The first call had been to the transport pool at Lal Bazar, requesting that a car be sent to us immediately. The second was to the Park Street thana, ordering them to send officers back to the Dunlop residence at Park Street. I asked that Constable Mondol, who’d been there earlier in the day, be present. Constables generally lived in police force accommodation provided near or next to their thanas, and the good thing about India was that native officers didn’t tend to question an order issued by a sahib, even if that meant being roused from their beds in the middle of the night.
The boys from the Park Street thana had reached the Dunlop house before we arrived, and we were let in by a young constable who escorted us up the stairs.
It hadn’t taken Mondol’s men long to find traces of something amiss, and soon we were standing once more at the entrance to Dunlop’s study.
Mondol himself was kneeling on the floor. He looked up and grinned, then pointed to a brownish stain between on the tassels of a rug that covered much of the floor.
‘There,’ he said, almost triumphantly.
‘That could be anything,’ said Surrender-not sternly.
Mondol bent down, lifted a corner of the rug and pulled it back. The varnish on the floorboards was thin and in certain places had worn through. In one such spot, not much larger than the palm of a hand, the boards were partly stained.
I walked over and knelt down beside him, then ran my finger over it.
‘Someone’s tried to clean up,’ I said.
I got to my feet, then addressed Mondol. ‘Bring Mrs Dunlop in here. Then search this place from top to bottom.’
His brow creased. ‘For what, sir?’
‘For whatever was used to clean up,’ barked Surrender-not. ‘Rags or cloths or sheets stained with blood. Check the refuse. Check the fireplaces.’
The constable nodded and turned on his heel.
It appeared Dunlop might have been killed right here in his study. I took the seat behind the dead man’s desk and stared at the photographs on the wall. Those that Surrender-not had dragged down with him as part of his dying swan routine, and which had not been damaged, had been replaced, and the floor swept of shattered glass. Still, there were several empty spaces where photographs had previously hung, their absence made conspicuous by the discoloured outlines of their frames on the wall.
The door creaked open and, accompanied by a constable, Anthea Dunlop entered, looking like thunder, wrapped in a dressing gown.
‘What’s the meaning of this, Captain? I take it you realise it’s the middle of the night. Your behaviour is tantamount to harassment. Rest assured, I shall be lodging a complaint with your superiors in the morning.’
‘Forgive me, Mrs Dunlop,’ I said, ‘but what we have to discuss can’t wait till morning.’
She eyed me suspiciously. ‘I was rather given to understand that you weren’t supposed to be discussing anything further with me.’ She gestured to Surrender-not who stood next to the door. ‘I’m sure your assistant hasn’t forgotten.’
‘I doubt our friends in the military are going to object this time,’ I replied, directing her to the chair opposite. ‘In fact they seem to be positively keen to encourage our investigations. You have a telephone, I believe. We can call them if you wish?’
She stood there, raging silently, and for a moment I felt she was actually considering it, but then she thought better of it and sat down.
‘What do you wish to know?’
‘For a start, Mrs Dunlop,’ I said, ‘how about you tell me why you lied to us?’
‘Excuse me?’
I looked her in the eye. ‘Your husband wasn’t killed in his bed, was he?’
There was a flicker, something in the eyes. Just as there had been the first time I’d questioned her. It wasn’t fear, exactly, but something else. Was it defiance? I watched as her hand went to the pocket of her dressing gown, then came back up empty. Maybe she was searching for her rosary. It didn’t look like she needed a handkerchief.
She sighed bitterly. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘Because it’s true,’ I said. ‘Because I doubt his research into malaria went as far as sleeping without a mosquito net. I think you know who killed your husband. I think you’re covering for them. What I don’t know is why.’
It was a statement calculated to shock, but there was no alternative – I didn’t have time for niceties – and to be honest, I was too tired to care. Given she was a recently widowed woman one might have expected the waterworks to start, but Anthea Dunlop didn’t shed a tear. Instead, she looked up at me.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Captain. I’ve told you already, I’d taken a sleeping draught. I found Alastair lying in his room in the morning.’
