A Rising Man

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘You mean a secret police?’

  The Commissioner winced. Returning to his seat, he picked up a lacquered fountain pen and tapped it distractedly on the desk. ‘Let’s just call them alternative channels.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. A secret police was something only other nations employed. We British used alternative channels.

  ‘Whatever they’ve told him has got him extremely worried,’ Taggart went on. ‘When news gets out that a senior British civil servant – one of his closest aides, no less – has been murdered, the situation is likely to be explosive. The revolutionaries will have a field day. Who knows what they’ll be emboldened to do next? I’ve had the background from Digby, but I want your assessment.’

  There wasn’t much to tell him. ‘The investigation is at an early stage, sir,’ I said, ‘but I concur with Sub-inspector Digby. It looks like a political act.’

  The Commissioner rubbed a hand across his chin. ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘None as yet, but we’re following up certain leads.’

  ‘And how do you propose to proceed?’

  ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘We’ll start with a fingertip search of the locus, talk to witnesses, then to people who knew him. I want to find out more about MacAuley: when he was last seen, and what he was doing up in Black Town last night dressed like he was off to the opera. I’d also like to talk to his boss, the Lieutenant Governor.’

  Digby snorted.

  ‘That might be difficult, Sam.’ The Commissioner sighed. ‘The L-G and his staff are preparing to ship out to Darjeeling in less than a fortnight. We may struggle to fit you into his schedule. Leave it with me, though. Given the delicate nature of the situation, he might spare you fifteen minutes. In the meantime, you should pursue other avenues.’

  ‘In that case, we’ll start with MacAuley’s secretary, assuming he had one.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Digby. ‘Probably some pen-pusher over at Writers’.’

  ‘Very good,’ said the Commissioner. ‘Carry on, and keep me posted, Sam. Digby, speak to your people in Black Town. See if they’ve heard anything. I want all the stops pulled out on this one, gentlemen.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘One last thing,’ said the Commissioner. He turned towards Surrender-not. ‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’

  ‘Banerjee, sir,’ replied the sergeant. He looked at me. ‘Surrender-not Banerjee.’

  I left the office with Digby and Surrender-not in tow, all the while ruminating on the conversation with the Commissioner. Something didn’t sit right.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked Digby.

  ‘Looks like we’ve landed ourselves a real hot potato, old boy.’

  In terms of analysis, it was hardly piercing.

  ‘Start talking to your informants. See if any of them have heard anything.’

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it.

  ‘You’ve a better idea?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at all, old boy.’ He smiled. ‘You’re the ex-Scotland Yard man. Let’s do it your way.’

  I dismissed him and watched as he strode off towards his office, then ordered Banerjee to get an update from the crime scene. The sergeant saluted and set off in the direction of the ‘pit’ where he and the other native officers sat. In the meantime, I needed space to think.

  I walked out of the building and made for the courtyard between the main block and an annexe that held the stables, garage and some of the administrative departments. Here stood the Imperial Police Garden, a patch of grass and a few wooden benches surrounded by flower beds and a handful of scrawny trees. It was a grand title for such a small patch of scrub, but it was still a garden, and that was good enough for me.

  For me, gardens recalled memories of happier times. For three years I’d sat in the trenches and remembered the days I’d spent wandering the parks of London with Sarah. I dreamed of being with her again, just looking out over grass and flowers. That dream was dead, but gardens still brought me joy. I am an Englishman, after all.

  I sat on a bench and ordered my thoughts. The Commissioner had dragged us back from a crime scene only to impress upon us the importance of the case. That in itself was odd. It was like interrupting a surgeon in the middle of an operation, simply to stress how vital it was that he save the patient.

