Coming down Cheapside, he saw a dome rising above a flat roof. It reminded him of his own country—of the mosques in which the Maharaja generously allowed his Muslim subjects to worship, once they had paid an additional tax. But this was no mosque. The dome concealed the workings of the hydraulic lifts which took passengers down to the platforms of the Bank tube station, and it told him that he was nearly there—and still had not solved the problem of what to do with the extraneous contents of his case!
Lombard Street! he thought with a sudden burst of inspiration.
There were banks on Lombard Street. There was his bank on Lombard Street. A man could go into a bank and do what he had to do without drawing undue attention to himself. In truth, the curiosity which would have seemed only natural on the street would be construed as extreme rudeness within the confines of that august institution.
So relieved that he paid little attention to the traffic—and was almost knocked down by a grocer’s delivery cart in consequence—Aggarwal crossed the road in front of the Mansion House and stepped into Lombard Street. That his own bank—the Anglo-India Bank—was so close to the tube station, could only be taken as a sign that fortune was on his side in this enterprise, he thought.
He entered the bank full of almost light-headed optimism. But he must not relax, he warned himself—he must not lower his guard even for a second. The chances that one of the kidnappers was already in the bank were so minimal as to be non-existent, but he must still make sure that the desk he chose gave him a clear view of anyone entering or leaving by the main door.
Aggarwal unbuckled the straps on the attaché case, opened it slightly, and looked down at the bundles of bank notes. It was a fortune, he thought—but not quite as big a fortune as some people might believe.
***
Blackstone and Patterson sat in the public bar of the Crown and Anchor—a pub which boasted neither the royal nor the nautical connections that its name seemed to promise and owed most of its business to its proximity to Scotland Yard.
Blackstone had ordered a pint of stout with—unusually—a whisky chaser, and for the previous five minutes had sipped the two alternately with so little sign of pleasure that he could have been drinking ditch water.
‘Do you want to tell me what’s troubling you, sir?’ asked Patterson, whose sociable nature took no great pleasure in being alone with its own thoughts.
‘What was that?’ Blackstone said, distractedly.
‘Is there something on your mind?’
‘Yes, there is,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘General Pugh isn’t at all how I’d pictured he’d be—especially after what Major Walsh told us about him.’
Patterson grinned. ‘Oh, I get it, sir. Pugh’s supposed to be one of the villains of the piece, so he should have a black eye patch and big scar running down one cheek!’
Blackstone returned the grin, somewhat sheepishly. ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, ‘but…’
‘But what?’
‘Put yourself in his shoes for a minute—or rather, put yourself in the shoes that, up to now, we’ve been assuming he occupies. You’re a ruthless kidnapper—part of a conspiracy.’
‘All right,’ Patterson agreed, attempting to harden his plump features into an appropriate criminal mould.
‘Perhaps you read about Colonel Howarth’s death in the newspapers,’ Blackstone continued. ‘Or perhaps you’ve been told in advance that he’s going to die. Whatever the case, you know that it’s highly likely the police will get your name from Howarth’s butler, and will want to know why you visited him. So what story are you going to tell me when I ask?’
‘General Pugh said—’
‘I know what he said. What I asked was what you would have said in his place. Bear in mind that you have secrets to guard, and that you don’t have to stick to the truth.’
Patterson slipped into the role. His spine stiffened, and from the way he began to hold his nose it was almost possible to see a heavy military moustache underneath it.
‘Charlie Howarth told me that he’d overreached himself in buying Amritsar Lodge, and asked me for a loan for old times’ sake,’ he said in a fair imitation of Pugh’s voice.
‘Not bad. Now give me another explanation.’
Patterson thought for a second. ‘Howarth has no close living relatives and wanted my advice on who to leave his estate to.’
‘Even better. Give me another.’
‘He asked me down to his estate because he needed cheering up. Said there’d been times recently when he’d felt quite suicidal. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when he shot himself.’
‘One more, and we’ll call it a day.’
‘He wanted advice on the best way to look after the tiger he’d ordered from India.’
‘That’s four possible explanations, and all of them pretty convincing,’ Blackstone said. ‘What was it that made you—thinking as General Pugh—choose any, or all, of those stories?’
‘I couldn’t tell the police the truth about my visit—that it was to do with the kidnapping—so I needed to come up with a story which was both simple and plausible.’
‘Exactly!’ Blackstone agreed. ‘The whole object of the exercise, from your point of view, was to send me away satisfied—to put me in a frame of mind in which I’d rule you out of the investigation. So that is indeed the kind of story you’d have told me. What you certainly wouldn’t have done is spin me a tale which threw up any number of new questions. But that’s just what Pugh did do, didn’t he?’
‘I suppose he did,’ Patterson agreed.
‘For the last fifteen minutes, I’ve been asking myself why Howarth should have wanted to know about Pugh’s expedition to the Caspian Sea,’ Blackstone continued. ‘And you see what the fact that I’ve even been considering that means, don’t you?’
‘It means that you’re taking it seriously. That you don’t think it’s a story at all. That what Pugh claims was said actually was said.’
‘And that in turn means what?’
