‘Many people don’t inform us that they are coming, or when they will leave. We are a house of God, open to all in need of shelter.’ Mascarenhas hesitated. ‘But there was a man who corresponds to your description. He stayed with us for a number of months, though he spent most of his time outside the premises. The name he gave us was John. I’m afraid that is all. We do not ask for identification. However, it is my belief that he was English. I have met many Englishmen and I can always recognise the accents.’ Mascarenhas gave a faint smile. ‘I asked him why he was here. I could see that he did not wish to discuss the matter, but once, in a moment of weakness perhaps, he joked that he was searching for a mirage, the ghost of a long-dead woman, and that he had a message to deliver to the past. It reminded me of an English film I had once seen: Brigadoon. Though the woman in that film wasn’t exactly a ghost, I felt the same sense that John was chasing something not quite real.’
John – John Doe’s – room had remained unoccupied since he had vanished. Mascarenhas explained that they had touched nothing, awaiting his return.
Chopra searched it quickly. There was little to find. A suitcase full of clothes – John Doe hadn’t bothered to hang them up in the room’s solitary steel cupboard. Some toiletries in a plastic bag. A pair of worn sandals.
Under the mattress of the steel-framed bed he discovered a folder.
Chopra sat on the bed and flicked through it. It was a scrapbook of sorts, tracing, haphazardly, the genealogy of an Indian woman named Nirmala Bhagayshree Wadhwa. Nirmala had been born in 1928, the only daughter of a royal Indian household, the Wadhwa dynasty of the Palsekar clan. The Palsekars, Chopra knew, had once served as military commanders to the Peshwas, the ancient rulers of the Maratha Empire.
Nirmala had married in late 1947, shortly after the upheaval of Partition, and had had a daughter in 1948. She had died just months after the birth.
The file tracked the daughter, born Kalpana Bhagayshree Shankar, up until the age of about fifteen – photocopies of old newspaper articles, official registry documents, land records – then the trail stopped cold.
The file was incomplete.
Why would John Doe be digging into the history of a long-dead Indian noblewoman?
‘May I keep this file?’ Chopra asked.
‘If it helps you to identify this poor young man, then, by all means,’ said Mascarenhas. ‘In the meantime, I shall pray for his soul.’
The British High Commission in Mumbai was housed in an imposing glass skyscraper in the elite Bandra-Kurla complex in an affluent suburb of the city. Chopra called ahead and managed to wangle a fifteen-minute meeting with the high commissioner.
Inside the commissioner’s office, he was greeted with hurried enthusiasm.
Robert Mallory was newly in post and was discovering that wading through the swamp of Anglo-Indian diplomacy was a trickier endeavour than he had expected. Chopra had become acquainted with the man during his recent investigation into the theft of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, brought to Mumbai as part of a special exhibition and subsequently stolen in a daring heist. By recovering the great diamond he had made a friend of the high commissioner, and, through him, earned the gratitude of the British government.
‘What can I do for you, Chopra?’
Mallory was in a brisk pinstripe suit, pacing up and down as his personal assistant read out the agenda for his upcoming address to the Indian Christian Theosophical Society, an encounter he was dreading. He stopped mid-stride as he saw Ganesha trot into the office behind Chopra. Bending down he chucked Ganesha under the chin, the little elephant responding with a delighted tap of his trunk on Mallory’s cheek. ‘How are you, young man? Still hard at work in the detecting business?’
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ said Chopra. ‘I wanted to speak to you personally before this matter becomes public news … Two days ago a body was found in the Aarey Milk Colony. The man had been dead for two weeks, maybe more. He had been attacked, violently, then burned alive. Initially, the police thought he was a local. But we now know that he was a white male, almost certainly English.’
Mallory straightened, exhaling slowly, his finger tapping at the side of his leg. ‘Do you know why the previous incumbent of this office quit, Chopra? It was all that trouble over the Sussex woman raped in Delhi last Christmas. Turned out she was from a well-connected household – connected all the way to the House of Lords. But, in spite of my predecessor’s best efforts at cajoling the Indian authorities, neither he, nor they, got near to finding the culprit. The stress almost killed him.’
‘I remember,’ said Chopra.
The fallout had led to acrimonious words between the British and Indian governments, a public spat that had left a lingering bitterness in both countries.
‘What do you know so far?’
‘Not much.’ Chopra then quickly brought the commissioner up to speed.
‘Let me guess. You want me to make some calls, see if I can find out who your John Doe is?’
‘Yes,’ said Chopra. ‘That is precisely what I wish.’
The commissioner called back six hours later, as Chopra was sitting down to an uneasy dinner with his wife, Poppy. The day had drained him. The revelations of John Doe’s death – the thought of a man burned alive, his last moments – stirred something inside him, killing his appetite. He had seen death in all its forms. Good deaths and bad deaths. But this was something else; a death that called from beyond the grave.
‘Are you sitting down?’ said Mallory.
Chopra stood up and went to his office, closing the door behind him, ignoring the expression of irritation on his wife’s face.
‘Tell me.’