  Something else bothered me. How had the Lieutenant Governor’s people got wind of the murder so soon? The peon had only found the body at around seven o’clock. It would have taken him about fifteen minutes to make it to the nearest thana and raise the alarm. By the time the local constables had arrived on the scene, realised that the peon wasn’t mad and that there really was a dead sahib in dress shirt and dickie bow lying in a gutter with his eye pecked out, it would have been at least seven thirty. It was almost eight thirty by the time we arrived, and Digby didn’t even identify the body as MacAuley’s for another fifteen minutes after that. And yet, only an hour later, a constable arrives and summons us back to Lal Bazar. Assuming it took him the best part of fifteen minutes to cycle over from the local thana, that would mean that within forty-five minutes of us identifying the body, the L-G’s office knew about it, had contacted the Commissioner and told him something that spooked him so much that he immediately called the investigating officers back from the crime scene. Like West Ham winning the league, it was possible… just not particularly plausible.

  I considered the options: one of the constables on the investigating team was working for the L-G’s secret police and had got a message to them while Banerjee and I were at the brothel questioning Mrs Bose and her staff. That was conceivable. Even in the short time I’d been here, it was clear that in terms of corruption at least, the men of the Imperial Police Force could give the boys of the Met a good run for their money.

  There was, though, another possibility: that the L-G’s operatives had known about the murder before the peon had even found the body. That would explain how the L-G came to know so quickly. But it too raised questions. Were the operatives tailing MacAuley? If so, why didn’t they intervene when they saw he was in trouble? He was a senior British administrator, after all. If they weren’t going to intervene when a burra sahib was attacked, then we might all as well just pack our bags, shut up shop and hand the keys back to the Indians.

  On the other hand, the L-G’s men may have simply found MacAuley’s body after he’d been murdered. That seemed more likely, but if so, why leave it and wait for someone else to find the body? Why not raise the alarm themselves? Better still, why not just tidy up the mess without anyone knowing? It wouldn’t be the first time a high-profile death had been hushed up. I remembered the case of a South American ambassador to the Court of St James we’d found asphyxiated in a room above a pub in the Shepherd Market wearing nothing but a noose round his neck and a smile on his face. It was later reported that his Excellency had passed away peacefully, asleep in his own bed.

  I was going round in circles. None of the possibilities made much sense. It wasn’t an especially auspicious start to my first case in Calcutta, a case which, I was beginning to realise, was as unique as any I’d dealt with before. It wasn’t just the murder of a white man in a black suburb. This appeared to be the assassination of a senior British official by native terrorists. The stakes didn’t come much higher.

  My mind wandered to thoughts of Sarah. What would she have made of me sitting here, thousands of miles from home, leading such an investigation? I hoped she’d be proud of me. God, I missed her.

  I must have sat there for some time for the next thing I knew, the sun had shifted, my shade had disappeared and I was sweating. Focusing on the task in hand was becoming increasingly difficult. At that moment I’d gladly have given a month’s pay for a shot of morphine or a hit of ‘O’, but I had a murder to solve. And I didn’t yet have a month’s pay.

  I stalked back up to my office. Surrender-not was sat on a chair in the corridor outside, lost in his own thoughts.

 
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Sergeant?’

  Startled, he jumped up and saluted, knocking his chair over in the process. He didn’t seem to have much luck with chairs.

  ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir,’ he said, before trailing after me into my office. The look on his face suggested he had bad news and wasn’t sure if I was the type to shoot the messenger. I could have assured him I wasn’t, mainly because the alternative would have left me well short of subordinates by now.

  ‘Out with it, Sergeant,’ I said.

  Surrender-not looked at his feet. ‘We’ve had a call from Cossipore thana. It’s the crime scene, sir. It’s been taken over by the military.’

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘This is a civilian matter. What’s it got to do with the military?’

  ‘It’s military intelligence, sir, not military police,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘I’ve seen it happen before, sir. Last year, we were in attendance at the scene of an explosive detonation. Nationalists had blown up the railway lines north of Howrah. A truck load of military personnel turned up and the whole investigation was taken out of our hands within a few hours. We were ordered not to mention a word to anyone, on pain of disciplinary action.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you told me,’ I said sincerely. ‘What else do you know about them?’

