A Rising Man

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘Please take a seat,’ she said, ushering me to a chair. ‘Would you like something to drink? Some tea, perhaps?’

  I asked for water.

  ‘Are you sure, Captain? You know what they say about the water here. Maybe you’d prefer a gin and tonic? It’s safer, after all.’

  The idea of a gin and tonic with her didn’t sound too bad, even if we were stuck in an office and about to discuss the murder of her employer. But I was on duty.

  ‘Water is fine, thank you.’

  A decanter and some bottles sat on a sideboard. She filled two glasses with water and handed me one.

  ‘I heard the news this morning,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘A friend at the L-G’s office called me. She said they’d found Mr MacAuley’s body. Is it true?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Tears welled in her eyes. I didn’t want her to cry as I never know quite what to say when a woman gets emotional. In the end, I did what I always do in such situations and offered her a cigarette. She accepted and I took out one for myself and lit both.

  She inhaled deeply and composed herself. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I need you to answer a few questions, Miss Grant.’

  She nodded. ‘Please, call me Annie.’

  It suited her.

  ‘Maybe you could start by telling me about Mr MacAuley. How long you’ve known him, what his role was here, who his friends were, that sort of thing.’

  She thought for a moment, taking another drag on her cigarette. I watched as its tip glowed red. She withdrew it from her lips and exhaled nervously.

  ‘Mr MacAuley was head of the ICS finance department in Bengal. But he was more than that. He was one of the L-G’s inner circle, advising him on all sorts of policy matters. On a day-to-day level, he could be involved in anything from negotiating pay for post office workers to making sure the trains ran on time.’ She said it like she’d memorised the words.

  ‘I’ve worked for him for about three years,’ she continued, ‘since late ’sixteen when his previous secretary decided to do his bit for King and country and got himself killed in the desert somewhere near Baghdad.’ She took another drag. ‘As for Mr MacAuley, they say he’d been in Calcutta for a quarter of a century or more. A permanent fixture at the Bengal Club most evenings.’ She looked past me, as though speaking to the wall. ‘He didn’t have many friends. He wasn’t the type to have friends.’

  I could sympathise. I had precious few friends left alive myself these days.

  ‘Then what type was he?’

  ‘The type who saw you in terms of what you could do for him. If you were rich, he’d seek to charm the pants off you. If you weren’t, he wouldn’t give you the time of day.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘It seemed to work for him, too. He was close to some very influential men.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, there’s the L-G, of course. But that was business. There was no friendship there. There’s no way the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, the deputy to the Viceroy of all India, is going to socialise with the likes of MacAuley, no matter how useful he could be.’

  ‘Useful in what way?’

  She gave me a look that suggested she thought the question, or possibly me, to be stupid. ‘MacAuley was the L-G’s fixer, Captain. He came from working-class stock; a hard-nosed so-and-so who could get things done quickly and quietly, and didn’t much care who got hurt in the process. Someone like that can be very useful to a politician like the L-G.’

  I stayed silent, hoping she’d elaborate. People will often keep talking just to fill the void, but she wasn’t that type. She just let the silence hang in the air.

  ‘Who else was he close to?’

  ‘James Buchan,’ she said, as if the name should mean something to me. She read the look on my face and smiled. ‘I take it you’re new to Calcutta, Captain. Mr Buchan is one of our beloved merchant princes, one of the richest men in Calcutta. He’s a jute baron, and a Scot like MacAuley. His family have been jute and rubber traders for over a century, since the days of the East India Company. They used to own several mills back in the old country. If you go down to the river, you’ll probably see barges with the name Buchan Works – Dundee printed on them. They used to ship the raw jute from East Bengal, through Calcutta and on to Scotland. There they’d weave it into everything from rope to wagon tarpaulins. Buchan’s brainwave was to shift his mills from Dundee and start production here. All the things he used to make in Scotland, he now makes here at a fraction of the cost. The story goes he trebled his profits at a stroke. He’s a millionaire many times over. He owns some mills about ten miles upriver, at a place called Serampore, and a mansion the size of a maharaja’s palace.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  She nodded. ‘He practically runs that town.’

