Smoke and Ashes Read online

  ‘He thinks outlawing the Volunteers is a dangerous move, sir,’ said Surrender-not.

  ‘Oh, does he now, Sergeant?’ said Taggart. ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘He’s worried that without their presence the demonstrations might spiral out of control. He’s not sure we have the manpower to keep the peace.’

  It might have been a fair point, but I still baulked at the thought of law and order being maintained by anyone other than the police.

  Taggart walked back to his chair behind the desk and sat down.

  ‘The gall of that man. I expect he’d love to show the world that we don’t have the ability to maintain calm in this town. If it wasn’t for his antics, there’d be no danger to the peace in the first place.’

  ‘I fear he doesn’t quite see it that way, sir,’ said Surrender-not.

  ‘No,’ said Taggart, ‘of course he doesn’t. The question is, will he comply?’

  Surrender-not and I exchanged a glance.

  ‘I doubt it, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he’d better,’ said Taggart. ‘For all our sakes.’

  The meeting with Taggart had ended somewhat abruptly, with the commissioner again suggesting that I draw upon my experience in Special Branch in London and military intelligence in wartime France to figure out exactly what Das planned to do next and then make sure he didn’t do it. I could have pointed out that divination wasn’t exactly a skill I’d picked up in either Scotland Yard or the trenches, and that trailing burly Irishmen or tracking down German spies afforded little insight into the innermost thoughts of a wily old Indian lawyer in bad health, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. In his current mood, Taggart would only have dismissed it as a convenient excuse.

  And so, having been tasked with the impossible, Surrender-not and I had retreated to my office to lick our wounds and figure out how best to achieve it. Blame, like water, always flows downwards, and just as Taggart had taken out his frustrations on me, I took out mine on Surrender-not.

  ‘I don’t care what you have to do,’ I said. ‘Call in whatever favours you’re owed, speak to whoever you need to, from your father to Das’s washerwoman if need be, just find out what he’s planning.’

  Surrender-not’s expression wasn’t dissimilar to the one I’d given Taggart when faced with the same ridiculous order. Nevertheless, he made some notes in his little yellow notepad and then excused himself.

  My head was pounding. I checked my watch. It was only just gone 3 p.m. These days, a half-day’s work seemed about all I was good for.

  I settled back into my chair and tried to concentrate on work. Figuring out Das’s plans might be beyond me, but I could at least try to determine what had happened to the body of the Chinaman I’d left at the opium den.

  I’d made scant progress when the telephone rang. I expected it to be Surrender-not, calling to tell me he’d worked out Das’s next move, or, more likely, to ask a stupid question.

  I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Sam?’

  It was a woman’s voice; one that I hadn’t heard in a few months.

  ‘Annie?’ I replied. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘I’m not bothering you, am I … ?’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’

  For a detective, it wasn’t the most astute of questions. Something had to be wrong. She wouldn’t have called otherwise. For a moment, the only response was static. Then she answered.

  ‘Something’s happened, Sam.’

  Half an hour later I was in Alipore, among the boulevards and bungalows of White Town. In this part of Calcutta you’d be hard pressed to tell that most of the city had been in turmoil for the best part of a year. Maybe the grass of some lawns was half an inch longer than usual, or the paint on a mansion or two hadn’t been retouched after the monsoon deluge back in August, but it was only to be expected. These days, with so many natives on strike, it wasn’t always easy to find the right workmen for the job. Of course it had been worse earlier in the year, when every native and his dog seemed to have heeded the Mahatma’s message and gone on strike. A hartal they called it. But it seemed that hartals were subject to Newton’s laws. For every action there was a reaction. For every flower bed that went untended, a workman went unpaid and his family edged closer to penury and starvation. Strikes, like warfare, are campaigns of attrition, and in the end, an empty belly trumps politics. Over time the workmen, the malis, the durwans, the railwaymen and most of the others had drifted back to their posts, and behind their well-tended hedgerows the houses of Alipore sparkled in the winter sun once more.

  The driver stopped on the road outside Annie’s home. The iron gates were locked shut and beside them sat her durwan, a greasy little fellow with the appearance of an overfed cherub and the work ethic of a sloth. It usually took a stream of invective or a natural disaster to prise him out of his well-worn chair at any speed faster than a snail’s pace, but today he was up from his seat like a tubby greyhound out of the traps. Taking a key from a ring on his belt, he quickly unlocked the gates, flung them open and waved us into a gravel driveway the length of the Suez Canal, at the end of which stood Annie’s house. With its green shutters and pink bougainvillea climbing the whitewashed walls, it would normally have been considered picturesque, but not today. Not with its front door daubed with red paint.

  I jumped out before the car came to a halt and made for the steps to the entrance. The door was opened by Annie’s maid, Anju, a slight woman with a pronounced stoop and an expression that suggested she had the cares of the world on her back. I’d met her before, quite a few times in fact, when I was a more regular visitor to the house. She generally greeted me with a cautious smile, a pranam and a few mumbled words, but there were other things on her mind today.

