Deadly Anniversaries

by Marcia Muller

  The Indian gent’s face had grown increasingly bewildered as I spoke, but at this final exclamation, he turned and followed my gaze. “These are not friends?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not. By God, I’m going to murder that newspaper—”

  My grumbles were cut off as the man threw back his shoulders and drew his kirpan from its sheath, holding it aloft into the morning sun.

  The kirpan, one of the five required articles of all Sikhs, is a most vicious-looking dagger even in its shorter, modern variation, a twist of gleaming steel all too suggestive of a disembowelling thrust. Certainly it impressed my next set of invaders. They came to an abrupt halt. After a moment, the turbaned head before me moved slowly: first right, then left, and right again.

  The two looked at each other, and reversed course down the drive.

  The Sikh put away the foot-long dagger, gave a quick flick of the wrist to drop his steel bangle—the kara is another of the five requirements—back into place, and turned to face me.

  “Well,” I said. “I suppose for that you deserve a cup of tea.”

  * * *

  I installed my guest in front of the fireplace, where the morning flames had died away but the warmth persisted. He rose when I came in with the tray, but after a glance at his shoes, I asked what he would like to eat.

  “Tea is sufficient, thank you.”

  “You must be hungry. You’ve walked from the Seaford station,” I pointed out.

  “How do you know where I come from?”

  “That rough paper could only come from the railway station. And your shoes, which were polished this morning, are dusty now. I’ll bring you some bread and cheese.” I collected them on a tray. Also some oranges. And a bowl of some walnuts that did not look too stale.

  He rose again when I came back, and did not sit until I had.

  “Look, Mr—Singh, is it?”

  He dropped the bread roll he had just taken from the plate and jumped to his feet yet again. “Anik Singh, madam, at your service.”

  I held out a hand, which he took so cautiously, I wondered if he’d ever shaken hands with a woman. “Mary Russell, at yours. Please sit. And eat. But honestly, if you’re looking for my husband, he may not be back for a day or two.” Which is just fine, I thought. It’s not as if I’d been asking him for—“If you want to leave a note, I’ll give it to him when he returns.”

  “But, madam, you said—did you not?—that you were a detective?”

  “I...yes. Among other things, I am that.”

  “And a detective is what I need.”

  With that, the Indian gentleman had my attention. The idea that detectives were interchangeable—that he thought a detective was every bit as good as The Detective—touched both my sense of humour and my dented self-esteem. I cleared my throat.

  “I see. Well, I’m not sure what I can do for you, but how about telling me what your problem is, and I’ll see if I can find someone to help you.”

  I poured tea. He stirred the sugar in his, and sat back with his cup.

  “Miss Russell, what do you know of the Brighton Pavilion?”

  “The Royal Pavilion? Not much. George IV hired John Nash to turn a pleasant building into a mock-Mughal palace, which he then stuffed full of chinoiserie. When Victoria took the throne, she couldn’t bear the place, and forced the city of Brighton to buy it. They used it for balls and exhibitions until the War, when it became...”

  Ah: the penny dropped.

  “A hospital for wounded Indian soldiers, yes.”

  A remarkably well-equipped hospital, as I recalled, with multiple kitchens, many subcastes of servants, and various places of worship, all of which were geared to the needs of specific Indian subgroups. The Sepoy Rebellion might have taken place well back in Victoria’s era, but the memory of it had left the British government, and especially the army, extremely wary of any faint whiff of religious offence to subcontinental soldiers—who, in the early months of the Great War, had made up a third of all Britain’s troops. “But that was only for a year or so, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Your European winter killed so many of my countrymen, the next autumn we were moved to warmer Fronts—we in the infantry, at any rate—to face trials other than frostbite. After that, the Pavilion became a rehabilitation hospital.”

  “But it’s been returned to the city, I think. Four or five years ago?”

  “Yes. No doubt as worn as the rest of us by its long years of war work.”