  ‘And how does he do that?’

  ‘Money talks, Captain. He has all of the local officials in his pocket, probably the police too. I don’t know what it’s like back in England, but here, anyone can be bought for the right amount of rupees. Almost everyone up there owes their position to him in one way or another. He’s even shipped in several hundred of his own people from Scotland to run his operations upriver. Dundee on the Hooghly, they call it. You should take a walk along Chowringhee on a Sunday afternoon, Captain. Every second person you see strutting along will probably be one of Buchan’s people from Serampore, down in the big city for the day. No better than working-class labourers back home, here they have their own servants and swagger about like lords.’

  ‘Chowringhee? The road opposite the park?’

  ‘Really, Captain,’ she teased, ‘just when did you arrive here? Chowringhee is our Piccadilly. It’s where the great and the good come out to play.’ She paused. ‘I’d be glad to show you it some time.’

  That sounded good. The prospect of going anywhere with her sounded good. But I instantly regretted the thought and reproached myself. I was a man in mourning, after all. Still, I’d never met a girl in England who was ever this forward. But then Miss Grant wasn’t English.

  I tried to focus. ‘What was Buchan’s relationship with MacAuley?’

  ‘Mr MacAuley always said he was the only man Buchan trusted. Something to do with them coming from the same town. Buchan never had any issues about socialising with him. They’d often get hopelessly drunk together. MacAuley would regularly come into the office at ten or eleven in the morning after a night out with Buchan. That man knows how to throw a party.’

  ‘They were close friends?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I’m not sure, Captain. MacAuley was definitely closer to Buchan than he was to the L-G, but it’s not as though Buchan ever treated him as an equal. I got the impression that MacAuley was Buchan’s man. He would get things done for Buchan, a permit here, a by-law changed there. Buchan probably looked after him handsomely for it too, though I’ve no proof, of course.’

  ‘Anyone else he considered a friend?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. Like I said, he wasn’t a popular man… There was that preacher, though; I think his name’s Dunne or Gunn, or something. MacAuley was never the religious type, but about six months ago he met this preacher, I think he’d only recently arrived in Calcutta. A common enough sort – fresh off the boat, here to do God’s work saving little brown souls from the fires of hell… Zealots,’ she said distastefully. ‘Anyway, I think he runs an orphanage.’ She stubbed out her cigarette in a tin ashtray on the desk. ‘MacAuley would go and help out now and again. That came as a shock to a lot of people round here, me included. Then, about two months ago, he started attending church. Began talking more and more about sin and redemption. I think something changed inside him. It was as if he’d become a different person. It’s funny,’ she said, her lips forming a thin smile, ‘a man like MacAuley can spend his whole life being a swine and then find God just before he dies. Clean slate, all sins forgiven. Is there any justice in that, Captain?’

  I could have pointed out that there was a
certain justice in his being found stabbed to death in a gutter, but it seemed better just to ask her a few more questions.

  ‘Did he have any enemies?’ I asked. ‘Anyone who would benefit from seeing him dead?’

  She gave a small laugh. ‘Half the people in this building hated him, but I can’t see any of them killing him. Other than that, there’s probably a whole heap of people he must have ruined to help his patrons, but I couldn’t tell you who they are.’

  ‘What about Indians? Did he have any enemies amongst them?’

  ‘I dare say he did. There were quite a few native landowners and jute agents who were bankrupted by MacAuley’s actions on behalf of Buchan. Not to mention those affected when Bengal was partitioned by Lord Curzon. It might have been Curzon’s name on the order but MacAuley was the one who drew up the report and its recommendations. It was fifteen years ago but a great many Bengalis still haven’t forgotten. Or forgiven.’

