FIVE

That night, I lay awake on my bed in the turgid heat.

My head felt thick, like fog. My eyes watered and my nose ran, and overlaying everything, the constant throbbing at the temples, an incessant drumbeat of pain.

A casual observer might think I was coming down with a cold, but the initiated would know. These were the first symptoms of opium withdrawal.

I should point out that I’m not an addict or, to use the vernacular, an opium fiend. Fiend – even the name has a certain malevolence to it, something that I’ve never felt applied to me. My usage was purely medicinal.

They say opium, if taken in moderation, is difficult to become addicted to. This was one of the reasons it was my drug of choice after the war. So it was a shock the first time I experienced withdrawal. To be fair, the symptoms tended to subside over a period of a week or so, after which my head cleared and I could function normally once more. As such, while the after-effects weren’t pleasant, I judged my condition to be manageable.

I lay there and forced myself to concentrate. I replayed Adhir’s murder in my mind. Dissecting it. Analysing it. Was there anything I could, or should, have done differently? I turned over. But sleep wouldn’t be coming soon, and so I got up, pulled on a shirt and headed for the door. Surrender-not was in the living room, sitting in the dark. No doubt he too was re-living the murder in his head.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I said.

He stared at me with that hang-dog expression of his, but said nothing. It wasn’t as though he was ignorant of my situation – you would have to be a particularly useless policeman to spend a year living in the same digs as someone without realising that their fondness for midnight walks might be for reasons other than exercise, but we never discussed it.

Calcutta’s Chinatown was Tangra, a rats’ nest of lanes and dirt roads to the south of White Town. It was a hinterland of seedy buildings, dormitories and dilapidated factories hidden behind high walls and spike-topped metal gates. There wasn’t much to see during the day, just another shabby suburb, distinguishable from the other nonwhite areas only by the fact that most of the hoardings were in Chinese. At night, though, Tangra transformed itself into a hive of shebeens, street kitchens, gambling houses and opium dens. In short, it housed all the things that made living in a sweltering, crumbling metropolis of several million people worthwhile.

I ordered the taxi to stop beside a boarded-up shop and handed the driver a few crumpled notes. Crossing an open drain, I headed down an ill-lit alley that was deserted save for a pack of mongrel dogs and a mound of rotting refuse that smelled worse than the drain.

A door opened up ahead, spilling a shaft of greasy yellow light into the rubble-strewn gullee. A man stumbled out, silhouetted against the glare, and staggered past without looking up. The door slammed shut and the alley plunged once more into darkness. I kept walking, heading for another door a hundred yards further along.

I knocked twice and waited. Eventually it opened a crack, just wide enough for an eyeball to stare out.

‘What you want?’

‘Lao Yin sent me,’ I said.

‘Who are you?’

‘A friend.’

‘You wait.’

The door closed. I waited.

I’d never met Lao Yin, but I knew about him: most of the Imperial Police Force did. He was rumoured to be a representative of the Red Gang, a Shanghai-based criminal organisation that specialised in opium, prostitution, gambling and extortion. And with that sort of pedigree it was natural that they exercised a degree of political control too. Lao Yin was in Calcutta to manage the supply side of their opium operations and his name opened many doors in Tangra, including, I hoped, this one. Minutes later I was being ushered through the doorway, along a narrow passageway and through to a small room lit by hurricane lamps where the plaster flaked from the walls onto a floor scattered with dirty mattresses. The sweet, earthy scent of opium smoke hung in the stifling air.

Two of the mattresses were occupied, both by Orientals. Both lay on their sides, one pulling at an opium pipe, the other seemingly passed out.

An elderly Chinese woman entered. From the lines on her face, I guessed she wasn’t far off eighty but her movements were still spritely.

She smiled and pointed to an empty mattress.

‘Please make comfortable,’ she said softly. ‘I bring afeem.’

I settled onto the mattress, lay my head on a smooth, porcelain pillow and waited until she returned with the opium tray. On it sat the pipe, lamp, opium resin and a collection of tools used to cook the O.

I tried to relax as she sat cross-legged on the floor and set to work, warming the ball of opium over the flickering candle flame. Just being in the presence of the O seemed to ease my symptoms. The woman teased and pulled the ball as I looked on, almost hypnotised. As it heated, the ball softened and transformed into a viscous state and then began to evaporate. She placed it into the saddle of the pipe and handed it to me. I took the first pull. The tendrils of O worked their magic, infiltrating first my lungs, then through the capillaries into my bloodstream. I heard the crack of the old woman’s bones as she stood up, then the sound of her footsteps. I took a second pull, then a third, and felt my nose begin to itch and a million nerve endings across my body seemed to fire in unison. I shut my eyes as the whole world gradually contracted to the area inside my skull.