  I eyed Mr Singh. A man in his fifties, who walked with the faint limp of an old injury, was sure to have seen active service.

  “Were you there? In the Pavilion hospital?”

  “I was among the first, in the early weeks of 1915. An English shell went astray and burst among us. One minute I was shivering and staring out across No Man’s Land—and when I woke, some days later, I was gazing up at crystal chandeliers and gilded dragons.” I gave a cough of laughter, and his bearded face crinkled into a warm smile. “I assumed at first that I had died and gone to some Christian heaven, until I began to feel my leg.”

  “So why do you require the help of a detective, Mr Singh?”

  “Miss Russell, do you remember what took place ten years ago last month?”

  Did he imagine I might be too young for the War’s events to be seared onto my mind? True, I had been preoccupied in March 1915—fifteen years old, a recent orphan, newly arrived in Sussex—but the headlines would never fade in my mind’s eye.

  “Neuve Chapelle.” I could feel the expression of distaste on my face as I said the words. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle was Britain’s first deliberately mapped-out offensive of the seven-month-old war, with detailed aeroplane reconnaissance and a tightly planned sequence of bombardment followed by assault. It would be a paradigm for a new and terrifying kind of warfare—a paradigm, too, for how the sacrifice of the troops would be wasted by the incompetence of officers far behind the front line. The big guns had indeed sent the Germans for cover. The troops had indeed managed to push all the way to the German lines—only to have the attack flounder into chaos and bloody failure when the artillery ran out of shells, the field telephones broke down, and Command’s insistence that troops wait for direct orders gave the Germans time to bring up guns of their own.

  And as I remembered, nearly half the troops in that attack had been Indian.

  “I was just too late to fight in Neuve Chapelle,” said my visitor. “I was healed, and received my orders to return to the Front in the third week of March. Two days before I was to go, I passed through the room of new arrivals and heard my brother’s voice.”

  “Your brother was also a soldier?”

  “He was. A gentle boy, four years younger than I, and yet he joined the Garhwal Rifles as soon as his beard had grown. Men of my family have borne arms for generations. Mani and I—his name was Manvir—were in the same company nearly the whole time. For fifteen years, we marched together across the north of India, serving the King. And when the Austrian Archduke was killed, they sent us to France. Mani and I reached there in late September. Both of us came down with pneumonia in November, and spent two weeks in a field hospital. When we returned to the lines, we two fought at each other’s shoulder and slept at each other’s side until the shell landed on me in the second week of January.

  “As I said, this was before Neuve Chapelle, but I have talked with men who were at that battle. I know that we began to drop shells into the German lines as soon as it was light enough to see. Thousands of shells from our field guns—a wall of artillery—turning the German wire into an expanse of mud. After precisely thirty-five minutes, the guns went silent and our brigade fixed bayonets to go up the ladders.

  “If I know my brother, he would have been one of the first over the top. Once there, the men were as much slowed by the mud as they were speeded by the destruction of the wire, permitting the G
ermans to retrieve some of their Maxim guns from the debris and get them working. My brother took three bullets before he stayed down. All three were in his front: he did not turn away.

  “The two men I talked with said they were surprised that he had survived the trip to the field hospital. But he survived, long enough for the doctors to decide that he should be shipped to Brighton. He lived to reach there, too—although by then, fever had set in. When I heard his voice, he was raving, and did not know me. When I left for the Front two days later, he was still burning with fever. And yet he lived, at least for a time. Many months later, our mother wrote me to say that a field postcard had arrived from Brighton with the message that Mani had been wounded but was recovering. Some kind soul had added a note that his hand was injured and he was fighting an infection, but that he would write when he could hold a pen. Its date was early April. And that was the last we heard, until the telegram came in the beginning of July to say he was gone.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Such is war,” he said. “In another world, my brother might have been an artist, the father to many sons. But in this world, Mani was proud to fight for his King.” He reached into his breast pocket for his notecase, taking from it the photograph of a young man in uniform: slim, dark, bearded (of course) and blessed with shining eyes and eyelashes a cinema star would kill for. I dutifully studied it, then handed it back.

