Smoke and Ashes Read online

  ‘No, sir,’ he stammered, ‘I only –’

  ‘Let me tell you, Sergeant. I pray I never get used to seeing it.’

  They say that opium addiction and paranoia go hand in hand, and maybe that was why the first thought that went through my head was that someone was toying with me. Of all the detectives in Lal Bazar, why was it that I had been called out to investigate the death of this native woman?

  Lamont mumbled an apology which I barely listened to.

  ‘Why are we here?’

  The question seemed to take Lamont by surprise.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This woman’s a native,’ I said, ‘not a European, despite her name. This is a matter for the Serampore police, not Calcutta.’

  ‘You’ll see, sir,’ he said.

  He walked over to a small metal trolley on which sat a tray containing, I presumed, the dead woman’s possessions. He picked up something, turned and held it aloft. A small golden crucifix glinted in the light.

  ‘She might no’ be European,’ he continued, ‘but she was from Goa, and that makes her technically Portuguese. And she’s a Christian.’

  Beside me, Banerjee let out a whistle.

  The Portuguese used to control quite a bit of territory on the western coast of India. Now all they really had left was Goa, a speck of land which they and their priests administered in a manner which, to my eyes at least, appeared rather distasteful, converting as many of the locals to Catholicism as they could.

  ‘Standing orders,’ continued Lamont, ‘are that all matters which may be linked to the current tensions be escalated to Lal Bazar.’

  ‘Did anyone request me or the sergeant specifically?’ I asked.

  Lamont shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t think so, sir. The details were telephoned through to Lal Bazar. I expect the decision to send you was taken there.’

  I walked over to the table to get a better look at the body. In addition to the wounds to her head and chest, I noticed that a finger on her left hand was bent backwards, as though recently broken.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said to Surrender-not.

  He examined the mutilated finger. ‘Curious.’

  ‘What else do we know about her?’ I asked.

  Lamont consulted a small notebook which he pulled from his pocket. ‘Ruth Fernandes, a nurse, aged thirty-four, married to George Fernandes, an engineer at the Hastings Jute Mill here in Rishra.’

  ‘Where did she work? At this clinic? Or at the hospital in Serampore?’

  Lamont shook his head. ‘Neither. She was a nurse at the military hospital across the river in Barrackpore.’

  ‘Has anyone contacted her employers?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  That she worked for the military could complicate matters. One whiff of her murder and there was a fair chance military intelligence would swoop in and take over the case. That might actually be in my best interests, but for the moment, I wanted to keep my options open.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep it that way for now. Any idea why someone would want to kill her?’

  ‘We ruled out the obvious motives – she wasn’t robbed and she wasn’t … interfered with.’ He pointed to the body. ‘Her undergarments were intact and untouched. That’s why we assumed it might be related to the current tensions. The bastards keep talking about non-violence, but this is the reality: attacks on anyone who might not agree with them.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Banerjee.

  The question took Lamont by surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘Why do you assume she was against the independence movement?’

  ‘Well, she worked for the military, she was a Christian, and she wasn’t a local. I’d imagine that would be reason enough to make her a target for a lot of these vigilantes.’

  I looked closely at the corpse. There was a slight discoloration around the sides of her neck. It could have been bruising, but it was often hard to tell on dark skin. I lifted her right arm and turned it over, revealing the lighter skin on the inside of the wrist. There was more discoloration there, and this time I was sure it was bruised.

  ‘Have you requested a post-mortem?’

  ‘I thought it best to wait for you,’ said Lamont.

  ‘Contact Dr Lamb,’ said Surrender-not. ‘He’s the pathologist at the Medical College Hospital in Calcutta.’

  Lamont wrote the name in his notebook.

  ‘I want the body moved there as soon as possible,’ I said. ‘And how does a Goanese woman find herself in the middle of Bengal in the first place?’ The question was rhetorical, but Lamont saw fit to answer.

