The Day of the Scorpion (29 page)

‘To begin with there was just the name, Merrick. It was vaguely familiar when Mr Kasim first mentioned it to me on Wednesday evening. But a young army officer called Merrick meant nothing to me. In fact I doubt whether the same young officer described by Mrs Grace as late of the Indian Police a moment ago would have meant anything either but for two other things that I was thinking about on the way here, wondering whether there could possibly be a connection between them. The incident of the stone, and a report I had from Mr Kasim on Thursday morning. Tell me, Captain Merrick, does the name Pandit Baba mean anything to you?’

Merrick did not answer immediately, but his expression was that of a man sorting out a number of images conjured by the name rather than that of someone taking time to search the dim reaches of an uncertain memory.

‘As a matter of fact, it does.’

‘Please tell me what.’

‘He’s one of those so-called venerable Hindu scholars who manages never to get caught inciting his eager young disciples to commit acts of violence against the Muslims,
against the British, against anything the Pandit currently disapproves of.’

‘But he does incite them?’

‘I’m sure of it. In Mayapore I could never lay a finger on him though. Anything he did in public, like making a speech to college students, was all sweet reason and high-mindedness. He was quite capable of criticizing the Congress Party, too. I think the line he took was that they were poisoning Hinduism with politics, but he shunned publicity and discouraged any attempt to turn him into a renowned local figure. He was the perfect dedicated scholar. As far as I was concerned he was too good to be true. I also think he was a snake. A lot of the educated young Indians who got into trouble in Mayapore were under his influence at one time or another. We once arrested a chap for handing out seditious leaflets among workers in the British-Indian Electric factory. He said his pamphlet only repeated things Pandit Baba had discussed with a group of young men about ten days before. I thought I’d got him at last. We picked up some of the other boys, and then hauled in Baba Sahib. Within ten minutes the Pandit had them all grovelling and weeping and begging his forgiveness for misinterpreting his teaching. The one we’d arrested actually said he deserved to go to prison for his stupidity and unworthiness and the Pandit made a great show of being willing to go to prison in his stead as a penance for being such a poor
guru
that his innocent words could lead boys into trouble. Of course he knew he was as safe as houses. All the same he was more cautious afterwards.’

‘Good. Thank you, Captain Merrick. Then you’ll be interested to know that Pandit Baba is in Mirat at the moment. Mr Kasim was asked to meet him the other evening, ostensibly to enable Pandit Baba to be introduced to a son of M. A. Kasim, whom he professed to admire, which I doubt. But according to Mr Kasim, the Pandit spent most of the time talking about the Bibighar Gardens affair, with particular reference to the activities of the District Superintendent of Police, whom he can’t have named, otherwise Ahmed would have hit on the connection at once. No doubt the omission was intentional. He knew Ahmed had already met you. I find Ahmed a useful extra pair of eyes and ears
because of his objectivity. He tells me what happens more or less exactly as it happens and I then consider the implications. In this case I wasn’t very sure what the implications were. To involve Ahmed in something? To pump him about something? Something to do with Ahmed’s father? Perhaps, perhaps. But it made little sense. Neither did the stone-throwing. However, it all makes very good sense when the police officer whose reputation Pandit Baba was carefully tearing to shreds the other evening turns out to be one of the officers riding in the car that has a stone thrown at it. The venerable gentleman used to live in Mirat, incidentally. We felt very much the same about him as you did when you were in Mayapore. By we I mean the then chief of police and myself. He never actually became
persona non grata
, but things were going that way. I was glad when he made the decision for us, and went off to Mayapore.’

‘And you believe he was behind the incident this morning.’

‘Oh, I think so, don’t you?’

Merrick turned, placed his hands on the balustrade and looked out across the dazzling garden. Bronowsky came to the balustrade as well but continued to support himself on the cane.

