We dropped Gulmohamed at Kemp’s Corner. If it was unusual to interrogate a man and then drop him home, it was also a tad embarrassing, as being strangers to the city, we had to rely on his directions. Still, he could console himself with the knowledge that we didn’t charge him the cab fare, even though we could have done with the money.
We left him near his front door with a smile and a warning that should he mention this evening’s events to anyone, we’d pay him another visit that wouldn’t end quite so amicably.
Back in the car, Suren and I headed for the lockdown near the station to return our borrowed vehicle. The sergeant was taciturn. For the best part of three days he’d chased Gulmohamed and now, having caught him, we had no option but to let him go. But this was no time to fester.
‘Come on, spit it out.’ I said as we drove through deserted, lamp-lit streets.
Suren weighed his response as though each word was a burden.
‘All this time I have been sustaining myself on the hope that when we caught Gulmohamed, I would be able to prove my innocence. That appears naive now.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll start tracking down this Irani chap.’
Suren looked straight ahead. ‘I doubt that will make a difference. If we cannot link Gulmohamed to the case, what chance is there that we will have more luck with some Parsee businessman? He probably has no involvement at all. Parsees are about the most law-abiding people in the whole empire. When was the last time you heard of a Parsee so much as littering let alone committing a murder?’
I couldn’t help but laugh.
‘How many times have I told you that no one is ever totally innocent, not the Parsees, and not even your sainted Mahatma Gandhi sitting in his prison cell. We’ll get to the bottom of this.’
‘Even if it kills me?’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’
‘Very well,’ he said, regaining a measure of optimism. ‘As you say, first thing tomorrow, we start looking for Cyrus Irani.’
‘Second thing,’ I corrected him. ‘First thing, I need to telephone Miss Grant.’
He gave me a look. ‘You have to check in with her every morning? She must be most concerned as to your welfare.’
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘I asked her to sort us out with some cash.’
‘Asking a lady for money? This is not proper.’
He was right of course, but we had little option.
‘As you might have noticed,’ I said, ‘I can’t go back to my hotel and we’re pretty much flat broke. So unless you have a better idea, we’re going to need to rely on the charity of Miss Grant.’
‘Where are you going to sleep tonight?’
That was a good question. Spending the night on the floor of Suren’s room at the Far Bengal Guest House was as ludicrous as going back to Watson’s. The notion of a sahib spending the night in an establishment patronised by Indians was just the sort of thing to attract undesired attention.
‘I’ll find somewhere.’
We rolled the car back into the lock-up, past an open-jawed durwan who showed no sign that he’d noticed it had ever gone missing in the first place.
The man seemed unsure of how to react. His job was to prevent the theft of items under his care. No one had ever stipulated what to do in the event of stolen property being returned. Raising the alarm now would be like closing the stable door not only after the horse had bolted, but after it had gone for a run, won the Grand National and then returned home safe and well. In the end, he decided to do nothing.
Suren and I parted a few minutes later, he heading to the Far Bengal Guest House and I… well that remained to be seen.
‘You are certain you will be OK?’ he asked with the concern of a mother hen.
I was a veteran of the trenches of the Western Front, not to mention a former opium addict. I’d found billets in far more hellish locales than South Bombay and managed a decent night’s sleep to boot. ‘I’ll see you at the Gateway again. Tomorrow morning. Nine sharp.’
I watched him head north and then I set off in the direction of the dockyards.
On a cobbled backstreet, out of sight of the docks yet still close enough for the air to smell of rotting fish and diesel fumes, I found what I was looking for: a row of dilapidated buildings, each with identical worn and cracked brick facades and bearing hand-painted blue-and-white signs above their entrances.
The sign above the smallest, which also happened to be the closest to me, read Punjabi Seamen’s Lodging House. The one beside it, a little larger yet just as dilapidated, had a similar sign, this one stating it catered to Kharwa sailors. And so it went on, a roll-call of the seafaring communities of India, the Konkanis, the Goanese, a separate lodging for Muslims, regardless of ethnicity, Bengali lascars and Tamils.
Outside them, sailors loitered in groups, smoking, playing poker and thanee, drinking bathtub hooch from tin cups and wearing the look of men unused to having time on their hands or money in their pockets.
Finally, and set apart slightly from the others, was the European Seamen’s Lodging House. Here a man could get a mattress for the night and a coffee in the morning for little money down and fewer questions asked. It wasn’t the Ritz, but by the same token it wasn’t a waterlogged trench on the Marne, so I wasn’t about to complain.
I walked into an ill-lit reception where a man with a ginger beard and the physique of a bear snored in a chair behind a counter. I leaned over and woke him as gently as possible with a prod of one of his substantial arms.
He let out a snort, opened his eyes slowly, as though the act required a degree of effort bordering on the Herculean, and then passed a burst of wind.
‘Yeah?’
‘I need a bed,’ I said.
The man scrutinised me with the energy of a sloth.
‘Ain’t seen you in ’ere before. You new?’
‘Just got in,’ I said. ‘First time in town.’
That seemed more information than he cared for, and with the formalities over, he shoved an open ledger and a pen on a greasy string across the counter towards me.
‘Fill in yer details,’ he said. ‘Charge is ’alf a rupee a night.’
I made up a name, and a vessel that I’d sailed in on, added an indecipherable scrawl as a signature and paid for two nights.
The bear took back the ledger without a glance and placed the money in a battered cash box.
‘You’ll find a bunk in room 3 on the second floor.’