by Caro Peacock
‘I don’t need protest meetings,’ Mr Griffiths said, sounding quite unworried. ‘I think actions are better than words. Although words have their uses too.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
McPherson’s voice was a bull-like roar. It looked as if he was having to restrain himself from charging at Mr Griffiths and tossing him aside.
‘With words?’
If McPherson was the bull, Mr Griffiths was taunting him like a picador, though it was hard to see why what he said should annoy his target so much.
‘You’re determined to slander me, aren’t you?’ McPherson said.
‘How could any words of mine hurt the reputation of a man so prosperous and well regarded?’
Mr Griffiths’s tone was satirical, but it seemed an odd thing to say for a man who had spent years bombarding McPherson’s reputation with words.
‘If you have anything to say against me, why not come out with it?’
Mr Griffiths smiled. ‘I shall, in the fullness of time.’
‘So I suppose I must wait and tremble,’ McPherson said.
His attempt to meet sarcasm with sarcasm sounded forced, but it brought louder sycophantic titters from his supporters.
‘Just so,’ Mr Griffiths said. ‘Meanwhile, make the best of what’s left to you.’
He nodded towards the hawk, turned and walked away and out of the hall as steadily as he’d walked with me by the river the day before.
McPherson stood looking after him, the men round him chattering and laughing as if he’d scored a victory. I was worried about Mr Griffiths and might have gone after him but at that moment the door to the committee room opened, Tom came out and McPherson was called inside. It was his turn to give evidence. Tom was pale-faced and miserable. Some of the men who’d been waiting closed round him, obviously wanting to know what had happened. When they’d got their answers they strolled away, leaving Tom standing there on his own. By this time, there was no sign of Mr Griffiths. I went up to Tom. He might have been angry that I’d come there, but I could no more have left him than when he’d been lost and alone in the woods at home. He came towards me and gripped my hand.
‘Oh Libby, I feel like Judas.’
I tried to reassure him that none of it was his fault. We walked together through the hall and out into the sunshine.
‘Was it worse than you’d expected?’
‘Not really worse, but bad enough. Some of them were really out to destroy Griffiths, every little rumour and sneer from cutting one of the governor’s dinners to wearing native dress sometimes. Why shouldn’t a man dress as he likes in his own bungalow?’
‘I can’t see what that’s got to do with the proper government of India.’
‘Disrespect for the authorities, bringing the English into disrepute. As if some of the wine-swilling bullies we send out there weren’t doing that all the time. McPherson will twist that committee round his finger. I suppose he’s in there now, demanding compensation for his opium.’
We walked alongside the river for a while, watching boats going up and down. The tide was out and even this early in the summer the smell was so bad that we walked back to St James’s Park. In the sweeter air by the lake he relaxed a little and sighed.
‘At least it’s over now.’
I didn’t like having to tell him about the scene between McPherson and Mr Griffiths, but it would be worse if he heard it from anyone else. I tried to play it down as much as I could, but it depressed his spirits all over again.
‘It won’t help him,’ Tom said. ‘Griffiths himself has to appear before the committee on Monday. After the poison McPherson and his cronies had been spreading, what I had to tell them and now this, they’ll tear him apart.’
‘I don’t think he’s so easy to tear,’ I said.
But Tom wouldn’t be comforted. We stood for a while, watching ducks upend themselves in the water.
‘So what happens to you, now you’ve given your evidence,’ I said.
He shrugged.
‘Another few weeks here, I suppose, then back to Bombay.’
My heart lurched. Having found Tom again, I dreaded losing him.
‘Only a few weeks?’
‘A month perhaps. Now the other men have come all the way to England they’re in no great hurry to go back, and I suppose they’ll send me on the same ship.’
With men he thoroughly disliked, to a career he’d probably blighted by being on Griffiths’s side.
‘Must you go back? I’m sure we could find work for you here.’
I had a few influential friends, but not many. I’d struck the wrong note and Tom frowned.
‘Using my sister’s kind influence to get me a job on a clerk’s stool? No thank you. Liberty, I want to talk to you seriously.’
I’d known this was coming, though I’d hoped it wouldn’t be today.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve done what you wanted. I’ve talked to Daniel Suter and Legge. I know the life you’ve been leading while I’ve been away.’
‘Quite an eventful one,’ I said.
His grave manner was sparking off the spirit of contradiction in me again, even though I felt sorry for him.
‘I can see that in some cases you had no choice . . .’
‘And in others I made a choice.’
‘. . . and your motives have been honourable on the whole . . .’
‘On the whole! I’ve never done anything that’s dishonourable.’
‘I’ll accept that. But setting up to earn your living as . . . as . . .’
He was almost choking on it.
‘As a private inquiry agent,’ I said. ‘It’s more interesting than giving music lessons, though not much more profitable on the whole. Still, we live.’
‘It’s got to stop, Liberty.’
We walked on in silence for a while, and his next words were in a lower voice.
‘So is there somebody in this country, Libby?’
