Smoke and Ashes Read online

  It was tempting to chalk the whole thing up to paranoia, and a better man might have questioned my suspicions – as better men had done in the past. But most of them were dead now, while I and my neuroses were still here.

  Back at Rishra thana, the Scot, Sergeant Lamont, was behind his desk, finishing a telephone call.

  ‘Captain Wyndham,’ he said, replacing the receiver on its hook, ‘I’ve made arrangements for the transfer of Ruth Fernandes’s body to the Medical College Hospital as per your instructions, and I’ve left a message for Dr Lamb regarding the post-mortem.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope the old man can add something to our inquiries. Has a first information report been filed?’

  ‘A missing persons report was done when George Fernandes came in this morning. Did you get much out of him, by the way?’

  ‘Not much, other than his wife was loved by all. He seems to be in shock.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘Now …’ I said, ‘now we go and pay our very own Charon a visit.’

  Lamont’s brow creased. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘We’re going to see the ferryman tasked with carrying the dead over the River Hooghly to Hades.’

  The river was peaceful this far upstream, more peaceful than at Calcutta at any rate. Most of the larger vessels and ocean-going merchantmen never made it up this far, leaving the water to the barges that carried the jute downriver and the myriad smaller craft that had plied goods and people along and across the Hooghly since time began.

  A few small boats were tied to a rotting wooden jetty. Others sat temporarily marooned in the soft mud of the riverbank, awaiting rebirth on the incoming tide. Several boatmen, barefoot and clad in little more than vests and lungis, were seated at a tea stall, engaged in vociferous discussion and enveloped in a haze of grey bidi smoke. Their conversation died as we approached, their voices ceasing as abruptly as a falling guillotine, replaced by the watchful glances of men who knew better than to talk to strangers.

  I held back as Surrender-not went over to question them. From where I stood, their replies seemed slow and sullen, but eventually Surrender-not returned.

  ‘The boatman who ferried Mrs Fernandes over this morning is called Kanai Biswas. He’s not here at the moment – apparently he’s taking some goods across to Khardah – but he should return soon.’

  So we waited. Surrender-not went back and purchased two bhãrs of sweet tea and rejoined me as I sat on the ledge of a low wall and took in the surroundings.

  A dinghi-nauka, with its rounded hull and pointed bow, and from which we’d derived the word dinghy, sat rising and falling on the ebbing waves, its ebony-hued owner busy in its stern tending to a net with the care of a seamstress with her sewing. I presumed he’d be catching hilsa, that silvery freshwater fish so beloved of Bengalis, but which seemed to me to be nothing more than a million small bones wrapped in scales.

  The leaves on the coconut palms that lined the bank shivered in the early-afternoon breeze. Surrender-not anxiously checked his watch.

  ‘Keep calm, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Das’s protest doesn’t start till four. We’ve still got time to get back to town.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied without much conviction.

  Eventually a boat, what the locals called a chandi-nauka, began to draw near. It was little more than a large wooden canoe, with a deck of loose planks and a burlap hood over its middle. At the stern, his weight pressing down on the long wooden steering pole, was a boatman in a loose, dirty blue turban, vest and checked lungi. He looked as lean and gnarled as the boles of banyan wood which occasionally floated past.

  As it approached the ghat, the man jumped off into the waisthigh water and began to push the vessel aground. A couple of the men at the tea stall walked over to help pull it to shore. One of them gestured in our direction. The boatman straightened his back and looked over, wiping the spray from his face.

  On drier ground, he bent over and wrung the water out of his lungi, then made for the tea stall. Surrender-not and I got up and walked over as he settled himself at one of the worn wooden benches with a bhãr of tea.

  ‘Kanai Biswas?’ said Surrender-not.

  The man took a sip of his tea and looked up. His eyes were little more than dark pits set in the leathery skin of a face pockmarked with greying stubble.

  ‘Hã.’

  ‘Tell him we’d like to ask him some questions about the woman he transported this morning,’ I said.

  Surrender-not translated. The man’s response was brief.

  ‘He says he’s already told the local police all he knows.’

  ‘In that case, ask him what he charges for the trip to Barrackpore.’

  Surrender-not looked at me quizzically but then did as requested.

  ‘Du’i tākā,’ said the man.

  ‘Two rupees –’

  ‘Prati ta.’

  ‘Each,’ completed Surrender-not. ‘It’s extortion. He’s trying to fleece us because you’re a sahib.’

  ‘Tell him we’ll pay him five – for the journey, and a few answers.’

  The man agreed, and while he finished his tea, I sent Surrender-not back to the road with a message for our driver, ordering him to return to Lal Bazar without us.

  Five minutes later, we embarked from the jetty into the small boat. Kanai Biswas leaned on his steering paddle and pushed the boat out into the current. Between his position at the stern and where we sat was a small area covered by the burlap hood, in which sat some of his possessions: a reed mat, a water bottle, and a small shrine to the goddesses Kali and Durga. Surrender-not positioned himself on the portside of the boat, midway between Biswas and me.

