A non-co-operation backer was arrested in Dalhousie Square on the strength of a writ of arrest issued by the Chief Presidency Magistrate. He was taken into custody on a charge of having made a seditious speech in College Square.
The second read:
On the strength of a warrant issued by the District Magistrate of North Calcutta, the Criminal Investigation Department, assisted by local police, searched the house of Ram Chandra Deep in Upper Chitpur Road. Copies of Vanguard, Advance Vanguard and other seditious publications were seized.
‘Concerning the speech,’ observed Dr Ganguly, as I handed back the cuttings, ‘. . . they had to drop the charge for insufficient evidence. As you also may or may not know. And regarding the search and seizure . . . he wasn’t in the house. Khan visited me at the start of April and I managed to extract that data from him.’ Dr Ganguly turned and looked kindly at me. ‘Let’s assume you do know everything, and that I am boring you by this repetition.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Khan thinks there’s more to this man who sometimes calls himself Deep than seditious speeches and papers. He’s been on his tail for months. He thinks he’s the brains behind the arson attacks at Howrah.’
‘The burnt godowns.’
‘Yes. Also two murders of police constables in the past eighteen months. Khan really has a bee in his bonnet about this man, and he thinks that, of late, he’s started using my name.’
‘I suppose because it’s displayed in the centre of town. You’d think he would have varied the initials, at least.’
‘Yes, you would think that.’
‘I suppose he can’t be very imaginative.’
‘If anything, I’d say the fellow was over-imaginative.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve met him; he consulted me. At least, I think he did. I have him down as a fellow who came to see me in February, I suppose at about the time he was making seditious speeches.’
‘What did he come to see you about?’
‘Oh, nerves. Nervous neuralgia. Acute toothache and pains about the jaw. I told him to drink cocoa at night and have a good long walk every day.’
‘What name did he give?’
‘Of course, I asked his name, and he came out with “Mr Mukerji”, but he’d told the nurse it was S. T. Dutt.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Pale. As Bengalis go, you understand.’
‘Hair?’
‘Yes. I mean, he wasn’t bald.’
‘Centre-parted, like mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Moustache similar to mine?’
‘Not dissimilar. What are you driving at?’
What I was driving at was that if his features were similar to mine, then he would have looked even more like the murdered man, John Young, being closer to Young in colour. But I kept this from Dr Ganguly.
I said, ‘It seems, then, that he walked away from here with your name?’
‘And a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment that he bought off the nurse . . . Didn’t believe me, you see, when I told him that all he really needed was rest.’
‘It was reckless of him to take the name of a man who’d met him.’
‘Yes. But then he obviously is a reckless man. I gave his description to Khan and he disclosed, in a roundabout way, that this was very likely the fellow he was after.’
Dr Ganguly walked over to the window and looked down on the fuming traffic of Chowringhee. He made a half turn towards me, saying, ‘And now he’s in Jamalpur?’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said.
‘You are becoming as cryptic as Detective Inspector Khan.’
‘. . . But it is useful to discover it wasn’t you who took the train,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t guess that I knew any more than that.
I walked up to the window, and we shook hands. We both looked down on the traffic.
‘Do you know much about women’s cycles?’ I asked Ganguly.
‘Women’s bicycles, you mean?’
‘No.’
‘Then yes, I do.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘My dear sir, you have now exceeded your colleague in opacity.’
III
At eight o’clock I sat on the terrace of Willard’s Hotel. Darkness had spread over the maidan, but here the fairy lights blazed, the caged birds chirped and the fountain played, doing its best to dispel the memory of the day’s heat. There were not many on the terrace, in these evenings of the dog days. I was drinking my daily allowance of Beck’s beer and smoking a cigar I had bought at Hatzopolo’s on Lindsay Street. It was a Havana, a half corona. I had bought the cigar at five o’clock. At four, I had been standing in front of the massed typists of Chowringhee, and speaking to the man who had been summoned by his colleagues just in case I kept my promise of the day before, and had turned up again to seek a translation of the words on the two crumpled scraps of paper. The man had given me the translation. The language was similar to Bengali, but was not Bengali. It was called Hajong, or something like. It was a dialect spoken in the north-east of Bengal, towards Assam, a district lying a fair distance from Jamalpur; but still it was not impossible, according to the translator, that people around Jamalpur might know it, or might have relatives who knew it, or might use it for covert purposes. The first message translated roughly as follows:
Khan sahib, you asked of us a very hard thing. We had much trouble, but work is complete. Where is the payment?
