by Khan, Vaseem
Her next errand took her back to the jewellery shop belonging to the deceased Vishal Mistry. His assistant, Kedarnath, did not seem pleased to see her again. She waited for him to finish tending to a customer, then pulled him to one side and showed him the newspaper cutting she had obtained from the Amritsar Journal containing an image of Surat Bakshi. ‘Have you seen this man before?’
Kedarnath squinted at the picture. At first, he seemed intent on denial, then his eyes widened. He nodded. ‘Yes. This was one of Vishal’s private clients. Though he looked somewhat different when I saw him last.’
‘What business did he have with Vishal?’
‘That I don’t know. Vishal dealt with him personally. He said it was just advice. He asked me not to enter it in the ledger.’
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. She thanked the man, then left.
Superintendent Roshan Seth lived in a whitewashed bungalow just a mile from Colaba Point, at the southernmost tip of Bombay. On one side loomed the lighthouse, on the other lay the old lunatic asylum and the abandoned British infantry barracks.
She was led through the deserted home by an elderly maid, into a small garden where she discovered her commanding officer on his knees in the dirt, planting a sapling. He was dressed in shorts and a wide-brimmed sunhat. At her approach, he glanced around. His eyes widened, and then he returned to his work.
She watched him for a while. The maid had vanished and it was just the two of them now.
The garden was well tended, with a profusion of flowering plants, bushes and trees. Bougainvillea made vivid splashes of colour. It astonished her that Seth might have been responsible for this. The loucheness with which he approached his work at the station seemed curiously at odds with the regimented dedication she saw around her.
A bead of sweat trickled down her back. She should probably have gone home, showered and changed. After more than a day on a rattling train, she must smell ripe.
Seth finished with the tree and struggled to his feet. He took off his hat and passed a forearm over his sweating brow. ‘You have to get the depth just right,’ he said. ‘Too shallow and it won’t hold. Too deep and you’ll smother it.’
She wondered briefly if he was being allegorical.
‘Let’s get into the shade.’
They sat on a swing seat out on the veranda.
Persis explained all that she had discovered, the various criss-crossing theories that now plagued her thoughts.
Seth’s expression suggested that he had been stricken with a bout of stomach cramps. ‘So you disobeyed a direct order?’ he eventually said.
‘I took leave as you suggested—’ she began, but he waved her into silence.
‘Semantics don’t suit you, Persis. You’ve always been a straight talker, too much so for your own good.’ He sighed. ‘What’s done is done. I hope you realise that others will discover what you’ve been up to. It will not go down well.’
She adopted a look of contriteness.
Seth stared at her, then burst into a bray of laughter. ‘If you’re going to pretend to look sorry, at least make a half-decent stab at it.’
Her cheeks burned, but she said nothing.
‘You could have got hurt,’ he said, a little more gently. ‘How would that have looked? India’s first female detective cut down at the very flowering of her career.’
‘You’re being melodramatic.’
‘Am I? Evil is real, Persis. It lives inside men’s hearts, waiting to be unleashed. How else do you explain it? The killings, the rapes, the savage lusts that overtake us? Has history taught you nothing?’
‘What if I’m right? What if Maan Singh isn’t guilty?’
‘What if he is?’ Seth shot back.
‘If he is, then what will we lose?’
He shook his head. ‘You want to fling mud in all directions, hoping that it sticks to – to someone, and you sit there and tell me what will we lose?’
‘I have evidence.’
‘You have supposition,’ snapped Seth. ‘It isn’t the same thing. Tell me, can you categorically state who actually killed Sir James?’
She hesitated. ‘No. But—’
‘Then how can you expect me to allow you to continue?’ His eyes softened. ‘Persis, I would support you in a great many things, but don’t ask me to light the funeral pyre for both our careers.’
She arrived home seething with rage. Her anger was directed not so much at Seth as it was at the institution that had corralled his thinking, stifling the courage that a truly good investigator needed.
She threw her luggage on to the bed, narrowly missing Akbar, who hissed at her, flung off her sweaty clothes, and walked into the bathroom.
Thirty minutes later, showered, dressed in a short white kimono imprinted with cherry blossom trees, she sat down heavily at the dining room table. Her father looked up from his newspaper.
‘Good trip?’
She stared at him, and then sat her chin on her forearms. ‘Yes. And no.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Akbar had followed her out and jumped on to the table. He took a strategic position at the very corner, in case she flung anything else his way.
She went over her trip north, her thoughts about the case, and her meeting with Seth.
Her father spooned pancakes smothered in Lyle’s Golden Syrup into his mouth as he listened, then burped loudly. He pushed his plate away, then looked at her with a mixture of affection and sympathy.
‘Your mother was a crusader. I know that you’ve always thought of me as the one who somehow infected her with my anarchy, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. It was she who decided that she wanted to participate in the struggle. And once she made up her mind, even Zoroaster himself couldn’t change it.’ His eyes softened in memory. ‘The day she died I begged her not to go. She was pregnant, you see. Six weeks along. We’d had word of a rally planned at Azad Maidan. The British were panicked, by then. They could sense that the horse had bolted; they were losing control.
