A Necessary Evil

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked.

  ‘You can still examine Prince Adhir’s bedchamber; and interview the Englishwoman.’

  ‘That’s not much to go on,’ I replied.

  ‘Let me see what I can do regarding a meeting with Prince Punit. In the meantime, he’ll also be attending his brother’s wake tonight. Maybe you could ask him a few questions then?’

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Yuvraj’s apartments were located somewhere near the end of one of the wings of the Surya Mahal. It was difficult to be any more precise on account of the place being, well, the size of a palace, and because my mind was on other things.

  We were following the man who’d delivered the note to Colonel Arora, with Surrender-not almost running to keep up. Eventually, we stopped at an arched doorway set into an alcove, ornately carved to resemble the feathers of a peacock and inlaid with jade and blue topaz tiles. The door itself was guarded by another bearded warrior of similar stature to our guide.

  The two had a brief exchange of words. From the look of them, theirs was probably a language from somewhere near the North West Frontier. The sentry gave a stiff nod of acknowledgement, then opened the door and stood to one side.

  Our guide turned to me. ‘His Highness the Yuvraj’s quarters,’ he said and gestured for us to enter, before closing the door behind us.

  We entered a small antechamber that led through to a larger sitting room furnished in a style that House & Garden magazine might have described as oriental opulence. The room was cool, despite there being no sign of a fan or punkah, and the smell of jasmine and attar of roses hung in the air.

  ‘Nice place,’ mused Surrender-not.

  ‘Mmm.’ I nodded. ‘We’re certainly not in Premchand Boral Street any more.’

  ‘So what are we looking for exactly?’ he asked as he walked through to an adjoining room which I presumed was the Yuvraj’s bedchamber.

  ‘I want to get a feel for the place,’ I replied. ‘There are few better ways of gaining an insight into a man than examining his living quarters.’

  ‘Even when the man’s a prince?’ asked Surrender-not sceptically.

  He was toying with a few bejewelled trinkets that sat on a shelf recessed into the wall beside a large four-poster bed with gold silken sheets and a headboard inlaid with marble. He may have had a point.

  I sat down on the bed. It was hard, probably packed with wadded cotton rather than sprung like a European mattress. This was a surprise. I’d assumed the prince’s bed would be soft and westernised, like so much else in the palace.

  I turned over one of the pillows. This too was hard in the Indian style. I remembered something the prince had said in the car journey across the Maidan before he was killed. He’d mentioned that he’d found one note under his pillow and the other in a suit pocket. It set me thinking.

  Across the room from the bed stood an elegant writing desk. I walked over to it, pulled open the drawers and began to search through the contents: some official papers bearing the state seal, a few jewel-encrusted writing implements, but nothing of interest to me.

  Closing the drawers, I walked into a small chamber replete with large wardrobes. I opened one and stared at a rack of thirty or so suits.

  When I returned to the main bedchamber, Surrender-not was examining one of two silken tapestries that hung on either side of a gilded full-length mirror.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Why what, sir?’

  ‘Why were the notes left where they were?’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘You mean in his quarters?’

  ‘Why under the pillow? And why in the suit? Why not on his desk?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘Whoever left them there wanted to make sure that the prince, and only the prince, found them.’

  I got up, crossed the room and opened the one remaining door to find the prince’s private bathroom. On a blue-tiled shelf sat over a dozen neatly folded white towels. I shook each one out, then dropped them in a pile on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing, sir?’ asked Surrender-not.

  ‘Why leave two notes saying the same thing?’ I asked.

  The sergeant pondered the question. ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Maybe because the first note wasn’t found?’ I suggested. ‘The prince said he’d found the first one under his pillow, and the second one in a suit pocket. But he’s a prince, he probably has a hundred suits. What if the first one was left in his suit pocket and he simply didn’t find it till later?’

  I shook open the penultimate towel. A small white sheet of paper fell out and fluttered to the ground. I picked it up, opened it and looked over at Surrender-not.

  ‘I think this might be the second warning note the prince was sent,’ I said. ‘It was a risk, leaving a note in a towel, especially when the prince seems to have enough of them to stock a Turkish bath, but it would be something that he and only he would be likely to use, and the chances of him finding it were probably greater than of him wearing one particular suit. When it wasn’t discovered either, I’m guessing the third note was placed under the pillow, where he was almost guaranteed to find it.’

  ‘Their positioning implies a degree of secrecy,’ said Surrender-not. ‘If there was a plot to kill the prince, why didn’t the informant simply tell him directly?’

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘The notes were written in the local language. That suggests they were written by a local. And someone with a very specific degree of education: enough to read and write, but only in the local language – a language that the prince himself didn’t speak. Who would have access to the prince’s bedchamber, but lack the stature or status to talk to the prince directly?’

  The answer was obvious.

  ‘A maidservant,’ said Surrender-not. ‘We should get back to Colonel Arora’s office and request interviews with whichever maids would have serviced the prince’s apartments.’ He walked back through to the sitting room and headed for the door.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I’ve a better idea.’

