Bowman let go.
“Go and tell him.”
He walked back down the steps and waited for Reeves to appear at the door.
His face was the same as the one in Bowman’s memory, standing behind the helm of the sloop, only older and more wrinkled, his hair now completely white. He no longer had a beard, just two thick sideburns that went down to the bottom of his jaw. The straight-backed, solid captain Bowman recalled was now a slope-shouldered old man. One hand on the doorframe, the other hidden behind it, Reeves watched him anxiously.
“Who are you?”
The old captain narrowed his eyes and seemed to have trouble with his vision. Bowman took a step forward in spite of the weapon that Reeves was undoubtedly hiding behind the door.
“Stay where you are.”
“You don’t remember me? Sergeant Bowman. On the Sea Runner. I boarded the junk.”
Reeves squinted even harder.
“What did you say?”
“I was there when the village burned. I gave you something.”
The captain’s face tensed. Bowman put his foot on the first step and spoke more slowly.
“I was there. So were you. You can’t have forgotten. Sergeant Bowman.”
Reeves clung to the door.
“Sergeant Bowman?”
The old man let go of the doorframe and put his hand in his pocket, drawing out a pair of glasses that he placed on his nose. His eyes appeared suddenly huge, leering at the sergeant in his baggy, worn uniform.
“You were dead . . . They told me you were all dead.”
“Not all of us, Captain.”
Reeves opened the door wide. In his right hand he held a loaded pistol, but he seemed to have forgotten this.
“Come in.”
Bowman looked at the gun, and the old man stammered:
“I beg your pardon, I thought something was going on. I couldn’t understand what Dorothy was saying to me.”
The old captain put his gun on the sideboard in the entrance hall.
“Follow me, Sergeant.”
They walked through the living room to a semi-circular solarium on the other side of the house with windows overlooking the Thames. The masts of little boats moored outside the house swayed gently in the sunlight. Bowman stood facing the windows, keeping as much distance as he could from everything: the polished furniture, the embroidered chairs, the flower pots; if he could, he’d have removed his feet from the carpet. Souvenirs of Reeves’s travels hung on the walls: African masks, muskets and swords, spears and daggers. Lit by the low sun, six paintings of Company ships. The vessels that the captain had commanded. One of the frames was smaller than the others, the wood plain, no gilding, and the picture inside showed an elegant white sloop. The Sea Runner.
“Please, sit down. Would you like to drink something?”
“What?”
“Something to drink?”
“Coffee.”
Reeves went off to the kitchen, and Bowman heard him speaking to his maid; the woman protested in a whisper, advising Reeves to put this man out on the street. Reeves told her to calm down and bring the coffee into the solarium.
“Please, Sergeant, do sit down.”
Bowman took his eyes from the painting and sat in a chair without putting his hands on the armrests. Reeves sat facing him. The old officer, sitting on the edge of his seat, his eyes enlarged by the lenses of his glasses, was observing him intently.
“What . . . what happened to you?”
Bowman looked away, to avoid the old man’s probing eyes.
“We came back from Wright’s mission. Only ten of us.”
“Wright . . .”
“He died on the river. We were taken prisoner.”
“They told me there were no survivors.”
The sergeant lowered his gaze.
“No-one knows anything about Wright’s mission anymore. That’s why I came. It was the Naval Affairs office at the Company who gave me your address.”
“Wright’s mission?”
Bowman looked up.
“The ambassador, on the river. We were supposed to intercept the ambassador’s boat. But that’s not why I came, Captain. It’s for something else.”
“What then, Sergeant? What . . . what do you need?”
Bowman turned towards the river, and tried to moisten his dry tongue.
“It’s about that murder. The murder in the sewers, a few weeks ago.”
The two men jumped and turned around: Dorothy, the maid, was standing in the middle of the living room, her hands open, a silver tray at her feet, the cups broken and the coffee pot overturned.
“Mr Reeves, tell him to leave! Tell him to leave!”
The old captain stood up, took the maid by the arm and tried to reassure her.
“Clean this up and leave us, Dorothy. Go home. I won’t need you this evening.”
The servant protested. She did not want to leave her employer alone with Bowman. It took Reeves a few minutes to lead her to the door. Outside, the sun was setting, turning the Thames yellow and splashing golden reflections on the hulls of the boats. Reeves took a bottle of whisky and two glasses from a sideboard and placed them on the coffee table. He poured a glass for Bowman, who raised it. The old man stared at his severed fingers.
“Help yourself to more, Sergeant, please. I heard rumours about that horrible story, but why have you come to speak with me about it?”
Sergeant Bowman poured himself a second glass. This was perhaps the best whisky he had ever tasted, but it was no stronger than ordinary tavern gin and he needed more alcohol to calm down.
“I’m a policeman now, in Wapping. I have to find the murderer. My colleagues think it was me, and they’ll frame me for it if they get half a chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I found the corpse in the sewer. They think I’m mad. I’m not mad. It’s just . . . it’s just the nightmares. Since we got back to England, it’s been better. But I don’t sleep well at night, Captain.”
“What nightmares, Sergeant?”
“The forest. What they did to us.”
