McColl was reluctantly impressed. He doubted whether any of his colleagues could have mounted a defense of British rule that was even half as well thought through. He was, he realized, getting nowhere. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing in the Dutch East Indies.”
“It’s confidential, but I don’t suppose my father would mind your knowing. He is thinking of setting up an office in Batavia, and I was sent on a forward reconnaissance, as your soldiers would say. Premises, local workers, that sort of thing.”
“Your father would confirm that?”
“Of course.”
He probably would, McColl thought. Either out of loyalty to his son or because it was true. And there’d been nothing to stop young Abhijit here from working for both Daddy and Jugantar. McColl asked the obvious question: “Did you visit the German consulate while you were in Batavia?”
“No.”
“Or meet any German official?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Because my enemy’s enemy is my friend?”
Bhattacharyya looked exasperated. “We can win independence by our own efforts. We certainly don’t need another European master.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” McColl agreed, “but would you refuse such help if it were offered?” Colm Hanley and his group hadn’t planned on handing Ireland over to the Kaiser, but they’d been more than willing to swap anti-British favors.
Bhattacharyya just shrugged.
McColl gave him a long, hard look. He felt fairly sure that the young man in front of him was a fully paid-up member of Jugantar and might even be the group’s principal go-between in its dealings with the Germans. But he had no proof. A British court would probably jail the young man anyway, but the prospect of a few months’ patriotic detention wouldn’t open Bhattacharyya up. McColl needed a likely conviction for treason, and the real prospect of a firing squad, if he were going to get the Indian talking.
He stood up. “Well, that’s all for now.”
“How long will I be kept here?” Bhattacharyya asked. “I have done nothing wrong.”
“I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“You can’t just keep me here.”
“The Defence of India Act says we can. I expect you were on your travels when it was introduced. We can detain you until we are satisfied that you pose no threat to the rule of law.”
“And whose law would that be?” Bhattacharyya asked sarcastically as McColl let himself out.
The Bengal Club, like many of the better-known British establishments, faced the Maidan across Chowringhee Road. McColl found Tindall in the shaded back garden, enjoying the slight breeze engendered by the punkah wallah’s exertions and sipping at a very large whiskey and tonic. McColl ordered the same, and the two of them shared small talk while they waited for Cunningham. Tindall, it turned out, had been in Calcutta for more than ten years and was looking forward to that much again. “I know everyone says it’s the most horrible city in India,” he said, “and the hot season really is dreadful, but there’s just something about the place.” He gave a wry smile. “My wife, I’m afraid, feels different, and now that the children are at school back home . . . well, she misses them and she loathes this climate. She went up to the hills last week, so the next few months will be a bit lonely.” He lifted his glass. “When she’s gone, I have to be careful I don’t drink too much.”
Cunningham arrived just in time to share the next round. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, sinking wearily into the rattan chair. “Crisis at home—a snake slithered out of a drainpipe and almost gave the ayah a heart attack. One of the old hands blew its head off with a twelve-bore.” He turned to McColl. “So what did you get out of Bhattacharyya Minor?”
“Not a great deal,” McColl admitted once Tindall had signed for their drinks. “He makes no secret of his nationalist beliefs, but having them isn’t a crime. And there are thousands of Indians who think like he does yet wouldn’t dream of turning such thoughts into action. It’s entirely possible that he’s as innocent as he says he is.”
“But you don’t think so?” Tindall suggested.
“No, I think he’s the man we’re looking for—Jugantar’s link to the Germans. Or one of them at least.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Cunningham said. “And locking him up should put a spoke in their wheels—finding a replacement won’t be easy.”
Tindall disagreed. “We can’t just lock him up—his father’s an important man in the Bengali business community. We’ll need something to put before a judge.”
“There’s one thing we could do,” McColl said. “Take his picture and send it to our people in Batavia. They’ve been keeping an eye on the German consulate there, and since he denies ever going near it, proof to the contrary would be pretty damning.”
“As long as we keep him locked up in the meantime,” Cunningham conceded.
“How long would it take to get a reply?” McColl asked Tindall.
“Oh. There’s a boat every two or three days, four days to get there, a couple to sort things out—we should get a cable in a fortnight or so.”
“We can certainly hold him that long,” Cunningham insisted.
McColl disagreed. “We should let him go but keep him under constant surveillance. We’ll need some locals . . . That Indian in the Punjab who scotched the Ghadar plot—wasn’t he a sepoy working undercover? The regiments here must have men who’d be willing to spend a couple of weeks watching Bhattacharyya for a decent bonus.”
“After Neuve-Chapelle I should think not being shipped to France would be reward enough,” Cunningham noted cynically.
“After what happened to Gangapadhyay,” McColl retorted, “we may have to offer rather more than that.”
