Patterson pictured his tall, thin mentor standing before him, and tried to imagine what Blackstone would have speculated in this situation.
‘Imagine it was a drunken bloke instead of a doped tiger,’ said a voice in his head, which sounded very much like the Inspector’s. ‘What would make him shift himself?’
‘Something somebody else did to him,’ a second voice—Patterson’s own—replied.
‘Then find out what that ‘something’ is,’ the Blackstone voice advised.
Fair enough, Patterson thought, stepping closer to the two Black Marias.
The doors of the right-hand van were wide open, whilst those of the one on the left were tightly shut. So it didn’t take a trained detective to work out which van the tiger had emerged from, Patterson thought. It was so simple that even the Commissioner could have worked it out—given time. Besides, the back of the right van reeked of tiger. And if any more confirmation had been needed, the animal had left its calling card in the form of a large heap of tiger droppings.
Patterson climbed into the back of the van. Running around the walls was an elaborate system of rods and gears. There was no such mechanism in the back of a regular police Black Maria, and for a moment Patterson wondered what it was all in aid of. And then he had it!
He’d been wondering earlier what kind of man it would take to be brave enough—or stupid enough—to open the doors and let the tiger out. Now he saw nobody had undertaken the dangerous task—because nobody had needed to. It had all been done mechanically, by someone sitting on the driver’s seat.
He advanced further into the van, stepping carefully to avoid any tiger shit lying in wait in the shadows. He noticed the small circles of light in the front wall almost immediately, but it was not until he got close to them that he identified them as a series of six small holes, drilled close to the floor, which were letting in daylight.
He wondered why anyone should have gone to so much trouble. Perhaps for ventilation. But if that had been the case, they would surely have been larger, and there would have been more of them.
Patterson squatted down. If the tiger had been standing up, the holes would have been at about the level of its knees, he thought. But the tiger probably hadn’t been standing. In its doped condition, it would have been much more likely to have been lying down. And in that case, it would have been its trunk which was on a level with the holes.
‘All the better to prick you through, my dear!’ Patterson said aloud.
That was it! That had to be it! The man on the driver’s side, having opened the doors, had then proceeded to taunt the tiger with a metal spike or sharpened wooden stick. And the tiger, tired of being poked, had decided to take itself elsewhere, which was exactly what the kidnappers had wanted.
Patterson backed out of the van and stepped down on to the street. After the stink inside, it was a relief to be in the open again, and he took in a lungful of good old smoky London air.
What next? he wondered.
There was a gap between the side of the right-hand van and the wall. It was not big enough for a full-grown tiger to squeeze through, but for a fit—if slightly portly—young police officer, it was quite another matter. And he supposed he should go to the other side, because it was always just possible that the kidnappers, who had not put a foot wrong during the rest of operation, had suffered from a sudden mental aberration and left what might turn out to be a vital clue on the driver’s seat.
A body had been the last thing he had been expecting to find when he had eased his way through to the other side of the van, but the moment he saw the three stripes on the dead man’s arm, he realized what had happened to Sergeant Simcox.
‘Jesus!’ he said.
Blackstone had been angry enough before. When he learned that one of their own had been killed, he’d hit the bloody roof.
Fifteen
Major Walsh walked over to the bar and ordered a double whisky for himself and a pint of bitter for Blackstone. The whisky came first, and while the pint was still being pulled, the Major knocked it back and ordered another one. Watching the whole incident from a table, Blackstone found himself wondering just how many state secrets he’d entrust the Major with.
Walsh brought the drinks over to the table, his hands now so steady that he did not spill a drop.
‘Would you like to know why our friend Fullerton-Smythe is so concerned about Chandrapore?’ he asked.
‘Very much,’ Blackstone said.
‘Then perhaps, given that you must only have been a small child when the Indian Mutiny occurred, we should begin with a brief history lesson,’ Walsh said. ‘You wouldn’t object to that, would you?’
‘Only a fool ignores history,’ Blackstone replied.
‘You’re quite right about that,’ Walsh agreed, ‘though it would probably surprise you to learn just how many fools there are around. To begin then. The Mutiny started in 1857, when the sepoy regiments in several of the northern cities revolted. The British, both those in India and those back home, found it almost impossible to believe at first. Can you understand that?’
Blackstone nodded. ‘If a dog habitually submits to your kicks, it comes as a great shock when it finally decides to bite back.’
‘Quite so,’ Walsh agreed, looking longingly at his already-empty whisky glass. ‘But the fact was, the dog had bitten back. The Mutiny soon developed into a bloody business on all sides. The renegade troops massacred a great many wives and children of British officers and officials—though the actual figures were later considerably inflated by our government.’
‘Why was that?’
‘To justify the extent of the repression which followed. Some British commanders hung every Indian they could lay their hands on. Others were even more vindictive. Before he executed his prisoners, Colonel Neill forced the Hindus among them to eat beef and the Muslims to eat pork—the point being that they would not only know they were dying, but understand that they died damned. There are accounts of Sikh soldiers roasting mutineers over a slow fire, while British officers looked on.’ Walsh looked down at his glass again. ‘You wouldn’t mind getting me another drink, would you?’
