Smoke and Ashes

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.

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.

To them, winter was nothing but a perilous time of the year. Indeed, to most of the city’s denizens, Christmas was an alien festival, planted in their soil by zealous missionaries and celebrated by the British and some misguided converts from other parts of the country – South Indians mainly – who’d settled here. Not that they necessarily resented it. The Hindus of Bengal could be a pragmatic people, and many of them had no problem accepting Jesus as another deity in the universal pantheon of gods and holy men, especially since we British had decreed his birthday as a holiday.

Still, the festivities were half-hearted at best, and that was fine with me. I preferred not to be reminded of the ghosts of Christmas past. The few happy memories I had of the festive period were of the days I’d spent with my wife, Sarah. She’d died four years ago, and like a man scared of his own shadow, I’d spent every Christmas since running away, first into a bottle, and then to Calcutta; because looking back at the past was like picking at the scab of an unhealed wound.

If there had been joy in my life since then, it had come from Annie Grant. The irony was that, while I ran from my memories, my inability to move forward – to consign my time with Sarah to the past – had probably crushed any prospect of a future with Annie.

The hibiscus fragrance of Alipore soon gave way to the stench of sewage as we approached the Tolly Canal, the boundary between the well-heeled suburb and the centre of town. The driver seemed to being doing his damnedest to drive through every pothole on the route back and my head pounded, as though the goddess Kali herself was hammering at it, hoping to add mine to the garland of skulls around her neck.

Dusk had settled by the time the car stopped outside my lodgings. Premchand Boral Street wasn’t the most salubrious of locales, but the rent was cheap and, more importantly, the landlord had no objection to a white man sharing lodgings with a native. The street was quiet at this hour. Most of the girls didn’t do much business before eight, and even then things only got rowdy after ten. Before that, it was the refined clientele, the salarymen with their starched dhotis and their neatly oiled and parted hair, stopping off on their way home for their regular appointments with a box of sweetmeats in hand and a smile on their face.

I made it up the stairs and turned the key in the lock. The hallway was in darkness. It meant Surrender-not was still out, but of course Sandesh would be in, probably in the kitchen, cooking by candlelight. It wasn’t that he was frugal – he just didn’t trust electricity.

The reply came not from the kitchen but the living room. From the scraping of the furniture, I surmised he’d been having a nap under the dining table. There came the scratching of a match, a flaring, then the soft glow of a hurricane lamp as he padded into the hallway.

‘Hã, sahib.’ He nodded, pressing the switch in the hall, before heading off to the kitchen. I entered the living room, took off my jacket and threw it over the back of a chair, then made for the drinks cabinet.

Minutes later I was on the veranda, a tumbler of Glenfarclas in my hand, seated on a wicker chair about as comfortable as a bag of rocks. With a shaking hand I lifted the heavy glass to my lips as, from behind me, Sandesh came out and wordlessly placed an enamel cup and a small brass pot and spoon on the table beside me, then retreated back inside. The cup was filled with a greyish, pulpy liquid that made Ganges water taste like ambrosia. But I wasn’t complaining. Not about that, nor the spoonful of clarified butter I’d take from the brass pot as a chaser.

The concoction had been prescribed by a quack called Chatterjee, whose consulting room consisted of a cabin little larger than a priest’s confessional booth in an unhygienic alley off Dharmatolla Street. He called himself a doctor of homeopathic medicine, and judging by the number of certificates hanging on the wall behind him, he seemed well qualified in his field.

I’d been sceptical of course, but as they say – needs must and all that. My cravings had reached the stage where the symptoms were becoming impossible to hide, even from myself. Going to a European doctor, even one of the Armenian chaps who practised over Barabazar way, was out of the question, seeing as how the confidentiality clause of the Hippocratic oath only seemed to sporadically apply in Calcutta. Besides, when it came to combating opium addiction, Western medicine appeared to have little in its armoury other than electroshock therapy, which sounded about as much fun as being bled by leeches.

So it had to be an Indian doctor, and it had to be secret. Even being caught making enquiries could cause trouble. But I was a detective with over a decade’s experience in covert surveillance. Tracking down people was what I did. From the outset I felt my chances of finding an appropriate physician were good; and they improved considerably when I saw Dr Chatterjee’s advertisement in the classified section of the Statesman.

Dr Hariprashad Chatterjee

Practitioner of Ayurvedic and Homeopathic Medicines

Remedies for infection, addiction, constipation, marital dysfunction…

One Tuesday evening in November, I’d made the trip to the doctor’s consulting cabin to confess my sins. Chatterjee turned out to be a thin man in thick glasses, a dhoti, and a half-sleeve shirt, ink-stained around the breast pocket where a pen had leaked.