  I crossed over to a table beside the prince’s bed and picked up the telephone.

  ‘You want to interrogate the maids now?’

  Colonel Arora sounded somewhat exasperated.

  ‘Who else would have left the notes in those particular places?’ I asked.

  ‘But how would a maid be aware of a plot to assassinate the Yuvraj?’

  ‘We won’t know that till we’ve talked to them.;’ I replied.

  ‘Very well,’ he sighed, ‘I’ll see what I can do. I trust you’ve seen all you need to in the Yuvraj’s apartments?’

  ‘I think we’re done here,’ I replied.

  ‘In that case, I’d be grateful if you would meet me outside the Rose Building in ten minutes. A car will be waiting.’

  ‘Are we going somewhere nice?’

  ‘That depends on your opinion of the lodgings of accountants,’ he said tersely.

  ‘Has something happened to Golding?’

  The colonel was silent. ‘I tried to locate him as you requested,’ he said finally. ‘He’s not been seen this morning and he’s not answering his telephone at home.’

  I felt a rising sense of dread.

  ‘Is it possible he’s gone off somewhere?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ replied the colonel. ‘Even in an emergency, he’d never have left without informing someone.’

  The Mercedes drew to a halt outside a neat, mock-Tudor bungalow that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Kent. A green-painted iron gate, set between high hedgerows, opened onto a path bisecting trimmed lawns and neat beds full of English flowers. The cottage itself appeared newly whitewashed, with its half-timbered frame painted the same shade of green as the gate.

  The air was still, the silence punctured only by the calls of a mynah bird.

  The driver waited by the car while Surrender-not and I made for the front door. Colonel Arora hadn’t come with us. He’d left a note with the
driver saying he’d been called off to deal with last-minute arrangements for the prince’s funeral.

  I reached for a large black door knocker and rapped it several times. We waited. There was no sound from inside the house.

  ‘That should have been loud enough to waken the dead,’ said Surrender-not.

  ‘Let’s hope it hasn’t come to that, Sergeant,’ I replied. ‘Make a circuit of the cottage. See if you can find any open windows or doors.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said and moved off to scour the side of the house.

  In the meantime, I walked around to the other side and tried to peer in through what I assumed were the living-room windows. The interior was dark and the window shrouded by net curtains, so it was impossible to make anything out. Returning to the front door, I gave it a hefty shove. It was solid, and locked, and I really didn’t fancy shoulder charging it. The last time we’d tried to break down a door, we’d been met with a hail of bullets. Moreover, I was technically on holiday. Then I recalled that the owner was an accountant, and took a step back to lift the door mat at my feet.

  I swore quietly to myself. No spare key.

  Surrender-not returned from his circumnavigation. The look on his face told me all I needed to know.

  ‘The rear door has been forced.’

  The garden at the back was larger, though just as neat as the one in front. A row of rose bushes with pink and red blooms ran close to the house and a table and two cane chairs sat under a jacaranda tree. It would have been a picture-postcard scene had it not been for the state of the rear door. Surrender-not had been conservative in his description when he said it had been ‘forced’. It looked like someone had taken an axe to it. Half of it lay splintered on the ground, while the rest hung limply from one hinge. One thing was certain: Golding hadn’t just decided to take the day off.

  I pushed aside the remains of the door and stepped warily into the rear porch, shattered wood beneath my feet. The house was wreathed in silence. On the tiled floor stood a pair of brown riding boots.

  With Surrender-not behind me, I opened the door to the next room, a kitchen which looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Drawers pulled out, cupboards upended and crockery smashed on the floor.

  I looked at Surrender-not. ‘Do you have your revolver, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ whispered Surrender-not. ‘It’s back at the Residency.’

  I could hardly chastise him, not when mine was a few hundred miles further away in Calcutta.

  ‘In that case, we’d better hope that whoever did this is long gone or is as complacent as we are.’

  We moved cautiously towards another door at the far end. I inched it open and viewed what would have been the living room. It was now just a chaos of overturned furniture. Books lay strewn on the floor, and the sofa looked like it had been disembowelled with a knife, a mass of grey cotton stuffing spilling from it. Thick velvet curtains had been pulled to the ground, their linings slashed.

  From somewhere behind us came a crash. Startled, we turned and headed back towards the kitchen. Before I could warn him, Surrender-not threw open the door: a reckless act, given that neither of us was armed. Half expecting a volley of gunfire, I dived after him and pulled him to the ground, but no shots rang out. Instead, on the floor in front of us stood a brown and black tabby cat, rather nonplussed by our entrance.

  Surrender-not got up and brushed himself off. The cat meanwhile jumped onto a sideboard, sending more crockery crashing to the floor. I turned and went back to continue the search.

  There was only one bedroom: a decent-sized room which had housed a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a desk, but which now resembled a rubbish dump covered by a blizzard of feathers from a savagely hacked mattress. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents hurled liberally into the maelstrom.

  I looked for signs of a struggle, but found none. The carnage in the room might have suggested one, but to me it looked like the results of someone searching for something. There were no traces of blood, though whoever had done this obviously had a knife. It appeared that Golding had been absent when the place was ransacked.

