FORTY-THREE

The journey took an age. Two hours into nowhere and two hundred years into the past. At points the dirt road was submerged under rivers of monsoon rainwater that had fallen upcountry. More than once, the driver was forced to detour around an unfordable stream that only yesterday had been dry river bed.

Remunda, when it came, was little more than a huddle of mud and thatch huts clustered around a temple and a tube-well. As in Bengal, the hut walls were covered in round cakes of cow-dung, baking dry in the heat of the day before being used as fuel in the evenings. But the similarity stopped there. Unlike the villages in Bengal, with their bountiful groves of palm and banana and their emerald-green bathing and fishing pools, this place was dust brown and bone dry.

Surrender-not ordered the driver to halt near the well. The engine died and a silence fell, broken only by the occasional cry of a mynah bird high up in a blackened tree. The village at first appeared abandoned to the heat. On closer inspection, though, you noticed the signs of life: a few scrawny chickens, their feathers coated in dust, pecking at the side of the road; a mongrel dog yawning lazily in the shade of a wall; a twitch at one of the darkened holes that passed for a window.

Soft tinkling was coming from the direction of the small whitewashed temple. A ragged saffron flag hung limply from a bamboo stick atop its spire. I nodded to Surrender-not and we headed towards it. The sound was that of a small bell, the kind used by Hindus in their religious ceremonies, and its ring mingled with sonorous murmurings of priestly incantations.

I waited at the threshold while Surrender-not entered to speak to the priest. Inside, three idols were visible, small and roughhewn, but unmistakable: the over-large eyes, the stubby arms and the absence of legs that signified the Lord Jagannath and his siblings.

The chanting stopped. Surrender-not was speaking to the priest in what sounded like Hindi. I lit a cigarette and waited. When he came out, he turned to face the temple, touched his forehead and his chest with his right hand, just as Annie had done at the temple in Sambalpore a few days before.

I passed him a cigarette, which he gratefully accepted. ‘Any joy?’ I asked, wiping perspiration from my forehead. He stuck the cigarette in a corner of his mouth and fished out a box of matches from his pocket.

‘Arora was right,’ he said. ‘There are no mines around here.’ He struck a match and it flared into life. ‘But there is a cave.’

‘A cave?’

‘Apparently so.’

Inside, the bell began tinkling once again.

‘The priest says it’s about half a mile further up the road. There’s a turning off to the right which leads to a hill. He says there’s been a lot of activity up there recently. Outsiders. Men in lorries. It all stopped about a week ago, though.’

‘Any local men up there?’

Surrender-not shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely, sir. This is farming country, if you can believe it,’ he said distastefully. ‘The village men would all be in the fields.’

I stubbed my cigarette out on the side of a tree and began walking back towards the car. ‘Let’s go.’

Ten minutes up the road from Remunda, a dirt path split from the main track and snaked its way northwards. We followed it for a short distance before spotting the hill.

‘That must be it,’ said Surrender-not, pointing to a rust-coloured mound of rock.

As we neared it, the entrance to the cave became visible: a dark slit amidst reddish stone. Surrender-not ordered the driver to stop. We got out and walked over, picking our way through the dry scrub. The place was deserted. You might even have believed it had been untouched by human hands, had it not been for the wooden beams and scaffolds that had been inserted to expand and reinforce the natural fissure that formed the cave entrance.

‘What does this look like to you?’ I asked.

‘I’m no expert, sir,’ replied Surrender-not, ‘but it appears to be the entrance to a mine.’

‘Shall we see what’s inside?’

Surrender-not shuddered.

‘You’re not scared of ghosts, are you, Sergeant?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but that’s not the problem, sir.’

‘What then?’

‘Bats,’ he said. ‘That cave is bound to be teeming with them.’

‘It’s the middle of the day. We’ll need a torch, though. Check if there’s one in the car.’

Duly equipped, we continued, only to be hit by the acrid stench of ammonia within a few feet of the entrance. I pulled out a handkerchief and covered my nose and mouth, but it made little difference.

My eyes watered, but I pressed on, unsure of what I was looking for. The light from the entrance faded fast and behind me Surrender-not switched on the torch, illuminating a mound of what looked like brown rice grains, several feet high.

‘I told you, sir,’ said Surrender-not. ‘Bat droppings. There must be thousands of the creatures in here.’

He passed me the torch and I swept it across the walls, outlining a rectangular shaft cut into the rock.

‘This way,’ I said and headed into a man-made tunnel.

A gentle slope ran downwards and after a few minutes there seemed to be a slight change in air pressure. As we walked, the smell of guano gradually receded. Whatever else was down this shaft, it didn’t seem like there were bats.

Deeper inside, I stumbled over broken rock, almost losing my footing. Pointing the torch at the floor, I discovered shining black rubble. I knelt down, picked up a piece, examined it briefly then pocketed it.

‘Exactly what are we looking for, sir?’ asked Surrender-not.

‘We’ll know when we see it,’ I replied. But even as I said the words, the answer became apparent. Surrender-not noticed it too. The faintest of smells.

‘Come on,’ I said, moving further into the tunnel. The odour grew stronger: that peculiar, putrid stench with a sickly sweet edge to it – unmistakable. There was a corpse nearby, and judging by the smell, it hadn’t been here particularly long.

We hurried on over the uneven floor, and suddenly it was in front of us. A mangled heap of clothes and flesh that seemed to shimmer.

Surrender-not balked. ‘Maggots,’ he said. ‘Most unsavoury.’

‘Is it Golding?’

‘It’s hard to tell, sir.’

I shone the torch at the decomposing corpse. The clothes and hair looked European.

Surrender-not bent down to take a closer look. It was brave of him. A year ago he’d have fainted at the sight of blood. Now he was poking around at a rotting body who knew how far underground. The torch beam reflected off something metallic. I knelt beside Surrender-not to better examine the object.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Golding’s signet ring.’