  ‘Ask him how long it’ll take,’ I said, sitting back on a bench of loose boards.

  ‘Bís minit prãi.’

  ‘Twenty minutes, give or take.’

  I dropped one hand into the cold waters of the Hooghly and left it there. It was odd. From the banks, the river appeared almost bracken in colour, but close up it was much greener. The tide was with us, and all Biswas had to do was guide the boat in the right direction with the steering pole.

  ‘I expect this is similar to your university days,’ I said to Surrender-not. ‘Punting on the Cam. Maybe you could give Mr Biswas here some tips.’

  ‘Hardly,’ replied the sergeant. ‘You could almost leap across the Cam in a single bound.’

  It was a fair point. Though not quite as wide as it was in Calcutta, the river here still seemed about a mile across.

  ‘In that case, make yourself useful and ask him some questions about Ruth Fernandes.’

  Surrender-not launched into a series of questions, the boatman replying with little more than monosyllabic grunts.

  ‘He says he knew her quite well. She was a regular customer apparently. A kind-hearted woman, even though she was a non-Bengali … and a Christian. He would take her most days, whether she was on the day or night shift.’

  ‘When does he clock off?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He lives on the boat and moors at either Rishra or Khardah in the evenings. He says this morning was unusual in that she was early.’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘He thinks about an hour or so. She normally arrives at the Barrackpore jetty when the sun is rising from behind the trees. This morning, she was there at first light. He says he’s normally in midstream when the shift whistle at the Wellington Jute Mill goes off. That’s probably seven o’clock. This morning, he was already on his way back with passengers when he heard it.

  ‘Was anyone else on the boat with her?’

  Surrender-not asked the question. The man shook his head and muttered another solitary syllable in reply.

  ‘She was alone,’ said Surrender-not.

  ‘Does he know why she was early?’

  ‘He says it’s not his place to ask.’

  ‘Ask him if she seemed any different this morning. Was she at all anxious?’

  ‘He says he couldn’t tell. She was sit
ting where you are now, with her back to him, and he was at his position at the rear.’

  Behind me, I heard the boatman clear his throat. Something he said caught Surrender-not’s attention. The sergeant’s demeanour changed suddenly and he fired off a volley of questions in rapid succession.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘He says he did notice something odd.’

  I sat upright. ‘What?’

  ‘He says that when they arrived at the jetty in Rishra, there was a man loitering at the roadside. He says he appeared to be waiting for her.’

  ‘Can he describe the man?’

  ‘Short black hair … middle-aged, maybe in his forties. He says he can’t say much else. He didn’t get a good look. It was dark and the man was a distance away, but it wasn’t someone he’d seen before, at least not a local.’

  ‘Might it have been the husband, George Fernandes?’ I asked.

  Surrender-not put the question to the boatman.

  ‘He says he knows what Fernandes’s husband looks like and it wasn’t him. But he says the man wasn’t Bengali – he was dressed in a chador, but wore trousers rather than a dhoti. He says he looked “Eastern”. Assamese possibly.’

  That wasn’t so unusual. Assam bordered Bengal and there were plenty of Assamese in Calcutta, drawn to the city in search of paid work.

  ‘Why does he think our man was waiting for Nurse Fernandes?’

  Surrender-not translated the question.

  ‘When she disembarked, she took the path to the right, towards him, rather than the normal route towards her home.’

  I joined the dots. Nurse Fernandes had left work earlier than usual and caught the ferry back to Rishra, possibly to meet a man whom she might have known, but whom the boatman didn’t think was a local. A few hours later she was dead, her face sliced up like a Picasso painting.

  If she did know the man waiting for her at the riverbank, it suggested some sort of romantic assignation, and that, in turn, suggested two potential suspects: the man she was meeting; or the man she was married to.

  By now we were in midstream, heading upriver, and the features of the opposite bank were coming into focus. The Barrackpore side of the river looked very different to Rishra. Gone were the warehouses and the mills with their smokestacks, and in their place, a regiment of neat, white, officers’ bungalows of the military cantonment, with gardens leading down to the water’s edge.

  ‘Barrackpore was where the mutiny of 1857 started,’ said Surrender-not.

  ‘I thought it started up near Lucknow,’ I replied. ‘Something to do with tales of rifle cartridges greased in cow and pig fat?’

  ‘That’s true, but the first shot was fired here, a few months earlier, by a sepoy called Mangal Pandey. They hanged him of course, and disbanded his regiment.’

  Barrackpore didn’t seem the sort of place where revolutions started. Indeed, it looked like the most British place in all of India. The viceroy had a palace here, though it had hardly been used since the capital had moved to Delhi.

  We approached the jetty, and with a pull on his oar, Biswas deftly brought the boat around so that it lined up neatly with the pier. I checked my watch. It was almost two o’clock. The protest at the bridge began at four. That didn’t leave much time for what I needed to do in Barrackpore. Especially not if I wanted to get home for a dose of kerdū pulp prior to Das’s demonstration.

  TWELVE

  A row of bicycle rickshaws was lined up on the roadside. Surrender-not and I walked up the shallow bank and commandeered a couple.

