FORTY-SEVEN

Sambalpore cut a sorry sight in the rain. Lamps lit drenched, desolate streets, the bunting that had adorned its buildings on the day of Adhir’s funeral now hung tattered, in places torn down and washed into overflowing gutters.

The railway station looked no less forlorn as the car halted beneath its sagging awning. Surrender-not and I made our way inside and the driver went in search of a porter for our cases.

The half-deserted concourse was manned by a handful of attendants doing their damnedest to keep the waters at bay with as much success as King Canute.

Gone were the crowds, soldiers and pomp and circumstance that had greeted our arrival. Gone too was the royal train, replaced by a locomotive that looked like a child’s toy, and carriages that might have belonged to one of those pretend trains that plied the promenade at Brighton.

There weren’t many passengers tonight. A few native traders, some European salesmen with their sample cases, and farmers returning home from market with empty baskets and coops.

‘I thought Carmichael was organising our tickets?’ I said, scouring the concourse for the Resident.

‘Perhaps he forgot?’ suggested Surrender-not.

‘So what do we do now?’ I asked.

Surrender-not pointed to a fat man in a uniform and a peaked cap.

‘He’ll have some,’ he said.

I didn’t question him. In India, it was often the case that the fattest man in the room was the one with the power. Sure enough, I watched as Surrender-not walked over and chatted to him, before handing over some rupees and returning with two squares of soggy brown cardboard. He passed me one. There were some illegible words printed on it.

‘Tickets,’ he said. ‘First class.’

Slipping a couple of annas to the porter, we took our cases and climbed the iron step onto the train.

The carriage smelled musty, its wooden benches ingrained with a musk acquired from years of contact with human bodies. Other than an Anglo-Indian who sat dozing at the far end, though, it was blessedly empty. Surrender-not pushed our cases onto the narrow rack above our heads while I sat down and tried to make myself comfortable, though that seemed like yet another battle I was destined to lose that night.

Surrender-not sat down opposite me, then stood up with a start.

A flicker of hope stirred inside me. Had he seen Annie on the station platform?

‘What is it, Sergeant?’ I asked eagerly.

‘Tea!’ he exclaimed.

‘What?’

‘The journey to Jharsugudah will take several hours. It would be wrong to start it without a cup of tea.’

He hurried to the end of the carriage and descended on to the platform.

Where there’s tea, there’s hope, as some wag once said.

Surrender-not ran over to the old man in the red turban with his makeshift bicycle tea-stall. He returned a few minutes later with two small clay cups.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me one. ‘It should make you feel better.’

I looked at him, but said nothing.

The guard on the platform blew his whistle. There was a hiss of steam and the train moved gently off. I sat back, took a sip of tea and stared into the rain. I wasn’t sorry to see the back of Sambalpore. My case – the murder of the Yuvraj, Prince Adhir of Sambalpore, was over the moment the assassin put a bullet through his own head on the roof of a seedy hotel in Howrah. It had been solved to the satisfaction of everyone including the Viceroy and if I’d had any sense, I’d have left it there. But I couldn’t let it go. The Maharani Shubhadra had called me a seeker of truth. It was a fine phrase, but Sambalpore had taught me that I was no more a seeker of truth than I was a canary. The truth, when it challenged my perceptions, was just as unpalatable to me as it was to anyone else: that an Englishwoman might fall in love with an Indian; that a woman behind purdah in a harem might have the power to assassinate a prince; and that I might lose out to a fop. All of these things were true and I didn’t particularly want to face any of them.

The train ploughed on into the night, towards the railway junction town where we would switch to the broad-gauge to take us back to Calcutta. The deluge drummed off the carriage roof and reminded me of the rain in the trenches, bouncing off tarpaulins and men’s helmets.

Our progress seemed painfully slow, a combination of monsoon rains and a pitifully weak engine. Nevertheless, with every additional mile, I felt my spirits lift. Sambalpore was behind me. Annie was, too, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

It was after one in the morning when we pulled into Jharsugudah station, not that you’d have believed it looking at the number of people milling around. Surrender-not and I retrieved our cases and alighted onto a platform swarming with pilgrims, porters and saffron-shirted sadhus. The calls of vendors touting their wares mingled with the chanted mantras of Hindu devotees.

‘Any idea what’s going on?’ I asked Surrender-not.

‘No, sir. I’ll see if I can find a railway official.’

He set off along the platform and I soon lost sight of him amidst a sea of bodies.

‘Captain Wyndham?’ came a voice from behind me. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure!’

I turned to find the anthropologist I’d met at the Carmichaels’ dinner party standing in front of me.

‘Mr Portelli,’ I said. ‘This is a surprise. What are you doing in the middle of nowhere at this hour?’

