Smoke and Ashes Read online

Cheaper too.

  My fears took on a different hue. Wherever they were taking me, I very much doubted it was an opium den. I was already craving a hit and who knew how much longer it would now be before I got one. My new friends didn’t seem particularly keen on conversation, so it fell to me to try and break the ice.

  ‘Are we going anywhere nice?’

  ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ said the one who’d asked me for a light. In truth, I already had an inkling as to where we were heading. I had, after all, met men like these before – military types with necks like tree trunks and a certain muscular presence that was difficult to ignore – the sort favoured by military intelligence to do their donkey work – knocking on doors and sometimes on faces.

  The car sped through the Maidan and the thick walls of Fort William loomed in the distance like a bad dream. It was home to the army’s Eastern Command and to its intelligence wing, Section H.

  The driver was waved quickly through one of the fort’s gates and drove on. The place was hardly new to me and, despite the lateness of the hour, I expected I was being taken for a friendly chat with one of Section H’s senior officers – a prospect that was as appealing as a tooth extraction. Like Bram Stoker’s eponymous vampire, Section H tended to do their best work after dark. But instead of pulling up outside the section’s offices, the car sped straight on, its headlights cutting through the darkness, and suddenly I felt the sweat trickle down my back.

  Minutes later, we came to a halt outside a squat, oblong building. The gorilla beside me opened the door and got out. When I made no effort to follow him, he bent down and looked at me.

  ‘Come on,’ he sighed, and in case I had any thoughts to the contrary, the one still beside me gave me a hefty shove with a palm the size of a tennis racket. I stumbled out, straightened up and took in my surroundings. The building had a steel door and half a dozen slits for windows, three on either side of the entryway. A trickle of cold perspiration ran down the side of my face and onto my neck.

  My minder rapped hard on the metallic door and, moments later, an eye-slit slid open. Words were exchanged and then came the sound of bolts being pulled back, before the door slowly opened. The thing was thick, several inches of armour plating that looked like it had been salvaged from the hull of a dreadnought. A concrete stairwell ran down into a dark basement.

  ‘What’s down there?’ I asked.

  A hand pushed me inside. ‘You’ll see soon enough. You’re about to enter the Black Hole of Calcutta,’ laughed the voice behind me.

  I’d heard the story before. The Black Hole had been the prison where a number of English men and women had suffocated to death. They said the place was still haunted by their souls, but that I knew was nonsense, not because I didn’t believe in ghosts, but because that prison had been located in the old Fort William: located up near Dalhousie Square and which had been destroyed shortly afterwards.

  Sandwiched between the two, I walked down the steep flight of steps, deep into the bowels of the original fort and into history.

  The sharp smell of disinfectant clawed at my throat, as the concrete of the upper level gave way to cold stone walls. At the foot of the stairwell was a corridor lit by low-wattage bulbs. We continued along it, past a line of cells before my minder stopped, pushed open a door, stood back and gestured for me to enter.

  I assumed I was about to be interrogated, though if they thought I’d be intimidated by the Gothic setting, they were sorely mistaken.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ I said and walked in, then swung round in confusion as I realised the cell was empty. The guard stood there, grinning. He shook his head before slamming the door in my face. Yelling, I threw myself against the cold metal of the cell door.

  The observation slit in the door slid open.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I shouted.

  ‘Major Dawson will see you shortly,’ said the voice on the other side. ‘In the meantime, pipe down and make yourself at home.’

  With that he snapped the slit shut and I heard the sound of boots head back along the corridor.

  A wave of fear passed through me. Beating up native prisoners was one thing, but accosting and detaining a police officer was something altogether more serious. Did Section H really have the power to get away with something like that?

  I thought about banging on the door again but there was no point. Besides, my body was already aching from the lack of O. The last thing I needed was to add to my own pain through a futile gesture induced by a fit of pique.

  I turned round and familiarised myself with my new accommodation. The cell was small and cold and lit by a single bulb encased in a wire-mesh cage high up on one wall. Against another sat a low cot bed with a thin mattress and a threadbare blanket that looked like it dated from the Crimean War.

  The city seemed to be spiralling out of control and I was stuck here, cooling my backside in a cell under Fort William. Every minute I spent incarcerated was a minute lost and the trail to whoever had killed Ruth Fernandes and possibly the Chinaman in Tangra grew colder.

  I dropped down onto the cot and considered what I was going to say to Dawson when he turned up. Knowing the man, he’d probably derive great delight from keeping me waiting for a while. I just prayed it wouldn’t be too long.

  SIXTEEN

  The minutes creaked by agonisingly slowly as opium cravings tightened their grip on my nerves. The trick was to ignore the gnawing aches by occupying my mind with something constructive. I tried to focus on Ruth Fernandes and the man she’d met before her death, but it was no use. My mind wandered to thoughts of why Dawson was holding me here. Could he know that I’d found Fen Wang’s body stuffed in a drawer in the basement of the funeral parlour? Or had his men been involved in some covert activity at Das’s demonstration earlier which he thought I might have witnessed? If so, the truth was I’d seen absolutely nothing and I’d be happy to tell him that, even though telling the truth to Dawson wasn’t something I did lightly. It went against my instincts but it would be worth it to get out of this cell.

