A Rising Man

by Abir Mukherjee

  The press got hold of the story, whipped the locals into a frenzy, and soon CID took over the case. After some persuasion, they let me stay on the case. I convinced them I could be useful – I was, after all, the first copper on the scene and I knew the territory.

  We appealed for eye-witnesses and several came forward. They spoke of two shifty-looking men seen leaving the premises that morning. A couple even identified the two as brothers, Alfred and Albert Stratford, toughs with a reputation for violence considered excessive, even for that part of town. We hauled them in for questioning and of course they denied everything. To listen to them, you’d have thought they’d been in church at the time of the murders.

  Then witnesses started backtracking. Stories changed – it was dark, they couldn’t be certain, weren’t even sure if it was the same day – and suddenly we had nothing and the Stratford brothers were going to walk. In a last throw of the dice, the CID officers returned to the crime scene in the vain hope of turning up some evidence that might have been missed. I was left at the station and to my own devices. On a whim, I went down to the evidence locker. With the case slipping away, my stint in CID seemed almost over and I wanted to take one last look at what we had, for old times’ sake. I examined the meagre contents: the blood-soaked night clothes, a cracked pocket watch, the empty cash box. It was then that I noticed the reddish smudge hidden on the inside lip of the cash-box lid. In all the commotion it must have been missed when the box was originally discovered. Instantly I knew what it was, and, more importantly, what it might mean. I vaulted back up the stairs, my hands shaking as I held out the box and showed it to the senior officer. Soon Scotland Yard’s nascent Fingerprinting Bureau had been summoned. They managed to lift a print, which turned out to be an exact match for Alfred Stratford’s thumb. We’d caught him red-handed. I applied for a transfer to CID and was accepted.

  As for the Stratford brothers, they were both hanged.

  I spent the next seven years in CID, dealing with crimes that would put most men off their dinners. It gets tiring after a while and in late 1912 I transferred to Special Branch, whose primary role at the time was to keep an eye on Fenians and their sympathisers in the capital. Not many people remember that the Special Branch started life as the Special Irish Branch. The name may have changed, but the mission hadn’t.

  The war came in the summer of ’14. I wasn’t one of those who welcomed its arrival like so many turkeys cheering for Christmas, maybe because I’d already seen enough death to know it was often gruesome, generally pointless and rarely honourable. I certainly didn’t get caught up in the fever that saw countless young men head gleefully to the recruiting office in those early days, thinking it would all be over by the New Year. So many people thought it would be a short affair; that we’d go over there, give the Kaiser a thrashing and that would be that. As though dispatching the industrialised might of the Imperial German Army would be no more arduous than beating the spear-chuckers we liked to fight in our colonial campaigns.

  In the end, though, I did volunteer. Not for love of king and country, which is considered noble, but for the love of a woman, which is something altogether more complicated.

  I first saw Sarah on the Mile End omnibus one morning in the autumn of 1913. People talk of love at first sight, of violins and fireworks. For me the experience was more akin to a mild heart attack. She was beautiful, in the way one always imagines an English girl should be, and far too pretty to be on an omnibus on the Whitechapel Road – or within a five-mile radius of the place for that matter. Before I could regain my wits, she had alighted and I lost her in the crowds. That might have been the end of it had I not spotted her again on the same bus a few days later. Soon I’d planned my journey with precision, fine-tuning it to coincide with hers. It was nice to have a use for the old Special Branch surveillance techniques that for once didn’t involve trailing Irishmen all over town.

  For the next few weeks, that morning journey coloured my life; there was joy at the sight of her, and a hollowness when she wasn’t there. One day, when the bus was particularly packed, I offered her my seat. She took it as an act of kindness. I took it as an opportunity to start a conversation.