  “And yet, you require a detective.” Sad as it might be, and interesting in the abstract—something had brought him here, and someone had drawn him a map to find us.

  “Mani is dead.” He carefully slid the photograph away. “This I have known for nearly ten years. And yet, only recently did I learn that his death was not as immediate as we thought. When the telegram came, we assumed that it had simply been delayed. Administrative details for Indian troops were not always handled as...scrupulously as for white soldiers.” There was no bitterness in his voice, merely experience. “And yet, when I came here and asked to see the hospital records, all I found was a brief notation that said, Died of wounds. Not from the spring, but dated June 14.”

  “Lingering deaths were all too common.”

  “And so I thought. Until we received this.” He bent down for the canvas haversack he’d left on the carpet, taking out a much-travelled cardboard box some fifteen inches by four. The twine around it was new. The front bore English stamps and was addressed, in capital letters, to an army brigade headquarters in India. There was no return address.

  I undid the twine and found inside some scrunched-up brown paper padding, on top of which lay a square of quality stationery, folded, with the message:

  PLEASE RETURN TO THE FAMILY OF RIFLEMAN MANVEER SINGH.

  I held up the page, and saw that its upper edge had been trimmed away with a pair of short, sharp scissors. The sender did not care to include a home address.

  At the centre of the packing material was a knife, a twin to the one Mr Singh had used to chase away the would-be clients: smooth wooden handle with a decorative silver end, encased in a slim, curved leather sheath also tipped in silver. When he laid it beside our teacups on the table, I saw that the leather was far from new, dark with both use and stains.

  “May I?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  When I picked the scabbard up, using my left hand, my fingers came down atop the four darkest spots on its back side. I slid the kirpan out. The steel blade was clean and smelled faintly of oil, its cutting side razor sharp. It was also beautiful, in a deadly sort of way, with a complex arabesque etched into the steel near the guard. That design was a part of the manufacture. The blade’s other carving was not.

  I bent over the weapon to study the marks. Beginning where the blade’s point entered its vicious upturn, an amateur hand had carved a series of brief phrases into the steel, using a rounded alphabet descending from horizontal lines.

  “This is writing,” I said. “Sanskrit?”

  “Gurmukhi. My little brother was a romantic. He wished his kirpan to bear a record of every battle in which he had fought. Beginning with a duel of honour, one might call it, when he was thirteen years old.” He reached out to touch the roughest, faintest words near the tip. “That childhood tussle is represented by the word for nose, to commemorate how he’d bloodied his enemy’s. The next line says lathi. That marks Mani’s first active service in the army, when we had to charge a crowd with our batons drawn. But the last one is what brought me here, from India.” He laid his finger next to the tenth scratched phrase, close to the knife’s guard. “That one you would translate as three bullets.”

  I looked at him, then carried the weapon over to the window, where it was bright despite the gathering clouds. I dug around in the desk drawer for the big looking glass, and held it above the writing. Considering that proper engraving tools would have been as thin on the ground in the Western Front as they were on the Northwest Frontier, the scratched letters were remarkably clear and controlled—even the last one. And all had been made by the same hand.

  I gazed out at the garden, thinking. Ten years. Ten years ago, my own life had changed, although I would not know it for a time. Not that meeting a man on a barren hillside was comparable to charging, bayonets drawn, toward the German lines, but... Ten years ago, for both events.

  I smiled wryly down at the artifact in my hand. Don’t be an idiot, Russell.

  Back at the fireplace, I returned the blade cautiously to its scabbard and laid it on the packing.

  “I agree, it looks as though your brother lived long enough—and was fit enough—to add Neuve Chapelle to his kirpan. But what do you expect me to do?”