‘That you don’t believe Pugh is a member of the gang?’
Blackstone nodded. ‘Exactly so! Are you still on drinking terms with any of the clerks at the India Office?’
‘I keep in touch with a few,’ Patterson said warily. ‘Purely in case I need to talk to them in the line of duty, of course.’
‘Look them up this evening. See what you can find out about General Pugh’s time in India. I’d be particularly interested in the period he spent in Calcutta, while he was still a major.’
‘Couldn’t Major Walsh tell you about that?’
‘Walsh already has,’ Blackstone reminded his sergeant. ‘And I’m not sure he’s given me the whole picture. I like Walsh. He’s intelligent, perceptive—and as reliable as anyone who drinks as much as he does could be. But we’ve never put all our faith in a single source of information before, and I don’t see why we should start now.’
Thirty-Three
Sapan Aggarwal had only ever been underground once before—to talk to a prisoner in the deep dungeons below the Maharaja’s palace. It had not been a pleasant experience for him, but it had at least been made bearable by the knowledge that the visit was only temporary—that while the prisoner was still festering and suffering, he would be back at ground level, smelling the clean air and sipping warm, fresh tea.
The underground at Bank Station was quite a different matter. There were no bodyguards there to make him feel secure, no reassurance that a pleasanter time lay just ahead. And though he prided himself on being as sophisticated as any Briton, he did not share the obvious assurance of his fellow passengers that the tons of rock overhead would stay overhead.
He paid his two coppers and took the crowded lift down to the platform. What should he do next, he wondered? Get on the waiting train? Or wait to be contacted?
The cricket ground was not as full as it would have been if the match had been held on a bank holiday. Nonetheless, the very fact that Surrey were playing their old rivals, Sussex, w
as enough to ensure that a large number of clerks had rung in sick, that a small legion of boys had decided their education would not unduly suffer from missing one day’s schooling, and that at least a quarter of the House of Lords had weighed up the pros and cons and reached the conclusion that the legislation on the floor of the house that day was not particularly important.
It had been a hard-fought match thus far, and it was becoming uncomfortably hot. Many of the spectators had tucked handkerchiefs or newspapers under their hats, to protect their necks from the sun. Some of the players were visibly wilting. Yet no one would have wished to leave the scene at such a nail-biting point in the match.
It was midway through an over when the phone call came. The steward who answered it, furious at being dragged away from the action, was more than willing to give the caller short shrift. Then he heard what the caller had to say and his expression changed from annoyance to disbelief—and then genuine concern.
‘This isn’t a joke, is it?’ he demanded.
‘No joke,’ said the man with the Irish accent at the other end of the line. ‘We think you’ve got fifteen minutes—but the mechanism’s not always reliable.’
As the steward hung up the mouthpiece, he saw that his hands were shaking. Instinctively, his gaze was drawn to the edge of the ground—to the huge, dull-red cylinders of the gasworks.
‘Something wrong?’ one of the stewards asked him.
‘Something’s very wrong,’ the first steward replied. ‘That was the Fenians.’
***
‘Get on the next train to come into the station!’ said the voice behind Aggarwal, as if the man it belonged to had been reading his mind and gauging his indecision. Aggarwal began to turn around.
‘If I’d wanted you to see me, I’d have stood in front of you!’ the voice growled.
Aggarwal froze. ‘Can I not just give you the money now?’ he asked tremulously.
‘I’m the dispatcher, not the collector,’ the other man said. ‘And you are nothing but the messenger boy. You don’t ask questions—you just do as you’re told. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ Aggarwal mumbled.
‘Good. Then listen carefully. Stay on the train until the fifth stop, then get off. You’ll be met outside the station.’
‘Who will meet me?’ Aggarwal asked.
But there was no answer, and when he finally plucked up the nerve to glance over his shoulder, he found that the man had gone and the space had been filled by a woman and two small children.
The train entered the station. The carriages it was pulling were of the old-fashioned type—the ones that Londoners called ‘padded cells’, because they had no windows and the upholstery of the seatbacks reached almost to the ceiling. Aggarwal, a novice in the underground, did not know this, yet as he stepped into the carriage he still felt as if he had entered some kind of lunatic asylum.
***
The man with the megaphone held to his mouth walked slowly around the boundary of the pitch, shouting his remarks at the crowd.
‘Gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we regret that the day’s play is now being brought to an end. The management request that you evacuate the ground as soon as possible, though please do so in an orderly manner.’
The spectators were as puzzled as the players obviously were. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the match still had some time to play. Why should they leave, when there appeared to be no reason for it?
‘Please evacuate the ground now!’
Nobody moved. They had all paid their entrance fee and were determined to get their money’s worth.
Faced with such recalcitrance, the man with the megaphone saw no alternative but to tell the truth.
‘We have just received a telephone call from the Fenian Movement,’ he said. ‘They claim that there is a bomb planted somewhere in the ground.’
***
At each stop of the rattling journey, the guard called out the name of the station—London Bridge, Borough, Elephant and Castle, Kennington.