  ‘As I said, her husband’s an engineer at one of the local jute works. He probably got a job here and then sent for her. That’s the normal practice with a lot of these folk.’

  ‘And where’s he, now?’

  ‘We sent him home. He reported her missing this morning. Collapsed in shock when we brought him here to identify the body. Poor bugger.’

  ‘I’ll need to speak to him, and any other eyewitnesses. Who found the body, by the way?’

  ‘And where?’ added Surrender-not.

  ‘She was found face down in a ditch, a few hundred yards from the ghat where the boatmen operate. We interviewed them. One of them remembers bringing her across at around 5 a.m.’

  ‘And was he the one who found her?’

  Lamont gave a laugh of sorts and shook his head. ‘No. That was someone else. A holy woman the locals call Mataji. It means Reverend Mother apparently, though she’s like no nun you’ll have seen before. She’s back at the thana if you’d like to talk to her.’

  ELEVEN

  Lamont was right. The woman in front of us hardly looked like a Mother Superior. For a start she was smoking a chillum pipe, and from the smell, the contents weren’t tobacco.

  Mataji was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Lamont’s office, despite there being three perfectly good chairs in the room. She was younger than I’d expected, probably in her forties, with a shock of long, black unkempt hair, and was dressed in a saffron-coloured cotton sari. Her forehead was smeared with ash and around her neck hung a string of beads fashioned from bone into the shape of small skulls.

  ‘She’s a sadhvi,’ said Surrender-not, as we sat opposite her. ‘An itinerant holy woman. Like your Christian hermit priests, she’s turned her back on this world to focus solely on the path to God.’

  From the look of her eyes, I doubted she was able to focus on anything at the present time. She just sat there grinning at us, and especially at Surrender-not.

  ‘Does she speak English?’ I asked Lamont.

  ‘I speak English,’ interjected the woman. ‘French also.’

  ‘Then maybe you could start by telling me your name.’

  ‘I have many names. Which one do you want?’

  ‘How about the one your parents gave you.’

  ‘They named me Mala.’

  ‘And you found the body?’

  ‘Hã.’ She nodded. ‘In the gullee that runs down to the river. Across the open ground between the ferry ghat and the factories.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Can you be more specific? What time exactly?’

  She shook her head as though the question were meaningless. ‘Time-fime I don’t know. Maybe three–four hours ago?’

  ‘And how did you come across it?’

  ‘Hãin?’

  ‘How did you find the body? Was it visible from the road?’

  ‘No not visible.’

  ‘Then how did you know it was there?’

  ‘The birds told me.’

  ‘The birds?’

  ‘Hã.’ She nodded definitively, then stared at me, and I felt a chill between my shoulder blades. She turned to Surrender-not and muttered something in Bengali.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  Surrender-not had one eye on Lamont. ‘Nothing, sir,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Only that she was attracted to the spot by vultu
res. She says she is in tune with the world.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else in the vicinity?’

  The sadhvi closed her eyes and rolled her head around her shoulders. ‘No one important. Just a few women going down to the dhobi ghat with their washing.’

  ‘No one else? Anyone suspicious?’

  She opened her eyes. ‘Only that sahib sergeant-wallah,’ she said, gesturing at Lamont. ‘And now, you.’

  ‘Where were you off to at such an early hour?’ asked Surrender-not.

  The woman’s brow creased. ‘Off to? Off to?’

  ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘Going? I was going to look for God. Instead I found evil.’

  We’d soon exhausted the font of wisdom that was Mala the holy woman. I turned to Surrender-not as Lamont escorted her from the room.

  ‘What did you make of that?’

  ‘I suppose her story makes sense. She saw the vultures and that attracted her to the body. I didn’t get the impression she was lying.’

  I didn’t either, but the experience had left me unsettled.

  ‘And what did she really say to you, just then?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When she looked at me. You claimed she’d said she was in tune with the world.’

  Surrender-not hesitated. ‘She said she can tell when creation is out of balance … and when people are, too.’

