I stood on the pier and watched the boat cast off into the blackness. I waited until it was almost at mid-river before turning and heading back towards the stairs to the embankment. With any luck, Rouvel would be on French soil by sunrise. I’d let her go, not because she told me everything she knew, or even half of it for that matter, but because what she did tell me was enough for me to know she was right. There was no way I could protect her in Calcutta. Not from the military and their attack dogs in Section H; not given what she knew. It was better that she headed for the relative safety of Chandernagore, outside their jurisdiction.
As I walked back up the steps, the gravity of what she’d told me began to sink in. It was hard to believe, but the logic of it was damning. Rawalpindi had never referred to the place in the Punjab but rather a series of experiments, all carried out at Barrackpore under the aegis of Alastair Dunlop; experiments that had left some of its subjects dead and others hospitalised – burned and scarred for life.
But then mustard gas will do that to you.
The Germans had used it first. In July 1917, they’d fired fifty thousand shells of the stuff at our lines and immediately we knew that this was something different. Of course, they’d used poison gas before; so had we, for that matter – chlorine or phosgene agents mainly, but while they assaulted only the eyes and lungs, this new toxin burned you inside and out.
The lucky ones suffered only the blistering: unbearable, untreatable lesions on the neck, body and limbs. Most victims were blinded. Others slowly suffocated.
At first we’d called it Yperite, after the town of Ypres where it had been used, and because we knew bugger all else about it. Later we’d discover it was a complex concoction of sulphur dichloride and ethylene: a viscous brackenish liquid that smelled of horseradish; and that it was a cytotoxic agent – one that attacked every living cell it touched.
According to Rouvel, the experiments had started in autumn of 1917. Dunlop and his assistants had arrived at Barrackpore and set about establishing their tests to develop a better, more toxic mustard gas of our own.
The military, after the fiasco of the Dardanelles, and believing that Asiatics were hardier to poison gas than white troops, had wanted to develop a weapon that would be effective against all the enemy powers, including the Turks. I’d seen the effects of poison gas during the war. I’d watched men die in agony as the gas seared through their eyes and lungs; seen others cut their own throats when they could no longer stand the pain. Dunlop’s task was to calculate the minimum quantity of gas required to produce fatalities. It was wartime after all. Everything was in short supply and there was no sense in wasting the stuff. As for the men, the lab rats on whom the trials were to be inflicted, most had been chosen from the hardiest regiments – the Gurkhas and the Sikhs – and were told that the gas would make them stronger; their subsequent silence bought with the promise of a few paltry rupees.
It all began to make sense. Rawalpindi was the reason why Dunlop, Ruth Fernandes and Prio Tamang were dead. It was the reason why Mathilde Rouvel was running for her life and why the military had presumably whisked Colonel McGuire into protective custody. It also explained Section H’s eagerness to know what I was doing at the opium den the night Tamang was killed and their alacrity at preventing me from questioning Anthea Dunlop. Several questions remained, though: who was the Gurkha killing the perpetrators of Rawalpindi? what was his connection to the project? why the ritualistic stab marks and gouging of eyes? and, most importantly, who was next on his list?
I reached the embankment, and in the light of a street lamp, once more pulled out the photograph and examined the faces. In addition to the six people already identified, there were another two white officers, standing directly behind Dunlop. I assumed they were his assistants. My first task had to be to locate them.
Stuffing the photograph back into my jacket pocket, I began to walk in the direction of the station where I expected Surrender-not was still waiting.
‘No sign of her,’ said Surrender-not, descending the steps from the station platform.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I found her.’
The surprise was evident on the sergeant’s face.
‘Where?’
‘Down by the river. At the ghat.’
‘And where is she?’
‘On her way to Chandernagore,’ I said.
‘You let her go?’
I gave him a nod. ‘We made a deal. She told me what I needed to know, and I let her leave.’
Surrender-not’s eyes widened. ‘So what did she say?’
‘It’s a long story, and right now we don’t have much time. I’ll tell you in the car.’
‘Revenge,’ I said, recounting the details of Rouvel’s confession as the Wolseley sped back towards town. ‘Our killer appears to have a vendetta against a number of people who were involved in running a series of poison gas experiments on servicemen which were code-named Rawalpindi and carried out here in 1917.’
‘You think it’s one of the men they experimented on?’
‘That would be my guess. In which case, we’d need to see the records of all the test subjects.’
The sergeant mulled it over wordlessly, his forehead furrowed like a ploughed field.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to break into the records section at Barrackpore to find them. Section H are as determined to find this chap as we are, and it’s about time they did some of the work. Besides, I’m tired.’
Surrender-not winced. ‘It’s not that, sir.’
‘Then what?’
‘Why wait so long?’
‘What?’
‘If the experiments took place in 1917, why does the killer wait almost five years before taking his revenge?’
It was a good question. I stared out at the road and tried to come up with an answer, but instead felt only the growing nausea in my stomach and the aching of my bones. I picked up the bottle of kerdū pulp and took a swig.
