IT WAS TIME.
Wrenching myself off the bed, I stumbled over to the sink and washed the sweat from my face. I pulled on a nondescript shirt and trousers, then silently left the room, made my way downstairs and out the front door, locking it carefully behind me. Several rickshaw wallahs were lounging at the corner of the square, engrossed in some heated discussion. They eyed me warily as I walked over, their conversation dying away mid sentence.
‘English?’ I asked.
‘I speak English, sahib,’ answered the youngest, a wiry sort in a yellowing vest and red checked lunghi.
I looked him over. Black eyes and skin the colour of the cheroot he held between two tobacco-stained fingers. He raised it to his lips and took a long hard pull. His cheeks hollowed, accentuating an angular, pockmarked face.
‘I need to go to Tangra,’ I said.
The other rickshaw wallahs laughed, exchanging incomprehensible words in some damnable foreign tongue. The youngster shook his head and smiled in the manner the natives all do when about to impart bad news.
‘Tangra is far, sahib. Too far for rickshaw.’
I cursed. That was stupid of me. I should have realised a rickshaw was never going to take me the five miles to Tangra. I obviously wasn’t thinking straight. But I’m not the type to give up easily. Especially where opium’s concerned.
‘Take me to a tonga rank, then.’
He nodded and helped me onto the rickshaw and moments later we were moving, passing briskly through the streets around Marcus Square.
‘Why you want to go Tangra now, sahib?’ he asked as he pulled.
‘I want to go to Chinatown.’
There was only one reason for a European to go to Chinatown in the dead of night. But it would be out of place for a native to say so out loud.
‘Sahib,’ he said, ‘I can take you to little Chinatown. Is in Tiretta Bazaar, near Coolootolah. Everything you find in Chinatown you will find also in Tiretta Bazaar. Chinese food… Chinese medicine…’
The man was no fool.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘take me there.’
I smiled grimly at the thought of what Mrs Tebbit would say if she knew where her prize lodger was off to at this hour. Still, the way I saw it, she was partly responsible. If she hadn’t given me the key to the front door, I’d still have been in bed.
That was a lie. The cravings were too strong. If she hadn’t given me the key, I’d have found some other means of escape, probably involving windows, bedsheets and drainpipes. One of the practical benefits of attending an English boarding school is that one receives a first-class education in the surreptitious access and egress from almost any premises.
Anyway, Mrs Tebbit’s hypothetical displeasure was irrelevant. What I was doing wasn’t illegal. Very few things are strictly illegal for an Englishman in India. Visiting an opium den certainly isn’t. Opium’s only really illegal for Burmese workers. Even registered Indians can get hold of it. And as for the Chinese, well we could hardly make it illegal for them, seeing as we’d fought two wars against their emperors for the right to peddle the damn stuff in their country. And peddle it we did. So much so that we managed to make addicts out of a quarter of the male population. If you thought about it, that probably made Queen Victoria the greatest drug peddler in history.
The city was quiet at this hour, as quiet as Calcutta gets at any rate. Travelling south, the roads became narrower and the houses shabbier. The back streets seemed inhabited mainly by stray dogs and stray sailors, who staggered from shebeen to brothel, eager to part with whatever back pay they had left before shipping out on the next tide.
We turned into a nondescript alley and stopped outside a decrepit doorway. No windows, no signs, just a door in a wall beside one of those paper lanterns the Chinese love so much. I got down and paid the man. No words were spoken. My mind was on other things. He just nodded his thanks and pressed his palms together in pranaam, then walked over to the door, knocked loudly and called out. The door was opened by a squat Chinaman in a greasy shirt and khaki shorts that revealed podgy knees and made him look like a Boy Scout gone to seed.
He looked me up and down, assessing me in the way a farmer does a lame horse before deciding whether or not to shoot it, then beckoned me inside.
‘Quickly quickly,’ he snapped, looking past me into the alley, as though the whole exercise of conversation was distasteful to him. After a week of dealing with obsequious Indians, his attitude was oddly refreshing.