He listened without comment as I haltingly explained my problem and betrayed no surprise at seeing a white man come to seek his services. He gave the matter the attention it deserved, nodding gravely every now and then until my words dried up.

‘Hã,’ he said finally. ‘Afeem addiction is most serious bãpaar. Efficacious treatment is long-drawn, intensive affair. Most unsavoury to Western sentiments …’

‘Of course there is treatment!’ He bridled. ‘You are aware of Ayurveda?’

Surrender-not was an advocate of Ayurvedic medicine, but like so much else about native practices, I’d found it hopelessly impenetrable, wrapped in the fog and folklore of Indian mysticism.

‘Cleansing,’ continued Chatterjee, the pupils of his eyes magnified through the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘Cure involves cleansing. Of full body and spirit. You will need to travel to ashram of Devraha Swami in Assam.’

‘No. But I send him many patients. Process takes twenty-five days. There will be much expulsion of poisons from the body. You will need to examine your stools most carefully.’

The problem, as ever, was time. In the current circumstances, the chances of Lord Taggart granting me twenty-five days’ leave to visit an ashram in Assam were as high as Kaiser Wilhelm being awarded the French Legion of Honour.

The glasses on Chatterjee’s face swayed as he shook his head. ‘I am sorry, no. Not if you want full cure.’

‘But,’ said the doctor, ‘there is one temporary measure. Kerdū. In English it is called, I think, ash gourd. It is not cure, but its juices can alleviate symptoms of afeem sickness.’

‘Take one half kerdū. Mash into pulp and drink with one teaspoon ghee. Take when symptoms are becoming too great.’

I’d been sceptical, but it wasn’t as though I had much of a choice, at least not until I could find the time for a month’s vomiting and stool examination. So I’d tried it, hesitantly at first, and surprisingly it seemed to work. I found that, after a draught of the concoction, the aches would abate for a day or so, plugging the gap between the severest onset of my symptoms and the next visit to a den in the dead of night.

I set down the tumbler of whisky, reached for the enamel cup and steeled myself. The stuff tasted foul and I drank it down in two gulps, then took a spoonful of the clarified butter from the pot and swallowed it while trying not to retch. I knew from experience that the brew would need a while to take effect, so I did the decent thing and picked up the whisky, sat back, sipped and waited.

My thoughts returned to the events of the previous night. A raid, scheduled at the behest of Section H, in secrecy and at the last minute. A dead man whose body seemed to have gone undetected – or at least unremarked – even though the place was crawling with policemen.

But corpses didn’t just disappear, not without the aid of a high-explosive shell, and as none had fallen on the opium den, it stood to reason that the body of the missing Chinaman must still be there … assuming, that is, I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

There was only one way to be sure. I got up, grabbed my jacket and headed out into the fog and hailed a taxi.

The streets were dead. On winter nights like this, Calcutta took on a ghostly quality, the veil between the living and the dead, indistinct at the best of times, now became positively porous. A rickshaw appeared out of the gloom, its driver wrapped up against the night in jumper, muffler and woollen cap, as though off to pick up Captain Scott at the South Pole.

The journey to Tangra was punctuated by the rickshaw-wallah’s hacking cough, each eruption accompanied by a curse and an apology.

It was the same every winter. As soon as the temperature fell below fifty, half the city fell ill, and talk of pneumonia and chest infections soon vied for conversational space with those perennial Bengali obsessions: politics and bowel movements.

I alighted a few streets distant and walked the rest of the way back to the opium den. From the front, the building looked like any other in this part of town: barred and shuttered windows set in a facade of stained, cracked plaster and crumbling brickwork. A wooden hoarding was nailed to the wall above the padlocked door, its Chinese characters painted in fading red.

A solitary, scarf-clad constable stood outside next to a hurricane lamp, stamping his feet in an attempt to drum up some bodily heat. He looked barely twenty and twitchy, and at the sound of my footsteps, he snatched up his rifle.

‘Who goes there?’ he challenged, with as much conviction as a priest in a brothel.

He relaxed when he saw I was a sahib, and even more so when I pulled out my warrant card.

I lied and told him I was from Vice Division. ‘I need access to the premises,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, fishing a ring of keys from his pocket. Finding the correct one, he turned and stooped over the padlock. It clicked open and the chain it fastened fell rattling to the ground. Mitra pushed it out of the way with the side of his boot, then held the door open. Borrowing his lamp, I stepped inside and into darkness.

It smelled different from the previous night. The aroma of formaldehyde and opium had gone, replaced by something else – something faint which I couldn’t quite define but which reminded me of the trenches. I took the stairs down to the basement, along the corridor to the room where, less than twenty-four hours earlier, I’d lain comatose on a flimsy charpoy, surrounded by half a dozen other opium fiends. The room was empty now, mute like the ante-chamber of a pharaoh’s tomb. Yet the ghosts of last night were still there: a broken chair, an upturned cot, an opium tray languishing in the corner like an afterthought; all bearing silent testament to what had transpired.