It was the wrong answer. Or maybe she just said it in the wrong way. Whatever the case, she was lying. She was asking me to believe that a murderer entered her home, found her husband, brought him in here, killed him, cleaned up the mess and placed a rug over the one area where the traces of blood couldn’t be removed, then left without her or anyone else in the house noticing. Even for Calcutta, the story stank. Not for a moment did I consider she’d killed her husband herself, but that didn’t mean she was innocent.
‘Is someone threatening you?’ I asked. ‘Is that why you’re shielding them? If so, we can protect you.’ It was the second time that night I’d offered police protection to a woman. Mathilde Rouvel hadn’t believed I could protect her. This time the reaction was different. Anthea Dunlop obviously didn’t think she needed protection.
‘I’ve told you, Captain. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Her tone was casual; almost flippant. It certainly wasn’t the tenor of a woman trying desperately to convince me of the truth of her story.
And then it struck me. She believed her husband’s death was justified. She was a religious woman, a devout Catholic with a clearly defined sense of right and wrong. Maybe her husband had done something she couldn’t condone. It was clear she felt no guilt over his murder, but from her expression it seemed lying to me was proving a little harder. Suddenly I understood that earlier flicker in her eyes. She wanted to tell me – to explain why her husband had to die and why she’d been right to protect his killer.
All I had to do was ask the right question.
‘Mustard gas,’ I said.
She looked at me in horror. ‘What?’
‘When did you find out your husband wasn’t researching a cure for malaria but was working on creating a more toxic strain of mustard gas for the military?’
‘I didn’t –’
‘Did you know before you even left England? At the very least, you must have realised the nature of his work when you came out here and took up your position as a nurse at the hospital in Barrackpore. It must have been difficult, a God-fearing woman such as yourself, having to live in the same house as a man who was developing weapons of mass murder.’
‘I didn’t know,’ she said forcefully. There were tears and anger in her eyes. ‘He told me he was working on a countermeasure. And I’d believed him until …’
‘Until what?’
‘Until Colonel McGuire told me the truth.’
‘McGuire?’ I asked. ‘The director of the hospital? Why would he tell you?’
‘Grief,’ she said. ‘It was the end of 1917. His son had been wounded at Passchendaele. The boy had been burned terribly in a gas attack and died in hospital a week later. And here he was, in charge of a facility where they were running a mustard gas research programme. The irony wasn’t lost on him. He took it stoically at first, but there was one occasion, I had cause to go to his office and he was drunk. He wasn’t making much sense, kept roaring on about the wrath of the Lord. He saw it as God’s punishment for his role in facilitating evil.
‘Of course I confronted Alastair about it. He told me he had no choice in the matter, that he was working for the good of king and country. I made him promise me he’d stop once the war was over. And he did. He took the position at the School of Tropical Medicine.’
She wiped the tears from her eyes.
‘Then that letter arrived from London, recalling him to Porton Down to continue his research. I begged him to turn it down, but he refused. He never saw the evil in what he was doing, only the scientific challenge: the goal of perfecting ever more effective poisons. It was when he accepted the post that I realised he was no longer the man I’d married. I don’t know that I would have done anything about it if that man hadn’t showed up about a month ago.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
She fell silent.
‘I don’t know what hold this man has over you,’ I said, ‘but you should know that we suspect he has acquired a substantial quantity of poison gas and that he intends to use it on innocent civilians. Our only hope of stopping him rests with you telling me everything you know.’
I watched the struggle play out in her eyes.
‘Mrs Dunlop,’ I said gently, ‘this man is about to murder countless people. You have a chance to atone for your husband’s work. You can help me stop him.’
She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
‘Gurung,’ she said. ‘His name is Lacchiman Gurung. He’s a rifleman in one of the Gurkha regiments.’
‘Do you know which one?’
‘No.’