  ‘Captain Wyndham, sahib,’ she said, before launching into a flow of Bengali so rapid it was beyond me. Sensing my incomprehension, she stopped abruptly, then, all but taking my hand, she gestured for me to follow. ‘Come,’ she said breathlessly, ‘memsahib is this way.’

  I accompanied her through the hall. The place smelled of gardenias. Annie liked gardenias. There was generally a bunch or two scattered around the place, and it struck me that I could have done myself a favour by bringing a bouquet along too – not that this was a social call. The maid stopped at the open door to the drawing room and looked up at me, hopefully. I wasn’t sure what the look meant.

  ‘Please wait. I call memsahib.’

  I walked past her into the room. It hadn’t changed much since my last visit. The same few photographs of family sat on a walnut table in front of a brocade sofa, the kind favoured by people in Calcutta who possessed that rare combination of both money and good taste. On either side of the picture window stood the two large statues of the Hindu god Shiva, the creator and protector of the universe, standing on a lotus flower, performing his celestial dance inside a ring of fire. You’d have been forgiven for thinking that they were identical, but a closer look would reveal subtle disparities. The god’s expressions and his poses were dissimilar. Annie had once explained the difference to me.

  ‘The first is Shiva in his benign state,’ she’d said, ‘the creator dancing the universe into existence. The other is his angrier form.’

  ‘The destroyer?’ I’d asked.

  She’d hesitated. ‘In a way, but not like our God destroying the world as in the book of Revelation. Hindus believe in reincarnation, not just of the soul but of the universe. Shiva pulls down the old so that it can be renewed. He destroys so that he can create again.’

  I had hoped it might be a metaphor for our relationship. There certainly was a pattern to it. More than once, things had blossomed between us, but circumstances always seemed to conspire against us. It was possible those circumstances were orchestrated by the gods; more likely they were precipitated by my actions.

  It’s true that I’d once suspected her of withholding information about the death of
her former employer from me. I may even have broached the subject with her, but the way she told it, I’d practically accused her of stabbing the man herself. The truth was I’d done no such thing. I’d merely considered it.

  There had been an entente of sorts a year later, but even that cordiality floundered, partly on the rocks of my opium habit. At the time, I could go several days without the need for a hit and could even keep up a decent air of respectability during daylight hours. But there was no hiding the nocturnal excursions, and in Calcutta there were only two reasons why a man would go out so late and so regularly, and neither of them was particularly palatable. She’d noticed them and confronted me, and I’d denied it all. I’d told her it was police work – and she’d believed not a word of it. That was six months ago and I’d seen her only intermittently since. At first I’d hoped she might reconsider, but that was never likely. She looked like a princess and had a bank balance to match, thanks to the careful investment of cash she’d received from someone else I’d once suspected of murder. I might have been wrong on both counts, but surely it’s right and proper for a detective to have a healthy sense of suspicion.

  From the day I’d met her, I’d known she was something special. She wasn’t perfect; she wasn’t even English for that matter; but she was intelligent, and tough, and in a society that valued breeding over ability she was a misfit. Like me, she was a survivor, and she was pretty good at it, probably because she’d had to fight for everything her whole life. As such, I couldn’t blame her for grasping any opportunity for advancement that came her way. The point was, these days she was never short of admirers, even with her part-Indian blood. I had no problem with that, nor with her using them to get what she wanted. Of course I’d felt our relationship had been different, and while in my darker hours I might have suspected I was no different from the rest of those men trapped in her orbit, I could still accept that. My real fear, though, was that one of these days she’d meet some man and see in him more than a means to an end.

  Word had it, of late, that she’d been seen around town on the arm of an American businessman recently arrived from some place no one had ever heard of called Wisconsin; no one save for Surrender-not of course, who was a veritable walking atlas, and who said it was cold there; colder, at any rate, than anywhere sane men had reason to be. That was good. I doubted the man would survive a Bengal summer. With luck he might even melt.

  ‘Sam?’

  I turned to find Annie at the entrance to the room.

  It didn’t matter that I’d been expecting her, seeing her standing there like a Greek goddess was still like a punch to the stomach.

  She looked perplexed.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to come yourself,’ she said as she entered. ‘Sending a constable would have been fine.’

  I didn’t believe a word of it. If she’d wanted a constable, she’d have telephoned the local thana – an officer would have been here in five minutes. Instead she’d called me at police headquarters.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You saw the door?’ There was a brittleness to her tone.

  ‘It was hard to miss.’

  ‘Well, take a look at this,’ she said, leading the way into the hall. I followed her to the dining room at the rear of the house. The window had been smashed, and on the floor, amid the glittering shards, sat a brick.

  I knelt down and made a show of examining it. People expect a detective to examine things. It went with the badge, and like some performing monkey, I felt almost enthusiastic about obliging her. If it had been a new brick, I might have had something to go on. Maybe there was construction work going on nearby and someone might have taken it, but this one was old and worn – like most of Calcutta. It was just a brick: reddish-orange and no different to any other of the thousands you could find strewn all over the more dilapidated parts of town.

