The Day Of The Scorpion (Raj Quartet 2)

by Paul Scott

  Merrick said, ‘No, it was the other way round. I agreed to be best man and then realized I was probably the worst possible choice. But it was too late to withdraw and I wouldn’t have known how. All that business is something I prefer to forget. I’m sorry you’ve identified me.’

  ‘My dear fellow, why? All I can say is that if I’ve correctly judged Mrs Grace’s reactions to my quite unintentional disclosure, you are now an object not only of interest but of admiring curiosity. They will remember how at the time the DSP Mayapore was singled out by the English press for praise and congratulation. One recalls it all well enough, the newspaper reports and the gossip here in the club, on this very terrace. Well you can imagine. An English girl criminally assaulted by Indians, not just any English girl – if there could possibly be such a thing in India – but a connection of a one-time Governor in Ranpur who stayed at the palace in the thirties. Within – what was it, an hour or two – the police in Mayapore under their DSP had arrested the six culprits. Technically they were only suspects and not proven culprits but that hardly diminished the blaze of satisfaction at thoughts of revenge already afoot. It’s all people talked about for days. Mirat has always had a floating population and we had people in from Mayapore who naturally enjoyed their reputations as experts on the rape and the riots, although these weren’t really connected, were they? The rape was a local affair and the riots were on a national scale. Being a military and not a civil station, of course, the major focus of interest here was on that brigadier you had in Mayapore who took charge when the civil authorities decided they couldn’t cope.’

  ‘Brigadier Reid.’

  ‘That’s him. Reid. Most of the talk was of Reid but what it came down to in the majority view was that both the army and the police in Mayapore had acted with commendable vigour, whereas the civil had shilly-shallied. Well you know how people think these days – they say the civil has become so riddled with Indians that the old dependable type of English civilian has more or less died out and it’s only the English army and police officer who can really handle an explosive situation. I remember a fellow sitting somewhere along there’ – Bronowsky pointed to the far end of the terrace – ‘one evening when I was having a drink with the Station Commander, not Hobhouse, his predecessor. There’d been a paragraph in the Courier about a farewell party in the Artillery Mess in Mayapore for Brigadier Reid, and, of course, the implication was that he’d got the sack. This fellow leaned across, pointed at the paragraph and said, “There you are. Reid saves the situation and then gets kicked out because he saved it his way, which probably means he killed twelve Indians where the Government thinks ten would have been enough. But the deputy commissioner who sat on his backside will probably get a plummy job in the Secretariat and a CIE.”’

  Merrick said, ‘The Deputy Commissioner was a good enough man. And Reid didn’t get the sack. He was given another brigade. It was a better job really. The brigade he had in Mayapore was only half-trained. The one he got was ready to go into the field. He’s back at a desk now, though, so I’ve heard. Perhaps he didn’t measure up. Perhaps he was a bit too old. His wife was dying when all that business was going on. We didn’t know about that until afterwards.’

  ‘Ah well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it’s the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people’s hearts lie. Reid saving the situation and getting the sack is what they wanted to believe. Just as they wanted to believe that the fellow in charge of the police in Mayapore had arrested the right men in the Bibighar rape business. They blamed the civil for any excessive use of force the Brigadier was guilty of and they blamed the civil when it was gradually realized that the rape case was coming to nothing. Not even coming to court. They never thought of blaming the District Superintendent for arresting the wrong men because they were convinced they must have been the right men. And the people we got here from Mayapore during those few weeks following the rape took the line that it would have served the six suspects right if the rumours going round were true.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘That the six boys were whipped and forced to eat beef to make them confess.’

  ‘I see. That tale even reached Mirat, then?’

  ‘Indeed it did.’ Bronowsky paused. ‘Was there any truth in it?’

  ‘The beef business was a result of some minor confusion, I believe.’

  ‘Confusion?’

  ‘The jailers were Muslims and some food sent in for them was mistaken by an orderly for food sent in for the prisoners, who were all Hindus’

  ‘Ah, yes. A very reasonable explanation. And the whipping?’

  ‘Judge Menen satisfied himself on that score by having the men examined.’

  ‘Physically? Or merely by questioning?’

  ‘I gathered questioning was all that was necessary. They all denied the rumour and swore they’d not been ill-treated.’

  ‘You didn’t examine them yourself?’

  Merrick, who had answered most of Bronowsky’s questions without facing him now did so. ‘Why should I have? I’m the chap who was being accused of defiling and beating the prisoners.’

  ‘Not actually accused, though? It was merely gossip, surely. Enough of it to cause the District Judge uneasiness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You ruled out the possibility of your subordinates having beaten the suspects?’

  ‘I took personal charge of the interrogations. I knew everything that went on.’

  ‘Except about the beef. You said there may have been confusion over the beef but you weren’t present when the confusion arose?’

  ‘I’m not in the witness-box.’

  ‘Captain Merrick, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cross-examine you. But I have a natural curiosity. Would you satisfy it on one point? Were those men you arrested guilty of the rape?’

  Merrick again looked across the balustrade, fixing his eyes, it seemed, on some intense but distant vision of incontrovertible truth.

  ‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that I shall believe they were until my dying day.’

  After a while Bronowsky said, ‘Our venerable pandit told Mr Kasim that he is acquainted with the aunt of one of your principal suspects, and was once engaged to try to teach him Hindi, the young man in question having lived most of his life in England.’

  ‘Hari Kumar. That’s quite correct. The aunt was a Mrs Gupta Sen.’ He looked round at Bronowsky. ‘Kumar wasn’t just one of the principal suspects. He was the principal suspect. I believed then and believe now that he planned the whole thing. He’d been going out with Miss Manners for weeks, quite publicly. People were talking. In the end I warned her against that kind of association.’

  ‘Oh, you knew her personally then?’

  Merrick flushed. He took a fresh grip on the balustrade. ‘Yes, I knew her very well.’ He hesitated before continuing. ‘Sometimes I blame myself for what happened to her because I think she partly took heed of my warning. She seemed to stop seeing him. She came more often to the club. She did voluntary work at the local hospital, and was living with an Indian woman. But that was all right, in its way. Lady Chatterjee was a very old friend of Miss Manners’s aunt, Lady Manners. All the same, living with an Indian woman like that meant she came in contact with Indians socially. That was part of the trouble. But Kumar didn’t run in those circles at all. He was nothing but a tin-pot reporter on the local gazette and gave himself airs because he’d been brought up expensively in England. I don’t really know how she first met up with him, but I saw her go up to him once at one of those war week exhibitions that were all the rage last year, and it was obvious they already knew each other. I think he’d been once to the MacGregor House where she lived. But I knew him from the time I had to haul him in for questioning. We’d been making a search of a place called The Sanctuary where a mad old white woman used to take in the dying and starving. We were looking for a chap who’d escaped from prison,
a fellow called Moti Lal who specialized in organizing subversive activities among well-educated youths. Needless to say he was an acquaintance of our venerable pandit. So was Kumar. Kumar was at The Sanctuary because that mad woman had found him drunk the night before. He needn’t have been in any trouble the morning we found him but he chose to make a mystery out of his name. In England he’d been known as Harry Coomer. He thought he was too good to answer the questions of a mere district superintendent of police. I let him go because there was nothing to pin on him, but he went down on my list all right, and before long I’d connected him with most of our other suspected trouble-makers, including of course our venerable pandit. I didn’t link the idea of a girl of Miss Manners’s kind – well, any kind of decent English girl I suppose – getting mixed up with Master Kumar. In the end I warned her. And although she said it was really none of my business who she chose to be friends with I think she realized she wasn’t doing herself any good. And I think she tried to end the association. Kumar wasn’t going to stand for that. And she must still have been infatuated. The way I see it is that he bided his time, then sent her a message begging her to meet him again at the place they apparently often met, the Bibighar, and waited for her there with those friends of his. She denied having gone there to meet Kumar and made up a cock and bull story about passing the gardens that night and being curious to see if there really were ghosts there, as the Indians said. She and Kumar both swore they’d not seen each other for several weeks. She said she never saw the men who attacked her. Well, perhaps that was true. She said they came at her from behind, in the dark, and covered her head. Perhaps she simply wasn’t prepared to believe Kumar could plan such a thing or be mixed up in it at all. In the end that infatuation of hers led to the whole damned thing going unpunished. When she found out we’d arrested Kumar she refused even to attempt to identify the other boys and started loading her evidence or threatening to load it, and if the thing had gone to trial she’d have turned it into a complete farce. I’d have been prepared to let her try but others weren’t. She changed her story, only slightly, but just enough to turn the scales. She said she’d not seen the men because of the darkness and because they’d come upon her suddenly, but she had a clear impression of them as dirty, smelly hooligans of the kind who might have come in from one of the villages beacause of the news of the riots and disturbances that were just breaking out all over the province. She knew that the boys we had in custody were the last type you could describe as dirty and smelly. You can appreciate the visual impression there’d have been in court, with these six Indian youths in the dock in Western-style dress, most of them ex-students, and Miss Manners in the witness stand describing a gang of striking whooping bad-mashes. She might have changed her tune if she’d seen them all as I did the night I arrested them. Five of them half pissed in a derelict hut where they’d gone to celebrate on home-made hooch, and Kumar back home, actually bathing his face to try and clean up the marks she made on it, hitting out at her first attacker.’

  ‘How did Kumar explain the marks?’

  ‘Explain? Oh, Master Kumar never explained anything. He was above explanations. His speciality was dumb insolence. He refused to explain the marks. He refused to answer any question until he was back at my headquarters and was told what he was being charged with. His answer to that was that he hadn’t seen Miss Manners since a night two or three weeks before when he’d gone to a local temple with her. What struck me as extraordinary really was that she said exactly the same thing. They were both so specific about their last meeting having been the visit to the temple it was as if they’d rehearsed it, or rather as if he’d terrified her or hypnotized her somehow into using just those words: I’ve not seen Hari Kumar since the night we visited the temple: while he for his part said: I’ve not seen Miss Manners since the night we visited the temple. I thought it didn’t ring true, but everyone else thought it would sound pretty conclusive in court. I always hoped we could get it into court because on oath and in those sort of surroundings the terror and shame I think she was suffering might have been lifted. I’m sure she was under a kind of spell. I’ll never understand it. I can never get it out of my head either. The picture of her running home as she did, all alone along those badly lit streets. I expect you know she died nine months later, in child-birth?’

