A Necessary Evil

by Abir Mukherjee

  Surrender-not turned to face me, suddenly animated. ‘You don’t think—’ He broke off mid-sentence.

  ‘That Colonel Arora was part of the plot?’

  ‘He was the one who chose the route. He could have tipped off the attacker.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘From the sound of the blow with which the man struck the Colonel, I think he’s lucky to be alive.’

  ‘Then how did he know we were going to take Mayo Road?’ asked Surrender-not.

  ‘Maybe there were several assassins covering all the routes,’ I said. ‘It’s been done by terrorists before.’

  Before I could give it much more thought, there was a knock at the door. Behind me I heard Sandesh, our manservant, pad barefoot down the hallway. The front door opened and my stomach leaped as I recognised the voice of the new arrival. It had been a while since I’d last heard it, and things between us were complicated to say the least, but even now, it acted like electricity on my synapses.

  I knocked back the whisky, took a deep breath and returned to the living room just as Sandesh showed our visitor in.

  She wore a sleek black silk dress and a choker with a diamond at its centre, and to me, she was the most beautiful thing in all of Bengal.

  ‘Miss Grant,’ I said. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’

  I meant it too.

  I’d first met her while investigating the death of her former employer. We’d even been close for a while. But there had been a slight misunderstanding, which had rather derailed things. I didn’t blame her for it, though: I imagine most women would go off a man who’d accused them of complicity in murder. I had of course tried to explain that I hadn’t technically accused her of anything; but it’s difficult to resurrect a romance by resorting to technicalities.

  Not that the whole thing had affected her much; indeed, she’d come out of it smelling of roses, or at least smelling of whatever expensive perfume she wore these days. She’d made quite a bit of money out of the whole affair, had invested it in the stock of a jute company, and was now rumoured to be worth a pretty rupee. She was smart that way. Smarter than I was, at any rate.

  The money had done a lot for her. Not only did it allow her to dress as elegantly as she deserved to, it had also gone a long way to removing the one stigma that her looks and charm could never overcome: her part-Indian blood. Not that her being an Anglo-Indian had ever been an issue for me.

  I directed her to the sofa.

  ‘Surrender-not was saying, just the other day, that we don’t see enough of you,’ I lied. It wasn’t the first time I’d put him on the spot, but I considered it an essential part of his training. A good detective needs to be able to think on his feet, after all.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ I said as he entered the room.

  ‘Oh yes, Miss Grant. A-absolutely . . . Just the other day,’ he stammered from his position near the door.

  ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ I asked. ‘There’s not much of a selection, I’m afraid. We’ve whisky, and there’s some gin somewhere. Neither Surrender-not nor I much care for it, but we always seem to get through it at a fair rate of knots. It’s odd as we don’t get many lady callers – not unless you count the housekeeper, of course, and she swears she never touches the stuff. I suspect she’s more of a champagne drinker. As, I suppose, are you these days,’ I said, gesturing to the diamond-studded choker round her neck.

  ‘Whisky’s fine,’ she said, turning to Sandesh, ‘ek chota peg.

  ‘One for me too, Sandesh,’ I added, ‘but make mine a burra. Anything for you, Surrender-not?’

  ‘I better not,’ he replied, still hovering near the door.

  Sandesh nodded and made for the drinks cabinet.

  A quiet night in for you both?’ asked Annie, fanning herself gently with a newspaper she’d picked up from the coffee table.

  ‘Absolutely, Miss Grant,’ I said. ‘Surrender-not’s mother wanted him to meet some girl tonight, but the boy’s not particularly keen on settling down just yet. He’s told her he can’t make it because I’ve got him working night and day on a case.’

  Surrender-not smiled weakly.

  ‘As a result we’re keeping a low profile.’

  ‘And what do you think his mother makes of you calling her son Surrender-not?’ she replied. ‘For pity’s sake, Sam. You could at least try to pronounce it properly.’

  Surrender-not and I shared a look.