I followed him through a dimly lit hall and down a narrow stairway into a small corridor, at the far end of which stood a doorway covered by a faded curtain. The smell of opium smoke, sweet and resinous and earthy, hung heavy in the air and sparked something in my brain. It wouldn’t be long now.
The Chinaman held out a hand. I’d no idea as to the going rate, so I just took out a bunch of dirty notes and handed them over. He counted them and smiled. ‘You wait here,’ he said, before disappearing behind the curtain. The minutes passed and I grew restless. Lifting the veil, I peered inside. Bare walls and stubby little cots of wood and string stood illuminated in the flickering glow of a hurricane lamp. This was no den for the sophisticate. No silken beds, gilded pipes or pretty girls here. This was a place for real addicts: little men with little to live for. It was the right sort of place for me. Not that I considered myself an addict. My usage was purely medicinal. I just needed the O to help me sleep, and for such a purpose, a back-alley shit-hole was better than any upmarket premises, even if it did lack the pretty girls. The problem with a high-class establishment is the quality of the opium. It’s just too good. Pure opium is energising. You get a buzz from it. I didn’t want a buzz. I wanted oblivion, and for that, you need the cheap stuff: the rough, impure, adulterated filth they’d serve in a dive like this, cut with ash and God knows what else. The end result is euphoria followed by anaesthetising, deadening, stupor. Blessed O. After morphine, it’s the next best thing in the world.
From an anteroom appeared a young, moon-faced oriental woman. Her lips and nails were painted blood red and she wore a dress as black and silken as the hair that flowed over her slender shoulders and onto her back. A slit ran up one side of the dress all the way to her thigh and made me think I might have been hasty in judging the place.
‘Please come with me, sahib,’ she said. It jarred hearing an Oriental use the Indian term. Like a Frenchman singing ‘God Save the King’. Nevertheless, I followed her to a charpoy, near the back of the dingy room.
‘Please make yourself comfortable,’ she said, gesturing to the rickety wooden cot. Comfortable would be an achievement, but I lay down on the low bed. She disappeared, returning moments later carrying a wooden tray on which stood a simple bamboo opium pipe, long stemmed and with a metal saddle which connected to a small ceramic pipe bowl. Beside it sat a spirit lamp, a long needle and finally a little black ball of opium resin, not much larger than a pea. She set the tray on the floor and, taking a candle that lay close by, proceeded to light the spirit lamp. Then, picking up the ball of opium, she deftly placed it on the end of the needle.
‘Bengal opium,’ she said. ‘Much better than Chinese opium. Gives more pleasure for sahib.’
She took the needle and held it over the flame. The O swelled and turned from black to molten red. Working with the finesse of a glass blower, she teased it, first stretching it, then rolling it back into a ball. This went on, until finally, happy that the O was cooked, she once more rolled it up and quickly inserted it into the pipe bowl, before passing me the pipe with all the deference of a samurai handing over a sword. I took it and held the bowl close to the spirit lamp, close enough for a tongue of flame to lick the ball of O. I took a pull of the pipe, a long steady pull, and inhaled deeply the smooth, syrup scented smoke. I breathed it in until there was nothing left.
And then at last I slept.
I awoke some hours later. I checked my watch, but as usual it had stopped and read a quarter to two. It always stopped around that time, and as a rule was generally unreliable any time after nine p.m. It had been my father’s. He’d given it to me on my eighteenth birthday and it was about the only family heirloom I had. I’d worn it constantly since then, including the years in France. It had been problematic for some time now, ever since the Germans had tried to take my head off with a high-explosive shell at the Somme in ’16. I was thrown clear by the force of the blast and, by some miracle, survived unscathed. The watch, however, had been less fortunate. Its face was cracked and the casing dented. I’d had it patched up on my next leave, but, like many an old soldier, it had never been quite the same since. There was some problem with the mechanism, which meant that it would slow down and fail to keep proper time about twelve hours after winding. After the war I’d taken it to some of the finest horologists in Hatton Garden. They’d tinker with it and eventually proclaim success, but after a week it would always revert to type – regular as clockwork.
