‘Do you fancy a drink?’ she asked.
Time alone with her – wasn’t this what I’d hoped for when I’d invited her to come with me to Sambalpore? And yet right now I had a prisoner to question. I cursed myself.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Her face fell. ‘Well, in that case, I may as well have a rest before dinner. It’s no fun drinking alone.’
I watched as she made her way up to her room. She was probably right about Punit. The man was a fop, a good-time Charlie. Even if he possessed the inclination to murder his own brother, did he have the foresight to formulate such a plan and the discipline to see it through? And yet Shreya Bidika, who knew him far better than I did, couldn’t discount the possibility. Who knew where the truth lay?
I walked back out into the evening air, just as the car containing Colonel Arora and Surrender-not drew up.
‘Where’s the prisoner?’ I asked.
‘He’s being taken to the guardhouse in the barracks,’ replied the colonel.
‘Is he compos mentis?’
‘He’s come round, but he’s not making much sense,’ said Surrender-not. ‘He may have concussion.’
That was less than ideal. I opened the rear door and got in beside Surrender-not. ‘Let’s go and see, shall we?’
THIRTY-FIVE
The guardhouse was a squat structure set close to the Rose Building. Entry was via an arched doorway into a corridor that smelled of boot polish and perspiration. At Arora’s orders, we were shown through to the cells by two guards. The prisoner was at the far end lying on a cot bed. Arora nodded and the guards unlocked the cell door, then lifted the man up by his arms and onto his feet. His head hung limp. Arora walked forward, grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked it back. The man’s eyes opened, bloodshot and unfocused.
‘You’re going to answer some questions,’ said Arora. ‘Who sent you?’
The man said nothing.
‘What is your name?’ The man groaned as Arora yanked his head further. ‘Well get what we need out of you.’
Arora released his grip and the prisoner slumped forward again. He walked around behind him, muttered something in a foreign tongue, then punched him in the kidneys. The man writhed in pain as the two guards held him upright. The colonel raised his arm but I caught and held his fist before he could deliver another blow.
‘Wait,’ I said.
He turned and stared at me. There was madness in his eyes.
‘This is pointless. We want to ask him questions, not beat him to a pulp.’
‘You have a better way?’ growled the colonel.
‘Get a doctor in here. See to his head injury, then get him some food. We can question him in the morning.’
Arora considered it. ‘Very well,’ he said. He issued some orders to the guards and then stalked out. The guards dropped their prisoner unceremoniously onto the cell floor, then guided us out and locked the door.
Surrender-not and I walked slowly back to the guest lodge.
‘What do we do now, sir?’ he asked.
‘We stick to the plan,’ I said. ‘We have dinner with the prince, then get back to the Dewan’s office and look for Golding’s report.’
‘You think the Dewan might be involved in today’s attack?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but if he’s a suspect in Adhir’s assassination, that also makes him a suspect for the attack on Punit.’
‘There is another possibility, sir,’ he ventured. ‘What if the prince hadn’t been the intended target? What if the victim was supposed to have been you?’
‘Things are complicated enough without us indulging in conspiracies of that nature,’ I replied.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘And there’s something else. What if the search of the Dewan’s office is a trap?’
‘Explain,’ I said.
‘It’s Colonel Arora, sir. I can’t shake the thought of his hesitation before apprehending the assassin. Do you really think we can trust him?’
‘He’s the one who persuaded the Maharaja to allow us to investigate,’ I said. ‘Why would he do that if he didn’t want to get to the bottom of it?’
He didn’t look convinced. ‘But what about his actions this afternoon? You think there’s an innocent explanation for that?’
I ran a hand through my hair. ‘I just can’t believe he’s involved in a plot to assassinate the Sambalpore princes.’
Surrender-not thought for a moment. ‘Maybe he’s only involved in a plot to assassinate the second prince?’ he said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Maybe he believes that Punit murdered Prince Adhir. Perhaps this was his attempt at retribution?’
It was an interesting theory – it would explain why Arora might have wanted to let Punit’s attacker escape but still wanted our help to solve the case of who was behind Adhir’s murder. If Surrender-not was right, it meant that Punit was still a suspect with regard to Adhir’s murder. And if Arora had hired the second assassin to kill Punit, it would explain the colonel’s willingness to beat our prisoner to a pulp before we’d extracted any information from him.
‘What do you think?’ asked Surrender-not.
I sighed. ‘I think we need to keep an eye on Colonel Arora.’
THIRTY-SIX
Dinner was a low-key affair, at least by Sambalpori standards, and probably because Punit wasn’t exactly in high spirits. I didn’t blame him. Being a target for assassination was guaranteed to put a dampener on anyone’s day; for a prince accustomed to adoration and obeisance, it must have been particularly troubling.
That was, of course, assuming he hadn’t staged it himself. However unlikely that theory might be, I wasn’t about to discount it just yet.
There had been the usual pre-prandial drinks, but Annie had turned up only minutes before the servants rang the gong and I suspected her tardiness hadn’t helped the prince’s mood. He’d barely said a word to Carmichael – not that I could fault him for that – nor to the Dewan; what he did say tended towards the monosyllabic. Fitzmaurice was missing from the ensemble, no doubt en route to the station to catch the train back to British India.
