Smoke and Ashes Read online

  But Calcutta wasn’t Cape Town and I wondered if the mandarins in London or Delhi really knew what a tall order it would be for the prince to do any good here. If it was tranquillity you were looking for, Calcutta was about as good a choice as the Second Battle of the Marne. I’d met him once, Prince Edward Albert Saxe-Coburg Windsor, or whatever his name was, back in the trenches in ’16. Then, as now, they’d sent him on a morale-boosting tour, though it eluded me how a handshake from a prince who’d never have to experience the horrors of war was supposed to raise the morale of men whose lives consisted of little more than waiting for the machine-gun bullet with their name on it. He couldn’t have been much more than a boy then. I remember the smooth face and the uniform which seemed a size too large for him. He didn’t lack courage though. Rumour had it he’d volunteered for the Front in ’15 but the king and the government had dismissed it out of hand.

  ‘To that end,’ Taggart continued, ‘the viceroy has decided to designate the Congress Volunteers a proscribed organisation; and not before time. They will be banned as of tomorrow. And that’s where you come in, Sam. I want you to deliver that message personally to Das. Tell him to consider it fair warning.

  ‘As for the prince, I’m rather hoping he won’t be in much of a mood to dawdle in our fair city. Word has it he finds Indians rather odious and just wants to get back to the arms of his mistress in London. Nevertheless, on no account are we to allow any stunts or other actions to occur which could cause embarrassment to His Royal Highness or to His Majesty’s government.’

  ‘And you think Das is planning some stunt?’ I asked.

  Taggart picked up a silver pen and tapped it on his desk. ‘I’ve no doubt that’s exactly what he’s doing. What you need to find out is what specifically he is planning, and then persuade him not to do it.’

  ‘We could always arrest him,’ I ventured. It seemed like the obvious solution, assuming we had anywhere to put him.

  Taggart shook his head. ‘That’s what he wants us to do. If we arrest him on a charge of sedition, we make a martyr out of him and suddenly another ten thousand flock to his cause. Besides, the London and foreign press will be in town covering the prince’s visit. The viceroy is rather keen that we avoid any adverse reaction. A general strike is one thing – I can live with pictures of empty streets – but an angry mob protesting the arrest of Bengal’s most beloved son is quite another.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you expect of us, sir,’ I said. ‘In any case, surely this is a matter for our military intelligence friends at Section H? Or have they given up trying to crush political sedition?’

  ‘I doubt they’ve given up, Sam,’ he replied. ‘It’s more likely they just don’t know quite what to do. It’s one thing tackling a few hundred bomb-throwing terrorists. Dealing with a national mass movement led by a saint whose strategy is to smile at you before he orders his followers to sit down, block the streets and pretend to pray, isn’t something they’re particularly adept at dealing with. And to be honest, I can’t say I’m surprised. The whole thing’s damned unsporting.’ He placed the pen back on the desk. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘I fear that we’ll need more than the sledgehammer that is Section H to crack this particular nut. And that’s where you come in, Sam. You spent time in Special Branch in London, infiltrating Irish nationalists.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ I said, ‘before the war. And anyway, following an Irishman around London is hardly the same thing as dealing with an Indian in Calcutta. For a start, I’m the wrong colour to infiltrate much of anything out here, unless it’s the bar at the Bengal Club. How am I supposed to get close to Das?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Sam,’ he sighed. ‘I’m not asking you to infiltrate his bloody inner circle. What I want is for you to meet him, deliver the viceroy’s ultimatum and warn him off. Then report back to me with your assessment of the man. You’ve dealt with his sort before. You know how their minds work. Gauge what he’s up to.’

  ‘And why would he tell me anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Because.’ Taggart smiled. ‘I understand that our Mr Das is a close family friend of Sergeant Banerjee here.’

  FOUR

  ‘You kept that one quiet,’ I said, taking a seat behind my desk.