  The dark eyes blinked in surprise. “I need to know what happened. Why my brother lived for some weeks, yet did not write. Why he was recovering, yet then he died.” I studied his face. The embers whispered. And after a minute, Mr Singh slumped back into his chair. “You will not help me. I knew it was unlikely. I merely did not wish—”

  “Oh no,” I said. “You misunderstand. I will find out what happened, if you truly want.”

  “Why would I not?”

  I could think of any number of reasons. “Not all mysteries have comfortable solutions.”

  His smile was that of a soldier who has lived with loss too long to remember its beginning. “There is a hole in my life where my brother was,” he said gently. “If it can be filled, it must be.”

  “I’d like—” But my wishes went both unvoiced and unmet. The clatter of the doorbell came just as a face peered around the corner of the bow window, trying to see inside.

  I shot to my feet with an oath; the startled soldier came upright an instant later. “Where are you staying?” I demanded.

  “I have not yet—”

  “Never mind. Mrs Hudson—the housekeeper—she’ll be home in an hour or so. Tell her I said to put you in the guest room. Patrick will go for your things, which I’m assuming you left at the station? I shall be back when I have news. No, you can’t come with me—that’s really not possible. If you want to help, perhaps you could hold this current batch of invaders in place while I make my escape?”

  A quick dash upstairs gave me a change of clothing and my still-packed valise. As I trotted back down, I heard my Sepoy troop puzzling over the demands of the people on my doorstep—two of them German, by the sound of it. To my amusement, his English had deteriorated mightily in the past five minutes.

  “Oah, verry sorry,” he said, wagging his turban back and forth like a pantomime Indian. “Please, you look for the home of who?”

  “Not home, Holmes,” the irritated voice enunciated. “Sherlock Holmes. Does he live here or not?”

  “Shairlock Holmes? The man of the hound story and the pipe? Is he a real man, then? But why would you think he lives here?”

  I slipped down the hallway to the study, then out of its window to the ground. The trio at the door heard the
car too late to intercept me, and the determined-looking young man marching through East Dean cast me not a glance. I will admit to a degree of satisfaction as the first drops splashed against my windscreen a minute later: every would-be client was going to be very wet by the time they reached the shelter of the village inn.

  * * *

  I drove through Seaford and along the coast to Brighton, scarcely aware of the chalk Downs to my right or the waves to my left.

  It had been sunny, ten years ago yesterday. I remembered everything about that day, every vivid detail. All along the coastline, one could hear the rumble of guns from the distant Front. I had been walking with my nose in a book, only to literally stumble across the man who would change my life. Sherlock Holmes: teacher, partner, and for the last four years, husband. A man no less maddening now than he’d been a decade ago, when he’d looked down his long nose at me from his seat on the ground, to deliver a cool and dismissive insult.

  On the one hand, does an anniversary matter? Of course not: one day is like another, merely a square on a calendar. And yet, we humans are issued a limited number of days in our lives, and some resonate more than others. Some days—some anniversaries—require at least a degree of recognition. More than a puzzled look after a wife’s protest, when her teacher-partner-husband suggests that she drop him in London to finish a touch of research rather than—

  I tore my thoughts away from that spiral, and scolded my self-centred preoccupations. A young soldier was horribly wounded in a foreign land, leaving his family bereft, Russell. Kindly keep some perspective on the matter at hand.

  I needed to start with the Pavilion and its brief time as a home for wounded Indian soldiers. Of course, there were the hospital records that Mr Singh had consulted, no doubt composed of endless shelves and cabinets filled with dusty, ill-organised, and often illegible file folders.

  In search of a shortcut to save me from the archives, I parked on a wet side street and put up my umbrella, approaching the Royal Pavilion from the south. John Nash’s unlikely domes and minarets rose up above the workaday city traffic like something conjured by one of its patients’ fever dreams—or like a display of upright spindles in a yarn shop window. What must an actual citizen of India make of this gallimaufry of elements? And this was only the exterior.