“We certainly need men who are motivated enough to do a good job,” Tindall said. “If Bhattacharyya realizes he’s being followed, he won’t lead us to anyone.” He studied his freshly empty glass. “But it might work. I’ll talk to the regimental commanders tomorrow. See what they’ve got to offer.”
The police photographer—an enthusiastic young Bengali—accompanied McColl to the local prison, where Bhattacharyya was now in comfortable, albeit solitary, confinement. A second night in custody had not improved his mood, and McColl’s refusal to speculate about the length of his incarceration only made him angrier. But he raised no objection to having his photograph taken. “One day a picture in British police files will be a badge of honor,” the Indian said as his countryman set up the camera. A few minutes later he greeted the click of the shutter with an anticipatory smile.
The man in the resulting photograph looked anything but a threat to the empire, and McColl found himself having doubts as he took it down to the ship. Had he misread Bhattacharyya? Time would presumably tell. If he had, Cunningham wouldn’t let him forget it, but who the hell cared about Cunningham? He handed the envelope containing the picture to the steamship captain and gave him the name of the agent who would be waiting on the dockside in Batavia. As he left, two sailors were waiting to pull up the gangplank, which seemed like a good omen.
Four days later Bhattacharyya was released from custody and followed to the family home by two of the four Bengalis whom Tindall had hired on their British CO’s recommendation. From then on, the two pairs worked twelve-hour shifts, reporting to McColl at the end of each. They all seemed like nice lads, and McColl hoped he’d never find one with a knife sticking out of his throat.
Days went by, and his watchers insisted that Abhijit Bhattacharyya was unaware of their surveillance. Which, if true, was somewhat depressing, because the man showed no sign of leading them anywhere useful. He spent most of the daylight hours at his father’s godown, and when he did venture farther afield, for either business or social purposes, there was nothing obviously suspicious about the people he met. McColl spent his mornings checking them out and could find
nothing to suggest that they were other than what they seemed—smart, successful businessmen, getting on with business. If these young men belonged to Jugantar, the Raj was really in trouble.
Afternoons nothing much moved. In April it had been hard to imagine more oppressive weather, but May was decidedly worse. Cumming had written “suggesting” that McColl move into permanent accommodation more befitting his status, but the glaring lack of electric fans in the flats he visited persuaded McColl to stay where he was. His expenditure seemed negligible—the Raj’s chit system was unmatched when it came to generating a false sense of financial security—and if Cumming got shirty, he was willing to make up the difference from his largely untouched salary.
The evenings were marginally better, but his social life was hardly expansive. After finishing The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, he took a tonga out to Alipur and the bungalow that Cynthia Malone shared with her civil servant brother. After they’d debated Tressell’s ideas with their usual friendly combativeness, McColl was saddened to hear that the brother had been called back to England and that she was going with him. “I’m tempted to stay,” she said, “but I think I’m too old to live here on my own. And much as I love India, I do miss British culture. Not to mention spring and autumn.”
He would miss her, he thought, as the tonga took him home. Partly because she was one of the few people he’d met in India who actually seemed to like the place and partly, he knew, because although she was twenty years older, Cynthia had reminded him of Caitlin.
An answer arrived from Batavia. “They recognized him,” McColl told Tindall, “but not for the reasons I’d hoped. He was picked up the moment he arrived—an Indian traveling from India to a neutral country apparently sets off an alarm. He took care of his father’s business just as he said he did, and then he started visiting brothels. Eleven of them before our men gave up.”
“Hell,” Tindall said quietly.
“We’ve been barking up the wrong tree,” McColl decided. “I have, that is.”
“Back to square one, then.”
A sharp rap on the door swiftly gave way to a face. “You are needed, sahib,” a constable told Tindall. “A shooting on Clive Street.”
McColl went along for the ride. The road had been closed off about a hundred yards north of Dalhousie Square, leaving all the side streets crammed with travelers keen to express their frustration. In the middle of the cordoned-off area, a dead horse with a gaping head wound was still tethered to what looked like a large metal box on wheels. The latter had chartered bank of bengal emblazoned on its side.
There was one uniformed man on the ground who wasn’t moving and another sitting with his back to the fallen vehicle, receiving medical attention from a nurse.
There was a cow on the pavement beyond, watching with apparent interest.
Two British police detectives were already on the scene, along with a sizable number of Indian subordinates. “They got away with about ten thousand rupees,” one told Tindall, a figure that McColl mentally reconfigured at around eight hundred pounds.
“Jugantar?” Tindall was asking.
“Most likely. They were educated men, according to the guard.”
Men with more money to finance their revolution, McColl thought. Men who could use the guns that were coming to set the Raj ablaze.
The Night Watchman
It was unusually sunny in Dublin, but not particularly warm. Caitlin Hanley was sitting at the only outside table of a pub on Wellington Quay, coat buttoned against the breeze that was blowing up the Liffey. A half-full glass of stout sat in front of her, alongside a sad-looking, partially eaten cheese sandwich. Through the open window behind, she could hear loud Irish voices discussing that afternoon’s racing at Leopardstown.