The second said something to the effect of:
Khan sahib, thank you for payment. Sorry for trouble but it was not our making.
Neither was dated, but both were signed by a certain Sabir Huq, who very generously supplied an address on both occasions, or at any rate the name of a village, which translated as ‘The Place of the Crossroads’. The translator had consulted one of his fellows, who, on being prised away from his typewriter, confirmed that he had heard of this spot, and it was not such a small village either. I had put it to him that it might be near the big railway colony of Jamalpur, and he had said, ‘Fifty-sixty miles east’, which is near by Indian standards.
A man had been done away with, but the wrong man, as this Sabir Huq, assassin for hire, seemed guiltily aware. I wondered which of the horsemen I’d observed fleeing the scene had been Sabir Huq.
I now had little doubt that Huq, and his fellows, had been the agents of Detective Inspector Khan. Khan had set out to dispose of the troublesome Deep or Ganguly, and he had meant to make it look like an act of banditry. He must have been overjoyed at learning through his spies that Deep/Ganguly had booked on to the Jamalpur Night Mail of 23 April. Here was his opportunity.
Why had Deep/Ganguly intended to visit Jamalpur before changing his mind? Perhaps to agitate among the young railway apprentices. A bigger question, to my mind, was whether Khan had acted under his own initiative, or whether he carried the authority of his superiors. He was very much the sort of man who would act alone, I believed.
A bearer came up to me.
‘Telephone, sahib.’
I left the cigar smoking in the ashtray as I walked quickly to the telephone box underneath the main stairs. It was Lydia, three hundred miles away and seven thousand feet up.
‘Enjoying yourself, are you?’ I said. ‘You and Bernadette have been riding every day, I suppose?’
‘She has; not me.’
‘How many cards have you had dropped on you?’
‘And how many bottles of beer have you drunk?’
‘One. My daily allowance.’
Silence for a space.
‘We’ve had enough of it here,’ said Lydia. ‘We’re coming home next week; on Tuesday.’ In spite of her negative remarks, she did not seem quite as blue as she had done beforehand. ‘I’ve had two invitations to speak.’
‘Where? In Calcutta?’
‘Nearby.’
‘Who to?’
‘Indian wo
men.’
‘Right. And what about Indian men?’
‘What?’
‘Khan. I saw you talking to him at the riding place when I was on the train out. You seemed to be hitting if off pretty well.’
‘I was sounding him out. You idiot. I was trying to appear pleasant.’
‘Well, you seemed to be managing that. Sounding him out about what?’
‘About how much trouble you were in, given that you were the only man on the spot with the right sort of gun. Are there people listening on this line?’
‘There probably are now.’
‘I wanted to find out how much he disliked the British. I should say quite a lot, and who can blame him? But he’s no Indian nationalist.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly right. It was thinking he must be a nationalist that threw me off.’
‘Threw you off what?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get back.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘I think he arranged the killing, and John Young was mistaken for someone else – a revolutionary. You know, a Ghandi-ite.’
‘Ghandi . . .’ said the wife, after a pause. ‘I mentioned the Mahatma to him and he said, “That Hindu saint” with a real sneer.’
‘That might be because Khan’s Moslem,’ I said.
‘Or just a policeman,’ said Lydia.
Silence for another space.
‘You’ve seemed a bit blue lately,’ I said.
‘Yes, well.’
‘Are you expecting?’
A longer silence this time.
‘Why would that make me blue?’
‘Because you’re forty-three. You’re ambitious. I was thinking about our . . . thing two weeks ago, when Bernadette went to the Askwiths overnight. I was thinking that your vulcanised device might have perished in the heat.’
‘Jim! There might be people listening on this line!’