  As the time passed and the pain grew, so did a visceral fear. What if Dawson planned to leave me here till morning? What if he wasn’t coming at all? I knew from past experience what real withdrawal symptoms were. I’d tried to quit several times before and I’d failed, and the fear of what lay in store if Dawson didn’t come soon was as palpable as any pain I was currently feeling.

  My watch stopped around midnight and I estimated it was about an hour afterwards that my eyes started watering and my nose began to run. People called it an opium cold. It was the precursor to the real pain. I’d been saving the last cigarette for this moment. I knew that if I left it much later I’d be in too much agony to smoke it. Carefully I took it out from the pack and lit it with shaking hands. Breathing in, I savoured a brief ebbing of the pain and the maelstrom of horrors coursing through my head. However, the respite was short-lived and the pain returned before I’d even finished it. Shivering uncontrollably, I dropped the fag to the floor. The skin on my forearms was pitted with goosebumps – just another symptom of ‘going cold turkey’.

  I pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders and curled up in an attempt to generate some body heat, but it was no use. The Western Front in December had felt warmer than this. I was freezing to death and yet my clothes and the blanket were drenched in sweat. I felt I was dying, and visions filled my head of Dawson turning up the next morning only to be greeted by my cold corpse. Too weak to crawl to the door, with the last of my strength I yelled for the guard. No one heard or no one cared.

  It was then that I found myself doing something I hadn’t done since the war. I muttered a prayer.

  I must have passed into some form of torpor because the next thing I remember, I was being shaken awake by a uniformed sentry. There was a figure standing behind him, but my vision was blurred. Slowly his features came into focus: the slicked-back brown hair, the moustache and the ubiquitous pipe clamped between his jaws.


  ‘Wyndham,’ said Major Dawson, ‘you look like shit.’

  I guessed it was a fair observation. A moment later the smell of pipe tobacco reached my nostrils, my stomach turned and I vomited all over the floor in front of him.

  Dawson looked on with a distaste that suggested some of what I’d disgorged had landed on his shoes. I hoped so. After all, it’s the little victories that keep you going.

  ‘Get him cleaned up,’ he growled to his subordinate, ‘then bring him to me.’

  Ten minutes later, after a bucket of cold water had been thrown in my face, I was led by the blond officer who’d first accosted me in the street over to a nondescript block in the administrative part of the base, dragged up the stairs and deposited on a chair in Dawson’s office. The air stank of pipe smoke and it took all of my self-control not to throw up again. I congratulated myself on the achievement. It would have been a shame to vomit in the major’s office seeing as he was yet to arrive.

  The door behind me opened. Dawson walked in, told his deputy to stand back, and took his seat behind his desk. There was silence for several moments as he made a show of reading a typed sheet of paper that had been left on his desk. Mind games, straight out of an interrogation handbook. If he’d intended it as intimidation, it wasn’t working, not because I too had read the handbook, but because I was past caring.

  Dawson eventually looked up from the paper.

  ‘So, Wyndham,’ he said. ‘Apologies for the manner in which you’ve been brought here, but I have a few questions for you.’

  ‘You know it’s an offence to unlawfully detain a police officer,’ I said.

  He stared at me and sighed. ‘I could keep you here all night if I wanted to. All week for that matter and nobody would give a fig. So why don’t you just keep your complaints to yourself and afford me some cooperation?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I understand you’ve been assigned the case of a dead nurse up in Rishra.’

  ‘News travels fast,’ I said. Not that that was much of a surprise. Section H had paid informers everywhere. In a city where a man would happily slit his brother’s throat for a hundred rupees, their largesse attracted more than a few fair-weather friends. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘what business is it of yours?’

  ‘She was a nurse at a military hospital.’

  ‘But she was a civilian.’

  ‘The woman was a Portuguese national,’ he replied. ‘The murder of a foreigner, even an Indian one, is my business.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell you. She was on her way home from her night shift, and someone sliced her open like a hilsa fish.’

  ‘Any suspects?’

  I could have told him about her husband, or the shifty-looking native with Assamese features who’d been seen loitering nearby, but I wasn’t in the mood to help him.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Dawson nodded, then once more scanned the sheet of paper in front of him.

  ‘It’s also come to my attention that you’ve been sniffing around an opium den in Tangra. One that was the scene of a raid by Vice Division a few nights ago.’ He paused. ‘Anything to say about that?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He looked up. ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me, Wyndham. You should know by now that I don’t take kindly to it. You were there last night, asking questions of a constable.’

  I cursed myself. Callaghan had told me that the raid had been carried out at Section H’s request. It stood to reason they’d have been keeping the place under watch even after the raid. I should have been more careful.

  Dawson continued. ‘I want to know what you were doing there.’

  ‘It’s a police matter,’ I said. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  Dawson didn’t look convinced. ‘A police matter? And all your other trips to Tangra? They were police business too?’

  I tried to keep my composure but felt my face betray me.

