‘However,’ Arden had said. ‘It’s the fact that Colton is not a doctor which puts the hypothesis right out of court. More so than the absence of bruising.’
‘Why more so?’
‘Well, the doctor in Edinburgh wasn’t quite clever enough. He omitted to use glycerine.’
VI
The flight to Paris was crowded and noisy as were James’s thoughts. In an attempt to keep some balance in his mind, he tried to think of Teresa and his first grandchild. He hoped for a boy, though it would never bear the name of Locke. Teresa’s attitude was eminently sensible: ‘ I don’t in the least mind so long as it’s got two eyes and four limbs.’
Had he in his heart always felt a slight preference for the younger and prettier and more awkward of his daughters? Teresa was a marvellous girl, and to save his sanity and good sense he must concentrate on her and all that he had got left.
He had bought yesterday’s Times in the hotel before he left and he tried to read this on the plane. It was useless. England were heading for defeat in the first Test match against the West Indians. It was happening in another world. A British barque called the Marques had foundered in heavy seas off Bermuda while taking part in a tall ships race, with the loss of nineteen lives, including a baby. Very sad. The death toll in the Lancashire underground water treatment plant explosion had risen to fifteen. The cost of first class post was to be put up to seventeen pence. The miners’ strike was going on for ever, and there was a threat of more disturbances. President Reagan was arriving in London tomorrow to attend the London Economic Summit.
James folded the paper again and again, and thrust it impatiently in the net pouch in front of his seat, took up an illustrated French magazine. There was an article entitled ‘L’an de Georges Orwell’, and he tried to read it, No go. This was not quite the world Eric Blair had imagined; but it was nasty and brutal and evil and in most ways unspeakably vile. Perhaps Big Brother would have been better after all.
The DC3 put down quietly at the airport, and then it was wheelchair and bus and wheelchair again, moving from one satellite to another. The second wheelchair attendant was a negro with a cheerful face and a whistle he employed throughout the journey to the point of take-off.
Charles de Gaulle Airport is innovative in that its designers employ enclosed moving platforms to a unique degree. James found himself being pushed, or in the main simply steered – since effort was unnecessary – inside a transparent tube which was like progressing through the intestines of a caterpillar. Sometimes you went uphill and sometimes down, and alongside at varying times was a similar caterpillar in which strangers passed in the night or kept one company before separating and going off in some other direction.
People stood there like Aunt Sallys at a shooting range. In his present mood James toyed with the idea of having a gun and venting his grief and frustration on some innocent passenger travelling to Stuttgart or Madrid. His mind was still full of astonishment and enormity; it was weighed down with enormity, struggling with enormity for air and light and understanding.
And then he looked again and shouted, ‘Halt! Halt!’
The wheelchair attendant stopped whistling and bent down over his passenger inquiringly, but allowed the moving platform to carry them along.
‘Halt!’ James shouted angrily, impotently, foolishly. ‘Stop! I want to speak to that man!’
In the neighbouring caterpillar, quite close but moving inexorably away, was Arun Jiva.
Absolutely no mistaking him, black-haired, fair-skinned, austere, high white collar, gold-rimmed pince-nez. Carrying a newspaper and a briefcase and wearing a light grey tweed suit.
‘No stop,’ said the attendant. ‘Not possible.’
Jiva was almost out of sight. James shouted again, too well aware that the attendant was right. They came out at the satellite which served the plane he was going to catch. Twenty minutes to boarding time. When he knew he was having to break his journey in Paris James had changed ten pounds into francs in case of some emergency. He now thrust fifty francs into the porter’s hand.
‘Find out where that plane was going! These people in the next corridor.’
‘Comment?’
‘Those people who were in the next corridor, the next tube – whatever you call it – they looked as if they were outward bound. Another fifty francs when you find out!’
‘I do not understand. What is wrong?’ The black man was a Senegalese and spoke French much less well than James. ‘What is this? What are you at? Pray be seated. See, there is your flight.’
James got out of his chair, staggering on his sticks and almost fell. People stared, and seeing the commotion a young French girl official came over, heels tapping.
‘What is wrong, sir? Can I assist you?’
‘That man,’ said James, pointing vaguely in the direction from which he had just come. ‘ There was a man in the other couloir. He is – he is an old friend. I have not seen him for five years. I wish specially – there is an urgent special need that I should see him, meet him, get in touch with him.’
‘But, sir, you are asking something very difficult – almost impossible. What is your friend’s name?’
‘Jiva. Arun Jiva. He is an Indian doctor. At least can you tell me where his plane is going – the one he is taking, so that perhaps I can get in touch with him later.’
The girl shrugged and went back to the desk, picked up the telephone and had a conversation. Presently she came back, her attractive face full of Gallic impatience.
‘I regret, sir. We regret we cannot help you in the way you wish.’ She addressed a flood of questions to the attendant, asking in which direction the other convoy had been moving and when, and in what tube. Then she went away again and fingered through some lists with another girl. Eventually she returned.
‘That flight is due to take off right now. It is the AF 902 Air France flight for Birmingham, England, arriving in Birmingham at five past one your time.’