She hadn’t minded discussing a murder on it though.
‘You were drinking the beef extract with milk,’ I said, ‘and you seemed annoyed with me all the time.’
‘I like the way it didn’t occur to you that I might seem annoyed with you because I was annoyed with you!’
‘It did.’
She would have the child, I knew that. Those devices – of which progressive women were so in favour – were to stop children but they were also to stop abortions. I felt a great surge of excitement at the thought of this new person coming into the world, like an express train going down a line with all the signals set to ‘Proceed’.
‘I’m bowled over, kidder,’ I said. ‘I’m really bowled over.’
‘Well, Jim,’ she said, ‘Good. That’s good.’ And finally she laughed. ‘You cottoned on. I’m amazed.’
‘You shouldn’t underestimate me. I’ve cracked the John Young case; now I’m going to see about the snakes.’
‘Jim, are you sure you’ve only had one bottle of beer?’
‘I might go on to champagne next.’
‘You should have something to eat.’
‘I’m having a cigar. That’s a similar thing.’
‘Jim.’
‘What?’
‘Be careful.’
Chapter Thirteen
I
The next day was Saturday. I went into the office in the morning, and spent a desultory few hours looking over Commission of Enquiry papers, and giving an occasional glance at some of the files to do with the year 1919 in the history of the East Indian Railway. Much of the time I spent considering what to do about the fact that Detective Inspector Khan had commissioned a political murder that had led to the death of an innocent man. Of course I had not much in the way of evidence, unless the two crumpled chits could be counted as such. I had considered telling the whole tale to Bennett, who might then have a word with one of Khan’s superior officers, who might or might not have been in on it. Either way, that felt rather dishonourable, too much like splitting, and I was currently minded to keep that option in reserve, depending on how far Khan pushed his efforts to throw blame on me.
In the middle of the afternoon, I stepped into Fairlie Place. Having been unable to get hold of a police tonga, I hailed a motor taxi, and asked for Howrah station. The motor taxi men felt themselves a cut above the tonga-wallahs, but they all had the famous Howrah Bridge traffic block to contend with. Midway over the bridge, the driver turned his motor off. I kept the passenger window down until the first mangled beggar approached along the walkway. I had wound it up by the time he’d arrived, so that the crying of the gulls, the tooting of the horns, the blaring of the ships on the river all became muted and the air in the taxi became unbreathable. The beggar was knocking on the window with the palm of his hand, and that was because he had no fingers. The driver, a Sikh, was reading The Statesman. He didn’t look up from his paper, still less attempt to shoo the man away.
Half an hour later, the driver pulled up at the rank in front of Howrah station. I walked a little way into the blue-black, smoky interior, and saw fewer European faces than usual, on account of the exodus to the hills. This was how it would be when the British pulled out of India. That was only a matter of time. ‘The balloon’, as somebody told me, had ‘gone up’, and it had gone up at Amritsar. It was strange that Detective Inspector Khan couldn’t see that for himself; or perhaps he did, and he was merely fighting a rearguard action.
I came out of the station, and walked on to the railway lands. There was a sharp smell of white spirit in the hot air. Every so often, the pounding of my boots caused a rat to bolt into a dirty hole; but the queer thing was that I never saw the rats until the moment they did bolt. That was the one good thing you could say about snakes: they killed rats.
When I came to the end of some goods wagons I’d been shadowing, I cut diagonally across the tracks towards the passenger carriage sidings. Ahead of me lay the burnt godowns, the work of the man who had stolen the name of Dr Ganguly. Behind me the orange cloud was rising over the railway lands. The passenger carriages alongside me were dusty green, in the main. The closed venetian slats made them appear to be sleeping, and they were top-heavy with various kinds of overhanging sun canopies. Where were the armed guards? I had hardly seen a single Company employee since entering the railway lands – a couple of Anglo-Indian foremen, a couple of coolies. Fisher believed that the coolies working for the Railway should be given a different designation, something more dignified like ‘charge hand’. They’d be more loyal in that case, and less likely to pilfer. He had his points, did Fisher.
