I took the slow train back to Calcutta. Colonel Dawson had offered a military flight, but I was in no great hurry. Besides, he still didn’t know about Suren’s little disappearing act, facilitated by the passport which he himself had provided. And though I doubted the spymaster would pass that information on to the authorities which might interdict Suren’s flight, I saw no reason to tempt fate.
And so it was a full two days later that I arrived back at Howrah station, to be met with the usual crowd of a million souls, among them, the familiar face and pipe of the colonel.
He saw me as I descended, his face lighting up in recognition and I daresay the expectation of seeing Suren behind me, but that quickly changed to consternation when he realised the sergeant was missing. For once it seemed, this was a situation he hadn’t anticipated, and that made me happy.
‘Where is he?’
‘Good to see you too,’ I said. ‘As for Suren, he sends his regards but he won’t be returning to Calcutta just yet.’
‘I can’t protect him if I don’t know where he is.’
‘How’s Taggart?’
‘Stable. The doctors think he’ll recover, they just won’t say when.’
‘I don’t think we’ll be seeing Suren before Taggart’s back on his feet and the charges against him are dropped. Unless you can convince his stand-in, Halifax, to drop them?’
‘That’s not going to happen. Halifax seems to have taken your friend’s escape as a personal affront. He’d like to see the sergeant strung up, ideally with you next to him.’
‘That bad?’
Dawson nodded. ‘Word is he’s after your blood. Charges of aiding and abetting. You might want to prepare for a grilling.’
I’d been expecting as much. ‘Any news on Atchabahian?’
‘Nothing yet. We pulled MacRae in for questioning, and he admitted recruiting Atchabahian and giving him the Irani cover, but he claims it was only for the purpose of funnelling money to certain political parties. He says he hasn’t seen or heard from him since before the attack on Mukherjee.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘because Suren said that bomb at Haji Ali looked like something built by professionals rather than ordered on room service at the Taj Hotel.’
‘The point is, we have MacRae under surveillance. If he makes contact with Atchabahian, we’ll know about it.’
‘And then? I doubt your superiors in Delhi would want Section H’s activities brought under the microscope. Atchabahian would be an embarrassment.’
‘True,’ he said. ‘But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’
Dawson had been right of course. No sooner had I reported back to Lal Bazar than I was called in by Halifax and his coterie, hauled over the coals and then placed on suspension under charge of assisting a fugitive.
I explained everything to them: how Atchabahian, a rogue agent of Section H, had murdered Mukherjee in an attempt to frame Gulmohamed and propel the whole country into a religious bloodbath. But that truth was rather too unpalatable to accept, especially when the military denied every scintilla of it.
There was also the small matter of the attack on Taggart which Suren had taken advantage of to effect his escape. I told them I suspected Uddam Singh had been behind that, hoping to kill Suren and me rather than the commissioner. But I had no proof to back up that assertion, and no one cared to believe that the city’s British police chief could have been the victim of dumb luck rather than a meticulously planned attack.
Speaking of Singh, he’d been as good as his word and reined in his hoodlums. Maybe it was a case of honour among thieves, or just that the cash funnelled by Atchabahian to hardliners had dried up and religious violence was no longer as profitable as the good old-fashioned rackets of drugs and prostitution. Either way, I wasn’t complaining. I’d even upheld my side of the bargain, or at least part of it, and made sure that his son Vinay had been released from prison.
I’d spent the next fortnight quietly stewing and rattling around in the flat in Premchand Boral Street which now seemed a tad too large. I’d visited Suren’s parents in Shyambazar and delivered his letter. His mother had left the room in tears, but his father had reacted with a curious pride, which wasn’t entirely surprising. In certain circles, being a fugitive from British justice was a badge of honour; certainly more so than being an instrument of that justice.
I had another letter to deliver, this one sealed in an ornate envelope and enclosed with a twenty-rupee note. It entailed a trip down to Metiabruz, to a large house beside the river and a girl called Ayisha.
Suren had told me the tale of his meetings with Gulmohamed’s niece, together with stories of her skill on the santoor. What he’d neglected to mention, however, was that she was rather beautiful, which was odd because the boy was apt to bandy about that particular term, applying it liberally to many ladies who scarcely deserved it. But now, with this girl to whom the appellation most definitely applied, he’d singularly failed to mention it.
She was of course surprised to see me.
‘I’ve a letter for you, Miss Gulmohamed,’ I said, ‘from a mutual acquaintance.’
She took the envelope and opened it, tearing the seal with one elegant finger. She read the contents quickly, sating her initial curiosity, then once again, more slowly this time, coming to terms with its content.