I looked over at Surrender-not, who already had his notepad out and was scribbling down the details. ‘Get on the telephone to Dawson. Tell him the man we’re looking for is Rifleman Lacchiman Gurung.’
‘Immediately, sir,’ he said, making for the door.
I turned back to Anthea Dunlop. ‘Why did he come to you a month ago? Was he one of the subjects your husband carried out his tests on?’
She shook her head. ‘No, but he was the father of one of them. His son, Bahadur, was only fifteen when he signed up. Bobby, we called him. He was a tiny boy, even for a Nepalese. I expect they’d have rejected him if it hadn’t been wartime. He was recruited for the tests by Prio – Prio Tamang, that is. Tamang was a hospital orderly but he also acted as an unofficial gallah-wallah, one of those men who go round the Nepalese hill villages and sign up boys for the army.’ She smiled to herself. ‘I suppose none of this would have occurred if Bobby hadn’t been quite so tiny.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘The tests,’ she said. ‘Alastair’s tests. He’d told me that part of developing a countermeasure meant exposing the subjects to small amounts of gas. He said they weren’t harmful and that when lethal concentrations were used, the men were given gas masks. The accident occurred on one of the high-concentration trials. The gas masks were army issue, you see, and Bobby’s head was too little for even the smallest size to fit. During the trial, his mask slipped.’
She paused and looked past me.
‘I remember they brought him in to the infirmary. We’d seen injuries before, but nothing like this. Both his eyes were burned through and his breathing was ragged. He survived for almost three days in agony, before he finally passed away.
‘During that time, I looked after him as though he were my own son. Afterwards, I felt I had a duty to write to his family. His father was stationed on the Western Front, and I sent him a letter, telling him his son was at peace. I expect the censors took their black pencils to it, but at least some of what I wrote made it to Lacchiman. He wrote back, thanking me for my kindness towards his son and that was an end of it. At least it was, until a month ago when he turned up at my door. He told me his regiment had just been posted to Calcutta and that he wanted to thank me personally for what I’d done for his son. He was a shy man, ill at ease, but polite to a fault. It became apparent that he had no real idea how his son had died.’
‘And you set him right?’ I asked.
She stared at me. ‘Every parent has a right to know how their child died, Captain. Not to tell him would have been a crime – before God if not the law.’
‘How did he take the news?’
‘Stoically. Would you expect a native to react any other way when given such news by a memsahib? To do otherwise would no doubt have been shameful to him.’
‘Well, his subsequent actions seem to have been rather less stoic,’ I said. ‘He’s already murdered three people, including your husband.’
‘Alastair deserved his fate,’ she said. ‘My husband wanted to create more weapons, better weapons. Ones that would kill more sons. And all because it was a scientific challenge.’
‘What happened after Gurung left?’
‘About a fortnight ago, he came back to the house. He told me he’d met the man who’d recruited his son for the tests – I assumed that was Prio Tamang – and that after plying him with drink, Tamang had told him the names of those responsible for the tests. He told me he knew what my husband had done during the war, and that he was going to seek revenge. I told him only God should seek retribution. Of course, he quoted the Bible, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” – it seems to be a verse most popular with heathens – and I, in turn, told him of Our Lord’s response, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” I thought I had convinced him.’ She turned away. ‘Obviously, I was wrong.’
That was an understatement. In my experience, turning the other cheek wasn’t a philosophy the Gurkhas put much stock in. They were far more likely to follow the doctrine that if someone were to smite you on the right cheek, the best thing to do would be to smash them in the face so hard that they’d never entertain the thought of trying to smite you ever again. Less a case of an eye for an eye and more of you take my eye, I’ll take your whole head. Indeed, that tempered, homicidal rage was one of the reasons we prized them so highly as soldiers.
Yet something in the words still struck home.
An eye for an eye.
‘What did you tell Gurung about the injuries sustained by his son?’
Anthea Dunlop looked away.