BOOK THREE
Chapter One
When he was nineteen Arun Jiva’s father had met a man called Savarkar. Savarkar was then a plump bald benign-looking Indian of fifty-six. His appearance, in a dark robe and clerical sandals, belied his reputation as one of the most fearsome advocates of Hindu orthodoxy. He opposed not only the Raj but the Congress ideals of a secular state in which all religions might live in peace. Indeed during the war which followed he went directly in the teeth of Congress by supporting the British. This was not out of love for them but because they were prepared to train and equip an Indian army in the latest weapons, a great asset, he thought, when independence inevitably came.
At an impressionable age, Jaya Jiva fell completely under his spell, gave up his work as a railway clerk and devoted himself to promoting Hindu Mahasabha as a nationwide political party. In India, perhaps more than anywhere else, the opposing philosophies of violence and nonviolence are carried to extremes. Unlike Jaya’s family, to whom the taking of the life of even the smallest insect was anathema, Savarkar preached cold-blooded killing for political ends, and Jaya went along with him. Assassination, whether of an official of the Raj or of one of his own race, was a means to an end, and when Mahatma Gandhi was shot and killed by active members of the Mahasabha, as a protest against his apparent favouritism to the Muslims, Savarkar was arrested and tried with seven others for the murder. He alone was acquitted – as being far away from Delhi at the time of the crime.
Jaya Jiva, when his son grew old enough, told him all the events of those days over and over again. He had been questioned and horribly tortured by the police, but had then been released for lack of evidence. Often and often he told Arun the story of the bungling of the assassins, of the stupidity of the police who with half an eye open could have scotched such an amateurish attempt. After Savarkar’s death Jaya Jiva became one of the leaders of the Hindu Sanghatan until his own untimely death in the riots of 1958.
Arun Jiva grew up with the beliefs of his father, so much the
obverse of all that his grandparents held religiously dear. He saw no sanctity in any life if it was to his advantage or to the advantage of his cause to destroy it. Practising medicine in the crowded tenements of Old Delhi did nothing to alter his views.
After a few years he even became estranged from the orthodoxy of the Mahasabha party and more and more discontented with his personal position as a poor doctor in a poor nation. His prospects were as narrow as a ravine, from which the only escape was to the West.
Such advancement, however, needed money, and money he had not got. Then, providentially, on a visit to Bombay he met a man called Mr Erasmus. Mr Erasmus was condescending but gracious. Through underlings a proposition was put to Arun Jiva, which, after long consideration, he accepted. He heartily despised the trade in which he was now asked to participate, but a three-year graduate course at Oxford, England, was exactly what he needed, and this was offered him. With a D. Phil. to his name there would be opportunities open to him, opportunities especially in America. So he had come to England and had co-operated with the group who financed him. At first he thought the work he did risky, but the immunity from trouble or even suspicion gradually reassured him, and he had gone on his way until last month, obeying the instructions about reception and distribution that came to him from time to time. He looked forward to the day when he could leave this despicable trade behind him and cross the Atlantic to begin a new life.
Then suddenly this crisis. On him without warning. Although he advocated political assassination he had never himself killed deliberately, except occasionally prescribing an overdose to some miserable Hindu woman bloated with cancer or bedridden with arthritis. This was altogether different, someone in the height of youth and vigour, someone he knew and against whom he had had virtually no grudge – except that she had twice rather roughly shaken off his hand when he put it on her bare arm. (Blonde white girl spurning someone of inferior race.) But his first impulse was to refuse, and with contempt.
Then the temptation. A hundred thousand dollars in his name at Crédit Lyonnais in Paris. More than he could hope to earn in any other way. When he gained his doctorate he had intended to leave England and go to live in Paris, where he had friends of his own kind, and from there write to a selected number of American universities stating his qualifications. But with this sort of money at his back he could go to the United States, having severed any connection with his ‘benefactors’ before he left, and live over there until the right interview yielded the right appointment.
It was that and the challenge to his medical skill that influenced him to accept. Twice in Delhi: once when he had emptied the stomach of a garage mechanic who had drunk Lysol, and once with a young woman who had tried to kill herself with turpentine, he had reflected on the fact that not only was it easy to extract the contents of the stomach, but it would be equally easy to introduce things.
In cases of poisoning, whether accidental or self-administered, the patient was too ill to make a choice. In other cases the patient would have to be a willing subject of experiment. Therein lay one of the big problems concerning Miss Stephanie Locke.
But it was a challenge, and he had taken it up. Originally it had been intended that Errol should offer to take her home from the party and go into her flat with her and persuade her to have just one more drink; but this had been scrapped because of the risk of his car being seen parked outside. So Arun had done just what he said he had done, driven her home and then let her go in alone, driven to his own flat, and walked back and waited for Errol to arrive. Errol, having parked his car three streets away, had eventually come, let himself into the flat and offered to tell Stephanie the whole story of his involvement in drugs distribution, if she would but listen. Forty-five minutes later the corner of the curtain had been lifted to give the sign for Arun to go in. He had found Stephanie lying on the bed heavily asleep and Errol in an appalling state of fright and nerves. It had been agreed that Errol should stay and help Arun in the later stages but in spite of a snort he was clearly so unnerved that Arun told him to go home.