It was only when the conversation turned to hunting that the prince became animated. Carmichael began to retell the day’s events for the benefit of the Dewan, who, to his credit, feigned interest remarkably well. Then came stories of Carmichael’s previous hunts, where it sounded like he’d bagged pretty much every creature that had had the misfortune to cross his path, everything from antelope to water buffalo, like King Leopold of the Belgians shooting his way across the Congo. Bored, I spent a few pleasant moments imagining what his own head might look like mounted on a wall.
Annie’s eventual arrival felt like a godsend. She was dressed in ivory silk and sported a golden necklace, intricately designed in the Indian style and studded with small diamonds. I’d never seen her wear it before, and the thought hit me that it might be a present from Punit. For my part, I’d once bought her flowers, so I felt we were pretty much even in the gift-giving stakes.
In the absence of his father, Punit sat at the head of the table, with Annie to his right. Colonel Arora made for the chair beside her, but I wasn’t keen on that. In the nick of time I dispatched Surrender-not to beat him to it. Arora seemed rather put out, but there wasn’t much he could do. Instead, he consoled himself by taking the seat next to me.
This all turned out to be a tactical error. Surrender-not said very little throughout dinner and Punit had Annie’s undivided attention. I cursed myself. The colonel might at least have put up a conversational fight. Surrender-not just sat there chewing his vegetables.
Beside me, Arora sat with a face like Sisyphus behind his rock. He seemed to have as little time for Punit’s stories as I did. As the meal ended, though, he became more animated. He murmured to me to wait.
As the others left th
e dining room, he reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a sealed envelope and passed it to me.
‘Keys,’ he said. ‘To Davé’s office and the safe. Happy hunting,’ he continued as I pocketed the envelope. ‘Now we should rejoin the others.’
In the lounge, Punit was busy placing a record on the gramophone, and soon the syncopated rhythm of ragtime burst forth.
‘Come on,’ shouted the prince, taking Annie by the arm, ‘let’s dance!’ She smiled and followed him into the middle of the room, and I looked on as Punit indulged in a series of physical jerks and gestures that reminded me of the actions of shell-shocked men in the trenches. Not that anyone else seemed to notice anything odd. Some of them even clapped.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked Carmichael.
‘It’s called the Turkey Trot,’ he replied, taking a sip of whisky, ‘an American dance that the prince is quite fond of.’
‘It looks like he’s having a fit,’ I said.
‘Don’t let him hear you say that, old man,’ he replied. ‘He thinks it’s the height of sophistication.’
‘Your Highness is quite the dancer,’ said Annie as the music ended and she and the prince walked over. ‘Wherever did you learn?’
‘Right here,’ he replied, panting, ‘though my teacher was from Blackpool. It is a fact, my dear, that all the finest dancers hail from Blackpool.’
He clicked his fingers and a liveried waiter appeared carrying a bottle of Dom Perignon and half a dozen champagne flutes on a silver tray. The prince took one and passed it to Annie, before helping himself to another.
He took a sip and laughed. ‘Tonight we shall party with gay abandon!’
I took two glasses from the waiter and headed over to where Davé stood watching the proceedings. He declined my offer politely.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t drink.’
‘I thought everyone at court drank?’ I said.
‘Not all of us,’ he replied. ‘And someone must remain sober to ensure His Highness makes it safely to his bed.’
‘Babysitting the heir to the throne,’ I said. ‘That hardly sounds like a job for a prime minister.’
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘let us say that my role is somewhat more all-encompassing than that of your Mr Lloyd George.’
‘You’d better make yourself comfortable,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look like the prince is in much of a hurry to get to his bed tonight.’
I turned back to the revellers. The Carmichaels had joined the prince and Annie in the centre of the room, though from his face, it looked as though Mr Carmichael had not gone particularly willingly.
‘You don’t dance?’ asked the Dewan.
I nodded towards Punit. ‘Not like that, at any rate.’
I downed the champagne, made my excuses and headed for the exit, collecting Surrender-not on the way.
‘Come on, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘we’ve got a report to find.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Rose Building was cosseted in darkness with only a solitary bulb shining in the garages below. Surrender-not and I felt our way through the gloom, up the stairs to the first floor and along the corridor to the Dewan’s office. I slipped the larger of Arora’s keys into the lock and turned it.
Entering the darkened room, I extracted a box of matches from my pocket and struck one. It flared into life, dimly illuminating a cavernous office split into two parts: an informal seating area, with sofas and a low table, and a step leading to a raised working area beyond, dominated by a large wooden desk. The walls were lined with paintings of rajas and ranis in regal pose, and the floor was covered with several rugs. Behind the desk stood a chair and not much more.
‘Where’s the safe?’ asked Surrender-not.
‘Check behind the desk,’ I replied.
The match burned down and I blew it out as the flame singed my fingers. On a corner of the desk sat a brass table lamp with a shade of emerald glass. Surrender-not closed the window shutters, then switched on the lamp, bathing the room in a dim aquamarine light. The desktop was clear of papers.
