Smoke and Ashes Read online

  ‘Not during my watch, sir.’

  ‘What about afterwards? Who took over from you? Another officer from the Tangra thana?’

  Mitra nodded. ‘Constable Grewal. He was here from ten o’clock this morning, before I once more came on shift at six. He did not mention any activity.’

  ‘I want you to speak to him again,’ I said. ‘Ask him if anyone entered the premises on his watch, and find out if anything was taken away. Get as much detail as you can. You have a notepad and pencil?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Take this down.’ I gave him the number for the central switchboard at Lal Bazar and was about to tell him to ask for me, when I thought better of it. Maybe it was paranoia, but I decided to be careful. I’d already told him I worked for Vice Division. And anyway, when it came to dealing with Section H, a degree of healthy paranoia was not necessarily a bad thing.

  ‘Ask to be put through to the pit,’ I said. It was the open area where the native officers from several departments had their desks. ‘Then ask the desk sergeant for Banerjee. You can leave a message with him.’

  There were half a dozen Banerjees at Lal Bazar. I reckoned that should anyone take interest in the constable’s call, Surrender-not could always claim that it had been intended for a different Banerjee and had come through to him by mistake.

  ‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘The two sahibs who came last night. Was one of them smoking a pipe?’

  Mitra pondered the question. ‘I don’t think so … Wait …’ He smiled. ‘When they were leaving. As they got back into their car. The junior was driving and the senior officer sat in the rear. I believe he lit a pipe as they drove off.’

  That sounded like Major Dawson, one of Section H’s senior officers. He hardly went anywhere without his pipe. As though he fancied himself as some sort of subtropical Sherlock Holmes.

  The possibility that Dawson had turned up here, hours after the initial raid, reinforced my conviction that there was more to last night than just a fruitless search for a Chinese drug lord. The Section H officer would hardly have ventured all the way down here just to take a tour of an empty opium den. He must have come to see something, and my guess was that he’d come to identify the corpse of the dead man. That in turn suggested the body was still here somewhere – at least it had been when Dawson had visited, and from what Constable Mitra had said, it didn’t seem likely that anyone had removed it since then.

  So where was it?

  I walked into the street, turned and looked up at the funeral parlour. Two blackened storeys high with barred windows, a faded sign above the door and a basement that linked through to the opium den. And then it struck me. The answer was staring me in the face.

  I stubbed the butt of my cigarette out against the wall and rushed back inside. The best place to hide anything was always in plain sight. And what better place to stash a corpse than in the midst of other dead bodies. I made for the stairs down to the basement in search of the mortuary room. It didn’t take long to find: I just followed the stench of formaldehyde and putrefaction.

  It was a dark, low-vaulted room with a row of metal cabinets built into one wall. Reaching for a handkerchief, I held it to my face and pulled the handle of the first cabinet and gently rolled it out. There was a body inside, placed in head first, so I that had to pull the whole drawer out to see the chest and face. The cadaver wasn’t my missing Chinaman. It was Chinese, but this one appeared to have died from natural causes rather than stab wounds to the chest. Closing it, I tried a second cabinet, which turned out to be empty. The third held the body of an old Chinese lady. The smell was becoming unbearable, and with a growing sense of dread, I pulled open the fourth and final one. I knew as soon as I saw the bloodstained shirt. Still, I checked the man’s face to make sure. The scar was there; the eyes were not. It was good to know I hadn’t imagined it.

  Closing the drawer, I turned and made my way back up the stairs and out the front entrance. I thanked Mitra, and told him not to worry about asking any more questions of his colleague, Constable Grewal. I gave him another cigarette for his trouble, then headed off, to all intents in the direction of the main road and a tonga rank.