  ‘Yes. As I recall it, her aunt inserted notices.’

  ‘That was extraordinary too, wasn’t it? Inserting notices. The death, yes. But the birth of an illegitimate half-caste kid whose father couldn’t be identified?’ Merrick raised his hands and let them fall again on to the balustrade.

  ‘It shocks you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Merrick paused, as if considering the nature and depth of his reaction. ‘It’s like a direct challenge to everything sane and decent that we try to do out here.’

  ‘It was a human life lost, and a human life beginning. Why not mark the occasion?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t see it that way.’

  ‘Most of your countrymen would agree with you,’ Bronowsky said. ‘I find it sad that in the end Miss Manners inspires more contempt than she does compassion, but I recognize that this is the way it has to be. You English all felt that she didn’t want you, want any of you, and of course among exiles that is a serious breach of faith. It amounts to treachery, really. Poor lady. The Indians didn’t want her either. There were those things that happened to Indian boys because of her. Happened or didn’t happen. In any case they went to prison, and no one seriously believed their political affiliations or crimes or whatever it was that was used as an excuse to keep them under lock and key were of a kind to warrant detention. Even the English thought it a pretty transparent ruse to hold the suspects, a handy alternative to punishing the culprits. It was the kind of ruse that wouldn’t have worked in more settled times. One forgets how highly charged the whole emotional and political atmosphere was. There were English here who talked as if a new Mutiny had broken out. Later, I remember, some of your more liberal-minded people had prickings of conscience. There was an article in the Statesman. I expect you saw it. It interested me but I looked in vain for any further developments. I thought, well that police officer was sticking his neck out but no one is going to cut it off. He’s weathered the storm. I’m sorry to realize you didn’t. Sundernagar was something of a back-water, wasn’t it? Tell me, if you’d had a chance to serve in the police force of an Indian state such as Mirat, would you have been interested? Or would the army have exerted a stronger fascination? I know how much many of you young Englishmen in the civil and the police dislike the general policy of treating these as reserved occupations.’

  ‘Would you have given me such a chance?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not. But I’ve never been inhibited, by any reservations. I might have about the consequences, in taking controversial action and making unpopular appointments, if that action or appointment attracts me strongly enough. My own appointment, after all, was monumentally controversial. Let me put it this way, rather. Were you not presently committed in quite a different direction, I should be interested to discuss such a possibility with you.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  Bronowsky smiled. ‘Because my instinct tells me you are something of an anachronism in this modern world of files, second-hand policies and disciplinary virtues. The Indian states are an anachronism too. The rubber-stamp administrator or executive is too advanced an animal for us, although ideally that is the likeness one looks for in the outward appearance. Detachment. Objectivity. Absolute incorruptibility – I don’t mean in the venal sense of the word, or the word’s opposite I suppose I should say. But a man can be – swerved – by his own passions, and to me incorruptibility always suggests a certain lack of concern. The concept of justice as a lady with a blindfold and a pair of scales someone else may lay a decisive finger on without her noticing has often struck me as questionable. It presupposes a readiness in those among whom she dispenses her gifts to keep their hands to themselves. Yo
u must agree that would be a perfect world and in such a world she would be a redundant figure. But we are dealing in imperfection. Keep the figure by all means, as a symbol of what might be achieved. Keep the illusion of detachment. Cultivate its manner. But admit it cannot be a controlling force without compromising itself. What is detachment, if it’s without the power to make itself felt? Ah, that’s the common factor – power! To exercise power in Mirat you need eyes in the back of your head as well as an unblinkered pair in front. And you need men around you who do not lack concern, who have enough concern to be in danger of it getting the better of them and leading them into error. God save us anyway from a world where there’s no room for passionate mistakes.’

  ‘You think I made one?’

  ‘I think it’s possible. For instance you haven’t said what led you to the hut where the boys were celebrating, or to Kumar’s house where you found him bathing his face. It strikes me as a significant omission. It suggests that your only reason for visiting Kumar so soon after you heard Miss Manners had been raped by a gang of unknown Indians was that Kumar had been associated with her in the past.’

  ‘You think that reason insufficient?’

  Bronowsky shook his head and looked down at his shoes, considering. ‘This hut,’ he said, ‘where the other boys were found half-drunk. It was close to the Bibighar?’

  ‘Just the other side of the river, in some waste ground.’

  ‘And Kumar’s house?’

  ‘That was also on the other side of the river.’

  ‘In roughly the same area as the hut?’

  ‘No. But not far.’

  ‘How soon after the rape, approximately, would you say you found the boys in the hut?’

  ‘At the time I estimated it at approximately three-quarters of an hour.’