What could I tell him that was true? Yes, I’d thought there was somebody, only he wasn’t in this country now, probably in Athens already or beyond that for all I knew. He’d offered to marry me, only I’d thought he wasn’t sure of his own feelings and had sent him travelling. Still no letters. It was a big world, full of women, and Robert was a romantic at heart. In other circumstances I might have confided my loss, and possibly my foolishness, to Tom.
‘No, not really.’
‘I hoped Griffiths might have convinced you by now.’
Naturally, I wasn’t going to tell him about his friend’s treason in this respect. I asked him if he intended to call on Mr Griffiths.
‘Yes, tomorrow afternoon or Sunday. He’ll need to know what line the committee’s taking.’
We didn’t say much more as we walked through the park and across Piccadilly to Abel Yard. We parted at the bottom of the stairs. I watched him walk away, his shoulders slumped, and felt an unreasonable anger against India and everybody in it for doing this to us.
The weekend passed without a visit from Tom. I rode in the park with Amos on the Saturday, walked with Mrs Martley. Although she didn’t realize it, our walk took us to some of the places in the park where Tabby’s urchin friends congregated. I hoped I might see Tabby at least, even if she wouldn’t talk to me, but there was no sign of her. All the time I was wondering about Tom’s meeting with Mr Griffiths. I hoped that Mr Griffiths would do a better job of cheering him up than I’d managed. Soon after eleven o’clock on Monday morning, Tom’s call from the bottom of the stairs told me that had not happened.
‘Libby, are you up there?’
His voice was sharp and urgent. He came rushing upstairs, hat in hand, face white.
‘Tom. What’s wrong?’
It was in my mind that he and Mr Griffiths must have quarrelled, but his next words were much worse.
‘He’s dead, Libby. Griffiths is dead.’
SEVEN
I took him to my own room upstairs and sat him down on the couch.
‘What happened?’
‘He’s killed himself.’
‘No!’ Then, uselessly, ‘Are you sure?’
‘I found him, Libby.’
‘Tell me.’
If Tom had been less shocked, he might have tried to spare me the details. As it was, he poured the story out, trying to come to terms in his own mind with the reality of it, still hardly believing.
‘I told you I was going to call on him over the weekend. I went on Saturday afternoon. His boy, Anil, came to the door and told me Griffiths sahib was sorry but he had a visitor and couldn’t see me. He sent down a message inviting me to come to breakfast with him this morning at eight o’clock. That surprised me a little, that he hadn’t suggested I should call on Sunday instead of Monday morning, but I thought he might have overstrained his heart and wanted a day to rest. We’d quite often have breakfast together back in Bombay. We’d talk about anything and everything – Persian poetry, or the letters of Cicero, or some bird he’d seen, or politics. You never knew. That’s one of the fascinating things about him. Was, I mean.’ He swallowed a few times and went on. ‘Would you believe, I was looking forward to it. You’d helped convince me that I’d got myself into a stupid state about the committee. I hadn’t told them anything about Griffiths they didn’t know already so I didn’t have to feel badly about facing him. I even thought I’d tell him how awful some of the members were and we’d have . . . have a good laugh about it.’
He drew a long breath and sat with his hand to his eyes. I took out the Madeira bottle I keep in my desk cupboard for clients and poured him a good glassful. He drank it at a gulp.
‘Sorry, Libby. As I said, I was looking forward to seeing him. I was ringing his bell just after eight. I expected Anil to come down and let me in. When he didn’t, I thought he was preparing breakfast upstairs and hadn’t heard. I tried the door and it was only latched, not locked, so I pushed it open and went upstairs. We never stood on ceremony. I went into that big room with the bookcases and called good morning to him. No reply, and no sign of Anil either. No smell of coffee. I suppose that should have struck me as odd. Then I thought perhaps he’d overslept and Anil was in the bedroom, helping him dress or shave. So I just picked up one of his books, sat down and started reading. I got interested in the book and it was probably ten minutes or so later that it struck me that things were very quiet. No sound of anybody moving. So I thought maybe he’d had to go out early and had taken Anil with him. He might have forgotten he’d invited me, though that wouldn’t have been like him. So I stood up to go but I thought I’d take a glance in the bedroom, just in case he happened to be still in there and asleep. I opened the door. Nothing. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Then I noticed that the door from the bedroom to the bathroom was half open.’
A long pause. He sat, head lowered, breathing deeply. When he looked up, his expression was dazed, as if living the scene again.
‘Have you ever felt as if your mind’s split itself in two? As if half of it’s saying that of course everything is quite all right, nothing to worry about, while the other half’s screaming out that something terrible has happened? That’s the way I felt, looking at that door and the sunlight coming through the doorway from the bathroom window. It was just a door, and yet somehow I already knew what I’d see when I went through it.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Only I didn’t think Tom heard. In any case, it wouldn’t have helped him then to tell him why I knew exactly what he meant.
