There was an envelope waiting on my desk at Lal Bazar. It was dated 23 December in florid, feminine handwriting.
I ripped it open and drew out the contents, a few flimsy sheets of paper, closely typed, with the words Barrackpore Military Hospital printed in large block capitals at top, and the name Ruth Fernandes beneath it.
‘What is it?’ asked Surrender-not.
‘Someone’s seen fit to send us Nurse Fernandes’s personnel file.’
‘Who? Colonel McGuire?’
I checked the envelope for any cover note but there was none, but I was quite certain who’d sent it. The date written on the envelope told me everything I needed to know. French handwriting is subtly different to the English variety, especially in the way that certain characters are drawn – the number ’1’ in particular. The French always write it with a much longer slant at the top.
‘I doubt it,’ I said, turning over the pages.
‘How can you tell?’
‘There’s no cover note,’ I said. ‘If it had been sent at McGuire’s behest, there would have been one, in fact there’s nothing at all with the sender’s name on it, which suggests it’s been sent surreptitiously. I think this has come from Sister Rouvel, and, if I’m correct, without McGuire’s knowledge.’
I sat down and read through the pages. There seemed little in the way of new information. Under her name and address was a short description of her qualifications and pay grade. Set out beneath that was her service history at the hospital. It began in November 1912, shortly after she’d come to Bengal at the behest of her husband, presumably.
She’d been promoted in October 1915 to head of ward. With the war starting in 1914, I imagined the hospital would have seen a large influx of wounded native troops returning for recuperation and rehabilitation the following year. It stood to reason that Fernandes, with her time served in Barrackpore and her previous experience as a nurse in Goa, would have been a natural choice for promotion.
The next entry was succinct. It read simply: September 1917: Transfer to RAWALPINDI.
Rawalpindi was a garrison town in the Punjab, over a thousand miles from Bengal, close to the North-West Frontier. By November of the following year though, she was back overseeing her old ward in Barrackpore, a position she retained until her death less than forty-eight hours earlier.
The next page was taken up with annual evaluations of her performance. There was a gap for 1917–18, as was to be expected given that during that time she’d been transferred to Rawalpindi.
I tossed the pages over the desk to Surrender-not and waited for him to read them.
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked as he finally looked up.
‘For the most part there’s nothing here.’ He shrugged. ‘But …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why would a staff nurse be transferred from Barrackpore to Rawalpindi?’
‘It was wartime,’ I said. ‘People were moved about all over the place. Things were pretty bad in ’17 and a lot of our Indian troops were from the Punjab. Maybe they needed additional nurses to tend to the wounded men sent back there?’
‘It’s possible.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s odd that her husband made no mention of it.’
It was a good point. The man had moved his wife and family all the way from Goa to Bengal. And while it was not uncommon in India for a man to leave his family to go off and seek work many hundreds of miles away, it was unheard of for women to do the same. Indeed the chances that George Fernandes had simply let his wife go off to the Punjab for a year were minuscule. Maybe Surrender-not had hit on something. So much of police work consisted of painstakingly poring over documents and most of the time you got precious little for your efforts. More often than not, all you got were more questions. But questions weren’t bad. Questions were the loose threads that, if you pulled on them hard enough and followed them for long enough, might just unravel the whole puzzle.
But a reference to Rawalpindi did nothing to progress my theory of a romantic assignation gone wrong. Still, the fact that George Fernandes hadn’t mentioned his wife’s year-long absence was curious. Just as importantly, it didn’t help the theory that her murder was carried out by Congress-supporting vigilantes – the only explanation that seemed to matter to Taggart and the politicians. To them, Ruth Fernandes was more important in death than she’d ever been in life, and the truth, if it didn’t fit their preferred narrative, counted for as much as a gob of spit in a downpour.
The Hindus believed that a person’s destiny was linked to the positions of heavenly bodies at the instant of birth – that their fates were written in the stars. Ruth Fernandes may have been a Christian, but that hadn’t prevented her fate from being sealed the minute she was born. From that moment, three things would always mitigate against her: she was poor; she was a native; and she was a woman. In India, that meant her life counted for little, and, unless it could be made to fit a wider narrative, her death would matter even less.
But her case had landed on my desk, and while it probably didn’t matter to her, I’d never been one to give up on lost causes, maybe because I was one myself. I’d keep going as long as there were questions to ask and loose threads to pull; not as a riposte to Surrender-not’s father and his belief that we didn’t care about the ordinary victims, but because at the end of the day, there was precious little else in my life that seemed noble.
‘Any news yet from Sergeant Lamont on the strength of George Fernandes’s alibi?’ I asked.
‘Nothing concrete,’ said Surrender-not. ‘He left a message saying he’d interviewed the neighbours. They confirm he went around knocking on doors and asking after his wife at around half past eight yesterday morning. That fits in with his story, but it doesn’t mean he couldn’t have gone out earlier and killed her. Lamont’s continuing his inquiries.’
‘And where are we with the post-mortem?’
‘The body has been transferred to the Medical College mortuary. Dr Lamb has it scheduled for tomorrow.’
‘See if you can’t persuade him to move it up to this afternoon. Tell him that Taggart wants it made top priority.’
Surrender-not looked at me dubiously. ‘What are we hoping to find?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe Lamb will tell us that her wounds were caused by some oriental ceremonial knife, or something else that connects her to the dead man in the opium den.’ Though what that might be was frankly beyond me. The truth was I didn’t know what I expected to find, but getting the post-mortem carried out felt like momentum, and in the absence of any clear direction, any momentum felt like progress.
‘I suppose we’ll know when we see it,’ I said.
‘There’s no chance you’re mistaken about the link with the body you found in the opium den?’
I fixed him with a stare. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’
‘We’ve discussed this, Sam. Going back there would end your career.’
That much was probably true, but it didn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Before I could respond, our peon, Ram Lal, a stick of a man in a blue shirt and a dhoti as grey as his hair, burst in, clutching a note and panting like a terrier. Surrender-not chided him for entering without first knocking, but there was little point. The old man was in his sixties and the days of learning new tricks were firmly behind him. The odd thing was that there were times when he’d knock fastidiously and then, ignoring calls to enter, wait until someone actually opened the door to let him in. There seemed no rhyme or reason to his behaviour. Ram Lal made his apologies and was about to exit so that he could this time knock and re-enter, when I put a stop to the farce.
‘Just give me the chitty,’ I said, pointing to the note, crumpled in hand.
‘Hã, sahib,’ he said, placing it on the desk and flattening it out, before nodding several times and backing his way out of the room.
I picked up the chit. It had my name on one side, and on the other was a handwritten note from Lord Taggart. I scanned it quickly and turned to Surrender-not.
‘There’s been another murder.’