TWENTY-FOUR

It was mid-afternoon by the time I returned to the office in the Rose Building. Surrender-not bolted upright as I walked in.

‘So Miss Grant decided to follow you here after all, sir?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I replied, taking a seat at the other desk. ‘Any luck with the maids?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said gravely. ‘We’ve found the one who placed the notes in Adhir’s bed chamber. She’s in Colonel Arora’s office now.’

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Did she write the notes?’

He shook his head. ‘No, sir. She’s illiterate.’

My spirits sank faster than a depth-charged U-boat.

‘So we’re back to square one.’

Surrender-not broke into a thin smile.

‘Not necessarily, sir,’ he replied. ‘You see, she was handed the notes by one of the women in the zenana. You were right, sir. The plan was hatched inside the palace.’

‘So who gave them to her? Adhir’s wife?’

‘No.’

‘Then who?’

‘That’s the problem, sir. It’s another woman of the harem, a concubine named Rupali. I asked Colonel Arora to set up an interview, but in light of the Maharaja’s rejection of our request to speak to the Princess Gitanjali, he refused point-blank.’

The frustration was etched on his face. My reaction was similar. There were now two women I needed to speak to, and the only hope I had was that Annie somehow convinced the Maharaja to let her interview them on our behalf. In the meantime, there was something else we urgently needed to do.

Golding’s office was on the same floor as Colonel Arora’s. It was small and stuffy and crammed with boxes of indexed files: almost every flat surface piled high with papers and folders, and all weighed down by paperweights, little glass worlds with pieces of coral or coins at their heart. The walls too were covered in paper, charts filled with numbers competing for acreage with maps of the kingdom of Sambalpore, each marked with a myriad symbols and crosses. The ceiling fan was switched off and hung impotently.

‘Judging by the state of his office,’ said Surrender-not, ‘are we sure the mess in his house was the result of a break-in?’

I ignored the remark. ‘Let’s just see if we can’t find the report he was working on for the Yuvraj,’ I said. ‘The one to do with the sale of the mines to Anglo-Indian Diamond.’

I instructed Surrender-not to go through the avalanche of papers. He had a head for these things which I lacked even at the best of times. In my present state, the whole room felt impenetrable, like being trapped inside a telephone directory. I turned to the charts on the walls. One in particular caught my attention. At the top, ‘MINES’ had been written in black ink and beneath was the outline of the kingdom of Sambalpore, a shape I was becoming familiar with: the Mahanadi River running north to south, with Sambalpore town on its right bank. Upriver from it, a dozen crosses had been marked in red. Then, to the south-west, one more solitary cross, this time marked in black.

‘What do you make of this?’ I asked.

Surrender-not turned away from his papers and walked over.

‘The location of diamond mines, I’d imagine, sir.’

‘What about this black cross down to the south-west?’

Surrender-not shrugged. ‘Maybe a disused one?’

There was a knock on the door and in walked Colonel Arora.

‘Making progress?’ he asked.

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Well, maybe this will help,’ he said. ‘I’ve arranged rooms for you at the guest lodge in the palace grounds. Your belongings are being taken there as we speak.’

A cold shiver ran down my spine. After my failed attempt to smoke last night, I’d packed away the opium travelling kit in my suitcase, but in my hurry to make the meeting with Golding this morning, I couldn’t recall whether I’d locked the bag.

The colonel noticed my hesitation.

‘I trust that is in order, Captain?’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

When he left, I tipped the contents of one of Golding’s desk drawers onto the floor. My mind continued to race, consumed with fear that the travelling case would be discovered. At that moment I could have stumbled upon Golding’s suicide note without noticing it; I may actually have been on holiday, for all the good I was doing. Luckily, Surrender-not was still on the clock.

‘You might want to have a look at this, sir,’ he said, from under a pile of documents.

‘What is it?’

‘It looks like Golding’s diary.’

He passed it to me and I flicked through the pages: business meetings, deadlines for submissions of documents, the usual schedule of a bureaucrat.

There was only one entry for today – a time and a place but no name – 6.30 PM New Temple.