‘It was the combination of the tattoo and the steel plate,’ said Mallory. ‘I contacted some old friends in the security services, people who are used to finding other people … Your John Doe is a Jason Edward Latimer. Born in London, aged thirty-five, married … Here’s where it gets sticky. Latimer is a career criminal. He’s been in and out of prison since he was fifteen. Eleven months ago, he was released from a category B prison after serving three years of a six-year sentence for aggravated assault.’
Chopra was silent. The feeling of unease that had been with him all day seemed to sharpen to a point. ‘What was he doing in India?’
‘No one seems to know. Passport and airline records show that he entered the country precisely seven months and eleven days ago. Effectively, he’s overstayed his visa. What he’s been doing here in all that time is anyone’s guess. His former parole officer told us that he had been involved in petty drug trafficking for many years. It’s a good bet that he was in India looking for a new supplier. It might explain what happened to him. Perhaps he made enemies of the wrong people. A deal gone bad. I’m sure you know better than me the sort of thing I’m talking about.’ Mallory sighed. ‘Look, I know this is a terrible thing to say, but it’s probably for the best that he’s turned out to be a bad penny. I mean, compared to the alternative.’
Chopra felt a rush of anger at Mallory’s palpable relief. He did not share the commissioner’s sentiments. ‘What about next of kin?’
‘Already notified. His wife is on a plane. She’ll be here in the morning.’
‘I will pick her up from the airport.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
‘You are correct,’ said Chopra. ‘I don’t have to. I wish to.’
Susan Latimer’s flight arrived at what had once been Bombay International Airport, before the government’s frenzied renaming spree, an attempt to excise the lingering echoes of the country’s colonial past.
Chopra was an hour early.
His first surprise was to discover that Susan Latimer was pregnant.
She was a tall, elegant woman, dressed in jeans and a simple cotton blouse, strawberry blonde hair cut short to the nape of a long neck. An angular, but pleasant face, set with two brilliant blue eyes.
‘Are you sure you won’t go to the hotel first?’ asked Chopra.
> ‘I want to see his body.’
She spoke only once more. ‘Why do you have an elephant in your van?’
Chopra hesitated, a slight flush rising to his cheeks. It was always this way when he was asked about Ganesha. What could he say without sounding insane? The elephant was not his partner. Ganesha didn’t speak, or fly, or solve mysteries. But there was something about his young ward that defied explanation … And he could not deny that in these past months he had learned to appreciate the little calf ’s company. He had stopped dwelling on how fantastical it was for him to be wandering around the city with a baby elephant in tow. And, after all, this was India, where the impossible became merely the improbable.
‘I … ahh … I look after him,’ he said eventually. ‘Though sometimes I feel it is the other way around,’ he muttered, under his breath.
Ganesha looked on from the rear of the van with solemn eyes.
In the morgue Chopra observed her quietly as she gazed down at what was left of her husband, presumably the father of her child.
He thought that she would cry, but she did not.
‘The British Embassy will fly him back to England once you give your consent,’ he said.
‘No. I want him to be cremated. I’ll scatter his ashes in the river. Isn’t that what you do here?’
‘He is Hindu?’ said Chopra, surprise lifting his eyebrows.
‘No. He’s a born-again Christian. But it’s all the same in the end, isn’t it? Stories for children.’
He drove her to her hotel.
In the lobby they sat down and he explained what he had learned in his short investigation. He floated the theory that Jason Latimer had come to India to source drugs.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, vehemently. ‘He wouldn’t do that.’
‘My understanding is that he spent many years in the drug trade. His last spell in prison was the result of an assault on a rival dealer in London.’
‘Whatever else he was here for,’ said Susan, firmly, ‘the one thing he most certainly was not here for was drugs. I know because I was the prison counsellor that got him out of that life.’ Her hands clasped each other in her lap, but her gaze was strong and steadfast. ‘It’s how we met, how we fell in love. He was a prisoner, a criminal with a record, but I saw him for what he was – a basically good man who had made some bad choices. A man seeking redemption. I helped him to find it. And then, at some point, God took over.’ She sighed. ‘I encouraged it at the time because I could see the effect his new-found faith had on him. He became a model prisoner, and that took years off his sentence. When he was paroled we moved in together.’
She took a photograph out from her handbag and handed it to Chopra.
Jason Latimer, a brown-haired, handsome man with dark, quick eyes and an easy smile.
‘He made me laugh. You may not want to believe this, but he was one of the most honest men I had ever met. Beneath everything that was his life, he had a sense of morality, a conscience. It bothered him, what he was: a criminal; but he could never find his way out of the maze. I helped him do that.’
‘Why did he come to India?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me he was going. Just left a note.’ She handed Chopra a slip of paper.
It read: ‘I’m going to India. There’s something I have to do. If I don’t sort it, it won’t let go of me. I’m sorry.’
‘You have no idea what he meant by this?’
‘No.’
‘Did he ever mention a prior connection to India?’
‘None.’
‘Why do you think he didn’t discuss this with you?’
‘I don’t know. I guess he thought I would talk him out of it.’