  Over time, I got to know her. She was a school mistress, a few years older than me, and smart too. If it was her beauty that first attracted me, then it was her intellect that made me fall in love with her. Hers was a open mind, espousing ideas liberal and radical. Some men are put off by intelligence in a woman. I find it intoxicating. Those days were the happiest of my life. She had a fondness for nature and we spent many a freezing Sunday afternoon walking in the royal gardens. Nowadays I can’t see a park without thinking of her.

  But the course of true love never did run smooth, and in our case, it meandered all over the place. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only one captivated by her. She had more than her fair share of admirers: intellectuals and radicals mainly, even the odd foreigner. She introduced me to her circle: long-faced, sincere men with shiny new ideas and old threadbare coats, who’d gather in coffee shops and talk heatedly about the fraternal solidarity of the working classes and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was all nonsense, of course. They were there for the same reason I was – moths around the same flame. If they thought it would help win her affection, each one of them would have happily knifed the others in the back with fraternal solidarity having gone out the nearest window. There was one thing that united them, though – their suspicion of me, a mistrust that didn’t exactly diminish when they learned I was a policeman.

  Of course, there were other women in the group, but Sarah’s light was always the brightest. And she, aware of her position, made sure to distribute her favours evenly: a kind word here, a glance there, just enough so that no one suitor ever seemed to be preferred or any other ever lost heart.

  It was in order to set myself apart from these men that I enlisted. Like most radicals, they talked a lot but did nothing, and it didn’t take an intellectual to see that she was tiring of the endless discourse. I enlisted because I sensed that, despite her liberated views, what she really wanted was for a man to be a man. I enlisted because I loved her. And then I asked her to marry me.

  I joined up in January 1915 and received three weeks of the most basic of basic training alongside two dozen other men. Sarah and I were married in late February and two days later, I shipped out to France.

  We saw action almost immediately, thrown into the attack at Neuve Chapelle. A number of my comrades died in that battle; just the first of many. There were a lot of dead men’s shoes to fill in those days and field promotions became common place. As a detective inspector, I was considered officer material and quickly made a second lieutenant. After that came further promotions, all by dint of me still being alive. One by one, my friends were killed. Family too. My half brother, Charlie, died at Cambrai in ’17: missing, presumed killed in action. He’d been at my wedding two years before and his funeral was the last time I saw my father, who’d died shortly after. In the end, out of the twenty or so of us who signed up together, only two of us survived, and only me with my wits intact. Though that’s debatable.

  It was during the war that I first met Lord Taggart. I was pulled out of the line and ordered to report to him in St Omer. He wore the insignia of a major of the 10th Fusiliers, but it quickly became apparent that his real role was military intelligence. He’d read my file, noted my time in Special Branch, and had a job for me. I was ordered to Calais, to track a Dutch national whom military intelligence suspected of abetting the enemy. I tailed the man for several weeks, noting his contacts and meetings, and soon we’d uncovered a ring of spies working at the docks and passing information on our logistics to the Germans.

  Taggart asked if I wished to continue working for him. It wasn’t a difficult decision: I’d done more for the war effort in a month in intelligence than I had in almost two years of sitting in a trench. The work was for the most part enjoyable, and I proved to be good at it. Compared to t
he Irish, the Germans were amateurs. They tended to view espionage much as we British view haggling: a slightly seedy business, best left to other races.

  My war came to an end in the summer of 1918 at the second Battle of the Marne. It was to be the Hun’s last throw of the dice. They let loose with everything they had; a barrage of shells that seemed to last a couple of weeks. I was on a reconnaissance mission in the forward trenches when we took a direct hit. I was lucky. A medical orderly found me and dragged me to a field hospital and a week later I was transferred to a facility back in England. It was touch and go for a while. They gave me morphine for the pain and I spent many days in a drug-induced fog. It was only much later, when they considered my mental state sufficiently robust, that they told me of Sarah’s death. They said it was influenza, that there had been an epidemic, that a lot of people had died from it. As if that made it somehow easier to accept.