She looked up. ‘Where has he gone?’
‘Europe,’ I said. ‘I can’t say more than that,’ and to be fair, that seemed to satisfy her.
‘Well, thank you for delivering it, Mr…?’
‘Wyndham,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of Suren’s.’
‘Thank you, Mr Wyndham.’
There was no reason for me to linger, but something within me stirred. I felt I should put in a word on Suren’s behalf.
‘I take it you’re aware of the attack on your uncle’s rally at Haji Ali Mosque in Bombay. Well, it was Suren who saved your uncle’s life that day.’
That caught her interest.
‘Honestly?’
‘And a lot of other people’s lives too. He’s a hero.’
Suren wouldn’t have thanked me for using the word, but he wasn’t here and I thought it might go down well with the girl. It certainly had an impact, though not quite in the way I’d expected.
‘A hero? And yet in his letter he says he has been forced to leave the country. It seems an odd way to treat a hero.’
How was I supposed to answer? I should have agreed with her. Suren had played his part in averting a bloody civil war. He should have been feted for that. Instead he’d hounded out of the country. Yet what did it say about me that my first reaction was not to support my friend but to obfuscate, to utter an ill-defined, insincere defence of the system that had banished him?
Exhaustion – or was it self-loathing? – washed over me. I was tired of always being on the back foot, always defending the indefensible. Placing oneself in a position of semi-permanent hypocrisy, that’s what it meant to be an Englishman in India, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who felt that way. God knows there were enough embittered, broken colonial men and women of good conscience, driven to drink and ruin by the irreconcilable absurdity at the heart of it all: the claim that we were here for the betterment of this land, when all the time we merely sucked it dry.
We never spoke of it of course. That would be bad form, enough to make one an outcast. Instead we maintained the fiction of the wonderful munificence of the Pax Brittanica, claiming to be on the side of the angels while doing the work of the devil.
In the end, I said nothing, merely bade her good day and assured her that Suren would return soon enough.
If there was a silver lining to those days, it was that I was able to spend a little time with Miss Grant. I’d been ordered not to leave town, and I might have obeyed had they not provoked me by placing a watchman across the road from the flat. That was hardly a challenge I could ignore, and so I set myself the objective of finding ever more creative ways of giving my minder the slip and getting as far out of Calcutta as possible before returning by midnight and making sure my surveillance watched me enter the front door.
On a whim, I organised a picnic out to Barasat some forty miles south of the city, by which I mean I came up with the idea. It was Annie who supplied the car and the food and the bagan-bari, the bungalow out in the countryside where we ate it.
We sat outside, on a tartan rug thrown on the grass and a wicker hamper between us. Around us, the flowers of Bengal – marigold and jasmine, bougainvillea and hibiscus, and a dozen others I couldn’t name – blossomed in a haze of colour. In the palms nested green parrots, ever-watchful for the langur monkeys that foraged below.
It was a moment of peace, a brief hiatus between storm fronts, but I was grateful for it. I watched as Annie sipped from a glass of freshly squeezed mosambi juice, the green husks of the fruit arranged in a neat, sunlit pile on the grass beside her. Sitting there, with her, it was almost possible to forget my troubles; almost, but not quite. They still circled my thoughts like vultures. Most revolved around Suren, and Annie seemed to sense that.
‘Are you going to tell me where he’s gone?’
‘Europe,’ I said. ‘France, to start with. There’s a group of Indian émigrés holed up in Paris. He said he’d make contact with them and take things from there.’
‘Paris?’ Annie’s eyes lit up. ‘I bet he’ll love it.’
‘Trust me, he’ll hate it,’ I said. ‘He can’t speak the language, he’s got no palate for wine, and where’s he going to find a bloody hilsa fish in France?’
Annie couldn’t help but laugh. ‘He’ll get used to the food and he’ll learn to drink wine. The only reason he hasn’t already is because you spoiled him with whisky.’
‘I educated him.’
‘Of course you did.’ She took another sip. ‘He’s going to be fine. It’s you I’m more concerned about.’
Well, that was clearly nonsense, but I didn’t wish to dwell on the matter.
‘I wonder where he is now,’ I said, as a cloud passed in front of the sun.
She looked up. ‘You’ve not heard from him?’
‘No. And I don’t expect to, not for a while yet. The last thing we need is for him to break cover and get himself arrested on the high seas.’
‘And then?’
‘What?’
‘When is he going to be able to come home?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Not until Taggart recovers, or we catch the bastard who actually killed Mukherjee. I doubt we’ll ever catch him though.’