‘Of course not,’ Blackstone said.
He bought another whisky, making it a treble this time. Walsh cupped his hands around it as if it were a precious relic.
‘The important question to ask is why the rebellion failed,’ the Major continued. ‘Consider this. There were only 21,000 British troops in the whole of India, whereas the combined sepoy regiments of Bengal, Madras and Bombay alone amounted to an excess of 277,000 native soldiers. In addition, there were many areas in which the civilians gave their wholehearted support to the revolt. So what went wrong, do you think, Inspector Blackstone?’
‘The Sikhs remained loyal, as did some of the Hindu and Muslim regiments,’ Blackstone guessed.
‘Very good,’ Walsh agreed. ‘But in my opinion, that was not the decisive factor. Not by a long chalk!’
‘Then what was?’
‘Consider your own position, Mr Blackstone. Which are there more of in London—policemen or criminals?’
Blackstone grinned. ‘Criminals. Without a doubt.’
‘So why, with the numbers on their side, do the criminals not call the shots?’
‘Because they’re not united, and we are.’
‘Precisely. And that was exactly the case in India. There was not one mutiny, you see, but a series of mutinies. Most of the rebels—including the rebel Indian princes—never looked further than their own state. If they had been united, they would have been harder—perhaps even impossible—to defeat.’
Walsh was making a great deal of sense at that moment, Blackstone thought, but that state of affairs wouldn’t continue after he’d knocked back another whisky or two. It was time to get him to the point.
‘What has all this to do with Chandrapore?’ the Inspector asked.
‘We’ll come to that in a moment,’ Walsh said. ‘We must now shift our gaze fro
m the Indian sub-continent to Europe, which is best seen as a very small cage inhabited by increasingly larger hounds.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that Europe is too small to satisfy the ambitions of all the strong monarchs who now inhabit it. I do not know who we will have to fight when it comes to it. It may be Germany or Austro-Hungary, Russia or France. Possibly it will be a combination of several of them. But we will have to fight—and within the next twenty years.’
‘Is that a personal view?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Yes, but though it would never admit it openly, it is also a view that this government—and any government likely to succeed it—secretly shares. Consider the implications of that, Mr Blackstone. If we are to pursue a war in Europe, we will need not only peace in India, we will need that vast rich country’s resources at our disposal. If India were to take the opportunity to revolt, however, we would not only be denied Indian troops for the European battlefield, but we would be forced to send precious British troops to India.’
‘Not a pretty thought,’ Blackstone said.
‘Not a pretty thought at all,’ Walsh agreed. He smiled again. ‘You may relax, Inspector. I will come to the point I am trying to make long before I pass out from the drink.’
‘I never thought—’
‘Yes, you did, but that is only understandable. To get back to Chandrapore, then. During the Mutiny, the Maharaja stayed loyal. But he was a very different prince to the one who runs the state now.’
‘You don’t think we can rely on this one?’
‘I served on secondment in Chandrapore for three years, and I got to know this Maharaja well. He’s a very intelligent man and a very strong leader. This would not matter if he came from a small or poor state, but unfortunately Chandrapore is neither. Were he to lead a revolt against us, he would not make the mistakes his predecessors fell victim to. He would unite the whole of northern India—and perhaps the south as well—behind his leadership.’
‘And is he likely to want to do that?’
‘If you’d asked me yesterday, I would not have hesitated to say no. His aim then was simply to maintain his state, so that he could pass it on as an inheritance to his son. But what if he loses that son? Grief can do strange things to a man. If he is to be denied the glory of establishing a royal line, then perhaps he will seek personal immediate glory, and decide to become the emperor of India.’
‘But surely, he has other sons who could carry on the line,’ Blackstone said.
‘You would think so, wouldn’t you?’ Walsh agreed. ‘But his wife is dead. She died giving birth to Balachandra, her first and only child.’
‘The Maharaja could marry again.’
‘Yes, he could—but it would be a pointless exercise. Shortly after his wife died, he caught a particularly nasty strain of a social disease. He recovered his health, but lost his manhood. There will be no more children, however fertile the woman he takes as his wife.’
‘So you’re saying that returning his son to him is the key to maintaining stability in Northern India?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Yes,’ Walsh replied gravely. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
Sixteen
Blackstone stood by his office window, watching dusk fall over the Thames. At least, that was what Patterson assumed he was doing, though since the Inspector hadn’t spoken nor moved so much as a muscle for several minutes, it was difficult to say for certain. Perhaps the Inspector’s eyes weren’t taking in the view at all. Perhaps, though his body was still in the room, his mind was somewhere else entirely.
Patterson gave an involuntary shudder. This wasn’t the hot anger—the hit-the-roof anger—that he’d been anticipating when he told his boss about Simcox’s murder. This was a cold, chilling rage which was much, much worse.
Only once before had the sergeant ever seen his boss in such a state. They’d been investigating a series of razor attacks on prostitutes, and their investigation had led them to a room in a cheap boarding house in the East End. There’d been four people in the room when they arrived. One had been a girl—she couldn’t have been more than thirteen— who’d been lying in the corner, softly whimpering to herself and doing her best to staunch the blood which was flowing from the slashes in her cheeks. The other three had been men—big bruisers who claimed the right to most of the pittance which poor girls like this one earned on the streets.