I sat up on the charpoy, my shirt drenched with perspiration. The candles had burned out and were now nothing more than pools of melted wax, fossilised on the floor. By the light of the hurricane lamp, one or two other patrons were visible, lying on their sides, passed out on their cots. There was no sign of the girl. Slowly, I rose to my feet and staggered out, back up the stairs and out onto the street.
An industrial fog had settled and the night air smelled foul and reminded me of London. It was only now that I pondered how to get back to the guest house. The chances of finding transport at this hour were slim. Walking was the only real option. Or at least it would have been, if I’d had any idea of where I actually was. I cursed myself for not having had the presence of mind to tell the rickshaw wallah to wait. Suddenly it occurred to me that MacAuley had met his end in a similarly unsavoury neighbourhood almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier. It would be ironic for the man charged with investigating his murder to himself be murdered in similar circumstances so soon after. Ironic and not particularly pleasant.
I set off in the direction I hoped was north, groping my way towards a solitary light that in the mist was little more than an orange blur. From somewhere behind me there came a sound. I spun round and reached for my revolver, realising as I did so, that it was still slung over the back of the chair in my room. I cursed myself once again.
‘Who’s there?’ I called out, hoping to mask the fear in my voice.
There was silence. A fat sewer rat scurried out of the gloom and into an open drain. I gave a sigh of relief. The city was making me jumpy.
As I turned back, I felt something. Nothing tangible, just a change in the air and a shifting of shadows. I peered into the black, and, for an instant, thought I heard the faintest of whispers. A shiver ran down my spine. I told myself it was nothing, that I was being paranoid. People often thought they heard things after smoking O. In hindsight, I wished I’d just stayed at the Belvedere instead of venturing out into the middle of nowhere. But hindsight’s a commodity that’s generally in short supply when you’re craving a hit.
Then came another noise. A metallic scraping, louder and closer. Without thinking I backed away and began to hurry in the opposite direction. I turned a corner and collided with a man, knocking him off his feet.
‘Sahib?’
It was the young rickshaw wallah who’d brought me here.
‘Sahib,’ he said, struggling for breath, ‘I did not see you exit the premises.’ He smiled as I helped him to his feet, then pointed to his rickshaw, which lay close by.
‘Guest house?’
I considered going back to investigate the noises, but decided against it. After all, discretion is the better part of valour. Doubly so when your gun is sitting in a room half a mile away.
Fifteen minutes later we were back in Marcus Square. I got down outside the Belvedere, pulled a one-rupee note from my pocket and handed it to him. He brought out a battered leather purse and began to rummage for change. I stopped him and he looked perplexed.
‘Fare is only two annas, sahib.’
‘The rest is for waiting time,’ I said.
He smiled, and pressed his palms together. ‘Thank you, sahib.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Salman.’
‘You’re a Mohammedan?’
‘Yes, sahib.’
‘Have you lived here all your life?’
‘No sahib, I originally am coming from Noakhali, in East Bengal. But many years now I am living in Calcutta.’
‘So you know the city well?’
‘Most certainly, sir,’ he said, shaking his head in the Indian fashion.
‘I need a good rickshaw wallah,’ I said. ‘One I can call on at short notice. Do you fancy the job?’
‘I am always here only,’ he said, pointing to the rickshaw stand at the corner of the square.
‘Good,’ I said, rummaging in my pocket, this time for a five-rupee note. I handed it to him. ‘Consider this a retainer.’
I let myself back into the guest house and crept silently up to my room. Undressing in the dark, I sat on the bed and rested my back against the headboard. On the floor next to me sat the bottle of whisky and a tooth glass. I picked them up and poured out a measure. Just a nightcap, no more. Swirling the whisky gently round the glass, I let the antiseptic scent envelop me. Feeling calmer than I had in days, I sipped slowly and reflected on events. Only my second week in Calcutta and I already had my first murder. A high-profile one too.
I wondered why Lord Taggart had given me the case. Surely there were a few seasoned inspectors in Calcutta to whom he could have turned? Was he testing me? The proverbial baptism of fire? I pondered the alternatives but made precious little progress in figuring out his motives. Instead, I finished the whisky, lay down and tried to think of other things. I succeeded too, finally falling asleep to the memory of Sarah on the Mile End omnibus.