  Surrender-not entered the room. He had the cat in his arms.

  ‘You seem to have made a friend,’ I said.

  ‘According to the tag on his collar, his name is Mordecai,’ he replied. ‘He must belong to Mr Golding.’

  It felt like the sergeant was jumping to conclusions. The back door wasn’t exactly secure and the damn thing could have just wandered in behind us.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked.

  The sergeant looked slightly taken aback at the question. ‘Because no Indian would ever give a cat such a ridiculous name.’

  The sergeant had a point. I knelt down and picked two framed photographs off the floor. The glass in one had shattered and fallen out. Both showed Golding, perhaps ten or fifteen years younger, standing beside a seated elderly woman. I searched the floor for other photographs but found none.

  ’What do you make of these?’ I asked, passing the photographs to Surrender-not.

  ‘Golding’s mother?’ he suggested.

  It looked like the man was a bachelor, and I figured that a bachelor was more likely to own a cat than a married man was. Everyone needs some form of companionship, even an accountant.

  I walked through to the bathroom and knelt down to examine the contents of a medicine cabinet that had been thrown into a zinc bathtub.

  ‘What should we do with the cat?’ asked Surrender-not from behind me.

  ‘Just leave it,’ I said. ‘Cats can take care of themselves.’

  ‘It looks like an English cat, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’m not sure it would last five minutes on the streets in India.’

  I reminded him that our priority was finding Golding rather than worrying about his pet.

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,’ he said, abashed. ‘Do you think Golding was kidnapped?’

  ‘If he was,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it was from here.’

  ‘So where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, picking up a small blue bottle that was half full of round white tablets.

  ‘Maybe he’s found himself in some kind of trouble and gone into hiding?’ Surrender-not suggested. ‘He didn’t seem particularly comfortable last night.’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said, though I doubted it. And as I examined the bottle of pills, I got the feeling that Golding hadn’t intended on going anywhere for very long.

  ‘His cottage has been ransacked.’ I said.

  We were standing in Colonel Arora’s office. He was sitting behind his desk drinking tea.

  ‘You think he’s been kidnapped?’ he said, taking a sip.

  ‘He might have been. Or he may have become embroiled in something and disappeared before they could get to him. It’s hard to say one way or the other. But I don’t think they took him when they upended the place.’

  ‘It is possible, though?’

  The colonel set down the teacup and extracted a silver case from his pocket. Opening it, he offered us each a cigarette, then took one for himself.

  ‘Whoever ransacked his cottage was looking for something,’ I said. ‘If they’ve kidnapped Golding, he doesn’t seem to have told them where to find it.’

  ‘That’s not to say they didn’t find it,’ interjected Surrender-not. ‘From what we observed, they seem to have executed quite a thorough search.’

  ‘True enough,’ I agreed, ‘but I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the colonel.

  ‘Every room in the house was turned upside down, even the bathroom. It would be odd for them to keep searching the place once they’d found what they wanted. So either they found it in the last room of the house or they didn’t find it at all. My money’s on the latter.’

  ‘And do you know what they were looking for?’ asked Arora.

  ‘I was hoping you might tell me.’

  He said nothing; just fixed me with a firm, expressionle
ss stare. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, but from what I’d learned of the man over the last few days, I’d have wagered a sizeable amount that he was working out just how much to share with me. I was pretty sure that he was keeping something from us. After all, he had voiced his concerns about Golding’s whereabouts within an hour of us asking him to find the man. In my experience, no one was ever that concerned with the well-being of an accountant out of mere goodness of heart.

  ‘Do you know what he was working on?’ I persisted.

  This time the colonel was more forthcoming.

  ‘He was preparing a report on the value of the kingdom’s diamond mines. As you’ve probably surmised, Sir Ernest Fitzmaurice isn’t just here to take the air. Anglo-Indian Diamond are once again sniffing around. This time, though, His Highness had instructed the Dewan to open a dialogue with regard to the potential sale of the mines. The Dewan was to report to Prince Adhir on the discussions. Golding was tasked with preparing a report on the potential price that the kingdom might seek to obtain for the sale of the mineral rights.’

  ‘And now the prince has been assassinated and your accountant has disappeared,’ I said. ‘Do you suspect a connection?’

  The colonel fixed me with his green eyes.

  ‘Golding’s a good man, Captain,’ he replied. ‘Scrupulously honest. Sambalpore needs men like him.’

  It wasn’t an answer to my question, but it told me a lot. I took a pull on my cigarette. ‘I’d like to search his office,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll find something there that will shed some light on his disappearance.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the colonel. Til arrange it immediately after the cremation.’

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ I added. ‘Were you able to organise a list of the maids who would have had access to Adhir’s chambers in the weeks before he was killed?’

  The colonel picked up a sheet of paper. ‘I have the list here.’

  ‘Good,’ I said and turned to Surrender-not. After the funeral, Sergeant, I want you to interview the women on this list. Hopefully you’ll be able to find the one who left those notes for Adhir.’