Blackstone had told the men they were under arrest and that they should come quietly. But he hadn’t wanted that, his sergeant had realized. He wanted them to resist—he wanted a chance to hurt them.
A carefully aimed kick had knocked Patterson out of the action right from the start, which had left one tall but thin police Inspector to deal with three heavy thugs whose occupation it was to hurt people.
Lying on the floor in agony, the sergeant had been a helpless witness to what followed. Later, he would describe it to his colleagues as a bloodbath, and there was no doubt that it had been. Blackstone was on sick leave for a week—and it had been a month before the police surgeon finally decided that the hooligans were fit enough to stand trial.
Blackstone turned around. The cold rage still showed on his face, but now he seemed to have it under control, and Patterson felt himself breathing a deep sigh of relief.
‘Why do you think the kidnappers killed Sergeant Simcox?’ the Inspector asked.
‘Because the poor devil was unlucky enough to get in the way,’ Patterson suggested.
‘By which you mean that if he’d never gone round to the front of the Black Marias, he’d still be alive?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
The Inspector nodded gravely. ‘But if they hadn’t murdered Simcox, they’d have found an excuse to kill another copper.’
‘You think murdering a policeman was part of the plan?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘But why?’
‘Why did they send that poor bloody kid’s head back in a hat box?’ Blackstone demanded. ‘Why did they stage the kidnapping in the way they did, when they could just have stormed the Maharaja’s suite in Claridge’s?’
‘An attack on the suite might have been expected,’ Patterson pointed out. ‘What they chose to do instead gave them the element of surprise on their side.’
‘True,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But wouldn’t they have caused just as much confusion with a small bomb? Why use anything as elaborate and complex as a live tiger?’
‘I don’t know,’ Patterson admitted.
‘Because it was complex and elaborate! Because they wanted to show us just what they could do if they set their minds to it. Nothing has happened accidentally or as a spur of the moment decision. They cut off the kid’s head and murdered Sergeant Simcox to demonstrate that they’re serious. They’ll hang for those murders, if we catch them. Not only that, but they know we know that they know it. It’s their way of saying that they’re not interested in half measures—they’ll either get everything they want, or they’ll die.’
‘But what do they want?’ Patterson asked. ‘Shouldn’t we have had a ransom demand by now?’
‘Yes, and if it had been an ordinary kidnapping, we certainly would have. But we’ve already established that it isn’t ordinary. They’re not in a hurry, like most kidnappers. They’re working to a timetable of their own—and they’re banking on us not being able to find out anything about them while that timetable’s still in operation.’
‘They could be right about that,’ Patterson said gloomily. ‘We haven’t got a thing to go on so far.’
‘That’s not true,’ Blackstone contradicted him. ‘They’ve left a mountain of clues. They couldn’t have failed to, with an operation of this complexity.’
‘Clues?’ Patterson repeated. ‘Like what?’
‘The tiger, for a start. By the way, have you worked out why it was drugged yet?’
‘Because that made it easier to get it into the Black Maria?’
‘Possibly that’s part
of the reason. But why drug it so heavily? Wouldn’t it have been better to have it fully alert when it came out of the van?’
‘Yes, it would,’ Patterson said. Then catching the look of disdain on his boss’s face, he quickly added, ‘that is to say, no, it wouldn’t have been better.’
‘Why not?’
Why not indeed? Patterson wondered. And then he saw the way Blackstone’s mind was working. ‘Drugged or not, it would have frightened the horses, thus accomplishing half its function,’ he said. ‘And if it hadn’t been drugged, it might have attacked the elephant.’
‘So?’
‘So the object of the exercise was never to harm the elephant at that point. Quite the reverse. All the kidnappers wanted was for the elephant to turn around and stampede back to where they were waiting for it.’
‘Absolutely,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Now we come to the second point. They had both the Maharaja and his son in their hands. Why did they only take the son?’
‘That’s easy. It’d be like killing the goose which laid the golden eggs.’
‘Go on.’
‘The kidnappers could be pretty sure that the Maharaja would pay the ransom to get his only son back. What they couldn’t be sure of is that whoever took over in Chandrapore once the Maharaja had gone missing would be willing to raise the money to get him back.’
‘We’ll make a copper out of you yet,’ Blackstone said approvingly. ‘Now let’s get back to the way in which the tiger might help us to get on to their trail. Suppose you wanted to get your hands on one of the beasts. How would you go about it?’
‘There must be zoos and circuses that have tigers.’
‘So you’d steal it from one of them?’
Patterson thought about it for a few seconds. ‘No,’ he said finally.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s too chancy. I’d be running the risk of getting caught during the actual theft—which would mean that the real operation would be over even before it started. And even if I got away with it, the theft would create a sensation. Everybody would be on the lookout for the beast. Moving it around the country would be almost impossible.’
Blackstone and the Great Game (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 2) Page 8