As usual, my watch had stopped at some point during the fun and games in Barrackpore, but something in the quality of the air told me it was well after midnight. I could have asked Surrender-not, but then we’d once more have got into the whole debate about why I didn’t get the damn thing fixed, or, failing that, a new one. The fact was, it was the only possession of my late father’s that I’d inherited. It had been with me through the war in France and had never been the same since. The best horologists in Hatton Garden hadn’t managed to fix it and there was no way I was about to let some Calcutta watch-wallah mess around with its innards.
I rubbed the fatigue from my eyes as the car entered the environs of College Street. Outside our lodgings on Premchand Boral Street, a long, black saloon loitered with all the menace of an unexploded bomb. It looked like the same one that Section H had used the night before to drop me off in Tangra after I’d spilled my guts in Dawson’s office. If I was in line for another journey across town in it, I could only hope that in the meantime they’d had it valeted.
As our Wolseley came to a halt behind it, one of its doors opened and out strode Allenby, the same man who, after asking for a light, had stuck a gun in my ribs the last time. He walked over and waited for me to get out.
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You need another match.’
‘That’s good,’ he replied, a thin sickle of a smile from his slit of a mouth. ‘You’ll be needing that sense of humour before the night’s out.’
I feared I was about to spend another ten hours in a cell under Fort William. I suspected they’d only left me there that long so that, wracked with the pain of opium withdrawal, I’d be more pliable when it came to questioning me. The problem was that now we just didn’t have ten hours to spare.
‘How about we dispense with the niceties and you just take me to see your organ-grinder?’ I said.
He shook his head and ushered me towards the black car.
‘Organ-grinder,’ he said, as though trying the words out in his mouth. ‘I suppose Major Dawson is just that, in the figurative sense. Me, on the other hand, well, you could say I’m more the literal type.’
He bent over and pushed me into the car.
Behind me, I heard Surrender-not approach.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘If you’re taking the captain, you’re taking me too.’
Allenby straightened and looked at Surrender-not as though appraising a rotten fish.
‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘If we’re going to see the organ-grinder, I suppose the more monkeys the merrier.’
He nodded at the car’s rear door. ‘Get in.’
The sergeant did just that, and once seated beside me gave me a smile that suggested he considered the whole thing a nice adventure.
Surrender-not and I settled in for the journey to Fort William. However, it wasn’t long before I figured something was awry. Instead of carrying on straight along College Street, the car slowed and then turned right into Bow Bazar.
‘You do remember the way to Fort William, don’t you?’ I asked.
Allenby kept his back to me. ‘We’re not going to Fort William.’
‘Then where?’
‘Your office.’
Minutes later, flagged through by sentries, the car turned into the courtyard inside Lal Bazar and pulled up close to the block which housed the officers’ quarters. The Section H man got out and opened the rear door.
‘I thought we were going to see Major Dawson?’ I said, exiting the vehicle and stretching my cramping legs.
‘We are,’ he replied. ‘He’s here with your boss, Taggart.’
Sweat trickled down my back. That Dawson was here with Taggart in the middle of the night suggested he was making good on his threat. He must have suspected I was getting close to the secret of Rawalpindi and he’d come here to tell the commissioner about my opium habit.
‘Come on,’ said Allenby, pushing me towards the side entrance. ‘We haven’t got all night.’
My thoughts raced as we entered the building and made for the stairs up to Taggart’s office on the top floor. There was no going back from here. Allegations of drug addiction weren’t something you recovered from professionally. I resolved that if this was the end of my career in the Imperial Police Force, or any police force, for that matter, I’d do my damnedest to take Dawson and his friends in the military down with me.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs, my fury had been tempered by cold reality. There was no point in anger – or self-pity for that matter – not when there remained the small matter of a Gurkha still at large and intent on murdering more people.
‘Wait outside,’ I said to Surrender-not, as we walked down the corridor. ‘Whatever happens to me, make sure you tell Taggart about the Gurkha. He needs to be stopped before anyone else gets hurt.’
Lord Taggart’s office was at the far end, accessed by a small anteroom in which his secretary sat, but which at this hour was empty. One of the double doors to the commissioner’s inner sanctum lay open and light from the office spilled into the anteroom. From inside came the sound of Dawson’s voice.
I stopped just short of the threshold and composed myself. Two and a half years I’d been in Calcutta – a pretty good innings by my standards – especially as I’d never expected to last beyond that first month. I wouldn’t be too sad to see the back of the place – this accursed city with its abominable climate and ridiculous citizens, both British and Indian – and yet I felt some part of me would be left here, its loss gnawing away at me for the rest of my life. Calcutta could be insidious like that. At least it would draw a line under the fiasco of my relationship with Annie Grant, which had been going on for just as long, and which, judging by the glacial rate of progress achieved during that time, suggested my strategy might have been directed by Field Marshal Haig himself. I’d miss her, no doubt a lot more than she’d miss me, and the thought of that seemed to rouse something in me. Not something noble, but rather the bloody-minded side of my nature. If there was a reason for sticking it out here, it was that when it came to Annie, I realised I wasn’t about to admit defeat just yet.
I took a breath, knocked on the open door, and entered.