‘The same as you, I imagine, Captain.’ He smiled. ‘Waiting for the arrival of a train to take me onwards.’

‘You’re going to Calcutta?’

He shook his head. ‘No, sir. Like most of these people, I’m bound for Puri, to witness the final day of the Jagannath festival, assuming a train ever arrives to take us there. It appears the rains have washed away several sections of track to the east. No trains have come in from there for almost a day now. But the pilgrims keep arriving from the west, and without the trains to take them on to Puri, they’re stuck here.’

‘You should have stayed in Sambalpore,’ I said. ‘I believe they have the same festival tomorrow.’

‘True enough,’ Portelli nodded, ‘but in Sambalpore there will only be one chariot. In Puri, there are three: one for the Lord Jagannath and one each for his brother, Balabhadra and his sister, Shubhadra.’ His eyes widened at the prospect.

‘Puri might be politically insignificant compared to Sambalpore,’ he continued, ‘but it’s the centre of the Jagannath cult and home to its most holy temple. In religious terms, it’s by far the most important place in the region. So much so that the king of Puri has precedence over all of the local maharajas, even our friends in Sambalpore, and tomorrow is the highlight of his calendar. As the chariot of the Lord Jagannath returns to its temple, the king has the duty of sweeping the path before it with a golden broom. They call him the Sweeper King.’

Those final words. They were an echo of something important, a whisper of something someone had told me not long ago. But what was it? Frantically, I searched my mind for the answer. I could feel it there, lodged in my skull, just out of reach. Then it hit me.

Emily Carmichael.

I recalled the Resident’s wife’s words that night at the dinner where I’d first met Portelli.

I once heard someone at court say she was the daughter of a sweeper, if you can believe such a thing.

She’d been talking about one of the Maharaja’s wives. At the time, I’d dismissed it as drunken nonsense. A king would never marry a sweeper’s daughter. But he would marry the daughter of another king. With a thudding clarity, everything dropped into place and my stomach lurched as I realised the error I’d made.

‘Captain? Are you all right?’

I snapped out of my thoughts.

‘I’m fine, Mr Portelli.’ I thanked him, hastily made my excuses, then turned and ran in Surrender-not’s direction. Finally I spotted him coming towards me with a railway official in a cap and mutton-chops in tow.

‘Surrender-not,’ I gasped as I reached him.

‘This is Mr Cooper,’ he said, stationmaster at Jharsugudah. He says the train to Cal—’

‘Forget Calcutta,’ I interrupted, ‘Punit is still in danger.’ I turned to the stationmaster. ‘We need to get a message to Sambalpore, urgently.’

The man’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir. All lines to Sambalpore have been down for the last three days. Some sort of problem on their end.’

I cursed. Of course the lines were down. I’d been the one to request them cut in the first place.

‘In that case we need to get back to Sambalpore immediately,’ I said. ‘Do you have a car?’

The man stared at me as if I’d asked to borrow his wife.

‘There are no cars in Jharsugudah. The local brickworks has a lorry, but it’s two in the morning. The driver will be in his bed.’

‘I don’t need the driver,’ I said. ‘Just the lorry.’

‘It’s a five-minute cycle ride down the main street,’ he protested, ‘but I’ll be damned if I’m going out there in this downpour!’

‘Then give me two bicycles,’ I said.

Soaked to the skin, Surrender-not and I hurtled down the main street on bikes commandeered from the station staff. The brickworks weren’t hard to spot. We just headed for the largest chimney in town.

A decrepit-looking lorry stood soaking in a yard that the rains had transformed into something resembling an Irish bog. A durwan, one of the ubiquitous nightwatchmen who appear indispensable to any organisation in India but who generally run for cover at the first sign of trouble, dozed in a hut nearby. Surrender-not shook him awake and hit him with the news that we were requisitioning his vehicle.

The man must have thought he was still dreaming. He was about to protest when he saw me. The sight of a white man, dripping from head to toe, gave him a shock and within seconds his objections melted away. I wrote and signed a note informing his bosses that their vehicle had been commandeered by the Imperial Police and that it could be retrieved from the royal palace in Sambalpore. In the meantime, Surrender-not waded through the mud, opened the driver’s door and climbed in.

‘Where are the keys?’ he shouted.

‘Try under the seat,’ I said, running over.

I reached the passenger door and hauled myself up just as the engine spluttered to life. Surrender-not checked his watch. In a few hours, the sun would rise, heralding the day that would see Punit crowned Yuvraj.

I only hoped we’d make it back in time to stop his murder.

‘What are you waiting for, Sergeant?’ I exclaimed. ‘Get moving!’

Surrender-not reversed the vehicle, then accelerated out of the exit and onto the main road heading south, back to Sambalpore.