  Across from me, Surrender-not shifted on his chair.

  ‘All the trouble we’ve had over the last year – the strikes, the resignations, the attacks – you didn’t think to mention that the man behind it all was a chum of yours?’

  The sergeant dropped his gaze to the floor. ‘I very much doubt he’d consider me a chum. He’s my father’s friend,’ he replied. ‘It’s been years since I’ve seen Uncle Das socially.’

  ‘Uncle Das?’ I teased. In the past, I might have assumed that uncle meant an actual familial connection, but you didn’t have to be around Indians for very long to realise that they referred to almost every acquaintance as uncle, or aunt, or grandfather or big brother. Everyone was a kakū, or a masi or a dada, as though all three hundred million of them were one big extended unhappy family.

  ‘Well, if he’s your uncle, we should be able to sort out this whole business by lunchtime.’

  ‘You know he’s not my real uncle,’ said Surrender-not. ‘And even if he were, I doubt that would help very much. Not given my current standing within the family.’

  That much was true. The boy had made more than his fair share of sacrifices in order to continue doing this job that he loved. He’d battled his own conscience and burned bridges with his kith and kin, and while I hadn’t exactly been keeping tabs, I doubted he’d seen his parents since Kali Puja, the festival of the goddess Kali, over a year ago.

  I should have apologised, but of course I didn’t. I doubted he even expected me to. There were so many things I needed to apologise to him for, one more hardly made a difference.

  ‘He and my father were at Lincoln’s Inn together,’ he continued. ‘They were called to the Bar within a year of each other. When I was a child, he and his family would often visit our home, especially at puja time. In fact’ – he laughed sourly – ‘I expect he has been inside my family home more recently that I have.’

  ‘What else can you tell me about him?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘What we’re up against. What sort of a man is he?’

  ‘The type you hate – a Bengali who knows the law.’

  ‘I don’t hate them,’ I said, ‘not all of them anyway, I just prefer dealing with people who appreciate the job we do.’

  He smiled sardonically. ‘I doubt there are many of them left in the country, sir.’

  ‘Do you have anything useful to contribute?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, absolutely,’ he replied. ‘Das is the scion of a prominent Bengali family and one of the wealthiest barristers in Calcutta. At least he was.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘After he met Gandhi, he donated it all to the independence movement. Even his house. He’s an ardent believer in the Mahatma’s creed of non-violence. He was the one who first advocated the boycott of Western clothes, which is ironic as he used to be famous for his tailor-made Parisian suits, before he burned them all and took to wearing only homespun Indian cloth.’

  The man sounded like a fanatic.

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘He has a wife and three children,’ he ventured.

  I had the feeling he was holding back.

  ‘Do you think he’s planning something?’

  ‘In his place, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Get me his file,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He nodded. He rose and headed for the door.

  ‘And find out where he is,’ I said. ‘We’re going to pay the Deshbandhu a visit this afternoon.’

  A few minutes later, once I was sure Surrender-not was safely back at his desk, I left the office on a journey of my own.

  Across the courtyard lay an annexe, on the second floor of which was Vice Division. I walked up and into a r
ather barren room. The morning after a raid, the room should have been as busy as Waterloo station at rush hour. Instead it was dead. A couple of secretaries sat whispering in a corner and a few junior officers cooled their heels while the fans on the ceiling creaked round at half-speed. I’d become such a regular visitor that no one paid me much notice as I walked through the room to the cabin at the end, knocked and stuck my head round the door.

  Inspector Callaghan was poring over some document, pen in hand. He was a stocky, earnest-looking man, with a head of thick red hair, glasses and that peculiarly pale, Celtic complexion that went as red as a lobster at the first hint of sun. He also had a mortal fear of foreign food that, when taken in conjunction with his pallor, made you wonder exactly what it was that had persuaded him to leave Britain in the first place, let alone settle in Calcutta. Still, he was an affable chap and I liked him. What had started off as an attempt to inveigle myself into his confidence had turned into a friendship, of sorts, and it would have been a shame if one of his men had shot me the previous night, as I imagine he might never have forgiven himself.