  As I walked, I tried to piece it all together. Two British men in military uniform, one of them probably Major Dawson, had turned up some time after Callaghan’s men had left. They’d stayed an hour at the scene before leaving, taking little if anything with them. In that time, they must have moved the body down to the mortuary in the funeral parlour and stashed it in an empty drawer. If they were Section H operatives, that suggested that someone in Callaghan’s team had tipped them off. Maybe Callaghan himself had called them in. He’d already told me the raid had been called at short notice. Maybe Section H were behind it all along. The questions now were: why had they hidden the body and what did they intend to do with it?

  I might have pondered the matter further if I hadn’t found myself passing a familiar gullee. Some way down it was an opium den I hadn’t visited in a while. It sat next to a shebeen run by Piet, a Dutchman the size of an oak tree, where the clientele was as rough as the liquor. Piet had washed up in Calcutta one summer and, like jetsam stranded on a beach at high tide, he’d been here ever since. I liked the man. He didn’t ask questions, just served you a drink and left you alone. I might even have ventured in if I’d had the time. Instead I walked straight past Piet’s place and headed for the opium den.

  EIGHT

  23 December 1921

  The tea was lukewarm, which was a surprise. Either I’d woken earlier than usual or Sandesh had been tardy brewing it. My watch had stopped, so I couldn’t be sure which, but it was probably the former as Sandesh wasn’t one to vary his routine.

  I got up, dressed and emptied the teacup out of the window, then stepped into the hall to the scent of boiled eggs.

  ‘Good morning, sahib.’ Sandesh brushed past me on his way to the living room with a glass of lime juice in his hand. I followed him. Surrender-not was at the dining table, studying the Englishman and dipping a triangle of toast into his egg. His eyes still fixed on his paper, he nodded as Sandesh placed the glass on the table in front of him.

  Sharing lodgings with a junior officer, especially a native, wasn’t exactly common practice among the officers of the Imperial Police Force, and my decision to do just that had been met with bewilderment in some quarters and consternation in others, but it hadn’t deterred me. Indeed, the thought that my actions were met with horror by certain people was, I found, rather appealing. But there were practical reasons for it too: just as there was no point in learning about Paris from a German if there was a Frenchman around, the best way to understand Calcutta and its people was from one of its native sons – and Surrender-not, despite his Cambridge education and cut-glass accent, was still Calcutta born and bred and able to offer me insights that a whole faculty of professors of orientalism couldn’t. Then there was the fact that he’d saved my life, which was more than any English officer had done in Calcutta.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  He looked up, startled, as though he hadn’t seen me in months. Maybe he hadn’t at this hour.

  He made to rise. ‘Good morning.’

  I took a seat opposite him while Sandesh hovered behind me, savouring the novelty of seeing me up this early. ‘Anything interesting in the paper?’

  He tapped the headline on the front page. ‘The viceroy’s order banning the Congress Volunteers. It takes up three columns – and the editorial.’

  I told Sandesh to bring me toast and coffee, then turned to Surrender-not. ‘And what does the editor of the Englishman have to say about it?’

  The Englishman was generally most strident in its denunciation of Das and the Congress-wallahs. Indeed, it was the sort of rag that would have accused John Calvin of being soft on Roman Catholics. I didn’t much care for it, but Surrender-not liked it, though the irony of that seemed to escape him. Given the paper’s strain of hard-line, uncompromi
sing, empire-first rhetoric, which branded almost all natives as indolent, insidious or, worst of all, ungrateful, his reading of it seemed to me to be a rather unique form of self-flagellation.

  ‘They think common sense is prevailing. And not a moment too soon, apparently. Here,’ he said, passing me the paper, ‘see for yourself.’

  Sure enough, under the headline ‘Taking back control’, the editorial applauded the government’s firm stance, criticised the police for being lackadaisical in their dealings with the agitators, and called for the toughest measures to be taken not just against those flouting the new rule but also against those who by their actions close down the free flow of trade and commerce that is the city’s lifeblood.

  The paper had long been an advocate of more active police and physical intervention against the demonstrators, and I had the impression that only the sight of us breaking bones and smashing heads would satisfy them. After all, there was nothing lackadaisical about a lathi charge.