  ‘Not much, I’m afraid. Those sorts of things are not really shared with people of my… rank, but it’s common knowledge, inside Lal Bazar at least, that there’s a unit within military intelligence – “Section H”, I believe it’s called – which reports directly to the L-G. Anything he considers a political crime falls under their jurisdiction.’

  ‘And there’s a law to that effect?’

  Banerjee smiled ruefully. ‘I doubt very much that there is, sir, but that is irrelevant. One might say that the Lieutenant Governor has certain broad, discretionary powers that he is free to exercise in furtherance of the good governance of His Majesty’s colonial territories of the Bengal Presidency.’

  ‘You mean he can do whatever the hell he likes?’

  He gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  I was unsure where that left my investigation. But there was one way to find out. Sometimes, in a new job, it’s important to set out the ground rules early. What you will put up with and what you won’t. What people call ‘Red Lines’. I’ve found that in the early days, at least, your superior is as likely to cut you some slack as reprimand you, especially if he’s the man who hired you.

  Leaving the sergeant standing where he was, I calmly rose, walked out the door and back up the stairs. Ignoring the protestations of a startled Daniels, I barged straight into Taggart’s office.

  The Commissioner looked up from his desk. He didn’t seem surprised.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Sam.’

  ‘Am I off the MacAuley case?’

  Taggart calmly beckoned me over to a chair while the stricken Daniels looked on.

  ‘With the greatest respect,’ I said, ‘what the hell’s going on, sir? An hour ago you tell me to pull out all the stops and now I find out it’s someone else’s case.’

  Taggart removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a small handkerchief. ‘Calm down, Sam.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve just found out myself. Look, it’s still your case. The L-G simply felt that the crime scene itself should be secured by the military. The last thing we need is the terrorists exploiting the situation any further. The whole area is under curfew. I’ll do what I can to ensure the military don’t get in the way of your investigation.’

  ‘I need access to the crime scene,’ I said. ‘We haven’t found a murder weapon yet.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Taggart, ‘but it might take a day or so.’

  In a day or so, my crime scene wouldn’t be worth a tin rupee. Anything of interest would be in the hands of military intelligence, and if they were anything like their counterparts in wartime France, they were unlikely to share. The bile was rising in my throat. I tried to swallow it down. There wasn’t much else to say, so I took my leave and headed back down the stairs. At least for now, it was still my case.

  Surrender-not was waiting in my office. In my haste to confront Taggart, I’d forgotten to dismiss him. I wondered just how long he would have stayed there had I not returned. Hours possibly.

  Now, though, I had work for him to do. The priority was to secure MacAuley’s body. Assuming we still had it.

  FOUR

  IT TOOK A few telephone calls to find the name of MacAuley’s secretary, and it turned out he was a she, a Miss Grant. It was surprising that a man as senior as MacAuley should have a woman for a secretary. Then again, times were changing. In England, too, there seemed to be a hell of a lot more women about, doing the jobs of men sent to the trenches. With the war over, they didn’t seem in any hurry to return to the kitchen. That was just fine with me. Any man who’s spent time in a field hospital being ministered to by female nurses would happily tell you that more women in the workplace was something to be wholeheartedly supported.

  My appointment with Miss Grant was at Writers’ Building at four p.m. It was a five-minute walk from Lal Bazar so I made the journey on foot, which was a mistake. Even in the late afternoon, the heat was like a lead weight on my shoulders and I was sweating like a Spaniard by the time I turned into Dalhousie Square. If Calcutta has a heart, it’s Dalhousie. Like Trafalgar in London, Dalhousie was too big to be elegant. No public space needs to be quite so huge. At its centre sat a large, rectangular pool of water the colour of banana leaves. Digby had mentioned that in the old days, the natives would use it for washing, swimming and religious pursuits. All that stopped after the mutiny of ’57. Such things were no longer to be tolerated. Now the pool stood empty, its bottle-green waters shimmering in the afternoon sun. The natives – the ones we approved of, at any rate – now suited and booted in frock coats and buttoned-down collars, hurried around it, heads down, on their way to meetings and appointments, kept at a safe distance from the water by iron railings and signs in English and Bengali warning of stiff penalties should they be tempted to revert to their base natures and go for a dip.

