THIRTY-SEVEN

The Rose Building was cosseted in darkness with only a solitary bulb shining in the garages below. Surrender-not and I felt our way through the gloom, up the stairs to the first floor and along the corridor to the Dewan’s office. I slipped the larger of Arora’s keys into the lock and turned it.

Entering the darkened room, I extracted a box of matches from my pocket and struck one. It flared into life, dimly illuminating a cavernous office split into two parts: an informal seating area, with sofas and a low table, and a step leading to a raised working area beyond, dominated by a large wooden desk. The walls were lined with paintings of rajas and ranis in regal pose, and the floor was covered with several rugs. Behind the desk stood a chair and not much more.

‘Where’s the safe?’ asked Surrender-not.

‘Check behind the desk,’ I replied.

The match burned down and I blew it out as the flame singed my fingers. On a corner of the desk sat a brass table lamp with a shade of emerald glass. Surrender-not closed the window shutters, then switched on the lamp, bathing the room in a dim aquamarine light. The desktop was clear of papers.

Surrender-not opened the desk drawers and began to search through them. Meanwhile, I scoured the room, looking for anything that might conceal the safe.

‘Any luck?’ I asked after several minutes.

He’d extracted some papers from one of the drawers and was busy leafing through them.

‘Nothing so far,’ he said, his attention focused on the documents. ‘Any sign of the safe?’

‘There’s nothing behind any of the paintings,’ I said, ‘and there’s precious little else in here to hide it behind.’

‘Maybe the colonel was mistaken?’

‘It has to be here,’ I said.

‘But if not under the desk or in the walls, then where?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. Surrender-not was still poring over his pile of papers on the desk. I walked over.

‘Anything?’ I asked.

He looked up.

‘Tell me you’ve found something.’

‘Geological reports, I think.’

Anything to do with the diamond mines?’

‘I can’t tell, sir.’

‘I suppose they’re better than nothing. Grab them and let’s go,’ I said, switching off the lamp.

He rose from his chair, and with the room plunged back into darkness we groped our way towards the door. Neither of us remembered the step between the raised area and the rest of the office. Things might have turned out rather differently if we had.

Being a few paces in front, it was I who missed the step first and took the fall. I landed awkwardly, and winced as a searing pain shot through my left ankle. A moment later, Surrender-not was sprawled beside me.

‘Bloody hell,’ I whispered, rubbing my injured ankle. Are you okay?’

‘Yes, sir. You?’

I stood up slowly and cautiously put some weight on my left leg, then breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘What sort of an idiot puts a step in the middle of the room?’

But the answer hit me before Surrender-not could reply. I hobbled back up to the desk and switched on the lamp.

‘That rug,’ I said. ‘Help me move it.’

Together, Surrender-not and I rolled up the rug that was behind the desk. I dropped to my knees for a closer look, then traced the outline of a rectangular panel, about one foot square, cut into the floorboard. At one end was a small hole, just large enough for a finger to pass through. I gently lifted out the wooden panel and placed it beside me on the floor. Beneath it was a grey metal box with a small brass plaque embossed with the words FICHET, Paris. I looked at Surrender-not.

‘Voilà,’ I said, turning back to the hole in the floor. ‘One steel fire safe.’

I reached into my pocket for the smaller of the two keys and placed it in the lock.

Inside the safe were a series of thin grey files, a small velvet pouch and a revolver, which, thanks to Colonel Arora, I now knew to be a Colt, identical to the one the assassin had used on Prince Adhir. Leaving the gun and the pouch in place, I lifted out the files and passed them to Surrender-not. Sitting back down at the desk, he began to leaf through the first one.

‘Anything?’ I asked.

‘Just budget papers.’ He closed the file and put it to one side, then opened another. He looked up almost immediately. ‘This looks like it.’ He smiled. ‘Golding’s report on the valuation of the Sambalpore diamond mines.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Replace the others and let’s get out of here.’

Ten minutes later, having repositioned the rug and locked the door, we were back in our own office. Surrender-not sat down and pulled the grey folder out from under his dinner jacket. As he did so, two thick documents slid out and onto the desk. He picked them up and examined the covers, then quickly leafed through both and frowned.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘There are two reports here,’ he replied. ‘Both with the same title and both signed by Golding and dated the day before yesterday.’

‘Two copies of the same report?’

‘I’m not sure. The signatures are different. Look, sir,’ he said, passing them to me.

He was right. The signatures were subtly different. I held both up to the light. There was something else peculiar. ‘The ink is different too,’ I said. ‘Both signatures are blue, but in different shades.’

I passed the documents back to Surrender-not who opened both to the first page and began to compare them. He soon looked up.

‘There’s more, sir,’ he said, pointing to a paragraph in both documents. ‘The numbers are different.’

‘How different?’

‘Quite substantially. It’s as though they’re describing two completely different sets of mines.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘I’ll have to go through them in detail, but from what I can tell from the summary, one report places a valuation on the diamond reserves hundreds of crores of rupees higher than the other.’

Where we used millions, Indians talked in lakhs and crores. It was still confusing to me, but it didn’t take a Ph.D. in mathematics to work out that hundreds of crores of rupees made for a damn big discrepancy.