  Dawson gave a bitter laugh. ‘That’s right, Captain. We know all about your nasty little habit. I’ve lost track of the number of dens you’ve frequented. Indeed, you’ve discovered one or two that even we hadn’t come across. Please don’t tell me that the one raided the other night was your favourite. Now I’ll ask you again. What were you doing there last night?’

  Dawson’s knowledge of my addiction shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Part of me had suspected as much ever since I was attacked and almost killed outside a den a few years back. I’d put it down to paranoia but I’d never shaken the feeling that Section H had been behind it. I tried to figure out exactly what lies I could tell him that were plausible enough to get me out of there. The major, though, seemed to misinterpret my silence.

  ‘Don’t be difficult, Wyndham. As I’ve told you, under the emergency powers I can keep you here all night or longer, though by the looks of you, that probably won’t be necessary. Just tell me what I want to know and you’ll be free to go. I’ll even arrange for a car to take you to your destination of choice, whichever stinking opium den that happens to be.’

  I tried to concentrate, to come up with a coherent sentence or two, but the pain behind my eyes was excruciating. Dawson picked up a pen and began to write something in the margins of his document. The noise of the nib scratching across the paper’s surface seemed amplified a hundredfold, and then a pernicious voice in my head began to whisper:

  ‘Why not tell him the truth? What have you got to hide?’

  My willpower began to ebb like sand in an egg timer, until the desire to hold out against him seemed nothing more than stubborn recalcitrance. The more I considered it, the more sensible his request seemed. I hadn’t mentioned the murder of the Chinaman to anyone because I didn’t want to reveal my presence at the opium den, but Dawson already knew about my addiction. What was the harm in telling him everything? We were supposed to be on the same side after all. And as the man said, the sooner I came clean, the sooner I’d get out of here.

  ‘I was there,’ I said. ‘At the opium den. The night you ordered the raid.’

  He laid down his pen and looked up, his face expressionless as a mask. ‘Go on.’

  ‘One of the Chinese girls helped me escape, just before Callaghan’s men entered.’

  ‘And of all the dens in Calcutta, why did you choose that one?’

  ‘Dumb chance,’ I said. ‘As you know, I like to visit a variety of places. That night it just happened to be that one.’

  I tried to hold his gaze but it felt like my head was about to explode.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ he said.

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘So why go back there last night? If indeed you just chanced to be there and were so fortunate to escape, why the continued interest in the place?’

  ‘Because of the corpse.’

  A shadow passed over Dawson’s face. ‘What corpse might this be?’

  Before I could answer, I felt a retching in my throat. I doubled over and vomited on the floor. There was a snarl of disgust from Dawson and almost immediately the hand of my minder grabbed my hair from behind and pulled my head back.

  Dawson stood up and leaned across the desk.

  ‘Now listen to me, Wyndham. Tell me about this corpse.’

  ‘A Chinaman,’ I said. ‘I stumbled across him as I was trying to escape.’

  ‘And what did you do when you found this Chinaman?’

  ‘Nothing. There wasn’t anything to do. He was dead. I just left him there and ran.’

  The major shook his head. ‘Wyndham, you know there were no bodies found at the scene.’

  ‘That’s what Callaghan told me. But I saw it. That’s why I went back.’

  ‘And did you find it?’

  I thought about coming clean. They say confession is good for the soul, but really it depends on who your confessor is.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know whether you’re lying or you really do believe yo
u saw a body. Either way you’re a disgrace. Now here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to keep me informed about whatever you find out regarding this dead nurse in Rishra and you’re going to stop asking any more questions about that opium den in Tangra. If I find out you’ve gone back there, I’ll make sure your life isn’t worth living.’

  I nodded my assent, though as threats went, it was hardly compelling. I wasn’t sure my life was worth living anyway.

  Dawson looked to the guard who still held me by the hair.

  ‘Let him go, Allenby.’

  Allenby – at least I now knew his assistant’s name.

  ‘Get him out of here,’ he growled. ‘Drop him off in some shitty gullee in Tangra.’

  Letting go of my head, Allenby hauled me unceremoniously to my feet and dragged me out. Behind me I heard Dawson’s voice.

  ‘And send someone to clean up this mess in here.’

  SEVENTEEN

  24 December 1921

  Dawson’s men had followed his orders meticulously, driving to Chinatown and kicking me out into the shittiest alley they could find, which in Tangra was a finely judged affair. From there I’d crawled to the nearest den, onto a cot and into the embrace of the first of a dozen opium pipes. My cravings finally slaked, I’d passed into a stupor which didn’t lift until the sun was rising in the east.

  Staggering to a main road, I’d hailed a bicycle rickshaw which had taken me to a tonga rank and from there I’d travelled back to town, ordering the driver to drop me off a few streets away from our lodgings, an action that was the flimsiest of fig leaves at the best of times, but was now completely pointless. Something still made me do it, though. Old habits die hard they say, but maybe I was still keeping up the pretence for my own benefit. Even now, part of me still couldn’t accept the fact that without the kerdū juice I was totally and utterly an opium fiend.

  I made my way up the stairs and silently slid the key into the lock. With luck, I’d be able to reach my room without either Sandesh or Surrender-not noticing.