  Around the flanks of the square sat the key buildings of British administration: the General Post Office, the telephone exchange and, of course, the massive stone bulk of the Writers’ Building. The lives of over a hundred million Indians, from Bihar to the borders of Burma, were administered from Writers’, so it was apt that it was as large a building as probably existed anywhere in the empire. But large hardly did it justice. The word that best described it was awesome. For that was its purpose: to inspire awe in all who saw it, but mainly in the natives. It was certainly formidable. Four storeys high and about two hundred yards long, with massive plinths and huge columns topped off with statues of the gods. Not Indian gods, of course. These ones were Greek, or possibly Roman. I never could tell the difference.

  That was the thing about Calcutta. Everything we’d built here was in the classical style. And everything was larger than necessary. Our offices, mansions and monuments all shouted, Look at our works! Truly we are the inheritors of Rome.

  It was the architecture of domination and it all seemed faintly absurd. The Palladian buildings with their columns and pediments, the toga-clad statues of Englishmen long deceased, and the Latin inscriptions on everything from palaces to public lavatories. Looking at it all, a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that Calcutta had been colonised by Italians rather than Englishmen.

  The square buzzed with activity. Trams and motor cars disgorged a steady stream of white and native civil servants in suits and ties despite the heat, who joined the throng of others rushing in and out of the building’s wide portico.

  I asked at the front desk for Miss Grant and the clerk searched through a directory before ringing a brass bell on the marble counter top. A turbaned flunky appeared and the clerk addressed him in the brusque tone that minor bureaucrats generally use with their underlings. The flunky smiled obsequiously a
nd beckoned me to follow. We crossed to the far side of the lobby to an elevator marked, RESERVED. He opened the grille door and ushered me in. There were no buttons. Instead, he removed a key from his pocket, inserted it into a brass slot and turned it. The lift gave a jolt, then smoothly began its ascent. The flunky smiled. ‘Express elevator, sahib!’

  The lift lurched to a halt at the fourth floor and the flunky led the way down an oak-panelled corridor with a blue carpet thick enough to suffocate a small dog. He stopped outside one of the many identical, unnumbered doors and smiled. The clacking of a typewriter could be heard emanating from the other side. I thanked him and he pressed his palms together in the Indian gesture of pranaam, then retreated down the corridor.

  I knocked and entered. A young woman was seated behind a desk too small for the oversized typewriter, telephone and stacks of papers that sat upon it. She seemed preoccupied with her typing.

  ‘Miss Grant?’

  She looked up, flustered, her eyes red-rimmed.

  ‘I’m Captain Wyndham.’

  ‘Captain,’ she said, pushing a strand of brown hair from her face, ‘please do come in.’ She rose from her chair and in the process knocked over a stack of papers, which scattered on the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, quickly bending down to gather them up. I tried not to stare at her legs, which was difficult because they were fine legs and I appreciate these things. She caught me nevertheless, and to hide my embarrassment, I knelt down, picked up a few stray sheets that had landed at my feet and handed them to her. Her fingers brushed against mine and I caught the scent of her perfume. Not floral – something more earthy. She smiled her thanks. A nice smile. The nicest thing I’d seen since arriving in Calcutta, at any rate. A few buttons, open at the neck of her blouse, revealed smooth, tanned skin. Too tanned to be English; not enough to be Indian.

  I guessed she was of mixed ancestry. What they called Anglo-Indian. Somewhere along the line, there would have been some native blood in her family. It was enough to condemn her, and those like her, to a strange kind of limbo. Not Indian, but not British either.