  ‘Is something bothering you, sir?’ asked Surrender-not.

  We’d left the thana and were now following one of Lamont’s constables through a maze of alleyways that ran between a shanty town of mud-brick dwellings stretching from the factories beside the river to the railway line, the best part of half a mile inland, and which housed the myriad native workers employed in Rishra’s mills and machine shops.

  ‘I was wondering how a hermit woman comes to learn English.’

  ‘And French,’ added Surrender-not.

  ‘And French.’

  ‘She’s probably a widow,’ he replied. ‘Upper caste, I would imagine. Educated in English from an early age. Probably married off at an early age too. It’s likely she turned to the path of the sadhvi when her husband died. It’s not all that uncommon. Quite a few women do it. There’s a certain stigma in our society associated with young widows. Becoming one is akin to being a social outcast, so why not go the whole hog and follow the path to God?’

  ‘Why not indeed,’ I replied.

  We entered a gullee of squat, single-storey houses, with sagging red-tiled roofs and walls covered in cakes of cow dung set out to dry in the winter sun. The constable stopped outside one. Its walls were painted a faded blue and the crooked roof was missing a tile or two. There was no window, just a small doorway left open to let the light in. Surrender-not knocked on the open door, and without waiting for a response, bowed his head and entered.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I heard the sound of children. Three of them, none older than ten, and the youngest, a toddler in nothing but a vest, sat on the large bed that took up much of the room. An old Indian woman, wearing a faded, patterned dress, was busy keeping the youngest one occupied, quietly reciting a rhyme while playing with the child’s fingers. She stopped and looked up as we entered. The room itself was sparsely furnished. Beside the bed was a rough-hewn almirah, and in one corner a wooden table and chairs, unusual in a dwelling like this, as most Bengalis of this class ate cross-legged on the floor. On one of the chairs sat a man who seemed oblivious to our presence.

  ‘Mr Fernandes?’

  He snapped out of his reverie.

  ‘George Fernandes?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was little more than a whisper.

  ‘I’m Captain Wyndham and this is Sergeant Banerjee. We’re from Lal Bazar. We’d like to ask you some questions, if we may?’

  ‘Lal Bazar?’ he asked.

  ‘Police headquarters in Calcutta.’

  ‘I do not know what more I can tell you. Already I have spoken everything to Sergeant Lamont. He will tell you –’

  ‘I’ve been placed in charge of the case,’ I interjected. ‘Maybe we could speak to you without the children present?’

  It took a moment for the request to register.

  Finally he gestured to the old woman and pointed to a door at the far end. The woman rose and, gathering the toddler in her arms, shepherded the other children out of the room and into what I presumed was the part of the dwelling where the meals were prepared.

  ‘Our condolences on your loss,’ said Surrender-not.

  Fernandes nodded an acknowledgement. ‘Please. Ask your questions.’

  ‘We understand that you were the one who reported her missing?’

  ‘That is correct. She did not return home. I became concerned.’

  The man stared blankly past us, at a calendar on the wall with a picture of the Virgin Mary, who in turn gazed benignly at her son hanging on a cross on the wall opposite.

  ‘When did you realise she was missing?’

  Fernandes rubbed a hand across his forehead. ‘She was doing night duty … She is a nurse at the hospital in Barrackpore. Her shift is finishing at six o’clock … then normally she is taking boat and is returning home by half past seven. I am employed here at the Hastings Mill only.’ With a finger, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the door. ‘My shift is starting at half past eight … When my wife is still not returning by then, I am beginning to worry … I go out to search for her … down to the river but she is not there … So I wait at the ghat … for the boatman. He was returning from other side … I am thinking maybe she is delayed with some urgent patient and she is now coming on this boat … But when boatman comes, he is telling me she had come across much earlier … This is when I went to police.’

  The hesitancy in his account, the measured delay, may have been shock, or possibly a lack of fluency in the English language. Or maybe it was something more.