  They didn’t send me back to France. There was no point. By October it was clear the war was over. Instead, I was demobilised, allowed to return to civilian life. But it’s not much of a life when everyone you cared about is lying in a cemetery or scattered over a French field; when all you have left are memories and guilt. I rejoined the police force in the hope of regaining some purpose, as though returning to the familiar might somehow reanimate what was now a hollowed-out husk. It didn’t help. Sarah’s passing had taken the best part of me with it, and now the days were empty and the nights populated by the cries of the dead, which nothing could extinguish. Nothing except the morphine. When that ran out, I took to opium. Not as effective, but easy enough to get a hold of, especially for a copper who’d cut his teeth in the East End. I knew of several dens in Limehouse alone, and it was while staggering along Narrow Street one freezing December night, past where the Cut flows into the Thames, that I considered ending it all. It would be easy. Just a short walk into the blackness. The cold would numb the pain and it would all soon be over…

  Then I remembered an argument I’d once had with a sergeant from the River Police at Wapping. It was only the thought of the satisfaction he’d get from fishing my bloated corpse out of the water that kept me from doing it.

  I can be petty like that.

  It was soon after that I received the telegram from Lord Taggart offering me a job. He’d been appointed Commissioner of the Imperial Police Force in Bengal, had need of good detectives and requested that I join him in Calcutta. There was precious little left for me in England, and so in early March, after bidding farewell to Sarah’s father on the quayside, I boarded a P&O steamer bound for Bengal. I’d managed to pilfer a stash of morphine tablets from an evidence locker in Bethnal Green before leaving. It was easy enough to do: evidence went astray all the time. There were rumours that certain officers in Wapping earned more on the side from the sale of contraband than they ever did pounding the beat. What concerned me, though, was whether I’d managed to purloin enough tablets for the three-week journey. It would be touch and go. I’d have to ration myself, but hoped that it would be enough to see me through to Calcutta.

  Unfortunately, Lady Luck can be fickle sometimes. Bad weather in the Mediterranean added almost a week to the journey and I’d run out of tablets several days before the coast of Bengal finally came into view.

  Bengal: verdant, bountiful and benighted. It seemed a country of steaming jungle and sodden mangrove, more water than land. Its climate was as hostile as almost anywhere in the world, in turn parched by baking sun and drenched by monsoon rains, as though God himself, in a fit of petulance, had chosen everything in nature most abominable to an Englishman and set it down in this one cursed place. So it stood to reason that it was here, eighty miles inland, in a malarial swamp on the east bank of the muddy Hooghly river, that we should see fit to build Calcutta, our Indian capital. I guess we like a challenge.

  I set foot on the soil of India on the first of April, 1919. All Fools’ Day. It seemed appropriate. The steamer had made its way up river. Jungle had given way to fields and mud villages, and then finally, around a dog-leg bend in the river, the great city appeared under a crown of black haze from a hundred industrial smokestacks.

  Pitching up in Calcutta for the first time without the assistance of drugs is not a pleasant experience. Of course there’s the heat, the broiling, suffocating, relentless heat. But the heat’s not the problem. It’s the humidity that drives men mad.

  The river was choked with vessels. Vast ocean-going merchantmen jostled for position at the dockside. If the river was the city’s artery, these vessels were its lifeblood, carrying its exports to the world.

  To look at it, you might think Calcutta some ancient metropolis. The truth is it’s younger than New York or Boston or half a dozen other cities of the Americas. Unlike them, though, it was never conceived out of aspirations of a new beginning in a New World. This place was born of more base a reason. This place existed for trade.

  Calcutta – we called it the City of Palaces. Our Star in the East. We’d built this city, erected mansions and monuments where previously had stood only jungle and thatch. We’d paid our price in blood and now, we proclaimed, Calcutta was a British city. Five minutes here would tell you it was no such thing. But that didn’t mean it was Indian.

  The truth was, Calcutta was unique.