The plane taking Arun to Birmingham International Airport was on time, and, after the usual extra fuss at passports accorded to the coloured visitor, he was through in time to take a late lunch at the airport restaurant. There would be no food in the house and he didn’t want to shop in Oxford and advertise his presence there before he needed to.
The viva was tomorrow, and a little fasting would do him good. That day in mid-May when he was rung up and told to leave the country he had been impatient and angry. The inquest was over, the girl buried, and everyone in the process of forgetting the tragedy. He had just delivered his thesis: eighty thousand words on The Inflammatory Responses of Diseased Tissues, and he had only a couple of weeks to wait before he was granted his degree. But the Boss had been adamant. The girl’s father was still very much on the prowl, refusing to be satisfied, questioning people three and four times over, pulling strings at the Home Office, bent on making trouble. He was particularly set on interviewing Jeremy Hillsborough and Arun Jiva again. Get out for the time being, until things blew over. Go back to India for a month or two. Or go straight off to the States if he so fancied.
Arun might well have so fancied, but he wouldn’t go, couldn’t go yet. So far as he knew, he was in no danger of arrest or of further police questioning; and anyway, no one could prove anything now, or ever. It was a stupid condition of the Oxford examinations that he had to take an oral test before he could be granted his doctorate – but that was the way it was, and there appeared to be no way round it. Of course, if he did not turn up his years of dedicated work would not be lost, but he would not be granted his degree for perhaps a further six months, after once again being requested to attend. And how could one be certain that it would be any safer to attend then than now?
So instead of going to Delhi or New York, he had gone to Paris and awaited events there.
The death of Errol Colton, which he had seen in the Daily Mail, was an event which had jolted him. It seemed likely that Errol had been disposed of by the group because in his present parlous state he was a safety risk. The newspaper reported the early findings of the police, and to Arun it was evident that Angelo Smith had been appointed to get rid of him. Somehow in the process Smith had met his own death, but the object had been achieved. Errol Colton, the security risk, had been eliminated.
The only serious question in Arun’s mind was how much he also might be regarded as a security risk. Certainly he could say nothing without totally incriminating himself; but then neither could Errol. Errol might have been considered to be in such an unstable condition that under persistent examination he would give way and confess his involvement, and Errol, of course, knew a great deal about a lot of things. He, Arun Jiva, also knew a lot, had come to know a great deal too much about the organisation.
Arun remembered all too many Indian legends of princes who had buried some priceless treasure and then had the workmen who buried it put to death so that no one should be able to tell where it was. But surely the people he knew and for whom he worked, Mr Erasmus, and the Boss, and the rest, would never suppose he, Arun Jiva, was a weakling who might be induced to talk. He, whose father had endured the obscene tortures of the Indian police, would be unlikely to be intimidated by a British examination.
But that was why he had come back via Birmingham instead of Heathrow. That was why he intended no further communication with anyone until he had taken his viva and flown back to Paris. From there he could telephone them and ask about the latest developments. From there he could bid them farewell.
The house in Caxton Street looked much the same when he unlocked the door and went in. Nearly three weeks of dust had accumulated, and some milk left on the draining board had long gone sour. The sickly young man who had called just as he was leaving had departed without trace. Reluctantly he had handed his distant cousin over to the organisation, and they would have taken care of him. Like every other object dangerous to them he w
ould have been removed – or sent back to India after an operation on his abdomen to clear the obstruction.
He was just about to retire to bed when he noticed the photograph of Errol and Stephanie had gone. That night of 29 April, which seemed now months past, he had leafed through a pile of photographs in Stephanie’s desk, and taken it as a memento. He was not wasting time on that dangerous night but waiting for the girl to go into a deeper sleep, before he went on with the job. Errol had met him in sweating fear. ‘ She didn’t want another drink, for Christ’s sake. I nearly gave up. I wish to Christ I had given up. I can’t go on with this, you know; I can’t go on!’ Perhaps that young fool Nari Prasad had seen the photograph and fancied it. Perhaps it had slipped down between the mantelpiece and the wall. He would look in the morning.
He fasted right through the following morning, making do with milkless coffee and some stale tea biscuits. The viva was to be at the Examination Schools in the High at 3 p.m., so at 2.30 he put on his subfusc and mortar board and walked through the town to his appointment.
The viva took seventy minutes. They wanted elucidation of some of the obscurer points of his thesis, and they questioned him and cross-questioned him to make sure he understood the wider body of literature and scientific evidence on his subject; also were at pains to make sure his was an original work and hadn’t been too much the result of strenuous efforts by his supervisor. Eventually it became clear that the thesis had gone over well.
The second examiner, after a consultation with the man from Dublin, said: ‘Well, Dr Jiva, I think I can tell you that you have made a satisfactory showing this afternoon. Formally, of course, you’ll have to wait until we have reported to the Faculty Board, but I think you need have no worries about the outcome.’
Stephanie Page 24
