at my door. He told me his regiment had just been posted to Calcutta and that he wanted to thank me personally for what I’d done for his son. He was a shy man, ill at ease, but polite to a fault. It became apparent that he had no real idea how his son had died.’

  ‘And you set him right?’ I asked.

  She stared at me. ‘Every parent has a right to know how their child died, Captain. Not to tell him would have been a crime – before God if not the law.’

  ‘How did he take the news?’

  ‘Stoically. Would you expect a native to react any other way when given such news by a memsahib? To do otherwise would no doubt have been shameful to him.’

  ‘Well, his subsequent actions seem to have been rather less stoic,’ I said. ‘He’s already murdered three people, including your husband.’

  ‘Alastair deserved his fate,’ she said. ‘My husband wanted to create more weapons, better weapons. Ones that would kill more sons. And all because it was a scientific challenge.’

  ‘What happened after Gurung left?’

  ‘About a fortnight ago, he came back to the house. He told me he’d met the man who’d recruited his son for the tests – I assumed that was Prio Tamang – and that after plying him with drink, Tamang had told him the names of those responsible for the tests. He told me he knew what my husband had done during the war, and that he was going to seek revenge. I told him only God should seek retribution. Of course, he quoted the Bible, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” – it seems to be a verse most popular with heathens – and I, in turn, told him of Our Lord’s response, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” I thought I had convinced him.’ She turned away. ‘Obviously, I was wrong.’

  That was an understatement. In my experience, turning the other cheek wasn’t a philosophy the Gurkhas put much stock in. They were far more likely to follow the doctrine that if someone were to smite you on the right cheek, the best thing to do would be to smash them in the face so hard that they’d never entertain the thought of trying to smite you ever again. Less a case of an eye for an eye and more of you take my eye, I’ll take your whole head. Indeed, that tempered, homicidal rage was one of the reasons we prized them so highly as soldiers.

  Yet something in the words still struck home.

  An eye for an eye.

  ‘What did you tell Gurung about the injuries sustained by his son?’

  Anthea Dunlop looked away.

  ‘Mrs Dunlop,’ I said forcefully, ‘what injuries did Bahadur Gurung sustain and what exactly did you tell his father?’

  She looked up. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I told him the truth!’

  ‘That Bahadur Gurung was blinded by the gas?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Did it also affect his lungs?’

  ‘It was the damage to his lungs that finally killed him,’ she said.

  ‘And you told all this to his father, didn’t you? That’s why he marked your husband and his other victims with the same wounds. Eye for eye. Lung for lung.’

  The woman didn’t reply. She didn’t need to.

  Yet I imagined that for a man like Gurung, the gassing of his son by the British military, an institution he’d probably venerated and served since he’d been old enough to join, would be the ultimate act of betrayal. For such a sin, the slaying of those directly responsible might not be enough.

  I pictured the scene: Gurung tracking down Prio Tamang, the man responsible for recruiting his son for Rawalpindi; getting Tamang drunk, hoping to find out details of the persons responsible for his son’s death; then discovering that Prio Tamang was now no longer just a recruiter of innocent Nepalese village boys, these days he’s assistant quartermaster at Barrackpore. During their conversation, Tamang boasts about the transfer of the remaining mustard gas stocks from Barrackpore to Fort William, and Gurung realises that here is a way of exacting the sort of revenge that would be fitting. He bribes Tamang to ‘lose’ some of the mustard gas canisters en route to Fort William. Tamang delivers them to Gurung, but instead of the expected pay-off at the opium den in Tangra, the Gurkha murders him – the first in the sequence of revenge killings that would then include Ruth Fernandes, Alastair Dunlop, Mathilde Rouvel and Colonel McGuire, before the ultimate act of retribution, the gassing of massed civilians in Calcutta on Christmas Day.

  ‘And that was the last time you saw him?’ I asked. ‘Until last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, recovering some of her composure. ‘He broke in some time after midnight. I was in bed and Alastair was in here, working.’ There was a bitterness to her tone. ‘All he did was work. Lacchiman must have known that the servants’ quarters were on the ground floor, for he came in through the roof. He entered my bedroom first.’

  ‘You didn’t scream?’

  ‘I would have, but he clamped his hand over my mouth before I realised what was happening. He said he wasn’t going to harm me. That he was here to ask my husband some questions.’

  ‘And you told him Alastair was in his study?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘He bound and gagged me, then left the room. I heard him cross the landing to the study. I heard Alastair call out once, but that was it. I assumed Gurung had threatened him with a gun. The next thing I remember is Gurung returning to the room. He looked like the Devil … or maybe one of Our Lord’s avenging angels. They do say that Satan is nothing more than one of God’s fallen angels, don’t they? He bent down and started to untie me. I asked him what he’d done. He didn’t reply.’