‘Mrs Dunlop,’ I said forcefully, ‘what injuries did Bahadur Gurung sustain and what exactly did you tell his father?’
She looked up. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I told him the truth!’
‘That Bahadur Gurung was blinded by the gas?’
She nodded.
‘Did it also affect his lungs?’
‘It was the damage to his lungs that finally killed him,’ she said.
‘And you told all this to his father, didn’t you? That’s why he marked your husband and his other victims with the same wounds. Eye for eye. Lung for lung.’
The woman didn’t reply. She didn’t need to.
Yet I imagined that for a man like Gurung, the gassing of his son by the British military, an institution he’d probably venerated and served since he’d been old enough to join, would be the ultimate act of betrayal. For such a sin, the slaying of those directly responsible might not be enough.
I pictured the scene: Gurung tracking down Prio Tamang, the man responsible for recruiting his son for Rawalpindi; getting Tamang drunk, hoping to find out details of the persons responsible for his son’s death; then discovering that Prio Tamang was now no longer just a recruiter of innocent Nepalese village boys, these days he’s assistant quartermaster at Barrackpore. During their conversation, Tamang boasts about the transfer of the remaining mustard gas stocks from Barrackpore to Fort William, and Gurung realises that here is a way of exacting the sort of revenge that would be fitting. He bribes Tamang to ‘lose’ some of the mustard gas canisters en route to Fort William. Tamang delivers them to Gurung, but instead of the expected pay-off at the opium den in Tangra, the Gurkha murders him – the first in the sequence of revenge killings that would then include Ruth Fernandes, Alastair Dunlop, Mathilde Rouvel and Colonel McGuire, before the ultimate act of retribution, the gassing of massed civilians in Calcutta on Christmas Day.
‘And that was the last time you saw him?’ I asked. ‘Until last night?’
‘Yes,’ she said, recovering some of her composure. ‘He broke in some time after midnight. I was in bed and Alastair was in here, working.’ There was a bitterness to her tone. ‘All he did was work. Lacchiman must have known that the servants’ quarters were on the ground floor, for he came in through the roof. He entered my bedroom first.’
‘You didn’t scream?’
‘I would have, but he clamped his hand over my mouth before I realised what was happening. He said he wasn’t going to harm me. That he was here to ask my husband some questions.’
‘And you told him Alastair was in his study?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘He bound and gagged me, then left the room. I heard him cross the landing to the study. I heard Alastair call out once, but that was it. I assumed Gurung had threatened him with a gun. The next thing I remember is Gurung returning to the room. He looked like the Devil … or maybe one of Our Lord’s avenging angels. They do say that Satan is nothing more than one of God’s fallen angels, don’t they? He bent down and started to untie me. I asked him what he’d done. He didn’t reply.’
The door opened and Surrender-not walked in. He gave me a nod, then returned to his place beside me.
I pulled the photograph from my pocket, flattened it out on the desk and pointed out her own image. ‘He’s after those involved with Operation Rawalpindi,’ I said, ‘even the nurses who cared for the injured and the dying. So why didn’t he kill you?’
Once more she stared at the wall. ‘Would you believe me if I said I’d asked him to? I too have lost children, I’ve contemplated taking my own life more than once, but of course self-harm is a sin for which there is no absolution. Had he killed me, he would have been doing me a service, but he refused. He said he didn’t want my death on his conscience.’
‘And yet, he’s prepared to poison innocent civilians?’
‘You say he’s prepared to do so,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen no evidence of that. So far, he’s only killed those whom he sees as responsible for his son’s death.’
Her point might have been well made, had it not been for the fact that the man had stolen several canisters of mustard gas. Her defence of him triggered something else in my head.
‘Did you ask Gurung to kill your husband?’
‘No,’ she replied flatly, ‘but I didn’t try to stop him. My husband was creating weapons more poisonous than those which killed Bahadur Gurung. If you knew someone whose purpose was to sow death, wouldn’t you try to stop them, Captain?’
I stared at her. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Mrs Dunlop.’