The guest house was indeed as Colonel Dawson had described, a small corner of Calcutta in the heart of Bombay, where a travelling Bengali businessman or administrator could find sanctuary, swap his suit for a dhoti, and settle down to a dinner of bhāt mach in the mess hall.
I signed in under my newly adopted name, handing over the pass book of Mr Nihar Dey to a rather uninterested lady behind the counter who gave it a perfunctory scan before sliding it back and returning her nose to her copy of Prabasi.
‘Pharst floor,’ she said, pointing out the stairs with a gesture of the head. ‘Breakfast, seven o’clock, aar dinner saarvice chotta thekké aat-ta.’
‘Thank you, mashi,’ I said and made dutifully for the stairs.
The room was larger than I’d expected and came complete with double bed, steel almirah and a window looking onto the busy road below. I removed my shirt, placed it on the back of a solitary chair, and decided to follow Sam’s advice and take a rest.
Sleep though was difficult to come by. Instead, I simply lay back on the bed and took stock.
Forty-eight hours earlier, I had been a respected detective sergeant of the Imperial Police Force. Now I was a fugitive, wanted for murder and also, according to Sam at least, in connection with the bomb attack on Lord Taggart. If those were the items in the debit column, I struggled to find many which might be credits. I still had my freedom, and an opportunity to catch Gulmohamed, but my best chance to stop him had disappeared with a leap from the train outside Howrah.
At some point I must have dozed off, because when I awoke, the skies were dark and I looked out onto a wholly different Bombay.