‘And you, Sam?’
‘What about me?’
‘Oh, come now,’ she said incredulously. ‘You’ve been at a loose end for ages now. Have you thought about leaving the force?’
‘And do what?’
‘Anything you wanted to! There must be a thousand other careers you could follow.’
The thought was seductive, at least for a few seconds before it hit the rocks of practicality.
‘Such as?’ I said. ‘I’m not cut out for anything else.’
‘Well, maybe take some time to think about it,’ she said. ‘Suspension from duty has worked wonders on you. Imagine what it’d be like if they actually sacked you. You’d be wonderful!’
I raised my glass to her. ‘I thought I already was.’
Suitably buoyed, I moved on to planning a longer trip, one to Tagore’s university in the woods at Shantiniketan. I’d heard it was pleasant out there, and along with almost every non-white in the city, Annie was mad about the man’s poetry. I, for my part, found his work rather sentimental, which Suren had once put down to the fact that I was reading it wrongly.
Of the sergeant there’d still been no word and no postcard from the Pyramids.
Rather than worry, I focused on planning the perfect trip for Annie. Shorn of other responsibilities, I found myself investing all my energies into this one endeavour.
I’d planned the Shantiniketan trip down to a tee, but the night before we were scheduled to leave, I received a call from Dawson.
‘They’ve found him.’
My stomach turned. ‘Who? Suren?’
‘No, Atchabahian. He slipped aboard a vessel called the Rajputana last night, bound for Rangoon. Booked in under the name of LeClerc, an alias, but like Irani it’s one that Section H created. It’s definitely him.’
‘Your colleagues have arrested him?’
‘The ship left port before they got a chance. And just as well too.’
My head spun. ‘You want him to get away?’
‘No,’ said Dawson. ‘It’s just that if you’re keen on exonerating the young Sergeant Banerjee, it would be far better if you were the one to make the arrest.’
‘I’m suspended, remember,’ I said. ‘Right now, I don’t have the power to arrest anyone.’
I heard the disappointment in his voice. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Wyndham,’ he said. ‘I know that, and you know that, but Atchabahian doesn’t. Do you have a uniform?’
‘Just my police dress whites.’
‘That’ll have to do,’ he said. ‘Put ’em on. I’m sending a car for you.’
An hour later I was at Annie’s door, apologising once again.
‘It’s for Suren,’ I said. ‘If I can catch this bastard Atchabahian, then there’s a chance I can get him to confess. That would put Suren in the clear.’
‘Do what you have to do, Sam,’ she said. ‘Shantiniketan can wait.’
I thanked her and readied to go.
‘And, Sam,’ she said.
I turned back to her and was startled to receive a kiss.
‘Come back safe.’
And so, as a red sun rose the next morning, I found myself not on the way to Shantiniketan with Annie, but staring out over the mist-covered stillness of the Bay of Bengal from the shore of a speck of a settlement called Frasergunj. The place felt like the end of the world, just mud and mangrove and the mingling of fresh and salt water as far as the horizon.
A grey military launch was waiting at the jetty. I climbed aboard and soon we were skimming thorough the olive-green waters, heading out to sea and a rendezvous with the SS Rajputana, whose captain had been ordered to discreetly alter his course to the north.
It was over an hour before the black outline of the vessel appeared on the horizon and I felt a twinge of anticipation. The distance closed agonisingly slowly and it seemed that we might never reach her, but gradually her silhouette grew and finally we drew close and ordered her to heave to.
In my white dress uniform, I stood on the deck like a lighthouse on a shoreline, feeling like Nelson waiting to get shot on the deck of the Victory. I just hoped Atchabahian was a late riser.
I led a party of three soldiers up a rope ladder and onto the deck of the Rajputana, where a petty officer stood waiting.
‘You have a passenger travelling under the name of LeClerc,’ I said. ‘He’s a fugitive wanted by the Imperial Police.’ I didn’t mention the fact that I didn’t possess an arrest warrant, nor that the only member of the Imperial Police he was wanted by was me. Fortunately, the uniform and the three armed men behind me were corroboration enough and the sailor led us first to the bridge and then on the captain’s instructions to a cabin near the stern.
I knocked, waited a gracious fraction of a second and then ordered the officers to force the door. Inside, an unmistakable figure jumped from his bed and made for a revolver that sat on a desk nearby.
‘Leave it!’ I shouted as two officers pointed their rifles at him.
The man froze, then slowly raised his hands.
‘It’s good to see you again, Mr Atchabahian,’ I said. ‘You’re under arrest.’