‘There were thousands there that day. Chanting, shouting, making speeches. It was a blisteringly hot day; I saw people fainting in the press of bodies. I could sense your mother weakening. I tried to make her leave, but she wouldn’t go until she’d heard Sardar Patel speak – he was a favourite of hers.
‘By the time Patel finished, an electric rage was passing through the crowd. We were in danger of becoming a mob. The British sensed it too, and ordered us to disperse. That didn’t go down too well. Everyone was high on Gandhi’s spirit of non-cooperation, your mother too. That was when it all went wrong.
‘I heard a gunshot. I looked back and saw a British soldier at the very edge of the gathering go down. Everything became a blur after that. I hauled your mother to our car, threw her in and tried to drive out of there. But the roads were congested, people fleeing in panic. I saw British troops firing wildly in all directions.’ He stopped, his wheelchair seeming to grow around him until it filled the room. ‘I panicked. I went too fast; I didn’t pay attention to the road. The car spun out of control. I ran into an oncoming British Army truck. My legs were crushed, but I was conscious long enough to see her die beside me. She murmured your name as she passed.’
Persis sat still in her seat, a fist clenched around her heart.
All these years she had waited for her father to speak, to explain why she had grown up without a mother. And now that he had, she felt as if something had been stolen from her. Whatever else she might hold the British accountable for, she could not blame them for the death of Sanaz Wadia. Her mother was simply another victim of circumstance.
She reached across the table and enclosed his fist with her hands. His skin was warm and seemed to throb. They sat there like this, until finally she arose, kissed him on the forehead, and went back to her room.
She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan as it rotated above her.
In the corner of the room Akbar prowled the side of the wardrobe
. A mouse had recently begun to torment him.
The case swirled around her. She now had all the pieces. It simply remained to fit them together.
Sir James might have been murdered by any of a number of people. And yet only one was actually responsible. As she lined up the suspects in her mind, she became convinced that it was the Englishman’s journey to Jalanpur that lay at the heart of his death. And at the centre of that was . . .
She sat upright. The necklace.
Memory arced into her mind with the force of lightning; she realised that she too had encountered the peacock necklace, back at the very beginning of the case. She had seen it precisely where Sir James had also first seen it, after he had read the account by Mangal describing it. As she clung to the image, she felt doubt dropping away, answers unfolding before her.
She was now certain that she knew who had murdered Sir James Herriot. But could she prove it?
She did not think so. The evidence was there, but, following her meeting with Seth, she did not believe her seniors would entertain anything less than a confession.
So the question was: how could she force Herriot’s killer to admit the crime?
Chapter 27
10 January 1950
The Cathedral of St Thomas the Apostle dominated the Fort area. Built in 1718, as the first Anglican church in the city, its original purpose had been to aid in the improvement of the moral fibre of the growing British community in Bombay. They had come to India seeking fame and fortune. Instead they had found malaria, dysentery, heat and monsoon. It was inevitable that some would turn from the righteous path, seeking solace in gin, gambling and infidelity. Many of those early luminaries lay interred within the church’s precincts, under marble headstones engraved with moving elegies. Soldiers, clerks, lawyers and company men. Few had anticipated the subcontinent as their final resting place. Yet here they were, banded together for all eternity.
The funeral of Sir James Herriot took place in the afternoon, with the midday heat at its zenith, a dry wind rustling the palms lining the cathedral’s courtyard.
Persis arrived in her jeep to discover a line of cars already pulled up along Churchgate Street. She parked, then walked briskly towards the cathedral, glancing up at the white Neo-Gothic façade. Her father had once told her that the roof had been designed to be cannon-proof. She wondered just who it was that the British had expected to fire cannons at their place of worship.
At the entrance to the church she encountered a press of people, Europeans dressed universally in black, Indians in white. This contrast, the plumage each community adopted in the shadow of death, had always struck her as strangely perverse.
She had chosen to attend in uniform.
She wasn’t the only one. Police officers of various ranks were among the mourners. She spotted Ravi Patnagar bent towards the ear of the Additional Deputy Commissioner, Amit Shukla. She ducked away as she saw Roshan Seth approaching them. Seth would soon discover that she was here, but she did not want him to order her home before she had had a chance to put into action the plan she had come up with the night before.
The mourners were being greeted by the Bishop of Bombay, William Quinn, a weathered Englishman who had spent three decades broiling in the Indian sun. He met each arrival with a red face and an expression of incipient martyrdom. The bishop was famed for his bombastic sermons, and his fondness of fine wine.
‘Wasn’t sure if you’d be attending.’
She turned to find Blackfinch at her elbow. The Englishman too was dressed in black, a tight-fitting suit that appeared to elicit a wince each time he moved. The right side of his face had puffed up, giving him a beery look behind his spectacles. He was paler than usual. She guessed he had had a difficult couple of nights.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ They stared at each other, and then, lowering her voice, she said, ‘I need your help.’
‘Really? I’m not sure my body can take the prospect of offering you any more help.’ He gave a wan smile, but she was in no mood for humour.
Quickly, she outlined her plan.