“I don’t understand. You have to tell me why you’re here. Sergeant?”
Bowman was silent for a moment. He pulled on his shirt collar because it was making it hard for him to breathe and the top button went flying.
“We came back, ten of Wright’s men. The murderer is one of the prisoners who was with me. I gave the list to the superintendent, but the Company said there was no mission, that we did not exist. And now the Company doesn’t exist. You understand?”
“You’re looking for a former prisoner?”
“The murderer.”
Captain Reeves smiled to encourage Bowman and took a sip of his whisky, which he hadn’t touched up to now.
“Tell me.”
Bowman finished his glass, and turned towards the windows and the almost black Thames.
“When we boarded the junk, we went up the Irrawaddy to intercept Min’s ambassador. The monsoon began and we ran aground on the bank. We didn’t see them arrive. We fought against the first boat . . .”
Reeves listened to Sergeant Bowman’s story for an hour, sunk deep in his armchair, without interrupting or making the slightest movement. Bowman told him everything. How the boats carrying Min’s prisoners, those starving ghosts, entered the port in Rangoon. Their repatriation to Madras. Then what happened to Bowman afterwards – becoming a Company copper in Wapping, the discovery of the corpse, Andrews’ visit to his room, his subterfuge at East India House, and his arrival here.
Night had fallen. Reeves got up, lit some candles, and gradually light returned to the room again. The bottle was empty. The old captain lit a match and brought it up to his pipe. His tired face was illuminated, his eyes replaced for a moment by the reflection of the flame in his glasses.
“I have nightmares too, Sergeant Bowman.”
“What?”
“The village, Sergeant. The women and children.
”
The light of the candles danced on the paintings that hung on the wall. The Sea Runner, in Reeves’s living room, was the same colour it had been that night, under the cloud of cinders.
“It was war, Captain. Orders. We had to . . .”
“What war, Sergeant?”
“Against Pagan. The ambassador . . .”
“The rubies.”
“Huh?”
The old man let his head fall backwards. He looked tiny in his large armchair.
“What happened to you had nothing to do with the war. Not Dalhousie’s war, anyway. It wasn’t the Company who sent you up that river – it was some of the fleet’s officers, Cavendish and a few of his friends. Of whom I was one.”
Bowman’s shoulders trembled under his uniform. He stared at the windows, which now revealed nothing but the flickering candlelight, and tried to see what might lie beyond the glass. Reeves’s voice, shaky with age and fatigue, spoke slowly: “Wright was a Company spy. A brave man, but above all an ambitious man, who became close to Cavendish’s inner circle. His mission was to draw up a list of Pagan Min’s forces before Dalhousie’s declaration of war. As he was seeking this information, he found out that the king was already preparing for defeat, well aware as he was that he could not defeat the Company. If war broke out, his plan was to flee, and take his treasure with him. Do you know Mogok, Sergeant? It’s a small town of no interest, about fifteen miles from Ava, in the middle of the jungle. But it also has the best ruby mines in the world. When Bombay declared war on the kingdom of Ava, Pagan filled chests with those jewels and sent them by boat up the river, so he could safeguard them before he fled. Wright told Cavendish what he had discovered. Together, with the help of other trusted officers, they decided to mount that expedition. In the middle of the war. That’s why you were chosen, Sergeant, you and the dregs of the fleet who were waiting to be sentenced. There was no ambassador aboard those junks, only rubies. Burning the village and its inhabitants was not a Company order, it was a precaution to ensure our plan remained secret. Your superintendent did not lie to you: that mission never existed. Despite our precautions, the Company’s managers ended up discovering what we had done. It put them in a difficult position. There was no question of allowing the news to break: they could not let the future Duke of Devonshire be seen as a brigand, a sordid jewel thief. Thanks to the patronage of Cavendish, we were protected. The Company suppressed the affair for us – much more effectively this time. While the loss of Captain Wright was regrettable, no-one cared about the disappearance of a bunch of criminals and a few soldiers. You could spend years searching for it, but you will never find any record of your mission in East India House. And now that the Company no longer exists, the Crown will take charge of everything. Our secret is safe.”
Reeves took a drag on his pipe, but it had gone out and he sucked in only air.
“It’s rather ironic, but in fact it was Wright’s death that saved you. If the mission had been a success and you hadn’t been taken prisoner, you would have been executed upon your return.”
Bowman got up from his chair and staggered, knocking the candlestick from the coffee table. Reeves did not react. The dead pipe hung from his lips. The candles began to burn the varnish on the wood. Bowman went over to the sideboard and took out a bottle without looking to see what it was. He tore out the cork and drank some sweet, strong port from the bottle. It burned his throat and made him even thirstier. He dropped the bottle, which rolled across the floorboards and came to a halt next to an armchair.
Ship’s lanterns, hung in the rigging, passed outside the window of the solarium. The sound of a steam engine reached them and made the windowpanes shake. Reeves stood up, left the room and returned a moment later. He put a sheet of paper, an inkwell and a pen on the coffee table, then relit the candles.
“I’m listening, Sergeant.”
Bowman’s voice was mournful:
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“The list, Sergeant Bowman. Give me their names. I’ll find them all for you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“There will not be any truth, Sergeant. There will never be any truth. But it’s . . . a sort of duty.”