Surrender-not opened the desk drawers and began to search through them. Meanwhile, I scoured the room, looking for anything that might conceal the safe.
‘Any luck?’ I asked after several minutes.
He’d extracted some papers from one of the drawers and was busy leafing through them.
‘Nothing so far,’ he said, his attention focused on the documents. ‘Any sign of the safe?’
‘There’s nothing behind any of the paintings,’ I said, ‘and there’s precious little else in here to hide it behind.’
‘Maybe the colonel was mistaken?’
‘It has to be here,’ I said.
‘But if not under the desk or in the walls, then where?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Surrender-not was still poring over his pile of papers on the desk. I walked over.
‘Anything?’ I asked.
He looked up.
‘Tell me you’ve found something.’
‘Geological reports, I think.’
Anything to do with the diamond mines?’
‘I can’t tell, sir.’
‘I suppose they’re better than nothing. Grab them and let’s go,’ I said, switching off the lamp.
He rose from his chair, and with the room plunged back into darkness we groped our way towards the door. Neither of us remembered the step between the raised area and the rest of the office. Things might have turned out rather differently if we had.
Being a few paces in front, it was I who missed the step first and took the fall. I landed awkwardly, and winced as a searing pain shot through my left ankle. A moment later, Surrender-not was sprawled beside me.
‘Bloody hell,’ I whispered, rubbing my injured ankle. Are you okay?’
‘Yes, sir. You?’
I stood up slowly and cautiously put some weight on my left leg, then breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘What sort of an idiot puts a step in the middle of the room?’
But the answer hit me before Surrender-not could reply. I hobbled back up to the desk and switched on the lamp.
‘That rug,’ I said. ‘Help me move it.’
Together, Surrender-not and I rolled up the rug that was behind the desk. I dropped to my knees for a closer look, then traced the outline of a rectangular panel, about one foot square, cut into the floorboard. At one end was a small hole, just large enough for a finger to pass through. I gently lifted out the wooden panel and placed it beside me on the floor. Beneath it was a grey metal box with a small brass plaque embossed with the words FICHET, Paris. I looked at Surrender-not.
‘Voilà,’ I said, turning back to the hole in the floor. ‘One steel fire safe.’
I reached into my pocket for the smaller of the two keys and placed it in the lock.
Inside the safe were a series of thin grey files, a small velvet pouch and a revolver, which, thanks to Colonel Arora, I now knew to be a Colt, identical to the one the assassin had used on Prince Adhir. Leaving the gun and the pouch in place, I lifted out the files and passed them to Surrender-not. Sitting back down at the desk, he began to leaf through the first one.
‘Anything?’ I asked.
‘Just budget papers.’ He closed the file and put it to one side, then opened another. He looked up almost immediately. ‘This looks like it.’ He smiled. ‘Golding’s report on the valuation of the Sambalpore diamond mines.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Replace the others and let’s get out of here.’
Ten minutes later, having repositioned the rug and locked the door, we were back in our own office. Surrender-not sat down and pulled the grey folder out from under his dinner jacket. As he did so, two thick documents slid out and onto the desk. He picked them up and examined the covers, then quickly leafed through both and frowned.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘There are two reports here,’ he replied. ‘Both with the same title and both signed by Golding an
d dated the day before yesterday.’
‘Two copies of the same report?’
‘I’m not sure. The signatures are different. Look, sir,’ he said, passing them to me.
He was right. The signatures were subtly different. I held both up to the light. There was something else peculiar. ‘The ink is different too,’ I said. ‘Both signatures are blue, but in different shades.’
I passed the documents back to Surrender-not who opened both to the first page and began to compare them. He soon looked up.
‘There’s more, sir,’ he said, pointing to a paragraph in both documents. ‘The numbers are different.’
‘How different?’
‘Quite substantially. It’s as though they’re describing two completely different sets of mines.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘I’ll have to go through them in detail, but from what I can tell from the summary, one report places a valuation on the diamond reserves hundreds of crores of rupees higher than the other.’
Where we used millions, Indians talked in lakhs and crores. It was still confusing to me, but it didn’t take a Ph.D. in mathematics to work out that hundreds of crores of rupees made for a damn big discrepancy.
‘Which one has the higher figure?’ I asked.
Surrender-not pointed to one. ‘This one,’ he said. ‘It looks as though you might have been right to suspect the Dewan, sir.’
He continued reading. Suddenly his expression darkened.
‘Could you just explain your theory to me, sir.’
‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘Davé has some illicit business going on with respect to the diamond mines. Maybe he’s been dealing on the side or taking a cut on sales and covering his tracks by distorting the figures for the diamond reserves. Suddenly Anglo-Indian Diamond come sniffing around, wanting to buy the mines, and unlike in the past, this time the decision is taken to sell them. As part of the process, Golding is tasked by Adhir with preparing a valuation report. That would have led to Davé’s scam being uncovered, so he assassinates the prince and makes the accountant disappear. He then obtains the document and falsifies the figures.’
A Necessary Evil Page 26