  The door opened and Surrender-not walked in. He gave me a nod, then returned to his place beside me.

  I pulled the photograph from my pocket, flattened it out on the desk and pointed out her own image. ‘He’s after those involved with Operation Rawalpindi,’ I said, ‘even the nurses who cared for the injured and the dying. So why didn’t he kill you?’

  Once more she stared at the wall. ‘Would you believe me if I said I’d asked him to? I too
have lost children, I’ve contemplated taking my own life more than once, but of course self-harm is a sin for which there is no absolution. Had he killed me, he would have been doing me a service, but he refused. He said he didn’t want my death on his conscience.’

  ‘And yet, he’s prepared to poison innocent civilians?’

  ‘You say he’s prepared to do so,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen no evidence of that. So far, he’s only killed those whom he sees as responsible for his son’s death.’

  Her point might have been well made, had it not been for the fact that the man had stolen several canisters of mustard gas. Her defence of him triggered something else in my head.

  ‘Did you ask Gurung to kill your husband?’

  ‘No,’ she replied flatly, ‘but I didn’t try to stop him. My husband was creating weapons more poisonous than those which killed Bahadur Gurung. If you knew someone whose purpose was to sow death, wouldn’t you try to stop them, Captain?’

  I stared at her. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Mrs Dunlop.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Five o’clock. Christmas morning. It was supposed to be a day of joy; of hope and rebirth. Maybe it was. We now had the name of our killer – Lacchiman Gurung – and with that came the hope, however slender, of stopping him before he killed again.

  To the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. We walked back down the steps from Anthea Dunlop’s residence to the car. Our driver sat dozing in his seat, his head resting against the glass, and it took a rap on his window from Surrender-not to jolt him from his slumber.

  ‘Fort William. Chalo!’ I said as we got in.

  ‘What did Dawson say when you telephoned him?’ I asked Surrender-not.

  ‘He said he’d alert the relevant authorities and commence a search among all military units in and around the city.’ Surrender-not smiled. ‘He was most grateful for the information. He even went as far as to say “thank you”.’

  ‘And you thought we wouldn’t live to see the day,’ I said. ‘If we’re lucky, Dawson’s men will track him down and arrest him before long and that’ll be an end to it.’ But even as I said the words, I doubted that capturing Rifleman Gurung was going to be quite that easy. For a start, nothing in Calcutta was ever easy; and for another thing, the man we were chasing just happened to be a battle-hardened Gurkha.

  ‘He had some news of his own,’ Surrender-not continued. ‘The two other English doctors in the photograph – Dunlop’s assistants; they both returned to England after the war. If Gurung is going after them, he’s going to need to make a boat trip.’

  That left McGuire as the sole British member of the photograph so far unvisited by the Gurkha. The possibilities for murder were narrowing and I felt happier on that journey than I had done two hours earlier. I now knew my enemy, by name and by face, and more importantly, I understood his motive. There was still the imminent danger of him launching a gas attack that would lead to mass casualties, but we now stood a better chance of stopping him than we had done previously, even if the odds were still stacked against us.

  The car sped westwards towards the river, across the Maidan along Outram Road, with the parade ground and Victoria Memorial to our left. Fort William loomed like a behemoth in the half-light. A bright-eyed sentry waved us briskly through the Chowringhee Gate and soon we pulled up outside the block that was home to Section H.

  Dawson’s office was a frosted-glass and wood cubicle at the far end of a larger room on the second floor. Despite the hour, the place seemed as frenzied as Bow Bazar during the festival of the goddess Durga, with scores of uniformed men and women busy at their desks, on telephones, or rushing, paper-laden, from one room to another. Among the commotion, I spotted the familiar face of Marjorie Braithwaite, Dawson’s secretary.

  Marjorie was a formidable-looking woman with a permanent scowl, the no-nonsense temperament of a headmistress and a reputation for being the most trustworthy secretary in Calcutta – all indispensable qualities for a woman who was assistant to one of the most feared secret policemen in India. The mere sound of her voice was known to put the fear of God into subordinates, to the extent that I suspected she’d attended at least some of the interrogation training courses that Section H officers were sent on. Surrender-not was terrified of her, but I quite liked her, and though her loyalty was always to her boss, she seemed to have a weary tolerance for me.

  We made our way to her desk.

  ‘Marjorie,’ I said, ‘we’re here to see Torquemada. It’s urgent.’

  She shook her head and sighed. ‘Go through, Captain Wyndham. He’s expecting you.’

  I thanked her and headed for Dawson’s office.

  ‘And, Captain,’ she called. ‘You shouldn’t call him that. He doesn’t like it and I’d hate to see him pull out your fingernails on account of a little joke.’

