Could this fellow have truly been there? Ghote asked himself. Certainly what he was telling was altogether vivid. And yet Mr Henry Reymond had, if he was to be believed, never been to India in his life.
‘So at last I reached the address Rekha had put on her letter. The door of the place was standing wide open. I am not knowing why. Perhaps the Scotsman had only just come himself and had carelessly left it. And then, from above, I was hearing Rekha’s voice. Crying out. Begging for mercy only. So I was creeping upwards, quickly but carefully also. Luckily an iron staircase was there, so I was making no noise. And then . . .’
Henry Reymond - or was it Pranav Bandopadhyaya? - took in a great noisy gulp of air.
‘He was standing over her, Inspector,’ he whispered. ‘He had a horsewhip. At once I flung myself at him. I sent him to the ground, but I fell also with him. And in an instant he had rolled over and his great red hands were round my throat. I thought my final moment had come. But in my agonies my arms were threshing to and fro on the floor and one of my hands touched some metal object. I grasped it. It was heavy, curved and very, very sharp. What they call in Bombay a chhura.’
‘A chopper,’ Ghote heard himself murmur in English.
But Henry Reymond, no, Pranav Bandopadhyaya who was speaking, no doubt about that, simply went on with his account of what had happened in those distant days of the British Raj.
‘Rekha told me afterwards she had been chopping spices, and the chopper had fallen to the ground when the Scotsman had come in and seized hold of her.’
Once more Henry Reymond paused, gasped for air.
‘I killed him then,’ he said. ‘I brought that thing down on the back of his neck with my utmost force. It was almost cutting off his head.’
‘You are hundred per cent certain of all this?’ Ghote said at last, speaking into the deep silence.
‘Yes, yes. But the thing was, Rekha was wonderful.’ And now had the English voice taken over once more? ‘Without Rekha I would have just lain there in that man’s blood and waited for something, for anything, to happen. But Rekha saw at once how to get rid of the body. The house looked over the wall of the Park Street Cemetery. She made me heave that heavy, red-faced corpse out, and in the moonlight I saw the name on the tomb where it fell. Sacred to the Memory of Colonel William Kirkpatrick. Then, when Rekha found no one knew I had come to Calcutta, she cleaned me up and simply sent me straight back to Bombay. The Scotsman’s death, she promised me, would be put down to dacoits hiding in the cemetery. I wanted her to come to Bombay with me, but she refused. She said it would only make me more conspicuous. And - and I never heard from her again. I wrote within a week to that flat she had been installed in, taking care not to use my name at all. But the letter was returned marked “Not known”. So I never went back to Calcutta, never.’
Ghote saw that sweat had begun again to spring up on the pale face in front of him.
‘Look,’ Henry Reymond said, leaning earnestly forward, ‘when it came into my head, there in Calcutta, in the Park Street Cemetery, that I might have somehow in my former life committed murder, I thought - I’m really quite level-headed you know - that the thing I had to do before anything else was to find out if such a murder had really occurred. Well, that morning at breakfast in the hotel I had been reading The Statesman, and I remembered seeing that the paper had been going strong as far back as the 1930s. So I went round there and asked if I could possibly see the files. Very decently they took them out for me. And I confirmed then that a certain James McFarlane, a shipping company manager, had been found brutally murdered, the report said, in the Park Street Cemetery. Then I looked through the files for a good many weeks onwards, but I saw no report of anyone being apprehended for the crime.’
Ghote felt now that he was beginning to see what had brought the young Englishman hurry-scurrying to Bombay. He must need to know whether such a person as the Bengali he thought he had been had ever existed.
‘And now,’ he said slowly and carefully, ‘you have found out that one Pranav Bandopadhyaya was here in Bombay itself in the year 1937.’
‘Yes, you’re right, Inspector. You see, even when I had discovered that in some mysterious way there had come into my head facts about a murder in the past that no one else, apparently, had ever known about, I still wanted proof that I was that Pranav Bandopadhyaya who had committed the murder. So I took the first flight here that I could get, and, yes, Bombay University records show that one Pranav Bandopadhyaya was a lecturer in Bengali here in 1937. He had eventually retired and received a pension until the date of his death, October 31, 1966. And you know what date that is, don’t you?’
For an instant it eluded Ghote. Then he knew. Date of birth: October the thirty-first 1966. The young man in front of him had said just that when, attempting to get him into a rational state of mind, he had asked him in his best official manner to provide his bio-data. 31 October, the day of the death of the Bengali who, in 1937, had, or had not, murdered a certain Scotsman.
‘Day of your birth itself,’ he said.
The young English visitor almost rose out of his chair. ‘Inspector,’ he said, voice creaking with suppressed fears, ‘I killed James McFarlane. I did. I did. It was me. I’ve come to you to confess to it. So, please, Inspector, what are you going to do?’
Tears were standing in the young Englishman’s eyes.
Inspector Ghote permitted himself a small smile.