  He looked up. ‘Oh, it’s you, Wyndham,’ he said, placing the pen on his desk. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Lunch?’

  He shook his head. ‘You know I don’t eat lunch.’

  It was true. He’d told me before. Lunch played havoc with his digestion. He blamed it on a long-standing stomach ulcer. That no doctor had ever been able to find it only made him more certain that it was there, and while all medication had proved useless, a few glasses of Guinness generally acted as a palliative.

  ‘Of the liquid variety?’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s not even noon.’

  I entered his office and sat down in the chair across the desk from him.

  ‘I’m having a rough day.’

  He peered at me over the ridge of his spectacles. ‘Yes, well, you certainly don’t look your best.’

  ‘So how about it?’ I persisted.

  ‘Can’t, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically. He picked up the pen and tapped it on the document in front of him. ‘Too much to do.’

  I feigned incredulity. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve been sitting on your backside, twiddling your thumbs for months. I can’t even remember the last time you launched a raid. When was it – June?’

  A hint of a smile brightened his face. ‘It was last night, if you must know. Big one too. Down in Tangra.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘You kept that quiet.’

  ‘There’s a reason for that,’ he confided. ‘I only found out myself about an hour beforehand. All very hush-hush. Ordered by Lord Taggart himself at the request of Section H apparently.’

  ‘Section H? What were they after?’

  Callaghan glanced over at the open door behind me. ‘Close the door,’ he said conspiratorially. I leaned over and pushed it shut.

  ‘Seems they’d received a tip-off that some Green Gang kingpin by the name of Fen Wang was in from Shanghai, and that he’d be in Tangra last night.’

  ‘And was he?’

  Callaghan shrugged. ‘Well, if he was, he’d left by the time we got there.’

  ‘Any arrests?’

  ‘Just the usual dross – a few local Chinese and a Belgian who should have known better. We passed their names on to Dawson at Section H, but he just ordered us to release them. I expect they were only interested in Fen Wang.’

  Callaghan sounded bored. There was no mention that a man had been murdered on the scene. Surely that was worthy of note?

  ‘Anything of interest to CID?’ I asked.

  He stared at me intensely. ‘Are you feeling all right, Wyndham?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said defensively.

  ‘Are you looking for work? It’s not like you to volunteer your services. You’re sure you’re not ill?’

  ‘Just trying to be helpful,’ I said. ‘I’m at a bit of a loose end.’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘So I’d heard. Look, old man, I’m afraid I’ve got nothing for you. Last night was a washout.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, and rose to go.

  ‘And, Wyndham,’ he called from behind me. ‘We’ll have that drink soon, all right?’

  I left him, walked out of the office and slowly back down the stairs. At the foot, I leaned against the wall and pulled out my packet of cigarettes. Lighting one, I tried to make sense of Callaghan’s story. Last night’s raid had apparently been ordered by Section H on the pretext of a tip-off about a Chinese gangster being in town. But Section H were charged with monitoring Indian political subversives. Since when had they started worrying about Chinese drug runners? And if this Fen Wang was so important, why leave the raid to the police and not carry it out themselves? It was true that since Gandhi’s calls for soldiers to resign their commissions, the military had experienced a spike in the level of native troops going absent without leave, but I couldn’t believe they’d suffered losses any worse than we in the police had.

  The reason for the raid, though, was only part of the conundrum. There was also the question of what had happened to the corpse of the murdered man. Why hadn’t Callaghan mentioned it? Had his men simply failed to find it? The opium den and the premises above it were a warren of small rooms, nooks and crevices. Was it possible his officers hadn’t searched the place thoroughly? That seemed unlikely, given that they were hunting for a specific person, and the effort they’d put into chasing me.