  THREE

  AT 18 LAL BAZAR Street sits a solid-looking mansion that dates back to the glory days of the East India Company, a time when any old Englishman armed with enough brains and an eye for opportunity could turn up penniless in Bengal and, if he played his cards right, end up as rich as a prince. Of course, it also helped if he wasn’t too fussy about how he did it. They say it was built by just such a fellow who’d come here with nothing, made a fortune but then lost it all. He’d sold it to someone, who’d sold it someone, who’d sold it to the government and now it’s the headquarters of the Imperial Police Force (Bengal Division).

  It was built in the style we like to call colonial neo-classic – all columns and cornices and shuttered windows. And it was painted maroon. If the Raj has a colour, it’s maroon. Most government buildings, from police stations to post offices, are painted maroon. I expect there’s a fat industrialist somewhere, Manchester or Birmingham probably, who got rich off the contract to produce a sea of maroon paint for all the buildings of the Raj.

  Surrender-not and I passed between two saluting sentries, into a bustling foyer and made for the stairs, past walls covered in the plaques, photographs and other assorted memorabilia of a hundred years of colonial law enforcement.

  Lord Taggart’s office was on the third floor and accessed by a small anteroom. There sat his personal secretary, a diminutive fellow by the name of Daniels, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to serve his master, a task he performed with the dedication of a besotted cocker spaniel. I knocked and entered, with Surrender-not trailing two paces behind. Daniels rose from behind his desk. He looked like secretaries to important men always do: pale, unthreatening and several inches shorter than his boss.

  ‘This way please, Captain Wyndham,’ he said, leading me towards a set of double doors. ‘The Commissioner’s expecting you.’

  I walked in. Surrender-not stopped at the threshold.

  ‘Come on, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘let’s not keep the Commissioner waiting.’

  He took a deep breath and followed me into a room the size of a small Zeppelin hangar. Light streamed in through French windows and reflected off chandeliers hanging from a high ceiling. It was an impressive office for a policeman. Still, I guessed the chief guardian of law and order in such a prominent, yet problematic outpost of empire probably deserved such an office. At the far end of the room, behind a desk the size of a rowing boat and under a life-size portrait of George V, sat the Commissioner. Digby was sat opposite him. I made my way over to join the three of them, Surrender-not a half-step behind me, doing my best to hide my surprise.

  ‘Take a seat, Sam,’ said the Commissioner without rising from his chair.

  I did as
ordered and took the chair next to Digby. There were only two, which just served to exacerbate Surrender-not’s nerves. He frantically scanned the room. It was a look I’d seen before on the faces of men stranded under fire in no man’s land.

  Digby turned crimson. ‘Where do you think you are, Sergeant, Howrah station? This is no place for the likes of—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Taggart, raising a hand, ‘the sergeant should stay. I think it appropriate that at least one Indian be present.’ He turned towards the door and called out.

  ‘Daniels! Fetch a chair for the sergeant.’

  The secretary stood and stared like a startled rabbit. Then without a word, he nodded and left the room, returning with a chair which he placed next to mine, before exiting once again, barely acknowledging the sergeant’s words of thanks. Surrender-not sat down and concentrated on staring at the floor. Digby looked like he might be having a seizure.

  I turned my attention to Lord Taggart. He was a tall man in his fifties, with the benevolent face of a priest and the devil’s charm.

  ‘Now, Sam,’ he said, rising from his chair and pacing, ‘this MacAuley business. I’ve already had the Lieutenant Governor on the telephone. He wants to know what we’re doing about it.’

  ‘News travels fast,’ I said, glancing at Digby whose face was set in a rictus stare. ‘We only found the body a few hours ago.’

  Digby shrugged.

  ‘Something you should know about Calcutta, Sam,’ the Commissioner continued, ‘we aren’t the only force of law and order.’ He lowered his voice and continued, ‘The L-G has his own sources, shall we say.’