  I gave her a smile and knocked on the major’s door.

  Dawson was seated behind his desk, his pipe clamped between his jaws and the telephone held to one ear. Less than forty-eight hours ago, he’d interrogated me in here and I’d vomited on his floor. Now he was rather less hostile, though I’d have been a fool to think that this was anything more than a truce: a pause in hostilities while we faced a more pressing foe. He gestured with a nod of his head towards the two chairs that faced him across the desk.

  ‘Any news?’ I said as he replaced the receiver.

  He puffed vigorously on his pipe, sending a cloud of smoke ceilingward.

  ‘Rifleman Lacchiman Guring,’ he said, tapping a thin buff-coloured file on the desk in front of him. ‘Private, first class, of the 4th Regiment, the Prince of Wales Own Gurkhas. Age forty-two. Enlisted in 1897, saw active service on the Afghan border, then in France and Palestine during the war. A career soldier, he turned down the offer of demobilisation in 1920. Most recently, posted with his regiment to Calcutta last month, to this very base.’

  ‘Have you arrested him?’

  Dawson took another puff on his pipe. His eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘Not yet. He went AWOL just over a week ago. At about the same time that the stocks of gas went missing.’

  ‘Any idea where he might be holed up?’

  ‘We’re checking for any known relatives he may have in the area and putting the word out among our operatives in the native parts of town. We’ll spot him if he surfaces.’

  It was hollow bravado. Like me, Dawson was too long in the tooth to believe his own rhetoric. Gurung had gone to ground. The only way we’d catch him now was to pre-empt him: figure out where he was going, then get there first.

  ‘Your plan to use McGuire,’ I said. ‘Is that still on the cards?’

  Dawson rubbed his forehead. ‘It has to be,’ he said. ‘There’s a Christmas fair in the grounds of Barrackpore cantonment in a few hours. Most personnel are being given the morning off in honour of the Prince of Wales’s visit. Colonel McGuire is going to spend his morning at the fair, being as conspicuous as possible.’

  ‘You think that’ll flush Gurung out?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and paint a target on McGuire’s back?’

  ‘Believe me, I would do if I thought it would help.’ He removed the pipe from his mouth. ‘By the way, how did Mrs Dunlop know his name?’

  ‘Because she’d met him twice before. His son was a victim of the Rawalpindi experiments – she nursed him in the days before his death. He’d lost his sight and his lungs were burned. The father is out for revenge.’

  ‘Let’s hope, then,’ said Dawson, ‘that his desire for vengeance leads him to take chances going after McGuire.’

  Twenty minutes later, having swallowed a cupful of black coffee in a nearby barracks mess hall, Surrender-not and I were back in the car, stuck somewhere along the Strand Road. In anticipation of the Prince of Wales’s imminent arrival, the quickest route back into town – along Red Road and up past Government House – had been closed and the traffic diverted along the riverfront. In the
distance, the bridge across to Howrah was shrouded in early-morning mist. Dawn had broken, and with it, the city began waking to Christmas Day. The road was already choked, the carts of traders carrying fresh produce, jostling for entry into the city. This morning, though, the traffic was joined by another sort of crowd. White-clad, placard-carrying protesters streamed towards the shoreline, trying, presumably, to make for Howrah station.

  Ahead of us, the traffic was stalled, the demonstrators corralled by a military ring of steel, holding them back from the bridge and the boulevards into town beyond. At the river ghats too, long queues had formed as soldiers restricted access to the ferry piers, questioning anyone who looked like they might be out to cause trouble.

  ‘So much for the Prince of Wales’s low-key entry to the city,’ said Surrender-not.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise. In India, even the best-kept secrets have a habit of slipping out and, as usual, the problem lay with the Indians themselves. It was a pity the country couldn’t function without them, not the bureaucracy, or the railways, or the forces of law and order; and wherever you had Indians in the system, whether it was a lowly peon or a fat babu pen-pusher, you had the risk that information would leak to the opponents of the Raj. People talked, and all it would have taken would have been a Congress-sympathising stationmaster’s assistant in Benares or Patna, or somewhere else along the route, to realise that the VIP on the special train passing through the station was His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and get a message to the local party cadre, and the news would reach Calcutta hours before the prince did.

  A fleet of vehicles appeared on far side of the bridge: an olive-green armoured car led the way across, followed by two black saloons, one a Rolls, the other possibly a Crossley – it was hard to tell at this distance – both with their roofs up, with another military car bringing up the rear. After the cortège came a busload of what I presumed were the royal retinue, then another carrying the gentlemen of the press and a lorry with the newsreel technicians from Pathé who travelled with the circus.