  ‘Well, if he doesn’t like it, I suppose I could always call him Bunty.’

  ‘What?’ said Annie, perplexed.

  The sergeant’s face reddened. ‘Surrender-not is fine,’ he said hastily.

  Sandesh brought over the drinks, then retreated quietly from the room, pressing the switch on the wall activating the ceiling fan as he went.

  ‘Anyway, Miss Grant,’ I said, ‘as you can see, Bunty and I are both very busy. Is there something we can do for you, or have you just popped round to enjoy the sparkling conversation?’

  She took another sip of her whisky, a substantially larger one this time. ‘Actually, I came round to ask you to stop interfering in my affairs.’

  I feigned a look of innocence that could have graced the face of St Francis of Assisi. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to explain, Miss Grant, as I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  She didn’t look wholly convinced. ‘So you haven’t been talking to Mr Peal about me?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles Peal – the solicitor.’

  ‘The name doesn’t ring any bells.’ I shrugged.

  ‘Well, he seems to know you, Sam.’

  ‘Old fellow with a big nose?’ I asked, as though suddenly struck with inspiration. ‘Now you come to mention it, I think I might have come across him in the Calcutta Club once. Nice enough chap, I suppose – if you like that sort.’

  ‘He mentioned you’d spun him some story about me. Apparently the phrase suspicion of complicity to murder was used more than once.’

  I puffed out my cheeks and scratched the back of my head. ‘That’s a shocking accusation. I only talked to him for about five minutes.’

  ‘And in that time, you managed to sully my reputation? How did my name even come up?’

  ‘He said he was an acquaintance of yours.’

  ‘Oh really?’ She folded her arms. ‘He told me you seemed to know that he’d taken me to dinner a few times. Are you spying on me, Sam?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I expect Surrender-not must have mentioned it to me. He knows pretty much everything that goes on in this city.’ This wasn’t strictly true. Surrender-not didn’t have a clue what went on in the brothel next door, never mind the rest of town.

  The truth was I had quite a few paid informers across town, from rickshaw wallahs to shopkeepers. The doorman at the Great Eastern Hotel just happened to be one of them.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Surrender-not, ‘I really should be getting on.’ And he left the room with rather more haste than seemed either appropriate or helpful.

  ‘So, old Charlie Peal’s keen on you, is he?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t see why that should be any business of yours, Captain Wyndham,’ she replied.

  ‘It isn’t,’ I said, ‘but if you ask me, he must be at least fifteen years older than you. What is he, forty?’

  I thought I noticed the faintest of smiles on her face.

  ‘He told me he was thirty-five.’

  Charlie Peal was a bigger liar than I was.

  ‘And you believed him?’ I said. I can get Surrender-not to check, if you want?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, Sam,’ she said, taking another sip.

  It was time to take the initiative.

  ‘And what are you doing going to dinner with someone as dull as that?’ I asked. ‘I’ve met corpses more lively than him. I only talked to him for five minutes and it felt like I was physically ageing. You carry on seeing him and before you know it you’ll look sixty.’

 
‘So you were doing me a favour, besmirching my reputation, were you?’

  ‘As I said, I didn’t do anything . . . But you’re welcome.’

  She paused, then held out her glass. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a top-up?’

  I took the tumbler from her and walked over to the drinks cabinet.

  ‘There’s another reason I’m here,’ she said as I refilled the glasses.

  ‘And what might that be?’ I asked, with my back still turned towards her.

  ‘Adi Sai.’

  I turned around as calmly as I could.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘I heard he’d been shot today. That you were with him when it happened.’

  ‘How did you come to hear that?’ I asked, passing her drink to her.

  ‘Come now, Sam,’ she said. ‘Do you think Surrender-not’s the only one who knows what goes on in this city? I’ve got contacts at the Statesman. They’re running a picture of the assassin in tomorrow’s paper.’