‘So I opened the door and went in,’ Tom said. ‘The sun was bright, even through the curtain, and it was shining in my eyes so I couldn’t see properly. He was sitting up in the bath facing me, with his back to the window. I felt embarrassed and started apologizing. I think it was the smell that told me, before anything else. The blood smell, you know, like iron filings.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I looked down and the water was red. It came halfway up his chest. I was thinking, stupidly, “What’s he doing sitting there in red water?” I think I’d even taken a step forward to lift him out of it, then I saw his wrist. His left wrist it was, just under the water. It was cut nearly half through, flopping back. His other wrist had got trapped between his body and the side of the bath, but when we got him out that was cut through too.’
‘We?’
‘Myself and the men from East India House.’
‘How did they know?’
‘I went and told them. Not immediately. I . . . I had to be sure he . . . really was dead. I knelt down and put my hand on his chest. No heartbeat. I remembered you were meant to try a feather, so I went to the bed and found a feather out of the pillow and held it under his nose. Not a breath. His eyes . . . his eyes were open. All the time, I half expected him to laugh and ask what I was doing. Only . . . oh, Libby.’
I went and sat beside him on the couch and held him. It was a long time before he moved away.
‘I must go back. There’ll be things to do. They said the coroner’s officer will want to speak to me because I found him.’
‘He’ll wait for a while,’ I said.
I got up, poured Madeira for both of us and went back to sit beside Tom.
‘So you went and told them at East India House?’
‘Yes. It was just round the corner. It was the obvious thing to do. I passed a police constable and thought of telling him, but what would have been the good?’
‘How did people react when you told them?’
‘Shocked. The first one I told was Mr Jarvis. He’s the head of the section where they’ve put me, not a bad old stick. But before I knew it, the Calcutta men had taken over.’
‘You mean, the ones who didn’t like Mr Griffiths?’
‘Yes. Three of them came back to his rooms with me. They called the porter up from the basement to lift him out of the water and wrapped him in sheets and blankets off the bed. There was blood and water everywhere.’
‘They told the police?’
‘There was a little crowd outside the house by then. People knew something had happened. A constable came up to them and one of the Calcutta men sent him to tell the coroner. They took his body away in a cart.’
‘These Calcutta men, was Alexander McPherson one of them?’
‘No, but he’ll know by now. I dare say he’s gloating.’
A flash of anger went over Tom’s face, then he hung his head again.
‘If only I could have seen Griffiths over the weekend. I might have persuaded him that things weren’t as bad as they seemed.’
‘Why are you so sure he killed himself?’
‘Libby, haven’t you been listening?’
‘Just tell me.’
‘The old Roman way. If a Roman was facing defeat or dishonour, killing himself was the proper thing to do. Very often, he’d have his servants prepare a warm bath, then slit his wrists and calmly bleed to death.’
‘And was the water warm when you found him?’
‘Of course not. It was stone cold. It would have gone cold.’
‘Those hot water cans in the bathroom, did they look as if they’d been used?’
‘For heaven’s sake, do you think I was worrying about hot water cans?’
The porter would know, I thought.
‘But he wasn’t facing death or dishonour,’ I said.
‘He’d have been in front of that damned committee this afternoon.’
‘He didn’t seem in the least worried about the committee. I had the impression he was even looking forward to it.’
Tom shook his head.
‘That was before what happened on Friday, when McPherson humiliated him in public.’
‘But he didn’t. I told you what happened.’
‘That’s not the way the Calcutta men have been putting it around. In their account, all Griffiths could do was splutter threats and they all laughed at him.’
‘He didn’t splutter and McPherson seemed quite put out when he was teasing him about things he migh
t say.’
‘What things, do you think?’
‘His pamphlet, I assumed.’
‘The Calcutta men don’t say anything about that. In their account, he got the worst of it and slunk away with his tail between his legs.’
‘He certainly didn’t slink. I thought he seemed quite pleased with himself.’
‘He must have been keeping up a front. Then he was alone all the weekend, thinking about it.’
‘Not alone all the time, if he had a visitor on Saturday afternoon. Who was it, do you think?’
Tom groaned.
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I must go back.’
‘What happened to the pamphlet?’
‘It’s with his things, I suppose.’
‘But we unpacked his things for him. The pamphlet wasn’t with them. It was quite a big bundle of manuscript. We wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘Then he must have kept it with him. It will be in his rooms somewhere.’
‘And the servant boy, Anil? Where was he in all this?’
‘Nowhere to be seen. The men thought he must have found Griffiths’s body, got scared and run off.’
‘In a city he doesn’t know?’
‘It surprised me, I admit. Anil had been in Griffiths’s household all his life.’
‘But he’s only fourteen or so from the look of him.’
‘Yes, but his father had been Griffiths’s khitmutgar. That’s how these things go. He was devoted to Griffiths.’
‘So he finds him dead and just runs away?’
‘Indians see things differently.’
I wasn’t so sure about that, but there was no point in arguing. Tom stood up.
‘I must go. There’ll be so much to see to. Nobody seems to know even who his next of kin is.’
‘I’m sure the Calcutta men will see to all that,’ I said.
Tom picked up the sarcasm in my voice and nodded.
‘Yes, they will if they can. They’ll be putting the word round already: “Mad Griffiths couldn’t face the committee and killed himself”. That’s why I want to be back at East India House, to protect his reputation as best I can. I don’t want to fail him all over again.’