  ‘Where to, sahib?’ asked the rickshaw-wallah.

  It was obvious communication wouldn’t be a problem. If any rickshaw-men in the country were likely to speak good English, it was the well-drilled wallahs who serviced the military cantonment of Barrackpore.

  ‘The hospital,’ I said, ‘and be quick about it.’

  It turned out he didn’t need to pedal too hard, as the hospital was only two streets away. We could have walked it in under five minutes but I’ve yet to meet a rickshaw-wallah who’d pass up a fare rather than tell you your destination was just around the corner.

  We alighted as a detachment of Sikhs in olive-green uniforms and turbans marched past in time to oaths shouted by their sergeant. It was hardly a surprise to find these men from the Punjab here, a thousand miles from their homeland. The regiments billeted here tended to be from far away: Jats, Pathans and the like. It was a well-known fact that native troops were more willing to do our bidding when they were far from home. And that’s what we did: moved them away from their native place, to somewhere they wouldn’t have any ties; Sikhs to Bengal and Gurkhas to the Punjab, just so they’d be less tempted to side with the locals in the event of any disturbance. As for Bengalis, I had no idea where we sent them.

  The hospital was a nondescript three-storey building set behind neat lawns bisected by a palm-lined path. A veranda ran the length of its whitewashed frontage and its windows were framed with green shutters. As hospitals went, it was nicer than any that I’d seen during the war, and as if to emphasise the point, the few recuperating servicemen taking exercise in the grounds all sported the correct number of limbs and lacked the bloodied bandages I remembered from my time being ministered to by the army. Still, that had been almost five years ago, and the world, outside of Bengal at least, had been a lot more insane then.

  Surrender-not rang the bell at the front desk in a lobby that looked to have been polished to within an inch of its life, and an Indian duty nurse in a blue uniform appeared.

  ‘Who’s in charge of this facility?’ I asked, with possibly less politeness than would have been ideal. I put that down to opium withdrawal.

  ‘The senior medical officer is Colonel McGuire.’

  ‘And where can I find him?’

  The question seemed to throw her. ‘The colonel?’

  ‘I presume he’s here.’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t see people without an appointment.’

  I took out my warrant card and held it under her nose. ‘He’ll speak to the police.’

  Minutes later we were being escorted up a flight of stairs by McGuire’s personal assistant, a pretty nurse with a French accent and, I imagined, the sort of bedside manner that made you want to take your time recuperating. Her name was Rouvel – at least that’s what it said on the identification badge pinned to her uniform.

  I fought back the urge to ask her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this. I’d been in Bengal long enough to know that wasn’t a question everyone appreciated. The place drew misfits like a magnet and many of them, myself included, weren’t overly keen on divulging their history. Indeed, I’d wager more people came to Calcutta to forget their past than joined the French Foreign Legion. More importantly though, I was sure she’d have heard that line before, and you don’t impress a girl by repeating what the last sap probably said to her. Not that the line I came up with was any better.

  ‘You’re a long way from home, Nurse Rouvel,’ I said.

  ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘Home is only fifteen miles away.’

  Beside me Surrender-not tried to stifle a laugh.

  ‘But you sound French,’ I said.

  ‘I am French. I grew up in Chandernagore. You have not heard of it?’

  Of course I’d heard of Chandernagore. It was a French settlement twenty-five miles up the Hooghly from Calcutta. Even after several centuries of Anglo-French hostility, including the small matter of the Napoleonic Wars, the town was still sovereign French territory – baguettes and all.

  We followed her along a corridor that smelled of iodine, with a row of wards on one side and a view of the cantonment on the other. McGuire’s office was at the far end.

  ‘The colonel is finishing his rounds,’ said Rouvel as she showed us in. ‘Please take a seat and he will be with you shortly.’

  The colonel’s office was what you’d expect of a doctor who was also a military officer. M
edical tomes arranged in regimental fashion, by colour and size, graced a bookshelf on one wall, while another was dominated by framed photographs, mainly of groups of officers and men – the kind of photographs that were popular during the war – mementos of a shared camaraderie; but more importantly in a time when death was indiscriminate and sudden, they were a record, in the event that the worst should happen, that you had actually lived – that you were more than just a name carved on a memorial to the fallen.

  In the centre of the room was a large, leather-topped desk on which sat several buff-coloured card folders weighed down by a glass paperweight, and a framed photograph of a stern-faced woman doing a rather good imitation of Queen Victoria looking unamused, and another beside it of a young man in military garb. Behind the desk, a window looked out onto a building which, from the size of it, I presumed was the old viceroy’s palace. Either that or the cantonment’s commanding officer lived in a style akin to a Venetian doge.

  The door opened and in strode an officer with blond hair, ruddy, handsome features and a white lab coat draped over an officer’s uniform.

  ‘Colonel McGuire?’ I asked, turning my attention away from the photographs on the wall.

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘My name’s Wyndham, of the Imperial Police Force,’ I said, stretching out a hand, ‘and this is Sergeant Banerjee. I’m afraid we have some unfortunate news regarding one of your staff.’