  ‘So you’ve come to check that I wasn’t hurt?’ I asked. ‘I’m touched.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ve come to ask you what happened. Adi was a friend. We were introduced last year at a party. I’ve met him and other members of the family a few times since then.’

  That the prince might have been a friend of Annie’s was not something I wanted to hear. ‘You know I can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘You can at least tell me when the funeral is.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’d like to attend.’

  I shook my head. ‘There’ll be no funeral in Calcutta. All I know is that the body’s being repatriated to Sambalpore as soon as possible.’

  She didn’t stay much longer. Just long enough to finish her drink, walk to the hall and kiss me on the cheek. I closed the front door behind her and slowly breathed out.

  FIVE

  That night, I lay awake on my bed in the turgid heat.

  My head felt thick, like fog. My eyes watered and my nose ran, and overlaying everything, the constant throbbing at the temples, an incessant drumbeat of pain.

  A casual observer might think I was coming down with a cold, but the initiated would know. These were the first symptoms of opium withdrawal.

  I should point out that I’m not an addict or, to use the vernacular, an opium fiend. Fiend – even the name has a certain malevolence to it, something that I’ve never felt applied to me. My usage was purely medicinal.

  They say opium, if taken in moderation, is difficult to become addicted to. This was one of the reasons it was my drug of choice after the war. So it was a shock the first time I experienced withdrawal. To be fair, the symptoms tended to subside over a period of a week or so, after which my head cleared and I could function normally once more. As such, while the after-effects weren’t pleasant, I judged my condition to be manageable.

  I lay there and forced myself to concentrate. I replayed Adhir’s murder in my mind. Dissecting it. Analysing it. Was there anything I could, or should, have done differently? I turned over. But sleep wouldn’t be coming soon, and so I got up, pulled on a shirt and headed for the door. Surrender-not was in the living room, sitting in the dark. No doubt he too was re-living the murder in his head.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ I said.

  He stared at me with that hang-dog expression of his, but said nothing. It wasn’t as though he was ignorant of my situation – you would have to be a particularly useless policeman to spend a year living in the same digs as someone without realising that their fondness for midnight walks might be for reasons other than exercise, but we never discussed it.

  Calcutta’s Chinatown was Tangra, a rats’ nest of lanes and dirt roads to the south of White Town. It was a hinterland of seedy buildings, dormitories and dilapidated factories hidden behind high walls and spike-topped metal gates. There wasn’t much to see during the day, just another shabby suburb, distinguishable from the other nonwhite areas only by the fact that most of the hoardings were in Chinese. At night, though, Tangra transformed itself into a hive of shebeens, street kitchens, gambling houses and opium dens. In short, it housed all the things that made living in a sweltering, crumbling metropolis of several million people worthwhile.

  I ordered the taxi to stop beside a boarded-up shop and handed the driver a few crumpled notes. Crossing an open drain, I headed down an ill-lit alley that was deserted save for a pack of mongrel dogs and a mound of rotting refuse that smelled worse than the drain.

  A door opened up ahead, spilling a shaft of greasy yellow light into the rubble-strewn gullee. A man stumbled out, silhouetted against the glare, and staggered past without looking up. The door slammed shut and the alley plunged once more into darkness. I kept walking, heading for another door a hundred yards further along.

  I knocked twice and waited. Eventually it opened a crack, just wide enough for an eyeball to stare out.

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘Lao Yin sent me,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘You wait.’

  The door closed. I waited.

  I’d never met Lao Yin, but I knew about him: most of the Imperial Police Force did. He was rumoured to be a representative of the Red Gang, a Shanghai-based criminal organisation that specialised in opium, prostitution, gambling and extortion. And with that sort of pedigree it was natural that they exercised a degree of political control too. Lao Yin was in Calcutta to manage the supply side of their opium operations and his name opened many doors in Tangra, including, I hoped, this one. Minutes later I was being ushered through the doorway, along a narrow passageway and through to a small room lit by hurricane lamps where the plaster flaked from the walls onto a floor scattered with dirty mattresses. The sweet, earthy scent of opium smoke hung in the stifling air.