Almost two months had passed since Colm’s death, and although she was still prone to fits of weeping, the tide of grief seemed like it might at last be slowly beginning to ebb. When Michael Killen finally sent word to London that the relatives of those involved in the operation had agreed to meet her, it felt like an invitation to reengage with the world.
That morning she’d taken omnibuses across the city to visit the parents of the two men captured at Eastleigh after a long and bloodless exchange of fire with the local police. The O’Farrells in Kilmainham—a works foreman and his wife—were as ashamed of their younger son as they were proud of his older brother, now serving with the British army. Patrick had always been difficult, his mother kept saying, as if that explained his republican beliefs.
The Giffords in Cabra were intensely proud of their only son, who had always been “a lovely boy” and would be now forevermore. He had taken the fight to the English oppressor, as every real Irishman should. They had killed him, of course, but others would follow in his footsteps, and sooner or later there’d be statues to all the brave boys outside an Irish parliament.
All that the two couples shared was their astonishment at meeting a woman reporter and their ignorance of the event that their sons had been involved in. They had little idea how their boys had become involved or what exactly they had hoped to achieve, and even less of what had happened on that August evening. Caitlin hoped that Maeve McCarron, the sister she was seeing that afternoon, might help with the first two questions—siblings usually knew more than parents—but the third seemed increasingly likely to remain a mystery, particularly where Maeve and her brother were concerned. He had been killed at Godalming, and his partner, Brady, had been missing ever since.
Caitlin took a sip of the stout and pushed the sandwich plate farther away. A phalanx of uniformed children was being marched down the opposite quay by two young schoolmistresses, one to the fore, one to the rear. Half an hour earlier, a troop of soldiers had marched by in the same direction, and Caitlin had the sudden heartsick feeling that she was watching their future replacements in what people already called “the mincing machine in France.”
She shivered and went back to her notes. What did she actually know?
There was no dispute about Colm and his comrades’ intentions. The press had called it a campaign of sabotage but had never, as far as she knew, spelled out the specific targets. These had been four railway bridges, whose simultaneous demolition would have drastically delayed the transport of British troops to their ports of embarkation for France. Had the would-be saboteurs been German, Caitlin felt pretty certain that no one would have questioned the soundness of their military logic or the genuineness of their patriotic motives.
But they hadn’t been German—they’d been Irish or Irish-American—and there hadn’t been any obvious benefit to their compatriots in slowing down an English army en route to the Continent. Had the Germans offered them something in return? If they had, no one seemed to know what. “We needed to show them we were serious,” Colm had told her, which made some sort of sense. But had there been any more to it than that? Had guns been promised if the plot succeeded?
Who had these eight men been? Tiernan and at least three others had been members of the Irish Citizen Army, but Colm had not, and neither, she assumed, had his fellow American, Aidan Brady. The previous day Caitlin had talked to James Connolly, the current commander of the ICA, at his Liberty Hall headquarters, and he had assured her that the operation had not been officially sanctioned. She’d believed him, particularly when he added that he almost wished it had been. So the eight men had been acting on their own initiative, on behalf of Ireland. “Just volunteers,” as Colm had claimed.
Which brought her to the last question—what had actually happened that night? At the Arun bridge, Colm and Seán Tiernan had been ambushed by McColl and others. According to Colm, Tiernan had been shot without warning and had been forced to surrender. At Eastleigh the police had been waiting for the two whose parents she’d seen, and the ensuing gun battle had come to end only when the boys ran out of bullets. The pair at Romsey had actually brought down their bridge but shortly thereaf
ter had both been caught. So far, so clear.
The events at Godalming were more a matter for dispute. According to the official report, Brady had murdered two police constables in cold blood, then managed to make his escape after police fire killed his partner, Donal McCarron. Colm had refused to believe this version of events, but as Brady had not been seen or heard from since, there was no one to offer another.
She would have to talk to the relatives of the dead policemen, Caitlin realized. They might know or guess that something was not quite right in the police story, might even blame their loved ones’ superiors or colleagues for the deaths.
And then there was the other victim. At their last meeting in his flat, McColl had mentioned the murder of a night watchman several days earlier—he’d been killed, or so McColl had claimed, when the Irish invaded his quarry site to steal the explosives they needed. Colm had denied this, saying that Tiernan had told him the dynamite was part of a military shipment to Egypt, which Irish dockers in the Port of London had intercepted and smuggled out.
Caitlin had wanted to believe her brother but feared that just this once McColl might be telling the truth. And sure enough a search through the local papers of towns lying close to a working quarry had eventually turned up the story. She had gone to see the night watchman’s widow and found the woman still struggling to accept what had happened. The police had told her that those responsible for her husband’s death had been killed a few days later, while committing another crime, so there’d be no need of further proceedings.
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