  ‘And what time was that?’

  ‘Nine o’clock. I am waiting at the station not more than one hour, when they tell me she is found.’

  A tear ran down the skin of one cheek before he wiped it away with the heel of his palm.

  ‘Have you any idea why someone might wish to attack her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe because she worked for the army?’

  Fernandes stared at the floor and shook his head. ‘It is true she is working for the British, but she is a nurse. She is everyone’s friend. She is bringing medicines for the children of the para. Everyone is fond of her.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Surrender-not. ‘Is there anyone who may have wished harm to you?’

  ‘Me?’ He gave a broken sigh. ‘I don’t know. So many people are angry these days.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about at your place of employment? Have the workers come out on strike?’

  ‘It is a jute mill. The workers are always happy to go on strike. But they are returning to work over two months now.’

  ‘And did you take part in the strike?’

  ‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I have family to support. Mā requires medication. If I am losing my income, we could not afford to pay for them.’

  ‘How does a Goanese come to be working in a jute mill in the middle of Bengal?’ I asked.

  Fernandes gave the thinnest of smiles. ‘Once more due to the strikes. Almost ten years ago, the men of both Hastings Mill and Wellington Mill went on strike. Not just workers but engineers who maintained the machinery also. The sahibs sacked many people. But it is simple to replace manual workers. Harder to replace engineers. Englishmen are too expensive and Bengalis are too hot-headed, so mill owners advertised in Bombay and Delhi. I was working in Bombay. I saw advertisement in paper, made application and was called for interview. They offered me a position, so I came to Bengal and sent for family some time later. My wife had been nurse in clinic in Goa, and quickly sh
e is finding position at hospital in Barrackpore.’

  ‘You identified your wife’s body, I believe?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you any idea why someone would inflict those particular injuries on her?’

  Fernandes fell silent, then began to sob gently. ‘Who would do such a terrible thing to her?’

  It was a good question.

  We kept up the interview for another ten minutes or so, but it quickly became apparent that he had nothing more of use to tell us. I offered my condolences once more, then left him to his grief.

  Back in the lane, I fished out my Capstans and extracted the last two cigarettes from the pack. I passed one to Surrender-not and stuck the other in my mouth, then crushed the empty carton and dropped it into the gutter that ran down the middle of the alley. Surrender-not pulled out a lighter and lit us both.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ I asked.

  Surrender-not shrugged. ‘Obviously, the man was in some distress.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I agreed without conviction.

  The sergeant sensed my ambivalence.

  ‘You think he might have something to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ I said. ‘Not yet anyway. All we know is that it wasn’t robbery and it wasn’t rape. That rules out most reasons for a random attack.’

  ‘What about Jack the Ripper?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t rape or rob his victims, just mutilated them.’

  The sergeant had a fascination about the Ripper murders, a fascination that I’d exacerbated by telling him I’d known some of the officers who’d worked on the case. Since then, and despite me explaining more than once that I’d joined the force years after the murders, he still seemed to think I was some sort of expert on the subject.

  I shook my head. ‘Not the same,’ I said. ‘His victims were all prostitutes.’

  That didn’t seem to dissuade him. ‘Maybe our killer has something against nurses?’

  Of course he had no way of knowing, as I did, about the dead man in Tangra.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Everyone loves nurses.’

  We walked out of the slum and back towards the thana, the sweet tobacco smoke helping to mask both the stench of the place and also my fraying nerves. It wasn’t just the usual cravings that were beginning to bite, it was also the feeling that someone was toying with me: the first raid in months on an opium den occurs just when I happen to be there; a murder which no one reports and where the body disappears; and now this poor woman turns up dead, bearing the same wounds as the dead Chinaman. And out of all the detectives in Lal Bazar, the case just happens to fall to me. I had trouble accepting the notion that I’d simply become embroiled in a series of random events – wrong time, wrong place. Could it all just be coincidence? And if not, then what was the point of it? Why involve me?