  Two of the mattresses were occupied, both by Orientals. Both lay on their sides, one pulling at an opium pipe, the other seemingly passed out.

  An elderly Chinese woman entered. From the lines on her face, I guessed she wasn’t far off eighty but her movements were still spritely.

  She smiled and pointed to an empty mattress.

  ‘Please make comfortable,’ she said softly. ‘I bring afeem.’

  I settled onto the mattress, lay my head on a smooth, porcelain pillow and waited until she returned with the opium tray. On it sat the pipe, lamp, opium resin and a collection of tools used to cook the O.

  I tried to relax as she sat cross-legged on the floor and set to work, warming the ball of opium over the flickering candle flame. Just being in the presence of the O seemed to ease my symptoms. The woman teased and pulled the ball as I looked on, almost hypnotised. As it heated, the ball softened and transformed into a viscous state and then began to evaporate. She placed it into the saddle of the pipe and handed it to me. I took the first pull. The tendrils of O worked their magic, infiltrating first my lungs, then through the capillaries into my bloodstream. I heard the crack of the old woman’s bones as she stood up, then the sound of her footsteps. I took a second pull, then a third, and felt my nose begin to itch and a million nerve endings across my body seemed to fire in unison. I shut my eyes as the whole world gradually contracted to the area inside my skull.

  SIX

  Saturday 19 June 1920

  It was another stupidly stifling day – overcast but sweltering. ‘Calcutta Weather’ they called it. The monsoon rains were coming, you could feel it, yet the clouds were still to break. Surrender-not and I were in the Wolseley, crossing the pontoon bridge over the river.

  Our destination, the Hotel Yes Please, was a no-star dive located partway down a cobbled street missing half its cobbles. A stone’s throw from Howrah station, the area was popular with native travellers of limited means needing a place to stay, and the street was dotted with lodging houses and dubious-looking eateries. From outside, the Yes Please looked a cut above the others, which is to say that it had a pot plant beside the door
and a sign above it that was still legible.

  Leaving the Wolseley parked some way down the street, Surrender-not and I headed for the entrance. The air stank with the God-awful smell of ammonia and dung that indicated a tannery was located not far upwind. A number of Chinamen sat on the veranda of the building opposite, engrossed in that oriental version of dominoes that seems to fascinate them. Their presence confirmed what my nostrils had suggested. In Calcutta, where there was a tannery, there were Chinamen. They had a virtual monopoly in the city’s leather trade, since the locals, Hindus in the main, would have nothing to do with the slaughter of cows, and their Mohammedan neighbours weren’t overly keen either.

  We crossed over the open sewer by way of a strategically placed slab, then up a short flight of stairs into the dimly lit lobby. At one end, behind a metal grille, sat a plump, middle-aged woman. Beside her, a reed-thin joss stick in a metal holder released a stream of incense which battled in vain against the stench from outside.

  She looked up – a moon face with the slightly oriental features that many Bengalis seemed to possess. Her dark eyes were tinged with kohl and in the centre of her forehead sat a red dot the size of a ha’penny.

  ‘Mrs Mitter?’ I enquired.

  Her face lit up. ‘Yes. You received my message?’

  ‘You have information as to the whereabouts of the man we’re looking for?’

  ‘Hã.’ She nodded. ‘He is lodging here for last two-three days. Here for the Rath Yatra, or so he said. Odd no? Why come to Calcutta for Rath Yatra when real temple to Lord Jagannath is in Puri?’

  ‘You’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘Most sure,’ she snorted. ‘Though sketch in the paper was hardly work of art. You maybe should get Asit Haldar or one of the Tagores to do next one.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘This morning only. When he returned from taking breakfast.’ She brandished a native newspaper. ‘I had paper open to page with his picture when he passed on way to his room.’

  ‘How long is he registered to stay?’