  ‘Why do you read this drivel?’ I asked.

  He looked perplexed. ‘Would you prefer I confined myself to only reading things I agreed with?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, tossing the paper onto the table as Sandesh arrived with the toast. ‘At least over breakfast. Reading that rubbish first thing in the morning is bound to give you indigestion.’

  I was right, as it turned out.

  Ninety minutes later Surrender-not and I were back at Lal Bazar, in Taggart’s office on the top floor, seated opposite him like two schoolboys summoned to the principal’s office. The commissioner looked like he’d slept worse than I had – which was quite impressive in its own way. He had only one subject on his mind, and one name on his lips.

  ‘Das,’ he said, picking up a sheet of paper from the acreage of his desk. ‘He’s sent me a letter, thanking me for the advance notice of the new ordinance, but he regrets that, unfortunately, his conscience dictates he cannot accede to my request as it would endanger the lives of innocent civilians. His conscience, for crying out loud!’ The vein in the commissioner’s temple throbbed. ‘Anyone would think he was in charge of security in this city.’

  ‘Did he say what he plans to do?’ I asked.

  Taggart stared at me. ‘If you’d care to remember, Captain, that’s what I charged you with eliciting. Fortunately, Mr Das has been kind enough to tell me himself in his bloody letter. A mass demonstration protesting the order, scheduled for four o’ clock this afternoon.’

  ‘On the Maidan?’

  ‘Don’t be naive, Sam. Holding his damn rally in the middle of the park would hardly cause the inconvenience he wants. He’s far too wily for that.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ he said, tossing the letter across the table.

  I picked it up and read. The words were written in neat, public-school handwriting with Das’s flourish of a signature at the bottom.

  ‘Howrah Bridge.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Taggart. ‘Or rather, the approaches to it. It would seem our friend Das would make a rather fine tactical officer.’

  The Indian had indeed chosen his ground well. Calcutta was a strategic oddity in that it was situated on the wrong side of the Hooghly River from most of India. It had probably made sense when the city was just a vulnerable little trading post, at the mercy of Moguls and their local satraps, but these days it was a damn nuisance. Choked both day and night, the bridge was the city’s lifeline; its artery across the river and its connection to the main rail terminus at Howrah.

  ‘Clever,’ I said. ‘It won’t take many people blocking the approaches on the Strand Road to bring the city’s trade to a halt.’

  ‘And all but cut us off from the rest of the country,’ added Surrender-not.

  ‘I’m not about to let that happen,’ said Taggart, rising from his chair. He walked over to the windows and I sensed something precipitous was coming. ‘I won’t have this city held to ransom,’ he continued. ‘Not by the likes of a jumped-up Middle Temple lawyer, and certainly not two days before the arrival of the next king-emperor. That bridge must stay open, gentlemen. I want you to inform Mr Das of that.’

  He might have been addressing both of us, but his gaze was fixed firmly on Surrender-not.

  ‘Tell him that I’ve no issue with arresting him, his family and every one of his supporters to a man, if he tries to test me. Let him know I’ll call out the army if I have to.’

  Surrender-not swallowed hard and looked like he half wished the ground would open up and swallow him.

  ‘With respect, sir,’ I said, ‘I fear that’s what he wants. He’s goading us. He’s been at this game for nearly a year now, and the people are getting tired of it. His supporters are demoralised. He needs something big to stir their passions, and he’s gambling that our arresting him would do just that. Any overreaction on our part would just play into his hands.’

  Surrender-not stirred beside me. ‘If I may, sir, there is another factor to consider. Das’s health. He’s not a young man. Should we arrest him and his health takes a turn for the worse, or, God forbid, he should pass away, the outpouring of anger would be such that it would take the army to quell it, probably at the loss of a significant number of lives.’

