I was less than thrilled at Suren’s reticence in confiding in me, and at the prospect of acting as messenger boy between him and Lord Taggart, and I told him as much. But he can be an obstinate arse when he chooses, and he tends to choose the most inopportune of moments. Yet it was 2 a.m., he’d been beaten black and blue, and I was too tired to argue.
It was a ridiculous hour to wake Lord Taggart, which made me all the more unwilling to do so, but I needed Suren out of this hole of a jail cell so that I could get him to Uddam Singh, even if we were a few hours late.
Then there was the reaction to Mukherjee’s death to consider. There would be trouble when word got out. Especially if people thought he’d been murdered by the police. If they discovered that the suspect was being held in the local thana, there was a good chance they’d burn the place to the ground before the morning. All in all, it was ample cause to rob the commissioner of his sleep.
And so I summoned the constable to let me out and lock Suren back in his cell. I headed for the exit, but not before leaving the officer with a few words of advice.
‘The man in that cell. You know who he is?’
The constable shook his head. ‘No, sahib.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is Detective Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee. Lal Bazar big shot.’
The man’s eyes widened like saucers.
‘Detective?’
‘That’s right, and a personal friend of Lord Taggart.’
The constable’s mouth fell open.
‘Laat sahib?’
‘The very same. Now, between you and me, Detective Banerjee is going to be released first thing in the morning and I’m guessing he’s going to be rather annoyed at the beating you and your friends gave him earlier. If you value your jobs, you might want to make sure the rest of his stay here is as pleasant as a night at the Grand Hotel. Understood?’
I left him quaking and smiled to myself. I’ve found that there’s nothing quite like putting the fear of God in others to make you feel better about your own tawdry situation.
Outside, Shiva stood leaning against the bonnet of the Wolseley, sucking on a bidi and metronomically tapping the end of his lathi on the dirt.
‘Shob theek aché?’ I asked.
He spat on the ground and stowed the lathi on the running board.
‘All quiet, sahib.’
The drive to Taggart’s residence passed in a blur. The streets were quiet and I was so engrossed in my own thoughts that not even the potholes of Budge Budge could distract me. Soon we were in White Town, an altogether different part of the city, where the vistas were grand and the roads level. But even here, in this bastion of Britishness, the other India made its presence felt. Shiva pulled up at the checkpoint – a sandbag and razor-wire redoubt – that marked the entrance to Taggart’s street.
A stone-faced Sikh officer, rifle at the ready, scrutinised the minutiae of my warrant card with a mixture of suspicion and diligence, before eventually deigning to wave us through.
Halfway up the road, past a red postbox and a machine-gun nest discreetly hidden behind a hedgerow, lay Taggart’s driveway, barred by the sort of security that might grace Buckingham Palace or the Bank of England. This time there were questions to complement the inspection of our documentation, delivered in a firm but genteel Home Counties accent by a young English officer.
‘What business have you with the commissioner, sir?… Are you aware of the hour, sir?… Is the commissioner expecting you?’
I restricted my answers to the vague and the monosyllabic, and eventually the young man reached for a telephone to speak to what I assumed was a higher authority within Taggart’s bungalow. The response was swift, however, and the young man granted us access to the inner sanctum with a nod and stiff salute.
Shiva parked up under the portico and I got out to the sound of the cicadas clicking in the trees. A uniformed bearer showed me up the steps and into the chequerboard hallway where I was met by Taggart’s batman, a heavyset Ulsterman named Villiers, with the physique of a bull and a face like an East End knife fight. It looked like he’d pulled his shirt and trousers on in a hurry. Still, I appreciated the effort.
‘Captain Wyndham. Rather late for a social call, isn’t it?’
‘Not for me, Villiers,’ I said. ‘Have you woken the boss?’
The batman scowled. Like many an Ulsterman, he was a stickler for protocol and not overly keen on me taking His Lordship’s name in vain. ‘Lord Taggart’s been informed of your arrival. He’ll be down presently. In the meantime, he’s asked that you wait for him in his study.’
Lord Taggart’s study was much like Lord Taggart’s office at Lal Bazar: tobacco-scented, and unnecessarily large. I made myself comfortable on one of the several chesterfields that dotted the room like islands in an ocean of parquet and tried to compose my thoughts. Before I’d had a chance to compose much of anything, however, the door opened and in walked His Lordship wrapped in a dressing gown and with his face as grey as his hair.
I stood to attention.
‘Sit, Wyndham,’ he said, as he walked over, ‘and tell me what’s so bloody urgent that you felt the need to force poor Villiers to get dressed in the middle of the night.’
‘It’s Banerjee, sir. He’s been arrested on a charge of murder.’
‘What?’
‘It gets worse. The victim was Prashant Mukherjee.’
Taggart stood transfixed, his face unwilling to accept what his ears were hearing, as though he were still wrapped up in bed and that all this was just some ill-starred dream.
‘Why the hell would he do that?’
‘He claims he didn’t, but the local coppers arrested him trying to set fire to Mukherjee’s house. And he doesn’t deny that part.’
The commissioner made for the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large measure of something from a decanter.
‘We need to keep a lid on this. If word spreads that Mukherjee’s been murdered, there’ll be hell to pay.’
If word spreads… in my mind, there was precious little chance of it doing anything else. Calcutta might have been a city of a million people, but when it came to gossip, it seemed little different to a village, with scandal spreading like a virus. And like any virus, it would exact a toll. A price to be paid in fire and blood.
Taggart rubbed a hand across his face. For someone with the might of the Imperial Police Force at his fingertips he seemed remarkably jittery. Not that I blamed him. With that authority came a terrible weight of responsibility.
The damn elections were only weeks away and the city was a powder keg. You could feel it: a nervous, pent-up, explosive energy, carried on the air and infused into the oppressive heat as though the end of days were approaching. With the collapse of Gandhi’s protest movement, the natives of Calcutta had fallen into a slough of despondency. Confusion had given way to grief, and then grief to anger. And Bengalis were good at anger, especially of the political sort. No one did it quite like them, which was a surprise, given their lack of physical stature. For a short people, they could be surprisingly violent – like the Scots, but with less bulk. And while they weren’t averse to the physical stuff, the sort with fists and teeth and boots, where they truly excelled was in the sort that required ingenuity and malice aforethought – or, failing that, kerosene and a box of matches. Indeed, for a people who prided themselves on their love of the arts, Bengalis were surprisingly quick to start burning things whenever matters didn’t go their way. And the targets of their incendiary retribution were suitably catholic and comprehensive: from buildings and tram cars to other Bengalis… especially other Bengalis if they were of a different religion.
‘What the devil possessed him?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me, sir. Said he would only speak to you and that only you would be able to sort it out. I rather got the impression, sir, that he felt he was acting on your orders.’
I felt the chill of his stare.
‘You think I ordered him to kill Mukherjee?’
‘No, sir. As I say, the sergeant denies he killed anybody. But he’s adamant that he’ll only talk to you.’
Taggart took a long, pensive sip from his glass, then made for the chair behind his desk. He sat down, pulled pen and paper towards him and began to scribble a note, signing off with a flourish.
‘Here,’ he said, passing me the letter. ‘Get him out and get him back here as soon as you can.’