‘Which one has the higher figure?’ I asked.

Surrender-not pointed to one. ‘This one,’ he said. ‘It looks as though you might have been right to suspect the Dewan, sir.’

He continued reading. Suddenly his expression darkened.

‘Could you just explain your theory to me, sir.’

‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘Davé has some illicit business going on with respect to the diamond mines. Maybe he’s been dealing on the side or taking a cut on sales and covering his tracks by distorting the figures for the diamond reserves. Suddenly Anglo-Indian Diamond come sniffing around, wanting to buy the mines, and unlike in the past, this time the decision is taken to sell them. As part of the process, Golding is tasked by Adhir with preparing a valuation report. That would have led to Davé’s scam being uncovered, so he assassinates the prince and makes the accountant disappear. He then obtains the document and falsifies the figures.’

Surrender-not’s face fell.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Which part of it don’t you like?’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it, sir,’ he protested, ‘I just have some questions.’

‘How many questions?’

‘Four.’

Four?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I stopped pacing and sat down in the chair opposite him.

‘Prince Adhir was no fan of the British,’ he began. ‘I doubt he’d be happy with them having a hold over assets that are effectively Sambalpore’s financial lifeblood.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘So someone else persuaded the Maharaja to sell the mines. It didn’t necessarily have to be Adhir.’

‘Then why have Adhir assassinated? I would have thought that if the Dewan was trying to scupper the sale of the mines, Adhir would have been one of his closest allies.’

It was a fair point, but as I thought it through, I realised it wasn’t fatal to my theory.

‘I guess he might have been at first,’ I said, ‘but when Adhir sanctioned the preparation of Golding’s report, he would have sealed the Dewan’s fate. He had Adhir killed so he could get his hands on the report, assuming that in Adhir’s absence, it would automatically come to him. He must also have anticipated that he could then change the report and buy Golding’s silence. I’m guessing Golding refused to be bought.’

‘Very well.’ Surrender-not blinked. ‘That leads to my second question: if the Dewan is responsible for Adhir’s assassination, why would he also try to kill Prince Punit today?’

‘You answered that one yourself earlier,’ I said. ‘The two assassination attempts aren’t necessarily linked. Maybe Colonel Arora is behind the attempt on Punit because he suspects Punit had Adhir assassinated. The Dewan might have nothing to do with it.’

The sergeant considered this, then nodded.

‘Question three?’ I asked.

‘If Golding was such a fastidious accountant, why hadn’t he discovered the fraud at the mines before? If, as Colonel Arora claims, he accounted for every penny spent by the royal household, it beggars belief that he wouldn’t know what was going on at the diamond mines. They were the kingdom’s chief source of revenue, and the size of the discrepancy suggests that any fraud must have been going on for years. How could he not have known?’

I didn’t have an answer to that.

‘Let’s come back to that one.’ I sighed. ‘What’s the fourth question?’

‘As I mentioned,’ said Surrender-not, ‘the discrepancy is huge, hundreds of crores of rupees. That’s millions of Pounds—’

‘I know how much it is,’ I interjected, unwilling to admit I didn’t know just how many millions.

‘Well, I was wondering, sir . . . any man who had embezzled that much wealth would himself be almost as rich as a maharaja. If he realised the game was up, why not simply disappear and enjoy his wealth somewhere? Why bother staying on here as Dewan?’

I cursed. I had no plausible answer for this question either. The problem seemed intractable. I knew Davé was connected to Golding’s disappearance. I just needed time to work out exactly how.

‘Go through the two reports closely,’ I said, ‘then tell me what the differences are.’

He placed the reports side by side.

‘This could take some time, sir.’

‘You’ve got all night,’ I replied.

‘You’re not going to stay?’

‘Would it help?’

‘No.’

I threw him the keys to the door and the safe and he caught them in one hand.

‘Then I’ll get back to the party,’ I said.

I headed back down the stairs and into the night. Across the gardens the palace, its lights blazing, shimmered like a mirage in the desert. Strains of American music floated over on the breeze, and the thought of having to go back in and watch Punit carrying on with Annie was suddenly more than I could stomach.

I leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette. The investigation was spiralling out of control. Punit, who’d had the clearest motive just twelve hours ago, had become the likely target of an assassination attempt and was now trying to woo Annie with the unwitting assistance of Al Jolson. Meanwhile, Colonel Arora, the closest thing I thought I had to an ally in this benighted place, looked like he might have been behind that particular plot. Then there was Surrender-not’s theory that I, and not the prince, had been the intended victim, not to mention Fitzmaurice’s fear that his life too was under threat. Maybe both were paranoia, but one Englishman was already missing, and Sambalpore, with its whispered plots and intrigue, seemed to be the sort of place where a healthy dose of paranoia might just help keep you alive.

I thought about Golding’s disappearance and the role of the Dewan, Davé. I was sure the two had met on the morning the accountant vanished. Just how did Davé fit into the whole picture? At least we now had Golding’s report. Indeed, we had not just one, but two versions of it.

In truth, all I had was a series of unending questions. I needed answers, and my best chance of getting them lay with questioning a man sitting in a cell a hundred yards away. I turned round and started walking in the direction of the guardhouse. It was time to end this.