  I supposed someone might have moved the body in the minutes between my leaving him and the police searching the room. If so, who, and where to?

  None of the circumstances made much sense, and then a more disturbing possibility came to mind. Maybe there never had been a body. I’d been groggy with O. Maybe I imagined the whole thing?

  But I’d held the murder weapon in my hand. The dead man’s blood had been on my shirt and on my hands. Alas, the knife and my shirt were now at the bottom of the Circular Canal, and my hands were washed clean. There were of course the borrowed shirt and chador locked away in my almirah, but they proved nothing. The truth was I had no physical evidence that anything had ever occurred.

  I took a long, hard pull on the cigarette and tried to put the thought out of my mind. The man had been real, I told myself. The obvious explanation was that Callaghan was lying to me. His men must have found the body, it was probably that of Fen Wang, and Section H had ordered him to keep quiet about it. That had to be it. Everything else was just paranoia.

  There was a thick file waiting for me on my desk. The name C. R. Das was typed on the tab, and on top of it, a note in Surrender-not’s hand. He’d managed to track down Das. The Deshbandhu, it appeared, would be at the High Court that afternoon.

  FIVE

  Surrender-not and I were seated in the back of a police Wolseley, going nowhere. The car was pointed in the direction of the Strand Road, but we hadn’t moved in almost ten minutes. In the distance, the whitewashed tower of the High Court glinted in the afternoon sun.

  ‘You’re sure he’s in there?’ I asked.

  ‘We wouldn’t be stuck in traffic if he wasn’t,’ replied Surrender-not.

  Around us, horns blared and tempers flared. I opened the door and jumped out. Some yards away stood a forlorn-looking native traffic constable, made conspicuous by his red fez and the umbrella affixed to a harness and his belt, leaving his hands free to direct vehicles – not that he was doing much directing, seeing as all the streets in the vicinity were gridlocked.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said, walking up to him.

  He shook his head in that curious Indian fashion. ‘Road is blocked, sir. Demonstration occurring at court building.’

  I thanked him and returned to the car. Surrender-not was standing there, waiting patiently.

  ‘We’ll go on foot from here,’ I said.

  The High Court was a neo-Gothic palace of a building, tucked between the town hall, the river and the cricket pitch at Eden Gardens. They said it was modelled on the Cloth Hall
in Ypres. I’d passed through Ypres during the war, but couldn’t remember anything that looked like this particular building. That wasn’t so surprising. I hadn’t exactly been there sightseeing, and there was always the possibility that we, the Germans, the French, or a combination of all of us, had by then shelled it to smithereens.

  The cause of the chaos on the street soon became apparent. Halfway along Esplanade Row, two dozen or so men in white caps and dhotis were seated in the middle of the road, shouting slogans and waving placards calling for the usual things – the release of political prisoners, Home Rule for India and, for good measure, the restoration of the Sultan of Turkey as the defender of the Mohammedan holy places. The last one might have seemed odd, but it was Gandhi’s idea, and it had been bloody clever. By tacking on that final demand to his calls for independence, the little man had done something no one else had managed to do in the best part of a thousand years: he’d won over the millions of Mohammedans and united them in common cause with the Hindus. That was a rather unfortunate development, at least as far as the viceroy and the India Office were concerned. After all, a key plank of the government’s refusal to grant independence was that we couldn’t just leave the minorities of India, especially the Mohammedans, to live under the tyranny of the Hindus. But it was a difficult argument to make when they were all joining hands and playing nicely with one another.

  A crowd of a few hundred natives, marshalled by a phalanx of Congress Volunteers, had also gathered on the pavements, blocking our route to the courthouse. At the front, on a raised platform and flanked by two more khaki-uniformed Volunteers, stood a young, bespectacled Bengali, with a moon face and neatly parted, prematurely thinning, black hair. Dressed in a white dhoti and kurta, and wrapped in a heavy white chador, against the cold, he was addressing the crowd.