“A duty?”
“That man who committed murder in the sewers, he has to know. You must find him, Sergeant Bowman.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not how it has to be. There’s no point explaining anything to the man who did that. He has to be killed.”
Reeves smiled and Bowman wanted to smash his head against the sheet of paper.
“I hope you’ll have time to understand before, Sergeant. Now, give me their names.”
Bowman unbuttoned his uniform jacket and his shirt, and began, his face gaunt in the candlelight, to slowly recite the names, as if each letter was part of a face that he was remembering.
The old man had drained his memory. Bowman could barely stand straight, and Reeves had to lead him by the arm, taking small steps, a candlestick in one hand, to the front door. The old captain asked him to wait there for a moment, then put the candlestick on the sideboard in the entrance hall and disappeared. He returned from the living room and stopped six feet from Bowman. He took off his glasses, slipped them in a pocket and stood facing the sergeant, who was pointing the pistol at his chest.
“You deserve your nightmares. We don’t. You’re scum.”
“There’s nothing you can do about that, Sergeant. You are who you are, now. The only choice you have – you said it to me yourself – is to find your old comrade. You can kill me later if you still feel the need.”
“It’s too easy.”
“Yes.”
The old man raised his hand. He was holding a scrap of those coloured cloths that Bowman kept in Madras, made by the village weavers. Reeves unfolded the cloth. The mother-of-pearl and the inlaid silver sparkled in the candlelight. Bowman slowly put down the pistol and opened his hands. Captain Reeves put the powder horn into them.
“I never thought you would come back for it, but I kept it all the same. I didn’t forget you, Sergeant.”
Bowman gazed at the horn, caressing the mother-of-pearl with his fingertips.
“Come back in a week. I’ll have found your men.”
Bowman walked through the garden, stopped at the pavement and looked around him. The street was empty: no passers-by, no lights. He crossed Grosvenor Road and disappeared under the black trees of St George’s Fields, holding the powder horn close to his belly.
5
Bowman drank alcohol and took laudanum until he lost track of the days. Curled up in a ball on his bed, he watched the bits of iridescent shells change colour in the light, caressed the silver inlays, opened the watertight leather lid and held the horn to his ear so he could listen to what it had to say. He told it everything that had happened to him since their separation, apologised for having abandoned it on that boat, reassured it that everything would be fine now they were back together.
Bowman waited for it to respond. As the horn remained silent, he continued speaking to it.
He sent the landlady out to buy him drugs, while outside on the street, Andrews’ men took turns to guard him. Beneath the floorboards, the chest was almost empty: he had spent most of his savings.
“Why should I be the one to find their killer, eh? Why don’t they deal with it? They’re the ones who sent us there. Leave them be. All ten of them! They should leave us be or do it themselves.”
The neighbours came to knock at the door when he started shouting to his horn. Bowman screamed at them and scared them away. The coppers who guarded him did not intervene. Bowman was mad, there was no doubt about that now.
He woke up and did not recognise his room. He fell asleep thinking he was on the junk, in a hammock on the Healing Joy, or in his cage in the middle of the forest.
“It wasn’t the war. They sent us there for rubies. We had no powder or ammunition left when the other junks arrived. I ke
pt fighting, but there was no point: there were too many of them. I tried to cut the hawsers, so we could drift away in the current, but it was too late for that. Back then, I didn’t know why I was fighting. I know now. I know why we were kept for months inside those cages.”
He spent his days looking out of the window. The women coming out of the shops, the Wapping guards who ac’costed them, the children carrying buckets of water on their heads, the grinders with their millstones that sent sparks flying when blades touched them, the open door of a forge and the sound of hammers on anvils.
“With a horn like this, I could throw myself in the Thames without getting my powder wet.”
He laughed sometimes too.
When he had finished a bottle of laudanum, he saw Burmese fishermen in their baggy trousers out on Fletcher Street, Company officers in full uniform parading past along the pavements, four-masted ships with their portholes open moving up the train tracks on Cable Street.
With the horn to his ear, he listened to the sound of the sea muffled by rubber-tree resin.
“Can’t you hear the screams? That’s Clements, when they burned his ear. And Peavish, the first time they took him away. Can’t you hear them?”
Ten days had passed. Bowman had forgotten all about Reeves when, one morning, his forehead glued to the window, a spectator to the life of the street three storeys below, emerging from a nap that he’d begun either last night or five minutes ago or two days before, he saw a carriage stop outside his building. A man in a long coat and a top hat descended from it. Some children went up to the horse, a handsome beast, and the driver cracked his whip over their heads. The children scarpered. The man in black was no longer there.
“That one was an executioner. I recognise them.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Piss off! Leave me alone!”
Another knock, and then he heard a voice on the landing.
“Sergeant Bowman?”
He walked across the room, opened the door and staggered backwards.
Captain Reeves, in his long black coat and his shiny hat, walked past him like a ghost, the folds in his clothes unmoving, his footsteps making no noise. The captain looked pale and drawn, a hundred years older than when Bowman had gone to visit him.
Retribution Road Page 13