  Could that have been a motive? At the time, I’d read in the papers about the protests in Calcutta when the partition was announced. The then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had decided to split the Bengal Presidency in two. He’d justified it on the grounds that Bengal was just too big to govern effectively. There was some truth to this – the province was larger than France with almost twice the population – but the natives saw it as an attempt to divide and rule. They’d reacted with fury. But why would anyone wait fifteen years before taking revenge? They do say our eastern cousins have long memories but if one of them were to wait quite so long for vengeance, I’d have expected something more elaborate than a back-alley stabbing.

  My mind was wandering. I’d grown to recognise the signs. In a few hours the cold sweats would start. I needed to focus.

  ‘Did he have any female friends?’ I asked. ‘A companion maybe?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t a very attractive man.’

  That much was true, especially with his eyes pecked out.

  ‘He was a confirmed bachelor by all accounts,’ she continued. ‘At any rate, he never mentioned any companions to me. I kept his diary for three years and I don’t recall him ever asking me to make a dinner reservation or buy flowers for anyone.’

  I took out the photo I’d found in MacAuley’s wallet and showed it to her. ‘What about this woman? Do you recognise her?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I can’t say that I do. Is it important?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It could be. Did MacAuley have any appointments yesterday?’

  She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a large gilt-edged diary, and thumbed through the pages.

  ‘He’d a ten a.m. with the L-G. They’ve been meeting a lot recently. It’s the same at this time every year. Always so much to organise before the L-G and his retinue decamp for Darjeeling. Then he had lunch with Sir Godfrey Soames of the Landowners’ Association. That was at the Great Eastern. He returned here at around four, rather the worse for wear, and left pretty soon after that. I expect he went home to sleep it off.’ She continued to read. ‘Then he had some function at the Bengal Club at nine p.m. One of Mr Buchan’s soirées, I believe.’

  ‘Are Buchan’s parties a common occurrence?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, picking up the pencil once again from the desk. ‘Once or twice a month, generally. I think it’s got much to do with the climate and the Scottish temperament. If the mercury so much as touches eighty-five, they all go half-mad, resort to drink and raise hell.’

  It didn’t sound such a bad life to me. That MacAuley was at one of Buchan’s parties last night would also explain the clothes he’d been found in, though not what he was doing in Black Town, miles away from the Bengal Club.

  ‘Any idea why he might have been up in Cossipore last night?’

  She shook her head. ‘None at all, I’m afraid. He would never venture into a native area without good reason, though. The only place he visited up there was the orphanage run by that preacher, but it’s in Dum Dum, not Cossipore.’

  ‘Dum Dum?’ The name sounded like it should mean something to me.

  ‘It’s a suburb out near the new aerodrome, about ten miles from here. There’s a munitions factory there, home to the dum-dum bullet. I expect you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, as I remembered a demonstration of that particularly nasty munition at a Scotland Yard weapons range. The dum-dum was one of the world’s first soft-point bullets, designed to expand on hitting a human torso in order to cause maximum damage. As such, the dum-dum didn’t so much hit its target as obliterate it. Before the war, we’d been especially fond of using them to put down local tribal disturbances in Africa. They were later banned by international convention, something a few of our generals found rather inconvenient.

  ‘In any case,’ she continued, ‘he’d no cause to go out to the orphanage last night.’

  And even if he had, I thought, he’d hardly have gone there in black tie.

  ‘What did he have in his diary for today?’

  ‘He was supposed to join the L-G at nine for a briefing on next term’s budget, then he had a lunch appointment with a director of one of the local banks. Otherwise his diary was empty.’

  ‘When MacAuley failed to show up for the nine o’clock meeting, did anyone telephone from the L-G’s office asking where he was?’

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No. I was here from eight. The first call came through from the L-G’s office around eleven, when my friend telephoned to tell me they’d found his body.’