‘Not that we should be able to prove it,’ Bronowsky continued. ‘I don’t intend to try. The Pandit is playing a little game with me, I think. The opening move was his invitation to Ahmed. He knew every word would be reported back to me. He also knew that directly I realized he was back in Mirat I would set my spies on him. My spies tell me he didn’t come to Mirat alone but with a woman, who keeps in seclusion in the private rooms of Mrs Nair, who is the wife of the principal of the Hindu College, in whose bungalow Pandit Baba is staying. My spies also tell me that this morning between nine-forty-five and ten-forty-five, Pandit Sahib was scheduled to speak to the students of the college on the subject of his new study of the Bhagavad Gita. No doubt he did so, in full view of several hundred youths, standing on a dais, splendidly detached from anything so violent and vulgar as stone-throwing. Where my spies have been less successful is in getting the names of any of the young men with whom he has had private conversations. Perhaps he has
had none. Perhaps it was all done before he actually reached Mirat. He is almost certainly in touch with very many people, throughout India.’

‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’

‘Oh, am I? Was the stone this morning then the first evidence you’ve had that you’ve been carefully tracked since leaving Mayapore?’

Bronowsky waited. Presently, as if reluctantly, Merrick said, ‘Go on.’

‘There was an incident in Sundernagar, perhaps? An anonymous letter referring to the fate of what, if I remember correctly, were called the innocent victims of the Bibighar Gardens? And in your first military establishment – another letter, or something even more direct to suggest there was some ill-wisher close at hand. For instance an inauspicious design drawn in chalk on the threshold of your quarters? Wherever you have been? Didn’t it begin in Mayapore itself, and hasn’t it continued, at intervals nicely calculated to make you believe that your last posting shook off whoever was intent on your discomfiture?’

Merrick allowed several seconds to elapse before replying.

‘It’s been much as you say. But it hasn’t bothered me, and Mirat is their last opportunity. They can hardly go on persecuting me where I’m going unless some sepoy has been bribed to put a bullet through my head when nobody’s looking.’

Bronowsky smiled. ‘I don’t think killing you is the idea, although I’m surprised they haven’t thought of a more dramatic way of embarrassing you than throwing a stone. As you say, Mirat is their last opportunity for some time to come. The wedding would have been an excellent background for something colourful. I understand, incidentally, that you’re not a close friend of the groom. Did it pass through your mind that taking part in the wedding might bring your persecutors out into the open?’

Merrick said, ‘No, it was the other way round. I agreed to be best man and then realized I was probably the worst possible choice. But it was too late to withdraw and I wouldn’t have known how. All that business is something I prefer to forget. I’m sorry you’ve identified me.’

‘My dear fellow, why? All I can say is that if I’ve correctly judged Mrs Grace’s reactions to my quite unintentional disclosure, you are now an object not only of interest but of admiring curiosity. They will remember how at the time the DSP Mayapore was singled out by the English press for praise and congratulation. One recalls it all well enough, the newspaper reports and the gossip here in the club, on this very terrace. Well you can imagine. An English girl criminally assaulted by Indians, not just any English girl – if there could possibly be such a thing in India – but a connection of a one-time Governor in Ranpur who stayed at the palace in the thirties. Within – what was it, an hour or two – the police in Mayapore under their DSP had arrested the six culprits. Technically they were only suspects and not proven culprits but that hardly diminished the blaze of satisfaction at thoughts of revenge already afoot. It’s all people talked about for days. Mirat has always had a floating population and we had people in from Mayapore who naturally enjoyed their reputations as experts on the rape and the riots, although these weren’t really connected, were they? The rape was a local affair and the riots were on a national scale. Being a military and not a civil station, of course, the major focus of interest here was on that brigadier you had in Mayapore who took charge when the civil authorities decided they couldn’t cope.’

‘Brigadier Reid.’

