‘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 rather 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.