‘Mr Henry Reymond,’ he said. ‘You are citizen of UK only, a visitor to our India of 1996, a nation that has been independent almost to fifty years. Very well, you have, so to say it, had as a visitor inside yourself, some Bengali fellow from days of British Raj now long dead and forgotten also. Perhaps it is only in India, with our so many millions of people, that such things are found quite often to occur, even although the science of the West would not like to acknowledge same. But occur they do. They are just only something that is happening in life. Mr Reymond, kindly visit the India of reality.
<
~ * ~
THE CASE OF THE VANISHING VAGRANT
An Inspector Faro Mystery
Alanna Knight
Alanna Knight is a novelist, biographer and playwright. Author of more than forty books, she is an expert on Scottish history and an authority on Robert Louis Stevenson. Her crime fiction includes the Inspector Faro mysteries, set in Victorian Edinburgh.
~ * ~
Edinburgh, 1882
T
hat’s where it happened, Faro.’ Dr Winton indicated the house opposite. ‘Eight years ago and they never got anyone. That was the summer you were at Balmoral. Rumours of an assassination attempt, weren’t there?’
‘More than rumours,’ Inspector Jeremy Faro, Her Majesty’s personal detective, said grimly, and it had cut short his time with his two motherless daughters on holiday from Orkney with their grandmother.
Across the street, a mirror image of the doctor’s own highly respectable middle-class semi-villa, the murder house with a For Sale notice in its overgrown garden looked too mild for violence.
Dealing out the playing cards, the police doctor continued, ‘Apparently it was some old vagrant, wandered down the side of the house, broke the kitchen window, crept upstairs, smothered Fanshaw where he slept. And disappeared again. Remarkable.’
‘Remarkable indeed. That no one heard him. Surely that broken glass made enough noise?’
‘Indeed. Woke Mrs Dora Fanshaw and Mrs Wade, the housekeeper. But Fanshaw rarely went to bed sober, so they presumed that he’d knocked over a glass of water.’
‘Any clues?’
‘None. No apparent motive either. Police absolutely baffled. Only possible verdict: murder by person or persons unknown.’
From Faro’s vast experience murder had to have a motive. ‘The most likely reason would have been that Fanshaw tackled an intruder.’
Winton shook his head. ‘I was called in. No evidence of a struggle, nothing disturbed or stolen. In their eviden
ce, Mrs Dora - his cousin by marriage - said that she and Mrs Wade made a thorough search. Not even a silver spoon missing. That was odd with valuables for the picking, including Fanshaw’s timepiece and wallet on his bedside table.’
‘So we are left with the only other logical conclusion. That the victim was known to the killer. A known enemy with a score to settle, a close friend or member of the family. Indeed, it is not unknown for the murderer to be revealed as the person who first discovers the body.’
Pausing to shed a tentative ace, Faro sat back. ‘A passing vagrant does not fit any of these categories.’
‘My game, Faro!’ said Winton triumphantly, scooping up the handful of coins. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he added heartily. ‘As they say, unlucky at cards, lucky in love.’
Faro smiled sadly. ‘In my case, alas, neither.’
Considering the inspector’s still youthful appearance, his thick fair hair and excellent bone structure - the ultimate Viking inheritance of the Orkney Isles - Winton decided that his friend was being exceptionally modest.
‘You weren’t paying enough attention to the game,’ he added kindly. ‘You threw away that trick. Perhaps your mind was elsewhere.’
Faro nodded absently. Later, as he was leaving, he suggested a closer look at the murder house. ‘Come with me, Winton, you can tell the neighbours that I am a would-be buyer.’
Dr Winton thought that unlikely, but led the way, pushing open the gate leading past the kitchen door to an enclosed walled garden, with a door into the back lane for tradesmen’s deliveries and access to the coal cellar.
The Fanshaw grocery chain provided the splendid chutney to accompany Faro’s breakfast sausage and bacon. The founder Thomas Fanshaw was responsible for the marmalade, made from his grandmother’s recipe in a dingy tenement kitchen to sell on market day stalls. A story of rags to riches.
Sadly, Thomas lost his first wife in childbirth and remarried late in life, an attractive young lady called Dora Wills, first brought to his attention in an amateur production of ‘School for Scandal’. He was delighted to encounter her off-stage serving behind the counter in a Fanshaw shop.
Marriage swiftly followed but alas, Thomas did not long survive and left Dora a grieving childless widow to discover that the business passed to Ronald Fanshaw - a very different individual to his kindly older cousin.
Few things kept Faro from a good night’s sleep, apart from toothache and an unsolved mystery; the latter decided him, that although the trail had long since gone cold he would not be satisfied until he had carefully re-examined all the evidence in this baffling case.
At the Central Office of the Edinburgh City Police, enquiries for the file revealed that his newly acquired Sergeant Brodie had not only been involved as a witness but that the housekeeper was related to his wife.
‘Mrs Wade,’ said Brodie, ‘a widow, only son a deep-sea sailor. Loyal family retainer, devoted to Mrs Dora. No servants, a daily maid and Duncan the gardener who was short on temper and stone deaf.’
‘Any visitors or guests at the time of the murder?’ Faro asked.
‘Only decorators from a Glasgow firm. But they went back home on the train every night.’
‘What exactly were they decorating?’