In the gloom, I stepped on a bamboo opium pipe, cracking it underfoot. I kicked it to one side and watched it roll into the shadows. I kept going, out of the room and into the corridor which the oriental girl had shepherded me to, then up the stairs, through the hatch and into the room where I’d found the dying man.

The room was empty. That was hardly a surprise. Short-staffed or not, the boys of Vice Division would hardly have missed a body lying in the middle of the floor. I knelt down and ran a finger over the tiled floor. There was no trace of blood. In fact there was little trace of anything. Was it possible that after my escape, with Callaghan’s men crawling all over the scene, someone had moved the body and washed the floor? It sounded absurd – and yet it must have happened. The alternative was that I’d imagined the whole thing.

The dead man had been no pipe dream. I remembered him vividly: remembered putting my ear to his mouth and checking his breathing; remembered his blood on my shirt and on my hands; remembered the strange bent blade. But what proof did I have?

It was better to concentrate on the concrete. I was a detective. I dealt in evidence and if I currently didn’t have any, I’d just bloody well have to find some. Retreating to the corridor, I once more knelt down and ran a finger over the floor. This time it came up coated in dust.

I returned to the room and walked over to where I thought the body had lain. Taking out my penknife and dropping to my knees, I flipped open the small blade and stuck it into the gap between two of the tiles, scraping it along the brittle cement of the join before bringing it up and examining it. The tip was coated in dirt and a dark powdery residue. I continued to scrape, further along the join between more of the tiles. Again the blade came up covered with the same dark brownish residue.

I wiped the blade on my shirtsleeve and stood up. The body might have been moved and the floor mopped, but the job had been rushed. Blood had seeped into the cracks between the floor tiles and dried.

The question was, who had cleaned up and what had they done with the body? I doubted it had been Callaghan’s men. He’d told me to my face that they’d found nothing of interest for CID, and he wasn’t the sort to lie, at least not convincingly.

I guessed the Chinese had either run or been arrested. Whichever it was, I doubted any of them would have been around long enough to hide a dead body and mop a floor. As for the local police, why would they bother to cover up a murder?

If anyone had a reason to hide a dead body, it was probably them. The raid had been carried out at their behest. Maybe the dead man was the elusive Fen Wang, the Green Gang mobster from Shanghai. The murder of a Chinese citizen in Calcutta, a drug lord at that, could well be the sort of thing they’d wish to hush up.

Storing my penknife, I walked slowly back to the front of the funeral parlour. Mitra was still there, rifle in hand, and looking as nervous as a baby.

‘At ease, Constable,’ I said, reaching into my pocket and fishing out a couple of crumpled cigarettes. I stuck one in the corner of my mouth, the way I’d expect a vice officer to, and offered him the other. His shoulders relaxed and he smiled and accepted it gratefully. I made a show of looking for a light.

His face brightened. Lowering his rifle, he searched his tunic pocket and extracted a matchbox, then took out a match and struck it against the emery. A halo of yellow light illuminated the dark, pitted skin of his face. Cupping the flame with his free hand, he lit my cigarette and then his own. I thanked him with a nod, and he responded with a look that suggested I’d just given him a medal.

A shift on watch tended to be six hours, though these days they could be longer. Either way, it meant that his relief wouldn’t be here till at least midnight – still several hours away.

That would probably have made him the first sentry on duty after Callaghan’s men had got back into their trucks and left.

He shook his head. ‘No, sir. No civilians. Only a few officers who came at around 5 a.m. Just before dawn.’

‘Yes, sir. One officer, and one junior. But I am thinking they were not from Vice Division.’

He shook his head in the manner Indians do when they have bad news to impart. ‘I saw the papers, sir, but I did not inspect them closely.’

That was normal. It was enough that the officer was a sahib. No other accreditation would have been necessary.

‘Of course.’ I smiled. Calcutta coppers’ uniforms were white, even those of the constables from Vice Division. Only police from outside the city boundaries wore khaki. ‘Well deduced,’ I said. ‘We could use a man like you at Lal Bazar.’

But there was one government organisation in town that did wear khaki uniforms: the military.

‘Any idea what they wanted?’ I asked. It was a long shot. The officers of Section H weren’t in the habit of explaining themselves to anyone, let alone some native constable standing shivering in the cold of a winter’s night in Tangra.

‘I don’t believe so, sir. Nothing that couldn’t be concealed in their pockets, at least.’

‘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?’

‘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.

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.

SEVEN