I cut through a gap between two rakes of carriages, and my object was in view: a pale blue church-like building with a pretty garden surrounding, so that it looked like a kind of oasis materialising in the dusty railway lands: the Insty.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the Anglos generally stayed in town during the heat, so the place was busy. Children played a scratch game of cricket on the tennis court; one of the peacocks was on the tennis court as well, and periodically doing its display, as though practising until a more distinguished audience came along. At the burra clubs, neither incursion would have been allowed. The grass on the tennis court of the Insty was rather worn and burnt, and I imagined its upkeep did not interest the resident gardener, it affording no opportunity to grow the vivid flowers that bloomed in the remainder of the garden.
A bearer was bringing drinks out on to the terrace, where perhaps twenty men and women sat talking or reading. I passed one of the curious, half-dead bushes. Was this the manasa tree that Canon Peter Selwyn had mentioned as being supposed by the Hindus to give protection against snake bites? He had said they were common throughout Calcutta, and that you would find a statuette of the goddess Manasa beneath the trees, yet there was nothing at the base of this one but a white stone. Nodding at a couple of the terrace drinkers whom I vaguely recognised from Fairlie Place, I entered the lobby of the Insty, where a big card game was in progress. Other members sat in the basket chairs near the bookshelves,
reading through the engineering journals, or the novels of the Wheeler’s Indian Railway Series, and there were a couple of kids flipping through the Bumper Books.
There was a whole new crop of advertisements on the notice-boards, and their severe practicality seemed to clash with this scene of Saturday afternoon jollity. ‘Goodbye Rust!’ I read. ‘Syronite WILL NOT rust’, or ‘Rupees Fifteen Thousand – save this amount yearly using Sentinel Steam Wagons’. And there were notices advertising ‘homeward’ sailings: ‘P&O British India Companies’ . . . ‘Isthmian Steamship Lines’ . . . ‘Ellerman Line’.
I heard, ‘Now with a sportsman’s instinct, I was absolutely sure I had hit the beast, but I didn’t see it fall. So I summoned a few of the men, and told them to take their dogs down and search the hillside . . .’ The speaker was Charles Sermon, the only European in the place apart from me, as far as I could tell. He had collared some poor fellow, and was steering him into the corridor leading to the bar. I had been banking on Sermon being at the Insty; in fact, he was the main reason for my visit. I wanted a word with him about the rebellion of the Company officers in 1919. The grievances had arisen from the war, and Sermon had been in the war. Therefore I too began walking along the corridor leading to the bar. In the rooms off, the holiday mood continued. One room seemed to be hosting a table-tennis tournament; a gram played in another.
The bar was pretty crowded, and with men and women, whereas in the burra clubs the sexes were separated for drinking purposes. Sermon had taken his latest victim over to a corner table, where a bearer was serving them pegs, but I was looking at two middle-aged women sitting at the next-but-one table over. Before them on their table were some tasselled photograph albums, a stack of photographs, and a pot of paste. One of the two women I didn’t know. The other was Sonia Young, widow of John.
Reasoning that Charles Sermon would be talking shikar for at least the next hour, I first walked across to where Mrs Young sat. She recognised me immediately. In her extremely direct way, she introduced me to her companion as ‘probably the last man to see John alive, apart from whoever killed him’, causing her companion to shake my hand rather gingerly. As she spoke, she was pasting a photograph into the album: it showed a European couple looking silly as they engaged in what was probably an animal dance. The woman’s hair was all across her face, and the man’s tongue was sticking out. The picture had been taken at the Debating Society dance, and that went for all the photographs. I knew what Sonia Young was about. She was the custodian of the albums, and it was right they be stored at the Railway Institute, since an invitation to this particular dance was one of the highest social peaks an Anglo-Indian could achieve. The next photograph to go into the book showed William Askwith being congratulated by his wife after making his speech from the stage, and the one after showed Sonia Young herself. She was in the garden, the French windows were open behind her; she held a glass of something, and she was smiling, but of course she was alone, and this must have been one of the few pictures in all the collected albums showing a sole individual rather than a couple. Mrs Young’s companion was studying the photograph.
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