Aggarwal had been feeling more and more of his confidence seep away with each passing second, and by the time the train reached the next stop—his destination—his nerves were quite shattered. On legs which felt as if they were made of rubber, he walked towards the exit, sustained only by the knowledge that he would soon be clear of this dim underground hell.
What he saw as he approached the steps both stopped him in his tracks and dashed his hopes. A great wave of men was approaching from the opposite direction. They seemed in a great hurry—perhaps even in a panic. As they pushed and shoved each other in their angling for position, Aggarwal tried to move, and found that he could not.
The wave converged on him. He found himself being pushed backwards, and would no doubt have been dragged back into the booking hall, had not a hand grabbed his arm and pulled him clear.
The two detective constables—at least a dozen yards behind Aggarwal, and in a narrower section of the passageway—saw what was happening but could do nothing about it. Push and shove as they might, the fleeing crowd had now become jammed into an ever-tighter space, and all their-efforts were to no avail.
‘Shit!’ one of the constables said.
‘Double shit!’ the other replied.
They had done a brilliant job in keeping Aggarwal in their sights for so long, but now that it really mattered, they had undoubtedly lost him.
Thirty-Four
It was not a large room, but the absence of any furniture save for a plain deal table and two upright chairs made it seem perhaps bigger than it was. There was only one small window and even that was masked by heavy sacking so that very little light was allowed to penetrate from the outside. What illumination did exist came from two wall-mounted gas-mantles, which—though they would have seemed perfectly normal in most circumstances—had taken on a sinister air in Aggarwal’s mind, and seemed to flicker and hiss with true menace.
Once the blindfold had been removed, the Maharaja’s secretary had been instructed to sit at one of the chairs. Facing him, at the opposite side of the table, was a man in his late fifties with iron-grey hair, a clipped grey moustache and pale, cold eyes. He had introduced himself as ‘Mr Jones’.
‘We have met before,’ the secretary said, hoping that this fact would make the exchange which followed somewhat easier.
‘You are mistaken,’ the man said frostily. ‘We are strangers to each other and strangers we will remain.’
Yet though the man’s tone allowed no scope for further discussion, Aggarwal was now sure that they had met. It had been in Chandrapore, he remembered, and then Jones had had quite some other name—with the title ‘Colonel’ before it—and had been wearing a military uniform.
There were two other men in the room with them. They were younger than Jones—not more than in their middle thirties. Their speech was not as refined as his, and their attitude to him was clearly subservient. Jones introduced them as Brown and Green, and once Aggarwal had sat down, they positioned themselves behind his chair—Brown just to the left, Green just to the right.
Jones lifted the attaché case Aggarwal had brought with him, turned it upside down, and shook it vigorously. Bundles of bank notes spilled out on to the table. Jones spread his arms, pulling all the bundles of notes towards him.
‘These are all issued by the same bank, are they not?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Aggarwal said.
‘And that bank is the Bank of England, not some obscure little institution in Yorkshire or Cornwall?’
Forgetting for a moment the perils of his situation—and the fear that they engendered—Aggarwal felt a sudden burst of resentment that his competence should be questioned in such a manner.
‘You asked for Bank of England notes, and it is Bank of England notes I have delivered,’ he said snottily. ‘I am not some minor clerk sweating it out in a counting house in Bombay—I am the private secretary to, the Maharaja of Chandrapore.’
Jones laughed. ‘Our fri
end here seems to think that because he is working for the biggest monkey in his own particular jungle that means they have both come down from the trees,’ he said to the two men behind Aggarwal’s chair.
‘What do you mean by that?’ the secretary demanded.
‘Shut up!’ Jones ordered him. ‘It will take me some time to count this cash, and while I am doing so you will keep your mouth closed and desist from picking your fleas.’
No soldier nor official in Chandrapore—however high his rank—would have dared to speak to him—a man with the Maharaja’s ear—in that manner, Aggarwal thought. Yet it was the fear, not the anger, which was dominant in him once more, and thus he held his peace.
Jones slowly and carefully went through each bundle of notes.
‘Why are the bundles of different thickness?’ he asked, about halfway through the process. ‘Why do some contain a thousand pounds, and some less than fifty?’
‘It is all there,’ the secretary said. ‘Why should you care how thick or thin each bundle is?’
‘Very true,’ Jones agreed. ‘Why should I care?’
Jones licked his finger for the second or third time, and continued to count off the notes in hundred pound batches.
‘I have told you it is all there,’ Aggarwal said. ‘Why will you not take my word for it?’
Jones ignored him and continued to count. ‘Ninety-nine thousand five hundred, ninety-nine thousand six hundred, ninety-nine thousand seven hundred, ninety-nine thousand eight hundred, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred, one hundred thousand.’
‘You see! Did I not tell you not to waste your time by counting?’ Aggarwal asked.
Jones frowned. ‘Where is the rest?’
‘The rest? What rest? When we met on the barge, you asked me to bring you one hundred thousand pounds. And that is what I have done.’
‘True,’ Jones agreed. ‘But you did not ask the Maharaja for a hundred thousand pounds, did you? You asked him for a hundred and twenty thousand. And why was what? So that you could keep the twenty thousand for yourself?’
Blackstone and the Great Game (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 2) Page 17