‘I discovered a file in the room that he was staying in,’ said Chopra. ‘Did he ever mention a woman named Nirmala Bhagayshree Wadhwa? She died in 1948.’
‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, he’s never even been out here before. But his grandfather was stationed in India, a long time ago. He died recently.’
Chopra filed this away. ‘Did he call you from India?’
‘Yes. On and off. I begged him to come back, but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘He knew that you were pregnant?’
‘Yes. He kept telling me he was almost done, that he was getting closer.’
‘Closer to what?’
‘I don’t know.’ Grief quivered her cheeks. ‘I guess, in the end, it was closer to his death.’
Chopra left the woman in the hotel lobby.
Sitting in his van, he went back through the folder he had discovered in Latimer’s room, examining each document anew. He found something that he had missed. A photocopying receipt, tucked into the spine of the folder, stamped with the name of the charging organisation: the University of Mumbai.
The drive to the university, which was located in the southern half of the city, took an hour along potholed roads and through gridlocked traffic. If the road to hell had been paved by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Chopra had often thought, sinners could have slept safe in the knowledge that they would not be arriving at their destination anytime soon.
In the university library he spoke to the librarians one by one, showing them the photograph of Jason Latimer. He found a youngish woman who remembered him. An Englishman was a rare enough sight to be memorable. They had got talking. She recalled that he had mentioned he was working with a Professor Vikram Shroff in the Department of War Studies.
Professor Shroff was a military historian in his sixties, with a thick head of wavy grey hair, albatross eyebrows and an intense stare.
‘Yes, of course I remember him. He asked me to help him access old military records – British army records in India. Specifically, the court martial of a British officer in 1947.’
Chopra felt his senses quicken. ‘Who was the officer?’
‘A Reginald James Willoughby. Aged twenty-six at the time; commanding lieutenant of the First Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. The battalion was based in India throughout the war and helped oversee the transition of power during Partition, supervised by the Mumbai High Command. The First was the last British unit to leave the subcontinent, in fact, in late 1948.’
‘Why was this Willoughby court martialled?’
‘It was unusual, to say the least. A British officer tried under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code: outraging the modesty of a woman.’ The professor shifted in his seat. ‘You have to remember that in those days the British rode roughshod over both our laws and our women. It was inconceivable to put a British officer on trial for such an offence.’
‘But they did … I presume you managed to get the trial documents for Jason?’
‘The trial was conducted behind closed doors; the proceedings have been sealed for decades. But I have a contact in the military who was able to dig up the records.’
‘Do you have copies?’
The professor fetched a manila folder from a battered steel filing cabinet.
Chopra scanned the documents while Shroff waited.
There was a photograph of Lieutenant Reginald Willoughby. He compared it to the one of Jason Latimer. The likeness was too distinct to be a coincidence. ‘This man was Jason’s grandfather.’
‘Yes, I believe so. Though he never admitted it.’
‘Who was the woman he was accused of…?’ Chopra hesitated.
‘Raping?’ Shroff pursed his lips. ‘Her name was Nirmala Bhagayshree Wadhwa. Nineteen-year-old daughter of a princely household. Her twin brothers both served in the Somerset Lights – officer level, of course – that’s probably where they befriended Reg Willoughby. He became a regular at their residence in Pune – it was close to the Mumbai base. They were keen polo players, and Willoughby was, by all accounts, a good horseman. I believe it was only because of the influence wielded by the family that Willoughby was even tried.’
‘Did he do it?’
‘He was found guilty,’ said Shroff. ‘But in absentia. You see, just after he was
charged, Willoughby deserted. Fled the city. A deserter’s record was created for him, but no one knows what happened to him.’
What happened, thought Chopra, was that Reg Willoughby found a way to return to England, changed his name, and spent the rest of his life living in the body of his false persona. Until his death, when, burdened by the same conscience that was Jason Latimer’s curse, he had revealed his crime to his grandson. The decades of guilt must have bled into his soul. He could not die without absolution and so he had sent his grandson to find it for him.
‘Jason had compiled a file on Nirmala. He was tracking her family. Do you know why?’
‘He wanted to find her living descendants. It is my belief that he wished to meet them.’
To carry his grandfather’s deathbed confession, his apology, to those who now stood in Nirmala’s place, thought Chopra.
‘Did he find a name?’
Shroff nodded. ‘I asked an acquaintance, a genealogy expert, to assist him. She traced the family to the present day. Right here in Mumbai.’
‘Give me the name.’
The bungalow rose up, ghostly white, against the Mumbai night, a bright moon picking out the red tiles of the roof, the jharoka-style decorative windows.
Chopra left Ganesha in the van and spoke to the security guard drinking chai and smoking a roll-up outside the gate. He took out the photo of Latimer, showed it to him.
A call was made to the house and Chopra was taken to the front entrance.
A servant led him up a grand spiral staircase to a large, bookish room – a study.
A tall man rose from behind the solitary desk and dismissed the servant.
As the door closed, the man came around the desk to stand before Chopra.
Mystery Tour Page 28