  ‘And this came through the window?’ I said, straightening up.

  It was a stupid question, but I got an odd satisfaction from asking it. She stared at me as though I was an idiot.

  ‘No, Sam. It came in the post. Of course it came through the window.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘About an hour ago. Maybe ten minutes before I called you.’

  Attacks on properties in White Town were as rare as a hot day in the Hebrides, and an attack in broad daylight was unheard of.

  ‘Did you see the perpetrators?’

  She shook her head. ‘The room was empty. It was the noise which alerted Anju. She arrived to see two men running away towards the trees.’ Annie pointed to the far end of the garden.

  I looked out. The trees were a hundred yards away.

  ‘Indians?’ I asked.

  ‘She thought so.’

  ‘Did she recognise them?’

  ‘No,’ she said, with an air of resignation. ‘There are so many new faces around these days …’ Her voice trailed off, but there was no need to finish the sentence. Das had called for a one-day general strike earlier in the year, and many of Alipore’s workmen and gardeners had heeded his request. Certain sahibs had taken the actions of their staff as a personal insult and sacked them the next day, replacing them with new men who knew on which side their roti was buttered.

  ‘What about that durwan of yours?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t he supposed to patrol the grounds?’

  ‘He was at the front gate,’ she said. ‘He only does his rounds after dark.’

  ‘And he didn’t see anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even someone throwing a bucket of paint at the front door?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  I supposed it was possible. It was a fair distance between the gate and the house, and her durwan couldn’t have been much less vigilant had he been dead.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘for all the good he does, you might just as well employ a scarecrow. It’d be cheaper.’

  She sighed. ‘And then who would feed his family, Sam?’

  I let the matter drop. If she wanted to act as patron saint to every native in Calcutta, that was her business, but it hadn’t stopped a couple of them lobbing a brick through her window.

  ‘Have you received any threats?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but the neighbourhood is panicky. A Parsee doctor and his wife who live nearby had their garden room set alight a few nights ago.’

  ‘What about you?’ I continued. ‘Any idea why someone would wish to target your house?’

  She shot me that look again, the one that made it clear that she wasn’t exactly in awe of my deductive skills.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  Anglo-Indians were a soft target. Attacks on them were up all across town. They’d always had it tough – viewed with distaste by us and with distrust by the Indians – but things had worsened considerably since the summer. The reason was the railways. They were the government’s Achilles heel. Without them, the country would be paralysed and the authorities would have been forced to compromise. But after some initial disruption, the trains were up and running again within a week. The natives blamed the Anglo-Indians. After all, people thought they ran the railways. They didn’t, of course. While it was true that many railway jobs were reserved for them, the top posts were all held by British men. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Indians made convenient scapegoats. It was always easier to blame sabotage on a minority than admit that maybe not all Indians were behind the Mahatma’s call to drop arms.

  If Das was right, and the banning of the Volunteers from the streets did lead to more attacks, it didn’t take a genius to work out who the first targets would be.

  ‘It might be better if you moved out of the house for a few days,’ I said. ‘Just until tempers cool.’

  ‘And where would you have me go, Sam?’

  There was an edge to her voice.

  ‘A hotel.’ I shrugged. ‘The Great Eastern, maybe?’ The thought brought back memories. It was the first place I’d taken her t
o dinner. But that was over two years ago. We were different people then.

  ‘I’m not going to be driven from my own home,’ she said, and her tone made clear there was no point in debating the matter. Instead I nodded and followed her back into the hallway.

  I gave the rest of the place a quick once-over, checking the external doors and windows, and offered to post a constable at the door, which was rash, given we were short of men and that I had no authority to do so in the first place, but it wasn’t the first time I’d shot my mouth off in an attempt to impress her.

  Declining the offer, she accompanied me back to the front door, just as several workmen arrived with tools and wooden boards to temporarily barricade the broken window.

  I turned to face her, still unsure why she’d called me out here in the first place. Part of me felt she might not know herself. Maybe, confronted with danger, she’d done it on instinct and was now regretting it. Judging by the look on her face, that was a distinct possibility.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll be all right, here?’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Sam,’ she said. It sounded like she meant it. ‘I was just a bit shaken by everything. I shouldn’t have troubled you.’

  ‘I could come back later,’ I said, ‘and stay over … if you’re concerned?’ The words were out of my mouth before I even realised.

  She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Would that be all night, Sam, or just till two in the morning?’

  SEVEN

  I left Annie’s place as the fog descended, both in the streets and in my head. As ever, the stillness of dusk was punctuated by the sound of crickets. My limbs ached and even the exertion of climbing into the waiting car was energy-sapping. I slumped into the back seat and pulled the door shut.

  ‘Lal Bazar, sir?’ asked the driver.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘Premchand Boral Street.’

  It was going to be another uncommonly cold night. Lately, the mercury had dropped as low as forty and for the natives, that must have felt like the Arctic. On a night like this, in the poorer parts of Black Town, some of those without a roof or a fire wouldn’t make it through to morning.