  ‘What about military intelligence?’ I asked. ‘Did MacAuley have any dealings with them?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Not as far as I’m aware, Captain. If he did, he kept it very quiet.’

  I’d run out of useful questions. I considered asking some useless ones too, but it’s best not to outstay your welcome with a beautiful woman. The longer you hang around, the greater the chance she’ll see through you. I thanked her for her time and stood up to leave. She rose and led me to the door.

  ‘And Captain,’ she said, ‘if I can be of any further assistance, please let me know.’

  I thanked her, took one last surreptitious glance at those smooth, tanned legs, then heard myself saying, ‘And, if it’s still open, I might take you up on your offer to show me Chowringhee.’

  She smiled. ‘Of course, Captain. I look forward to it.’

  I stood on the steps of the building, lit a cigarette and stared into the distance. The sun was now just a red disc off to the west and the temperature was dropping. That didn’t mean it was comfortable, just less hot. By common consent, dusk was the best time of day out here, not that it lasted long. Night falls like a stone in the tropics. Broad daylight to darkness in less than an hour.

  I watched as a flock of birds flew overhead and landed on the pool at the centre of the square. Crossing over the road, I leaned on the low railing, looked down at the water and considered what I’d learned from the beautiful Miss Grant. Alexander MacAuley, a Scot from somewhere near Dundee, a twenty-five-year India-man with few friends and no family. A fixer for powerful men – something that had made him many enemies. A nasty piece of work whose own secretary thought he was a bastard. Then, in the last few months, he finds God and becomes a different person.

  As for who might want him dead, though, I wasn’t much wiser. I flicked the cigarette butt into the water below and watched it land with a hiss. Other than discovering MacAuley’s links to Buchan and why he’d been found wearing a penguin suit, I hadn’t really made much progress. Apart from meeting Annie Grant, of course. In some ways, that felt like the most progress I’d made since leaving London.

  The street lamps were being lit. They glowed orange, then bright white. The government departments and mercantile houses were shutting up shop for the night. Office buildings disgorged bureaucrats and boxwallahs into the gloom as I made my way back to Lal Bazar along pavements jammed with salarymen, jostling in the half-light for space on the
trams to take them home.

  The lights were blazing at Lal Bazar and shafts of yellow broke through the slats of shuttered windows. On my desk was a note from Surrender-not. I telephoned the pit and asked the desk sergeant to tell him to join me. Minutes later, he was knocking on my door. He entered, saluted and stood to attention like an oversized tin soldier.

  ‘This isn’t a parade ground, Surrender-not,’ I said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘At ease, Sergeant. You don’t need to salute every time you enter the office.’

  The poor boy furrowed his brow. ‘No, sir; sorry, sir. I wished to provide you with an update. I’ve instructed a guard to be posted at the morgue as per your orders. Access to the body has been restricted to authorised personnel only.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘and the post-mortem?’

  ‘Scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, sir. There’s only one pathologist. He claims to have a backlog of several weeks’ worth of cadavers, but I impressed upon him the urgency and delicacy of this particular case and requested, in the most steadfast terms, that he make this a priority. He was not especially enamoured of my request, however he did eventually agree to make a one-off dispensation and fit it in tomorrow.’

  ‘You must have been pretty convincing.’

  ‘I may have mentioned the Commissioner’s name a few times. It’s possible that helped.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, impressed. ‘I forgot that you and he are on first-name terms now. Anything else?’

  ‘Sub-inspector Digby was looking for you earlier, sir. I informed him you were over at Writers’ Building interviewing MacAuley’s secretary. He said it could wait till the morning.’

  ‘Do you know what he wanted?’

  ‘I think he may have a lead.’

  The news came as a jolt. Whenever a colleague had a lead, I tended to experience an odd, bittersweet feeling: the thrill of potential progress tinged with a certain resentment that someone else’s efforts may have eclipsed my own. I put it down to my natural competitiveness. That and a certain insecurity.