‘That’s him. Reid. Most of the talk was of Reid but what it came down to in the majority view was that both the army and the police in Mayapore had acted with commendable vigour, whereas the civil had shilly-shallied. Well you know how people think these days – they say the civil has become so riddled with Indians that the old dependable type of English civilian has more or less died out and it’s only the English army and police officer who can really handle an explosive situation. I remember a fellow sitting somewhere along there’ – Bronowsky pointed to the far end of the terrace – ‘one evening when I was having a drink with the Station Commander, not Hobhouse, his predecessor. There’d been a paragraph in the
Courier
about a farewell party in the Artillery Mess in Mayapore for Brigadier Reid, and, of course,
the implication was that he’d got the sack. This fellow leaned across, pointed at the paragraph and said, “There you are. Reid saves the situation and then gets kicked out because he saved it his way, which probably means he killed twelve Indians where the Government thinks ten would have been enough. But the deputy commissioner who sat on his backside will probably get a plummy job in the Secretariat and a CIE.”’

Merrick said, ‘The Deputy Commissioner was a good enough man. And Reid didn’t get the sack. He was given another brigade. It was a better job really. The brigade he had in Mayapore was only half-trained. The one he got was ready to go into the field. He’s back at a desk now, though, so I’ve heard. Perhaps he didn’t measure up. Perhaps he was a bit too old. His wife was dying when all that business was going on. We didn’t know about that until afterwards.’

‘Ah well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it’s the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people’s hearts lie. Reid saving the situation and getting the sack is what they wanted to believe. Just as they wanted to believe that the fellow in charge of the police in Mayapore had arrested the right men in the Bibighar rape business. They blamed the civil for any excessive use of force the Brigadier was guilty of and they blamed the civil when it was gradually realized that the rape case was coming to nothing. Not even coming to court. They never thought of blaming the District Superintendent for arresting the wrong men because they were convinced they must have been the right men. And the people we got here from Mayapore during those few weeks following the rape took the line that it would have served the six suspects right if the rumours going round were true.’

‘What rumours?’

‘That the six boys were whipped and forced to eat beef to make them confess.’

‘I see. That tale even reached Mirat, then?’

‘Indeed it did.’ Bronowsky paused. ‘Was there any truth in it?’

‘The beef business was a result of some minor confusion, I believe.’

‘Confusion?’

‘The jailers were Muslims and some food sent in for them was mistaken by an orderly for food sent in for the prisoners, who were all Hindus’

‘Ah, yes. A very reasonable explanation. And the whipping?’

‘Judge Menen satisfied himself on that score by having the men examined.’

‘Physically? Or merely by questioning?’

‘I gathered questioning was all that was necessary. They all denied the rumour and swore they’d not been ill-treated.’

‘You didn’t examine them yourself?’

Merrick, who had answered most of Bronowsky’s questions without facing him now did so. ‘Why should I have? I’m the chap who was being accused of defiling and beating the prisoners.’

‘Not actually accused, though? It was merely gossip, surely. Enough of it to cause the District Judge uneasiness?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not you?’

‘No.’

‘You ruled out the possibility of your subordinates having beaten the suspects?’

‘I took personal charge of the interrogations. I knew everything that went on.’

‘Except about the beef. You said there may have been confusion over the beef but you weren’t present when the confusion arose?’

‘I’m not in the witness-box.’

‘Captain Merrick, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cross-examine you. But I have a natural curiosity. Would you satisfy it on one point? Were those men you arrested guilty of the rape?’

Merrick again looked across the balustrade, fixing his eyes, it seemed, on some intense but distant vision of incontrovertible truth.

‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that I shall believe they were until my dying day.’

After a while Bronowsky said, ‘Our venerable pandit told Mr Kasim that he is acquainted with the aunt of one of your principal suspects, and was once engaged to try to teach him
Hindi, the young man in question having lived most of his life in England.’