‘Fanshaw had taken over the master bedroom from Mrs Dora. A mean man, pretty heartless, everyone agreed. Best room in the house, moved everything of value with him, including a very valuable new Aubusson carpet from the drawing room.’
Faro had been making notes of his own. ‘Excellent, Brodie. Now, if you will be so good as to leave the file with me.’
‘I can do better than that, sir,’ the sergeant said with a grin. ‘I was one of the few people who actually met the murderer,’ he added triumphantly. ‘The Fanshaw residence was on my regular daily beat in Minto Place. Until the murder, nothing exciting ever happened, apart from rescuing lost dogs and cats up trees—’
‘And the murderer?’ Faro interrupted.
Ah yes. One day I observed a shabby old vagrant. Long ragged coat, battered hat pulled well down, muffled up to the eyes. Loitering about in what could only be called a suspicious manner. So I called out, polite as you like, “Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?” Well, one look at my uniform and he was off. Very fleet too, for an old chap.’ He shook his head. ‘Felt a bit sorry for him, guessed that he’d fallen on bad times.’
‘What made you think that, Sergeant?’
‘His boots. Inspector. As he ran I noticed his boots, very spruce, in far better shape than the rest of his apparel.’ ‘Remarkably observant, Sergeant! Pray continue.’
Brodie grinned. ‘Thank you, sir. Well, dashing off like that confirmed he was up to no good. So I set off after him. The garden gate of the Fanshaw residence was open. He rushed in, slammed it shut. By the time I got it unlatched, he’d disappeared across the lawn. The back lane door was bolted, so he must have leapt the wall. Duncan was in his greenhouse; I shouted but he just stared at me, deaf as I told you.
‘Suddenly Mrs Fanshaw appeared. She’d seen it all from the kitchen window. Told me to wait while she went for Mrs Wade who had taken Mr Fanshaw his afternoon tea upstairs. Terrified she was, some wild story that this was the same man who’d been sending her vile letters.’ Brodie shook his head. ‘Didn’t quite fit the old beggar I’d just seen.’
‘The condition of the tramp’s boots might well indicate an educated man,’ Faro said as the sergeant pointed to the file.
‘Both the ladies’ statements are here, sir.’
Reading them, Faro was particularly interested in Mrs Dora’s account of the incident at the enquiry.
‘I was preparing a meal and when I saw this vagrant enter the garden I knew I was in terrible danger. He had been lurking about outside the house and sending notes threatening to kill me.’
Questioned as to the postmark on these notes, Mrs Fanshaw had said, ‘There was none. They had been pushed through the letter box. But I was sure the sender was Ronald, especially as the words were composed of capital letters cut from his daily newspaper and stuck on the same brand of notepaper that he used.’
Asked why he should send her notes, she replied, ‘My late cousin-in-law was a practical joker of the vilest nature. He enjoyed scaring people, especially any children in the street. Even as a child I learned that he was cruel to small animals. I thought this was just one of his crude efforts to persuade me to marry him. I was not deceived that he loved me. What he really wanted were my shares of the Fanshaw business.’
Asked how many of these notes she had received, Mrs Dora said firmly, ‘Four in four weeks. The first three said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Take care, Dora Fanshaw”. I recognized the quotation from John Donne, a favourite of Ronald’s. In his less aggressive moments he was fond of quoting poetry.
The last one the week he died was the worst. It said, “The bell tolls for thee, Dora Fanshaw. You are a dead woman”. I confronted him but he just laughed. Said he had more to do than write silly notes to scare silly women. Again he insisted that I marry him then I need fear no one.’
The final question was, why she had not informed the police? She responded that Mrs Wade urged her to do so. But afraid that Ronald would throw her out of the house if she involved the police or tried to damage his reputation, she threw them on the fire.
Faro turned to Mrs Wade’s statement which added no new material, beyond the fact that the notes might have provided vital evidence concerning the killer’s identity.
~ * ~
At his meeting with Sergeant Brodie the following day Faro had made some observations of his own.
‘Considering Fanshaw as a practical joker trying to frighten Mrs Dora into marrying him, one might well imagine the sinister vagrant as Fanshaw himself.’
Brodie nodded eagerly. ‘And that would account for his good boots, except that when I was pursuing him, Mrs Wade was taking him his tea upstairs. He couldn’t have been in two places at once, could he now?’
‘Nor could
he have committed suicide by smothering himself with a pillow, Sergeant.’
Brodie shook his head. ‘That just isn’t logical, sir.’
‘There is a lot that isn’t logical about this case,’ Faro said grimly to his sergeant.
He turned again to Mrs Dora’s statement. ‘I awoke in the middle the night to the sound of breaking glass. It was still dark. I told myself it came from the master bedroom opposite and that Ronald had dropped his glass tumbler. I fell asleep again and was downstairs first, usually it is Mrs Wade and although she is in poor health she refuses to abandon her duties.
‘When I saw the glass on the back door window had been broken - and the bolt was undone, I was terrified. Mrs Wade rushed downstairs and cried, “Something terrible has happened, madam: I think Mr Ronald is dead”.’
Guilty Consciences - [A CWA Anthology] Page 12