  He had a point. Das was one of the most respected men in Bengal. The ramifications of him dying in our custody didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘I must concur with the sergeant,’ I said. ‘The last thing we should do is risk making a martyr of him.’

  Taggart returned to his desk and slumped into his seat, looking even wearier than he did a few minutes earlier. ‘You have a better idea?’ he said, rubbing a hand across his chin.

  ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we should let him know that we’ll arrest everyone except him. It won’t look too good for “the friend of the nation” if everyone he’s exhorting to disobey the law gets carted away while he remains free. They’ll think he’s happy to see others suffer at his behest while facing no privations himself. Like those leaflets the Boche dropped over French trenches during the war saying the British were willing to fight to the last Frenchman.’

  Taggart shook his head. ‘No. I want him to know there’ll be personal consequences for his actions. Tell him we’ll arrest him and everyone else.’

  NINE

  Calcutta was a city divided in more ways than one. To the north, there was Black Town, home to the native population; to the south, White Town for the British; and in the middle, a grey, amorphous area full of Chinese, Armenians, Jews, Parsees, Anglo-Indians and anyone else who didn’t fit in. There was no law demarking the city, no barriers or walls; the segregation was just one of those things that seemed to have evolved while no one was paying attention. There were oddities of course, the odd Anglo-Indian in Alipore or a couple of Englishman in Bow Bazar, but for the most part, the rule held.

  The exception was Bhowanipore. While much of the Bengali elite resided around Shyam Bazar, a sizeable number had decided that it would be jolly to build their mansions in the south of the city. Not just anywhere in the south, but a stone’s throw from lily-white Alipore. The walls were as high, and the houses as big, but where those of Alipore were set back from the road and hidden from view – as though the buildings, like their residents, were different from their surroundings – the mansions of Bhowanipore stood tall, their columned facades looming high over the roadsides. I doubted it was coincidence that some of Bhowanipore’s finest houses were those visible from across the canal in Alipore. In a city where the natives were second-class citizens, the suburb’s architecture was a political statement. Bhowanipore was two fingers raised towards the British. And Bhowanipore was where Das lived.

  Surrender-not and I sat in the back of a police Wolseley as it drove down Russa Road in the hazy winter sunshine. The sergeant had seemed on edge ever since we’d left Lord Taggart’s office.

  ‘Come on, spit it out,’ I said.

  He turned to face me. ‘What?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I
asked. ‘You’ve spent the whole journey looking like someone stole your sweets.’

  He vacillated for a moment.

  ‘Don’t make me pull rank,’ I pressed.

  ‘The commissioner’s orders,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t help but feel he thinks I have some pull with Das, when the truth is quite the opposite.’

  ‘He is a family friend of yours,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a friend of my family – which is something quite different to being a friend of mine. He’s no more likely to listen to me than he is to listen to you; probably less so, given I’m an Indian who …’

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. He was a native who’d sided with the British, at least in the eyes of Das and his cohorts. It didn’t matter that, in his way, Surrender-not was as patriotic as any of them. He’d done what he believed was right – stayed at his post and continued to do his job. But he’d paid a heavy price for it.

  The car stopped outside the gates to Das’s residence.

  ‘His house looks even bigger than your father’s,’ I said to Surrender-not as a manservant dressed in a white kurta opened the gates.

  ‘Yes.’ The sergeant smiled, as the car edged forward once more. ‘But our house in Darjeeling is larger and better situated than Das’s.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said drily.

  The driver halted at the foot of a set of marble steps leading up to a column-studded veranda and we exited the car.

  ‘We’re here to see Mr Das,’ I said to the manservant, who’d come running over.

  ‘Hã, sahib,’ he said. ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘We’re the police,’ I said. ‘We don’t need an appointment.’

  The man’s face fell, yet he answered with good grace.

  ‘If you’ll kindly follow me.’

  He led us through a high-ceilinged hallway dominated by an iceberg-sized chandelier to a drawing room which opened out onto a courtyard that could have doubled as a football pitch.