He sighed. ‘Persis, you realise that half the city’s brass is here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re risking your career.’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, you could lose your uniform.’
Persis hesitated. It was not that the thought hadn’t occurred to her, or that she had blindly committed herself to a suicidal course of action. The fear was real. She simply chose to blank it from her mind, and to follow the instincts that had brought her this far.
‘I can’t let it go.’
He stared at her with a curious mixture of sympathy and admiration. ‘No. I suppose not. How can I help?’
She reached into her pocket and took out the slips of paper she had carefully written out the night before. ‘Once the service is over, I need you to hand these to the following individuals. You must be quick, before they leave.’ She named each of the recipients.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to do this at the wake? At Laburnum House.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t be sure they will all attend the wake.’
He took the chits from her and stuffed them into his pocket. ‘Shall we?’
They walked towards the front door. Persis attempted to brush past the bishop, but he latched on to her, grabbing her by the shoulders and gazing down beatifically into her eyes as if the mother of Christ had risen before him. ‘Ah, the lady of the hour.’ He flashed her a ruddy beam. ‘It is never pleasant to preside over the obsequies of a murdered man, but at least Sir James can go to his rest knowing that his killer will receive earthly justice.’
‘Is there another kind?’ said Persis tersely.
Quinn’s smile dimmed. He looked at Blackfinch as if for support, but the Englishman merely offered him a nod of greeting, then followed the policewoman into the enfolding darkness of the church.
To Persis, the close confines of the nave, packed with bodies, poorly ventilated and badly lit, had the feel of a malarial hospice. Around her, the city’s nobility tugged at their collars, fanned themselves with copies of sermon books, and sweated in sombre solidarity. One of their own had fallen, cut down from his pedestal by the forces that lurked forever at the edge of the forest. If Partition had taught them anything, it was that no man of wealth or power – Indian or British – was ever safe, not out here.
She moved towards the edge of the cathedral, drifting behind a statue of St John the Baptist. From here she could observe proceedings in relative anonymity. Blackfinch made to follow her, but was hailed by an elderly white woman who appeared to know him. Grasping him by the elbow, she wheeled him around to introduce him to an equally ancient male; between the pair of them they propelled him towards a pew, as Quinn ascended the pulpit and called the congregation to order.
Persis looked over the sea of heads, searching for the faces of those she had come for. One by one she picked them out, sitting, like the others, awaiting Quinn’s peroration.
Some of the certainty leaked from her. There was no telling how things would go. The only thing she could say with any assurance was that it would soon be over, one way or the other.
A silence descended on the congregation, punctuated by the odd cough.
‘Sir James Herriot was a man admired for many qualities,’ began Quinn. ‘A man of empathy and integrity, an inspiration to those who knew him. Taken from us too soon, he nevertheless leaves behind the richest of legacies. As Isaiah tells us: “The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come.” ’
Persis resisted the urge to interject. The one thing she now knew about James Herriot was that his integrity, such as it was, had evaporated in the face of circumstance.
She reflected on how swiftly time had passed. It seemed only moments before that the phone had rung summoning her to Laburnum House. She marshalled her initial impressions once again, set them
beside all that she had discovered, the pieces of the puzzle that she had assembled.
A shiver ran through her. What if she was wrong? What if all her conjecture amounted to no more than a ladder of false assumptions?
Her throat felt dry. She worked some moisture into her mouth.
Quinn had become animated, face red, arms flailing, in serious risk of ventricular strain. She tuned him out. Focus. Everything she had learned pointed her in the direction of the guilty party, but there was no way to be sure. Maan Singh’s confession made her task doubly difficult.
Her plan was simple. Bring together all those who might have murdered Herriot, then throw the cat among the pigeons. In the ensuing chaos, she hoped that she could force a confession from the true killer. It wasn’t a great plan. She could admit that to herself. But it was all she had.
Quinn had wound down. He muttered words to the effect that the family would not be delivering any eulogies, and then asked for the pallbearers to step forward.
She saw Herriot’s son stand up and move reluctantly towards the coffin. Robert Campbell followed him, together with Madan Lal, Adi Shankar and two others whom Persis did not recognise. Brass poles were inserted into the casket, before it was heaved up from its dais by the pallbearers.
They made for the rear exit, out towards the cemetery, a hymn swelling behind them. As soon as they passed through the door, the mourners lifted from their pews and herded out behind them, Persis following in their wake.
Herriot’s plot lay next to the grave of a former East India Company director. The hole had already been dug. Two gravediggers awaited, leaning on their shovels. She noticed that ravens lined the branches of the surrounding trees. A langur looked on from a crow’s nest at the top of a nearby palm, letting out occasional shrieks.
The casket was swiftly lowered into the earth. Quinn said a few final words, uttered a prayer, then gestured at the diggers.
Earth rained down on the casket and in short order James Herriot – what remained of him – vanished from the world.
The crowd instantly dispersed, racing for the exit without a backward glance, as if pursued by death or the tax man. Persis searched for Blackfinch, saw that he had sprung into action, moving among the mourners, pulling them aside, a terse conversation, then handing over the note, before wheeling away to the next on the list, leaving behind frowns of consternation and anger.