‘Hari Kumar. That’s quite correct. The aunt was a Mrs Gupta Sen.’ He looked round at Bronowsky. ‘Kumar wasn’t just one of the principal suspects. He was
the
principal suspect. I believed then and believe now that he planned the whole thing. He’d been going out with Miss Manners for weeks, quite publicly. People were talking. In the end I warned her against that kind of association.’

‘Oh, you knew her personally then?’

Merrick flushed. He took a fresh grip on the balustrade. ‘Yes, I knew her very well.’ He hesitated before continuing. ‘Sometimes I blame myself for what happened to her because I think she partly took heed of my warning. She seemed to stop seeing him. She came more often to the club. She did voluntary work at the local hospital, and was living with an Indian woman. But that was all right, in its way. Lady Chatterjee was a very old friend of Miss Manners’s aunt, Lady Manners. All the same, living with an Indian woman like that meant she came in contact with Indians socially. That was part of the trouble. But Kumar didn’t run in those circles at all. He was nothing but a tin-pot reporter on the local gazette and gave himself airs because he’d been brought up expensively in England. I don’t really know how she first met up with him, but I saw her go up to him once at one of those war week exhibitions that were all the rage last year, and it was obvious they already knew each other. I think he’d been once to the MacGregor House where she lived. But I knew him from the time I had to haul him in for questioning. We’d been making a search of a place called The Sanctuary where a mad old white woman used to take in the dying and starving. We were looking for a chap who’d escaped from prison, a fellow called Moti Lal who specialized in organizing subversive activities among well-educated youths. Needless to say he was an acquaintance of our venerable pandit. So was Kumar. Kumar was at The Sanctuary because that mad woman had found him drunk the night before. He needn’t have been in any trouble the morning we found him but he chose to make a mystery out of his name. In England he’d been known as Harry Coomer. He thought he was too good to
answer the questions of a mere district superintendent of police. I let him go because there was nothing to pin on him, but he went down on my list all right, and before long I’d connected him with most of our other suspected trouble-makers, including of course our venerable pandit. I didn’t link the idea of a girl of Miss Manners’s kind – well, any kind of decent English girl I suppose – getting mixed up with Master Kumar. In the end I warned her. And although she said it was really none of my business who she chose to be friends with I think she realized she wasn’t doing herself any good. And I think she tried to end the association. Kumar wasn’t going to stand for that. And she must still have been infatuated. The way I see it is that he bided his time, then sent her a message begging her to meet him again at the place they apparently often met, the Bibighar, and waited for her there with those friends of his. She denied having gone there to meet Kumar and made up a cock and bull story about passing the gardens that night and being curious to see if there really were ghosts there, as the Indians said. She and Kumar both swore they’d not seen each other for several weeks. She said she never saw the men who attacked her. Well, perhaps that was true. She said they came at her from behind, in the dark, and covered her head. Perhaps she simply wasn’t prepared to believe Kumar could plan such a thing or be mixed up in it at all. In the end that infatuation of hers led to the whole damned thing going unpunished. When she found out we’d arrested Kumar she refused even to attempt to identify the other boys and started loading her evidence or threatening to load it, and if the thing had gone to trial she’d have turned it into a complete farce. I’d have been prepared to let her try but others weren’t. She changed her story, only slightly, but just enough to turn the scales. She said she’d not seen the men because of the darkness and because they’d come upon her suddenly, but she had a clear impression of them as dirty, smelly hooligans of the kind who might have come in from one of the villages beacause of the news of the riots and disturbances that were just breaking out all over the province. She knew that the boys we had in custody were the last type you could describe as dirty and smelly. You can appreciate the visual impression there’d have been in court,
with these six Indian youths in the dock in Western-style dress, most of them ex-students, and Miss Manners in the witness stand describing a gang of striking whooping bad-mashes. She might have changed her tune if she’d seen them all as I did the night I arrested them. Five of them half pissed in a derelict hut where they’d gone to celebrate on home-made hooch, and Kumar back home, actually bathing his face to try and clean up the marks she made on it, hitting out at her first attacker.’